Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  Spence slouched into his chair, whispered over to Chad, “Hell, I'm ready to slit my wrists.” Jeannie, overhearing, was nothing if not empathetic.

  Murray was going the other direction. “So what, you're saying we should give up? Screw that! I'm ready to take some heads!” He flailed his hands and said, “Hey, they took back Poland with sticks and stones. I'm thinking we can do them one better and start blowing up every establishment accused of corporate malfeasance!”

  “He's my new favorite.” Hartman’s face registered tongue-in-cheek humor.

  The others laughed on cue.

  Murray continued his tirade. “Let's chop off some heads! Shove some two-by-fours up their asses! Gouge out their eyes! Light them afire!”

  “God, get out of my head,” Hartman joked. His remark was followed by additional scripted laughs from the class. He changed tone and said, “There comes a time when – to really turn your life around – you have to become somebody else.”

  There was dead silence, as they warily eyed Hartman. Jeannie observed Murray scrunching up his face as he tried to decode the message.

  “Look, kids,” Hartman said, pressing on, “all I ask is you give yourself a little time each day to reflect on where your life's going.” Stuffing his suitcase, he added, “Where life in general is going. And what you're going to do about it. He snapped the suitcase closed. “It may just be a drop in the bucket. But enough of us working together become an ocean that can wash away the sins of the world. That's your final project by the way: Sell me on the real value of the rest of your lives.”

  Hartman exited with deliberate and dramatic fanfare.

  The moment the door closed behind him, and it was safe to speak, Murray said, “I'm telling you, he's going to go Mt. Vesuvius on our asses.”

  “Takes one to know one, right?” Danny asked.

  Murray refused to be offended. “Damn right. At least I don't hold it in. Those are the ones you have to worry about.”

  Lorie rubbed him on the shoulders to help him calm down.

  “And I got her. Who's he got? A mind like that, and no one with which to make a real connection?”

  “We get it, honey,” Lorie said, subtly condescending in the way one reins in a tempestuous child with the mildest of cues.

  “I'm just saying,” Murray said, trailing off.

  “Relax, buddy.” Adam patted him on the shoulder. “We got the party coming up at his place. He can let off some steam there.”

  Murray shrugged off Adam’s gesture. “I guess.”

  “I hear Winona’s come up with a drama therapy take on dinner theater,” Lorie said, “designed to help him get over himself as much as the rest of us.”

  Adam snorted. “God help us.”

  “You have to appreciate where he’s coming from,” Murray said, changing tack. “Everyone, these days, is selling some get-over-yourself concoction, lightning in a bottle. Smart-drinks like choline. No-Dose. Liquid free-form aminos to balance out your brain chemistry. Transcendental meditation. It’s all bullshit. None of it works. Most of it just burns you out even faster. And yet if we all don’t get smarter by the minute, what’s to say any of us is ever going to make it into the work force, ahead of software, robotics, and everything inhuman, that as it turns out, does a better job at being human.”

  “What was that Newsweek article? Oh, yeah, ‘Thirty-One Ways to Get Smarter Faster,’” Adam said smirking. “Guess it’s no surprise what the national obsession is. And in this economy, next year it’ll be ‘One Hundred and Thirty-One Ways to Get Smarter Faster.’ Pray some of it works.”

  Jeannie snorted. “Even if we all think we have a better formula for living life, we owe it to him to see if he can penetrate our thick heads. Maybe an eclectic approach is best on the trail to self-transcendence. Maybe we should all be learning what we can from one another, Hartman included, and relying less on smugness and personal defensiveness.”

  “Hear, hear,” Murray said. “Can I get an amen?” He got some chuckles. “Well, it was starting to feel like church around here.”

  “Maybe that’s the irony,” Adam said, chiming in off cue with one of Murray’s earlier remarks. “Maybe the faster we need to evolve, the more our individual psychologies show themselves impervious to change. The memes floating around in our heads have more sticking power than the bubonic plague. The unconscious behaviors, what’s more, remain hidden and impervious to scrutiny, and therefore beyond hope of being modified. Maybe Hartman’s old-school approach is more valid today than ever, when the high-tech solutions, all by themselves, ring hollow. Maybe without the targeted feedback and the pressure-cooker environment, what’s buried deep down will never find its way to the surface and so seal our fates.”

  After a stunned silence, Murray laughed. “Out of the mouth of babes. You go, Adam. Didn’t think you had it in you.” Jeannie was every bit as surprised at the sudden turn in Adam.

  “His class is so hard to get into,” Spence said. “It does make you wonder why he chose us, and it does make me want to at least try and live up to expectations. Maybe the party is a last ditch effort to that end for all of us.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The police precinct was housed in a grand building done in the Gothic-revival style. In a more just world, the structure would have been put to far nobler uses. With high ornate ceilings, and elaborate stonework, it was disarmingly warm and inviting. It created a feeling of safety, despite the forest of shadows and inadequate lighting.

