by Kris Ripper
“Wild-goose chases?” I shoved the chair back and stood. “Wild-goose chases like trying to find out who’s killing my friends? Is that a wild-goose chase? Someone’s killing queer people and no one gives a shit! And that’s way the hell more important than fucking bingo, or what the community garden’s harvesting right now!”
Potter took a deep breath and stood up, and shit, right, he was fucking way bigger than me. I didn’t step back, but I was distantly grateful for the desk between us.
“You’re absolutely right, Masiello. Some stories are more important than others. And when you’re no longer a snot-nosed green-behind-the-ears kid, you may even get to write those stories. But at the moment I need someone who’s gonna write the shit my grandma reads, and for now, that’s you. You can do your job or I’ll find someone else. Now get the hell out of my office!”
I wanted to fight with him—I opened my mouth to fight with him—but a hand grabbed the back of my shirt and tugged me out of the room.
Joe Rodriguez shoved me roughly to the side. “Boys, boys, let’s not forget to be civil.”
Potter, face even redder, growled, “Get lost, Rodriguez!”
“Masiello’s blood sugar’s down. I’ll take him for an emergency Snickers run.”
“Get him away from me before I fire him.”
The words jolted me out of my rage. I couldn’t get fired. Shit. I’d yelled at my boss. What the hell was I thinking right now?
“Come on, you.”
I couldn’t meet Caspar’s eyes as I grabbed my bag, and followed Rodriguez out.
Apparently when he said Snickers run, he meant bar.
“What do you drink?” he asked me.
“Beer. Stella if they have it.” I didn’t know this place, but it was full of older men. What would they have on tap here? Bud Light?
“I’ll be back. You try to resist the urge to yell at anyone else, okay?”
I rolled my eyes.
He brought back a plate of sliders and two beers.
The second I saw the sliders my mouth started watering. I mean, if my mom had made them I’d eat them, so what was the problem with me eating them now? I didn’t have to be a vegan all the time. Right? “Oh my god, those look so good.”
“I wasn’t joking about your blood sugar, Ed. What the hell’s going on with you lately? You’re moody as fuck.” He took one of the burgers for himself and pushed the plate across the table.
I almost hid behind testosterone, which definitely made for moodiness. But that wasn’t the problem, and I’d feel like an idiot if I claimed it was. And there was a slight chance he hadn’t worked out I was trans, which would mean explaining, and I definitely didn’t have the energy for that.
“It’s this case. The murders. I can’t stop thinking about it.” Except when Alisha and I were camping in a storm with no cell service. That had been the first break in weeks, and I felt a little guilty about it.
“Yeah.”
That was it? I swallowed my first bite of meat in forever and said, “Wait, was that your pep talk?”
“This”—a hand-wave at the food and beer—“is my pep talk, smartass.”
“It just feels like nobody is really trying to find this guy, whoever he is. Like people are going to keep dying and no one even notices because it’s just drag kings and trans women and gay people. No one important.” I took another huge bite and focused on chewing.
Joe didn’t say anything until he’d devoured a slider and half his beer. Then he sat back, surveying me. “Look, kid, I get it. But you’re on the outside of this one. I talk to Baker every day. It’s a lot of work, putting four crime scenes next to each other, comparing the evidence, judging if the same force was used against each victim. They’re trying to find all the inconsistencies and document all the similarities so that when this sonofabitch is found, and arrested, they can lock him up for good.”
“So until then, what, we just keep dying?”
“People only move so fast. Let me tell you a story about a bright-eyed young reporter we’ll call Roe Jodriguez.”
Laughter surprised me, and I almost spit beer all over the table.
“Young Roe was a serious, hard-nosed reporter. This kid never saw a crime he didn’t want to write about. He got in with some local cops—other young Turks like himself—and learned a little about how they investigated and how crimes actually got solved, which was a whole lot more talking on the phone and interviewing people who didn’t see nothing than it looked like on the TV shows.”
