Taking the Highway

by M. H. Mead

  The next spotter over—a woman with an expression sick with despair—waved at him. Her mouth moved, but he couldn’t hear a word. Still her message was clear. Keep going. Don’t look. Keep going.

  “There he is!” shouted a voice from behind him.

  Andre turned, expecting a paramedic, only to have a minicam shoved at him. He stared stupidly at the most famous name in Detroit spindom. Ugly Ben was dressed in white and his facial tattoos seemed to jump out of his pale face. “Officer LaCroix, can you explain what happened here?”

  He blinked and turned around, only to be met with the fill-in light of another camera, this one wielded by an overweight man in a dark brown bodysuit the exact shade of his skin. “Was this a bomb? We heard Overdrive was bombed.”

  Andre squinted in the glare from the spotlights. Naked Jay and Ugly Ben hated one another. They couldn’t both be here, calling him by name, both demanding answers that he wasn’t able to give. Second units flanked both men, angling around to include both the spinner’s face and Andre’s reaction in each shot.

  “Can you tell us who did this?”

  “Do you know who’s responsible?”

  “How unsafe is Overdrive?”

  Andre tried to move away from them. Nothing made sense—the spotter in his hands, the destruction all around him, these men and their questions.

  “No one has yet claimed responsibility for this,” Naked Jay said. “Who did this?”

  Andre stared down at the highway, feeling his breath catch and wheeze. “I did.” If I hadn’t come here, this never would have happened.

  “How did you plant the bomb?”

  “What do you hope to gain?”

  “What do you have against Overdrive?”

  Andre moved in a slow circle, pointing a finger in all directions. “This is my fault.” He moved away from the spinners. They did not follow.

  My fault. This death, this destruction. I did this. I should have stopped Topher Price-Powell. I should have arrested Nikhil. I should have helped Elway.

  Elway. Was he all right? He wasn’t answering any calls, official or otherwise. Andre struggled up the embankment, trying to retrace his steps, to get to the place where he’d last seen him. He needed Elway to make sense of this, to tell him what had happened, how to fix it.

  At the service drive he blinked and turned around, sure that he was seeing double. There were just as many wrecked and crackling cars up here as there were on the highway below. It made no sense. There was no Overdrive up here, nothing to disable. A service drive was an ordinary surface street with cars controlled by humans. There shouldn’t be any crashes up here.

  He wove between cars until he found a patrolman and tapped him on the shoulder. The patrolman waved him away. “Not now, buddy.”

  Andre tapped him again and showed his shield. “I’m looking for my friend.”

  “You and everyone else.” He gestured to the mangled cars. “Rubberneckers, every single one. Forgot how to drive. I heard someone plowed right into a crowd of pedestrians a few minutes ago. But do you think an ambulance can get in here? They’ll have to nose in from the cross street, if they can make it at all.”

  Andre passed the spotter from one hand to the other and back again. No. It couldn’t be. He tried to swallow past an aching throat. “Where?”

  “Where, what?”

  Andre couldn’t answer. He staggered to the alley where he’d last seen Elway. There, a gathered knot of people. He pushed his way to the center. No Elway. He moved to the next, and the next.

  Something, surely not conscious realization, for he’d stopped seeing faces, but something in his subconscious must still have been recording and reviewing because he stopped, retraced his steps, and knelt beside Jordan Elway.

  Elway was surrounded by people, good Samaritans, all talking at once. A pretty Asian girl stroked his hair. A young mother pressed her hands into a wound at his shoulder while a toddler stood nearby, sucking her thumb. A man was on his pad, talking in a language that Andre didn’t speak. Elway was pale. So pale.

  The blood was everywhere.

  Andre felt wetness spattering across his hands as he keyed living, priority into his spotter. Was it raining? Then he heard his own voice saying Elway’s name and realized he was crying. At least, tears were leaking down out of eyes that felt like they couldn’t blink across cheeks that were numb, freezing and burning at once. He wasn’t supposed to stay there and take Elway’s hand. He was supposed to keep moving, spotting. He was supposed to finish his soul-scraping walk through the highway of the dead to save other lives. He had no business squeezing that hand and screaming aloud for the medics to hurry the fuck up when he felt it squeeze back.

