by Dan Stout
“Isn’t that a better question for the candies themselves?”
“Sure, but here’s a tip from an old cop: Whenever possible work in some questions you already know the answer to. It’ll help separate out who’s full of crap.”
From down the street someone screamed a string of blisteringly vile curses, and I knew we’d found Talena. At the other end of the block a corner had cleared except for a man and two women. The guy was human, early twenties, heavy acne, denim jeans, matching vest, and raw rage in his eyes. The kind of guy who preyed on the vulnerable and fragile. One of the women he yelled at did look fragile. The other, standing between them, was Talena.
Talena was a ray of light. She wasn’t a candy or a cop. She wasn’t even a social worker, trying to help people limp through a broken system. She was an activist. And she thought she could change the world.
As we pulled over, the guy’s face had turned red from bellowing obscenities at Talena. She kept her cool, though. It was when he reached for the candy behind her that she snapped.
The guy had thirty pounds and a couple inches of reach on her but Talena didn’t hesitate. She attacked like she had to tear him apart. Underdogs don’t have the luxury of pulling their punches.
It was the opposite of the show I’d put on at the Hey-Hey. No shouting, no swearing. Just strikes backed by every muscle in her body, landing where they’d have the most impact. The assault threw her opponent off balance and he fell back. Talena kept coming, relentless. Exactly like I taught her.
By the time we got to them, the guy had curled in on himself, head tucked between his hands. But he was still on his feet, so she hadn’t let up. Each blow staggered him more. Knee strikes to his thighs were followed by elbows to the back of his head. He wasn’t going to be standing for much longer.
“Police!” I waved my badge in the air and the spectators melted away.
Talena spun, hands up, ready to deal with the new threat. When she saw me her lips pulled tight and she turned her back.
“I don’t want to press charges!” She said it loud, so that everyone on the street could hear. Beating up a pimp or violent john is one thing, being seen as a snitch is another. Especially when he’d likely be back out on the street that same night.
I went to the trouble of reciting a toneless, “Sir, do you need assistance?”
The acne-faced man was already moving down the street. He waved us off without looking back, limping and drifting to one side before he disappeared into one of the city’s countless winding alleyways. I guessed he didn’t want to press charges, either.
Talena squatted down and gathered up the pamphlets she’d dropped when the fight started. I cleared my throat and she glared over her shoulder at me.
“What the Hells do you want, Carter?”
I didn’t have time to reply before she stood and pointed a bruised finger at me.
“I don’t even need to ask. You’re here to round up candies to pacify some politician’s election run, rather than actually get off your ass and do your job for a change.”
Jax took a step back, surprised by the onslaught. I’d tried to tell him she was no candy. I counted to three and started over.
“I need to know where you were last night.”
She stared at me. I stared back.
“Why?” she asked.
I pulled the photo of her from my pocket. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized herself. I tried asking again.
“Where were you last night, what were you doing, and who else was there?”
“Let me see that.” She snatched the photo from my hand and examined it before looking back up at me.
“If you have camera footage then you know where I was. I was doing exactly what you think, and it’s none of your damn business who was there.” She barely paused as she glanced at Ajax. “Who are you?”
Talena wore conservative clothes. Thick flannel and boots that indicated she had no intention of going in-mountain today. The only jewelry she wore was a lapel pin in the shape of a sideways figure eight, the sign of the Infinite Path. Her hair was dark brown and pulled back in a ponytail rather than elaborate curls. Only her profile resembled the girl in the security footage.
I made introductions. “Talena, this is my partner, Detective Ajax. Ajax, this is Talena Michaels, activist and missionary.”
“Missionary?” Jax’s voice chirped, and his mandibles twitched. He glanced toward the alley where the pimp had disappeared.
“Is that so surprising?” Talena popped a hand on her hip and clutched her pamphlets to her chest. “You think that this world doesn’t need missionaries?”
Jax’s biting jaws opened and shut. “No,” he said. “I just—”
“You thought that a woman in this part of town is more likely to turn a trick than turn a life around? Or maybe you were too busy picking out which of these kids to shake down for extra spending cash to notice someone who’s actually trying to make a difference? Because I can tell you that I am damn tired of having to justify my work to pimps and cops who’d just as soon rob a widow as help her across the street.”
Eyes darting from me to Talena and back, Jax shook his head. “No! No, I was—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder and took a step backward. “You know, I’m actually going to wait by the car.”
I watched my partner retreat, then faced Talena again. She was staring daggers at me.
I took another deep breath and let it out as a sigh.
“It’s good to see you, kiddo.”
The steel in her glance softened a little.
“Good to see you, too.”
I pointed after the dispersing crowd. “You sure you don’t want me to—”
She crossed her arms. “No. Dwayne’s a little shit, but if you arrest him now it’ll blow months spent building bridges out here.”
