The Sky Skraper Krips lifted their name and aesthetics straight from the lore of gangsta rap and decades of filmic Los Angeles underworld. The SSKs were, in a way, the antithesis of the posers: they’d appropriated their host culture, and mutated the perceived values into something far more potent than the original. In all her dealings with old-timers on the force, she’d never heard any pre-war stories rivaling the sheer barbarity of the newcomers’ gangs.
Although the worst of it had been over by the time Terri had made the force. In the old days, warfare raged floor by floor, block by block, replicated outside downtown, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. After the relative success of the LAPD’s targeted drone attacks on automatic weapons—and then all firearms used by labeled gang members—the gangs had reverted to more primitive weapons; slingshots, knives, home-printed zip guns. One industrious set in Century City built a working medieval siege engine, capable of catapulting two hundred pounds of projectile a full city block.
Russian roulette was the most perverse form of jump-in for the SSKs, searing the inductee’s psyche from the outset, while simultaneously pruning down the swollen pool of humanity. She’d heard these jump-ins referred to as “decimations,” after the Roman military punishments from two millennia earlier. But that form of military killing had at least involved one-in-ten odds. These kids, some not even teenagers, were shooting themselves with home-printed revolvers, so their odds never rose above one in six. Probably even less than that, once you factored in the shitty makes of some of these guns.
Among male refugees ages fourteen to twenty-two, Russian roulette fatalities edged out homicide as the leading cause of death. The ratio was probably higher than that, since some of the bodies were dumped in the middle of nowhere with no explanation. Cops hated this phenomenon only because it further swelled the city’s unsolved murder rolls. Zack texted,
In 10, 9, 8 …
She braced herself to run.
“Los Angeles police. Down on the ground, Rajagopalan,” he said without yelling. She saw Bottlecap look up, as if the voice had come down from the Heavens, and realized Zack was using a public address drone, literally talking down to his target as he approached. “Down. Now.”
She and Zack and John Hawley speed-walked out in their best rendition of a pincer movement. All three kept their weapons holstered but hands at the ready, careful not to rile up the crowd any further.
Bottlecap sighed and dropped to his knees in melodramatic slow-mo, raising his arms behind his head in a well-practiced gesture of resignation.
“Man, this is bull shit.”
Zack was behind him now, the gaggle of teen cronies frittering away nonchalantly as if their buddy had simply been called off for lunch by his mom. Although no one frittered away too far.
“I gotta go. I got an important meeting I got to be at!”
Zack laughed and looked at Terri, saying, “I hawing a wery im-poor-tant air-and.”
The words came out brittle, Zack fluttering his hands like a Bollywood dancer and then producing a pair of zipcuffs as if he were a stage magician.
“Yo man, that’s not what I sound like!”
Bottlecap was right. Skyscraper kids, having grown up without a nation, had no such Old World inflections, their accents instead culled from a century of American movies and songs.
“If you please,” Zack continued for his own amusement, “you doing a wery bad im-per-soo-nation of me.”
“Pshhht,” Bottlecap looked off, unimpressed. “You know in Sweden? Everybody a cop.”
“You wouldn’t last a second in Sweden, idiot,” Hawley said.
Bottlecap looked baffled. “What does that even mean?”
Terri took in the crowd, realizing they’d been quickly and efficiently surrounded by the older refugee men. No one had shades, meaning the group was running on unchecked emotion alone. One said something behind her, his words coming out in an unintelligible rush.
“Excuse me?”
He repeated himself, the mellifluous roll of his speech completely undercut by his bizarre stresses.
Zack looked over his shoulder as he hoisted Bottlecap to his feet. “What are you trying to say?”
The man spoke a third time, his anger making his words faster still, triggering subtitles in the lower margins of PanOpt. Terri tried to suppress a snigger as John Hawley laughed out loud. She read,
You can’t come down here any time you choose and just drag people off without rhyme or reason!
“Hey, we’ve got plenty of rhyme,” Zack said, grinning, one hand clamped on Bottlecap’s elbow, snapping his fingers with the other hand, coming off a little manic.
