A couple of people looked up from papers they had carried in with them. Their expressions made it clear that they either didn’t grasp geek humor, or were mulling over some version of global Armageddon. It made Tanner’s usually dour lips twist though, so all was not lost.
“What he means is, the process is gradual to account for small nuisances along the way. We deal with those issues one by one until the whole system is amalgamated,” Tanner explained. The left side of his face remained still as he spoke, the right side as animated as a cartoon. Likewise, his left arm gestured of its own accord, seemingly ten seconds behind its twin on the right. He leaned forward on the table, listing decidedly to port.
“What he said,” Seth agreed.
The class went back to their other homework.
“When can we expect the software to be,” Baker looked at Tanner, “amalgamated?”
Seth watched his shadow squirm. He’d opened his mouth, tried to make himself look like he knew what the hell he was talking about, and now was being faced with a question that only Seth could answer. “Well, I….”
“It’s ready now,” Meek said. Again, heads came up. More this time.
“Now?” one of the faces asked.
“Unofficially, it’s been ready since the last brief. It’s good to go.”
“Well aren’t you the eager beaver,” another face atop a green uniform said.
“You aren’t paying me to sit on my ass.”
A few of the gathering chuckled.
“Well then Mr. Meek,” Baker closed his folder and looked around the table, “let’s have a look.”
* * *
Seth stepped back through the gracefully hidden metal detector at the front security checkpoint, feeling funny about having to do it on the way out as if he’d had time to steal the fixtures out of the toilet. All of the security procedures were reversed on the way out – escorts, digital fingerprinting, the über–creepy retinal scan, all of the sci–fi stuff that he’d grown up on as a kid was pretty much all here under one roof. Even the new facial recognition software was up and running. It was cool, scary stuff. He collected his things, stashed them in their respective pockets, and pulled on his coat.
“Thanks Leroy,” he offered the sentry, getting a yawn and wave in return. Better than usual, maybe his stock was going up with these guys.
He'd never see them again.
He stepped out into the wind, hunched up his shoulders and started the long walk to his car. On the way he flipped open his phone and scrolled down through the calls. One from an area code out west. Probably some exec that had tripped on a plug or something. Their home phone was in the list, a couple from work and an inter–office memo. He trotted the last hundred yards, his face fairly numbed by the time he’d beeped open his door locks and slid into the little Civic. He got the engine running, turned up the heat, and made his way out of the lot and toward the guard shack.
“Hey, how you doing?” he asked another trim, serious looking guard.
“Just need your lot pass sir,” the guard eyed his car. Running the heater made it squeal as if it was in pain.
Seth handed it over, always puzzled at needing a pass to get out of the bottleneck he’d been waved through forty–five minutes ago.
“Thank you, sir.” The guard handed him the ID complete with cheap lanyard, and stepped back into the protection of his booth. The gate remained in place for about fifteen seconds… then he was free.
His wife drove their Escalade for two reasons. Her commute was shorter – the thing seemed to consume gas in gallons per mile – and generally speaking, she picked up Jenny. It was easier to just leave the booster seat in the backseat. Seth held one hand and then the other in front of the vents. It would have been nice to have that industrial sized heater right now though, and it was sexier… it would have looked better in NSA's lot than the beat up old Honda.
Seth turned up the radio and eased into traffic. He turned the phone to speaker so he wouldn’t accidentally launch himself off of a bridge while checking messages.
The first one, as suspected, was a system administrator having a fit because he’d locked himself, and more importantly his boss, out of his own system.
“Sorry fella,” Seth said. “It might be 3:30 in LA but not here….” He glanced at his watch. He’d probably still call the guy when he got home.
“Seth…. Seth someone’s in our driveway…”
His mind slowed.
Without warning his vision narrowed so tightly that he struggled to see the telephone in his hands, to concentrate on dialing the house.
Busy.
“Alright, alright… could be anything,” he said, but without conviction. He began to weave through traffic, picking up speed with the growing sense of panic he felt as the message replayed again and again in his mind.
