The bug guys were on their way. They would break out their little nets and jars and wade around capturing maggots and looking at what kind of bugs had nibbled what part of the carcass. Now there was a career Cho didn’t understand. You put two of the creepiest things you can think of together and make it your job? What kind of freak does that?
Cho turned away from the other officers and sneezed. His tea jumped out of the cup and scalded his fingers. It was just that kind of day.
Cho sneezed again and thought about his next step. The protocol was pretty standard, stuff he’d done hundreds of times. He’d order a ballistics test on the bullet they’d recovered from the dead guy. He had the guy’s wallet, empty of everything but his California driver’s license. Cho read the name out loud.
“Barry White.”
Quijano looked over at him.
“Like the singer?”
Cho nodded.
“You think he’s a gang guy?”
“His name’s Barry. I don’t think he’s gonna be runnin’ with the Toons.”
Cho sneezed again and reached into his pocket for a tissue as two clear streamers of mucus festooned his upper lip.
“That’s disgusting. You should cover your mouth.”
Cho nodded. It was disgusting. There was no denying it. The more he blew his nose, the more snot came out. He filled tissue after tissue.
Quijano put his hand over his face and moved a few feet away from Cho.
“I’ll run a check against the missing-person reports. Then I guess we go by the victim’s address. Deliver the bad news.”
Cho nodded. “I need an Advil.” He turned and walked toward a couple of EMT paramedics who were hanging around.
…
Ted handed the snot-nosed detective a couple of acetaminophen and a decongestant.
“Get some rest.”
The detective nodded, started to say something, then changed his mind and walked off. Fran and Ted stood in front of the ambulance and watched him skulk back toward the crime scene. They’d been called when the body was found but it wasn’t like they could do anything. They didn’t really deal with people who were already dead. Especially people who’d been dead a long time.
Fran started humming a song, one of those insipid pop ballads like the kind they sing on American Idol, the kind of song that’s more true-love propaganda than music. Ted didn’t know what song it was. Of course he’d heard it a thousand times before, but now it would be stuck in his head all day like a viral infection. He wished Fran liked hip-hop. Nobody hums a rap song.
Ted looked out at the river with its clumps of broken concrete and scabby palm trees, crime-scene vehicles, police cars, and coroner’s van. Ted never liked it when they got to a call and found a DOA. It was a bummer. He watched as an SUV arrived and pulled in alongside the police cars. A man got out and started pulling on thigh-high rubber boots.
“Looks like the bug guys are here.”
He turned to look at her.
“Didn’t you go out with one of them once?”
Fran made a face.
“Are you kidding? Can you imagine fucking one of those guys? Gross.”
Ted had to admit he couldn’t imagine fucking a forensic entymologist, but he didn’t think he needed to answer Fran’s question.
“You wanna get a coffee?”
Fran nodded and climbed into the ambulance.
…
They rode in silence for a few blocks. Ted looked out the window, watching the morning traffic coalesce, seeing kids on their way to school. He saw a lone skateboarder, a tall teenager with his long dark hair flowing in the breeze, go flying down a hill.
“Look at that kid go.”
Fran turned to look and saw the kid crouch down and jump up, hopping over the curb. The skateboarder’s school backpack bounced around on his back.
“In my day we walked places.”
Ted had to laugh. It wasn’t that Fran had said anything funny. It was the way she said it. As if there was some kind of morally superior way to transport yourself to school in the mornings.
Ted watched the skateboarder turn his head to check out a young Latina mother pushing her baby in a stroller. The front wheel of his board must’ve caught a crack or divot in the sidewalk because one second the guy was cruising, looking cool, checking out a hottie, and the next he was doing a face-plant into the street.
Ted turned to Fran.
“Stop.”
…
Detective Cho leaned his head against the window of the burnt-sienna colored Crown Vic and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look at his partner. Quijano had a penchant for putting some kind of goo in his hair that made it black and shiny and smeared back like he was moving fast even when he was sitting still. It reminded Cho of an anime character, like in those Japanese cartoons his kids were always watching. Normally it didn’t bother him, but today it made him feel slightly dizzy.
Cho felt Quijano’s hand on his shoulder.
“You okay?”
“I’m just waiting for the cold medicine to kick in.”
That was the truth. He wanted the decongestants to start decongesting, the painkiller to start easing the achy feeling he had all over and he wanted whatever would stop his runny nose to stop the ridiculous drip. It occurred to him that the decongestants and drip stoppers might actually be working at cross-purposes.
“You should go home, get some rest. That’s what it means when you’ve got a cold. Your body needs rest.”
Another truism. Quijano was full of ’em. That was the problem with the younger generation, they traded in clichés and reliable standbys. Clichés and platitudes and common expressions had become marketing slogans; even the expression “thinking outside the box” was probably trademarked and copyright registered to some marketing guru somewhere. It was like they’d put a gigantic, invisible box around the box that you’re thinking outside of, so you’re never really outside the box, you’re just in a bigger box, a box so gigantic that you can’t see it, so you can’t begin to think outside it. It gave Cho a headache. He wanted nothing more in life right now than to curl up on his big soft bed and fall asleep. But that wasn’t what they were doing. They had a body. Now they had to verify who he was, what had killed him, and, if they were lucky, why. Once he knew why, he could figure out who had done it. That’s how it worked.
