Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan Page A

how Bryant was dealing with the pipe high.
    “Where’s the fucking car?”
    “This way.”
    Bryant grabbed him by the arm, dragged him around the corner, and started across the deserted street. Halfway there, he jammed to an abrupt halt.
    “Ooops,” he said softly.
    The BMW sat on the far side of the street under one of the few working street lamps. Sitting on the car: four men and one woman, all dressed in oil-smeared jeans and jackets. The grime was a uniform, the pale silent faces style-coordinated accessories. Heads shaven and tattooed, feet heavily booted. Hands filled with a variety of blunt metal implements.
    None of them looked over eighteen.
    They stared at the two suited men on the other side of the street and made no move to get off the car.
    “You’ve got to get your contact stunner fixed, Mike,” Chris sniggered, still drunk. “Look at the shit you get all over it if you don’t have it powered up.”
    “Shut the fuck up,” hissed Bryant.
    The female contingent of the carjackers levered herself off the hood of the BMW with sinuous grace.
    “Nice car, Mister Zek-tiv,” she said solemnly. “Got the keys?”
    Bryant clutched automatically at his pocket. The woman’s eyes flickered to the move and locked on. She nodded in satisfaction.
    “Get off my fucking car!” Bryant barked.
    The remaining four jackers obeyed in unison, arms spread and filled with their makeshift weapons.
    Chris glanced sideways at his companion. “Bad move, Mike. You carrying?”
    Bryant shook his head almost imperceptibly. “In the car, remember. You?”
    “Yeah.” Chris paused, embarrassed. “But it’s not loaded.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t like guns.”
    “See, it’s like this.” The woman’s voice jerked Chris back from the disbelieving expression on Bryant’s face. “Either you can give us the keys. And your wallets. And your watches. Or we can take them from you. That’s our best offer.”
    She lifted thumb and little finger solemnly to ear and mouth, making a child’s telephone.
    “Sell, sell, sell.”
    Bryant muttered something out of the corner of his mouth.
    “What?” Chris muttered back.
    “I
said.
Back the way we came and
fucking run
!”
    Then he was gone, sprinting flat out for the corner they had just rounded. Chris went after him, flailing to stay upright in the Argentine leather shoes. Behind him, the incentive—sounds of yells and booted pursuit. He leveled with Bryant and found, incredibly, that the other man was grinning.
    “All part of a night out in the zones,” he gritted. “Try to keep up.”
    Behind them, someone ran a metal wrecking bar along a concrete wall. It made a sound like a gigantic dentist’s drill.
    They looked at each other and put on speed.
    Three streets away from the Falkland, the neighborhood plunged from run-down to rotted through. The houses were suddenly derelict, unglassed windows gaping out at the street and tiny gardens full of rubble and other detritus. Chris, brain abruptly adrenaline-flushed and working, grabbed Bryant and yanked him sideways into one of the gardens. Over piles of junk, scrambling. In past a front door that someone had kicked in long ago. Weeds grew up waist-high in the gap it had left. Beyond, a narrow, darkened hallway ran parallel to a staircase with half the banisters torn out. At the end, a tiled room that breathed stench like a diseased mouth.
    Chris leaned cautiously against the staircase and listened to the yells of the carjackers as they ran past and down an adjacent street.
    Bryant was bent over, hands braced on his knees, panting.
    “You mind telling me,” he managed hoarsely after a while, “
why
you’re carrying an unloaded gun around with you?”
    “I told you. I don’t like guns. I don’t like Louise Hewitt telling me what to do.”
    “Man, after five days that’s a bad attitude to have. I wouldn’t go telling anybody things like that, if I were you.”
    “Why not? I told you, didn’t I?”
    Bryant straightened