2. Cruising with gunhead
Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur Hussar with twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a straightaway, assuming you could find one open and had the time to accelerate. Hernandez, his shift super, said you couldnt trust an Englishman to build anything much bigger than a hat, not if you wanted it to work when you needed it; he said IntenSecure shouldve bought Israeli or at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph Lauren to design a tank anyway?
Rydell didnt know about that, but that paint job was definitely trying too hard. He thought they probably wanted people to think of those big brown United Parcel trucks, and at the same time they maybe hoped it would look sort of like something youd see in an Episcopal church. Not too much gilt on the logo. Sort of restrained.
The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian immigrants, recent ones who had trouble getting better jobs. They did this crazy throat-singing thing while they worked, and he liked to hear that. He couldnt figure out how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but like it was two sounds at once.
Now they were buffing the rows of chromed nubs down the sides. Those had been meant to support electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed for looks. The riot-wagons in Knoxville had been electrified, but with this drip-system that kept them wet, which was a lot nastier.
Sign here said the crew boss, this quiet black kid named Anderson. He was a medical student, days, and he always looked like he was about two nights short of sleep.
Rydell took the pad and the light-pen and signed the signature-plate. Anderson handed Rydell the keys.
You ought to get you some rest Rydell said. Anderson grinned, wanly. Rydell walked over to Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm.
Somebody had written that inside, GUNHEAD in green marker on the panel above the windshield. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect. He said his mother had been getting ready to deed his ass to the church, whatever that meant.
Sublett wasnt too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten the idea that these people figured video was the Lords preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Hes in the de-tails Sublett had said once. You gotta watch for Him close. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met, mostly old movies on channels that never ran anything but. Sublett said Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese monster movie. Hernandez thought Sublett had written the name on there himself. Sublett denied it. Hernandez said take it off. Sublett ignored him. It was still there, but Rydell knew Sublett was too law-abiding to commit any vandalism, and anyway the ink in the marker mightve killed him.
Sublett had had allergies. He went into shock from various kinds of cleaners and solvents, so you couldnt get him to come into the car wash at all, ever. The allergies made him light sensitive, too, so he had to wear these mirrored contacts. What with the black IntenSecure uniform and his dry blond hair, the contacts made him look like some kind of Klan-assed Nazi robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the wrong store on Sunset, say three in the morning and all you really wanted was some mineral water and a Coke. But Rydell was always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably wasnt even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldnt be a hairdresser.
Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecures response people were former police officers of some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if the companys rules about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any indication, his co-workers were expected to turn up packing all manner of hardware. There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school. Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but when they went calling, they were supposed to make do with their Glocks and the chunkers.
The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty years old, that IntenSecure bought by the truckload from PDs that could afford to upgrade to caseless ammunition. If you did it by the book, you kept the Glocks in their plastic holsters, and kept the holsters Velcroed to the wagons central console. When you answered a call, you pulled a holstered pistol off the console and stuck it on the patch provided on your uniform. That was the only time you were supposed to be out of the wagon with a gun on, when you were actually responding.
The chunkers werent even guns, not legally anyway, but a ten-second burst at close range would chew somebodys face off. They were Israeli riot-control devices, air-powered, that fired one-inch cubes of recycled rubber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a bullpup assault rifle and an industrial staple gun, except they were made out of this bright yellow plastic. When you pulled the trigger, those chunks came out in a solid stream. If you got really good with one, you could shoot around corners; just kind of bounce them off a convenient surface. Up close, theyd eventually cut a sheet of plywood in half, if you kept on shooting, and they left major bruises out to about thirty yards. The theory was, you didnt always encounter that many armed intruders, and a chunker was a lot less likely to injure the client or the clients property. If you did encounter an armed intruder, you had the Glock. Although the intruder was probably running caseless through a floating breechnot part of the theory. Nor was it part of the theory that seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and were thereby both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic.
There had been a lot of dancer in Knoxville, and some of it had gotten Rydell suspended. Hed crawled into an apartment where a machinist named Kenneth Turvey was holding his girlfriend, two little kids, and demanding to speak to the president. Turvey was white, skinny, hadnt bathed in a month, and had the Last Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it hadnt even scabbed over. Through a film of drying blood, Rydell could see that Jesus didnt have any face. Neither did any of the Apostles.
Damn it Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. I just wanna speak to the president. He was sitting cross-legged, naked, on his girlfriends couch. He had something like a piece of pipe across his lap, all wrapped with tape.
Were trying to get her for you Rydell said. Were sorry its taking so long, but we have to go through channels.
God damn it Turvey said wearily, doesnt nobody understand Im on a mission from God? He didnt sound particularly angry, just tired and put out. Rydell could see the girlfriend through the open door of the apartments single bedroom. She was on her back, on the floor, and one of her legs looked broken. He couldnt see her face. She wasnt moving at all. Where were the kids?
What is that thing you got there? Rydell asked, indicating the object across Turveys lap.
Its a gun Turvey said, and its why I gotta talk to the president.
Never seen a gun like that Rydell allowed. Whats it shoot?