"The Bridge Trilogy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William - The Bridge Trilogy)

'That's nice,' Rydell said.
'Look good in court,' she said, 'in the unlikely event we ever get there.'
'He wasn't "recovering",' Rydell said. 'Hadn't even recovered from the last bunch he jammed up his nose.'
'Apparently true,' she said. 'But he was also a member of Adult Survivors of Satanism, and they are starting to take an interest in this case. Therefore, both Mr. Pursley and Mr. Ma feel it best we coast it but soon, Berry. You and me.'
'But what about the court stuff?'
'You're on suspension from the Department, you haven't been charged with anything yet, and your lawyer's name is Aaron-with-two-a's Pursley. You're out of here, Berry.'
'To L.A.?'
'None other.'
Rydell looked at her. He thought about Los Angeles on television. 'Will I like it?'
'At first,' she said. 'At first, it'll probably like you. I know Ido.'
Which was how he wound up going to bed with a lawyer- one who smelled like a million dollars, talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear from Milan, which was in Italy.
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'The Kill-Fix. Cyrinda Burdette, Gudrun Weaver, Dean Mitchell, Shinobu Sakamaki. 1997.'
'Never saw it,' Rydebb said, sucking the last of his grande decaf cold capp-with-an-extra-shot from the milky ice at the bottom of his plastic thermos cup.
'Mama saw Cyrinda Burdette. In this mall over by Waco. Got her autograph, too. Kept it up on the set with the prayer-hankies and her hologram of the Reverend Wayne Falbon. She had a prayer-hanky for every damn thing. One for the rent, one to keep the AIDS off, the TB...'
'Yeah? How'd she use 'em?'
'Kept 'em on top of the set,' Sublett explained, and finished the inch of quadruple-distilled water left in the skinny translucent bottle. There was only one place along this part of Sunset sold the stuff, but Rydell didn't mind; it was next to a take-out coffee-bar, and they could park in the lot on the corner. Fellow who ran the lot always seemed kind of glad to see them.
'Prayer-hanky won't keep any AIDS off,' Rydell said. 'Get yourself vaccinated, like anybody else. Get your momma vaccinated, too.' Through the de-mirrored window, Rydell could see a street-shrine to J. D. Shapely, up against the concrete wall that was all that was left of the building that had stood there once. You saw a lot of them in West Hollywood. Somebody had sprayed SHAPELY WAS A COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT in bright pink paint, the letters three feet high, and then a big pink heart. Below that, stuck to the wall, were postcards of Shapely and photographs of people who must've died. God only knew how many millions had. On the pavement at the base of the wall were dead flowers, stubs of candles, other stuff. Something about the postcards gave Rydell the creeps; they made the guy look like a cross between Elvis and some kind of Catholic saint, skinny and with his eyes too big.
He turned to Suhlett. 'Man, you still haven't got your ass
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vaccinated yet, you got nothin' but stone white-trash ignorance to thank for it.'
Sublett cringed. 'That's worse than a live vaccine, man; that's a whole 'nother disease right there!'
'Sure is,' Rydell said, 'but it doesn't do anything to you. And there's still plenty of the old kind walking around here. They oughta make it compulsory, you ask me.'
Sublett shuddered. 'Reverend Fallon always said-'
'Screw Reverend Fallon,' Rydell said, hitting the ignition. 'Son of a bitch just makes money selling prayer-hankies to people like your momma. You knew that was all bulishit anyway, didn't you, otherwise why'd you come out here?' He put Gunhead into gear and eased over into the Sunset traffic. One thing about driving a Hotspur Hussar, people almost always let you cut in.
Sublett's head seemed to draw down between his high shoulders, giving him the look of a worried, steel-eyed buzzard. 'Ain't all that simple,' he said. 'It's everything I been brought up to be. Can't all be bullshit, can it?'
Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. 'Naw,' he said, 'I guess it wouldn't have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it's just-'
'What they bring you all up to be, Berry?'
Rydell had to think about it. 'Republican,' he said, finally.