  Taking in the extravagant edifice with shivers of delight, Robin wondered how many frustrated architects besides himself there were running around Berkeley. Of course, he’d also wanted to be a psychologist, a lawyer, a doctor, a professional athlete, and he kept adding professions all the time. He was getting ready to throw in the towel and land on writing, where he could be anything he wanted in his imagination, and everything at once, if only one at a time, as he lived inside one character’s head after another. He’d landed in his current role as detective, because, as it turned out, his critical thinking skills were about the only thing to survive a second rate education. That, with a strong sense of justice, took one far as a detective, if it didn’t make a dent in those other professions.

  Upon entering his shared work area, Robin observed Manny seated at a desk, reviewing the surveillance video from The Lost Souls Club on his computer. He had his own office, but this computer was more up-to-date for when he needed all the bells and whistles. One of the techies downstairs had transposed the files so he could spend endless hours reviewing. He was familiar enough with the software to do his own picture enhancement, zooming and panning. Besides, none of the desktop reconnaissance work should have been so demanding as to require a specialist.

  He turned as Robin entered, witnessed him eating a hoagie a little too zealously.

  “You trying to eat that thing, or give it a blow job?” Manny chided.

  “You'd show more respect if you saw my wife's clitoris.”

  Manny laughed. “Seriously, Robin, she's going through with the sex change?”

  “She’s already halfway through it. She’s got a ten inch dick to go with the boobs! Why you think I'm getting in practice?” He shoved another couple inches of the hoagie down his mouth.

  “You're going to stay married to a man?”

  “What can I tell ya? Love is blind. Hey, it'll cut down on the pillow talk, anyway.”

  Manny smiled as he rewound the tapes. He watched the towering oak that was Hartman prowling the bar, making no effort to conceal the menace on his face.

  “Gee, I wonder who our mad dog killer is?” Robin said derisively.

  “Yeah, I'm thinking we should go talk to him.”

  “Just on account of looking suspicious? You do realize I was joking? What if our real bad guy had the good sense not to telegraph his feelings?”

  “Have to start somewhere. Should be worth a laugh, anyway.”

  “By the way, the wife and I – uh, the husband and I – Drew
and I – would like to have you over for dinner.”

  “Robin, I can't do it, man. Not with a straight face.”

  “Why do you have to be that way?”

  “I love you guys too much. Hell, I fell in love with Drew all those nights she cried on my shoulder while you were out getting yourself in one dangerous situation after another you needed extricating from, which, if it didn’t involve her coming to the rescue, involved me. I feel more betrayed than you do.”

  “Try and get your mind around it. It's not like our day job is any less spooky.”

  “I'll think about it.”

  Detective Badger, from the night shift, dropped the latest regulations book on Manny’s desk on his way out the door. The San Francisco phone book had nothing on it for size. “I know how much you love these things.”

  Manny reacted to the tome the way people react to cholera.

  “If I were you,” Badger said, “I’d count my blessings you only have to recertify every couple years. Because I hear next year’s got a few hundred pages on this one.”

  Robin stifled a grin. They all knew how Manny felt about bureaucratic red tape. Manny just stared at the manual.

  Captain Boroughs exited his office, made a beeline for Manny. “You know I don’t mean to climb up your ass on this, Manny. I really don’t.”

  Of all the bosses in all the police precincts, he had to draw this pencil-necked, limp-dicked, mealy-mouthed bastard Boroughs who couldn’t stand up straight if Manny inserted a steel rod in his back. He was the opposite of commanding and domineering, more the begging, beseeching, needling type, whose passive aggressiveness wore on Manny quicker than if he were surfing a landslide belly up.

  “It’s just that… well, you know how those damn regents are. Little pissants can’t seem to come to a decision on anything, save of course, us being completely useless as a department. They’ll have my head for sure.”

  “Don’t worry, boss. We got this,” Manny said.

  “God, I can’t tell you how reassured I am to hear that. It’s just that, well, you know how it is? If we take more than a day or two to collar the bastards, first I’ll be eating crow from the mayor, then I’ll be sucking ass to the lieutenant governor, to say nothing of the head of the Regents, who is the biggest asshole of them all. What is his name? You see, I’m already blocking it. Must be post-traumatic stress arriving ahead of the trauma of speaking to any of those assholes.”

  Manny clenched his jaw. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “You say that now, and of course, coming from you, what is there to do but take you at your word, but it’s my frail constitution is what it is. Doctor says my ulcers are eating me from the inside out. If you could even save me a few hours, Manny, I tell you, it’ll be one less organ transplant this year. I think I’m on my third stomach since June of last year.” He held out his hand demonstratively, “No, no, I shit you not. Surprised I’m not on my third asshole with all the reaming I get from the mucky mucks upstairs. But I better knock wood, before I go and jinx that, too.”

