The Easytown Box Set

by Brian Parker

  “Ah,” I replied, tapping the right side of my head. “Shoulda remembered. The composite alloys up here play havoc with cheaper scanning devices.” I shrugged in mock helplessness. “But it keeps my brain from oozing out of my head, so I kinda need it.”

  “Damn, what did you get into?” Sergeant Jackson asked.

  “A redhead,” I deadpanned, referring to Sadie, the clone who’d helped me break the politician cloning case. “Angry she-devils. Pro tip: stay away from ’em.”

  The scanner tech frowned at me and shook her head. Too late, I realized she had red hair too.

  Charming to the end.

  FIVE: FRIDAY

  “Start talking, Corrigan,” I said, looking down at the monster in the bed.

  Drake and I had done a number on this guy. His massive bare chest had bandages over at least a dozen small caliber bullet holes, his left arm was—well, his left arm sat on a hovertray beside me—and they had a giant valve-type bandage over the hole where his lung used to be. Damn, I loved that Aegis. Tubes snaked out of him at various places. There was a tube up his nose for oxygen, an IV line into his arm, a large drainage tube through the intercostal muscles along his ribcage on the side with the damaged lung, and he had a catheter line running up under the sheet. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  They even took the time to shave away his mop of dreadlocks. Maybe Sabatier wasn’t as bad of a place as I remembered.

  This part of the prison island’s hospital ward was three parts prison and only one part medical facility. A set of inch-and-a-half thick vertical metal bars encircled each bed and treatment area. Guards accompanied the doctors and nurses at all times; no one was allowed to be alone with the patients—both for the safety of the care providers and to keep an unhealthy bond from forming between patient and staff. Sympathetic clinic staff had helped too many inmates escape at other prisons. That was closely monitored here.

  Branch’s eyes fluttered open slightly, widened in recognition and then closed again. “I’m tired, man,” he rumbled. Even with only one functioning lung and tubes crammed up his nose, the cyborg’s voice sounded like an avalanche of rocks rolling down a mountain.

  “I don’t care. I need intel on who’s running these chop shops. Wake up or I’ll wake you up.”

  He laughed at me and tried to turn over, but the restraints held him firmly in place. “I need my rest to heal if I’m gonna show up in court to claim police brutality.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” I said, snapping a large ammonia capsule and holding it under the cyborg’s nose.

  He thrashed his head to one side and I followed with the capsule. This little game went on for ten seconds until he finally blurted out, “Okay! I’ll talk to you. What is it, goddamn it?”

  “Language, inmate,” Sergeant Jackson cautioned.

  “Fuck you, screw.”

  I smirked at his use of the old-time term for a prison guard. Had to give the guy some credit, not many people used that anymore, mostly I heard things like dickhole, vagina trumpet, and the ever-popular motherfucker.

  “Alright, Corrigan. Knock that shit off.” I tapped a button on the hovertray and it floated up to my chest height. I lifted the back end so that it tilted toward the ’borg and he could see what I had with me. “Recognize this?”

  He thrashed against his restraints and the mechanical nub sticking out of his shoulder wiggled back and forth pathetically. “That’s mine.”

  “It was yours. Now it’s mine. Who’s running the chop shops that are creating the cyborgs?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Bullshit. I want to know where these things are coming from.”

  “Most of us were enforcers for the dealers. Best way to keep the synthaine dripping is to take out the competition. It worked at first, now everybody has ’em and we spend more time fighting each other than dealing.”

  “So… You regret becoming a cyborg, then?”

  “No, but the money is drying up from the synthaine. Dealers are trying to hit other dealers to score a quick win instead of just selling their own shit. They spend more money on their ’borgs than they do on the product. It’s just bad for business, man.”

  “A businessman. I can respect that,” I lied. I couldn’t respect anything about the man, but I’d say just about anything to get the perp to talk to me. “If the ’borgs are bad for business, why do the dealers keep financing to get them made?”

  “You wanna be the only one left without protection when someone like me comes to take your stash?”

  “Is that what you did over on Snapdragon back in February?” I asked, trying to tie up an old loose end.

  “Snapdragon?”

  “Yeah. Drug house, there was a woman named Janie Kelso, a bunch of kids’ shit, and several of these.” I held up a single round of disc ammunition. “Janie was cut clean in half and whoever did it rooted around her corpse to pull the evidence. Most of the discs were collected up, but I found some…” I trailed off to let him pick up the story.

  He shrugged his shoulders and the nub went straight out to the side. “Eh. I kill a lot of people. If those were there, then it was either me or a couple other guys.”

  I have got to get a prescription of whatever drugs they have this guy on for other interrogations, I told myself, making a mental note to check the charts.

  “How many people have you killed?”

  “I don’t know… Do I get a lawyer or something?”

  “Do you want a lawyer?” I asked. “Andi, show me the available public defenders that Mr. Corrigan could expect if he were assigned one right now.”

  I placed my phone on the bedside table and it projected the holographic images of four goofy-looking white guys and one black female into the air above it. “These are your current choices,” I said. “Who’s it gonna be?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Branch asked, staring at the image. “None of ’em are old enough to buy cigarettes.”

