Bleeding Edge (38 page)

“Nick.”

He’s silent, wherever he is. By now one more American sheep the shepherds have temporarily lost track of, somewhere in the high country above this ruinous hour, cragfast in the storm.

•   •   •

MONDAY AFTER THE HOLIDAYS,
Kugelblitz has resumed, Horst and Jake Pimento are over in New Jersey looking for office space, Maxine should either try to cop another hour of z’s or go in to work, but she knows where she ought to be, and as soon as everybody’s out of the house, she
brews twelve cups of coffee, gets in front of her screen, logs in, and heads for DeepArcher.

Open source has certainly brought some changes. Core is teeming these days with smartasses, yups, tourists, and twits writing code for whatever they think they want and installing it, till some other headcase finds it and deinstalls it. Maxine goes in with no clear idea of what she’ll find.

Onto the screen, accordingly, leaps a desert, correction,
the
desert. Empty as the train stations and spaceport terminals of a more innocent time were overpopulated. No middle-class amenities here, beyond arrows to let you scan around the horizon. This is survivalist country. Movements are blurless, every pixel doing its job, the radiation from above triggering colors too unsafe for hex code, a sound track of ground-level desert wind. This is what she’s supposed to pick her way across, dowsing a desert which is not only a desert, for links invisible and undefined.

Not yet in despair, off she goes, zooming and swiveling, up and down dunes and wadis of deep purity finely touched with mineral tints, beneath rocks and ridgelines, empty stretches in which Omar Sharif continues not to come riding in out of a mirage. It should be just one more teen-sociopath video game, except it’s not a shooter, so far anyway, there’s no story line, no details about the destination, no manual to read, no cheat list. Does anybody get extra lives? Does anybody even get this one?

She pauses in the uneasy melismas of desert wind. Suppose it’s all about losing, not finding. What has she lost? Maxine? Hello? To put it another way, what’s she trying to lose?

Windust, back to Windust. Dowsing through her off-screen day-to-day, did she once in the pre–11 September past somehow click on the exact invisible pixel that brought her to him? Did he do the same and find himself entering her life? How does one of them reverse the process?

Toggling between horizontal and overhead views, she discovers a way to vary the angle in between, so that like an archaeologist at dawn
she can now see this desert landscape at a very shallow raking angle, allowing her to pick up relief features that would otherwise be invisible. These prove to be fertile sources of the links she needs to be clicking on. Soon she finds herself getting crossfaded to relay stations, oases, very rarely a traveler coming the other way, back from whatever’s out ahead, with very little to tell beyond cryptic allusions to some icy uncanalized river on whose far bank lies a city built of a rare impregnable metal, gray and gleaming in self-contained mystery, entered only after lengthy exchanges of signs and countersigns . . .

Structures begin to emerge ahead, carrion birds appear in the sky. Now and then, far off, human figures, robed and hooded, still, wind-ruffled, taller than the perspective would call for, stand and watch Maxine. No attempts at approach or welcome. Ahead, past the baked-mud district that now rises around her, she can feel a presence. The sky changes, beginning to pick up saturation, edging into SVG Alice Blue, the landscape acquiring a queer luminosity, moving toward her, picking up speed, rushing in to envelop her.

Where should her freakout point be set here, exactly? The town, the casbah, whatever it is, sweeps past, leaving her in what is now a Third World darkness, lit only by isolated episodes of fire. After a while, feeling her way in the dark, she strikes oil. An enormous gusher, sudden, bass-intensive, black on black, goes booming upward, prospectors appear from nowhere with generators and searchlights, in whose glare the top of the thing can’t even be seen. Every wildcatter’s dream, and for many the point of the journey. Maxine goes wow, takes a virtual snapshot, but continues on her way. Not long after, the blowout bursts into flame and remains visible behind her for miles.

A night whose length can’t be selected as a preference. A midwatch whose purpose is to turn whoever’ s out in it into a blind dowser of the unknown, all but lost in the empty quarter. Never to focus on anything that can be seen.

At virtual daybreak who should Maxine run into but Vip Epperdew,
up on a ridgeline gazing at the desert. She’s not sure he recognizes her. “How are Shae and Bruno?”

