Poltergeist might help. She contemplated digging up her old password and posting footage of the shirt, seeing if anyone out in the world somewhere had spotted this in the garbage or being worn by some thief. She’d known a cop in Van Nuys who’d used Poltergeist to find a guy who’d stolen his rhinestone jacket right off the hook of a Denny’s men’s room, just reached right in over the stall door and snatched it. And Gabby had successfully used the service once, years ago, after she’d left a shopping bag full of expensive cosmetics in a dressing room somewhere.
Terri had set up an account but had never figured out how to use Poltergeist anonymously, always getting tagged as cop from the get go, not being savvy enough to know how to conceal her identity. And anyway, Poltergeist was notorious for creeping trolls. Even if she could get on incognito she’d still have men sniffing around her public VT. She’d have to learn how to get into these services as a four hundred-pound Samoan guy. Somebody in her circle of acquaintances must know how to do such a thing.
The refrigerator door made a cool surface to lean into. The only light came from the living room, and as she surveyed the silent apartment that had so thoroughly bested her, someone far away—a teenager or crazy person on the train tracks or beyond—squawked once, a forlorn, high-pitch whoop of glee or defeat or primal terror.
Riding over to Uganda, she’d suspected that the thing for Mutty was really just an excuse for a smaller core of detectives to continue the abridged New Year’s Day party. When she arrived, however, she was surprised to see a small thicket of cardboard birthday hats by the bar. Mutty Posada himself emerged from the crowd, wearing two hats at angles, like pointy demon horns.
“Alright. Pastuszka on the spot. Somebody here owes me $50. Said you weren’t gonna show.”
“Who said that?” she said, secretly a little pleased that anybody had thought enough of her social life to include her in a wager.
“Um,” he turned back and peered into the crowd with bewilderment. “Somebody … um …” For a second, he appeared to raise a tube of lipstick to his mouth. She realized it was a portable vaporizer. “Man …”
It had taken her a while to figure out that Mutty’s perpetual gap-toothed grin was the result of ongoing highness. So many cops stumbled through the profession permanently fuzzy, although booze remained the drug of choice. Back when she’d joined the force, many of the older cops still remembered having to drive themselves around the city. “The Battle” had originally been a term of derision aimed at her bracket, the generation of cops for whom cop cars were chauffeurs. It was only later that the word had taken on a stoic quality, The Battle being the fight against chronic drunkenness or highness. And something providing joyful balance to their daily slog. The Job vs. The Battle.
As the lone black detective on the not-so-newly reformed housing division, Mutty probably had to deal with his share of both, Job and Battle, many of the adult refugees still harboring deep-seated racism from their own rural hinterlands. Although by all outward appearances, he was as serene as the Buddha. In a profession full of storytellers, Mutty was a rare good listener, able to sit back and tease out interesting details. He was probably the closest Uganda came to having a mascot.
Not quite sure what to get, she ordered a whiskey sour. Two detectives from Juvenile eased over, Kirk Delacruz and Marilee Havers, Kirk saying, “Just the tiebreaker we need.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Tell Mary I’m not crazy. We did see graffiti on the 10, right?”
“I don’t remember seeing that.”
“Not on the 10. On the freeway sign. Remember?”
“Oh yeah. Yeah, that was weird. I didn’t see what it said.”
“Who cares what it said. But we saw it, right? And it wasn’t some group hallucination?”
“It was real. Yeah.”
“It said ‘Imsane’,” Steve Cruz said from behind the bar. After spending thirteen years on Homicide and Robbery, Steve had retired to serve drinks and butt into any conversation within earshot.
“Hey, c’mon Steve. You weren’t even there …”
Steve shrugged. “Grooper sent me footage. I’m telling you what I saw.”
“‘Insane’?” Terri asked.
“No, I-M-S-A-N-E.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” Terri said.
“Vandalism,” Marilee said. “Nihilism.”
Terri nodded vigorously as a hand clasped her shoulder.
