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

by Dean C. Moore

  Three of his fellow cops charged into the office. “What do you think?” Emmett asked, as they spread their magazines, dropping the nude centerfolds.

  Ethan sported the biggest smile. “We've been saving up since your ‘little vacation,’” Ethan informed him. “Pick one.”

  “Can’t anyone keep a secret around here?” Manny finished tucking in his shirt.

  “With this crew?” Ethan said. “They're worse than a bunch of women.”

  “Shit, that reminds me.” Manny checked his watch. “I’m expected for dinner with Robin and Drew.”

  Collective moans spewed across the room.

  “Great.” Emmett folded up his magazine. “Now we gotta spend all the money we saved up for you on ourselves before our dicks turn into innies.”

  “You boys are about as understanding as a hooker you refuse to pay after she finishes going down on you,” Manny said.

  “You got that right.” Ethan collapsed his centerfold, sighed. “If you're sure about what'll heal ya...”

  The threesome departed to the main office, hamming up how despondent they were. No doubt, his refusing to assimilate better was an invitation to worry that, next time, it could be one of them being shipped off to the loony bin. He supposed he owed it to them to make a big show over his recovery, but he wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.

  Manny watched them out his window, and chuckled to himself. He grabbed his coat and hat, and closed the door to his office, protecting the inner sanctum.

  In the main office, Ethan grabbed Manny before he got too far. “Look, been meaning to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, I heard, Boroughs took an early retirement. The little shit is out of our hair once and for all. Pity, he’d be the perfect one on which to test my new coping mechanisms.”

  “No, no, no. Nothing to do with that.” Ethan sounded both reassuring and impatient.

  Sensing the shift in tone, Manny asked, “Can't this wait?”

  “Wait? It's already waited three months.” Ethan dragged him off to the locker room and bided his time until the swinging door to the main office settled. “Doctor tells me I have cancer.”

  “Sorry, Ethan. That's rough.”

  “Hey, not like I didn't have a good go-around, huh? Hell, eat too much, smoke too much, drink like an Irishman. Should have been dead ten years ago.”

  “What you gonna do about it?”

  “I'm going to go out in style, that's what. Rented a boat for a couple weeks. Enough money for beer up to our eyeballs, broads. The guys are all coming. There's just you. Come on, whaddaya say?”

  There it was. Ever-more alluring bait. They hadn’t given up yet on reeling him in. “This is how you're going to spend your final days on Earth? Boozing and carousing? And debasing yourself?”

  “Since you put it that way, yeah.”

  “You don't think you might want to get closer to God? Revel in the meaning of life? Donate some of that money to kids with cancer so you can leave a positive mark on this Earth?”

  “You're going all mental to screw with me, right? Hey, you were never much of a kidder, but you're really learning to lighten up, Manny. Good for you.”

  Manny pulled out Ethan’s gun, and shot him under the chin. His head popped like a piñata. Then he took Ethan’s .40 caliber pistol and threw it on the floor, as the other cops rushed in.

  “What the hell!” Emmett gasped.

  Manny, staring in shock himself at what he'd done, proclaimed, “He said the most unbelievable things before his head went clean off.”

  “I'm sorry you had to see this on your first day back, man,” Emmett said, sobering. “But he didn't tell you? He got diagnosed with cancer.”

  Emmett pushed Manny away from the body. “Probably just couldn't take it. Poor bastard. Let's be honest, he hasn't been himself for a while. It's probably for the best.”

  “It's probably for the best!” Manny wiped his face of blood with the back of his sleeve. “That's all you have to say? That's the depth of your emotional range?”

  Pushing Emmett off him, he said, “Some of you have known the guy for years, and the sum total of your response is, it's probably for the best?”

  “Hey, ease up, Manny,” Emmett said.

  Paolo echoed in a thick Brazilian accent, “Ease up, pal. You don't need to punish us for what he did. We'll say a couple Hail Marys and we'll move on.” He laid his hand on Manny supportively. “It's our way. You know we can't take this stuff to heart. Or we'll be bat-shit crazy in no time.”

  Manny pulled out his .32 caliber six-shooter. If he was going to continue like this, he was going to have to upgrade to an automatic with a fifteen-round magazine.

  The officers jumped back, their hands reaching for their guns in concert. “Don’t. I’m not as rusty with this thing as all that.” With the straps of their holsters over the hammers of their pistols, they calculated correctly, Manny figured, that by the time they unsnapped them, they’d all be dead. Manny was a spot-on marksman, his gun had a hair-trigger, nothing like his temper, and they knew it. Their hands went up.

  “Whoa!” Emmett said. His voice didn’t sound that rattled; suggesting he was still in denial about the turn of events, and certain he could talk his way out of this.

