“A fucking mess!” plot-summarized Deputy Chief Carlyle, banging the desk hard enough to make the diplomas on the wall shudder.
Greggs, Demoines, and A. Z. Kimrean lowered their heads and weathered the storm. Kimrean had just driven back from San Carnal, checked into headquarters, and reported on the events of the last forty-eight hours with the other two detectives removing the pictures of cartel actors from the case board as Kimrean pronounced them dead. All that while, Carlyle, leaning on a radiator and chomping on his cigar, had been hoarding energy for the expletive-rich monologue at the end of the scene. It was his big moment, and he was giving it everything he had.
“Two years we’ve been working this case! Eighteen months Mojave’s been undercover, and for what?! For one goddamned loose cannon to undo everything in one week! And you! (Pointing at Kimrean.) Is there anything you do well, apart from dropping people off buildings?”
Adrian recognized the question as rhetorical, but Zooey answered: “Well, I’m a decent pianist.”
“A fucking mess!” Carlyle rounded off, finally knocking out Greggs’s desk with the last hammer-punch.
After that, the storm subsided. Timidly the voices of fax machines and typewriters from the bullpen ebbed in again. Kimrean swept the commissioner’s spittle off the rim of their hat.
“Heartbroken though I am for the futility of your efforts, am I the only one who is kinda okay with a drug cartel being annihilated?”
“Who cares about the cartel!” Carlyle grunted in a tantrum like an earthquake aftershock.
“We need a big shot alive to help bring down the badappletroika,” Greggs explained. “If the cartel just dies out, another will take its place. Villahermosa is already in line. As long as they keep the badges and the gavels happy, nothing will change. And there’s no reason to think the killer will stop until he reaches the guy at the top, Victor Lyon himself.”
“There is one, actually,” Kimrean commented. “He’s been to Villa Leona already; he could have killed two Lyons then, and he didn’t.”
“Not a very solid point,” Carlyle judged.
“Yeah, I think so too,” said Adrian.
“My point is, we should try and salvage what we can,” Greggs resumed. “Danny, for instance. We should pull him out yesterday.”
“After the Lyon has lost his three sons, you want Danny to vanish?” Demoines objected. “You know how that will look?”
“Who cares about appearances—the Lyon will be dead in a week.”
“Suppose he isn’t. Suppose he’s spared. Then what’s left of the cartel will hunt down Danny like a dog.”
“How do we help him then?”
“Cast the net,” Kimrean said. They read the room, then continued, chin-pointing at Carlyle: “You said it, the case is coming undone. After two years coordinating, eighteen months undercover, you gotta have something. Just raid in, bring them to court, take all you can. Victor will cooperate now; he has barely anything to lose, and he wants something you can offer: protection.”
“The question is, protection from whom?” Carlyle cued.
Kimrean scowled, biting a colorless lip.
“Shit, you love to hear me say it, don’t you?” Adrian jeered. “You all want me to say it.”
They stood up, extended their arms, and delivered the crowd-pleaser:
“Well, rejoice: I. Don’t. Know.”
Then they put their hat on and walked out of the room.
A few curious heads hatching out of their cubicles followed them to the elevator and watched the doors close. Then they turned back to Greggs’s office.
The detectives remained seated, waiting for instructions. It was their way to commemorate the rare occasions when they didn’t have any better ideas.
Carlyle blew a couple consonants in smoke signals and squished his cigar in an ashtray.
“Call state, the feds, and the rest: they have sixteen hours. We’re wrapping this up first thing tomorrow.”
Right at that point along the plot, in other offices in other novels, different detectives sat facing their own case walls covered in pictures of their dramatis personae connected with wool thread. Police inspectors smoked, P.I.s drank and smoked. House, MD, balanced a ball on the end of his cane. In 1890s London, Sherlock Holmes lay interred on his own sofa under a toxic cloud of pipe tobacco and tried to pluck some music out of a twenty-ounce bottle of morphine after having shot his own violin up his cubital vein. Meanwhile, behind the door with the glass panel and the fresh shiny vinyl letters, A. Z. Kimrean kept wearing out the floorboards in their apartment, up and down the pool of light from the window like a Brechtian actor, chewing on hypotheses and spitting them on the floor. Every now and then, one of their hands hovered over the chessboard and prodded a piece. That was their thing.
“Who.”
They peeked through the blinds hanging loosely over the broken window. Their right hand rubbed their eyes, cheeks, and chin.
“Who?”
The left hand moved some piece on the board.
Then the whole body bent backward:
“WHOOOOO?!”
The scream faded out with the flapping of a dozen seagulls scampering away from the docks.
“Who is it?! Who the hell breaks into a drug lord’s fortress, a crowded club, and a thirty-seventh floor penthouse without planning ahead? Why does he do it, how’s he so reckless, what’s the point?!”
“Check.”
Adrian Kimrean froze in midstep.
With an audible whiplash he spun around and looked at the chessboard for the first time in hours. Maybe days. He played in his head; he didn’t need the visual aid of the pieces.
A black pawn and a knight in row one had the white king cornered.
“What the fuck is that knight doing there?”
“I promoted.”
“Pawns are promoted to queens!”
“Not necessarily. You’re allowed to promote to knight. Check.”
