Carrier Wave: A Day Of Knowing Tale (3 page)

Price nodded. He smiled at Helms, and
slapped her on the shoulder. Her terrible coffee sloshed over her
fingers, scalding them. She sighed at nothing in particular and
turned away from Danny Greene, still sitting at the holding room
table, picking his nose and carefully examining his
discoveries.

***

Fully 90% of the noise complaints in the
last month were from a single person: one Eleanor Dubicek, of 2031
April Terrace, Unit C. She thought the neighbor across the way was
ghastly, with his leafblower going so early in the morning. She
thought her downstairs neighbor absolutely didn’t need to watch
Knight Rider that loudly, and her upstairs neighbor was probably
listening to Springsteen at such a high volume so as to drown out
his criminal dealings. And surely the garbagemen didn’t need to
make such a racket every Thursday morning – they were probably
banging the cans around just to spite her.

Helms read through every single report
anyway, just in case the old bat had filed a complaint about the
positively disrespectful young man that went around her complex,
fiddling with a tape recorder and making people murder each
other.

She did not.

The remaining 10% of the noise reports were
scattered – mostly kids having parties while their parents were
away, drunkenly hollering while they smoked cigarettes on the porch
late at night. But there was one interesting report: Two weeks ago,
Andrew Falkous called police from the Cosmo’s Ladder Trailer Park
to complain of a neighbor making loud squeaks and squeals all
through the night.

It was thin, but Helms was ready to grab at
less. She pushed her chair back and took the report over to Price,
who was grimacing down at his own tower of folders.

“Check this out,” she said, slapping the
report down on the desk in front of him.

He arched an eyebrow at her, and stared
quietly.

“Just read it,” she said, and left to get
them both refills from the coffee machine.

When she got there, she found the pot empty,
but still sitting on the active burner. The last dregs of coffee
burnt into black tar death.

“Terrell,” she yelled over her shoulder, in
the general direction of the office.

“What?” Came an answering voice, already
annoyed.

“Did you take the last of the coffee?”

“Yeah, so what?”

Helms turned and stalked out of the
breakroom, over to Terrell’s desk. He was a chubby guy, just
starting to bald. He used to be a looker, back in the day. Helms
knew this, because he told literally everybody about it. He kept a
framed photo of his younger self on his own desk. In it, he was
standing on the beach somewhere with his shirt off, big smile,
defined pecs glistening beneath a bed of curly chest hair. That and
the southern accent didn’t make him
unpopular
with the
ladies. Helms knew this, again, because Terrell told everybody he
met just about as soon as he met them.

“So what?” She sighed. “So if you take the
last of the coffee, you make a new pot. Or you at least turn the
burner off so we don’t get this…this industrial waste shit to
scrape out.”

She rattled the pot at Helms, who just
curled his lip and swiveled his chair away from her.

“Making coffee is women’s work,” Terrell
said, loud enough for the whole office to hear. “Or maybe the help.
You look like both to me.”

Helms entered into a beautiful and elaborate
fantasy wherein she cracked the glass pot against the back of his
head, the shards exploding outward like a new universe being born.
The stupid look on Terrell’s face – hovering there right between
confusion and terror…

She should at least say something clever in
response, but she’d gone blank while entertaining the beautiful
dream, and now the moment had passed. She settled for calling him
an asshole, and returned to the breakroom. She set the pot in the
sink, filled it with water, and returned to Price.

He’d had enough time to read the report, but
he was still flipping back and forth between the pages, trying to
decide something.

“What do you think? Worth checking out?”
Helms asked.

“Hmm?” Price said.

“Hmm what? Listen, the Chewbacca thing only
goes so far. You’ll have to talk sometime.”

“I think,” Price croaked, “that neither of
us are allowed to check
anything
out.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Helms waved his
concerns away. “I only meant if it looks solid enough to bug the
other guys with. Have them do a follow up or something, just a
friendly visit.”

“I…” Price gagged a little and took a second
to compose himself. “I think Terrell and Bryant are the only ones
on active duty tonight, so no visit is going to be ‘friendly.’”

“Damn,” Helms bit her lip and glanced over
at Terrell’s desk. He was deep in concentration filling out the
crossword puzzle. No way in hell he’d follow up on a noise
disturbance as a favor to her. And if she tried to explain…

On her first day, Helms showed up with a
lucky rabbit’s foot on her keychain. Terrell saw it and made some
crack about ‘you darkies and your voodoo.’

Terrell and Bryant were not an option.

“Maybe it can wait until tomorrow when
they’re off rotation,” Helms agreed.

Price smiled at her, and turned back to his
reports.

Helms started back toward her desk, made
sure Price was lost once again in the paperwork, and walked right
past it, out the side door. She unlocked her cruiser, gave herself
ten seconds to feel stupid about what she was doing, then put it in
gear and drove off.

***

Andrew Falkous would have been a stunningly
handsome man if not for the severe overbite and facial psoriasis.
He opened the door to his weathered and peeling trailer in nothing
but a very open and very pink bathrobe. It took him a long second
to realize he was hanging in the breeze, and he tied the belt with
no special hurry. Falkous had a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in one
hand and a TV remote in the other. In the background, something
with an obnoxious laugh track regularly interrupted their
conversation.

“Mr. Falkous?” Helms said.

She was still wearing her uniform. She kept
telling herself she wasn’t here in an official capacity. The
uniform would give everybody the right impression, but maybe if she
specifically avoided introducing herself as an officer or
mentioning police business she could leave herself an out when this
inevitably blew up in her face.

“Mr. Falkous is my daddy, you lil’ sip of
molasses,” Falkous said. “You can call me Andy.”

She could practically feel Falkous’ eyes
rolling up and down her body.

