'You, ah, want maybe a quarter-million to give me that and take a walk?'
A fat hand came up to stroke his pale, lean face nervously.
'What I want,' she said, snapping her fingers so that the unit spun and glittered, 'is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist. But a quarter'll do for a retainer.'
Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn't been kept up to the Christian White standard. The she turned the disruptor off.
'Two million,' I said.
'My kind of man,' she said, and laughed. 'What's in the bag?'
'A shotgun.'
'Crude.' It might have been a compliment.'
Ralfi said nothing at all. 'Name's Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare.' She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the colour of dried blood. And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets, I saw my new face twinned there.
'I'm Johnny,' I said. 'We're taking Mr. face with us.'
He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm's most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shakes hands endlessly with the bartender.
And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and careful with his credit when he was.
The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they'd carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament.
Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemed to know them.
I heard the black one laugh.
I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I've never got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above them. Maybe that saved me. Ralfi kept walking, but I don't think he was trying to escape. I think he'd already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.
I looked back down in time to see him explode.
Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls of. It's a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended.
Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known.
And then the joke-shop thumb tip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lightning Yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer's hand passes laterally through Ralfi's skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.
Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched section rolling forward on the tiled pavement. In total silence.
I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.
It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She'd just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in frond of the Drome, red lights flashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.
I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. 'I don't see how the hell I missed him.'
'Cause he's fast, so fast.' She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her boot heels. 'His nervous system's jacked up. He's factory custom.' She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. 'I'm gonna get that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.'
'What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City.
He's a Yakuza assassin.'
'Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too.' And she showed me her hands, fingers slightly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel.
I'd never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of sharpshooters had clipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl. Where do you go when the world's wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.
Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace.
You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own filament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.
She had another answer, too.
'So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.
'The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contra autism prostheses.' I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. 'Client's code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk about, there's no way to recover your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut it out, and torture it. I don't know it, never did.'
'Squids? Crawly things with arms?' We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit. 'Super conducting quantum inference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.'
'Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours?'
She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.
'Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of cheering stadium.'
'Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.'
'But your data's still secure.' Pride in profession. 'No government'll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too likely to Watergate you.'
'Navy stuff,' she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. 'Navy stuff. I got a friend down here that was in the navy, name's Jones. I think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to take him something.'