From out of the outlands
Part 7
Police File:
I met Bubba in a Hollywood Boulevard eatery just after the L.A. Wars.
Things were hard for people like me who had got caught there when the violence broke out. I wasn’t a member of any of the gangs or part of the military, so me and my girlfriend didn't have any place to turn.
We just held out in one of the public shelters until the fighting stopped, then crawled back out onto the street like everybody else. I was luckier than most. I managed to get a job at one of the slop joints, washing dishes.
Although we had a place to sleep, we could only go there at night, so most days my girlfriend hung around the front, helping the waitress out although I was the only one that actually got paid.
Because the place offered cheap food, it became the unofficial hangout for one of the local gangs – a rough lot of war veterans whose surgical implants had given the federal troops a tough time. They had survived the war and were proud about it, prowling around the city as if they had won. They often celebrated in our place, stoned out, sometimes violent enough for my boss to call the police.
On this particular day, they flooded the front, celebrating some successful raid they’d made on the Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Whether they had stormed the wall or blown a hole in it, they never made clear, but they apparently had made their way inside and come away with a cache of credits and items easily hocked downtown. They had already consumed much of their profits: drugs that excited their hormones and made they want to fuck anyone they saw.
They just happened to see my girlfriend and the waitress.
Me and the cook went out to rescue them. But we were no match for the gang – their grossly distorted faces grinning at us as if they would whet their sexual mood by beating us up first. In a panic, the cook made the mistake of activating his cellular phone chip, his jaw shattered by a sonic blast before he could utter the code for the police.
He fell to the floor at my feet, his mouth a bloody mass of flesh out of which pieces of his jawbone protruded.
It was a warning to me. But I had a bad habit of telling people off.
My girlfriend constantly yelled at me for it, and wondered how I’d survived so long in the Outlands.
“Why don’t the lot of you get the hell out of here!” I yelled.
Had the owner been around, he would have handled things better, knowing that telling this crowd off would have only caused them to wreck the place – hangout or not.
The gang stopped laughing and stared at me. Maybe nobody like me every shouted at them like that before, and perhaps they might even have laughed had no one else been in the place at the time. But with a peppering of other people in the place, they easily saw me as insulting their pride. They bristled like angered wolves, and with their implanted fangs and hormone-generated hair, they looked very much like wolves indeed – if wolves had purple, green or orange fur, and had various high tech weaponry protruding from their limbs instead of claws.
At some point growing up, all of them had come from different backgrounds, Mexican, Native American Indian, blacks, whites; but looking at them, I couldn't tell which was which, only that they were angry enough to want to tear me limb from limb without use of their technological weapons.
Chairs clattered to the floor as they rose from the tables. My girlfriend clutched my shoulder, as if I could actually protect her, her sharp nails digging into flesh.
One of the larger members of this gang of extraordinarily large people staggered towards me, his green hair strewn around his face so I could make out little except his nose and his fangs. These last were apparently not the alloy and porcelain version typically implanted, but actual animal teeth biologically graphed to his own. A brown cavity spread along the right tooth, made more visible by his snarl.
“You’re a fuckin’ fool, little man,” he said, words slurred by drugs and the teeth. “This is our place. You want us to leave, you’ll have to make us.”
His confident grin dripped with the wish that I should try.
I could have called him a savage, but he would have taken that as a complement. I called him a pussy instead, drawing yet another snarl.
“I’m going to make this slow,” he told me as he staggered closer to where I stood at the gap in the counter.
I planted my feet and waited.
I had fought in the street before. You didn’t grow up in the Outlands and not fight at some time, especially with a mouth like mine. Yet I could turn a sweet tongue on a situation, too, and had talked my way out of more situations than I fought.
“Look, man, I’m not looking for trouble,” I told him. “But you’re messing my woman.”
My girlfriend’s nails dug deeper into my shoulder as if to say she didn’t think this would help.
The big man’s grin wavered for a moment as he cast a glance at her, and then at me. His silver-colored eyes – tattooed to resemble metal – showed the slight red around the edges from the hormone treatments. His pants bulged, he helpless to the hormone’s hunger as a wild wolf might be to the sight of raw meat. This was no longer a matter of morality or choice. He needed to indulge, and would indulge brushing me aside in the process.
