by K. W. Jeter
Buck pasted a concerned look on his face. “So what’s going to happen? With the lists?”
“Doesn’t look too good.” Marilyn set the eraser in the tray and turned around, slapping chalk dust from her hands. “The English department won’t be doing Salinger or Kesey; plus we’ll be dropping a lot of the material in translation. No Flaubert or Camus . . .”
“Camus? You mean we aren’t going to read L’Etranger?”
He had to hand it to Buck. The guy made it sound as though he’d been stabbed through both his hearts.
Marilyn shook her head. “Not in school.”
“Lay what?” Noah hadn’t caught the name of whatever it was they were talking about.
“The Stranger.” The teacher’s voice took on the patient tone that always bugged him a little. “A pivotal book in twentieth-century literature. And one which, I’m afraid, certain parents consider ‘subversive.’ ”
Cool, thought Noah. It might be worth checking out from the public library, to see if that meant it had sex scenes in it, or taught you how to blow up buildings for fun and profit.
“I loved that book!”
Maybe Buck wasn’t just laying it on thick—Noah looked over at him, and saw what was either genuine outrage on his buddy’s face or an Academy Award performance.
Silence as Marilyn gazed out the window; she seemed tired suddenly, shoulders slumped in resignation. “In the senior American history class, you know what’s required reading now?” She spoke to her reflection in the glass. “My Turn, by Nancy Reagan.” A slow shake of the head and a rueful smile as she turned back toward them. “Listen, people—out of the classroom, your time is your own. The school board can’t interfere with that. So if any of you are interested, I’d be happy to get together informally to read and discuss any books you want.”
“Great,” said Buck. “When’s a good time? I mean, to get together and talk, about what books and stuff.”
“Whoa—” Noah could see all this getting out of hand. He was having a hard enough time keeping up as it was. “Let’s just keep the books short ones, okay?”
“Tomorrow . . . no, the day after tomorrow. Thursday.” Marilyn looked up from her desk calendar. “How does that suit everybody?”
She got mainly yeses from the kids scattered around the room, a few shaking their heads.
“I’ll be there.” Buck wrote it down on the back of his notebook, circled in red.
Most of the other students had left, and Noah had his jacket on and was at the door when Marilyn called Buck’s name. He looked over his shoulder as Buck, right behind him, stopped and turned around.
“I just wanted to tell you, Buck, your essay on Whitman as the Zeitgeist of post-Civil War America was really well thought out.” She had spread papers out across her desk, and sat there with her marking pen in hand. “Very sophisticated.”
“Thanks.” Buck nodded. “I was kinda trying to—”
“Uh, hey; I know mine’s late.” Noah put his hands on Buck’s shoulders and pushed himself up, looking over his friend’s spotted head. “My hard disk crashed—I’ll get it to you tomorrow.” Buck pushed him off with an elbow to the ribs. He squeezed in at the side of the doorway. “It’s about the Alamo.”
That got a tolerant smile. “I’m looking forward to it, Noah.”
Buck acted as if he and the teacher were the only ones there. “About the reading outside of class—could we start with Flaubert? I hear Madame Bovary is great.”
“Oh, yes!” A smile of genuine delight. “It’s always been one of my favorites.”
He might as well have disappeared. He stood there and watched, and saw the thin, invisible connection that ran between Buck and the teacher. Between this Newcomer teenager and a human woman, not that many years older.
He saw it, and in his single heart a worm twisted.
God save me from places like that, thought Sikes. It’d already been dark when he’d left the station, and he’d stopped off at one of the old, funky cop bars down the street. Establishments of that type, with their satchel-faced, peroxided lady bartenders and yellowing photos on the dust-furred walls, were a dying breed. Urban-renewal bulldozers would eventually scrape their buzzing neon signs from the face of the city, and the old blue retirees would have to drink at home, and the green rookies would have to find someplace else to show off their testosterone behavior and Wambaugh dialogue.
He’d gone in and had one beer and a shot too many. It would have been easy enough to drive the few blocks home in that condition—he’d done it plenty of times before—but being over the legal blood-alcohol limit gave him an excuse to leave his car parked at the curb outside, and walk to clear his head.
