Black Glass (13 page)

Candle was beginning to feel like he was spinning his wheels. He sat at a wobbly table in Nodder’s bar, the place now mostly deserted, playing Hold ’Em poker on a borrowed blueglove, with Nodder and a wild-eyed young blond Norwegian kid who kept overplaying his hands. Nodder and Candle were waiting for Shortstack to get back from his “ginger” so they could finish their business. He glanced at the digital image in the palm of his glove, which showed the community cards and his hole cards—his two-pair were no better than they were last time he’d looked—and asked his thumb what time it was. The thumb on the sheer digital glove soothed, in a woman’s voice, “Four P.M., Pacific Time.”

“You getting impatient?” Nodder asked, glancing at the palm of his blue glove.

“Yeah I am. I’ve gotta go out and find Danny. He hears I’m out, he’s liable to leave town. Ginger’s going to take Shortstack some time—genetic re-engineering takes some goddamn time, like a week in some clinic or ...”

“Nah, not always. Depends. You just think like that because you’re a basic.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what Shortstack calls people that haven’t been gingered.”

“My DNA was screwed up enough when my parents got married. I don’t need some pseudocompetent wanx with a degree from, like, the University of the Falkland Islands retrofitting it. Accidentally giving me a face on my ass or something.” Maybe he should bet ... but Nodder could be slow-playing trips.

“Face on your ass might come in handy. Watch your back for you.”

The young Norwegian laughed at that.

Candle snorted, peering at the little image of his cards in his palm. “If Shortstack’s into that, can’t he ‘ginger’ himself larger? Taller? You’d think ...”

“There’s limitations to retro-engineering. Complications, genetic frontiers. Naw—he can’t do that. He did though give himself an ...” Nodder yawned. “... an enormous—enormous ...” Then Nodder’s head drooped. He started to narcoleptically nod out.

Candle gave out a near-shout: “Raise, a hundred!”

Nodder snapped awake. “What? You’re raising me?”

“I could be bluffing.” But he wasn’t. The dealer—a server in some distant place—had dealt the river card, giving Candle a third five, and a full house.

Nodder frowned at his palm. “Uhhhh ... I call.”

Candle looked at the Norwegian kid who closed his fingers into a fist, folding with a scowl.

“Full house,” Candle said, sending them the image on his palm. Trying not to sound triumphant.

“Shitter shatter! Hey—instead of the cash how about I give you that glove. It’s been ID neutralized. Somebody left it here.”

“Or you pulled it off a sleeping drunk?”

“Same thing.”

“Well hell, if it’s blank, I can put my own stuff on it. Thanks.” It was worth more than Nodder owed him.

Shortstack came in then, all jaunty, grinning energy. He was carrying a pizza box. “You see? Didn’t take long. Just had to get the ATP turned up in my mitochondria. Means I got to eat more, though. Who’s for curried pizza?”

Candle pocketed the blue glove and they ate, sharing pizza with the crestfallen and now much poorer Norwegian, who had murmured of winning the World Hold ’Em Poker Tournament someday. Then Shortstack wiped his mouth and said, “See you later, Knut. Candle, come on.”

Candle got up—and froze, squinting at an upper corner of the dimly lit room. It was like a piece of one of the chain of handcuffs decorating the wall had gotten free and was drifting in the air, near the ceiling ...

Then he realized it was a birdseye. He was being watched by
another silvery, bird-sized surveillance drone. Not quite the same model as earlier. Just slightly larger, its silver body supported by transparent-polymer wings beating with hummingbird rapidity. Watching him.

Either someone at a surveil-monitor somewhere was staring right at him through that thing, or a wide-task law enforcement computer was just doing a biometric scan on them, to see if there were any outstanding warrants here. If there were any, Candle knew, that didn’t mean they’d rush the cops over. They’d run the warrant through a program that triaged for priority and unless it was multiple murder, terrorism, or digital banking fraud, probably no one would show up anytime soon, if at all. But if it was a Slakon bird, they’d send some boys around. They let him slip through their fingers when he got out of jail and now someone was trying to make up for slacking.

“Shortstack,” Candle muttered. “Uh ...”

“I see it,” Shortstack said softly, not looking directly at the drone. He signaled to Rina who was just straightening up from installing a beer keg behind the bar. “Hey you got an audience, Rina. If it’s a man on the other end of the feed, then maybe ...”

A song by Jerome-X, “Sexual Identification Strata”, came thumping on through the sound system. She came dancing out from behind the bar, pulling off her top. Her small brown nipples were pierced, Candle saw. That was new. She still looked good. Taut stomach muscles. Candle tried not to stare as she rippled her flat belly and spun the blouse around in front of the camera ... and it tilted its lens toward her.

