Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  “Hey, so. I actually came down to get some fresh eyes on a situation. There’s some new footage in the local news cycle, and I can’t really tell if I’m getting sand trapped in it or not …”

  “Welcome to the club,” the burly patrol officer said. “We should make up membership cards.” The byline over his head read JOSE ARMENDARIZ, PO II. In all her years detecting, she’d never made the connection that civilian bylines had to be read surname first. Only cops had their names listed in correct order.

  “Come again?”

  “I saw myself at the Tournament of Roses thing just this morning. I’m riding a water buffalo through the crowd, shooting kids with a Yugo gun.”

  “Oh shit. I didn’t realize the Tournament thing had gotten that bad this quick …”

  “It’s not good,” Ledesma said. “I’ve got two dozen different remix issues I’m handling as of last night. But you were saying you’re in there somewhere yourself?”

  “I’m in the Nuestro Quintiglio footage remixes.”

  “Oh yeah, Public Information has been handling a bunch of those today also. Multiple fronts. What you should do is send macro footage of your actual whereabouts to Bob Trender over at …”

  “No, I was there. I was lead.”

  “Ahhh. That makes things more complicated.”

  “Just hit the mats for a few days,” Officer Armendariz said. “Go low, wear a dust mask. The huddled masses will find something else to bark about by the weekend.”

  “I hope,” Terri said. “I never shoulda spoken with that guy.”

  “Which guy?” Linda asked. “A reporter guy?”

  “Kofi Agyeman.”

  Armendariz looked off in annoyance. “Pshht. That guy can go buy me a cup of kofi.”

  “Yeah, seriously, Terri.” Linda looked concerned. “Never ever talk to reporters. That’s Rule One of Public Information.”

  Up early Thursday morning, Terri jogged to clear her mind, the path forward now obvious. It all came down to EyePhones. Farrukh was the anomaly in the group of killers, the only one who would have saved his eyewear, and the only one with an heir to guard that eyewear. Liney had given up a location. After a quick shower and omelet, she spent the morning and early afternoon trying to reach Chandrika Chavan, calling every twenty minutes, searching the woman out by Ghost. All she needed was RALA’s assistance as the lubricant to get a crew into the tower named by Liney. At three thirty, she started organizing a raid party.

  An hour later she stood next to a dozen-strong contingent of housing cops, each a known quantity within the downtown word-of-mouth networks. The idea here was to draw as much attention to herself as possible, to call out RALA in their own environment, forcing a confrontation and then negotiating passage for herself and a few bodyguards.

  She turned back and was happy to see Zack talking with one of the uniformed officers. She’d left him a message earlier in the day, forcing herself not to ponder too hard how to explain this move to Zack, hoping she wouldn’t be forced into pitting the explicit commands of the police chief against the implicit bonds of partnership. As she walked up, he was laughing, saying, “… cowboys and Indians. And the Indians have to be the Indians.”

  “Glad to see you here, Zendejas.”

  “Hey, I’m always down for a little excursionary force.” He looked off, seeing a growing mass of refugees watching and waiting for their next move. “Some shiny eyes in the jungle. Gotta say, I’m minorly impressed by your dedication to the cause of the hapless nobody. I give you points for persistence, Pastuszka.”

  In hand-to-text, she wrote him,

  this is almost def a bluff. RALA won’t budge & I need assistance in getting the guy’s shades.

  Smiling, Zack texted,

  Coulda fooled me. You have enough muscle here to do a full staged raid

  She frowned, looking back to the uniformed officers, several already slipping into rubber-edged riot costumes, fetish gear, with a slow, showy pace that would be sure to attract attention dozens of floors up. Where the hell was Chavan?

  Terri texted to Zack,

  If u have anything offensive 2 say, nows the time. I need 2 get this show on the road, so it’d be good 2 whip up some pissed offedness

  Zack smiled, looked around for inspiration, stood tippy-toe, then said, “Why couldn’t the Indians have taken the Chinese lead and deserted town? They certainly haven’t been made any more welcome. I don’t care who was whose ally.”

