49.

walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.

Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he must've driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty s.p.a.ces behind dirty gla.s.s, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldn't be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You'd pa.s.s a couple of those, then a place selling sungla.s.ses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sungla.s.ses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.

Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.

There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored gla.s.s of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, hut they beat h.e.l.l out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform- shirt with the

50.

patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn't sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the b.u.t.ton. The rentacop buzzed him in.

'Got an appointment with Justine Cooper,' he said, taking his sungla.s.ses off.

'With a client,' the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he should've been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a skinny woman with black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.

'I'll wait,' Rydell said.

The farmer didn't answer. State law said he couldn't have a gun, just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some G.o.dawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Sat.u.r.day- night specials.

Rydell looked around. That ol' Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallon-at least that had some kind of spin on it.

He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn't good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind gla.s.s in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were

5 :i tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldn't read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on your lawn in Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big, red- lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was spread with a hand-st.i.tched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.

'Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?' Justine Cooper's jaw was so narrow that it looked like she wouldn't have room for the ordinary complement of teeth in there. Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a couple of dark, flowing things that Rydell supposed were meant to conceal the fact that she was built more or less like a stick-insect. She didn't sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.

Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate the Range Rover's defenses.

'Sure.'

'You're from Knoxville?' He noticed she was breathing deliberately, like she was trying not to hyperventilate.

'That's right.'

'You don't have much of an accent.'

'Well, I wish everybody felt that way.' He smiled, but she didn't smile back.

'Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?'

s.h.i.t, he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. 'My father was, I guess. My mother's people are from up around Bristol, mostly.'

Justine (;ooper's dark eyes, not showing much white, were looking right at him, hut they didn't seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties.

'IVIs. Cooper?'

She gave a violent start, as though he'd goosed her.

'Ms. Cooper, what are those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames there?' Pointing at them.

'Memorial wreaths. Southwestern Virginia, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.'

Good, Rydell thought, get her talking about the stock. He walked over to the framed wreaths for a closer look. 'Looks like hair,' he said.

'It is,' she said. 'What else would it be?'

'Human hair?'

'Of course.'

'You mean like dead people's hair?' He saw now the minute braiding, the hair twisted up into tiny flowerlike knots. It was l.u.s.terless and no particular color.

'Mr. Rydell, I'm afraid that I may have wasted your time.' She moved tentatively in his direction.

'When I spoke with you on the phone, I was under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South...'

'How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?'

'What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.'

d.a.m.n. That talking head in the agency display had been playing this s.h.i.t back word for word.

'I don't suppose you've read Faulkner?' She raised one hand to brush at something invisible, something hanging in front of her face.

There it was again. 'Nope.'

'No, I didn't think so. I'm hoping to find someone who can help to convey that very darkness, Mr.

Rydell. The mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality.'

Rydell blinked.

'But you don't convey that to me. I'm sorry.' It looked like the invisible cobweb had come hack.

Rydell looked at the rentacop, hut he didn't seem to he listening to any of this. h.e.l.l, he seemed to he asleep.

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'Lady,' Rydell said carefully, 'I think you're crazier than a sack full of a.s.sholes.'

Her eyebrows shot up. 'There,' she said.

'There what?'

'Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.'

Rydell had to think about that. He found himself looking at the jockey-boy bed. 'Don't you ever get any black people in here, complaining about stuff like this?'

'On the contrary,' she said, a new edge in her tone, 'we do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.'

Now he'd have to walk to whatever the nearest station was, take the subway home, and tell Kevin Tarkovsky he hadn't been Southern enough.

The rentacop was letting him out.

'Where exactly you from, Ms. Cooper?' he asked her.

'New Hampshire,' she said.

He was on the sidewalk, the door closing behind him.

'f.u.c.king Yankees,' he said to the Porsche roadster. It was what his father would have said, but he had a hard time now connecting it to anything.

One of those big articulated German cargo-rigs went by, the kind that burned canola oil. Rydell hated those things. The exhaust smelled like fried chicken.