  He let go of the hand when a team of white-shirts jogged up with a basket-stretcher and pried Elway away from him. An eddy of smoke and a blast of wind from above as another helicopter stooped low over the scene. Elway and the men bearing him vanished.

  Andre stared stupidly around him, wondering what had happened. Had he really just found Elway? Was he really alive? He shook his head, unsure. He checked the device in his hands. It indicated a priority victim here and recorded that victim as in transit. Had it really been Elway? He thought so. He hoped so. The spotter flashed at him and spurred him back on his pathway. He went, marking as he did so.

  “LaCroix.” A hand on his arm. More spinners already? He shrugged it off and kept moving. Spotting the living and the dead with an invisible dot of infrared energy. The hand clutched at him again. He spun around and looked into the face of a living man. A standing man with no red-orange vest. Dark suit and specs. Someone from IA. He even knew the man’s name. Or should. It just wouldn’t come. Andre turned back to his task, grateful again for something else to think about. He moved along his way, spotting.

  Voices behind him again. “I think he’s in shock.”

  “Yeah. Even so, we need to bring him.”

  “Bring him? Jesus, Dubnar, I think we should grab orangies and help him.”

  Yes, Andre thought. Help me. Grab a vest. Grab a spotter. Fix this. Make this not my fault. Help me.

  Help me.

  THE HOLORECORDERS HAD IMPROVED since Andre left Internal Affairs. He remembered, three years ago, when they had to get an authenticator chip and notarized anti-tampering software in order to make any interrogation stick. Now, the recorders had authenticators built-in, and single-use recording media guaranteed that nothing could be altered. Everything he said and did in this interrogation room was now part of a permanent record. Hell, they could probably measure how much oxygen he breathed and how much sweat he produced.

  One thing that hadn’t improved in the last three years was Lieutenant Quigg’s mood. Quigg reached into his pocket and pulled out a third chunk of clove gum, adding it to the other two already in his mouth. He worked the gob around for a bit, then put his hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “So, you say you saw ‘someone’ point a rifle out a car window, but you don’t know who.”

  “Correct.” Andre leaned as far back as his chair would allow. He knew how that looked to the cameras—like he was trying to get away from the question. The recorders couldn’t tell that he was retreating from the stench of Quigg’s gum.

  Quigg exhaled, blowing a spicy stream in his direction. “And this so-called shooter was aiming at the fourths.”

  “He was aiming at a fourth.” Andre looked over Quigg’s head at the holorecorder. With all that measuring and quantifying and verifying, was anyone even listening to what he said?

  “A fourth,” Quigg said. “Which one?”

  “I don’t know.” How long had he been sitting in this room? A half hour? An hour? And it looked bad. It looked very, very bad. He imagined himself back in IA, on the other side of the table, doing Quigg’s job. After mentally spitting out that disgusting gum, he took a hard look at the suspect. Spotty reputation and poor work ethic. Charming, fun to work with, a good guy, but not exactly known for clearing cases. There was that one incident a cou
ple, maybe three years ago . . . and now he sat here, giving vague half-answers that looked worse than no answers at all. If Andre were in the investigator’s chair, he’d throw the book at himself. He’d throw a whole library.

  “So let me get this straight,” Quigg said. “You just happened to be in the same place as this shooter.”

  “I didn’t ‘just happen.’ He was following me. Somebody put a smart tag on me.”

  “What kind?”

  Andre threw up his hands. “How should I know?”

  “You don’t know what kind, but you’re sure you had one.”

  “They were tracking me, okay? There was a device, about this big.” Andre held his thumb and finger a centimeter apart. He’d instantly assumed it belonged to a spinner. One of them, he thought it was Naked Jay, had used the word bomb. The same word Andre had used in the car. But wasn’t it the first word that came to mind? For all he knew, the spins had called the last crash a bomb as well. The tag he’d found wasn’t necessarily a spintag. It could have just as easily come from the shooter.