Karen Mendelsohn had seemed like the best of a whole string of things Rydell felt he could get used to just fine. Like flying business-class or having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in Trouble.
That first time with her, in the Executive Suites in Knoxville, not having anything with him, he'd tried to show her his certificates of vaccination (required by the Department, else they couldn't get you insured). She'd just laughed and said German nanotech would take care of all of that. Then she showed Rydell this thing through the transparent top of a
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gadget like a little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell had heard about them, but he hadn't ever seen one; he'd also heard they cost about as much as a small car. He'd read somewhere how they always had to be kept at body temperature.
It looked like it might be moving a little in there. Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked her if it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn't, exactly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls and subcellular automata. And he wouldn't even know it was there, but no way was she going to put it in in front of him.
She'd gone into the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that underwear, he got to learn where Milan was. And while it was true he wouldn't have known the thing was there, he did know it was there, but pretty soon he forgot about it, almost.
They chartered a tilt-rotor to Memphis the next morning and got on Air Magellan to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in the seatback in front of you, and Rydell's immediate favorite was a telepresence set you could tune to servo-mounted mollies on the outside of the plane. Karen hated to use the little VirtuFax she carried around in her purse, so she'd gotten on to her office in L.A. and had them download her morning's mail into her seatback display. She got down to that fast, talking on the phone, sending faxes, and leaving Rydell to ooh and ah at the views from the mollies.
The seats were bigger than when he used to fly down to Florida to see his father, the food was better, and the drinks were free. Rydell had three or four of those, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until somewhere over Arizona.
The air was funny, at LAX, and the light was different. California was a lot more crowded than he'd expected, and louder. There was a man there from Cops in Trouble, holding up a piece of wrinkled white cardboard that said
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MENDELSOHN in red marker, only the S was backward. Rydell smiled, introduced himself, and shook hands with him. He seemed to like that; said his name was Sergei. When Karen asked him where the fucking car was, he turned bright red and said it would just take him a minute to get it. Karen said no thanks, they'd walk to the lot with him as soon as their bags turned up, no way was she waiting around in a zoo like this. Sergei nodded. He kept trying to fold up the sign and put it into his jacket pocket, but it was too big. Rydell wondered why she'd suddenly gotten bitchy like that. Tired from the trip, maybe. He winked at Sergei, but that just seemed to make the guy more nervous.
After their bags came, Karen's two black leather ones and the softside blue Samsonite Rydell had bought with his new debit-card, he and Sergei carried them out and across a kind of trafficioop. The air outside was about the same, but hotter. This recording kept saying that the white spaces were for loading and unloading only. There were all kinds of cars jockeying around, babies crying, people leaning on piles of luggage, but Sergei knew where they were going-over to this garage across the way.
Sergei's car was long, black, German, and looked like somebody had just cleaned it all over with warm spit and QTips. When Rydell offered to ride shotgun, Sergei got rattled again and hustled him into the back seat with Karen. Which made her laugh, so Rydell felt better.
As they were pulling out of the garage, Rydell spotted two cops over by these big stainless-steel letters that said METRO. They wore air-conditioned helmets with clear plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their sticks, though it didn't look like they had them turned on. The old man's jeans were out at the knees and he had big patches of tape on both cheekbones, which almost always means cancer. He was SO burned, it was hard to tell if he was white or what. A crowd of people was streaming up the stairs behind the old man and the cops, under the METRO sign, and stepping around them.
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'Welcome to Los Angeles,' she said. 'Be glad you aren't taking the subway.'
They had dinner that night in what Karen said was Hollywood, with Aaron Pursley himself, in a Tex-Mex restaurant on North Flores Street. It was the best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a month later, he tried to take Sublett there for his birthday, maybe cheer him up with a down-home meal, but the man out front just wouldn't let them in.
'Full up,' he said.
Rydell could see plenty of empty tables through the window. It was early and there was hardly anybody in there. 'How 'bout those,' Rydell said, pointing at all the empty tables.
'Reserved,' the man said.