“I think they’re in L.A. I’m not, I’m still in Vegas. We seem to be no longer a threesome.”

“What happened?”

“We were at the MGM Grand, I was playing one of the Stooges slots, had just got three Larrys, a Moe, and a pie on the payline, turned around to share my good fortune, Shae and Bruno were nowhere in sight. Collected my jackpot, went looking all over for them, they were gone. I always imagined if they ever did run out, I’d be left in some embarrassing public situation, handcuffed to a lamppost or whatever. But there I was, free as any normal citizen, with the room paid up and enough casino credit to last me a couple of days anyway.”

“Must’ve been unsettling.”

“At that point I was still too preoccupied with the slots, actually. By the time I understood the kids weren’t coming back, I’d won enough to sign a lease on a one-bedroom unit in North Las Vegas. The rest has been coasting on momentum.” Nowadays Vip is a professional slots jockey, somehow so far staying a fraction of a percent ahead, a regular, known all around town, from carpet joints to convenience stores. He’s picked up an attitude to go with his casino butt. He’s found a calling.

“Like my rig?” gesturing downhill at a Citroën Sahara, built back in the sixties, front and rear engines, four-wheel drive for desert terrain, rendered in affectionate detail, looks like a normal 2CV except for the spare tire on the hood. “Only 600 of ’em ever produced, won the real one on a pair of fishhooks nobody believed I had. Cut you for it if you’d like, high card. Case you’re wondering, the beauty of this site,” looking around the empty desertscape, “is it
ain’t
Vegas. No casinos, honest odds. Random numbers here are strictly legit.”

“So I was told once. Nowadays, not so sure. You might want to be careful, now—Vip? do you remember me?”

“Darlin, I don’t even remember the last deal.”

She finds a link that brings her into an oasis, a wraparound garden straight out of the Islamic paradise, more water than has ever flowed in all the broken country she’s come in out of, palms, swimming pools with in-pool bars, wine and pipe smoke, melons and dates, a music track heavy on the hijaz scale. This time, as a matter of fact, she has a confirmed Omar Sharif sighting, inside a tent, playing bridge and flashing that killer smile. And then, with no intro,

“Hi, Maxine.” Windust’s avatar is a younger version of himself, a not-yet-corrupted entry-level wise-ass, brighter than he deserves.

“Never expected to find you in here, Nick.”

Oh, really? This isn’t what she hoped would happen? That somebody, some all-knowing cyber-yenta her online history has always belonged to, would be logging her every click, every cursor movement? Knowing what she wants before she does?

“Did you get back to D.C. all right?” Which, if it sounds too much like where’s my money, tough shit.

“Not all the way back. There are exclusion zones now. Around my house, my family. I haven’t been getting much sleep. It looks like they’ve cut me loose. Loose at last. All gone dark, everybody in my address book, even those with no names, only numbers.”

“Where are you now, like physically?”

“Some Wi-Fi hotspot. Starbucks, I think.”

He thinks. She has to take an unexpected breath then. This is almost the first thing he’s said that she really believes. He doesn’t fucking know where he is anymore. Some transparent beam of feeling passes through her, which she won’t identify till later. This is how long it’s been since she felt pity.

Abruptly, she isn’t sure who took the first step, they’re back out on the desert again, moving at high speed, not exactly flying because that would mean she’s asleep and dreaming, beneath a crescent moon that sheds more illumination than it should, past wind-shaped rock formations that Windust tends to dodge suddenly and violently into the cover of, pulling her somehow with him.

“Somebody’s shooting at us?”

“Not yet, but we have to assume something’s tracking us, everything we do, holding it short-term. They’ll think they see a pattern of run for cover. Then we’ll surprise them and stay in the open . . .”

“‘We’? I kind of like hide behind the rocks myself. Are these the same people who were shooting AKs at us that time?”

“Don’t go sentimental on me.”

“Why not? We could’ve been just like this. Lovers on the run.”

