“Yeah, right.” She floored it and gave him whiplash in the process. By the time they arrived at Mario Escondido’s door he’d feel like the back of the car seat was a catcher’s mitt and his head the ball thrown repeatedly from the baseball mound by a professional league player.
“Who needs a chiropractor when I have you to crack my neck for me,” he said, climbing out of the car a short while later and rubbing the back of his neck.
He wasn’t sure she’d even heard him. She had her gun out and was walking towards the entrance of Escondido’s place in that take no prisoners air that SWAT guys had around them when they went knocking on someone’s door.
They found Escondido sitting, guru-like, upon a raised platform, not quite a stage, more like an altar, before swaying masses. He had the same baby face Torin imagined he had as an infant, the portrait of unblemished innocence. Damningly, in his hand was a soda, and against the far wall a soda machine. Of course it could have been any soda. Torin would have to test it to find out if it was the one they were looking for. But judging from his guru-effect on the masses, it was a good chance that Davenport hadn’t led them astray.
The church interiors were cafeteria-bare and plain. And no windows. The throng appeared to be in the trance-induced throes of ecstasy. And the dumb ass smile on Escondido’s face, hard to tell apart from the smile of the truly enlightened, wasn’t winning him any points with Kendra.
She made a beeline for him, handcuffed him with zero resistance from him, and dragged him out of the room, right up the center of the aisle before anyone could react, and presumably before she succumbed to the guru effect. Her quick thinking may have saved them, but from what? True bliss or mere psychic bullying?
Torin released the soda can he’d grabbed out of Escondido’s hands, and zip-locked it in the evidence bag. He nodded to the robot to grab the soda machine. It did so without question and without the slightest sign of exertion.
When he got outside, Kendra was looking around, all riled. “What the hell happened to my car, Torin?”
Torin nodded toward the robot that was busy carrying off the soda machine to the precinct. “You shapeshifted my car? I didn’t give you permission to do that.”
“You’re not the only one who can think quickly under pressure. I wasn’t going to fight off a church full of devotees. Were you?”
“No, I guess not.” She whistled for a taxi. As it pulled up, she opened the back door and pushed down on Escondido’s bald head. “Let’s hope that guru light you’re emitting is the real deal. Because inside the dark hole you’re getting sent to, it’s going to be the only light you have.”
She climbed in next to him in the back of the cab. Torin got in next to the cab driver up front. “This is now a police car. It’s no longer a taxi,” he said to the car, ignoring the driver entirely. After doing a retinal scan on him, the car morphed on cue, and sped off, siren blaring. “Take us to the nearest precinct,” he said.
The driver just shook his head and cursed. “God damn it! This is the third time this week!”
“I don’t detect any accent,” Torin said. “I thought all you cabbies were ethnic. First generation immigrants and all that. Sorry, don’t mean to be racist, just that statistically speaking it is a gateway job if you’re just off the boat. Sorry, that sounded terrible.”
“He steals my livelihood out from under me and all he can worry about are my feelings? Well, screw you. And for your information, I graduated Harvard, Summa Cum Laude. American born and bred.”
“Ah, English major. That was going to be my second guess,” Torin said.
The guy deflated on cue and put his eyes back on the road.
TWENTY-THREE
“Can’t you work any faster?” Kendra said pacing back and forth, alternating between breathing down his neck and wearing a groove in the linoleum parquet tiles. They had robots living on Mars in self-sufficient colonies, but no one could figure out how to replace low priced linoleum flooring. Of course, the police department made no pretenses about being solidly in the 21st century.
Torin continued to work at his lab instruments until he got the answer he wanted. Some hours later, by which time she was in a trance pacing back and forth, and had all but forgotten about him, he said, “You want the good news or the bad news?”
“The good news,” she said, stopping dead in her tracks.
“This is definitely the drug that convinced Monty he was a bird, and opened Carl’s mind to the Godhead like the friggin’ portal to Narnia. It wasn’t just in the can Escondido was sipping, it was in every can in the soda machine we dragged in here. What’s more, the blood tests from Escondido’s worshippers all show similar analogues, though targeted at opening their hearts to the Godhead, not their minds.”
“As much as I want to kiss you right now, how can you possibly know that with any certainty without testing the drug on someone?”
Torin pointed to Davenport who was swimming the English Channel on the floor. “He’s been at it for hours, nearly as long as you’ve been in a trance pacing back and forth. Though you did that to yourself.”
“I thought the effects of the drug wore off long before that.”
“I’ve been sipping my soda gingerly, just enough to keep the psi field from collapsing.”
“What about the supernatural powers Carl claimed Monty exhibited?”
“Watch,” Torin said taking a big sip from the spiked soda. She stared at Escondido as the floor around him changed to what looked like a lane in a swimming pool, the water pushing him back so that his swimmer’s strokes were just enough to keep him in place. “If you like I can put us in a dinghy and him in a real ocean.”
“No, you’ve made your point.”
She collapsed into her desk chair. “And the bad news?”
“I think Escondido is the real deal.”
“Come again?”