Helms felt her baton itch.

Not in an official capacity
, she
reminded herself.

Helms turned on her flirtiest smile and
giggled.

“Hi, Andy!” She said, putting some ditzy pep
in her voice.

A big sloppy grin stumbled around Falkous’
face.

“I heard a neighbor of yours was making a
lot noise a few weeks ago?” Helms said, carefully avoiding any
mention of a report or the authorities.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, that. Listen, I’m not one
for calling the pigs. No offense,” he gestured at Helms with the
beer can, sloshed a little out and onto her shoes. “But that guy
was at it with his bullshit MTV crap every night for near a week. I
tried to settle it like a man, gone over there and knocked right on
his door. I ain’t no pussy. But he is – he wouldn’t answer. So,
ipso fatso, the pigs.”

“Right,” Helms said, imagining herself on a
beach somewhere with a big, icy drink. Utterly alone. All other
human beings dead or otherwise confined somewhere far, far away.
“What do you mean, MTV music?”

“Like that video channel crap. The beepy and
the boopy electronic German stuff. Like that song about cars? Only
without even any words. Just noises. Call that music? I should put
on some Haggard and crank it up to 11, show that little punk what
real-“

“Thanks, Andy!” She bubbled, turning quickly
and making for the cruiser.

Helms sat in the driver’s seat and stared at
the dented aluminum caravan for ten full minutes. She ran over the
scenario in her head again and again. She had come out here and
verified the report firsthand, and now it really sounded like she
might be on to something. She should call the station and have a
unit sent out, even if it was Terrell and Bryant. Maybe they
wouldn’t just laugh it off if she’d scouted it in person first.
Maybe they would just laugh harder. She should at least call
Price.

And he would say “what are you doing in the
field?” and “we’re riding desks this week,” and “by the book” and
“blah blah blah.”

Helms knew all of this before she drove out
here in the first place. She was just having doubts now because it
was time to actually do it – time to pull the trigger and go
vigilante. You saw it in movies all the time: A cop gets pulled
from the case, but they pursue it anyway on their own time. They
get the perp, save the day, and all is forgiven. That’s not how it
works in real life. If she knocked on the door of that trailer and
things went south, it would mean her job, at least.

She drummed on the steering wheel. She
checked and rechecked her service revolver. She opened the glovebox
for no particular reason, closed it, then opened it again.

Screw it
, she thought,
it’s going
to be nothing anyway. Just some guy with bad taste in
music.

No need to report anything. Nobody would
even know, and she and Price would be down one bad lead when they
picked up the case again in a week. That’s progress.

Helms stepped out of the cruiser and
adjusted her belt. Her shoes crunched over gravel and broken glass,
then up a set of creaking, crudely built wood stairs. She rapped on
the thin aluminum door of the caravan, and took a step back. Her
hand rested on the hilt of her pistol. She swallowed hard. Watched
the light leaking out from the floorboards so she could tell when
footsteps blocked it. They did. A silhouette moved back there.

“Hello sir,” she said, biting back the
instinctual urge to identify herself. “We’ve had some noise
complaints recently. Just following up on those, if you could spare
a moment to answer a few routine questions….”

Silence.

Helms hated this part. The wait. Every
traffic stop, every knock on every door -- there was always this
agonizing moment. While you waited for whoever was on the other
side of that glass, wood, or steel to decide if this was the day
they drew down on a cop. She knew most every encounter goes down
peacefully, but there was always the chance. There was always the
decision to be made, and she had no hand in it. Helms hated that
more than anything.

The door creaked open an inch. Just a thin
swatch of face – white male, short, maybe 5’4” if he wasn’t
slouching, probably 30-40, brown hair, green eyes. Deep bags under
them. Pale skin. She couldn’t tell the weight just from the few
inches of face showing, but judging by his gaunt cheekbones: Not
much. Not exactly a threatening specimen, but a bullet is the great
equalizer. She kept her hand on her pistol.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Helms tried to
sound as harmless as possible. She threw a little ‘even
I’m
annoyed, having to be out here’ into her tone. “We’re just
following up on all disturbances from this neighborhood as part of
a community outreach program. We’re making sure relations are still
solid with your neighbors and there hasn’t been any further
escalation between you.”

The single eye narrowed and the door closed
a fraction of an inch.

“Look, it’s just this thing my superiors are
making us do. I’m sorry to bother you, I really am, but you know
how bosses are – and mine get worse around election season. They
just want some feedback, make sure you’re not harboring some
complaint about us that’ll come back to bite ‘em in the ass around
poll time. You know? It’ll only take a second.”

The door opened a bit further, and the man
took in Helms from head to toe. Finally he swung the door wide and
stepped back. He gestured Helms inside with a sweep of his
head.

Helms knew it was a bad idea to step into an
unknown premises like this, with no backup. But she also knew there
was no way in hell she was getting a search warrant based on ‘this
funny feeling she had.’ She stepped around the man – most of her
assumptions were right, she saw. Short, skinny, pale. But she was
off about the age. She figured he was only in his late 20s, maybe
early 30s, after seeing him up close. But he did not wear the years
well. Junkie, maybe?

Helms quickly surveyed the interior of the
caravan. There wasn’t much to see: A little kitchenette to her
right, a stained bench opposite that, piled high with papers and
textbooks. A faux wooden door directly across from her, barely the
size of a closet. The bathroom, probably. To her left there was a
cramped bedroom, barely more than a twin mattress and a couple of
nightstands. It was jam packed with electronic equipment – smooth
steel surfaces thick with dials, gauges, switches and needles. They
were all on and active, flashing, sweeping and clicking with hidden
purpose. In the center there was an enormous reel to reel
recorder.