I couldn’t resist. “They had TV when Roe started out?”
He raised his hand like he was gonna smack the back of my head. “Mind your manners. And hey, it doesn’t get better than Cagney & Lacey, kid, so shut it.”
I laughed.
“As I was saying, Roe wanted to be involved. He wanted to be on the inside of it, where things were happening. He was a journalist, but it wasn’t enough to just talk to people after the fact, damn it, he wanted a seat at the table. Or at least he wanted to stand at the outskirts and watch.” He took a pull off his beer. “You remember Paloma Santiago Ortiz?”
The name tickled the edges of my memory, but after a second I shook my head. “I know the name, but I don’t know the story.”
“This was ’91. I was working your beat, the shit work, the crap handed down to me by everyone else at the paper. And it wasn’t just one guy back then. You may not have noticed this, Masiello, but I’m not a blond, blue-eyed, all-American white boy.”
“Me neither.”
“And back then, well, it was understood that we token people of color were only there on sufferance, but any excuse would be welcome to get rid of us. So when guys who came in after I did shuffled their shit assignments my way, I wrote them. Maybe not with a smile, but I didn’t want to rock the boat because I knew I’d be the first one they tossed overboard.”
Shit. I’d yelled at Potter and I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to fire me. It hadn’t even occurred to me to be quiet because my brown skin might make me a target.
“This ain’t a ‘you got it so much easier than I did’ story.” Rodriguez leaned over. “I think all that’s bullshit, and you got your own shit to deal with. But I want you to know where I’m coming from so you understand what I risked.”
I nodded.
“I was busy enough, between my own work and other people’s, so on my off hours I’d hang out with my cop buddies. Guys like Baker and Smith. We’d shoot the shit, they’d tell me about whatever they were working on, I’d bitch about my bosses, you know how it goes. So one day we’re sitting around in Baker’s garage—he was the only one of us who was married, so we spent a lot of time over there, and Marion, his wife, would give us shit about being lazy bums and keep making sandwiches for us.” He cracked a smile. “One day I go into their kitchen and tell her she shouldn’t let him treat her like a fuckin’ maid, and you know what she said to me? She goes, ‘Joe, do you really think I want the lot of you in here? As long as I make sure you got snacks and beer, I don’t ever have to hear your horror stories or smell the stink of you.’ Then she told me off for tracking dirt in her house and kicked my ass back out to the garage where I belonged. Man. She was a great lady. Died in a car accident, oh, maybe ten years later.”
He shook his head and visibly brought himself back to the conversation.
“One day we’re in Baker’s garage and they’re all depressed as hell so I ask what’s up. And they tell me about little six-year-old Paloma Santiago Ortiz. They found her body in a trash dump off Horizon and Twenty-third, back when the east side was a hell of a lot more ghetto than it is now. Someone left a sofa that had been lit on fire, and a busted TV, and a little girl’s body on the side of the road in front of an elementary school. Since it was just the east side, no one went to clear away the trash for days, which is when they found Paloma. Little tiny kid, beat to shit, broken arms, messed-up face, and the reason they knew it was her was because her mama always put ribbons in her hair and she
was from the neighborhood, so when the police taped the whole scene off, but before they’d taken away the body, Paloma’s big brother happened to be part of the crowd, only there to see what was going on. He saw the ribbons in her hair as Baker was laying his jacket down over her.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Poor kid. How do you get over seeing your little sister like that? Anyway, by the time we’re sitting there drinking and they’re telling me all this, it had been two weeks, and not only did they have no fucking idea who did it, but I hadn’t even heard of this little girl. The paper hadn’t reported a single word about her.” He gave me a rueful look. “Young Roe was a believer in the press, Ed. He believed a free press was almost an arm of government, that’s how important it was to democracy. He believed that people had the right, and the obligation, to be informed. But how the fuck could they stay informed if no one was reporting a story like that?