“When you interviewed him he said he liked his soda fresh. So he frequently rotated out his supply, which you know just got recycled into other vending machines. I think the soda was transformed the same way his subjects were, secondary to his guru effect, which in his case, turns out to be real.”
“Bullshit.”
“I think there were only two ways to survive his past. One was to become the closest thing to a living Buddha we’ll likely run into. The other was to become the complete monster you see him as. I’ve been studying those interrogation tapes, not just with my two eyes, but with my third eye,” he said pointing to his forehead. “His aura or energy body doesn’t betray his words. It’s brighter and showier than 4th of July fireworks.”
“He didn’t say much during that interview, Torin.”
“He knew he didn’t have to. If you sat around him long enough, you’d be just like the rest of his followers. I noticed you kept running out of the interview room to get more coffee. You never spent more than five minutes at one time with him. You may not have known on a conscious level what game you were playing. But your unconscious knew. It knew that for you to hold on to your hating and typecasting, you needed to get to hell out of that room.”
She paced the perimeter of Davenport’s swimming lane like a coach. “Whichever one of us is right, he can’t go back on the streets. He’ll be someone’s lab rat from here on out. If not some penal colony’s psych ward then a private sector psych ward, or…”
“…more likely a government psych ward. Maybe one identified by three letters we never heard of.”
“Either way, he’s off the street and that’s all I care about. And you, are you good with this?”
“He’ll likely have the same effect on the government stooges that he had on his following. Properly isolated, and contained, his guru effect might actually do the world some good, rippling out gradually from the darkest of dark holes.”
“We make a good team, Torin,” Kendra said with a smile. “We keep each other in check so the worst part of our natures doesn’t get to leave the same mark as the best part of our natures.”
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“Yeah, I guess we do.”
“Home for some all-night lovemaking as we continue to get drunk off of one another?”
Torin jumped out of his chair and grabbed his coat and headed for the door all in one motion. “The man has the reflexes of a black panther,” she said. She glanced down at Davenport, who’d shifted to the Breast stroke. “Keep it up, Davenport, you have all those hot men to look good for.”
They got home and for the next few hours were unable to tell where each other’s bodies ended and the other one’s began. They were sweating like marathon runners but forestalling dehydration by lapping up one another’s sweat.
Finally, they took a break for chocolate covered strawberries and champagne and Evian. There were clothes strewn everywhere. That didn’t inspire them to clean up so much as to try on other costumes.
A few hours later, the costume gala had brought all manner of lovers together from various historical eras, and even involved Kendra playing the male part and Torin the female part in one instance.
They culminated by making love on the balcony, in full view of the world, as it was the only place in her flat where they hadn’t yet made love.
They rolled off each other eventually, laughing. “We’re far too good at getting one another high in the absence of drugs,” he said.
It wasn’t too long before she asked as she stared up at the stars, “So why do you think we were drawn to the case of the Buddha man?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, according to you, everything is connected, everything happens for a reason.”
Staring at the same night sky, as opposed to blinking, to help engage his intuitive mind, he said, “I guess you could argue he’s a milder version of Clyde Barker, leaving a lasting, life-transforming psychic impression on others.”
“You think some part of our minds drew us to him? The smarter part of us that knows we’re kidding ourselves thinking we’re through with Clyde Barker? You think it was using him to get through to us?”
Torin took in a deep lungful of cleansing, fragrant night air. “Rest assured there are versions of us in parallel universes out there doggedly chasing him down. Just so one of us reaches him in time, we can afford the luxury of being wrong.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Her tone belied her words.
Torin’s mind drifted back to the police precinct and to the outcome of the Escondido case. He thought about what Kendra had said. “We make a good team, Torin. We keep each other in check so the worst parts of our natures don’t get to leave the same marks as the best parts of our natures.” Could they expect to continue to nullify one another’s negative effects on the world by helping to keep each other’s demons at bay? What seemed a perfectly fair assessment of the dynamics of their relationship earlier, from this elevated state of consciousness following the tantric sex, didn’t seem to ring nearly as true. The latest realization about how the Buddha Man case connected to the Clyde Barker case suggested that if they were going to be medicine for one another, they might well need to up the dosage.
TWENTY-FOUR
If 9th Street were any more alive with activity at eight in the morning, Kendra would mistake it for Mardi Gras. She wasn’t yet sure what safari in time Torin was taking her on, but she was playing along for now, leastways until he frayed her last nerve. “What the…? Are astronauts falling out of the sky now?”
“Not exactly. That’s how the homeless roll these days. Survival suit, which was developed by NASA, by the way, you’re right about that part, protects him against all extremes of inclement weather. Even senses when they’re sleeping and inflates on that side to provide them adequate bedding. Monitors vitals, dispenses medication, food, liquids, all synthesized from the air around him by bacteria living on the outer surface. Cocooned in that thing, he doesn’t want for anything, including privacy. Noise cancellation technology can mute us out, or foreign language translators allow him the opportunity to travel the world just as freely.” Kendra and Torin regarded their curious funhouse reflections in the visors of the “crashed astronauts.”