A second refugee chimed in, older, gray bearded, but with clearer intonations. “This is totally unacceptable. You can’t pick people at random from a crowd and drag them off to God knows where.”
“You know,” Hawley said, “maybe you should take this as a sign from Vishnu to pick a better caliber of city park to relax in.”
“What other park?” the man demanded.
“I dunno. Maybe check the directory of ‘places not infested with gangland wasteoids?’”
Subtitle Man chimed in,
There is no such! Where are we supposed to go?
“How the hell is that my problem?”
How the hell is that your problem? You run this city! You are the ones in charge!
Hawley darkened. “I never told you guys to come here!”
“And where are we supposed to go?” the older man demanded, his words coming out quick now as well. “Huh? You tell me? Where are we supposed to go? Huh? Where?”
Terri grabbed Bottlecap’s other elbow and said, “Next time, don’t blow up your own country then, moron.”
Among the younger refugees milling in the background, she heard an “oh shit,” and saw several boys staggering off, hands over mouths, suppressing laughter. But the words hit the older refugees like a unified slap in the face. Each stepped back, stunned, unable to make eye contact.
She and Zack brought Bottlecap up the slope and into a waiting cruiser. The car sped off toward the 110, giving them time to interrogate, maybe make the kid nervous if they had an opportunity to zipper through some cars at high speed. Zack had placed him on the jump seat, so that he’d see the rush of the freeway between his two interrogators. Zack wiped his brow and removed his shades for a moment.
“Kid, you are in a world of fuck if you don’t tell me exactly what I need to know.”
Abruptly, Bottlecap started bawling, backing his legs up onto the car seat in sheer terror.
“Don’t put those things on me!”
“What …”
“Don’t do it! I’ll talk!” He was snorting back tears and mucus, having gone from nought to a hundred in just a few seconds.
Zack looked down at his PanOpts. “These?”
The kid stared wildly at the shades, as if Zack held a poisonous snake.
“Okay, calm down,” Terri said, hands outstretched. “No one’s putting anything on you. Zack?”
He placed the shades back on his face. “Look. Happy?”
Bottlecap sniffled and nodded, smearing his wet cheek on one shoulder.
Terri retrieved a handful of tissues from her jacket, quickly swiping his face, stuffing the nastiness in the car’s waste slot with disgust.
“Jesus, kid. We’re going to take a few minutes and when you’ve got yourself together, we are going to have a friendly discussion. Got it?”
He nodded once without making eye contact.
Zack texted,
What?
She shrugged. The car sped up, hooking onto the I-5, starting into the arc of a citywide loop. They passed through a cloud of animal stink, and Bottlecap looked up, more or less composed again, saying, “Ooh, skunk.”
After they’d dropped off Bottlecap on a street corner—but before she’d marinated in the Basement for hours—Terri had waited while Zack bickered with his wife. Five blocks away, they parked below an oak tree ob
scuring a huge, Mexican-style mural of Gandhi and Nehru, then spent several hours back in the Basement, following leads. When she finally took a break, the sun had already swung to the other side of the street and her leg had cramped enough that she had to exit and do some ham stretches on the sidewalk.
Looking back through the car window, she saw Zack hunkering down, manipulating the air, guiding himself through unseen regions, and Terri grasped that she’d unfairly misjudged her partner. Justice would almost certainly elude Farrukh Jhadav, but it wasn’t either of their faults. Throughout her career, cops talked wistfully of the Slide, that stat-obliterating surge of humanity into every American city by the former citizens of its late ally. Even though it had the tone of permanence, some cops still treated the Slide as a temporary condition. But people made more people, and when those new people grew up angry and hermetically disenfranchised, the Slide kept sliding. Every year it got a little more entwined with the other capitalized missions: The Job. The Battle. The Slide.
The initial crisis had reduced Los Angeles to a tide pool; the Slide chipped away at the city’s recovery. Convictions for mayhem bumped up by 2%–4% every year, one of a dozen Slide stats that cops continually studied and swapped, like baseball fanatics. The sheer glut of people strained every agency. Mental illness went masked under varied violations—assault, disorderlies, drugs—but everyone knew it was on the rise. Just in the last two years, it had seemed to infect the ranks of first responders, mutating from absurdist gallows humor to something darker. “I’ve lost my inspiration,” one paramedic had told Terri after she’d caught him pissing on a corpse.