The Outlands had its share of women. Gang gals, prostitutes, and laborers. Gang gals looked little different from their male counterparts. Prostitutes -–even those who started out pretty – soon found traffic wore them out. Laborers usually didn’t maintain beauty much better. My girl was plain, but in a world so ugly as this, looked pretty by comparison, and the tall green haired man lusted after her, as did his dozen or so companions who would get their taste after he had finished. Most likely, she would not survive the first round.
“I want her,” he said.
“I’m sure you do, but you’re not going to get her,” I said, my boast sounding hollow even to me.
“You get out of the way, I won’t hurt you,” the man promised, as if somewhere deep in his animal-like brain he understood my need to resist – as if the treatments could not entirely erase the early vestiges of civilization.
“I’m not getting out of your way,” I said.
Something glinted in his silver eyes and as his hand rose, blades flashing out of the fingertips to strike at me like claws.
I didn’t move. Maybe I was so scared I couldn’t. But his blow seemed to knock me back, and the blades sliced at my cheek without tearing out my eyes. Warm liquid spouted from the wound as I fell into the kitchen.
My green-haired enemy must have thought the blow worse than it was, because he turned towards my girlfriend and didn’t see me rise again. He certainly took no notice until I hit his head with the frying pan, his silver eyes rolling up into his head as he died, sparks showing at his temples where communication implants shorted out.
The rest of the gang howled in outrage! Then, they leaped at me, slashing and biting at me, and I would have died right then and there if a larger, darker shape didn’t suddenly appear tossing them off the way a Grizzly Bear might have wolves. The bodies of the gang flew threw the air, falling among tables or against walls. Those that managed to move after that, scrambled towards the door and the street, not towards me.
The black shaped paused along enough for me to make out the details. He was huge, but unadorned, except for a black leather jacket, jeans and boots. If he possessed implants, I saw no sign of them, and he looked more like the old fashioned motor cycle gangster I recalled seeing on the V-tube’s historic segments. His broad black face had stubble suggesting he still shaved. He had a glint in his eyes, not mean, but humored, as if he found the whole fight amusing.
“You got balls, little man,” he told me when he paused to survey his slaughter. The pitiful gang moaned around us, blood dripping from mouths and ears and eyes. “But you really shouldn’t take on more than you can handle.”
“I didn’t mean to, but they were after my girl.”
The big black man grinned. “Well, you don’t have to worry about that no more,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about nothing as long as your Bubba’s friend.”
The word "Bubba" rolled around among the survivors as they hobbled to their feet, their faces dark with fear.
“This ain’t your fight, Bubba,” one of them said.
“Well, I’m making it my fight,” Bubba said. “Now you go and do what my little friend said: get out.”
And they did, hobbling or crawling, most of them leaving a trail of blood behind him as well as pieces of their implants they had paid so much to get installed. They would come back later, but they never gave me a hard time again. No one messed with Bubba’s friend.
That’s when I got a better look at my new friend. He had the most remarkable face I ever saw, blue-black eyes pressed into a blue-black face with only a thin rim of white to separate them. He seemed humored by me, as if my brief struggle against overwhelming odds had amused him, and because of this entertainment, he felt he owed it to me to save me.
My girlfriend didn’t need to hang around the store after that. Bubba took us in, giving her a place to stay while I worked my shift.
Then a few weeks later, the waitress pulled me aside.
“I saw your black friend, yesterday," she said. "You know the one that hangs out with your girlfriend?"
"You mean Bubba?"
"That's him, the biker guy."
"What about him?"
"I saw him over at the clinic."
"So?"
"He was getting shots against the disease."
Two days later, I was at the clinic, too, the doctor telling me I had disease, too.
"That's impossible," I said.
"It's always impossible," the doctor said, as he plunged the needle into my arm.
I didn’t see Bubba for a long time after that. Although you could get the disease other ways than sexually, my girlfriend admitted she had gotten from him, and she had given it to me. I lost touch with both as I moved east to seek out free treatment in New York City.
I was lying in a bed getting IV – the doctors claimed I didn’t have much time – when I heard someone moaning in the hall, and then saw the huge black shape looming in the doorway.
