Black Glass (28 page)

Halido relaxed a little, and drank from his rum and coke, glancing out the window. They were well out over the sea now. “We’re heading to Catalina? Is that it, out there? No, that’s an oil rig ...”

“How could you mistake an oil rig for Catalina?”

“The haze, sir.” Halido had another sip. “And it’s kind of dark out there even with the moon.” Sip. “Mr. Grist, I just want to say ...” One sip more. “... that I have a plan for–” Halido broke off, staring. The glass dropped from his nerveless fingers. His jaws worked soundlessly; his mouth gaped like a fish in murky water. He tried to speak.

“I guess we’ll never know your plan, Halido,” Grist said, sipping his drink. His own drink was safe—the first “ice cube” had been a tasteless material that melted instantly on contact with alcohol; it contained a transparent quick-dissolve capsule
infused with a paralyzing toxin. “But we can guess at the quality of your plan. It was something stupid. We can figure that much, I believe.”

Grist sipped a little more rum and Coke, put the glass on the bar, sent the bar back into the wall compartment.

Halido was sitting there, gaping, making
ack ack ack
sounds. “You’re wondering,” Grist said, “why I did it this way. So elaborately, putting a paralysis agent in your drink myself, dealing with your execution myself. Because I enjoy it—and because I want Targer to see it, naturally. I will reward him hugely if he solves these problems for me—Can you hear me up there, Targer?”

“Yes, sir!”

“I’ll reward him either way. Hugely. This is one kind of reward you’re getting, Halido. Targer hopes to earn the other kind. The pleasant kind.” Grist stood up, and stretched. Then he took Halido by the collar, dragged him over to the red-edged emergency escape hatch on the other side of the cabin. He leaned Halido against the escape hatch, and Halido twitched a little, which was all the resistance he could manage. His eyes were pinning; his lips were drawn back in terror. He was drooling. Really, Grist found it repellent. But fascinating. “There is a special feeling of engagement with life, when you end another man completely,” Grist said, straightening up to look at his handiwork. He grunted, bent and shifted Halido a little, centering him against the door, to make sure. “Yes, a special feeling—you appreciate life more when you end another man’s life personally. And there is a certain high to it. I’ve always had a weakness for certain highs. I try to get them in a healthy way when I can—you know, in a way that doesn’t harm my brain or liver. So here we are—I’m doing work I could easily have delegated. And as I said—it’s instructive to other personnel.”

He returned to his seat, and strapped himself in. Looked at Halido for a moment, twitching against the emergency lock.

Then he said, “Targer? Anyone around to observe us?”

“No, sir. Don’t see any other aircraft, or boats. We’re five miles out, should be far enough.”

“Tilt the chopper a little to the starboard.”

“Aye aye.”

The chopper tilted, a little. Grist was now leaning slightly to his left. He flipped up the switch cover to reveal his arm-rest’s master controls; he tapped the combination that opened the emergency lock of the chopper. An alarm began pealing—Grist quickly turned the alarm off and watched as the door slid aside, opening the helicopter’s cabin to the naked night sky. Cold air gushed into the chopper along with the sound of humming engines and slashing chopper blades and wind. And Halido was gone, almost as if he’d magically vanished. Grist wished he could watch him fall. By the time he got the door safely closed and went to look through a port, Halido would be gone from sight. Seemed a shame. Grist would have liked to watch Halido tumbling, turning end over end in the moonlight, down to the Pacific Ocean.

When Halido washed up on the beach, Targer would have witnesses ready, saying Halido had been depressed, talking of suicide.

Grist felt the chill wind blowing in from the open hatch; he listened to it roar and rattle. Halido would be hitting the sea about now ...

“Home, Targer,” Grist said, closing the hatch. “Damn it’s cold out there. A cold, cold world. Aren’t we glad we’re nice and snug in our chopper, Targer?”

Targer didn’t answer. But Grist felt sure Targer understood.

The morning sun was bright on the misty windows and shiny fenders of Autopia.. Candle wished he’d brought sunglasses, like Danny. His eyes were watering from the reflections.

