Vortex

  “Up till the day he got on the bus to Houston, yes.”

  “You’re his sister—what about your parents?”

  “Me and Orrin had different daddies and neither one of ’em stuck around. Mama was Danela Mather and she died when I was just sixteen. She looked after us as best as she could but she got distracted pretty easy. And she had trouble with drugs toward the end. Meth and the wrong men, if you know what I mean. After that it was only me there to take care of Orrin.”

  “Did he need a lot of taking care of?”

  “Yes and no. He never asked for much in the way of attention. Orrin was always happy to be by himself, looking at picture books or whatever. Even when he was little he didn’t cry much at all. But he was pretty useless at school and he cried plenty when Mama took him to class, so he just mostly stayed home. And he wasn’t good at feeding himself. You didn’t put food in front of him twice a day, he’d blink and go hungry. That’s just how he was.”

  “Different from other children, in other words?”

  “Different he surely was, but if you mean is he retarded I have to say no he is not. He can write letters and read words. He’s smart enough to hold a job if anybody’d hire him. He worked a night watchman job a while back in Raleigh—and here, too, Officer Bose tells me, until he got fired.”

  “Does Orrin ever hear voices or see things that aren’t there?”

  Ariel Mather crossed her arms and glared. “I already told you he’s not crazy. He just has a good imagination. That was obvious even when he was little, the way he’d make up stories about his toy animals or whatnot. Sometimes I’d find him staring at the TV when it wasn’t even turned on, like what he saw in that empty screen was just as interesting as any show on cable. Or at the sky, watching clouds go by. Windows on a rainy day, he liked to look at those. That don’t make him crazy, I don’t think.”

  “I don’t think so either.”

  “And what’s it matter? All’s you have to do is get him out of that place he’s locked up in.”

  “The only way I can do that—if I can do that—is to convince my colleagues Orrin isn’t in danger of going back to the streets and getting hurt. What you’re telling me is helpful. Which I have to assume is why Officer Bose brought us together.” Sandra gave Bose another sidelong look. “You said Orrin was never aggressive?”

  “Orrin’d run from an argument with his hands over his ears. He’s shy, not violent. It was always hard for him when Mama came home with a man. He hid out, mostly, times like that. Especially if there was any kind of disagreement or unpleasantness.”

  “And I’m sorry I have to ask this, but was your mother ever aggressive toward Orrin?”

  “She had her meth fits sometimes, especially toward the end. Some scenes. Nothing serious.”

  “You mentioned that Orrin liked to tell stories. Does he ever write them down? Did he keep a journal?”

  Ariel seemed surprised at the question. “No, nothing like that. His printing is neat but he don’t practice it much.”

  “Did he have a girlfriend back in Raleigh?”

  “He’s bashful around women, so no.”

  “Did he worry about that? Resent it?”

  Ariel Mather shrugged.

  “Okay. Thank you for your patience, Ariel. I don’t believe Orrin needs to go into custodial care, and what you’ve said tends to confirm that.” Though it raised other questions, Sandra thought.

  “You can get him out?”

  “It’s not that simple. We’ll have to sort out whatever happened this afternoon that led Dr. Congreve to believe he’s violent—but I’ll do everything I can.” A thought occurred to her. “One more question. What was it that caused Orrin to leave Raleigh, and why did he come to Houston?”

  Ariel hesitated. Her posture remained stiff as a spindle, as if her sense of dignity had settled into the knobs of her spine. “He has moods sometimes…”

  “What kind of moods?”

  “Well … most of the time Orrin seems young for his age, I guess you noticed that. Every once in a while, though, a mood takes him … and when Orrin’s in a mood he don’t seem young at all. He’ll give you a look like he sees right through you, make you think he’s older than the moon and the stars put together. Like a wind blows through him from somewhere far away. That’s what Mama used to say when Orrin was like that.”

  “And does that have something to do with why he came to Houston?”

