Liquid Cool

by Austin Dragon

  Then the Wans stopped yelling, suddenly. I opened my eyes. There was Dot!

  The topless—and pantless—Mr. Wan was frozen. I was already frozen, wedged between the two cell bars. Mrs. Wan was silent.

  Dot looked at the main officer and said, “Are they being arrested?”

  “We had to hold them until we verified their story, which we have, but they wouldn’t behave, so we left them in there.”

  “So I can leave them here?”

  “If it were anyone else, I’d leave them there. But I don’t think I can take any more of their antics, so I will have to ask you to take them with you now.”

  Dot turned her back to us and whispered to the officer. He listened and then nodded. With that, she walked out of the station.

  It must have been another hour or two before the officers opened the cell door and escorted Mr. Wan and me out. Mrs. Wan appeared with a female officer. The three of us were lifted up by full silver-and-gray peace officers and pushed out of the station into the pouring rain.

  “If I ever see you three again, you won’t be held pending investigation. You will be arrested, booked, convicted, and jailed for real,” one police officer said. “I pity that young lady having any relation to the likes of the three of you. The three of you are definitely cut from the exact cloth. I’m sure we’ll see you all again in some capacity. Until then, get out of our sight!”

  We stood there in the rain looking at each other. There was no Scotty from the Enterprise to beam me up and away from my parents-in-law, so I did the only thing I could do, short of teleportation. I ran away as fast as I could.

  My first stop would be the main Disease Control center to sterilize my clothes and give me a full anti-biohazard shower. It was something the average citizen didn’t know about, but it was all covered by medical insurance.

  Chapter 34

  Compstat Connie

  I WOULD PUT MYSELF in the “box”. It wasn’t a real box, and it wasn’t even a physical thing. It was what I called completely separating yourself from people and any possible distractions to get some major life task done. It was like going off to a secluded island, but you could go anywhere, even your own place. The key was unplugging from everyone and everything to create your own “fortress of solitude” for an indefinite period.

  But I found out there was another group of people, who liked to put themselves in a “box” away from the outside world and all possible distractions to sit and assimilate a set of knowledge like a machine—gazillionaires. All these CEO, founders, and innovative genius scientists of the greatest corporations seem to do it in their quest to come up with the next “big thing.” Unlike normal people, they had island retreats, lunar strongholds, or personal flying cities to go to, but it was the same concept—cut yourself off from humanity with a ton of books and no access to the Net.

  So, the original idea was not my own. Monks did that long before the Greeks invented money and there could be gazillionaires. Solitude was a must, and often, some quasi-fasting was involved. There was absolutely no answering the video-phone, texts, or emails. For the hardcore, nakedness sometimes was also involved. They said the purpose of all this was to get to your most primal state, so your “inner child” would not only emerge, but go wild. Well, I wasn’t doing the complete full monty nakedness in my place. No clothes except for my boxers was what I did.

  Regular eating and sleeping also went out the window. When this primitive process of hyper-knowledge consumption was over, they had a flurry of new ideas for their next robot, machine, computer system or program, vehicle, or spaceship. I couldn’t knock the process when it worked for me, too.

  I had done it before when I was much younger, when I wanted to know everything there was about classic hovercars and restoring them. I don’t think I left my place for three whole months, as I consumed every piece of data about hovercars, the technology to make them, the technology to keep them running, and all those ninja tactics that would set me above anyone else doing what I was doing. I was in my twenties and was in all the top classic hovercar clubs in my neighborhood and beyond. Every other member of those clubs was at least in their fifties, so I was the “child prodigy”. But I wasn’t a genius. I simply channeled my OCD tendencies into something productive.

  So I was about to do this for my new vocation. I needed to, because I was about to jump right back into the Easy Chair Charlie case, and the client was me. Easy never touched guns, so the notion he went gun-crazy one night was…crazy. I was also still checking around on the Guy Who Got Shot in My Office and the guy PJ threw through the door and I blasted out the window with my pop-gun. Then yesterday, someone showed up at the office main entrance, and he looked a lot like the sucker shooter who tried to gun me down in front of my place. Thank God for remote video surveillance. He sniffed around (literally) and then left.

  Random violence happened in Metropolis all too often. But this wasn’t random. I couldn’t prove it yet, but the bigger question was—why? I would learn everything possible, and impossible, there was to know about that night of the crime. So, before I went into the “box”, I had to visit Compstat Connie. She was like the female version of Wilford G. Megacorporations had machines that knew all there was to know worth knowing. The City had Connie and, lucky for me, I first met her when I was a police intern kid in school. So that, not my business card, was my introduction to her.

  City Hall looked different because of its white marble interior, flecks of embedded black paint, with huge columns from ceiling to ground throughout. But it was ruined by the video displays everywhere that showed the Mayor and City Hall meetings, department meetings, committee meetings, ad infinitum.

