THE LAST EXIT
A JEN LU MYSTERY
Michael Kaufman
To Betty
Acknowledgments
My biggest thanks go to Gary Barker, my co-author for the anti-war fable The Afghan Vampires Book Club and author of the wonderful The Museum of Lost Love. A few years ago, Gary announced he had an idea for a new joint work. We went for one of our meandering walks in Washington, DC, and he told me the germ of a new story: in the near-future, a disease is killing off huge numbers of middle-aged people, but, if I recall, you could access a cure if your parents voluntarily died. By the end of that first walk, we were bubbling with ideas. Within a few weeks, we’d chosen different paths: mine, this mystery, and his, a work of literary fiction called The Day They Came for the Nouns, about the effects of war, memory, and forgetting. Keep your eyes open for it; it should be terrific. The Last Exit wouldn’t exist without him.
Huge thanks to Marcia Markland, who brought her editorial smarts to the manuscript and poked, pushed, and cheered until I got the story right. And to Marie-Lynn Hammond, who took her sharp blue pencil and keen sense of character and story to an earlier draft.
Thanks to Jean Prince who gave feedback and tips on police procedure and the life of a female cop—any mistakes and flights of fancy are entirely my own (or simply an accurate reflection of how things are done in the early 2030s). I was aided by timely comments from Liam Kaufman Simpkins and medical tips from Victoria Lee, and enjoyed helpful theoretical discussions with Chloe Hung about the intersection of story arc and character development. Hugs to my sisters, Naomi, Miriam, Hannah, and Judith, who are always there for me.
My appreciation to the gang at Crooked Lane Books: senior acquisitions editor, Toni Kirkpatrick; Melissa Rechter; Katie McGuire; cover designer Melanie Sun; and the entire production and marketing teams, as well as to the sales force at Penguin Random House.
My gratitude goes out, and out again, to my agents, Ginger Curwen and Julia Lord, of the Julia Lord Literary Agency, who’ve been enthusiastic and supportive from the start. This book benefited in many ways from their ideas and insights. As Chandler might say, I’m a lucky guy to have them in my corner.
And thanks as always to my first reader and biggest critic, who doesn’t let me get away with anything. Betty Chee, this one’s for you.
1
Tuesday, July 3—08:00:05
It was only eight in the morning, but I could already feel sweat collecting under our breasts. Jen had been kicked in the butt for switching me off for five minutes while on duty last week, so for the third day in a row, we were back in regulation blues, trudging along the two-mile path circling the Tidal Basin.
It was boring work. Retrieve phones dropped in the water. Search for kids who eluded their parents’ jail-guard gaze for two seconds. Tolerate the private US Park Police. Help the dumber tourists figure out which one was the Jefferson Monument. Keep an eye out for the saltwater crocs. This task seemed a particular waste of time since only one had been spotted so far this summer. But then again, it had eaten a jogger. When the croc was shot and sliced open, the running shoes still looked new.
I was young, two years and three months. Detective Jen Lu was thirty-eight and change. I’ll be dead in three more years. She’ll live to a hundred after her mother does her duty and exits, and Jen can snag the treatment. Good for her.
08:03:52. The sun was smudged by haze that hung around like a fart under a blanket. We heard a shout by the FDR Memorial. Then a scream. I tagged the time and our position. We ran.
A Caucasian man who looked like he’d been stewed in scarlet food coloring was screaming at a Black woman in yellow running gear. She was lying on her side, clutching her shoulder. I scanned the man and found a match.
“Watch out,” I cautioned Jen. We ran harder.
The man saw us and shot off like he had a Roman candle up his butt. We reached the prone woman, yelled, “You alright?” We got a nod and took off after the man.
He was good. We were better. We tackled him at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Nonviolence has its place, but I whacked him across the face.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Jen said.
“Sure I did, and you know it.”
James O’Neil. Twenty-seven. Follows the Klan and two neo-Nazi sites. Arrested once for battery. Dad is a Timeless, so James got off.
We cuffed him and I called it in. We waited for the car, handed him over, me sharing the data and time stamp with the officer’s synth. We went back and called an ambulance for the jogger, although she said she was fine.
Any hope we’d be rewarded with a better gig for the day crashed when I received the order to get back on patrol.
Tuesday, July 3. 08:42:11. Washington, DC. Good times.
* * *
“Chandler,” she said to me, in the didactic tone of a really bored teacher, “having the Fourth of July fall on a Wednesday is the biggest bitch there is.”
There are things I am still learning.
“Why?” I said.
“Think about it for a second,” she said. Too bored to tell me.
Jen pulled her N95 back on, masking her up like half the people we passed. Two months into the Great Shenandoah Blaze, and DC was at the mercy of the wind. We were on our twelfth circuit. Two lost kids. Forty-five Shadows—nineteen females and twenty-six males with ten children in tow—who we ordered to keep walking or get out. Thirteen sets of directions given to monuments, museums, or the Metro. One bad tumble and a call to paramedics. Four men stopped and IDed. One photo for a group of tourists who acted like they owned the show.
Winds shifted, mask came off. More days now with no smoke—the fire was finally running out of fuel.