  “The mood was on him at the time. I don’t know for sure he even meant to go to Texas in particular. He never said anything to me, just took the five hundred dollars I was saving toward a new car, took it from my dresser drawer when I was out at work. He asked our neighbor, Mrs. Bostick, to drive him to the bus station. He didn’t pack a bag or nothing. He wasn’t carrying nothing but an old pad of paper and a pen, Mrs. Bostick said. She guessed he was meeting somebody at the depot. Orrin didn’t deny it. But once she left him there he must’ve bought himself a ticket and got on an interstate bus. The mood was on him for some days before that, him all quiet and far-eyed.” She gave Sandra a calculating look. “I hope that don’t change your opinion of him.”

  Complicates it, Sandra thought. But she shook her head: no.

  * * *

  Ariel Mather had arrived in town early this morning. Bose had helped her check her into a motel before their aborted visit to State, but she had barely had time to unpack her suitcase. She was tired, and she told Bose she wanted to get a decent night’s sleep. “But thank you for the dinner and all.”

  “I still need to discuss a few things with Sandra,” Bose said. He asked the waiter to call a cab for her. “While we’re waiting, Ariel, one more question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did Orrin contact you after he arrived here in Houston?”

  “One phone call to let me know he was all right. I was mad enough to light into him for leaving but that just made him hang up, and I was sorry afterward. I should’ve known better. Yelling at him never does any good. A week later I had a letter to say he was working steady and he hoped I wasn’t too mad at him. I would’ve wrote back but he didn’t put down any return address.”

  “Did he say anything about where he was working here in town?”

  “Not as I recall.”

  “Nothing about a warehouse? A man named Findley?”

  “No, sir. Does it matter?”

  “Probably not. Thank you again, Ariel.”

  Bose said he’d call her tomorrow to let her know how things were progressing. She stood up and made her way to the door of the restaurant with her chin thrust forward.

  “Well?” Bose asked. “What’s your reaction?”

  Sandra shook her head firmly. “Oh, no. No. You don’t get anything more from me until you answer a question or two.”

  “I guess that’s fair. Listen, I need a ride home—I came in a cab with Ariel. Can I beg a lift from you?”

  “I guess so … but if you bullshit me, Bose, I swear I’ll leave you by the side of the road.”

  “Deal,” he said.

  * * *

  It turned out he lived in a new development off the West Belt, a longish drive and out of her way, but Sandra didn’t object: it gave her time to assemble her thoughts. Bose was patient in the passenger seat, hands in his lap, quietly attentive as she pulled into traffic. It was another mercilessly hot night. The car’s air conditioner struggled gamely.

  She said, “This is obviously not standard police work.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I’m no expert. But your interest in Orrin seemed unusual from the day you escorted him into State. And I saw you slip the cab fare to Ariel—don’t you need some kind of receipt? For that matter, shouldn’t you be interviewing her downtown?”

  “Downtown?”

  “At police headquarters or whatever. In the movies they always call it ‘downtown’…”

  “Oh. That downtown.”

  She felt herself blushing but persisted: “Another thing. At State w
e talk to HPD referrals every day. A lot of them are considerably less tractable than Orrin, but some are just as scared and just as vulnerable. As a professional I have to behave like a clinician no matter who I’m dealing with. The cops who drop these cases at State, on the other hand … for them it’s the end of a tedious necessity. Their interest in the individuals they remand to us is less than nil. Except on legal business, no cop ever does follow-up. Until you walked in. You acted like you cared about Orrin. So explain that to me, before we get into the question of Orrin’s writing or my opinion of his sister. Tell me what your stake in the matter is.”

  “Maybe I happen to like him. Maybe I think he’s being railroaded.”

  “Railroaded by who?”

  “I’m not sure. And if I haven’t been entirely frank, it’s because I don’t want to involve you in something potentially dangerous.”

  “Your chivalry is noted, but I’m already involved.”

