And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunheads crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth Turveys death finally real before him, Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasnt always quite entirely to be trusted.
But, man Sublett had said, as if to himself, they gonna kill those little babies. And, with that, hed snapped his harness open and was out of there, Glock in hand, before Rydell could do anything at all. Rydell had had him shut the siren and the strobes off a block away, but surely anybody in the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.
Responding Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers going straight through the inch-thick glass top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve stitches, but it wasnt deep.) He couldnt see Sublett. He stumbled forward, cradling the yellow bulk of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was something wrong with his arm.
Freeze, cocksucker! said the biggest voice in the world, LAPD! Drop that shit or we blow your ass away! Rydell found himself the focus of an abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a light so bright that it fell into his uncomprehending eyes like hot metal. You hear me, cocksucker? Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadnt already taken care of.
Rydell dropped the chunker.
The pistol, too, asshole!
Rydell grasped the Glocks handle between thumb and forefinger. It came away, in its plastic holster, with a tiny but distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow audible through the drumming of the helicopters combat-muffled engine.
He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was broken.
They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead. His face and hands were swelling like bright pink toy balloons and he seemed to be suffocating, Schonbrunns Bosnian housekeeper having employed a product that contained xylene and chlorinated hydrocarbons to clean some crayon-marks off a bleached-oak end table.
What the fucks wrong with him? asked one of the cops.
Hes got allergies Rydell said through gritted teeth; theyd cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like hell. You gotta get him to Emergency.
Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.
Berry
Rydell remembered the name of the movie hed seen on television. Miracle Mile he said.
Sublett squinted up at him. Never seen it Sublett said, and fainted.
Mrs. Schonbrunn had been entertaining her Polish landscape gardener that evening. The cops found her in the nursery. Angered beyond speech, she was cinched quite interestingly up in a couple of thousand dollars worth of English latex, North Beach leather, and a pair of vintage Smith & Wesson handcuffs that someone had paid to have lovingly buffed and redone in black chromethe gardener evidently having headed for the hills when he heard Rydell parking Gunhead in the living room.
3. Not a nice party
Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when she took this total assholes sunglasses, but that was because she just didnt like him.
How it was, she was standing up there by this ninth-floor window, just looking out at the bridge, past the gray shells of the big stores, when hed come up behind her. Shed almost managed to make out Skinners room, there, high up in the old cables, when the tip of a finger found her bare back. Under Skinners jacket, under her t-shirt, touching her.
She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of armor. She knew that nanopore was the only thing to wear, riding this time of year, but she wore Skinners old horsehide anyway, with her bar-coded Allied badges on the lapels. The little ball-chains on the zippers swinging as she spun to knock that finger aside.
Bloodshot eyes. A face that looked as though it were about to melt. He had a short little greenish cigar in his mouth but it wasnt lit. He took it out, swirled its wet end in a small glass of clear liquor, then took a long suck on it. Grinning at her around it. Like he knew she didnt belong here, not at a party like this and not in any old but seriously expensive hotel up Over Geary.
But it had been the last tag of the day, a package for a lawyer, with Tenderloins trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those so terminally luckless, utterly and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her, always.
Locking and arming her bike in the hollow sound of the Morriseys underground lot, shed taken a service elevator to the lobby, where the security grunts tried to brace her for the package, but there was no way. She wouldnt deliver to anyone at all except this one very specific Mr. Garreau in 808, as stated right here on the tag. They ran a scanner across the bar-code on her Allied badge, x-rayed the package, put her through a metal-detector, and waved her into an elevator lined with pink mirrors and trimmed in bank-vault bronze.
So up shed gone, to eight, to a corridor quiet as the floor of some forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau there, his shirt-sleeves white and his tie the color of freshly poured lead. He signed the tab without making eye-contact; package in hand, hed closed the doors three brass digits in her face. Shed checked her hair in the mirror-polished italic zero. Her tail was sticking up okay, in back, but she wasnt sure theyd got the front right. The spikes were still too long. Wispy, sort of. She headed back down the hall, the hardware jingling on Skinners jacket, her new SWAT-trainers sinking into freshly vacuumed pile the color of rain-wet terracotta.
But when the elevator doors opened, this Japanese girl fell out. Or near enough, Chevette grabbing her beneath both arms and propping her against the edge of the door.
Where party?
What folks gonna ask you Chevette said.
Floor nine! Big party!
The girls eyes were all pupil, her bangs glossy as plastic.
So Chevette, with a real glass wine-glass full of real French wine in one hand, and the smallest sandwich shed ever seen in the other, came to find herself wondering how long she still had before the hotels computer noticed she hadnt yet left the premises. Not that they were likely to come looking for her here, because someone had obviously put down good money to have this kind of party.
Some really private kind, because she could see these people in a darkened bathroom, smoking ice through a blown-glass dolphin, its smooth curves illuminated by the fluttering bluish tongue of an industrial-strength lighter.
Not just one room, either, but lots of them, all connected up. And lots of people, too, the men mostly gotten up in those suits with the four-button jackets, stiff shirts with those choker collars, and no tie but a little jeweled stud. The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.
Shed managed to get the Japanese girl horizontal on a long green couch, where she was snoring now, and safe enough unless somebody sat on her.
Looking around, Chevette had seen that she wasnt the only underdressed local to have somehow scammed entry. The guy in the bathroom working the big yellow Bic, for starters, but he was an extreme case. Then there were a couple of pretty obvious Tenderloin working-girls, too, but maybe that was no more than the accepted amount of local color for whatever this was supposed to be.