From Out of the Outlands

 

Email to Al Sullivan

 

Part One

 

Police file:

            In South Carolina, they build jails right out on the swamp.

 No point in wasting good real estate on people like us, people who've spent our lives outside the walls of the towns, never inside, never sitting on a sofa with a cool drink in our hands. They figured we were half dogs anyway from the way we dressed, and those of us, unlucky enough to get caught by this town's patrol or that town's, came to places like Liberty Bell, whose few barbed windows looked straight out on the wetlands.

            The whole idea was to discourage escape. The guards even let you open the window so as to let the smell in, and when a man did wander off and the body recovered, the guards let us out of our cells to look the man over, to see what three or four days of swamp living does to a body. No one even bothered to swipe off the flies or close the rotting eyes so none of us had to look as their milk white surface. No one bothered to tell us whether we could catch the disease from a rotting body. We all knew you could catch it from the still living, as the seasonal plagues could attest.

            I think that's the thing that finally convinced us that we'd be better off out there, struggling through the march, than here, waiting for someone to knife us in our sleep or a plague to get us anyway. Cova thought of it first, I think, a son of a bitch who had the good life in the city, but got dumped out on his duff cause he couldn't stop complaining about the lack of democracy, saying condo and homeowner associations aren't the same as government. He kept talking and talking and talking about how the guards beat up people outside the walls, until the guards finally beat him up to. Those people in the inside don't want to hear anything about inalienable rights. They just want to keep their property values from plummeting, and their crime rate from going through the roof -- and if their guards happen to shoot one of us outsiders by mistake. Hey, that's the breaks.

            But Cova, despite his bitching, is sharp. He's got that Wall Street instinct, knowing when to leap off the edge of things, and I'd trust him further than I would Bob or Morgan, on this point, though the other two are pure outsiders just like myself. When Cova said it was time to move. I listened, and started to inquire about finding others to go out with us. After all, what's a little swamp after what we've all been through? Life between neighborhoods is pure jungle anyway, rusting cars and crumbling buildings, walls so torn up with bullets it's surprising any of them can still stand. One old man said it reminded him of World War Two films he used to see in school as a kid. With the cops riding tanks between walled neighborhoods, that's no surprise.

            “Okay,” I said. “Let's go.”

            But the population in these private jails doesn't breed the same bold blood you get in the county, state or federal joints. Maybe it has to do with the kind of hoods these places get, people crawling over the wall, not to pillage or rape -- the way most insiders think -- but to get something smart to sell, or to grab a bottle or two of grape. Many of this crowd came from the inside, too, getting dumped, less because they complained like Cova, but because they couldn't keep up their share. People are always falling out of those places, private disasters making it impossible for them to keep up the payments to their home owners association -- with the rise of the associations' defense budget, it's a surprise anybody can afford to stay inside at all. Lose your job, use up your savings, and you're out on the street. At the rate most places are going, they're will be more guards than people living inside. Morgan believes a time will come when the insiders stop building prisons and start shooting us, just to lower their budgets. But Cova says it's pretty close to that now. Although state and federal law says we should get medical care, plagues run rampant. In most cases, the guards don't treat people unless they're ordered by the state health people -- but unless there's an inspection, no one knows, and the disease usually wears itself out after thirty or forty people get it, some dying, others struggling to survive only to die of something else in their weak condition.

            So after Cova says we're leaving, I talk around, being very careful about who I speak with. There are cons, and then there are cons. Some can be trusted to keep their mouths shut, some can't. Others are stooges and will run straight to the guards the minute they hear news, getting paid off in cigarettes and other privileges. One rotten con even got to mess with one of the women cons for his trouble, though the woman found out and scratched his eyes out. But even with the straight population, I get a few nods, a lot more stares and only two fellows saying absolutely yes. Morgan -- a muscle man, who had so many warrants with the state and feds that spending a year in a private prison, was more like a vacation. He scares me. One of those hot heads that's all reaction. You never know when he's going to explode. Cova doesn't like him either. But Morgan knows this part of the county, and he's big, strong, and the kind of man who can carry you out of the swamp if he likes you. He keeps talking about getting even with somebody inside one of the neighborhoods, a woman who called the town guards on him after he thought he'd settled in for life. I hate to think what he intends to do when he catches up with her.

            Bob scares me more than any of them. He's less tough than mean, the kind of man that takes pleasure he watching living things suffer. I saw him torture a rat in his cell once, cutting off its toes, then its legs, then poking out its eyes. The thing didn't die right away, and he simply grinned down at it, saying soothing as it slowly expired. Then, when one of his cellmates came along and killed the creature out of mercy, Bob vowed to get even. And he did. Though no one could prove it was him that poked the man's eyes out, then plunged the home made knife into the heart. Since then, those people who hadn't avoided Bob before, did so, and he seemed to like it that way -- except for the plague, which he seemed convinced would kill him if he didn't get out.

            One thing about private prison. Nobody really cares a whole lot if you escape. Oh, the guard'll shoot you down if they can get good aim. But none of them will go out of their way to chase you, if you've gotten passed them in the first place. After all, what do they care if you die in the swamp. These places are all built outside the neighborhoods. But later, the guards will come out to recover your body. The feds will pay for everyone recovered. That's a ratable the neighborhoods won't live without.  Half the security in these places had nothing to do with barbed or razor wire, or even machine-gun covered walls. It's the outside that kills you. If not the swamp here, then the hundreds of city blocks filled with mean outsiders waiting to cut you down for your shoes and socks. Some people claim cannibalism’s returned, especially in those dismal neighborhoods too far away from the rich to burglarize the supermarkets.

            “How do we do it?” Morgan asked.

            “Bill knows,” Cova said, nodding at me, causing the other two to stare in my direction.

            “`Him?” Bob growled. “How the hell is that twerp going to help us? He's an insider that got caught playing with his condo president's daughter. They stuck him in here to teach him a lesson.”

            “That's not true,” I said. “I'm an outsider. I've always been an outsider. I can't help I worked inside once.”

            “And screwed it up,” said Morgan. “You could have been sitting pretty. But you couldn't control your hormones.”

            “Neither could you!” Cova barked. “You were sitting on the inside, too, living off some rich bitch. But it wasn't enough. You had to beat the crap out of her one day. Leave the boy alone. He has access to a boat.”

            “A boat?” Bob said, his mean eyes narrowing. “Where the hell would you get a boat from?”

            “I don't own it. I just know where it is.”

            “Inside the neighborhood won't help us,” Morgan said.

            “It's not inside the neighborhood,” I said. “The owner keeps it locked up on the outside. He takes joy rides from time to time when the marsh is flooded. He figures its safe enough here, not like the outside in a city where he'd have to shoot his way to get home again, or call for the guards to come rescue him.”

            “A boat?” Bob says, his eyes glinting with some private vision that makes me shiver. “That's the best news I've heard in a long time.”

            “Well, keep it to yourself,” Cova said. “We've got to get to it first, and there is the small matter of getting out of here, then across the swamp to where it's kept.”

            “Yeah,” Morgan said. “But once we get to it, it's clear sailing. We can take that boat right out to the coast and down to Miami.”

            “Or up to New York,” said Bob.

            “I was thinking of getting out of the whole country,” Cova said. “Coast down to the Caribbean somewhere, ask one of those small islands to take us in.”

            “And have them shoot us on sight?” Morgan said. “No way.”

            “You miss the point,” Cova said. “I'm not talking about no wealthy neighborhood. Those people down there hate what we've done up here. They've all been invaded by Cuba. They'll look at us as heroes, the innocent victims of a system that hates poor folks. We'll do all right.”

            “I don't know,” I said. “I don't know if the boat has enough fuel to get that far.”

            “We can get more,” Cova said, dismissing my fears with a wave of his hand.

            “How?”

            “How do you think, twerp,” Bob said. “We'll steal it.”

            “But someone might catch us and then we'd be in bigger trouble and go to a real prison.”

            “No one will catch us,” Morgan said, slapping the palm of his hand with his fist. “Or they won't live to tell about it.”

            So they made their plans, leaving me to find the boat once they got us out of the jail -- something so simple that we couldn't have gotten out easier than if we had had the key. Morgan grabbed a guard. Bob cut his throat. Cova took the keys, and we were free.

            Now, there were times when the guards did get riled enough to give chase. I knew -- as I saw the guard bleeding on the pavement -- that we would be pursued. Cova wasn't worried. He said we had hours to get away before anyone discovered the body, and by that time, we would all over near the boat house, or hidden it, or gunning out of the wetlands at full throttle. I was less sure. I kept seeing the helicopter in my head, with flashes of gunfire.