"Bubba?" I said, and the black man paused, something odd showing in his blue-black eyes, distortion, from a later stage of the disease as it worked up into his brain to do its damage. He frowned at me as if struggling to recall where he knew me from. I was thinner than I was back in L.A., all bones, and couldn’t have looked remotely like the man I was.
But he knew me and grinned, a faint light of sanity from a brain rapidly deteriorating. He kept mumbling about needing to hit the road, and how the bars on the windows were keeping him from getting away. He continued to mumble as he vanished again.
Lucky for me the cure stuck. But it took months for me to get back out onto the street, and then, I had to take up petty crime to get by. Jobs were scarce for people with certificates, but recovered or not, I wasn’t getting a clean bill of health enough for anyone to trust. I dealt dope. I talked old ladies out of their savings. I broke into places, hocked off the goods. And then, I got caught.
They had me in handcuffs when they brought me into the county jail, behind me, garage doors closed, thumping with a sound of utter finality. How I wound up in New Jersey I couldn’t recall. But my chip told local law enforcement all they needed to know about my record, and it was clear I wasn’t getting out for a long time.
Oddly enough, I didn’t mind as much as I would have when I was younger. Although it was dangerous in jail, it wasn’t much worse than the Outlands, and I didn’t have to scramble for my three squares a day or for a mattress to snuggle.
I still had the details to work out like a preliminary hearing so sat in the bullpen section of the jail waiting for the court to call me up. This was a large box with about fifty others just like me, most of whom had the face scars testifying to their recovery from the disease. None of the hard color-haired inmates came near us.
When they brought the black man in, he was wrapped in chains. I didn't immediately recognize him because of his bruised face, the blood dripping from his mouth and eyes. They dumped him in with us, laughing as Bubba staggered around, arms pinned under the chains at his side, he, cursing them, they laughing harder on account of his cursing.
The cure had taken with him, but not in time to save his mind.
He promised to kill them all if he ever got loose, and managed to get one hand free, a Houdini trick that eventually brought both arms free, he, swinging the chain over his head and through the bars, guard and prisoner ducking to avoid his fury. When he could not reach the guards outside the cell, he grabbed a hold of the toilet in the way and yanked it free as well.
Shouting! Holding it up. Then, frowning over his shoulder as he caught sight of me, a moment before the guards -- now with sonic guns -- fired, his blood mingling with the gush of water as he died at my feet.
***********
“I won't hear of it,” the mayor said, pounding his fist down on his desk. “The man's been tried and proven innocent. I won't have you harassing him again.”
“You can't call that a trial,” Vincent said. “Besides, we have new evidence.”
“What new evidence?”
“A witness.”
The mayor's thick brows rose. “You found someone who saw the murders?”
“No, but someone who can put him at the site of every crime.”
“And for that you're proposing a raid on Chelsea?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I won't allow it.”
“I'm afraid you don't have a choice,” Vincent said. “I've already gotten a court order.”
“You son of a bitch!” the mayor screamed, leaping out of his seat as if he intended to fly across the desk, jabbing his finger at Vincent's face. “You went behind my back.”
“I had to.”
“Well, you can forget your little raid. A court order won't do you any good if you're not around to enforce it.”
“Are you telling me I'm fired?”
“Yes, damn it, I am.”
Vincent nodded slowly, something like a smile rising to his lips. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to arrest you.”
“Arrest me? What for?”
“Interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty.”
“I have a right to fire you,” the mayor yelled.
“Yes, but not for doing my job.”
“You have no witnesses. I can say I fired you for a number of reasons.”
Again, Vincent smiled, then bent his head forward. “Did you get all that, Hudson?” he said into the combination microphone and camera hooked to his label.
“Sure did, chief,” Hudson said, his laughing voice coming over the earpiece.
“Get what? Who are you talking to?” the mayor demanded.
“My assistant,” Vincent said. “He's been monitoring me the way we monitored Laura at the club.”
“You mean you're wired?”
“Yes,” Vincent said.
“That’s outrageous! I'll have you in jail for that, violating my rights.”
“We violated nothing,” Vincent said. “We did everything by the book.”
“But it's illegal to spy on a private citizen.”
“For one thing, you’re not a private citizen. Secondly, we have a court order.”
“And how would you go about getting one of those? What judge in his right mind would have you spy on the mayor?”