So that answered a question: it was a man on the other end of the feed, reacting with a knee-jerk male response. Just long enough. Funny, Candle thought, all that techno-enhancement and he’s just as responsive to sex as a caveman.

She danced as Jerome-X rapped out raspily, right on electronica-grime beat, with guitar stylings by the aging Dweezil Zappa:

And she danced nearer to the flying camera ... which drifted a little nearer her as she swung her blouse with one hand and started to tug on her pants with the other. The boyish Norwegian, drinking aquavit, pounded on the table and whooped as Rina danced past him, rhythmically sidling ever closer to the drone.

Any second now, Candle figured, as Shortstack tugged him toward a door to a back room, the drone operator was going to realize ...

Then Rina was close enough, and she tossed her blouse over the drone, tangling its wings. It clunked to the floor, clattered and buzzed there like a wasp in a bottle.

She stepped over to it and, still with the beat, stamped it several times, smashing it thoroughly. “Oh shit it got lubrication oil on my blouse ... Okay, you can go now ...”

“Come on, Candle,” Shortstack said eagerly. “This way.”

Nodder and Candle followed the energized Shortstack through a room that had once been used for mug shots, through another door, down a back stairs, along a corridor where a couple of dying fluorescent light-strips flickered unsteadily like the last thoughts of a dying man. “You want to tell me where we’re going?” Candle asked.

“Not really,” Nodder said.

“Not much use being cagey, Nodder,” Shortstack said, chugging along ahead of them. “I made up my mind we’re going to trust him. You don’t think he’s undercover? They’re not going to put somebody in that place four years just to go undercover. Rina knew all about it. Rina says he’s okay, he’s okay ...”

Nodder shook his head. “I don’t like it. I think we shoulda felt it out longer.”

“Still didn’t tell me where we’re going,” Candle pointed out.

“We’re going to the back room,” Shortstack said. “Way, way in back. The room where the girls are.”

“I didn’t do that kind of time,” Candle said. “I don’t need to get laid that bad. To me it was just yesterday they put me under.” This wasn’t exactly true, though. His body knew the difference and it had been prodding him hard, while he watched Rina dance.

Nodder chuckled and shook his head.

They reached the end of the corridor and Shortstack opened a door into a room on their right, a dusty office empty except for a series of abandoned workstations, cobwebby cubicles. The only light shafted in through a window, illuminating whorls of dust motes. The light dimmed for a moment as a police flying cruiser drifted past. Gone, and the light returned.

That’s how it is to people like Nodder and Shortstack, Candle thought. The cops come around and it’s like a shadow falling over everything. To a cop—to me, back then—it was like we were shining light in dark corners. My light blinds you; my light is your darkness ...

He still wished he was in that cruiser, and not here. It’d been hard to take, surrendering his badge.

Nodder closed the door behind them and they went to a cubicle pressed against the wall, its workstation piled with old computer drives. But the random stack of drives were glued together like something in a stage set, Candle saw, looking close—realizing they were camouflage as Shortstack easily pulled the cubicle away from the wall, and walked through the low opening hidden on the other side. It was a rough door shape cut in the wall; Candle and Nodder had to stoop to get through. Shortstack reached back and pulled the cubicle back into place behind them as Candle looked around the smaller room ...

Three women in jogging suits worked quietly side-by-side at three workstations, under a whispering air condition vent; a plump blond, a freckled, willowy brunette, a tall black woman with her head shaved, hoop earrings. Candle recognized the blond as a former hooker from Sunset Boulevard, and the other two had the hardened look—and the hand-inked prison tattoos—of women the street had known intimately. Delicate sensor headsets hooked them wirelessly to the computer, ball keyboards flickered
and spun under their rapt fingers. The blond, he noticed, had her hair styled and colored to duplicate Marilyn Monroe’s classic ‘do. She had drawn on a beauty mark in the right place, too.

The room was windowless, but animated posters of natural scenes, a waterfall, breakers crashing on rocks, broke up the sense of confinement. Music played softly, chugging enticingly along, a neo-reggae band just becoming popular when Candle had been UnMinded:
The Sober Jamaicans.

“Got a visitor,” Nodder said.

Brinny, the short-haired brunette, turned to glare at him—Candle vaguely remembered booking her for illegal-software. She’d have been pretty if her eyes hadn’t been a trifle too close together. “That guy—he’s a ... ain’t he?” She broke off, frowning, not sure she should say it out loud. Maybe she should be pretending there was no reason a cop shouldn’t be here. She looked questioningly at Shortstack.

