Lunatic City

by T. Allen Diaz

  “Tommy did some digging. He accused Keith of being a pimp and a slave trader. It was pretty heavy stuff.”

  “But?”

  She took a breath and shook her head. “The evidence was pretty thin and Keith was… Keith was…. He—”

  “Was sleeping with Jessica,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, Tommy had a meltdown in her office after it came to blows with Keith.”

  “Close enough,” said BB.

  I thought to ask why he didn’t go to the cops, but BB would just look at me like I was an idiot. “So, do you still have the key to his apartment?”

  “Are you asking a lady if she has a key to a man’s flat?”

  “No,” I said. “You dated him for eighteen months. I’m asking if you still have it.”

  Her smile was a coy one. “Maybe.”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s finish this amazing dinner and get over to his place to see if we can figure out a way to reach him.”

  *******

  Tommy Henson lived on the fifth floor of the Winder Building. The rooms were wide and spacious enough to be comfortable, but lacked the ostentatiousness of true luxury. The kid was a pig. I commented on that fact.

  “Genius is often messy,” said BB.

  “Then he should get the Nobel Prize for something.”

  She glared at me. We gained access to his home computer. It was a standard household unit. It was a built-in model that we accessed via a pre-constructed computer nook cut into one of those multi-purpose study/family rooms.

  I read the holographic screen and frowned.

  “Nothing?”

  “Na,” I said and leaned back into the computer chair. “I doubt there was ever anything here. Even if there was, a computer genius like Tommy could erase any trace so clean it’d take a hundred forensic techs a million hours to find any clue.”

  “I’m surprised Tommy would even leave it here for you to find.”

  “These house computers usually belong to the building owners. Taking it constitutes a significant breach of contract and carries a significant criminal penalty.

  “Besides, there’s a pretty healthy paranoia among the younger folk that management might be reading their mail over their shoulder. Tommy might’ve used it to surf some of his crusading sites, but any correspondences he had regarding his involvement with my subject was likely done right off his pReC.”

  I stood from my chair and searched the rest of the house: his drawers and closet, I flipped his mattress, the bathroom, even his kitchen. There were lots of holes, and nothing of substance.

  “It looks like he packed,” said BB.

  “Yeah, he won’t be back for a while.” I closed the door and stood before the picture window that looked out at the massive building across the street. The place was sterile, at least in an investigative sense. I shook my head.

  “There’s nothing here, is there?”

  I looked at BB. “I’m afraid not.”

  CHAPTER XII

  A bundle of clothes was piled in front of my door when I got home. They were my clothes from the dryer. I picked up the note that was on top. Next time I throw them in the trash, dickhead.

  Ah, my wonderful neighbors!

  I slipped inside, savored Suzanne’s aroma and flicked the light on. I was home. I sat on the couch and accessed The Lunar Crusader with my pReC. But, before I could read the first post, I was asleep.

  My pReC woke me five hours later. It was a little after nine-thirty. It was Piper: this couldn’t be good news. “Yes.”

  There was no visual. I didn’t feel like letting him see me this way and I didn’t really wanna look at him.

  “Good morning, Mr. Parker! Trying to give me bonus points for added difficulty?”

  I took a deep snort of air through my nose, cleared my throat and rubbed my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “You were served by your wife, or, more precisely, by Patricia Stanley.”

  I cleared my throat again. “Oh yeah, that.”

  “Oh yeah, that! Did you know you have a hearing, today?”

  That woke me up. “A hearing. What?”

  “Yeah, she’s trying to file an injunction to keep you from your daughter.”

  Maddy! “No! She can’t do that!”

  “It’s lucky for you we pull the itinerary every morning to check upcoming cases. Parker v Parker just happened to jump out at my legal secretary. Thank God it’s a one-thirty or you’d be what we in the legal profession call fucked. Can you be there at one?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can be there.”

  “One o’clock.”

  “One o’clock.”