Some squatter with a mordant sense of humor had started calling the big squat Autopia, and it stuck They trudged past the dingey
AUTOPIA
sign, ripped off from the old Disneyland and propped on the back of a big wheelless pick up truck; trudged through spongey weed-overgrown lots between the clusters and rings and linkages of cars in the vast old automotive dump, kicking through trash, starting to feel warm, now that the rain had let up and the clouds had mostly blown away.

“You sure they’re here?” Danny asked. He was wearing an ankle-length black leather coat, the seams popping at the shoulders, and he was chain smoking.

“Not sure, but Shortstack mentioned it as a ‘safe house’ to retreat to,” Candle said. “And he’s got a connection to this place—driving that obsolete van.”

They were surrounded by obsolete cars and vans and trucks. This was a graveyard for gas burners, one of the last junk yards of old style vehicles left—the others had been turned into cubes of scrap and sold to China. This one, southeast of Los Angeles, near San Bernardino, had evolved into another vast squat, like Rooftown, but made of cars and mostly close to the ground. Toward the end of the general abandonment of gas burning cars, they’d been piled up almost at random in places like this, to be recycled. But there’d been so many that, for a time, great tracts of land had been swallowed up. The homeless, the disenfranchised, had used this one, to set up a makeshift community.

They’d pushed and tugged vans nose to nose, removed the engines, making them passageways; branching off them, old gutted SUVs were used as little living compartments. Compact cars were used for outhouses and storage and building scrap. The more powerful, relatively prosperous members of the Autopia community had claimed the campers and RVs. Most lived in SUVs and a couple of haphazardly constructed buildings: trucks were used as foundations for two-story structures made from wired-together pieces of cars.

Candle glimpsed faces, half seen through the misted car windows on either side—making him think of the translucent stage panels in Black Glass. Silhouettes, dim glimpses of people, removed from direct contact by glass compartmentalization. He had a mental image of people physically trapped behind computer screens, trying to get out—and he smiled, thinking he was being influenced by Zilia’s art.

He wished she were here. But if she were, with Danny here too, there’d be a tension that’d have to find release, and it might go lots of ways.

They passed a group of kids throwing a battered football, tussling over it with little sense of game rules; they passed a Volkswagen bug, half sunk in the ground, that had the roof removed, the charred body of the car turned into a kind of outdoor fire pit. Ragged figures huddled near the fire—fueled by small amounts of
gasoline found in gas tanks, oil from engines—and black plumes of smoke twisted, smelling of the rank childhood of industrial civilization before its toilet-training. Here and there, in the weedy lots, pieces of cars had been welded together into rusty sculptures: rough outlines of men and women dancing, children playing, a giant dog. Up ahead was a wall of cars, nose to nose, apparently unoccupied—except for a couple of teenagers in one, smoking pot and giggling. The dope plants grew out of the car’s trunk. The path threaded between two old nose-to-tail Cadillacs and into an open space in front of what looked like a big pile of cars, till you looked closer and saw it was a building. Music thumped and wheedled from somewhere in the scrappy structure.

As they approached the two-story construct, Candle saw it was wired and, in some places, welded together, with bent and battered sedan hoods and stripped pieces of tire forming a weatherstripping carapace. “That’s the new squatters place,” Danny said. “Mostly likely one your guy would be in.” He’d been here before, to cop some illegal ware; electric wires ran into the herky-jerky building at odd angles, channeling energy swiped from power poles on the other side of the containment fence.

The entrance seemed to be a crude archway of mismatched car body sections extending from the building; inside, water dripped, and flickering lights mottled the dimness. To one side of the archway, outside, a shaggy figure sprawled bulkily in a buckling old lawn chair under an awning torn from an absent RV. The man had a gallon bottle of wine, half empty, in the grass next to him.

The big man came from under the awning, blinking in the light, to block their way: a towering dishevel-haired bushy-bearded door guard. “He’s the Doorman,” Danny muttered.