“He was a cop,” Shortstack confirmed. “He’s O-source now.”

“Says you!” Brinny scoffed. “He was undercover, sneaking around Johnny Ebo. Shot Johnny through the head, all gone’n took his woman.” There was something very trailer park about Brinny’s accent, her diction.

“When I was undercover, I was looking for sex slaves, Brinny,” Candle said. “I know you don’t support that sex slave thing. Tell the women they’re getting jobs in the States and they end locked in a room with a bed. That’s not legit sex work.”

“Johnny wasn’t in that,” she persisted, scowling.

“But he knew who was. And I only shot him when he was going to hurt Rina. You hear a lotta dropcall on the street about me, isn’t true.”

“So you going to work with us?” the black woman asked, looking at him sidelong.

“This is Pell Mell,” Nodder said, indicating the tall bald black woman. “We usually just call her Pell. You know Brinny. This is Monroe. They’re all damn good—they’re all
leet
. Ladies, Candle here might be working with us—then again he might not.”

All three women looked at him in vaguely hostile confusion.

“Don’t know what you’re doing—or what I’d be doing,”
Candle said. “But I can tell you, I’m not a cop. Not anymore. That just isn’t happening. I’m not busting anyone, anywhere.”

Even as he said it—and Brinny sniffed skeptically—he wondered if it were entirely true; there were crimes he probably would report to old friends on the job, if he saw the crime going down. Some crimes—but not many.

“Not like we’ve never done business with police,” Pell said. “I sucked many a pig dick to keep out of jail.”

Candle winced at that. Pig dick.

“Yeah,” Monroe said, her voice almost believably breathy. “We used to pay ’em off when we were dealing ... well.” She shrugged and went back to work.

Candle was slightly more than half convinced Monroe used to be male.

“Yeah well—if he was undercover before,” Brinny pointed out, “maybe he is now. But whatever, I’m-a let you guys worry on it.”

She went back to work, fingers flying over the keyboards. Candle marveled at the dexterity of her fingers.

“Okay here’s the texer, Candle,” Shortstack said, “What we got here is–”

“Ah, ’Stack,” Nodder interrupted, “are we entirely certain. . .?”

“Nodder—we can
trust
the guy!” Shortstack insisted. “We’re doing this!”

Even Candle wondered why Shortstack was so sure. But he suspected that the little guy had a big ego, and refused to admit he was wrong once he’d set a course for himself. Candle also suspected Shortstack was just trying to please Rina by helping Candle.

As he spoke, Nodder pulled a stim-patch from a pocket and thoughtfully peeled it, applied it above the last one on his arm. “Well ... Brinny’s right that the guy was undercover. I mean, seriously ’Stack, what if ...”

“If I were undercover, you’d be done for already, with me getting this far,” Candle said. “But I’m not. I’m just ... not.”

He looked Nodder in the eye. Nodder pursed his lips—then made a gesture of benediction to Shortstack.

“I can fucking
talk
now?” Shortstack asked, sidling up next to Brinny, putting a hand on her thigh and looking at the screen in front of her. The figures on the screen were three-leveled, stacked in three dimensions, and represented, Candle suspected, only a small part of what Brinny was seeing: the headset probably sent signals to interfacers along her optic nerves. “Okay, so the texer is that this is the L.A. locus of the Black Stock Market, Candle. Things were bad when you got sent down, got even worse the last four years. All the controls on monopolies are just ... gone. Dismantled. There’s the Fortune 33 and that’s just it, man. Oh sure, some Chinese outfits, yeah, but the 33 run the fucking planet. Privatizing everything—that’s why all the infrastructure’s gone to shit. The 33 rule. Except for the Black Stock Market! There are other businesses, millions of small ones, some that come and go in a few days, some that go on and on, some that change their names and show up under, like, all these different guises but, you know, same company, right? They’re pretty much under the radar of the 33. Lots of ’em are Mesh based, lots others are wi-net, others are brainchippers, others are little shops that move around, work outta the back of trucks, some are sizable small companies in Third World Countries—you get the idea. So they need support, right, they need money coming in, so we sell ‘quick stock’ for these people, a few thousand WD for a few thousand shares for some of ’em—others are more expensive. But it’s all a quick turnaround. They repay the buyer by Internet or wi-buy transfer within thirty-six hours if the profit’s there. We monitor it and they trust us with their data. Some have longer term deals, it’s monthly, got some going twice yearly. We take a cut.”