Campanelli: Sentinel Page 3

  “One sec,” Frank answered, annoyed that the “L” train could now be heard approaching. He had truly slept a lot that day and, though he had indeed been refreshed, much of his day was now gone.

  His front door came into view as the implanted network finished booting up. The time was five-oh-eight. Frank quickly opened the door to greet Tam.

  “Wow,” she said as she stepped inside, “looks like I just woke you up.”

  “It is that obvious?”

  “Yeah. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he answered as he took stock of her. Tam had taken the time to get out of her diner’s uniform and change into one of her “Going out” outfits. Consisting of a traditional, but very trendy, knee-length black skirt with a shiny pearl white blouse, she looked great. Tam had also changed her makeup and shoes from her normal professional look to something a bit more eye catching. Shorter than Campanelli by a couple inches, her heels lifted her shapely frame to his level. Frank became very conscious of his t-shirt and wrinkled slacks.

  “I take it you haven’t checked what’s playing yet,” she said as more of a question once they had kissed ‘hello’.

  “Nope,” he admitted and backed to the bedroom door.

  “That’s okay, I did,” she said and followed him, “and you’ll be glad I did because guess what’s playing tomorrow night.”

  He could not answer as his implant had not yet made contact with the internet service.

  “Key Largo,” she announced brightly and smiled, wide-eyed.

  “Really?” he said as more of a statement.

  “So, it looks to me like you want to stay in. I say let’s just go to the movies tomorrow.”

  Frank grew even more aware of why he loved this woman so much. Immediately after discovering the time, he realized that the last thing he had energy for was going out to dinner and a movie. He nodded in grateful acquiescence.

  “Why don’t I make us some dinner here?” she asked of him and moved into the kitchen.

  “If you can find something, sure,” he agreed. There must have been a note of melancholy in his voice, for Tam halted her search and went to him.

  “Marcus told me that there was something you left out of this shooting last night,” she prodded as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “My partner needs to shut the hell up once in a while,” he grumbled but did not pull away.

  “He didn’t tell me what it was, Frank,” Tam said defensively though sternly. “What happened?”

  “I shot an unarmed man. A family man at that,” he said and did pull away, though gently. Frank walked past her and into the kitchen. He squelched the attempt to search the cabinets for ingredients for dinner and turned toward her. He crossed his arms and leaned hard against the counter.

  Tam stammered a moment in surprise. “How?” she asked cautiously.

  “The guy shootin’ at me used him as a shield,” Campanelli explained in a tone thick with disgust.

  “Oh,” she said, relieved. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Sure, once they’re done buryin’ him!” he shouted ferociously as he drilled a hot look of anger into Tam’s face. She was not the intended target and she knew it. His fury dissipated quickly as his shoulders drooped.

  “Oh, Frank,” Tam said lowly, her voice thick with emotion. She stepped to him slowly and embraced him. Though she wanted to say more, she waited, uncertain that more words would help. She held him until he patted her on the shoulder many moments later.

  “What do ya say we keep looking here?”

  “Okay,” she whispered and both of them continued on their search for food in silence.

  ***

  Tamara was better at making something out of nothing than Frank had ever suspected. Soon, they were having a modest feast of pre-formed pasta in a light sauce that resembled Alfredo, two chicken breasts that Campanelli had purchased at least six months prior but had kept frozen and a side dish of green beans that she had found underneath the chicken. With some inventive seasoning, the potentially bland meal was turned gourmet.

  “It’s getting harder and harder to find anything at the store, isn’t it?” Tam said to stimulate conversation. Frank was quieter than usual, but she understood why.

  “Yeah,” he agreed after a moment. He thought back to his childhood in New York City, a time before the recently discovered planet Alethea had been colonized, where anything one could dream of ever wanting was within a walk or a bike ride from home. The grocery shops of his youth were giants. Dozens of aisles stacked high beyond his reach filled the buildings from wall to wall with tempting packages of foodstuffs.

  The days of those giant retail shops were long, long gone. Wiped away like the dinosaurs of millions of years ago. The skeletons of these structures could still be found in Chicago, either abandoned and falling into themselves or repurposed as something entirely different. Many were churches or gambling halls. In any case, the supermarket was extinct.

  “What are you thinking about?” came the dreaded question from Tam, who could not seem to leave a quiet, introverted moment alone. More times than not, he did not mind it.

  In a moment’s editorial, he explained his pondering.

  “I’m having a hard time keeping the diner stocked, too,” she explained while nodding. “I’m down to what? A dozen menu items.”

  “That’s about right,” he agreed with a knowing sigh.

  Their conversation turned lighter as they recounted childhood memories, though, if one were honest with the other, they would both admit that the mutual recollections were bittersweet.

  The meal finished and the dishes washed, the two ended up in the adjoining living room and seated upon the couch. The evening had turned cooler and the wind passed through the open spaces quite comfortably, though Tam would be asking for a blanket in time.

  Frank had turned on the holovision and the channel that it had been on when he turned it off came into view. A well-kempt man appeared in the space, shouting into an old-style microphone as he paced back and forth upon a stage. For a moment, both he and Tam were transfixed.

