Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  “Testify.”

  “Froggy.”

  “What about him?”

  “Dio Sarin,” he said. “I-K-D-K-S-S-K.”

  This got her attention. “Okay, you got his name and set right. What else?”

  “Froggy trick Nailer.”

  “Achindra Sankaran? That Nailer?” Nailer was a tough character.

  Liney nodded and looked side to side theatrically, as if agents of the underworld could hear him in his booth.

  “Froggy trick Nailer,” he whispered. “Froggy marked for death by Nailer’s people.”

  She exhaled. His lie detector looked good, and Past Intel Reliability stood at an impressive eighty six percent.

  “Well, Liney, I gotta say you’re an odd goddamn duck, and I don’t really believe you talk like this in real life. But all things considered … you eat.”

  He clapped his hands together in tranquil joy.

  “Liney eats.”

  Reenergized, she called Blanco. The Chief’s VT materialized in the messy living room in front of her.

  “Any developments, Detective?”

  “I’m checking in to see which way I should go. I have good intel on where Farrukh Jhadav’s EyePhones might be, but it’s forty-plus stories up, and I think negotiation for passage is going to be a trick. So I’m wondering what the best use of my resources is at this stage.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, is the primary focus here who shot Nuestro Quintiglio, or finding Farrukh’s glasses? Glasses get me motives, but finding the shooter on Quintiglio gets me closer to whatever is happening.” She was about to follow up with, “Is this who, or why?”, when Blanco interrupted her.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Chief? I’m not sure what you mean …”

  “There are a thousand different possible shooters. Quintiglio’s death may be completely unrelated to the other deaths involved. I don’t think it’s fair to set up assumptions, and I’m actually very disappointed that you went ahead with the raid on Mr. Quintiglio’s apartment without calling me for authorization first. Exigent circumstances or not, you are to check in with my office first, do you understand?”

  Terri nodded, baffled, deciding that the best course was to stay mum. Reading into this pause at least that her point had been sufficiently underlined, Blanco continued.

  “I’ve assigned Mr. Quintiglio’s case to homicide detectives in Southwest. That thread is no longer your concern. I want you to stay on the search for Farrukh’s glasses.”

  Terri nodded, giving the woman credit for at least having the right names and pronunciations up in front of her.

  “And I don’t want you talking with any more journalists about this. Even in passing. That clear?” Her face got hot at the minor injustice of this part of the chew out, looking over Blanco’s shoulder toward her dark kitchenette, nodding. The Chief hung up abruptly.

  Terri kicked into a box of donation clothes, hangers scattering, something hard in the bottom of the box smashing her toe. She hopped over to the window and placed a hand on the frame to steady herself. The apartment was the worst place to be when pissed off. She stood for a long moment, foot throbbing, staring down at the I-10, then paused motion, merged the Basement with real time, and ghosted herself down onto the freeway, in the westbound lane, surrounded by frozen cars and distracted passengers. Civilians: oblivious, thankless. She glanced up and zoomed in on the gym bag, still stuck on the freeway sign ledge a week and a half later. It would probably be there for years and years, a reminder of Carlos Jaramillo’s jab at her life every time she looked out the window. Terri looked back up at her apartment from this angle, disgusted with everything, and was shocked to see herself in this window now, also frozen, looking down at herself, a phantom woman.

  A wave of pity came. She didn’t mind strangers, or even fellow cops, seeing her building in all its naked ugliness. But the thought of her sister and niece seeing her new place filled her with a sharp sorrow. When living in South Pasadena, she’d felt strangely self-conscious inviting her sister’s family over, her own place so spacious and better furnished than Tammi’s adequate bungalow in Valley Village. Now she felt a symmetrical self-consciousness, having sunk so low in one move. When Krista stopped by last month to do Christmas shopping, Terri had quickly hustled them right back out the door.

  She frowned in realization. It hadn’t been that quickly. She switched back to her apartment and looked around the room, all the clothes scattered around the floor. Krista had been left alone while Terri applied eyeliner in the bathroom.

