Genesys X

by B. J. Graf

  But I slipped through the crowd unnoticed and made my way inside Nokia.

  RHD took up most of the third floor. Comprised of approximately one-hundred and ten sworn and civilian personnel under the command of Captain III Cheryl Tatum, RHD housed five sections: Robbery, Homicide, Special Assault, Cold Case and Special Investigation. As I passed RSS, my footsteps echoed on reinforced concrete. Digital frames hung on the corridor walls under energy-efficient fluorescents. The images changed every few seconds, displaying black and white wanted posters of suspects at large. Entering the Homicide Special Section, I glanced at the large digital "on-call" board, which dominated the front wall of the squad room. The board listed detective teams available for dispatch to new homicides. My name wasn't on it.

  An aisle split the large room into two halves - Homicide I and Homicide II. The squads alternate by the week, with two-person teams often working independently. Walking past the two rows of twelve metal desks flanking the aisle felt like walking a gauntlet. I nodded to Shin, sitting next to my empty desk in Homicide I. He flashed me a wan smile and a thumbs up. Making my way past the silent detectives planted behind those grey metal desks, and the doors to the offices of the two lieutenants who oversee each squad, I’d slid my barcode over the security scanner outside the captain’s office. The door opened and I went in. LCD crystals on the privacy screen darkened the windows and muffled the sound almost before I’d closed the door. It didn’t matter. Every detective in RHD knew what was going down.

  Tatum didn’t get up. She sat behind her desk, glaring at me. Captain Tatum had over twenty-seven years with the LAPD, and every year showed. She was a fifty-year old African-American with a body gone soft around the middle. Her eyes, however, were liquid steel.

  “You wanted to see me, Captain?” I took off my hat, smoothed my hair and sat in the chair fronting her desk. I could see my face floating in the air before her. The open file on her computer was my jacket and ten card.

  “Carmen Ramirez, mother of the deceased, has filed a complaint against you, citing wrongful death.”

  “I saved two lives.”

  “But you shot and killed her fourteen-year-old son.”

  "He shot first." I clenched the brim of my fedora hard enough to turn my knuckles white but kept my voice steady.

  She nodded with narrowed eyes. “You’re one of my best detectives and most decorated officers. So why is it you keep drawing fire?”

  “Captain, that kid was a tweaked-out baby-banger. He fired shots and drove a three-ton stolen vehicle straight at my partner and a civilian. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Let someone who didn’t have a blood alcohol reading just under the legal limit take the call,” Tatum snapped. “Thank god the uniform who tested your BAC had enough sense to wait.”

  I sat back in my chair. .08 is the legal blood alcohol limit. The officer, who had administered the breathalyzer, had done so an hour or more after the crash, giving my system time to wash some of the alcohol out. Legally, I hadn't been drunk, but I had been drinking.

  “Our shift was over. I was off duty.” I was careful to edit out all mention of Shin.

  “You responded to the call. In a police vehicle.”

  “Because the suspect slammed into the black and white already in pursuit. Right in front of us. Ramirez disabled them, then shot at us.”

  “Piedmont, we’re RHD. We investigate officer-involved shootings. We’re not supposed to be the subject of the investigation. Maybe we promoted you too fast." She leaned back in her chair, peering at me.

  A chill crept along my spine.

  “Then there’s the racial element,” she continued, leaning forward again, placing her elbows on top of the desk and folding her hands together.

  “Racist? The driver wasn’t even visible.” I explained that even if it hadn’t been dark, the Excaliber SUV had sported illegally tinted windows.

  “Racial, not racist, Detective. Take it from a black woman in a white world, there’s always a racial element.”

  “The cameras should back me up,” I said. “I was within policy.”

  The Captain put both her hands flat on her desk and pressed down as if she was either about to hoist herself up or keep the desk from levitating. “Civilians don’t read police policy. They see the video of a dead child. You know the spotlight the department’s under. Ambulance chasers are just looking for an excuse to tie our hands. Here you hand them another viral video."

  "This was a righteous shoot."

