delb to think he'd seen that she either wore silver horns or some kind of hat with an upturned crescent, and that she might've been Japanese, which struck him right then as the weirdest thing about any of it.

Then she saw him-he saw her see him-and smiled. Then she was gone.

Sublett had seen her, too, but it only kicked him into some kind of motormouthed ecstasy of religious dread, every horrormovie he'd ever seen tumbling over into ъeverend Fallon's rants about witches, devil-worshippers, and the living power of Satan.

He'd gone through his week's supply of gum, talk ing nonstop, until ъydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.

Because now she was gone, he wanted to think about her. How she'd looked, what she might have been doing there, and how it was she'd vanished. With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, ъydell had tried to remember just exactly how it was she'd managed to so perfectly and suddenly not be there. And the funny thing was, he sort of remembered it two ways, which was nothing at all like the way he still didn't really remember shooting Kenneth Turvey, even though he'd heard production assistants and network lawyers go over it so many times he felt like he'd seen it, or at least the Cops in Trouble version (which never aired). One way he remembered it, she'd just sort of gone down the slope beside the road, though whether she was running or floating, he couldn't say. The other way he remembered, she'd jumped-though that was such a poor word for it-up the slope above the other side of the road, somehow clearing all that dust-silvered moonlit vegetation, and just flat-out impossible gone, forty feet if it was five.

And did Japanese women ever have that kind of long curly hair? And hadn't it looked like the shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved into something like an exclamation point?

He'd wound up buying Sublett four packs of the special gum at an all-night ъussian pharmacy on Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff cost him.

He'd seen other things, too, up the canyons, particularly when he'd drawn a shift on deep graveyard. Mostly fires, small ones, where fires couldn't be. And lights in the sky, sometimes, but Sublett was so full of trailer-camp contactee shit that if

ъydell saw a light now, driving, he knew better than to mention it.

But sometimes, when he was up there, he'd think about her. He knew he didn't know what she was, and in some funny way he didn't even care if she'd been human or not. But he hadn't ever felt like she was bad, just different.

So now he just drove, shooting the shit with Sublett, on the night that would turn out to be his very last night on patrol with IntenSecure. No moon, but a rare clear sky with a few stars showing. Five minutes to their first house check, then they'd be swinging back toward Beverly Hills.

They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms called Body Hammer. Body Hammer didn't offer much in the way of traditional gym culture; in fact they went as far as possible in the opposite direction, catering mostly to kids who liked the idea of being injected with Brazilian fetal tissue and having their skeletons reinforced with what the ads called 'performance materials.'

Sublett said it was the Devil's work.

ъydell said it was a Tokyo franchise operation.

Gunhead said: 'Multiple homicide, hostage-taking in progress, may involve subscriber's minor children. Benedict Canyon. You have IntenSecure authorization to employ deadly, repeat, deadly force.'

And the dash lit up like an old-time video arcade.

 

 

The way it had worked out, ъydell hadn't actually had time to get used to Karen Mendelsohn, business-class seats, or any of that stuff.

Karen lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka the Blob, which looked sort of like a streamlined, semi-transparent green tit and was the third-tallest structure in the L.A. Basin. When the light was right, you could see almost clear through it, and make out the three giant struts that held it up, each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper up it with room to spare. There were elevators up through these tripod-things, and they ran at an angle; ъydell hadn't had time to get used to that either.

The tit had a carefully corroded copper nipple, like one of those Chinese hats, that could've covered a couple of football fields. That was where Karen's apartment was, under there, along with an equally pricey hundred others, a tennis club, bars and restaurants, and a mall you had to pay to join before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge, with big curved windows set into the green wall.

Everything in there was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were always black, her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of dry oatmeal.

Karen said it was Aggressive ъetro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. ъydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.

The network had gotten him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked more like a regular condo-building, but he never did spend much time there. Until the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he'd mostly been up at Karen's.

The discovery of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear victims pretty much put paid to ъydell's career as a cop in trouble. It hadn't helped that the officers who'd first reached the scene, Sgt. China Valdez and Cpl. Norma Pierce, were easily the two best-looking women on the whole Cincinnati force ('balls-out telegenic,' one of the production assistants had said, though ъydell thought it sounded weird under the circumstances). Then the count began to rise, ultimately going right off any known or established serial-killing scale. Then it was revealed that all the victims were children. Then Sgt. Valdez went post-traumatic in stone bugfuck fashion, walking into a downtown tavern and clipping both kneecaps off a known pedophile- this amazingly repulsive character, nickname of Jellybeans, who had absolutely no connection with the Pooky Bear murders.

Aaron Pursley was already Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that had no metal in it whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles across her eyes and was talking nonstop to at least six people at once, and ъydell was sitting on the edge of her big white bed, starting to get the idea that something had changed.

 

 

When she finally took the goggles off, she just sat there, staring at a white painting on a white wall.

'They got suspects?' ъydell asked.

Karen looked over at him like she'd never seen him before.

'Suspects? They've got confessions already . . .' It struck ъydell how old she looked right then, and he wondered how old she actually was. She got up and walked out of the room.