  This was the second time I had business at the city in the space of a few days. Based on all the referrals the Government Guy gave me, I would be here a lot more often.

  Downtown Metropolis was the nerve center of the city. I would never say the brain, because that implies intelligence. The city was not that and never would be; it was what controlled the brain. Its monolith towers were no bigger or taller than any other in the city, but they always looked different when I flew by in my vehicle. Some said it was its historic architecture of lighter colored paint for its exterior in contrast to the dark hues of the surrounding towers. But really, in the dark rainy skies, no one notices. It had to be a state of mind. You knew it was the center of power, so you intuitively saw that in its buildings when, in reality, it was the same as everywhere else.

  While the City Clerk’s office was in a prominent place in the main city towers, the Crime Information Center (CIC) of the Police Department was in what could only be called the basement levels. The Clerk’s office had guards and other visible security; CIC had nothing.

  Compstat Connie had to be in her late seventies, and she ran the multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars division, but when I entered the subterranean offices, she was at the counter sorting through papers, like she was an entry level worker. It was the same with the Government Guy, who was at a counter doing his own work. It seemed in government, unlike the corporate world, you may get the title and the salary, but you did the same grunt work you did as when you were first hired.

  It was still unbelievable, because it was such an important office for the police higher-ups. CompStat (Computer Statistics) was all the crime data collected in the city. That was her division, and it drove everything that the police did—deployment, budgets, resources, and personnel. The stats made it into every government press conference, including all the way to the mayor.

  “Why do you look familiar?” she said, watching me from the counter. It seemed like there was no one else in the office, with row-after-row of shelves to the ceiling with file boxes.

  We were now sitting in her tiny office. I handed her the “graduation” picture from the last day of my police internship—students and police personnel.

  “Well, look at that,” she said holding the picture. “Back when my hair had color, other t
han white. Cruz, isn’t it?”

  I was amazed. “There’s absolutely no way you’d remember me from all those years ago.” I laughed. “I wasn’t memorable, and there were like fifty other interns running around.”

  “No, I remember you. I may be old, but I have a great memory. You hung around my division.”

  “I interned for you.”

  “And the uniformed officers, too.”

  “You do remember me.”

  “I told you. What can I do for you?”

  “I want to become the male version of you.”

  She laughed. “Meaning what?”

  “It was the talk you gave to us.”

  “I remember people, but I can’t remember one of all those silly presentations I gave back then. I couldn’t remember it, even if it were yesterday. It’s always off the cuff, spur of the moment, when I give presentations.”

  “You told us how everything is connected, and your division looks at all the data, and after it absorbs every data point, it can see the connections, the trends, and patterns. That’s the ultimate in crime-fighting tools—those connections.”

  “I said that?”

  “You did.”

  “And you remember it?”

  “I do.”

  “Why would a high school kid remember a speech like that? Were you going to be a cop?”

  “No, but it helped me with other occupations. Seeing connections where other people didn’t. That’s why I’m visiting. I want to do that for one specific day.”

  “A specific day? What day?”

  I knew the day and time like my own birthday.

  Compstat Connie reached behind the counter for her mobile computer and started typing.

  “What stands out to you about the day?” I asked.

  There was a specific reason I asked the question, and if Compstat Connie was the same casual human computer she was before, she’d basically do my work for me—cutting off hours, maybe days, from me being in the “box.”

  She stared at her screen. “That was the night of the big shootout at Joe Blows.” She read more. “And the kidnapping of a little girl at Alien Alley. All the rest of your standard car-jacks, armed robberies, rapes, office invasions, murders.”

  “But why did you mention those two specific incidents first?”

  “They’re anomalies. All the rest is normal fare in the city.”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said to her. “I need to be able to see anomalies and understand how your mind gets you there. How long will it take you to teach me?”

  “Do you have five decades to spare?”

  I laughed. “No, but I’ll give the time I need to give. Think of me as your returning intern, two decades later.”

  “I thought you were some kind of hovercar guy.”

  “I have a new occupation, but don’t tell the Clerk’s Office.”

  She chuckled.

  “I’m like a private detective.”

  “Now that intrigues me.”

  Chapter 35

  Trash Boss

  WHO WAS THE MOST POWERFUL of them all? One government agency to rule them all. It wasn’t transportation, energy, health services, or even the police; it was garbage—Trash Services.

  One reason I didn’t mind the rain, like most people, was because the alternative would be far worse. Imagine this world as a smoky, humid hot-house. We’d all kill ourselves. People forgot that no matter how sophisticated and advanced we thought ourselves to be, any populated city has two things, no matter what: people and waste. Waste services was one of the many gray words people created for polite conversation. Wet, smelly, dirty, venal garbage. You could work yourself into a psychosis, simply imagining how much garbage flowed through a city of 50 million people on top of each other by the day, hour, or minute. Nasty! If the power ever went out, it wasn’t the cessation of food to the markets that terrified me. If we ever had an Extinction Level Event, it would be that no toilets would flush, and there’d be no one to pick up the trash. My own borderline clinical germophobia would be unrestrained to a point beyond any ability to manage.

