Chapter 3
So, I had Constantine by the balls. At least until I’d shown him exactly where the girl had crashed before her death. That bought me maybe an hour or two. No more. But I was scrambling, clawing for anything to keep me afloat, any way to hang on to my job.
If Constantine was serious about the Feds turning Seattle into a Federal protectorate, then there wasn’t be a snowball’s chance in hell that the likes of me would be kept around. I wasn’t political at all, but those on the force that weren’t outright, card-carrying Progs, were at least soft on the issues the NeoCons always harped on about – Seattle itself was soft on the issues the NeoCons always harped on about. A haven for hippies, Genies and abortion-huggers.
Sure, the Federal takeover might not hold up in court, but that would take months to play out. As sure as I was standing, the NeoCons would certainly take the interim period to pack the city payroll with right-minded folks and make sure that all the positions of power had their prayer rugs correctly oriented toward DC. Constantine wouldn’t lift a single support of his mobile command center until he was sure he had Seattle neatly in his pocket.
No, once Constantine was through, Seattle wouldn’t be fit for a guy like me.
So, it was with my best interests at heart that I set out to string the whole Montavez case out for as long as possible.
I couldn’t see there was any real mystery behind the murder and subsequent abduction. The body would show up. If the Progs had taken it, they’d sooner or later play their hand. If it was just some sort of sick joke...well, she’d wash up in the Sound in the morning. As I said, she was already dead. There wasn’t really much more that could happen to her.
I’d gotten the girl’s address out of a small notebook I’d found in a purse in the dumpster next to the body. Her wallet was gone, along with any money or phone, or any ID, but the battered notebook, with a bunch of torn out pages, had been tossed aside by her attacker as nothing more than trash.
All the remaining pages in the book were blank, but I did that old Hardy Boys trick where you shade in the impression left by the force of the pen writing on the sheet of paper above the top page left on the pad.
Of course, I didn’t have to do it with any fucking piece of charcoal or lemon juice, or however they did it in the books. I had a high dpi scanner and software custom designed for the task. Fiddle with the chroma long enough and everything that’d been written on the pages earlier in the book showed up as shadowy outlines. There was always a lot of crazy overlap, as each successive page added its own contents to the resulting image, but usually you could make out something in the mess.
I could make out the street name, Galer, and the number of an apartment. I vaguely knew the apartment building, up on Queen Anne Hill. But what the girl had been writing over and over, on page after page in her little notebook, was what really caught my attention. It freaked me out enough that I decided to toss all the rest of the evidence away and falsify that report. If the chief had gotten a look at what I saw on that computer screen, he’d have told me to do the same without blinking an eye.
On my computer screen I saw Q after interlocking Q forming a crazy mosaic, covering every inch of the reconstructed handwriting. Hidden amongst the Q’s I could just make out the street address – a note she’d perhaps handed to someone – but all the Q’s, that was freaky. Q after Q after Q.
Okay, I should back-fill here, because you have no idea what I’m talking about. Probably because you’re not supposed to know what I’m talking about. All of this stuff, the Gene Genies, Q, everything that happened, has successfully been expelled from the official records. It’s like it’s some sort of state secret. Though I don’t know why. None of it really shows the Progs in a bad light. But then Progs never like anything that they can’t control. Never have, never will. And none of this was under their control. Maybe that, to Progs, is showing them in a bad light. I don’t know.
Anyway, you might have some memory of Geneing and what it was. And that it’s been done away with. Sort of like the Black Plague – but of drugs. Something horrible that happened to other people long ago, but nothing anyone worries about anymore.
I guess that’s not too far from the truth. Progs might not actually say it, but they hint that their social programs did away with it. Like the New Deal and the Depression. But don’t believe it. I’m here to tell you what really happened. And the Progs didn’t have a fucking thing to do with it. Social programs or not.
Geneing first hit the streets in the early 20’s, selling itself as the ultimate designer drug. A drug you only had to take once and then, forever, you could get high whenever you wanted.
It wasn’t really a drug, though. Not technically. Sure, it got you high, but not in the usual way. Geneing was a very targeted form of gene therapy that resequenced DNA to naturally produce opiates, or at least the neurotransmitters involved in opiate intoxication. One hit and you were high forever.
Okay, suppository it was tailored with verbal and non-verbal triggers that allowed you to turn the intoxication on or off – a smell, a sound, a safe word – but I sure as hell never heard of any Genies really using them. Once someone took that shit, they were perpetually stoned out of their minds. They never ran out of dope, never had withdrawal symptoms, never woke up the morning after.
Most didn’t live long enough to have regrets. The constant flood of endorphins inevitably fried their cerebral cortex. But most simply died of thirst or starvation, lost in the bliss of their perpetual high.
But those that lived long enough to want to clean up their act, quickly discovered that there was no sobering up from Geneing. They’d willfully modified their most basic genetic code. The damage with irrevocable. There was no way to turn it off, even for the Genies who chose to willfully be sober. The trigger was always there, ready to open the floodgates of Elysium with a single thought. They had to live with the constant, torturing temptation ready to reclaim them. It took them all, eventually. Geneing wasn’t just a drug, it was a terminal condition.
And all of this, it was rumored, was the work of one man. Some genetic scientist who’d developed the gene therapy and unleashed it on the world. Nobody knew who he was, or why he’d created Geneing, but many Genies spoke of him like he was the progenitor of a new race. A Moses-like character who’d finally freed humanity from the shackles of living.
In these circles, he came to be known as Q. I don’t know if it was a “Star Trek” reference, or James Bond or something, but the title Q was soon taken up by the mainstream news. It entered the common consciousness.
I know it’s all but forgotten now, but back then, Q became the whipping boy for pretty much all of society’s ills. Who was behind the Geneing epidemic? Q. Who was responsible for the outbreak of rampant crime? Q. Who was causing instability in the Middle East? Q. Who’d caused the downfall of Western Civilization? Q. Why was the Government running a deficit? Q. Who kicked the dog? Q.
Calling him America’s Most Wanted would be a major understatement. NeoCons, Progs, the Salvation Army, everyone wanted this guy dead. No one since bin Laden had such a big target pinned to his back.
And Vivian Montavez liked to draw curly Q’s...
Of course, it didn’t mean anything. If she’d liked to draw swastikas I wouldn’t have thought she was in league with Hitler. But all those Q’s and the girl killed so violently...and then for her body to turn up gone...
That was the kind of business nobody wanted to get mixed up in.
Certainly not a beat cop working toward his pension.