Mona Lisa Overdrive (3 page)

“Go on around,” the girl said.

Slick walked around the hover, past the chrome skulls, hearing Kid Afrika’s window
come down with that same demonstrative little sound.

“Slick Henry,” the Kid said, his breath puffing white as it hit the air of the Solitude,
“hello.”

Slick looked down at the long brown face. Kid Afrika had big hazel eyes, slitted like
a cat’s, a pencil-thin mustache, and skin with the sheen of buffed leather.

“Hey, Kid.” Slick smelled some kind of incense from inside the hover. “How y’ doin’?”

“Well,” the Kid said, narrowing his eyes, “recall you sayin’ once, if I ever needed
a favor …”

“Right,” Slick said, feeling a first twinge of apprehension. Kid Afrika had saved
his ass once, in Atlantic City; talked some irate brothers out of dropping him off
this balcony on the forty-third floor of a burned-out highstack. “Somebody wanna throw
you off a tall building?”

“Slick,” the Kid said, “I wanna introduce you to somebody.”

“Then we’ll be even?”

“Slick Henry, this fine-looking girl here, this is Miss
Cherry Chesterfield of Cleveland, Ohio.” Slick bent down and looked at the driver.
Blond shockhead, paintstick around her eyes. “Cherry, this is my close personal friend
Mr. Slick Henry. When he was young and bad he rode with the Deacon Blues. Now he’s
old and bad, he holes up out here and pursues his
art
, understand. A
talented
man, understand.”

“He’s the one builds the robots,” the girl said, around a wad of gum, “you said.”

“The very one,” the Kid said, opening his door. “You wait for us here, Cherry honey.”
The Kid, draped in a mink coat that brushed the immaculate tips of his yellow ostrich
boots, stepped out onto the Solitude, and Slick caught a glimpse of something in the
back of the hover, eye-blink ambulance flash of bandages and surgical tubing.…

“Hey, Kid,” he said, “what you got back there?” The Kid’s jeweled hand came up, gesturing
Slick back as the hover’s door clanked shut and Cherry Chesterfield hit the window
buttons.

“We have to talk about that, Slick.”

“I don’t think it’s much to ask,” Kid Afrika said, leaning back against a bare metal
workbench, wrapped in his mink. “Cherry has a med-tech’s ticket and she knows she’ll
get paid. Nice girl, Slick.” He winked.

“Kid …”

Kid Afrika had this guy in the back of the hover who was like dead, coma or something,
had him hooked up to pumps and bags and tubes and some kind of simstim rig, all of
it bolted to an old alloy ambulance stretcher, batteries and everything.

“What’s this?” Cherry, who’d followed them in after the Kid had taken Slick back out
to show him the guy in the back of the hover, was peering dubiously up at the towering
Judge, most of him anyway; the arm with the buzzsaw was where they’d left it, on the
floor on the greasy tarp.
If she has a med-tech’s ticket
, Slick thought,
the med-tech probably hasn’t noticed it’s missing yet
. She was wearing at least four leather jackets, all of them several sizes too big.

“Slick’s art, like I told you.”

“That guy’s dying. He smells like piss.”

“Catheter came loose,” Cherry said. “What’s this thing supposed to
do
, anyway?”

“We can’t keep him here, Kid, he’ll stiff. You wanna kill him, go stuff him down a
hole on the Solitude.”

“The man’s not dying,” Kid Afrika said. “He’s not hurt, he’s not sick.…”

“Then what the fuck’s wrong with him?”

“He’s
under
, baby. He’s on a
long trip
. He needs
peace and quiet
.”

Slick looked from the Kid to the Judge, then back to the Kid. He wanted to be working
on that arm. Kid said he wanted Slick to keep the guy for two weeks, maybe three;
he’d leave Cherry there to take care of him.

“I can’t figure it. This guy, he’s a friend of yours?”

Kid Afrika shrugged inside his mink.

“So why don’t you keep him at your place?”

“Not so quiet. Not peaceful enough.”

