Part 2 (2/2)
Oh-s.h.i.+t-oh-s.h.i.+t-oh-s.h.i.+t. She did a little two-step at her bed's edge. Tomorrow she'd go see her editor about this, but it just felt *right*, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever.
It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour's worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell's insomnia was as contagious as his excitement.
Hollywood, Florida's biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne's Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn't ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates.
”Yeah, it's 'cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn't been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I'll get you some decent lat-long.”
His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell's talent-scouts.
The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they'd been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they'd been abandoned, they hadn't been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she'd left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually *farmed* by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.
The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she pa.s.sed. She'd felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts -- nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn't the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-s.e.xed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick.
The GPS queeped when she came up on the junkyard, a sprawling, half-built discount mall whose waist-high walls had been used to parcel out different kinds of sorted waste. The mall had been planned with wide indoor boulevards between the shops wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and she cruised those lanes now in the hertzmobile, looking for a human. Once she reached the center of the mall -- a dry fountain filled with dusty Christmas-tree ornaments -- she stopped and leaned on the horn.
She got out of the car and called, ”h.e.l.lo? Perry?” She could have phoned him but it always seemed so wasteful spending money on airtime when you were trying to talk to someone within shouting range.
”Suzanne!” The voice came from her left. She s.h.i.+elded her eyes from the sun's glare and peered down a spoke of mall-lane and caught her first glimpse of Perry Gibbons. He was standing in the basket of a tall cherry-picker, barechested and brown. He wore a sun-visor and big work gloves, and big, baggy shorts whose pockets jangled as he s.h.i.+nnied down the crane's neck.
She started toward him tentatively. Not a lot of business-reporting a.s.signments involved spending time with half-naked, sun-baked dudes in remote southern junkyards. Still, he sounded nice.
”h.e.l.lo!” she called. He was young, 22 or 23, and already had squint-creases at the corners of his eyes. He had a brace on one wrist and his steel-toed boots were the mottled grey of a grease-puddle on the floor of a m.u.f.fler and brake shop.
He grinned and tugged off a glove, stuck out his hand. ”A pleasure. Sorry for the trouble finding this place. It's not easy to get to, but it's cheap as h.e.l.l.”
”I believe it.” She looked around again -- the heaps of interesting trash, the fountain-dish filled with thousands of s.h.i.+ning ornaments. The smell was a mixture of machine-oil and salt, jungle air, Florida swamp and Detroit steel. ”So, this place is pretty cool. Looks like you've got pretty much everything you could imagine.”
”And then some.” This was spoken by another man, one who puffed heavily up from behind her. He was enormous, not just tall but fat, as big around as a barrel. His green tee-s.h.i.+rt read IT'S FUN TO USE LEARNING FOR EVIL! in blocky, pixelated letters. He took her hand and shook it. ”I love your blog,” he said. ”I read it all the time.” He had three chins, and eyes that were nearly lost in his apple cheeks.
”Meet Lester,” Perry said. ”My partner.”
”Sidekick,” Lester said with a huge wink. ”Sysadmin slash hardware hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org.”
She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar.
”Right, let's get started. You wanna see what I do, right?” Perry said.
”That's right,” Suzanne said.
”Lead the way, Lester,” Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep into the center of the junkpile. ”All right, check this stuff out as we go.” He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop and plucked out a toy in a battered box. ”I love these things,”
he said, handing it to her.
She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE WOOGIE ELMO.
”That's from the great Elmo Crash,” Perry said, taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was sh.e.l.ling a nut. ”The last and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring world that bought millions of Li'l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide.
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