  “You’ll be meeting with Janet Foxx. She’s an associate of mine.”

  I understood what he was saying: Piper had pawned me off on lesser attorneys and wouldn’t be bothered with me anymore. I thought about our visit and his family and secretary. I was fine with that.

  I wiped the sleep out of my eyes and moved to the kitchen. I gulped down a gritty breakfast shake and walked down to the showers. I dressed in a nice white button-down and grey slacks. They were the uniform from my days as a real detective. I slipped into my unshined black shoes and headed downstairs.

  I was on the street, moving towards the Thirty-third Precinct when I saw the clown face of a Lunatic soldier standing in the street before me. I stopped and thought about running, but that’s when the bag came down over my head.

  I don’t know how long they beat and kicked me, but it was long enough to render me senseless. I awoke on a floor. Music was playing in another room. The monkeys from my hangover were back. I tried to appease them by not moving my head. It helped.

  “He lives!” The voice boomed and echoed as if the very room were speaking.

  I looked up. A panel of hoodlums was clustered in a semi-circle. Each had the tats and piercings of The Lunatics. Their dress was just as gaudy: lots of bright reds and blues, yellows and oranges. They sat in stoic silence, looking back at me like gravestones.

  All, that is, but the man in the middle. He wore a baggy orange and blue silk button-down and royal purple pantaloons. His faux snakeskin dress shoes were dyed blue. A pair of purple gloved hands were folded on an emerald-topped walking stick.

  His skin had once held an olive complexion. Now his whole head was midnight black, right down to his lips. His eye sockets were blood red. His hair was neon green. His irises had been tatted yellow. A silver bolt passed through his nose and silver studs dotted his mouth. He leaned forward with his weight on the cane.

  I tried not to show my fear. “Giovanni Rocamora! I thought that might be you!”

  He didn’t flinch. A blow landed from behind me. It was followed by another and another and another.

  “You should speak with reverence, cop,” he said. “You have caused me some problems. I’ve lost two good soldiers because of you, that’s not including others that were—useful.”

  My heart thundered. The pain from my beatings was throbbing everywhere, especially my face. I closed my eyes and waited to hear him proclaim my death sentence.

  “Have you anything to say for yourself?”

  I measured my words. The wrong ones would get me killed faster than the right ones. “I’m sorry,” the words threatened to choke me. “Please forgive me.”

  The panel just gazed, motionless as gargoyles.

  “I was seeking answers to the death of my partner, my friend.”

  Giovanni the Rock leaned forward and stared at me. Those yellow eyes were terrifying. “I don’t give a damn about no dead cop.” He looked past me and tilted his head. The blow took me in the back of the skull.

  I’m pretty sure the rest were kicks. I was clinging to consciousness when the beating stopped. A hand grabbed me by my hair and pulled me onto my ass. It turned my face up. The Rock
was leaning over me. His yellow eyes pierced the fog of my stupor. “Here, you’ve bought them with your life, so you may as well have them.” He motioned with his hand.

  A soldier came from beyond my view and tossed a bag on my lap. The grip on my hair was released. I understood, steeled myself, and opened the sack. The contents looked like a pair of Halloween masks, but I recognized the gloss-white with red tribal tats across the holes of his eye sockets. The other was a dark blue with a gold starburst over one eye.

  “They were good soldiers, Mr. Policeman! Better than you!”

  I thought the presence of their faces in this bag might dispute that wisdom, but I refrained from pointing it out.

  “It pained me to my soul to strip them.”

  I tried not to think about that. Their faces were always cut and peeled while the subjects were still alive. I didn’t want to imagine what that would be like.

  One of the soldiers held a fileting knife to my jugular. I barely stopped the whimper that tried to force its way through my throat, but there was no way to stop the trembling. I thought of how I had tormented E-Rod before shattering his hands and breaking his jaw and felt a sting of guilt.