  “Well, that’s what you get with public defenders. Most of them use that job as a starting point right after law school. You have the right to an attorney and we can wait until somebody can make it out here…” I let it hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Or, we could skip it and you tell me who’s behind all of this.” I paused for effect. “Even better, we could see about you turning state’s witness, possibly get a reduced sentence and then try to become a contributing member of society after you get out.”

  “Uh.”

  “So, if you were to become a state’s witness,” I pressed, knowing that I was on shaky legal ground since I couldn’t offer him the deal; it had to come from an attorney with a judge’s backing. This meeting, like everything else on Sabatier, was being recorded. I needed to pick my words carefully and not commit to anything. “How many people would you say you killed?”

  “I don’t know,” Corrigan replied. “More than forty.”

  I tempered my emotions purposefully. “That’s a lot.”

  He chuckled. “I’m trying to catch up to your record.”

  “I haven’t killed that many criminals,” I replied.

  “Are you sure about that?” he asked, lifting slightly from the bed. “Word on the street is you’re a stone cold killer.”

  “Did you kill Janie Kelso in February?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  Good enough for me, I thought. Maybe I could close out some of those unsolved cases back at the precinct.

  “The night I shot you, what—”

  “Lucky bastard,” he interrupted. “I was going to wipe my ass with your corpse.”

  “You missed an opportunity then. The night I shot you, what were you doing at Dale Henderson’s apartment building?”

  “Who the fuck is Dale Henderson?”

  “He was a doorman at Liquid Genesis and one of your little saw blades was found in his neck.”

  “That homo club? I don’t go to places like that, man. I plant my root in wet, juicy pussy, not d
udes’ assholes.”

  I wondered how often Branch had practiced that little speech about his ‘planting his root’ and waited for an opportunity to use it. “Okay, that’s fine. To each their own. What were you doing at that apartment building when you attacked us—unprovoked?”

  “I was looking for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t like where this is going. I want a lawyer, even if it is one of those pencil-dicked fuckholes you showed me.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You admitted to killing around forty people, but when I asked you about what you were doing at an apartment, you clam up. What’s that about, Corrigan?”

  “I just decided that I want a lawyer.”

  I sighed. This just got a lot more complicated. I’d have to schedule an interrogation with whomever the judge assigned to defend the cyborg, and now this trip was a waste.

  “Andi, let the Public Defender’s office know that Mr. Corrigan has requested an attorney. I’ll need to schedule an appointment with them as soon as they’re identified by the judge.”

  I looked down at him. “Okay, my assistant will notify the court that you’ve requested council. We’re done until I can speak to you with your lawyer present.”

  His rumbling laugh caused the entire bed to shake. “Hell, if I’d known that’s all it took to make you shut up, I’d have lawyered up the moment you came in here. I need my beauty rest.”

  “Yeah, you sure do, you ugly son of a bitch.”

  The return ferry was running late due to some rough waves in Chandeleur Sound, so I wasn’t able to return Corrigan’s weapon arm to the evidence locker before I had to rush over to Xavier University in Gert Town for Teagan’s graduation. I phoned the precinct and left a message with the evidence locker staff telling them I got delayed and wouldn’t be able to return the piece until the late afternoon.

  I tried Teagan’s line one more time and she still didn’t answer. “Screw it,” I grumbled, tossing the phone angrily into the Jeep’s passenger seat.

  The girl was pissed off. I get it, I’m a shitty boyfriend, always on the clock, kept unpredictable office hours and had a habit of missing important events because of my job. Not my fault, and she knew all that going in.

  As the Jeep drove toward downtown, I thought about all the events I’d missed since we started dating. Her graduation dinner, date nights, the party for her and Rebecca when they passed the state’s educator certification exams for senior high school, I’d even missed my own birthday dinner that she planned for me. It was a lot. If I was being honest with myself, more than half of them, I could have made. I didn’t always need to be out on an investigation; some things could have waited a few hours. Avery called it when this whole thing started. I was a shitty person who wasn’t emotionally ready for a relationship.

  My self-assessment was sobering to say the least. It’s one thing to have others tell you that you’re an asshole, but entirely different when you come to the realization that you’re actually a terrible human being.

  God, I could use a drink.

  The Jeep dropped me off at the Convocation Academic Center along Washington Avenue. I had four minutes to make it inside, find a seat and see Teagan graduate. If I missed this, she’d kill me—probably literally, not figuratively.

  Luckily, Xavier was a small school. The basketball arena only had forty or fifty rows of seats surrounding the floor. Finding a seat wasn’t too difficult. I had time to take my coat off and set it on the floor at my feet and then their God-awful school alma mater began playing over the loudspeakers as the graduates began to walk in from either side of the rows of chairs in the center of the court below. When they got to their assigned row, they turned into their row and filed through to their seats.

  I scanned the graduates rapidly, not seeing Teagan. “Andi,” I whispered. “Download the graduation program to my phone.”

  I waited, tapping my fingers on my leg impatiently. Finally, it came up and I scrolled to the list of graduates. It took a moment, but I found Teagan’s name. I must have missed her, I thought, settling back into my chair for the commencement speech, which was sure to be a snooze fest.

