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作  家: xian (去日留痕) on board 'SFworld'
题  目: dogwalker (2)
来  源: 哈尔滨紫丁香站
日  期: Thu Sep 25 11:26:11 1997
出  处: byh.bbs@bbs.net.tsinghua.edu.cn

发信人: dogwalker (沉苇), 信区: SFworld
标  题: dogwalker (2)
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Thu Jul 17 02:03:22 1997)

  Anyway we got down to business. The target's
name was Jesse H. Hunt, and I did a real job on
him. The Crystal Kid really plugged in on this one.
Dogwalker had about two pages of stuff-date of
birth, place of birth, sex at birth (no changes since),
education, employment history. It was like getting
an armload of empty boxes. I just laughed at it.
  "You got a jack to the city library?" I asked him,
and he shows me the wall outlet. I plugged right in,
visual onto my pocket sony, with my own little crys-
tal 5ead for ee-i-ee-i-oh. Not every goo-head can
think clear enough to do this, you know, put out
clean type just by thinking the right stuff out my left
ear interface port.
  I showed Dogwalker a little bit about research.
Took me ten minutes. I know my way right through
the Greensboro Public Library. I have P-words for
every single librarian and I'm so ept that they don't
even guess I'm stepping upstream through their
access channels. From the Public Library you can
get all the way into North Carolina Records Division
in Raleigh, and from there you can jumble into fed-
eral personnel records anywhere in the country:
Which meant that by nightfall on that most por-
tentous day we had hardcopy of every document in
Jesse H. Hunt's whole life, from his birth certificate
and first grade report card to his medical history and
security clearance reports when he first worked for
the feds.
  Dogwalker knew enough to be impressed. "If you
can do all that," he says, "you might as well put his
P-word straight out."
  "No puedo, putz," says I as cheerful as can be.
"Think of the fed as a castle. Personnel files are
floating in the moat-there's a few alligators but I
swim real good. Hot data is deep in the dungeon.
You can get in there, but you can't get out clean.
And P-words-P-words are kept up the queen's
ass."
  "No system is unbeatable," he says.
  "Where'd you learn that, from graffiti in a toilet
stall? If the P-word system was even a little bit
breakable, Dogwalker, the gentlemen you plan to
sell these cards to would already be inside looking
out at us, and they wouldn't need to spend a meg
to get clean greens from a street pug."
  Trouble was that after impressing Dogwalker with
all the stuff I could find out about Jesse H., I didn't
know that much more than before. Oh, I could guess
at some P-words, but that was all it was-guessing.
I couldn't even pick a P most likely to succeed. Jesse
was one ordinary dull rat. Regulation good grades
in school, regulation good evaluations on the job,
probably gave his wife regulation lube jobs on a
weekly schedule.
  "You don't really think your girl's going to get his
finger," says I with sickening scorn.
  "You don't know the girl," says he. "If we needed
his flipper she'd get molds in five sizes."
  "You don't know this guy," says I. "This is the
straightest opie in Mayberry. I don't see him cheat-
ing on his wife."
  "Trust me," says Dogwalker. "She'll get his finger
so smooth he won't even know she took the mold."
  I didn't believe him. I got a knack for knowing
things about people, and Jesse H. wasn't faking.
Unless he started faking when he was five, which is
pretty unpopulated. He wasn't going to bounce the
first pretty girl who made his zipper tight. Besides
which he was smart. His career path showed that he
was always in the right place. The right people
always seemed to know his name. Which is to say
he isn't the kind whose brain can't run if his jeans
get hot. I said so.
  "You're really a marching band," says Dog-
walker. "You can't tell me his P-word, but you're
obliquely sure that he's a limp or a wimp."
  "Neither one," says I. "He's hard and straight,
But a girl starts rubbing up to him, he isn't going
to think it s because she heard that his crotch is
cantilevered. He's going to figure she wants some.
thing, and he'll give her string till he finds out what.
  He just grinned at me. "I got me the best Pass-
word Man in the Triass, didn't I? I got me a miracle
worker named Goo-Boy, didn't I? The ice-brain
they call Crystal Kid. I got him, didn't I?"
  "Maybe," says I.
  "I got him or kill him," he says, showing more
teeth than a primate's supposed to have.
  "You got me," says I. "But don't go thinking you
can kill me."
  He just laughs. "I got you and you're so good,
you can bet I got me a girl who's at least as good at
what she does."
  "No such," says I.
  "Tell me his P-word and then I'll be impressed.
  "You want quick results? Then go ask him to give
you his password himself."
  Dogwalker isn't one of those guys who can hide
it when he's mad. "I want quick results," he sa s
"And if I start thinking you can't deliver, I'll pull
your tongue out of your head. Through your nose."
  "Oh, that's good," says I. "I always do my best
thinking when I'm being physically threatened by a
client. You really know how to bring out the best in
me."
  "I don't want to bring out the best," he says. "I
just want to bring out his password."
  "I got to meet him first," says I.
  He leans over me so I can smell his musk, which
is to say I'm very olftory and so I can tell you he
reeked of testosterone, by which I mean ladies could
fill up with babies just from sniffing his sweat. "Meet
him?" he asks me. "Why don't we just ask him to
gll out a job application?"
  "I've read all his job applications," says I.
  "How's a glass-head like you going to meet Mr
Fed?" says he. "I bet you're always getting invi-
tations to the same parties as guys like him."
  "I don't get invited to grown-up parties," says I.
"But on the other hand, grown-ups don't pay much
attention to sweet little kids like me."
  He sighed. "You really have to meet him?"
  "Unless fifty-fifty on a P-word is good enough
odds for you."
  All of a sudden he goes nova. Slaps a glass off the
table and it breaks against the wall, and then he
kicks the table over, and all the time I'm thinking
about ways to get out of there unkilled. But it's me
he's doing the show for, so there's no way I'm leav-
