The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (11 page)

“You got transferred at age 86,” Sylvia said slowly. “Your family?”

“Scattered. You know how it goes. None of us got low enough to have any juice. We go where the company blows us.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother you.”

Corrida chuckled. “Like I said about the Milkman, it’s a all a matter of perceptive. Your generation doesn’t quite get what it was like before. You don’t fully get how good you have it. We worked that farm 12 hours a day every day. We didn’t have sick days. You broke your arm, you worked. You couldn’t work, there was always somebody around who could. Somebody who wanted to eat.”

“Didn’t everyone have a job?”

“Eventually. It took years for everything to settle down. All kinds of folk didn’t know what to do and the companies didn’t know what to do with them. I taught four accountants how to drive combines. You know what an accountant is?”

“Can’t say as I do,” Sylvia said.

“Not combine drivers, that’s all I ever figured out. The Buy-Ups weren’t all about battles and whatnot. Not like the movies. It was mostly about surviving. For a while there, a gallon of milk cost three days pay. You’d work all week for some oranges and a loaf of bread.”

Sylvia touched her glasses. She wanted to zoom in on the woman’s face. See if she could be any glint of fluid in her eyes. “So not being near your family doesn’t hurt?”

Corrida stood straight, turned slightly and ran her hands through the cow’s top most tuft of hair. “They are alive and well. That’s something.”

Sylvia patted the nose of the cow. “Belgian Blue.”

“You know your cows.”

“I did my homework. These are the prettiest.”

“They make milk. Like you, soon enough.” The old woman laughed.

* * *

Wayne Clement rowed on a machine in the Systems Security Gym every day (almost) at 11:45 a.m. Finding that in his personnel file took McCallum less than a second; deciding to look it up took a few days. Every search left a trail leading from that fact back to him. He didn’t like trails. At least not to himself. McCallum quickly moved on to another file, a man associated with some sanitation removal case he was supposed to be working. If ever asked, he could claim an error. He had no reason to see Clement, so he had to run into him. By chance. Casually. As he did with nearly everyone else in the building when he didn’t want to.

McCallum’s workout times tended to be in the morning. He sparred with other ops, then swam a few hundred meters. Just enough to keep his medical coverage current. The last thing an active op needed was a lapse in health insurance. Visiting the gym in the middle of the day would be unusual if somebody was paying attention, but wouldn’t set off any bells. So he changed into his shorts and T-shirt and walked towards the weights, by way of the rowing contraptions.

“Hey, Wayne,” he said as he passed.

“Detective.” Clement’s voice came out clearly. No gasps or grunts.

McCallum knelt down next to the machine. Clement stopped cranking and sliding.

“I don’t usually see you here.” Clement dabbed his forehead with a small, red towel.

“I don’t like to intimidate the rookies,” McCallum said.

“What brings you here now?”

“You.” McCallum lowered his voice. “I’ve got a question I didn’t feel like digitizing.”

Clement paused for a moment, face blank. Then he said, “This is a noisy place, isn’t it?”

“Makes it easy to talk.”

“Go oral, my friend. I’m already intrigued.”

“You remember that Vasquez case?”

“Like my middle name. It never came together right.”

“I got visited by a messenger the other night who’s sole purpose was to inform me I’d written up the wrong man.”

“You believe him.”

“That’s the easy part. I never thought the guy I tagged for the murder did it.”

“There’s a hard part?” Clement picked up a water bottle and snapped open the cap.

“I can’t reclude the file without a revenue source.”

“Ah.” Clement took a long sip of his water.

“I know I’m stretching things thin, but if there’s any potential…”

Clement turned in his seat and put his arms across his bent knees. “One of the worst parts of this system we’ve got is our shared ignorance. Ambyr decides it wants you to be a security operative, so they teach what they think you need to know and very little else. I’m no different. A couple of years ago my son told me plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. I thought he was messing with me. We argued about it until he convinced me to search it. Man, did I feel like an idiot. I’ve got my masters in economics and don’t know how plants grow. I don’t say this to insult you. Or me. It’s just the way it is.”