“One who believes there is probable cause that a crime has been committed.”
“What crime? My firing you?”
“No,” Vincent said. “The crime started much earlier, when you and Cromwell agreed to circumvent justice. You made a deal with him, allowing a neighborhood court to try him instead of a criminal court.”
“And why would I do that?”
“To keep him from mounting a campaign against you. You're always so concerned with votes and Mr. Cromwell is perfectly capable of spreading rumors that could draw whole neighborhoods against you.”
The mayor's face grew sly as he sat back down in his chair, the red fading from his cheeks. “That sounds very convincing,” he said. “I suppose if I was a judge, I might grant you a court order. Proving it is another matter, don't you think?”
“Not so difficult a task as you would believe,” Vincent said, watching the mayor's eyes as they dilated with both interest and fear.
“How would you do that?”
“By placing Cromwell and you in the same location at the same time.”
“You can't prove that,” the mayor said his voice rising for a moment before he managed to control it.
“Oh, but I can. The same witness who put Cromwell as the scene of every murder, put him here in this office just before you agreed to let him be tried.”
“That's a lie!”
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “But it was enough to get a court order, and now thanks to the court order, we can charge you with trying to block our investigation against Cromwell,” Vincent said, then bent his head, speaking into the hidden transceiver. “Hudson. Would you please send some officers in here. We need to transport the mayor to the station.”
“Wait a minute,” the mayor yelled, jumping up again. “I have rights.”
“Of course you do. We wouldn't dream of depriving you of them. You will be informed of your rights as soon as my men get here.”
“I demand to see an attorney.”
“All in good time,” Vincent said as two uniformed officers entered, looking a bit shy as they eyed the office and the man they were to arrest. “You can make whatever calls you need once we have completed the booking -- from the station. By the way, I've taken the liberty to inform the press of your possible arrest. They are waiting outside. You might want to make a statement.”
The mayor's face became more vivid red than it had before, the eyes nearly bulging with their outrage. “You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “You fucking traitor. I appointed you. I took you out of the gutter and made you. And now this is what I get?”
“This is what you get if you violate the law,” Vincent said. “Come along. I'm sure you want to get this over with as soon as possible.”
***********
A cold air blew on Vincent's neck, the air conditioner running in the van despite the snow outside, air blowing constantly to keep the electronics from burning up. He could feel their heat, too, coming at him in waves, the way an illness strikes, alternate shivers and sweats. Yet no one else in the van seemed to notice, or at least, he could read nothing of it on their faces. The driver beside him in the front looked as impassive as the stone lion outside the library. Hudson, fitted up with headphones and microphone, looked too busy to feel heat or cold, engineering an operation that would wind them all up in jail. He whispered orders to men inside and outside the van, orders that sent a fleet of police vehicles slowly towards the walls of Chelsea.
“Everything's in place, chief,” Hudson said, holding one hand over the microphone, his eyes showing the shimmer of excitement, as the mind behind them contemplated the upcoming violence.
“Good,” Vincent said, snapping off his seat belt as the van came to a stop, just this side of the belt of light surrounding the besieged neighborhood. “Alert the invasion team. I'll meet them on the street.”
Vincent yanked open the passenger side door and slid out, his body armor giving him an additional thirty pounds, making him feel more vulnerable, not less. Speed was always key to his survival, but Hudson had insisted on the added armor.
“If you're crazy enough to go in with the team, then you're going to wear this stuff,” he'd said. “Frankly, I don't understand why you want to go. It's a routine arrest. Any officer can do it.”
“It's not routine,” Vincent said. “This man will resist. I don't want him shot before I can get him to trial.”
“If he resists too much, you'll still have to shoot him,” Hudson said. “Then there's his security team to worry about. You might have cut off the head, but he's sure to have gotten another by now. If something goes wrong, you may have to shoot your way out.”
But Vincent liked the odds. He had the woman working on the inside, and Bosk helping out with security codes and maps of Chelsea's inner workings. Between the two, Cromwell wouldn't escape. He had talked to the woman once, informing her of his intentions to come in and arrest Cromwell.
“But we need to have him occupied,” Vincent said. “If he gets wind of us, he'll make a fight of it. I don't want any more innocent people killed.”
“He'll be occupied,” the woman said, telling Vincent the doors would be open and personal security devices relaxed. “You just come and get him.”
