Black Glass (10 page)

“W
hy’d you choose to come with us?” Nodder asked. The gun was loose in his hand but still pointed in Candle’s general direction. Candle was pretty sure the big guy was Nodder—anyway that was the guy’s nickname. “I mean, yeah, it was ‘the lady or the tiger’ but ...”

“The remark about corporate goons. Instant affinity, right there, man.” Candle wondered if he could make a lunge for that niner. If he remembered rightly, the guy was a narcoleptic, but he didn’t look like he was anywhere near nodding out. His eyes were shiny with excitement. And the pistol had a battery pack under the barrel—meaning charged bullets. One of those hits you even glancingly, you tend to freeze up with the electric shock, for three or four seconds. Long enough. “I have a history with Slakon and that pretty-boy prick Terrence Grist,” Candle went on. Talking about one thing, but thinking about another: that gun. He didn’t like being the guy in the situation without the gun. “There was the thing with Danny. They were making an example of him. Then I tried to trace a skim-skam he was up to when there was a freeze on his bank account. If I’d succeeded, his rivals in the 33 could have used it against him. So I had to go down ...”

“You think we lost ’em, ’Stack?” Nodder asked, without taking his eyes off Candle.

“They didn’t follow, I think we lost their surveillance, hode,” Shortstack said, still barreling the van along. He kept zigzagging through less crowded side streets.

Shortstack was someone Candle definitely remembered from
the old days. Hard to forget. “No,” Candle said, “They had a birdseye on me. They’re just hanging back, letting the birds-eye follow. Probably going to cut us off somewhere.”

“Shitter-shatter, a birdseye,” Shortstack muttered.

“They don’t move as fast as a car, those things, not for long distances,” Candle pointed out. “If you step on it, maybe run a red light ...”

“Oh jeez, don’t tell him that, ‘Stack’s a lunatic when he’s in a hurry,” Nodder said, wincing, glancing at Shortstack—

And Candle used Nodder’s distraction to snatch the gun from his hand.

“Hey!”

Candle reversed the gun, pointed it at Nodder. “You were making me nervous with this thing.”

“What? I wasn’t going to shoot you. Probably. You worry too much Candle. Why, the Black Wind’ll get us, if the mutated malaria doesn’t. You should be more easy going.”

What’s the Black Wind?
Candle wondered, as they jerked screechingly around another corner. “I’m easygoing into a fucking car crash here pretty soon ...”

“Nodder?” Shortstack scowlingly glanced back at them. “You troll, did you let him get your shooter?”

“I just looked away for a second ...”

“So what the hell do you–” Candle coughed as the car roared into overdrive through an intersection, gas fumes coming up through the porous metal floor. “Fuck! This is a gas burner!”

“So?” Shortstack said, looking in the rear view. “There’s still a lot of leakage pools of the stuff around. I pump it out, run it through a filter, get free fuel. Free is cheaper than hydrogen cells. Got to know where to look.”

Candle coughed again and persisted, “What do you guys want with me? You aren’t putting your asses on the line ’cause you’re sentimental about some cop who arrested you once.”

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Shortstack said, spinning the wheel so the van fishtailed around a corner. Honking and shouts of fury trailed after them. “But we got to talk about it later. I don’t figure they ID’d us. This van’s plates aren’t legit. And there was rain on the windshield and ... I think if we can dodge the birdseye
we’ll be safe at your bar, Nodder. Anyway we can always say we were just picking up a pal and didn’t know anything about the other thing, if they shove their snouts in there ...”

“We’ll come at it by the under-park entrance though,” Nodder said. “Hey Candle—put away the gun. No, wait—that’s my gun. Give it back.”

“When we get to the bar,” Candle said. He shoved the gun in his waist-band.

Nodder shrugged—and clutched at the wall as they veered around another corner. “I ...” He coughed from the fumes. “Are those sirens I hear?”

“Cruise flyer,” Candle said, looking out the back window. “Nice model.” He could see the flying police car, lit up and sirening, its wheels retracted, veering down between the com-towers about three blocks back. “He must’ve seen you run a couple of lights.”

