“Yeah?” she said, and smiled, maybe a little sadly. “I know it’s tough for you, Carroll. I can’t even imagine. At least I know where my kid is.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek and went inside.
Monks gathered up the rest of the groceries and followed her. The kitchen was small and neat, smelling of herbs and garlic, its butcher-block counters scarred and the Creuset cookware much used. Like the deck, it was something she intended to redo if she ever got the time. He liked it as it was.
“You pour us a drink and shell the shrimp, I’ll do the rest,” she said. She liked to get everything ready in advance, then kick back, and do the final cooking when they were good and hungry.
“Done,” Monks said. He opened the bottle of Guigal Côtes du Rhône that she had brought-seafood or not, Sara was a red wine drinker, with a keen sense for good inexpensive varietals-then poured himself his old standby of Finlandia vodka on ice, touched with fresh lemon. This was the time of year that he had planned to be in Ireland, but that had been put on indefinite hold.
He dumped the big tiger prawns into a bowl. Sara turned on the TV news, and Monks half-listened as he pried apart the carapaces. They were barely thawed, the shells’ icy edges stiff and sharp against his thumbs. While his hands moved automatically, his senses drank in the pleasantness around him-the lovely woman, the cozy place, the savory food and drink. He had enough money, enough of everything. What he needed was to feel more useful, he decided-not too useful, just a little.
His mind started going over employment options. He still worked as an investigator for a malpractice insurance firm in San Francisco. His case load had been light lately, but only by his choice. He could let them know that he was willing to take on more. There were also many hospitals and clinics that would gladly hire him for temporary locum tenens work, including a couple around here. He could arrange a schedule that would satisfy him and still leave him plenty of free time. That would be the ticket.
“…this country better be ready for a wake-up call, because it’s about to get one,” a man’s angry voice said on the television. In the background came the shouts and mutterings of a crowd.
Monks paused, his attention caught by something he could not quite identify.
“It’s bad enough they don’t give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like this,” the speaker fulminated. “Those politicians better start realizing, there’s twenty million people out here who got nothing. Outlaws, or damned near.”
Monks dropped the shrimp he was holding and strode to the TV. Sara glanced at him in surprise.
“What-” she started to say, but he held his hand up for silence.
The television screen showed a fiftyish white man with the look of the homeless-thin and bearded, wearing a greasy parka and mismatched pants and shirt-stabbing a forefinger with violent emphasis as he spoke. A mob hundreds strong was grouped behind him, murmuring and erupting in shouts of anger and menace. The background looked somehow familiar-a slum in an older city, four-and five-story brick buildings with rickety back porches hung with laundry.
“There’s an army already out there, and it’s ready to fight back.” The speaker thrust his fist into the air in a Black Power salute. The crowd repeated the gesture, pumping fists up and down and raising its collective voice to a roar.
The TV screen switched back to the studio anchorwoman, well groomed and professionally poised.
“Again, Chicago police came down hard on an urban homeless camp after items were discovered there that might be linked to the ‘Calamity Jane’ killings,” she said.
Chicago. That’s where he’d seen those buildings-on the South Side, where he’d grown up, down by the Rock Island Railroad tracks.
“Officials deny that any brutality was used, but a videotape has surfaced of police rampaging through the area, evoking outraged comparisons to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles,” the announcer went on. “Authorities say they’re looking into the matter.
“Up next, a look at the weekend’s sports. Stay with us.”
Sara’s face was questioning.
“Freeboot said the same thing to me, in almost those same words,” Monks said. “The same number, twenty million outlaws. The riff about the army already being out there.”
He flipped to a different channel and this time caught the story as it was starting.
“…now we’ll hear how a shocking murder in an Illinois gated community has led to a near riot in a homeless camp,” another anchorwoman said. “Here’s Ted Derrick in Chicago. Ted?”
The screen flashed to a good-looking young man with a microphone, standing at the fringes of the same slum and crowd that the earlier newscast had shown.
“Kelly, events have taken a strange and even uglier turn here, since the murder yesterday of Walter Krieger and his wife,” he said. “This morning, items of Mrs. Krieger’s lingerie, believe it or not, started turning up in this urban homeless camp-very expensive stuff, Italian silk and what-have-you, not the kind of thing you’d expect to find here.”
Sara was watching now with dismay, holding a chopping knife in a posture that looked unconsciously defensive.
“They stole her underwear?” she murmured. “That’s creepy.”
“Police received an anonymous tip about the lingerie, is that right?” Kelly, the anchorwoman said.
“Correct. There’s speculation that the tip came from the killers themselves, wanting to link this to the previous Calamity Jane murders.”
“Why are they doing this?” she said, leaning forward suddenly and slapping her hand down on her desk, with the petulance of a teeange girl.
Not just petulance, Monks thought. Fear. It could happen to her.
“Nobody seems to have any answers yet, Kelly.”
She leaned back, regaining her composure. “And there are complaints of brutality when police searched the camp?”
“Yes. Residents say they ran amok, with violence, threats, and racial slurs. Here’s a video that was taken by a bystander.”
The screen changed again, this time to a scenario that looked like it could have been from a movie of a postapocalyptic world. Unsteady and amateurish, surreally lit by the garish flashing lights of squad cars, the footage showed a dozen policemen in full riot gear charging through an alley, tearing apart cardboard shelters, kicking men in bedrolls and clubbing those who tried to stand.
“There’s a sense that the police were taking out their frustrations on the homeless,” Ted’s voice cut in. “Blaming and punishing them for the murders.”
The screen switched to the same homeless spokesman who had been on the earlier broadcast, repeating his strident shout:
“It’s bad enough they don’t give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like this-”
Monks felt Sara’s hand touch his arm. The concern was in her eyes again.
“How about we turn this off and get in the hot tub?” she said.
“There’s an army already out there, and it’s ready to fight back,” the angry face shouted.
Monks switched off the set. “Let me just clean up,” he said. He peeled the few remaining shrimp, put them in the refrigerator, and washed the counter.
Since the fire, he had checked out some of Freeboot’s claims and found them accurate. Official estimates put the homeless population at over three and a half million, more than a third of them children. That was probably on the conservative side, and didn’t take into account the many more who were marginal-one short step away.
More than three million jobs in industry had disappeared over the past couple of years. There was a pervasive perception of the homeless as lazy and irresponsible, but a whole lot of them were staunch, hardworking citizens who couldn’t pay their bills after the factory doors slammed shut. The few jobs that were “created” to replace those lost tended to be either high-end technical-beyond the reach of people without higher education-or minimum-wage. Thousands of soldiers were coming home from overseas deployment and finding that out.