“You had to look that up?” she asked.
“Hey, he plows a lot of large ladies. I wasn’t sure who got top billing.”
Carlos and Trinh wandered off in opposite directions, and Chuck, their ward, seemed momentarily lost as to who to follow.
“Pure art,” Benny said, slightly shiny-faced. “Hey. Richie Guerrero. There was some talent. Remember that guy, Terri?”
“Huh,” she was still scrolling through an Overlay menu box, trying to find a naughty detector.
“New guy,” Benny said to Chuck. “You ever hear of ‘Richie the Itchy’?”
“Who?”
“Infamous. Richie Guerrero uses the men’s room in a restaurant. Takes off his PanOpts to do a two, and because he doesn’t want to set them down on any filthy surfaces, he perches them on the branches of a fake tree in the corner of the room. We’ve all done the exact same thing in times of lower GI distress. Finishes, leaves, gets halfway to the street when he remembers he left his shades back on the fake tree. Richie runs back, but someone is in the men’s room now. Richie’s pounding on the door, yelling, ‘Police! Let me in now!’, and the guy inside is yelling, ‘I’m using the john!’ Richie couldn’t call the cavalry even if he wanted to, so he starts yelling through the door that he’s going to break the door down. The guy inside gets mad, starts yelling about his constitutional rights this, due process that, how he’s gonna flush the PanOpts down the toilet if Richie doesn’t cool down.”
Chuck seemed to be following the story as if he were going to get graded on it.
“Richie kicks the door in. You ever had to do that?”
Chuck shook his head solemnly.
“It sucks. Doors are tough. But he gets his shades back. End of story, right? No. Turns out the restaurant owner is an ex-con, some hard lucker made good, and, for whatever reason, the kicked-in door was the final straw in his life. So now the owner makes footage of Richie going nuts, assaulting wait staff, setting the building on fire, having a drug freakout. The footage takes off. Half the city is making its own mashups, but the originals were so good that it didn’t matter that the spinoffs were subpar, so that by two weeks later you could see the tree in the corner with sunglasses singing a blues song and it didn’t matter, that’s how much time and energy went into the production values. And of course you’d see footage with that just playing on a TV screen in the background and it would ring true with the actuality anchor. That’s how they sandbag you, kid.”
“Sand trap,” Terri said.
“That’s how they sand trap you, kid.”
“What happened to the guy?” Chuck asked. “Richie.”
“He quit, moved to Mexicali, probably makes twice his old salary as a paralegal.”
She strolled over to where Zack stood, catching a low-level group groan from something said on the TV. Terri was about to inquire on his game plan for tomorrow, remembering he’d already told her he was going back to the train station, hearing him say, “Maybe if you hadn’t spent your whole day reading, you wouldn’t have forgotten that.”
She veered off, back toward the bar. Long before Zack had met his wife, Janice had dated an older man, one of the leading experts on palm trees in the state. After he’d died, she’d inherited his library of tree books, hundreds of them, enough to fill two floor-to-ceiling shelves she’d had built in the hallway at the Zendejas home. Over the years, she’d slowly slogged through the collection, and Terri kept trying to remember to think of some questions about palm trees. They didn’t have much to talk about otherwise. The odd hallway in their otherwise bookless home was a little off-putting.
Zack wandered over to the bar a few minutes later, sunk in a funk, not seeing her.
“Bad times?”
“Don’t ask.” He motioned to the bartender. In the low illumination from the backlit bottles, he appeared prematurely haggard.
“Listen,” she said. “When was the last time you took a day off?”
“Yeah.” He stared at himself in the long, wide mirror above the lit-up liquor. The bartender took his order and he looked down to his hands on the smooth counter. “What?”
“Benny was talking about sick days.”
“I don’t listen to that foolwad.”
“Well, he was saying how he didn’t want to take any sick days because he was probably going to need them, being in as bad shape as he is.”
“Yeah. And?”
“And you’re not in such bad shape, yet. Have you ever even taken a sick day?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Not in the time I’ve known you. You’ve probably got a shitload. Go on a vacation.”
