Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  An injection of potassium meant he’d be dead in a minute, unable to even put up much of a fight as his muscles went flaccid. Even more insidiously, it would leave no trace. No one but the co-conspirators in this room would ever know.

  Manny shrieked and squirmed as the needle went into his arm. They didn’t even stay to see the results of their work, just snuck out of the room like smoke caught in a backdraft.

  Good. He was becoming a half-decent actor himself. He’d made sure to swallow salt and magnesium, imbibing both in anticipation of just this moment. If they’d tried any of a hundred other ways of killing him by injection, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But potassium injection was an old staple of hospital murderers, being easy to come by, easy to administer, and virtually untraceable. It was a logical choice.

  They’d undone his restraints, confident he wouldn’t be moving a muscle ever again, and perhaps so no later insinuations of ill-treatment could be made. Even the door was left unlatched. That way they could blame his state on whoever wandered in. The camera light was off, adding to the confusion come time to explain all this. So far, that was all going in his favor. On the other hand, it could all add up to one big set up; maybe they’d taken out an insurance policy of another kind.

  Manny still hadn’t gotten an adequate look at his assailants’ faces. No sooner had he snatched a glance at the potassium vial than his blood pressure shot up, further diminishing his range of view. Just as well. Keep him from trusting anyone too much.

  Time for plan B. He had to find his way to the locker room the staff used. Someone would be sure to have a cell phone tucked away. Or a can of mace. Any number of things could prove useful. And there would be less security and less in and out this time of night, in the middle of the shift. He could put his lock-picking skills to work.

  He pushed his way into the hall. Curse the flat lighting. No shadows anywhere to hide within. It was that way for every room.

  The patients tucked away for the night behind locked doors, paperwork to be done, and Manny out of the picture, things were quiet all around. No staff visible anywhere. Of course, there were still the cameras. He could never be sure who was monitoring what camera bank when. Lazy, careless dispositions or no, all it would take is one of them panning their eyes over to the right screen at the wrong time.

  He figured his fast thinking could be put to better use imagining the hundred and one ways to succeed rather than to fail, and placed one foot in front of the other in the direction of the locker room.

  As much as he was in fear for his life, he didn’t want the game to end; he loved it. He had never felt more alive. And it had the curious effect of recasting those childhood years as so much fun. That was the last time he had to think like this. The child in him hated it. But the adult in him, that nascent ego growing up like a weed in this high pressure environment, had other ideas. Saverly’s therapy was working. God bless him.

  Time to put the distance getting to the locker room to better use than worrying about someone seeing him. Plan C, use the vacuousness of the hospital to conceal him. Find the right hiding place, and it’d take staff a month to find him. He was already running through the maze in his head, recalling potential places of concealment without cameras. He remembered the time when, without Winona, he couldn’t even work a maze shown to him on a map. Now he could draw the map in his head from memory and make sense of that.

  Overlaying the path to the locker room in his head with the path to the nearest hiding places, he realized there was an alternate route to the locker room that wouldn’t require a key, or making a whole lot of noise. Let’s hear it for learning to think under pressure in a condensed timeframe.

  Maybe it was the adrenaline in him releasing the inner Renaissance man. Maybe the fight for survival brought him to the forefront. Maybe it was our natural state, only we’d gotten too civilized, too comfortable to remember. Maybe all it took was an endorphin rush to dilate time inside his head for him, allow him to do more with less, allow all the aptitudes and the voices which articulated them to rise to the surface, appear out of the fog of his mind, his more normal state.

  He realized it could just have easily gone the other way, the added pressure the perfect excuse to give up against the adversity. But he wanted to live. His sense of self was getting stronger, and with it, his refusal to do anything that would compromise his own survival. Not having much to go on regarding what he could or couldn’t do, being too much of a “newborn,” made it that much easier to access the God within. He could work miracles that a more stable, long-lived ego would have dismissed as impossible for having too clear a sense of its limits. The speculations could all amount to a big pile of bullshit, but it was comforting bullshit to wile away the time it took to get to the locker room.

  At last, he was within striking range. But the damn nurse’s aide was making the bed in the room he needed to cut through.

  Manny stood statue-still in the brightly lit room as the nurse’s aide made the bed; he adjusted his position only to stay outside her peripheral vision, which meant anticipating her next move before she did. She had turned a half dozen times, and not once noticed anyone in the room. Skills mastered as a child with his father were starting to come back to Manny, now that the world had turned every bit as fascist and the old survival skills were worth their weight in gold once more.

  After another couple minutes, the nurse’s aide departed.

  Manny tried his hand on the lock with the paperclip he’d secured earlier. In their zeal to strap him down they must have missed it, tucked into his sock.

  After swallowing large chunks of time whole to no avail, he glanced at the mop a lazy janitor failed to secure, thinking he could use the handle to bore a hole through the sheetrock wall separating him from the locker room. He wiped the sweat trickling into his eyes from his brow.

  There, in the waste basket. A broken hairclip left by one of the nurses—perhaps after a patient had yanked at her hair. Maybe if he used it in tandem with the paperclip…

  He never got the chance to follow up on either of those ideas; the lock finally succumbed to the paper clip.

