He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she’d become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth.

It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.

“Get me out of here,” he said to Daniels, who smiled beneath his surgical clamp, whipping the card triumphantly away from the plastic.

“Steady,” said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-pink fretwork of scars, over Laney’s wrist, “You haven’t even had your drink yet.”

Laney had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed him in a suite at the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched between the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of office buildings dating from the final year of the previous century. These reflected all the Millennial anxiety of the year of their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mysterious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal and even less attractive.

Laney’s suite, much larger than his apartment in Santa Monica, was like an elongated 1920s apartment following the long, shallow concrete balcony that faced Sunset, this in turn overlooking a deeper balcony on the floor below and the tiny circular lawn that was all that remained of the original gardens.

Laney thought it was a strange choice, considering his situation. He would have imagined they’d choose something more corporate, more fortified, more heavily wired, but Rice Daniels had explained that the Chateau had advantages all its own. It was a good choice in terms of image, because it humanized Laney; it looked like a habitation, basically, something with walls and doors and windows, in which a guest could be imagined to be living something akin to a life—not at all the case with the geometric solids that were serious business hotels. It also had deeply rooted associations with the Hollywood star system, and with human tragedy as well. Stars had lived here, in the heyday of old Hollywood, and, later, certain stars had died here. Out of Control planned to frame the death of Alison Shires as a tragedy in a venerable Hollywood tradition, but one that had been brought on by Slitscan, a very contemporary entity. Besides, Daniels explained, the Chateau was far more secure than it might at first look. And at this point Laney had been introduced to Berry Rydell, the night security man.

Daniels and Rydell, it seemed to Laney, had known one another prior to Rydell working at the Chateau, though how, exactly, remained unclear. Rydell seemed oddly at home with the workings of the infotainment industry, and at one point, when they’d found themselves alone together, he’d asked Laney who was representing him.

“How do you mean?” Laney had said.

“You’ve got an agent, don’t you?”

Laney said he didn’t.

“You better get one,” Rydell had said. “Not that it’ll necessarily come out the way you’d wanted, but, hey, it’s show business, right?”

It was indeed show business, to an extent that very quickly made Laney wonder if he’d made the right decision. There had been sixteen people in his suite, for a four-hour meeting, and he’d only been out of the lock-up for six hours. When they’d finally gone, Laney had staggered the length of the place, mistakenly trying several closet doors in his search for the bedroom. Finding it, he’d crawled onto the bed and fallen asleep in the clothes they’d sent Rydell to the Beverly Center to buy for him.

Which he thought he might well do right here, now, in this Golden Street bar, thereby answering the question of what the bourbon was doing to his jet lag. But now, finishing the remainder of the shot, he felt one of those tidal reversals begin, perhaps less to do with the drink than with some in-built chemistry of fatigue and displacement.

“Was Rydell happy?” Yamazaki asked,

It seemed a strange question, to Laney, but then he’d remembered Rydell mentioning someone Japanese, someone he’d known in San Francisco, and that, of course, had been Yamazaki.

“Well,” Laney said, “he didn’t strike me as desperately unhappy, but there was something sort of down about him. You could say that. I mean, I don’t really know him well at all.”

“It is too bad,” Yamazaki said. “Rydell is a brave man.”

“How about you, Laney,” Blackwell said, “you think of yourself as a brave man?” The wormlike scar that bisected his eyebrow writhed into a new degree of concentration.

“No,” Laney said, “I don’t.”

“But you went up against Slitscan, didn’t you, because of what they did to the girl? You had a job, you had food, you had a place to sleep. You got all that from Slitscan, but they did the girl, so you opted to do ’em back. Is that right?”

“Nothing’s ever that simple,” Laney said.

When Blackwell spoke, Laney was unexpectedly aware of another sort of intelligence, something the man must ordinarily conceal. “No,” Blackwell said, almost gently, “it fucking well isn’t, is it?” One large, pinkly jigsawed hand, like some clumsy animal in its own right, began to root in the taut breast pocket of Blackwell’s micropore. Producing a small, gray, metallic object that he placed on the bar.

“Now that’s a nail,” Blackwell said, “galvanized, one-and-a-half-inch, roofing, I’ve nailed men’s hands to bars like this, with nails like that. And some of them were right bastards.” There was nothing at all of threat in Blackwell’s voice. “And some of those, you nail their one hand, their other comes up with a razor, or a pair of needle-nose pliers.” Blackwell’s forefinger absently found an angry-looking scar beneath his right eye, as though something had entered there and been deflected along the cheekbone. “To have a go, right?”

“Pliers?”

“Bastards,” Blackwell said. “You have to kill ’em, then, Now that’s one kind of ‘brave,’ Laney. What I mean is, how’s that so different from what you tried to do to Slitscan?”

“I just didn’t want them to let it drop. To let her… settle to the bottom. Be forgotten. I didn’t really care how badly Slitscan got hurt, or even if they were damaged or not. I wasn’t thinking of revenge, as much as of a way of… keeping her alive?”

“There’s other men, you nail their hand to a table, they’ll sit there and look at you. That’s your true hard man, Laney. Do you think you’re one of those?”

Laney looked from Blackwell to the empty bourbon glass, back to Blackwell; the bartender moved, as if to refill it, but Laney covered it with his hand. “If you nail my hand to the bar, Blackwell,” and here he spread his other hand, flat, palm down, on the dark wood, the drink-ringed varnish, “I’ll scream, okay? I don’t know what anyof this is about. You might be crazy. But what I most definitely am not is anybody’s idea of a hero. I’m not now, and I wasn’t back there in L.A.”

Blackwell and Yamazaki exchanged glances. Blackwell pursed his lips, gave a tiny nod. “Good on you then,” he said. “I think you just might be right for the job.”

“No job,” Laney said, but let the bartender pour him a second bourbon. “I don’t want to hear about any job at all, not until I know who’s hiring me.”

“I’m chief of security for Lo/Rez,” Blackwell said, “and I owe that silly bastard my life. The last five of which I’d’ve passed in the punitive bowels of the State of fucking Victoria. If it hadn’t been for him. Though I’d’ve topped myself first, no fear.”

“The band? You’re security for them?”

“Rydell spoke well of you, Mr. Laney.” Yamazaki’s neck bobbed in the collar of his plaid shirt,

“I don’t know Rydell,” Laney said. “He was just the night watchman at a hotel I couldn’t afford.”

“Rydell has a good sense of people, I think,” Yamazaki said.