I didn’t wait long, but the activity didn’t come from the corridor outside. The door to thirteen or fourteen opened beneath me. This was not the time to freeze. I moved to the landing above with as much speed and stealth as I could manage. I positioned myself to keep the ascending stairs between me and the fifteenth-floor landing and began untying my shoes.
I could hear the person sneaking up the stairs. There seemed some hesitation, and I wondered if I had been made. I chose to wait her out. The noise was coming from the floor below before she stopped ascending. I risked a peek: it was her.
She had her back to me. She was sliding some kind of probe through the crack at the bottom of the door. It was small, little thicker than a hair. A bag sat on the floor next to her. I thought of the one on my shoulder. This girl was a pro. I’d have to be careful.
I slipped my socked feet from my shoes and began to stalk my prey. She was intent on her work and didn’t seem to sense my approach. I made it to the middle of the steps and then the bottom with no sign she knew. But, when my second foot touched the landing floor, I saw her body language change. Something had given me away.
She lunged for her bag. I kicked it with my foot and almost broke a toe on something inside. There was no time to worry about that. I grabbed for her hair but there wasn’t much, and she twisted away before I could secure my hold.
She tried to turn on me. I could feel formal training in her moves, but I had some training of my own. I also had more strength, reach, and the element of surprise. I pinned her to the wall and looked into her face. She was young, late twenties. Her brown hair wasn’t buzzed, but it was short. Her skin was a soft tan. She had white teeth and eyes like caramel. She was tiny, one-point-six meters or so. Her small breasts heaved as she gulped down air.
Her face went slack with surprise when she looked at me. “Frank Parker!”
“Who the hell are you?”
She looked away.
“Ok,” I took a grip of her right arm and snatched her bag off the floor. “To the roof. You and I have a lot to discuss, Miss…?”
She just gave me a sulky look.
The Bartholomew was thirty-seven stories. I really should have picked a higher floor to trap her on, but I couldn’t do anything about that now. We stepped out onto the roof, and I directed her towards the observation wall. We passed a couple of families, obvious tourists. One of the young men looked at me, concern in his eyes.
I smiled. “How are ya?”
He nodded but didn’t speak. I didn’t like the way he looked at my unwilling guest, but he didn’t move or protest, so I kept moving. We stepped around the corner so the wall would block our view. I had no intention of hurting this girl, but I didn’t want to advertise that, either. I put my back to the parapet wall and glanced back down the way we had come. Our concerned stranger was back to enjoying his view. That was good.
I shoved the girl towards the floor and began to peruse her bag. She looked up at me with that same pouting expression. I glanced over the top of the bag at her. “You sure you don’t want to tell me who you are? I’m thinking I’ll find out pretty quick.”
Her eyes moved to the floor, and I glanced back towards the families. The last of them was moving away. None were taking their place. We were alone. I shifted back to the bag. There was a change of clothes, burglary tools, some electronic, some manual. There was a wand-looking device. I held it out and looked it over. It was a cylinder and had a button on the shaft. The business end was charred.
We were still alone. I pressed a button. Blue-white light jumped from the tip: stun gun. I looked back at her and waved it in her general direction. “Planning on using this on me?”
She still wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I reached down and grabbed her face and made her look at me. “I need some answers, Missy! Why are you following me? How do you know who I am?”
She pulled her face from my grip and glared at me. “Everyone knows Frank Parker. Rick Sanchez was big news, you know.”
“There might be some people who remember some cop got murdered six weeks ago, but they couldn’t pull him out of a line up or remember his name, let alone his partner’s. So, why don’t you try me again?”
She crawled backwards away from me. I let her. There was nowhere to go. “Or what? I’ll end up like Sanchez?”
That sent my temper into overdrive. I moved into her face, my voice a harsh whisper. “Listen, lady, I don’t know who you think you are or your connection to Rick, but he was my partner! He was like a brother to me! Understand?”
Her face was terrified. She kept backing away. “Were you dirty like him?”
That stopped me cold. I wanted to tell her that Rick wasn’t dirty, that he was a good cop, that he’d been framed, but Deb’s words kept ringing in my ears: Rick used to go down there to see him—once, twice a week. I stood up straight and looked out past her and let out a breath. “No,” my voice was soft. “I’m not dir—”
It wasn’t noise I heard. It was more like the absence of sound, an acoustic shadow. I commanded my body to turn, but it was being stung by a million hornets.
CHAPTER IX
The face was all out of focus. “Hey, buddy. Hey, buddy, you ok?”
I looked at the man. He was in a bright shirt and cap. His hair was long, grey, and greasy. I didn’t know him. The fuck? I tried to remember how I’d ended up here, wherever here was. I looked around. I was outside. Air traffic swirled overhead. There was a parapet wall to my left. Another wall stood to my right, and I recognized that I was on an observation deck.
I had been here. “Were you dirty, like him?”
“No.”
“What’s that, buddy?”
I stared at the man again, the world coming back to me in layers. I looked at the observation deck around me. I’d been talking to a woman: brown hair, caramel eyes. Something had gone wrong. I had to get out of here. I didn’t want to answer any questions. I reached for my bag. My thigh and crotch felt cold. I looked down with disgust: I’d pissed myself.
