***
Santini and Mort ogled the menagerie of colorful critters scampering about Zip’s flat. Santini thought, Dr. Doolittle had nothing on this guy. There was a miniature giraffe—though still taller than Santini—nibbling doggie treats off the top of his head, flung there by the silver-backed gorilla, also scaled down for apartment living. The baby Bengal tiger, about the size of a German shepherd, leaped off the book case it was perched on and onto Mort’s shoulder.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Mort barked.
“I know, that’s not the Tourette’s,” Santini said, wise-assed.
The tiger playfully nibbled at Mort’s neck, with the kind of crushing pressure better suited to giving a neck and shoulder massage. Calming down, Mort was definitely taking to Bengal in a hurry. Neck and shoulder tension was a specialty with Mort, whereas with Santini it was all hips.
“How come these critters aren’t in toy stores?” Mort asked.
“Still negotiating pricing with Roverly,” Streaky-Haired Boy replied. “They think because I’m on salary they own me. They can blow me. They think their lawyers are better than my dad’s. Very funny. They think their hackers can get to my code secrets. Funnier still. Blow them all. Blow them all to hell.”
Santini allowed himself to get sucked into the gorilla’s grooming ritual; the animal checked him over closely. “I guess the pertinent question is: Can you train one of these things to kill?”
Zip’s eyes alighted. “Sure, just change the coding. They’re already programmed to be cute and cuddly, so your mark can’t resist buying one. But for him to get used to having it with him wherever he goes, it has to be very well-behaved, like a seeing-eye dog. Then, it waits until the owner is alone, and clamps down on his jugular, or rips his face off, or whatever. Two, maybe three subroutines added to the basic model, tops. How soon you need it?”
“Maybe we should clarify what side we’re on,” Mort said. Santini and Mort showed him their badges.
“This was all theoretical, right?” Zip postulated. “I assumed you goons worked for my father, who, sadly, does have to have people whacked once in a while. I would never condone such things outside of family, of course.”
“What about getting them to eat brains?” Santini asked.
Zip winced. “Wet work. Not my specialty. Messy. Very messy. You’d need an empty cavity in the head or body, of course, maybe where you’d ordinarily find a stomach. Not a problem these days with the size of microchips. But you’d need some kind of chemical reaction that destroyed the evidence and left no traces. You will have to employ some other designer for that part.”
“How often do these creatures shed?”
“Never,” Zip said proudly. “Hypo-allergenic for people who can’t be around real pets. Can’t even pull the hair out; complex polymer strands too strong.” He demonstrated, lifting one of the toy-dogs by the scruff.
“Well, I guess that lets you off the hook,” Mort said. “Pity, I was warming to the idea of adopting Bengal here… confiscating him, I mean, for police evidence.”
“What were you doing last night?” Santini asked. “Just in case you lie as well as you engineer things.”
Zip crossed his arms. “Here, working all night on my latest robot.”
“So, no alibi, huh?” Mort said. “That’s convenient.”
“It’s all on camera.” Zip pointed to the numerous hidden cameras around the room. “I’m on camera twenty-four-seven. Helps with the legal battles, so they can’t say I built my creatures on company time.”
Zip initiated a CD-burn of his last three weeks activities off his laptop memory banks. Santini, waiting for Zip and the computer to do their thing, figured the images could be faked too for a kid this tech savvy. But by the time he proved that, the kid would be out of the country courtesy of his lawyers and his diplomatic connections. So, it was really in Santini’s best interests for this kid not to be the killer. As a consequence, he’d put his energies elsewhere.
Santini wanted to get home and work on his car. An auburn 1949 Mercury convertible. Simple enough for him to strip the engine and rebuild from scratch, as he’d already done a couple of times. Tooling around on it helped him to think. Helped him to feel in control of a world increasingly out of reach, intellectually, for simpler folks like him, and out of reach in every other sense, as well. He just didn’t have the peacock-like flamboyance needed to thrive in this world of creative hotshots.
The sordid, grimy world of Oakland’s ghettos, moreover, better suited his film noir nature, down to the fact he saw the world in black and white, courtesy of his particular flavor of color-blindness, something giving him more in common with dogs than other humans. He was thinking of getting one. Some big ugly brute to play off his self-image, the way reliving his Golden Glove days by beating on suspects helped Mort hold on to his glory days.
Oakland’s crime lords and grift harkened back to an era to which Santini and Mort belonged. But maybe they were getting a little too comfortable in their ruts, which only put more emphasis on their expiration dates.