She came back five minutes later in a fresh black outfit. 'Pack. I can't have you here now.' Then she was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and that was that.

He got up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first time. All three of them. They looked, he thought, pretty much like everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit usually do look on television.

He was sitting there in one of her oatmeal robes when a pair of rentacops let themselves in without knocking. Their uniforms were black and they were wearing the same kind of black high-top SWAT-trainers that ъydell had worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with the Kevlar insoles in case somebody snuck up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of the foot.

One of them was eating an apple. The other one had a stun-stick in his hand.

'Hey, pal,' the first one said, around a mouthful of apple, 'we gotta show you out.'

'I had a pair of shoes like that,' ъydell said. 'Made in Portland, Oregon. Two hundred ninety-nine dollars out at CostCo.'

The one with the stick grinned. 'You gonna get packing now?'

So ъydell did, picking up anything that wasn't black, white, or oatmeal and tossing it into his blue Samsonite.

The rentacop with the stick watched him, while the other one wandered around, finishing his apple.

'Who you guys with?' ъydell asked.

'lntenSecure,' said the one with the stick.

'Good outfit?' ъydell was zipping up his bag.

The man shrugged.

'Outa Singapore,' the other one said, wrapping the core of his apple in a crumpled Kleenex he'd taken from his pants pocket. 'We got all the big buildings, gated communities, like that.' He carefully tucked the apple-core into the breast-pocket of his crisp black uniform shirt, behind the bronze badge.

'You got money for the Metro?' Mr. Stick asked ъydell.

'Sure,' ъydell said, thinking of his debit-card.

'Then you're better off than the majority of assholes we get to escort out of here,' the man said.

A day later, the network pulled the plug on his MexAmeriBank card.

 

 

Hernandez might be wrong about English SWAT-wagons, ъydell found himself thinking, punching the Hotspur Hussar into six-wheel overdrive and feeling Gunhead suck down on pavement like a twin-engined, three-ton leech. He'd never really stomped on that thing before.

Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking him up out of his usual slouch.

ъydell slung Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink of a woman passenger's horrified face, then Sublett must have managed to slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren.

Straight stretch now. No cars at all. ъydell straddled the centerline and floored it. Sublett was making a weird keening sound that synched eerily with the rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came to ъydell that the Texan had snapped completely under the pressure of the thing, and was Singing in Some trailer-camp tongue known only to the benighted followers of the ъev. Fallon.

But, no, when he glanced that way, he saw Suhlctt, lips moving, frantically scanning the client-data as it seethed on the dash-screens, his eyes bugging like the silver contacts might pop right out. But while he read, ъydell saw, he was actually loading his worn-out, secondhand Gbock, his long white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, as though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper.

And that was scary.

'Death Star!' ъydell yelled. It was Sublett's job to keep the bead in his ear at all times, listening for the satellite-relayed, instantly overriding Word of the ъeal Cops.

Sublett turned, snapping the magazine into his Gbock, his face so pale that it seemed to reflect the colors of the dash-display as readily as did the blank steel rounds of his eyes.

'The help's all dead,' he said, 'an' they got the three kids in the nursery.' He sounded like he was talking about something mildly baffling he was seeing on television, say a badly altered version of some old, favorite film, drastically recast for some obscure ethnic market-niche. 'Say they're gonna kill 'em, Berry.'

'What do the fucking cops say about it?' ъydell shouted, pounding on the padded figure-eight steering wheel in the purest rage of frustration he'd ever felt.

Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He looked like he was about to scream. 'Down,' he said.

Gunhead's right front fender clipped off somebody's circa-1943 fully-galvanized Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired at great cost on Melrose Avenue.

'They can't be fucking down,' ъydell said, 'they're the police.'

Sublett tugged the bead from his ear and offered it to ъydell. 'Static's all . .

ъydell looked down at his dash-display. Gunhead's cursor was a green spear of destiny, whipping along a paler-green canyon road toward a chaste white circle the size of a seddingring. In the window immediately to the right, he could read the vital-signs data on the subscriber's three kids. Their pulse rates were up. In the window below, there was a ~idicubousty peaceful-looking infrared frame of the subscriber's front gate. It looked solid. The read-out said it was locked and armed.

ъight then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it.

 

 

A week or so later, when it had all been sorted out, Hernandez was basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy, mind you, because it had happened over his shift, but he did say he couldn't much blame ъydell under the circumstances.

IntenSecure had brought in a whole planeload of people from the head office in Singapore, ъydell had heard, to keep it all out of the media and work out some kind of settlement with the subscribers, the Schonbrunns. He had no idea what that settlement might have finally amounted to, but he was just as happy not to know; there was no such program as KentaCops in Trouble, and the Schonbrunns' front gate alone had probably been worth a couple of dozen of his paychecks.

IntenSecure could replace that gate, sure, because they'd installed it in the first place. It had been quite a gate, too, some kind of Japanese fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete, and it sure as hell had managed to get most of that Wet

Honey Sienna off Gunhead's front end.

Then there was the damage to the house itself, mostly to the living-room windows (which he'd driven through) and the furniture (which he'd driven over).