…
Ted reached behind him for a first-aid kit as Fran hopped out of the vehicle. The skateboarder was obviously injured—blood was gushing out of his nose and it looked, from the way he was holding it, like he’d broken his arm—but he stood up and tried to wave them off.
“I’m okay. Really.”
Fran shook her head.
“Sit back down. Take it easy.”
But instead of letting the EMT assist him—and talk about response time, this was, like, five seconds—the teenager turned, leaving his backpack and skateboard on the sidewalk, and ran as fast as he could down a side street.
Ted came up to Fran as she stood there, watching the kid run.
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.”
“You think he’s illegal?”
Fran shrugged.
“Who gives a flying fuck?”
Ted picked up the backpack and skateboard and tossed them in the ambulance.
“I bet I can find the name of his school on his books. We can drop it by for him.”
Fran shook her head.
“There you go with that bleeding-heart thing.”
“The kid needs his books.”
“Then he shouldn’t have run off.”
…
Fran sat in the ambulance and watched as Ted walked into the Starbucks. Why anyone would pay five bucks for a cup of coffee was beyond her. Especially when there was a Yum-Yum Donut shop just down the street that made really good, always piping hot, coffee. But Ted liked his fancy espresso drink with hazelnut flavor and soy milk. He was a nice enough guy, she liked him, she really did,
but sometimes he did stuff that was so, she didn’t know what to call it. Metrosexual?
She reached around behind and pulled out the skateboarder’s backpack. She was curious what kind of crap kids carried to school nowadays. Maybe there was a gun or something in there. Maybe that’s why the kid had gone all Speedy Gonzalez.
But when she opened the backpack and looked inside she understood instantly why the kid had taken off running. Nestled between a three-ring notebook and an American History textbook, all packaged up in a couple of large Ziplocs, was a giant bag of marijuana.
24
THE WHITE PICKET FENCE needed a coat of paint and the grass was slowly turning brown but the yard was neat and the hibiscus bushes were in bloom. The small, two-bedroom, ranch-style house was painted gray and white, a couple of lawn chairs were parked on the front porch, and an old screen door slouched on its hinges as if it was drunk, leaning on the sturdy, periwinkle-blue door behind it.
The house fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. It was as bland and characterless as every other ranch house on the street and that’s exactly the way it was supposed to be.
If you were ever invited inside, if you knew the couple who lived there—Bernardo and his wife Blanca—you might notice some discreet fortifications. The periwinkle blue door was actually steel, reinforced with a special door frame and hinge that were built to withstand sustained attempts to kick it in; the windows were all shatter-proof glass and the ones in the backyard had steel bars over them; and there was a small armory of shotguns, automatic rifles, flak jackets, and gas masks in one of the bedroom closets. These improvements were not made to enhance the resale value of the home but were there because the entire basement and attic of the innocuous house had been converted into a massive indoor marijuana farm capable of accommodating—with seedlings sprouted in the shed behind the house—almost one thousand plants in various stages of maturation. Shamus had thrown the grow-house operation together quickly, converting a building that he had been using as a storage facility into a viable greenhouse, using the equipment they’d stolen from Miro’s home. The entire house had been converted into an Elephant Crush farm. Fortunately, Bernardo had grown up on a ranch outside Guanajuato and had worked as a gardener for a rich lady in Beverly Hills when he first came to the United States, so he knew a thing or two about plants, fertilizers, and all the other shit farmers need to know about.
Even though Shamus had a key to the house, he knocked and waited for Bernardo to open the door. It was, after all, the polite thing to do and he didn’t want the neighbors to think that he was anything more than a friend or distant relative of the couple. Guillermo and Damon stood behind him. Guillermo had a bored look on his face like he’d prefer to be almost anywhere else, while Damon actually tried to play it cool.
When the door opened the smell of skunkweed and tropical fruit hit Shamus’s nostrils and caused him to sneeze. He scowled at Bernardo.
“Turn on the filters, ese. This place stinks.”
Bernardo, a surprisingly diminutive man who was also an excellent car mechanic who specialized in diesel engines, shook his head.
“They’re on, jefe. It’s my wife’s cooking that smells so bad.”
Bernardo looked over at Blanca who, in turn, gave an exasperated snort and threw her dish towel on the floor as she stomped out of the room.
“Mira.”
The men followed Bernardo through the well-kept living room, the kitchen, and down a flight of stairs to the basement where hundreds of plants were growing, like a small forest, under dozens of grow lights. The whirr of the irrigation pump was complimented by the hum of fans as CO2-enriched air was circulated through the room.
Damon gasped when he saw all the plants.
“Fucking A. This is the shizzle.”
Guillermo grinned and leaned in to get a closer look at the massive colas sprouting off the plants.
Bernardo fiddled with the system, checking to see that water and nutrients were flowing evenly. Shamus stroked his goatee.
“We’re like, what? A month away?”