I said, “People only get one day off instead of a three-day weekend. Ditto with Tuesday or Thursday.”
“Chandler, you’re not so dumb after all.”
I let that pass. I know she likes me, sort of.
“Then again,” she said, “half the people don’t have real work, so what the hell.”
“What the hell,” I agreed.
A good-looking young man and woman stared at Jen as we passed. Even in uniform, Jen turns heads. Tall. Ebony hair gathered into a ponytail that tumbles down her back. Chinese American. High cheekbones and startling blue eyes with heavy lashes, apparently inherited from a father she couldn’t remember and about whom her mother refused to tell her anything. They shouted at passersby to stare.
I said we should grab lunch.
“You hungry?” she said.
“Yuk, yuk.” I’m a synth implant, tucked into a fold of Jennifer’s neocortex. Ergo, I don’t get hungry, but I’m whacked the millisecond her energy starts to flag.
Lunch was a hummus roll with kimchi.
“Shouldn’t we be having a hot dog?”
“Mañana.”
Speaking of mañana, word came through at 12:41:39 that Les had gone home sick and we’d have to work the next night, the Fourth of July.
“Call in,” she said.
The 1940s ringtone sounded in her rostromedial prefrontal cortex.
“Chandler,” she said, “let’s go with something less jarring for a while.”
“Headache?”
“My life’s a headache.”
Even I knew this wasn’t completely true, but I complied.
Captain Brooks answered. Jen explained she was supposed to go to a fireworks party at her boyfriend’s family home. Earlier, I had asked if she could turn me on for part of it and at first she had said, “Fat chance,” but later softened that to, “We’ll see.”
Captain Brooks didn’t even bother to say he was sorry.
“I love you too,” she said after he snapped off the connection. Jennifer once told me that the ha
rdest thing she had ever learned as a cop was how to talk over a phone that existed only in her imagination. But she was kidding, since that wasn’t her hardest thing by a long shot.
Then she brightened. “At least it means I’m out of this damn uniform and back to the unit.”
Regular duty, but another twenty-five days on probation.
Tuesday, July 3. 12:46:09.
* * *
“Why did you turn me off last week?” I asked.
She ignored me.
We lumbered across the Mall on our way back to the station. It was in the low hundreds again, and the soupy air stunk of sweat, dried piss, crumbling asphalt, dead grass, and distant charred trees.
I waited a respectful time before disrespectfully asking again.
“Chandler,” she said, “it’s nothing.”
Translation: “It’s everything.” Jennifer did her job and normally followed the rules. She never defied authority. Turning me off didn’t make sense. She’d been docked a week’s pay and was now pounding the pavement. I wondered if it had to do with her current obsession: “Eden,” a massive bee on her brain. “Eden.” Buzzing in fat quotation marks, because it was a prize collection of silly rumors glued together with spit and gossip. Humans have this unbending fascination with things they don’t know. The very quality of not knowing invests the thing with hypercharged reality. And when something can’t possibly exist, then it positively glows in their imaginations. “Eden” burned in Jennifer’s brain.
I asked her.
“What?”
“Eden,” I repeated.
“You’re kidding. I would never turn you off for any work thing. It was … Drop it, will you? I made a stupid mistake.”
I dropped it right into my human puzzle box. Jennifer always plays it straight, so why had she turned me off?
In front of the National Gallery, a recruitment mini-fair was in full swing. “65 and out!” a banner proclaimed. “Exit now!”
Jen’s feet were sore and her legs were slabs of dead meat, so I gave her a nibble of adrenalin. We were on the new six-to-two shift they were giving foot patrols. Three officers had plopped over dead from heat exhaustion in April, so the new hours divvied up the afternoon death zone more evenly between the day and evening shifts.
Chatty guy that I am, I asked Jen what she was doing that night. I knew, of course, but we like to preserve the fiction of mental independence.
“Meeting Zach for a drink.”
“Boot me up for a bit?”
She had allowed me to be drunk twice and stoned once.
“Chandler, grow up.”
Back at the station, she signed out and switched me off.
Tuesday, July 3. 14:02:09. Washington, DC.
2
Early in their relationship, Jen realized that Zach had many althoughs in his life. He had a moderately steady, although excruciatingly small, income. He had a PhD in environmental economics from the London School of Economics, although that didn’t exactly mean he had a job. For the past two years, he had run a gardening business, although the word business was a bit of a stretch, since he worked from a bicycle that dragged a tiny trailer. In the winter, he shoveled snow, although snow in DC was now as rare as pregnant popes. And he had a nice place to live, although, like millions of others, it was at home with his parents, even though he was forty-one. He was expecting, although not hoping, that would come to an end in January. After all, his parents were both sixty-four.
If Jen had first seen him in close-up photographs of his face, she wouldn’t have tagged him for a fashion model. His eyes were slightly too far apart, and his head one size too large, as if that big brain of his had pressed everything outward at some point. He had a boyish mop of hair that was forever flopping into his eyes and, by contrast, a long-ago-broken nose.