  “God damn it,” she said, bringing up a call box and dialing her niece.

  “Hey,” she said, letting the anger come out in her voice.

  “Hey,” Krista said.

  “Did you take my shirt? Last month? The baseball sleeve with the fat blue and purple lightning bolts?”

  “Oh, no, I’m just Krista’s Dupe,” Krista appeared to tell her. An orange D floated in the lower-right corner. “Can I take a message?”

  “Tell her I’m pissed off. Tell her she can’t come over here and take whatever clothes of mine she wants.”

  “Okay, Aunt Terri,” the Dupe said with good cheer.

  “And tell her I hung up abruptly,” Terri said, doing just that.

  Up and down, the day taking on a see-saw feel, she fished around in her jacket’s many pockets until she found the business card given to her by Chandrika Chavan. The lady picked up after five rings, answering with a curt, “Yes.”

  “Ms. Chavan, this is Detective Pastuszka. We spoke last week about Farrukh Jhadav.”

  “Of course. Can you hold please?”

  “No,” Terri said, realizing she was already on hold, glad at least she’d gotten the actual woman and not some mannequin dummy of an answering service. Although she would’ve preferred that with the Chief. She switched out of audio only and threw Chandrika’s profile into a call box, seeing her VT in a flat screen floating over the couch’s armrest.

  The fact that Chandrika Chavan still had the shiny red keloid on her throat—it being the easiest thing in the world to customize and beautify one’s VT—seemed obviously for effect, to play up the victim card. On hold, she realized that she was free to examine this grizzly vertical scar. It looked like a fat red worm, or a leech. How could such a scar even be real? Terri had seen such an injury once, years ago, during a domestic dispute involving two tweakers. One had cut the other, and blood had jetted out in great arterial arcs, the victim still trying to fight, slipping on his own juices. Later, inspecting the body, she’d been shocked at what a tiny puncture it actually was. This scar looked far more severe. How could she have possibly survived such a wound? Terri absentmindedly wondered if it was fake, some kind of plastic surgery.

  Chandrika returned, unapologetic for the rudeness.

  “I have good intelligence on the whereabouts of Mr. Jhadav’s former home,” Terri said. “I think the odds are very good that his niece still lives in this space, and I think the odds are equally good that she still has these EyePhones.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  “How many honest-labor refugees do you know that can afford shades?”

  “Honest-labor is a politically loaded term …”

  “And yet you know exactly what I mean by it.”

  “Where is this home located?

  “The 333 S. Grand skyscraper. I’ll give you a floor address if you think you can help me locate these remotely.”

  “‘Remotely.’ You know I can’t sanction any sort of drone incursion …”

  “I’m talking about human intervention.”

  “You want me to send a member of my staff into 333 S. Grand? I’m confused. What are you asking here?”

  “I’m requesting the help you offered. I need to find Rujuta Jhadav, or at least her premises. She’s off the charts, no face, no profession. If you have contacts that can assist in this search, this would be the time to proffer.”

  “I’
m sure you’re well aware of our long-standing policy regarding police presence inside the skyscrapers. These are people’s homes. As such, the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure directly applies to these homes. I can’t in good conscience offer any assistance in a matter like this unless you first have a warrant.”

  “And you know there’s no judge in the state who will give a warrant on a squatted skyscraper. Politically, I’d burn down a couple of bridges just asking.”

  “Couldn’t I say the same thing on my end?”

  Terri sighed. “Look, I’m not asking you to stick your neck out within your own constituency …” She paused, unsure if she should have mentioned that hideous neck. “I’m asking you to extend your reach through backdoor channels.”

  “To get justice for Mr. Jhadav.”

  “Absolutely.” She had no assurance this call wasn’t going to be played back for anyone, anywhere, so she was hoping to avoid explicitly stating the implied lie, that she sought a Who and not a Why.

  “And if I can’t help?”

