Genrenauts: Season One

by Michael R. Underwood

  “Shit, boss, I’m sorry. But what about bringing her back?”

  Memories bubbled up again, conversations late at night on the stoop of their row house about what they’d do if they were ever stuck on a story world.

  King shook his head. “Recovery from dimensional sickness has a very low success rate. Nancy knew it. She made her choice, and if I took her from this place and brought her back, even if she survived, I would have been violating her wishes.”

  Nancy told me, “I’d rather live a story than die trying to get back. It’s still living.” King spoke with practiced ease. He must have repeated this speech a thousand times. “Those worlds, they’re as real as ours. Just more focused. Limited. And God knows my life was already limited before I signed up. But this time I’m making the choice.”

  King wiped his eyes, then straightened. Plenty of time to feel sorry for myself later. “What’s most important right now is this case. And piling a second breach on top of the first one, even if the previous breach was small, means we’ve got trouble on our hands.”

  He’d seen it on De La Cruz’s face as soon as she walked in. She’d gone out of sync with the world, flickering around the edges. Smart money said the same would be true of DeeZee when they saw him.

  “With DeeZee out of action, this department is short a wacky specialist. It’s how the precinct operates. They need a weird outsider with strange insights to solve the bizarre cases. Chen and McWilliams work the by-the-book kinds of cases and play second unit on the big stories.”

  King waved to the precinct, the rows of desks. “But there’s so much of a thirst for these stories that the region’s mandate has broadened, and the precincts with them. They’ve gotten more and more elaborate—bigger CSI teams, more Special Victims cases, and here, with DeeZee and De La Cruz, the oddball cases requiring off-the-wall thinking, almost a crossover with Cozies, though not in the same manner as Crossover Zones. This is more of a fully integrated sub-thread of the genre.” He gestured out toward Detective De La Cruz’s desk and the captain’s office. “With the Odd Couple Duo, women get to be powerful cops, but the story boxes them in to Strong Female Character archetypes, and the wacky specialists balance them out.”

  “I’m your girl,” Leah said.

  Good. Confidence, no hesitation.

  “I mean, stand-up comic turned PI? It practically writes itself.”

  “But that’s not all,” King said. “The whacky specialist needs a handler, a by-the-book, driven detective. This will be more trying than anything you’ve done yet. We’ll have to keep one another afloat. The specialist goes off the wall, but their stern partner goes the other way, becomes uncompromising, harsh. By diving into a role this hard, with the strong history with the captain, there’s a risk of me getting in over my head.”

  And diving into the role definitely isn’t a defense mechanism to help keep your distance with Nancy, he told himself. He was old enough to own up to his bullshit. To himself, if not to his team. But it was the right call. For the mission, for her, for all of them.

  This was no laughing matter. Well, her jokes would be. But this was heavy work. You dove into an archetype with every fiber of your being, and sometimes it got its hooks in you, left a mark. Every time he came back from Post-Apocalypse world having worn the mantle of the Max, he felt his world get a bit grayer, found himself expecting the worst a bit more often. But it also gave him an edge. There was power in wrapping yourself up in a story, but it always came with a price. Roman was still paying that price, still exploring who he was outside the role.

  “We have to keep each other level. When we’re not neck-deep in investigating, make me take a breather. Get me thinking about Mallery’s case again; be the uppity new kid. And whatever you do, do not let us stay here more than seven days. In fact, it’s best that we get out in six.”

  He couldn’t make Nancy’s choice. The team needed him. “I’m going to call this in. Shirin and company will stick with their mission. And don’t think this lets you off the hook there.”

  Leah rubbed her arms. “Somehow, this is all very serious now.”

  “Comedy is just drama with a greater emotional range, newbie. There’s a reason why some of the greatest actors the stage and screen have ever known started as comedians.”

  That line met with great approval from his rookie partner. “So, I treat this like a USA or TNT show, except I need to keep you from going off the method deep end.”

