Different Strong

by Nat Kozinn

  After he’s polished off his plate of greasiness, he goes into the think.Net stare. Either he’s one of the few people who can talk on think.Net without moving their lips, or he’s doing something other than call into the precinct house. Considering it took me weeks to teach myself how not talk when I’m communicating on think.Net, and that’s taking into account that I have control over my entire body, I’m going to go ahead and eliminate that possibility.

  After watching him spend more than two hours in the think.Net stare, I can say with certainty that he is not doing anything related to his job. Given the chuckles he lets out every few seconds, I’m guessing he’s watching a think.Net show, or maybe even a movie. My tax dollars hard at work. He finally comes out of the stare, gets up, and walks out of the café, yelling his goodbye to the waitress. Maybe he paid his check on think.Net, but he seems more like the abuse his police power type.

  I follow him as he walks a few more blocks. I stay out of the illumination provided by the occasional WormLight on the street. Rose doesn’t seem like he’s worried about being followed. He doesn’t seem like he’s worried about anything at all. He walks past a group of teenage boys.

  “Shouldn’t you kids be in bed by now?” Detective Rose asks.

  “What’s it to you, metal mouth?”

  He pulls out his badge. “Do you kids need a lesson on respecting your elders?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good, now get your asses to bed.”

  The kids listen and start to scatter. Detective Rose stops one of them. The kid has a cigarette in his mouth. Rose grabs the cigarette. “Don’t you know smoking is a bad for your health?” Then he puts it in his own mouth and takes a big drag. An impressive feat considering his wired-shut jaw. He’s quite the role model. He shoos the kid away and hooks his badge to the outside of his trench coat, where it can easily be seen. I guess he doesn’t want to have to fish it out to get respect again.

  He continues his “patrol” until we get to a block full of scantily clad women. They aren’t exactly being discreet about what they’re here for. They’re plying the oldest profession in the world. One would expect these ladies of the night to shy away from a man with a badge on his coat, but they do the opposite: they all flock around him.

  “Hi Detective Rose, how’s my poor, hurt baby? You looking for a date tonight? I can make you feel all better,” the leader of the pack of prostitutes asks.

  “Not yet. Sorry to disappoint you all, ladies. Few more weeks and I’ll be all fixed up.”

  He spends a few more minutes flirting with the women and saying offensive things to all of them. It seems like he believes the women are genuinely interested in him, not because he’s a potential payday, and a cop to boot.

  After he’s had his fill of committing sexual harassment, he moves on from the women, waving and winking back at them as he walks away. I have to stay hidden in an alley so he doesn’t see me when he turns around. It was probably unnecessary. I don’t think he was paying attention to anything but the women.

  He continues on his way without incident back to the precinct house. I go into a café across the street from the police station, order a cup of coffee, and wait. After a few hours, he steps back out of the station, waving goodbye to someone inside.

  I pay my check with cash and follow him to the nearby Slug station. I make sure to get on a different train car than him, and we ride five stops to Balboa Station. This is a fancy part of town; can he afford an apartment here? He walks a few blocks before turning into a building marked “Genoa Retirement Community.”

  I can’t follow him into the building. I don’t trust my fat face disguise enough to gamble on Rose not recognizing me if he sees me up close. So I take position in the shadows across the street and watch through the windows. Rose climbs a beautiful white tiled staircase and exits on the third floor. This facility looks lavishly expensive. Rose must be meeting with the person paying for the cover-ups. The mastermind.

  I wait about an hour before Rose walks out of the Retirement Community. He wipes his eyes on his sleeve. Was he crying? He walks off back towards the Slug station. I wait to make sure he is safely out of sight before walking into the building.

  I’m right; whoever Rose met with is loaded. This place looks like the lobby of the Ritz, not an old folks home. Everything is tile, marble, and wood. The WormLights are shaped like delicate glass flowers instead of the normal cylindrical design. I feel too poor to be let inside the door, but since I’m here I walk up to the attractive middle-aged woman manning the grand wooden reception desk.

