The skyscrapers towered over all this. Seen this close, the towers were dark, imposing, with only a few flickers coming from a tiny fraction of the hundreds and hundreds of blacked-out windows. She found the nighttime skyline unnerving, as if this prosperous, well-lit metropolis existed in the foothills of a dead city, built by giants thousands of years ago. She’d once watched an immersive documentary about Bunker Hill, showing her all the run-down Victorians and squalid grandeur of the neighborhood erased by the city a half century before she’d been born. Could they have imagined that the skyscraper building boom would one day facilitate exponentially larger and broker surges of humanity? In PanOpt, she set these buildings to appear the way they did in movies, their offices lit by late-night commerce or cleaning crews, a random but seemingly significant assortment of windows still blazing with the exertions of some midnight oil-burning entrepreneur, struggling into the wee hours to propel the economy even further.
Whatever Chief Blanco was going to do, Terri had at least tonight, a genuine last stand before her PanOpts were shut off, suspension, who knew what else. As she acknowledged the self-pitying tone of the thought, she saw the Feeler team—hulking Angel, the even-larger Vincente, and petite Alejandra—emerge from around the corner, lit up by the Christmas lights some enterprising person had strung up thirty feet of nearby palm tree. The Feeler team were a specialized plainclothes unit tasked with going after any nocturnal wrongdoing that crossed their paths. The detachment functioned largely as a nighttime cleanup crew, handling narcotics, vice, robbery, anything and everything but homicide.
As they approached, she heard Vincente’s booming voice first. “So this human beluga looks at me and says, ‘I just came over here to fry up some onions. It stinks up my place too bad.’ Then he goes and gets the onion, like that’s his alibi. The Onion Defense.” Alejandra laughed like a secretary. Terri had never been sure how such a polite woman worked this particular shift. She raised her scraped-up palm in a greeting.
Vincente did a war-whoop and tomahawk chop.
“Going after a no-name, huh?” Alejandra asked.
“Yeah. Long shot, but … you know.” She figured everyone was too polite or, far more likely, too overwhelmed to give a shit about the Mutty shooting. Maybe they hadn’t even heard about it yet.
“How does this work? Do you all go out as one unit, or …”
“I gotta do that thing,” Alejandra said to Vincente. “So we’ll catch up on the other side.” They slapped hands, then she waited for Terri to do the same, Terri suppressing a wince at the smack on her raw flesh.
“So just you two guys, then?” Terri wanted to make a joke about having large males escort her through the underbelly, then realized it wasn’t that far off the mark.
“I’m due back over at the Dolson, having some drinks.” Angel already seemed well into boozy. “Got a one-week time out.”
“For what?” She yanked up her PanOpts to confirm that he meant figuratively, that he hadn’t just magically projected his VT and made it seem like his physical self.
“Ah, I got caught relinquishing some cock taco of his petty cash. I’ll be back in on Wednesday. Who else is going to do this shift?” Both men guffawed in a low pitch, slapping hands fiercely.
She used to assume all of them had gotten busted down to Feeler team for the sin of indiscretion, for being unlucky enough to have gotten caught doing something stupid. Everyone she knew had met opportunities to separate scums from funds. Once, before making homicide, she’d assisted in the bust of two pimps, twin albinos from Ghana who ran a stable of women in Eagle Rock. After all the hooplah of the raid, she’d found herself in a room with five bankers’ boxes full of hundred dollar bills. She hadn’t taken any, there being too big an asterisk on money earned by helpless immigrants. But just a month later, she’d had a smaller experience with a two-bit coke crew, and she’d wound up splitting a thin wad of cash with the other responding officer. She had been struck by how easily it could have been the same bills, circulated through four weeks worth of human misery. That weekend, she’d hesitated depositing the modest take in her joint checking account, not because she was worried about Gabby noticing, but because it felt like the cash would somehow taint the rest of their money. She wound up buying a $2,200 Lojas gift certificate and sheepishly placing the inappropriately expensive present in that year’s Secret Santa box at work.
