William Gibson - Virtual Light

“Why’d you do that?”

“So you don’t snag it on something, wind up cuffed to the door-handle or a street sign—”

“Take it off.”

“No key.”

She rattled it at him. “Take it off.”

“Stick it up the sleeve of your jacket. Those are Beretta cuffs. Real good cuffs.” He sounded like he was sort of happy to have something to talk about, and his driving had evened out. Brown eyes. Not old; twenties, maybe. Cheap clothes like K-Mart stuff, all wet. Light brown hair cut too short but not short enough. She watched a muscle in his jaw work, like he was chewing gum, but he wasn’t.

Where we going?” she asked him.

“Fuck if I know” he said, gunning the engine a little. “You the one said ‘left’…”

“Who are you?”

He glanced over at her. “Rydell. Berry Rydell.”

“Barry?”

“Berry. Like straw. Like dingle. Hey, this a big fucking Street, lights and everything—”

“Right.”

“So where should I—”

“Right!”

“Okay” he said, and hung it. “Why?”

“The Haight. Lots of people up late, cops don’t like to go there…”

“Ditch this car there?”

“Turn your back on it two seconds, it’s history.”

“They got ATM’s there?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, here’s one…” Up over a curb, hunks of crazed safety-glass falling out of the frame where the back window had been. She hadn’t even noticed that.

He dug a soggy-looking wallet out of his back pocket and started pulling cards out of it. Three of them. “I have to try to get some cash” he said. He looked at her. “You wanna jump out of this car and run” he shrugged, “then you just go for it.” Then he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the glasses and Codes’s phone that she’d scooped when the lights went out in Dissidents. Because she knew from Lowell that people in trouble need a phone, most times worse than anything. He dropped them in her lap, the asshole’s glasses and the phone. “Yours.”

Then he got out, walked over to the ATM, and started feeding it cards. She sat there, watching it emerge from its armor, the way they do, shy and cautious, its cameras coming out, too, to monitor the transaction. He stood there, drumming his fingers on the side, his mouth like he was whistling but he wasn’t making any noise. She looked down at the case and the phone and wondered why she didn’t just jump out and run, like he said.

Finally he came back, thumb-counting a fold of bills, stuck it down in his front jeans pocket, and got in He sailed the first of his cards out the open window at the ATM, which was pulling back into its shell like a crab. “Don’t know how they cancelled that one so quick, after you put that thing through Freddie’s laptop.” Flicked another. Then the last one. They lay in front of the ATM as its lexan shield came trundling down, their little holograms winding up in the machine’s halogen floods.

“Somebody’ll get those” she said.

“Hope so” he said, “hope they get ’em and go to Mars.” 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 O, and the part of her that was still a messenger sort of liked it. All the times they’d cut her off. “Shit” he said, 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 shit 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 hitching 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 stitched 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 fuckin’ mouth…”

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

Then something rattled beside him. The hardware on Chevette Washington’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 seat, because he hadn’t wanted to 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 goosebumps, 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 Washington 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 shift-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 Dissidents.”

“That bar?”

“Not a bar. A chill.”

“Serves alcohol” Rydell said.

“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?”