Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (20 page)

Matt wondered if Fancy, upon looking at
her
transformation for the first time, had experienced the same feeling in reverse. Over and above all the things she’d have to sacrifice, had she felt
. . .

Control . . .?

Power over her own life . . .?

Permission to roam freely among the owners of the world . . . ?

Had she liked herself better, simply for knowing that now she would be liked by others, liked not in
spite
of being a Newcomer, but liked without label or qualification?

Yesterday, Matt had taken Fancy’s side against George by saying that she’d “made a mistake” . . . but who the hell was he to determine that, any more than George had been to decide that she was irredeemably vile?

Every now and again, Matt found himself pulling back from the book a little, when it referred to the whites only restrooms and the back-of-the-bus indignities of the past.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore,
he would think. And then he would remember . . . sure it did. Of
course
it did. But like everything else in this new age of technology and reason, it was just subtler.

And so all-pervasive it could send you off the deep end.

Literally . . .

They got word about the jumper at exactly 2:37 on a Thursday afternoon. Matt remembered it clearly because Tuggle had been behind the wheel, and Matt had been the one to log it in on the clipboard, the better to reference it easily come time to fill out the paperwork. He had to be especially meticulous about writing it too, because Tug had just popped the bubble onto the roof of their unmarked car, hit the siren, and stepped on the gas, the sudden acceleration making Matt’s hand shaky.

The destination to which they were racing was the Markell Tower, a skyscraper hotel in downtown L.A.

The crowd had gathered, of course. Guy wants to leap, you’re gonna get a crowd. All types in the crowd, too, which was par for the course: concerned citizens, curiosity hounds, and that all-time fave—you know ’em, you love ’em, you can’t live without ’em—the Cheerleaders.

“Jump!” they shouted. “Jump!”

Cheerleaders yer ass. Effin’ Death Squad, if you asked Sikes, which nobody did. Idiots to boot. They thought it was like the movies: guy jumps, does his fall, dog-paddling through the air, screaming, hitting the pavement
(damn,
that smarts), cops and coroners and chalk outlines on the street. Telly Savalas sucking on a lollipop, asking hard questions; Danny Travanti, if you fantasized a cop from a younger, hipper generation, gritty and soulful, just like on the Hill.

What they didn’t know, morons, was that unless you
really
dove when you took your dive—positioned yourself to slice through the air like a knife blade—the fall was a graceless thing, resistance from the air molecules causing the body in motion to cartwheel rather frighteningly, gravity pulling it back toward the building, against which it would bounce along the way. And as far the chalk outline . . . figure a humanoid body is, what, ninety percent water, something like that? Held in place by a particularly fragile surround of skin. Basic physics, folks. Ever see a water-balloon hit the pavement? You may get your chalk outline, but there’s not a helluva lotta hope it’ll come out lookin’ too much like a thing that was once a person.

Sikes always wanted to rub this information into their drooling yahoo faces, but there was never time, not in a situation like this. He was always too busy trying to get upstairs before the jumper came down. This fella was very damn high up, too, thirty-second floor.

He and Tuggle waited very impatiently for the elevator, but when it came, at least hotel management had been smart enough to send a guy with a special key, allowing the elevator to pass all interim stops between L and 32.

When the elevator doors slid open, the hotel manager was there, Denis Markell himself, forty-eight, goatee, thinning hair line, subtle French accent.

“Are you
les gendarmes?”

Tug, who had a reflexive need to lampoon pretension, strode out of the elevator a split second before Matt, saying, in his best black basso: “Dat be us.”

“Avec moi, s’il vous plaît,”
Markell commanded, too high up on his personal food chain to give much of a
merde
about irony from a public servant, and spurs on his heels with characteristic French primness, setting a long-legged quick-march pace which they followed.

“Ze man is a Newcomair,” Markell informed them as they walked. “His name is Carl Orff, he paid cash for an overnight stay in our least expensive type room, and he brought wiz him a child.”