She realized what she was doing as she was doing it, trying to steer him out of the picture while she cracked the Santos case. No: this was heartfelt advice. She ignored the conflicting thoughts.
“What? Where?”
“Wherever you want. Or wherever Janice wants. Take a break. Skip town for a few days, I don’t know. Go up the coast.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Think about it.”
He looked at her with barely amused suspicion. The bartender handed him his drink and Zack lurched off toward an empty table, revealing Trinh Nghiem in the space behind him. Maybe Zack wasn’t in such great shape. His bulk had completely hidden her.
“Hey,” Trinh said.
“Hey,” said Terri.
Later, in Terri’s bed, Trinh said, “What’s that large scar?”
“Which one?” Terri whispered.
“The big one. On your thigh.”
“Oh. That.” She thought of her lunch at Jazz Hands: keep it simple. She’d had a tendency to overtalk things in the past. “Um. I got thrown down a flight of stairs in my first year, by a meth head. A large, crazy meth head. They didn’t realize how bad my leg had gotten ripped up until I was in the ER with two cracked vertebrae. We were never sure what cut me. I mean, it was a flight of stairs. Stairs aren’t sharp.”
Trinh murmured, “Those stairs were,” lightly brushing a fingertip along the raised scar in the dark. Terri smiled and shivered, looking up at the rows of streetlight slatted through blinds and steamed-up windowpane, wondering if she should add the only interesting part of her rookie ordeal. She hadn’t lost consciousness during the fall down the stairs. Afterwards, lying in a heap on the lower landing, she remembered looking up at the silhouette of her assailant and thinking that she was peering down the staircase at him, that somehow she’d just killed him and his body had landed perfectly. It was a spooky disconnect, a sensation that had stayed with her over the years.
“I had to deal with one of those in my first year,” Trinh said.
“One of what?”
“A large, crazy overlord head. He’d been popping them all day, like candy. Sublinguals.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. By the time I crossed paths with him, he’d thrown a refrigerator … remember that neat little bistro on Main, South Main? I think it’s that pub now, with the tree in the window?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. So, in that place, he somehow pushed the refrigerator out of the kitchen, hauled it into the dining room, and shoved it through the front window.”
Terri snickered, then caught herself.
“No, it’s funny,” Trinh said. “Although I think that’s why they eventually closed. The employees were so bummed out they just gave up. Anyway, I’d gotten off shift, and I was going to meet some friends there for drinks. I showed up maybe thirty seconds after it happened. All the customers and the staff were just frozen in terror, waiting to see what this guy was going to do next. I knew it was going to be three or four minutes, at best, before backup arrived. Did I mention he was naked?”
“You did not.”
“Okay. So he’s naked, out of his mind, high as a kite, mile-high boner, laughing and pointing at the maître d’. I’ve got one hand on my heater, and I say, ‘You’re going to have to come into custody with me, sir.’ And he says, ‘I’m not going to jail.
’ So I say, ‘No, actually, you’re not. I’m taking you to Rivera Mental Health Facility.’
“This guy looks at me and says, ‘You’re gonna 5150 me? Over this? Why?’ And I say, ‘Well for starters, sir, you’re obviously batshit insane.’ And he looks off into the distance for a moment, looks down, looks at the fridge out on the sidewalk, and he gets this sad expression on his face. And then looks back at me and says, really politely, ‘You know? You’re absolutely right.’”
They both laughed at this. Terri shifted to lie on her side.
“And let me guess, when the guy finally came down for real, he was totally baffled.”
“I don’t think he ever really came down.”
“Seriously.”
“I mean, he was nice enough on the ride, once he was cuffed and all, but he wasn’t what you’d call a rational actor. I remembered to check up on him maybe six months later, after I realized I’d never gotten pulled for a deposition, and they told me he was still at Rivera.”
“Jesus. I was only in the hospital a month.”
“Just a month? With two cracked vertebrae? You must’ve had a hell of a nurse.”
