Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  “Hey gang. Anyone have a personal contact for Babylon Johnson?” This got a few chuckles and quick head shakes. She sat, and the gathering used her arrival as an excuse for a group break. Chessy pinched the bridge of his nose and removed his shades. She’d seen a study recently about the alleged harm to humanity posed by a steadily diminishing lack of eye contact.

  “Okay. Two men enter, one man leaves,” he said. “Babylon Johnson versus Torg. Go.”

  “Babs is only a foot taller,” Diego said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s his handicap?”

  “You mean Babs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A backhoe,” someone said.

  “I’m being serious,” Chessy said with mock seriousness.

  “A baseball bat. Wait,” Dena said to jeers. “A baseball bat that’s also a gun that can shoot baseballs.”

  “So, a magic baseball bat.”

  “It doesn’t have to be magic. Somebody could actually build a baseball bat that shoots baseballs.”

  “How many baseballs would it hold?”

  As the conversation devolved into a discussion of how many baseballs could fit in the chamber of a baseball bat gun, Terri considered sharing her spooky incident from the park, the screams from the little league game. But how would she even phrase it? This was always her barrier to mingling; a lack of socializing meant a lack of social skills, and she always ended up oversharing to compensate. Someone said, “So once he’s shot his what, four baseballs? Then what? He has to fight with a hollow bat? Jeez, even I don’t hate Babs that much.”

  Diego said, “I dreamed last night my mother-in-law attacked me with a baseball bat. She was pissed off because she’d just found out I’d been sleeping with her daughter. I was all, ‘But me and Aricely have been married eight years!’”

  Terri laughed politely, relieved she wasn’t the only one with a compulsion to divulge.

  “So this morning I tried daymaring it, to show my wife,” he said. “You ever done that?”

  She realized he was talking to her. “Done what?”

  “Daymaring.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Oh. It’s when you go back and try to recreate your dream in soft content.”

  “I’ve never heard it called that. Huh. I probably tried a few times, but it never really seems as good as the dream was.”

  “Don’t do that,” Dena said.

  “I know,” he said. “Although I almost got it right a few times. I guess it’s not the mentally healthiest thing to do …”

  “No, seriously. It’s not just that it’s bad for you. I mean it’s bad for you. Remember Bruce Quezada?”

  “From MCD? I thought he retired.”

  “Yeah, before he retired. There was this thing at a construction site in the valley, a family business. The eldest son crossed one of the last big-time meth crews, and thought he was going to somehow skip town before they found out. Instead, they showed up at the home office, tied everyone up and threw the whole family into a cement mixer. Then they tossed in some cinderblocks and the guard dog and left the thing on in the hot sun. And it was a long weekend. Bruce was the first one on scene, three days later. They weren’t even bodies by that point.

  “Afterward, Bruce does everything right, takes his eight weeks, does the Blue Dot, the works. One day he has an especially bad dream. He spent most of the morning trying to recreate it in soft content. Which is already really not mentally healthy. And, like you said, doesn’t really work anyway. That afternoon he’s watching a game when a commercial for detergent comes on. At the end of the commercial, this lady stuffs a collie into her front-loading washer and turns it on. Bruce was horrified, but what could he do? He got tagged.”

  “Tagged by who?” Diego said.

  “There is no who. He just got tagged.”

  Terri said, “Reiteratives?”

  “Maybe not that complicated, but that general type of thing. Some automated marketers decided that Bruce liked seeing dogs tumble around. And once they decided to show him that … well, that was that. It’s not like there’s some central authority he can go to and say, ‘Hey, your targeted advertising is deeply messing my shit up.’ There probably aren’t even any real people left in advertising these days. So he’s off network now. The poor guy sits around and reads mystery novels. He has to have his daughter place phone calls for him, because he doesn’t want to see any more dogs get stuffed into appliances.”

