Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

ventured, “he’s a vampire?”
    Cherry stared at him. “You kidding?”
    Eyes wide, Little Bird solemnly shook his head.
    Cherry looked at Slick. “Your friend playing with a full deck?”
    “No vampires,” Slick said to Little Bird, “that’s not a real thing, understand? That’s
     just in stims. Guy’s no vampire, okay?”
    Little Bird nodded slowly, looking not at all reassured, while the wind popped the
     plastic taut against the milky light.
    He tried to get a morning’s work in on the Judge, but Little Bird had vanished again
     and the image of the figure on the stretcher kept getting in the way. It was too cold;
     he’d have to run a line down from Gentry’s territory at the top of Factory, get some
     space heaters. But that meant haggling with Gentry over the current. The juice wasGentry’s because Gentry knew how to fiddle it out of the Fission Authority.
    It was heading into Slick’s third winter in Factory, but Gentry had been there four
     years when Slick found the place. When they’d gotten Gentry’s loft together, Slick
     had inherited the room where he’d put Cherry and the man she said Kid Afrika called
     the Count. Gentry took the position that Factory was his, that he’d been there first,
     got the power in so the Authority didn’t know. But Slick did a lot of things around
     Factory that Gentry wouldn’t have wanted to do himself, like making sure there was
     food, and if something major broke down, if the wiring shorted or the water filter
     packed it in, it was Slick who had the tools and did the fixing.
    Gentry didn’t like people. He spent days on end with his decks and FX-organs and holo
     projectors and came out only when he got hungry. Slick didn’t understand what it was
     that Gentry was trying to do, but he envied Gentry the narrowness of his obsession.
     Nothing got to Gentry. Kid Afrika couldn’t have gotten to Gentry, because Gentry wouldn’t
     have gone over to Atlantic City and gotten into deep shit and Kid Afrika’s debt.
    He went into his room without knocking and Cherry was washing the guy’s chest with
     a sponge, wearing white throwaway gloves. She’d carried the butane stove up from the
     room where they did the cooking and heated water in a steel mixing bowl.
    He made himself look at the pinched face, the slack lips parted just enough to reveal
     yellow smoker’s teeth. It was a street face, a crowd face, face you’d see in any bar.
    She looked up at Slick.
    He sat on the edge of the bed, where she’d unzipped his sleeping bag and spread it
     out flat like a blanket, with the torn end tucked in under the foam.
    “We gotta talk, Cherry. Figure this, you know?”
    She squeezed the sponge out over the bowl.
    “How’d you get mixed up with Kid Afrika?”
    She put the sponge in a Ziploc and put that away in the black nylon bag from the Kid’s
     hover. As he watched her, he saw there was no wasted motion, and she didn’t seem to
     have to think about what she was doing. “You know a place called Moby Jane’s?”
    “No.”
    “Roadhouse, off the interstate. So I had this friend was manager there, doing it for
     about a month when I move in with him. Moby Jane, she’s just huge; she just sits out
     back the club in a float tank with this freebase IV drip in her arm and it’s
totally
disgusting. So like I said, I move in there with my friend Spencer, he’s the new
     manager, because I had this trouble over my ticket in Cleveland and I couldn’t work
     right then.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “The
usual
kind, okay? You wanna hear this or not? So Spencer’s let me in on the owner’s horrible
     condition, right? So the last thing I want anybody to know is that I’m a med-tech,
     otherwise they’ll have me out there changing filters on her tank and pumping freebase
     into two hundred kilos of hallucinating psychotic. So they put me waiting tables,
     slinging beer. It’s okay. Get some good music in there. Kind of a rough place but
     it’s okay