As if there wasn’t enough to keep them perky.

“A
child?”
Matt blurted.

“Oui.
It is hard to know wiz Newcomairs, zey are so, well,
new,
but ze desk man informs me zat ze child looked to be about ten years old. I have not seen ze boy myself.”

“Not much mystery about the young’uns,” Tug said. “If he looked about ten, he was about ten.”

They stopped at room 3206. A chambermaid was poised and ready with a key; a few other staff members gathered around also, waiting to help in ways they couldn’t fathom and trying to control interference from onlookers as more and more guests stepped out of their rooms to observe.

From inside they could hear the wails of a young boy.

“Dahh-DEE. Please, DONNN’T! Dahh
-DEE!!!”

And, more faintly, an adult voice:

“I just want you to
see,
that’s all. Chuck, I just want you to
see
what your mother has done to me! And then you can
tell
her!” (The voice was fainter, not because it was any less intense, but because it was coming from outside, half its volume being whipped away by the breeze.)

It kept going on like that and had clearly been thus for quite a while. Every now and again the exchange would shift into Tenctonese, but there was no translation needed. Desperation made the same noises in any tongue.

The chambermaid, a young college student, unusually articulate and to-the-point for one in her job (sometimes God gave you a break in the detail work), said, “Every time I try to enter, even if it’s only to comfort the boy, he threatens to jump. I don’t dare call his bluff. He says he’ll speak to cops, though.”

“Sounds like he’s willing to negotiate, then,” Sikes commented, looking at Tuggle.

“I don’t know,” said the chambermaid. “Whatever his wife did to him, he’s very bitter. He says he wants a cop to witness this because he knows it’s a cop’s job to get the facts right. A cop will deliver the message to her.”

Tuggle frowned. “So what does he need the kid for?”

“To deliver the pain.”

Matt ran a hand through his hair. “Mama Mia,” he said. And then, “Hey, Tug, I fucked up Slag Psychology but good in PACT class. You wanna take this guy, I’ll handle the kid?”

“Don’t know ’bout no ‘wanna,’ ” Tug replied. “But I’ll do it.”

He took the key from the chambermaid, knocked lightly on the door, started to open it.

“I’m warning you!”
they heard from outside.
“I’m warning you!”

“Stay away!” came the smaller voice from closer in. “Don’t make my daddy jump!”

The door was open only a crack; Tuggle held it there, spoke through the narrow opening. “Son, we’re two police officers. Tell your dad it’s the police. He asked for us. Remind him that he asked for us.”

They waited as the message was whimperingly conveyed. A minute later, Tug felt the doorknob moving within his grasp. He let it go, and the young boy. Chuck Orff, opened it.

“He says you can come in. Nobody else.”

The boy wore a striped shirt, ripped Levis, ratty sneakers, and an expression of emotional devastation too deep for any ten-year-old to have to bear. Sikes knelt to his level, said, “C’mere,” and the boy practically fell into his arms. Sikes held little Chuck tight, and Chuck returned the grip to match, as if Matt were a lifeline.

The room was, as Markell had said, a no-frills jobbie: twin beds, dresser drawers, a little side table, a chair, small bathroom to the right as you walked in, GE television with remote, and a phone. And, of course—now—an open window. Big one, pivot hinges, so it swung in like a revolving door.

Tuggle crossed to it, stuck his head out, looked left, obviously spotting his man on the ledge, said, “Carl, I’m a cop, my name is Bi—”

And that was as far as he got before Carl’s voice roared back from the ledge, “Not you! Not you! I don’t want to speak to you! You’re brown! I want one of the pink ones! I can only speak to one of the pink ones! Get away or I jump!”

A little spooked, Tuggle said, “ ’Kay, man, chill, chill,” and backed the hell off. He turned toward Matt, with a look of dumb astonishment on his face.

“You believe this shit?” he said. “A bigot
Newcomer.”

Little Chuck lifted his head from Sikes’s shoulder, turned to face Tuggle.

