On Tuesday morning, she woke with a vague sense of gratitude, the aftertaste of some dispersed dream victory, or maybe just her own body thanking her for not drinking herself to sleep for the third night in a row. After breakfast and a shower, she drew her curtains against the slanted sun, grabbed the PanOpts from the hall table, aimed the portable fan at her face, and arranged two big pillows under her knees. At eight on the dot, the phone rang with a shrill chirp. She slid down her shades as Zack appeared in her living room.
“Yo.”
“Yo to you. Everything correct? Got your coffee?”
“I’m good. Got the goddamn house to myself for once,” he said, tagging a space in the air above her head and then flipping them into the Basement.
She found herself seated before an austere office desk in an otherwise empty room of luminous walls, each papered with the faint, huge watermark of the LAPD. Her couch had vanished, so that she saw herself floating on air, legs still bent at the knees, propped up on invisible pillows. She tried to remember what she’d set as her public VT, then decided it didn’t really matter if she was just going to be down here all day. Pearly Rodriguez appeared behind the desk. He was a pasty, balding little man with a hairline starting on the top of his head and the thin cardigan of a librarian.
“Pastuszka and Zendejas”, he said, beaming. “The dynamic duo. What’s shakin’, kids?”
“Fightin’ crime. How’re you holding up, Pearly? Still doing the Friday night Risk marathons with, who was that? Salcedo?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know,” Pearly said, smiling like the Buddha. “I’m not Pearly. You got his Dupe.”
“I thought you just got back from vacation,” Zack said with a surly edge.
“Pearly did. Like I said, I am not he. I guess he decided he liked it so much he went on the big vacation. He retired just before Thanksgiving. You’re looking at the captain of the ship now.”
“No shit,” Terri said, feeling a little thrown off. “So it’s a Duplicado-run basement from here on out?”
“Yeah, they made some tweaks, decided they didn’t need a real person, so here I am.”
Zack glowered. “Jesus Christ. This whole operation is on autopilot?”
“‘Fraid so,” Pearly said with jovial delight. He’d always seemed to treat the world as one big joke when it was actually him. Why wouldn’t his Dupe act even more amused?
“Hey, weren’t you working on that thing with the pallet king last year, Detective Zendejas?”
“Yeah,” Zack said with a curt undertone.
“Whatever happened with that?”
“Nothing happened with that. Let’s get on with this, okay?”
“Hey, it’s not like this thing’s gonna start up without you, right?” he said, making a few high squawks of laughter, as if all three of them were in on a joke that was also somehow at their own expense.
“Okay,” Pearly said, smiling broadly, not taking his eyes off Zack. “So I have you both starting just inland from West Twelfth and South Fig at 5:28 yesterday morning. Sound right?”
“That’s the one. Where’s the consent box now?”
“Just your lovely face and this conversation, my dear.”
“Oh, you mean we won’t have to sign in with you each and every time now?”
Pearly beamed again. “Nope. Come and go.”
“Good,” Zack said, too late. The room dissolved and they were back in the Swap Meet parking lot an hour and ten minutes before they’d actually laid eyes on Farrukh’s bewildered corpse. They’d seemingly arrived at the crime scene at the moment a drone located the body, having itself been alerted, roughly a minute earlier, by the ShotSpotter network. For all the hassles and drudgery of Basement work, she always enjoyed this moment of drop-in, that feeling, fleeting in its magic, of being a time traveler.
In actuality, they’d each entered a frozen simulacrum, an immersive visualization of Los Angeles constructed from a million eyes: camera nests, traffic control, drone footage, smart surfaces, and the nonstop rolling feed of every personal macro carried by every officer on the force. In the arsenal of LAPD forensic intelligence, the Basement was one of the heaviest guns, a private vision of the entire city in which cops could sleuth through public footage, stopping, starting, rewinding, or speeding time as needed.
Zack had set his VT to show him as he would appear if they’d been physically standing in this actual spot, and as he surveyed the crime scene, she saw him shake his head as he’d surely be doing in the living room of his actual house, many miles away.