Santini had never married. He’d never done well in school, an average student, straight through to the academy. The few hobbies he’d tried to take up, like miniature-airplane building and flying, took too much fine hand dexterity which was foiled by his astigmatism and arthritis. In the end, overhauling cars had taken, but that was about it. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. It was those people who had the world at their fingertips that earned his pity. A cushy life dulled awareness. Most people didn’t question a damn thing about themselves or the nature of reality until things started going seriously wrong. What little edge he had, boiled down to that.
The copy finished burning. Zip handed Santini the DVD, which he promptly pocketed.
“Now what?” Mort asked, after stepping outside Zip’s apartment. “The next star attraction on the list? Or you for decompressing a while at Denny’s where we only have to worry about running into wolf people?”
“Maybe that’s enough for today. I could use a break. Go tinker on the car, hope something comes to me of some help with this case.”
“Suits me,” Mort said. “Two hours in fairy land is like two months building bridges under water. I’m too old to sustain that kind of pressure without coughing up blood. I say we erect a wall around the town, only closer in size to the one they had in King Kong.”
FORTY-TWO
“Hi, Gretchen.” Santini wiped his hands of grease with the rag as she approached. He was covered from head to toe in car slime. You’d imagine that’d be enough of a keep away sign, he thought.
He stepped out of the puddle of shadow created by his detached garage into the piercing sun. Not blinding enough, apparently, judging from Gretchen’s get up. Some thrift-store special his mother might have worn, all flowery print and paper thin. She prided herself on looking like a million bucks on just one dollar, and that included accessories like purse and hat. She was plain in everyone else’s eyes, but to Santini, she was a knockout, and he was entirely in love with her, which was the problem. He’d been trying to gently push her away for months now so he wouldn’t have to say the unsayable: Sorry, babe, my dick doesn’t work. She either refused to take a hint, or was harder up for company than he was.
“You catch your killer yet?” she said, sounding bubbly.
“No, ‘fraid not.” He sounded like he’d been gut punched.
“I read about you in the paper today! Said it was just a matter of days now.”
“Don’t believe everything you read.” He ran his eyes over her as a form of rejection, like someone who’d sampled a tomato, then put it back on the shelf. Judging from her face, that’s how she took the look too. Maybe he figured with his ice and her warmth, together they’d make steam some other way. Get off it, Santini, she certainly doesn’t deserve this.
She lowered her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look into his face and see the daggers coming at her.
“Why don’t you come in for a spot of lemonade?�
�� he said, relenting, figuring she deserved a consolation prize for putting up with a side of himself he usually saved for serial killers.
“That would be lovely!” she said, brightening. Say one thing for her, you couldn’t keep her down any more than you could get a lock on Bay Area weather.
As they stepped inside, he couldn’t imagine how much duller his kitchen looked to her in color than from his current perspective in black and white. The Ashby flea market sold better stuff and with more character. Leaving the kitchen generic was just another way to hide details about himself and maintain a sense of privacy. He lived life looking into the sordid underbellies of others. It left him with a flair for staying off-grid, and for how to hide in plain sight. Maybe deep down, he always figured one day he’d be on the run himself. Feeling like the last sane man in an insane world tended to trigger guilt and paranoia over being found out, with the ensuing fight or flight fantasies.
He wasn’t sure how to feel about her not batting an eyelash at his digs, if he’d won the prize because she had such low expectations of him, and of life. Then he realized, it was her self-image she felt matched the dowdy ambiance, and felt even more like shit for perpetuating her beliefs about herself with his rebuffs. Three months now this had gone on; it had to stop. He made up his mind to tell her. Maybe after that ice cold lemonade went down and further dulled his sensibilities from the sugar rush.
Taking the lemonade from him without releasing her hand on his, she said, “It’s been months now, Santini, when are you going to ask me out, already?”
He couldn’t help but smile. “You don’t take a hint, do you?”
“If you really wanted to push me away you’d have crossed some line there was no coming back from, instead of finding a thousand little ways to be hurtful. I figured it was an act, and I’d wear you down. But there’s something you fear worse than being mean.”
Leave it to him to attract a woman with wonderful powers of observation. They really did belong together – in an alternate universe. “How do you know I’m not just mean?”
“I had five brothers who never wanted to play with me. I know every shade of hurtful like you know every shade of gray and what color it translates to with those eyes of yours.”
He should know better than to let personal details slip. The better she knew him, the more she could play to his desire to be totally and utterly right with someone.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He released her hand, and poured a drink for himself.
“That’s the whole point of dating.”
“Maybe there’s a lot I don’t want you to know. Maybe it’s easier to feel better about myself that way.” He chewed the ice from his lemonade wondering if it was true what the act inferred about sexual frustration.
