Rock, holding out a lit match, blinked twice at the line, unusually long for a fight scene. Murdoc ignored the flame and loomed over Kimrean again.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The brown and green eyes looked away from his face, revolted. The frail throat almost rebelled at the smell. The lipless mouth smirked, grateful for that perfectly timed villain question.
“It means I never needed the ace.”
Which Kimrean proved by showing the ace was still in their waistcoat pocket and bringing it to Murdoc’s eyes. All of it in one-twelfth of a second.
In fact, the edge of the card sliced Murdoc’s cornea.
Just as the villain jerked back, Kimrean’s left hand gripped the cord and flailed the toaster against the neckless thug’s head, the burning match flying out of his grasp. Murdoc leaned forward again, ready to unload the Uzi point-blank into Kimrean’s brain, while Kimrean swung the toaster again into the air. Over the ceiling fan.
The cord got caught in the rotating blades, winding Murdoc up by the neck, lifting him just as the still-burning match landed in the stream of bourbon on the floor.
—
DEMOINES
The bourbon from…Oh, right.
(beat)
Did you even know it would land there?
KIMREAN
I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I just hope the other guy does.
—
It was a blazing red-hot August morning.
The ceiling fan did its best to hoist a full-grown, chain-smoking, midlevel gang lord upward and counterclockwise.
A Milky Way of toxic saliva droplets trailed off the nine-inch tongue wrung out of his mouth.
His clenched finger strangled the Uzi’s trigger, bullets pulsing out of the barrel drawing a perfect logarithmic spiral.
Rock staggered back toward the door, into the predicted trajectory of a bullet.
The sixth round clicked inside the chamber of the forgotten revolver that Gravel had retrieved near the window.
Blue flames ran up the stream of alcohol across the room, flowing right under the propane canister in the kitchenette, and A. Z. Kimrean, sprinting ahead of the flames, gazed over the chessboard on the way to the window and, as they passed, moved a black pawn to c3.
“Oooh yeah! Let’s see you get out of that one.”
* * *
—
And then time resumed, and Murdoc completed a full revolution on the fan, and an Uzi bullet went right into Rock’s skull, and Gravel aimed the revolver at the charging private eye, and the propane bottle exploded, and Kimrean rammed against the revolver and the thug and the window behind him and crashed through it, inches ahead of the deflagration trailing them out into the blue sky.
In the time it took to free fall down three stories, wind slapping their faces at 9.81 m/s2, Kimrean clambered on the thug, all the way screaming, “My turn on top, baaaaaaaaaaaabe!”
Three hundred thirty-five pounds of combined weight dropped on the roof of the police car that had just parked in front of the building, sinking its blaring siren and flashing lights beneath the dashboard, where the neckless thug stayed, while Kimrean bounced off the flesh-and-broken-bones sack, flipped six times in the air, and landed faceup on the road two steps away from the incoming Powell-Hyde cable car whose driver jammed on the brakes until sparks welded the brake pad to the wheel and pulled the juggernaut to a full stop just as the front right wheel was literally rolling on top of a strand of Kimrean’s hair.
Two policemen crawled out of the cruiser, shaking the broken glass from their eyes. The thug lay buried in the hood, fused with the engine. Smoke and no flames billowed out of the third-floor window.
On the pavement, Kimrean stared dead at the underside of the cable car and at a slice of morning sky beyond, mentally roll-calling all four limbs spread on the asphalt and checking on a wallowing—but still intact—spinal cord.
And then they burst into maniac laughter.
1
Carlyle smashed the receiver on the phone, bit down on a cigar, whatted away some guy who had just knocked on his door, did something else that deputy police chiefs do, though in an unnecessarily violent manner, and rounded on the other person in the room.
“What’s the word from Mojave?”
The other person was Lieutenant Greggs, homicide detective.
“We left him a message. Still no word,” she said from her corner near the file cabinet. Then, looking up from the linoleum: “Sir, they’re our best chance.”