  Quigg held out his hand. “Let me see it.”

  “Elway took it.” Oh God. Jordan. Where was Elway now? Surgery? Recovering? Andre didn’t know how bad it was, but prayed it wasn’t as bad as it looked. A few hours ago, he’d slapped Elway on the back and called him a hero. Told him that his career was secure. Now he was flushing the poor guy’s future right down the shithole with his own.

  Andre sat straight and inhaled a deep breath of fiery air. “I want a lawyer.”

  “You can’t have one. You’re not under arrest.”

  “Horseshit, Quigg. Bring me a lawyer or I’m not saying another word.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “I can’t say ‘horseshit?’ What kind of horseshit is that?”

  “Watch it.” Quigg worked his gum, staring at Andre across the table. “Let me tell you what this looks like. It looks like you knew that Overdrive would be sabotaged, and you knew who was doing it, and you wanted to arrest the saboteurs yourself. You always were a hotdog. When it all went south, you decided to throw off some suspicion by conveniently mentioning a shooter.”

  “I wasn’t hotdogging!”

  Quigg raised a single finger to pause the conversation. He left the room, and reappeared a moment later. He held the same finger in the air, pointed upward, and Andre’s own voice came through the ceiling’s speakers. “Sofia, listen to me. You cannot have a visible presence here. You’ll scare them off.”

  Quigg raised his eyebrows and pointed. Again, Andre’s voice: “You have to move those units. Backup means back. I don’t want anyone within five klicks of Vernier. Ten would be better.”

  Quigg signaled to whoever was on the other side of the window to shut it off. He crossed his arms. “Once wasn’t enough. You had to tell her twice.”

  “You don’t understand. That—” Andre pointed to the ceiling. “Did you listen to the whole thing? I had to tell her—I couldn’t let her—” Andre closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He wondered if it would have turned out differently if he’d brought Sofia with him. But then she might be on her way to the hospital, too—injured, like Elway. Maybe even dead. He wouldn’t be able to stand it.

  Quigg rested his forearms on the table. “You knew enough to request backup. You knew something was going down today.”

  “Arrest someone before they commit a crime? Is that how we do things now?”

  “You were there, LaCroix. You had had enough evidence to hold somebody. Yeah, that’s how we do things now. That’s how good officers have always done things.”

  Andre stood. “Get me counsel or I walk.”

  “Sit down, Sergeant!”

  Andre did not move. “Counsel.”

  Quigg looked over his shoulder at the holorecorder, then at Andre, and back at the recorder. He pulled out his datapad. “Have it your way, but Stamps isn’t going to believe you, either.”

  “I don’t want the union lawyer. Get me Oliver LaCroix.”

  Quigg pocketed his gum in his cheek, making a bulge the size of a ping-pong ball. “I never liked you.” He ran his finger across the top of his datapad. “I never liked working with you.”

  Andre perched on the edge of his chair. “Yes, you did. You’re just reconsidering.”

  “That’s what I’m doing all right. I’m reconsidering everything about you.” Quigg stood. “Oliver LaCroix? So you’re going to tattle to city council?”

  “My brother’s a damn good lawyer.”

  “Stay here. Watch your mouth.” Quigg made for the door.

  Andre found the air vent in the corner of the ceiling. He dragged the heavy chair directly underneath it and stood on it to open the vent wider. Cool air rushed onto his head and he tilted his face toward it, savoring the breeze. Never had the stale, damp, air of a police station basement felt so fresh.

  He thought about how glibly he’d dismissed fourthing as shallow, with only social consequences. What he wouldn’t give to be nothing but a fourth right now, where the pleasures were immediate and a sure thing, and where mistakes disappeared with the next carpool. What did a mistake cost a fourth? Half a day’s pay? Never more than that. It never cost anyone’s life.

  How many were dead? How many were injured? He’d seen Elway taken in the ambulance, but in the crush of bodies, would Elway even get the medical attention he needed?

