Taking the Highway

MARGOT PULLED THE FORD Pegasus into the lot of a run-down drugstore on the city side of the disincorporated zone. “Police or not, this is as far as I go.”

“No, it’s fine,” Andre said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you all the way to work.”

Margot fumbled in her purse. “Well, here. At least take this.” She handed him twenty dollars.

Andre thanked her and exited the car. He didn’t ask about a ride home. They would find another fourth, a downtown stray, for the afternoon commute, probably for a bargain. He peered into his pocket, flicked on his datapad, and stole a glance at the map. The address Danny had given him was five blocks away, perhaps more if he encountered a long stretch of border. He started jogging in that direction. When he neared Fullerton Street, he made a sharp turn and left the city for a different world.

Windows and doors were barred where they weren’t covered over with plywood. Ambitious weeds poked through cracks in the street. What had once been lawn was now a tangle of weed and scrub, running from broken porches, across walks, and down into dry swimming pools in junglesque profusion.

As with many neighborhoods in this not-quite-urban ring around the city, this area had once been part of Detroit, a fashionable ellipse of upper-middle class homes. Now, smack within the wasteland surrounding the shrunken city, this was part of what was officially called the disincorporated zone. Unofficially, everyone called it the oh-zone. Outside of the city’s new, smaller footprint, unclaimed by the suburbs, the oh-zone was a wild place. It had its own customs, its own language, its own dangers. And of course, its own cautionary tales. “Where did this happen? . . . Oh.”

There were places where the city bordered the suburbs quite elegantly. Other places, the ring of the oh-zone was several kilometers wide. Still, Detroiters could pretty much look in any direction and see unspeakable poverty squeezing the city like a noose. Even Windsor, across the river, felt like an extension of the zone sometimes, especially in comparison to the glittering beauty of Cityheart or the green serenity of the northern suburbs.

Pounding footsteps from behind put Andre on guard. He spun around to see the petite form of Delandra Kelso hurrying down the street. The coroner never parked her car in the oh-zone if she could help it, even at a taped-off crime scene. He waved, but Delandra pushed ahead mumbling, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead.”

Andre caught up to her. “Coroner humor? I mean, your patients are dead.”

Delandra raked her hair off her face. She had masses of the stuff, black and gray waves, which she usually wore pinned tightly to her head. Now it flowed over her shoulders and down her back, the breeze blowing ribbons of it across her cheeks. “I turned my phone off last night.”

Andre clicked his tongue. “Naughty, naughty.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I turn mine off every night. Who can sleep with that in your head?”

“Yeah, but I forgot to turn it back on until, like, five minutes ago. Don’t get too close. I haven’t brushed my teeth.” She grabbed a fistful of hair at her shoulder, catching less than half of it. “Do you have a rubber band or anything? I can’t work like this.”

Andre slowed his footsteps, stopping on a weedy patch of pavement. “Don’t worry. As long as you’re not the last one there, you’re not late. There’s a drugstore about four blocks back. I’ll get you some elastic, be ten minutes behind you, make you look like you’re on time.”

Delandra touched his elbow to urge him forward. “Yeah, and Cariatti will bust your balls instead of mine. I can’t let you do that.”

Andre shrugged. “Danny is used to it.”

“You mean you’re used to it.”

“That is something you never get used to.” He turned to walk back the way he’d come, gesturing for Delandra to go on.

“Get me some mints too!” she called after him.

Choosing the perfect hair elastics took slightly more than ten minutes. By the time Andre returned to the crime scene, his shirt was stuck to his back and his collar was wilting from his sweaty neck, but there was still a gap between the line-bots. Technically, he was not late.

He walked past the crash car and nodded to Delandra’s two assistants. They had the same first name and so were always just the Jeffs.

Danny stood inside the scene perimeter, glaring at the empty street. In the city, a cordon of line-bots and holotape acted as a magnet, and they’d have to pull in patrol officers to keep gawkers away. Here in the zone, police presence was a signal to go to ground. Nobody was supposed to live here. In reality, a lot of people did. The police would never see any of them. The entire disincorporated zone looked like ten years after a zombie attack.

“About time,” Danny said.

Andre eased himself into the gap between bots and closed the holotape behind him. “Don’t tell me that Del-Kel is done already.”

“Waiting for an essential piece of equipment.”

“Ah. That would be these.” Andre caught Delandra’s eye and handed her the hair elastics. They were the kind meant for little girls, pink and yellow and cute.

Delandra opened the package and sighed at the impossibly small bands. “Men.”

“What?” Andre asked, all innocence.

“Nothing. Thank you.” She divided her hair into sections and bound one into a tiny loop with a plastic duck on the end. Andre waited until she had a second section done and had started on the third before holding out the other package he’d bought—elastics both large and plain.

