The Big Sheep (3 page)

Three months after I quit, Keane showed up at my apartment with a job offer, saying I'd been “invaluable” on the hologram case. I almost punched him, thinking he had shown up at my door with the sole purpose of making fun of me. Taking my reticence as a bargaining tactic, he upped his offer by twenty grand. When I balked at this, he offered me five grand for my notes on the hologram case. That was when it finally penetrated that he was serious.

I still probably wouldn't have taken the job, but Keane's timing—by chance or design—was fortuitous. I had spent every waking moment since leaving CSI investigating Gwen's disappearance, and had come up with exactly nothing. One day she simply hadn't shown up for work. I'd talked to her the previous night, and she had sounded fine. We were planning to see Sheila Tong at the Orpheum, and Gwen was complaining that she couldn't stay out late because she had to work most of the weekend. She worked for the city planning department, and they had been short-staffed ever since the Collapse, so she often took work home. She had called me on the way home from work on Wednesday night, and as far as I could tell, that was the last time anyone had talked to her. It was unclear whether she ever made it home that night; her last documented location was the parking garage down the street from her office. I had talked to friends, family members, coworkers, neighbors … but nobody had a clue what had happened to her. She had vanished into the proverbial thin air.

In any case, by the time Keane showed up with his offer, I was out of leads, nearly out of money, and rapidly sinking into hopelessness and depression. I'm still not certain whether I took the job because I thought Keane could help me find Gwen or because I thought working with him would be an effective distraction from what I knew to be a lost cause.

My official title was Director of Operations, but it became clear in short order that my function was essentially to be Keane's tether to mundane reality. Keane's mind dealt in concepts and abstractions; when it came to routine tasks like keeping case notes or doing laundry, he was hopeless. He subsisted entirely on Lucky Charms, Dr Pepper, and instadinners. He dressed in rumpled, mismatched clothing he bought by the pallet directly from a Chinese wholesaler; he wore a set of clothes for a week and then threw it out. Ironically, my first task as Keane's employee was to locate the funds for paying my own salary. Keane possessed a bewildering array of bank accounts and investments, the value of which I eventually established at nearly a million new dollars, but for those first few weeks I was basically writing myself checks and holding my breath. Even after spending three years sorting out his accounts, it wasn't uncommon for us to be two or three months in arrears on our lease. Currently it was closer to four. Hopefully the Case of the Lost Sheep would bring us close to being current, if I could keep Keane from spending the money on a new aircar.

There was little doubt that Keane needed me, but I never did figure out exactly how I was so “invaluable” to him on the hologram case. I think maybe it helped him to have a sane person around to bounce ideas off. Either that, or he just liked having an audience. When we weren't on a case, I felt like a babysitter for a manic-depressive eight-year-old. When we were on a case, I alternated between feeling like I was chaperoning a chimpanzee on acid and having flashbacks to Mr. Feldman's advanced calculus class, where I'd been placed in tenth grade, despite my lack of mathematical aptitude, as a result of a computer error. Life with Erasmus Keane was not a low-stress existence, but on most days it beat the hell out of the boredom of a corporate job.

“What do you make of Dr. Takemago?” asked Keane on the way back to the office.

I took a deep breath. Questions like that were often tests. Keane had come to some conclusion and wanted to know if I'd reached it as well. Not so much to confirm his own hypothesis as to determine how much of it, with my feeble neurotypical brain, I had managed to piece together. “Well,” I said, “she's clearly hiding something.”

Keane let out a derisive sigh.

“Something about the missing sheep,” I tried.

“Yes?” Keane said.

I thought for a moment. “Hang on,” I said, feigning a need to concentrate on my driving. There weren't many other cars in the air at this time in the afternoon, but we were nearing a notorious bottleneck. Unlike in many areas of the city, where you could make a beeline to your destination, traffic in the downtown area was routed along a few narrowly defined channels. Sometimes when traffic got really bad, I would take a shortcut over the DZ, but we were in no hurry, so there was no point in risking some bored banger taking a potshot at us. I eased the car into the eastbound channel and put it on auto. A light went on, indicating that the car had successfully synced with the city's traffic routing system, and it settled into a comfortable niche between two other eastbound vehicles. I'd take back control once we were clear of Downtown.