  King nodded. “Here comes the captain. I’m stepping out to tell my secretary we’re on the case, got it?”

  Her body language said yes. While her confidence was still developing, Leah had always been quick to adapt. Throw her a curveball and she adjusted on the fly.

  Let’s just hope it’s enough to handle two cases at once. We’re not exactly working with a full roster right now. The ever-full medical wing back at HQ jumped to mind, and he put it aside.

  One thing at a time.

  * * *

  The number-one thing Leah had learned on the job so far was to roll with the punches. Sometimes literally, but not too often, so far. Fortunately, four years of improv comedy made her as light on her toes as a ballerina. But, like, a short third-tier ballerina that mostly stood in the back. Fortunately, no one had asked her to do anything en pointe yet.

  The captain passed King as he left the room to call in the mission.

  “Hi, Captain. King just stepped out to check in with his secretary, tell them we’re on the case.”

  “Understood. Let’s get started.”

  Leah helped the captain pin the pictures, email print-outs, and other materials to a corkboard. Every piece that Leah put up, the captain corrected her or added a comment, but Leah was used to being countermanded, overridden, and otherwise pushed around, and not just as a Genrenaut. The last time she’d stuck with something long enough to get seniority was the improv team, and even when she was team captain, she’d never been the star player. Damn you, Gary Walker, she thought, remembering the superstar transfer who had dominated her senior year. He could barely organize a stack of three apples, let alone a team. But how the audiences loved him.

  King walked back in as Captain Franklin stepped back from the board, doing that cop thing of staring at the case materials to force it make sense. Mentally, she filled in the “thinking soft rock” music that accompanied the scenes on TV.

  “Vic’s name is Dwayne Smith, chef at Lake Effect, a high-end restaurant near the lake on Clark. DeeZee is a regular customer there, so it made sense for De La Cruz and him to take the case. Smith was found in the oven at Lake Effect this morning when the owner came in early to do payroll. No signs of struggle outside, but we got three inches last night, so who knows. The body had been cooking, probably since close. Doctor Lombardi will run the autopsy later today.”

  “They cooked him? Overnight?” Leah made a yuck face, exaggerating her reaction as she went for both gallows humor and wackiness. “Did they at least set a timer? Use some air freshener?”

  King made an act of ignoring her clowning but gave her a wink out of the corner of his eye. “What’s been done already?”

  “Uniforms were on their way to secure the scene, and they found DeeZee in the alley. Lucky bastard. Paramedics say if he’d been there much longer, he might not have made it.”

  King got them back on-track. “Was anyone leaning on the restaurant? Rivals? Mob? Any enemies?”

  “The owner, Adnan Refai, bought Lake Effect from Oliver Balicki about five years ago. The place is part of a line restaurateurs that broke from the mob back in the thirties. The Salvatores have had designs on the place for years. But they’re staying squeaky clean. Plus they’ve got a handful of Aldermen in their pockets.”

  King jumped in. “Looks like the Mob angle is the most likely. Not exactly promising.” His voice was more gruff, and he was moving more sharply, more severe. Like he was playing to an audience thirty feet away, in a room with only two other people, both within arm’s reach. And so it beg
ins, she thought. He’d be one extreme, she the other.

  In Leah’s previous missions, the Genrenauts had built identities to blend into the story worlds. They’d slid into archetypes with slight adjustments. What King was doing here already felt different, the way he talked about it. He’d never looked worried about taking a role before. And his carriage was already different—stiffer but with more aggressive motions.

  Fear crawled up her back like a big-ass spider.

  Leah picked up the thread from King. “We could be the people that finally put them away!”

  The captain and King both gave Leah a look that said Good luck with that, kiddo.

  She pivoted. “Anyone on the staff have motive to go after Smith?”

  “Good question. We’ll bring that to the staff.”

  King said, “We’ll need to run down all of these eventualities, plus investigate DeeZee’s attack for any possible connections. For now, we need to get to the scene of DeeZee’s shooting.”

