"Too tight a squeeze," she said.
The nearest cop's grin broadened. "You could sit on my lap."
"I think I'll get in the back."
He pretended to be horrified. "A nice girl like you can't sit in there. That's where we put the prisoners."
His partner joined in. "You know? Sinners?"
"We've had all kind of scumbags back there."
"Probably diseased."
Cynthia reached for the rear door handle. "I'll manage."
"Suit yourself."
The lock popped. Cynthia opened the door and climbed inside. There actually were some unpleasant-looking stains on the plastic seat cover.
"You asked for it."
"I'll live with it."
"Hold tight."
"I'm holding."
The cruiser took off in a squeal of laid rubber, the scream of its siren, and a blaze of flashing lights. The boys were showing off. They had those plain, scrubbed, unlined faces that seemed to have become so common in the last few years, as if they were manufactured somewhere out in the Midwest, complete with crewcuts, emotionless eyes, and mouths that seemed designed only to leer and sneer. They roared up Third Avenue at high speed. At Fifteenth Street they all but plowed into a bus.
"Goddamn it."
"Had to be on Fifteenth Street."
As they got underway again, the cop riding shotgun swivelled in his seat. "You know about Fifteenth Street?" His leer was back.
The driver sniggered. "Sure she does. I heard some of these clerical auxiliaries even moonlight back there."
Cynthia Kline did not, in fact, know anything about Fifteenth Street and made the appropriate noises. She was certain that the grinning assholes in the front seat couldn't wait to tell her. She was immediately proved right.
"The dekes have a house on that block. A regular sink of iniquity. It's where they go to have a bit of illicit fun."
"When the strain of being righteous gets too much for them."
The driver laughed. Cynthia found the sound instantly irritating.
"Maybe you shouldn't talk like that in front of the lady. I mean, she's practically one of them."
Shotgun put his face close to the grille that separated the back of the car from the front. "You wouldn't get us into trouble, would you, gorgeous?"
Cynthia shook her head. "I always do my best to avoid trouble."
She was storing away the tidbit of information about Fifteenth Street in the back of her mind. There was no knowing when something like that might come in handy. She might be a damn sight more use moonlighting in a deacon whorehouse than shuffling data on Astor Place. Or maybe not. She could imagine what those repressed bastards might want to have done to them.
The cruiser was still screaming up Third as if it were on its way to an emergency. The two cops kept up a running commentary on individuals on the sidewalk. All of it was abusive and a good percentage was homicidal.
"Look at that big fat bastard. Imagine pumping a hollow point into his fat gut."
There seemed to be nobody that they did not hate. But, Cynthia reflected, it was actually understandable that the younger cops should behave like an occupying army. That was virtually what they were. After the takeover, working on the principle of divide and rule, the NYPD had adopted the same recruiting policy that the deacons used. They went out and hired country boys from the depressed Midwest. The new rookies came as strangers to a town they disliked and distrusted, and they quickly developed a relationship of mutual loathing with its inhabitants.
They hung a tire-wrenching left on Twenty-third Street and started heading west. Cynthia realized that they were driving directly into the riot area.
"Are you going to drop me off, or what?" she asked.
"Thought we'd take a look around first. You want to see what's happening, don't you?"
"I…"She trailed off as she realized that there was no point in answering. She was going to get a tour of the riot scene whether she wanted one or not. She had seen riots before, more than enough, but she was not about to admit that. It hardly fitted with her current identity.
There was a police barricade across Eighth Avenue. A crowd had gathered on the north side of Twenty-third Street. Quiet and sullen, the rubbernecks kept a cautious distance from the line of heavily armed police. There was a smell of gasoline and burned plastic in the air, as well as the bite of lingering tear gas. Gunships circled overhead with their rotors slapping and their spotlights probing the area. As the cruiser nosed up to the barricade, two patrolmen in full riot gear, visors locked down, pulled a pair of sawhorses aside to let them pass. The cruiser had to give way, though, as a paramedic unit came through. The two cops put on their helmets and downlocked their Remingtons. They were noticeably more tense now that they were in the battle line.
"There's been a lot of casualties. St. Vincent's is having quite a problem coping," the driver said.
Shotgun grunted. "Bastards should be left in the street to bleed."
"A lot of them were."
Cynthia wanted nothing more than to be out of there.
Beyond that barrier, the power was out and the streetlamps dark. The only lights came from flickering fires, the searchlights of the slowly turning gunships, and the rotating red and blue of the dozens of police and fire department vehicles. The center of everything was the supermarket at the corner of Twentieth. It had been reduced to nothing but a burned-out skeleton of blackened girders. To the north and east, the lights on the Empire State Building shone bright and clear. Farther north, the Trump Grand Tower gleamed in the night.
"The firemen couldn't get to the blaze until about an hour ago. There were snipers on the rooftops."
"Can't take the guns away from the people." Shotgun sounded bitter. It was one of the major paradoxes of the Faithful regime that although pornography and rock music had been outlawed, it was easier than ever to get a gun. During the campaign of 2000, Larry Faithful had gotten himself so far into hock with the gun lobby that there was no way he could ever institute gun controls. In a situation of almost complete repression, the American people had the inalienable right to arm themselves to the teeth.
They passed a long line of chained and handcuffed people, covered by riot guns while waiting for transport to the lockup. Other huddled shapes draped in black plastic sheeting were obviously bodies. The car crunched over a continuous carpet of broken window glass. There were still flames inside a building across the street from the supermarket. Cynthia peered through the rear window of the cruiser. Despite all that she had seen, part of her still found it hard to believe that such chaos could result from what was really only a minor distribution screwup in the Daily Bread program. She remembered the words of Tom Weber, her political science instructor back at the camp in the woods outside Vancouver. "It's far easier to run an inefficient welfare program that fouls up all the time than just end welfare altogether. You have the advantage of appearing to do something while, at the same time, you are equipped with an ideal tool to manipulate the underclass. Faithful's Daily Bread program is the perfect example. By substituting a crude handout for every other kind of more sophisticated safety-net program, it reduced the recipients to the most degradedly dependent level. Whenever glitches occur in the system, they spark riots. If you start instigating these glitches according to a planned pattern, you are able to use them as an excuse to raze neighborhoods and relocate unwanted populations."
The cops were guffawing.
"Daily Bread."
"Sounds like a newspaper."
"So let the scum eat newspaper."
The neighborhood looked as if it were well on the way to being razed. Cynthia doubted that the A&P would ever be rebuilt. The cardboard box people would be setting up homes in the ruin inside of a week. The police stood around in tight, watchful knots, weapons at the ready, scanning the rooftops. They obviously had the area secured but were still nervous about random sniper fire. House clearing had already started. A brown-skinned teenager was being dragged from a doorway. Two cops were holding his arms, and a third had him by the hair. There was blood on his face, and his eyes were wide with terror. He put up a certain minimal struggle, and immediately the three uniforms laid into him with their nightsticks. The cops in the front of the cruiser shouted encouragement.