“Fantastic. Blindsville.”
She nodded. The space between each narrowly parked car appeared solid, filled with a geometric wedge of fluorescent pink: the blind. The blind represented any portion of the physical world not surveilled. Public spaces such as parking lots were thickets of blinds, full of crevices and undersides unrevealed by the forces of civic detection. Only the between-car gap that held Farrukh’s body was illuminated, lit up by the twin eyes of the drone dispatched to locate the site of a shooting. She looked up now and saw this drone lit up for identification, appearing here as bright and significant as the star of Bethlehem.
Where were her old presets? It hadn’t been that long since her last serious visit, back in September. A forger of casino chips had spiked his partner’s celebratory margarita with coolant and then chopped the body into bits, which he’d distributed in bite-sized chunks across the streets of downtown, the poor vic wolfed down by stray dogs. She’d followed that scavenger hunt in the Basement, painstakingly tagging every glistening nugget. It was only when she’d retold the story to her sister’s family, over Christmas dinner, that she’d realized how grisly the whole case had been.
Zack tagged and linked her, and then the city around them sprang to life. Traffic lurched into reverse, birds flapped backward, lone figures strutted jauntily back down the sidewalk. The space occupied by Farrukh’s corpse filled with a bright solid pink. As they watched, a hooded figure popped up from this blind. A second later, corpse rose to face killer, both of them emerging from the solid pink above the shoulders, the perp coming out at chin level, Farrukh jutting out at the collarbone, the goofy shock of his death mask mirrored in his last moment of life.
“Meat marionette,” Zack said to himself, halting playback. He stepped to the left of the moment of death, so that his own head appeared to jut out from the roof of one of the parked cars. She floated over to the other side, bringing herself up close to the shooter. He was four inches shorter than Farrukh, wearing shaded EyePhones, a dust mask, and a green-and-blue-checkered sweatshirt with the hood up and tightly drawn. Only a one-inch triangle of nose gave any indication of a general skin tone.
“Little guy,” she said.
“So … huh.” Zack’s hand emerged from the roof of the car and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Came up from under a car, and then …”
He hit play and Farrukh collapsed back into the blind. Almost imperceptibly, the killer glanced down at his handiwork. Then he dipped back down into the blind as well.
“That’s a new one,” Zack said, meaning the opposite. Every stick-up kid and would-be criminal mastermind knew to travel under parked cars to avoid detection. Zack stepped back out from the vehicle and said, “You check south, I’ll go up by the buses.” She nodded, floating back down toward West Twelfth as the world started back up. She passed a half-dozen cars, each connected to the next, and the asphalt below, by a solid block of pink.
“Anything?” he asked, still sounding as if he were standing next to her.
“Naw,” she reached the end of the row. “There’s no way he came up over here. It’s wide open. Those buses were probably too inviting. Want to wager that it’s all blind between the two?”
He grunted as she raised herself up twenty feet to get a full overview of the dreary lot, its somber array of battered cars parked in tight formations, the swift flow of traffic on Figueroa and then the more complex flow of the human crush starting on the sidewalk past t
hat.
“Yeah,” Zack said from the end of the buses. “All pink. Surprise, surprise.”
“Should do a daylight request on that hoodie.”
“Okay,” he said, appearing to type in space. “Fingers crossed.”
The world sped up. Car traffic blurred into a transparent river. Shadows shrank and then elongated, and as dusk approached, a comic, high-speed mass exodus spilled out from the Swap Meet, the parking lot clearing out in what appeared to be three seconds. These were the outside vendors, non-refugees, upper-middle-class merchants with leased vehicles. These people knew to get out of Dodge before nightfall, downtown being a very different world after dark. The lot was bare; if the suspect had made an appearance in the blur, the system would’ve caught it. He paused motion and sighed.
“So our guy’s only escape route was between those two buses. He comes up, changes, makes a casual getaway.”