Terri stared into the middle distance, feeling her bare back cooling, trying to think of something to say that would steer them toward a different topic.
“So … any new developments from the seedy underbelly?” she finally said, instantly wishing she’d thought of something else.
Now it was Trinh’s turn to stare off, into the darkness on the other side of the room.
“Terri, if I were to tell you how bad things are out there, you’d piss your mind.”
They lay like this for a moment in silence, and then Trinh sighed, rising to kneel naked before her.
“Speaking of which. Bathroom?”
“Out and all the way back. Can’t miss it.”
“Gracias,” she stood, crossing into the living room, ambient light from the open curtains flashing off her bare torso for a split second as she padded toward the back of the apartment.
As soon as Terri heard the bathroom door click, she stripped off her pillowcase and stuffed this down the side of the mattress. She’d noticed a few days ago that it had taken on a dingy, yellowy hue. When they’d barged into the bedroom, she’d had to maneuver herself over to the light switch, to get them into darkness as quickly as possible. At least she could offer her guest a private bathroom. One of the few things she’d never liked about the Pasadena house was that the smaller bathroom was next to the bedroom and had no fan, so that she and Gabriella had always had to hear each other using the john.
She fell flat on her back, listening to the freeway, trying to pick out patterns, thinking of the 5150 story and smiling to herself. It always fascinated her, all those indecipherable numbers the dispatchers used to use. The world had once been far less direct, unable to provide visuals for every situation. Her mom, a supermarket cashier all through Terri’s childhood, had told her that she’d had to memorize dozens of random numbers, nearly a hundred, each corresponding to a different fruit or vegetable. It was always odd to her that a few similar numbers had survived in cop slang as vestiges, bits of obsolete code whose digits still held some weird Kabalistic power. 5-0. 187. 911. 5150.
Feet sounded on floorboards, and it took a moment to figure out these belonged to the upstairs tenant. Terri heard him cross overhead and pause. She cringed, hearing the first unmistakable plashing chimes of male urination.
Trinh had returned and stood mesmerized in the doorway, wrapped in Terri’s bathrobe. She looked up, at the ceiling, saying, “That sucks.”
Tuesday morning Terri woke alone, with only a bare pillow to prove she hadn’t merely had a nice dream. Groggily prepping the coffeemaker, she tried to let her thoughts drift, to come up with something from her lingering subconscious to pry this weird case wide open. But the smell of coffee only reminded her of coffee. Throughout all the privations of the four-years-long Bad Days—all the shortages and brownouts and dread—losing coffee had been her biggest struggle. A week after the war, she’d tried to quit cold turkey, to get a jump on the impending food rationing, finding herself completely unprepared for how hard her body would take the cutoff. All that death, and the worst she’d had to deal with was a crushing caffeine headache.
The nagging suspicion remained after breakfast. This was generally the worst part of any case, that old pang that could be either self-doubt or her subliminal sleuth. That the feeling lingered meant there was probably something to it. But what was the feeling? She thought back over the last few days, the hospital, the college, the train station. Something had been like something else. She tried to remember objectively. The paper-mache shanty town; had there been something there, something she’d let get obscured by Babs and Ruben? No, that wasn’t it. The kid in the turtleneck. Maybe. No. But something to that. She frowned, hating this familiar, unscratchable itch.
Zack was going to be back at the train station all day. She had nowhere to go, nothing else to do except attempt to scratch this itch. Terri called up yesterday’s footage from the station, deciding to start there both out of logic and from a secondary suspicion, a hunch on a hunch. The playback opened in the car, her and Zack again waiting out the crush of refugees before First Ride. The thought of Zack back there for another day filled her with a mix of envy and pity. Hopefully he wouldn’t get his man: she didn’t need the gloating.