“I’ve picked up a few things along the way,” McCallum said. “The job demands it.”

Clement nodded. “You’re a good man. You’ve stayed curious. I’m lamenting the mysteries of my profession. They shouldn’t be mysteries. Of course, if everyone were an economist, the economy would cease to function.”

“We’ve all got our place on the rope,” McCallum said.

“Something like that.” Clement ticked off a humorless snicker. “Do you think the girl was killed by someone from India Group or BCCA Hong Kong?”

“Not enough information.”

“That’s about the only way the company might make some money. Even then, it’s a fight they don’t always want to pick. Is the murderer going to kill again?”

“Don’t know that either.”

“That would drive up the opportunity cost of allowing the killer to remain in the marketplace. Other than that, I’ve got nothing.”

“I hoped you might know some other trick.”

“Ah, now I get it. Your world is short-cuts and scams. People trying to beat the system. That’s your base of knowledge.” Clement stretched his back and rolled his head around, stretching his neck muscles, popping the gases trapped in his spine.

“You know how the world works,” Clement said. “You know all about bottom lines and who pays for what. What you don’t know is why the world works the way it does and that’s why you believe in tricks. My rules — the laws of supply and demand, the infinite repetitiveness of human choice — they can’t be fooled. There are no tricks. I understand you are used to people bending policies, but these rules. They’re structural.”

McCallum sat back on the floor of the gym. “What don’t I understand here?”

“Your problem is one of externalities. In that there aren’t any anymore. For the company, with rare exceptions, all costs are internal.”

“Including the cost of a young woman’s life.”

“In the old days you could have…” Clement held up his bottle of water. “A mining company, let’s say. It mines iron efficiently, but there’s a by-product. A nasty chemical that gets thrown into the river. It made people sick, but whatever. The company generated profit by mining iron.

“Now suppose that company’s employees only drank water from the river they polluted? Suppose the company paid for their health care and sick time. Suppose the company educated all their employees from birth? Now that external cost of poisoning the river is forced inside. It’s internal. They bear it. Ambyr and the others are just like that now. Every problem is their problem. They can’t shove anything off onto anyone else.”

“Murder’s like poisoning those employees. The company doesn’t profit from murder.”

“The company doesn’t profit from punishment, either.”

“The girl had value.”

“Whoever took her life has value, too. Odds are, the company paid for the killer’s birth, education, dental care— everything it takes to create a decent worker. What are they going to do with that? Throw it away and double the cost of the girl’s death?”

“The alternative work details. The chain gangs.”

“They’re deterrents. I guess. You’d know better than me. But they don’t maximize productivity for everyone assigned. What if the killer’s an aeronautics engineer? Or a neurosurgeon? It doesn’t make sense to have employees with that level of education and skill filling potholes on the road. Not to mention the cost of removing a consumer from the market. Men and women on alternative work details aren’t buying new sweaters or tickets to hockey games. They’re not contributing to the economy to their fullest extent.”

“So the company doesn’t want my guy on the chain gang?” McCallum let a bit of hop into his voice.

“No,” Clement said. “For the most part, they don’t. They’ve found over the years that they need carrots
and
sticks. You’re the stick. Ultimately, what they want is for the
right
people to be on chain gangs. The ones who
should
be painting the tops of bridges. If the company found someone to blame for the Vasquez murder, and they can extract equitable value from that person in a manner alternative to the open work place, they’re made whole.”

“There’s a chance the real killer is from another company or is a lesser grade to the guy I tagged.”

“Not a good chance. The first thing I did was consult an actuary. I looked at the odds on who committed the murder. You know the rest.”

McCallum crossed his legs into a pretzel shape and straightened his back. He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose, like his martial arts teacher had instructed him years ago. Clement took another sip from his bottle.

“It’s not right,” McCallum said.

“It’s not meant to be,” Clement replied. “It’s profit maximization. Right and wrong are irrelevant.”

“That is the why?” McCallum asked.

“Yes,” Clement said.

