The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  “I wish like hell I could go after them,” Jeremiah said. “Really, I do. You have no idea. But I can’t just disobey orders. I was told to stay here with you and make sure you’re safe. So that’s what I have to do. May not be the best use of my time, but I can’t do anything about it.”

  Marcus recognized in Jeremiah a resoluteness that wasn’t going to change no matter how long he waited or pleaded. Marcus was briefly reminded that the good cops could be almost as maddening as the bad ones. There was nothing left for Marcus to do but smile and thank Jeremiah for the ride before emerging into the heat of the climbing sun. He slowly lowered himself to pick up the day’s Inquisitor, which the paperboy had an uncanny gift of throwing directly into his freshly planted and mulched verbenas.

  He was unlocking the front door when Jeremiah called out after him, “Mr. Waters.”

  Marcus turned around.

  Jeremiah was standing with one foot on the driveway, the other inside the car. His head turned shoulder-to-shoulder, voice lowering.

  “If you’re serious about what you said, I think I might know someone who can help.” He smiled into the sunlight.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Give me the names and I’ll see what I can do.”

  5 TINFOIL BIRDS

  TILLMAN LIFTED HERSELF through the kitchen window and out onto the fire escape. She lived on the sixth floor of a narrow apartment building that seemed, at least when she looked down at the alley below, to gently sway.

  She pulled a pack of Camels from her sports bra and struggled to light her cigarette in the wind. Once it was lit, she took an enormous drag, the paper crackling. She turned and looked through the window to make sure her father was still seated in his recliner, listening to Al Green and staring at the ceiling.

  One of life’s many cruel ironies was that cigarettes tasted so much better after a long run. The death-drive at its finest.

  When her father had moved in three months ago, just days after her mother’s funeral, she blurted out that she had quit smoking. She wasn’t sure why she’d said it, given that it wasn’t true at all. The words had evidently formed themselves without her consent. She had been carrying a box of his clothes into the apartment. He was sitting in the recliner. She saw him seated in her small apartment, diminished and embarrassed, occupying this unfamiliar space, and she simply blurted out that she had quit smoking. He smiled and said he was glad for that. And then she knew why she had told him the lie—to give the man some small, false peace that she couldn’t otherwise offer.

  It had been an easy lie to maintain back when she was still working. She’d smoke on her way to the station, smoke on patrol, and smoke on her way home. She never had to worry about her father smelling it on her because—and here was another one of life’s cruel ironies—four decades of chain-smoking had disintegrated completely his sense of taste and smell. The only thing he could remotely taste, or so he said, were Hershey’s Kisses, which he ate by the handful. He kept the tin wrappers and made little sculptures of birds, which he kept in the junk drawer where he said they belonged.

  But lately it was hard to find excuses to get out of the apartment. She didn’t have the money for unnecessary errands, and there wasn’t anywhere else she really had to be. So she resorted to a few quick breaks on the fire escape, her head on a swivel, the city bending and swaying beneath her feet as the nicotine rushed to her head.

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket. The caller ID read: Jeremiah Combs.

  She looked back into the window, saw her father unchanged, and looked back to the phone. She ignored the call. She didn’t have anything to say to Jeremiah.

  She leaned against the iron railing, took another deep drag, and felt her phone ringing again. Jeremiah Combs. She didn’t answer. Jeremiah Combs, again.

  He was nothing if not insistent. Always had been.

  She stared at the phone for a moment before answering. “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  Jeremiah had a way of always sounding distantly amiable, the sort of tone that, from a friendly stranger, had maybe once been endearing, but was now unbearable. It made her wince, grit her teeth.

  “Are you busy?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “Can you please just answer my question?”

  “I have a few minutes to spare.”

  “You seen the news?”

  “What about it?”

  “Please just answer me.”

  “I’ve seen it. Must be pretty busy today down there.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know.”

  She heard the anticipatory edge in his voice, inviting her to ask him why. But she didn’t.

  “Yeah,” he continued, “Stetson put me on escort.”

  “Babysitting? Must have pissed him off.”

  “Maybe. I’m just parked out in a driveway right now.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “It’s actually all right. It’s for someone you might remember.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Marcus Waters,” he said. “You know, the journalist. The Kingfisher reporter. I remember you talking once about how your dad practically worshipped him.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Something like that.”

  “What do you want, Jeremiah?”

  Her cigarette had burned down nearly to the filter, enough for a small hit, but she took a large one anyway. It burnt her lips. If nothing else, she thought, cigarettes taught you to relish the moment of pain that accompanied the inevitable end of all good things.

  “How are you doing with everything?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We miss you down here. I hope you know that. We talk about you. What happened to you wasn’t fair.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Since when do detectives reminisce about disgraced beat cops?”

  “Come on, Tilly. Cut it out. Wallowing isn’t a good look on you.”

  She sighed loud enough for him to hear through the phone. “I can’t imagine Stetson wants you, or anybody else for that matter, talking to me.”

  “He’s got enough to worry about right now. Speaking of which”—his voice notched down a register—“I might need your help with something. Only if you’re interested.”

  “What, you need another babysitter?”