They look bad…
He didn’t hear the horns, didn’t check his mirrors, just sped forward in the shoulder kicking up rocks and debris. By the time he reached his exit, the pedal was on the floor, his foot cramped and aching. He dashed the brakes, turned across traffic, and ignored the light. The house number was still busy. He thumbed 911 and let it ring. Nothing. The drive in from the highway usually took around five minutes, he turned up their street in two.
The Civic slid to a stop and he sat in the sudden silence looking at the grey car in their driveway. Seth had absolutely no idea what to do. His mind screamed. Indecision, painful, searing indecision rooted him in place. He stumbled out of the car leaving the door ajar and chiming, and stumbled to the rear of the home.
The door was open, but worse, it was splintered away from the locks. He heard himself make a sound. Weak, vulnerable, the voice of a child. A void enveloped him, a soundless void of vacillation. He couldn't move forward, couldn't move back. It seemed an illusion, a terrible tactless prank and he willed it to be just that.
The shot rang out and he fell back, the pure terror of the moment hamstringing him to the ground. He crawled across the threshold in this child’s nightmare, willing his body to move, to stand, to run.
“Please….” he heard himself rasping again and again. He’d managed to get to his feet just as he reeled into the living room.
A black kid wheeled around, a gun in each hand.
Seth pitched forward at the sound of his wife screaming and the guy with the guns jerked the triggers. Nothing.
“What the
fuck?
” Another man came from the hall stuffing himself back into his open fly, bloodied, his face a pale mask of malevolence. “
Kill him,
”
he shouted. “You dumb fuck, cap his ass!” the kid shouted, pointing his blood slick hands at Seth.
Seth’s eyes traveled down the hall, blood. One of Em’s legs… Jenny… the spray paint clearly visible on the wall, a circle, numbers.
The moment clicked into place, and he realized that he’d failed them. He’d failed as a father, as a husband, as a man. He deserved to die kneeling on his own living room rug. He looked away from the hall and into the face of iniquity. His killer smiled.
Seth looked on, suddenly nothing more than curious. The terror – filled void lifted and he was left with nothing, just an idle wonder at how his life could possibly have come to this in a matter of just minutes.
“Look at this little bitch will ya?” the white face said.
His lips moved and Seth tried to ask why. He tried to understand what had gone wrong. Tears welled in his eyes. “No….”
“Beg bitch,” the face said again. “Go on, cap ‘em Saul, do it.” He took something out of the younger guy’s other hand and aimed it at Seth’s face. Something echoed in Seth's mind, somewhere between dream and reality.
A siren. Two. The bloody white face turned away with a jerk. “Fuck, gimme that,” he snatched the gun from the black kid and jammed it up under Seth’s chin.
“Night night bitch,” he said and pulled the trigger fiercely.
Seth heard himself screaming and saw the surprise on the guy's face when the pistol didn’t fire. He yanked at the slide, trying to chamber another round. The sirens wailed.
The face snarled in frustration, glanced at the door. He reared back from above, and with one savage thrust, smashed the pistol down into Seth’s face. There was a flash, a jolt….
Chapter Two
Impenitence
Seth stared into the light until a face came into view.
“Somebody messed up your nose pal,” the face said. “We’ll get it back to north and south though, no worries.”
“My wife,” he said through lips that were split and swollen.
“She’s in surgery. Let’s concentrate on getting you back in shape for now.”
“I need to be there."
The man was already shaking his head as he poked about Seth’s nose with gloved hands. “Yeah, I know, but you couldn’t be anyway.”
Seth eyed the gloves. “Jenny,” he said. His throat was dry beyond coughing.
“Who’s that?” the young doctor asked with an absence that he instantly wished to take back.
“My little girl.”
The change in the doctor's face told him what he already knew.
And suddenly… there was no more pain. Grief raced through him like morphine, deadening his senses but not his thoughts. He could feel the pressure, see the curved suture needles backlit against the glaring light, and even hear the click of the cartilage as his nose moved back into place. But there wasn’t any pain.