“We’re the San Francisco Police Department,” Carlyle grunted. “We do not outsource.”
“Precisely because we’re the police, there are things we can’t do. They can.”
Carlyle Hindenburged into his chair, chugging out black smoke like a coal refinery. He knew Greggs believed in Dirty Harry types: passionately homicidal cops who skip over the chain of command and bend rules for the greater good. She saw these lone wolves as a necessary stopgap for an imperfect system. Maybe she had dreamed of being the first lone wolf on the force since Harry Callahan minted the role, but the truth was she believed in that kind of officer only in theory; she knew the difficulties it posed to try to be one, especially for a first-generation African American woman. It was obvious to her that white males were given much more leeway: when she tried the same approach to police work it took only three days to earn her first disciplinary action, with Carlyle doing the whole I’ll take your badge and weapon routine in that very office. To this day she still indulged in the odd reckless behavior or merited a reprimand for breaking the occasional rapist’s arm in more pieces than could be fixed, but no one considered her a rogue officer. And unlike the white male lone wolves, she was a parent too, so facing gunmen without backup or a suspension without pay was no laughing matter. But she still believed in creative workarounds to the rules, or she wouldn’t be in Carlyle’s office right now.
Carlyle squished the cigar in his ashtray, or somewhere in its suburbs.
“Where’s that wonder duo now?”
“Demoines is taking their statement,” Greggs said. She considered adding something else at that point but she bit her lip. It was better to wait.
Carlyle interlaced his sausagy fingers and leaned back in his chair, framed by the bright city skyline behind his desk like a late-night talk show host. To his right, a map of the Bay Area hung voodooed by a hundred colored pins. The pins were part of a case closed in 1975, but they were kept there to reinforce the impression that a lot of work got done in that office. Carlyle himself stayed fat, hypertensive, and divorced for the same purpose.
“All right,” he puffed, slapping some indiscriminate object on his desk. “Let’s go see them.”
Greggs reined in a victory gesture. The hardest part—towing Carlyle out of his office—had been accomplished.
* * *
—
They stepped out into the bullpen, spread out under cigarette fog and fluorescent lights. Jacketless cops pulled their feet off their desks or hurried through personal phone calls as the party of two walked past their cubicles, Carlyle filling both lanes of the hallway and forcing the mail boys to take alternate routes. The low-tar air teemed with analog phone rings and yapping typewriters.
At an intersection, they caught sight of Detective Ted Demoines, from the Narcotic and Vice Division. He did not see them, but the guy behind him did. At first glance, Carlyle dismissed him as a lingering detainee from some raid at the harbor on the night shift: nothing to shock a veteran officer, although there was something about that skinny, overexplicit body that made the chief scowl. Perhaps it was his bearing, or the way he moved like an emaciated marionette. On instinct, Carlyle checked the ceiling for the operator’s strings. His clothes (somehow not enough to fully dress the wearer) were all in black and white: tight pants, a t
ank top, and a silly little waistcoat, open. His hair reminded Carlyle of hay, and his face of a carnival in Venice. He seemed to be speaking to Demoines, complaining about some handcuffs (his wrists were not cuffed), when he halted upon seeing Greggs—more accurately, the head stopped first, then the rest of the body followed—and immediately changed directions to greet her.
“Gre-e-e-eggs!”
He hugged her like French people hug on train platforms. Greggs didn’t seem off-put; she patted the marionette’s back like she would an overexcited dog.
“Hello, Zooey, hello.” Then she pushed him away a little, as if to reckon how much he had grown, but she only said, in a different tone, “Adrian.”
“Lieutenant,” the marionette replied, solemnly. “How’s the kid?”
“Fine. Thanks for faking interest.”
“The handcuffs on Green Teeth Murdoc—they’re mine, I want them back!” he whined, pointing at Demoines, who had joined them.
“I’ll tell the morgue,” Greggs promised. “We need to talk. Care to come into my office?”