  “Your second in five years.” Tatum jabbed her index finger at my floating file. The black hair and faded denim eyes rippled into pixels, then coalesced into my face once more. “I have cops who’ve never pulled their guns their entire twenty on the force.”

  They must work Pacific Palisades. We both knew those cops waved and drove by trouble so they wouldn’t have to have this conversation.

  “You want cops,” I said, “or politicians out there?”

  “Policing is political.” Tatum exhaled a long, exasperated sigh. “Why didn’t Miyaguchi drive?”

  An eighteen-wheeler sat on my tongue.

  Those steely eyes bored into mine for a few seconds before they softened a micro-millimeter. “Still not good enough,” Captain Tatum said. “Not for RHD. Go home. You’re on modified-administrative duty pending O.I.S. investigation. But Piedmont, if O.I.S. rules against you, you’re out. We’re not baseball. You don’t get a third strike. Now get out of here.”

  The privacy screen lifted; I stood and jammed my hat back on my head. Eight pairs of eyes met me on the way out. As I walked through that gauntlet, nobody said a word. Shin’s arched eyebrows framed his unspoken question as he mimed a hammer pounding a nail into his desk. I nodded and went home.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Home was the house on Howland Avenue in Venice that belongs to my girlfriend Jo. I moved in three months ago. It’s a contemporary smart-home design with an open floor plan and huge picture windows looking out to the canal. I still felt like I was the one piece of cheap furniture held over from a college dorm room amongst a house full of designer collectibles.

  I walked in with the fingers of one hand curled around the neck of a bottle of good champagne. With the other hand, I tapped the little velvet ring box secure in my left suit pocket. The day before yesterday I’d picked up wine along with the ring with plans to pop the question. But the day before yesterday I didn’t have a new case stalled and an OIS investigation looming over me. I stashed the champagne in the back of the Sub-Zero, and the ring in my gun safe.

  Then I turned off the bathroom’s smart-home technology. The last thing I needed today was Tommy the Talking Toilet giving me the rundown on my deficient vitamin levels.

  Kicking off my shoes, I ambled back through the house to the kitchen area. Jo’s cats appeared one by one trotting along in my wake–yowling off-key like a bad garage band. I touched the menu screen of the auto-chef, and the 3D printer started to churn out their tuna dinner. The yowling stopped as the cats swarmed the stinky fish paste I emptied into their dishes.

  Jo was a magnet for stray cats. She had a weakness for the ferals– wild warriors missing teeth, ears, and patches of fur. Eddie and the ferals; we could start a band.

  I poured myself a drink. OIS Investigation was routine for any shooting – no matter how justified. That’s the song I was singing as the whiskey’s slow burn blotted out the pictures in my head and smoothed out the rest.

  “Fade to black,” I said to the home monitor, and the walls went black. LCD crystals darkened the windows too. I sat down in the dark and let my eyes close.

  I was too exhausted to open them back up even when the face of system kid Britney Devonshire flashed into my head and morphed into Paco Ramirez. Then it was too late. The black hole where Paco’s eye should have been dragged me down like a riptide. He’d been fourteen: just one year younger than me when I’d left home for good.

  And suddenly I was back there – back to that day sixteen years ago wit
h all the details clear and crisp as ever.

  **

  The black eye my fifteen-year-old self had worn to school that day had won me another trip to the nurse. Nurse Winters and I were getting to be old friends.

  “I fell,” I’d mumbled before my ass even hit the seat. I’d hoped the lie would pre-empt questions. The nurse’s office always smelled like lemon air freshner and cleanser, but that day the scent of the freshly baked blueberry muffin she slid toward me made my stomach growl. Sunlight angled in from the window overlooking the street. The light made my swollen eye hurt.

  “You fall a lot for such an athletic guy, Eddie,” Ms.Winters said. The middle-aged nurse had a smiley mouth but sad eyes. “I have to report this.” She’d put her hand on my arm. “We need to get you out of that house.”

  “Can’t.” Who’d look out for my Mom? I glanced down at my feet. The left Nike still had a spot of blood on the toe. I tucked it behind my right.

