Free The Shaft by David J. Schow Page A

plus motion sensors dutifully blinking green-to-red whenever somebody moved.
        Was Bauhaus expecting loud compliments? He probably thought Cruz was playing blast too hard. Impress me? Naah . He had no way of knowing how stunned Cruz still was. Pure physiochemical shock had not yet waned. The events of that morning were still less than a day distant.
        So he supplied praise himself: 'Yeah, I tell you, kiddo. You and me can sit down, relax, discuss what kind of business arrangements we need to make. We can scope the great view, when it's not so overcast and the snow's not battering the windows. We can swill Veuve Cliquot at a hundred bucks a bottle and Chari will suck our dicks while we count money. And I can videotape it from almost any vantage in the room.'
        'How do you compensate for the light?'
        'That's for the Japs to worry about, not me. Dig in.'
        Cruz lifted a morsel of shredded Szechuan pork to his mouth with chopsticks. 'You sweep for bugs?'
        'Twice a week.' Bauhaus swigged half his bottle of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had a belly his silk shirt did not care to hide. The belt fighting his waistline had a cast bronze buckle far too big - embossed fighter planes in commemoration of some forgotten World War Two battle. It made Cruz think of Texans.
        'Easy enough to toast outside taps on the phone lines,' Bauhaus went on. 'Govemment-issue sniffers can't penetrate the electrical interference I've set up inside my walls. We modify before the good guys can budget improved equipment. Two jumps ahead, always. The window glass over there has a chemically-disrupted refraction index; that means nobody standing outside can photograph us standing inside.'
        'Like polarized glass.'
        'You got it. And all the guy outside gets is a sheet of gray.' He wolfed a large, drippy bite of kung pao shrimp and chased with a plastic forkful of wok vegetables before the first mouthful was chewed. The greens were swimming in garlic. 'Potential entry areas have vibration trips in the floor. Suspect movement when the house is empty kicks on the video surveillance. I have large, ugly, and very faithful enforcers ninety seconds from either side of the house.'
        The shrimp was good but too peppery. The food began to soothe the steel-spike aspect of Cruz's headache. Time for maintenance.
        Bauhaus conducted him to a large bathroom off one of the guest bedrooms. Here the throb of the neon could finally dissipate. Cruz rifled the cabinets and used a bottle of chilled Perrier to drop a hundred and twenty milligrams of commercial decongestant, five aspirin, two ibuprofen tabs, four Rolaids and a multipak of vitamins. He plugged in extra Vitamin C, plus a B-complex to activate it. His head would turn right in twenty minutes.
        He stood under an extremely hot shower, letting the massage spray pound him. He scrubbed hard and emerged red as a stop sign. Pills sloshed in fizzy water and his stomach invented a rude noise. His feet felt good out of their shoes. Muscle aches that had begun to deep-seat were headed off by the aspirin. He pulled on fresh underwear and socks. His aloha shirt was still wadded up in the Nike bag. He left it there. Bad mojo to re-don that shirt now. It was tiring enough dressing in his other used clothes.
        When he came out, the big video projector was going. Freddy Krueger was chasing dream teens and delivering the blade between one-liners. Cruz stuck to the blander Mandarin dishes, knowing that between the vegetables and the vitamins his urine would come out phosphorescent. Another jailbait snow princess floated out to join them after regaining consciousness in another of the back rooms. This one had brown bangs and heavy, flashy earrings. Stunning eyes, video blue, in a blank china-doll face. Her aspect was feline and sinuous. Bauhaus sure liked his home stock young. She wore a shortie terrycloth bathrobe and did