  “If we handle this badly, you could be putting your job at risk.”

  Sandra laughed despite herself. “There hasn’t been a day in the last year I didn’t half hope to be fired. My résumé is out at hospitals all over the country.” This was true.

  “Any takers?”

  No. “Not yet.”

  Bose looked down the highway into the simmering night. “Well, you’re right. What you said. This isn’t standard police work.”

  * * *

  The Spin had been a difficult time for police and security forces the world over—especially the frightening finale of it, when the stars had reappeared in the night sky and the sun, four billion years older than it had been five years ago, crossed the meridian like a bloody banner of the apocalypse. It had seemed like the end of the world. A great many police personnel had abandoned their duties and joined their families for the final hours. And when it became obvious that the world would not end—that the Hypotheticals would filter the radiation reaching the Earth to a tolerable level, giving the planet at least a probationary future—many of those deserters had stayed home despite a general amnesty. Lives had changed beyond recognition or restoration.

  New bodies were recruited, some with only marginal qualifications. Bose had joined the force two decades later, at a time when many of those marginal recruits had become senior staff. He had found himself in an HPD rife with internal conflicts and generational rivalries. His own career, such as it was, had advanced at a glacial pace.

  The problem, he told Sandra, was an endemic corruption, born out of the years when vice had spent freely and virtue went begging. The incoming tide of Equatorian oil had only compounded the problem. On the surface Houston was a clean enough city: the HPD was good at keeping a lid on property crimes and petty violence. And if, under the city’s polished exterior, a river of illicit goods and undocumented cash flowed freely … well, it was the job of the HPD to make sure nobody paid too much attention.

  Bose had been careful not to skirt too close to the shady side. He had volunteered for drudge work rather than accept dubious assignments, had even turned down offers of promotion. As a result he was considered unimaginative and even, in a certain sense, stupid. But because he never passed judgment on his peers he was also considered useful, an officer whose dogged attention to small matters freed up more ambitious men for more lucrative work.

  “So you kept your hands clean,” Sandra said, offering it as an observation but withholding her approval.

  “Up to a point. I’m not a saint.”

  “You could have gone to some, uh, higher authority, exposed the corruption—”

  He smiled. “Respectfully, no, I couldn’t. In this town the money and the power hold hands. The higher authorities are the people taking the biggest dip. Turn right at the intersection. My building’s the second left at the light. If you want to hear the rest of this you can come up to my place. I don’t entertain much but I can probably crack a bottle of wine.” This time his look was almost sheepish. “If you’re interested.”

  She agreed. And not just because she was curious. Or rather, her curiosity wasn’t limited to Orrin Mather and the HPD. She was increasingly curious about Jefferson Bose himself.

  * * *

  Clearly he wasn’t a wine person. He produced a dusty bottle of some off-brand Shiraz, probably a gift, long neglected in a kitchen cupboard. Sandra told him beer would do fine. His refrigerator was amply stocked with Corona.

  Bose’s single-bedroom apartment was conventionally furnished and relatively neat, as if it had been cleaned recently if not enthusiastically. It was only three stories up but it was situated with a partial view of the Houston skyline, all the gaudy towers that had shot up in the aftermath of the Spin like gigantic pixelboards of randomly lit windows.

  “It’s the money that drives the corruption,” Bose said, putting a chilled bottle into her hand and sitting opposite her in a recliner that had seen better days. “Money, and the one thing more valuable than money.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Life. Longevity.”

  He was talking about the trade in Martian pharmaceuticals.

  Back in med school, Sandra had roomed with a biochemistry major who had been obsessively curious about the Martian longevity treatment brought to Earth by Wun Ngo Wen—she had suspected that its life-prolonging effects could be teased away from the neurological modifications the Martians had engineered into it, if only the government would free up samples for analysis. That hadn’t happened. The drug was deemed too dangerous for general release, and Sandra’s roommate had gone on to a perfectly conventional career, but her intuition about the Martian drug had been correct. Samples had leaked out of the NIH labs onto the black market.