  “If we don’t,” Ms. Winters said, “it doesn’t take a prophet to predict your future.”

  I met her eyes as she continued. “Either your dad kills you or you kill him. My money’s on you, Eddie. You’re taller already. Getting stronger every day too. He’s not.”

  I’d been counting on that myself. That part about me getting stronger.

  I looked at Ms. Winters with her sad eyes. “I fell,” I said again.

  She shook her head and wrote something in my file. Chances are she’d have catapulted me out of there anyway. But what happened later that night sped everything up. By the next morning with a bloody foot and a face like a patchwork quilt of bruises I’d lit out from my parents’ house in San Diego and trekked north to L.A.

  I’d never gone back.

  **

  I must have fallen asleep during the trip down memory lane because when I woke, Jo was leaning in to kiss me, a curtain of her pale blonde hair brushing my neck. I hadn’t even heard her come in.

  Tall, blonde and blue-eyed Jocelyn A. Sloan was a California girl, but she came from old money, east coast money. I didn’t know much about her history except she’d gone to college in the east then moved to California, where her brother Craig was already well-established, to take a law degree. Craig, who’d set up a corporate security business flush with high profile contracts, had offered his sister a place to stay until she finished school.

  Despite the heat, Jo wore a long-sleeved blue silk blouse that hid the row of small white scars on on her wrists. Those old scars told me Jo’s history wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows, but unlike so many women I knew, she didn’t jabber on about herself or her past. So, I didn’t press.

  “Rough day?” Jo took a seat on the arm of the sofa.

  I shrugged. For a couple beats neither of us spoke. “That feels good,” I said as she started to massage my feet. I drank in the subtle floral notes of her perfume as she leaned in close.

  “Anyone ever tell you, you have scars in weird places, Eddie?” Jo’s fingers pressed the white worm of scar tissue on my left foot.

  I let my eyes dart from her wrists to her deep blue eyes, waiting to see if this was Jo’s way of signalling she wanted to talk about her own past. It wasn’t and she didn’t.

  “I don’t show my scars to just anyone.” I kept my tone light.

  “I’m flattered. How’d you get this one again?”

  Kerchunk! The sound of the nail gun in my father’s hand hammered in my head.

  “Stepped on a nail.” I pulled my foot in and pointed to the bag of groceries from Mizuma Market she’d set on the table. “What’d you get?”

  “They had Kobe beef,” she said, standing and heading to the kitchen. “I’m going to fix all your favorites tonight.”

  “Special occasion?” I stretched.

  Jo took a slow twirl. “You are looking at the newest partner of Wen-Ho, Schwartz and Sloan.”

  “My Sloan ranger got her name on the door,” I said.

  Jo had been a senior associate in the firm. This was a major upgrade. On another day, it might not have felt like the sucker punch it did then. I was happy for her, truly, but with the sting of my own set-back still fresh, I had to work a little to inject the right enthusiasm in my voice.

  “I’m proud of you, Jo.”

  She smiled. “The news won’t be announced till the week after next. Assuming I don’t do anything between now and then to mess it up.”

  Jo had a low, sultry voice that sounded like dark wood and cellos. She could read the back of a box of cat treats and the soft music of her voice turned trivia into a titillating promise of secrets for me alone.

  “You won’t. You’re perfect.” The muscles in my back kinked. Elbows out and hands behind my head, I stretched. “Kudos on making Partner with Tax Masters of the Universe.”

  Jo came back over and perched herself on my lap. “I don’t think you really listen to me or you’d know I’m now heading up intellectual property. The -

  “- hot arena. I listen. I just get distracted by the visuals.” I kissed her again.

  “You’re not too hideous either,” she said, lightly tracing the outline of my mouth with her index finger before she kissed me.

  I put my arms around her and let my eyes wander appreciatively over her face with its pale blonde hair framing dark blue eyes. So different from my own black hair, black moods and faded denim eyes. Being with Jo just felt right, and had from the first moment I saw her.