  She draped her head over the cloth chair back. Daymaring: she marveled at the beautiful circularity of the word. All those primitive fumblings with shared lucid dreaming—phantasmagoria, kinetoscope, cinema—had found their endpoint in immersive soft content. Film had returned to the days of the nineteenth-century peepshow, seen one person at a time. Even animation had come full circle, all of existence essentially a giant cartoon, to be squashed and stretched at will. It amazed her, the ease with which the average citizen could go through life with their core beliefs upheld by a personalized reality. Even she had done this, in a way, having had Gabriella scrubbed from her PanOpt archives. She didn’t want to contemplate how thoroughly Krista edited her universe.

  This new generation lacked a common, central event. Terri’s generation had been defined by that long, hot June weekend when billions died, everyone watching in disbelief as China and India killed each other. Her own adult life seemed bound by just a handful of afterimages; the night scenes from remote villages, the obscene silhouettes of apartment blocks lit by distant flashes, the sound of thousands of people screaming at once, the moment when she’d pulled off her EyePhones in terror and realized she could still hear the screams, people in nearby apartments screaming, people on the street screaming, an entire networked species howling in horror.

  Modern kids had no such common event. They had no common anything. Everyone Terri’s age groused about the entitlement of the next generation, people who grew up after the deprivation of the postwar bad days, the American economy temporarily totaled by acts of aggression half a world away. But the difference was larger than that. These kids had never experienced wholesale suspension of belief, the firm sensation that the carnage on the news had to be fake. All the world required of them now was a momentary suspension of disbelief; if everything was fake to begin with, then they’d never had a stake in the world in the first place.

  Terri’s dad had been a kind-eyed tree of a man who’d put on a lot of weight and lost a lot of hair in the years before he’d died in the shower when she was fifteen. He’d driven two hours a day, sometimes three, for a decent port job. She’d always been grateful that he hadn’t been around for the bad days, despite the fact that her mother had to go through so much on her own. At least the Port Authority pension had held, the firewall between the extended Pastuszka household—eventually including her aunt and two nieces—and all the cash-crunch misery of the world beyond their house.

  There was a game called Time Tower, or Tower Timer, she never remembered. It was hugely popular and strangely persistent in its popularity. In the game, players traveled back in time to the morning of 9/11, having to perform a series of tasks in both of the burning twin towers. A player could go back again and again, encountering past versions of one’s self, altering past actions, looting jewelry from corpses, wandering through smoke-filled corridors, dodging sparks and flames. She’d never played herself, but Zack once let her watch his own game play. He’d stopped on the sixtieth floor and showed her, through a telescope his in-game character had had the foresight to bring along, an earlier version of himself in the window of the opposite tower. It’d been spooky and arresting: she could see why the game was so addictive.

  Terri’s parents would have been horrified by this game. Her dad had known two transit workers smothered under the rubble. Throughout her childhood, the date had the whiff of death. Now it was just a punchline, or, somehow worse, a plot device. She realized this was just the way of the world. Soon people would divorce the India-C
hina war from its power to shock, laugh at its flattened miseries, squeeze it for whatever jokes and games and puzzles it had to offer. In all likelihood, this had already happened. For half her life, she’d heard the mantra: the dead should not have died in vain. But they already had.

  Voices from the other seats made her realize she’d drifted off. She heard Chessy repeat the two-men-enter question, and then heard Mutty say, “Is this because Torg is back up?” Terri opened her eyes and straightened, smacking her mouth.

  “Back in again?”

  “Yeah. My man’s got some more scores to settle, I guess. Hey Terri.”

  “Hey Mutty,” she said, hoping the sleep breath wasn’t as bad as it tasted. “You have a contact for Babs?”

  On Sunday morning, Babylon Johnson and Ruben Torres picked her up in front of her building. She’d heard of both men long before she’d had the displeasure of meeting either, back when they’d served on the city’s infamous fan-out anti-gang unit, two mayors ago. The duo had made a big impression on the powers that be, big enough that both rolled over to homicide when Pacific Area absorbed the Marina Del Rey station five years ago. Climbing into the department minivan, she realized the Santos case was probably the stuff guys like this dreamed of. Terri was just tagging along to see what made Stacy Santos kill, not who had killed her.