“Unless there’s a burrow hole we don’t know about.”
Zack turned up the brightness, bathing the lot, now free of all cars, in an eerie half light.
“Gotta be sure,” he agreed.
They moved over the surface of the lot at what would be 6 p.m. yesterday, him on foot, her floating on an invisible couch. They both knew they weren’t going to find any getaway holes, their search being just one more pantomime of Cover Your Ass. You never knew who was going to be watching the playback.
“Fuck that swizzledick busybody,” Zack said.
“What? Who?”
In a squeaky voice, Zack said, “‘Catch the pallet king yet?’”
“You’re getting yourself worked up over a Duplicado, idiot.”
“I’m gonna go find the real Pearly and rip the rest of his hair out. That molester.”
“Didn’t the real Pearly have some serious health problems? He’s probably dead now.”
“Yeah? Good.”
She yawned and took in her environs: an empty lot in a motionless city. It was too early in the investigation to have hit such a complete dead end.
“Okay. Rock paper scissors for high-low.”
“Loser’s high,” he said as they shook fists, him keeping his while she flashed two fingers.
“Damn it.”
“Hey, you think I like going low?” Zack asked. “Just get up there and let’s one of us find something quick so we can get back to being actual cops and not walking dog shit detectors, okay?”
He vanished into his own viewing session. She opened a control box, resetting the world to noon and then sending herself aloft. No matter how slow she made this ascent, going high always gave her a bad combination of vertigo and carsickness. Thirty stories up, she pulled off her shades and rubbed her eyes, undergoing one more flush of queasiness as she found herself back in her own living room, seated and motionless. After a minute of this, she pulled the PanOpts back on, seeing herself floating a quarter mile over the city. From this vantage point, she could view the entire skyline, and the distant county edges where the basement ended in vast walls of solid pink. She was glad she’d remembered to set up the fan. In the Basement’s street level, her fan’s breeze provided a gentle gust in the canyons of downtown. When viewing the city from overhead, it was a puff of stratosphere.
She called up the same routeline she’d run the morning before, in front of the Swap Meet, opening another control box for this and setting the duration to two weeks. Next to this, she opened a separate control box for all of Los Angeles, reducing the city to black and white and lowering the opacity to 50 percent, so that she peered down at a vast diorama of smoked glass. Everywhere the late Farrukh had traveled in the last half month was now represented by the red line—thread-thin when seen from this altitude—that curved through the streets and alleys containing his life’s routines. When she dropped back down to nine hundred feet, she had to clutch at the soft throw pillows below her legs to ward off that nagging sense of free fall.
Farrukh’s daily schedule showed a hub on West Second Street. From here, he left every morning between 5:00 and 5:10, returning every night between 8:50 and 9:20, each exit and entry clearly time coded on the routeline with multicolored tabs. His daily routine fanned out in westward patterns made visible: Koreatown, Hollywood, Wilshire. In the margin, she opened a text box for Zack, typing,
The deceased was a delivery boy. I’ll get in closer, but I’m guessing taco walla
As she dropped down to five hundred feet, he replied by text,
Bullshit. What kind of taco walla earns an assassin?
She shrugged. It was a good point, maybe. Zooming down to fifty stories, she peered at the hub, squinting in curiosity, like a child examining an insect. At twenty stories, she saw where the multiple lines seemed to converge on a bush. She slipped down to street level, annoyed at herself for not doing this part last and sparing herself another ascent. She brought the city back up to full opacity, seeing the many lines indeed dipping into a large, overgrown hedge that, on closer inspection, had been yanked from its roots to clumsily cover a three-foot chasm in the sidewalk.
She opened a call box and dialed the housing directory. Billy Bustamante came up first. She’d dealt with him a few times before, and couldn’t remember anything wrong with the guy. He answered on the first ring.
“Howdy, Terri P.”
“Hey Billy. Question. I got a meatball dead in the Swap Meet lot, and when I do his routeline, it looks like his daily comings and goings are through a hole at Second and Grand. I’m assuming this guy isn’t burrowing down into the ground, so … where does this go?”
