“Sir, had I known they were back in business, I would’ve called them myself. They’re a gift from above. Quite literally—there’s a wrecked cruiser outside that can bear witness to that.”
“Of all the P.I.s in the Bay Area…”
“Chief, do you have any brothers or sisters?” Demoines actually waited for an answer; Carlyle passed. “I am the fourth of five. Let me tell you: God, or Mother Nature, or whatever there is, didn’t create siblings to keep us company. It did to make us compete and succeed at each other’s expense. Adrian Kimrean has spent all his life, from the very first minute, since before the first minute, competing against Zooey. Fighting for a body of his own, for a life of his own. They are both compelled to be the best at everything they do.”
“But…why P.I.s?” Carlyle moaned.
“I’m not sure. Adrian sees it as a purely intellectual craft. And Zooey likes the aesthetic cliché, I guess.”
“I hate clichés,” Police Deputy Chief Carlyle grunted, scratching his big belly and biting on a hapless doughnut that was grazing near the water cooler. “No way am I bringing that clown into this mess.”
“Sir.” It was Greggs, pulling a handset from the phone in the next cubicle. “Mojave.”
Carlyle snatched the receiver from her. “Danny. Good work, son. Listen to me, you give the signal, I can pull you out of there in one hour, okay? Soon as—”
He cut himself off, as if something unexpected or viscous was pouring out of the handset. Out of focus, Greggs gave Demoines a conspiratorial nod.
“Danny, you’re not thinking clearly,” Carlyle said.
It was the last full sentence he would be able to squeeze into the conversation. He babbled a couple promises, said good-bye, and handed the phone back to Greggs. He laid a hand on the aquarium glass.
“He wants him,” he mumbled. “Them.”
On the other side, the grinning marionette waved.
* * *
—
All three cops marched back into Greggs’s office, hands in their pockets.
“Okay,” the chief said, brushing up on his apologetic tone. “Your agents here told me you’re a regular sleuth. Two sleuths, as it happens.”
“A sleuth and his comedy sidekick, all in one,” Kimrean rephrased, neutral.
“Yes, I heard it’s a little…complex.”
The heterochromatic eyes were still unsettling, but somehow he knew to address the golden-brown one. The green one, half veiled by the bangs, gazed in the same direction, shone just as brightly, but somehow seemed permanently distracted.
“I apologize about the language before. The Tinker Bell thing, I mean.”
“Oh, it’s okay. I don’t think much of that PC bullshit either. I too am a bit of a fat, white-privileged, dick-dangling, baby-dipping douchebag that way.”
Greggs, ever the mediator, stepped between Kimrean and the chief before the joke even landed; there was barely any time for turmoil to build up.
“Okay, point made, Zooey. Siddown,” she begged, pushing the contenders apart—those who could be parted, that is.
“It wasn’t me,” Zooey proclaimed naively. “But I agree with everything he said.”
“Adrian, Zooey,” Demoines roll-called. “Maybe we started on the wrong foot here. This is Deputy Chief Llewelyn Carlyle. He needs a favor.”
“I’m not doing anything for the deputy chief,” Kimrean said. “At best, I’ll do it for Danny Mojave.”
That successfully cooled down the tempers. In fact, it flash-froze the room. Carlyle checked Greggs, Demoines, then the brown eye, then the green one, then anything inert in the office that might provide an answer.
“How does he know about Mojave?” he barked. “Only three people outside this room know about him!”
“Plus anyone that walks into this office and notices that the fourth guy from the right in Greggs’s graduation photo on her desk is the same guy on the board in that picture with Victor Lyon, supreme ruler of the San Carnal drug cartel,” Kimrean inserted, pointing at the walls on each side. “In other words, you guys managed to plant a narc in the home of the evil lord who runs San Carnal. The Ciudad Juárez this side of the border. The city where Sudanese war refugees once refused to stay because it didn’t feel safe. Good job. Anyone called dibs on Danny’s condo yet?”
“You been to San Carnal lately?” asked Demoines.