            Some of that did happen. The guards found the body quicker than we imagined, and we just stepped out onto the marsh when the alarm honked and the search lights started sweeping around the perimeter. Then, we ran, the sound of the helicopters rising from behind the walls as we ran. Then, we saw them sweeping over the tops of the reeds, their blades bending down the tall reed heads nearly revealing us.

            “If only I could get my hands on those bastards,” Morgan kept saying. “I’d wring their throats.”

            “A rocket launcher would be more helpful,” Bob said, eyes glinting as if he could see the mangled bodies in the twisted wreckage, a vision that gave him extreme pleasure.

            “Just shut up, both of you, and we'll be fine,” Cova said. “They're not going to waste precious helicopter fuel on an extended search. They might not like our killing a guard, but they're not like cops, they won't go to the ends of the earth to eke revenge.”

 He was right. After a while the helicopter went back. Then, Cova pushed us to hurry.

            “They'll call the real cops now,” he explained. “We've got to make tracks quick before they come. The farther away we are, they less likely anyone's going to look for us. The cops don't like the private prisons any more than we do, or the guards. But the law says they've got to come around if one of them gets killed.”

            Yet hurrying wasn't easy. Half the time we marched through muck up to our knees, and for some reason, we didn't have the energy we had when we first escaped. We just slowed down more and more and more, as if the mud was sucking strength out of us as well as our shoes.

            “Come on! Come on!” Cova said, already many yards ahead of the rest of us. Strangely enough, Morgan seemed the worst, and then, after awhile, he fell face down into the mud and didn't move.

            Bob went to the man, struggled to turn the bulky man over, then when he succeeded, he yelped, stepping back from the body of our former escapee. Morgan's eyes had the same frosted look as every other disease-ridden soul we'd seen in the jail.

            “Oh God!” Bob moaned.

            “No time to mourn him,” Cova said. “If he's got it, he's got it. Nothing we can do about it now. We've just got to move on before we get it, too.”

            “If he had it, then we have it,” Bob growled.

            “Maybe not,” Cova said. “Just come on.”

            So we moved on, slowing even more as we went, only vaguely aware of the buzzing of police helicopters behind us somewhere. We didn't even duck into the reeds. We just plodded on until Bob stumbled and fell to his knees, his hands grasping at the air.

            “I can't see! I can't see!” he screamed.

            “Leave him,” Cova told me as I made to turn back to help Bob to his feet.

            “But he's hurt.”

            “He's dead; he just hasn't stop moving yet. If you try to help him, you'll be dead, too. Come on. We've got to get to the boat. Quick. If we're lucky we can get to one of the free clinics and get ourselves a shot.”

            “Is there a shot for this?” I asked, feeling even weaker than I had, though seeing two men die before my eyes may have partly accounting for this weakness.

            “There has to be,” Cova mumbled, and then pushed on.

            We reached clear water before I fell, but then, I could hardly tell, I had been floating for some time, hearing a buzzing growing louder and louder in my ears, hearing Cova urging me to keep moving, to get to the boat we both knew we could never reach. Then, standing over him, Cova screamed down.

            “Where is it?” he demanded though the buzzing had turned to roars as the reed head bent, and the rattle of machine guns sounded from above us, Cove’s chest exploding suddenly in a great surge of what appeared to be red mud.

            “The other one's only a boy,” I heard the voices saying above me over the roar of the spinning blades.

            “Leave him, he's got the disease.”

            “But he's only a boy!” the man shouted again. “What the hell's wrong with those people back there, putting a boy in jail with the rest of that scum. We've got a medic. We can take him out of there.”

            “Then what?” the other voice said. “You think he's going to going to appreciate us letting him live. He'll only wind up on the outside again. Let him die here. It's more merciful.”

            “We can't,” the other voice said. “Everything's been videoed. Headquarters will know we let him die.”

            “Son of a bitch!” the harsh voice said. “All right, bring him and give him the needle. But you're going to have to explain why we wasted good medicine on a goddamn outsider. Our luck, we'll go over budget and get our asses tossed outside.”

**********

            Twilight hung over the street as she crossed towards her favorite watering hole. The bar looked small from the outside, its brick face exactly like the two or three others on that block, down to those 1940s style glass bricks that served the joint as windows. All had neon lights blinking madly to attract customers. This bar's neon fizzed a little, and winked, and threatened to burn out at any minute, but never did.

            If it had security systems, Sherry did not see them – although even the poorest places tended to have some kind of technologically based defense. You couldn’t trust protection agreements with any of the gangs. Rival gangs made raids, and even the groups to which you were aligned shifted with changing leadership.

            This place, she knew, despite its appearance, probably had the best defense money could buy, an ongoing agreements not merely with the gangs, but the police and a pack of private security made up of veterans straight out of the L.A. Wars. Most people thought the place an eye-opener for the bums, the breakfast place of doorway champions. Sherry knew better, and she sailed through the door grinning, as if she had a secret no one else did, and loved the idea.

Inside, she came upon the swankiest slumming place in the whole city, a jumping joint where all the Inlanders came to sample the underside of life -- or what they thought was how the poor half lived. She knew the place designed itself to look the way it did, the swank more design than outcome. Many of the hard-knockers who sat around with their bulldozer faces and their arms of steel, were bouncers, not dock workers.

            Most of the whores who sat at the bar came by invitation of management, hired out of some swab uptown escort service -- clean as glass.

            Maybe some of the Inlanders knew. Or at least suspected. No one ever got into a serious fight here, where their attitude would have gotten them killed anywhere else in the Outlands. Sometimes, words got said. Sometimes people stood up. But always an arm came out, hanging around a shoulder, yanking this fool back from that fool, whispering that they didn't want to wind up dead. Those who insisted got put out to suffer their own fate on the Outlands. No sneaky Petes there. If they got hurt, they did it on their own, messing with the wrong folks -- who weren't employees of the joint.  It was all one big pretense.

            And Sherry liked that, pulling up her panty hose as she eased to the door. She didn’t go in. She had to straighten out her face first, and studied her reflection in the dark glass. She made out very well with those crazy people, even though most girls said they didn’t.

            “You have to know how to milk an Inlander," she always told the others when they hung out in the ladies room. “You can’t just expect them to give you their money.”

            “Give nothing,” one of the other girls always said. “They want too much for what they’re willing to pay.”

            Yes, they wanted a lot, Sherry admitted to herself. Sober. But get them drunk enough, get them flopping over and bragging about their super efforts in Berlin or London investments and they were no more immune than any other man, maybe less so, maybe more like little kids bragging about what they did in the school yard.

            She always urged them on, always told them how great she thought they were, always urged them to break out their designer drugs, even when she always politely refused, watching them inject the stuff up with pin-prick them dispensers, licking up the bubble of blood, or snorting some cocaine variant the way she used to lick up powdered candy when she was a girl, coughing slightly as they leaned back, their heads so full of it they couldn't think about not giving her everything and anything she asked them for.

            After all, she’d tell them. How important could they be if they couldn’t afford to buy her a little this or that, and how did they expect to get her into a hotel room if they wouldn’t show some kindness in the bar.

            They always came across.

            Then, just as she was finished with her hair, she noticed the boy's reflection in the glass, his dark shape hovering between the fish market and the dry cleaners across the street. He was not alone, standing with a white uniformed woman on one side (whom Sherry guessed was a nurse) and another, more eloquently dressed older woman (perhaps his mother).

            “Oh God,” Sherry thought, turning around to face them. “What is he doing here?   The boy lacked Sherry's light hair color, but maintained all the slight features she remembered when she gave him up, almost more a girl’s than a boy’s. Still, she almost didn’t recognize him, he looked so big.

            “He must be ten years old by now,” she thought.

             She had looked in on him from time to time, of course, coming up to the fence when he came out into the yard, she with her fingers stuck through the spaces, gripping hard to keep herself from shaking, and he, on the inside, frowning at her, shaking his head as if to draw out the memory of her face from his foggy thoughts.  His illness -- that mental thing that the doctors talked on and on about a by product of the various chemicals and biological agents launched by the terrorists after the attack on the World Trade Center thirty years earlier -- had served as a convenient excuse to be rid of him. She had not wanted him as part of her life. She would have aborted him, except for the belief she could actually  live with him, shape him into someone, do her part in making him a man -- unlike the Goddamn sailor who had helped her create him, who had zipped up his pants and walked away, without a name, without a glance back, without even a clue as to where she might reach him to get his help in paying for the birth. 

            “He said he would be back,” Sherry thought. “He said he was just going back to his ship to talk to his commanding officer.”

             "You know I'd never leave you like this,” he’d told her, and she like the young fool she had been, believed it, believed in love, counted on him and love to make  things right in her very, very wrong life.