The plan called for a team of seven to enter a service door in one of the walls. If Bosk's codes still worked, this would bring the team into one of the many service tunnels that burrowed through the neighborhood, bypassing the whole normal security process. Crossing the light barrier presented the greatest risk of discovery -- which was why Vincent had arranged for a daytime invasion, and several distractions. The first would occur before the invasion team approached, a car accident hear the uptown gate, so violent, one of the vehicles would explode on impact. No one would get hurt, but that team, with the liberal use of theatrical makeup, bandages, and other creative measures, would make it seem that way. Vincent had even arranged for an ambulance, one with full wailing sirens, to approach the scene just as the invasion team made its approach on the wall. He hoped, all attention would shift from the quiet southwest corner to the accident scene.
The second distraction would come later, once Vincent and the team got inside, something much more threatening, something designed to turn Security's attention outward again, allowing the team to move quickly and quietly to Cromwell's mansion. Vincent had made arrangements for several of the street gangs to mount an attack on the south side of the city, just as the team got inside near the southwest wall. This part of the plan worried Vincent. Gunfire would erupt on both sides, and though he had little respect for the street gangs per se, these fools did this as a personal favor to him.
“You want an attack, you got it,” the grim leader told Vincent when he approached them with the idea. “We’ll do anything for you.”
“I don't want you to kill anybody,” Vincent told him. “Or get any of your own shot. Those guards are going to be hot to kill, pumped up by months of frustration. We've had them closed up and they're just waiting for the chance to explode on somebody.”
“We know. We've watched them, too. We'll be careful.”
Vincent never asked why the gangs had kept watch on the neighborhood, though several possible motives crossed his mind. This gang -- like most of the street gangs -- largely survived off dead meat, vultures sweeping down onto the scene of a tragedy. Although full of bravado, they rarely fought straight up with anyone, preferring the helpless and the hapless as their victims, pursuing those who wandered out of the walled places in curiosity, or wandered out of the clubs dead drunk. Gangs waited and watched and then, pouched, collecting their reward for patience. Perhaps, they'd sensed some kind of fair game in Chelsea, some catastrophic clash between the police and security that would leave something left for them, or provide them with some window of opportunity through which they could climb.
Standing on the street, the wind blowing cold from uptown, Vincent searched the shadowy walls of the dilapidated Outlands for some sign of the gang. He saw nothing, except other men, dressed as he was in the gray padding of police armor, radios drooping from their necks like Internet newscasters -- though none of their faces was pretty enough to make the grade visually. He knew all five men: Johnson, Eliot, Ranch, Kowoski, Garcia. He had done duty with all of them from time to time, been down and dirty on the street with them, knew their habits and their flaws, but knew above all he could trust them and count on them. The sixth figure looked much like the rest, although her face was pretty enough to make the network news. He knew less about her than he did the others, but had insisted upon her coming, after he had seen the gleam in her eye and heard her reasons for volunteering.
“I want that son of a bitch, chief,” she said. “I want to make him pay for what he did to Laura.”
“Pay how?” Vincent asked.
“I want him in a real court before a real jury, and I want to see his face when that jury says we should fry him.”
That convinced him, though taking her brought back the images of Laura and his fears of having another victim to Cromwell's madness, fears only remotely allayed by the fact that this woman, Myrna Roth, was going in fully armed, and had a record in hand to hand combat at the academy unmatched by any man. Cromwell wouldn't catch her by surprise.
Roth reached Vincent first, her eyes still hot behind the plastic mask, her mouth only marginally softer, touched with the usual pre-operation jitters.
“You okay?” Vincent asked her.
“Damned straight,” she said as the other five men gathered around. Hudson's voice whispered in their hears, going through the plan again for the hundredth time, the man having memorized every detail, insisting by repetition they memorize it, too. Then, the chanting changed into a more direct communication with Vincent.
“Everything's in place, chief,” Hudson said, his voice tainted a little by his doubts. He had wanted to come along. Vincent had refused.
“I want somebody back in the van I can rely on to get me out if something goes wrong,” Vincent had told him.
“If I go with you we won't have a problem getting out,” Hudson told him.
“ can't rely on that. Just do what you're told.”
