The figure detached itself from the shadows around his car, stood to face him. Soft violet light from the lot’s marker lamps threw the form into silhouette, killed facial recognition. But something about the stance chased up the memories the voice had stirred. The syn gave him a name, features to put on the darkened form. He stared, trying to make sense of it.
“You?”
The figure shifted, made a low gesture with one hand.
“But…” He shook his head. “You…You’re on fucking Mars, man.”
The figure said nothing, waited. Eddie moved closer, arms raised toward a tentative hugging embrace.
“When’d you get back? I mean, man, what are you doing back here?”
“Don’t you know?”
He made a baffled smile, genuine in its origins. “No, man, I’ve got no fucking—”
—and the smile collapsed, bleached out with sudden understanding.
For just an instant, the desert quiet and the rushing away of an autohauler on the highway.
He clawed across his belly, under his jacket. Had fingers hooked around the butt of the compact Colt Citizen he kept cling-padded at his belt—
He’d moved too close.
The knowledge dripped through him, and it was a Scorpion knowing from that other time, somehow sad and slow despite the speed at which he could see it all coming apart. The figure snapped forward, bruising grip on his wrist, and pinned his gun arm where it was. He flung up a warding left arm, chopped at the other man’s throat, or face, or, too close, too fucking close in, and here came the block, he had nothing, could do nothing. A low kick took out his legs from under him, a full-body shove, and he went down. He rolled, desperately, don’t let the fucker get on you with his boots, land on your back maybe, the gun, the fucking gun—
The cling-clip held. He got a grip of the Colt’s butt again, dragged it loose and sprawled backward with a snarl of relief, raising the pistol, the Citizen had no safety, just squeeze hard and—
The figure stood over him, black against the sky. Arm down, pointing—
And something flattened him to the ground again, something with god-like force.
Muffled crack. His ears took it in, but it took him a couple of moments to assign it any importance. The stars were right overhead. He watched them, abruptly fascinated. They seemed a lot closer than you’d expect, hanging low, like they’d taken a sudden interest.
He wheezed, felt something leaking rapidly, like cold water in his chest. He knew what it was. The syn forced a merciless clarity.
He lifted his head and it was the hardest work he’d ever done, as if his skull were made of solid stone. He made out the figure of the other man, arm still pointing down at him like some kind of judgment.
“I figured you’d fight,” said the voice. “But it’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it. Too long. Maybe that’s why.”
Why what? he wondered muzzily. He coughed, tasted blood in his throat. Wondered also what Chrissie was going to do now, stupid little bitch.
“I think you’re done,” said the voice.
He tried to nod, but his head just fell back on the gritty surface of the lot, and this time it stayed there. The stars, he noticed, seemed to be dimming, and the sky looked colder than it had before, less velvet-soft and more like the open void it really was.
Dead in a brothel parking lot, for fuck’s sake.
He heard the blastpast of another autohauler out on the highway, saw in his mind’s eye the cozy red glow of its taillights accelerating away into the darkness.
He ran to catch up.
part II. OFF THE HOOK
Curtailment of freedom is a powerful social tool and must be deployed as such, with wisdom and restraint. It is therefore vital to distinguish between the genuine and quite complex parameters of what is socially necessary, and the simplistic and emotive demands of a growing popular hysteria. Failure to make this distinction is likely to have unattractive consequences.
CHAPTER 11
In the end, it went down in the chapel, pretty much as he’d expected it would. Prisons like this didn’t offer many places free of surveillance, but Florida’s faith-based approach to rehabilitation meant that a man had a Charter-enshrined right to privacy in prayer at any hour outside of the night lockdown. No securi-cams, no invasive scrutiny. The theory was, presumably, that in the House of the Lord the corrections officers didn’t need to be watching you, because God already was. No one seemed to have noticed that the Lord was falling down on the job. In the three months since Carl transferred in from Miami, there’d been at least half a dozen bloody showdowns in the low-light arena of the chapel. Two ended in fatal injury.
Carl wasn’t sure if at some level, prison staff were giving sanction to the fights, or if quiet and massive pressure from above kept the matter clean of investigation or review. In the end, it came to the same thing. No one wanted to buck the system, no one wanted to hear about it. Sigma Corporation, by invoking religious status for its operation, effectively sidestepped the bulk of what weak administrative oversight the Confederated Republic was prepared to endorse, and glowing testimonials at the congressional level pissed all over the rest. The bodies were taken away, shrink-wrapped in black.
See, niggah, you gotta put your trust in the Lord, grinned the Guatemalan when he sold him the shank. He nodded at the little oil lamp altar he had on a corner shelf, though it was the black-skinnned Virgen de Guadalupe behind the flickering flame. Like the governor always sayin’ at the assemblies, the Lord got your back. But it don’ never hurt to equalize, right.
The shank itself was a splinter of homegrown practicality that echoed the pragmatism in the Guatemalan’s words. Someone had taken the monofil blade off a workshop fretsaw and piece-melted an array of colored plastic beads around the lower half to form a garish, pebbly-surfaced grip. The whole thing was less than twenty centimeters long, and the beads had been carefully selected for a surface that resisted fingerprinting. That left genetic trace, of course, but the Guatemalan was thorough and he’d carefully anointed his customer’s hands from a tiny bottle he kept on the same shelf as the Virgen. Brief high-tech reek of engineered molecules cutting through the fart-and-patchouli warmth in the cell as Carl rubbed the fluid in; then the volatile bulk evaporated and left a fading chill on his palms. For a good three or four hours now, any skin cells he shed from either hand would be useless to a gene sniffer. The high-and low-tech mix sent a faint shudder of recollection through him. Going equipped among the nighttime shanties of Caracas. The city center spread out below him like a bowl of stars, the close warmth of barely lit streets up where he prowled. The confidence of well-chosen weaponry and what it would do.
Eventually, of course, the monofil would cut into the plastic enough to loosen the mounting, and with time the blade would drop out. But by then the whole weapon would have been dropped through the grate on some basement ventilation duct. Like a lot of what went on inside the South Florida State Partnership (Sigma Holdings) Correctional Facility, it was strictly a short-term option.
It was also expensive.
Seventeen, the Guatemalan wanted. He liked Carl enough to add explanations. My boy Danny gotta run big risks down in the shop, puttin’ something like this together. Then I gotta hold it for you. Do your hands for you. Find the downtime for handover. Full service like that don’t come cheap. Carl looked back into the man’s polished coal features, shrugged, nodded. There was a degree of race solidarity operating in South Florida State, but it didn’t do to push it too far. And he had the seventeen. Had, in fact, nearly two dozen of the twenty-mil endorphin capsules that served the prison as a high-denomination contraband currency. Never mind that he’d need them in a couple of weeks to trade against whatever debased form of griego Louie the Chem could swing for him this time around. Never mind that he might need endorphins for his own wounds a few hours hence. Short-term focus. Now he needed the shank. Worry about the rest later, if and when he had the leisure.