Lost in the System

by Nancy Jo Wilson

  When we arrive at the car, I open the door and reach into the storage compartment. My target rests right at hand. It is good to know I’m not totally off my game. I put my left foot on the seat and go to work removing Romeo and Sir Puffington’s leftovers.

  “You called me a baby, and you’re out here in the parking lot lint-rolling your pants?” Charlie asks.

  “An earmark of a good detective is his neat, professional appearance. You could use it, too.” I point to his Dockers with the roller.

  Charlie looks down, gives his pants a couple of whacks, and shrugs. “Good enough,” he says and climbs into the car. “Let’s go to lunch.”

  I finish up, returning the trousers to their pristine condition. “Sounds good,” I say as I throw the roller into its place. I could eat a three-course meal, but I must maintain my cover. “Somewhere with soup.”

  VI

  We eat at one of those trendy places that serves food and provides Wi-Fi. The tables are crowded with college students hunkered over textbooks and middle-aged businessmen answering emails on their laptops. Noises of clanking utensils and people chattering surround us. The aromas of coffee, hot bread, and soup fill the air. I love it; the hustle and bustle has me buzzing.

  I neatly tear apart my bread and dip it into the soup, taking a bite. Chuckles stares at me over his burger. I notice he hasn’t started eating. Great. Benny’s not a dipper.

  “You’re not gonna pray?” he asks, disbelief in his voice, merriment in his eyes. “Doesn’t that mean you have to go to church like twice on Sunday or something?”

  Bad tradecraft, Smullian. You saw the devotion book. I pat my belly. “This virus, man.” I bow my head and repeat a prayer on the chip. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive, through thy bounty through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.”

  “Thy? Bounty? You’re breaking out the holy words today. You must be in real trouble,” he laughs. Chuckles recounts a recent football game while mauling his dripping cheeseburger. His hand can barely contain the inch-tall patty, onion bun, and fixin’s. The tomato and lettuce keep slipping out of the thick sandwich. Ketchup and mustard ooze from of the sides. My soup loses flavor while I watch him enjoy such a masterpiece. First the Krispy Kreme, now this. I don’t care who I am tomorrow. I’m eating a steak.

  During lunch Charlie keeps conversation to everyday things: football, zombie movies, actresses he doesn’t think are as hot as everyone else does. I figure he and Pretty Boy have a no-talking-about-the-case-at-lunch policy, and I appreciate the sentiment. It doesn’t work though; my mind is on fire. Questions flick through my brain like sparks from a lighter. I’ve known plenty of stunning gems in my day. Why is Lydia getting under my skin? It was the tears, had to be.

  What is David’s problem? He has the best gig an orphan could ask for: loving sister, nice house, his own stereo. All the rules of self-preservation state he should keep his skinny rear at home. Why run off? Unless things aren’t so peachy, but I can’t imagine Lydia as an evil sister with a sweet façade.

  Who is this Father to the Fatherless and why was he bugging me? What does that even mean anyway? I wonder if I should read Psalm 68:5 when I get the chance, but then discard the notion as quickly as it surfaces. No need putting in more work than necessary, especially over a system glitch. Nothing pulls my strings. I know that sounds funny, considering They have literal control over my body, but my thoughts are my own. I choose to cooperate with Life Modification because it is in my best interests. I have every intention of returning to my nefarious ways when I get out of the clink. Behaving is the quickest way to get my life back.

  “Seriously, those huge eyes and puffy lips set in that skinny face. Yuck. I guess I’d understand if someone had a Mistress of the Dark fetish, but she does nothing for me,” Charlie says.

  “Who?” I mutter, feigning interest.

  “Who? Angelina. Are you even listening?”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Dude, you’re not all here. Maybe you should go home. Let me finish up the interviews.”