The footage moved forward in eight-speed, faces and name boxes whizzing past, the view zooming up and down the main hall, walking and ghosting about the main room, the catch-and-release drudgery of it all. A half hour in, she was about to take a break when she watched herself shoot up out of her seat, floating up to examine the totem pole of abusive comments. The footage had already darted up through the ceiling when she paused, feeling her index finger perched on her lips but seeing only a paused downtown below her. She rewound, sinking back into the train station. Two stories below, the crowd of students remained huddled around their luggage. She watched as the one student again leaned over her seat and again reached behind her to scratch her lower back.
Smiling, she flattened everything and moved it to the kitchenette counter, the one free horizontal surface in the apartment. She tediously fast-forwarded through the last week of Farrukh’s life in 2D, watching him whip through the repetitive motions of his joyless existence in octuple speed. Just after dawn on New Year’s Eve, she caught something, rewound and played it back in real time.
Farrukh stood on a street corner downtown, waiting for someone, his wheel-board of food boxes—essentially a painted plank with two casters—perched against a nearby wall. A car eased up in front of him and rolled down its window. He leaned into the door, the gesture suddenly rhyming with the kid at Union Station leaning over her seat. When she’d seen Farrukh do this the first time, she’d assumed the overtly hookerish gesture meant he’d been talking with a potential client, or maybe just a hungry motorist attempting to buy a snack on the go. Scrutinizing now, she saw Farrukh run a hand under the back of his shirt with the insecurity of feigned nonchalance. He was clearly concealing.
“Sum bitch.”
She paused, went immersive, and continued playback seemingly standing next to him. Farrukh slowly moved an object around in his waistband, finally retrieving whatever it was from just under the window. There was plenty of blind space on this street, most vexingly the entire seemingly empty car interior below the windowline. But in the half second it took for him to move his hand into the vehicle, she glimpsed the grip and then barrel of a handgun. Farrukh dipped his hands into the blind, clearly stashing this gun in the glove box, then stood and wiped his fingers on his forehead as the car sped off. Terri froze the world when the car was a block away, called up its license and VIN and registry, seeing that it was indeed vacant and serviced by Concierge Glove Box.
She conjured a Superior Court directory box in the air next to the motionless Farrukh, scrolling down to the bottom and selecting Judge Zamora. She’d dealt with Zamo
ra enough times to know she’d probably get the guy’s who-gives-a-shit Dupe, hoping not too many other cops had caught on to this same trick. The street faded and she stood in an ornate recreation of Zamora’s office, the mahogany paneling and gilt-framed Monet probably not faithful depictions of the man’s real-world chambers. The judge’s Dupe sat behind an oak desk the size of a lifeboat. For some reason he wolfed down a sloppy joe, using a fast-food bag for a plate. He saw her, smiled, and wiped his mouth on a shirtsleeve.
“Detective Pastuszka.”
“Your honor. I need a search warrant for glove box records,” she said, bringing up an affidavit template and tapping the Autofill box.
“I trust you’re sending me relevant footage.”
“Right this moment,” she said, bundling the last ten minutes of her life into a neat cube of sound and motion and attaching this to the affidavit. Terri raised her right hand for the affiant swearing, then the room dissolved, depositing her back next to poor immobile Farrukh, a search warrant box icon visible at the bottom of her desktop.
She opened a web box, another hovering windowpane into a false universe. For a moment the square went all white, negative space framing Concierge’s bow tie logo. Then this plane melted to reveal a blandly decorated corporate office space. A young man in a sports jacket walked out with the cordial air of an emcee. The odds were good he was a super Dupe, a persona with no real-world counterpart.
“Good morning. Welcome to Concierge.”
“Morning. I’ve got a search warrant for rental records.”
“Absolutely, Detective. Please send those over whenever you’re ready.”
She tagged the warrant icon, flipping it through the window like a beanbag. It was funny: delivering search warrants meant all kinds of attitude and speed bumps from real people. Dupes, having nothing to go on but protocol, acted with unfailing politeness when faced with writs.
“This all looks to be in order,” the young man said without breaking eye contact. “Here are the records you’ve requested.” Another little beanbag zipped up from under his side of the window, landing on her lower desktop.
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