  “…if we could take it back. But, brothers and sisters, the truth is we can’t! The Lord wanted us to flourish here, on his good Earth…not somewhere in the stars!” the man proclaimed with many dramatic pauses where his audience would insert their rumbles of approval.

  “Hallelujah!” his followers cried among other things less perceivable.

  “But, it is the heathens that have left us behind! They of the knowledge and the technology…weren’t happy enough here to stay,” the orange-skinned preacher with the shiny light blue suit and perfectly chiseled chunk of white hair went on.

  “Tell it!” some howled.

  “They had to take it with them to that hell others dared called Alethea, the Greek word for truth! It is we that have to deal with what is left! It is you and I, my brothers and sisters that are left to suffer this failure of mankind’s self-discovered amenities! And that, my brothers and sisters, is truth!”

  “Hallelujah! Reverend! Preach it!” the unseen yelled.

  “Who is this guy?” Frank asked over the strange, white-haired man’s continued oration.

  “You’ve never seen him? That’s Reverend Maximilian DeSilva. He’s on like, every day on this channel. I think he bought the network,” Tam explained.

  Frank was quiet for a while as he took in what the evangelist was saying. Though the Reverend was not incorrect in his assertion that the Earth had lost a great many innovators of technology to the colony planet, to label those people and the people that followed them as ‘evil’ was more than just a stretch. To Campanelli’s way of thinking, making migration illegal had been a mistake and everyone in the world had the right to choose to stay or go. As a police officer, however, the enforcement of the law under the ‘Sentinel’ program was his chosen duty. His personal opinion had no place when it came to doing his job.

  “Frank,” Tam interrupted mercifully, “isn’t there a movie
or something you can put on?”

  “Sure,” he replied and promptly found one. As their plans the following Friday night were to see the Humphrey Bogart movie, Campanelli chose another from his entertainment center’s hard drive.

  The HV quickly flushed the evangelist away in a flash of white light, switched to flat screen mode and began to play Casablanca much to Tam’s delight.

  It was halfway through the film that Frank received a message from Chief Vanek. As the man had promised, he had personally checked on Sarah Whethers. The news was not good. Sarah was forced to stay as a guest of the illness-plagued juvenile hall. Though separated from the general population, there was still a good chance that the girl would be exposed to whatever was floating around the facility until she could be placed with a volunteer foster family.

  “When is she expected to be placed in a home?” Campanelli sent in reply.

  “All I could get from the assistant director was an estimate of two to three days,” Dmitri answered immediately.

  Suppressing a sigh of concern to avoid distracting Tam from her enjoyment of the movie, Frank thanked his boss for the information.

  ***

  Though Frank had the following day off, Tam did not and had to leave his condo quite early in the morning to get home to change into her light blue uniform. She left without stirring Campanelli from his deep, though dream hindered sleep.

  Frank awoke to an empty bed, something he had become more or less used to since before he left New York. He was aware of her schedule, though he wished she had awakened him before leaving.

  He milled about his living space for some time, suppressing his irrational guilt over his time off all the while. He checked into the CPD server with his implant and found the message from his partner from earlier that morning.

  “Attached is the update from your group’s cases,” read Williams’s message. “How was your evening?”

  Frank sat at his dining room table as he drank coffee and read through the report. He composed a reply, which included some directives that he forwarded to his subordinate detectives and indicated to Marcus that the previous evening had been restful.

  Not wishing to take in any HV programming or that of the satellite-fed variety intended for implants, Campanelli quickly grew restless. He could not rid the Whethers family from his mind, especially the vision of Sam Whethers falling to the tarmac.

  Frank showered and dressed as he thought of Sarah. He wondered just how isolated she could possibly be, not from other detainees, but from the influenza and other diseases which were present. In his communication with Vanek the night before, Frank had seen her health records and found that the girl had not received the bi-annual booster shot of Perpetuamivir since she was five, a little over two years ago. The modern version of the dynamic and indefatigable flu shot was weaker than the original formula because of the lack of facilities and qualified personnel that could produce it, but it was still a vital protection against whatever the diminishing human race faced.

  Campanelli dressed in a blue pullover collared shirt and light tan slacks and left the condo with an urgency that rivaled a typical day at work. Once in his car, he sent out a message over the CPD server to H. Lincoln Rothgery, the leading forensic investigator in the entire department. Frank sat in his car with the door open, smoking a cigarette as he waited. In a few minutes he received a reply, shut the door and directed the car to drive a block and park on the north side of the Division One building, where Rothgery was currently working. The man was based there, but would often be requested by other divisions in need of his vast array of knowledge.

  Frank hopped out of his car once it had parked and strode to a side door, tossing the spent cigarette onto the concrete before stepping inside. The walk to Rothgery’s forensic lab was short, but around several corners. Having the day officially off, he did not wish to be seen by anyone that was privy to that fact. It was not that he did not have the right to come to work, but he wished not to rile Chief Vanek by going against the man’s order.