  “How may I help you?” she asks cheerily.

  “Hello, I’m here to see my grandmother,” I say confidently.

  “Sir, it’s the middle of the night. If you’d like to come back tomorrow morning, visiting hours start at 9AM.”

  “But I saw another guy walk out of here.”

  “Patients in hospice care have different rules for obvious reasons. Your grandmother isn’t in hospice is she?”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “May I ask you her name sir?”

  “Uhh Smith,” I answer. My confidence melting away.

  “Her first name, sir?” she asks on a tone that indicates she doubts me though her smile betrays nothing.

  I’m halfway up the stairway before I even realize I already made my decision to run past check-in. I fly up the tiled stairs two at a time. I can hear the receptionist screaming for help below me.

  Whoever Rose was visiting is on the 3rd floor, hospice. I guess some rich dying old man’s wish was to kill Differents or drug them or both. I need to find out who he was seeing, and fast. I make it to the third floor in less than five seconds. I’m confident that I’m moving too fast for security. The trouble makers they’re used to chasing are of the low-speed geriatric variety.

  The entire third floor is hospice care. There are a lot of dying wealthy old people. I rush through the hallway passing by dozens of private rooms. I make sure I get a good look at each door. They have the names of the patients written on them. Later on, I can go back through my memories and research the names on think.Net to see if I can draw any connections to the Different druggings or killings.

  One of the name cards stops me dead in my tracks. Eleanor Eden Rose. Inside the room is a frail withered shell of a person not long for this world. Even though she’s as skinny as a rail, she still looks a lot like her son.

  “He went that way!” I hear a male voice yell from the hallway.

  #

  “They tried to chase me for a block or so after I made it out on the fire escape, but they gave up quickly. Nobody saw who I was,” I say and sip my mug.

  This is my fourth cup of coffee in the last hour. The liquid is coursing through me and filling my bladder. I’m trying to absorb as much of it as I can, but it’s a losing battle. I’d have peed all over myself already if I was a normal person. I should excuse myself, but I don’t want to lose any time with Maria.

  “Seems like a big chance to take. If you get caught, you go back to prison, right?”

  “But it was worth it. We knew Rose wasn’t investigating the murders and we suspected that he was drugging those Differents or at least covering it up. Now we have a motive for why he’s doing it, to pay for the nursing home for his mom. You said we needed a motive right?”

  “I guess. It’s a little weak though. If we want to get a warrant we’re going to need more.”

  “Did you always want to be a cop?” I say. Slyly turning the conversation to more personal matters.

  “Me? No,” she says shaking her head. “I was raised as a girly girl. Pink dresses, ribbons, tea parties all that jazz. My father was old-school… Detective Rose mentioned he had brothers, maybe they’re helping pay for the room.”

  “You didn’t see this place. Unless one of those brothers won the lottery, they can’t afford it. It was a Pre-Plague money kind of place. What changed that made you want to become a cop?” I ask, undeterred in my efforts to derail th
e conversation from our stated goal.

  “An accident to my brother Esteban. The train went off the tracks and crashed into the ground, a fifty foot drop at thirty miles per hour. Over two hundred fifty people on the train, and five survived. Esteban was not one of them. At least it was quick. If I was a year older, I would have been in middle school too and died with him,” Maria says.

  “That’s terrible,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I thought that wasn’t supposed to happen; they always talk about how safe the Slug is. The rail is made of Maceo Steel, so how does a train get derailed from an unbreakable track?” I ask. I’m not sure if that was the right response to the story, but this might be one of those situations where there really isn’t a right thing to say. At least I got her talking about something personal, that’s a good way to form an emotional connection… I shouldn’t think thoughts like that.

  “The rail can’t break, but the supports holding up the tracks used to be wood.“

  “It’s amazing how many people have died through history trying to get from point A to point B,” I say. There might not be a right thing to say, but I assume from the look on her face that was the wrong thing to say.