            She hadn't even pulled her first trick then, though she had been through a bunch of men, listening to their lies as they spread her legs, watching them walk away throwing promises over their shoulders at her, and she, had believed them all until the last one, that Goddamn sailor, had left her knocked up at fifteen.  Sherry eased deeper into the doorway and watched as the two women helped the boy across the street, guiding him up onto the sidewalk. The women held him by the shoulders as he held the long stick that allowed him to tap out his progress, an act that  startled Sherry more than seeing him.

            “What’s wrong with his eyes?” she thought. “He can’t be blind. He wasn’t blind when I left him.”

            Yet the closer the boy came, the more clearly it became that he was indeed blind, his eyes wide open, his eyes no longer peering with the intensity that had drawn such guilt from her.

            “He was mad when I left him,” she thought, remembering how she had faced off with  the doctor, refusing to deal with the issue.

            “What the hell am I supposed to do with a mad baby?” she'd demanded.

            “What every parent does with any baby,” he said.

            “That's bullshit and you know it.”

            “Is it?” the doctor said, taking the instrument from around his throat to sit on the couch beside her. “The boy needs love like anybody else.” 

            “Not from me!” she snapped, wishing the doctor would keep his distance, wishing  he didn't look as good as he did or make her feel towards him the way she had toward the baby's father. “I've got a life, too, and I'm not going to spend it dragging  a Goddamn vegetable around.”

            “He's not as bad as you make out,” the doctor said, his hand falling on her knee. She stared at it, then up at the man, both hand and man seemed out of place.

            “What do you think you're doing?” she asked.

            “You know,” the doctor said, with that same glint. “I can help you with your baby if you're good to me.”

            “Help me? How?”

            “Find a place for you to put the kid,” the doctor said, slowly licking his lips as he stared at her chest. “You don't ever need to worry about him again, if you treat me right.”

            That was her first trick -- and she didn't get a cent for it. She and he, in a hotel room, a series of encounters that lasted a few weeks, long enough for him to make arrangements, and then, she walked away, crying about her decision, hating herself for making the choice.

            But what else could she do?

            The two women walked the child towards Sherry, and then, Sherry realized they hadn't recognized her at all.

            “Just a coincidence,” Sherry thought. “Just one fucking bad joke.”

            She watched the boy hobble passed, watched him vanish into the twilight, the nurse's uniform glowing long after the boy had ceased to exist.

            Then, she noticed someone else staring at her, a large, wide-shouldered man, with a broad face and intense stare, clothing and jewel – especially for the large ring on his left hand – identifying him as an Inlander.

            She smiled. He nodded. She was shaken, otherwise her instincts would have told her, this was not one of her typical marks.

            It was a mistake that would cost her her life.

 

**********

            She was cold. The fake fur around her shoulders wouldn't keep it out, any more than the phony flames flickering in the bar windows. She shivered and huddled deeper into the doorway, clamping her teeth to prevent their chattering. People came-- largely couples crawling up from Wall Street, their body armor designed by Gucci and Channel, each piece designed as if a jewel.

            Their voices seemed out of touch with the depressing world through which they walked. But it was that mocking, superior laugh Inlanders have when strolling through the Outlands – each feeling immune to the remarkable danger they faced.

            Mamey peered out at them from the shadow of her doorway, their shapes blinking on and off as they passed through one island of light and into the darkness again.

            “They’re too freakin’ cheery,” she thought. “Drunk most likely.”

            But she waited dutifully until they closed in on her position, she the perfect soldier planning her assault. When they drew close enough, she stepped out, her mouth shaping a smile neither the cold nor her mood justified.

            They ignored her, moving around her as if she didn't exist, without pause in their conversation, vanishing back into the foggy night.

            The wind moved the fog deeper into the city,  covering and uncovering secret little treasures, blowing fast-food wrappers along the curb. One flattened itself around Mamey's stocking'd leg.

            “Damn it,” she said, snatching it off, her long red nail leaving a hole where the paper had been.

            A bar light flashed on and off behind her, the sign reading "Heaven's Abode." It was surrounded by two eccentric angels whose sly eyes shifted with each blink. One of the bar doors opened with a groan, turning Mamey immediately from her sidewalk march.

            A well-dress man with short hair and a long overcoat eased  out, staggering slightly, pausing at the edge of the fog to light a cigarette, the match illuminating his features-- a young, downtown business executive clean-shaven.

            He clearly lacked armor or protection of any kind. He looked angry enough to discourage most of the typical trouble he might encounter in the unprotected street, although his wrist displayed a readout system any good hacker would buy as salvage if any mugger could cut it out of the man’s flesh.

            “The damned fool,” he grumbled, clearly peeved at some previous encounter.

            “Hey, honey,” Mamey said. “You want a date?”

            The man stared at her, something odd registered in his gaze. He seemed to check off details in his mind from some mental list. When she did not measure up completely to his expectation, he snarled.

            “Get the hell away from me," he said, crushing the half-smoked cigarette under his heel. “I don’t mess with grandmothers.”

            And then, he, too, slipped away into the fog.

            “You son of a bitch!” Mamey yelled. “You probably do it in a towel!”

            Her voice died, but she regretted her reaction. All she needed was for Kracko to hear her.

            Grandmother? She didn’t look a day over thirty.

            “Well that was clever,” someone said from another darkened doorway.

            “Kracko, honey!” Mamey said, flashing a smile at the smooth-faced black man who appeared in the light, a floppy straw hat pushed down over his eyes. He stopped a yard away and pushed up his hat with a forefinger.

            “You look like I feel after a week of drinking,” he said. “Was that a mark I saw walking away from here, baby-cakes?”

            Mamey nodded dumbly.

            “Then why didn’t you hit on him?”

            “I did hit on him, Kracko. But he was in an awful hurry.”

            “Hurrying to get away from you, you mean!”

            “But he didn't want nothing, Kracko.”

            “Damn it, woman. A man’s a man, and a good lady knows how to make him want something. Right now he's probably headed uptown to get himself a younger piece. One of Dell's little girls.”

            “I get them sometimes, Kracko,” Mamey said, sagging against the cool metal of the lamp post. The world swirled around her as if she was drunk. She could hear the sounds of movement in the fog, the dull groan of armored limousine carrying wealthy patrons from club to club. She could also hear the stir of other, darker things, the haunting figures of the night waiting their opportunity to spring on the unprotected. Even they found Mamey an unattractive target, too old to gang bang, too old to have much in the way of receipts from recent tricks.

            “You ain’t had a trick in a week,” Kracko said. “That ain’t exactly knocking `em dead.”

            “I know, I know,” she said, her head down.

            “Well if you know so much, why ain't you doing something about it? Or ain't that got into your head yet either?”

She looked up, her eyes questioning, blinking thick blue eye shadow to the skin below her brow.

            “The scene, girl. Can't you dig the scene?” Kracko spread his hands. “Don’t this look like the end of the world to you? There ain't a whole lot more steps down from here, Baby-cakes. If you can't make it here, it's out with the dish water, dig? Next step in the mill, where you just suck and fuck in the dark with nobody caring much about what you look like as long as you keep performing. Those are 16-hour a day shifts, Baby-cakes. Can you did?”

            “I’m trying, Kracko.”

            “I’m trying, Krac-ko,” Kracko mocked. “I’m trying! What kind of talk is that? Trying don't pay no bills. It don't keep no loan sharks off my ass neither. Those uptown boys ain’t exactly Chase Manhattan bank when it comes to waiting on payment.”

            “I thought you had a drug thing going,” Mamey said. “Doesn't that pay?”

            Kracko's cool expression cracked slightly as he glanced hurried away in the direction of the river. The sound of water came, flapping against the dock side, spreading an uneven rhythm to the various strains of music escaping from bar doors and apartment windows. Viewed from that angle, New York City looked as it always had, as it had for more than a hundred and fifty years, before the World Trade Center, before the wars in L.A. changed everything, before the neighborhoods struck up walls behind which to hide. He couldn’t see the river for the fog or he might have seen the heavy security that protected the marinas there, or the lights of the towers over on the Jersey City where the Hoboken neighborhood mocked the past.

            But the world was different now. Neighborhood walls made it harder to make a living. The street gangs cut and sliced their piece of the profits, but better protection made that a narrow market, too. Suckers that made their way out of the neighborhoods to engage in some sinful fun had to be lured into giving up their credits. Nor were the Outlands as open as people believed. Someone was always cracking down on them to make things look good to neighborhood associations.

            “Drugs ain’t exactly blooming," Kracko mumbled. "Some fool politician’s always cracking down. If it ain’t the city, then it’s the state, and if it ain’t the state, it's the feds."