  The Rock leered at me. Even his teeth and gums were black. “I could strip you, right now, cop. Spill your blood all over this floor, like a slaughterhouse. Cut that ugly mug off of you and smear what was left of you into the street in front of the Thirty-third Precinct. Let your buddies see you writhe all the way to the hospital.

  “You’d probably live. But I can’t take the chance.” He stood and looked down at me, my very life in his hands. “I need you alive. I need you alive for the day we catch up to that pretty daughter of yours.” He leaned into my face, his rank breath assaulting my nose. “Cause when we find her, we’re gonna strip her of more than her face!”

  He spit on me.

  I was trembling, but it was no longer out of fear. Not now, I told myself. You’ll only end up dead.

  The beating resumed and I hovered on the brink of consciousness for what seemed like hours. I finally opened my eyes and looked at my apartment. Jupiter lay next to me. I picked him up and stumbled inside. I put ice on my face and looked in the mirror.

  My lips were swollen and split in three or four places. My left eye was now swollen shut. I had a cut over my right eye and cheek. My nose was broken and swollen. Blood had washed over my broken face and ruined my white button-down.

  “I need you alive for the day we catch up to that pretty daughter of yours. ’Cause when we find her, we’re gonna strip her of more than her face!”

  Maddy. Then, I remembered the time. Maddy!

  I looked at the time on the wall: one-forty-five. Shit!

  I ripped the ruined shirt off without bothering with the buttons and snatched a wrinkled one out of the laundry that had been on the floor. I ran down the street and climbed to the third floor mezzanine and sprinted to the nearest train station. The Transit cops gave me some grief, but they could have done a lot more to slow me down.

  I was at a full sprint and about to collapse from sheer exhaustion when I reached the courthouse. I didn’t see a face that looked like Janet Foxx, but the assistant, Gordon, was there. His eyes widened when he saw me and said, “What happened to you?”

  “I fell down the stairs.”

  He frowned at my humor.

  “Do we really wanna talk about this now?”

  That’s when the nearest chamber doors opened. Suzanne was walking out, her face tipped back, nose in the air. There was a time I found that smug superiority so damned sexy. Now, it had a very different effect. “Suzanne,” I said. “I need to talk to you!”

  She looked my way. The arrogance on her face was shattered by horrified shock. She looked at her lawyer, an auburn-haired woman of middle age and a mostly youthful figure.

  Patricia Stanley, I presume. “Suzanne! Suzanne! Please! I need to talk to you!”

  A bunch of powerful arms restrained me, including Gordon.

  I was still calling after Suzanne.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I turned to the voice. It belonged to a tiny woman, barely more than one and a half meters. She had short gray hair and black skirt suit and glittering blue eyes. She grabbed me by the scruff of the shirt and pulled me into one of the private conference rooms. “What in the name of all that’s holy happened to you, and what the hell are you doing here looking like that?”

  I just gaped at her. I had never been so close to breaking down in front of a stranger in my entire life.

  She took a deep breath. Her tone softened. “Listen, I’m gonna step out and give you a minute. When you’re ready, you come get me.”

  I just nodded. I took several minutes, maybe fifteen.

  She came back in and sat down. I told her the whole story. How I’d been threatened by one of the most dangerous street captains in the Lunatic street gang. How he’d had me beaten and how he promised to rape my daughter and cut off her face.

  “I can’t be near her now,” I said. “I can’t do this.”

  The lawyer looked at me, her eyes hard as two blue diamonds. “The first thing we’re gonna do is protect that daughter of yours. That’s not gonna be easy on you. We may have to keep you apart for a long time, but I’ll try to squeeze in some visits somehow, someway. Maybe some digital conferences. We’ll do something.”

  I looked down at the floor and nodded. I was never gonna see her again. I could never be close to her without bringing the specter of death with me. I tried to reconcile that in my head.