“Oh, great call. Your kids, your home, your family, your business and reputation, in exchange for a cheap fatality for all those you can’t save. Works for me.” The avatar gazes at her, steady, unremorseful, all a deliberate front, granted, but whoever “they” are, she needs to believe they are far worse than anything Windust became later on, working for them. They found his careless gift of boy’s cruelty and developed it, deployed and used it, by tiny increments, till one day he was a professional sadist with a GS-1800-series job and no regrets. Nothing could touch him, and he thought that would just go on, deep into his retirement years. Chump. Asshole.

She’s furious, she’s helpless. “What can I—”

“Nothing.”

“I know. But—”

“I didn’t come looking for you. You clicked on me.”

“Did I.”

Long silence, as if he’s having an argument with himself and they finally settle it. “I’ll be at the place. I can’t guarantee an erection.”

“Aw. You OK with opening your heart to somebody?”

“I was thinking more like, bring money?”

“I’ll see how much I can steal from the children.”

D
ue to some likely 007–related mental block about packing it, she has tried to avoid the Walther PPK with the laser in the grip, depending instead on her secondary, the Beretta, which, if handguns had conscious careers, it might consider a promotion. But now she goes, gets the stepladder, roots around up in the back of the closet, and brings out the PPK. At least it isn’t the ladies’ model where the grip comes in pink pearl. Checks the batteries, cycles the laser on and off. Never know when a gal might need a laser.

Out into one of those oppressive wintry afternoons, the sky over New Jersey a pale battle flag of the ancient nation of winter, divided horizontally, hex thistle above, buttermilk yellow below, over to Broadway to look for a cab, which this time of day is likely heading back off shift to Long Island City and unwilling to pick up fares. So it turns out. By the time she can finally wave one down, city lights are coming on and darkness is falling.

Down at the “safe house,” she hits the buzzer, waits, waits, no reply, the door’s locked, but she can see light around the edges. She peers in to check out the lock situation and notices that only the latch is on, no bolt. After years of experimenting with different store and credit cards, she’s
found the ideal combination of strength and flexibility in the plastic game cards the boys keep bringing home from ESPN Zone. Taking one of these now, down briefly on one knee, she has ’loided her way in before she can let herself wonder if it’s such a good idea.

Rodent life, quick shadows flickering across her path. Echoing in the stairwells, screamers on other floors, nonhuman noises she can’t identify. Corner shadows thick as grease, that can’t be seen into no matter how bright your bulb. Hallways lighted fitfully and heat, if any, only through selected radiators, so that there are cold patches, indicating the presence of malevolent spirit forces, according to ex–New Agers of Maxine’s acquaintance. Down some corridor a fire alarm with a dying battery repeats a shrill, desolate chirp. She remembers Windust saying that sundown is when the dogs come out.

The door of the apartment is open. She brings out the PPK, hits the laser, flips up the safety, eases inside. The dogs are there, three, four of them surrounding something lying between here and the kitchen. There’s a smell you don’t have to be a dog to pick up. Maxine slides away from the door in case any of them want to leave in a hurry. Her voice firm enough so far, “All right, Toto—freeze!”

Their heads come up, their muzzles are darker-colored than they need to be. She edges in, along the wall. The object hasn’t moved. It announces itself, the center of attention, even if it’s dead, it’s still trying to manage the story.

One dog goes running out the door, two move up snarling to confront her, another stands by Windust’s corpse and waits for the intruder to be dealt with. Gazing at Maxine with—not a canine look really, Shawn if he were here certainly could confirm—the face before the face. “Don’t I remember you from Westminster last year, Best in Category?”

The nearest dog is a mix of rottweiler plus you name it, and the little red dot has moved to the center of its forehead, encouragingly not jittering around but steady as a rock. The wingdog pauses, as if to see what will happen.

“Come on,” she whispers, “you know what it is, pal, it’s drilling right
into your third eye . . . come on . . . we don’t need to have this happen . . .” The snarling stops, the dogs, attentively, step toward the exit, the alpha in the kitchen backs away finally from the corpse and—is it nodding at her? joins them. They wait out in the hallway.