Sometime in the late afternoon, Zack slapped his knees and said, “Liney time.” He had the car drive them to an alley behind an industrial laundromat, one of several public spots used for meetups, the clang and the billowing steam pretty much obliterating any chance of getting overseen or overheard.
Liney dawdled up ten minutes later. He was a wizened old-timer, a paid informant who tattled on fellow refugees in exchange for restaurant credit. Liney was notoriously unclean, his silver hair glued to his scalp through sheer grime, the creases and crags of his face filled with deep furrows of grit. She’d once glimpsed Liney without his shirt on, in the street, and had been surprised at how sinewy the guy was, beneath the sheen of filth and the thick gray fur of his caved-in chest.
Zack stepped out for their meeting and she heard Liney clap his hands in delight, his greeting lost under the machine noise. She’d always been amused by the guy’s speaking voice, both his proper British accent and his weird, third-person delivery. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been wearing bowling shoes, having made the comical, bright-green leather seem almost elegant.
By the time Zack returned, the day had turned overcast, drizzly, and when she pulled up a second weather box, she saw the forecast directly contradicted PanOpt’s own row of cartoon suns.
“Maybe my man will finally get a shower,” Zack said.
“Anything of consequence come up?”
“Just seeding seeds.” He shrugged. “You never know. He’s come up with the goods in the past.”
At dusk, they both realized they’d never eaten a proper lunch. Five minutes later, they were in Food Truck Alley, Zack ordering some gloppy orange something, Terri getting chicken vindaloo, thinking just for once, she’d love to eat someplace that didn’t include chutney or some dank plastic bowl of warm cucumber yogurt. Zack motioned her toward an empty picnic table chained to a tree, then said, “Nope, bird poop, forget it.”
“You could just sit away from it.”
“Would you say that if a dog did it?”
They agreed on a railing bordering a useless strip of concrete, finding a length where some frustrated vagrant had pried off the bird spikes. Terri tried to balance her meal on her lap, finally giving up, keeping the paper bowl in front of her and placing her tea on the ground, hoping the ceramic mug wouldn’t read this as abandonment and report back to its food truck. From this angle, they could view the last strands of dusk across a lot framed by boarded-up buildings. The sky faded without reds, its hues of blue fading straight into pale gradations of gold, and she felt perched on a mountaintop, Olympus, looking down on a vast ocean.
Terri was halfway through her meal when Zack murmured, “The Accursed.”
“Huh?” She glanced down the sidewalk as three figures approached. Two were known vice detectives. When she’d joined the force, vice was just one more division, with all the beats and downtimes of any other unit. Now it was a portal into the inferno. In the wake of the Slide, vice detectives saw the true floor of the city. Most cops she knew used PanOpt’s tweaks and content walls to shield themselves from the raw horror that vice cops wallowed in every day. Within the force, they were a sad caste: The Accursed.
“Hey gang,” Zack said, greeting Carlos Moisey and Trinh Nghiem and a young guy, fit but clearly green about the gills. Carlos was a giant, nearly a head taller than Zack, with colossal hands and forearms. Trinh was a compact, slender blonde. The few times she’d run into them, Terri had always been struck with how utterly in sync they seemed as partners, both operating with that quiet reserve of all Accursed.
“Hey Zack. Hey Terri.” Carlos had a surprisingly gentle voice. “This is Chuck. He just came in from Philly last week. We’re giving him the grand tour.” She and Zack raised their mugs in salute, a measure of pity in the gesture. If this guy got sent to vice straight out, he must’ve severely pissed off someone somewhere. Carlos and Trinh both ate churros; Chuck looked like he might puke.
“So what’s new out there?” Zack asked, making Terri cringe. Asking any questions about the day-to-days of the Accursed seemed hopelessly tone-deaf.
“I was going to ask you how the DA’s daughter thing was going. That’s all anyone wants to talk about on our end. Must be some scrambling going on for you all.”