“Kid,” Slick said, “I owe you one, but nothing this weird. Anyway, I gotta work, and
anyway, it’s too weird. And there’s Gentry, too. He’s gone to Boston now; be back
tomorrow night and he wouldn’t like it. You know how he’s funny about people.… It’s
mostly his
place
, too, how it is.…”

“They had you over the railing, man,” Kid Afrika said sadly. “You remember?”

“Hey, I remember, I …”

“You don’t remember too good,” the Kid said. “Okay, Cherry. Let’s go. Don’t wanna
cross Dog Solitude at night.” He pushed off from the steel bench.

“Kid, look …”

“Forget it. I didn’t know your fucking name, that time in Atlantic City, just figured
I didn’t wanna see the
white boy all over the street, y’know? So I didn’t know your name then, I guess I
don’t know it now.”

“Kid …”

“Yeah?”

“Okay. He stays. Two weeks max. You gimme your word, you’ll come back and get him?
And you gotta help me square it with Gentry.”

“What’s he need?”

“Drugs.”

Little Bird reappeared as the Kid’s Dodge wallowed away across the Solitude. He came
edging out from behind an outcropping of compacted cars, rusty pallets of crumpled
steel that still showed patches of bright enamel.

Slick watched him from a window high up in Factory. The squares of the steel frame
had been fitted with sections of scavenged plastic, each one a different shade and
thickness, so that when Slick tilted his head to one side, he saw Little Bird through
a pane of hot-pink Lucite.

“Who lives here?” Cherry asked, from the room behind him.

“Me,” Slick said, “Little Bird, Gentry …”

“In this room, I mean.”

He turned and saw her there beside the stretcher and its attendant machines. “You
do,” he said.

“It’s your place?” She was staring at the drawings taped to the walls, his original
conceptions of the Judge and his Investigators, the Corpsegrinder and the Witch.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Better you don’t get any ideas,” she said.

He looked at her. She had a large red sore at the corner of her mouth. Her bleached
hair stood out like a static display. “Like I said, don’t worry about it.”

“Kid said you got electricity.”

“Yeah.”

“Better get him hooked up,” she said, turning to the
stretcher. “He doesn’t draw much, but the batteries’ll be getting low.”

He crossed the room to look down at the wasted face. “You better tell me something,”
he said. He didn’t like the tubes. One of them went into a nostril and the idea made
him want to gag. “Who is this guy and what exactly the fuck is Kid Afrika doing to
him?”

“He’s not,” she said, tapping a readout into view on a biomonitor panel lashed to
the foot of the stretcher with silver tape. “REM’s still up, like he dreams all the
time …” The man on the stretcher was strapped down in a brand-new blue sleeping bag.
“What it is, he—whoever—he’s paying Kid for this.”

There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was
lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package
that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look
like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or anyway
he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything about getting unconscious
and just staying jacked in.… People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes
on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon
city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because
if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece
of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.

“He paying the Kid?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“What for?”

“Keep him that way. Hide him out, too.”

“Who from?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t say.”

In the silence that followed, he could hear the steady rasp of the man’s breath.

There was a smell in the house; it had always been there.

It belonged to time and the salt air and the entropic nature of expensive houses built
too close to the sea. Perhaps it was also peculiar to places briefly but frequently
uninhabited, houses opened and closed as their restless residents arrived and departed.
She imagined the rooms empty, flecks of corrosion blossoming silently on chrome, pale
molds taking hold in obscure corners. The architects, as if in recognition of eternal
processes, had encouraged a degree of rust; massive steel railings along the deck
had been eaten wrist-thin by years of spray.

The house crouched, like its neighbors, on fragments of ruined foundations, and her
walks along the beach sometimes involved attempts at archaeological fantasy. She tried
to imagine a past for the place, other houses, other voices. She was accompanied,
on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen
rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently,
and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about
the way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas
gift.

She knew that Hilton Swift was watching through the Dornier’s cameras. Little that
occurred in the beach house escaped Sense/Net; her solitude, the week alone she’d
demanded, was under constant surveillance.

Her years in the profession had conveyed a singular immunity to observation.