  Manny gunned them down in quick succession – one bullet to the heart each. Maybe if they didn’t have their hands so high in the air, one of them would have made it to their pistol in time. Long odds were still better than no odds.

  He reloaded his pistol in case any more cops came through the door. None did. He could thank the thick walls of the old building in part for that. But most of his fellow officers were likely deployed in the field.

  Gazing down at the bodies, he said, “Sorry, gentlemen. I just wasn't seeing any redeeming value in your sorry, shallow dispositions.”

  He holstered the gun. “You're supposed to be doing God's work, for Christ's sake. You need some depth of character for that, some internal contradictions to iron out at the very least.”

  He absently straightened his tie before the mirror over the sink. “Can’t you see the world is at the brink? There’s no time to tutor the ones at the back of the class.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  The doorbell rang, a falsetto excerpt from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Robin doubted anyone caught the joke but him, considering Beethoven was deaf when he wrote the piece, which is exactly what you wanted to be to avoid hearing it brutalized by the cheap brass chimes.

  Drew opened the door. “Robin, honey? You want to field this one?”

  Robin grabbed the door, widened the aperture enough to give himself a clear view of Manny covered in blood. He gulped in stunned silence.

  “Get a chance to stop by the precinct first, did ya?” Robin said.

  “I don't seem to recall.” Manny stepped inside and pushed past them. “What is that? Smells divine.”

  Robin held Drew back from bolting out the door, then locked them both in.

  “Are you mad?” Drew hissed.

  Manny, overhearing, turned toward them. “Why should I be upset?”

  “It's a lot to take in, seeing me like this.” Robin stretched out his form-fitting top to accentuate his figure.

  “Shit, Robin.” Manny brushed his upper arm. “You know me better than that. Always thought Robin was more of a girl's name. Glad to see you finally growing into yourself.” Manny stepped off the tile floor of the foyer onto the living room carpet. A splash of blood spilled from his shirt and settled into the shag. Drew sucked in a lungful of air. Manny did too. “Is that curry I smell? I love things hot!”

  Robin took Drew by the arm. “Relax. You’re among old friends. In fact, the more relaxed, the better.”

  "When others overstep our bounds, we get to practice patience and forgiveness,” Manny said. “They’re the final keys to Heaven… That’s how I relax. Though, sadly, it’s often after the fact."

  Minutes later, Drew served dinner from a semi-conscious, semi-robotic state. It was possibly the best cop
ing mechanism she had at her disposal. But she was still having trouble keeping her eyes off the bloody man seated at the dining room table.

  “So what do the two of you plan on doing for the rest of your – hopefully – long lives?” Manny asked, burping out the last part.

  Drew dropped the dish. Robin made a quick save, ferried the salad to the table in one piece across the ocean of dead-still air. “Drew wants to be a cop,” Robin said.

  “That's tremendous!” Manny clapped as if swatting a fly between his hands. “There’re a few openings at the precinct.”

  There wasn’t a mannequin on Rodeo Drive that sported a less convincing smile than Drew, and she held it nearly as long. Flopping into her seat, she said, “Honestly, I may be more the social worker type.”

  “Nonsense.” Manny swirled the wine in his wine glass. “That's all police work is – social work with a gun. Let me tell you, the gun makes all the difference.”

  Serving himself a portion that was too big considering what there was to go around, Manny said, “You try winning an argument downtown without one.” He passed the dish, grabbed another one. “And what about you, Robin?”

  As Robin sat, the holster strapped under his short dress, high on his inner thigh, was noticeable, as was the fact that it was aimed directly at Manny. “The caterpillars have to finish becoming butterflies first,” Robin said, squeezing Drew's hand. “Thinking through the cloud of new hormones coursing through us will likely prevent too many hard and fast decisions any time soon.”

  “I have to admit, I'm gaining a newfound respect for the effects of unbalanced brain chemistry on a situation.” Manny emptied his wine glass, poured himself another with the bottle on the table.

  “You can't do it all with medications,” Drew said, a bit too suggestively. Robin was becoming increasingly unnerved by the role reversal between them. He relied on Drew to be the socially smooth one doing damage control so he could get away with being more foot in mouth. Surely if she could handle diplomats and foreign dignitaries, she could handle a mass murderer. Weren’t they more often than not, one and the same? “You have to be prepared to do some of the heavy lifting yourself,” she said, adding insult to injury.

  “That's absolutely right.” Talking with food in his mouth, Manny said, “Spontaneity is a better shortcut to the divine than a pill. How better to have Him speak through you? I’m devoting this portion of my life to being more in the moment.”

  “If we deny who we are, over a period of time, it could lead to some pretty disturbing behavior changes,” Drew said, to rising alarm from Robin. “If you run certain software in the mind long enough, it impacts the hardware.”

