“I know where you’re coming from. I’ve been there.”
“Really?”
“I love you, man,” ROMS says.
I chew a mouthful of hot dog, and looking at ROMS, wash it down with Nix. Because of his hostage skills, he always has something good to say when you’re down, but this surprises me. This is not in his programming.
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask ROMS.
“Love makes the world go round,” he says and sniffles.
I reach out, and his instrument shield is cool to the touch. When I check his power light, it’s flashing. He gets pretty emotional when his batteries are low, and his bomb sniffer resets to default, so that it sounds like he’s sniveling, like he’s about to cry.
“Can’t we all just get along?” he asks me, his voice slow and slurred.
Poor guy. I use my scope to call Maintenance to come pick him up.
“Hugs,” ROMS mutters before all five of his arms droop, and he finally goes out.
* * *
In the afternoon, there’s a brief rampage at Oracle and then a standoff at an upstart called crepes.com, but tactical ends up handling it. It turns out that a crepe is a sort of pancake, except you roll it up like a breakfast burrito. I don’t get to try one, though. All those bulls on SWAT snarf them down. Online crepe sales must be good, though — the parking lot’s solid BMW.
The last shot of the day is a disgruntled so-and-so at Sun Microsystems, and as the news choppers begin to circle overhead, my heart stops for the longest time ever. I can’t even tell if I stopped it or if it just shut down on its own. I’ve never been hooked up to a monitor or anything, but you can feel your chest tighten and know when something’s not working, so this is not in my head, like Lt. Kim says. Above, the hovering reporters are already trying to hack into my scope’s video feed for the evening news, and all I can do is sit on a gray, stinky roof, feeling nothing.
After work, Gupta and I ride the CalTrain to his gym.
Lt. Kim says one of the keys to being a healthy sniper is not taking your job home with you, so I agreed to find a way to unwind after work. That’s when Gupta invited me to join him a couple nights a week for a little Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
At rush hour, the train is packed. Most of the people are just guys hunched over their Porn Pilots, though there’s a couple tough-looking characters, too. I don’t get worried. Even though I only weigh 110 pounds, people don’t mess with me. They see my rifle and know I’m a peace officer, that I’m here to help.
The Transit Authority painted yellow happy faces on the fronts of their trains to discourage all these suicides, and as a northbound commuter races past in a smiley blur, it makes me wonder if Lt. Kim doesn’t have it all wrong. Maybe when you put a good image over a bad one, it’s the bad that wins out. I wonder if the happy face helps the guy driving the train.
I ask Gupta, “Hey, who’s Cherry Garcia?”
“Ah, this is Ben and Jerry,” he says. “A very fine flavor of ice cream. Every bite is cherries.”
I think of cherry blossoms, see their peeling pink bursts.
“Well, at least all those hostages made it safely out of HP.”
“It was data he was holding hostage,” Gupta says. “He threatened to erase all of HP’s bar codes. Talk about bringing a company to its knees.”
“So no one was in danger?”
Gupta shakes his head.
“What were his demands?”
“He wanted a magic carpet ride back to Karachi.”
We shake our heads over the tragedy of this, over the needless waste.
“Why not just jump on a plane, then?” I ask
“Why not just jump in front of a train?” Gupta says.
“He really said ‘magic carpet ride’?”
Gupta shrugs. Beyond him in the window, California bungalows flash their pastel backs at us. “I don’t know about exact words,” he says. “This is a popular saying.”
When we get to the jiu-jitsu gym, there’s a beautiful girl waiting for Gupta. She’s about sixteen, bay-leaf skin against the blue of the mat, warming up with knee twirls and neck bridges.
“What a daughter,” Gupta says to me. “Why couldn’t she stick with debate? Keep your distance from this one,” he adds, but I can’t tell if he thinks I’d be trouble for her, or the other way around.
When she comes over, she’s still loosening up her arms.
“Nice rifle,” she says. “Rhodesian?”
She talks a little funny because of her mouthguard.
“South African,” I answer. “It’s an early model Kruger.”
“Didn’t the UN ban those?”
I shrug. “Technically.”
She lifts her eyebrows, impressed. “I’m Seema,” she says. “Wanna spar?”
“Okay,” I tell her, even though she’s got ten pounds on me and “Mission: Submission” is embroidered on her gi.
We start to circle each other, with Seema faking a couple lazy leg chops. Her ankles, when they flash from her gi, are strong and cut.
Jiu-jitsu is based on the notion that people need distance to hurt you. Instead of keeping away, you pull your opponent closer, so that your bodies are touching, so their arms and legs are too close to strike. Then you have to learn to feel at home in the grasp of a stranger.
Seema rushes me, clinches, and sweeps a leg. On the ground, I endure a couple ankle cranks. I roll out of a double heel hook, then surprise her with a wrist crucifix.
That gets her attention. “You new here?” I ask.
Seema’s keylocks are savage, and she keeps a constant knee in my kidneys.
“I beat all the guys at my old dojo,” she says, “so here I am.”
From behind her hot pink mouthguard, she flashes me a wicked smile.
Her legs are around my hips, feet interlocked, and when I try to pass her guard, I almost eat a triangle choke. Even though she’s wearing a full gi, her ta-tas are right there. I’ve never grappled with a girl before, and I’ll admit I’m concentrating on not farting or anything.
“You’re the Blackbird, aren’t you?” she asks, sneaking her legs up to my shoulders so she can set an arm bar.
“My real name’s Tim.” I block her arm attempt, but the distraction suckers me into a side-mount, and before I know it, I’m breathing some serious shoulder blade. Suddenly, I’ve got gi burns on my face. This girl is wriggly.
“So, do you shoot women?” she asks.
This question is probably just a distraction so she can reverse me. I entangle an arm and work an elbow lock. She winces enough that I know the joint is getting pretty hot. “Justice is blind,” I tell her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I don’t really have an answer for this. It’s just what they taught us at the Academy. Under me, I can feel her ribs undulate as she breathes, the graceful arc of her sternum, and to answer her question, my mind’s drifting back to an old sniper ethics course, when Wham — she flips me with an elevator.
“I’d shoot a woman,” Seema says. “If she was asking for it.”
“Really?”
She sets her hooks, improves position, and then Bang — rear naked choke.
“That was a joke,” she says, knowing I can’t talk anymore. To really sink the choke, she arches her back, which makes my vision go sparkly. Then she gives me a little lecture. “You know, in Switzerland, you need a court order to shoot a woman, and in Brazil, they teach women jiu-jitsu, so there’s way less violence.”
I can’t tell if her dark hair has fallen in my face or if the lights have gone out. All I know is I feel relaxed all over and warm, the opposite of when your heart stops and your blood’s just loitering. I picture Brazil as a green country filled with colorful talking birds and mangos maybe, where beautiful women walk around in white gis, and whenever one person tries to hurt another person, a woman appears and pulls you down, wraps her arms around you.