The dogs have done some damage she tries not to look at, and there’s the smell. Reciting to herself a rhyme from long-ago girlhood,

Dead, said the doc-tuhvr,

Dead, said the nurse,

Dead, said da lady wit

De al-liga-tuh purse . . .

She stumbles to the toilet, hits the exhaust fan, and kneels on the cold tiles beneath the racket of the fan. The contents of the bowl give a slight but unmistakable surge upward, as if trying to communicate. She vomits, seized in a vision of all the exhaust ducts from every dismal office and forgotten transient space of the city, all feeding by way of a gigantic manifold into a single pipe and roaring away in a constant wind of anal gas, bad breath, and decaying tissue, venting as you’d expect someplace over in New Jersey . . . as meantime, inside the gratings over each one of these million vents, grease goes on collecting forever in the slots and louvers, and the dust rising and falling is held there, accumulating over the years in a blackened, browned, secret fur . . . merciless powder-blue light, black-and-white floral wallpaper, her own unstable reflection in the mirror . . . There’s vomit on the sleeve of her coat, she tries to wash it out with cold water, nothing works.

She rejoins the silent stiff in the other room. Over in the corner, the Lady with the Alligator Purse watches, silent, no highlights off her eyes, only the curve of a smile faintly visible in the shadows, the purse slung over one shoulder, its contents forever unrevealed because you always wake up before you see them.

“Time’s a-wastin,” the Lady whispers, not unkindly.

Despite which Maxine takes a minute to observe the former Nick
Windust. He was a torturer, a murderer many times over, his cock has been inside her, and at the moment she’s not sure what she feels, all she can focus on are the bespoke chukka boots, in this light a soiled pale brown. What is she doing here? What the blessed fuck, did she run over here thinking she could do to stop this? . . . These poor, stupid shoes . . .

She takes a rapid tour of his pockets—no wallet, no money, folding or otherwise, no keys, no Filofax, no cellular phone, no smokes or matches or lighters, no meds or eyewear, just the collection of empty pockets. Talk about going out clean. At least he’s consistent. He was never in this for the money. Neolib mischief must have held some different and now-unknowable appeal for him. All he had at the end, with the other world drawing near, was his rap sheet, and his dispatchers have left him to its mercy. The full length of it, the years, the weight.

So who was she talking to, back there in the DeepArcher oasis? If Windust, judging by the smell, was already long dead by then, it gives her a couple of problematic choices—either he was speaking to her from the other side or it was an impostor and the link could have been embedded by anybody, not necessarily a well-wisher, spooks, Gabriel Ice . . . Some random twelve-year-old in California. Why believe any of it?

The phone rings. She jumps a little. The dogs come to the doorway, curious. Pick up? she thinks not. After five rings an answering machine on the kitchen counter comes on, with the volume set on high so there’s no avoiding the incoming. It’s no voice she recognizes, a high harsh whisper. “We know you’re there. You don’t have to pick up. This is just a reminder that it’s a school night, and you never know when your kids might need you with them.”

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.

On the way out, she passes a mirror, takes an automatic look, sees a blurred moving figure, maybe herself, likely something else, the Lady again, all in shadow except for a single highlight off her wedding band, whose color, if you could taste light, which for a moment she imagines she can, you’d have to call faintly bitter.

•   •   •

NO COPS OUTSIDE ANYPLACE,
no cabs, early-midwinter darkness. Cold, a wind picking up. The glow of inhabited city streets too far away. She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs. She gropes through her bag, finds her cellular phone, and of course can’t get a signal this far away from civilization, and even if she could, the batteries are almost dead.

Maybe the phone call was only a warning, maybe that’s all, maybe the boys are safe. Maybe this is a fool’s assumption she can’t make anymore. Vyrva was supposed to be picking up Otis at school, Ziggy should be down at krav maga with Nigel, but so what. Every place in her day she’s taken for granted is no longer safe, because the only question it’s come down to is, where will Ziggy and Otis be protected from harm? Who of all those on her network really is trustworthy anymore?

