A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0050

Chapter 50

The sofa was new, and that still bothered Richard.

It had been a month since the two had started working for the city, and in that month the office at the back of the warehouse had gone from being a makeshift room made from motel leftovers to something that almost deserved the name of a living room. The walls remained bare, the ceiling remained high and blank, but there was a rug underfoot, there were two leather armchairs that didn’t belong to anyone who was closing the doors, and there was that wide, dark sofa where the detective had settled down with his briefcase open on his lap and the feeling, which he couldn’t shake, of visiting people who were rising in life too quickly for the liking of a man who had climbed his own slowly and at the cost of ten years of shifts.

In the armchairs, Jack and Kevin Liam.

Each held a copy of the report, and Richard observed the difference in their reading styles with the professional interest of someone who had spent his career judging people by small gestures. Kevin read with his whole body, running his thick finger under the lines, his lips moving slightly, pausing now and then to reread a passage as if checking a number. Jack read as he always did: quickly, without moving anything but his eyes, his face motionless behind his thin-lensed glasses. He finished before Kevin had even turned the second page.

He closed the folder, placed it on the coffee table, and slowly exhaled.

“I didn’t think this city could get any worse,” he said.

Richard didn’t respond immediately because he agreed, and agreeing was the easy part. The report he himself had brought spoke of an international organ trafficking network, and the word “international” hurt the most because it meant that what was being seen in San Diego was only the local tip of something much bigger, with much more money and much more patience than anything the city knew how to handle. There had been months when the Bureau could still send people. Now, no. The agencies that investigated this type of crime had retreated along with everything else, sucked into the few places where it was still possible to pretend that the law existed, and in the vacuum that remained, kidnappings had ceased to be news. People simply disappeared. And sometimes, weeks later, someone would turn up in a vacant lot with their body opened up and organized inside in the cold manner of someone who knew exactly what they were taking.

“Good,” said Jack, rubbing the corner of his eye with his knuckle. “At least now it’s in my hands. I’ll do everything I can to catch these guys.” He let the sentence rest for a moment. “Do you know when the operation begins?”

“In two days.”

Jack simply tilted his head, waiting for the rest, because with Richard there was always a remainder.

“The problem isn’t the operation itself.” The detective flipped through a page of his own copy without really looking at it, the gesture of a man who already knew by heart what was written. “The problem is who’s in charge. From what my informants have gathered, the boss is a shapeshifter.”

Kevin looked up from his folder for the first time.

“A shapeshifter who changes faces?”

“A shapeshifter, the kind that none of the four people who swear they were in the same room as him describe the same man.” Richard closed the folder. “One swears he was short and bald. Another, that he was a guy in a suit with an Eastern accent. A woman who served him drinks all night drew a face from memory that doesn’t match either of them. And all three were telling the truth, because all three were terrified of me when I asked, and people that scared don’t have the imagination to lie beautifully. That’s why nobody ever caught him. You don’t chase a man who has no face. You chase four men who don’t exist.”

The silence that followed was heavy. Jack left him there for a moment, processing the information as he processed everything, searching for the angle from which it could cause harm.

“If nobody knows what he looks like,” he finally said, “how are we supposed to know where he’s going to be?”

“We don’t know where he’ll be. We know where the merchandise will be.” Richard allowed himself a near-smile, devoid of any joy. “One of my informants found out the location and time of the next delivery. It’s the only opening we’ve had in years, and it’ll close quickly. If the boss shows up to inspect the cargo in person, great, he’s the one we want. If he doesn’t show up, at the very least we’ll cut off a leg of the thing and free whoever’s waiting to be dismantled. In both cases it’s worth it. In both cases it’s dangerous.”

“Everything that’s worthwhile is,” said Jack.

He let a moment pass, and the next question came out more quietly, the way things he preferred to know before deciding how he felt about them usually came out.

“The delivery. Is it ready-made merchandise, or are they people?”

Richard stared at him for a second, and in that second it was clear that he had been expecting the question and hoping he wouldn’t have to answer.

“Both things.” The detective spoke with the same neutrality he used about the weather, because it was the only way to get the sentence out in one piece. “Part of the cargo is refrigerated boxes, things that have already been taken from someone. And part,” he hesitated for the first time in the whole conversation, “part is still breathing. That’s how these people work. They transport the raw material alive for as long as they can, because an organ lasts longer inside its owner than inside a styrofoam cooler. If the operation goes well, there are people in that warehouse who leave standing instead of in pieces.”

