From a homicide point of view it worked like this. On floors 1-50, in official terms, you have human garbage. Black, white, Chicano, Asian—it doesn’t matter. No one cares what happens to these people, except the Narcs and DEA, because this is where most of the drug industry happens. Unfortunately, well over half the cops in these departments are dirty, so they’ll be more concerned with hiding what’s going on than with solving crimes. Complicating matters is the fact that not all the cops on the take are on the same side. It’s generally reckoned that about a third of the homicides on 1-50 are committed by men with badges. The last time one of these was solved was never.
Floors 50-100, you had to start taking notice. Some of these people have proper jobs. So if one of them gets killed, you have to at least look like you’re trying to find out who did it. But chances are you won’t, because no one saw anything, no one knows anything, no one’s going to help the cops if they can avoid it, and anyone involved is probably holed up on one of the floors where the cops simply won’t go. Every now and then, the mayor’ll get a hair up his ass over the hundreds of unsolved homicides in this sector, and there’ll be a show of strength—which basically involves framing enough losers to bring the percentage solved up to an acceptable level. Say ten per cent. So if you’re lucky enough to get murdered during one of these periods, you’ve got a one in ten chance of being—technically, if not actually—avenged. Otherwise, forget it—most people don’t even bother calling the cops for minor misdemeanors like murder anymore.
Floors 100-184 are different. If someone gets killed there, you’re supposed to solve it. But you don’t, most of the time. Sure, you’ve got the subnet and computer-enhanced suspect tracking, print matching, photo analysis. But most of those crimes will have been committed by people out of 1-50, in which case you’ll never find them. They’ll probably have been killed in some other action before you even get close to knowing who they were. A few of the other murders will be the standard deals of jealousy, hatred and revenge, some of which will go down. The rest will have been committed by people who live above 150, in which case you can’t touch them. As soon as a case starts pointing above this magic second line, toward some wayward son or psychotic patriarch, the case is marked “Beyond Economic Repair.”
185 is the mob floor, frequent social visitors to which include every senior policeman, local politician, and businessman. The mob generally only kill their own kind—unless they feel like killing someone else, in which case there’s a set kickback fee to ensure it never goes any further. Any homicide investigation originating out of 185 is dead before it reaches the station.
Nobody gets killed above 185, except by their own hand or by God. Neither has so far proved indictable.
You join the force, for whatever reason, and within days you’ll be locked into place. You choose which club to join: the one creaming money off the drug trade, or prostitution, protection, or the mob—the NRPD is basically an overhead which crime has to pay, Smart cops get recruited in the first weeks. The others will either leave by the end of the month or get killed in the line of duty. Nobody gets a big funeral for that anymore; it’s understood that it means the cop didn’t get with the program. You go stand at crime scenes, you fill in reports, you take money—half of which you’ll have to kick back to someone else—and you run around with a gun in your hand. At night you swap cop tales over beer, shake prostitutes down for freebies, and then go home to your wife. Sometimes you might get killed. That’s pretty much it.
Some cops were different. Mal was different. Mal would take the call on any homicide, anywhere, and then try to make that sucker go down. I did, too, I guess, which is why I ended up a Lieutenant at the wise, old, experienced age of thirty-two. Within each department there is a hidden and motley collection of cops who are still there to solve crimes, like some tiny vestigial organ hidden in a thriving body of corruption. Mal solved enough prostitute killings that they had to promote him. However much the brass hated real work being done on kickback time, they couldn’t ignore the statistics. I concentrated on the soluble homicides in 50-184, and dunked enough to make lower brass myself.
And that was my mistake. Up till then I’d been on the take in a small way, enough to demonstrate I was one of the team. I’d shaken down a lot of drug dealers for my own purposes, which brought up my average. But when I made Lieutenant, things changed. I was expected to take my place in the second hierarchy, the criminal one. I didn’t, mainly for self-serving reasons of my own, partly because I was naïve enough to think it was wrong.
Worse than that, I tried to put away someone who was then one of its up-and-coming stars. A man by the name of Johnny Vinaldi.
I took the xPress elevator up to 100, then had to get out, like everyone else, and shuffle through Clearance Control. As usual, the commuters were outnumbered by security guards, men in gray uniforms who tried to combine subservience with a clear threat toward anyone who shouldn’t be there. Most of them couldn’t pull off the mixture, and tended to skimp on the subservience. In front of me in the queue were a typical selection of midlifers trying to get higher for the night. Most got turned away—single-day passes out of date, or straightforward fakes. One guy was either a habitual offender or a known criminal who hadn’t paid enough kickback, and was hustled unceremoniously into a side room, his cooperation ensured by a blow across the face from a metal riot stick. The remaining few, like me, were allowed through, and then given a complimentary peppermint.
My pass was fake, too, as it happened—just a better fake than the ones which had bounced. It had cost me one hundred fifty dollars from someone working on the 24th floor. This gentleman had sold me a variety of other things, including a substance which sat in my jacket pocket wrapped in foil. I’d been dealing with the guy quite sensibly, buying useful stuff and trying not to slur my speech, when the words had just slipped out. Now I could feel the packet glowing against my chest, almost as if it was hot I’d made myself promise that I’d throw it away, the first opportunity I got. Guess that opportunity hadn’t presented itself yet.
Another thing that I was trying not to admit to myself was that I had less than three hundred dollars left. Not enough to buy a truck. Perhaps not enough to get out of New Richmond by any means other than foot. I could borrow money off Howie, but I knew I wouldn’t. I was boxing myself in, apparently incapable of stopping myself, and I recognized this with a combination of weary panic and calm indifference.
While we waited for the elevator to take us into the upper levels, I eyed my fellow passengers. A couple of guys in overalls, looking self-conscious. Repairmen. An old couple in expensive casual clothes; the costSlots on their sleeves registering prices higher than the average annual wage. The old guy was dressed in a spotless lilac suit and looked like an unusually hued ostrich as he craned his neck imperiously round the lobby. His crone made no bones about staring disdainfully at me and the final passenger, a young woman with cropped hair and an assortment of deliberately ragged clothes. As the elevator doors opened and we entered the sumptuous carriage, one of the girl’s eyes glinted in the uplighting, confirming my suspicion that she was a prostitute. Some of them have a system where you just run a credit card in front of their right eye: An implant reads the code and debits your account to their manager’s, and then she’s yours until the meter runs out. She doesn’t have to carry cash around, and it comes up on your statement as something like “gardening tools.”