“The only one?”

“I can’t be drinking water and have that conversation. That sounds like a bourbon kind of talk.”

McCallum almost smiled. Then he thought, and subsequently said, “I’ve got no way to free an innocent man.”

Clement nodded. “None.”

Chapter Fourteen

Emory tried sleeping in a stall in the men’s room. In many ways — in separate ways — the anticipation of the gang rapes were worse than the rapes themselves. Once an evening’s attack began, he knew they’d be over soon. His stomach could untwist. He’d cease twitching at every creak and shuffle. His neck and shoulders could release their unrelenting hunch and the ache could seep away. So he tried the lavatory. Cold, brightly lit and with every surface hard enough to cut off blood from parts pressed too tight to the porcelain, the environment fought sleep in every way he could imagine. Other men came and went, knocking him out of whatever hazy state of pseudo-slumber he achieved through exhaustion.

He gave up twice, but returning to his cot made him sick. While being raped he tried to blank his mind. He didn’t want to think of his family or Christmas or a warm, lush creek side. He didn’t want to associate things he loved with the violation for fear that he wouldn’t be able to uncouple them later. In freedom. When he had his real life back. The smell, however, had a main line to his memory. The scent of chemicals and sweat, the maleness other than his own, it triggered revulsion as quickly and efficiently as the smell of rotting flesh, sulfur or spoiled milk.

Spoiled milk. He hated his own bed because of spoiled milk. Everyday he worked until his body gave out. Some nights he barely had strength enough to get soup into his mouth. If he didn’t dip his bread, it was too hard to chew. Then he tumbled onto his cot and the smell reminded him of being rousted and rolled onto his knees. That op said he’d murdered a girl. The thought would be laughable, if it weren’t so serious. No. He was here because of the milk.

Although even that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Ambyr Consolidated could have shut him down at any time. He always figured some day he’d go to post and find his access denied. The company owned the network, the storage, the satellites, towers and power to make it all function. They could bar him from doing anything they wanted with a few keystrokes. Why this? It’s not like they needed a systems guy to help fix the sewers. They’d be better off snatching some civil engineers, if that’s what they needed.

He darted into the men’s room. Balancing on the toilet and trying to sleep was near impossible. Still, he thought it worth a try.

He thought wrong. He knew as the men’s room door opened and multiple footsteps echoed on the tile. At night, men didn’t travel in groups. Late night potty breaks were a singular call. They smashed open the stall door. It sounded like thunder when the lighting hits just inches away. They hauled him out. Four of them. He saw their faces. He didn’t want to. He tried to close his eyes tight, waiting for the storm to pass. Every swirl and spin exacted a peek. He saw each one, in complete detail.

Clark was the leader. Lean and mean, he was in his fifties, and it looked like all of them had been hard. Gem could have been two Emories put together. Conner and Teddy were young. He didn’t know much about them. During the day he didn’t notice them much at all. Quiet and surly, which were not attributes that made one stand out on the chain gang.

The hardness of the tile floor hurt their knees as they took him from behind. The third guy dug his knees into Emory’s calves, creating a whole new level of pain. In the morning, he struggled with the yellow plastic suit, legs refusing to bend enough, joints on fire, his rectum still moist with blood.

* * *

“I’m only trying to do right by my baby, you know?” The woman said, bouncing the child on her thigh, keeping him close to her chest. He looked at the lights, smiling, Sylvia thought, though it was a matter of opinion. His tiny mouth bowed open like a wet flower. Samjahnee’s lights made the baby’s enormous eyes sparkle like sapphires. The lights delighted him, the blue mound of sweater. So happy…

“Certainly,” Sylvia said. “You want to make sure your baby’s getting good, wholesome milk. Because he didn’t always.”

The mom’s mouth opened. Her eyebrows rose. She seemed so much younger when surprised, Sylvia thought. And the younger the better. People have inherent sympathy for mothers like this one, pretty in a plain way, unadorned by jewelry or obvious makeup, wearing a pink sweater and jeans you could buy in any catchment on the continent. Her curly brown hair would have looked amazing, if she didn’t devote all her time to her baby. People sense those things, and find them comforting.