Carlyle noticed the marionette registering him out of the corner of its eye—a furtive golden-brown eye, half hidden behind a sideswept bang. The rest of the mannequin didn’t speak to or acknowledge him, but that spying pupil made him feel exposed, naked. Something neither he nor anyone on that floor cared to imagine.
He followed Greggs and Demoines and the marionette into a smaller office than his own. A few Himalayas of case files and manila envelopes stood tall in the perimeter of the room. An overpopulated corkboard on one wall and several swarms of sticky notes here and there gave the impression that even more work got done here, which incidentally was also true. The lieutenant started vacating furniture; the marionette seized the first available seat.
“We missed you,” said Greggs. “So nice of you to come see us.”
“I know,” the marionette said, mouth wide open like one of Jim Henson’s Muppets. “I could’ve come earlier, but I was in a ladyboy all week.” There was a pause for laughs, but Greggs wasn’t listening, Demoines barely needed to suppress a chuckle, and Carlyle had nothing to suppress. The marionette sat staring at the last with strangely disjointed eyes, legs obscenely spread apart. “I meant to say I was having sex with her. Not that she’d swallowed me whole. (Pointing at Carlyle’s belly.) As you seem capable of doing.”
Carlyle scratched his middle chin, then queried Greggs, who had finished emptying seats, and Demoines. The latter had nestled in a corner, arms crossed, and would say nothing. He was blond, a Quebecker, and exasperatingly timid.
“So?” the chief prompted. “Do the P.I.s come after the drag queen’s routine or what?”
There was a sort of Mexican standoff of dodgy stares. Greggs’s and Demoines’s seemed to drift toward the marionette, who now appeared to be wildly interested in the fluvial system of veins in his arm.
The synaptic spark made Carlyle wince. “No way. This Tinker Bell is a P.I.?”
The Tinker Bell in question bent in a silent Harpo Marx laugh.
“Sir, he’s got experience—tons of it,” Greggs jumped in. “He’s run his own practice in North Beach for quite some time.”
“Four days,” the marionette refined, brimming with pride.
“He had others before this one,” Demoines assisted.
“Where were you four days ago?” Carlyle inquired.
“Green Teeth Murdoc’s poker night.”
“And before that?”
“Claymoore.”
“Claymoore, as in Claymoore Psychiatric Hospital?”
The marionette nodded its big, lolling head.
The chief fell silent. It was only eleven a.m., and already he was regretting not being hit by a trolley on the way to work.
“Okay. Where’s the other one?”
Greggs bit her lip again.
DEMOINES: (Pointing at the marionette.) It’s…(Beat.) It’s him as well.
GREGGS: Her.
DEMOINES: Them.
Now the marionette looked bored.
Carlyle sat in silence for a while and then rose and snapped his fingers.
“Outside. Now.”
They left the P.I. wrapped like a boa constrictor around the rotating desk chair; they could still see him/her/them through the window.
Carlyle closed the door and shot a .44 Magnum index finger at his subordinates: “Forget that PC bullshit and someone tell me who the fuck that clown is.”
Greggs volunteered for the first round. “Sir, it’s…Look, you know how a fetus grows in the mother’s womb? Sometimes, if two blastocytes merge—”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Lieutenant?!”
“Wait, Chief, it’s easier than that,” Demoines interceded, waving the conversation back to a civil volume. “You know about conjoined twins? Babies joined at the torso, or two bodies splitting out of one pair of legs?”
“Road show freaks,” Carlyle summed up.
“Yeah, in Dust Bowl–era lingo, but yes,” Demoines conceded. “Okay, now picture conjoined twins that share every part of one body. Not only one torso, but one head, two arms, two legs…But they’re still two people.”
He gestured toward the window like a zoo guide pointing at the aquarium. Inside, the marionette sat idly feeling their earlobe with a stapler while studying the conspiracy mural on Greggs’s corkboard.