They wheeled him along a corridor, found the appointed room and deposited him without ceremony. A nurse introduced herself a few moments later, but he was tucked down inside of himself, his thoughts jammed and grinding into one another like an ice flow. He didn’t hear the conversation in the hallway, and he didn’t see the two detectives step into the room amid the protests of his new guardians.
“Seth Meek?” one of them said.
“Mr. Meek?” the other repeated. They stood on either side of the bed, staring down at him.
“Seth?”
“Yeah.”
“My name’s Finn, James Finny. I’m a cop," he gestured without looking. "This is my partner Spencer. You probably know that we need to ask you some questions.”
A nod. The detective continued, “And it’s important that we ask you soon. Before painkillers and all that. You understand?”
Another nod. Seth blinked and focused through the one eye that functioned properly; the other was nearly swollen shut. “My wife,” he said, “she’s okay?”
“Dunno man, sorry,” Spencer said. “They said she was in surgery, that’s all we know.” This wasn’t technically true, but it probably wasn’t a time for details. Not yet.
“Mr. Meek, we need to know everything that you remember. Anything that comes to mind about tonight. Maybe we’ll ask some specifics… but for now just tell us what you remember,” Finn, the taller of the two, said. “Is it alright with you if we tape this so we can go back through it later?”
Seth tried to swallow, and, finding that he couldn't, began without further hesitation. This, they took for a yes. He went through each moment, each line of code in his mind. Took it all apart and examined the details. He told them everything, every little bit that he’d seen and heard, from the conversation on the phone to the moment the gun crashed down into his face. He told them how he’d just stood there, how he’d waited in the driveway not knowing what to do, how he’d watched from his knees as the white kid with the crazy out–turned eyes knocked him down, broke his nose, left his teeth in the back of his throat. How the black kid held a gun in each hand, how he tried to kill him. Everything.
The two men listened without a word. After a pause, Seth looked over at Finn, “I just let them.”
Finn watched him remember. This part was always uncomfortable, but he knew better than to interrupt a witness when they were talking off the cuff. His gut told him that he was seeing the real deal, but sometimes even the truth was a distraction from the
truth.
It was entirely possible that a guy could be crushed by the events in his life and yet still be covering something, maybe without even making the connection. Unfortunately, it was often their job to refresh someone’s memory.
“Do you use drugs Mr. Meek?” Finn asked. Spencer watched carefully.
“Never have.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“You see why we’re asking?” Finn went on.
“Not really,” Seth exhaled.
Spencer said, “It’s a connection that fits.”
“No, I don’t do drugs.”
Finn stood and looked out of the window, letting his partner do his job. Spencer Tonic couldn’t help but be the ‘good cop.’ The surfer dude charm was just too valuable to waste on being a bad guy.
“So you see what we’re driving at? It’d be easy to think that maybe a guy like you might want to buy some weed just like anyone else. Nothing big, just to relax, you know, take the edge off. Good people meet bad people and things go wrong.”
“I understand. I don’t do drugs.”
“It’ll come back in your blood work,” Finn said to his own reflection in the window.
“Then you’ll know,” Seth said without any particular emotion.
Finn worked the drug angle purposefully while avoiding the guy's family
.
Making someone angry, especially a man, sometimes brought out interesting details, but rarely did this work with grief. Anger made men shout and contradict themselves, grief made them quiet. Tact, even for a guy like Finn was sometimes the rule. They sat in silence for a few moments. Outside, snow fell. It swirled aimlessly on the frozen pavement.
Seth squeezed his eye shut, still not looking at either detective, then broke the silence, “Gloves."
“What?” Finn turned from the window.
“Gloves," Meek looked up. "They were wearing gloves. Latex gloves, I could see them on the black guy. I don’t….” Seth rolled his head on his shoulders. “I don’t know about the guy that hit me I guess, but they stood out on the black guy."
"And the black kid, he had two guns?" Tonic asked.
"Yeah, I think so. One in each hand. One big one, one little. Pointed at me. He didn't move much."
"And the white kid hit you with one of these guns?"
A nod.
"Right after the black guy tried to pull the trigger…."
