Distraction - Bruce Sterling [216]
Oscar nodded. “Get used to the idea. This is a clean sweep. Huey took us out. It’s decapitation. I can barely talk now. I can barely walk. And Greta, she’s in some kind of wide-awake schizoid catatonia hebephrenia trance nonverbal.…”
“A little adjective trouble there, man, but no problem, I take your point. Either I seize power myself now, and try to run the whole shebang as a secret-police state. Or else I just … I dunno … airmail myself back to Boston. End of the story. It all makes a nice hacker brag, though, right? Kind of a good bar story.”
“You can’t hold this place together alone, Kevin. People don’t trust you.”
“Oh, I know that, man. You distribute all the big favors yourself, and you use me as your heavy guy to intimidate people. I know that I was the heavy guy. My dad was the heavy, too. The Founding Fathers are a bunch of dead white males; the guys on Mount Rushmore are all scary Anglo guys now. We’re the heavies. I was used to the role. Hey, I was glad to have the work.”
“I want you to help me now, Kevin.”
“Help you what, pal?”
“To get out of here.”
“No problem, boss. I’m still Captain Scubbly Bee. Hell, I was working hard on being Colonel Scubbly Bee. I can get you outside this place. Where you want to go?”
“Baton Rouge. Or wherever Huey is hiding.”
“Oh ho! Not that I doubt your judgment now, man, but I have a really great countersuggestion. Boston, okay? The good old muddy water! Beacon Hill, Charlestown, Cambridge.… You and I, we’re actually neighbors, man. We live on the same street! We could go home together. We could have a real beer, inside a real Boston bar. We could take in a hockey game.”
“I need to talk to Huey,” Oscar said flatly. “I have a big personal problem with him.”
Green Huey had gone into semiretirement. He was doing a lot of ceremonial ribbon-clipping these days. It was a little difficult doing all this public apple-polishing while surrounded by a militant phalanx of Regulator bodyguards, but Huey enjoyed the show. The ex-Governor had always been good for a laugh. He knew how to show the people a good time.
Oscar and Kevin dressed like derelicts, vanished through the social membrane, and began to stalk the Governor. They traveled by night in the sorriest hotels; they slept in roadside parks in newly purchased military-surplus tents. They burned their IDs and wore straw hats and gum boots and overalls. Kevin passed as Oscar’s minder, a lame guy with a guitar. Oscar passed as Kevin’s somewhat dim-witted cousin, the one who mumbled a lot. Oscar brandished an accordion. Even in a land that had once favored accordion music, they were mostly avoided. It was a frightening thing to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk instruments, who might at any moment burst into song.
Oscar had finally lost his temper with Huey. He was of two minds about the matter. Oscar was always of two minds about everything now. On the one hand, he wanted to publicly confront the man. And on the other, he simply wanted to murder him. The second concept made a lot of sense to Oscar now, since killing political figures was not uncommon behavior for mentally ruined drifters with nothing left to lose. He and Kevin had serious discussions about the issue. Kevin seemed to waver between pro and con. Oscar was pro and con at the same time.
Their strategic problem was dizzyingly multiform. Oscar found it extremely hard to stop thinking about it, since he could contemplate so many different aspects of the issue all at once. Killing Huey. Maiming Huey, perhaps breaking Huey’s arms. Reducing him to a wheelchair, that had appealing aspects. Blinding Huey had a certain biblical majesty to it. But how? Long-range sniping was not a pursuit for amateurs who had never handled firearms. Handguns would surely entail almost instant arrest. Poison sounded intriguing,