He kept on walking up the street, and was pleased to see that the taco truck was parked in its usual spot, and open for business.
But as he got in line behind the other patrons waiting to place their orders, he felt anxiety itching at him again, and felt exposed and vulnerable, even in broad daylight.
Twenty minutes later Patrick was walking back into the station house with a paper bag filled with tacos in one hand and a bottle of Mexican Coke in the other. The tumult in the intake area had subsided, and the prisoners had been transferred to holding cells.
As he passed the intake desk, he held the paper bag against his chest with the hand holding the Coke bottle, and with his free hand reached in and pulled out a taco wrapped in aluminum foil.
“For you, Anderson,” he said, holding the taco out to her. “With Carlos’s compliments. He said it was your usual.”
“That old smoothie.” A blush rose on her cheek as she took the taco from him. “I swear he’s trying to fatten me up. Probably has a thing for big girls.”
Patrick shrugged, a sly grin on his face. “I wish I had someone that can cook like that flirting with me.”
“Don’t give up, Tevake,” she said around a mouthful of taco al pastor, as Patrick pushed the call button for the elevator. “There’s a taco truck out there for everyone.”
“You’re a regular poet,” he called back to her as the elevator doors clanked open.
Anderson was nearly finished with the taco already, chewing contentedly. “What can I say? I’m a romantic.”
Patrick smiled at her as he stepped onto the elevator, but the smile quickly faded as soon as the doors shut behind him.
“Damn it,” he said softly to himself.
He couldn’t help feeling like he was putting his fellow officers at risk by not telling them about the Ridden. Uniforms routinely pulled in blots for public intoxication—it had been cops who had coined the term for users of Ink in the first place—but those encounters so far had not escalated to the point where the user had gone full-on Ridden. But assuming that the step between run-of-the-mill Ink user and full blown possession was as simple as Patrick and the others had theorized, then how long until a blot being processed at intake or just riding in the back of a squad car made that transition? How would the officers involved respond to a prisoner who couldn’t be subdued and was impervious to even the deadliest of force?
He tried to tell himself that his theory about Tasers might pan out, in which case the officers could at least contain the situation. But what if he was wrong? What if one of the Ridden shrugged off a jolt from a Taser as easily as it could shrug off a bullet? Was Patrick then responsible for any casualties that resulted, because he failed to warn the others in time?
Just three days before, Chavez, Harrison, and the others had watched the lifeless, Ridden form of Malcom Price get up off the pavement after a three-story fall, with three bullets already in his chest, and attack Izzie. And even seeing it with their own eyes, they hadn’t had any problem accepting that it was just a question of a man so out of his head on drugs that he didn’t feel any pain. If Patrick had tried to tell them what had really happened, what were the chances that they’d believe him?
The elevator chimed as the doors opened on the second floor, followed by a grumbling from Patrick’s stomach.
“Well, I function better on a full stomach,” he said to himself, savoring the smell of the tacos wafting up from the bag.
Stopping by the squad room to grab his laptop computer, Patrick came back out and turned the corner toward the community room that was at the end of the corridor. Snagging the top of the paper bag with the fingers of the hand holding the Coke bottle, the laptop tucked under his elbow, he fished his keys out of his pocket with his other hand and unlocked the door.
He flicked the light switch with his elbow as he stepped inside, and the fluorescents overhead flickered and buzzed as they warmed up, bathing the room in a wan, antiseptic light. The boxes that they had recovered from the Property and Evidence warehouse in the South Bay were still piled to one side of the room along with most of the furniture, and the table was stacked high with papers, books, maps, academic journals, and all of the other material evidence that had been taken from Nicholas Fuller’s apartment five years before. The dry erase board at the front of the room was covered with a constellation of names and places and facts, those associated with the Fuller murders on one side and those associated with Ink on the other, with a web of lines connecting one to another, the physical manifestation of the thought processes that he and Izzie had worked their way through in the previous days as they had tried to figure out how it all fit together.
Patrick put the laptop down on one end of the long table, and booted it up while he sat down, taking a long sip from the bottle. By the time he got to the log-in screen, he was already halfway through the first of the tacos he’d pulled from the bag. He’d had better carne asada, but rarely from a street vendor.
Punching in his password one handed, the other occupied with keeping the taco from falling apart before he could maneuver the rest