            He had seen the black helicopters zooming over head more than once, each time, sending him into a panic as he believed his time had come.

            He spat off to the side then shook his head.

            “It’s always the little guy that gets cracked down on, you dig. It’s all those neighborhood dudes with their big cars and fancy titles. They get away with murder and no one goes after them. They deal drugs, they pimp girls, but they got the credits to hand out to this cop or that prosecutor. I ain’t got credit enough to pay for my laundry. How am I suppose to pay the man?”

            “I didn't know, Kracko. I thought you were rolling in dough.”

            Kracko's face split into a web-work of lines.

            “Now ain’t that some asset,” he said. “A bitch that thinks. Don’t you dig it yet? You ain’t supposed to think, you're supposed to pitch. Cause when the uptown boys come to collect, I’d better have credits to give them -- or we’re both out. You out of a job. Me out of my skin.”

            They stood silent for a moment as another wave of fog rolled in, separating them, like large gray hands of giant reaching in towards the heart of the city. The volume of music rose with the opening bar door. A young blond girl stepped out, reeking of New Jersey. She couldn't been more than seventeen, though she staggered slightly as she descended the step, holding her polished nails across her lips as she burped.

            Kracko straightened, the lines fading again as he gaze grew interested. “Now ain't she sweet.”

            “Take it easy, Kracko,” Mamey said. “That girl’s jail bait if I ever saw it.”

            A sly look shifted its way towards Mamey. “If that's so, why she drunk? No bartender gonna serve a sweet face like that unless she got credentials saying she's of age.”

            “There’s ways of getting those,” Mamey said. “You know that better than anyone.”

            The girl stepped out from the door, the fog washing away from her bold clothing-- short gold skirt, thin black jacket. Her flowing white shirt revealed two blossoming breasts.

            She had no protection of any kind, no tell-tale shimmer of a personal protection field – typical of those who could afford its limited but expensive protection.

            Kracko whistled slowly.

            “Paul?” the girl said, her voice tentative. “Where are you, Paul. Don't kid around like this. You're not being funny.”

            “She must be with the boy I saw,” Mamey said.

            “Was with,” Kracko said. “She ain’t with nobody now.”

            “Paul, please! I didn’t mean anything by what I said in there. You look as macho as any of those gang guys, honest.”

             But her words were lost like smoke to the swirling fog-- a tug horn hooted from the river. A distant siren hinted of a fire or crime.

            “Damn,” she hissed and kicked at the curb, then slumped against the brick wall, her arms folded across her chest.

            Kracko smiled, glancing at Mamey.

            “Why don't you go dig up that mark again,” he said, tugging down on his jacket sleeves, one at a time, as if cracking his knuckles.

            “He's long gone by this time. Besides, he wasn’t interested. Marks just aren't the same these days. They don't seem to be as interested in sex as they used to be.”

             Kracko eyed Mamey spuriously. “I wonder why.”

            “Maybe it’s the place, Kracko. People that come to these clubs don’t need no whore to make them happy. They got each other. They like slumming it, but they don’t want to have to pay for it. They don’t want to really stain themselves by touching anybody like me. They want to pretend, coming out from behind their walls to fuck each other but without being in any real danger. Maybe we could go uptown some and find us a better place, where the clientele is more interested in buying my services.”

            “Marks are always looking for sex, baby-cakes,” Kracko said, eyeing the girl near the bar door. “It ain't the neighborhood. Plenty of these guys don’t score with the neighborhood broads and come out drunk and horny, willing to pay for the right piece of ass. Besides, we’ve been uptown already. Remember?”

            “Those places were worse than these,” Mamey complained. “They weren’t even pretending to slum. All they wanted was their own kind.”

            “Don’t start that diatribe again,” Kracko moaned. “They’d have bought if the merchandise was right. And they had credits enough to pay for the ones they want. What they got sick of was seeing this old whore outside their door, getting older and fatter right before their eyes.”

            “I'm not that heavy, Kracko,” Mamey protested. “And I'm losing it, honest.”

            “Losing, my ass! I’ll bet you gained another pound or two just today.”

            The girl looked up, apparently aware of the voices, her dilated eyes narrowing as the faces of Mamey and Kracko appeared with the shifting fog.

            “Paul?” the girl said, her voice growing stronger. “Please, Paul. I'm getting cold.”

            “It’s not like I don't diet,” Mamey continued. “I hardly eat anything all day. It's just that the more I try to lose, the more I seem to gain.”

            “Maybe you can diet off the wrinkles while you're at it.”

            Mamey looked up sharply, her expression pained. “Kracko?”

            “Let's face it, Baby-cakes,” Kracko said to Mamey. “Your days as a street walker are numbered.”

            “Don’t say that, Kracko. I’ll loose weight. I promise. And I'll knock them dead, just like I used to.”

             Kracko laughed. “You never knocked them dead. Not when I got you. You were always the motherly type. Some marks like to be mothered. But face it, none of them wants to go to bed with a bitch that looks like their mother.”

            “Paul?” the girl said, her sharp heals clicking on the side walk as she moved first one way then the other, coming to the wall of white, stopping. “Quit kidding Paul. It's getting cold out here. Come back. I'll make things good for you.”

            Kracko's eyebrows rose, as he looked across the street at the pacing girl. “Now if I had something like that to work with, Baby. I wouldn't have to worry about no mob-men coming to break my legs. I wouldn’t have no other pimps laughing behind my back either.”

            “She's too young.”

            “Which goes to show how out of touch you are. Young’s the way marks like them these days. The younger the better.”

            For a moment, they both fell silent, with only the clicking panicky heals of the girl filling the space where traffic horns might have on a clear night. A deep fog horn sounded again from the river, then the cough of someone moving through the white with a shuffled step.

            A drunk staggered into view on the far side of the street, stopping short at the sight of the girl, a lusting grin smeared across his bubbling mouth.

            “S-Say, now ain't you the c-cute one,” the drunk said. “Why d-don't you and m-m-me step around the corner for a little f-fun?”

            “Fuck off,” the girl snapped. “My boyfriend's around here and he’s a big man.”

            But the drunk's grin never wavered. “Oh come on, honey,” he said, grabbing at her arm. “I don't see no bad wolf around here?”

            “I told you to leave me alone!” the girl said, yanking her arm free.

            “You got a problem, girl?” Kracko shouted as he crossed the street.

            The girl looked up gratefully. “Yeah. This man here won’t leave me alone.”

            “Is that so?” Kracko growled, looking over the drunk. “You got some problem, man?”

            The drunk staggered back, eyeing Kracko’s hard exterior, blinking and wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

            “Problem? N-No problem --except that your damned whore won’t come along with me. And it ain't like I can’t pay.”

            The drunk pulled out a wad of credits, waving them under the girl’s nose.

            “I’ll come with you, sweetheart,” Mamey said, striding across the street, her thin lips quivering as she tried to smile.

            The drunk looked at her, his face tightening around the jaw. “I don't want to go with you.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because I don't,” the drunk said. “I want this one or nobody.” The drunk peered at Kracko. “What k-kind of g-game are you playing here, putting this young thing out like b-bait.”

            “I'm not anyone’s bait!” the girl said. “I don’t know what any of your are talking about. I’m just out here looking for my boyfriend. We had a fight and he walked out on me. I know he's not far away. He wouldn’t go far from me. So if you people don’t watch yourselves, he’ll show you what a college line-backer can do.”

            “Horseshit!” the drunk said, spitting off into the gutter. “Damn whores can’t be trusted for nothing.”

            He staggered back into the fog still cursing.

            “Hey, Pal!” Kracko shouted. “Come back. I'll give you a discount on the old whore. She ain't near as bad as she looks. Besides, what difference does it make. They all look the same with the lights off!”

            “Shut up, Kracko,” Mamey said. “I wouldn't do it with that mark if he paid me double.”

            “Shut up? Since when have you gotten so uppity, baby-cakes?”

            “Since you started renting me out on discount.”

            “I wouldn’t have to if you earned your way.”

            “I’ve done fine by you, Kracko,” Mamey said. “You just don't appreciate what I've done – you’re not the one that has to crawl into the sack with some of these slime-buckets.”

             Kracko sighed. “You know, baby-cakes. That’s your problem. You’re just too damned selective. This ain’t the kind of business where you can pick and choose. You dig? Especially looking like you do. Now if you looked like this chick here, that would be a different story.”

            Kracko stepped back and looked over the girl. She shook her hair back and smiled.

            “It’s nice to be appreciated by someone,” she said, half-heartedly. “I don't know what's gotten into Paul, leaving me here like this. It wasn’t like we had a terrible row or anything. Not like the one we had on the way through the tunnel. You’d think by the way he acted, he'd planned to leave me here.”