Flying cars had been on the market since 2014 but they’d been too expensive for most people and a nightmare for the FAA to figure out so, in the end, they were restricted to a few special licenses granted the super rich, the Feds, and the police. Each police precinct had one, two at most. Cruise flyers were costly, and they had a tendency to crash. But they could go places choppers couldn’t and they were hard to run from. Candle had only been inside a flying car twice. Found it nauseating.

“Under-park entrance around the corner might work,” Shortstack said, and took the van up on two wheels to get around the corner without slowing. He hit the brakes, skidded, stopped, backed up, turned and suddenly they were pitching down into shadow. There was a crash as he crunched the van through a plastic barrier. Candle and Nodder reflexively clutched at one another to keep from tumbling over at the jolt.

Mildly embarrassed, Candle disengaged from Nodder, and looked down, as the van slowed—and saw Nodder had taken his gun back.

“Shit.”

Nodder pointed the pistol at him and chuckled. “Ought to give you a good shockin’ graze for stealing it. But there might be a ricochet in the van.” He stuck the gun under his rain coat as the van pulled up short, and Shortstack killed the engine.

“I don’t think the flyer saw us go down into the garage,” Shortstack said. “You can’t hardly see the entrance from above. Supposed to be shut down.”

“It
was
shut down,” Nodder said, climbing out. “You smashed through the fucking entrance, hode, you don’t think anybody’s going to notice that?”

“Not from up above,” Shortstack said, disengaging his legs from the driver prosthetics. “The entrance gate is inside, back from the street. Come on. But keep an eye out—it’s ‘shut down’ but people use it.”

His mouth dry, heart still pounding from the pursuit, Candle got gratefully out of the fume-choked van. “How did we ever stand those gas burners when I was a kid?”

They were in an old parking garage. There was sporadic lighting, cones of flickering glaucous glow here and there, probably maintained by the squatters who’d set up the little indoor shacks and tents clustered randomly down the length of the decaying parking structure. Candle expected to see the birds-eye, but there was no tell-tale glimmer of a flying surveillance camera in the air. He could feel dust, ancient asbestos, gathering in his mouth.

Still—the flying camera could be there. “You think we lost it?” he asked. He was more spun by the run-in with the corporate thugs than he wanted to admit to himself. Maybe he’d left his nerve back on the UnMinding table.

“Wait ...” Shortstack said. He reached into the van, under the driver’s seat, pulled out a hand-palm-sized sensor. Candle knew the device: it was supposed to warn of any birdseye transmission within five hundred yards. Along the lines of the police radar detectors sold when he was a kid. The sensors were illegal, unless they’d overturned the Surveillance Integrity Act while he’d been UnMinded. Circling the van, Shortstack watched the sensor’s small readout, frowning. He returned to his starting point, shaking his head. “Nothing in range. We lost it.” He locked up the van, stuck the sensor in the pocket of his Army coat—the coat dragged behind him on the grimy floor—and signaled for Candle to follow.

Candle started after him—then stopped, noticing Nodder, sagging against the van. “Hey, Shortstack.”

The dwarf sighed and returned to Nodder, whose eyes were rolled back, eyelids fluttering. “Nodder!”

“He’s narcoleptic, right?” Candle remarked. “Why doesn’t he get an implant for that? Last I knew they had pharm-quality pretty cheap off the Canadian black market.”

“Oh—he’s got a phobia of operations of any kind. ‘Not gonna let ’em put somethin’ in me—who knows what else they might stick in there?’ He’s paranoid. But you never
do
know ...”

Shortstack reached into the big man’s inside coat pocket, found a soft plastic tube, squeezed it under Nodder’s nose.

“Whuf!” Nodder snorted, his head jerking back. “Sorry. Sorry. All the excitement. Kinda crashed, after.”

“Come on, hode.” His coat leaving a trail in the dust, Shortstack strode to a glaze-eyed, half-toothless old tramp squatting on a filthy sleeping bag with his back to a crumbling gray cement column. Candle followed, walking on one shoe and one sock. The concrete was cold through the thin sock material. He figured his footwear was not necessarily out of place here.