“So I burst into my editor’s office the next day and I demanded—demanded—to write up Paloma for the paper. I didn’t see a downside. She deserved acknowledgment, damn it, and maybe someone had seen something. The cops had come up empty, but surely someone in town knew something, surely this monster, whoever he was, had told someone what he’d done. And if we published it, maybe that person would come forward with information.”
“They didn’t let you write it?”
“Oh, they did. A very, very sanitized version of it. The girl had been sexually assaulted, which just turns my fucking stomach, and beaten to death, and tied up somewhere. I wasn’t allowed to say all that. I was allowed to say a body of a young Hispanic female had been found in east La Vista and anyone with information pertaining to the child’s death was invited to share that information with LVPD.”
“Hispanic?”
He shrugged. “Those were the times.”
“Did anyone come forward?”
“Nah. Well, yeah, but no one credible. Some creepy fuckers who wanted to know more, some little old ladies who thought maybe they’d seen something, but nothing at all helpful. I asked if I could write a follow-up, you know, maybe try to get more energy going around the story, and of course they said no fucking way, we’re not wasting column inches on a story that isn’t going anywhere. And my cop buddies were getting the same thing from their side. No resources, no time, other crimes that might actually have a chance at being solved. So this little girl was just forgotten, tossed away, and no one knew anything except that she was walking home from school one day and never got there and a few hours later she was dead.”
“That’s fucking awful.” I shuddered.
“Eat more food. You’re skinny as shit.”
I took another slider, even though the first was sitting like a lump in my gut. “So did they ever find out who killed her?”
“No. At least, the guys had their theories but they never proved any of them. We were obsessed, man. We had a whole bulletin board Marion made us turn toward the wall when we were done for the night. Pictures, notes, a map of her walk home from school and the likely places she might have been snatched. We worked that case every night for months, Ed. I couldn’t sleep without dreaming about a little girl I’d never met. It got to the point where sometimes I’d be out in public, in a grocery store, maybe, or walking down the street, and I’d think I saw her out of the corner of my eye.” He shook his head again, wiping his lips with a napkin. “It got in the way of my life. I didn’t go out, didn’t eat, was belligerent at work a few times, until a guy who’d been there a lot longer than me took me aside and told me how it is.”
Huh. “So how is it?”
“You can’t solve all the mysteries. No one can. If you sacrifice everything in order to focus only on this one case, Ed, you won’t have anything left at the end of it. Look, good reporters get obsessed sometimes. It’s a hazard of the job. But you gotta know when to pull back. You gotta be able to maintain some perspective or you lose yourself to that obsession, you know what I’m saying? We had Marion. She wasn’t my wife, but she damn sure didn’t let us get lost down the rabbit hole for too long before flicking the lights at us and either kicking us out or throwing some blankets down on the armchair and the sofa in their living room. You need other people in your life to tell you when you’re in over your head, kid. And you’re in over your head right now.”
I set down the burger, half-eaten. “I hear you.”
“Good. Now finish your beer so we can make an appearance at the office before everyone goes home.”
“You sure we aren’t gonna be fired for leaving in the middle of the day?”
“Hell no. Potter likes you. He’s been pushing you for a while now, saying you’re better than grunt work.” This time he did cuff the back of my head. “If you’re ready to really work, kid, long fucking hours, I’ll start taking you along. Nights, weekends, forget fucking having a life, because the minute we have a lead, we jump on it.”
I looked up. “I’m ready.”
“Good. You keep your head down and finish all your assignments and you can get in on the real stories. How does that sound?”
“It sounds good. And thanks, Joe.”
“You got it, kid.”
We got back to work with just enough time for me to write an apology to Potter.
Despite the fact that Fredi had canceled Apocalypse WOW, a lot of people either hadn’t heard, or hadn’t cared. The crowd was a mix of people who seemed oblivious and were going about their usual Friday night, and people who were hyperaware of what was going on and couldn’t relax.
Tom was back behind the bar, but it was impossible to ignore the cold shoulder he was getting from the people who lined up five deep on Fredi’s side to wait for a drink so they wouldn’t have to talk to him.