            Kracko's smile widened. “Hey, you know how marks are, sweetie. Can’t trust them to do what they say.”

            “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I thought I could trust Paul. He’s always been so sweet to me, telling me not to worry about anything, telling me about this perfect little love nest place over in the city where we could get it on.”

            She looked back at the bar and shivered.

            “This place, I asked him. It looks like a dump. But he said it wasn’t so easy getting me served with my sweet face-- if I looked older, I could get in at some of the uptown places. But I got ID as good as anyone’s. I spent good money to get my retina tattooed, and my hologram ID printed.”

            She plucked out her wallet and held up the fake card, which Kracko politely examined.

            “It sure looks like you,” he said, “But no bartender's gonna believe you’re twenty one.”

            “That’s what Paul said, too. But this place? It must be cleaner in the sewer!” She shivered again and looked to the fog. “Now I don't know how I'm going to get home.”

            “There's always the bus, Honey,” Mamey said.

            “A bus?” the girl said, looking queerly at Mamey.

            “Don’t tell me you never heard of one of those, dear? You can get one uptown at the Port Authority, just about any time night or day.”

            The girl's shoulders shrugged helplessly. "Even if I thought I could survive that place,  I don’t have any money.  Paul was so sweet. Paul insisted I leave everything but my ID under the seat of his armored car. ‘My treat,’ he told me. ‘Don't want you to get it into your head to spend anything for yourself.’”

            “Money’s no problem,” Kracko said, his long arm sweeping around the girl’s small shoulder. “But we can’t have you walking those dangerous uptown streets all alone. There’s a lot of gangs between here and there, anyone of which would eat you alive. And it won’t do for you to try knocking on any neighborhood gates, security in those places wouldn’t let you in, even if you promised them a blow job. But I’m sure I could get you uptown safe enough. I’ll just escort you right though all the bullshit. No gangs will mess with you as along as Kracko’s with you.”

            The girl looked up gratefully.

            “Oh, that would be too kind of you,” she said. “But all I really need is enough money for a phone call – Paul insisted I live my cell in the car, too. God knows who I’d call. Paul obviously won’t come. And father....”

            She shuddered again.

            “No, no, sweetie,” Kracko said. “Money ain’t a problem when you look like you do. We could pick up enough for the bus just flapping your lashes.”

            “Kracko,” Mamey said, grabbing the man's arm. “Don’t be stupid. You can't go uptown -- not with those dudes looking to break your legs. You show your face above 34th street and you won't have a face to show.”

            Kracko grinned.

            “But Baby-cakes, I’ll have money to give them once I get this gal on the job.

            “Oh, let her go, Kracko. She really isn’t what you want anyway. She doesn't have what it takes to survive the street.”

            “I wasn’t planning on making her walk the street,” Kracko said, petting the long strands of blond hair as they swept down over the girl’s shoulders. “With something this foxy, I could have my own mid-town house. Wouldn’t need to drag the streets any more.”

            “Yeah, you’ll take every cent she has and when she's old and tired, you'll sell her to some other pimp," Mamey said.

            “Quit that talk,” Kracko said "She's everything I ever dreamed of.”

            He grabbed the girl and pulled her close.

            The girl glared, her blue eyes suddenly catching on to the situation.

            “Let go of me!” the girl yelled, but his other hand clamped over her mouth. His pressed his lips to her ear.

            “You don’t quit screaming, girl, you’ll be mighty sorry.” Kracko said. “You’re my bitch now, and you’ll do what I tell you.”

            The girl bit the palm of his hand and then screamed when his hand jerked free of her mouth.

            “Help, police!” the girl yelled, then tried to run.

            But Kracko grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back, hitting her across the mouth several times until shock or fear brought her to silence.

            “You’re going to do what I say,” he said, sternly. “You hear me?”

            The girl nodded.

            “And you,” Kracko said, glaring at Mamey. “When I get back I’m taking you over to the mill. You hear me?”

            “I won’t be here,” Mamey said.

            Kracko grinned. “I’ll find you,” he said. “I’ll just ask for the old bitch. People will tell me where you are.”

            Then, dragging the young girl along, Kracko vanished into the fog, leaving Mamey standing under a light.

            She stared after them as if she could still see them. Then, she heard the scuff of a shoe on the pavement behind her and turned. She saw a figure rising out of the fog. After a moment, she recognized the face.

            “It’s you,” she said as the man from earlier neared, a huge man with large hands. “Did you change your mind about me?”

            The man nodded. “Yes,” he said, softly. “But I don’t want to do it here. Let’s slip off somewhere.”

            “Sure, honey,” Mamey said, suddenly realizing that she was a free agent, despite Kracko’s threat. She could do anything she wanted, go with anybody who’d pay, and keep all the money for herself.  After all, she wasn’t that old or heavy. She could lose weight. “Anything you want, honey.”

 

***********

 

            Chief of Police William Vincent stepped warily over the chunks of broken stone and into the alley, his slick office shoes slipping on the wet street. He had just come from the mayor’s office, which required him to dress up.

            Always a performance when he got called on the carpet.

            Even routine meetings had a formality only the Vatican could duplicate, with the mayor demanding s similar level of respect.

            Out here in the Outlands, such gear was whole inappropriate, like a clown walking through a war zone. The rubble of the Lower East Side growing worse week by week as developers refused to reinvest in any area unprotected by walls.

            Uniformed officers scrambled through the debris like insects, digital cameras taking in each inch of detail for the city files as other officers swept through with scanners seeking fingerprints and traces of DNA. Metal detectors and body heat viewers treated this murder as seriously as a presidential assassination.

            No stone should remain unturned, the mayor had announced, as the press snapped his picture for the front page of tomorrow’s tabloids.

            Had this been an isolated case, the mayor might not have bothered. What was another Outlands prostitute to him or his effort at re-election. But the string of killings had struck more than prostitutes, leaving a list of society girls whose voting districts encompassed some of the better neighborhoods. Now, even a prostitute’s death brought out negative headlines. And any headline critical of his administration enraged the mayor and brought down his wrath upon whatever department was responsible.

            Vincent felt helpless among all the activity, one useless appendage in an otherwise fully functioning machine, although he and those working closest to the body appeared the most vulnerable, operating without the usual bulky body armor regulations insisted officers in the field wear. Only along the perimeter did officers wear the gear, standing guard against a possible ambush.

            “Lucas?” Vincent called, stopping within a dozen feet of where most of the blue uniforms had congregated.

            One of the smaller men broke off talk with one of the professionals to hurry over.

            “You called, Chief?” Police Captain Lucas Hudson asked his thin features as nearly two-dimensional as a cartoon’s. He had thick black eyebrows suited better for a larger man, and black hair that he cut soup-bowl style, giving him an oriental look.

            “How bad is it?” Vincent asked.

            “As bad as the others,’’ Hudson said, waving his right hand in the general direction where the body lay, a hand missing its thumb. Hudson sniffled. His red nose gave evidence to the cold he struggled to fight off. He was not the best kept man. His uniform didn’t fit him well, and most times had a crinkled appearance if he had slept in it – which he likely had.

            “Same MO?”

            “Right down to the marks on the neck,” Hudson said. “You want to see?”

            “I suppose I have to,” Vincent mumbled, knowing he had no business sticking his nose into the crime scene. They would have the reports on his desk computer within the house, down to scanned images of the body. But Vincent needed to look over the real life details. Computer images -- no matter how well crafted -- could not carry the desired effect.

            He followed Hudson across to the crowd, the other men parting before him, creating space near the foot of the body. One bare foot stuck out from under the plastic sheet.

            “She was naked?” Vincent said, surprising sounding in his voice, though he shouldn’t have been. The other five bodies had been naked, too.

            Hudson nodded. “We haven’t found the clothing yet, but we have someone searching the trash around here. In every other case, we found the victim’s clothing in the closest open bin,” the captain said.

            Vincent nodded, eased around the body until he was near the victim’s head. He crouched, his shoes grinding on the gritting stone as he flipped back the plastic from the blonde girl’s head. Her green eyes were open and still held the look of horror.

            “Age?” he asked.

            “As near as we can determine, between 40 and 50,” Hudson said, reading a report off a computerized clipboard.

            “That’s different from the others, isn’t it?”

            “Yes.”

            “Any  ID?”

            “We’ve run finger, foot prints and DNA.  The retina ID has been burned out. Probably with a laser.” Hudson said. “We should have something within an hour. But it’s unlikely she came from the other side of the wall like the others.”

            Vincent glanced up. “What makes you say that?”