I held my breath as a bus trundled by, kicking up a gray cloud of exhaust and street dirt. The sideboard advertising proclaimed in bold letters: OIL MADE US GREAT. OIL WILL KEEP US GREAT. Behind it, cars continued their slow prowl up and down the street.
“Look, this thing at the hotel,” I said. “You heard about it?”
“Everyone’s heard about it.”
“It’s a real nightmare. And I want to make sure it doesn’t bite you. Now, what were you doing at the Eagle Crest?”
“The usual.”
In other words, putting the “active” back in activist.
“You’re still running your own stings.” I shook my head. “You’re going to get killed that way.”
Talena and the other members of her activist group sometimes posed as candies, wearing a wire to record johns, then threatening to expose them if they came back to the neighborhood. The odds of running into an angry pimp or psychotic john were stupidly high, and she knew it. But she still tried to justify it.
“It’s not a sting,” she said, and stood a little straighter. “It’s an intervention. And you never had a problem with it when you were down here.”
I dropped my voice. “I didn’t arrest you. That’s not the same as giving you my blessing.”
“What we do is economics. If the demand dries up, the pimps and candies shut down.”
“No, they relocate. They move two blocks over and set up shop again.”
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, pointing at the candies lounging in doorways or approaching stopped cars. “I’m making a difference.”
“You’re making yourself a target. And if you think you’re changing things out here you’re kidding yourself.”
She pulled back. “How do you go to sleep at night knowing there’s this kind of violence going on all around you? I’m not willing to accept this is how it has to be. And if you think you can scare me off—”
I raised my hands.
“Yeah. I got it. And I know I can’t stop you. But this is a dangerous game you
’re playing.”
She closed her eyes and spoke in the affected cadence often used by human religious types. “To create change, you must become change.”
I could tell she was quoting something, and my best guess was scripture. I knew I wouldn’t win if I went down a rabbit hole. She had the fervor of youth and something else that was beyond me: faith.
A musical voice tinkled from behind us.
“Signposts may line the road, but they can only guide those who read them.”
Ajax had moved in closer. Eavesdropping while staying out of Talena’s fire. The kid had good instincts. I just wondered how much he’d overheard. If he’d picked up that I’d covered for Talena in any of her shakedowns, it could be a problem.
Talena opened her eyes and looked him over, a tight smile curling one side of her mouth.
“That’s right,” she said. “You can get all the signs you can handle, but if you don’t take their advice, you’ll find yourself wandering off the One Path.”
Ajax nodded. “Maybe Carter and I are signs on your personal Path. Someone was killed in that hotel while you were there. The powers that be are demanding that someone be strung up for it, and the longer it takes, the less picky they’ll be about getting the right one. You might end up in the crosshairs.”
Talena’s posture sagged, and for a second she looked young and vulnerable, a little girl standing at the edge of a haunted forest. The way she always looks in my mind.
“Alright,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
“You went down there posing as a candy?” I asked.
“Yeah. There were two johns there.”
“Both human?”
“Yeah.” She shifted her folders from one arm to the other, and scanned the streets. Always looking for another lost sheep.
“What room were you in?”
“You’re the one with photos.”
“Speaking of which . . .” I held out my hand.
She rolled her eyes and fished the security photo from where she’d tucked it in amidst her papers. One of the now crumpled pamphlets stuck to the edge of the photo when she handed it to me. It wouldn’t come free, so I slid them both into my jacket pocket.
“We only got photos of the lobby,” I said. “The hotel doesn’t record people coming and going from rooms. For ‘privacy reasons.’”
Talena laughed. “That’s so considerate of them. Room 324.”
I breathed a little easier. The Squib had been found in room 430.
“Good. Now the names of the johns.”
She smirked. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“The names.”
“My threats to expose them don’t work if I actually give their names to the cops.”
“I don’t care about what you told those johns, I don’t care about your shakedowns—”
“They’re not shakedowns!”
“And I don’t care about your friends. I just wanna make sure you’re not caught in deeper shit than you already are,” I said. “But you don’t need to tell me that. You don’t need to tell me anything. What you do with your life is up to you—I fulfilled my promise to your mom years ago.” I hoped she couldn’t read the lie on my face.
She rolled her eyes and looked away. I’m not sure if it was the mention of my promise to her mother, but something in my speech worked. She rattled off a description of the most bland, boring johns imaginable. I felt a tension drain from my chest. It sounded like she and her friends wouldn’t be caught up in any of this madness. I asked my traditional parting question.
“Anything else stick with you from that night?”
“There was one thing.” Talena shuffled her folders again. Restless. “I saw Stacie there, a girl from up in the Estates I’ve been trying to get out of the life. She was coming out as I was going in, and she was steaming about losing some high-paying job. Said she was going to have it out with her madame, because she’d come all the way down there to do kink work for some ambassador but it got canceled at the last minute.”
Shit.
I heard Ajax move closer. No more than a step, but I knew his ears were glued to the conversation.
“Ambassador. You’re sure she said ‘ambassador’?”
