No sign of the squatters yet, but Nohar doubted any lived near the first floor. That would be a little too close to the action. The empty beer bulbs scattered across the floor, the occasional cartridge from an air-hypo, the fresh bullet pockmarks, marked the lobby as a party spot for the gangs. Not to mention **Zip-perhead" painted on the side of the station wagon. Hmm, Nohar corrected himself. Gang—singular. Lately, the one gang seemed to be it. He didn't know exactly what to make of that. There had been at least five gangs around when he had been running with the Hellcats. But that was a long time ago—the years before this building burned up—and Nohar really didn't want to think about it.
He decided he had waited long enough and went straight for one of the open stairwells. The winding FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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concrete stairs were swathed in darkness, and Nohar's view became colorless and nocturnal. Here, the heat was even worse, and the smell of fire was overwhelmed by the aromas of rust, mold, and rotting garbage. The stairs were concrete, but every other footstep fell on something soft.
Nohar tried to ignore the garbage and think like a sniper. The face of the burned-out wing was pointed at the target, so the assassin would take a point amidst the wreckage. Few squatters in the remains of the fire—
Nohar hit floor ten and had to pause because he thought he'd come across a corpse. A lepus was curled in a fetal position in the corner of the tenth-floor landing. An acrid odor announced the fact the rabbit had soiled—him, her? Nohar couldn't tell in the dark—itself. As he approached, the rabbit's twitching showed it was still among the living. An air-hypo cartridge lay-on the ground.
A jacked rabbit—might have even been funny if it hadn't been so obvious the rabbit was on flush, and having a bad reaction. Nohar knelt next to the rabbit. She—Nohar could tell now—wasn't wearing anything. Filth covered her dark fur. He felt a wave of anger when he didn't see the hypo. That meant one of two things. Either someone had done her, or had stolen the hypo. In both cases they'd left her on her own like this. Scenes like this made Nohar think the fundamentalists might be right and moreys were an abomination in the eyes of whatever deity.
It was flush, all the classic symptoms. Near catato-nia, chills, dehydration, voiding the bowels, rolling up of the eyes, shallow breathing, slight nosebleed. She was lucky. In truly severe reactions, the nervous system went. Then he would have found a corpse. She'd been through the worst of it, though. What she needed now was light and water. The darkness tended to perpetuate the hallucinogenic effects of flush. She could
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be psychologically unable to move long after the physical effects had worn off.
Nohar picked her up. She weighed nothing. She was a small morey to begin with, and she was skinny as well. He hoped the squatters still kept those rain barrels up topside.
On the burned-out wing, with the exception of the concrete facade, the top three floors were gone. Nohar carried the rabbit out of the stairwell and into the open air of the seventeenth floor. Nohar saw the orange plastic barrels immediately. Good, the occupants still collected rainwater. He looked at the shivering rabbit, silently asked himself what he was doing, and lowered her face gently into one of the cleaner barrels.
The moment the water brushed the side of her face, her ears picked up. Good sign. They stayed like that, Nohar holding her face just above the water, the rabbit curled up with her neck resting on the edge of the barrel, for close to fifteen minutes. The only thing keeping Nohar from giving up on her brain-lock was the gradual improvement, and the fact she did seem to be drinking a little.
There had to be a better way to deal with this, Nohar thought. He wasn't a trained medic. He was following the home procedure for a bad flush trip. It was a lot easier with a toilet handy—the running joke was, the comedown in the head was the way the drug got its street name.
A sputtering came from the barrel. Nohar hoped she wouldn't vomit. "Listen to my voice." Nohar tried to sound reassuring. "It was a bad trip, but you're coming back. It wasn't real. You can relax now. It's important to untense your muscles, slowly—"
After a decade plus, the lines came back with surprising ease. She didn't say anything as he talked her down, and Nohar counted himself lucky she wasn't a screamer.
"Let go, damnit!"
A wide foot made a hollow slap on Nohar's chest,
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announcing the fact she had regained some contact with reality. Nohar didn't think letting go of her was a good idea, but the rabbit had suddenly erupted into thrashing motion from near paralysis. She was saying something in Spanish, and from the tone of her voice, it wasn't very pleasant. Good intentions only went so far. He set her down next to the barrel. She was panting, and a little unsteady on her feet.
Nohar rubbed his shoulder. It was tightening up after the stress of holding the rabbit above the barrel. He knew he was asking for it, but he said it anyway. "Are you all right?"
She looked up. She had a scar on one cheek that turned up her mouth in a quirky smile, as if she enjoyed some private joke at his expense. "Don't do no favors, Kit."
"Name's Nohar." He shrugged and started walking toward the windows on the south wall.
He got to the windows, began looking for Johnson's house, and immediately realized the limitations of his vision. The houses were mere blobs.
Nohar turned back to the rain barrel and saw the rabbit, apparently recovering out of sheer cussedness, doing her best to clean herself off with a rag. Oops, not a rag, he had left his shirt over there. Oh, well, the shirt was too hot anyway.
"Hey, Fluffy-"
She glared at him.
"Better at giving favors than receiving them?"
"Name's Angel. Fuck you."
"You owe me something for that shirt you just wasted."
She looked at the dripping cloth she'd been wiping herself with. "Yeah, you and every Ziphead this side of nirvana."
"Your trip an old debt coming home?"
"Wow, Kit, you have a grasp of the obvious that's worthy of a cop." She stood up—most of the filth was 10ft
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out of her spotted brown fur—walked over to the window and slapped the wet shirt across his midsection.
"Your shirt."
Nohar wrung out the shirt and tied it around his waist. "Thanks, Angel— Can you help? I need someone with better vision than I have."
Angel sighed. "What you want?"
"I need to find a window overlooking a ranch house with a shot-out picture window."
"You say shot?" A real smile overcame the ghost of the scar.
"Yes. I can't pick it out—"
She shook her head. "Kit, I didn't know the cops were hiring—"
"I am not a cop!"
Angel stepped back, still smiling, showing a pair of prominent front teeth. "Sore point? What are you, then? What you looking for?"
"I'm a private detective. I'm trying to find a sniper."
She laughed and said, "I can tell you who. What I get?"
It took Nohar half a second to realize she was serious. He closed the distance between them in an instant and grabbed her shoulders. There was a brief adrenaline rush, but he contained it.
"Tell me."
"Not for nothing."
"What do you want?"
"You played the savior, play it all the way. I want protection. You're a big one, Kit. Keep Zipheads from expressing me to nowhere again."
She had him. He'd gone to the trouble of saving her life. Now, he had to make it worth something.
Nohar looked into her eyes and she stopped smiling. "I will, if you tell me two things. First, why are they after you?"
She shrugged. "Made stupid mistake. I tried to keep Stigmata, my gang, going after the Zips moved in.