            “Look at her, chief,” Hudson said. “She’s worn out. She’s got scars no Inlander would have. If she didn’t have the black and blue ring around her neck like the others, I would have said her murder was unrelated.”

            Vincent had seen all of the bodies. He had recognized the details of their demise, the fact that all had come from inside the wall, born and raised there. This one had not.

            “But she is like the others in every other way,” Hudson said. “ The same hair color even and height. My guess is that she was a secondary victim.”

            “I don’t get you?”

            “The killer must have had someone else in mind, and took her up because the first one got away.”

            “That’s saying a lot,” Vincent said. then turned his attention back to the body, easing the plastic sheet down from the face to reveal throat. The violet colored wounds rapidly aged from where someone had strangled the woman. Yet, strange indentations showed, breaking the surface of the woman’s flesh, leaving tiny pools of now brownish blood.

            “These wounds are the same, too,” Vincent said. “I wonder if the lab will find traces of silver in them the way it had with the others.?”

            “I’m sure they will,” Hudson said. “This fits the pattern.’’

             Vincent did not look at the man, and his hands shook as he ruffled through his pockets, and came out with a lifesaver, cherry flavored, fingers struggling to peal all the silver paper from the candy before plopping it into his dry mouth -- the memory leaving him angrier than he had been since the day his wife died. Each rape case bring into the back of his head the idea that he might just catch the original bastard, the one who had left his wife to die, naked and cold. But he knew such a fantasy would not hold up to the cold reality. The Outlands killed her. The Outlands killed them all. Only in this case, the Outlands had worn an Inlander’s face.

            “Like a signature,” Vincent said. “I’d sure like to catch the son of a bitch who’s been doing these.”

            “We might this time,” Hudson said. “We’ve got a witness.”

            Vincent glanced up sharply. “With a positive ID?”

            “Afraid we’re not that lucky, chief,” Hudson, searching his pocket for a handkerchief, then after finding, he blew his nose, wiped the nose carefully, and replaced the handkerchief in his pocket. “Some old rag lady happen to go by, just as the man finished up.”

            “Did the killer see her?”

            “Apparently not, but she got a good gander at him. She said she heard the girl cry out and came over to look.”

            “A brave lady in these parts. If one of the gangs had spotted her, she would have been a victim, too.” Vincent said. “Or did she have her own agenda?”

            “I’m sure she did,” Hudson said. “She’s a regular here, selling rags, collecting whatever else she can find to sell. She probably figured she’d get a ring or something after the gangs finished with the girl. I don’t think the woman expected to find the girl dead or this strange fellow stalking away. Plus, I imagine, she thinks we’ll give her a little reward for what she’s seen.”

            “Did you tell her that?”

            “I didn’t see any harm.”

            Vincent nodded. Half of justice in the Outlands these days came by way of paid informers and witnesses, people earning their living off what they know or see.

            “You give her over to the image boys?”

            “Yep, they got a good picture, too, though who knows if we’ll ever find the guy it belongs to?”

            “But you said she followed him. Where?”

            “Bud oak.”

            Vincent again stared at his captain. “You kidding?”

            “That’s what she told us. Is there a problem with that?”

            “Only if she’s telling the truth,” Vincent said, rising again from the body, though he did not re-cover the face. “Bud Oak is about as exclusive a neighborhood as we have in this city. An ordinary neighborhood, we can pressure into cooperation. But that place...” Vincent shook his head  “...that place won’t want to know us from Adam.”

            “How do we get him, chief?” Hudson asked, strolling beside Vincent back to the police vehicle, the cold wind blowing across his cratered face -- disease scars a good plastic surgeon could have cured over time, but scars that cops kept to compete with the criminals, making Hudson look as vicious as any of the dogs who peed in the alley.

            “By the book” Vincent said, opening the door so his partner could climb in, the cleanup crew completing the ugly part of the task, taking the body back to the station where the lab people would work it over, raping the body with scalpels, taking it to pieces for evidence. Vincent had the clear part, the ego-inflating part, the part that played a vengeful God -- only the role he played never seemed big enough. He couldn’t enact the changes he wanted, recreating the Outlands in six days the way the original God had the world, and he fell into his seat and closed the door, feeling helpless, letting the driver zoom away from the whole bloody mess.

Beside him, the pockmarked face of his companion floated wearing a puzzled expression, an expression every cop saw when they saw Vincent, wondering about Vincent’s insistence on following the rules.

            “There are other ways we can do things, you know,” Hudson once told him. “You’re the chief here. None of these Outlands scum are going to go screaming that you’ve violated their rights.”

            “I know,” Vincent replied. “But it’s a matter of principle.”

            “You mean us being cops we should do things better?” Hudson said with obvious contempt. “That’s bullshit. It’s like putting handcuffs on us sometimes, letting them do whatever they want, use whatever methods they can, while we have to read them their rights and treat them like gentlemen. Most of the boys think we should kick their asses every time we run into them, letting them know whose the meanest dog on the block.”

            “I know that’s how they feel,” Vincent said. “But that’s fear speaking. Most of these men grew up on the right side of the neighborhood wall, learning to fight in the army or marines for the West Coast Wars. But I came up on these streets, learned what it means to have no sense or order, no right and wrong. Sure, we can kick their butts, we can violate their rights, we can put them in the grave and no one will blame us – in fact, most people will pin metals on our chest and call us heroes. But that doesn’t help anything. We have to create order, not contribute to the madness by being one bigger and meaner gang than all the rest. If we follow the rules, if we do everything the same way, treat everyone the way the law says we should, then we create islands of civilization in the middle of all this, civilization that doesn’t need walls to defend, doesn’t need armed guards to maintain, doesn’t fear being overwhelmed by chaos.”

            “You make it sound noble, but it isn’t that easy,” Hudson said. “People – good people – will get killed doing it your way.”

            “Yes,” Vincent admitted. “But then people have always given their lives up for noble causes, haven’t they?”

***********

            Vincent had dealt with wealthy neighborhoods before, as a cop and as a citizen. Those places thought themselves too superior to cooperate with an investigation, especially where one of its own was concerned. Vincent could get more information about their income through federal authorities, than he could never get about any other aspect of a resident’s life. In fact, the feds often showed up at such places to make sure those people paid their proper share of taxes. But murder? Rape? Those things were meaningless to a government concerned only with finance. That’s what local cops were for, and in places like Bud Oak, getting information might take a full scale invasion.

            And if this character is someone important in the community, Vincent might never get him, though more than likely, the man who did this was most likely some private contractor hired by the neighborhood to supply some messy service like sewage or street cleaning no neighborhood resident would dirty their hands on. Even though neighborhoods tended to check on the criminal history of such employees, many vicious people snuck through, especially where security was concerned, men as vicious as street dogs, hired to make the residents believe themselves secure – no resident ever believing such dogs might turn on them.

            Had Vincent been less lucky, he might have found himself in such a position himself. God knew he had all the proper credentials, an Outlands street fighter who had fought his way out of the worst neighborhood in the city to become the top dog cop, the fourth police chief in the last three years, hired to put a leach on crime -- especially here in the Outlands where crime ran rampant.

            Most people didn’t last a night here, so brutal was this world at times, a crazy jigsaw world of abandoned blocks that traditional neighborhoods refused to incorporate within their walls, full of broken people who had neither the money nor skills to win acceptance behind an neighborhood wall, factory workers, cab drivers, fast food sales people side by side with drug dealers, gang members, murderers, muggers, rapists and worse -- sharks eating sharks, eating sharks and a few minnows, too. The prostitutes prowled here. The transvestites. The down and out bums addicted to misery and cold.

            Just where the walled concepts for the neighborhoods started, only the historians knew for sure, though Vincent had heard they evolved mid-century, part of the white flight from the cities, when wealthy working class and middle Americans banded into communities for protection -- a new level of financial racism that allowed them to segregate themselves from those things they feared most, educating their children in private schools, letting their children play in neighborhoods that had no diversity of color or language, letting the grow up divorced from the experience of knowing anyone but their own kind, fearing out of ignorance anyone beyond the local gate and guard.

            No machine guns, then, no high walls with razor wire. No sensing devices. Just the guard and gate and all that such things symbolized. The walls, machine guns, and security systems came later, as such neighborhoods began their slow invasion back into the cities. One tale said the movement started with the second wave of LA riots, with wealthy people too stubborn and well-invested in the city to move, blocking up the street at one side of their neighborhood with a gate, and walling off every other entrance, hiring guards with guns to keep the criminals from climbing over.

