This ones on me Kevin said, passing Rydell the helmet. It wasnt anything like Karens slick little goggles; just a white plastic rig like kids used for games. Put it on. Ill dial for you.
Well Rydell said, this is nice, Kevin, but you dont have to go to all this trouble.
Kevin touched the bone in his nose. Well, theres the rent.
There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.
Now Sonya said, just as perky as could be, were showing that you did graduate from this post-secondary training program
Academy Rydell corrected. Police.
Yes, Berry, but were showing that you were then employed for a total of eighteen days, before being placed on suspension. Sonya looked like a cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very white and looked like a single unit, something that could be snapped out intact for closer inspection. But not for cleaning, because there was no need; cartoons didnt eat. She had wonderful tits, though; she had the tits Rydell would have drawn for her if hed been a talented cartoonist.
Well Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, I got into some trouble after they assigned me to Patrol.
Sonya nodded brightly. I see, Berry. Rydell wondered what she did see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-puppet could see. Or how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look like to an employment agencys computer system? Not like much, he decided.
Then you moved to Los Angeles, Berry, and we show ten weeks of employment with the IntenSecure Corporations residential armed-response branch. Driver with experience of weapons.
Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung under the LAPD chopper. Probably theyd had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. Yep he agreed.
And youve resigned your position with IntenSecure.
Guess so.
Sonya beamed at Rydell as though hed just admitted, shyly, to a congressional appointment or a post-doctoral degree. Well, Berry she said, let me put my thinking cap on for just a second! She winked, then closed her big cartoon eyes.
Jesus, Rydebl thought. He tried to glance sideways, but Kevins helmet didnt have any peripherals, so there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle of her desk, sketchy details suggesting an office, and the employment agencys logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look like the anchorwoman on a channel that only reported very good news.
Sonya opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. Youre from the South she said.
Uh-huh.
Plantations, Berry. Magnolias. Tradition. But a certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.
Fawk? Huh?
Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.
Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last weeks People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.
Something for you, Berry? Kevin looked hopeful.
Maybe Rydell said. This place in Sherman Oaks. Ill call em up, check it out.
Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. I can give you a lift he said.
There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.
Kevin had let him off at the corner of Sepulveda and hed walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.
Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he mustve driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldnt be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. Youd pass a couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.
Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.
There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored glass of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, but they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasnt sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.
Got an appointment with Justine Cooper he said, taking his sunglasses off.
With a client the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he shouldve been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a skinny woman with black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.
Ill wait Rydell said.
The farmer didnt answer. State law said he couldnt have a gun, just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night specials.
Rydell looked around. That ol Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallonat least that had some kind of spin on it.
He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasnt good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind glass in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldnt read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on your lawn in Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big, red-lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was spread with a hand-stitched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.