At night she sometimes lit the floods mounted beneath the deck, illuminating the hieroglyphic
antics of huge gray sandfleas. The deck itself she left in darkness, and the sunken
living room behind her. She sat on a chair of plain white plastic, watching the Brownian
dance of the fleas. In the glare of the floods, they cast minute, barely visible shadows,
fleeting cusps against the sand.

The sound of the sea wrapped her in its movement. Late at night, as she slept in the
smaller of the two guest bedrooms, it worked its way into her dreams. But never into
the stranger’s invading memories.

The choice of bedrooms was instinctive. The master bedroom was mined with the triggers
of old pain.

The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction away from
receptor sites in her brain.

She cooked for herself in the white kitchen, thawing bread in the microwave, dumping
packets of dehydrated Swiss soup into spotless steel pans, edging dully into the nameless
but increasingly familiar space from which she’d been so subtly insulated by the designer’s
dust.

“It’s called life,” she said to the white counter. And what would Sense/Net’s in-house
psychs make of that, she wondered, if some hidden microphone caught it and carried
it to them? She stirred the soup with a slender stainless whisk, watching steam rise.
It helped to do things, she thought, just to do things yourself; at the clinic, they’d
insisted she make her own bed. Now she spooned out her own bowl of soup, frowning,
remembering the clinic.

She’d checked herself out a week into the treatment. The medics protested. The detoxification
had gone beautifully, they said, but the therapy hadn’t begun. They pointed out the
rate of relapse among clients who failed to complete the program. They explained that
her insurance was invalid if she terminated her treatment. Sense/Net would pay, she
told them, unless they preferred she pay them herself. She produced her platinum MitsuBank
chip.

Her Lear arrived an hour later; she told it to take her to LAX, ordered a car to meet
her there, and canceled all incoming calls.

“I’m sorry, Angela,” the jet said, banking over Montego Bay seconds after they’d taken
off, “but I have Hilton Swift on executive override.”

“Angie,” Swift said, “you know I’m behind you all the way. You know that, Angie.”

She turned to stare at the black oval of the speaker. It was centered in smooth gray
plastic, and she imagined him crouching back there, his long runner’s legs folded
painfully, grotesquely, behind the Lear’s bulkhead.

“I know that, Hilton,” she said. “It’s nice of you to phone.”

“You’re going to L.A., Angie.”

“Yes. That’s what I told the plane.”

“To Malibu.”

“That’s right.”

“Piper Hill is on her way to the airport.”

“Thank you, Hilton, but I don’t want Piper there. I don’t want anybody. I want a car.”

“There’s no one at the house, Angie.”

“Good. That’s what I want, Hilton. No one at the house. The house, empty.”

“Are you certain that’s a good idea?”

“It’s the best idea I’ve had in a long time, Hilton.”

There was a pause. “They said it went really well, Angie, the treatment. But they
wanted you to stay.”

“I need a week,” she said. “One week. Seven days. Alone.”

After her third night in the house, she woke at dawn, made coffee, dressed. Condensation
stippled the broad window facing the deck. Sleep had been simply that; if dreams had
come, she couldn’t recall them. But there was something—a quickening, almost a giddiness.
She stood in the kitchen, feeling the cold of the ceramic floor through thick white
sweatsocks, both hands around the warm cup.

Something there. She extended her arms, raising the coffee like a chalice, the gesture
at once instinctive and ironic.

It had been three years since the loa had ridden her, three years since they had touched
her at all. But now?

Legba? One of the others?

The sense of a presence receded abruptly. She put the cup down on the counter too
quickly, coffee slopping over her hand, and ran to find shoes and a coat. Green rubber
boots from the beach closet, and a heavy blue mountain jacket she didn’t remember,
too large to have been Bobby’s. She hurried out of the house, down the stairs, ignoring
the hum of the toy Dornier’s prop as it lifted off behind her like a patient dragonfly.
She glanced north, along the jumble of beach houses, the confusion of rooflines reminding
her of a Rio barrio, then turned south, toward the Colony.