Alejandra set out. Vincente said, “Shit shift, baby,” as he led Terri in the opposite direction. They passed sidewalk chess games played by men with nowhere to go, cardboard and cloth vagrant nests, exhausted people sleeping in doorways, or on baled sacks of laundry, or slumped against alley walls. Tea merchants slept curled around their meager kiosks. They stumbled upon several sad family tableaus, groups of sleepers flanked by overfilled shopping carts wrapped in fluttering garbage bags. Did any of these carts lurch back to life and roll on home to their stores?
At Grand Hope Park, one lone, lean hobo did shirtless pull ups on a festively painted jungle gym, his bent legs brushing against a brood of inert street hens. Years earlier, there’d been a nasty rash of avian bronchitis, dead birds piled all around downtown, as if the Dead Chicken Fairy had visited the entire city overnight. The episode had provided a dramatic reminder of why tower life was so untenable, of how quickly a pandemic could rip through a skyscraper. Not that any steps had been taken.
Terri queried anyone conscious about Rujuta. No one knew anything. For the first hour, Vincente seemed content to walk alongside her, alert but not seeming actively interested in meeting any sort of quota or rounding up any particular bad guys. At one point they rounded a corner as another overmuscled street personality yelled, “Yo man, I thought you was broke!” as he bullied a frail elderly man, a wisp of a human. Vincente calmly strode over to defuse the scene. It was hard for Terri to imagine what these older refugees had to endure just to make it here, the lowest rung of Heaven.
It was 2:40 a.m. when they entered Pershing Square and Terri realized they’d nearly made a large circle. Vincente blinked like a jungle explorer coming into a clearing, saying, “Mothership.” The largest of the downtown toilet tents took up nearly half the plaza. In the daytime, the tent didn’t merit a second glance. At night, it was floodlit, luminous, its huge cloth walls billowing with the fury of galleon sails. Two unisex lines, each several hundred people long, curled from both sides in a spiral pattern. She wondered where the mystery hole was that the housing cop had told her about over a week ago. The thought somehow connected to Mutty, to feelings she needed to sequester until this was all over.
She worked the lines dutifully, asking every single person about Rujuta, a refugee without a known face, someone she knew only by name and scar. And this was assuming Liney hadn’t gotten the scar part wrong. She made sure to keep Vincente within her line of sight. Working with an audience bereft of eyewear, she could only prove her authority with her shield, a symbol not universally recognized. One homegrown drunk, perhaps mistaking her for a health inspector, grabbed her arm and pointed toward the tent’s interior, saying, “Thersh an outbreak of Sisyphus.”
Refugees’ endurance for queues perfectly balanced their total disdain for personal space. Squabbles flared over spouses jumping line to be with spouses, children with parents, cousins with cousins. Barging, skinny touts shouted out sad little bargains. Women worked their elbows like fighting cocks, forcing their way through the horde, fending off adolescents versed in squeezing between adults. Some refugees appointed themselves queue leaders, springing from the horde to direct the flow of humanity into orderly rows. These invisible codes of conduct were survival skills, born in the old world but reinforced through years of camps.
On the far side of the square, someone had left a perfectly nice couch, perhaps to commemorate the spot where she and Zack kidnapped Sanjiv Goswami. Two shirtless, clearly zonked-out Indian teenagers sat on its sinking cushions with spacey gazes directed toward Vincente, who stood posed with one leg up on an armrest. She heard him sa
y, “You goofed up on drugs, Tonto?”
Terri leaned against a light pole, always interested to learn the latest in illicit kicks among the city’s underclass. Skyscraper kids tried just about anything, getting high on laughing gas, or candy canes dipped in brake fluid, or grinding and snorting prenatal vitamins. For six months last year, the big thing had been Smiles, those black bouillon cubes that only affected people under twenty-five.
During her entire career, only two drugs had remained consistent: Overlord and opium. Cops had been fairly effective in strangling the supply of the former, which did away with the need for sleep, food, and any other logistical constraints not rooted in the immediate present. They’d been nearly as effective with their inaction toward the latter, tacitly allowing opium to continue as a tool of pacification. Apathy among refugees was never discouraged.