“Naaah,” Kimrean bleated. “Not my kind of town. All glass towers and synthetic lawns. Even the trash cans come in rose gold. It’s like the golf of cities: only appealing to the wealthy and easily challenged.”
“Would…you like to go?”
“You couldn’t drag me there pulling me by my nose hair,” they said, without a hint of irony. “Is that all? Cool; as soon as I get my handcuffs I’ll be on my way.”
Greggs prodded them back to the chair as she approached the corkboard, ready to give the lecture.
“You’re right: we did plant Danny Mojave in the Lyon’s org—and he bloomed. Started undercover among Lyon’s men at the harbor and now he’s practically the old man’s right hand. He’s become the fulcrum of this state-level op to topple the cartel and the whole kleptocracy running San Carnal. We’re weeding out the city. We share intel with DEA, FBI, you name it—but Danny’s still our man. Last spring, Lyon assigned him to his youngest son, Mikey, who’s in line to inherit a third of the family business. Part of the old man’s legacy will be this alliance with the Red Chrysanthemum Clan—the Japanese yakuza that’s spreading in the south, running the local gangs out of L.A.”
“I know all that.”
“Okay, this you may not know: as of this week that alliance is falling apart.” Greggs pointed at some photos brimming off the periphery of the board. They showed a parking lot in the desert, cordoned off with black-and-yellow tape. “Mikey committed a bit of a diplomatic faux pas.”
“Do you usually collect over a hundred bullet casings in a faux pas scene?”
“Sadly, it’s not infrequent for San Carnal. Mikey lost one soldier in the shoot-out: Cuban gunslinger by the name of Tomás Hilfiger. He was left wounded at the scene, died in the hospital.”
“Heh. Tommy Hilfiger? That’s one off my to-do list,” Kimrean said.
“Danny was there when it happened; according to him, it was all a misunderstanding. The Japanese didn’t speak good English.”
“Damn immigrants, coming over here and stealing our crime syndicates.”
“Danny was confident that talks between both clans would resume…until this happened.”
She handed Kimrean a last photograph, one that still hadn’t made it to the board. It had been taken at a crime scene with a phone camera. The man in it bore an evident resemblance to Victor Lyon. Only younger, with higher cheekbones and a broken nose, a burst lip, and an extra orifice in his face. The body lay in a pool of blood, ruining a leopard rug. The right hand rested on the chest, fingers wrapped around the stem of a red flower.
“Mikey Lyon,” Greggs captioned. “Beaten up and shot in his father’s residence, Villa Leona.”
“Breaking and entering plus homicide in San Carnal?” Kimrean exclaimed. “There must be a mistake.”
“The problem,” Greggs resumed, “is that before we find out who did it—”
“The Japanese,” said Kimrean.
“Yeah, well, before we know that—”
“You know, ’cause I just told you: the Japanese.”
“Before we can confirm that,” Greggs italicized, “Lyon is going to retaliate like this was a declaration of war.”
“It was!” Kimrean shouted. “And guess who from!”
“It wasn’t the Japanese.”
That was Carlyle’s line, straight from the back row. He was sitting on the radiator, back against the window. Those had been his first words since the exposition began.
<
br /> Kimrean read the silent agreement in the room, then ventured, “I’m assuming that’s not based off the ruling of the local police inquiry.”
“San Carnal Police is Lyon’s third arm. Or his fourth,” Demoines said. “The whole department is coming down with him.”
“Then how do you know…” Kimrean began, but those five words were enough. They smirked, lipless mouth skewed toward the right side of their face. “No shit. You have a mole inside the yakuza too?”
“Not us—that one’s LAPD, but yes,” Greggs explained. “We’re pooling resources, you see.”
“But their mole could be wrong; there could be rogue soldiers operating on each side,” Kimrean argued, sounding out everyone in the room. “But you don’t believe that. You believe it, but you rather wouldn’t. Because if it’s the yakuza, they just started a gang war.”
No one needed to answer.
Suddenly Kimrean went off in their seat.