But there had to be something for the Schonbrunns on top of that, Hernandez explained. Something for emotional pain, he said, pumping ъydell a cup of old nasty coffee from the big stainless thermos behind his desk. There was a fridge-magnet on the thermos that said I'M NOT OKAY, YOU'ъE NOT

OKAY-BUT, hEY, THAT'S OKAY.

 

 

It was two weeks since the night in question, tell in the morning, and ъydell was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave panama Stetson, a pair of baggy, faded orange trunks, a KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPAъTMENT t-shirt that was starting to disintegrate at the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from his

IntenSecure uniform, and an inflated transparent cast on his left arm. 'Emotional pain,' ъydell said.

Hernandez, who was very nearly as wide as his desk, passed ъydell the coffee. 'You way lucky, all I can say.'

'I'm out a job, arm in a cast, I'm "way lucky"?'

'Seriously, man,' Hernandez said, 'you coulda killed yourself. LAPD, they coulda greased your ass down dead. Mr. and Mrs. Schonbrunn, they been very nice about this, considering Mrs. Schonbrunn's embarrassment and everything. Your arm got hassled, hey, I'm sorry . . .' Hernandez shrugged, enormously. 'Anyway, you not fired, man. We just can't let you drive now. You want us put you on gated residential, no problem.'

'No thanks.'

'ъetail properties? You wanna work evenings, Encino Fashion Mall?'

'No.'

Hernandez narrowed his eyes. 'You seen the pussy over there?'

'Nope.'

Hernandez sighed. 'Man, what happen with all that shit coming down on you in Nashville?'

'Knoxville. Department came down for permanent suspension. Going in without authorization or proper back-up.'

'And that bitch, one's suing your ass?'

'She and her son got caught sticking up a muffler shop in Johnson City, last I heard . . .' Now it was ъydell's turn to shrug, except it made his shoulder hurt.

'See,' Hernandez said, beaming, 'you lucky.'

 

 

In the instant of putting Gunhead through the Schonbrunns locked-and-armed Benedict Canyon gate, ъydell had experienced a fleeting awareness of something very high, very puree and quite clinically empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.

And that-he later recalled remembering, as he'd fought the wheel, slashing through a Japanese garden, across a patio, and through a membrane of armored glass that gave way like something in a dream-had been a lot like what he'd felt as he'd drawn his gun and pulled the trigger, emptying Kenneth Turvey's brain-pan, and most copiously, across a seemingly infinite expanse of white-primered wallboard that nobody had ever bothered to paint.

 

 

ъydell went over to Cedars to see Sublett.

IntenSecure had sprung for a private cubicle, the better to keep Sublett away from any cruising minions of the media. The Texan was sitting up in bed, chewing gum, and watching a little liquid-crystal disk-player propped on his chest.

'Warlords of the 21st Century,' he said, when ъydell edged in, 'James Wainwright, Annie McEnroe, Michael Beck.'

ъydell grinned. 'When'd they make it?'

'1982..' Sublett muted the audio and looked up. 'But I've seen it a couple times already.'

'I been over at the shop seem' Hernandez, man. He says you don't have to worry any about your job.'

Sublett looked at ъydell with his blank silver eyes. 'How 'bout yours, Berry?'

ъydell's arm started to itch, inside the inflated cast. He bent over and fished a plastic drinking-straw from the little white wastebasket beside the bed. He poked the straw down inside the cast and wiggled it around. It helped some. 'I'm history, over there. They won't let me drive anymore.'

Sublett was looking at the straw. 'You shouldn't ought to touch used stuff, not in a hospital.'

'You don't have nothin' contagious, Sublett. You're one of the cleanest motherfuckers ever lived.'

'But what you gonna do, Berry? You gotta make a living, man.'

ъydell dropped the straw back into the basket. 'Well, I don't know. But I know I don't wanna do gated residential and I know I don't wanna do any malls.'

'What about those hackers, Berry? You figure they'll get the ones set us up?'

'Nope. Too many of 'em. ъepublic of Desire's been around a while. The Feds have a list of maybe three hundred "affiliates," but there's no way to haul 'em all in and figure out who actually did it. Not unless one of 'em rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.'

'But how come they'd want to do that to us anyway?'

'Hell, Sublett, how should I know?'

'Just mean,' Sublett said.

'Well, that, for sure, and Hernandez says the LAPD told him they figured somebody wanted Mrs. Schonbrunn caught more or less with her pants down.' Neither Sublett nor ъydell had actually seen Mrs. Schonbrunn, because she was, as it turned out, in the nursery. Although her kids weren't, having gone up to Washington State with their daddy to fly over the three newest volcanoes.

Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash, had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur Hussar's on-board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and utterly spurious data into the communications bundle, cutting ъydell and Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn't, of course, been down). ъydell figured a few of those good ol' Mongol boys over at the car wash might know a little bit about that.

And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead's crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth Turvey's death finally real before him, ъydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn't always quite entirely to be trusted.

'But, man,' Sublett had said, as if to himself, 'they gonna kill those little babies.' And, with that, he'd snapped his harness open and was out of there, Glock in hand, before ъydell could do anything at all. ъydell had had him shut the siren and the strobes off a block away, but surely anybody in the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.

'ъesponding,' ъydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers g