But we had also been certain that Gray Suit’s people had hired the security woman and erased his hospital records. I quickly looked but couldn’t find even one lousy case where the mob had pulled off a stunt like that. It just didn’t make sense.
Jen thought, Brooks.
26
“That’s all he said, sir.” Jen cupped a hand over her eyes to block out the late-afternoon sun.
“Jen, I told you, come to me before you got anyone involved.”
“Les and I were questioning him together. Ten minutes ago.”
Captain Brooks didn’t even seem to be listening.
“Your guy couldn’t identify his suppliers or the guys who sprung him. And what sort of name is Child’s Play anyway? When the hell did we stop using actual names?”
“Both were men, both native English speakers, probably late thirties or forties. One was white, the other Black.”
“Racial progress in America,” Brooks muttered. “Integrated gangs.”
“Besides that, he was useless.”
“Besides that? It’s all pretty useless. It’s no surprise there’s a big organization behind this. Who else could pull this off?”
“But we assumed Teko Teko Mea’s people got him out and hid him away to question him.”
“Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t.”
“That would be easy to find out.”
“Yeah?”
“Ask him.”
Captain Brooks blurted out, “That’s one thing I’m definitely not going to do.” His eyes whipped away from hers as if he was surprised he had said that out loud.
“Why not?”
Captain Brooks paced away from her to the edge of the roof. Then back again.
“Okay. You’re going to put an ankle monitor on him, seed his phone, and let him go,” he directed. “My hunch is he’s going to try to make this one sale and then take off.”
“It was in Michigan Park.”
“He’ll go there first to get money, then return with the drugs or to take them to get injected or however they do it. Have Chandler track him. If we’re lucky, he’ll lead us to his guys. I don’t think he’s going to wait long.”
Captain Brooks finally seemed to notice that Jen was pressing a thick wad of gauze to her cheek.
“Jen, what did you do to your face?”
“A dog. It’s nothing.”
“Yeah, until you die of rabies.”
* * *
That evening, Zach was at his microscopic desk and Jen was slumped on his bed, watching a show and trying to ignore her throbbing cheek. Fourteen tiny stitches. Career as a supermodel shot. The doctor’s helpful advice: “Try not to yawn, talk, chew, laugh, sneeze, or open your mouth to eat or brush your teeth, and you’ll be fine. And if you start having a compulsion to bite people, then the rabies shot didn’t work.”
Zach said, “You should read these articles.” He had been scrolling through Gabriel Cohen’s articles since Jen had brought home the guy’s name and URL.
Jen said, “I should read a lot of things.”
“Seriously. I think Captain Brooks is in it.”
She paused the show. “He writes about Brooks?”
“He doesn’t give any names, but there’s this one guy, a sergeant when this happens, Black, and he’s always rubbing a scar like you said Brooks does. How’s your cheek?”
“I’ll read it if you stop asking how my cheek is.”
At first she skimmed, and then slowed down.
A man, white and with the half-shaved head of a graduate student, led me around the block to an Ethiopian restaurant. Six people waited in a room at the back. Most were younger than the arrested 18. One of them, by her appearance a woman of Korean heritage, asked me to turn off my phone and tablet.”
A couple of months ago, Jen would have found this boring. She would have said, Why are you guys always dwelling on the past? Some things are better now, some worse. But now it felt different. She was part of this, part of some new story that was being written.
She read on.
An hour later, I had heard from everyone but one stern African American man. His expression was grave, perhaps even suspicious. From time to time, he rubbed a prominent scar above his eye. Finally, the other five looked at him.
“Your turn,” one man said.
He took a long time to begin, as if measuring his words.
“I’ve been listening to y’all, and I’ve been listening to the Eighteen and I’ve been listening in my community. This is a hard time for me. You see”—he turned directly to me, and continued—“I’m a cop. I know firsthand about bigotry and racism in the force. I know firsthand about putting down a strike or a protest. I know firsthand about protecting the rich from everyone else. But when I hear it from others, I get angry at all of you. I think I have to defend my brothers and sisters in the force. Sure, I know you’re not saying we’re all bad. I even know you’re not saying it’s about individuals, but the role we play. But it’s damn hard to listen to you.”
He rubbed that thick scar of his. He said, “You may think it’s strange I became a police officer. You see, when I was a kid, just sixteen, two cops beat the living crap out of me. One white, one Hispanic. No particular reason. I hadn’t done anything wrong. They just wanted to kick the crap out of a Black kid. They left me with this.” He lightly touched the scar.
“For a while, I was a hothead, but after college, I decided to become a cop. I did it knowing that as soon as I had a chance, I was going to put my lot in with those who were going to bring about change.
“I don’t know how long it will take. We might get the Eighteen out. I hope so. We might get some immediate changes in the force. I hope so. Kick out those who should have been kicked out years ago. Change our training and procedures. Forget about that damn blue line and stop giving a break to abusive officers. But you see, that’s only a beginning. The Eighteen and those of us sitting here are part of something bigger. And that’s what’s got to change. The much bigger picture. I’m in this for the long haul. However long. However patient I got to be. Whatever it takes.”
“Yeah, might be him,” Jen said.
“Cool.”
“Why cool? It’s depressing. Look at what he believed a decade ago. Now he’s nothing more than a cog in their machine.”
But it isn’t totally true, she thought. Deep down, she had always known there was more to Brooks. For the first time, she wondered if the captain’s slur to Gray Suit—She’s nothing, absolutely fucking zero—was Brooks’s attempt to protect her from Gray Suit’s prying eyes.
27
Wednesday, August 1—11:33:18
I’m not so sure about August. I know it’s only my third time around the bases, and the first one barely counts because I was still a baby with no clue about anything. But I can tell you this much about August: it’s too damn hot. People are ornery. Asphalt streets bubble like boiling molasses. Mangy dogs sprawl on the sidewalks, not even flinching when you step over them. Jen tired quicker, and there were times her brain turned to sludge. No, I’m not so sure about August.
With Les and P.D., we followed a few leads and spoke to everyone in our book who might be picking up rumors about Eden. Yep, people were hearing about it, people were asking for it, but no one admitted to knowing how to get it.
Child’s Play was out on bail and I was keeping an eye on his comings and goings, which even Jen in her August sluggishness could have pulled off, since he hadn’t left his apartment. “Scared shitless,” is what Jen said.
Jen was popping drugs like a junkie to dull the pain in her cheek, and I told her to lay off because they were fogging my brain.
On Wednesday, I said, “He’s moving,” but his adventure only took him to the corner and back, presumably to buy food, dope, and beer.
On Thursday at 14:28.10, he moved and kept moving. He was on foot, and it was pretty clear he was heading for Michigan Park. Les jumped into a car, and we popped Jen’s own bike onto the rack and easily b
eat Child’s Play to the area.
Jen and Les had talked to Brooks on Tuesday, and I’d have to be a pretty slow synth not to see that Jen already had had a second chitchat with him with me turned off or incapacitated. Les didn’t seem to clue in about this, but Les isn’t the most elegant line of code. A good cop and a good guy and a good friend to Jen, but there are only so many goods that a single person can lay claim to. Okay, fine, no reason Les would think I’d been turned off. It’s just that I keep expecting more from humans, and they keep letting me down.
Brooks had okayed three surveillance drones: two sparrows and a hawk, and they were flapping overhead, with feeds going to P.D. and me. Hammerhead and Amanda were deployed, but keeping their distance. The little weasel was going nowhere without us.
Child’s Play went to a house on 7th Street NE. Stayed there nine minutes. When he left, even from a bird’s-eye view he looked all twitchy, like he was expecting to be attacked any second. He cut through an empty lot and onto Varnum.
“Jen,” called Les through P.D. to me, “he’s heading to the hospital.”
Jen was locking her bike as Child’s Play reached the main entrance, where all the fast-food restaurants are. Les drove around to the ER exit, and Hammerhead and Amanda took up the other two exits.
Leave them on, I told Jen, meaning her civilian bike helmet and sunglasses. Strap on, cover your stitches. We followed Child’s Play inside.
Straight through the hospital. No stops.
He grabbed a car outside the ER.
Jen scrambled into Les’s car, and we followed Child’s Play to the Brookland-CUA Metro station. We sent Hammerhead and Amanda to the next stations north and south. We tailed him inside, Les wearing a Capitals’ hat, Jen still wearing her bike helmet and beginning to feel like an idiot. To the platform, Les forty feet ahead of him, us forty feet behind.
15:47:29. People pushing onto and off the rush-hour trains.
“Amanda,” we called a minute later, “it’s yours. He’s on the next train, fourth car. We’re in the third and fifth cars.”
Amanda boarded his car at Rhode Island.
At Metro Center, he got off.
To look at that station, you wouldn’t know that half the DC population didn’t have a regular job. It was so packed you could be dead for half an hour and still be standing upright. We pushed and squirmed between people, trying to keep Child’s Play in sight. We were in a box formation: Les was somewhere in front of our target, getting instructions from Amanda’s synth and me about which way he seemed to be heading. Amanda wasn’t more than twelve feet away, us three times that.
It happened in a flash. Child’s Play was heading toward the escalators. Ahead of him, Les squeezed himself into the crowd and rode up. Child’s Play was in line to get on. Amanda got caught in a swell of people and was carried off to the left like a riptide had grabbed her. We pushed forward to take her place.
A train pulled into the station. Just as Child’s Play neared the base of the escalators, a leg hooked around Jen’s ankle and five fingers, as hard as marble, shoved us off balance. We tottered sideways. A woman screamed. Child’s Play jerked around at the sound; we were heading for the ground, and right before we were buried in a forest of legs, I caught him shifting direction toward the train.
Every commuter in DC seemed hell-bent on kicking us. Jen threw her arms across her face to avoid a pummeling. Within seconds, three people were trying to help us stand up. Jen, cursing, pushed them away, and the crowd parted enough for us to spot Child’s Play wiggling through the train’s closing doors.
By the time we were upright, the train had pulled away. Les made it back down the escalator, and Amanda found us. Jen ripped off her bike helmet, and we looked around, trying to spot who had tripped her. Amanda popped a small pink bubble and looked ready to kill anyone who got in her way.
We waited for the next train. We still had strong signals from the anklet moving north on the Red Line; we still had the phone. The phone switched off. We still had the anklet.
The next train was delayed. We finally got on, ten minutes behind.
Child’s Play had gotten off at Woodley Park.
By the time we reached the station, he had made it to the zoo. Seemed a bad decision for a guy on the run. It’s surrounded by fences. Then again, it’s uneven terrain, with big summer crowds and lots of places to meet someone or hide. Didn’t matter, we had the signal loud and clear.
He was moving quickly, but we were running and making up ground. I love a chase. Good times.
Then the signal stopped moving, either inside or just outside the rainforest building. We split up to surround the building at a distance.
Les called, “He must be waiting for his dealer to arrive.”
Ten minutes passed.
We kept our distance, figuring we might all have been spotted. The drones arrived, and we flew them around the building. No sign of Child’s Play. We sent two of the sparrows inside, past some startled visitors when they opened the door.
Child’s Play didn’t seem to be in any space the sparrows managed to get to, but his signal was still strong and stationary.
Finally, we moved in.
Followed the signal.
Then followed the screams.
We found him in the piranha pond.
Or to be precise, we found what was left of his legs, hacked off at the knees. Found the rest of him a moment later in a supply closet.
Turns out that “cut off your legs” wasn’t just a tough-guy expression after all.
28
The Thursday afternoon debacle with Child’s Play meant Jen didn’t get home until 1:00 AM, although by then the crime scene folks had long taken over the show.
The next morning, as Chandler would retell the story later, their whole squad was lined up and shot by Brooks. Their bodies were then skewered on pikes in front of the police station as a warning to all officers to never totally fuck up.
They had valiantly tried to defend themselves. Sure, they’d momentarily lost Child’s Play, but they’d picked him up right away. What difference would it have made if they had staked out the rainforest building ten minutes earlier?
Brooks was pissed.
“There were four of you. With implants. With drone support. There was one of him.”
Amanda said, “At least two. Someone took Jen out.”
“Did you catch him? Her? They?”
They hadn’t even seen him, her, or they. Surveillance video couldn’t make anything out. Bad angles and too many heads blocking the view.
Surveillance cameras at the zoo entrance, the rainforest building, and the paths leading to it had spotted Child’s Play, but no one with any known links to organized crime.
As might be expected, the videos on the Metro and zoo had picked out hundreds of people with records, from medical problems like drug addiction, to theft, battery, sexual assault, and every other way that people try to benefit themselves at the expense of others. AI managed to discard ninety-seven percent of them, but that still left several dozen people of interest—either as the person who’d tripped Jen or the person or people who’d decided that weasels don’t need legs. Our unit spent two days tracking down each of them but came up with nothing, although Hammerhead did score some good weed from a former dealer who now ran a boutique dope shop.
Finally, to cap off Jen’s miserable week, she went to the clinic to get her annual ROSE screen. The test wasn’t anything more than a sample of blood, but it was one of the tests that still had to go off to a lab. The problem was it started the countdown clock, a three-day wait until she found out whether she was one of the lucky one in six who’d get whacked. Then the ten-year wait, maybe more, maybe less, for the prions to start turning her brain into compost. Then the short clock until she died.
And even though she really didn’t have to worry because, after her mother exited in two months and Jen received the treatment, it was impossible not to feel anxious.
As soon as she got home
from the clinic, she threw her work clothes into the laundry hamper, donned her bike gear, and headed to the Capital Crescent Trail, where she pushed and pushed to obliterate thoughts of Child’s Play and ROSE and Brooks and Eden and people aging overnight and anything else but making it to the next mile marker as quickly as she could.
Her mind, though, could not be fooled. Later, as she lay in their midnight bed, Zach at her side, her eyes were open and trying to make out the vague swatches of light on the ceiling. She lightly touched her cheek—at least that was healing well. Her mind buzzed with everything happening at work, and she searched for the invisible threads that stitched it all together. She knew she had made a mistake dropping the co-op lead. Shouldn’t have mattered what Brooks said. Shouldn’t have mattered if she ruffled Zach’s feathers. Sure, a lot of new stuff had happened, but she had lost two and a half good weeks.
She spoke toward the ceiling but addressed her words to Zach, who she thought might still be awake.
“The co-op folks. I have to meet them. I need to talk to them, fast.”
* * *
When she woke up late on Saturday morning, Jen went into the bathroom and pulled out the fourteen stitches. She made a cappuccino and found Zach tending his rooftop garden. He was on his knees, with his bare back to her. She paused, coffee mug in hand, and watched him work. Those beautiful hands, meticulously isolating and snipping off unwanted shoots from his tomato plants—she caught the soothing chlorophyll smell from fifteen feet away. His wonderful shoulders and back, not comic-hero ripped, but strong and tanned. The khaki shorts with a million pockets and scuffed work boots. He was so beautiful to watch.
He turned and caught sight of her.
“Good morning, pumpkin!”
“Pumpkin?”
“What can I say? I’m a gardener.”
She came over and held out her coffee for him to share.
She pulled up a deckchair and watched. Weeding. Loosening soil. She remembered a dream and just as quickly it flicked away from her mind. She needed to ask him; she hated to ask him.
The Last Exit Page 16