  It is tempting. For a second, I welcome the notion of lying in bed, staring at the TV, and letting Marisol take care of me. Having her around has really opened my eyes to the benefits of matrimony: the Sprite, the sweet phone call, the worrying about me, er, Benigno. I picture her hovering over me, boring into me with those bottomless dark eyes, and realizing something isn’t right with her husband. Yeah, I can’t handle an entire day with the wife. It’d be way too stressful. I’ll have to keep taking my chances with Chuckles.

  “Go home and trust you with all the paperwork? I don’t think so,” I say.

  “I said interviews. I was going to leave that for you,” he answers with his Cheshire grin.

  “Did you do any of your homework in school?”

  “I was captain of the football team.”

  Nailed it. Man, I’m good. I mentally pat myself on the back for excellent tradecraft while he continues.

  “As long as we were winning, there was someone around to free up my time so I could concentrate on the team. If we were losing, there was someone willing to ease my burdens and comfort me.”

  “Were these someones female?”

  “You know me too well, Benny Boy.”

  “Benigno.”

  On the way out, Charlie brings the case up. I guess the no-talking thing only applies when at the table. “We agree he ran off?”

  I nod.

  “How’s he getting to Nashville? I don’t think he’d spend the majority of his precious $387.12 on plane tickets. Bus seems the most logical.” We should send Miller. He already spent the morning there on the Clausen case. That would be hilarious.

  A mischievous look crosses Charlie’s face. “I hope Miller’s made it back to the office. It’ll make it more fun when we send him back.” He lets loose a rousing guffaw. “I wonder if his bag-lady girlfriend is still there.”

  Great minds think alike. “You should take it easy on the rookie,” I lecture in my best Benigno tone.

  “Give me a break, Benny. Our pay stinks, the hours stink, the only perk we have is picking on the rookies.”

  “Remind me again why you do this job.”

  Chuckles’ trademark smile vanishes. His blue eyes settle on mine. “Carrie, my sister’s best friend. You know that.”

  “It was a rhetorical question.”

  “Look Benigno, I know you think I don’t take this job seriously, but I do. I joke around to let off steam. I could have gone to narco or robbery, but I chose this. It’s not a stepping-stone for me. I know how a person vanishing affects a family, the entire community. I’m peeved at this David kid for acting like a schmuck and worrying his sister, but I hope we find him before some predator does. So, don’t get all high and mighty with me.” The absence of his smile changes the set of his face. His jaw and cheekbones look roughhewn out of granite. His eyes look like two raw sapphires mined from deep in the dark earth. He is fuming. I gotta defuse this quick.

  This version of Chuckles is a formidable guy. I could say that years of self-preservation have taught me to immediately neutralize a tense situation, and that would be true. But the baser fact was that I don’t want Charlie mad at me. Being the cause of that anger is uncomfortable. That’s the problem with letting people into your life; they knock you off balance, make you feel things like discomfort. To be able to affect a person’s emotions is power, my friend. Nobody has power over Smullian O’Toole, other than Smullian O’Toole himself. But I digress.

  I need to get rid of stone-face Charlie and return Cheshire Charlie. If we were women, I’d have to go into some spiel about how I was sorry and didn’t mean to get him upset. He’d go into some monologue about how I didn’t appreciate him. Blah, Blah, Blah. Good thing we aren’t women. This can be solved with one sentence.

  “You’re sexy when you’re angry.”

  Charlie doesn’t burst out laughing, but he does offer an appreciative sniff. Then he rolls his eyes and produces a
slight smile. “I’m telling Marisol you were hitting on me again.”

  “I know what’ll make you feel better. David had to get to the bus station somehow, right? Maybe he took JTA. Call Miller and tell him after he’s done at Greyhound, he can go to the JTA terminal.”

  His trademark smile and chuckle are back. He slaps me on the shoulder. “It’s a pity offer, but I’ll take it.” He grabs up his cell phone and makes the call.

  “Hey Miller,” Charlie says. “Do you have plenty of Meow Mix? We need you to head back to the depot with a picture of that David Hawthorne kid. Thanks.” There is a pause while Chuckles tries very hard not to laugh. “Oh, I almost forgot, when you’re done there, head over to JTA and do the same thing.” He taps off his phone and shoves it in his pocket.