  “You’re losing me,” Manny said. “I must have missed a turn in the conversation.”

  “I’m pretty sure that line of conversation was headed down a dead end street. You could just see the STOP sign,” Robin coached, his eyes boring a hole through Drew. Of all the times to push Manny to more self-awareness.

  “Excuse me a second while I go use the little boy’s room.” Drew got up from the table with the grace of a wounded albatross.

  Manny stifled a smile at the idea of this woman peeing through her penis – she was still a woman to Manny’s eyes. At least, that’s how Robin read his expression.

  ***

  Once in the bathroom, Drew’s riffling through the pill bottles in the medicine cabinet caused them to waterfall into the sink with a caterwauling splash. The sonic blast was setting off seismic needles halfway across the planet.

  ***

  Robin did his best to cover for Drew from the dining room. “Being a klutz was definitely more challenging for her as a female. Just the thought of her balancing on high heels compelled me to carry around a portable stretcher.”

  Manny howled. He fought to regain propriety by burying his face in the wine glass.

  ***

  Does Robin really think he can lie so baldly? I’m some child who can’t read nuance in tone the way a Geiger counter reads radioactivity?

  In all fairness, Manny considered, it wasn’t like they spent the last few months surviving a psychopathic doctor that made Hartman look like a failed protégé.

  Or like they had time to learn to read enough subtext in human behavior to thwart any amount of plotting and scheming.

  They don’t really think they can get out of this, do they? That the cat won’t tire toying with the mice eventually?

  ***

  Drew fished the bottle of tranquilizers out of the bathroom sink, didn’t even bother to return the pile to their natural resting places on the wall cabinet above.

  ***

  Drew planted herself back at the kitchen table.

  After teasing apart a capsule containing one of her tranquilizers, and stirring it into the wineglass under the table, Drew said, “Would you fetch me a napkin, sweetheart?”

  “Sure thing, doll,” Manny said.

  As Manny turned his back on them to retrieve the napkins, Drew exchanged his glass with hers.

  Robin, seeing the powder at the bottom of the glass, cued her to swirl the glass some more. Drew gave the glass another swish. Robin thought, God, poison really is a woman’s hate crime. It was the first clue Drew had ever given her sex change was not yet complete.

  ***

  Manny held up a long-stemmed glass from the overhead rack in the kitchen, pretending to admire the colored crystal, all the while observing the two conniving bastards he’d once taken to be his friends trying to poison him. Seeing around blind corners had been a staple of survival in the psych ward. Of course, he had those mirrors mounted in the corners for help. But he couldn’t always count on them. Meaning he’d long ago learned to improvise.

  He set down the empty glass he’d taken from the display case before becoming obvious, and twirled his cufflinks, pretending to be straightening himself up. The mirrored cufflinks were one of many little tricks he had up his sleeve for watching people spying on him without being detected. CIA training couldn’t match what he’d taught himself while surviving under Saverly’s omnipresent eyes.

  He noted Robin and Drew throwing one another guarded looks, checking to see how well the simmering emotions were doing under the lids of the stewpots. Their ping-ponging glances were easy to follow off the reflections in the well-appointed kitchen appliances when the cufflink ruse wore thin, the black enamel polished to perfection. He should really thank Drew for the merciless efforts to keep mundane reality from ever interceding in her designer lifestyle.

  Finding the cloth napkins finally, tucked within one of the drawers, he pulled out three.

  ***

  Manny brought them back cloth napkins embossed with tigers baring their fangs. Judging from the expression on her face, Drew had taken one look at the pattern, and decided then and there on a theme change for the kitchen.

  Drew apportioned the napkins. “And what about you, Manny? What exactly is your mission from God?”

  “Why, be the best detective I can be.” Manny spread his napkin on his lap. “Unlike so many in law enforcement today, I really welcome the social work side of what we do.” He dug into his food. “Just locking people up isn't the answer. You really have to crawl inside their heads, feel their pain, help them claw their way out of the hellhole that is life lived in the absence of adequate consciousness.”

  They both stared wide-eyed at Manny for a measurable sliver of eternity, as unmoving as the statues of Pharaoh hounds decorating the home. The look was meant to trigger some self-consciousness on Manny’s part; but it never came. Finally, Robin managed, “Well said, Manny.”

  “Sweetheart, would you get us a Bordeaux from the cellar?” Robin asked.

  Drew froze, Robin guessed because she knew exactly what her lover was inferring.

  “Please?”

  “I'm not sure a Bordeaux is what we need with this meal, dear,” Drew said.

  “Cook's choice then.” Robin rotated his wineglass by the stem back and forth.

  “Maybe
Manny isn't much of a wine drinker.” Drew smiled painfully.