  “Yeah, but there wasn’t an Indiatown to burn down.”

  “There is now,” he said, attempting to indicate the skyscraper next to them, his finger instead pointing directly at a wall-mounted dispenser offering free swish-and-spit fluoride gelcaps.

  “Before I forget,” she said, reaching into a jacket pocket and producing some ghosting stickers. “Just in case you need these.”

  Zack backed off, hands out, unwilling to accept her offering. “Hey, I’m good.”

  The sky darkened prematurely, heavy rain clouds threatening to move everyone into the lobby. Using the linked binocular app, she and Zack scanned the face of the building, searching for broken windows that could be exploited for drone access. She remembered being a kid, her dad driving her past houses in the suburbs at night, passing window after window lit only by the glow of TV. Later, there were years when EyePhones had this same effect, just the slightest play of light across a nose and forehead at night. Eventually shades became sealed worlds, just like the downtown office towers. There was no way to tell who was looking at what.

  The cops milled for fifteen minutes, waiting for instructions, making small talk, Terri catching a group bitch session about how nobody ever received certified documentation from hospital administrators or court clerks. It was the forced nonchalance that preceded action, although she couldn’t imagine that anybody believed they were actually going up as a mass. But even as she thought this, Terri caught a subtle shift in the group, cops snapping on rubber gloves, passing out alcohol swabs and wallet-sized soap strips, everyone acting proactive about bedbugs and resistants, infections that would be difficult to treat even in a hospital. Within a minute, the mood had shifted, everyone behaving as if going up were a forgone conclusion.

  Mutty emerged from the crowd, slapping hands with uniformed officers as he walked toward her, a replay of his birthday party.

  “If you please, mang, you are to be looking at all those pigs down there,” he said, an impersonation of Zack’s impersonation of a fictionalized Indian gangbanger’s impersonation of Al Pacino. She thought about how they would look from on high; would the raiding party appear in any way intimidating? Even with three dozen cops, they’d be outnumbered several hundred to one if they actually went up.

  “Is this real, Terri?” he drawled.

  “Damn straight,” she said so as not to alert the locals, making a face, texting him a replay of her communiqués to Zack.

  Mutty laughed and said, “Alright, but I got bowling league at eight, so …”

  A cop looked over Terri’s shoulder and said, “What a complete and utter hoo-er.”

  She turned, switched to wireframe view, seeing—through the momentarily invisible skyscraper directly in front of her—the RALA contingent marching up from the direction of Angel’s Knoll, the park where she’d nabbed Bottlecap. Chandrika Chavan headed the group, looking almost regal in her flowing orange sari. The whole unfolding scene suddenly seemed unnecessarily dramatic, the meeting forced upon the envoys of two occupying nations. Terri pulled out of wireframe, striding around the sharp prow of the tower onto South Grand and flipping up her shades to rest just above her hairline, a gesture of good faith.

  Terri walked down to meet the group at the footbridge a half block to the north, knowing the whole scene would be watched by the force of cops now massed on the other side of the skyscraper.

  “You’re a hard woman to reach.”

  “I gave you my card.”

  “Lady, I left you forty messages today. So let’s get one thing
straight. You’re responsible for whatever happens here.”

  “I’m a little unclear what is happening here. Are you planning a one-woman excursion into the 333 building?”

  “Me and the small army parked on the other side of the building, yeah.”

  Chavan looked genuinely baffled, her little red scar bobbling up and down, making Terri think of a turkey’s wattle.

  “Small army. Oh-kay. Well, if you are planning on summoning an incursion force, you should know that we are going to picket this action with as much media muscle as we can muster.”

  “I thought you were interested in getting some justice for Farrukh,” she said, truly baffled.

  “I don’t think Farrukh Jhadav would have wanted this skyscraper turned into a combat zone. There are roughly fifteen thousand people living in this building, Detective. Regardless of what floor your destination is, even one police officer constitutes a major disruption to occupants …”

  “Who have no right to their occupancy …”

  “… causing an extra, unacceptable level of stress to already unbearable stress levels. There are proper channels for negotiating with the residents.”