  And he was in. Just like that.

  He may as well be in a vault with access to all the safe deposit boxes. There were enough secure compartments in here to crack that the prize he sought had to be behind one of them.

  ***

  Three ripped-open lockers later. And nothing. Except footsteps getting louder. Perspiration beading in larger droplets. Frenzy dawning like a Venus sun.

  Manny tore his way into the next locker.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “I can’t believe he’s winning over the entire swing shift.” Paolo squeezed a flexi-grip in his left hand, working out his forearm, as he did his paperwork with his right hand. He looked up at Robin only when his paperwork got boring, which was every five seconds, more or less.

  “The kid’s got game.” Ethan turned over the brochures on colorectal cancer as if choosing a paint to go with the curtains. He glanced Robin’s way. “I’ve been here thirty-plus years and I haven’t gotten past names with those guys. I didn’t think it was possible.”

  Emmett inflated his latest whoopee cushion, talking between bursts of air directed into the plastic pouch. “Maybe he was right to step away from us, you know?” Blow. “We do treat him as if he’s wet behind the ears.” Power puff. “He’s giving himself space to reinvent himself.” Gasp. “Makes sense now that I think about it.”

  “Stepping out of the old habitual role play?” Ethan glanced up from the brochures with the pictures exposing his colon every which way. “I get it. Might explain why I’ve been stuck in a rut all these years. You guys just keep pressing the same buttons.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s all our fault,” Paolo said, throwing another file in his dust bin.

  “Hey, I like getting my buttons pushed.” Emmett tested his whoopee cushion, sitting down on it, enjoying its crass sounds. “Make me laugh and cry on command. It’s all I ask of my
wife, too, come to think of it.”

  Ethan tucked the colorectal cancer literature in a drawer and locked it. “You remember the days when he thought the solution to everything was a group hug?” The others laughed.

  “We’d arrest them.” Emmett set the whoopee-cushion on Billy’s chair. “He’d take their reports. Listen to their sob stories. And let them go.”

  “He never saw a crime he couldn’t turn into a misunderstanding.” Paolo said, tossing another file into the waste basket.

  “Those were the days.” Ethan glanced up at the perps handcuffed to the wall waiting to be processed, as if they could just keep waiting there until the end of time. “Thank God for Manny to show him the ropes.”

  “Poor, Manny.” Emmett nibbled on some mints just thinking about him.

  “Ah, he’s tough. Robin’s got a long way to go to be that tough.” Ethan scrutinized Robin, the sorry excuse for a hardboiled detective. “Manny’ll survive his tour of crazy-land just fine, like the time me and the wife went to Graceland.”

  “Maybe being hard as nails isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know?” Paolo pondered the point over his overly-pumped up forearms refusing to deflate. He squeezed them, grimacing. “Maybe the kid’s on to something with that soft-natured shit.” He talked with his eyes locked on Robin. “I got this aquarium. And I got artificial bonsai trees at the bottom. The pump that blows the bubbles keeps knocking them over. But the swamp grass just bends with the pressure. Now, which do you think is tougher?”

  Emmett and Ethan thought about it before getting antsy and burying their heads back in their work. They both made gestures to bring a couple of the perps they were saving for swing shift over to their stations. Better that than any more of this deep and meaningful shit.

  Robin sat with his feet up on his desk, so he could be at an angle that would allow him to glance covertly over the top of Hartman’s journals at the wisenheimers mouthing off about him without them knowing. He dropped what he was doing. As the last of the swing shift settled in, he set himself in motion. Like the others on days, he had noticed no more cracks were flying his way.

  He did his perp walk until he’d covered a distance of three desks. “So, how do you feel about this macabre turn of events, Blackman?”

  Blackman glared at Robin’s tits. “My wife left me twenty years ago, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. You may need to give me some time.”

  “The perp that tripped you a few weeks ago, broke your nose. I thought for sure you’d deck him at the very least.”

  “I’m thinking about decking him,” Blackman said, pulling out his chair.

  “He’s in lock up in Sacramento.”

  “It’s not like I’ve forgotten how to drive.” Blackman flopped down in his chair and flipped open a file. He perused the perp’s write up.

  “Can I ask, how did you ever decide to be a cop?”

  Blackman cleared his throat as if forcibly expectorating a toad. “My wife made that decision for me. I came close to telling her off once on account of it.”

  Robin smirked despite himself. “It’s okay to have conflicting feelings about things, Blackman. Personally, I think it puts you way ahead of the pack. People who pride themselves on decisiveness might do so a little less if they realized how married to their prejudices they are.”

  Blackman looked up from the file. “I can’t change who I am.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to.” Robin smiled warmly, and departed. He felt Blackman’s eyes on his back well into his back-to-his-desk strut.

  “At least he’s acting the part better,” Robin heard Blackman mumble.

  Robin surveyed the field to see if anyone else looked amenable to taking an olive branch from him. He decided to take a chance on Woody.

  He plopped himself down in the perp chair beside Woody’s desk. Woody zoomed his pupils on his tits better than if Robin had handed him a pair of binoculars. Then he looked away, seemingly unimpressed.