“It’s because you look like my other daddy,” he said.

“Your other—” Tug began, and Matt interrupted.

“Wait a minute,” he said, the tone of his voice implying that he was on to something. He cupped Chuck’s chin in his hand and said, “Did your mommy leave your first daddy?”

The boy, ashamed of it, nodded silently.

“And . . .” Matt continued, “did her new boyfriend look like my partner? Brown, like that?”

Again, a nod. Sniffles.

“Hey, listen. None of this is your fault. None of it, you hear me? Now, let me ask you—”

“What’s going on in there???”
came Carl’s voice from outside.
“Chuck?”

“Hang in, Carl, pink one’s on the way!” Tuggle called.

“You have to answer me quick. Chuck, so I can save your dad,” Sikes said.

Sniff, sniff. “You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise,” Matt vowed. Like a schmuck. And added, “Did your mommy take you to
live
with your new daddy?”

A nod.

“What’s your mommy’s name?”

“Bea.”

“Does she know you’re with your daddy?”

“Daddy said so.”

“Said so when?”

“When he came to pick me up at school.”

“Does he usually do that?”

“Nuh-uh. I go home on the school bus.”

Great. Carl had kidnapped his kid, in addition to everything else.

“Chuck? Can I give you over to my partner? He’s a really cool guy, he’ll take care of you.”

Chuck Orff, helpless among the bewildering world of grown-ups, nodded, and Matt handed the boy off to his partner.

Then he took a deep breath, trying not to freeze.

Tuggle creased his brow at Matt. His expression saying,
You got to do this, man.
Chuck’s expression saying.
You promised!

Matt squared his shoulders and crossed to the window, trying not to think about it too much. Just do it.

He stuck his head out, looked down. Yeah, you bet: long way. Too high up to hear the Cheerleaders, though. Their unamplified yells were snatched up by the breeze long before they could make the tall trip to floor thirty-two. And he could see that the emergency service trucks had arrived. Soon someone would be up here with a harness—for the cop, not the jumper; some rescues had actually been carried out by catching a leaper just as he started his fall—and down there they’d be pulling out a giant air mattress. Maybe. If it seemed worth it or practical, which Matt doubted. Pretty big gamble, calculating the angle of descent from this high. And no guarantee that if he landed where he was supposed to, he wouldn’t break his neck anyway.

The harness guy would probably be an expert crisis negotiator, too. But Matt was the one who had done Slag Time. He didn’t think he ought to wait anymore.

Man . . .

He turned to face Carl Orff.

Almost nondescript, really. Bookish. A thin, nice-guy face, small nose, open-necked blue denim sports shirt, gray slacks neatly pressed, rubber-soled black shoes keeping a grip on the ledge. Wasn’t much of one either, ever so marginally shorter than the length of Carl’s foot.

Carl’s collar, and the pleat of his pants, flapped wildly in the breeze—had Matt thinking that if he blew in the guy’s direction, a little make-a-wish-birthday-candle puff of air, that would be enough to do the guy but good.

“Hey, Carl,” Matt began, cucumber cool. “Name’s Matthew Sikes. Call me Matt if you like. Need to see ID?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Carl said. Nice of him.

“I hear tell you wanna talk.”

“No, I want to send a message to my wife. I thought I had made that clear.”

“Better if you deliver it firsthand.”

“If you try to talk me down, I won’t waste any more time with you.”

“You have to do what you want, Carl. But! have a job to do. If it means anything to you. I’m not getting out there with you. I’m real happy from in here.
Real
happy. I just thought I’d mention that. It’s a pretty nice place to be, relatively speaking.”

“Maybe for you. I have nothing left in there.”

“You have a son who loves you.”

“No, he loves Hal.”

Hal. Had to be the name of The Other Man.

“Maybe so,” Matt conceded. “I wouldn’t know. But he loves you, too. Children have an infinite capacity for spreading it around. Not such a bad thing, really.”