“Damn. Still, you’d think we could get them some serious shelter.”
“3D printers build skyscrapers for the homeless at no cost. Each flat has enough smart-tech to make them feel they’re surrounded by an army of support staff, maids, butlers, cooks, lawyers, psychologists. Cocoon yourself in one of those things and no one would ever want to emerge from it.”
“Which I suppose is the whole point. Who wants homeless people cluttering up the street.”
“Not a particularly kind sentiment, but I suppose you nailed the psychology behind why those buildings got built.”
She thought it entirely strange to watch the homeless people in spacesuits interact with pedestrians like emissaries from another world, collecting “samples” in the form of donations, and putting them in zip-lock compartments in their suits and carry cases to take back to “their world.”
“So why did these guys choose to become spacemen instead?” she asked.
“Nomads, I suppose, to the bitter end.”
The shock value of the “astronauts” waring off, Kendra set her sights further down the road, as did Torin. “Will you look at that dweeb?” she said. An air-biker riding the cushion of air provided by two rear downward-facing fan blades and one front one zipped right down the center of 9th Street. That was until one of the street lamps clipped him at the neck, spinning him around the part of the post parallel to the street below, and sending the bike crashing into the sidewalk.
Kendra picked up her pace so she could arrive in time to give the air-biker a piece of her mind. Torin beat her to it. “You all right, buddy? That’s a pretty expensive bike to destroy like that.”
“Ah, no worries,” he said, picking himself up and dusting himself off. “Just printed it up this morning using the garage 3D printer. I usually give whatever I’m riding away at the end of the day once I’ve had my fun, and print up something entirely different the following day.” He eyed the wreck mournfully all the same. “Guess this one goes to the street cleaners instead of to someone with half my imagination for killer rides.”
“You nearly snapped your neck, you moron!” Kendra blared.
Bike Boy rubbed the collar about his neck. “That’s what the smart collar is for. Wish I could say this was the first time this has happened. I’m great at designing rides, not so good at riding them. Still, can’t let that get in the way of having the time of my life.”
One of the homeless guys had started in with the repairs on the airbike, using the tools from his spacesuit, which he seemed to have no shortage of with all the pockets at his disposal. “Hey, pal. You fix it, you own it,” Bike Boy said.
Space Man gave him a thumbs-up by way of a thank you.
Kendra gritted her teeth and groaned. “Get me out of here before I start arresting people just for being stupid.”
Torin led her by the arm. “Maybe if we appealed to the beauty in you, the beast will subside,” he said, steering her towards a street vendor. He tried various earrings on her. Kept shaking his head. The artist, looking on, studied her face and drew her something more complementary on his floating virtual workspace. The 3-D printer coughed up the perfect earrings for her on the spot. Torin put them on her and smiled. So did she when she got a load of herself in the mirror on his display table. “What do we owe you for it?” Torin asked.
The artist waved him off. “Got my UBI, man, I’m good. Everything else is by donation. But don’t bother,” he said, as Torin reached for his pockets, “already made a few thousand bitcoins selling it on line. Looks like that particular design is going over big in Africa.”
Torin once again led the dumbstruck Kendra off. “Is it me, or is the world just a lot kinder since UBI?”
“What the hell is UBI?”
He looked at her as if she was an alien he’d laid eyes on for the first time. “Universal Basic Income. The greatest invention since the wheel.”
“Yo
u mean since robots and automation put everyone out of work?”
“You mean put them out of work they didn’t want to be doing in the first place and freed them up to do the kind of work they were made for.”
Kendra fiddled with her hair in a vain attempt to compensate for the wind tunnel effect of the nor’easterly blowing straight up 9th Street. “Where are you dragging me? And for the record, I’m the detective, I should be dragging you, in handcuffs.”
“Are you just trying to relive fond memories of last night?” Torin quipped, taking her by the arm with the aim of leading her across the street against traffic at the first sign of an opening.
“I mean it, Torin.”
“Well, if you’re determined to spoil the surprise, I thought we’d check in on Carl, see how he’s doing with his physical therapy. Can’t be an easy adjustment getting used to life without legs.”
She searched his face for some explanation lurking behind his expression. “Oh, I get it. You’ve come to the late realization that your very nature bruises the soul. At least some souls.”
“Something like that.”
“Then do your penance on your own time, don’t drag me into it.”
With a squeeze to signal the mad rush to cross one lane of traffic, they were off. Stopping in the gap between lanes, he said, “You don’t harbor any regrets yourself? You said we correct for one another’s deficits. That may be true, but it doesn’t blunt the impact we have on others, leastways not nearly enough to my thinking.”
“I have nothing to be sorry for.”
A honking motorist passing them by sounded Torin’s protest for him. “Don’t you? You were pretty hard on him.”
“Standard interrogation technique.” Another squeaking horn of a speeding car seemed to call her on her lie.
“Only, you had an ax to grind, so you pushed harder than normal. You leave psychic bruises on others you have no right inflicting, and you can expect your own bad karma to come back on you.”
Time Bandits Page 18