“’Sup, Terr,” Zack said, looking past her, toward the end of the bar. “Surprised to see you here.”
“I was going to say the same thing.”
“I had to come. I’m the hat man.” He pointed over to the birthday party contingent.
“Janice bought them for the party next week.” He raised his voice, projecting down toward the merry makers. “So I’m going to need them back at the end of the night.”
She smiled and squinted. Janice Zendejas was absolutely the kind of mom who would buy birthday hats a week early. When she’d been raising their twin girls, Ashley and Audrey, she’d gone overboard on the pink-and-pony-themed everything. Now that the girls were nearly adults—fifteen or sixteen, stern go-getters lost in academics and athletics—she’d poured that maternal energy into Wade, a spastic little man already halfway through first grade. Wade was a walking drum solo. Mutty approached from the rear.
“Zendejas.” They clasped hands, and Mutty pulled him in close to loudly whisper, “You owe me fifty bucks, son.”
The five of them grabbed a table. Mutty, odd man out, sat a distance from the group to receive well wishers. Marilee said, “Speaking of nihilism … tell them about the movie, Kirk.”
“Shit. We were down on South Grand two nights ago, going … I don’t even remember where now … and I see they’re showing a movie on the side of the old AT&T center.”
A few times a month, someone in the opposing skyscraper trained a projector out of one of a thousand windows to beam a film on four stories or so of blank wall on 420 South Grand. Terri remembered these showings being loud, booming off the glass canyon walls, someone having lugged concert speakers up into one of the skyscrapers as well. Some cops got pissed off by movie nights, but nearly everyone recognized their value as pressure releases for the community. Especially in the summer.
“We already had some popcorn from one of those mini-shops, so we’re both like, ‘Why not?’ It was that movie, um …”
“North By Northwest,” Marilee said.
“Yeah, that was it. Except in this version, Cary Grant was a private eye, and it was set in modern day LA, and there were these crazy Bollywood musical numbers. It wasn’t half bad. So we’re sitting there on the hood of the car, I know everyone can see us, everyone knows who we are, probably a million eyes on us. But then, the movie just got …”
“Fucked,” Marilee said.
“That’s the word for it. Cary Grant starts killing people, doing drugs, screwing amputee hookers, and I’m getting really uncomfortable. Then there’s a whole scene where he goes on a rampage in a police station, and afterward, he’s got maybe a hundred heads on spikes out in front of the station, and he’s drinking this big chalice of blood. And then, Mary leans over and says, ‘Is that you?’”
“It was,” she confirmed. “Both of us. They’d stuck our heads on sticks. In the movie. Someone saw us in the street, and inserted us into the film.”
“I’m not thin-skinned, but man. Creeped me out, seeing myself dead like that. And the worst part? How many thousands of kids do you think were watching this?”
“Pssssht,” Terri said, mad, taking her drink more seriously.
“Hell of a message to send these kids. Total nihilism. The meatballs are literally using our own buildings as canvases to project their twisted little psychodramas against us.”
Terri laughed at this without knowing exactly why, her own concentration a little fuzzy. She’d planned on taking it slow with her whiskey sour, and then suddenly realized she’d killed it. She’d forgotten ho
w strong the drinks were here. She closed her eyes, as someone said, “Didja catch the game last night?”
“I got bored by the third quarter, so I made all the players drop trou and take a shit on the court.”
She smiled. Every boy cop at Uganda kept a game or fight up in the corner of his vision. All these guys were probably only half here as well, secretly cheering or lamenting some private score. Probably most of them weren’t even real teams to begin with. She opened her eyes, seeing that a fresh beer had materialized in front of her. A pal of Mutty, Willis the Narcotics Guy, had taken up a backward chair at their tightly packed table. He asked, “What do you guys think about that thing at the Tournament of Roses?”
“What about it?” Zack said. “Wasn’t it nine kids got into a street fight or something?”
“I heard it was twelve.”
“You’re thinking of the fire in Lynwood.”
“Isn’t that you guys?”