  Terri stared with disbelief. “After all this, you want me to, what, meet with a gang representative and make an appointment? All due respect, but are you high? This is an active murder case.”

  “Here’s a better comparison. Would the LAPD have displaced fifteen thousand people in the Stacy Santos investigation?”

  “You know what I think? I think you don’t really give a shit about Farrukh Jhadav. I think you just want to make a little scene out here, in a public space where you know everyone is watching.”

  “You’re the one who seems intent on public spectacle, Detective.” Terri enjoyed the slight hint of disruption in the woman’s demeanor.

  “Yeah, and we agreed that you’d take this up with your board of directors before forcing my hand.”

  “I never said that,” Chandrika said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I never said any such thing.”

  “Are you being for real? Because, I can’t …”

  A shrill squeal came from the PanOpt earpiece, so nerve-janglingly piercing that both Terri and Chandrika flinched. She pulled the shades down and saw a bright red impact box on the ground, less than twenty feet away, Terri shuffle-jumping backward as something large and ceramic exploded on the pavement in front of her, pieces scattering, her mind shut down by combat fear. Visuals kicked in, the Falling Object Alarm sounding again, people raining objects down at them, PanOpt forcing her into motion. Terri sprinted toward the lobby’s main entrance, every cop having seen the alarm, knowing from their own systems that their hand had been forced: Everybody Up.

  With Detective Pastuszka in the lead, the incursion force did the human zipper up forty-six flights of clogged stairwells, boring a hole through the endless flow of refugees ascending and descending. Housing had attempted to maintain at least one working contingency elevator in every building, but this plan faded as the sealed shafts had filled with years of garbage, refugee floor captains drilling disposal slots in the stainless steel doors. Zack, Mutty, and the housing cops peeled off at the eighteenth floor, where the projectiles originated. By the thirtieth floor, refugees had cleared out, taking a different stairwell as word of the raid spread throughout the bloodstream of the building.

  Even pacing herself, Terri was the first to arrive on the forty-sixth floor. She stood at the top of the stairs, hands gripping knees, heart slamming, waiting for everyone else. Next to her, a badly plastered scar snaked up through the drywall. You could date a skyscraper’s abandonment by the presence or lack of these thin seams. Towers deserted before the collapse of the copper market had been systematically plundered of their pipes and wiring.

  She spotted the floor’s assortment of protein lozenges, another government freebie blasted by taxpayer groups, although this one didn’t cost California a dime. The federal government had a strong motivation to keep up baseline nutritional levels within the skyscrapers. Poor diet led to compromised immune systems, which led to quicker and more devastating mini-epidemics. The lozenges had originally come in wall-mounted vending machines that dispensed one per day per person. These went unused by refugees who’d assumed, correctly, that they’d been designed to identify and tag recipients. Now the gray, tasteless tablets sat out in wall-mounted steel basins on every stair landing.

  Terri resisted the urge to grab a mouthful. She was feeling her age until one of the uniformed officers, at least fifteen years younger than her, rounded the lower landing and lumbered up the final steps, his face beet red. She pulled up a drone layer, seeing their blue and green swoops throughout the building as they’d sped up the stairwell ahead of the cops.

  When her eight-cop contingent had reassembled on the stairwell landing, she clicked a series of check-boxes for the PA system. Eight public address drones had already positioned themselves in equidistant corners of the floor, and as she tapped the final consent box, she heard a boilerplate incursion message, delivered in her own voice, reverberating throughout the nearby halls; All occupants of the 46th floor of 333 South Grand Avenue are hereby notified …

  The group surged through the gray steel exit door, emerging into a hallway far more tightly packed than the lower stairwells, people acting as if they didn’t hear her message booming overhead. She assumed some sort of noncompliance order had been given by the floor captain to the two to four hundred people under his command. A realization came: they were far, far outside the protection of the Wall. With nine service revolvers and two stun drones, she might as well be on the surface of the moon.