  “If you really can’t find it in your heart to assist in an ongoing police investigation,” she said, putting the whole thing back on Chandrika, “then we’ll probably have to go in.”

  “Like the constitution doesn’t exist.”

  “Like it doesn’t exist inside 333 S. Grand, you betcha.”

  Chandrika tensed her mouth and looked down at something.

  “Pardon my resistance, but I’m sure you’re well aware that the timing here makes your own motives rather suspicious.”

  “I … huh?”

  “Watch the news. You’re part of a larger story.”

  “I’m not the issue here,” she said, controlling the nervous edge in her voice. “Your help is the issue. Why don’t we leave it at you will at least think over my offer.”

  “What is your offer?”

  “That you help me avoid a full-blown invasion of a skyscraper.”

  “That’s not really an offer, more like a good thing to avoid. Call me any time and I’ll talk.”

  “That the best you can do?”

  “Like I said. I can’t help with any activity that subverts our core mission. But I’d be happy to raise the matter with my board of directors. Who knows. Maybe one of them would be willing to offer you the backdoor channels that I cannot. So, let’s confer before you make any decisions and leave that as an option. Will that do?”

  “It’s a start.”

  The call ended, Terri thinking, Doesn’t anybody say goodbye anymore?

  Calling up a news aggregator, she entered her name and said, “What the fuck have I done now …”

  A series of stories covered the raid from yesterday, on the Quintiglio backhouse. She pulled up a block of footage, viewing herself and the other cops milling around in front of the property, seeing already that the scene had been altered, with Babs and Ruben flanking her and four or five Swatted-out officers in the background. A caption read, “Why Was A Militarized Police Unit Sent To Apprehend One Reporter?”

  She clicked one of the text links, reading,

  Several key questions remain about Mr. Quintiglio’s death at the hands of the LAPD. Chief among these; why was an unarmed citizen journalist taken down by a dozen paramilitarized police officers? And was Mr. Quintiglio targeted for his reportage? In the last few months, he’d written extensively about citywide controversies, including the recent contentious Immigration and Customs hearings, the OBE strike, and the widening Tournament of Roses riot scandal …

  “But not about Stacy Santos,” she whispered, staring at the ceiling and smiling in frustration. In all her years of dealing with public input, she’d never heard or read anyone offering one good idea.

  Why didn’t she live in a universe where it was okay to crowdsource a murder case? People went public with every other imaginable problem. Not quite twenty years ago, the networked citizenry had linked micro-plots of arable land—lawns, lots, medians—to stave off total agricultural collapse. Ever since then, the Efficiency Revolution had rolled on in smaller and smaller ripples, echoing a new national self-reliance. Vigilant citizens sniffed out wasted food, poor design, misused manpower. Humanity had become obsessed with problem solving.

  Of course, only the visible part of humanity solved problems. It was easy to dismiss how much of the world still remained in the dark, sometimes literally. The long emergency, bested by the US in under half a decade, still reverberated throughout the third world. The United States had secured an extension of The American Century only by default, having somehow tricked its two biggest competitors into killing each other, and suffering an almost unimaginable consequence.

  There’d been a time when she’d kept abreast of the world’s dark pockets. It’d fascinated her, the ease with which some governments repurposed the networks for obscene social control. A multitude of nations—regions—had fatally contracted into self-contained nightmares. And those were the realms that had pulled through the Dim Ages. Large pockets of the world had lost the fight entirely, descending into torchlit autarkies, yielding to deindustrialization, deforestation, the return of slavery. Saudi Arabia had shrunk down to two holy cities abutting a barbarian’s wasteland. Other parts of the Middle East were less able to support human life than the Chinese hinterlands. The United States sent probes out into the world’s battlefields the way it once used to send them out into the solar system. Terri had followed all this for years; now it was just too depressing.