This channel lined up more or less with the old I-10, which was basically an automotive graveyard at this point. The freeways had gotten so hopelessly snarled with traffic during the Collapse that nobody'd ever been able to unsnarl them. In fact, nobody had even really tried. There seemed to be sort of a general agreement that the Los Angeles freeway system was an experiment that hadn't really worked out, like nuclear power or rap metal. These days, if you wanted to get somewhere in LA, you had to take the surface streets; pay to drive on one of the privately funded, ultrafast expressways known as Uberbahns, which had been constructed on top of the old highway system; or—if you had the means—take an aircar. Thanks to the occasional deep-pocketed client like Esper, Erasmus Keane had the means, barely. His car was an old Nissan, one of their first aircar models, but it was in reasonably good shape and beat being stuck on the surface streets.

“What about the sheep?” asked Keane impatiently. He was sitting, his seat reclined as far as it would go, his feet up on the dash, his eyes closed.

“It's just a sheep,” I said finally. Keane sighed again and put his palms on the top of his head, as if trying to shield his brain from my stupidity. “No, wait,” I said. “What I mean is that it's just a sheep, for Pete's sake. Even if it's got some magic transplantable organs in it, so what? Why do they care so much? If they made one magical sheep, they can make another, right? It's not like it's irreplaceable. It's not the goose that laid the golden egg. It's a sheep.”

“Good,” said Keane, taking his hands off his head and opening his eyes.

Encouraged by this indication that I was not, after all, a complete moron, I went on, “As I see it, there are two possibilities: either there is something unique about that sheep that they aren't telling us, or there is some reason why they really don't want that sheep to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Or both,” said Keane. He sat upright and stared straight ahead.

“Right,” I said. “Either way, there's something about Mary they aren't telling us. Are you certain we're even still on the case? I thought you said they hired us only to provoke Takemago.”

“That was when they thought Takemago was behind the theft,” said Keane. “Now that I've cast doubt on that hypothesis, they'll need someone to conduct an actual investigation. In any case, Esper is contractually obligated to pay us through the week.”

“Do you think they'll call the police?”

“No,” said Keane. “Even if they were certain Takemago was the thief, they'd have involved the police if there weren't some pressing reason to keep them in the dark. They didn't hire me simply because I put on a better show than the police. They hired me because there's something they don't want the police to know.”

“Like what?” I asked.

Keane didn't respond, and I didn't press him. When Keane was done talking, he was done. Unlike most detectives, Keane rarely brainstormed about a case out loud, preferring, except for the occasional question, to ruminate silently. He believed that the process of translating abstract thoughts to language was “unavoidably reductionistic,” which I took to be a bad thing. That was another reason why I could never quite figure out how I had helped him on the hologram case. Or any other case, for that matter, other than preventing him from getting hopelessly lost or killed, which were admittedly prerequisites to solving any case. We rode the rest of the way to the office in silence.

The office was a rundown three-story building bordering the Disincorporated Zone. The DZ, as the zone was commonly known, was a conglomeration of areas that, like the freeway system, had been disowned by the civil authorities. LA had nearly gone up in flames during the Collapse; the city had survived by virtue of a sort of municipal triage process. The LAPD and National Guard had been instructed to protect and fortify “vital areas” of the city, but LA was so spread out that in the end it was easier to bottle up the bad areas of the city than to defend the parts considered worth saving. A vast swath of the city, including South Los Angeles, Compton, and Huntington Park, became essentially a free-range prison. Faced with massive riots, arson, and looting, the powers that be chose to preserve the financial infrastructure while allowing the rest of the city to go to hell. Temporary police barriers became concrete walls topped with razor wire, and any pretense of equality under the law evaporated. If you had the misfortune to live in the DZ post-Collapse, you were automatically suspect. The breakdown of the freeway system made it easy to control movements in and out of the DZ; checkpoints were set up with the ostensible purpose of identifying terrorists and other criminals and to stem the flow of illegal drugs and weapons. The drugs were usually coming out of the DZ; the weapons were going in.