Something changed in Jack’s face, brief, almost invisible, a hardening that didn’t reach his eyes but passed through his jaw and stayed. He was no longer calculating risk. He was calculating deadlines, how many minutes each second of hesitation cost, measured in people still whole inside a box.

“So we can’t get the timing wrong,” he said.

“No. It can’t be.”

“I need you two to take this seriously.” Richard leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the light fell in a way that revealed the layered weariness on his face, the gray that had taken over his temples and then the rest of his body without asking permission. “These people aren’t street gangs. They aren’t kids with guns bought in an alley. They’ve been operating for years, they’ve lived through three mayors, they survived Vought when Vought was still patrolling, and they survived precisely because they never underestimated anyone. Heroes better than you tried and failed, and some of those heroes didn’t come back to tell why they failed. I’m not here to flatter you. I’m here to ask you not to make the same mistake others made, which was thinking you’d already won before you even got in.”

Jack held the detective’s gaze slowly. There was something good about being treated like someone who could die; it was more honest than most of what Christopher did to them on camera.

“Understood,” he said. And it was true.

Kevin, standing beside him, had finally set his briefcase down on his lap, his broad face more serious than he usually allowed himself to be. “We’re going to be careful,” he said, and coming from his mouth, which spent half the day laughing, the phrase carried double the weight.

…

Richard straightened his back, and something in his posture changed the subject before his voice.

“But let’s put that aside for a moment.” He let his almost-smile turn into a real smile, and looked ten years younger for two seconds. “Your payment has arrived.”

Kevin, who had completely forgotten that a report existed in the world, sat up straight.

Richard picked up the briefcase that was leaning against the side of the sofa, the object he had carried into the warehouse without mentioning it, and placed it on the small table. He turned the latches with both thumbs and lifted the lid.

A million dollars has its own way of being inside a briefcase. It doesn’t shine, it doesn’t make a sound, it doesn’t seem like anything special at first glance, just rows of bundles held together by paper straps, stacked with the bureaucratic patience of someone who has counted everything twice. And yet, the air in the room changed, the way the air always changes near real money, and Kevin let out a low whistle through his teeth.

Jack smiled. He hadn’t expected it to be today.

“I confess I found it strange,” said Richard, closing the briefcase again and pushing it a few inches toward Jack, “that you demand everything in cash. The city would much rather do a transfer, have everything neatly on paper, tax-deductible. Cash like this is a lot of work. But I’ve stopped asking what you do with what’s yours.” He raised his hands, palms up, in a gesture of good-humored surrender. “And, to be fair, it was only possible to gather this because of the chaos. In a healthy city, this sort of thing doesn’t disappear from a safe without thirty signatures. Here, with half the city’s accounting still in ruins, a lot gets through. You’re being paid, in part, with the very mess you’re helping to clean up. There’s an irony in that that I prefer not to examine closely.”

Jack didn’t explain why he needed the money in that way—cash, countable, tangible. There was no way to explain it without starting with a holographic device that only he could see, and that wasn’t a conversation to have with a detective, no matter how decent he was. He let the silence do its usual work, and Richard, who was clever, didn’t insist.

The detective glanced at his own watch, and his eyebrows rose.

“Look at the time.” He stood up from the sofa, picking up his briefcase. “Gentlemen, I have an appointment. Study the mission, memorize the time, and meet me at the designated spot promptly. We’ll sort out the rest there.” He was already heading towards the door, knowing the way by heart, because he was there almost every day of the week, the flesh-and-blood bridge between a police force that was being rebuilt piece by piece and the two young men the city had decided to love. “See you later.”

And he left, and the shed swallowed the sound of his footsteps, and then the sound of the gate, and then the usual silence.

Kevin stared at the briefcase on the table like a man stares at the sea.

“Dude.” The voice came out almost reverent. “It’s a million dollars. Do you have any idea what we can do with that?”

Jack smiled at his friend, a small, corner-of-the-mouth smile that promised nothing and knew everything.

“I know,” he said.