Another Santa Ana had come in. He was sweating inside his jacket as the streetlights rolled his shadow out behind him. That much drinking, he told himself, and you didn’t accomplish squat. He’d started out thinking over the Kaiser homicide, trying to fit stray pieces out of his memory banks to the central image of the judge’s death-blighted face. Then his thoughts had wandered off to the attitude problem his partner had started displaying at the crime scene—he’d been working tandem with George Francisco long enough to catch that stiffening spine a mile away. Newcomers; sometimes you couldn’t look at them cross-eyed without getting a thousand-yard stare in return.
Then, once he’d gotten started thinking about Newcomers, there was no stopping. And he hadn’t been letting the stuff at the back of his skull go spitballing about the Kaiser case; he’d been thinking about Cathy, with a dead shot glass and a half-drained beer in front of him. That had been too much of a cliché for him. Time to go home.
He fumbled out his keys as he mounted the steps of the apartment building. Soon as he rounded the corner into the hallway, he spotted the kid sitting there, back against the numbered door.
“Hey, Noah.” The teenager had gotten to his feet, slamming shut the broken-spined civics textbook he’d had propped open against his knees, so Sikes could unlock the door. “How’s it been going?”
“Okay, I guess.” The kid followed inside the apartment. “Staying out of trouble.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Keeping his nose clean had not been much of a priority for Noah Ramsay a couple of years ago. It had, in fact, been a particularly snotty nose, in terms of sheer bad attitude. Sikes had caught the punk trying to sneak a six-pack out of the Korean convenience store down the street, collared him—literally, picking him up right by the nape of his cheap green nylon jacket—and recognized him as one of the neighborhood loiterers. He took the kid on as a project, dragging him down to the station and leaving him in the worst piss-smelling holding tank for a couple of hours. Thugs the size and intelligence of refrigerators had sidled up next to Noah on the wooden bench; his eyes had been round as teacups by the time Sikes had popped him out and told him to run along home and think twice before pulling that crap again.
So there was nobody but himself to blame when the kid kept coming around, hitting him up for advice and just talk. Sniffing for a role model, Sikes figured. There had already been a file on Noah over at the probation department, with a caseworker’s report on the single-mom-with-no-money home. That was pretty much as Sikes had expected; he couldn’t really think of any kids—human kids, at least—who didn’t come from that kind of place.
“Scrape off a chair, if you want to sit down.” He’d been letting the newspapers, some with the rubber bands still around them, and all the usual junk mail pile up. That was a bad sign. The apartment looked like what he imagined the inside of his head would be, if somebody could pry the lid off. He pushed a sack of dirty laundry back into the closet with his foot as he slid off his jacket. He tried to find a hanger, gave up, and draped the jacket over the edge of the door. “Want something to drink?” He headed toward the stale-smelling kitchen.
“Sure.” The kid dropped a stack of papers onto the floor with a soft whump. “Whattaya got?”
“For you, Coke. I got a thing about contributing
to the delinquency of a minor.” He came back with a can from the fridge and handed it to Noah. Twisting the cap off a green bottle of Rolling Rock, he lowered himself onto the couch. “So. What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing.”
The usual sullen teenager voice—he’d had it, too, when he’d been that age.
“Yeah, well, I can believe that, all right.” Sikes rubbed the beer bottle against his forehead. “What I meant was, what’s the problem? Or do you just like camping against my door ’cause of the great view off the fire escape?”
“Aw, man . . .” Noah slouched boneless in the armchair. “It’s nothing. Just school—that’s all.”
“I thought you liked it over there.” He’d pulled a few strings, district staffers who owed him favors, to get Noah into a transfer program that took him out to the same school George’s son, Buck, went to. “Last time I talked to your mom, she said you were aceing math.” The cold weight of his service piece poked him in the small of his back; he reached behind himself, dug out the gun, and laid it on the side table. “Talking about doing calculus prep next year.”
“That’s ’cause with math, at least I got a chance of getting it right. I mean, it’s either right or it’s wrong—right?” Noah’s voice went up in volume. “I mean, they don’t screw with you, like with all this English and literature and stuff.” He gazed at the Coke can with as much disgust as if he’d found a bug floating in there.