  “I love that kid,” he says to me. “We’re going to get a lot of mileage out of him.”

  “Time for the high school?” I ask.

  “Yep, the high school. It’s still shorts weather,” he adds with a grin.

  “They’re children.”

  “I wouldn’t date one—what kind of a guy do you think I am? I’m sayin’ if they didn’t want me looking, they wouldn’t dress that way.”

  I couldn’t agree more.

  VII

  I approach the school with some degree of fascination. Education is handled vastly differently in the twenty-fourth century. On Earth and its colonies, there are three different types of schools. Poorer colonies like Galwa are driven by industry. The school’s sessions are determined by the timing of the harvest or the hours at the factory. Child labor laws still exist, but on those planets the age of adulthood is thirteen. Where was our great universal government when that decision was made?

  Anyway, those kids only have an elementary or, at best, middle school foundation. Populations are small and infant mortality is pretty high, so the ones lucky enough to be school-aged attend the equivalent of one-room schoolhouses and, unfortunately, the teachers know barely more than the children.

  The middle-income planets have large auditoriums where the students are taught by a holographic teacher. The governments cut way down on cost by having one teacher per discipline educating the entire population. Richer, more advanced spheres, like Earth, distribute learning cubes (a sleeker, smarter distant relation of the PC) to each child. They are then tutored within the comfort of their own home by hologram.

  Budding grifters named Smullian were lucky enough to avoid all forms of formal schooling. Life is a far better teacher.

  On Venox, a non-human planet, adolescence is considered a form of insanity and all youth are kept in stasis until they’ve “returned to right thinking.” Those kiddies are educated via an implanted data stream while they sleep. They reach adulthood and wake-up—smart, refreshed, and ready to serve society.

  The metal detector and the uniformed cop in the school’s lobby make me think maybe the Venoxians are onto something. Charlie nods at the boy-in-blue with professional courtesy, and we make our way to the front office. We explain what we need to the harried woman behind the counter, and she produces a list of teachers for us. Then she says something that stops me cold.

  “Why don’t you wait until school is dismissed? It’s only an hour from now,” she says as if we are children in need of discipline. “We prefer not to interrupt classes.”

  Does she think we’re taking a survey here? I am not sure what irritates me more: her complete coldness toward David’s plight or her lack of respect for our authority. The second emotion surprised me. I mean, I wrote the book on lack of respect for authority, and yet here I am, fuming because she thinks my job is trivial in comparison to her need to keep things on track. The worst part is I actually thought “my job,” not “Benigno’s job.” I open my mouth to tell her what I think of her job, but Chuckles beats me to the punch.

  “Ma’am, when you call the police, do you expect a timely response?”

  “Excuse me?” she says.

  Granite guy returns, and, I have to admit, I am happy to see him this time. “If a burglar breaks into your home, you call the police. Right?” he asks as if she were the child in need of discipline. “And when you call them, do you expect a timely response?” he repeats, the muscle in his jaw twitching.

  “Of course,” she says.

  “Doesn’t David Hawthorne deserve that same consideration?”

  Her eyes dart to the side and she mutters, “Umm…”

  “What about the other people that might need mine or Detective Diaz’s assistance during that hour we’re twiddling our thumbs here in the lobby waiting for school to get out? Don’t they deserve the consideration of a timely response, or is that something only you deserve?”

  Get her, Granite Guy.

  She stammers for a moment, then grabs another sheet of paper and hands it to us. “Here’s a map of the facility.”

  “Thanks,” Charlie says with a smile that doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

  We study the map and make our way to the first classroom. The teacher, a woman, embodies casual, professional chic. For sure, she didn’t buy her slacks and sleeveless sweater at the mall. That, combined with the silver clip grasping her hair, indicates wealth. Hubby brings home the bacon. She is shocked when we tell her David is missing. Her next response, however, confirms what Chuckles and I have been thinking. “Did he run away?” she asks.

  “Why do you ask?” I respond.