  The Martians had believed longevity should confer both wisdom and certain moral obligations, and they had designed their pharmaceuticals that way. The famous “fourth stage of life,” the adulthood after adulthood, had entailed changes to the brain that modified aggressiveness and promoted sympathy for others. Not a bad idea, Sandra thought, but hardly commercial. The black-marketers had hacked the biochemical combination lock and evolved a better product. Nowadays—assuming you had serious money and the right contacts—you could buy yourself an extra twenty or thirty years of life while avoiding that awkward surge of human sympathy.

  All illegal, of course, and massively profitable. Just last week the FBI had shut down a distribution ring in Boca Raton that was processing more cash on an annual basis than most top-fifty corporations, and that was only a fraction of the market. Bose was right: in the end, for some people, life was worth anything you had to pay for it.

  “The longevity drug isn’t easy to cultivate,” Bose was saying. “It’s as much an organism as a molecule. You need genetic seed stock, you need a decent-sized bioreactor, and you need a lot of closely watched chemicals and catalysts. Which means you have to buy a lot of look-the-other-way.”

  “Including some in HPD?”

  “That would be a reasonable conclusion to draw.”

  “And you’re aware of this?”

  He shrugged.

  “But there must be somebody you could talk to—I don’t know, the FBI, the DEA…”

  “I believe the federal agencies have their hands full at the moment,” Bose said.

  “Okay,” Sandra said, “but what does all this have to do with Orrin Mather?”

  “It’s not Orrin so much as the place he used to work. As soon as he got off the bus from Raleigh, Orrin was hired by a man named Findley. Findley operates a warehouse that holds and forwards imported goods, mainly cheap plastic crap from manufacturers in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Most of his hires are transients or immigrants without papers. He doesn’t ask for social security numbers and his guys get paid in cash. He put Orrin to work doing the usual lift-and-carry jobs. But Orrin turned out to be an unusual employee by Findley’s standards, which means he came in on time and sober, he was bright enough to follow orders, he never complained and he didn’t care about finding a better job as long his pay was regu
lar. So after a while Findley took him off day work and made him night watchman. Most nights between midnight and dawn Orrin was locked in the warehouse with a phone and a patrol schedule, and all he had to do was conduct an hourly walk-through and call a certain number if he noticed anything unusual.”

  “A certain number? Not the police?”

  “Definitely not the police, because what passes through the warehouse, along with a lot of die-stamped toys and plastic kitchenware, are shipments of precursor chemicals bound for black-market bioreactors.”

  “Orrin knew about this?”

  “That’s unclear. Maybe he had some suspicions. In any case, Findley fired him a couple of months back, possibly because Orrin was getting a little too familiar with the details of the operation. Some of Findley’s black-market material comes in or goes out after hours, so Orrin would have seen a few transfers. The firing was pretty traumatic for Orrin—I guess he thought he was being punished for something.”

  “He talked to you about it?”

  “A little, reluctantly. All he says is that he didn’t do anything wrong and that it wasn’t time for him to leave.”

  Sandra asked Bose for another Corona, which gave her time to think about all this. What he had said seemed to make everything murkier. She decided to focus on the only part of this she really understood or could affect: Orrin’s assessment at State Care.

  Bose came back with a bottle, which she accepted but set down immediately on Bose’s ring-stained coffee table. He needed new furniture, she thought. Or at least a set of coasters.

  “You think Orrin might have information that would be damaging to a criminal smuggling operation.”

  Bose nodded. “None of this would matter if Orrin had been just another one of Findley’s hired drifters. Orrin would have left town or found other work or otherwise disappeared into povertyland, end of story. The trouble is that Orrin surfaced again when we took him into custody. Worse, when we asked him about his employment record, he piped right up about his six months at the warehouse. Mention of the name set off alarms in certain quarters, and I guess word worked its way up.”