“Take it easy,” said Sikes. “What’s hanging you up is that somebody’s got you buffaloed into thinking they’ve got it right. What it is, you just haven’t got the right set of buzzwords yet.”
Noah looked at him blankly.
“The secret of success.” Sikes knocked back another swallow of beer. “Got me where I am today.” Yeah, and where’s that? He ignored his own voice inside his head. “You need a specialization, something you can just whip out on any occasion. Hey, I flashed on this when I was in high school, so you know it’s ancient advice.” He pushed himself up from the couch and went over to the shelves made of bare planks on cinder blocks on the other side of the room. He rooted through the sagging cardboard boxes and finally came up with what he was looking for.
“Here.” He shoved his battered Modern Library edition of Kafka short stories into Noah’s hands. “This’ll do ya.”
Noah looked dubious. “Yeah? How?”
“Gives ya a name to drop. Instant impressiveness.” Sikes flopped back down. “Any book that people want to talk about, just compare it to Kafka. They’ll think that’s pretty damn meaningful. Trust me on this one—I got through high school and that year and a half when I was working on a criminal justice degree, just on good of Franz there.”
“I don’t know . . .” Noah flipped through the book. “I mean, like—what if I don’t understand Kafka, either?”
“What’s not to understand? Life’s a bitch and then you die, and you still don’t know what’s going on. It’s just like working for the LAPD. Oh yeah, plus some mornings you wake up and you feel like a cockroach. Books don’t get much more meaningful than that.”
Noah stacked it on top of the textbook in his lap. “I guess I’ll give it a shot.”
“You do that.” He set the empty bottle down on the floor. “There something else griping you? If not, how ’bout taking a hike? I gotta catch some sleep.”
The kid shook his head. “Naw.” He was at the door before he stopped and turned partway around. “Mr. Sikes . . .”
“Yeah?” He’d laid his head down on the sofa arm, and now didn’t even bother opening his eyes. “What?”
Silence, then: “Uh . . . nothing. Forget about it.” The door opened and closed, and the kid’s footsteps faded down the hallway outside.
Yeah, right. Nothing. Sikes pulled one of the sofa cushions behind his head. You didn’t need to be a detective to know what other kind of problem was on the kid’s mind. The same sort of thing of which he himself was living proof that you didn’t outgrow. Humans didn’t, at any rate.
He reached up and hit the light switch, and lay in the blue darkness.
I’m going to lie right here, and go to sleep, and not think about Cathy.
He thought about Cathy. Even after he fell asleep.
C H A P T E R 5
IN THE MORNING, he was glad he hadn’t gone on drinking after the kid had left. What little hangover Sikes woke up with was cured by a long shower, his face turned right up into the needles of cold water. He felt 90 percent restored to the human condition, the tolerable part of it, by the time he sauntered into the station’s booking room.
“Hey, Zepeda.” He poked her in the ribs. He knew she hated that; he was prepared to duck. “What’s happening?”
She didn’t even turn around from the booking desk and the file spread open on it. “Captain Grazer gave me the word about an hour ago. Me and Petrosian have been assigned to assist on the Kaiser case. Downtown’s really turning up the heat on this one.” She flipped the file shut.
“That’s cool. I suppose we can use the help.”
“Good thing, ’cause we’ve already called in some potential suspects to give prelim statements.”
The smell of coffee brewing floated out from somewhere farther inside the station building. “Is George around?” His partner nearly always got there before him. “I didn’t see him . . .”
“He’s gonna be late,” said Zepeda. “He had to go see the commissioner.”
“Commissioner? George in trouble?”
“The best kind. He made Detective Two.” Zepeda tilted her head toward the squad room. “Come on, I’ll show you the suspects.”
“Wait a minute.” The words finally sunk in. “He passed the test?”
“Yeah . . .” Zepeda was already walking toward the door. “He’s your boss now.”
That took longer to penetrate. And hit harder.
“Hold it.” Sikes followed her into the squad room. Petrosian, already looking grizzled and stubbly this early in the morning, hunched over one of the desks by the windows, taking a statement from the civilian on the other side. “How’d he pass the test? I didn’t pass it.”