Adrian closed up on the game. Without too much consideration, just like someone pushing the reset button, he had his king personally execute the black pawn.
His left hand immediately lifted the black knight and replaced the white king’s rook.
“Check.”
Adrian opened his mouth really wide. He didn’t yell, but the next line came out of tune anyway.
“How did you— Did you even know what you were doing when you promoted to knight?”
“Not really. The pawn just wanted to be a knight.”
“Nobody wants to be a knight! Everyone promotes to queen because it’s the best piece!”
“It’s my pawn; he can be whatever he wants as long as he’s happy. And I’m winning thanks to him. Hey, this is the second time I beat you at chess!”
“You never beat me at chess before; you cheated! You took my queen with He-Man! And no one, no one in their right mind promotes to knight!”
By the end of that speech he was hunching menacingly over the board, his shadow’s spidery fingers on the wall curled into evil claws above the round wooden heads of his embarrassed troops.
Outside, seagulls were warily returning to their posts on the crane.
When he looked back up, Adrian had spotted the key phrase.
“No one in their right mind.”
Stripes of midmorning illuminated their right profile.
“That’s it. He’s all right brain,” said Adrian in awe. “No reason—only passion. It’s not business at all, it’s not about justice. He’s not seeking balance. All he wants is to hurt. But to hurt…(Mimes a gun with a hand.)…by just killing people? No, of course not! He’s hurting the father! It’s not about murder, it’s torture! He wants the father to suffer by killing his offspring!”
“Whoa—all of his offspring?” Zooey inserted. “Then we better warn Ursula before—”
The green eye summoned a frown over both.
The rest of the body attempted to move; Zooey prevented it by fastening her left foot to the floor.
“Wait. Ursula…was here?”
She focused on the door with the glass panel and the fresh shiny vinyl letters. Then her sight line shifted to the bed. Then to the guitar next to the bed. Then to the pillows, beyond her own raised hand, petrified like a wait cursor.
(In a whisper.) “What did you…”
Her green eye, fixed on the penumbra region by the bed, watched last night’s movie replay. The bed scene. The toes. The check. The door.
The farewell speech.
Zooey winced.
Their knees bent, slouching away from the light. Her words rose like the last bubbles of breath from a drowning victim.
“What…How could you say that to her?”
Adrian pulled themselves together, stiffened up, commanded their chin to attention.
“I had to.” (Moves for the kitchen.) “This was wrong—you know very well it was wrong.” (Opens a Pop-Tarts sachet, moves toward the toaster.) “She’s infatuated and you’re enabling her. Someone had to slap some sense into her, so I did—without the actual slapping, by the way.”
(Inserts the Pop-Tarts into the slots, pushes down the lever. Then shoves their right hand into the slot, all the way down, scraping off the skin against the red-hot wire grill, and the left hand holds the right by the wrist, and the right arm wriggles and jolts while the left arm and shoulder and hip and leg lock it there and let the rest of the body shriek at the feeling of skin vaporizing into grilled-chicken smoke and the red flesh below simmering in its own blood for a whole second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, before a final jolt throws the toaster across the room, pulling the plug, and the whole body falls to the floor, gaping at their mutilated hand.)
(And then the unharmed left hand punches the skull into the floor.)
“How could you tell her that, you soulless monster?! She’s a child! She’s only a child!!”
(Adrian doesn’t answer, all his strength focused on dodging the left fist’s jabs while his own hand, in flesh and blood, lies palm-up on the floor twitching like a dying tarantula, and the feet fight each other, memories of the previous night still downloading for Zooey to see, now reaching Ursula’s last line before Adrian slammed the door with the glass panel and the fresh shiny vinyl letters: “Zooey does love you.”)
“NO, I DON’T!” Zooey yelled through both her and his tears. “I DON’T LOVE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU AND I HATE MYSELF, BECAUSE YOU DESERVE TO DIE ALONE AND I’LL BE STUCK HERE WITH YOU!!”
(But Adrian isn’t looking for excuses; he channels what little strength he still has to his elbow, the right one, as it pitifully tries to tug the whole body across the room, toward the desk, and Zooey’s left hand is clawing at his side of the face as his right one pulls the top drawer off the desk, and the case with the syringes comes tumbling out, and Adrian manages to grab a syringe and stab her shoulder down to the bone, and then another syringe, and then another, and another, until the left arm has gone numb, jerking in spasms like a wounded snake, and even then he stabs the last syringe again and again and again and again die die die until the shoulder cramps and the muscles beneath turn into jelly.)
(And then the cramp unexpectedly crawls up toward the neck, and for one sudden, terrifying second his windpipe is paralyzed, but then as though someone cut the noose it relaxes and his chest muscles liquefy and the cramp marches on to the right side of the body and flows into the arm, toward the elbow and the forearm and the charred, bloodied hand pining for it, begging it to smother its frenzied nerves, and finally the shock wave reaches the wrist and the thumb and splits into each of the four phalanxes up to the roasted fingertips and it disconnects all the alarms, every system inside the brain, every standby light, and the orange-brown eye looks in to check all systems are off and yields to the weight of its own eyelid and shuts down.)
(And Kimrean fades to black.)