  Leah hopped off the table, playing it broad. “Lead on, Captain.” She waved toward the door, topping it off with a wider smile than would ever be appropriate in a police department. She added on a two-finger salute for bonus over-kill.

  * * *

  Lake Effect was located in a rich neighborhood—Leah could tell because the roads were spotless, plowed, and salted, all of the sidewalks similarly clean.

  Caution tape surrounded the alley, and the captain’s car was the third police vehicle on site. On the way over, King had kept up the act, filling the captain in about various cases he’d solved across the country. Thanks to her homework, she recognized all of them as cases from TV procedurals—Castle, White Collar, and Lie to Me.

  They laid the groundwork to paint a picture of King as having become more hard-edged, more the man he thought he had to be for them to solve this case. The captain’s body language shifted during the trip as King laid out this new version of himself. Or maybe it was just the story’s momentum taking hold, wrapping the captain up in this new version of the narrative.

  Their shoes and boots crunched on fresh-packed snow as they approached the crime scene, the uniformed officers snapping to attention as they noticed the captain approaching.

  “Good morning, Captain,” said a fresh-faced officer, who seemed to have run the scene before the captain arrived. “What brings you out into this weather?”

  “We believe this may be related to the Smith case.” The captain nodded over her shoulder to the Genrenauts. “You remember Mr. King, and this is his associate, Ms. Tang.”

  The officer nodded. “Mr. King.”

  “Officer Rodriguez.”

  “It’s Sergeant now, actually.”

  King offered a handshake of congratulation, and then followed the captain under the police line to the scene. There wasn’t much there. Some blood in the snow, marked with a numbered tent-stand. There was an indentation in the snow around the blood, the place where DeeZee had fallen. A dusting of fresh snow covered the packed base, filling in the indentation without altering its shape. Nearby, the snow was melted in a splatter pattern. The edges were stained brown, a cup-holder and two spent coffee cups nearby with their own evidence tent.

  Living in the Upper Midwest, Leah had learned to read snow. Some days, that was all there was to do. She never expected it to come in handy for work.

  The senior Genrenaut crouched down by the blood spatter, looked from the blood up and away.

  “Judging from the silhouette and the blood splatter, I bet we’re looking at a shooter from the roof. One of those two buildings,” he said, pointing to a pair of two-story buildings behind Lake Effect, sharing the same alley. Both granted a clear view of the alley.

  “How can you tell that just from a splatter of blood?”

  “I’ve been doing this for a long time. Like I said, expectations for CSI evidence have been corrupted by the stories. Another team was on the beat, couldn’t patch the breach well enough. So now it’s been building over time, and now Earth Prime has unrealistic forensic expectations for real cases, real trials; they’re through the roof. But here, we can get all the detail we need.”

  “That’s a why explanation, not a how.”

  “The way the blood comes off the body tells you how fast it hit and lets me guess at where. Also, I see an indentation in the snow on the lips of the roofs of the buildings, there and there.”

  King pointed up, and Leah squinted, shielding her eyes from the drifting snow picked up and whirled around by the wind.

  “Yeah, but how do we know that was the shooter?”

  “Hunches, kid.” King stomped down the alley, giving a wide berth to the evidence tents. “And decades of training.”

  Leah followed King up a fire escape and onto the roof. “What are you looking for now, boss?” She remembered her role and kept spitballing. “Clue particles? Recollections of old cases that I weave together to create a web of speculation and unsubstantiated claims that we use to catch the criminals until they screw themselves over by confessing? Will we have to torture people here? I’m not down with that. Just because TV shows do it…”

  “That’s enough, rookie. And watch where you’re stepping.” King held an arm out to stop Leah from wandering forward. She stepped back and matched his gaze, looking down at a hole in the blanket of snow. It had been mussed at the edges.

  “What’s this?”

