Something fucking bit me, man!"
Thirty-six laughed at him. Los Angeles's face clouded instantly. He aimed a shove at the kid. Thirty-six twisted aside easily. With a muted clack, Thirty-six yanked one of the rickshaw's lacquered bracing bars from its sockets. He gripped it and smiled, and his shoebutton eyes gleamed like two dollops of axle grease.
Los Angeles stepped backward out of the line and ad- dressed the crowd. "Something stung me!" he screamed.
"Like a fucking wasp! And if it was this kid, like I think it was, somebody here ought to break his fucking back! And goddamn it, I've been standing out here all night! How come fucking big shots like this chick here get to go right in and, hey! This is that Webster bitch, everybody! Lauren Webster!
Pay attention, goddamn it!"
The crowd ignored him, with the inhuman patience of urbanites ignoring a drunk. Thirty-six quietly juggled his bamboo club.
A Tamil came limping up the pavement. He wore a dhoti, the ethnic skirt of a south Indian. He had a bandage on his bare, dark shin and an ornate walking cane. He gave Harvey a sharp poke with the cane's rubber tip. "Calming your friend down, la!" he advised. "Behaving like civilized fellows!"
"Fuck you, crip!" Harvey offered indifferently.
An automatic taxi pulled up to the curb and flung open its door.
A mad dog leapt out.
It was a big ugly mongrel that looked half Doberman, half hyena. Its hide was wet and slick, with something thick and oily, like vomit or blood. It erupted from the taxi with a frenzied snarl and tore into the crowd as if fired from a cannon.
It bowled into them, raging. Three men fell screaming. The crowd billowed away in terror.
Laura heard the dog's jaws snap like castanets. It tore a chunk from a fat man's forearm, then leapt up with an obscene, desperate wriggle and dashed toward the front of the bank. Great choking barks and shrieks, like some language of the damned. Flesh and shoes slapped damp pavement, the jostle and rush of panic-
The dog leapt six feet into the air, like a hooked marlin.
Its fur smoldered. A wedge of flame split it along the spine, bursting its body open.
Flame poured out of it.
It exploded wetly. A grotesque air-burst of steam and stink, spattering the crowd. It flopped to the pavement, dead in- stantly, a bag of burning flesh. Threads of impossible heat glimmered in it .. .
Laura was running.
The Tamil had her by the wrist. The crowd was running, everywhere, nowhere, into the streets where taxis screeched to sudden halts with robot honks of protest... "In here,"
the Tamil said helpfully, jumping into a cab.
It was silent inside the cab, air-conditioned. It took a right at the first curb and left the bank behind. The Tamil released her wrist, leaned back, smiled at her.
"Thanks," Laura said, rubbing her arm. "Thanks a lot, sir."
"No problem, la," the Tamil said. "The cab waiting for me." He paused, then tapped his cast with the cane. "My leg, you see."
Laura took a deep breath, shuddered. Half a block passed as she got a grip on herself. The Tamil looked her over, his eyes bright. He'd moved very fast for an injured man-he'd almost sprained her wrist, dragging her. "If you hadn't stopped me, I'd still be running," she told him gratefully. "You're very brave."
"So are you," he said.
"Not me, no way," she said. She was trembling.
The Tamil seemed to think it was funny. He nudged his chin with the head of his cane. A languid, dandyish gesture.
"Madam, you were fighting in the street with two big data pirates."
"Oh," she said, surprised. "That. That's nothing." She paused, embarrassed. "Thanks for taking my part, though."
" `An integrationist,' " the Tamil quoted. He was mimick- ing her. He looked down deliberately. "Oh, look-the nasty voodoo spoilt your nice coat."
There was a foul splattered blob on Laura's raincoat sleeve.
Red, glistening. She gasped in revulsion and tried to shrug her way out of it. Her arms were caught behind her... .
"Here," the Tamil said, smiling, as if to help. He held something under her nose. She heard a snap.
A wave of giddy heat touched her face. Then, without warning, she passed out.
A sudden sharp reek dug into Laura's head. Ammonia. Her eyes watered. "Lights..." she croaked.
The overheads dimmed to murky amber. She felt old, sick, like hours had marched through her on hangover feet. She was half-buried in something-she struggled, sudden claus- trophobic rush ...
She was lying in a beanbag chair. Like something her grandmother might have owned. The room around her was bluish with the grainy light of televisions.
"You back to the land of the living, Blondie."
Laura shook her head hard. Her nose and throat felt scorched.
"I'm..." She sneezed, painfully. "Goddamn it!" She got her elbows into the shifting pellets of the beanbag and levered herself up.
The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table. The smell of it, ginger and prawns, made her stomach tighten painfully.
"Is that you?" she said at last.
He looked down at her. "Who you thinkin', eh?"
"Sticky?"
"Yeah," he said, with the chin-swiveling nod of the Tamils.
"I and righteous I."
Laura knuckled her eyes. "Sticky, you're really different this time ... your goddamn cheeks are all wrong and your skin ... your hair.... You don't even sound the same."
He grunted.
She sat up. "What the hell have they done to you?"
"Trade secrets," Sticky said.
Laura looked around. The room was small and dark, and it stank. Bare plywood shelving weighted down with tape cas- settes, canvas bags, frazzled spools of wiring. Heaps of poly- urethane sheeting, and styrofoam noodles, and tangled cellulose.
A bolted wall rack held a dozen cheap Chinese televisions, alive with flickering Singapore street scenes. Against the other wall were heaped dozens of eviscerated cardboard boxes: bright commercial colors, American cornflakes, Kleenex, laun- dry soap. Gallon paint cans, tubing, rolls of duct tape. Some- one had tacked swimsuit shots of Miss Ting inside the grimy kitchenette.
It was hot. "Where the hell are we?"
"Don't ask," Sticky said.
"This is Singapore, though, right?" She glanced at her bare wrist. "What time is it?"
Sticky held up the smashed wreckage of her watchphone.
"Sorry. Nah sure I could trust it." He gestured across the table. "Take a seat, memsahib." He grinned tiredly. "You, I trust."
Laura got to her feet and made it to the second chair. She leaned on the table. "You know something? I'm goddamn glad to see you. I don't know why, but I am."
Sticky shoved her the remnants of his food. "Here, eat.
You been out a while." He scrubbed his plastic fork on a paper napkin and gave it to her.
"Thanks. There a ladies' room in this dump?"
"Over there," he nodded. "You feel a sting, back at the
Bank? You be sure to check you legs for pinholes in there."
The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. She had wet herself while unconscious-not badly, luckily, and the stains didn't show through her Grenadian jeans. She mopped herself with paper and came back. "No pinholes, Captain."
"Good," he said, "I'm happy I don't have to dig one of those Bulgarian pellets out of you ass. What the fock you doin' in that Bank crowd, anyway?"
"Trying to call David," she said, "after you screwed up the phones."
Sticky laughed. "Why you nah have the sense to stay with your Bwana? He nah as stupid as he look-have the sense not to be here, anyway."
"What are you doing here?"
"Having the time of my life," he said. "The last time, maybe." He rubbed his nose-they'd done something to his nostrils, too; they were narrower. "Ten years they train me for something like this. But now I'm here and doin' it, it's... "