            Once the pattern got established, it spread like disease, with every neighborhood doing just what it could when it could. In the end, such places proved Darwin’s theories on evolution.  Not that all neighborhoods were wealthy – a fact that came as a surprise to Vincent who had always and still lived outside the walls unlike many cops that settled inside. Even the less wealthy soon realized they could no longer survive in the Outlands and live normal lives, and these people shaped new, less-exclusive neighborhoods: Spanish neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, language-based neighborhoods, even neighborhoods of upscale homosexuals, each with its own level of security, from basic machine-guns and barbed wire all the way up to high tech.

            Not all neighborhoods survived, but those with the strongest investment did, often thriving the way small countries might, growing into little island states with their own clump of stores and houses, own security, even their own prisons. Most of the heavy manufacturing, of course, was done in the Outlands, yet with private commuter services to various poorer neighborhoods, where cheap labor allowed the factories to show big markups on products and kept small neighborhoods with mostly working class people from crumbling into the Outlands

            The Outlands, the areas excluded from this neighborhood or that grew more crowded with those too violent, lazy or poor to live inside, a growing population of victimizers and victims that -- by sheer abandonment -- lived up to the stereotypes that had driven people inside. Such places outside the walls became the hell people for years had painted cities, bloody alleys of contention, of survival or death, tooth and nail existence. Police forces struggled to keep them orderly, but could only marginally succeed, and only in daylight. Guns manufacturers -- whose profits had previously come from international war -- now made fortunes arming guards, police and criminals, expanding the horizons of violence until the Outlands resembled a full scale war zone.

            Cities pleaded with the states for help, and then the federal government. But the states, had their own hands full, regulating the mandates sent down from the federal government, struggling to balance new duties once in the exclusive hands of federal bureaucracy. The states would not send police into counties or cities or towns when they could barely afford to run other programs. And federal authorities, once stripped of the more mundane duties of welfare and environment, felt no need to take up the duties of public order. As long as the IRS received its revenues, it cared nothing about what went on. Only when a neighborhood reneged on its tax payments, did the skies fill with heavy black combat flyers; missiles and lasers cutting open neighborhood walls.

            Order, then, was left in the hands of local governments, whose revenue was limited and problems explosive. Cops became a specialized breed of combat soldier, traveling in teams through streets and allies where they might find themselves in a cross fire at any time. Such cross fires became deadly, especially at night, when the enemy was often simply a muzzle flash in the dark. Police departments came to an agreement with these streets, reserving their heaviest patrols for daylight – when trapped troops could be property protected – abandoning these same streets to the hoodlums after nightfall.

            Then, after a while, under the pressure of escalating costs, even the daylight hours became impossible, and the police lost control of the Outlands, keeping guard over them, rather than keeping order, responding to possible disasters rather than preventing them. For Vincent, who inherited his city’s Outlands, it was a war the police lost day by day, week by week, year by year, growing less and less effective, and more frustrated -- many officers giving up after a few years for the relatively soft life as wall guards or personnel security. Some even climbed up from the Outlands to state security or federal, where their experience on the ground gave them status as jungle fighters.

            Not all Outlands killed routinely, twenty four hours a day. People lived and worked here. Got on with their daily lives. Kids were born, went to school, grew up to replace their fathers in a strange cast system, rarely lucky enough to get themselves accepted into anyone’s neighborhood, and the city fathers, elected by huddling masses behind the walls, demanded more order, unattainable order, hiring tougher and tougher police, providing them with more ferrous weapons, calling on men like Vincent who they believed could bring order to this chaos -- when no one could -- firing police chiefs just as routinely when no order emerged.

            Yet Vincent was different than the previous police chiefs. The others had all been born and raised in neighborhoods, Vincent had not. He had come from Outlanders stock, working his way up through the police force by sheer accomplishment, winning approval for the way he whipped this portion of the city into shape, or that. He was the youngest chief in the history of the city, the youngest captain before that, the youngest lieutenant.

            The city fathers had not wanted him to lead the police, thought him too young, too wild, too much an Outlander himself, capable of taking the law beyond the books. But slowly with the Outlands growing more wild and furious, they grew desperate, and he vowed to shape the Outlands, to prove to all those neighborhood bastards that the Outlands could be controlled and made livable, despite each neighborhood’s effort to exclude these people.

            Few of the elected officials understood Vincent at all, seeing him as some kind of trained animal that could turn wild on them at any time. They failed to understand exactly what had allowed him to survive these streets, or how he had come to respect the idea and sense of law -- law that defined boundaries of civilization and gave civilization shape. Within its bounds, human beings could interact without killing each other. He needed and wanted it to take shape in the Outlands, a wall made of words rather than brick, something that could include everyone. A high ideal, he admitted, but then, coming from the street himself, he had accomplished more than many he knew, and if he could climb out of the Outlands, he might just be able to drag the rest of the Outlands with him.

************

            When Vincent made sergeant, he came home to tell his wife. He had been married two years, battling his wife’s expectations that they would -- like most cops -- move into a neighborhood somewhere, where they would raise a family. Vincent always changed the subject when the issue came up, promising to discuss it when he made a rank at which they could afford the excessive condo service charges.

            “When’s that, Bill? When you make police chief?” his wife asked, through those first two years.

            “When I’m sergeant,” he promised, never actually believing he would make that rank, since no Outsider ever had. He never wanted to make the move to a neighborhood, knowing how insecure he would feel living within walls, relying on other men to guard him. He believed living inside would ruin his instincts for survival on the outside, and eventually, when he most needed those instincts, he would find himself dead. He’d seen other men get careless.

            Then, when the police chief told Vincent he had made sergeant, he came home with a kind of dread, knowing that he and his wife would fight over the prospect of moving, over changing their lives, over having a family. Vincent had wanted to have kids right from the start. His wife refused, saying she would not bring a kid up in the Outlands for it to turn into an animal.

            “It’s bad enough we have to live out here like this, always looking over our shoulders, always locking ourselves in at night,” she said. “I won’t have a child live like that, too.”

            “But that’s crazy. What do you think we’d be doing inside a neighborhood? It’s just a bigger space that’s all.?

            “What do you know about neighborhoods?” she demanded. “I’m the one who grew up in one, remember, not you?”

            So when he pulled into the garage, the security door closing behind him, he was startled to find the lights still out and his wife’s car not in its usual spot. She routinely arrived home before him, setting the kitchen appliances into motion that would have supper on the table before he got home.  Now, the whole old converted brownstone seemed to echo with his footsteps as he climbed up from the garage to the first floor, his voice – calling her name despite his knowing she wasn’t there – echoing ahead of him.

            Why wasn’t she home? Where could she have stopped off on her way home? He pressed a button on the window sill, snapping open the outside metal shudders. A dark view greeted him, as the city slowly descended into night. The first thoughts of danger rising into him as the light failed. He would have to go out and look for her if she wasn’t home shortly, follow her usual route between office and home, and see if perhaps her vehicle had broken down somewhere along the way.

            Then, the telephone rang, like the crying voice of a child behind him, turning him away from the open window, making him snatch it up before it could ring again.

            “Hello?”

            “Sergeant Vincent?” a voice asked, the rasp of official activity sounding behind it, telling him it was the police.

            “Yes?”

            “We found your wife down on Sullivan Street,” the dispatcher said. “I think you’d better get down there.”

            Vincent didn’t even close the window, and if the garage door hadn’t closed automatically behind, he would have left that open, too, pushing the armored car faster and faster through streets no longer capable of being driven for speed on anything larger than a motorcycle, cluttered streets full of food vendors and crumbling buildings. Six blocks later, he came to the road block, the lights of numerous police vehicles flashing like fire in the darkening street. He flashed his idea at the security post and rushed up to the center of the scene, coroner leaning over the crumpled body of Vincent’s wife – whose neck was ringed with blue from someone strangling her, the eyes bulging slightly from the pressure, horror showing in them as a last expression.

***********

             Vincent called the Upper East Side himself, listening to the ghost voices of other conversations that fiber optics had not been able to erase from the phone system, voices crying or laughing, shouting or whispering -- part of the huge network of voices that made up the real city, the one walls could not stop, computer terminals and video displays creating new alternatives to the flesh to flesh intercourse of the past, people typing onto or speaking into screens with images and dots or talking  into microphones to perform magical technological feats their ancestors only dreamed about.. His screen had posted a message saying: one minute please. The connection is being made for you.

            Then, a familiar face replaced the notice, a face grown much older in the intervening years, but one Vincent could not forget, no matter how many years separated his seeing it again.

            ``Bosk?’’ he said, his voice sounding strained with disbelief. ``Hank Bosk?’’

            The figure on the far side laughed, his face distorted, too, though in a much different way than Hudson’s was, one slightly twisted, the right side drawn up around a deep scar. His smile seemed a grimace and his eyes seemed full of hate.