Not hearing an answer, Vincente sighed and said, “Look. Me and my partner here,”—he pointed toward Terri—“are gonna find it anyway. Instead of you making us strip search you in front of all your buddies here, making us make you waggle your junk in public, how’s about you just give up the goods. C’mon guys, okay? Scout’s honor,” he said, raising his hand without having actually promised anything. Terri had always heard Vincente did his lowly nocturnal shift for the sheer bossy thrill of it. His husband was a major star in the world of high-end glass art; he certainly didn’t need to work.
Slowly, underwater, the two kids glanced at each other, nodding just slightly, one reaching down into his sock and producing a small glassine baggie.
“There. See?” Vincente said, snatching this and letting the crumbly black stuff spill down into a small puddle on the sidewalk, the empty baggie drifting down to the gutter. Nearby, an older refugee man eyed the puddle, and she pictured the guy lapping up its nastiness as soon as they left.
Instead, this man said, in a voice crisp with anger, “Aren’t you going to arrest him for the opium?”
“Hey, opium is the opiate of the masses.” Vincente smiled widely, the tip of his tongue peeking out. “Who are we to impose our value system on you guys?”
“That is bullshit! If an American kid gets caught with opium, you pound his head into the curb, teach him a lesson. If one of us gets caught with opium, you laugh it off.” As the man’s speech grew heated, he lost his cultivated street accent and slipped into old world patois.
“You want me to pound your head?”
“I want you to behave like you behave with any other basic human being!”
Vincente laughed. “You sound like a cartoon character, you know that? ‘Ah Beep Bah-beep-a-beep-a-beep-a-beep …’”
They continued up West 5th, coltish candy girls meandering down the sidewalks in widely spaced pairs. In contrast to daytime streetwalkers, these girls really were girls, their garish rouged faces contradicted by short statures. Most were in the fourteen-to-sixteen age bracket, but looked even younger because of malnutrition, stumbling along in jeans cut into short-shorts, pockets poking out from underneath the ripped fabric, a substitution for actual fashion.
Night altered the geography and demographics of downtown prostitution. In the daytime, candy girls provided a good barometer of the younger generation’s buying power, hookers, refugee and otherwise, targeting high school kids. Seeing these streets now, Terri realized she and Vincente were the only citizens on the sidewalk. At night, did refugee hookers hook to other refugees? In a city flooded with lost or stolen daughters, Terri had a strange realization: she was hoping she didn’t find Rujuta.
“How do you cope with all this?”
“You really want to know?” Vincente smiled. “Try 6220.”
She switched to this sandbox layer, seeing nothing. An old woman with ulcerated facial lesions passed and Vincente said, loud enough to be overheard, “Hey, check out perpy with the herpes.” Laughter erupted, swelling and fading, and Terri had to fight to not laugh out loud as well.
“I don’t leave my house without a laugh track. Makes every little thing alright.”
“I don’t know why I’m surprised.” She didn’t. If a growing number of regular people could only muddle through their mundane desk jobs by overlaying constructions on the world—seeing their humdrum environs drenched in ivy, nine-mooned, medieval, tribal, the skies filled with swooping dragons—it made perfect sense that a night cop would find some relief in the same.
Vincente looked off into the distance. “Alejandra got something. Lez go.”
They caught up with her three blocks away, in a street level space that had once been retail. Scavengers had long since stripped the storefront of everything but the chipboard wall covering. Even the carpet was gone, the bare concrete patterned with faint gray squiggles of dried glue. A gaping hole connected this cavern to the next, presumably leading to a tunnel or skyscraper. Terri leaned against one of the open glass doors, seeing a sticker for the Better Business Bureau, their logo showing a curl of Hebrew floating up from a fedora. Had this been a Jewish organization?
