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

by Dean C. Moore

“Don’t I.” Robin closed his eyes, sank into his slouch on the sofa like pushing back in a rocking chair.

  “You can see where this is going?” Soldier Doll said.

  “Yeah.” Garden Gnome and Soldier Doll stood on either side of the blender at the ready, waited for it to fall out of Robin’s hands.

  “All this anticipation of their every need.” Garden Gnome held his hands at the ready, awaited the fateful moment. “Maybe we should go back to having no friends.”

  “We can always return to the yard and assume our statue poses and wait in glorious anticipation for a bird to poop on us.”

  “I guess, given the proper context, this isn’t half bad.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Robin figured he’d break the ice with the swing shift crowd at work. They may have been ships passing in the night, but it would do no good to be firing cannons at one another in the process.

  Moreover, he was going to need these people as a bridge to Hartman, and the next one after him. God knows what seedy underworld connections they have going on as an extension of their own dubious characters. Whatever they were good for, it had to be something big. The department couldn’t afford to keep them around in these lean times unless they had at least one attribute which made letting them go unthinkable. And as sure as the crow flies, one day soon, when Robin’s mind was back on line, he was going to need that hidden gem they were holding in their pocket to apprehend Hartman.

  Not to mention his energy would dip from time to time, he could get into a dysfunctional funk similar to the one he was in now; for these and a hundred other reasons, it paid to have friends in low places.

  Finally, it was a chance at a new beginning, one he desperately needed.

  “Save your energy,” Paolo said, seeing Robin rise from his desk, heading toward the swing shift folks settling in for the evening. “They’re a strange breed of folks. Face it, if they were ready to assimilate, they’d be on days. Who the hell works swing if they can avoid it?” His leather jacket on, he checked out how fine he looked in the mirror.

  Ethan chimed in, “I gotta say, you picked a hell of a time to start caring who’s ready to accept you and who isn’t.” He closed up shop by making sure all his desk drawers were locked down.

  Emmett got in his two cents as he threw on his coat. “Hey, you can make friends, or you can spend all day at the Charlie Chaplin retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive. Now which sounds better?”

  “Yeah, maybe you haven’t heard. Hell is other people.” Ethan waved goodbye.

  Robin smiled at the warmth of all the well-wishing. They were probably right. They just didn’t realize that rationality wasn’t exactly holding any part of his life together right now.

  Robin ambled over to Lance. He was picking at his hoagie, using a knife to separate a layer of cucumber from the other vegetables with surgical precision.

  “You may be a failed medical student, Lance, but you’ll succeed at cutting into that hoagie, I know you will.”

  Lance smiled dryly. “You’re a shit for noticing I’m still trying to make a go of my surgical career even now.” He crossed the knife and fork a couple times as if to sharpen his knife, and sighed. “My demons are best enjoyed in private.”

  “You should have been a perp, then, not a policeman. Here we keep each other honest by keeping everything out in the open.”

  “You’re making it awfully hard to stay mad at you when you give better lip than my wife.” Lance glanced indelicately at Robin’s breasts. He refused to relent from his attempts to tease the cucumber away from the menagerie of vegies without collapsing the entire framework of the sandwich, like a magic trick.

  “Don’t blame her if your limp dick wouldn’t stand up under a Hoover.”

  “She scared it stiff one time,” Lance confessed, “when I entered with the lights off and she started braying like a mule. With those broad hips of hers, really thought I might have stumbled drunkenly into the barn.”

  Robin laughed on cue, partly out of politeness, partly because the joke was damn funny.

  Lance set the knife and fork down. “There, it’s done. See if that doesn’t prove I could have been the greatest surgeon there ever was.”

  “We can be real with one another out here, though, can’t we?” Robin said. Lance stiffened at the suggestion he wasn’t being real with himself. “Not like the rest of those two-faced bastards who smile to your face while plotting your demise,” Robin added.

  Lance exhaled forcefully to dispel the cloud of tension around him. “Yes, we can.” He warily studied Robin’s transgender form. “About earlier—”.

  “Don’t worry about it. You were coping with the shock as best you knew how, with my springing it on you guys like that. You know how it is, afraid if you listen to enough people’s well-meaning advice, you could just end by drowning yourself.”

  Lance snorted. “Maybe if I’d had the same sense, I’d have finished med-school. You’re all right, Robin Wakefield. And don’t listen to we ‘wise men of the world’ about being too green under the collar. You may miss the things staring you square in the face, but you’re good at seeing the stuff no one else does.”

  Robin smiled at him before resuming his perp walk.

  “A hair flip or two wouldn’t kill ya,” Lance mumbled, with Robin’s back to him.

  Robin flipped his hair as he swiveled his hips in his latest attempt to appease the swing shift. It was an affront to feminism not to tell them to go stuff themselves. But maybe if they felt they had a hand in molding him, they’d let him off the hook more easily.

  He recharged his batteries at the coffee maker, watching the rest of the hostile faces just daring him to try his smooth talking on them. Rack ‘em up, knock ‘em down, Robin, easy as that.

  He strutted down the row separating the desks, headed straight for Crumley. Whatever reasons his unconscious had for separating Lance and him from the pack, it was keeping them to itself for now.