I stretched my hand toward my bag again. It grabbed empty air. I looked that way. I looked the other and behind me. My bag was gone. Awesome.
I stood and left the tourist to gawk at me. I didn’t answer any of his questions. I went to the tourist shop on the first floor. They didn’t sell underwear, but there were some jeans that looked suitable. I reached into my pocket and remembered how I’d come to need the jeans in the first place. I let out a sigh of disgust, but my cash was there. I paid with bright red and blue bills.
I went to the bathroom, found a private booth and dropped my drawers. I washed myself with soap and water. I dried myself the best I could with the warm air from the dryer. The jeans went on sans underwear, and it was time to go.
I accessed my pReC. Allyssa hadn’t called. I felt terrible and decided that I’d done enough in the name of Angelo Katsaros and Lenny Marquez for the day. I passed back to The Lower City and retrieved my gun from the locker. I tucked it in the back of my pants and pulled my shirt over it.
I was always careful coming home, these days. But, every day that The Lunatics didn’t come, I wondered if Dana hadn’t been mistaken. I walked a wide circle and then another smaller one around my building. There was no one here, at least, no Lunatics. I took the stairs and passed my floor: nothing suspicious there, either. I crossed the floor and descended.
There was still nothing, and I moved to the door. I opened it and the aroma of Suzanne was mixed with something else. I reached behind me with my right hand and across my body with my left. I drew the gun from my waistband, and flipped the light switch with my left. There was nothing here.
The intruding smell was feminine and familiar. Perhaps it was the girl from the observation deck, her and whoever had shot me in the back. I crept across my living room. The kitchen was empty. There was no sign of the place being ransacked. Nothing was
out of place. I heard the swish of movement in my bedroom. I pointed the gun and moved toward its dark doorway.
I reached the door and the lamp on my nightstand broke the blackness.
“Allyssa!” I said. “You know I almost killed you with this thing!”
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a strapless dress. It was emerald green and clung to her hourglass body. It was short and only came half way down her thigh. It was crawling toward her hip. “You’re not the only one who can show up unannounced.”
My eyes lingered on her toned legs. I looked her in the face. “You were supposed to call.”
She uncrossed her legs and leaned back on her outstretched hands. “I know.”
I let out a breath and put my gun on the drawer. “What if I had been my wife? What would you have done then?”
“What should your wife care? You’re not together. Are you?”
I looked at her. “Well, I care.”
Her eyes darted from mine. “Oh.”
An unpleasant silence settled over us.
Allyssa looked at the gun on my dresser. “Were you gonna shoot me with that thing?”
I glanced at the massive gun on the counter. “When I thought you were some Lunatic come to kill me, yeah.”
“That thing’s as big as Jupiter!”
I broke out into laughter.
She started to giggle. Good humor returned to those seductive eyes.
“Jupiter,” I said. “Yeah, I like that. That’s what I’ll call it, Jupiter.”
“You men and your guns.”
“You weren’t complaining about my gun yesterday.”
We shared a smile, and I wished my life were simpler.
“Tough day?” she said.
My thoughts returned to the present. “Yeah.”
“Why don’t you come here and let me give you a massage?”
It wasn’t a good idea. I knew that. I was going to keep slipping deeper and deeper into this quagmire if I didn’t stop. I pulled my shirt off and lay on the bed. She hiked her dress up and began to rub my shoulders. It felt so good. I told her about my day, about the meeting with Katsaros, the detour to ManaTech, the meeting with Kingsley, the girl from The Bartholomew. I even told her about that stupid AI.
I was feeling a lot better. My muscles were looser, and it wasn’t just the massage.
“You think this girl that was following you is a competitor?”
I rolled over to look at her. She kept her perch. I tried to not let it distract me. “You mean someone Katsaros hired?”
“No, like one of his rivals. Maybe he knows about the video.”
“I don’t know. Something about her being a corporate PI doesn’t feel right.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know but I just don’t think that’s her.”
“Well,” said Allyssa, changing the subject. “I got what I could.” She reached above me for the nightstand and pushed her breasts into my face. She sat up and felt the pressure down there. She just smiled and squirmed. Rub the right places with the right parts. “I had to run hard copies from a remote site, the old-fashioned way.”
She tossed the file on my chest. There were pics and a few dossiers. It took me a few moments to realize who these people were. I looked up at her. “Party-goers?”
She nodded. “Not like you think, though. They may or may not have attended that particular party, but they have intimate knowledge of these parties.”
It was useful information, but I doubted these people had much reason to break Lenny out of prison. They may, however, have been targets of Lenny’s surveillance, so their enemies and rivals were another matter.
Marcus Lamier, industrialist and conservative ideologue. Barry Randall, CFO of Iris Securities. His company specialized in underwriting government projects at an almost ten percent annual return. It was a lucrative business. Darnell Lucas was a married father of three. His dossier claimed him the sole proprietor of a construction company known to do lots of business with the city. She’d put the best one on the bottom of the stack.
