Robert Wilson - Vortex

The Martians had believed longevity should confer both wisdom and certain moral obligations, and they had designed their pharmaceuticals that way. The famous “fourth stage of life,” the adulthood after adulthood, had entailed changes to the brain that modified aggressiveness and promoted sympathy for others. Not a bad idea, Sandra thought, but hardly commercial. The black-marketers had hacked the biochemical combination lock and evolved a better product. Nowadays—assuming you had serious money and the right contacts—you could buy yourself an extra twenty or thirty years of life while avoiding that awkward surge of human sympathy.

All illegal, of course, and massively profitable. Just last week the FBI had shut down a distribution ring in Boca Raton that was processing more cash on an annual basis than most top-fifty corporations, and that was only a fraction of the market. Bose was right: in the end, for some people, life was worth anything you had to pay for it.

“The longevity drug isn’t easy to cultivate,” Bose was saying. “It’s as much an organism as a molecule. You need genetic seed stock, you need a decent-sized bioreactor, and you need a lot of closely watched chemicals and catalysts. Which means you have to buy a lot of look-the-other-way.”

“Including some in HPD?”

“That would be a reasonable conclusion to draw.”

“And you’re aware of this?”

He shrugged.

“But there must be somebody you could talk to—I don’t know, the FBI, the DEA…”

“I believe the federal agencies have their hands full at the moment,” Bose said.

“Okay,” Sandra said, “but what does all this have to do with Orrin Mather?”

“It’s not Orrin so much as the place he used to work. As soon as he got off the bus from Raleigh, Orrin was hired by a man named Findley. Findley operates a warehouse that holds and forwards imported goods, mainly cheap plastic crap from manufacturers in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Most of his hires are transients or immigrants without papers. He doesn’t ask for social security numbers and his guys get paid in cash. He put Orrin to work doing the usual lift-and-carry jobs. But Orrin turned out to be an unusual employee by Findley’s standards, which means he came in on time and sober, he was bright enough to follow orders, he never complained and he didn’t care about finding a better job as long his pay was regular. So after a while Findley took him off day work and made him night watchman. Most nights between midnight and dawn Orrin was locked in the warehouse with a phone and a patrol schedule, and all he had to do was conduct an hourly walk-through and call a certain number if he noticed anything unusual.”

“A certain number? Not the police?”

“Definitely not the police, because what passes through the warehouse, along with a lot of die-stamped toys and plastic kitchenware, are shipments of precursor chemicals bound for black-market bioreactors.”

“Orrin knew about this?”

“That’s unclear. Maybe he had some suspicions. In any case, Findley fired him a couple of months back, possibly because Orrin was getting a little too familiar with the details of the operation. Some of Findley’s black-market material comes in or goes out after hours, so Orrin would have seen a few transfers. The firing was pretty traumatic for Orrin—I guess he thought he was being punished for something.”

“He talked to you about it?”

“A little, reluctantly. All he says is that he didn’t do anything wrong and that it wasn’t time for him to leave.”

Sandra asked Bose for another Corona, which gave her time to think about all this. What he had said seemed to make everything murkier. She decided to focus on the only part of this she really understood or could affect: Orrin’s assessment at State Care.

Bose came back with a bottle, which she accepted but set down immediately on Bose’s ring-stained coffee table. He needed new furniture, she thought. Or at least a set of coasters.

“You think Orrin might have information that would be damaging to a criminal smuggling operation.”

Bose nodded. “None of this would matter if Orrin had been just another one of Findley’s hired drifters. Orrin would have left town or found other work or otherwise disappeared into povertyland, end of story. The trouble is that Orrin surfaced again when we took him into custody. Worse, when we asked him about his employment record, he piped right up about his six months at the warehouse. Mention of the name set off alarms in certain quarters, and I guess word worked its way up.”

“So what are the smugglers afraid of, that Orrin will reveal some secret?”

“I said the federal agencies are too busy to take on corruption in HPD, and that’s true. But there are ongoing investigations related to longevity-drug rings. Findley—and the people Findley works for—are nervous about Orrin as a potential witness, now that his name and history are in the database. You see where this is going?”

She nodded slowly. “His psychological condition.”

“Exactly. If Orrin’s admitted to State Care, that constitutes a formal declaration of incompetence. Any testimony he might give would be fatally compromised.”

“Which is where I come in.” She sipped her beer. She seldom drank beer. She thought it tasted the way old socks smell. But it was gratifyingly cold, and she welcomed the slight buzz, that oddly clarifying wisp of intoxication. “Except I’m not on Orrin’s case anymore. I can’t do anything to help him.”

“I don’t expect you to. I probably shouldn’t have told you what I did, but—like you said, quid pro quo . And I’m still interested in your opinion of Orrin’s writing.”

“So you think his document is what, some kind of coded confession?”

“I honestly don’t know what Orrin’s document is. And although it mentions the warehouse—”

“It does?”

“In a section you haven’t read. But it’s hardly the kind of evidence you can take to court. I’m just…” He seemed to struggle for a word. “You could say, professionally curious.”

You could say that, Sandra thought, but you’d only be telling a fraction of the truth. “Bose, I saw the way you acted when you brought him in. You’re more than curious. You actually appear to give a shit about him. As a human being, I mean.”

“By the time Orrin was remanded to State I’d got to know him a little bit. He’s being railroaded, and he doesn’t deserve it. He’s… well, you know how he is.”

“Vulnerable. Innocent.” But a lot of the people Sandra dealt with were both vulnerable and innocent; it was commonplace. “Endearing, in a kind of spooky way.”

Bose nodded. “That thing his sister said back at the restaurant. ‘A wind blows through him.’ I’m not exactly sure what she meant by that. But it sounds about right.”

Sandra couldn’t say at what point she decided to stay the night. Probably there was no single point of decision; that wasn’t how it worked. In her relatively limited experience, intimacy was a slow glide orchestrated not by words but by gestures: eye contact, the first touch (as she put a hand on Bose’s arm to make some conversational point), the easy way he came and sat beside her, thigh to thigh, as if they had known each other for half an eternity. Strange, she thought, how familiar it began to seem, and then how inevitable that she would go to bed with him. There was no first-time awkwardness about it. He was as sweet in bed as she had suspected he would be.

She fell asleep beside him, one hand draped across his hip. She wasn’t aware of him when he slipped away from her. But she was dimly awake when he came back from the bathroom, caught for a moment in the amber glow of city light through the bedroom window. She saw the scar she had already felt with her fingertips, a pale ridge that began below his navel and meandered like a mountain road along his rib cage and up toward his right shoulder.