Bodies in, bodies out.
It took a bit for Soledad to flag down an assistant assistant ME. Upstairs, somewhere else in the hospital he would have been an orderly. Down there, where the people weren't so particular, he had a title and owned just enough self-importance to ignore everyone around him. It was basically Soledad's flashed badge that got his attention.
"What yah need, sistah?" He was a black guy, young, with long dreads—well kept, not the raggedy-ass kind a lot of Rastahs sported—with more than a little accent from somewhere in the Caribbean.
"I'm looking for someone."
"Name?"
"Bannon, Reese."
The AAME repeated the name a couple of times to quick-fix it in his memory. He looked over some papers, then flicked a finger for Soledad to follow him.
A back room. Tables. Lots of tables. Stainless steel. A whole bunch of no-longer-living people all congregated, all draped in sheets.
Bodies in, bodies out.
The AAME went down a row checking toe tags…
Soledad shook her head. They really used toe tags.
He flipped one over, read it. Flipped another over, read it. Flipped another… He stopped at the table.
Looking to Soledad: "Ready?" He was already pulling back the sheet to reveal the body. Asking was just a formality.
Reese.
One time a guy called death the Big Sleep. It sounded good, clever, and it stuck. Reese didn't look like she was sleeping. She didn't look like she was sleeping or moving to a higher plane or in a better place. She looked dead, and she looked like getting that way hadn't come easy. Muscles atrophied. Pale and gaunt from months of coma, of being fed by tubes and kept breathing by machines. A chest wound that had been worked on every way doctors knew how but in the end would slow-kill her. Reese looked like life had been back-alley-beat from her. And Soledad figured that would've been about the only way Reese would go: not gentle into the night, but only after a long, nasty, bitter, violent fight. But not so much of one that Death wouldn't chalk the victory in the end. Nobody, not even BAMF Reese, was that good a warrior.
"Look aht daht shit, huh." The assistant assistant ME ticked his head at the stitched and stapled defect where Reese's sternum used to be."An' she duhn't die right away? She a tough sometin', huh?"
He said what he said oblivious to Soledad, to her feelings. He said it with no respect for Reese. Forty-plus-hour weeks in a morgue had long since desensitized him to the dead. They weren't people anymore, weren't even bodies. Just inventory to be sorted and stored and just-in-time-delivered to a destination six feet due south.
Bodies in, bodies out.
Meat in, meat out.
A row across and a couple of tables up, three people, a family, stood near the badly charred and mangled remains of someone. They cried profusely. Some other assistant assistant ME kept saying to them over and over: "I need you to identify the body. Please, could you just identify the body? Is this, or is this not…"
From her little backpack purse Soledad slipped a Kodak Fun Saver camera.
Yeah. Right.
She circled around to Reese's right shoulder and lined up a shot.
"Dhis for ahn invesTIgation?" the dreadlocked assistant assistant asked.
Soledad snapped a picture, then snapped a couple more to be safe.
"If daht's not for ahn invesTIgation, yah have tah ask de family fhurst. I can't jhust let yoou be comin' in here takin' pictures of de bodies."
Sure, now he cared.
Soledad tucked the camera back where it had come from and started from the room, let the dead get back to their business.
"Hey," the assistant yelled after her."I'm goin' tah have tah report dhis, sistah. I duhn't wanna have tah geet yah in trahuble."
"Take a number," Soledad said."Get in line."
I know you believe what you're telling me. But what I'm starting to think… look, you can't blame me if this—all of this—is starting to sound a little fantastic."
Soledad flashed anger. Gayle, the lawyer who'd come around uninvited, talked Soledad into letting her work her case, was calling Soledad a liar?
Verbalizing her anger: "You're saying I'm making things up?"
"No, I'm not."
"You said it was a fantasy."
"I said it was fantastic."
"Same thing." Big gesticulation. Dismissive."How's that not the same thing?"
A guy at the next table with good hair and bright but vacant eyes stared at the arguing women.
Gayle caught his look, said: "We want an audience we'll sell tickets. Turn your head, drink your mochaccino."
The guy did as told, was good about taking direction. Probably he was some variation of actor or unemployed actor or wannabe actor come to LA to give a go at being a superstar. The town was sick with them. The cafe—Kings Road, on Kings Road in West Hollywood—was full of them. Soledad didn't care for their kind, didn't like being around them, but Kings Road cafe was walking distance from her apartment, and Gayle had complained enough about meeting in the fumy Beverly Connection Soledad figured she'd make an offer of meeting in the coffeehouse. Now, thinking she'd been called a liar, on top of the fact Gayle was half an hour late for their meeting, Soledad was sorry she'd made the gesture.
Gayle calmed things down, stepped Soledad through the situation."You told me that two years ago you submitted a proposal on your gun to the PD."
"Yes."
"Well, there are no records of it. None that I can find."
No hesitation, strong in her conviction: "That's impossible."
"So it's okay for you to say it's impossible, but if I say it's fantastic…"
"You need to check with A Platoon and the Department of the Armorer."
"I did. No record anything was ever received. You send your work blind?"
"No. Well, not… I'd talked about it with the Sergeant. He told me I should submit my work to the Lieutenant."
"And you did that?"
"Yeah, I did."
"Did you get a receipt?"
"A receipt? I wasn't buying groceries."
"So that's a no."
"If I had something like that, I'd give it to you."
"So you sent your work to the lieutenant, then what?"
"After I didn't hear anything for about…" Soledad gave careful thought, confirmed the time line with herself."It was almost four months. I sent a follow-up letter. Three more months I sent a letter to the sergeant of MTac Operations, told him about what I was working on, that I'd already sent proposals to the Department of the Armorer. Sent another letter two months after that."
Gayle took a drink of her tea. Black and strong."What about the lieutenant of MTac?"
"Rysher?" A shake of Soledad's head."Figured it be better to start lower, have somebody rabbi me up the chain. When I made MTac, I sent the lieutenant commander a query, asked if my submissions had anything to do with my selection. That was just a backward way of trying to get someone to go back, look at my work."
"So, at least, what, five times you made some kind of communication regarding your work."
"At least that. Yeah. I did everything I could to get people on board with what I was doing."
"Not that I can prove."
Shrugging all that off: "So there's no paper; so what?"
"The so-what is: If there's paper, you're a conscientious cop who at least tried hard as she could to get people to listen to her. If there's no paper, no proof you tried, then you're a liar who doesn't give a damn what other people think and just does whatever the hell she pleases." Hand up, cutting Soledad off before she could even get going: "I'm not saying you are, so let's not even start that again. But you're saying there are these documents out there, and I'm telling you if they exist, I can't find them."