  “Yeah… Anyway, after Esteban died, my dad’s whole attitude changed. Tea parties got replaced with trips to the shooting range and basketball games. I wanted to be the female Billy the Kid, and my dad practiced with me every day. He taught me to work as hard as Billy. It wasn’t that he was trying to replace the son he lost, although I’m sure that was part of it. The accident made him realize how fragile life is and how little he can actually do to protect it. He decided it was more important to have a daughter who could take care of herself than make a good housewife. It didn’t take long for me to want to follow in his footsteps and become a cop. He didn’t mind. My mother on the other hand almost had a heart attack when she heard I was joining the force. Hard to blame her since she only has one kid left.”

  “Is your father still an officer?”

  “No, he died three years ago. Pancreatic cancer. It wasn’t pretty. At least he got to see me join the force before he died. He made it a month past my first day. I’ll always remember the look on his face when he saw me in my uniform for the first time, the pride was radiating off him.”

  “I’m glad you got to make your father proud. I’m sorry to hear he passed.”

  “Yeah, but enough of my sob stories. What about you? What are your parents up to?”

  “That’s not really going to put an end to the sob stories. Short version is mother ran off when she found out I was a Different. Father died on a fishing boat when I was in Section 26.”

  “That sucks,” Maria says. It’s comforting to hear that normal humans aren’t any better at knowing what to say than I am.

  “How about your mom, is she still around? Did she get over you joining the force?” I ask, turning the attention back to her.

  “Oh yeah, my mom’s great. I’d say she’s gotten used to me being on the force. I can see the pride in her eyes when she sees me in uniform, and I can tell it reminds her of my dad. She’s happy to know his legacy lives on. That being said, she still makes me call her after every shift so she knows I’m all right. I was talking to her when you called me.”

  She got off the phone with her mother to talk to me. That’s a good sign. Or maybe it just means she’s really invested in tracking this serial killer down. Maybe she only agreed to have coffee so our partnership doesn’t fall apart.

  “Sounds like she got over it, but that doesn’t mean she stopped being a mother,” I say.

  “That’s right, and I’m the only one she’s got now. I can’t imagine what she’d do if she didn’t have me to take care of her. Fifty-five-year-olds who spent most of their lives as housewives don’t have many career options. She knits a mean pair of mittens, but I don’t think she can go national with that.”

  “Yeah, wool is still too expensive thanks to the Plagues killing most of the sheep.” God, am I a weirdo or what?

  “Anyway, I should get going. I told my mom I’d be a little late, but if I’m not home soon, she’s going to call my captain again. You can imagine how awkward it is at work the day after one of those calls.”

  “I’ll walk you,” I say, then to the waitress who is walking by, “Can we settle up?” It occurs to me that I probably shouldn’t be the one to pay. I don’t have any cash. I spent the few cash dollars I had at the first café. Paying on think.Net will leave a record of the transaction. Maybe Linda can scrub this transaction from my record, but maybe not. “I know it’s not very gentlemanly, but do you mind paying, Maria? I spent all my cash already.”

  “Oh sure,” She says and goes into the think.Net stare, thinks about the café, and authorizes the transaction request. She signs off think.Net and says, “We’re good.”

  We step back outside into the night air. It got much colder while we were in the cafe. I increase my heart rate to raise my internal temperature as we walk.

  “You know, you don’t have to walk me home. I’m not one of your typical dates, unless you usually go out with women who are carrying a 9 millimeter. It’s just a couple blocks.”

  “I don’t go out on any dates. I’m a parolee, remember? This is the first time I’ve been out at night and free since I was Gavin Stillman the Vigilante. I was dating a woman before, but then The Beast…” I stop myself. I’ve got to slow down time and start thinking about what I’m saying more. No one wants to hear about ex-girlfriends.