“Fucking bastard whores,” Carlos kept muttering.
“On the upside,” Alisha said, “we’re getting really fast service.” She grinned at Tom, who returned a weak smile.
“Fredi always gives me her tips anyway. I bet knowing that would really piss all those people off.”
Carlos cursed under his breath. “Fucking bastards.”
“It’s okay. It’ll blow over.”
Just then a goblin or something came up to order a round of drinks. When the goblin took off, the guy on the next stool over caught my eye.
“You look super familiar to me,” he said. Cute, if you’re into guys. Real young-looking face.
“Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.” He was too young to have known me before, I thought, though faces like that are sometimes deceptive.
“Huh. Weird.” He put out his hand. “Joey.”
“Ed Masiello.” Alisha was still talking to Carlos, so I skipped introductions.
“Oh shit. Ed Masiello. You work at the paper with my dad.”
“Who’s your dad?”
“Joe Rodriguez.”
“Damn. Yeah, he bought me lunch the other day to keep me from getting fired. Good man, your dad.”
“Yeah, he’s all right. I knew I knew you from somewhere. I must’ve seen a picture or something. That’s funny.” A shadow shifted across his expression, and it definitely wasn’t funny. Not that I blamed him; I wouldn’t want to drink with my dad’s coworkers. He shrugged. “So, uh, how are you liking the theme nights, or whatever?”
I glanced around. “They’ve been interesting. You?”
“Oh, I guess they’re probably not really my thing. I prefer . . . simplicity. You know. Give me a beer and a hot guy and I’m good. But I guess I’m kind of old-fashioned that way.”
“I’m not sure ‘beer and a hot guy’ is ever really going out of style.” And if it did, I wasn’t about to mourn it, but I’d known younger guys who’d longed for “the old days” before. They seemed to miss the fact that the rest of us had been left out in the cold back then, and that quite a few of them hadn’t survived.
“Yeah, true. I guess it’s more about who we let in.”
I gestured to the costumed crowd. “Too many elves, right?”<
br />
He didn’t look all that amused, but he offered a weak smile.
“Ed!”
I half turned back to Alisha, who blinked at Joey. “Oh, jeez, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s okay. This is Joey Rodriguez. His dad works at the paper. Joey, this is my girlfriend, Alisha.”
“Hey, good to meet you.” She reached out.
After a beat of Joey staring at her hand, he shook. “Yeah, you too. Maybe I’ll see you guys around.” He slid off the stool and melted into the crowd.
Alisha made a face at me. “Oops. Sorry I harshed your conversation.”
“Yeah, that was a little weird. We were actually having a kind of interesting discussion about— I’m not sure. Community? Or maybe how it’s changing?”
“Ohh. Gay community? Because I’m pretty sure he thinks you’re straight now. Or at least bi.”
It took a full minute for me to understand what she meant. “You mean— Because you— Huh.”
“Yep. Good news: you pass. Bad news: now that dude thinks we’re straight people. Just can’t win, babe. Anyway, did you know Carlos and Tom were getting married?”
I turned back to the conversation at hand, and the next time a cosplaying WOW character approached (an elf?), we moved over to one of the tables where Jaq and Hannah were already sitting.
“I’m only saying there’s no point in being here all night freaked out,” Hannah was saying. “We might as well go home.”
“I’m not worried about us. But for fuck’s sake, people die after every theme night and where are we right now? A fucking theme night.” Jaq smiled apologetically at us. “Sorry, I’m just—concerned.”
“Me too,” I said. “But I don’t know what else Fredi could have done short of keeping the place closed.”
“She tried that, but people convinced her not to. They said closing down would be ‘letting the bad guys win,’ like this is a fucking comic book.”
“If we hid in our houses whenever we felt threatened, we’d never see daylight,” Hannah mumbled. “Alisha, you want to dance? I can’t deal with any more of this talk tonight.”