Two spotlight drones flanked the front entrance, their beams turned horizontally, illuminating the interior with the intensity of stadium arc lights. In the center of the space, six hapless handcuffed teenagers stood with heads bent low to keep out the glare, their gesture one of shame. Past them, in the washed-out brilliance, she saw a meager tent at the back of the room and long gang markings on the wall in chalk, most likely noting which SSK set collected taxes for that building. Alejandra and Vincente conferred and then the three of them stepped inside, the drone illumination sliding upward, looking now like track lights installed above the pavement.
From certain angles, downtown at night was a demilitarized zone, reminding her of the very worst neighborhoods in the city. Twenty years ago, black flight had essentially abandoned Watts to the most ruthless of refugee gangs, all the old residents fleeing either down—to well-paying service jobs south of the border—or sideways, to Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Maywood, or a half-dozen other shitty sub-cities nestled along the 710. Watts now struck her as an abandoned backlot out of some science-fiction movie. Even though it was infested with humanity, it always seemed as if no one was there. The vast Nickerson Gardens buildings, the third-largest housing project west of the Mississippi, had devolved into something especially eerie. The few times she’d driven through, it’d felt like a reconnaissance sortie, every window a peephole of jagged glass.
Eyes adjusting to the dimness, she realized a campfire smoldered in front of a tent; someone lived a life back there. Vincente said, “Okay. I reach in all your pockets, what do I find? Buncha earlobes?”
The kids laughed nervously. Urban legends of hedge clipper-wielding earring bandits had swirled around downtown for so long everyone could laugh off the reference. The smallest of the bunch apparently took this momentary lightening in the mood to lodge a complaint.
“Hey, what happens to all our shades? I need mine for school!”
“Yeah, what school is that?”
“LAUOED.”
“Is that some floating classroom crap?”
The kid nodded with a frown, having already realized his own question was rhetorical.
“In my day, we had to go to school, yo.”
Another kid chimed in: “She was just gettin’ down on the rest of us because we dint go to school. Now you’re mad at him because he does?”
Alejandra cleared her throat, smiling like a meter maid. “You can’t win, you can’t break even, nor can you get out of the game.”
“Move my ass to Sweden,” the largest member of the group mumbled.
Terri watched the smallest kid’s face for tears. A banger concerned about education: the concept fascinated her. Modern-day gang kids had the least to gain from formal schooling of any generation in human history. If you were a refugee and able to afford EyePhones, you certainly wouldn’t feel any truancy pressure. And if you owned a pair of EyePhones, you could basically outsource your comprehension. There were free layers that would read everything aloud. Most adult gangba
ngers she’d met had been proudly illiterate.
Vincente was speaking to someone remotely, pointing out attire details on the gathered bunch as if they were anthropological specimens.
“Yeah, shoulder blade and temple tats. I heard they gotta get their taints, too,” he said with a cheery laugh. Terri cleared her throat and asked the group about the girl with the vertical scar, barely waiting for the chorus of head shakes.
Alejandra murmured something that ended with the word “Mutty.”
Terri’s head snapped sideways. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
The handcuffed kids eyed her and then eyed them, sensing a new vibe coming off Terri, somewhere between shock and anger, a conflict between authorities so rare and exotic that they didn’t know how to react. She all at once felt her vulnerability, exposed on all sides, in a space more cave than room.
“It’s late, I need to hit the road,” she said, backing out.
Vincente said something that sounded conciliatory, but she was already speed-walking down the street, the drone lights casting a long thin shadow in front of her, Terri pinning her badge to her jacket to let late-night street creepers know the deal. She yawned once and was unable to stop.
Waiting for a pickup car a block away, she glanced down to the lights of Pershing Square. There’d been a shift in the street life, Saturday night transgressions giving way to Sunday morning labor. Upcyclers already combed the gutters for useful debris. The first raddiwallah of the day rolled past, hauling bundles of carefully twined old paper by pedicab to the recycling plant up by the train yards. These men were just more worker ants, carrying their seeds and crumbs back to the anthill. A woman in an incongruous gas mask darted into an alley. She pictured Rujuta already starting the day in a sweatshop somewhere, another round black spot stuck to the floor. When she looked away, Terri realized a corner of the sky was already light.
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