“This makes no sense,” spat Ratesic. “This makes no sense at all.”
“Sure it makes sense,” hissed Mr. Alvaro at his tough-talking colleague, hiding his admiration and envy behind a sneer. Mr. Ratesic was universally admired. That was a true fact, solid as steel, permanent and unbending. Among his fellow Speculators, among those who had worked with him, among dirty liars who’d had the bad luck to cross his path, he was considered a force of nature. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a strong jawline and intense, brooding eyes, Ratesic lifted a match to his cigarette and stared out the wide glass windows of the thirtieth floor of the Service.
“What do you mean, it makes no sense?” Mr. Alvaro was incensed. “This good-for-nothing punk was hustling fake IDs, and I caught his dumb ass. End of story.”
Mr. Alvaro was filling out the paperwork on an arrest he had made, a twenty-three-year-old street kid named Bert Pepper, sunglasses and a skateboard and ragged jeans, a shoulder bag filled with forged identifications. A serious crime, an out-and-out perversion of the truth. Alvaro was working his way through the charging documents.
But he should have waited. He should have known. When Charlie Ratesic sensed a discrepancy, when he caught wind of an anomaly, it was because there was an anomaly on the wind. Mr. Ratesic was brash and he was headstrong, but he did not make mistakes.
“I want to take a run at this kid.”
“He’s my arrest,” Alvaro protested.
“A kid like that needs a source for that kind of paper. I wanna ask him about the source.”
“Why don’t you worry about your own arrests, Ratesic?”
The rest of us watched as the two men butted heads. Carson raised her eyebrows to Burlington, who sighed. There was no question who was right, though: Ratesic was always right.
He’d come from a family of Speculators. His father, Nelson, had served with distinction, and Charles’s brother, Laszlo, had followed both of them into the Service. Laszlo Ratesic was there too, watching quietly, eyebrows raised, while his older brother persuaded Alvaro to let him have five minutes alone with Bert Pepper.
There was no one like Mr. Ratesic.
He was always right and he was right this time, more right than he knew.
Bert Pepper and his shoulder bag full of fake IDs were just the beginning.
Ratesic went in to talk to the kid, and the five minutes grew into ten, and the ten into twenty. Alvaro paced outside the interrogation room, watching the live feed stitched from the room’s four-corner captures, smoking and pacing, more and more angry, until at last Ratesic emerged, grinning ear to ear.
He was right. He was always right.
Pepper did indeed have a conspirator. His name was Armond Kessler, and he ran a small Mid-City print shop whose clients included the Publishing Arm of the Golden State itself. This Kessler sonofabitch was using the State’s own templates to press fake identifications.
“Well done, Mr. Ratesic,” I told him. “Let’s go pick up this Kessler and see what he has to say.”
I was his superior officer. Technically, I had given the man an order. But Charlie just grinned.
“You know what?” he said. “I’ve got a better idea.”