“Tournament of Roses stuff is Pasadena, not us.”
“Yeah, but it’s all in the county.”
At a certain point, she gave up trying to follow the conversation, happy to be here and not on her couch. Zack was laughing and then he slapped her on the back and said, “This round’s on you, lady.”
She nodded and rose, carefully crossing through the crowd, catching sight of herself in the one long mirror behind the bar and seeing that someone had placed a birthday hat on her head.
When she returned with draft beers for her and Zack, Willis was holding court, recalling some overheard story of carsurfing carnage. She smiled, feeling her own tipsiness, not quite able to follow who was saying what.
“These guys jump like they’re human mountain goats or something. Except mountain goats don’t slip.”
“Hey, every mountain goat slips when it’s leaping from car to car at 140 miles per hour.”
“How does someone convince themselves that a boosted glove box is worth instant spaghettification?”
“Stupid doesn’t need convincing.”
“‘Spaghettification,’” Kirk laughed. “More like ‘Darwinism in action.’”
Zack looked annoyed. “How the fuck is it Darwinism if each of these idiots leaves behind six kids?”
A chirpy alarm sounded at six fifteen a.m. She was still clothed, still wearing her PanOpts, slowly focusing to see a tremendous angry man standing over the bed, glowering down at her wretchedness. This was Boris. Boris was a man-shaped apparition conjured in an app for drunk people. She must’ve been destructively hammered to have triggered Boris. He would have assisted her home last night, yelling at her like a drill sergeant, coordinating with the battle taxi, forcing her to take step after step, helping guide her house key out of her pocket and into the door.
Terri dismissed Boris with a hand swipe, sat up, moaned in dizziness, and dropped back to the pillow. Grunting from the effort, she placed herself in the morning briefing. Seeing a room at eye level, when her inner ear told her she was flat on her back, was still somehow less awful than the vertigo that would come from sitting upright.
The department being decentralized, briefings and roll call took place in a simulated lecture hall modeled on the old Parker Center auditorium. Presence was mandatory, and she wondered how many in the hundred-plus audience of detectives, officers, and sergeants were similarly miserable, slumped in beds or car seats scattered across the city. A floating almanac box told her dawn was still forty minutes away. She pulled up a traffic box, seeing the Rolling Juggernaut—that eternal traffic jam—creeping up the Santa Ana Freeway and expected to head east. Some Lieutenant she didn’t know was droning on about boosting response times, perhaps deliberately trying to put everyone back to sleep.
Zack called and mumbled something as she placed him in audio, not wanting to see or be seen. Terri muted the briefing, letting the transcript unfurl in the margins, so that she appeared to be staring out at a still gathering of cops, perhaps during a long moment of silence. She tried to speak, growled, cleared her throat, and said, “Say what?”
“I said, I quit. I’m out.”
“Oh yeah? Finally gonna pursue the life of a scholar? Good for you.”
“Seriously, you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“Did you not check the big board?”
“I’m barely, barely, barely awake, Zack.”
“We just drew Zilch Patrol.”
She exhaled loudly, wincing from sinus pain. “Where?”
“Swap Meet, forty-five minutes ago, refugee cadaver littering the parking lot. I’m done with this Mickey Mouse shit. Seriously. I’ll retire, screw it. I’m heading your way right now.”
“I’m not even dressed,” she said, realizing this was a lie.
“Come down in your PJs, I don’t care. No one cares. First catch of the goddamn decade.”
“What, in the city?”
“I meant for me, my first catch. This stupid bastard couldn’t have kicked off a day later? Let me get a real person?”
“Yeah, that is tough on you,” she said, forcing herself upright. “Would you honestly be happier if it was some Oregon hobo in the Swap Meet lot?”
“If it was a made-in-the-USA corpse? Yeah, I would. ‘Gee, I wonder where this guy lived?’ ‘Golly, how did he wind up here?’ ‘Shucks, who would have a motive to bump off this poor little fellow with his one brown tooth and a knapsack full of pinecones?’”