  “It’s clear he isn’t happy. He’s, you know, withdrawn—draws all the time, doesn’t talk with anyone. He does his work though, not setting the world on fire, but far from failing.”

  “Can you think of anyone he might hang out with?”

  “No; as I said, he doesn’t talk with anyone.”

  I thank her and we move on. The next two teachers have similar stories. Educator number four is the English teacher. He is a pudgy, middle-aged man without any deep concern for fashion. His mildly wrinkled cotton button-up appears like he’d pulled it from the dryer and hung it up without ironing. His hair has grown out of its cut and hangs limply around his ears. Newly divorced and letting himself go? What a sap. Glad he’s not my host.

  His story is different from the rest. “I had David last year. He’s grown leaps and bounds since then. We journal every day in class, and his entries denote more hope than when he first got here. He wrote some pretty dark stuff in the beginning. I think he turned a corner over the summer.”

  “Other teachers have described him as withdrawn,” I say.

  “He’s an introvert alright, but compared to last year…” He lets the last part hang as if it were explanation enough.

  “What kinds of things does he write about?”

  “Last year it was all about his family. Boy, there was some serious guilt in those pages. I tried to get him to talk to the counselor, but he wouldn’t. This year, there’s family, but more about the sister than before. They’re planning a trip.” A sly smile stretches across his lips. “There’s been a couple about love.”

  Charlie snags that one. “He have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know if it’s reached that level, but he’s been talking to Madison. She’s been writing about love, too.”

  “Madison what?” Charlie asks.

  “Madison Fairburn.”

  “Does he write about Nashville much?” I ask.

  “Last year, that was second only to family. He’s only mentioned it once this year. He misses the leaves changing color. Have you seen any of his drawings?” We both nod. “He writes just as well. The setting he described made me want to walk through those woods.”

  “Do you think he’d try to go there?” I ask.

  The teacher fills his cheeks with air and blows it out. He runs his left hand through his hair. When he does, I notice a faint tan line and indentation on his ring finger. Recent removal of a wedding ring. I was right.

  “Last year, I’d have said an unequivocal yes. This year, it’s possible, but I don’t know how likely. He does seem to be adapting.”
/>
  We thank him for his time and return to the office. When we ask about Madison Fairburn, the lady behind the counter is quick to point out we couldn’t question her without a teacher present. Chuckles gives her a measured look. “I’m sure you know that,” the fussbudget adds quickly. “She’s in room 217. You only have a few minutes before the bell rings.”

  Room 217 isn’t that far, and we make it there right before the teacher dismisses class. When we ask for Madison, the teacher calls over a girl who would never be described as pretty but stops short of the ugly line. She has flat (both in color and body) brown hair and pale skin. She wears a baggy t-shirt and jeans. I am starting to wonder what David sees in her until she walks toward us. She moves with unexpected feminine grace—not as if she’s trying out for Star Model, like the other girls I’ve seen in the school. When she approaches us, a gentle smile touches her face showing perfectly straight, white teeth. I notice the shirt advertises one of the bands David has memorialized on his wall. It’s evident this quiet, unassuming girl would appeal to our runaway artist.

  “Hi, Madison,” I say. “I’m Detective Diaz.”

  “Hi,” she answers, clutching her books to her chest.

  “A teacher told us that you’re friends with David Hawthorne.”

  “Yes,” she says. A blush rises to her cheeks and then fades into a look of confusion. “Why are you asking about David?”

  I consider beating around the bush but decide to be straightforward. “He’s been missing for two days.”

  “I thought he was sick. I’ve called him, but he hasn’t answered. I thought he was out of minutes and turned off his phone.”

  “Do you remember when you last spoke to David?”

  “Sunday.” The blush returns. This girl has it bad. Makes sense, David was a handsome boy, probably not the kind of guy that normally paid her attention. “We talked for like, two hours. His sister was at work.”

  “Did he mention if he had plans to go anywhere?”

  “Rock the Universe. He was real excited. He’s never been to Universal Studios.”