  “Heyo Pastuszka,” Babylon said, extending one firm handshake from the front bench seat, even as she moved away from him, toward the third row. He was muscle-bound, black, with powerful forearms and one signature leather wristband, his shiny baldness offset by huge fuzzy rectangles of mutton chop.

  “Babs,” she said, nodding, “Ruben. Thanks again for the ridealong.”

  Ruben nodded from the other side of the front bench seat. He was small, and pensive, and adept at disguising grotesque stupidity as reserved thoughtfulness.

  The minivan swung back to the on-ramp and then they were on I-10, shooting east. “Whenever you’re ready, I can use that residence footage,” she said, partially to give herself something to do that didn’t involve talking with either man. Babs was in the middle of a heated conversation with someone unseen, but he flashed her a thumbs up and did a quick V-and-point motion as he laughed and said, “Forget it man, forget it…. that entire zip code needs to be spayed and neutered.”

  A one-inch cube materialized in front of her face. She tapped it with her finger and the cube expanded to fill her field of vision, and then she was inside the living room of the Santos house on Captain’s Row, a gated community on the western inlet of Marina Del Rey. She fiddled in the control box, delinking her view from the literal footage of what Babs had personally witnessed, hoping he’d done some thorough peeking, already annoyed at the neon pink blinds she could see between a book-lined breakfront and the wall. This was an extrapolation of the Santos house, culled from walkthrough footage and stripped of any other human life. She could wander the space at will, everything set as it was during the time of the walkthrough, roughly two hours after the body was found.

  The house had a breezy feel to it, holding a tasteful assortment of stained-wood furniture and spacious couches and throw pillows embroidered with bossy little anchors. The place seemed one level too large and posh for a mere District Attorney. But then she remembered something about the DA marrying a former supermodel, explaining both the money and Stacy’s good looks. Terri registered a flicker of sorrow at the destruction of such a perfect family unit, then thinking, Fuck it, he plays the martyr card right, he can leapfrog City Hall for Sacramento.

  She followed floating arrows upstairs to Stacy’s bedroom and found it bare, the discarded quarters of a college girl already four years gone, just a space with a bed and two large rolling suitcases piled on a dresser by the window. A doily sat tossed in the corner. Had Stacy resented her parents turning her old bedroom into a guest room? The other rooms on the floor had been explored hastily, leaving dozens of bright blinds between and under pieces of furniture, Babs and Ruben probably under strict orders to employ maximum tact.

  The actual murder had taken place downstairs, in the back of the house, in a small annex furthest from the street. A wall of deep shelves held oars, lifejackets, picnic coolers, and other brightly colored doodads she guessed were boating paraphernalia. The room had two doors, one to the house, one to the dock, and then two windows, west and east, the latter overlooking the marina water and a lower deck that connected, by a long catwalk, to the actual pier for their two boats. Stacy had presumably come back here to change into her bathing suit. The assailant had stood on a narrow landscaped ledge, waited for her outside the west window, and fired one shot clean through her head as soon as she’d entered.

  Her body lay on the floor, face down in a bikini top and terry cloth sarong, a mass of glistening black hair covering her head, arms at her side, palms up, a long smear of blood and slop on the wall the only indication that something terrible had happened. As was common with most scenes at the heart of an outsized horror, there was something small and nearly pathetic about the body itself. A floating coroner’s tag noted that this footage had been taken by the responding officers and then stitched into the detectives’ footage. She remembered hearing that the mother had been so distraught she’d forced the paramedics to perform CPR, despite half her daughter’s head having been taken off.