The courier's dreams are made of hot metal, shadows that scream and run, mountains the color of

concrete. They are burying the orphans on a hillside. Plastic coffins, pale blue. Clouds in the sky. The priest's tall hat. They do not see the first sh.e.l.l coming in from the concrete mountains.

It punches a hole in everything: the hillside, the sky, a blue coffin, the woman's face.

A sound too vast to be any sound at all, but through it, somehow, they hear, arriving only now, the distant festive pop-popping of the mortars, tidy little clouds of smoke rising on the gray mountainside.

He comes upright, alone in the wide bed, trying to scream, and the words are in a language he no longer allows himself to speak.

His head throbs. He drinks flat water from the stainless carafe on the nightstand. The room sways, blurs, comes back into focus. He forces himself from the bed, pads naked to the tall, old- fashioned windows. Fumbles the heavy drapes aside. San Francisco. Dawn like tarnished silver. It is Tuesday. Not Mexico.

In the white bathroom, wincing in the sudden light, scrubbing cold water into his numb face. The dream recedes, hut leaves a residue. He shivers, cold tile unpleasant beneath his bare feet. The wh.o.r.es at the party. ~I~his Harwood. I)ecadent. The courier disapproves of decadence. His work brings him into contact with real wealth, genuine power. He meets

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5 Hay problemas people of substance. Harwood is wealth without substance. He puts out the bathroom light and gingerly returns to his bed, favoring the ache in his head.

With the striped duvet drawn up to his chin, he begins to sort through the previous evening. There are gaps. Overindulgence. He disapproves of overindulgence. Harwood's party. The voice on the phone, instructing him to attend. He'd already had several drinks. He sees a young girl's face.

Anger, contempt. Her short dark hair twisted up in spikes.

His eyes feel as if they are too large for their sockets. When he rubs them, bright sick flashes of light surround him. The cold weight of the water moves in his stomach.

He remembers sitting at the broad mahogany desk, drinking. Before the call, before the party. He remembers the two cases open, in front of him, identical. He keeps her in one. The other is for that with which he has been entrusted. Expensive, but then he has no doubt that the information it contains is very valuable. He folds the thing's graphite earpieces and snaps the case shut. Then he touches the case that holds all her mystery, the white house on the hillside, the release she offers. He puts the cases in the pockets of his jacket- But now he tenses, beneath the duvet, his stomach twisted with a surge of anxiety.

He wore the jacket to that party, much of which he cannot remember.

Ignoring the pounding of his head, he claws his way out of the bed and finds the jacket crumpled on the floor beside a chair.

His heart is pounding.

Here. That which he must deliver. Zipped into the inner pocket. But the outer pockets are empty.

She is gone. lie roots through his other clothing. On his hands and knees, a pulsing agony behind his eyes, he peers under the chair. Gone.

But she, at least, can be replaced, he reminds himself, still on his knees, the jacket in his hands. He will find a dealer in that sort of software. Recently, he now admits, he had started to suspect that she was losing resolution.

Thinking this, he is watching his hands unzip the inner pocket, drawing out the case that contains his charge, their property, that which must be delivered. He opens it.

The scuffed black plastic frames, the label on the ca.s.sette worn and unreadable, the yellowed translucence of the audio-beads.

He hears a thin high sound emerge from the back of his throat. Very much as he must have done, years ago, when the first sh.e.l.l arrived.

Careful to correctly calculate the thirty-percent tip, Yamazaki paid the fare and struggled out of the cab's spavined rear seat. The driver, who knew that all j.a.panese were wealthy, sullenly counted the torn, filthy bills, then tossed the three five-dollar coins into a cracked Nissan County thermos-mug taped to the faded dashboard. Yamazaki, who was not wealthy, shouldered his bag, turned, and walked toward the bridge. As ever, it stirred his heart to see it there, morning light aslant through all the intricacy of its secondary construction.

The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a

queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England's Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.