“My Life”
by Gray
Me
One
Lone
Alone
Longing
Belonging
Acceptance
Ac
cept
Ex
cept
Exception
Exclusion
Conclusion
Alone
One
Me
9
Sonya Porter was one angry young woman. She came into Patrick’s bar with narrowed eyes homed in on Tippen like a pair of dark lasers. She came across the room to their booth with all the purpose of a heat-seeking missile and clipped him upside the head with the back of a hand.
Tippen winced. “Ouch! What was that for?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, clearly annoyed he would ask. “I was pissed off the second I heard the sound of your voice on the phone.”
“You were annoyed because you were hungover,” Tippen said. “That wasn’t my fault.”
“Yes, it was,” she snapped, then softened a bit. “Well, maybe not this time. But it was your fault that other time, and I never hit you for that.”
“So we’re even.”
She gave him a look of disgust. “Oh, hardly.”
Kovac looked from one to the other and back and forth. The girl—he put her around twenty-two—was a stylized character from a postmodern noir film. Jet-black hair cut in a sleek bob that played up the angles of her face. Dark purple lipstick on Kewpie-doll lips contrasted sharply with the perfect milk white of her skin.
She shrugged out of her heavy trench coat and hung it on a hook at the end of the booth. Bright-colored tattoos peeked out of the V-neck of her sweater. A green-inked vine with a purple morning glory flower crept up one side of her neck. A tiny steel barbell pierced the severe arch of one eyebrow. A matching steel ring went like a fish hook through her plump lower lip.
There was a part of Kovac that wanted to get up and leave this circus sideshow now. He was exhausted and out of what little patience he ever had. He had already dealt with two reporters over the phone, carefully doling out the information he wanted to let go of. Just enough detail, just enough insinuation that their Jane Doe’s murder might be tied to others. No, they couldn’t quote him. No, he didn’t have a name for the victim. And now he had to hope they didn’t fuck it up or fuck him over.
Now this: a Tippen family reunion.
“Oh, well,” Tippen said. “I have something to look forward to.”
“Maiming, for instance,” the girl said.
Tippen was unconcerned with the threat. “Sonya, this is my colleague Sergeant Sam Kovac. Sam, my niece, Sonya Porter, activist, feminist, anarchist, and freelance journalist.”
The girl narrowed her eyes at Kovac as she slid into the booth. “Do you have a problem with any of that?”
“I don’t like journalists,” he said. “The rest of it is none of my business.”
“That’s fair enough,” she said. “I don’t like cops.”
“Wow, this is gonna work out for everyone,” Kovac said sarcastically.
A waitress pissed off to be working New Year’s came over and asked if they wanted anything. The girl ordered a shot and a beer. Kovac ordered his usual burger and fries, a heart attack on a plate. Liska usually ate half of his fries, which he figured took the damage down to a minor stroke.
They had chosen Patrick’s for the meeting—and for the greasy food. An Irish-named bar owned by Swedes that catered to cops. Strategically located halfway between the police department and the sheriff’s office, the pub was open 365 days a year from lunch ’til the last possible moment allowed by the city—and sometimes later, depending on circumstance.
It was a place for meals, camaraderie, and the drowning of sorrows and stress for people not understood by civilian society. Even on a holiday the place was busy with cops coming off their shift, dogwatch uniforms grabbing dinner before heading out, and the retired and otherwise disenfranchised hanging out because they had nowhere else to go. College football was playing on the big-screen TVs above the bar and pool tables.
“Who do you freelance for?” Kovac asked.
“Whoever. That would be the definition of ‘freelance,’ wouldn’t it?”
“I can do without the attitude.”
She shrugged. “I can do without being here. You need me. I don’t need you.”
Kovac looked at Tippen. “And I figured you for the least charming member of your family.”
“Oh, I’m a peach,” Tippen said.
“This is about the zombie, right?” the girl said.
Kovac gave her a hard look. “This is about a Jane Doe murder victim. There is no fucking zombie. There’s a teenage girl lying dead on a steel table in the morgue with half her face dissolved by acid. She has a name, but we don’t know what it is. We can assume she has a family somewhere, but we don’t know who they are. How about that?”
Porter stared at him. “The zombie is the angle. You want people to get to the rest of what you just said? Embrace the zombie. We live in a society of self-absorbed, unaware drones desensitized to the suffering of others. You have to hit them in the fucking face to get their attention.”
Kovac thought about it. He had to grudgingly admit he liked that she wasn’t intimidated by him. “You have a poor outlook on humanity.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’ve lived longer than you have. I’ve earned the right to be bitter. You’re not old enough to be bitter.”
“Oh, I’m bitter,” she assured him. “Bitter and outraged.”
“Outraged by what?”
“Pretty much everything except puppies and kittens. The economy, ecology, foreign policy, social policy, women’s rights, gay rights. The list goes on. There’s a lot to be outraged about, including the lack of outrage exhibited by the average American.”
“Well, good for you,” Kovac said. “Hang on to that. But tell me, what good are you to me, Miss Outrage? I always think ‘freelance’ is just another word for unemployed. I need information disseminated.”
“Why don’t you call a press conference, then?”
“It’s delicate.”
The brow with the barbell sketched upward. “Ah. ‘Sources close to the investigation’ delicate?”
“Yeah, like that,” he said. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“That depends. Is what you’re going to tell me true?”
Kovac sat back, pretending confusion. “You’re a reporter, right? What’s truth got to do with it?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I live to compromise my journalistic integrity the same way you live to beat confessions out of innocent people.”
“I’ve never beaten a confession out of an innocent person.”
“And I don’t knowingly lie to my readers.”
The sulky waitress returned with a tray of drinks and Kovac’s dinner. He shook the ketchup bottle as Sonya Porter tossed back her shot. They never took their eyes off each other.
“What readers?” Kovac asked. “Tip tells me you do stuff on the Internet. What does that mean?”
“Online news sources. Twitter. Facebook. My blog.”
“And people actually read this stuff?”
She looked at her uncle with an expression that clearly said, Are you kidding me with this guy? Tippen shrugged.
“No one under the age of thirty reads an actual newspaper,” she said. “Seriously. How old are you?”
Kovac felt like a dinosaur. In the technological revolution, he usually felt like he had chosen the wrong side. He could make a computer do what he needed it to do—which wasn’t much—but in the last couple of years, with the meteoric rise of online social media, he felt like he had been run over on the information superhighway and left in the dust. Tinks stayed more current because of her boys, but as far as Kovac was concerned, tweeting came from birds, and a post was something that held up a fence.