  “Spent casing. It discharged from the gun and arced into the snow.” King shuffled sideways, still eyeballing the hole. “Which means that the killer fired from about…here.” He said, pointing to a space with powder over packed snow.

  King kept going. “The tracks here are layered, so the shooter was here for a while. They were disciplined, didn’t pace, but in this weather, even someone trained would need to keep moving to stay warm.”

  “Can we pull tread prints or something from this? Get a shovel and pull the whole sheet of ice out, put it in a flat-bed cooler, and haul it off to the CSI techs?”

  “More comedy speculation on top of the banter,” King said. “We need to play up the archetypes more.”

  “Aye aye, cap’n. So, this scene is about a would-be killer so dedicated that they wait in the cold. What are they thinking while they’re waiting? Maybe they’re smoking, they’ve got to be doing something with their hands. If they don’t smoke, no cigarettes around, right, and they’ve got medium-sized feet, wearing what, boots of some sort? The heel there looks pretty prominent, but it’s a smaller heel. It’s a woman! Totally a woman’s boot imprint.”

  “Very good. Keep going.”

  Leah got to pacing, talking with her hands like she’d seen from a dozen different wacky TV investigators. “So, our would-be killer was chilling up here. Either waiting for DeeZee or waiting for someone else, and got spotted, maybe? Crime of opportunity and necessity. What’s the official term?”

  “It would be a crime of necessity. Opportunity would be if our shooter already wanted to kill them and got an unexpected chance. But if she was here waiting for someone, maybe Smith’s killer, then DeeZee walked by, spotted her as she hid. He started to pursue, knowing as a PI that he could get away with trespassing onto a crime scene if it were in pursuit of a suspect…”

  “Is that legal?”

  “No, but it’s in-genre for his type of PI.”

  “This scene makes me think Mob hit. How do we approach it if the mob’s involved? Do we get to go eat Italian in a dimly lit restaurant, keeping our backs to the wall and having tense, super-subtextual conversations with dudes in three-piece suits over red wine while trying to avoid spilling red sauce on our fancy clothes? I didn’t bring fancy clothes.”

  Leah looked over and saw that King had started down the fire escape, leaving her to vamp.

  He called up after her. “We’ll get to the Mob later. For now, we interview the chef and his staff, confirm alibis, et cetera.”

  Leah rubbed her arms as she stepped down onto the fire escape. “Anything to get out of this cold.”


  Being in this region, she felt like she had a bull’s-eye painted on her back. Being here too long could make a body paranoid. For good reason. Apparently, you never knew when you were going to go from detective to victim.

  * * *

  The inside restaurant was way upscale, wearing its class trappings with pride—black-and-white photographs, massive wine selection displayed in glass-covered lacquered racks, and more.

  Executive Chef Adnan Refai greeted them as Sergeant Rodriguez walked them in. Refai was a slim Middle Eastern man, probably late forties, a dash of gray in his pulled-back hair. He wore a charcoal suit with a burgundy-collared shirt, and had two earrings in his left ear. He was slick without coming off as smarmy. But maybe that was just the grief. He looked pained, shocked, eyes still wide.

  “Thank you for coming so quickly. It’s…it’s horrible. First Dwayne, and now DeeZee…Is he going to make it?”

  King repeated what Rodriguez had told them, positioning himself as the authority in the situation. “We haven’t heard back from the hospital, but paramedics said that he should make it.”

  They walked back into the kitchen. All but empty, it felt hollow. And the body on the floor made it all the worse.

  Dwayne Smith was burned all around, and the room smelled foul, even with industrial-grade cleaner. He’d been white-guy pasty once. Not anymore. Now he was charred.

  “You said you found him in the oven?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t bear to leave him like that. But I wore gloves. He was my right hand, Detective. A good man. Not always the easiest to get along with, but gifted. Innovative.”

  Leah tried not to retch.

  Tried.

  And failed.

  She looked around, desperate for something to hurl on that wasn’t incredibly expensive kitchen equipment.

  Fortunately, there was a bucket.