“Nah, that’s Pacific. We’re just on dumbass duty until some pretty little college kid gets bumped off in Central.”
“I hadn’t even been keeping up.” Terri finished her tea. “Big story?”
“Yeah, of course. Got all the elements.” Carlos’s voice was so pleasant and soft, he should’ve been a therapist. In the air to her left, she brought up a web box and found a photo of Stacy Santos. Zack was right: she was pretty—had been pretty—with a big mane of frizzy brown hair and barely-there dimples. She hadn’t just been attractive, but fresh, vibrant, the kind of kid you’d want on a college brochure.
Carlos shifted slightly and blocked the streetlight behind them, so that all three were suddenly backlit, like a ghost trio sent to deliver a message. “I heard Juan Santos was supposed to give a press conference at noon, but he was too broken up to even get to the podium.”
“I heard they found multiple footprints from the same boots outside each window,” Zack said. “That means the shooter cased her house for days, just peeking in like he was watching a TV show.”
“It’s like The Walker,” Terri said, always nervous that she’d say the wrong thing around one of the Accursed.
“Yeah,” Trinh agreed. “Creepy.”
Chuck the Trainee cleared his throat. “What’s that?”
“The Walker … you never saw that show?” Zack asked. “Huh. I guess it’s set in LA I’d just kind of assumed everyone had seen it. It’s this program about … shit. How do I describe it?”
“The Walker is a person who walks through walls,” Terri explained. “The whole program is shot from the Walker’s perspective. The Walker just walks around. Sometimes the Walker walks through buildings. Sometimes the Walker walks through fields. Sometimes, if you watch at night, you’ll catch the Walker walking through empty businesses, libraries, kitchens.” Goose bumps rose on her forearms.
“It’s like those drones that float around in Asia,” Trinh said. “Making new drones, sending their reports back like someone was still watching.” Carlos shifted again, and in the fresh streetlight, Terri saw a look of utter desolation on Chuck t
he Trainee’s face.
“Hey, yeah.” Zack took a bite of his orange glop, continuing with his mouth full. “I’m supposed to ask. We had this weird thing where this banger wannabe started crying when he saw my shades. You have anyone do that to either of you?”
This time Terri actually made a face at Zack, trying to convey that he needed to quit it with the cop talk, to let the Accursed be.
Trinh said, “Oh yeah. The blinding thing.”
“What blinding thing?”
“It’s the new rumor going around. Someone somewhere got it into his head that we’ve been getting gang kids alone and using our PanOpts to blind them.”
“Blind them how? Huh?”
“I think the rumor is that PanOpts are set to blind anyone who isn’t the assigned user. You know, if someone finds a pair in the street.”
“Even if that was true, I wouldn’t place my shades on any of these nasty meatballs.” Zack belched lightly, patting his stomach. “Get that shit testing cootie positive? No, thanks.”
She arrived at her building just as a warning spritz burst into rain. The apartment, dark, silent except for water slapping windows, seemed to be someplace she’d found temporary shelter for the night. The lethargy was here, a mystery fatigue that hit whenever she was in her own space with no clear-cut goal. Tired without doing anything, she tried to figure out why she felt so horrible. The news about Froggy wasn’t it, although Tony Collazo had done a decent job of ruining her morning run.
After they’d dropped off Bottlecap on a street corner, Terri had waited while Zack bickered with his wife. She’d gone into a bar to use the john and stumbled into a round of mid-afternoon karaoke, refugees and unemployed citizens mauling their favorite tunes in front of each other. When she’d come out of the restroom, an overweight black lady in mismatched goodwill clothes had taken the stage. The woman had sung an old, slow-tempo soul song, something about someone she’d loved who had done her wrong. And although her delivery was halting, she’d had a nice voice and real sense of conviction, as if the woman had picked this song out of millions because it resonated with her own backstory, so determined was she to tell her tale in song, at least once, here in this mid-day beer den. Something about that faltering insistence had moved Terri, shaken her, and when she’d emerged back out onto the street she’d felt that familiar wobbliness, the rug of life pulled out from underfoot once again.
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