Part 23 (1/2)

'Somebody'll get those,' she said.

'Hope so,' he said, 'hope they get 'em and go tcMars.' Then he did something in reverse with all four wheels and the Ford sort of jumped up and backward, into the street, some other car swerving past them all brakes and horn and the driver's mouth a black 0, and the part of her that was still a messenger sort of liked it. All the times they'd cut her off. 's.h.i.+t,' he sa:d, jamming the gear- thing around until he got what he needed and they took off.

The handcuff was rubbing on the rash where the red worm had been. 'You a cop?'

'No.'

'Security? Like from the hotel?'

'Uh-uh.'

'Well,' she said, 'what are you?'

Streetlight sliding across his face. Seemed like he was thinking about it. 'Up s.h.i.+t creek. Without a paddle.'

The first thing Rydell saw when he got out of the Patriot, in the alley off Haight Street, was a one-armed, one-legged man on a skateboard. This man lay on his stomach, on the board, and propelled himself along with a curious. .h.i.tching motion that reminded Rydell of the limbs of a gigged frog. He had his right arm and his left leg, which at least allowed for some kind of symmetry, but there was no foot on the leg. His face, as if by some weird osmosis, was the color of dirty concrete, and Rydell couldn't have said what race he was. His hair, if he had any, was covered by a black knit cap, and the rest of him was sheathed in a black, one-piece garment apparently st.i.tched from sections of heavy-duty rubber inner-tube. He looked up, as he hitched past Rydell, through puddles left by the storm, headed for the mouth of the alley, and said, or Rydell thought he said: 'You wanna talk to me? You wanna talk to me, you better shut your f.u.c.kin'

mouth...'

Rydell stood there, Samsonite dangling, and watched him go.

Then something rattled beside him. The hardware on Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton's leather jacket. 'Come on,' she said, 'don't wanna hang around back in here.'

'You see that?' Rydell asked, gesturing with his suitcase.

'You hang around back in here, you'll see worse than that,' she said.

Rydell looked back at the Patriot. He'd locked it and left the key under the driver's scat, because he hadn't wanted to

26 Colored people make it look too easy, but he'd forgotten about that back window. He'd never been in the position before of actively wanting a car to be stolen.

'You sure somebody'll take that?' he asked her.

'We don't get out of here, they'll take us with it.' She started walking. Rydell followed. There was stuff painted on the brick walls as high as anyone could reach, but it didn't look like any language he'd ever seen, except maybe the way they wrote cuss-words in a printed cartoon.

They'd just rounded the corner, onto the sidewalk, when Rydell heard the Patriot's engine start to rev. It gave him gooseb.u.mps, like something in a ghost story, because there hadn't been anybody back in there at all, and now he couldn't see the skateboard man anywhere.

'Look at the ground,' Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton said. 'Don't look up when they go by or they'll kill us...'

Rydell concentrated on the toes of his black SWATs. 'You hang out with car-thieves much?'

'Just walk. Don't talk. Don't look.'

He heard the Patriot wheel out of the alley and draw up beside them, pacing them. His toes were making little squelching noises, each time he took a step, and what if the last thing you knew before you died was just some pathetic discomfort like that, like your shoes were soaked and your socks were wet, and you weren't ever going to get to change them?

Rydell heard the Patriot take off, the driver fighting the unfamiliar American s.h.i.+ft-pattern. He started to look up.

'Don't,' she said.

'Those friends of yours or what?'

'Alley pirates, Lowell calls 'em.'

'Who's Lowell?'

'You saw him in l)issidents.'

'That bar?'

'Not a bar. A chill.'

'Serves alcohol,' Rydell said.

'97.

~A chill. Where you hang.'

”You” who? This Lowell, he hang there?' Yeah.'

You too?'

~No,' she said, angry.

'He your friend, Lowell? Your boyfriend?'

'You said you weren't a cop. You talk like one.'

'I'm not,' he said. 'You can ask 'em.'

'He's just somebody I used to know,' she said. 'Fine.'

She looked at the Samsonite. 'You got a gun or something, in there?'

'Dry socks. Underwear.'

She looked up at him. 'I don't get you.'

'Don't have to,' he said. 'We just walking, or you maybe know somewhere to go? Like off this street?'

'We want to look at some flash,' she said to the fat man. He had a couple of things through each nipple, looked like Yale locks. Kind of pulled him down, there, and Rydell just couldn't look at them. Had on some kind of baggy white pants with the crotch down about where the knees should've been, and this little blue velvet vest all embroidered with gold. He was big and soft and fat and covered with tattoos.

Rydell's uncle, the one who'd gone to Africa with the army and hadn't come back, had had a couple of tattoos. The best one went right across his back, this big swirly dragon with horns and sort of a goofy grin. He'd gotten that one in Korea, eight colors and it had all been done by a computer.