  There were still plenty of stories out there involving human resilience. The Slide meant very different things to different continents. The Americas were overrun with Indian refugees; Europe teemed with the Chinese. Russia wound up unwillingly harboring both, pockets of immigrants sometimes continuing their war from camp to camp, fighting with bricks and pipes. Some refugees repatriated to the new cities being built along the edges of India and China, or tried their hand in the fringe cities that had escaped destruction—Huai’an, Madurai, Quanzhou, Vadodara—still churning out bananas, granite, paper, textiles, all of it untouchable, untradable, cursed, regardless of how many clicks each item did or did not set off under Geiger counters.

  Terri returned to the bad aftertaste of the Quintiglio story. She looked up the one public information officer she knew, Linda Ledesma, locating her at the Cadillac Avenue workstation. She placed her own VT on scene, thinking it was best to have this conversation in person, if not actually in person. She materialized near the front entrance, seeing Ledesma’s byline over a group huddled toward the back of the room. Terri approached, finding another cluster of chairs in a seeming repeat of the viewing from the bar the other night, everyone staring into one spot in the center of the crowd. This group seemed celebratory. Linda Ledesma high-fived a burly patrol officer.

  Terri did a V-slash overhead, making her presence known to the group, then said, “Hey Linda. What’s going on?”

  “Terri, hey. They caught that ‘Imsane’ mutt.”

  “No shit. That actually makes me happy. What was the magic trick? How’d he get up on all those signs?”

  She grimaced. “The fucking guy works for Caltrans.”

  “Huh?”

  “You ever see anyone cleaning that graffiti off?”

  “Just last week, actually.”

  “Chances are you were looking at him applying the graffiti. The kid would sign out a boom lift, do a little work, do a little crime. It’s ingenious.”

  Terri shook her head in disbelief. “Are you telling me that in this city, with all of us hunting this kid, he was somehow able to hide in plain sight? That’s absurd.”

  “Overseer oversight. No one thought to look for the obvious.”

  Another cop said, “Classic. They’d have put this kid in stocks within the hour in Chicago.”

  “Who thought to catch him?”

  “Benicio Penny. From Harbor?”

  “And does he get the reward pool?”

  “Hopefully he’ll get a real pool. Or a st
atue in a park somewhere.”

  “Where’s the kid at now?”

  “Now? Got me. Probably Vignes.”

  “No, I mean, where’s he at here?” Terri pointed to the empty space in the center of the group.

  “Oh, um. 21-20.”

  She brought up PanOpt layer 21, finding a large viewing box showing Detective Benicio Penny, strapping and copper toned, holding court in front of their little group and presumably a dozen more huddled micro-victory parties throughout the Southland. Ledesma touched Terri’s elbow and said, “Check out the money shot,” pointing to a thumbnail box in the corner of the scene. She tapped this, swelling it to fill the air in front of her, showing Penny and the perp. The kid was in his early twenties, handsome, black, wearing the hooded sweatshirt that had served as a villain’s cloak for all eternity. In the scene, Penny had the kid corralled in an alley somewhere, hands already cuffed. She saw MANSARAY, DESHAWN over his head, surprised to see he had no adult priors.

  “Million dollar question, kid,” Detective Penny said. “What does ‘Imsane’ mean?”

  “What do you mean, what does it mean?”

  “Don’t play dumb. What’s your thesis?”

  “Say what?”

  Penny rocked his head back and forth with the cadence of his own questioning.

  “Are you saying, ‘I’m Sane?’ or is it ‘I’m so insane that I can’t spell the word insane correctly?’”

  The kid smiled. Terri was struck by the genuineness of the gesture, as if he were delighted to find someone asking.

  “Nah man, it’s ‘I’m sain.’ You know?”

  “What?”

  “‘I’m sayin.’ You know what I’m sayin?”

  Terri groaned.

  Benicio Penny raised up to loom over the kid. “I am going to shoot you in the face and plant the gun on your grandmother and do my prison time with a smile, you fucking nincompoop.”

  Terri closed the box with a laugh. “I want to say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Doesn’t make it not a win. Man, that graffiti shit pissed me off.”

  The rest of the huddle, watching a different piece of footage, guffawed as a group, and she felt a twinge of pride.