She was working her way through streets of strip malls and businesses, traffic sometimes heavy, but most of the time light
An automobile with lights mounted on a roof rack shot out from a used car lot and fell in behind T-X.
She glanced in the rearview mirror with one eye, her
sensors scanning and evaluating the new phenomenon. The automobile was a Los Angeles Police squad car. Its red and white lights were flashing; its siren whooped several times.
She was being pursued.
"You, in the silver Lexus! Slow down and pull over!" the amplified voice of the lone police officer boomed from the radio unit "Pull over immediately!''
T-X considered the situation for something less than one millisecond before getting off the accelerator and braking to a hard stop as she pulled over to the side of the street across from what looked like an office or business complex of some sort behind a tall iron fence. Brightly colored graffiti was painted over all the brick walls inside the empty parking area.
At the end of the block a large, well lit billboard for Victoria's Secret displayed a beautiful model wearing nothing more than a wide, toothy smile, a very low-cut bra, and brief panties.
T-X was aware of the squad car stopping behind her, and of the lone male officer getting out of the car and approaching. He was beefy with a square face and short-cropped hair.
She was also aware of the Victoria's Secret advertisement and what its significance was vis-a-vis the human male-female sexual relationship.
' She flexed her shoulder and back muscles so that her breasts became more prominent, turned her head, looked up, and smiled just as the cop reached her.
"Good evening, Officer," she said.
His eyes strayed to her breasts. "Um, lady? You know how fast you were going?"
"Eighty-two point three miles per hour," T-X said.
The cop had to smile. This was one for the books, something he could tell at the precinct house. Christ, but she was built. "It's a thirty-mile-an-hour zone," he said. He'd opened his ticket book, but flipped it shut. How could you ticket perfection? "I really oughta write you a ticket here."
T-X glanced at the cop's shiny patent leather utility belt. She catalogued the sidearm as a Sig-Sauer P226, with a fifteen-round detachable box magazine. Total length was 196 mm, its weight empty was 750 g, the cartridge was a 9mm Parabellum with a muzzle velocity of 335 meters per second with the 115-grain JHP round.
She smiled again at the cop whose name tag read barnes. "I like that gun."
c.5
The Valley
He had trashed his bike, permanently this time. The frame was bent all to hell, the gas tank punctured, the engine case cracked when it hit the boulder, both wheels folded like pretzels.
Riding in the rear of the ratty flatbed truck back down into the valley, John Connor had plenty of time to feel sorry for himself, and to be pissed off as well by his own stupidity.
He knew what his mother would have said about it; she had been the one talking all the time about how fate was what we made of it. Not the other way around. He had done it to himself, this time, with no help from anyone.
Any of her biker boyfriends would have laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, passed him the tequila, and said something like: "Next time you go rodding around in the middle of the night, maybe you should wear a parachute." Or something like: "Did that big, bad deer knock you on your ass, kid?"
There'd be no sympathy from anyone, but there
would be a grudging acceptance that he'd had the cojones to pull off such a stunt in the first place and the bald-ass luck to survive it
The stuff from his packs had been scattered halfway down the hill to the ocean, and it had taken him the better part of two hours, climbing up and down in the loose sand and rocks, fighting his pains, to find most of it and get back up to the Drive.
It'd only taken one minute, however, from the moment he'd reached the tangled mess that had been his bike, until he came to the conclusion that it was beyond repair. He might have been able to salvage some parts, but he'd been unable to find his tools or flashlight, and he didn't have the heart to lug around a bunch of useless crap.
He'd had the balls, or the stupidity, to pull the stunt, but he had to wonder if he'd been lucky after all. If there was no purpose in living, then why live at all?
It had been a recurrent theme of his. Maybe it was time for him to finally do something about it.
Put up or shut up, his foster mom had told him once. That was when his real mother was in the nuthouse up at Pescadero.
The first vehicle that had come along had been the flatbed loaded with ten Mexican laborers nearly blind drunk, laughing and singing.
They had come from one party and were headed to a sister's house somewhere over near Van Nuys. None of them noticed that John was banged up, his hands raw
with road rash, jeans torn up, blood oozing from a long gash in his leg.
Never mind that the beer was piss warm, and the tequila was so cheap that kerosene would have tasted better. They were willing to share.
They had no trouble deciding who and what they were, or where their lives were going. They had never been fed any delusions about becoming a world leader. Nor probably had they ever been the target of some machine, sent on an assassination mission.
They had come down out of the hills and passed under 1-101 before Connor looked up out of his morose thoughts and became aware of where he was.
The neighborhood was blue collar, industrial. They passed a small bank and a supermarket, and at the end of the block, across from what looked like a construction site or maybe a place where they stored heavy construction equipment, was an animal hospital.
John flexed his leg, which had stiffened up on the long ride, and fresh blood oozed out of the wound. He needed help, but he wasn't willing to go to the emergency room of some hospital. There would be too many questions. And that was the one thing he was very bad at, answering questions, especially the kind that cops were bound to ask. He had no permanent address, no real money, not even a proper ID. He was in no one's database, so far as he knew. He had never applied for a loan or a credit card. He had never owned a house. In fact he'd never owned anything, except for his bike, which he bought from a
down-and-out biker who needed the cash for drugs. If the cops started digging into who and what he was, he figured that he would be in trouble.
He pulled himself up and pounded a fist on the roof of the cab. The driver stuck bis head out the window and looked over his shoulder at John.
"Que?"
"AcA me bap," John shouted at him.
"Si, si," the driver said, and he pulled over, bumping up on the curb and then down again. Everyone laughed. This was great fun.
The sign on the building read universal rentals, and behind the chain-link fence a big yellow mobile crane, its massive telescoping boom fixed over the truck's cab like a tank's cannon, loomed over the neighborhood.
Across the street a small glass-fronted building was lit only from the outside. The sign on the front read emery
ANIMAL HOSPITAL.
Connor gathered his tattered packs and bedroll and climbed painfully down from the back of the truck.
"Gracias," he called to the driver, who waved back.
"Si, si," the man said, and the others waved as the truck took off in a cloud of smoke and dust, leaving Connor standing alone in the middle of the street.
There was no traffic here at this hour, and after the truck was gone the night turned silent.
Connor limped across the street and looked through the front windows into the darkened reception room of the animal clinic. It was unlikely that a place this small would have a night watchman, but you could never tell.