  “Well, Crumley,” Robin said, “I see the wife worked you over good last night. Any more black and blue and you wouldn’t need the uniform.”

  “Save it.” After hanging up his jacket, he rubbed his shoulders as he did some quick arm rotations. Robin wondered if perhaps he’d been hanging with his hands pressed behind his back and held over his head. “I got nothing against you,” Crumley said.

  “How is it I feel worse than if you had something against me? No one likes to feel irrelevant.”

  Crumley snorted. “I got work to do.”

  He turned the nameplate face up on Crumley’s desk. “Try to expand your horizons. If the only people who can get a rise out of you are sending electrical currents to your balls, kind of hollows out your life. Soon all the electricity in the world won’t be enough. On the plus side, you’ll finally be able to climb inside the head of the best serial killers. Profilers make good money.”

  Crumley expressed his ingratitude by slamming his metal desk drawer.

  Paolo brought over a copy of The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin and handed it to Crumley. “I think it’s your turn with this.”

  “Here’s the other one I was telling you about.” He handed Paolo a copy of The European Dream, also by Rifkin.

  “I didn’t realize you guys had intellectual inclinations,” Robin said.

  Crumley made a sour face. “And he’s worried about me being a bigot.”

  “Yeah, man, what you saying? I can’t be literate?” Paolo patted the book against Robin’s shoulder.

  Robin smiled at the heckling; it meant this exchange was going better than planned. If they weren’t busting his balls, he’d be worried.

  “The Third Industrial Revolution is on Crowley’s desk, if you want to do the whole trifecta,” Paolo said to Crumley.

  Robin grunted. “I didn’t know Crowley’s mechanical inclinations extended that far; he’s not thinking of DIY solar and windmill power, is he?”

  Both Crumley and Paolo shook their heads at him. “The prejudices that
grow out of these snap judgments about people,” Paolo said.

  Robin smiled. “Good one.”

  Paolo went back to his work. Robin departed Crumley’s station with: “Think about what I said, Crumley.”

  Robin left. “I’d like a more feminine voice. I’m just saying,” Crumley said to his back.

  Robin turned to face Crumley, and said in a more feminine voice, “I can manage that.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After barely surviving his blood-thinning ordeal, Manny decided it was time for some payback.

  He glared at Ronald fucking Reggie for the final time. The poor guy saw green aphids crawling up his skin all day blinking their big yellow eyes at him. If they ceased their marching, it was only to deploy for another well-staged attack. This was one patient who could stand for someone to cut him a break. Robin was right, crazy people needed an advocate. And it wasn’t like Manny was being approached to run for President right now, so he had some political downtime to lobby in their favor.

  Ronald whispered in Reggie’s ear. He immediately flew into a tizzy, brushed the aphid armies off him as if they were storming his brain with the intent of hollowing out his skull to feed their insatiable hunger. He was jumping up and down and screaming, as if dancing on a bed of hot coals, to assist with aphid removal. Reggie had shared many such thoughts with Manny, also implanted by Ronald. One campaign involved aphids chewing off his belly-hairs so they could swordfight one another with them, which was why Reggie felt all those stabbing pains. Another campaign involved kamikaze aphids diving into his eyes, and splattering their white milky guts all over them, which was why Reggie felt his eyes were burning. Not that anyone but his mother cared what he had to say.

  Ronald had had to alter his tactics with Reggie from his usual giving-off-conflicting-signals m.o. because pattern-recognition really wasn’t Reggie’s strong suit. Upon being approached for the least amount of help, say with tying his shoes, Ronald would set those aphid armies on the move against him with a mere suggestion.

  Manny found a cup with a couple inches of coffee at the bottom that had crusted over from mold, having been parked behind a sofa and forgotten for a few days. He made sure to exchange it with Ronald’s cup.

  A few hours later, they had to carry Ronald off in a strait-jacket. Manny gave him his best “What the fuck?” face as he was being carted off. Manny had to admit, he was a bit surprised himself at the success of his little plan. Then again, they had bacteria and viruses inside hospital wards that could live off penicillin and eat his flesh down to the bone before breakfast. Could he help it if life was evolving?

  One asshole down. Many more left to go. A psych patient’s advocate’s job was never done.

  ***

  Manny observed Stephanie, handing out dinner trays, take a fork and deliberately smear the different food items together on Grately’s plate. Mr. OCD would light up like the Fourth of July. Bitch.

  Manny stared at the second hand on the clock after Stephanie set the plate in front of Grately. Sixty-five seconds to process the shock, and Grately erupted.

  The code blue required every muscle-bound lummox in the place to run to the rescue. Patients and staff alike would require medical treatment.

  Stephanie hung back and admired her handiwork. Afterwards, she ran up to Saverly. “You see! No one ever listens to me. I’m the girl who cries wolf. Now maybe you see how scary things are on the floor. I want guard rails and Plexiglas between me and them like at the zoo. So I can feel safe!”

  “Settle down, Stephanie,” Saverly said. “Only you could take a five alarm fire and find a way to make it worse. I want you to make an appointment with me. It’s time you came to terms with your need for crisis.”