  “No, listen. I need you to look into something for me. I’d do it myself, but well, I’m stuck here. Thumb in my ass.”

  Tillman flicked her cashed cigarette down into the alley and watched it spin out of sight. She looked inside the window and saw her father snoozing with a newspaper folded across his chest. She brought the phone back to her mouth. “What is it?”

  Jeremiah explained the situation to her. Marcus Waters knew the hostage in the video. For Marcus’s book—which Tillman had actually given her father for Christmas last year; she had read him a few pages, but he ended up falling asleep and the book, to this day, lay forgotten on his nightstand—Marcus had interviewed the hostage in question. The Kingfisher had evidently saved him one night those many years ago. And from that same night, there were two others the Kingfisher had saved.

  “And Waters told Stetson all of this?” she asked.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Then why isn’t it being reported?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Stetson is trying to keep it quiet, but Mr. Waters is worried that Stetson may not be going after the other two names. He said that Stetson seems most interested in locating the Liber-teens.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.” She laughed. “Those kids have nothing to do with this. They don’t need to kill someone to get their point across. They can do that with a few strokes of the keyboard. The Liber-teen mask was a diversion. It’s fucking obvious.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Tilly. But I’m not calling to talk about the Liber-teens. I’m calling about the other people Mr. Waters interviewed for the book
. He’s worried they might be in danger. I know I’m putting you in a bad position. If you don’t want to help with this, I’m not going to throw stones. I mean, like I said, I would do it myself, but—”

  “If Stetson found out, you’d lose your head. Maybe your job, too.”

  “Right.”

  “Give me the names.”

  Jeremiah sighed through the phone. “Before you agree, I need to point out to you that if Stetson finds out you are doing this, he’ll go apeshit. Not to mention, Stetson may already be sending people to check up on them. It’d be bad news if you ran into a familiar face out there.”

  “You and I both know that’s not going to happen,” she said. “He wants the arrest. That’s all he cares about. All he’s ever cared about.”

  “I’m just saying. If he finds out you were there.”

  “Fuck Stetson. I don’t care if he finds out.”

  “Look, I want your help. But I also happen to care about you. You and I both know you tend to cannonball into things. So think this through completely. You could be taken off administrative leave any day. But if you do this, you’re blowing your nose at Stetson. If he finds out you were out on the field, well,” he mumbled, “you know what he’d do.”

  “Send me the names,” she said. “And put in a call for the addresses while you’re at it.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Ask me that one more time, I swear to God.”

  She heard Jeremiah laugh on the other end. She could picture him as he did so, his head pressed against the headrest. She nearly smiled.

  “If you get a chance,” she said, “come check up on my dad while I’m out. He should be OK while I’m gone, but just do it anyway. He’s gotten used to someone being around.”

  “Will do. I owe you one, Tilly.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said.

  “Does your dad still eat those Hershey’s Kisses? I could pick some up at the CVS on my way.”

  But she was already hanging up the phone.

  6 THIN LINES

  WREN HAD HER LAPTOP OPEN on the counter next to the cash register, but she quickly stashed it when her boss, Fester, leaned out from the office door at the end of the alley. He did this every hour—poking out like a cuckoo clock, scoping out his domain, and then disappearing back inside his office, where he would remain until about five o’clock, when he would then emerge, sit at the bar, and pound Bud Lights into something resembling oblivion.

  She had spent the first hour of her shift running the gunman’s video through a digital enhancement program—Pixie, still in Beta—developed by a fellow Liber-teen who went by the name of TrotskiiResort. With Pixie, she was able to select certain coordinates of the video and enhance the collection of granular pixels. The resulting image wasn’t crystal clear, but it was better than nothing. Wren watched the enlarged face of the hostage as the gunman held a gun to his head. She took a screenshot of his face, trying not to look at his moving, trembling lips. She stopped the video before the gunshot. There wasn’t any point in watching his death again.

  That living body, that beating heart. Reduced to sheer matter in the space of a second. It was chilling enough to numb. She didn’t have the time to feel numb.

  As she parsed the image, it occurred to Wren—though not for the first time—that in some alternate reality she could have worked cyber security for the FBI or NSA, a hacker with the blessing of the United States government. She could work to protect information vital to national security, launch full-out cyberattacks at hostile governments in retaliation. She knew her skill set well enough to know she would be a vital asset, which was to say she knew—though she wasn’t one to brag, the Midwestern curse—that she was better than any single cybersecurity expert working for the government. She dreamt up algorithms in the shower and wrote code in her dreams. But she’d never work for the government, even if the pay were better than a part-time bowling alley job. She’d never work for anyone who told her what to protect, what to take, and who to attack. She was not a mercenary. She was a watcher of the watchers, and this was an identity she had adopted with complete comfort before today.

  The bowling alley this morning was empty, with the notable exception of two day-drunk college boys—likely prolonging last night’s revelries—shouting each time the ball collided with the pins. Spare, strike, split, scream. To make it worse, she had recognized one of them when he stumbled through the door, though he clearly hadn’t recognized her. She had been in a class with him during her brief, yet fateful semester at the University of Chicago several years ago. It was the same class in which she’d met Parker.

