Black Glass by John Shirley Read Free Book Online Page B

going to follow him or what?”
    “No, actually,” Halido said, striding up behind them. “You two rat’s assholes are not going to follow him. Now me, I’ll be taking the man to his friends, all in good time, when they’re ready to see him. You two, on the other hand, drive out of here, in the other direction. Now. Right now.”
    “His ‘friends’?” Shortstack said, looking Halido up and down. Mostly up. “He used to arrest some bottom feeders like you, but he never actually hung out with them, not so far as I know. Here’s a suggestion for you—and if I were you, I’d take this under serious advisement: Go ... fuck ... yourself.”
    Shortstack was waiting for it when Halido reached into his coat for the gun—and the dwarf stepped up to him, grabbed Halido around the knees, and heaved him up ... and over ... bodily.
    And threw him forty feet through the air.
    Halido flying end over end–” Holy shit!” he blurted, as he tumbled. You didn’t see a lot of dwarves enhanced for extra strength. Surprised him.
    Then he slammed into the roof of his sedan, face down, nose bloody, all the breath knocked out of him. Leaving a dent.
    Shortstack and Nodder—who rarely “nodded” in moments of physical concentration when he had adrenaline working for him—got into their van and started after the bus.
    “Uh,” Halido said, “Uh yuh ... uh ... fuh ... ckers ...”

    The bus broke down before they’d quite got to Candle’s stop.
    It ground to a halt and he got out of his seat to bend over, look through the windows. Was this really the right neighborhood? He wasn’t sure he remembered, for certain, where Danny’s girlfriend had lived. He remembered her, though. You couldn’t forget her, not easily.
    It had stopped raining, he saw, and the streets outside the bus were silver-slick as snail tracks. It rained more now in Los Angles, since global warming really got going good; some places that had been rainy got nakedly dry; some places that had been like tanning lamps suddenly got all wet and spongy. It was more like Mississippi, now, in Southern California, than the Los Angeles he remembered from his childhood.
    “Happens at least once a damn week,” said an elderly black woman in a white nurse’s uniform, getting off ahead of him. “Bus breaking down every damn ...” She seemed wobbly, so he tried to help her down the steps. She jerked her arm away from him. “Don’t be touching me or I’ll yell for a damn cop!” she snarled, her cube of white hair bobbing with each emphatic syllable.
    (Were those cubistic hair styles on women around four years ago?)
    Candle almost said, I am a cop, lady . And then he remembered.
“Sorry. Just trying to help.”
    “Damn buses don’t run anymore,” she muttered, stalking away. “Cost them money to fix them, they say. Got to make a profit, can’t be fixin’ the buses. White people got the plan, alright! Dumb cracker sons of bitches.”
    She went to the left, he went right, looking at the street corners, trying to remember. Right should go to the warehouses, the lofts, the art district. Maybe to Danny.
    Yes, this was the neighborhood. All the posters for impromptu art shows, guerilla galleries, slapped up helter-skelter on the walls, one atop the next. Most of the posters were static; the animated ones were too expensive for actual artists to afford. He saw just two micro-animated posters, with moving images: a woman with spiky green and blue hair running from a cop, then turning and chasing the cop, who ran away; then the sequence started over.
    A few more blocks, and he saw the building to his left. They’d painted it purple, around the last time he was there. It was still, more or less, purple.
    Candle approached the front door of the warehouse building—once a warehouse, now a decaying loft conversion. There were three doors, dividing the place into thirds. He started to ring the buzzer at the first one—a twentieth-century century relic, that buzzer—and