  She saw now what she’d already been told by Babs over the phone; there was no sex crime. The shooter hadn’t even waited for her to undress, instead firing and fleeing on foot. Terri stepped through the west wall, coming out on the narrow rise that bordered the back of the property. The perp had stood on landscaped wood chips and shot through the open window’s screen. No footprints, no fingerprints, no cells, no shells. She called up a Shotline layer, sending a thin purple ribbon through the blackened hole in the screen, across the room, and out through the broken glass of the opposite window. In a control box, she set the entire house for Wireframe View, and then looked through the walls to where the Shotline arced down into the water of the marina. Another LAPD tag read, UDU IN WATER 16:22 1.5.50 NOTHING RECOVERED.

  She whistled in marvel, never having heard of divers going in within two hours of first call. But that was the level of attention the force had brought to bear. How could it be otherwise? Not that it would do them any good. If they hadn’t gotten a break by now, they wouldn’t. The rich paid for privacy, and now they were going to pay because of privacy. Captain’s Row prided itself on a lack of surveillance, relying on foot security instead of drones or macros or even reliable ShotSpotter sensors. All the killer had to do was scramble down to the water thirty feet away and swim off in any of a half-dozen different directions. Maybe he or she had drifted away atop Froggy’s stiff corpse.

  She floated back toward the house, reentering through a kitchen wall. Turning, she saw a slender tree growing outside the window, and she thought of the skinny tree outside her old kitchen window in South Pasadena, an on-and-off-ramp for the agitated squirrels that used to gallop across their roof. Before moving to California, she’d never known that squirrels could cluck. But they did cluck, pausing at eye level on the tree to make eye contact with her and tut angrily, enraged at the beautifully arranged pots and saucepans dangling from the ceiling rack and the gleaming marble countertops Gabriella had so painstakingly selected.

  The car angled upward and Terri felt a pit of queasiness. She pulled up her shades as the freeway sloped up the hilly pass into the inland valley, peering out the back window to align stomach with inner ear. In the distance, downtown’s tightly packed skyscrapers perched on the horizon, like the Emerald City of Oz. Her earpiece chimed.

  “Hey,” Zack said, “Calling you back.”

  “Yeah, gimme a second.” She pulled up his VT and did a circle point to the seat next to her, so that it appeared to her and her alone that he sat in the car with them.

  “You at home?”

  “I got Wade’s birthday party all afternoon. There’s about five hundred seven-year-olds everywhere.”

>   She heard a rush of high-pitched squawks and squeals in the background. “Hold up. I’m going onto the patio.” Unaligned, his presence on the bench seat spoke and swayed with the motion of the car, but itself offered no other evidence that it was supposed to represent a sentient human being somewhere else on the planet. It was as if Zack spoke while hypnotized.

  “I saw you got a witness on the case of the guy who got killed in a parking lot that no one cared about,” he said, his lack of enthusiasm momentarily matching the torpor of his VT.

  “Yeah, I got with them yesterday.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Dead end number 846.”

  She had talked with Mr. Bhangoo this morning by phone. He’d told her what she had already suspected, that he and Farrukh hadn’t been friends, hadn’t been anything more than grunting acquaintances. Although when pressed, he offered that he didn’t think Farrukh had any friends. Both worked for three different walla companies, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Terri had asked if Farrukh had ever done anything out of line, out of the ordinary, had ever given him any reason to make any possible enemies. “There’s no time to make anything,” Bhangoo had said. “We get our boxes. We give our boxes. We go.”

  This sounded right. Farrukh had worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. The guy was at his maximum earning power, presumably still supporting his niece, and the odds were good his pay wasn’t cutting it. She’d heard of skyscraper residents working themselves to death on orders of their floor manager, taco wallas mired in eternal poverty, gangs juicing them for every penny, able to track their movements, and thus their earnings, through the networks. In some skyscrapers, gang middle managers dynamically priced rent in direct proportion to earnings. A guy squeezed this hard would have no problem going to other corners of the underworld for something extra: not work, but maybe a loan, or a finder’s fee on something. Ever so slowly, the pieces were drifting into place. But only if she ignored the Stacy Santos thing. Santos: shit. She realized she was going to have to be careful to keep all notes out of her and Zack’s shared data pool.