  He knocked wood, then grew silent, refusing to surrender his sulking pose or looking at the floor until Manny gave him one more bit of reassurance.

  Robin kept his mouth shut realizing Manny would seek his revenge by making sure no arrest was made in under a week. He watched the battery of Manny’s nature take the charge, store it up, wondering how much more it could take. A lifetime of knifing remarks, and this was his steadfast reaction? Viewed from the context of their friendship, their psycho killer already seemed the lesser problem.

  The pencil broke in Manny’s hand. “Nothing to worry about, boss,” Manny said.

  “Well, if you say so.” Boroughs ambled back to his office a beaten man, weighed down by his mountain of insecurities.

  As Boroughs faded into the background, Manny threw a glance at the overhead monitor tucked in the corner of the room near the ceiling, tuned to ENN. A senate investigatory committee was putting the screws to a public figure for tax evasion. The details would have escaped him; he didn’t have much time for the court of public opinion. All the same, Manny reacted as if he was the one being grilled. Robin realized the emotion was merely piggybacking on his reaction to Boroughs. But he also knew it to be part of a larger resentment of authority; strange, considering his occupation.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  On the way over to Hartman’s, Robin wondered if the professor was a devotee of thought projection, using it as Zen monks did in ages gone by as a defense against invaders. Because, out of nowhere, the weather turned foul just blocks away from Hartman’s home. Rain gushed. Traffic resistance followed in the wake of the pileups as they continued towards Hartman’s house.

  Police, themselves caught in the melee, were already redirecting cars. The glowing waving batons did nothing to diminish the aura of intimidation on the officers’ faces, adding to the forceful body language, and the order-barking. It was standard issue behavior designed for compelling compliance with minimal resistance; Robin and Manny both knew that. But Robin realized this wasn’t going to go over well with Manny, whose impatience grew visibly with each crank of the wheel, turning what should have been a straight shot to Hartman’s into a maze. The demeanor of the cops was trumping the logic in their requests.

  Manny tightened his vice-grip around the wheel and stared fugue-like at the cops shouting to get him to wake the hell up and follow directions. “Why do they have to be such dickheads?”

  Robin replied, “So much for Berkeley being the land of nice, politically-correct cops.”

  Veering his steering-wheel in the other direction from the one the officer was indicating, Manny blurted, “Damn it. I’ve always gone this way, and that’s the route I’m taking.”

  When Manny refused to take the latest turn, an officer, slogging through the rain and puddles, trudged up to the driver’s side window, and rapped the metal stem of his flashlight-cum-billy club against it. Manny rolled down the window.

  “Get this car off this road now!” the cop barked.

  Manny pulled him forward, knocking his forehead against the hood of the car. There were already two other cops with their guns drawn closing on Manny and Robin. “I’m sorry, officer. I just thought you needed a better angle on my badge,” Manny said, holding up his detective’s shield. “I’m going this way as a matter of preventing another homicide. I’m sure you understand.”

  The officer with the bump on his head gestured to the others to stand down. They didn’t budge. “All right, pal. You want to risk your life and endanger others, I have your badge number. Just so no one else gets hurt, I might be convinced to forget it.”

  He waved Manny on. Robin noticed no sense of victory or satisfaction on Manny’s face as he drove off. It was hard for him to let go of the residual anger.

  “Maybe it’s time we had a talk, Manny, on how to form healthier habitual responses to overbearing assholes, besides holding it all in until—”.

  “I’m fine.” As in: End of discussion.

  “At this rate, ulcers are going to be the least of your concerns,” Robin mumbled, not sure if he was talking to Manny or himself.

  They finally passed the lead car which had caused the pile up. The rear bumper-sticker read: “I Brake for Butterflies.” Robin thought, Berkeley, gotta love it. He didn’t bother to share the joke with Manny, figuring he was still in no mood to appreciate it.

  Robin noticed Manny didn’t appreciate the comedy, either, of the locals lifting their Euro Minis and Just For Two cars off the road, proving that eco-consciousness was as practical in the short-term as it was in the long-term.

  Eying the dented Prius, Manny said, “She’s not getting fifty miles to the gallon now.”

  Spoilsport, Robin thought.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Standing alongside Manny, Robin surveyed Hartman’s elaborate Victorian. It took up at least one city block.

  They turned their wary gaze to the run-down estate gardens. It was the dead of night, but the house and g
rounds, even without a soul around, had a creepy life of its own.

  The wrought-iron fence looked designed to keep in prison inmates. Even the windows and doors were barred. And the best part: Bullmastiffs patrolled the grounds.