  Wren had been seated in the front row of Introduction to Informatics. The professor—a hunched black man who wagged his finger like a dying metronome—stood in front of a clean chalkboard, lecturing about the impending effects of the Big Data Revolution.

  “If you live long enough,” he said, in a doleful voice escaping unmoving lips, “every single one of you sitting here today will die a collection of numbers and come back the same.”

  A girl seated next to Wren—Corvette-red hair, a VIVA LA ATARI T-shirt, typing madly on her laptop—whispered, “If you and I are coming back as numbers, Professor Father Time up there is coming back as Roman numerals.”

  Wren laughed, and the professor paused his lecture to settle a punitive gaze on her.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  The girl seated next to her smirked, and turned back to her laptop, where Wren saw her typing out a line of code. A tattoo of the pigeon from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman adorned her wrist, and each movement of her fingers against the keys gave the bird the illusion of flight.

  A more sentimental person than Wren might have called it love at first sight.

  The college boys at the end of the alley loudly celebrated a strike. She turned back to her laptop, in order to dissociate herself from the television that hung by a few fraying wires on top of the shoe rack. The news stations had finally gotten to the execution video and had begun to dissect it for their audience with a gluttonous glee. The newscaster jittered in his seat. He said, “At this point, a lot of speculation, and perhaps now we’ll have some answers. We’re going live to a press conference where Police Chief Gregory Stetson is speaking.”

  The camera cut to a broad-shouldered man standing at a podium outside, staring down at a few loose sheets of paper. The voice that found its way through the dense mustache was brusque, as though he were hurrying through the platitudes written before him—“the people of Chicago are strong and resolved and will not be shaken by malicious attempts to incite panic.” He assured the gaggle of reporters that the suspect’s claims about the Kingfisher were wholly false, the words of a “deranged individual.” He added, as an accentuated footnote, “Regarding the ideologies and affiliations with criminal groups alluded to in the suspect’s statement, specifically the Liber-teen hacktivist collective, we simply do not have enough evidence for such speculation at this time, but with the cooperation of the FBI, we are actively investigating any and all leads into their involvement.”

  She took a much-needed breath and opened the Liber-teen forum. The latest thread was titled “Vote?” She scrolled back through the conversation to find that they were considering whether or not they would launch an offensive against the Chicago Police Department.

  —If they won’t release the ME report, we’ll take it from them! There are lives at stake.

  —They’re not going to release it. We have to take it.

  —Fucking anarchy. I love it ☺

  —This is why we exist. To balance corrupted modes of justice. Why wait?

  —By helping a murderer?

  —This isn’t the way to bring about anarchy.

  —They ALREADY THINK WE’RE BEHIND THE FUCKING VIDEO! Why give them more reason to think that?

  —Sorry, I know this isn’t the right thread for this, but does anyone have a link to the Beta of SkullKrushers 2? Heard it’s fucking dope.


  —So we get the file and then what?

  —We RELEASE IT! We don’t need to do anything else. We let the PEOPLE decide what happens next.

  —“Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.”

  —Did you seriously just quote fucking Mick Jagger?

  —Hacking the report gives the asshole with the gun a reason to stop shooting people. That’s reason enough.

  —And let’s all remember that this is a police force that consistently brutalizes their minority citizens without penalty. They don’t deserve our deference.

  —http://doomsdayportalgames.com/skullkrushers2beta

  —There’s not going to be anything in the report.

  —This isn’t about the ME report. This is about showing the CPD that we are going to hold them accountable. No more secrecy. No more lies. They don’t care who lives and dies.

  —Who gives a SHIT about the Kingfisher anyways?

  —The Kingfisher was a badass. Real-life Superman. Ubermensch.

  —We could use the Kingfisher right about now.

  —The Kingfisher sucks ass.

  —The Kingfisher = harbinger of Reagan’s fascist/neoliberal drug war.

  —We’ve wanted to shine a light on the police in this city for a while now. This is our chance.

  —Anarchy, bitches.

  —In case you somehow missed it, we’re the number one trending topic on Twitter and Facebook right now. Pretty cool!

  —SkullKrushers2 sucks, don’t waste your time.

  Wren added her voice to the conversation, I can’t believe we’re even debating whether or not we advance the cause of a deranged sadist. This is not who we are. This is not our territory. What the fuck?

  And with that, she closed out of the tab and returned to Pixie, where she refocused the coordinates in the precise moment that the gunman displayed the hostages. There were two of them. But even with enhancement, it was nearly impossible to discern much else. Sacks covered each of their heads. Their torsos and legs were hidden beneath ropes binding them to chairs. The only parts of their bodies that were exposed were their hands. She took screenshots of each hostage’s hands, shadowed though they were. When she was finished, she viewed them one by one. By her best judgment, one remaining hostage was black. The other she couldn’t quite tell, but she enhanced the image another time and discerned a ring adorning one of the left hand’s slim fingers. An engagement ring, maybe. A woman. What this meant for identifying the hostage, Wren wasn’t sure. But it was something. And that was more than she’d had before.