Hudson did not complain again, though constantly dropped hints of his availability, if Vincent should choose to go with eight people instead of seven or if one of the seven should come down with heavy jitters or another insoluble problem. None did. All wanted this bust as much as Hudson did, all knew Cromwell's file by heart, from his photograph to the photographs of his victims.
“All right, Hudson,” Vincent said, whispering into his mouth mike, though this was an unnecessary precaution here. Inside, where they would need silence, all would whisper. The techy's had set the mikes to pick up the slightest moan.
“Two minutes,” Hudson said.
“Let's go,” Vincent said, motioning towards the wide barrier as the police vehicles pulled away. Inside the van, one of the technical men ran a search program that would find the electronic wavelengths, tuning into wall security. Then, finding it, he ran yet another program that sprayed the wall with a blanket of microwave transmissions so full of electro-magnetic trash none of the fine external sensors could continue to function.
Before them, the ground changed from ruined city to rubble, the bulldozers that had cleared the swath had left a foot high level of stone and brick stumps, like a vast floor of uncertain tiles, some shattered pieces filling the cracks of what once might have been a real floor. All the guards wanted with a free fire zone, and the lack of anything to give their enemies cover.
“One minute,” Hudson said, as seven stooped figures rushed towards that floor, then out onto it. Vincent heard the crackling in his earphones, the telltale announcement that the jamming had become, jamming that wiped out Hudson's voice along with the wall's sensors. Over the stones the seven figures went, feet slipping a little on the stones, steel-toed boots stumbling over pieces of brick brack sticking up from the rest. Vincent's heart kept time, beating out each quick step as he led them towards the door Bosk had told him about, towards the small silver electronic plate that rested just to the right of it. Vincent's silver pouch held Bosk's security card, the card that once inserted would let the seven in through the wall. Vincent wondered if he would work, wondered if security codes would be the same, or would the seven find themselves stranded against the wall, waiting for Hudson to return and blast the wall again with Microwaves to cover their retreat -- a retreat Vincent could not afford to take now that he had committed himself to the attack. His whole life now road on this operation. Although charged of duplicity, the mayor was still not convicted – and would soon be free on bail and available to the press. Vincent needed Cromwell, and needed a Cromwell willing to tell his own side of the matter once the shit started flying over the local Internet. Vincent needed Cromwell’s body to offer and a conviction, a sacrifice to the meat eater who would look unkindly towards anyone protecting a killer and rapists. Without that body, the press would shred Vincent, and the mayor would likely walk away, unscathed, and with the love and affection of the wealthy neighborhoods. The good mayor will have become a hero for firing a bad cop like Vincent.
Suddenly, they reached the wall. Vincent hadn't even seen it coming, charging like the others with his head down, struggling more with surviving the rough ground than worrying over just how close the wall was. Then, it loomed over them, and they thudded against it, like over-anxious children miscalculating a stop.
Johnson grinned, the broad black face of the police sergeant as lively behind the mask as it was in the flesh, devilishly pleased with the little joke the wall had played on them, as it was one of his own pranks.
“Who has the card” Vincent asked, though Eliot’s name came instantly to mind, Eliot, the techy, Vincent had insisted on bringing along instead of another heavy gun.
“I have it chief” Eliot said, easing up, a small man that looked utterly out of place in the heavy gear he carried, as much a kid in his father’s work clothing as a man doing a job. He looked confused as he searched his suit for the appropriate pocket, coming up with several wrong choices at first, pulling out a clip for his pistol first, then a neighborhood map, then finally the plastic credit card like key. He trust this into Vincent’s hands as the other men and woman pressed their backs against the wall on the opening side of the door, pistols with muzzles pointed upward, their faces turned towards the expected gap – though which they would immediately charge.
“Ready” Vincent asked. All heads nodded as he pushed the card into the slot, immediately giving life to the small screen above it. The image of buttons appeared there, a touch pad waiting for Vincent to feed in the appropriate code, the code Bosk had given him. Vincent’s palms sweated inside his gloves as he lifted his hand and began to punch in the sequence of numbers. Finally – with only a slight hesitation – he hit the pound key and stepped back. The punch pad faded from the screen, replaced by an imageless color blue. Then, with another short delay, the door eased open. Five figures swept in the moment it were wide enough to emit them. Four men and one woman bearing their pistols before, them, spreading out to either side of what proved to be a small room.
