'Who was he? Why'd he hit you?

'He was- She broke off, her front teeth pressing into her lower lip. 'Somebody I lived with. In LA.

'Huh, Rydell said, all he could manage around the idea that the scarf had just shot Chevette's new boyfriend.

'I mean I wasn't with him. Not now. He was following me, but, Jesus, Rydell, why'd that guy… Just walked up and shot him!

Because he was going after me, Rydell thought. Because he wanted to wail on me and I'm supposed to be theirs. But Rydell didn't say that. 'The guy with the gun, he said, instead, 'he'll be looking for me. He's not alone. That means you don't want to be with me when he finds me.

'Why's he looking for you?

'Because I've got something- But he didn't; he'd left the projector in the bar.

'You were looking for me, back there?

I've been looking for you since you walked out. I've been working up and down the face of the waking world, every last day, with a tiny little comb, looking for you. And each day shook out empty, never, never you. And he heard in memory the sound those rocks made, punching into the polymer behind the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. Pointless, pointless. 'No. I'm working. Private investigation for a man named Laney.

She didn't believe him. 'Carson followed me up here. I didn't want to be with him. Now you. What is this?

Laney says it's the end of the world. 'I'm just here, Chevette. You're just here. I gotta go now-

'Where?

'Back in the bar. I left something. It's important.

'Don't go back there!

'I have to.

'Rydell, she began, starting to shake, 'you're… you're- And looked down at her open hands, the palms dark with something. And he saw that it was blood, and knew that it would be the boyfriend's, that she'd crawled through that. She started to sob, and wiped her palms down her black jeans, trying to get it off.

'Mr. Rydell?

The man with the tanto, carrying Rydell's duffel in the crook of his arm as though it were a baby.

'Mr. Rydell, I don't think it would be advisable for you to attempt to leave the bridge. A watch has almost certainly been posted, and they will shoot you rather than permit the possibility of your escape. The pallid glare of the fluorescents chained overhead winked in the round lenses; this lean and concise man with perfectly blank, perfectly circular absences where eyes should be. 'Are you with this young woman?

'Yes, Rydell said.

'We must start toward Oakland, the man said, handing Rydell the duffel, the solid weight of the projector. Rydell hoped he'd gotten the power cable as well. 'Otherwise, they will slip past and cut us off.

Rydell turned to Chevette. 'Maybe they didn't see us together. You should just go.

'I wouldn't advise that, the man said. 'I saw you together. They likely did as well.

Chevette looked up at Rydell. 'Every time you come into my life, Rydell, I wind up in … She made a face.

'Shit, Rydell finished for her.

54. SOME THINGS NEVER HAPPEN

THE Gunsmith Cats alarm watch taped to the wall of Laney's box brings him home from the Walled City. It buzzes to announce the Suit's impending arrival. The Suit has no watch of his own but is relentlessly punctual, his rounds timed to the clocks of the subway, which are set in turn by radio, from an atomic clock in Nagoya.

Laney tastes blood. It is a long time since he has brushed his teeth, and they feel artificial and ill-fitting, as though in his absence they have been replaced with a stranger's. He spits into a bottle kept for this purpose and considers attempting the journey to the restroom. Importance of grooming. He feels the stubble on his cheeks, calculating the effort required to remove it. He could request that the Suit obtain an electric disposable, but really he prefers a blade. He is one of those men who has never grown a beard, not even briefly. (And now, some small voice, one always best ignored, suggests: he never will.)

He hears the old man, in the next box, say something in Japanese, and knows that the Suit has arrived. He wonders what model the old man is building now, and sees, in his mind's eye, with hallucinatory clarity, the finishing touches being put on a model of Cohn Laney.

It is a 'garage' kit, this Laney kit, a limited run produced for only the most serious of enthusiasts, the otaku of plastic model kits, and as such it is molded from styrene of a quite nauseous mauve. The plastic used in garage kits tends to uniformly ghastly shades, as the enthusiast-manufacturers know that no kit, assembled, will ever remain unpainted.

The Laney the old man is detailing is an earlier Laney, the Laney of his days in LA, when he worked as a quantitative analyst for Slitscan, a tabloid television show of quite monumental viciousness: this Laney wears Padanian designer clothing and sports a very expensive pair of sunglasses, the frames of which are even now being picked out in silver by the old man's narrowest sable, scarcely more than a single hair.

But this waking dream is broken now by the advent of the Suit's head, his hair like the molded pompadour of some archaic mannequin. Laney feels, rather than sees, the precision with which the Suit's black eyeglass frames have been most recently mended, and as the Suit crawls in, beneath the flap of melon blanket, Laney smells the rancid staleness the Suit's clothing exudes. It is strange that any odor produced by a warm body should suggest intense cold, but the Suit's somehow does.

The Suit is bringing Laney more of the blue syrup, more Regain, several large chocolate bars laden with sucrose and caffeine, and two liters of generic cola. The Suit's painted shirtfront seems faintly self-luminous, like the numerals of a diver's watch glimpsed far down in the depth of a lightless well, a sacrificial cenote perhaps, and Laney finds himself adrift for just an instant in fragments of some half-remembered Yucatan vacation.

Something is wrong, Laney thinks; something is wrong with his eyes, because now the Suit's luminous shirt glows with the light of a thousand suns, and all the rest is black, the black of old negatives. And still somehow he manages to give the Suit two more of the untraceable debit chips, and even to nod at the Suit's tense little salaryman bow, executed kneeling, amid sleeping bags and candy wrappers, and then the Suit is gone, and the glare of his shirt, surely that was just some artifact of whatever process this is that Laney is here to pursue.

LANEY drinks half of one of the bottles of cough syrup, chews and swallows a third of one of the candy bars, and washes this down with a swallow of the lukewarm cola.

When he closes his eyes, even before he puts the eyephones on, he seems to plunge into the flow of data.

Immediately he is aware of Libia and Paco, directing him. They do not bother to speak or to present, but he knows them now by a certain signature, a style of navigation. He lets them take him where they will, and of course he is not disappointed.

A lozenge opens before him.

He is looking down into what he takes to be Harwood's office, in San Francisco, at Harwood seated behind a vast dark desk littered with architectural models and stacks of printout. Harwood holding a telephone handset.

'It's an absurd launch, Hardwood says, 'but then it's an insane service. It works because it's redundant, understand? It's too dumb not to work.

Laney does not hear the reply, and takes this to mean that Libia and Paco have hacked a security camera in the ceiling of Harwood's office. The audio is ambient sound, not a phone tap.

Now Harwood rolls his eyes.

'People are fascinated by the pointlessness of it. That's what they like about it. Yes, it's crazy, but it's fun. You want to send your nephew in Houston a toy, and you're in Paris, you buy it, take it to a Lucky Dragon, and have it re-created, from the molecules up, in a Lucky Dragon in Houston… What? What happens to the toy you bought in Paris? You keep it. Give it away. Eviscerate it with your teeth, you tedious, literal-minded bitch. What? No, I didn't. No, I'm sorry Noriko, that must be an artifact of your translation program. How could you imagine I'd say that? Harwood stares straight ahead, stunned with boredom. 'Of course I want to give the interview. This is an exclusive, after all. And you were my first choice. Harwood smiles as he calms the journalist, but the smile vanishes the instant she begins to ask her next question.