Let’s keep her shocked and looking 16.

“Little Ian, there,” Sylvia said. “His medical records indicate a nasty bacterial infection around his first birthday. After you stopped breast feeding.”

“How did you—”

“I bought his medical records. I bought records for a lot of children in the region. Those with intestinal problems that could have been milk related, my staff cross-checked with the purchasing records of their parents. You, for instance. Since the illness you’ve been driving 26 miles out of your way to buy milk approved by the Milkman. The speed limit is 35, so that means you put an hour into your milk purchasing, when there’s a store four minutes from your house.”

“I’m choosey.”

“So it seems. Did you know 18 other people reported sickness after consuming the milk you used to buy?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody wants you to know that. Except the Milkman.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Don’t worry. There’s no policy against viewing the Milkman’s posts.”

“No.” The woman clutched her baby, pumping her leg as if blowing up a ball. “I mean this is never going to make it into the movie. Why are you even bothering? The company’s going to kill this thing faster than you can say ‘screw you lady’.”

Sylvia grinned. The mom had plenty of spunk. She hoped Samjahnee wasn’t getting any shadows on her face. She needed this woman to look pure, not spooky. Shadows would make people doubt her.

“I’m just trying to collect background,” Sylvia said. “Get an understanding as to what the Milkman does, why it might be important. Why someone might want to read his posts.”

“You don’t know?” She diverted her eyes to Sylvia’s belly. She looked back up at Sylvia and bobbed her head forward, eyes wide again, mouth saying ‘huh?’ sans sound.

“Cut,” Sylvia said.

“Seriously, Ms. Cho. How far along are you?”

“That’s not part of this.” Sylvia spun her head towards Samjahnee. He sat on a folding stool a meter behind her, gazing into a thin, flat monitor. He rubbed his chin, looking up when he realized the conversation had stopped.

“Did you hear me say cut?”

He pressed his right index finger to the lower left corner of the monitor. “We’re clear.”

“Sorry,” the mom said. “I just figured, you know… babies don’t come with an instruction video.”

“Perhaps that will be my next project,” Sylvia slipped.

The woman forced a smile at Sylvia and turned her attention to her son. She patted him on his head and told him he was a good boy in a cooing, cascading voice.

“After I find this god damned Milkman,” Sylvia said, mostly to herself.

“It must be your first.” The mom didn’t look at Sylvia. She played with her baby. “You’d be asking different questions if you had a child.”

“Really,” Sylvia snapped. “You learn all kinds of motherly secrets when the little things pop out.”

“Not right away, but you learn. Don’t we little guy? We learn.”

“And what questions would you ask?”

“Not if I visited the Milkman’s post, I can tell you that. Why wouldn’t you? The question is whether or not it matters. Are the reports good and usable? Has the Milkman, you know, saved you and your family from getting sick?”

“Such wisdom. Did any of this—”

“The break that refreshes,” played in her ear. A deep male voice with soulless guitar music behind it. “Coke.”

“Arrr.” She had told her cuff to hold calls, notes, messages of any kind. She jerked it in front of her face like she might bite it. The thumbnail-sized screen flashed red. She slapped it, bolted up and stomped towards the front door of the house.

“Yes,” she blasted out into the cold.

“Ms. Cho, this is Walter Whelen. Human Assets.”

“Yes,” she stretched out with lots of extra breadth, ensuring Walter Whelen knew she was already quite bored with him.

“You’re being recalled.”

“What?”

“You need to report to Mortimer Clive’s office Thursday morning for your new assignment.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Your supervisor, Ms. Cho. You are being returned to the grounds keeping crew at the Vermillion Office Complex.”

* * *

McCallum knew why the test funneled him into police work. Testing was one of the few things the companies did well. Growing up, he never considered becoming an op for a second, not even in pre-teen years, when every boy gets model armored cars, gold badges and hollow plastic truncheons to wail away on each other, burning off boyish energy and aggression. Little Eddie never bothered with that stuff. He liked to draw.

