LITMIR.BIZ

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and he wouldn’t give it up. They stabbed him.”

      “Okay.” He stood, shuffling his boots. “Ah, your guys still got that crime stage up, up in Hauser North?”

      There was no ticket on the Taurus where it blocked a hydrant. There was no one to paper up the town; half the ninjas were out with the bug, the other half refused to get out and open their yellow tag books.

      He backed out of the spot and went on the air, clearing the courthouse. “Desk, I’m rolling on a maybe, a couple of, ah, miscreants, in the vicinity of the Lite-Bite lunch.”

      The Desk played it straight, “Ten-four, sergeant solo. You require, ah, backup with that?”

      “Negatories, Desk.”

      Her sweet voice almost put him into a reverie. The Hauser North stage was broken and gone, but he thought of heading up to the local sector and prowling in the paperwork, getting the name of the policewoman who’d voiced out for him. He could, he thought, find her on the road and apologize for not busting her stage, steering the apology into maybe a night out. He felt hangdog: when you fell into brief love with a pair of plucked eyebrows or a voice you were really hurting.

      He was pulling into the lot behind the Lite-Bite when the dispatcher came back. “Ah, Sergeant Tate, come up on the air.”

      He responded.

      “Yes, Sergeant, when you’ve finished … investigating the two … hardboiled suspected miscreants, you’re to roll on headquarters, four-ten-s, ten-four?”

      “Ten-four.”

      Room Ten at south end of the fourth floor at the Jank Center for Public Safety was the briefing room for the Chief’s Squad for special projects. It could be anything: cold cases, maybe, a sensitive political operation or corruption. He hoped to get assigned to a target in a good part of town, where he could at least snaffle himself a good lunch on a patio while he surveilled whoever was in the chief’s sights. If it was a police corruption case, he’d start coughing and reeling around and go for medical-off. He’d been targeted himself a couple of times over the years and been ashamed for the cops who would set up on other cops at the whim of Pious Man Chan, the lumpy, bald Chinese chief, the beast, badge number 666. He wondered what kind of mentorship they’d had.

      He went into the Lite-Bite and ordered a Canadian bacon-and-egg sandwich on a bun and a coffee. The staff wore masks and some wit had tied one to the huge snout of a plastic pig mounted on the wall. He carried the greasy waxed-paper package out to his car and sat in the passenger seat, the door open, his legs out on the sidewalk. An elderly masked woman crouched near an overflowing trashcan, trying to tie a mask to her resisting schnauzer. He thought about his morning target, killed for not giving up his mask. Two Chinamen were on life-support after taking severe stompings because of the shape of their eyes. Cops were on lungs, doomed because they breathed public air.

      He pitched his wrappings into a garbage can, got behind the wheel, and crept the curbs to the Jank. He’d forgotten his mask, hanging around his neck. Pulling it on as he drove, he heard the dispatcher send a solo unit to a critical collapse, a man in a dumpster. She made it sound like a sexy and inviting adventure. He decided that enough was enough. After his shift, he’d sit down and have a talk with himself, get past the dreams of Djuna Brown and Montparnasse, maybe use the membership pass his daughter had given him, head down to the new art gallery and find himself a low-maintenance, Chardonnay-drinking divorcee who’d been to Paris.

      The slat blinds on the windows of the Four Ten-S briefing room were closed to daylight. Fluorescent lights eliminated any real shadows, making a grey world of boring indifference. Half of the three dozen hard plastic chairs were populated by single-dimension, yawning slumped creatures. Someone was snoring. Conditioned air chilled the room. The ceiling was absorbent cork and the floor was gleaming green sheet-run faux tile. It was very quiet and grim, as if to not disturb the array of three women whose photographs were set up on a row of easels. Each easel held a smiling portrait of a victim in life, and beside it was a colour morgue shot of the same woman, although you couldn’t be sure, because their faces had been taken apart and left un-reassembled. The colours evoked avocado and eggplant and ivory, Ray Tate thought, deflecting with artistic distraction.

      His ex-wife’s father had been an ident guy. He’d told Ray Tate he saw everything in a single dimension and pretended he was photographing a photograph. When he was first on the job, he said, on bad jobs he shot the pictures upside down to give the victims less human shape and perspective, but he got over that. His ex-wife’s father was a self-created tough guy who’d never pulled his gun but flashed it a lot under his jacket. He had a lot of imaginary cartoon adventures. Ray Tate marvelled that he’d once admired him. The old man’s mantra was a shrug and a comment that it was all pensionable time, so who gave a shit?

      Brian Comartin, the fat jogger who wrote poetry, was slumped in a middle row, rubbing his thumbs into his eyes. He saw Ray Tate slip in and pump soap from a dispenser, and waved him over. “Fuck, Picasso. Thirty feet from where we talked this morning, there was a girl under the ground. Thirty fucking feet. Now I’m wearing it because I was the senior guy on the detail. I’m fucking Traffic Flow. I’m not senior to nothing.”

      “That what this is about?” Ray Tate sat in the same row, a vacant seat between them. He heard people shuffling into the room behind him. A podium at the front waited.

      “Yeah. Chief’s special task force. They’re saying someone might be taking off women, might be the same guy, might be different guys.” Comartin shook his head. “Three fucking dead women and this is the first anyone hears about it. Now, for some reason it’s priority one to shut this down. Someone said they think it’s the Volunteers. Those women up there are all black.”

      “How’d the girl die, the one we stepped over.”

      “Well, she isn’t dead. Yet. In some kind of a coma. Some people off a boat found her. They thought she was a goner, she was all beat to shit. Then she got semi-conscious, then lapsed out.” He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his palms.

      “You okay, man?”

      Comartin looked down at his running shoes. “Fuck, how’d I miss her?” He looked at Ray Tate and exercised raw cop sympathy. “Poor little bitch.”

      Ray Tate felt for him. “She able to give up anything? Before she lapsed?”

      Comartin shook his head. “Naw, she said her dog or something saved her, then she yawned off to Nod.”

      A convoy of suits filed into the room and arrayed themselves at the podium.

      Chapter 6

      The city had taken a block of rooms at the Whistler Hotel in Stonetown. The lobby was frigid and none of the doormen or bellhops wore masks. The two women manning the check-in desk were clad in blue uniforms that resembled flight attendants’ outfits. They were chic and cheery and wore scarves knotted at the collars of their white blouses. Neither had masks. The check-in desk was three feet deep and the air conditioning had been set to send a strong sheet of arctic air laterally across the marble top. There was little activity in the lobby. Staff inspected each other’s tunics and brass buttons beside the antique wooden revolving doors.

      “Good afternoon,” Djuna Brown said softly to the nearest woman, showing her badge. “I’m Djuna Brown, with the State. They have a block?”

      “Welcome to the Whistler,” the woman said. Her name tag said “Front Desk. Gail.” She didn’t lean away, but she didn’t get too close, either. She was pleasant but seemed to be examining Djuna Brown with curiosity. “The city has several rooms and suites on reservation for the State.” She tapped into her computer. “Room, or suite? The suites, with mini-bars, full hotel facilities, are for, hmm, let me see … oh, Inspector or above.”

      “Oh, that’s me.” Djuna Brown made a confident smile. “I was told a suite. I’m an inspector.”

      “Certainly, Inspector. We have a suite on the twelfth floor with a view of Stonetown. Will that be all right?”

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