“Well, fuck them! You guys said it—another day in San Carnal—who gives a paragliding shit? It’s an artificial oasis for people with broken moral compasses! It’s Sin City in Technicolor, it’s Biff Tannen’s 1985, it’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of California—and I’m saying this from San Fran-fucking-cisco! It’s a money Laundromat, an evil interior designer’s sandbox, a playground for coked-up mortgage brokers and semen-choked spring breakers scripted by Bret Easton Ellis, ruled by John Grisham villains, roamed by SUV-driving Ayn Rand cultists, and sponsored by kingpins, sex traffickers, and sports execs with their chipped trophy wives who home in from all over the country attracted by this beacon of phallic skyscrapers, pubescent prostitutes, and glittery toilets! Christ—I am a multiple-drug-addict hypersexual felon and it repulses me!”
The audience waited respectfully for Kimrean to collapse back in the chair, panting away what was left of their fury. After that, Greggs stepped in and picked up the thread.
“This situation you so graphically described, Zooey, will continue after a gang war. Best-case scenario, one side wipes out the other, buys the bureaucrats cheap, and it’s another year in Gangsta’s Paradise.”
“The casualties of that war would be us,” the chief said, with unsurprising empathy. “For two years, twelve counties and five state agencies have cooperated to bring down the cartel—gathering evidence, tapping phones, building cases against every gun, every punk, every corrupt public servant. We are on the brink of cutting off all of the hydra’s heads at once.”
“The hydra would just grow twice as many heads—not a good analogy,” Kimrean judged.
“Gang war doesn’t help, and you know it,” Greggs insisted. “Even if every cartel soldier went to jail for pulling a trigger, they’ll take all the blame; they have to, or they die. Unless we take down the bosses, all bosses at once, it’s all in vain.”
“That’s what it will be,” Kimrean said, “unless the San Carnal coroner rules that Lyon’s son tripped and landed on a bullet on the floor.”
“We’re not counting on the coroner,” Demoines said. “We’re counting on you.”
There was no automatic reply to that.
Greggs added, “Lyon trusts very few people, but Danny is one of them. Danny can convince him that the Red Chrysanthemum didn’t kill his son, but he’ll need proof.”
“Otherwise, Lyon will go to war with the Red Mums, and he’ll lose,” Demoines predicted. “The man thinks himself stronger than he is: too many enemies. He will fall. And Danny will fall with him.”
“Pull him out of there,” Adrian urged, coldly.
“He doesn’t want us to. He’s been there for a year and a half, he’s way too invested. He thinks he can stop this war.”
“He’s wrong. It’s not his call to make.”
“He just made it anyway,” Greggs said. “He called ten minutes ago. He wants you, Adrian.”
* * *
—
Kimrean stayed silent, their stray gaze flown out the window. Flat geometric rooftops shone dazzling white against a deep blue, almost indigo sky.
The left hand was twiddling with some paper clips on the desk. The right one distractedly lurched toward Greggs.
“Cuffs,” Kimrean whispered, so soft that Carlyle had to lean closer.
Greggs sighed, went to pick up the phone: “I’ll tell forensics to bring them.”
“Not mine,” the marionette grunted through a slit mouth, both eyes fixed on the window, left hand sneakily pulled to join the right one. “Yours. Now, before Zooey finds out.”
2
Zooey found out on the Bayshore Highway on-ramp, as they were joining the southbound lane. For the first minutes they managed to distract her with a Rubik’s Cube, which thanks to the nonintervention of Adrian (whose personal record stood at 10.3 seconds, 13.9 blindfolded) kept her busy while she was being cuffed, escorted to the underground garage, and seated next to the car seat in the back of Greggs’s Toyota. That was when Demoines bartered her the Rubik’s Cube for his PlayStation Portable, which kept her fully engrossed while they rolled out into Franklin Street and headed for the expressway. They had nearly made it out of the city when a spray of water hitting her window made Zooey look away from the screen and wave at some children playing around a gushing fire hydrant. She went on to make a lewd comment at a Victoria’s Secret billboard, and then, alerted by the high number of ad boards around the junction, she noticed they were leaving town. That was when she checked their recent memory and realized she had been tricked.