Carlyle suggested, “So, he’s got split personality?”
“No,” Greggs refuted. “Split personality is a psychiatric disorder, and as a matter of fact, virtually every studied case has been ruled a hoax. Kimrean doesn’t have split personality; they are two people. It’s called genetic chimerism: looks like one individual, but it’s actually a mosaic organism made up of two people’s cells, each with its own DNA. Two siblings. In one body.”
Carlyle watched the fish in the aquarium. A soft undulation of ribs could be discerned under the armpits. He got the uncanny impression that the scant clothes didn’t actually hide anything, that beneath them the marionette would be all smooth like a Barbie. Or a Ken.
“In a man’s body, or a woman’s?”
“Well…” Greggs began, and hesitated again, this time almost splicing her lip open.
“Both,” Demoines said. “They’re brother and sister.”
Carlyle turned from the glass, dragging a hand over the scalp that several mornings like this one had contributed to despoil.
Demoines went on, if only to shorten the pain: “The funny thing about Kimrean is that most genetic chimeras are not proportional. It happens throughout the animal kingdom: your arm or your pancreas may actually belong to a twin brother who fused with you before the embryo stage. You, Greggs, me—any of us here could be a mosaic, and we wouldn’t know. For practical, psychological, legal purposes, we are only one person: the one who owns the brain, the one who is self-aware. But Kimrean is a bit of an oddity.”
“You don’t say,” the chief retorted.
Greggs tagged herself back in: “In Kimrean, their brain is shared as well. Each sibling owns a half. They both have self-awareness, a voice, and control over their body.”
“Relatively speaking,” Demoines said. “It’s…like having a pilot and a copilot.”
“More like two pilots fighting for the throttle.”
“As far as we know, Adrian holds the left hemisphere, the analytic brain. He has an IQ over one eighty, photographic memory, encyclopedic culture…He’s the internet with Asperger’s syndrome.”
“Zooey is the right hemisphere, the creative brain. She paints, writes, composes, plays several instruments…She’s also hyperactive, a nymphomaniac, and an addict to every substance she’s tried once.”
Beyond the glass, Carlyle watched the subject, or subjects, pushing off the floor and spinning on Greggs’s chair like a top, arms and legs sprea
d out. After nine or ten full spins, they collapsed on the floor, toppling a couple of Doric columns of case files on their way down.
When Carlyle finished massaging his brow, he was six months older than the last time he’d spoken.
“We are about to close the biggest joint narcotics op in twenty years. We are working with another sixteen law enforcement agencies. We’ve got the executed son of a drug lord, an impending gangland world war…not to mention an undercover officer sitting like a duck in the middle of Pearl Harbor. And your solution is to bring in this…(Points at the glass.) These…This pair of screwballs?”
A few nearby paper pushers who were distractedly eavesdropping on the conversation gravely pondered the question.
“Actually, we want to bring in Adrian,” Demoines pointed out. “Zooey just comes in the package.”
Greggs stepped forward: “Sir, I know they seem…” She stopped, restarted: “Okay, are—they are weird. But I know them, Mojave knows them, half this department knows them. They’re the best. And their…singularity, so to speak, is an advantage. Lyon badly needs a detective, but he’ll want no business with anyone remotely seeming to represent the law. And you know the P.I.s in the Bay Area—trench coats, suspenders, they walk into a bar and people ask them how’s the new Dick Tracy film going. A.Z. doesn’t have that issue. His—I mean, their—appearance, their demeanor, everything about them is so unconventional, the last thing anyone thinks is that they’re a private eye.”
“Private eyes,” Demoines fixed. “The grammar’s a little tricky.”
An officer interrupted to announce a phone call for Lieutenant Greggs. She sneaked into a cubicle; Carlyle and Demoines stood by, gazing at the aquarium.
“You really want to use this nutjob,” Carlyle said. It was not a question, more like a vain attempt to persuade himself.
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