ing, and he leans in close to me and screams in my
face. "That's the last of your fifty-fifty and sixty-
forty and three times in ten I want to hear about,
Goo Boy, you hear me?"
  And I'm talking real meek and sweet, cause this
boy's twice my size and three times my weight and
I don't exactly have no leverage. So I says to him,
"I can't help talking in odds and percentages, Dog-
walker, I'm vertical, remember? I've got glass chan-
nels in here, they spit out percentages as easy as
other people sweat."
  He slapped his hand against his own head. "This
ain't exactly a sausage biscuit, either, but you know
and I know that when you give me all them exact
numbers it's all guesswork anyhow. You don't know
the odds on this beakrat anymore than I do."
  "I don't know the odds on him, Walker, but I
know the odds on me. I'm sorry you don't like tbe
way I sound so precise, but my crystal memory has
every P-word I ever plumbed, which is to say I can
give you exact to the third decimal percentages on
when I hit it right on the first try after meeting the
subject, and how many times I hit it right on the
first try just from his curriculum vitae, and right now
if I don't meet him and I go on just what I've got
here you have a 48.838 percent chance I'll be right
on my P-word first time and a 66.667 chance I'll be
right with one out of three."
  Well that took him down, which was fine I must
say because he loosened up my sphincters with that
glass-smashing table-tossing hot-breath-in-my-face
routine he did. He stepped back and put his hands
in his pockets and leaned against the wall. "Well I
chose the right P-man, then, didn't I," he says, but
he doesn't smile, no, he says the back-down words
but his eyes don't back down, his eyes say don't try
to flash my face because I see through you, I got
most excellent inward shades all polarized to keep
out your glitz and see you straight and clear. I never
saw eyes like that before. Like he knew me. Nobody
ever knew me, and I didn't think he really knew me
either, but I didn't like him looking at me as if he
thought he knew me cause the fact is I didn't know
me all that well and it worned me to think he might
know me better than I did, if you catch my drift.
  "All I have to do is be a little lost boy in a store,"
I says.
  "What if he isn't the kind who helps little lost
boys?"
  "Is he the kind who lets them cry?"
  "I don't know. What if he is? What then? Think
you can get away with meeting him a second time?"
  "So the lost boy in the store won't work. I can
crash my bicycle on his front lawn. I can try to sell
him cable magazines."
  But he was ahead of me already. "For the cable
magazines he slams the door in your face, if he even
comes to the door at all. For the bicycle crash, you re
out of your little glass brain. I got my inside girl
working on him right now, very complicated,
because he's not the playing around kind, so she has
to make this a real emotional come-on, like she's
breaking up with a boyfriend and he's the only
shoulder she can cry on, and his wife is so lucky to
have a man like him. This much he can believe. But
then suddenly he has this little boy crashing in his
yard, and because he's paranoid, he begins to
wonder if some weird rain isn't falling, right? I know
he's paranoid because you don't get to his level in
the fed without you know how to watch behind you
and kill the enemy even before they know they're
out to get you. So he even suspects, for one instant,
that somebody's setting him up for something, and
what does he do?"
  I knew what Dogwalker was getting at now, and
he was right, and so I let him have his victory and
I let the words he wanted march out all in a row.
"He changes all his passwords, all his habits, and
watches over his shoulder all the time."
  "And my little project turns into compost. No
clean greens."
  So I saw for the first time why this street boy, this
ex-pimp, why he was the one to do this job. He
wasn't vertical like me, and he didn't have the inside
hook like his fed boy, and he didn't have bumps in
his sweater so he couldn't do the girl part, but he
had eyes in his elbows, ears in his knees, by which
I mean he noticed everything there was to notice
and then he thought of new things that weren't even
noticeable yet and noticed them. He earned his forty
percent. And he earned part of my twenty, too.
  Now while we waited around for the girl to fill
Jesse's empty aching arms and get a finger off him,
and while we were still working on how to get me
to meet him slow and easy and sure, I spent a lot of
time with Dogwalker. Not that he ever asked me,
but I found myself looping his bus route every morn-
ing till he picked me up, or I'd be eating at Bo-
jangle's when he came in to throw cajun chicken
down into his ulcerated organs. I watched to make
sure he didn't mind, cause I didn't want to piss the
boy, having once beheld the majesty of his wrath,
but if he wanted to shiver me he gave me no shiv.
  Even after a few days, when the ghosts of the cold
hard street started� haunting us, he didn't shake me,
and that includes when Bellbottom says to him;
"Looks like you stopped walking dogs. Now you
pimping little boys, right? Little catamites, we call
you Catwalker now, that so? Or maybe you just
keep him for private use, is that it? You be Boy-
poker now?" Well like I always said, someday some-
body's going to kill Bellbottom just to flay him and
use his skin for a convertible roof, but Dogwalker
just waved and walked on by while I made little
pissy bumps at Bell. Most people shake me right off
when they start getting splashed on about liking little
boys, but Doggy, he didn't say we were friends or
nothing, but he didn't give me no Miami howdy,
neither, which is to say I didn't find myself floating
in the Bermuda Triangle with my ass pulled down
around my ankles, by which I mean he wasn't
ashamed to be seen with me on the street, which
don't sound like a six-minute orgasm to you but to
me it was like a breeze in August, I didn't ask for
it and I don't trust it to last but as long as it's there
I'm going to like it.

--

                情深不寿      剑钢易折

※ 来源:·BBS 水木清华站 bbs.net.tsinghua.edu.cn·[FROM: as1-b54.syd.fl.]

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※ 来源:·哈尔滨紫丁香站 bbs1.hit.edu.cn·[FROM: byh.bbs@bbs.net.tsin]

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