Jericho Iteration by Allen Steele

he said. “I’ve done better. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in London back in ninety-two and fucked Princess Di in the back of a limo? Now that was—”
    “Get out of here,” I said, and he did just that, making a U-turn in the middle of the street and heading back up Geyer to ask the drunks if they needed a lift home. Leaving me on the brick sidewalk, alone for the first time that night.
    The Big Muddy Inquirer was located in a century-old three-story building that had been renovated sometime in the 1980s and turned into offices for some law firm; before then it had been yet another warehouse, as witnessed by the thick reinforced oak floors and long-defunct loading doors in the rear. The law firm that had refurbished the building had moved out around the turn of the century, and the property had remained vacant until Earl Bailey purchased it early last year.
    Bailey had just started up the paper when he bought the building. Ever the entrepreneur, he had intended to open a blues bar on the ground floor and eventually move the Big Muddy into the second-story space from its former location in Dogtown. Bailey had made his wad off the Soulard Howlers, the blues band for which he was the bassist and manager, and Earl’s Saloon had been intended to be the money tree behind his alternative paper. Big Muddy Inquirer might not have been the first newspaper whose publisher was a hacker-turned-guitarist-turned-bar-owner, but if you’ve heard of any others, please don’t let me know. One is scary enough.
    Anyway, Bailey was halfway through refurbishing the ground floor when the quake struck. The bar survived New Madrid but not the widespread looting that had occurred in Soulard several weeks later, when vandals broke into the place and took off with most of the barroom furnishings. By this time, though, the escalating street violence in the south city had forced the paper out of Dogtown, so he shelved plans for the bar, moved the Big Muddy to Soulard … and, not long afterward, grudgingly agreed to let out the unused third-floor loft to one of his employees. Namely, me.
    I had a keycard for the front door, which led up to the second and third floors, but tonight I really didn’t want the hassle of having to disable the burglar alarm Pearl had installed in the stairwell. The control box was difficult to see in the dark and, besides, I could never remember the seven-digit code that I would have to type into the keypad. So I ignored the front door, walked past the boarded-up ground-floor windows—spray-painted BLACK OWNED! DON’T LOOT! as if it made any difference to the street gangs who would have mugged Martin Luther King for pocket change—and went around the corner until I reached the enclosed courtyard behind the building.
    An old iron fire escape ran up the rear of the building. Pearl would have shot me if he had known I was using it as my private entrance, which was why I had to keep my stepladder hidden beneath the dumpster. I had just pulled out the ladder and was unfolding it in order to reach the fire escape’s gravity ladder when I heard a shout from the opposite side of the courtyard.
    “Hey, mu’fucker, whattaya doin’?”
    “Just trying to break into this building to steal some shit,” I yelled back as I put down the stepladder and turned around. “Why, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
    There was a large human shape blocking the light escaping from an open garage across the courtyard. I heard coarse laughter, then the voice changed. “Hey, Gerry, that you?”
    “That me. That you?”
    “Fuck you. C’mon over and have a beer.”
    I put down the ladder and ambled over toward the garage where Chevy Dick and a few of his cronies were hanging out next to his car. Chevy Dick was Ricardo Chavez, an auto mechanic whose shop was the Big Muddy’s closest neighbor. Chavez was in his early fifties; in 1980, when he was barely in his teens, he and his family had escaped from Cuba during the