            “I was wondering if we’d ever meet professionally,” Bosk said, his laugh as insulting as a jeer, just the way it had been on the street, when he had worked less noble jobs in the Outlands.

            “Long way from the strip joints, eh, Bosk?” Vincent asked, noting the sudden whitening of the man’s scar and the hardening of the man’s eyes.

            “They weren’t strip joints,” the man said. “Those were respectable places with a respectable clientele.”

            “Up front they were,” Vincent said. “But in the back, the women performed just like in any other whore house. Management just got better pay for their services.”

            “Enough with the small talk, Chief,” Bosk said. “What do you want from me?”

            “I’m in the middle of a murder investigation. A young woman was raped and strangled.”

            “So?”

            “So we have a witness that followed our suspect the gate of Chelsea. I’d like to circulate the computer graphic.”

            “Are you crazy?” Bosk said. “You can’t expect us to cooperate with something that went on in the Outlands?”

            “Look, Bosk,” Vincent said in a slow, deliberate delivery. “We can go about this the hard way with me getting search warrants. But I believe in cooperation and would rather let you people clean up your own messes. Besides, if you’ve got a killer on your staff, some maintenance person who’s record slipped past your security checks, it’s better for both sides if you know about it and get him out of there before he kills someone on the inside, too.”

            Bosk didn’t like Vincent’s suggestion, but even when the head of security for the ritzy sex clubs years earlier, the man had not been stupid – especially when the situation involved him risking his own neck. How bad would things look if one of the rich women wound up dead?

            “All right,” Bosk said. “You cable it over and we’ll look into the matter. I’m not guaranteeing anything. You hear? But we check it out.”

            “That’s all I ask,” Vincent said, then severed the connection with a quick jab of his finger, cutting off the flow of memories generated by the man’s face was far less easy.

**********

            Vincent knew Bosk from his own days as a beat cop, years before Vincent became sergeant or Bosk head of security – a surprisingly skillful street punk with the instincts of a rat, always the one man on the block with big plans and talent enough to make them come true. Bosk took a job for a local collection agency with the idea of becoming a cop, good training that avoided the risks of the more traditional route through the US Army. As a collector, Bosk excelled, not quite breaking people’s legs the way the loan sharks did, but using every other method short of illegal assault to make his quota. But his plans for making the police department faltered when he failed the psychological test – a test whose barriers for violence had loosened considerably over the years. Bosk was just too vicious for anyone to trust with a badge, a viciousness Vincent himself witnessed on the street those years collecting.

            In one instance, Vincent actually walked into the middle of Bosk’s routines, finding the scarred face pressed up against his victim’s, grinning madly, as he pressed in the man’s Adam’s apple with his upper arm.

            “Money, friend,” Bosk hissed. “That’s what I want. You said you would have it and I want it quick. No week’s wait for you to collect from your tenants. No day’s wait for you to go to the bank. If you need to make a withdrawal, use your cash card. Dig?”

            “Interesting routine you have, Bosk,” Vincent said, standing at the head of the alley, the store keeper’s wide, slightly bulging eyes staring over Bosk’s arm – eyes pleading for help, though technically, Vincent couldn’t help without a verbal request. The store keeper said nothing. But Bosk did.

            “Get out of here, cop,” he snapped. “You got not business interfering with this.”

            “If you kill him, I do,” Vincent said, taking a slow step closer, smelling the rotting trash from the butcher’s shop, trash that remained unrifled yet by the street people – they would come later after the sun went down and the store closed.

            “I’m not going to kill him, so go away,” Bosk said. “I’m just giving him a little incentive to pay his debts.”

            “Is that why your collection rate is so high?” Vincent asked. “You beat the hell out of people using loanshark techniques?”

            “Nobody asked for you to get into the middle of this, cop, now get before I file a complaint.”

            “For what?” Vincent asked, edging closer, studying Bosk, noticing the uniform-like clothing he wore, from the blue shirt and pants down to the leather belt and shoes, an imitation cop who couldn’t get the desire out of his blood.

            “Just let go of the man, Bosk. He got your point. He’s frightened enough to pay.”

            “And I said fuck off,” Bosk said, releasing the store keeper and reaching for Vincent all in one motion, a motion proved instantly to be a mistake. Vincent twisted, letting the man’s hand pass. He grabbed the arm, jerked it down, and felt the bone crack -- Bosk  letting loose with a wail as loud as a siren.

            “You broke my arm,” he screamed.

            “Did I?” Vincent said, stepping back, wearing a completely baffled expression.

            “You son of a bitch,” Bosk yelled. “I’ll have your badge. I swear I will.”

            But he never did, never even filed a complaint, and vanished from the street for a few weeks, as his wound healed – though Vincent heard rumors that the man’s ego took years to mend. Later, someone did die, a hotel owner fell out a window – in an apparent attempt to circumvent Bosk’s efforts at collection. Witnesses were confused. One or two thought they saw Bosk hovering in the shadows near the window. One brave soul said Bosk may have pushed. Charges in this case were never filed, but Vincent brought Bosk in for questioning anyway, just to teach the man he couldn’t get away with murder even in the Outlands.

            “You’re a son of a bitch,” Bosk said. “You don’t have the authority to do this and you know it.”

            “This is the Outlands, Bosk,” Vincent told him. “Cops are God here, don’t you know? You’ll sit in a cell for a few hours and think things through, then we’ll let you go.”

            “You know I can’t sit here and wait. I’ve got a schedule to keep up with, bills that needed to be collected.”

            “You should have thought of that before you pushed that poor son of a bitch into the street.”

            “I didn’t push him. He fell.”

            “I’ll be kind. I’ll say you let him fall,” Vincent said. “But there has to be a price for someone’s death.”

            “He was scum. He ran a prostitution ring in that hotel. You can’t tell me he was worth bothering me about. What I do is legal. What he did, wasn’t. Why don’t you pick on real criminals.”

            “Because I don’t know the difference any more,” Vincent said. “People keep edging in on the line between right and wrong, believing they’re good and proper as long as they don’t cross over, don’t actually break the letter of the law. I don’t believe that. I think if you run up to the line, you’re just as bad as if you cross it, and should pay some penalty. In this case, you’ll lose a few hours worth of work. Maybe next time you won’t come so close to the line.”

            “What you’re doing is illegal,” Bosk complained. “I got rights you know.”

            “I know. I’m going according to the book, and the book says we can hold you for 24 hours. That’s how long we will. You can set your watch by it.”

            Then, Vincent lost track of Bosk – the man vanishing from the street. Vincent believed he had gone straight, finding work that looked less like a criminal’s, then, one day, as fight broke out at one of the posh clubs down near soho, a trash joint for rich neighborhood folks who liked to take risks in the Outlands without actually doing anything risky, drinking, dancing and fucking the way they imagined Outlanders did, but behind the heavy veil of club security, fucking each other like animals, calling each other slut and bastard, coming close to the edge of civilized behavior without actually crossing it – though sometimes, getting careless enough to kill someone.

            Vincent came on the scene with the point squad, easing in through gates never meant for people like himself, metal alarms going crazy at the detection of the rifles and pistols, though no one paid the alarms much mind, not even the line of hairy-chested security men who stood just inside – their faces pale, their gazes nervous, their thoughts no doubt thinking about their jobs, and whether or not they should slip out now and start looking for employment elsewhere.

            “Well, well,” said Bosk, from the end of this line, his shoulder’s back and head set with no sign of shame or fear. His eyes delivered their usual message, the message Vincent had seen in them the time in the alley with the store keeper and the time in the hotel with the fallen body: these things happen. “If it isn’t my old friend. Are you still playing God?”

            “No,” Vincent said. “I’m investigating a murder.”

            “Where’s your uniform?”

            “I’m detective now,” Vincent said, flashing his badge, though he could see the man was not impressed. Bosk had done better for himself, leading a crew of want-to-be cops rather than being a solo practitioner. “You’re head of security here, I suppose?”

            “No supposing about it,” Bosk said and grinned, his scar dragging up the corner of his mouth into a jeer. “I’m in the big time now, making double your monthly salary in a week.”

            “No doubt,” Vincent said. “Now why don’t you tell me something I want to know. Like what happened here?”

            As with the other instances, Bosk came up clean – though the city did close the club for a month to appease outraged neighborhood residents – who pretended to be shocked that such playgrounds existed in the Outlands and that neighborhood residents went to them regularly. Bosk, however, blamed Vincent for the delay, and did file a complaint with the police department, outlining a pattern of harassment, going back years. Nothing came of that either, though rumor came back to Vincent that Bosk wanted him dead. Fate allowed for the next best thing. Vincent got promoted and lost touch with Bosk.

 

next chapter