  Quigg was right. Andre had enough information. He’d done the police work, he knew who the bad guys were. He just didn’t want to admit it. But he could have done something—arrested Topher, warned off Nikhil, something.

  Instead, he’d done the most useless possible thing. He’d stopped the shooter.

  Andre didn’t know how long he sat hunched over in his chair, the vent blowing cold air onto the back of his neck. They’d taken his datapad and would have taken his phone implant too, if they could. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t get a waveguide in this room, so they’d blocked his calls anyway. Besides, who would he call? Once word got out, no one would talk to him.

  He put his hands on his knees and felt something hard and rectangular in his suitcoat pocket. He brought out a crumpled paper booklet. He stared at it stupidly until he remembered Topher giving him the pamphlet at Oliver’s fundraiser. He’d barely glanced at it that night before shoving it in his pocket and forgetting about it.

  Now he unfolded it and looked at the pages. The typeface was so small that some of the words disappeared in the creases, but the meaning was unmistakable. He smashed the pamphlet in his fist and tucked it right back where he’d found it. The cameras in the room. Did they see? He cut his eyes to the door, wondering if he’d hidden it in time. He wanted to huddle in the corner, take it out, and study it more closely, but he didn’t dare. This pamphlet went beyond intelligent dissention into threatful manifesto. It was a prosecutor’s wet dream. No need to gather evidence against Topher or Nikhil or the CEJ, since they would just as gladly incriminate themselves. Andre wondered how to get rid of it, and if he could do so before Oliver arrived.

  He glanced at the door again, feeling like a child kept after school. Sure, your parents would come save you from the principal, but you’d be in worse trouble when you got home. What could he tell Oliver? Sorry, bro, your son and his friends fucked up Overdrive.

  He wouldn’t apologize. Not to Oliver. Not for this. He’d saved Nikhil’s life. He held onto that thought, like a shiny penny in an otherwise empty pocket. Nikhil is alive because of me. That had to count for something.

  He couldn’t tell Quigg about Topher, or the CEJ and certainly not Nikhil. One slip and he’d dump all this bad weight—every last particle—on his nephew. There was no way to share, no way to help. He broke contact with Nikhil, or he painted a target on him. It was as simple as that. He had to work his own angles, use the task force, arrest the ringleaders, maybe even get Nikhil to help him from the inside.

  Andre threw his head back and felt cold air blow on his cheeks. Who was he kidding? Sooner or l
ater—probably sooner—someone would ask the wrong question and make the connection between Andre LaCroix and Nikhil LaCroix, then from Nikhil to Topher Price-Powell and the CEJ. The whole thing was a ticking time bomb—for Nikhil if the shooter was still out there, for himself when anyone connected uncle to nephew, and for the entire city if the CEJ decided to bomb Overdrive again.

  The door opened and Quigg stormed through it. He tossed Andre’s datapad and wallet on the table. “Pick up your weapon on the first floor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get out.”

  “My brother?”

  “I never called.”

  Andre picked up his datapad and checked the time. How could it only be three o’clock when he’d already been in here a week? “No more questions?” he asked Quigg.

  Quigg worked his jaw. “None. Leave.”

  “So, why bring me here at all?”

  “You’re not here. You’re gone.”

  Andre walked past Quigg, then swung back around. Suspicion felt like someone squeezing his spine from inside his body. He leaned on the doorjamb, one foot inside and one foot outside the interrogation room. Quigg windmilled his arm, shooing him out.

  “You got other suspects who need the room?”

  “No. Out.”

  Quigg—or whoever was pushing Quigg—wanted Andre free and on the street. Nobody was afraid of what he might say. He could have said it all by now. Andre remained in the doorway, feeling like he was being set up for an even bigger fall. But what? And by whom? Well, he wouldn’t figure it out standing here watching Quigg chew his cud. If the world was going to fuck him, there was no sense trying to keep his pants on. Better to figure out a plan for when they were already around his ankles.

  Andre smiled and extended his right hand. “Thanks, Lieutenant. No hard feelings?”