  The filth is what I feared, and so did everyone else, which was why trashmen were treated with the respect they got. Everyone knew what would happen in mere hours if there were no City Trash and Waste Services. A reporter did an exposé and said the city could survive a few days without food, a week without water, without the Net for about ten days max, because of how many critical systems were manned by only machines. But the absence of trash and waste services would render the supercity unlivable within six hours. I once had to beat myself up to stop thinking about it, because a severe germophobic panic attack had gripped me and I felt my sanity slipping away. I think that was why people truncated their official name from Trash and Waste to just Trash Services.

  One thing about being involved, even tangentially, with the hovercar racing scene, as I had been, was you saw places of the city no one else had seen. These secret thruways and back alleys no one ever went made you firmly aware of the secret underground world of trash. On the main streets, trash was picked up quickly, never being allowed to pile up for too long. In secluded lots and alleys, that was not so, as the many amateur (and illegal) hovercar street races had shown me.

  It was at one of these secret, amateur races, a few years back I met the Surf Brothers. The brothers were also into classic hovercars, so we hit it off and talked for hours about the scene whenever we met. It was through them I met their boss, Mr. Pyle.

  I had heard of him before, when I was a police intern kid. People didn’t just throw garbage in the garbage. At Metro Police Central, I got an earful at one presentation about all the weapons, body parts, and full human bodies thrown into the trash. In fact, Trash Services and the Metro Police worked together on cases far more than anyone could imagine, which was why the Director of Trash Services had a dotted line report to the Chief of Police. If you’re a criminal and want to get rid of the evidence, don’t throw it in the trash. They’ll find it.

  I drove out to Nil Point early in the morning. The rain was coming down hard, but I paid it no mind. Rain or no rain, no matter what time of day, hovercar traffic would be awful.

  Nil Point was where the official offices of Trash Services were located—way out, away from the real main city. It was where all the garbage hovertrucks were always flying to and from. The skies around their building headquarters were thick with their vehicles, almost like swarming bees.

  I was surprised that I didn’t smell much as I approached the public parking area. What did I expect, open rivers of sewage?

  The public parking lot was huge. Trash Headquarters was the center, then a circle around it for government employee parking and the handicapped, then the outer rings for everyone else. There were public hovershuttles that also buzzed around the parking lot, small pods made for the driver, and one or two passengers. They were old, beat-up, and I didn’t even want to know the condition of the public seats in the back. I smiled at the driver, who hovered near me, and waved him off. I pulled down my fedora, pulled up my collar, and buttoned my coat. I was used to walking, since I always parked my vehicle away from everyone else, like every owner of a classic vehicle did. The rain was bad, but then, it often was.

  I was happy to arrive at the main building if only to get the hell out of the rain. There, I saw the metal detector arch with a policeman on either side.

  “Oh,” I said out loud. “I forgot my papers.” I spun around and went back into the rain.

  Was this the crap criminals had to go through?

  I walked all the way back to my vehicle in the rain, got in, unloaded all my illegal weapons, got out, and trudged all way back through the even heavier downpour to walk back inside. The two police officers were standing there laughing hysterically at me. They weren’t stupid.

  As I walked to the arch, one of them said, “Sure you got all of them?” They burst out laughing again.

  I ignored them and proceeded through. �
�Can you point me to Mr. Pyle’s office?” I asked.

  “Penthouse floor, of course,” one of them answered.

  Pyle knew he was an important man in the government; everyone knew it, and he made sure those who didn’t, knew it too. I met him only once before hanging out with the Surf Brothers. I didn’t like him then; I didn’t like him now.

  He was one man but had seven full-time secretaries, and though I had made an appointment and was early, I still waited fifteen minutes past the time. My rule is, if I’m late, cancel the appointment on my ass. But if I’m early or on time, I don’t expect to be waiting. One of his secretaries led me into his office, and I walked in with an obviously annoyed look on my face.

  “I hope I’m not inconveniencing your schedule,” I said before I reached his desk.

  He knew I was irritated, but didn’t care as he shook with a vice grip handshake. All trashmen had biceps of steel. “I was on the phone with the Mayor.”

  I didn’t believe him, but I let it go.

  “Thanks for taking the time,” I said as he gestured to take a seat in the very wide and plush chair in front of his desk. He sat, too.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Cruz? I understand you’re a detective?”

  “Well, since my licensing is on the distant horizon, I’m a consultant.”

  He chuckled and my little admission—government non-compliance—seemed to be an asset in his eyes.