…

The training area was at the other end of the warehouse, far enough from the office that if something too big were summoned, the damage wouldn’t reach where they actually lived.

The move had been a practical decision. In the beginning, when the apartment near the port was still their entire world, a delivery that brought in the wrong size could mean one less wall and one more neighbor asking questions. The warehouse easily solved that problem. There was space, plenty of ceiling, concrete that had already survived worse than any surprise the system could throw at it, and a floor that nobody would mind seeing cracked.

Jack placed the briefcase in the center of that empty space and sat down facing it on the low bench they used to rest between sets.

Teeth settled down beside him with the heavy satisfaction of a large dog that had found its place. The trunk rested its lid against Jack’s leg, opened it slightly in that crooked smile of overly white teeth, and let its long tongue dribble out, forming a puddle of drool on the concrete without the slightest ceremony. There was no way to look at it and recognize the wooden monster that the whole city had learned to fear in the alleys, the same one that ran faster than the cars Kevin watched on Sundays, that swallowed people from inside burning buildings and returned them whole on the other side. There, leaning against its owner’s leg, drooling, Teeth was just a contented animal.

And a little further on, on an overturned crate that served as a shelf, was the egg.

White, with green spots, warm even from a distance, with that complete calmness of something that hasn’t happened yet. Jack didn’t know when it would erupt. He knew it could be at any moment, and that’s why he kept it close, and that’s why he looked at it more times a day than he cared to admit. Of all the things the system had given him, this was the only one he awaited with something resembling tenderness, and not strategy.

But strategy was the topic of the evening.

The contract had been signed a month ago. For an entire month he knew that money was coming, and for an entire month he played with it in his head, spending it in a thousand different ways while running at dawn, while sweat dripped from his chin, while pretending to sleep. A million dollars. It was more money than he had ever touched in his life before all this began, and now it was there, locked in a briefcase, waiting for a decision he deliberately postponed just to feel its weight a little longer.

The question was old, and it always came up in the same place.

All at once, or little by little.

He could offer the entire million in a single roll. The system measured what the person was willing to risk, and a tribute of that size, all at once, tipped the scales upwards like nothing he had ever tried. The chances of something rare, of something far above the ordinary, rose in a way that made your mouth dry just thinking about it. But only the chances of rarity increased. And there lay the problem, the same old one, the one that no amount of money in the world could solve.

Rare was not the same as useful.

The compass he kept in a drawer was proof of that. A beautiful item, of impeccable quality, that pointed unfailingly to a specific thing that didn’t exist in this world, and therefore spent its days pointing to nothing with the stubborn fidelity of a perfect instrument in the wrong place. The radar had been even worse. He remembered the vibration in his hand when the object materialized, the leap his heart made at the description on the screen, the certainty that he had finally obtained something magnificent. And it was magnificent, in the universe from which it had come. Here, it was a toy that tracked seven spheres that didn’t exist, a blind radar searching for stars that no one had ever sown in this sky.

That’s how he learned, item by item, that the system didn’t negotiate context. He delivered what was asked for the offered price, and had no idea what world Jack inhabited or what that world demanded of him. Relevance was the problem of whoever was rolling.

“You have the look of someone who’s lost the million three times and hasn’t even spent it yet,” Kevin said.

Jack hadn’t heard his friend arrive. Kevin had changed his clothes, dropped the weight of the report somewhere in the office, and was now approaching, chewing something, with the lightness of someone who had already left the serious part of the evening behind and didn’t intend to carry it back.

“I’m thinking about how to roll it,” said Jack.

“Obviously it is.” Kevin sat heavily on the concrete, on the other side of the briefcase, and Dentes lifted the lid in a hopeful gesture of affection that Kevin absentmindedly responded to, scratching the wood next to the hinge. “The question is the same as always, right? One big bet or several small ones?”

“AND.”

“And what’s the fear this time? Removing another compass?”

“The fear is drawing ten more compasses.” Jack rested his elbows on his knees and stared at the briefcase as if he could see through the leather. “If I divide it into small rolls, I multiply the attempts, but I pull each one down. The chance of getting junk on each roll goes up. I’d end up with a drawer full of common things, and common, at best, is a compass. At worst, it’s skin cream.” He let out a faint laugh, devoid of joy. “If I roll everything at once, I buy the highest rarity chance I’ve ever had in my life. But rarity is still just rarity. I could offer a million dollars and receive the most powerful weapon in a universe that here is worth nothing more than an ornament. Then I won’t have a drawer full of compasses. I’ll have a million-dollar compass. And there won’t be another chance anytime soon.”