"Yes." Meek rubbed the bridge of his nose gently, "The gun didn't work. It didn't shoot."
"But it fired… before. You heard it right?" Tonic maintained a soft voice. He was boxing Meek in a little, but didn't want him to feel it.
A nod, "It did. Twice."
"And the other gun… it didn't work either?"
Seth sighed, "I should be dead. I know."
"But here you are," Finn said. His voice was not as soft, nor as friendly, and it brought Meek's head up.
"Yeah."
The two detectives waited out the quiet that followed. Meek stared at them through the streaks of blood in his eye, "I let it happen."
Finn squinted, and then tried something else. "What do you wish?"
It caught Meek short as designed, "What?"
Finn repeated the question he'd used hundreds of times.
Meek's reply told them both what they expected, hoped even. Certainly no one deserved what was happening to this guy.
"Anything else."
“You can reach us anytime you want,” Tonic said as he flipped his notebook shut and pocketed the recorder. “You and your wife are safe here. Security at the hospital is nice and tight.” It was another line that they’d used before and while not entirely true, it was intended to elicit a little anxiety. It was hard to hide fear, and if this guy was still afraid, it would give them one more thing to watch. Besides, on the long shot that he was crafty enough to do something like this on his own, they didn't want him just walking out the front doors. The uniform cop in the corridor would help in that regard as well.
“We’ll come back around to check in on you,” Tonic said. “Get some sleep.” They excused themselves and stepped into an empty room a few doors down the hall.
“I think he’s clean,” Finn took his partner's book and flipped it back open.
“Seems like it,” Tonic agreed as he sat on the bed. “Poor fucker.”
“Should we work possibilities or probabilities on this one?”
Tonic studied the ceiling, then yawned. “We’re gonna run out of possibilities fast I think. This is pretty simple.”
“Assume I'm slow.”
A smile. “Yeah, well… he didn’t do it.”
“Sure?” Finn agreed, but this why you had a partner. He turned Tonic's book around and held it up before he could reply, "What the fuck does this say?"
Tonic squinted. "Nothing."
Finn shook the book and waited.
"It's French."
Another shake.
"I was trying to remember the word for gloves. Darcy wants to take a trip to Paris. She's got me learning French."
Finn's lips twisted for a moment then came back to neutral. "Paris?"
"Okay, shut up," Tonic reached for the book only to have it pulled away.
"Oui, oui."
Tonic got up off of the bed. "Branleur."
"That means gloves?" Finn asked.
"Yeah, more or less. Alright, first we've got to get over to his house, we can go from there." He snatched his book back before Finn could react. "You
are
a little slow. Or is that just the old showing through?"
Finn grinned, "So just bad fuckin’ luck? What about the two guns thing?"
"I'm working on that." Tonic walked to the door and looked back down the hall. “He was scared too. You see it?”
“Yeah. Absolutely. He’ll have a long night. Lots of ‘em probably.”
They stepped into the hall and waited until a nurse broke away from the gaggle. “We’ll make sure that someone is with him,” she said as she approached. “We haven’t seen a doctor yet. Is he a risk?”
“Personally, I'd say no,” Tonic said. “But Jesus, watch him. It’s been a real bad night already and it’ll probably get worse. Once he starts to rehash it all it’ll be ugly as hell. He doesn’t get to play with scissors for a while alright? Probably there'll be more cops up here before long. For now you get the one uniform just to make sure he remembers that this is serious."
Finn added, “His wife. She’s in surgery now. Can you find out what’s going on there for us?"
“You bet. I’ll call down and let you know.”
"Before you tell him," Finn said.
She wasn't pleased with that, but nodded.
They thanked her, handed her their cell numbers and left. It occurred to both of them that they’d probably gotten all out of Seth Meek that they ever would. By morning he’d be through the shock that saves a life and lapsing into the shock that saps it away. He’d stop
trying
to remember, and the images that remained would be muted by the knowledge that he was made a victim in the worst possible way. They’d both seen guys blow their heads off over things like this, lesser things. People were fragile, and this was a lot like dumping a guy off of a building and telling him to walk it off.