It took almost a decade for the legal formalities to catch up to the harsh reality of the situation: the majority of the residents of the DZ at the time of the Collapse were undocumented immigrants, and the legal status of tens of thousands of others was thrown into question by the loss of records during the Collapse and subsequent years of near anarchy while the state and federal governments were reconstituted. In many areas of the country the legacy of the Collapse was little more than a temporary lapse in government services, with local governments and ad hoc civilian organizations picking up the slack. But in the DZ, the Collapse was near-total. Income taxes went unpaid, vehicles went unregistered, children were born without birth certificates. Criminal enterprises burgeoned. By some estimates, over 90 percent of economic activity in the DZ was off the books. By the time anyone started to get a handle on the scope of the problem, there was neither the will nor the means to reincorporate the DZ into American society. Los Angeles had given birth to a third-world country within its borders, and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. There was a lot of blame to go around, and a lot of people in the city government lost their jobs, but the impression I got from Gwen—who had a privileged vantage point from her position in the city's planning department—was that pretty much everybody in the city was doing everything they could just to control the chaos.

Erasmus Keane's response to these events was as brilliant as it was perverse: he leased a rundown office building that was literally on the border of the DZ and Los Angeles proper. It was located in an area known as Boyle Heights, just east of Downtown. The front of the building was inside LA proper, while the back door exited into an alley inside the DZ. (We couldn't legally enter the building that way; the authorities had boarded up the back of the building to prevent anyone from sneaking through.) Keane's theory, as I understood it, was that human-created borders, particularly ones as stark and arbitrary as the ones between the DZ and LA proper, were unnatural things, akin to a sort of societal psychosis. Setting up shop as a private investigator (or phenomenological inquisitor) at such a juncture was the equivalent of being an immunologist at ground zero of a viral outbreak. Keane figured he could just sit back and wait for the symptoms of the disease to present themselves. For better or worse, he was right. Over the past three years, we'd had no shortage of clients, and while most of them tended to live in the protected areas of LA, more often than not there was some connection to criminal elements in the DZ.

I parked the car on the roof and followed Keane into the building. His office was on the top floor, and I knew he'd want to be left alone to think, so I continued downstairs. Keane lived on the second floor, and my quarters had been cobbled together out of the offices on the first floor behind the lobby. It was a fairly dismal place to live, not least because the windows facing the alley were boarded up, but you couldn't beat the commute. I took a seat at my desk, with the intention of doing some research on Esper Corporation's genetic-engineering work. I supposed Keane might be doing the same thing upstairs, but it wouldn't hurt to educate myself a bit. Keane tended to play things pretty close to his vest, and in any case he's what you might call a big-picture thinker. That's a nice way of saying that details tended to elude him, and keeping track of those details was one of the reasons he kept me around.

I had barely gotten halfway through the About section of Esper's website when I was interrupted by a knock at the front door. I sighed, grabbed the SIG Sauer nine-millimeter I kept in the top drawer of my desk, and made my way down the hall toward the lobby. My ability to handle a gun—as well as just about any other weapon—was another reason Keane kept me around. The SIG was my gun of choice; there had been a lot of technological advancements in firearms over the past twenty years, from biometric authentication devices to smart bullets that could go around corners, but for my money nobody in the past hundred years had really improved on the basic idea of making a hunk of metal go really goddamned fast in a straight line.

Am I paranoid? Maybe a little. But as I mentioned, while the front of our building was technically in LA proper, it wasn't exactly what you'd call a nice neighborhood. Whoever was knocking on the door was probably just a religious freak or a guy selling vacuum cleaners, but it didn't hurt to be careful. The knocking became more persistent.