From that moment on, she spent the whole trip kicking in protest and singing atrocious road songs about San Carnal, not all of them entirely improvised, until they stole off the highway and passed the solitary road sign of State Route 325, pushing into the unmitigated desert of Gran South County.
* * *
—
Often called “America’s Namibia”—a nickname that Namibians deeply resent—Gran South County is an eight-hundred-thousand-acre expanse of rocks and sand that forty-niners refused to inhabit and coyotes, vipers, and scorpions alone call home with a fair amount of resignation. Only lower life-forms than those, such as land speculators, had learned to appreciate the territory for the gift of God it was, remembering the Old Testament’s tendency to oversell arid regions, and accepted the gift by sending a caravan of construction trucks to the spot of the last recorded human settling in the area—one which Spanish explorers had vacated shortly after its foundation, leaving behind their old and sick—and there they dug wells, rolled out lawns, and erected a city grid of concrete and plastic profusely strewn with palm-flanked avenues and roads of sun-whitened asphalt and houses with swimming pools where bad porn is filmed and interiors lavishly decorated by brain-damaged designers whose use and abuse of spiral stairs, aluminum, and zebra skin made any sane observer advocate for a Guantánamo Bay for aesthetic offenders.
While traversing the desert that kindly separated San Carnal from civilization, Zooey had a brief relapse into the song-improvising stage. The air cooler didn’t work: Greggs drove with the windows down, Demoines had loosened his necktie, and Kimrean, their dragonfly shape somehow spread all over the backseat, howled some new lyrics to the theme from New York, New York.
Start spreading the AIDS,
I’m headed your way!
Kids rush outside to greet me back—and sell me crack!
Teenagers wave at me on their way to school
In makeup and pumps, and ask to carpool,
And pay me with their behinds,
Condoms declined,
Fresh anal tears
Currency here,
in San Carnal!
She finished with a drum solo, hardly devalued by the presence of handcuffs or the absence of instrument, and crashed back in their seat, waiting for her ovation.
Greggs flipped a curl of her hair. Demoines just shrugged and talked to the mirror.
<
br /> “Okay, I gotta ask: So you’ve been six months locked away in the men’s ward in Claymoore…and the first thing you buy yourself when you get out is a ladyboy?”
“Yes!” Zooey said impatiently. “I looked over the menu, and that’s what I felt like having! Why does everybody have a problem with that? You, the arresting officer, those old ladies on the bus!”
“Why do you hate San Carnal anyway?” Greggs jumped in. “You’re a pervert.”
“I’m not a pervert. I’m a hedonist. There’s a difference.”
No expansion was offered to that argument, and no one requested it.
The silver-gray Toyota went on swallowing dashes of yellow line, like a mighty boring Pac-Man.
ZOOEY: I’m thirsty.
DEMOINES: We’re almost at the exchange point.
GREGGS: There should be water in the glove compartment.
ZOOEY: It’s okay, found something. (Pulls a feeding bottle from the car seat’s cupholder.)
GREGGS: What—no! Zooey! That’s my—
(Zooey is already squeezing the bottle six inches above her open mouth. She swallows, loudly smacking her lips like a cartoon cat.)
ZOOEY: Sorry, you were saying?
GREGGS: Nothing.
ZOOEY: Okay. (Watching Greggs, licking her lips again.) You were born in South Africa, right? Where would that be—Lower Orange River?
GREGGS: Shut up!
Demoines was keeping his eyes on the side mirror, his reflection covering a grin with his hand.
Kimrean leaned forward, showing their cuffed wrists.
“Seriously now, you can take these off. I’m not going to jump out of the car.”
Nobody pretended to listen, not even for a second.
“Guys? Come on, I know where we’re going, and I understand why we’re going.”
“You asked for the cuffs,” Demoines said.
“No, I didn’t,” said Zooey.
Greggs checked the mirror: the heterochromatic face smiled a pencil-lined smile.
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