  “My need for crisis? I’m the one trying to avert a crisis!”

  “We must all endeavor to know ourselves better if we expect to understand the patients better,” Saverly said. From the look on his face, Manny figured Saverly suspected full well she was behind the latest uprising.

  Manny to the rescue.

  He waited patiently for Saverly to go about his business, and put Stephanie comfortably out of his mind. When he finally exited the floor ten minutes later, after ensuring no one else needed medical attention, Manny set himself in motion.

  He pretended to be shuffling through the magazines on the coffee table, and made sure one in particular landed on top of the pile.

  “Oh my God!” Stephanie exclaimed, reaching for the JAMA article on flesh-eating bacteria.

  She barely had time to finish reading it before they were admitting someone with the disease. Manny had more than serendipity to thank; Jim had alerted him to as much. The entire staff was trying to keep it on the down low from Stephanie, knowing how much of an alarmist she was. She was biting her fingernails raw trying to make out the details past all the whisperings and they hadn’t even unstrapped the guy.

  ***

  “Stephanie, honey, is that a rash on your calf?” Manny asked innocently. “You should really take care of that. That flesh-eating bacteria is running rampant through the city hospitals. A couple establishments in Berkeley got hit just a week ago.”

  Stephanie regarded her leg with a sense of horror that made Manny want to offer her a fire axe before the feeling passed.

  Six hours later, they needed to confine Stephanie to a strait-jacket. She had bored down to her bone in an effort to peel away the bacteria, doing more damage than any flesh-eating bacteria could. Score one for the OCD cause. Manny guessed she’d have a little more understanding for anyone with the affliction if she ever made it out of isolation.

  Manny was stunned to hear of all the coincidences that had conspired to bring about Stephanie’s undoing when Jim relayed the story to him.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Crumley noticed him out of the corner of his eye, moving along the edges of the room. Was he disfigured? A fire victim? For some in the S&M crowd, ugliness, not beauty, was the true aphrodisiac. Crumley decided to follow him. Up close, his affliction seemed to morph into leprosy. But he could have just been scarred by 3rd degree burns from head to toe. There was an undeniable snakelike quality to him, down to how he flicked his tongue, as if tasting the air before entering a pool of darkness in the subterranean bar.

  Once outside, in the dead of night, Snake Man transformed further and faster. He seemed to see better and hear better, for one. Crumley repeatedly had to duck and cover to avoid detection, and even capitalizing on his penchant for stealth, he still couldn’t avoid triggering Snake Man’s sixth sense he was being followed.

  Finally, when Crumley stripped off his shoes, stuck to the blackest pools of darkness, and dropped back to the edge of his own visual and audial acuity, Snake Man relaxed enough to make his move. He darted up the sheer side of a building without the least toehold—exactly like a gecko. That was no advanced rock climbing stunt! Nor did Snake Man appear to be wearing any high-tech gloves and shoes that might explain his superhuman prowess—given that such things actually existed outside of the movies.

  Crumley did a mental calculation as to what apartment on what floor Snake Man had actually ducked into, and proceeded to enter the building after him—the old fashioned way. He stole in the front by grabbing the door as it was starting to swing close behind an elderly tenant, who was too deaf and blind to even notice he’d just been used as a form of keyless entry.

  Crumley donned his shoes before he got to the floor in question so he could pass for someone walking down the hall to his apartment without arousing suspicion by inviting questions about why he was being unduly stealthy. The biggest fear now was that Snake Man would recognize his gait as not that of someone who lived on the floor; the guy’s radar was definitely higher than most people’s.

  If he kicked the door in, he’d cause the guy to bolt. If he turned the knob gently, Snake Man might just think it was someone who was confusing his door for the countless others like it on this floor and each of the next. He might just freeze up, uncertain what to
do. Crumley moved with confidence and without hesitation, as if he belonged there, pushing his way inside Snake Man’s apartment.

  Inside the room was pitch black. Snake Man’s eyes shone at him in the darkness. He’d evidently chosen the room to give him the advantage on any intruder; lights from the street stood little chance of finding its way in here. “I mean you no harm. I have a gun in my holster and there it’ll stay.”

  When the light came on, he found his gun was in Snake Man’s hand, not in his holster, and pointing at him. A nice lift all in all; he hadn’t felt a thing. “I’m interested only in what inroads you can give me to the underground worlds of Berkeley—my stomping ground.”

  Snake Man breathed deeply as if to read the truth or the lie in his words from the scent in the air. He relaxed his grip on the gun and threw it back to Crumley. “I see you’re part of that underworld yourself, only more on the outside than you’d like.”

  “I’m a cop; a lot of people are bigoted against cops that way.”

  Snake Man snorted. “You’re a dirty cop; that’s different. No, you’re on the outside because S&M is a little too vanilla for my crowd.”

  “And what crowd is that, exactly?”

  Snake Man lifted a syringe from the desk filled with a yellow liquid. He came over to Crumley and rolled up his sleeve. “This is your entry pass, if you’d like.”

  Crumley grabbed his arm. “What’s it do?” Nothing. “Is that what turned you into what you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I wanted something different?”