  “You don’t seem shocked by this torrid turn of affairs,” Robin said.

  “See that hooker, over there?” Woody nodded in the direction of one of the perps waiting to be processed, a black drag queen with the brawny musculature of a line-backer. “She’ll bat her eyes at everything that walks by, hit on perps and cops alike. When that doesn’t get her anywhere, she’ll revert to being verbally abusive. And when that doesn’t get her anywhere, she’ll sink to talking in a man’s voice, hoping surprise’ll do the trick. People pride themselves on their shock value. But few truly have any.” Woody slammed the drawer on his metal desk closed as if there was nothing in his life that wasn’t an open and shut case.

  “What gave me away?” Robin asked.

  Woody lit an electronic cigarette, the kind that emitted steam as opposed to smoke, puffed on it, giving himself time to formulate a cogent, believable response. He waved the match to put it out and tossed it in the ashtray. “You bleeding heart types are all alike. Anything you can do to get more inside the head of the oppressed and unappreciated minorities of the world. If you underwent surgery to make you two feet taller so you could better appreciate the shame of being obscenely tall, wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

  Robin laughed. “I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it.” He held out his hand to Woody. “Go ahead, feel my hand up. I’m curious for the verdict.”

  Woody pursed his lips in a caricature of stormy seas, making unnatural wavy lines. He felt Robin’s hands. “I see those female hormones are doing their job.” He reached for a Kleenex, blew his nose, wiped his hands with the tissue.

  “That’s what I thought. You couldn’t wait to detox from the experience of touching me. Maybe if you didn’t work so hard at proving everything doesn’t shock you, then maybe nothing would.”

  Woody took another drag on his cigarette. “Truth or Dare? Another bleeding-heart game. Oh, so predictable.”

  “I get it,” Robin said, rising. “Don’t take a bone out of the mouth of a pit bull unless you’re expecting to lose your hand. You keep right on coping, Woody. I suppose that’s the best any of us can do.”

  “Just because he’s a fellow asshole, doesn’t mean you can’t find a hundred other reasons to hate him, Woody,” Robin heard him mumble behind his back. The remark forced a smile.

  Robin returned to his desk, refusing to feel defeated. This was a lot of energy to expend on people he didn’t want any more to do with than they wanted to do with him. Maybe he should rethink his approach. He eyed the rest of the swing shift rapidly replacing his own crew, who paid them no mind on their way out. Nah, you want feedback loops to help you get some distance on yourself, you need to invest in enriching social networks. Time well spent. He considered the sculpture on his desk of Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill. It had been a gag gift from Emmett. Speaking of value-added networks..., Robin thought sarcastically.

  ***

  The next evening, Robin had to gather strength before taking his perp walk. He sat there warily eying the arriving swing shift.

  “Do yourself a favor, forget those assholes,” Ethan suggested. Robin figured it was more good advice he’d be best advised not to heed. He smiled politely at Ethan, patted him on the back on his way out the door.

  He approached Crowly, taking his hand-crank pencil sharpener apart to see why it wasn’t working. “Sometimes a thing’s busted, there’s no fixing it,” Robin said.

  “Oh yeah, what makes you think this is one of those things?” Crowly snapped, then realized he’d stepped in the well baited trap. “Oh, I see, you’re referring to the two of us.” He tapped the metal core of the pencil grinder against the desk in the desperate hope of dislodging the lead stuck inside. “Suppose, if I had any sense,” he said, eying Robin top to bottom, “I’d get a costume and join the outdoor carnival that is the Berkeley streets, as well.”

  Robin smiled. “You could use a little color.”

  Crowly graced him with a world-weary smirk. Robin picked up the copy of The Third Industrial Revolution
on Crowly’s desk. “You into alternative energy?”

  “You could say that. I fix more than just broken staplers and pencil sharpeners, you know.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting there’s a lot more to all of us than meets the eye,” Robin said. Crowly, realizing he’d just stepped in the well-baited trap for the second time, returned his attention to his desktop tool in need of servicing with a smirk.

  Crowly seemed right with the world now that his pencil sharpener had held up for three pencils in a row, and Robin was proving to be true blue where it counted. He couldn’t be any more sarcastic and hard-nosed if he tried, forever cementing their bond in Crowly’s mind.

  “He could at least give me some decent hip action,” Robin heard Crowly mumble as he turned his back on him.

  Robin smiled. He made sure to give the boys the eagerly sought after hip action as he high-heeled it back towards his desk. “Small steps, Robin.” He figured the admonition worked just as well for getting used to his heels. His balance felt precarious. He felt that observation worked as well for his mind.

  He resumed his seat, the rest of the swing shift’s front guard digging in. You need some arena in life where you can make even a modicum of progress to goal, Robin thought, pleased by the headway he was making with the evening crew. That way, if he was losing his grip in every other part of his life, he would have some kind of lifeline. That thought took on renewed meaning as he tried to dig into some actual police work on his desk and found himself rereading a culprit’s file three times without so much as a line registering in his brain.