“Beats me.”
“Come again?”
“What’s your duration at? A week?”
“No, two.”
“Set it for a month and you’ll see what I mean. Before this hole was opened, your guy was probably crawling up out of a shaft behind the old law library. Go back to Halloween, and he was using one of a half-dozen holes under the 110. We gave up trying to map all this crap.”
“Since when?”
“Since last summer, when the meatballs discovered the old pedestrian tunnels under Grand Park. These guys have hundreds of displaced engineers and architects and nothing but time, so I’m kind of surprised this didn’t happen a decade ago. When they were doing just teeny rabbit holes, yeah, sure, we could totally track those. But these new tunnels plug into existing passageways, some of them a hundred and fifty years old and blocks long. In August, we discovered a full underground railroad. I don’t mean Harriet Tubman style, I mean a working miniature steam engine, like, for kids, that somebody salvaged from an old shopping mall. Some skyscraper folks found the sealed tunnel under the Hall Of Records, expanded it another six blocks, laid down tracks and lights, different station stops, the whole deal. It was impressive.”
“That’s insane. That would take boring machines, trucks, generators …”
“Or an unlimited amount of manpower. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but yeah. Your guy went in at Second and Grand, there’s a quarter-mile radius for where he might’ve actually called home. Maybe more.”
She puckered her lips, saying, “Got it. Thanks.”
“Hey, if it’s any consolation, I wouldn’t be surprised if downtown collapsed in five years. It’s probably Swiss cheese down there now.”
“That would be nice,” she said, hanging up.
Three hours later, having tagged every dreary way station on Farrukh’s daily itinerary—retail, work-at-homes, a few anomalies she’d have to check out in person—she pulled off her glasses, stretched, and made herself a sandwich. After lunch, she slipped back into the Basement and dialed Zack. They met in the Swap Meet lot. He hadn’t bothered to change the creepy twilight.
“Whatya got?”
“Yeah,” he looked around, seeming exhausted. “Let’s, ah … hold up.” He typed in the air, the world brightened, and the street and sidewalks snapped into focus, showing them one split second, everyone halted in place.
“Okay. 5:29 a.m. Three rings. First-tier potentia
l witnesses, here, here, here, and here,” he said, pointing to a row of motionless pedestrians, each tagged with colorful overhead boxes displaying their names and addresses. Zack had nicknamed each: Big Nose, Fatso Tits, No Neck, Cheese Whiz.
“Already long odds except for Fatso … Beverly Gutierrez, over here. She maybe made some kind of a face at the gunshot, although ShotSpotter says the whole thing was under 120 decibels. Maybe the shooter pressed close, used Farrukh himself as a silencer.”
“Does that ever really happen?” she asked.
“Then ring two, here.” He pointed out two cars whizzing by in the northbound lane, both neatly tagged. Zack beckoned her over to a passing car, its elderly passenger paused, mouth open in conversation, seeming delighted about something. Caught by eye-level spot cameras, he appeared to be sitting in a vat of day-glow pink fluid, the blind obscuring everything below the window line.
“Maybe,” she said. “G-Cars aren’t known for their side macros.”
“No, I mean maybe he saw something.”
“At eighty-five miles per hour.”
“Yeah. Okay. Touché. I’m trying. Fuck.”
“Third ring?”
“Whatever. This kid on the far side of Fig.” He pointed without enthusiasm toward one motionless teen leaning against the concrete wall of the Swap Meet like he was James Dean.
“Over a hundred feet away, no shades.”
“Yeah,” he made a quick smacking noise. “And then three cars, here, here, and here, in southbound. One’s a Mercedes. Good side macros. I looked up the specs.”
“And three lanes of northbound between them and the shooter.”
“Hey, you never know. I ran some sightlines, and there were a couple split-second gaps.” Zack stared off at something. “Also. Check this out.”
Exploded View Page 6