Not that he didn’t have his share of boyish energy and aggression. He ran, jumped and played with other kids in the neighborhood. He loved hide‘n seek. He won that game more than any other kid he knew, maybe more than any other in the Buffalo catchment. They had to make special rules for him, to make things more fair. You couldn’t hide more than five feet off or under the ground. Eddie had the ability to scan an area and see things before a count of ten that other kids would never see. He couldn’t have known his talent would be spotted and slotted, as they say in the human assets business.

McCallum saw, in any scene, both the detailed and the abstract, the real and the possible, the nuts and bolts and the high purpose of their conjoining. He nurtured and grew the talent, from doodles, to sketches, to large oil on canvas works that brought his first art teacher to tears. He didn’t figure out why she cried until about two years later, when Human Assets gave him his track. The company recognized his ability to put together big pictures from small details, to fill in the blanks, connect the dots, follow not the clues left behind by some tea-drinking writer in a cottage outside Sheffield, but the scraps left in a stupid, messy policy breach. The company didn’t need any artists, it needed ops. If Eddie wanted to doodle, he could do it on his own time.

Like usual, the company was right and wrong at the same time. He knew his art had merit. If he had more time, more feedback, more training, he knew he could kick art ass. They were wrong not to let him pursue it. They were right about him being a good op. He knew when something didn’t look right.

Emory Leveski didn’t murder Geri Vasquez or John Raston. He had the nagging feeling that the latter wasn’t even dead. The gleaming white of that unpainted corner, that place in the painting reserved for John Raston kept him awake at night, like a streetlight through your hotel window. It pulled his mind from other focal points, the way a fleck of white fuzz can ruin an old photo. Tugging the eye, pulling the eye, always diverting attention to itself. John Raston and his gasoline powered off-road vehicle. The asshole needed a conversation.

All he had to do was find him.

McCallum was supposed to be investigating a possible theft of services from a refuse crew. An Ambyr restaurant split a building with one owned by BCCA/Hong Kong Holdings, common but never a good idea from corporate’s perspective. In this case, the Ambyr restaurant seemed to be cranking out 40 percent more trash than the waste systems department expected. The garbage squad could easily be picking up BCCA trash and getting some kind of pay back under the table. They requested a detective be assigned. The missing person, the dead girl, the pitiful schlub on a chain gang for no reason… no. None of that required one of Ambyr Systems Security’s top detectives. Eight extra bags of trash per week? That demanded his complete and immediate attention.

He remembered Lillian’s Leveski’s car from reading her dossier four months ago. He had no idea why details like that stuck with him, but it came in handy. He didn’t want a file search to register with headquarters. No records were the best records. He chuckled to himself. The margin between ops and robbers was so thin they couldn’t help wobbling back and forth over it most of the time. It probably never occurred to the company that the traits of a young artist or future safety operative, could also make for an excellent arch insubordinate.

The Leveski woman had recently purchased a Mahindra Civet. It had two electric motors, the type of upgrade young couples purchased when they have recently started to keep a little bit more money than they brought in, when they thought they could see farther down the road and everything looked smooth and bright. Silver, shaped like raindrop sliding on glass, the car had a natural, organic prettiness McCallum found acceptable. They must have figured their careers were tracking upward.

The car passed him. McCallum pulled his pursuit vehicle out into traffic. Non-reflective black, a hunting knife with a shiny hilt, McCallum answered more questions about the pursuit vehicle than any other part of his job. Did he buzz it out every chance he got? Did he want to be op just so he could drive it? Did it really do 60 miles per hour? He made up answers depending on the questioner. Some guys got to hear how it sucked onto the road, all four motors working together made it handle like a train. And it could actually spin in place if needed. Some guys got the truth. It had all the comforts of a dentist’s chair, fit like an oversized hockey helmet and let you see as much of the world around you as a hangover. He found it amazing that he saw Lillian’s car at all through the thin strips of glass.