Bosk called it auxiliary headquarters, though it lacked most of the sophistication of the main unit, where Vincent had walked through on his own visit to Chelsea. Bosk said few people came here unless there was a problem with the main unit, and told Vincent not to expect trouble. But Vincent had expected trouble, believing security would dispatch someone once the microwaves blinded their visuals. Someone was there; but someone not ready for the batch of police charging through the unexpectedly opening door. The guard, in gray, leaped to his feet, a small metal panel open, displaying the inner workings of the neighborhood’s security system, light lines glowing with the transmission of TV, Radio, computer and other services through the entire walled area. The testing light pen fell from the guard’s hand, a hand whose fingers flexed but did not reach for the holstered pistol at his side.
“Hands up” Roth shouted, the woman cop leading the pack in her charge towards the man, slapping his hands away from the holster as she stripped away the guard’s pistol with her own free hand.
The man could no more have resisted than he could have run for help, staring with disbelief at the door and those armored police who came through its opening. Ranch took over for Roth, his gloved huge hands gripping the man by the collar and the belt and throwing him against the wall, where he finished checking for weapons or devices of warning with a quick frisk. Then, after having stripped off a communication device from the collar, he clamped a heavy set of electronic manacles on the man's wrists, slapped a piece of silence tape over his mouth, and maneuvered him into a corner of the room, where he warned him with a forefinger to stay put.
Eliot slipped passed the others, bending down over the open panel to study the fiber optic system. After a moment, he glanced up at Vincent and nodded.
“Everything runs through here,” he said. “I can take control of the whole neighborhood from this point.”
“Good,” Vincent said. “You get started. We won't need anything on the way to the house. But once we've got Cromwell, you're going to run the show. Break out your stuff. Meanwhile the rest of you strip.”
The team complied, except Kowowki, whose job it was to stand guard here, as a back up for trouble. Once control switched from the main panel near the gate to this location, security would come, and he would have to greet them. Like Ranch, Kowoski was huge, though unlike Kowoski, his expertise was in weapons and defense. He had learned much about setting up a firebase during his two-year stint in the L.A. wars. He moved now, slipping his backpack to the ground, from which he removed devices as complicated as Eliot's, but devices with a much deadlier purpose.
Finally, five ordinary people readied to ease out of the room and into the street on the far side of the wall, people dressed in street clothes much more becoming a posh neighborhood. Roth looked stunning, making Vincent wince a little when he looked at her. The others wore upscale clothing that looked a little threadbare, their police salary unable to afford the pricey stuff so commonly worn in Chelsea. But threadbare or not, it would pass for the short trip to and from Cromwell's house. Only Garcia looked out of place, a gold chain dangling from out of his shirt, in a cultural clash with the world into which they were to emerge.
“Remove it” Vincent said.
“But why”
“It doesn't fit”
“I paid good money for this” Garcia growled. “This is class stuff. First rate.”
“But it's not what these people consider class” Vincent said. “You're in disguise, not competition.”
Reluctantly, the small Puedo Rican slipped the gold chain off and put it in his pocket, his face making it clear he did not like Chelsea's sense of taste.
“All right,” Vincent told the four people who were coming with him. “I'm going to say this only one more time. If you get lost. Come back here. If this place is taken, turn yourself in. Don't try getting out on your own. The department will get you out the legal way. I won't have anybody killed unless we have to. Our prime objective is to get Cromwell out alive. Is that understood, Roth?”
Roth stirred, fire burning in her eyes. “That's the way I want him out, too,” she said. “I want to see his face when the jury pronounces him dead.”
“Fine,” Vincent said. “To that end, we kill anyone who interferes with us doing our duty. Do you all have your kits?”
Each pulled out a small plastic packet, containing map, compass, backup transmitting device, and money.
“And weapons?”
Each held up a pistol and extra magazines, except for Ranch, whose automatic rifle was strapped to his back, giving him a slightly hunched back appearance.
“All right then, let's go,” Vincent said, and led them to the security door that marked the entrance to the street.
