The night fell like a paper towel soaked in bacon grease – disposable, and yet totally non-biodegradable. Tucson never really cooled in the summer; the asphalt and concrete binged on the sun’s heat all day, and regurgitated it at night, which might account for the persistent sour stench. Despite the late hour, the street teemed with throngs of thrill seekers, whether club-hopping, bar-hopping, or just partaking in questionable street food. Everclear and Bacardi 151 weren’t mere party favors…possessing the required alcohol content, they doubled as internal disinfectants after noshing on noxious nom noms.
Richard lounged in the penumbra formed by a telephone pole and a nearby streetlamp. The shadow obscured him perfectly, an infiltration technique picked up from an old stealth video game. The inebriation of the perfunctory guards completed his invisibility. His eyes remained trained on the club’s front door; punctuated by bursts of strangers, he managed to recognize a few members of Harmony, as well as Sinterniklaas employees, but no one matching the description of the drug dealer. Taking careful note of patterns of foot traffic, he spotted a moment in the near future when no one would be looking in his direction. Seizing on it, he strode briskly across the street and into the club, unseen by anyone. All the same, though, he would have felt more comfortable doing so while covered with an empty cardboard box emblazoned with orange-fruit branding.
The club’s interior was the expected tribute to gloominess. Poor lighting, dark-colored wall paneling, and a miasma of unclear origin hovering near the ceiling all combined to bring the mood way down, and apparently that was just how the patrons liked it. Perhaps they deliberately went out in the evening to have a miserable time. As if purposefully raising the irony to farcical levels, the bartender suddenly called out that happy hour had begun.
The previous diversion was grinding to a close; the final trivia question appeared on the plethora of flat-screen TVs. Richard read it over quickly, and felt half motivated to whip out his cell phone and web-search for the answer. But he saw several other people do the same thing simultaneously. Richard wondered how bar-room trivia contests managed to survive in an age of universal access to information. Two minutes later, the screens proudly proclaimed the unsurprising answer, one band of casual acquaintances celebrated their meaningless victory over a different band of mutual strangers, then each group slowly dispersed as the members meandered toward other low-effort ways to distract themselves.
Richard stood in an indentation in the wall, the shadow swaddling him like a blanket wrapped by an overzealous au pair. It seemed almost too convenient, a spot in an otherwise packed club that served no apparent purpose but to allow one to lurk. His back brushed up against a solid, somewhat jagged object; turning to look, he let his eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. A familiar shape emerged from the dimness, starting with the shiny features. He smirked as old memories surfaced, when his father would get a message on his pager and have to pull the car over to find the nearest payphone. He picked up the handset, to check if it wasn’t just a piece of forgotten nostalgia; the droning dial tone brought back another barrage of dusty mental impressions, most involving the other side hanging up rudely. Tucson inexplicably still had a widespread network of these devices; it would take a deft bit of detective work just to unearth the identities of their customers.
As his eyes finished adjusting to the unnatural achromatic volume, he made out the coin slot, as well as the tease that called itself the coin-release lever, which not once in history had ever given up anything, no matter how well-deserved. The phone didn’t appear to have a card reader, so one would really have to use coins; his elusive payphone-using perp would also have to be the type to carry change. Baby boomer, then. Elderly ne’er-do-wells were somewhat rare…he could probably interview all the suspects in a single morning down at the nearest buffet breakfast.
Out of habit, he checked the coin-return slot for money, and for his troubles, acquired a dried-out wad of chewing gum. As he winced and turned back to face the club, he flung the grimy detritus to the ground and pointlessly brushed his hand off on his pants. Any pathogens in that rubbery hunk had most likely gone extinct ages ago, but he still felt unclean.
The club’s stage now sported competing sets of drums on each end; members of Harmony fussed over one such collection, and partisans of the Pelf Punks, their affiliation loudly advertised by matching T-shirts, hovered around the other percussive assembly. His eyes now well-adjusted to twilight, he scanned the crowd for anyone he could recognize. Still no one matching the description of Yuguti, though there were plenty that looked like legitimate targets for investigation. Who knew what sort of sordid persuasions they involved themselves with the other twenty or so hours of the day? Finding out could well be very harrowing, even entertaining, but no one was paying him to do that. Their tawdry tales would remain untold.
The scraggly master of ceremonies announced the commencement of musical hostilities, approved by all present with a chorus of scattered cheers. He learned that the first one to rap was the dopest, flyest, O.G. pimp gangster hardcore player living today, at least according to the supplied announcement. Harmony’s drums barked their staccato rhythm, the full-body swaying of the self-styled vocal performer resonated to inelegant levels of imbalance, and what passed for poetry poured out like cheap fortified wine.
“Tonight I’m gonna rhyme like I’m out of time!” Richard immediately seized up with a full case of cringe. He had never understood rap battles; they would speak a line, search their minds furiously for a rhyme or near-rhyme, and utter something with only the most tenuous connection to what came before it. Artlessness and banality would simply take turns until the crowd cheered long enough for the performer to declare some sort of victory, allowing him to leave the stage before his pretension became all too clear. Being a form of improv, the vocals tended to quote existing work liberally; he recognized phrases from blockbuster movies, advertising jingles, and Internet memes. Even the drums were derivative; he noticed rhythms from famous pop songs so frequently, he turned it into his own personal trivia game. If only anyone could see how well he was scoring.
A dark shape passing in front wrested him from his newly-acquired pastime. Unlike the extremes of bony thinness and fast-food corpulence all around him, this one appeared chiseled, even in poor light. Richard nervously tracked him as the recent arrival threaded his way to the middle of the crowd, finding his target and tapping him on the shoulder. Before Richard could get a look at this newer face, the hulking shape blocked his view. He could make out some furtive movements, possibly a trade of some kind, then the musclebound interloper quickly turned around and left that spot. A sudden bright image on a nearby TV screen illuminated his face for a split second, but it was enough. Richard felt shivers run down his spine, past his belt, along his pants, and straight through his shoes to the floor, where they quickly made a break for it. Repeated viewings of that exact visage, the ubiquitous surly glare, were burned into his mind like someone stubbing out a double corona cigar, and just as unpleasantly odorous. He matched Yuguti’s description perfectly, and there was no mistaking who he was.
It was the police captain.
Yuguti…Captain Ulysses Adeguti. Unraveling the lazy attempt at nicknaming wasn’t even necessary to crack that case; the clue fell into his lap like a cup of scalding hot coffee. The evening had just become more complicated than the romantic life of a truck stop waitress. His penchant for situational awareness was about to pay off, though; he had amassed a list of everyone in the crowd who could help him. All he needed was a way to get to one of them.