“Wayne Petrovich?”
She giggled. “I thought you’d like him.”
I did. He was one of these local evangelist moguls. His religious empire was worth millions. He was also a powerful supporter of The Right. The Right was a religious organization that pushed conservative principals and shrouded its less tolerant ideals in a cloak of religion. It was the kind of thing that had been around since the first two people started believing in ghosts in the wind and old men in the sky. It was also just the kind of thing that made me sick. “This guy’s banging your girls?”
“Or boys,” she said.
That brought back what she really did for a living. I looked at her kneeling on my crotch. “Could you get up?”
“Sure.” She climbed off me.
“Did you get the rest?”
She looked over her shoulder at me. I could see that she was wounded. I wanted to care, but she was as much a part of this as Katsaros. I couldn’t believe I’d slept with her. I wouldn’t do it again.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s on the nightstand. Even got you a little bonus.”
“Thanks.” I reached for the nightstand.
Allyssa was headed for the door. “I know what I do is fucked up, Parker. I do. That’s why I’m really trying to help. Sometimes the only way to change a fucked-up situation is from the inside, you know?”
Much of the weight that had lifted returned, with a side of guilt. I watched her leave and tried to go through the dossiers, but my thoughts kept trailing to the hurt feelings of a prostitute.
*******
I didn’t sleep well. To be honest, I didn’t sleep at all. Thoughts of Suzanne and Maddy wrestled with the guilt of Allyssa. Lenny Marquez and Angelo Katsaros didn’t leave me alone either. I was staring at the ceiling when my pReC pinged. It was Linus Piper, attorney to the falling stars.
“Yeah.”
Piper’s image flowed down my optical nerve to my brain. “Mr. Parker,” he said, “I’m sorry for the short notice, but we have just gotten a meeting with Deputy Chief Mellissa Bates. I was hoping we could get this messy matter resolved from the top.”
I sat up. “Sure. When and where?”
*******
The headquarters of the Tycho City Police Department was in The Upper City. It was on the third floor of the Tycho City Hall, a monument that stood twenty stories and was dwarfed by almost every other building in the skyline. It had polished stone floors and walls. The reception countertop had a marble look and feel. It was a far cry from Precinct Thirty-three.
The man was waiting there for me. He was dressed in a dark suit. He was young, in his twenties. I recognized him from the pic Piper had sent me. Another, older man carried a briefcase and accordion file. I figured him for the secretary. It might have been the twenty-third century, but lawyers still loved their paper.
The man shook my hand. “Mr. Parker,” he said. “Glad you could be here. I’m Pete Wendell, one of Mr. Piper’s labor associates. This is Devin Gordon, my assistant.”
I exchanged salutations and we made some small talk.
“What exactly are we meeting about?” I said.
“It’s an initial feeling-out meeting.”
“Meaning we have no reason to be confident here.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Parker. We probably won’t have your job in our pocket when we leave, but we’ll have a plan to move forward.” He had a chipper, upbeat demeanor that was both irritating and a little insincere. It was still good to hear, though.
A light-duty cop from the Second Precinct led us to the back. The meeting room was carpeted. A wannabe wood table more than two meters long ran the length of the room. The chairs were metal with cushions. Glamor shots depicting cops doing cop things hung on t
he walls. Each was christened with a word across the top: Integrity, Courage, Dedication, and Justice. They were pretty cool the first time I saw them, but they were kind of old hat, now.
The chief wasn’t here. I didn’t figure she would be. Running a major metropolitan police department took a lot of time and energy. Missy Bates had been hired after me, but that hadn’t stopped her from jumping several grades above me. Her ambitions went high above deputy police chief. She’d be running the whole department someday, and I doubted she’d stop there.
She came into the room at the head of her entourage. She was in her thirties, almost ten years younger than I was. Her black hair had a blue shimmer to it. It had been pulled into a tight bun and she had the look of a strict school teacher. Her skin was like creamed coffee. She had violet eyes.
I recognized some of the people behind her. Andrew Tsaris donned his shark’s smile when he looked at me. His eyes might have belonged to one of the killer fish. It crushed the hope that had dared to live in my soul. Captain Willis Rodson brought up the rear. His face was long, and he wouldn’t look at me. I was ready to leave.
Bates sat in the middle of the table opposite to where we stood. Her support staff flanked her. Tsaris sat on her left. A dark-haired man in a pinstriped suit sat to her right. Wendell was across from Bates, Gordon sat to his right. I sat to his left.
There was a pleasant exchange of introductions, but I could already feel the tension. Bates fired the opening salvo. “Gentlemen, thank you for meeting us here today.” She gave a smile that was more politician than cop. “We’ve come to discuss the ongoing discipline of Detective Francis Parker.” She looked at me and that smile returned. “Mr. Parker.”
I half smiled, half grimaced.
“I’ve reviewed the case and the department’s position is very clear and very solid. Mr. Parker is a habitual breaker of departmental policy and he has most recently used his authority and position as a police officer to conduct his own private investigation that has interfered with the active investigation into the death of one of our officers.”
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