  “Give me a minute to reboot,” I said. “I’ll take you out to celebrate.”

  “And waste the Kobe?” Jo’s eyes widened with mock alarm. “Never. You can do the honors on the grill. By the way, what’s the champagne for?”

  “Hmm?” I kissed her neck.

  “The champagne in the back of the fridge.”

  “For you, of course,” I said. It was only a tiny lie of omission any lawyer would appreciate. “The newest partner with her name on the door.”

  “You’re amazing,” she said. “So, you want to take a ride before dinner?”

  Now that can mean a lot of things, and I admit I pictured other more exciting options, but ten minutes later we were paddling a canoe down the Howland canal in front of the house. That is to say, I was paddling. Jo, seated opposite me, leaned back, and inspired me to paddle.

  Venice, California is a dream made from a memory. The dream was real estate entrepreneur Abbot Kinney’s vision of a resort by the sea recalling the floating Italian city. It’s an unfinished dream. In 1905 Kinney had sixteen miles of canals dug to drain the swamps of the area, but the grand complex of canals was never completed. By 1929 all but a handful of the canals had been buried under concrete and the city incorporated into L.A.. Dreams written on water will drown one day.

  We paddled under a pedestrian bridge of white wood laced with night jasmine. The agreeable scent filled the air.

  “We need to weed the side border,” Jo said, looking back towards the house at the tangle of weeds. “Remind me to tell the gardener.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Jo’s hand trailed in the canal, leaving a wake. The city had cleaned up the water on the existing canals in 2035. These days it was good enough to drink.

  “It’s so peaceful here.” Jo smiled. “Like nothing ever happens.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to stir things up,” I said, dipping the oar back into the crystalline canal water.

  “Sometimes it’s not.”

  I cocked my head and waited, focusing on the sound of the water lapping against the boat.

  “I heard you were put on administrative duty,” Jo said. “What happened?”

  She knew. Of course she knew. Her brother Craig’s security firm had feelers everywhere.

  I stared at Jo. From the first moment I saw her, I’d wanted to sleep with Jo because of the way she looked. But I fell in love with her because of the way she saw. Only sometimes that had its drawbacks.

  “Craig has too many friends downtown,” I said.

  “He’s just worried about you.”


  “He should mind his own business.”

  “He’s my brother. You’re my guy. He thinks that makes it his business.”

  My guy. I wanted to be more than just Jo’s guy. But it was suddenly crystal clear that diamond ring would stay stashed in my gun safe for a while longer. At least until I’d cleared the OIS Investigation.

  “You should get a medal for yesterday, Eddie, not a complaint,” Jo said.

  “You don’t get a medal when a kid dies.”

  Jo leaned forward and touched my knee. “Not your fault. Why put up with all the grief?”

  “I thought you liked me being a cop.” I kept my tone playful. Jo had never been a badge bunny, but she’d liked the thrill of dating a detective.

  “I did,” Jo said. “I do. What do you want, Eddie?”

  The truth was, like most cops, I didn’t like to talk about the job with civilians, even Jo. Try explaining sex to virgins. Being a detective wasn’t something I chose. It chose me. Like family. Only…

  “Every day I wake up wanting to make a difference,” I said. “Some days I do. Days like today, I’m not so sure.”

  “If you want out, there are lots of options in the private sector.” Jo dangled that suggestion like an expert fly fisherman flicking a tasty lure. “Craig would be happy to help.”

  I bet he would. “I’m a cop, Jo. I never wanted to be anything but. The right kind of cop.” Not like my father, who’d been the wrong kind. Taking bribes to pay for his addiction. And worse. I shifted my eyes to the oar. “I’m already living in your house...”

  “…our house,” she corrected.

  “Our house, which you own. Security doesn’t pay much.”

  “Corporate security does.” She kept her tone light too.

  Jo already out-earned me five times over, and that didn’t count her trust fund. And how much more would she rake in as a partner?

  “It’s not about the money,” Jo added quickly. “I want you to be happy.”

  I looked at her earnest face, wishing she’d yelled instead.