“You mean about your dick not working?”
He squirted lemonade across the floor after it went down his lungs instead of his throat.
“I know all about that and I don’t care.”
“How did—”.
“I went to every doctor in town and pretended to be your wife,” she explained, “said I needed to know because I was getting a divorce if it wasn’t on account of some health reason. Your doctor is a drunk who lost his license three times already and is practicing illegally, by the way. Kind of made squeezing information out of him easier than most.”
Santini collapsed in the chair and held the ice cold glass of lemonade against his forehead, back hunched.
“I don’t know what all this drama is about, I really don’t. There’s more to love than a penis, Santini.”
“All right, Gretchen. Stop winning this argument. I preferred it when it was a lost cause.”
“I joined the police academy!” When he gazed up at her looking even more flabbergasted than before, she added, “I saw you were a C-student and I felt bad for you. I thought maybe I could help you out. My brothers were always hiding things on me and playing nasty tricks, so I had to develop a taste for staying a few steps ahead of the bad guys from an early age. It’s really going to be a walk in the park.”
“Maybe if I’d met you earlier in my career.”
“Nonsense. We have the greater good to consider.”
“You have this all figured out, don’t you? What makes you think I want to spend every moment of every day with you?”
“Your eyes.” She sounded as confident of her destiny as an end-stage cancer patient. She stood taller than the Statue of Liberty and just as determined to accept him for all the wretched refuse of his person.
After a long pause, he said, “You are a good detective.”
FORTY-THREE
Mort parked his lime-green VW Bug outside Santini’s home. He had about as much cause to be driving one as the Wicked Witch of the West had for being off her broom. But he lived within spitting distance of egghead land, and in egghead land, VW Bugs had great resale value. And in Oakland, almost nothing resold; easier just to steal the damn thing, strip it down for parts. Mort figured he was close enough to his forced early retirement (thanks to the premature aging that came with police work) to be focused more on stretching dimes than stretching his backside in and out of this death trap. Considering his size and girth, he was giving the performance of his life as a clown stretching in and out of a clown car, he thought, straining to get out of it.
Mort pushed his way inside Santini’s kitchen past the protests of the door’s hinges. Santini was used to his not knocking and to the reasons for it. Though Santini had declined to do anything about them. Santini tended to long slow, simmering depressions that, to Mort’s way of thinking, might just benefit from medications. Cops weren’t much on mind-meds as it drew too thin a line between themselves and the crazies they chased after. On the other hand, they needed to consider any and all ways to take their game up a level in a world in which one only got ahead by cunning and treachery and rule-breaking, giving the bad guys an almost genetic advantage.
Mort found Santini with his head buried in a coffee table picture book of dogs. He’d been meaning to get one for a while to pal around with, just couldn’t commit, deliberating the unnecessary complication to his life. He liked things simple. Just his depression and his Jack D.
“Did you know Bullmastiffs have excellent night vision, the best of any dog’s. And they’re sized to easily tackle an adult male and pin him to the ground. Now what does that bring to mind?”
“The Hartman estate,” Mort said, the lightning strike of a revelation nearly searing his brain. Just then, the second revelation shook him like thunder. Santini sounded perky and positively upbeat. He talked in an up-tempo Mort hadn’t heard before – ever. “What, you got laid last night?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Santini said, looking up from the book with a cat that ate the canary look. Mort twisted his mouth into the shape of one of those oversized soft pretzels he bought on Telegraph.
“Hey, I’m a pragmatist. Whatever works, I say. Just so she isn’t privy to any pillow talk.”
“She’s the one that came up with the idea,” Santini said proudly. “This is the book she got me.”
“Simply fabulous. You patronize a stoolie doctor—”.
“He gives good horse racing tips. I think he might be connected with fixing the races. Hey, how do you think I pay for this dump? Not on a cop’s salary, or I’d be living in a cardboard box like the other street people, spouting off about wars I never fought in so people will take pity on me and throw me their coins.”
“You could room with me.” Mort caught the jealousy in his tone. He couldn’t believe he was envious of a woman he’d never met. But loneliness was their thing, part of a common bond. So was being angry at the world, and feeling left behind. Mort realized they didn’t exactly own the store on these feelings. But he hated the idea of Santini sharing them with anyone else. “You shouldn’t be talking shop with some civilian,” he mumbled, as he sensed the life leaking out of him.
“She’s becoming a cop.”
�
�That’s just great!” Mort skewered the half-dead flies in the catch-drain of the stovetop with the ice pick more to put himself out of his misery than to put them out of their misery. “Now I suppose I’m to find my own way in the world!”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 68