  They set out through a narrow hall lit by emergency lights presumably connected to rooftop solar arrays, the only electricity allowed by the city. She passed an old secretary hutch, and a door still marked “Telephone Room,” residents lined up along one wall of the constricted hallway, perhaps to intentionally slow them down. The body heat gave the floor a stifled smell that halfway masked a deeper odor, something strong and briny, reminding her of an aquarium she’d visited as a kid.

  Terri passed several open-door warrens of labor. Unpainted plywood berths flanked worn worktables. She saw evidence of printmaking, leatherwork, embroidery, all the tools of Poser Life used here for actual human enterprise. At least SSK sweatshops had the owners and workers under the same roof. There’d been a certain point, years ago, when housing had to choose between fighting child labor or fighting fire code violations. Above one door she saw the red-and-white humped dome of a city–installed fire suppression unit, a stark reminder of which way that question had gone.

  The northeast corner held three office suites. Terri dispensed with the PA drones, instead loudly pounding on each door, knowing that word of the police presence would have already arrived. All three doors opened at the precise same moment, as if a Bollywood dance number might break out. Families emerged in a general air of orderly compliance, some of the men giving her funny stares as they passed, perhaps unaccustomed to seeing a woman general in the army of occupation, even though it was the refugees who’d come to occupy her own country. She and the officers fanned out into the three rooms, Terri taking the left suite.

  There were no lofts or bunks here. Instead, orderly rows of bags and bundles formed knee-high partitions between sleeping areas. Toward the back of the room, overlapping clothes lines hung between hooks. Past this, the floor-to-ceiling window was entirely obscured by an ancient chunk of billboard someone had dragged up from the city streets, the last three massive letters of a company name reading OJO next to the neck of a rail-thin perfume model.

  “Imagine having to see this before you go to sleep every night,” one of the officers said.

  “If you lived up here, why, why, why would you block that view?” she said, high-stepping over mounds of clothing to the far corner, grabbing a chunk of the sign and bending it backward, expecting it to flex and instead hearing the entire piece crack loudly in two.


  Where she’d assumed there’d be a glittering skyline, there was only a wall of backlit brown glass. The layers of grime and soot on the outside of the building had obliterated the view of the city. Why was she so shocked? These buildings hadn’t been washed in over a decade.

  “What a bunch of Charles Dickens bullshit,” Terri muttered, taking off the shades and squinting into the ambient smudge beyond. Turning back, she saw that the other officers had already moved on to the next room, leaving her all alone in tenement living quarters that had once been a place of business.

  PanOpts back on, she conducted a quick walk-through of the next two rooms, cataloging everyone, looking for any female faces in Rujuta’s age range without a byline, scar or no scar. Following orders, several of the uniformed officers searched through the scattered boxes and bags of possessions, cataloging each pair of EyePhones. Within five minutes, it was obvious that everyone was accounted for. Emerging back out into the hallway, she surveyed the family members lined up against the two walls in a broken V formation, following their own protocols, seeing that everyone had a byline. Liney had gotten his intel wrong: wrong floor, wrong building, wrong city. “Pinche ciudad,” she muttered to herself. Zack texted,

  Firefight on 18, 1 hit

  From the looks on their faces, the other officers must’ve received the same message, an unfortunate break in protocol. She leaned against a hallway wall, calling Zack with what she hoped was an air of calm authority. Looking down, she saw a neat stack of photocopier paper, detritus from the original tenants.

  “Mutty got shot.”

  She exhaled slowly. “How bad?”

  “I’m not sure. They’re bringing him down right now. I’m here with the shooter and the rest of the delegation.”

  “What was it? What happened?” she asked, already reducing the building to glass and bringing up the players twenty-eight stories below.

  “It was the kid who’d tossed a serving bowl out the window at us. His floor captain gave him up, and the kid didn’t want to be given up. But it doesn’t seem coordinated with anyone else.”