Bernardo nodded. “We’ve got a few big ones that are almost ready, I think they’re days away. The clones need more time.”
Damon’s cell phone went off, bleating some kind of hip-hop ringtone that Shamus didn’t recognize. Damon looked at him apologetically.
“Sorry. I gotta take this.”
Damon answered his phone, turning his back on the other men.
Guillermo was leaning in, whispering something to one of the taller plants. Shamus looked over at him.
“What the fuck’re you doing?”
Guillermo shrugged.
“You’re supposed to talk to them. I read about it in the newspaper. It makes them feel good.”
“They’re fuckin’ plants, man.”
Behind him, Shamus detected something in the way Damon was speaking into the phone. It was a kind of urgent panic. It was fear.
Damon snapped his cell phone shut and turned to Shamus with a worried look on his face.
“We lost a package.”
25
MARIANNA STARED at the doctor.
“Positive?”
The doctor, a young and extremely tall Dutch woman, nodded.
“Positively positive.”
Marianna hung her head.
“Filho da puta.”
The doctor reached down and patted her on the shoulder.
“If it makes you feel any better, you’re completely healthy.”
Of course Marianna knew she was pregnant. She didn’t need the test result to tell her that. She felt it in her moods, her swelling and sensitive breasts, and the sudden looseness in her joints, like someone had untied the strings inside that kept her body from falling apart. She could see it in her suddenly robust appetite and her newfound aversion to cashews. And she had never been so tired.
She had tried to deny it, naturally. Blaming the early morning nausea on the stress of her research project. Attributing her shifting moods—from jubilant to melancholy in sixty seconds or less—to some kind of homesickness for Lisbon. She craved bacalhau and roasted potatoes, and her mother’s garlic and bread soup. She wanted to drink wine from her homeland, a tart Vinho Verde or a rosy Tinta Roriz. But in the back of her mind she knew.
The timing was bad. She was right in the middle of a special project for the bio-informatics think tank at Science Park Amsterdam, but then being pregnant wouldn’t really get in the way of her work; she sat in front of a computer all day.
She wasn’t a religious person by any stretch, even though she’d been raised Catholic; she was a spiritual person, a person who believed that there were things that happened for reasons that couldn’t be codified or understood by science, and it never occurred to her to have an abortion.
She thought about the baby’s father. What did she know about him? She knew he was American, but realized she didn’t know his last name. Was Miro a common name in the States? She knew he was some kind of botanist in Los Angeles, knew that he’d won the Cannabis Cup and that he’d been involved in some kind of business deal with the owner of Orange. She knew all this but she didn’t really know what kind of man he was. How would he feel about being a parent? How would he feel about her?
She had felt something different with him, a kind of connection that she hadn’t felt with any man before. What had caused it she couldn’t say. Because she was a scientist her rational side sometimes clashed with her spiritual side; she had convinced herself that true love and the idea of a soul mate was just a fantasy concocted by poets to explain pheromones and other biochemical phenomena that caused humans to attract mates. But despite this pragmatic and completely reasonable, rational approach to love, she had a nagging feeling that there really was something special about Miro. Why she had let him leave without getting his e-mail address, she couldn’t say. Maybe it was because she was afraid that they would make hollow promises to be in touch or meet somewhere again and it wouldn’t happen. Or maybe it wo
uld happen and it wouldn’t be the same. She didn’t want to live on false hope. Isn’t it better to remember the magic than to discover that the magic is gone? Maybe their few days together were everything they were supposed to be.
She’d logged in online and found the Web site for Orange. She moused around and found Guus’s e-mail address. Now that her condition was a medical certainty she was going to write Guus and get Miro’s phone number in America. Marianna had carefully considered her options. She wasn’t going to ask Miro for anything, she was fully prepared to take responsibility for the child, but she thought, as a courtesy, he ought to know.
Marianna walked along a canal, one hand holding her briefcase, the other on her belly, as if suddenly conscious that she had to protect the new life inside her. She stopped and entered a café she knew—one that had free Wi-Fi—and ordered a cup of peppermint tea. She sat at a table and pulled out her laptop. She wasn’t sure what to say to Guus. What if he wanted to protect Miro? What if he never responded? She thought of various approaches and strategies but ultimately opted for the truth.
…
Now that he had won the Cup, Guus was receiving samples sent from seed developers and growers from all over Europe. He packed his bong with a tight cluster of a new strain he’d been sent from a grower in Hamburg. The German grower was trying to get as pure an Indica wallop as possible; he wanted to develop a strain that would knock you on your ass and keep you there. It didn’t have the uplifting, euphoric quality of Elephant Crush but sometimes you just want to get flattened, KO’d, completely baked. His plan was to call it Mohammed Ali.
Guus sparked his lighter and, in honor of the ganja from Deutschland, said, “Setzen sie ihren phasers, um zu betäuben!”
He sucked down a long, heavy hit, held it, and then exhaled a plume of thick oily smoke up toward the ceiling of his coffeeshop. He felt the air pressure in his eyeballs drop, his ocular barometer registering the incoming storm of THC moving toward his cerebellum. He grinned.
Baked Page 9