Delandra snatched it out of his hand and tore into it. “Smartass.”

“Does that mean you don’t want the mints?”

Danny cleared his throat. “If the two of you are done playing beauty parlor, can we get this going before the body decays into the ground?”

With one smooth movement, Delandra caught her hair into a ponytail. “We’ve already had a preliminary look.”

Danny raised his eyebrows. “And?”

“He’s dead.”

“Imagine that,” Andre said. “A corpse in the disincorporated.”

The Jeffs groaned. Danny’s eyebrows hooded his eyes. “Do you have to do that every time?”

“It’s funny every time.”

“It wasn’t funny once.”

Andre nodded, hands in pockets. Danny found everything in the world hilarious except his job. He neither bitched nor bragged about being a cop. Danny and the job were one single thing. He was a homicide cop the same way he was male, or Italian, or fifty. It was simply a biological fact, a part of him too obvious to be commented on. Some people found Danny’s no-nonsense attitude off-putting, but to Andre it was a source of enormous comfort. Danny’s resemblance to a bad-tempered bulldog made him the kind of man who might resent tall, handsome, easily-promoted young detectives. Instead, he’d made a point of choosing Andre as his squad partner and bringing him home for dinner once a month.

Andre followed Danny as he inspected the quadrangle of holo cameras set in and around the overgrown island in the center of the cul-de-sac, where Delandra and the Jeffs had disappeared into a gap in the long grasses. The drying stalks hissed in a gust of wind. Outdoor crime scene. An automatic pain in the ass with all of nature working against the evidence.

He tapped Danny’s shoulder. “By the way, you owe me about three hundred bucks.”

“I’m sure the captain would love to sign for that.”

“Forget the money. How about a ride home tonight?”

Danny laughed and stared at Andre’s lapel. “You need to give that fourth crap a rest.”

Andre glanced at his lapel, noticed the official fourthing ID that still hung there, and shrugged. “I’m on flex,” he said.

“Flex still means available, Sergeant.”

“I’m available.” He didn’t say more. Didn’t have to. They’d had this conversation too many times. He held a hand under his nose. “God, the zone stinks. So, who called this in?”

“Couple of kids.”

“Around here?”

“I’m sure they were on their way home from Little League.” Danny adjusted a camera that didn’t need adjusting. “I have techs on the trace, but it’s one of those prepaids the school drug dealers use.”

“Lots of other people use them too.”

“Vocal stress puts the median age at eleven and a half. You want to hear it?” Danny touched his datapad without waiting for an answer.

Andre heard the smooth, “Nine-one-one,” and then the squeal of a frightened but excited kid, “There’s a dead guy on Pinest! He’s in the grass and all blood and his eyes open!” There was the mumble of another nearby voice, no words, just an insistent tone, then the first kid again. “Shut up, man! We didn’t do nothing and I don’t want a body laying here all dead and stuff.”

Can’t argue with that, Andre thought. “Can tech enhance the second voice?”

“That’s the voice after they enhanced it. On the original there was just a pause then the first kid answering.”

“Sounds like he lives here somewhere.” Andre looked at the dark houses.

“I have three units working the neighborhood with their comms listening for a voice match, but zoners watch the vee, they know that trick.” Danny shrugged. “It was a slow day so overwatch tasked a satellite in this area within twelve minutes of the call—”

“Why so long?”

“Had to figure out ‘Pinest’ meant Pinecrest and they only got it because the techs nailed the cell tower. Anyway, from space we could see this guy face down in the grass and thermal had him at room temp.”

“Not even a room.”

“Yeah. That one is funny every time. Anyway, I had the area sealed in another fifteen and then I sat waiting for you for an extra thirty-three minutes.”

Andre spread his hands. “Delandra isn’t done yet, you know. I’d have been standing right where I am anyway until—”

“About now.” Delandra rose and picked her way through the grass. Three other trails cut through the chest-high growth, all of them well away from Delandra’s path.

“Stand clear,” a Jeff said. He triggered the holocams which first gridded then flashed the area between them. He checked the results on his datapad, readjusted the angles, and took two more sets before he was satisfied.

Delandra waved the detectives in. “Everything is tagged and marked. He’s all yours.”

They gloved, then moved in along the same path Delandra had taken and squatted beside the body. The raw smell of late-summer grass now hung heavy with the reek of death. A young black man, mid-twenties, hair cut in a tidy fade, lay face down, his head turned to the side. Inky eyes seemed to stare at Andre, and he moved lower to check out the clothing. The suit was standard business single-vent, but the shoes gave Andre a start. Seagull loafers, the exact style and shade that he wore himself—shoes that had cost him a month of fourthing income. Andre’s were freshly-polished while the victim’s were scuffed and scratched. He’d been dragged.

