Caren Bistro had told him that Brat Gentile belonged to a gang down here in Subtown. The B Level of Folger Street. "The Folger Street Somethings," she had said.
Above him now, a solid sky with clouds of steam hissing out of the crisscrossed network of pipes up there. Stake slowed the car as the ramp fed into a grid of streets and the early morning traffic along this one congealed to an ooze. Among the work-bound pedestrians walking along the sidewalk he spotted several that glowed a luminous blue. Each of them turned its head to smile directly at him. One of the translucent blue figures stood at the curb with her thumb sticking out as if to hitchhike, her long hair blowing dreamily. It was then that a whispery voice spoke to him inside his vehicle.
"Open your world to Seance Friends-for the strongest, clearest Ouija channels in Paxton." He had left the holographic hitchhiker behind him a moment ago, but now she stepped up to the curb ahead of him again, her eyes seeming to look into his. The voice went on, "Make a special friend who can tell you about the long past, or even about your own future."
"Bastards," Stake said. It was legal for such advertisements to intrude into one's sound system, justified as "ambient sound," like hearing someone else's radio blast from another car. The ad didn't replace his music, but overlapped it, and that was invasive enough. It continued with a testimoniaclass="underline" the voice of a young girl.
"My spirit guide told me I'll die before I'm twenty, so your next ghost friend could be me!" She giggled.
Stake shut his sound system off altogether.
Further along, he made his way through a neighborhood of gray-skinned, blue-turbaned Kalians. Tenements and shops had hung black banners outside, and there was a group of protestors that shouted at the passing vehicles. Several helmeted and armored riot forcers made sure they didn't overflow into the street itself to block traffic. Stake glanced out at their furious, black-eyed faces. "What's their problem now?" he muttered.
He remembered what Janice had told him about the Kalian deity called Ugghiutu. "Sort of the
Kalian God and Satan in one body." One of the so-called "Outsiders," exiled from this dimension but waiting to return to power. He thought of the former owners of Alvine Products, their lunatic plan to design and grow a horde of giant monsters to reclaim the universe.
Despite the strict religious beliefs of most Kalians, Stake had never encountered a neighborhood that didn't have its street gang, and he soon noted a cluster of Kalian boys who wore blue satin jackets to match their turbans, which they wore facing backwards. But these were not the gang kids he was searching for. He continued on, until he arrived at last on Folger Street.
Stake cruised along the entire length of the extensive street. When he finally reached what appeared to be its end, he turned around and came back from the other direction.
He didn't spot a single gang kid. That is to say, he saw no apparent gang outfits, and what was the point of being in a gang if you didn't flaunt it, announce it in some way, brazen and proud?
Stake didn't know the full name of the gang Gentile belonged to, but he thought he knew gang graffiti when he saw it. On the face of one tenement building, in between two windows, someone had sprayed a very large, stylized dog's head baring its fangs, in red paint that glowed like neon. Though they didn't exhibit any obvious gang peacockery, there were three tough-looking kids sitting on the tenement's front steps, apparently in no hurry to be off to school.
Stake found a parking spot along the curb a little ways up, and then backtracked to the tenement building on foot. With animal-keen instincts, the kids noticed his approach right away. He hadn't been able to think of any guise he might have called up, seated in his car and browsing through the faces on his wrist comp, in order to gain their confidence. Couldn't think of an actor's role he might adopt. And so he figured he'd just jump right into it without pretense.
"Hey," he said in greeting as he came to the steps. The preteens looked a little too young to be in a full-blown street gang; maybe a tadpole gang. But you never knew. The adolescent gang called the Martians-after the god of war-was one of the deadliest in Punktown. "Do you guys know a kid named Brat Gentile? I'm a friend of a friend and nobody seems to know where's he got off to."
"Oh, please, officer," said one of the three, a Choom girl with her spiky hair dyed a metallic silver, her long mouth in a smirk. As young as she was, she'd had her eyelids surgically altered so as to look exotically slanted.
"No, no, I'm not a forcer. I'm a friend of Brat's girlfriend, Krimson. Krimson's gone missing, too."
"I don't know who the hell you're yakking about."
"Brat's in a gang from around here, the Folger Street Something-or-others."
"Snarlers," said one of the two boys seated beside the girl. "The Folger Street Snarlers."
"Snarlers. So do you know Brat?" he asked the boy.
"I'm sure I'd know his face if I saw him. But I haven't seen him or any of the Snarlers in a while." "What do you mean?"
The second boy spoke up. "It isn't just your friend of a friend that's missing, Mr. Forcer. Nobody's seen any of the Folger Street Snarlers for days."
"Mr. Gentile?"
Stake almost said Genitalia, because it had been running through his mind that Caren Bistro had said that was Krimson Tableau's playful nickname for Brat. Caren had also said, in Janice's classroom, that Brat had a brother whom she had contacted while trying to find out what had happened to her friend. Stake had been grateful to find his phone number listed on the net.
"Who is this?" asked the face on the hovercar's console screen. Theo Gentile appeared to be in his mid-twenties, and wary didn't begin to address the look in his eyes.
"My name is Jeremy Stake, sir. I'm a hired detective. I'm looking for a girl named Krimson Tableau, and I understand that your brother-"
"I don't know anyone by that name!" Gentile snapped.
"I'm told he calls her Smirk. She's your brother's girlfriend."
"I don't know where she is. I don't even know where my brother is! Who hired you?" Stake began to stammer a reply, but Gentile cut him off. "I just got back from Miniosis. You go tell your boss-I don't know anything!"
Theo Gentile disconnected. With a sigh, Stake started up the vehicle and pulled out into traffic. In his earlier cruising he had already established where the local police precinct house was located.
"It wasn't my turn to babysit the Folger Street Snarlers today," growled the beefy forcer behind the counter, not even bothering to look up at Stake. "Why don't you go earn your dirty money, gumshoe, instead of asking us to do your work for you?"
"Gumshoe?" Stake murmured to himself with a disgusted smile.
But a woman at a desk behind the burly officer looked up and said to him, "Eric mentioned something about the Snarlers not being around." Then to Stake: "Want to talk to Detective Moudry, sir? He's had a lot of dealings with the gangs around here."
"Yeah," said the first forcer. "He even took a bullet in the neck from one of the Snarlers. He had to kill the blasting punk."
Stake ignored him, said to the woman, "Yes, please, if it isn't too much trouble."
She got the plainclothesman on the phone, and a minute later he stepped out from some inner office and gestured for the woman to buzz Stake through the security door. Stake followed him back toward his office.
"Yeah," Moudry said, glancing at Stake with a cop's appraising eye. "It's funny. I'm hearing the Snarlers haven't been seen, and a couple of their family and friends are starting to get edgy."