And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in the tobacco-colored leather.
Then its in her hand, down the front of her bike-pants, shes out the door, and the asshole hasnt even noticed.
In the sudden quiet of the corridor, party sounds receding as she heads for the elevator, she wants to run. She wants to laugh, too, but now shes starting to feel scared.
Walk.
Past the partys build-up of trays, dirty glasses, plates.
Remembering the security grunts in the lobby.
The thing stuck down her pants.
Down a corridor that opens off this one, she sees the doors of a service elevator spread wide now and welcoming. A Central Asian kid with a paint-splattered steel cart stacked up with flat rectangles that are television screens. He gives her a careful look as she edges in beside him. His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes, his hair shaved up high in one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor. He has a security badge clipped to the front of his clean gray workshirt and a VirtuFax slung around his neck on a red nylon cord.
Basement Chevette says.
His fax buzzes. He raises it, pushes the button, peers into the eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge. Then he drops the fax back to his chest, blinks at her, and pushes a button marked B-6. The doors rumble shut and Chevette closes her eyes.
She leans back against the big quilted pads hung on the walls and wishes she were up in Skinners room, listening to the cables creak. The floor theres a layer of two-by-fours laid on edge; the very top of the hump of the cable, riding its steel saddle, sticks up through the middle, and Skinner says there are 17,464 strands of wire in that cable. Each one is about as thick as a pencil. You can press your ear against it and hear the whole bridge sing, when the winds just right.
The elevator stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody there when the door opens. Chevette wants to press B-6 again but she makes herself wait for the kid with the fax to do it. He does.
And B-6 is not the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of hundred-year-old concrete tunnels, floored in cracked asphalt tile, with big old pipes slung in iron brackets along the ceiling. She slips out while hes fiddling with one of the wheels on his cart.
A centurys-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but shes trying for tag-pulling attitude and looks, she hopes, like shes making a delivery.
She finds a narrow stairway and climbs. The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors click the lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.
But her bike is there, on B-1, behind a column of nicked concrete.
Back off it says when shes five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it.
Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbonwrapped frame makes Chevettes thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. Theres a little double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then shes up and off it.
Its never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of there.
4. Career opportunities
Rydells roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.
Monday morning, when Rydell told him hed quit his job with IntenSecure, Kevin offered to try to find him something in sales, in the beach-culture line.
You got an okay build, basically Kevin said, looking at Rydells bare chest and shoulders. Rydell was still wearing the orange trunks hed worn when hed gone to see Hernandez. Hed borrowed them from Kevin. Hed just taken his cast off, deflating it and crumpling it into the five-gallon plastic paint bucket that served as a wastebasket. The bucket had a big self-adhesive daisy on the side. You could work out a little more regularly. And maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.
Kevin, I dont know how to surf, wind-surf, anything. Hardly been in the ocean in my life. Couple of times down Tampa Bay. It was about ten in the morning. Kevin had the day off work.
Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give em an experience, too Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. Then you sell them a new outfit.
But I dont have a tan.
Kevin was the approximate color and sheen of a pair of mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydells aunt had given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but was the result of regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills and lotions.
Well Kevin admitted, you would need a tan.
Rydell knew that Kevin didnt wind-surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved, and Rydell had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of information a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important experience; with his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique, and that bone through his nose, he got a lot of attention. Mainly from women, though it didnt actually seem to do that much for him.
What Kevin sold, primarily, was clothing. Expensive kind that supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water off you. He had two whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their rooms one closet. Rydell, who currently didnt have much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through there and borrow whatever took his fancy. Which wasnt a lot, as it turned out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Glo, black nanopore, or mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time hed gone to the farmers market.
He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but there wasnt any. Someone had rigged up a couple of sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydells side, the drywall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and a collection of souvenir bumper-stickers from places like Magic Mountain, Nissan County, Disneyland, and Skywalker Park. There were two other people sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own bathroom in there).
Rydell had bought a futon with most of his first months pay from IntenSecure. Hed bought it at this stall in the market; they were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty funny. The Futon Mouth girl had explained how you could slip the Metro guy on the platform a twenty, then hed let you get on the train with the rolled-up futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that reminded Rydebl of a bodybag.
Lately, waiting to take the cast off, hed spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put them there had actually bothered to go to all those places. Hernandez had once offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had the rentacop franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Skywalker Park was up in San Francisco; it had been called Golden Gate, before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots on television when theyd privatized it.
You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?
Rydell shook his head.