“Sounds like you’ve cooked up quite a back story for your guy. Maybe they’ll let you switch cases.” She closed her eyes, letting the spins settle. “At least urgent response gets us out of roll call,” she croaked.
“I’ll take roll call,” Zack said as a car honked outside. “And I’m here. Hurry,” he added in mock impatience. “God forbid the maggots and buzzards get this idiot first.”
“Listen, I need to brush my teeth, find a hangover pill, change my shirt. Give me like five minutes.”
“I thought you said you weren’t dressed.”
“That was a metaphor.”
He made a snoring noise that sounded more like an oink.
They arrived at 6:40, South Figueroa Street looking like a surrealist painting, the blazing streetlights competing with the sky’s pre-dawn glow. It was easiest to have the car pull up on the southbound side of the street, depositing them onto a sidewalk already clogged with buyers and sellers. A pill kept the worst of the hangover at bay, but Terri still felt the pull of vertigo, extending one hand to steady herself on the car and almost falling when it abruptly zipped off. A teenage refugee kid selling pre-rolled joints on the street caught her eye and froze with a half smile. She frowned and pointed toward the Swap Meet wall, meaning toward the rabble just inside.
“Take it indoors, Hiawatha.”
It was strange to her that something so colossal didn’t have a formal name, but there it was; the Swap Meet, a 950,000-square-foot sports arena that had itself been dwarfed by the more modern Itaú Unibanco Arena in Carson. Before it’d been repurposed by refugees, the building had been an early, catastrophic casualty of downtown’s commercial collapse. Now it was the only major abandoned structure in Central Division that wasn’t used for human habitation. Instead, the space served as a massive indoor marketplace, every bit as labyrinthine as a Middle Eastern bazaar from a thousand years earlier. The Swap Meet was the main venue for selling to refugees. At least half the vendors were citizens looking to make a buck.
They crossed the street, both slipping on rubber gloves. The parking lot ran along two blocks of Figueroa, divided in the middle by West Twelfth Street. The entire space held 1,500 merchant-leased cars, give or take, most vehicles parked in tight formations. Their body was halfway up the northern lot, ten feet from the sidewalk but hidden by a concrete divider. At the far north edge, two huge buses, each bound for megacasinos in Rosarito, sat stalled by a small squadron of uniformed officers taking statements from every passenger. Zack chivalrously held up a yellow band of crime tape, Terri still feeling dizzy as she dipped
her head to pass under. As they approached the actual scene, they were both careful to view everything from every possible angle, dipping and weaving in the dance of all homicide detectives.
A slender, middle-aged Indian man lay face up between two tightly packed cars, having selected a deathbed so narrow that his shoulders hunched up against either tire. There was some salt and pepper in his mustache, but nearly none in his tousled, matte-black hair. By appearances, he was just shy of fifty, although any number of factors could easily have added decades to his true age. His face had that expression of slack-jawed shock Terri had seen so many times before, no one ever looking as if they’d made their final stand with a hint of dignity.
He’d been shot once in the heart at close range. The entry appeared well-placed, the shooter probably having used some sort of anatomy layer to get a clean kill. An overhead byline box read “JHADAV, FARRUKH” followed by a twelve-digit number—imported from India’s vast biometric database years earlier—as if he could only afford so many lines on his tombstone.
“He is wery died,” Zack muttered to himself in a fake accent as he did a squat and grunt to retrieve Farrukh’s wallet. She leaned against one of the cars for a moment, a swell of nausea rising and fading.
“How come you don’t have a hangover?”
“Because I weigh eight hundred pounds?” He straightened, red-faced, fishing through a deeply worn vinyl wallet that was probably a family heirloom.
“Nothing but cash.”
“So no robbery.”
“Hold up.” He fished out a pair of disposable EyePhones, a flimsy, curved rectangle with one triangular cutout for the nose. They were cheap, probably not comfortable, certainly not built or priced for long-term use.
“Why wasn’t he wearing these?” she asked.
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