The Doorman wore an oil-stained, blue ski jacket that seemed to go with his bulging forehead and wild eyes and blackened teeth. He leaned on the chrome bumper from a small car, the bumper bent and twisted into a four-foot club. As they came closer he took the club in both oil-blackened hands and hefted it warningly. Candle reckoned the man was at least six-foot-seven.

“You cain’t come inta heeah, eff you don’t belong’,” the Doorman rumbled. His accent was somewhere middle-south, maybe the “hollers” of Kentucky, Candle thought.

“You got a way to test a buy card?” Candle asked, taking the card out, holding it up for the Doorman to look at. “I got a hundred dollars here for you on this one. I’m a friend of Shortstack’s—he’s new, so I figure he’s in this building, where the new people squat. I just want to see him. If you can bring him out I don’t need to go in there ...” In fact he’d much rather not go in there.

“Got a way ah kin test ’er inside,” the doorman said. He snatched it from Candle’s hand. “Y’all wait here, I’ll test ’er, if it’s good I’ll find the little feller. But ya’ll come in before I say, I’ll bust yer heads, jus’ like melons.”

“We’ll be chill,” Danny said.

The big man ducked under the archway and went inside.

They waited. Children whooped; the smell of sewage wafted and retreated; the whiff of oil and gasoline, everywhere.

“Kind of good, this stuff is being used for something,” Candle said.

Danny shrugged. Candle sighed, thinking that Danny had the air of a kid forced to go to a family gathering when he’d rather stay home and go virtual with his friends.

A few minutes more, and then the Doorman shambled back out, followed by Shortstack and Rina.

Candle smiled, seeing Rina. “Hi Rina. I was wondering if you’d stayed to keep an eye on him.”

“I’m stuck with him,” she said, but she smiled and didn’t seem to mind.

“Hey, she works for me, man, what else she supposed to do,” Shortstack said.

Rina smiled crookedly at that, but said nothing.

“How’s your hand?” Candle asked.

“Fucked up but not too bad now.” He lifted it for Candle to see—it was encased in flesh-colored dried paste. “This’ll hold it till I get my new ginger to grow me some skin and stuff. I’ll get most of it back.”

“How about the girls?” Candle asked. “And Nodder?”

Shortstack shaded his eyes with his sealed-in hand to look up at Candle. “They’re all here with me, all okay. Well, Nodder’s out. You sure nobody followed you? Drones? Anything?” He peered at the sky behind Candle.

“I’ve got a good scanner, I’ve been checking. And I didn’t tell anyone anything online or on phone or any place. You thinking of setting up the business here?”

“No, we can’t stay here, after they realize the decoy purchases I set up over in Nevada are just a smokescreen, they’ll start checking places like this. Far as I can tell it’s working though—they’re combing the Vegas-Henderson complex for me.”

“Thought about the business?”

“I sent out a temporary suspension notice—but if I can find a way to get it rolling again ...” He shrugged. “I’d take the chance. Fuck those pricks.”

“I think I’ve found someplace you can set it up—a couple hours north of L.A.” He handed Shortstack a slip of paper. “All the contact info is there—cryptography, everything. You’ll go to a neutral site, it’s only gonna be set up for like two minutes so you got to get there at the right moment, and download–”

“I know the drill. But who is this?”

“You ever hear of Clive the Hive?”

“I’ve heard of him, sure. I thought he was out in eastern Oregon.”

“He’s out there just like you’re in Las Vegas.” Candle could feel Danny staring at him now.

“Oh right. They say he’s got huge processing power. So he’s ... interested? He knows about the undermarket?”

“He is. But he’ll have to meet you in person. I’ve got a contact—Zilia—Well it doesn’t matter. Clive approves of the whole thing. He wants to do it. He’s got a whole system for making them think it’s someplace it’s not. He’s got a wipe program that’ll take it down in twenty seconds if there’s a raid. He’s got vast processing, his own energy sources, he’ll give you a lot more leeway.”

“Dangerous as hell, though,” Shortstack said. Then he grinned. “I’ll do it! I’m gonna take another chance on you, Candle. I just always had a feeling about you. That’s what I do, I go with the gut feelings. But if they get to you somehow ...” Shortstack glanced at Danny.