The old tramp chuckled at their approach, flipping a razor-sharp eight-inch knife in his hands. He flipped the knife into the air, it spun glittering there three times, and fell blade-first toward his crotch; he caught it by the hand-guard; he flipped it again. Over and over.

“What search, Three Ring? Listen—you watch the van, when I come back I bring you a gallon of Alco-High.”

“And a sandwich! Falafel!”

“And a falafel sandwich. If no one in here touches my van.”

“I will whip a knife in their neck, it’ll go alla way through, come out the other side—and
then
–”

“Not necessary. Just threaten to do that. That’ll be better.”

“You say so. More impressive, there’s a body by the van. Keeps people off.” The tramp made a creaking noise that might have signified levity.

Shortstack tossed Three Ring a temporary buy card and strode on.

Three Ring squinted at the card and snorted. “Oh that’ll get me a roll of toilet paper. Big whippity.”

“The rest when I come back, like I fucking said,” Shortstack replied, without looking back.

They wended through the camps, between tents and indoor cardboard shanties; some were organized and reasonably hygienic, at others they stepped over pools of piss, ducked under drooping wires strung from retrofitted light fixtures, evaded snarling, emaciated pit bulls straining at frayed leashes. Smells of carb-heavy cooking, sweat, unwashed clothing, ammonia, marijuana, mold, feces. Candle stepping very, very carefully with his shoeless foot.

Shortstack stopped at the tent of a toothless bleached blond who might’ve been anywhere from thirty to seventy years old. Probably stim-plants or rotters had aged her early. Behind her was a wheelbarrow filled with odds and ends of dry goods, all in their original packaging. “Sandy, hey you got any shoes today?”

“Fell off the fuckin’ truck for you, Shortstack.” At least, that’s what Candle thought she said. It came out fast and mushy. “Got a bag of sneakers, that recycled vinyl fabric shit but they’ll work ... I think I got one for One-Shoe there ...”

Candle winced. Was that to be his street monicker? One-Shoe?

She found a matching pair of sneakers that were only a size too large for him, and Nodder promised to pay her in credit at his bar. Candle put the shoes on, tossed away his extra, and they continued across the encampment. The shoes were colored vomit-orange but they worked.

Somewhere a scavenged television droned earnestly about a war.

“There a war going on?” Candle asked, as they approached a trash strewn concrete stairway. The door over the stairwell had been long since stolen.

“Ain’t there usually?” Shortstack shrugged. “Indonesia—you know that Islamic hardliner bunch that took over there, they got the Liberation For Allah fever.”

“The reverse Crusades? I thought the LFA were bombed to shreds.”

“We thought so too. Doesn’t ever seem to quite go away. Once they get that Muslim Crusades idea. Keeps cropping up. And there’s big money in those wars—some people think that the Fortune 33 have agents stirring it all up, paying the Imams so
‘The 33’ can get the Privatized Military bids, sell arms.”

Nodder chuckled. “No doubt.” He led the way to the stairs. “Up the stairs, through a hole in the wall, across a roof, and then we’re on the roof of the building that contains my cozy little establishment.”

They stepped over a snoring old woman, dressed in layers of clothing, curled asleep on the landing, clutching a small girl about seven who was sitting on a crusty sleeping bag. Scratching in her matted red hair with dirt-mooned fingernails, the little girl was listlessly watching a Smart Plastic doll that would sit up, walk around a few steps, moving all on its own. The little doll, missing most of its hair, stopped moving, peered up at Candle with tiny jewel-like eyes as he hesitated on the landing. He glanced up the stairs to see that Nodder and Shortstack, weren’t watching him, then slipped the meal-in-a-bar from his pocket, handed it to the little girl.

And hurried up the stairs before the others saw him acting like a Deezy.

But as he went, stepping over a drunken pimply youth, a reeking wad of wet newspaper, and several broken bottles, he wondered what had actually happened on the street. Halido and the muscle suits. Instinct had told him not to surrender. Guesswork told him he wasn’t supposed to have gotten out of prison.

And his gut feeling told him that if they had taken him, sooner or later they’d have killed him.