  I spent the first several minutes trying to match the graduate in the chair with the name in the program, but quickly abandoned it as futile. The speaker took a full forty minutes to deliver her remarks. She hit the highlights of the school’s proud lineage as a historically black college and the graduates’ place in that shared history, as well as the parts about going out and making a difference in the world. She even tossed a few slurs toward the Mecca of Sin, Easytown, and cautioned the graduates to stay away from places with such reputations and realities.

  Finally, the speech was over and next on the agenda was the commencement where the graduates received their symbolic diplomas. The real ones would arrive by courier droid in a few hours as long as they didn’t do anything to ruin the ceremony.

  The graduates were called to shake the university president’s hand in alphabetical order. I watched as more than three hundred names were called and then they finally made it to the names that began with the letter ‘T’. Teagan Thibodaux was the twenty-third graduate in the T’s, so I counted backward along the line to see her. Still nothing. The girl that I thought was her had green hair poking out from under her square hat. It was hard to tell, though, as graduates shifted from foot to foot and shuffled forward.

  Then it was Teagan’s turn to walk across the stage and the announcer said, “Glory Thiess.”

  What?

  I glanced at the program. Glory Thiess was the girl behind Teagan. She wasn’t at the ceremony.

  Grumbles of complaint and telling me to wait until the ceremony was over filled my ears as I surged upward and jogged along the concourse at the top of the stairs. I tried Teagan’s number again and there still wasn’t an answer.

  “Andi, call Teagan’s mother.”

  “I don’t have that number, Zach,” she answered.

  “Bullshit,” I said, bursting through the doors to the outside. “Send the Jeep to pick me up. Andi, go through your logs, find some time when Teagan called her mother from inside the apartment and analyze the touch tones.”

  “It may take me a few minutes.”

  “I don’t care, just do it.” The rain had increased and poured down in great sheets while I waited under a large pedestrian rain shield.

  My mind began to kick into overdrive. I’d busted a lot of very bad people over the years. It wasn’t impossible to get messages out of Sabatier; did someone from inside have Teagan kidnapped? Or was it some of Ortega’s people in retaliation for his death? Was it possible that a leftover crony of Mayor Cantrell had offed her? We hadn’t been overt in our relationship, but she did live with me, so if any of my enemies had managed to figure out where I lived, it wasn’t a far stretch to think they could also figure out who she was.

  The Jeep’s headlights cut through the deluge and I hopped into the passenger seat, choosing the closest door over the need for control. The Jeep’s speakers began to ring hollowly, letting me know that Andi was placing an outgoing call.

  “Hello, Detective Forrest,” a woman answered.

  “Hi, Dhamiria,” I said, familiar enough with Teagan’s mother who was only a few years older than me. “I just left Teagan’s graduation ceremony, she wasn’t there. I’ve been trying—”

  “I know, Zach,” Dhamiria interrupted. “She informed us of her decision not to attend the graduation last night.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I—She told me not to tell you.”

  “I’m a cop, Dhamiria. I can file a missing person’s report and have the city scoured for her. I’ll find her, wherever she is.”

  “Zach,” Andi cut in.

  “I’m talking with Teagan’s mother.”

  “I know,” Andi continued. “However, there are two collection droids requesting entry into the apartment to secure Teagan Thibodaux’s personal items.”

  “Dhami
ria, my AI just told me that there are two droids at my apartment,” I said. “They’re collecting Teagan’s things. This is spinning out of control over a misunderstanding.”

  “Zach,” her voice cracked. “Believe me, when she told her father and I where she was going, we were very upset as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have hurt her greatly. She chose to leave the country. She flew to Indonesia this morning.”

  “Indonesia?” My mind couldn’t process what Dhamiria said. Why the hell would she go to that backward shithole? It was less than a third-world country, if there were such a classification. The people were in constant danger of succumbing to famine, disease, and war. It was worse than New Orleans could ever be.

  Finally, I settled on, “Why?”

  “She accepted a position teaching English at the Jesuit school in Jakarta. She tried to find information about going to Europe, but they use droids to teach students. Only the Southeast Asia countries still pay to import teachers from the West.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Please, Zach. She begged me not to tell you where she was going, but I didn’t feel that was the right thing to do to you. In time, she’ll learn that you cannot simply cease to be the person you were—and abandoning those you left behind, leaving them wondering about you is not proper. Teagan will be fine. Maybe some distance is all she needed.”

  “Uh… Mmm hmm,” I mumbled. “Okay, thank you for telling me.”

  I hung up the call and stared blankly out the windshield. I was a complete and utter fuck-up and I’d caused that girl to ruin her life. She was throwing away a golden opportunity to teach here in New Orleans in favor of escaping from me.

  I needed a drink, I said aloud to nobody. “Take me to Matilda’s on The Lane,” I muttered to the Jeep.

  I needed several drinks…

  SIX: FRIDAY

  “Another one,” I slurred.

  “Mr. Forrest,” the droid behind the bar leaned forward in a semblance of someone wanting to talk without being overheard. “You have had five double bourbons. I am no longer required to provide alcohol to you. Please, go home and have a good Friday night.”