It might be useful, she reminds herself, not to panic here. She imagines herself solidifying into not exactly a pillar of salt, something between that and a commemorative statue, iron and gaunt, of all the women in New York who used to annoy her standing by the curbsides “hailing a taxi,” though no taxis might be visible for ten miles in any direction—nevertheless holding their hand out toward the empty street and the oncoming traffic that isn’t there, not beseechingly but in a strangely entitled way, a secret gesture that will trigger an all-cabbie alert, “Bitch standing at corner with hand up in air! Go! Go!”

Yet here, turning into some version of herself she doesn’t recognize, without deliberation she watches her own hand drift out into the wind off the river, and tries from the absence of hope, the failure of redemption, to summon a magical escape. Maybe what she saw in those women wasn’t entitlement, maybe all it is really is an act of faith. Which in New York even stepping out onto the street is, technically.

Back in Manhattan meatspace, what she ends up doing is somehow passing through the shadowy copless cross streets to Tenth Avenue and finding headed uptown a curb-to-curb abundance of lighted alphanumerics on cheerful yellow rooftops, traveling the darkening hour as if the pavement like a black river is itself flowing away forever uptown, and all the taxis and trucks and suburbanite cars only being carried along on top of it . . .

•   •   •

HORST ISN’T HOME YET.
Otis and Fiona are in the boys’ room, having creative differences as usual. Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching
Scooby Goes Latin!
(1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial.

“Hi, Mom.” She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.

The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. “And I would’ve got away with it, too,” he complains, “if it hadn’t been for those Medellín kids!”

“So,” innocent as she can manage, “how was krav maga today?”

“You know, funny you should ask. I begin to see the point.”

Right after class Nigel was outside someplace looking for his sitter, and Emma Levin was going around setting the security perimeter, when Ziggy heard a beep from his backpack.

“Uh-oh. Nige.” Ziggy fished out his Cybiko, checked the screen,
started punching buttons with a little stylus. “He’s in the Duane Reade around the corner. There’s a van out in front of this place with some creepy guys and the motor idling.”

“Hey, cool, a pocket keyboard, you can send, like, e-mails on this?”

“More like instant messaging. You don’t think this van is anything to worry about?”

Suddenly there was a huge flash of light and burst of noise.
“Harah!”
muttered Emma, “the tripwire.”

They ran out the back exit to find a large paramilitary-looking party in the areaway blinking, staggering, and cursing. Everything smelling like fireworks.

“Something we can do for you?” Emma stepping quickly to the right and motioning Ziggy to the left. The visitor turned toward where she’d spoken from and appeared to be reaching for something. Emma went blurring into action. The ape didn’t fly very far through the air but was disorganized enough by the time he hit that it took her only a few economical gestures, with Ziggy as backup, to dispose of him.

“Not only an amateur but stupid too. He doesn’t know who he’s fooling with?”

“You’re awesome, Ms. Levin.”

“’Course, but I meant you. You’re part of my unit, Zig, nobody messes with any of us, he didn’t even get that far with it?”

She searches the intruder and finds a Glock with an oversize magazine. Ziggy’s eyes grow distant, as if attending to something internal. “Hmm . . . maybe not a civilian, yet not much of a professional, what else does that leave, I wonder.”

“Private contractor?”

“What I was thinking.”

“So you’re a sleeper cell after all.”

Shrug. “I’m on call 24/7. When I’m needed, I’m there. Looks like I’m needed. Just let me set another flashbang here, then we’ll check down in the basement, find a dolly, roll this idiot out to someplace his friends in the van can collect him.”

They rolled the unconscious gunhand on up the block and dumped him by the curb next to a broken pressboard credenza, swollen and lopsided from rainwater. They discussed whether or not to dial 911, figured what could hurt. “And that was about it. Nigel typically was pissed that he didn’t get in on it.”

“And . . . this is all something you saw on
Power Rangers
or one of them,” Maxine hopefully.

“Bad karma to lie about stuff like that . . . Mom? You all right?”

“Oh Ziggurat . . . I’m just glad you’re safe. So proud of you, how you handled yourself . . . Ms. Levin must be, too. OK if I call her later?”

“Tellin ya, she’ll confirm.”

“Just to say thanks, Ziggy.”

Otis and Fiona come blasting out the bedroom door.