“You’re not sure?” Parnassa growled.
“Three.” Yasaki nodded. “Three, sir. I didn’t know what to do.”
“He reacted quickly, Major,” Parnassa defended her charge with a hand on Yasaki’s shoulder.
“I’m sure he did.” Tomas glanced out of the jeep at the surrounding ten-person detachment. “Keep the shooters on the roofs, ‘copter Allie circling, and return ‘copter Billie home.”
Parnassa saluted. “As if she were still here, sir?”
Tomas nodded, wincing.
“What happened?” Yasaki persisted innocently, earning a painful smack from his Captain.
“Sometimes Grandma likes to just get away, son.” Tomas smiled reassuringly.
He waited until the last shooter left before heading onto the four train. The final subway of the night clattered lazily through the dark skyline. Tomas sat in the last car, eyes ahead, mind empty in case she contacted him. But she wouldn’t.
Stilton jostled a sleeping drunk out before the subway police arrested him for vagrancy, hurrying along East 205th Street past brooding empty buildings. Protocol AF3E had only been used once, and that’d been way on the other side of the Bronx in a modest walk-up with quiet neighbors. Why Grandma had changed to an abandoned building, he didn’t know. He sensed his way up two flights, counting steps.
Tomas stopped at fifty-seven and felt for the door handle. Still locked, thank her painted fingernails. He twisted off the handle and crouched forward, gun drawn, into the bare room which had an extra shroud of darkness. Twenty-three paces at two o’clock bumped against another closed door. Another violent twist inside, then eighteen steps toward twelve o’clock.
He slipped a thin key into the lock and opened the door. A perfect funnel of light streamed onto the A2. He gasped slightly. Except for her real more pronounced wrinkles along the eyes, it was a perfect resemblance. No one would know. Except him.
Tomas fumbled for the switch, unable to look away from the robot. He calmed himself into remembering the code. Lenora 2. Just punch it in. Your job’s to protect her.
Or is your job to protect your country? Maybe Cheng was right. Maybe they weren’t the same anymore.
• • • •
WATCHING BEHIND THE long glass window, Detective Tad Buca pushed back his brown hat in disgust as the gray-haired man wobbled toward the door, back bent from the exhaustion of proclaiming his innocence.
Buca nudged his partner Layon Y’or, who grumbled in disappointment.
“56 percent,” Y’or said.
“Sure?”
“You were watching, too.”
Buca rubbed his bloodshot eyes. Three hours of naked young girls and boys in all sorts of poses and all sorts of sex acts in all sorts of outfits. He hated the night shift.
“Still gets him cleansed,” Layon said with a faint smile about the man’s inappropriate responses to the videos.
Buca grunted. “That’s something.”
Anytime a complainant or suspect was brought in with anything remotely touching on a child, they got The Kurosawa, epic filmic moments of child pornography. Their reactions were charted on the Perv, officially the Pedophilia Scanning System.
Before they’d been banned, psychiatrists had controlled these tests, but the scandals of using results to generate more patients put them on the streets, where they belonged, Buca felt. Now the Brown Hats, the Detectives, ran the men and women through. To be a cop, a Blue Shirt, Brown Hat, required impeccable morals and judgement. If the people couldn’t trust the police, who could they trust?
“Should we send him downtown now?” the more junior Y’or asked hopefully.
Buca considered this for a moment as they returned to their desks in the 34th Precinct squad room. “Keep him around a little longer.”
“I can’t watch the movies anymore,” Y’or pleaded.
The perv protested angrily when he’d been forced into being tested. I was being friendly to a little girl in trouble. I paid for her ticket and she attacks me.
One tough little girl, Buca sneered, giving the guy props for arrogance.
“Why’d he come in?” Layon, only six months into the job, had asked hours ago.
The perv could’ve let it go, gone on home and popped one of the illicit films in an illicit handviewer and who would’ve known. But, Buca had explained, he believed he wasn’t a pedophile and so, by coming forward, he demonstrated, mostly to himself, his own innocence.
Help the children above all else, said Grandma’s Fourth Insight.
Buca waved off the cold pizza floating around the big squad room at five in the morning and rummaged through his desk,
“Where’s the morning update?” he asked.
Layon pushed the report over and gobbled down a slice.
Buca poured another cup of coffee. To please his doctor, who said his prostate would be a beach ball if he didn’t cut down, he only filled the mug half-way, dousing the bitter brew with powdered creamer. He stirred slowly, glancing at the midnight reports from around the country. Stabbing in Cleveland, suspect at large. Woman, twenty, black curls. New Haven, shooting, teenager, blonde and armed, at large.
No, it wasn’t from tonight, he thought, leaning back at his chipped wooden desk, still stirring and thinking.
“Where’s the updates from the previous three days?” he asked Layon, playing with the brim of his brown hat.
“What’s up?” His partner handed over the files.
“Something’s sticking in my head. The girl the perv described.” Buca tapped his cheek.
• • • •
MRS. WASHINGTON SQUEALED with delight at the sparkling gold shoe squeezed around her thick left foot.
“Lovely, dear. Just lovely.”
Annette frowned at the way the shoe and foot battled over who’d give up first.
“I see your former husband all over town now on those billboards. Striking man. You must be so proud,” the pudgy woman acknowledged the role everyone had in their ex’s life, post-marriage, good and bad. “A continuous thread of love, sometimes unstitched, went Grandma’s Thirty-First Insight.”
“Yeah. He’s a big shot.” Annette sighed at the expensive shoes she wouldn’t sell today.
“And that fiancé of his. Dara Dinkins…”
“Dinton. Dara Dinton.”
“That’s it. A stunning voice. We heard her at the Cobblers Club last night. She sang a wondrous medley of oldies.”
“Was she alone?” Annette reddened.
“There were about two thousand of us.” Washington chuckled and returned to her shoes. “You’ve done
