Free Black Glass by John Shirley Page B

a private detective and you didn’t talk to those in Borderbust, because the cops usually lied about what they were really after.
    As Candle had, while a cop, many times.
    Suppose he found Danny—what then? What refuge could he take his little brother to? He had a Thirdy Card, he had no home, no pension, no resources. There was Guffin, maybe ...
    No. If his old partner was still alive, he’d leave him alone. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve to have Slakon dogging him.
    Same with Tulku Kenpo. Leave Guffin alone, leave Tulku alone. Leave them alone ...
    Candle put the plastic cup into the trash, throwing away most of the ginseng coffee. It was already making him jittery.
    He walked on, sorting through faces on the street, hoping to get lucky, just run into Danny.
    His heart was thumping now; he thought he felt his old herpes trouble buzzing and stinging at his nervous system. He should renew his nano cure for that, if he could get Public Health to pay for it, though it made his skin crawl when the microseekers crept through his nervous system, dendron by ganglion by nerve ending, looking for viruses. What might his enemies have done to him when he was UnMinded? Or even just some jughead of a prison bull. There were stories of guards tinkering with the oversight cameras so they could fuck the prisoners, make them do humiliating things, some kind of elaborate tournament in a basement room using the UnMinded as pieces on a big board game.Urban myth, probably. But who knew?
    He found himself glancing over his shoulder often enough it was hurting his neck. That asshole who’d dogged him might be anyplace at all. Anywhere, anytime, really. It was probably Targer’s people, and they wouldn’t give up. By now they’d have a birdseye looking for him in likely neighborhoods.
    He looked up, couldn’t see much past the streetlights. Was that a gleam of silver? A little robot bird with camera eyes? Might have been a piece of foil blown on the wind.
    Going to be useless to Danny if you slide into paranoia, he told himself, as he turned down an uncrowded side street.
    He searched inside himself for the old place of refuge, the throne of objectivity, the seat of the Nature Mind that his lama had helped him find.
    It was still there. It was still, there. He directed his attention into the walking meditation that had kept him sane after a hundred bloody, unresolved investigations in the slums ...
    There was a sharp shift of perspective, and he was no longer caught up by the flow of free-association, he was here on the street in real-time, in the present moment, and he could sense the silver back of this moment’s mirror.
    Less identified, his mind could reset its priorities. He’d find Danny. First—
    Two sedans pulled up out of an alley, one blocking the street to his left, the other blocking the sidewalk in front of him.
    A couple of Slakon security thugs got out, one from each car, bored-looking men with shaved heads, big shoulders, hamlike forearms, topheavy chests threatening to burst their dull green Slakon jumpsuits. The latest steroids.
    “Mr. Candle?”
    Something silvery that wasn’t windblown foil fluttered overhead ...
    Two more guys got out of the car. Halido and the guard, Benson, from the prison.
    “Mr. Candle ...” said the nearer of the two thugs. “Just a word ...”
    “Fuck that, hode, just clock the motherfucker,” Halido said.
    Candle turned his head—and saw another vehicle rolling slowly up behind, a truck or a van, from here just a block of shadow behind headlight glare. Boxed in.
    “Mr. Candle. Oh, Mr. Candle ...” An odd voice from the vehicle behind him. “You gonna go with those corporate goons?”
    Candle looked at the “corporate goons” in front of him; at the rusty van in back.
    “Move in on him!” Halido shouted. The goons came on—
    Candle turned, slipped between the van and the wall. A side door of the old van slid open and he ducked in, the vehicle roar-ingly
reversing out of