  “Oh my God, The Beast didn’t kill her, did he?”

  “No. Well, almost. He attacked her, but she survived, barely. Didn’t do wonders for our relationship though.” Seems like the no ex talk rule goes out the window if it also involves serial killer monster talk.

  “I would guess not. Did she recover? Is she okay?”

  “She recovered, but she didn’t stick around long after. She was a Cabotist, or her father was anyway. You probably remember what happened in the Cabotist neighborhood after The Beast’s attack. I can’t blame her for wanting out of the Metro Area.”

  “That is rough. It’s awful what they did to that pastor. I don’t care what you believe, nobody deserves that.”

  “I guess so,” I say. Maybe no one deserves to be strung up and torn limb from limb, but if anyone deserved it, Pastor Newman would have been on the short list. She doesn’t want to hear that.

  “How about you? Any jealous ex-boyfriends going to come after me? They could be cops. I should probably be worried.”

  “Hah, maybe a few, but why would they come after you?”

  I don’t have anything to say to that so we walk on for another half block in silence. Finally, she stops in front of a three-story apartment building. It’s nothing great, but it puts Becky’s house in the slums to shame.

  “This is me,” she says and turns to me.

  I look into her beautiful brown eyes and get ready to make my move. Seems like a goodnight kiss might be appropriate. She senses my intentions and turns away.

  “Gavin, I’m sorry. I don’t think this is going to work,” she says.

  The words ring in my mind. I feel my brain’s desire to experience an entire cocktail of negative emotions. Anger, embarrassment, sorrow, disappointment, and self-pity would all like to hit me like a freight train. I turn those signals off. If I don’t, I might run away.

  “Oh really? I thought we had a pretty good time,” I say like it’s no big deal.

  “We did, and I like you, Gavin. I really do. You’re a sweet, smart as a whip, and not too bad-looking, at least when you have your normal face on.”

  “What’s wrong then?”

  “We’re doing something important here, Gavin. A dozen Differents murdered, drugs, crooked cops, and we’re the only ones trying to stop all that. We have to be able to stay objective. If we get distracted, people could die.”

  “I didn’t think about that. I suppose you’re right, we are doing something important. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I feel bad f
or bringing it up.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s my fault too, I might have been leading you on a little bit. Like I said I like you, but the timing isn’t right. Besides, you’re locked up all day unless you’ve got some maniac Different to go fight. And you may have found some way to get out of lockup at night, but you’ve got to spend all that new free time following you new boyfriend, Detective Rose. I don’t see any time for a girlfriend in that schedule .”

  “There you are, right again. Look at all that evidence for why we shouldn’t date. You will make a great detective,” I say before I realize how nasty it sounds.

  “It’s for right now,” she says, her police officer poker face unaffected by my barbs. “Who knows what the future holds. Maybe a Different like you can afford to have divided focus while chasing a serial killer, but as a normal human that’s more than I can handle.” She’s straining to walk the line between being nice and being firm.

  “Fair enough. Consider it forgotten. I won’t let it affect us working together. Trust me, I’m good at pushing my emotions aside. Superhuman in fact.”

  “Good to hear… Well, goodbye,” she says.

  I extend my arm for a handshake, she goes in for a hug, and then we switch before finally settling on a weird high-five/half hug. I turn off the part of me that wants to die from embarrassment.

  16

  It is a dark day for baseball, ladies and gentleman. Instead of celebrating a thrilling game seven victory by the New York Yankees, we are left questioning the results of this series and every World Series in recent memory. When Victor Campos threw out George Burns at home from the base of the centerfield wall, a throw no human being could make, we all knew we were watching a farce. Victor stole not just the game, a result which will eventually be overturned, he stole our trust in the sport. From here on out instead of cheering for baseball’s superstars, we will be forced to wonder if their performance is due to natural skill and athletic ability or if their dominance stems from the fact that there are Differents somehow hiding from the tests designed to find them.