Free Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

destiny and the street.
    She turned off the Avenue and walked down a line of unlicensed food stalls. Her stomach
     started growling at thesmell, but she didn’t trust street food, not if she didn’t have to, and there were
     licensed places in the mall that would take cash. Somebody was playing a trumpet in
     the asphalt square that had been the parking lot, a rambling Cuban solo that bounced
     and distorted off the concrete walls, dying notes lost in the morning clatter of the
     market. A soapbox evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the
     gesture in the air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he
     wore a battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank
     chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the belt
     at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The man’s eyes
     flashed God’s wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek. Mona turned left, between
     rows of fruit vendors stacking oranges and grapefruit in pyramids on their battered
     metal carts.
    She entered a low, cavernous building that housed aisles of more permanent businesses:
     sellers of fish and packaged foods, cheap household goods, counters serving a dozen
     kinds of hot food. It was cooler here in the shade, and a little quieter. She found
     a wonton place with six empty stools and took one. The Chinese cook spoke to her in
     Spanish; she ordered by pointing. He brought her soup in a plastic bowl; she paid
     him with the smallest of her bills, and he made change with eight greasy cardboard
     tokens. If Eddy meant it, about leaving, she wouldn’t be able to use them; if they
     stayed in Florida, she could always get some wonton. She shook her head. Gotta go,
     gotta. She shoved the worn yellow disks back across the painted plyboard counter.
     “You keep ’em.” The cook swept them out of sight, bland and expressionless, a blue
     plastic toothpick fixed at the corner of his mouth.
    She took chopsticks from the glass on the counter and fished a folded noodle from
     the bowl. There was a suit watching her from the aisle behind the cook’s pots and
     burners. A suit who was trying to look like something else,white sportshirt and sunglasses. More the way they stand than anything, she thought.
     But he had the teeth, too, and the haircut, except he had a beard. He was pretending
     to look around, like he was shopping, hands in his pockets, his mouth set in what
     he might have thought was an absent smile. He was pretty, the suit, what you could
     see of him behind the beard and the glasses. The smile wasn’t pretty, though; it was
     kind of rectangular, so you could see most of his teeth. She shifted a little on the
     stool, uneasy. Hooking was legal, but only if you did it right, got the tax chip and
     everything. She was suddenly aware of the cash in her pocket. She pretended to study
     the laminated foodhandling license taped to the counter; when she looked up again,
     he was gone.
    She spent fifty on the clothes. She worked her way through eighteen racks in four
     shops, everything the mall had, before she made up her mind. The vendors didn’t like
     her trying on so many things, but it was the most she’d ever had to spend. It was
     noon before she’d finished, and the Florida sun was cooking the pavement as she crossed
     the parking lot with her two plastic bags. The bags, like the clothes, were secondhand:
     one was printed with the logo of a Ginza shoe store, the other advertised Argentinian
     seafood briquettes molded from reconstituted krill. She was mentally mixing and matching
     the things she’d bought, figuring out different outfits.
    From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full volume, in mid-rant,
     like he’d warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he’d cut the amp in, the hologram
     Jesus shaking its white-robed arms and gesturing angrily to the sky, the mall, the
     sky