But in some unaccountable way, snap all the pieces together and add in his strong shoulders, and they gave him a rugged yet vulnerable appeal. Jennifer found him remarkably good looking. No, more than that: she was mesmerized by his looks.
They had met a year earlier after an accident she had on the trail along the Potomac. Afterward, she had phoned her best friend and her work partner, Les.
“His hairline is so low I think he’s part Neanderthal.”
“Yech,” Les had said. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“Caught a piece of glass. Nothing serious.”
“You’re still wearing those stupid minimalist shoes?”
Jen didn’t respond.
“And he rescued you?”
“You don’t have to say it like I was a damsel in distress.”
“Did he?”
“Kind of. He was riding his bike and saw me fall. He stopped and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine. He got off his bike about ten feet away and had a sip of water, but it was obvious he was making sure I wasn’t going to die. I repeated, ‘I’m fine,’ to try to get him to scram. I examined the bottom of my shoe. There was a nasty shard of glass sticking through the rubber.”
“Through the thin rubber.”
“Glass that somehow dug through the extremely tough rubber. I pulled it out. Started to stand, but, well … he pulled out a small first aid kit, came over to me, and said, ‘Let’s have a look.’
“I asked if he was a doctor and he laughed. I wriggled out of my shoe and there was blood everywhere. He said, ‘You tested?’ just like it was an everyday question. And when I said I was fine, he replied, ‘Okay, then, let’s have a look.’ He cupped my foot in one hand—did I tell you he has nice hands?—”
“Nice hands are definitely a turn on,” Les said.
“—and carefully wiped off the blood with a piece of gauze. The cut was on the ball of my foot, near my toes. He peered at it. He wiggled the two closest toes and looked up at me. I shook my head, saying it didn’t hurt. He said, ‘Scream if this does.’ He pressed gently around the perimeter of the wound, checking for another piece inside. At each point, he glanced up at my face. Halfway around, I swore, and he suggested we go to a hospital. Les, you really want to hear all this?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“At first, I tried to walk, and he pushed his bike alongside. But it hurt like hell. So he said, ‘Why don’t you borrow my bike.’ It wasn’t fancy but I could tell it had decent parts and I said, ‘What if I steal it?’”
“You tell him you’re a cop?”
“Nope. He said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t take it, would you.’ It wasn’t a question or a command, just like he’d known me forever and trusted me. But the bike didn’t have real pedals, just these clip-on knobs that I knew would kill my foot. So he said, ‘Then hop on.’ I pulled myself up sidesaddle on his bike frame, and off we went.”
“Are you nuts? You took off with a total stranger?”
“He didn’t give off any sketchy vibes.”
“Classic psychopath.”
“I’m not an idiot. There was nothing creepy. Totally the opposite. And anyway, I knew I could handle him.”
“Okay.” Les’s voice was still tentative, but he always was a sucker for a good love story.
“I was trying to hold myself upright so I wouldn’t touch him. I mean, I trusted him, but I didn’t know the guy from Adam, and I was soaked from my run.”
“Where did all this happen?”
“I told you, along the river.”
“No, I mean how far out?”
“Maybe three miles. So he had his arms around me, holding the handlebar, and he has beautiful shoulders, and I guess I sort of let myself lean against him little by little and before long, I just about had my head against him, and he was telling me about how much he loved it out there, and I was saying I used to escape there when I was a kid. Before I knew it, he said, ‘We’re here,’ and I’d barely noticed we’d come back into the city.”
“But you say he’s not exactly movie star material.”
“I’m not so sure.” She paused to think about this. “He has this rugged body and these really cute dimples when
he smiles—”
“God, I love dimples.”
“And his smile kind of pops out at you. Although I guess it did make his eyes kind of disappear under his hairline.”
“Sounds hot. Does he have a brother?”
“I won’t tell Christopher you said that.”
“It was a joke. Anyway, you’ve already exchanged bodily fluids.”
“Sweat and blood.”
“Two out of three ain’t bad.”
“Three?”
“Blood, sweat, and tears. There are always those goddam tears.”
After their second get-together, this time for a coffee, she reported back to Les.
“I saw him again.”
“Your shining armor guy? Does he have a name?”
“Zach.”
“Okay. I like Zachs.”
“We were doing the usual, asking what we did, where we went to school, all that.”
“Finally tell him you’re a cop?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I guess he kind of looked surprised.”
“Surprised?”
“I mean, none of the retrograde shit I still hear from some guys.”
Les threw up a pair of air quotes. “‘Pretty dykey’?”
“Or, ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting hurt?’”
“Classic.”
“Although …” She gazed off as if picturing the scene. “I kinda got a feeling he was wondering about being with a cop. Sounds like he had some bad experiences with the police when he was living in Jamaica.”
“Living in Jamaica?”
“For five years, after he did his PhD. He was working on a big climate change project.”
“And now he shovels snow.”
“What d’ya have against snow?”
* * *
On their third date, Jennifer and Zach had slept together—well, had sex.
“Apparently,” Jennifer told Les, “there is no correlation between a low hairline and lack of ability in bed.”
“His place?”
“Yeah, lives with his parents. Sort of an extended family vibe.”
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