************
As pre-arranged, Ranch and Garcia went together, a well-dressed white man might explain the Puedo Rican's presence if someone took a close enough look. Johnson came with Vincent and Roth, a black man stringing along with an obviously well-to-do couple. By his size and demeanor, he would appear as body guard, instead of companion, more to the power of the rich white couple. All this role playing made Vincent sick to his stomach. He'd grown up on the street where people addressed each other as nigger, spick and honky, and yet that world had more respect for each such people than did a neighborhood like this where such language was rarely if ever used. To two units walked casually, in a meandering style that seemed without purpose. Yet both teams moved quickly through the couple stone streets, Vincent struck by the turn of the century airs the people here had taken on when doing their renovation.
Imitation gas lanterns. Even a few turn of the century automobiles (constructed with all modern conveniences including truly modern engines. Nothing moved quickly. No trucks showed along the walks. It felt mostly like an overlarge mall of the 1970s, constructed for shopping, protected from everything but sunlight, snow and rain.
Sometimes it surprised Vincent that no one had thought to roof over the whole damned place, keeping these precious people cages the way canaries were caged. He had heard of such places elsewhere in the country. But then, New Yorkers -- even the wealthy ones – had their own kind of pioneer spirit. They liked some inconvenience in their lives. They wanted only protection from violence and pain and fear and distrust. Who could blame them?
Vincent himself wanted as much, and now, after Bosk's revelations about his wife, Vincent began to wonder about his priorities. He would not admit the amount of pain Bosk's statements caused him. Still he believed Bosk, and looking back, could reconstruct his world, taking down the fairy tale walls he had constructed around his wife's memory for a hard look at his life and her life. Until now, he had rarely thought about the bad times, about the nightly arguments over how much time he spent at his job, or the life of fear she led daily, or the sense of loneliness he'd seen in her eyes when he came home at night.
Just when the cheating started, Vincent couldn't precisely say, though it had come late in their love life, after much of the fighting had come to nothing, after she could not move him to seek a safer job inside the walls of some neighborhood like Chelsea.
“Why can't you get a job heading some security agency?” She'd asked.
“Because I can't,” he replied.
“Because you won't, you mean.”
And maybe that's exactly what he'd meant, fearing the walls as much as he feared jail, both served to cage him, both made him feel limited in movement. Outside the wall, he was always on the edge of rules, choosing to honor them, rather than being forced to. He liked having the option. He liked living his life where he could walk without the eye of a camera monitoring his every motion. He liked the life where danger lurked in every shadow, threatening to leap on him, promising to challenge his instincts for survival. He kept thinking then that if he caged himself, he would grow soft and careless -- killing himself by degrees. Better to face real death
every day, than extinction like that.
But she didn't agree. She wanted to live life the way ordinary people did -- by ordinary she meant the wealthier people, the people on the inside of the wall, the people who came and went for dinner regularly, who sent social invitations to parties every holiday, who smiled at each other when they passed in the street.
She wanted a life so boring she had to work hard to make it interesting, a life in which there were no unexpected surprises, no tests of courage, no constant reminders of just how cheap life is and how easily it was to lose.
As they walked, Roth slipped her arm through Vincent's, glancing at him, her eyes teasing him a little, though a small wrinkle showed between her brows, a wrinkle of concern.
“Are you all right, chief?” she asked.
He shrugged. “As all right as I can be with the weight of the city on my back,” Vincent said.
“You really think it's that bad?”
“Yes,” he said. “Even if we succeed in all this, I may not have a job. The charges against the mayor are -- well, thin, despite the recordings. And with all the money Cromwell has, he can afford a host of lawyers, who'll try like hell to ruin our case. We might not do any better in a criminal court than we did in the neighborhood court. In that case, I'll be working as a security guard for some Bowery mission once it's all over.”
“Then maybe Mr. Cromwell shouldn't make it out alive,” Roth said.
Vincent stared at her. She was kidding, but only barely, her eyes alive with fury and concern, repeating the images of death from the numerous videos she'd seen.
“He'll make it out alive,” Vincent said sternly. “It's the only chance I have of coming through this thing. But there are other people to worry about. Cromwell's niece is waiting for us. If Cromwell gets wind of this, and she's in the way...”
“Then we'd better pick up our pace,” Roth said, glancing at her watch.
The three had moved a little too lazily through the street, catching a little of sleepiness these neighborhood streets inspired.