Andre retrieved a wallet from the back pocket and flipped through it. What was a young, well-dressed man doing in the zone with a pair of holes through him? Drugs? This guy wouldn’t be the first urbanite looking for glaze in the zone, but dealers liked to keep repeat customers, not shoot them. So why him? And why here?

“Nice suit,” Danny said. He pointed to the holes in the jacket. “Except for the exit wounds. Thirty-eight, do you think?”

“Forget it,” sang a Jeff. “No shell casings, and you won’t find the slugs—”

“Because he was killed elsewhere and dumped here,” Danny finished.

The Jeff deflated. “Right.”

“And if he has a phone or a pad, nobody knows about it.”

Delandra gestured to the crumbling ruins around them. “Welcome to the oh-zone.”

Andre frowned at the driver’s license and multicard he’d found in the wallet. The photo matched and their corpse now had a name, but nothing else. Citizens of No Fixed Address were becoming more and more common, but unlike indigents, who would get rolled for the dregs of their wine bottles, NFAs were less likely to be the victim of a crime. They were almost always middle class, stable, and clean. “His name is Matthew Davis Shepler,” Andre told Danny. “And guess what?”

“He’s a mime.”

“Nope, Matthew Davis Shepler was NFA.”

“Not a zoner?”

They both shook their heads. Zoners usually wrote down something on their ID. Besides, Shepler was too well-dressed.

Danny leaned over the body. “No Fixed Address f*cks us hard. No neighbors to talk to, no roommates, and even if we find his phone, there’s no way he’d enable GPS. Well, good thing he’s dead, otherwise, getting any kind of breach-of-privacy warrant would be a bitch. Del-Kel? Turning.”

“Flip him,” she called. Danny tucked the right arm and they turned the corpse, then stood aside so the holocams could zap him again.

A circle of plastic, not quite the size of a drink coaster, was attached to Shepler’s lapel, its holographic seal floating above the center. A fourthing badge.

“Oh, shit.” Not again.

“Huh.” Danny glanced at Andre’s badge. “Anyone you know?”

“No.” The smell from Shepler seemed to roll over Andre. He stepped off the center island and away from the tall grass, waving away the droning insects that trailed him. He paced the weedy pavement in a tight circle.

He opened his datapad and flipped through his notes. Less than a week ago, a fourth named Arthur Yalna had jumped off the edge of an overpark into the traffic emerging from the tunnel beneath. There had been no witnesses, and they were still waiting for the final report from forensics, but it had been tagged a probable suicide. Now, Andre wasn’t so sure. They hadn’t found any money on Yalna and Shepler’s wallet had been empty. Fourths made soft targets if someone was looking for cash.

He accessed the forensics files, wondering if that department could possibly work any slower. Yalna’s file was only a preliminary report, some of the notes unreadable stylus scribbles. It had been years since Andre had sifted through any kind of major data dump, but he needed everything he could find on Yalna and couldn’t wait for forensics to tie it up with a neat bow. What if the fourth hadn’t jumped? What if he’d been pushed?

Danny marched forward and planted himself in front of Andre. He grabbed the datapad out of Andre’s hands and scanned the page he’d been reading, then tapped the screen with an impatient finger. “It’s a big city. There are a lot of fourths. This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah, but look at this. Hemorrhaging around the chest and armpits, groin and upper thighs. It occurred before Yalna met the front bumper of that semi.”

Danny scanned through the reports. “Since a Peterbilt can’t grab a man by the back of his well-tailored suit and throw him over a chest-high retaining wall . . .”

“Yalna had some help with his flying lesson.” Andre glanced back at the overgrown island. From here, all he could see was Shepler’s shoes. “It looks like our caseload went up by one. Two, if you count this Shepler.”

“I’m not counting anybody.” Danny stripped his gloves and tucked them in a pocket. “The only reason I’m even looking at Shepler is because he had the good sense to be killed somewhere else. Otherwise, I’m filing and forgetting, calling it zone-on-zone violence.”

“You’d do that? Just to avoid taking on another case?”

“I could, but I won’t.” Danny glanced over his shoulder, where Delandra stood conferring with the Jeffs. He gripped Andre’s shoulder and moved him out of earshot. “But you gotta promise me something. You treat this like any other case. You didn’t know Yalna. You didn’t know Shepler. Am I right? Please tell me I’m right.”

“You’re right.” He felt like a chunk of ice had hit his midsection, passing through and leaving nothing but cold, hollow dread.

“So. Not your brothers.” Danny folded his arms over his stomach. “Two guys, happen to be fourths.”

“What if there are more?” Andre tried to keep the urgency out of his voice. “All that untraceable cash. If no one puts it together that fourths make good hunting, the fourths stay unaware longer.” He tapped at his pad. “I’m going to run an all-district search. Maybe these aren’t the only two.”