  The lawyer leaned into my face. “And, once we’re sure Maddy’s safe, we’re gonna go after this bastard and cut his goddamned face off! Along with the giant balls it takes to threaten one of my clients. You got that?”

  I almost managed a smile. I didn’t know this lawyer, but I liked her already.

  *******

  I spent two hours with Janet Foxx, Esquire, sorting through the ashes of my life. We were going to offer a counter to Suzanne’s motion, but it was intended to be a compromise as opposed to a blocking motion. We were going to see about getting the girls someplace topside, or rather, Katsaros was. That troubled me, but I was in no position to argue. They were as good as dead in The Lower City and there was no other way to get them out.

  Visitations would have to wait for now, but we would soon look into some secret venues to at least give us some time. That’s when Foxx would start looking for a way to take a run at Rocamora and his empire. I was afraid that she was dreaming, but she seemed to think she could do something. There wasn’t much else to do but find a way to earn all this legal representation.

  I went back home. It would now be about as safe as any other in the city. I opened the door, took a breath of Suzanne and flipped on the light. I sat on the couch and accessed my pReC.

  Bennett was right: Tommy was a real crusader. He reported on sexual violence above and below the street. He took on rich brat and Lunatic punk with equal zeal. He mostly reposted articles from sexual violence watchdog sites and added his own take, but he talked about other cases from mainstream media sites.

  I pulled up one of the reposts, a recent one. It said: You get ’em Cyndi! It was a story that chronicled sex slaves that started on The Floor and were funneled through Lunatic ‘warehouses’ on their way to satisfy the desires of tourists from Earth. It named names and listed likely layovers.

  Aphrodite’s Parlor was mentioned, so was a chattel-broker named Michael E-Rod Taylor. It didn’t name specific sources, but the info was precise and accurate. The Lunatics wouldn’t like this, at all. I moved over to this thread: this girl’s name was Cynthia Travis, a freelancer who reported for a couple of different small media sites.

  She wasn’t likely to be getting rich doing this kind of work and she was really pissing off some people who could reach out and touch her. She wasn’t just a sexual cr
imes champion. Her real beat seemed to be politics.

  She investigated a lot of different people, powerful people. She didn’t seem to think much of the LAC. She also didn’t seem afraid of them. I thought that equal parts stupidity and courage. She didn’t seem to have a lot of use for the good Reverend Petrovich or his cronies. Good for her.

  That’s when I came across her profile pic and bio: shoulder-length brown hair, tan skin, pretty white teeth, and eyes like caramel. Son-of-a-bitch!

  *******

  “I told you she didn’t seem like a PI!”

  Dana sat across the table scanning her pReC. “A tabloid journalist.”

  “I wouldn’t categorize her stuff as tabloid journalism. It’s definitely not mainstream.”

  She looked at me. “Are you suddenly her biggest fan?”

  I smiled and looked out at the crowd. “The dildo cam should have been the clue. We should have known. It screams journalist.”

  “Give it a break, Frank. It screams extortion and blackmail even louder. We needed this last piece.”

  “So,” I said. “Tommy comes to her with this story told to him by Keith. He’s checked it out, it seems legit.”

  Dana nodded. “Cyndi-rella comes up with the idea of using Tommy to pose as a John and gets him to smuggle the dildo cam to her. Lenny shoots the footage—”

  “And then they just bust her out?” Something about that didn’t feel right. “How did they know that she would be chosen for this little party? How could they anticipate who would be there? It seems a lot to set up in the blind.”

  “Maybe they have another insider. Maybe they smuggled the camera to record your garden-variety behind-the-scenes-of-a-sex-cage and stumbled across this jackpot by accident. It could have happened a million different ways, Frank. We don’t have any way of knowing for sure with the information we have.”

  “I have a way.”

  Dana looked at me. “Not the hooker with the heart of gold?”

  I smiled. “Trust me. It might have soft spots, but that heart isn’t made of gold.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Allyssa opened the door. Her smile fell when she looked at me.