Kevin whistled softly, the same whistle he had given in front of the open money in the room.

“Put that way, it’s kind of depressing.”

“He’s honest.”

“It could be both.” Kevin leaned his broad back against a pillar and crossed his arms over his stomach, frowning, that same strange talent he had for turning comics and small talk into real strategy. “Listen. You talk like it’s all luck, but it’s not just luck, it’s luck with weight. We control the weight. We don’t control the outside flesh. So the question that matters isn’t ‘rare or not.’ It’s ‘what do we really need now, today, in this city.'” He pointed his chin toward the office, to the briefcase, to the folded mission somewhere behind them. “And in two days we’re going into a warehouse looking for a guy nobody’s ever even been able to look in the face. A guy who took down heroes better than us, according to Richard himself. Do you really want to bet that million hoping to pull off a pretty ornament? Or do you want to go into that place carrying something more than you already carry?”

Jack remained silent.

It was a good argument, and he kind of hated that it was. The temptation of a single roll had always been the most poetic, the gambler’s fantasy of betting everything and watching the die spin with impossible numbers multiplying on its faces until it stopped, and in that moment of stopping resided a kind of vertigo he knew all too well and didn’t trust at all. Vertigo didn’t pay the bills. Vertigo didn’t stop organ traffickers. What stopped them was having, at the right time, the right tool in hand, and Kevin, with a simplicity that sometimes was worth all of Jack’s analysis, had pointed to the only question that mattered.

Not what was rarest. What was most necessary.

“You’re less stupid than you pretend to be, you know,” Jack said.

“I pretend enough so you won’t ask me for my tax return.” Kevin smiled, and the smile dispelled the last lingering tension between them. “But, man. Seriously now.” He looked at the briefcase with an expression that wasn’t greed, although it had seemed greedy at first glance, in the room, in front of Richard. It was something else. It was a poor boy from a rich family who had seen money his whole life without a single bill meaning freedom, and who now saw, for the first time, money become exactly that. “We came from where we came from. You counting pennies in that cubicle, me making excuses not to go back to my parents’ house. And now there’s a million dollars on the floor of our warehouse, and the problem tonight is what brilliant way to spend it. Let me just… savor this part for a second.”

Jack left. He enjoyed it together, in his own restrained way, letting his gaze wander over the suitcase, the dripping trunk, the warm egg waiting on the makeshift shelf, over that enormous, ugly space that was theirs, entirely theirs, in a building that lied to the street outside about everything it contained.

A year earlier, at this time, he would have been huddled under a musty lamp, calculating whether the month would end.

The silence that had settled in was different from the silence of the room with Richard. That had been the silence of impending danger. This was the comfortable silence of two friends who had already said what needed to be said and could, for a moment, simply be there.

Dentes yawned, the lid of his mouth bulging open in that absurdly white grin, and snuggled back against Jack’s leg.

After a while, Kevin stood up, slumped his back against the pillar, and announced that he was going to make something hot for the two of them to eat, because making an important decision on an empty stomach was a stupid decision, and disappeared toward the renovated kitchen, dragging his feet in his usual way. Jack stayed behind.

He pulled the briefcase closer, twisted the latches, and opened it again, and the bright light from the warehouse fell on the rows of bundles held together by straps. He ran his fingertips over the money without moving it, feeling its value more than its texture, measuring with his hand the thing he would soon offer to the system in exchange for a roll of the die.

The decision, deep down, had already been made, and Kevin knew it when he spoke. It wouldn’t be a one-off move. It wouldn’t be the poetry of vertigo. It would be something thought out, the way Jack thought about everything, calculated to bring not the rarest thing, but what that sick city and that faceless shapeshifter demanded of him in two days.

All that was left was to pull the trigger.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he stared at the money with the sharp attention of someone about to risk everything he has for something he doesn’t yet know what it is, hoping, with an intensity he couldn’t even name, that this time something would come into his hands that was not only excellent, but finally useful.