Zepeda shrugged. “Maybe he knows more’n you.” She picked up her coffee mug, which she’d left sitting on top of a file cabinet. “You want to get to work now? We got a lot to get through.”
“Yeah, sure . . .” Sikes gazed at the heavy sunshine sliding in through the blinds. “Detective Two. Well, I’ll be dipped . . .”
“Probably. In the meantime . . .” She pointed to the gray-haired human Petrosian was questioning. The man had a sour, disdainful expression on a saggy face. “That’s Dr. Paul Matus. Recognize him?”
Sikes glanced over and pegged him. “Slumlord.”
“That’s the one. He’s got a string of the rottenest old buildings over in Little Tencton. Zip for maintenance. Judge Kaiser sentenced him to live in one of his own places for six months.” Zepeda studied him for a couple of seconds. He had liver-spotted hands folded in his lap, and small, mean eyes the color of watered milk. “Doesn’t look like it did much to change his attitude, though.”
She walked Sikes farther past the rows of desks.
“You know, I’ve been a detective for five years.” Sikes nodded slowly, turning things over in his head. “I pounded a beat for ten.”
Another detective—Sikes couldn’t remember his name right off the bat—was grilling an unkempt-looking human, a skinny guy with matted hair and stringy beard, probably mid-twenties. Sikes couldn’t recall the suspect’s name, either, but remembered seeing his face.
The guy, his pockmarked face looking furious, hunched over the desk toward the detective. “Look, I came down like you asked. Just let me wash my hands!”
“Michael Bukowski,” said Zepeda. “Repeat offender, mostly minor stuff. Kaiser threw the book at him when he took a shot at a Newcomer pizza-delivery man. Bumped up the sentence under the ‘habitual criminal’ statutes, told Bukowski it’d go even worse the next time he saw him in cou
rt. Only got out of central jail a couple of days ago.”
Bukowski overheard her. He flopped around in the chair, turning his hard, bugged-out gaze at Zepeda and Sikes. “I want to wash my hands . . .” Yellow teeth stayed clenched as he spoke. “They won’t let me wash my hands!”
“Hold on.” It all bounced right off Zepeda. “Soon as you finish giving your statement.”
The hands—they didn’t look particularly dirty to Sikes, except for the black-rimmed nails—twisted around each other. “How was I supposed to know what the dude was?” The fury in Bukowski’s voice had evaporated, replaced by teary pleading. “He looked like a thief . . .”
“Yeah, right.” Zepeda gave Sikes an arched-eyebrows glance, signifying that the subject in question was a mental case—as if he hadn’t been able to tell already.
Sikes shook his head as they walked past more desks. “You know, George’s only been a detective for a year—”
“Sixteen months. Remember, we all took him out for drinks, to celebrate? And that was just about four months ago. It was Connie over in Records’ birthday at the same time, and she got plotzed and took a hit off George’s glass of sour milk by mistake, and she wound up puking on the sidewalk outside the bar—remember that?” Spoken with some satisfaction; Zepeda had a long-standing grudge against the blonde she always referred to as ‘Anglo fluff.’
“A year, sixteen months . . . whatever. That’s still not like forever.” Yeah, and it’s not five years, either. Is it? Then he couldn’t stop the next batch of words from coming out. “Hell, he’s only been on this planet for six!”
Zepeda had gone back to being all business. She pointed to another person sitting in front of one of the detectives’ desks. “Remember Darlene Bryant? From our old friends, the Human Defense League?”
He noted the details—female Caucasian, mid-forties, expensive tailored clothing—and the face. Bryant had been a finalist for Miss California nearly two decades ago, back when she’d been a relatively sweeter young thing and there hadn’t been any Newcomers to get her ass riled. Now her good looks seemed to have been dipped in shellac to preserve them, which hadn’t kept squint lines from forming around her eyes—Sikes was pretty sure she wouldn’t win any photogenic awards these days. She’d come complete this morning with a thug bodyguard, standing by her chair in a too tight suit and sunglasses that were supposed to be intimidating, even indoors. Sikes recognized him as well.
