Neuromancer Read Free Page B

composed his narrow features
     in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let the crowd carry him along. When he saw
     a darkened display window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical boutique,
     closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through
     the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation
     jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone’s whores; it was tattooed with a
     luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery,
     he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just
     carry the thing around in your pocket?
    Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied the reflection of the passing
     crowd.
    There.
    Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored glasses, dark clothing,
     slender . . .
    And gone.
    Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
    “R ENT ME A gun, Shin?”
    The boy smiled. “Two hour.” They stood together in the smell of fresh raw seafood
     at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. “You come back, two hour.”
    “I need one now, man. Got anything right now?”
    Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once been filled with powdered
     horseradish. He produced a slender package wrapped in gray plastic. “Taser. One hour,
     twenty New Yen. Thirty deposit.”
    “Shit. I don’t need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna shoot somebody, understand?”
    The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horseradish cans. “Two hour.”
    H E WENT INTO the shop without bothering to glance at the display of shuriken. He’d never thrown
     one in his life.
    He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank chip that gave his name as
     Charles Derek May. It beat Truman Starr, the best he’d been able to do for a passport.
    The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she had a few years on old Deane,
     none of them with the benefit of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out
     of his pocket and showed it to her. “I want to buy a weapon.”
    She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
    “No,” he said, “I don’t like knives.”
    She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The lid was yellow cardboard,
     stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight
     identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown fingers stripped
     the paper from one. She held the thing up for him to examine, a dull steel tube with
     a leather thong at one end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the
     tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb andforefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coilspring
     slid out and locked. “Cobra,” she said.
    B EYOND THE NEON shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray. The air had gotten worse;
     it seemed to have teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case had
     spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient way to conceal his
     cobra; finally he’d settled for tucking the handle into the waistband of his jeans,
     with the tube slanting across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
     his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt like it might clatter
     to the pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better.
    The Chat wasn’t really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it attracted a related clientele.
     Fridays and Saturdays were different. The regulars were still there, most of them,
     but they faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed on them.
     As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for Ratz, but the bartender wasn’t in
     sight. Lonny Zone, the bar’s resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest
     as one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was addicted to a brand of
     hypnotic the Japanese