“Yeah. Sounded like she’d been scheduled up for some weird service. She’s got a higher tolerance for strange customers.” She shook her head, angry at a world where that was a marketable skill. I couldn’t blame her. “Anyway, might be useful with all your ‘powers that be’ problems.”
I asked Talena for a description of Stacie, and it matched one of the candies from the surveillance photos. I flipped the photos in front of her, and she confirmed one as Stacie, though she didn’t recognize the Mollenkampi girl. While she spoke she turned her head, watching one candy in particular emerge from the shadows, a teenage boy with a wicked purple bruise running across his cheek.
“Dammit.” Talena’s shoulders pulled back. “I’ve got to go.”
“If we need more information—”
“Yeah, okay. Take care of yourself, Carter.” She walked away with her folders full of pamphlets and scriptures, one hand in the air, yelling out, “Hey, Jermaine! We need to talk!”
Without taking his eyes off of Talena, Ajax mumbled, “So the ‘ambassador’ thing . . .”
“That’s a big deal.”
“What’s this mean?” he said.
“We need to call this in to Kravitz.” I paused, then added, “I want to be the one to talk to these diplomatic weasels.”
So we called it in. We double parked at the corner of Sinclair and 23rd and sauntered up to the pay phone. I stuck a coin in the slot, and while the line rang I unconsciously fingered the change return for any neglected coins. I saw Ajax take note and I pulled my finger back, cheeks reddening at the idea he’d seen me scrounging for loose change.
Kravitz answered, already sounding worn down on the first day of the investigation. Ajax and I crowded in close so we could both hear the reaction when we delivered the news of Talena’s scoop. Kravitz didn’t exactly burst at the seams.
“Did you find this Stacie girl?” he said.
There was a pause while Ajax and I stared at the phone held between our ears.
“That’s it?” I said. “How about some accolades for a major break?”
Ajax tugged the phone lower so it could pick up his voice. “The witness didn’t know the girl’s current whereabouts.”
I pulled the phone back. “But it doesn’t matter. We got enough to poke the politicians and see if they give anything up.”
The phone twisted out of my hands as Ajax reclaimed it. This was exactly the kind of reason I didn’t want a partner.
“What we’re trying to ask is do we have permission to talk to the Squib delegation,” Ajax said, then held the phone where we could both hear Kravitz’s answer.
“No, you don’t. Detectives Angus and Bengles met with the Squib delegation this morning.”
There was silence on our end.
“Instead,” Kravitz continued, “what I would like you to do is talk to the nice people at the AFS and see what you can find on this lead your candy turned up.”
I clenched my teeth. “She’s not a—”
Ajax interrupted. “Roger that,” he said. “Do we have a liaison in the diplomatic world?”
“As a matter of fact we do,” said Kravitz. “Roll back here and write up a full brief. I’ll line up someone to talk to you at 1 Government Plaza.”
I pulled the phone back to my mouth.
“This ‘someone’ has to be able to answer questions. I don’t want to waste our time with some PR stooge who’s only cleared to say ‘no comment.’”
There was a pause, with only the crackle of a typical bad connection coming through the line, then Kravitz spoke again. “I’ll get an appropriate interviewe
e, Detective. But I’m glad you mentioned PR. While you’re in there, Ajax does the talking. Carter, you’re cleared to listen.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve got years of experience working the—”
“You’ve also got years of experience burning bridges, and right now we’re all walking through a political minefield. These partnerships weren’t assigned by rolling dice, Carter. Detective Ajax is there to cover your rear. I will set up this interview, but when you get there you will take notes and nod your head politely. You understand?”
I had a whole list of thoughts that I wanted to share with the good Detective Kravitz, but I pressed my lips tight and didn’t say any of them. The phone’s static crackled again.
“Carter?”
I pushed a knuckle against my teeth, trying to contain the vitriol that boiled up inside me. I almost pulled it off.
“Been meaning to congratulate you,” I said. “For that Reynolds case.” The one that I’d broken for him. “That was some fine detective work. Set you up for a nice promotion for this Haberdine thing.”
I listened to the static pop and hiss in the long silence that followed.
“Just get your asses back to the Bunker,” he said. “I’ll have an answer when I have an answer.” The line went dead and I slammed the receiver home hard enough to generate an extra ring of protest. I stared at it, seething, because I didn’t trust myself to face Ajax yet. I closed my eyes and let out a breath, like the department shrinks had told me to do, then turned and looked at my partner. I saw a cop with decades less experience than me, who was apparently my assigned babysitter.
We stood in silence for a five count. He was the first to speak.
“You know you’ve got a reputation.”
I braced myself.
“How’s that reputation go?” I asked.
“You get in trouble. You act like you don’t care about any of your cases, but when you latch on to one you’ll obsess on it until your health breaks. You’ve got a temper, and you’re a smartass. And you’re honest.”
“And?” If he’d heard that much about me, then he’d heard the worst of it as well.
“And you used to get your share of headlines. But not anymore.”