  The Captain of Detectives kept his head on a swivel as he reached the lab door and quickly entered Rothgery’s realm. Immediately, his ears were assaulted by the nerve racking report of a firearm being discharged. Frank’s audio receptors reacted at once, canceling much of the more than one hundred and twenty decibel assault. Instinctively, he put his hands to his ears, though that tended to hinder the devices’ abilities. Before he could announce himself, the gun fired again, then once again. The muzzle flash of whatever the man was test firing lit up the dim room in a fleeting orange light.

  “Hey! Lincoln!” Campanelli shouted between firings. He would have sent a message via implant, but the older man had never wished to be equipped with one, even though his vision could have been improved. Rothgery preferred to wear his homemade, thick framed eyeglasses with bifocal lenses. Optometry was one of his many hobbies.

  “Ah,” Lincoln muttered once he discovered the detective’s presence. “Good morning, Frank,” he said as he turned to him and removed his earplugs.

  Frank returned the salutation and took a gander at the technician’s project. A pile of tagged handguns, magazines and a computer lie on a table to his left while stacks of ammunition boxes were meticulously placed on an identical table on the right. In between them was a testing jig, a device in which a handgun was mounted by adjustable grips and fired by an articulating metal finger. The height and angle at which the handgun was held was also fully adjustable, and at the moment was set at what appeared to be close to Lincoln’s height at just over six feet. At the end of the room were Rothgery’s targets: squares of amber ballistic gel approximately eighteen inches high and double the thickness of an average person’s abdomen. The one currently in the test gun’s sights had been hit at least five times, in Campanelli’s estimation. The center of the translucent block was chewed up severely and a multitude of lead fragments decorated it in plumes of dark gray.

  “What are you doing?” Campanelli could not help but ask.

  “I’m evaluating these seven firearms confiscated from some old friends of yours, the Triads, in order to determine whether any of them have been used in some cold case murders,” Rothgery explained in his mild mannered but carrying baritone.

  “There aren’t too many men left in that outfit since Lei Wong died,” Frank said. “Are these recent confiscations?”

  “Within the past few months, yes,” Lincoln confirmed as he flipped his glasses from his nose to rest on his bald cranium. “The gang is wrapped up in a civil war and its leaving a number of bodies behind. They’ll be long gone before we can prosecute any of them.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  The forensic scientist could read some urgency in Campanelli’s face. Even while the man’s eyes danced over the weapons on the table and the gel targets at the wall, his face betrayed much distraction. The expression was close to what Lincoln would have to call, ‘worry’, but on Frank Campanelli’s face, it was alien.

  “What’s on your mind, Frank?”

  “I have a bit of a favor to ask and from what I’ve heard you’re the one ‘in the know’.”

  “Oh? This ought to be interesting,” Lincoln exuded in his superior façade as his gaunt and angular face beamed.

  Frank sighed and his face turned gloomy, “Cut the crap, will you?”

  Lincoln smiled but frowned at the same time. His cockiness melted as he said, “What is it?”

  “There’s a little girl over in Juvi. Father’s dead. Mother’s going away for maybe a long while and there’s no other family.”

  H. Lincoln agreed; the matter was serious. The forensic scientist knew well the conditions of the facility and understood that a lengthy stay was a life or death crapshoot. He nodded as Frank spoke.

  “The girl hasn’t had a flu shot in two years and you and I both know the likelihood of a child in Juvi receiving one.”

  “What’s the girl’s name?” Rothgery asked and stepped to the computer on the table. Frank told h
im and Lincoln entered it into the CPD database, not so much to confirm Frank’s story, but to put a face to the name. “Looks like she’s stuck there at least until the day after tomorrow.”

  “Can something be done for her? My own booster shot is six months away,” Frank murmured.

  Lincoln straightened and stepped back from the terminal. “I’ll see what I can do, Campanelli. I have a couple of doctor friends that might be willing to help her.”

  “Thanks, Lincoln,” Frank said sincerely.

  “Quite welcome,” Rothgery returned and shook Frank’s offered hand.

  “What do I owe?” the detective inquired, knowing full well the cost of the medicine. There was no question he could afford it, but asking someone else to foot the bill for his charity was something he could not allow.

  “Just remember it and if I ever need a favor, I’ll ask,” Lincoln said with a bent smile and a slyness to his eyes that his glasses magnified.

  “Oh, great,” Campanelli huffed, “I can’t wait to hear about that one.”

  “Don’t worry, Frank,” the scientist said as he turned back to the handgun in the rest, “I’ll make it good.”

  With that, Frank headed out the door and went back to his car. He sat there for a bit, not knowing what else to do with his morning. Then, realizing that he was hungry, decided to head to Tam’s Place.

  ***

  Campanelli’s day was uneventful and drab after breakfast. Not knowing what else to do but sit around the house with a few drinks, he decided to drive around Chinatown for a while. He spent some time in a few shops and eventually drove back home. Frank had checked the CPD server many times during the day, looking for updates on his cases and hoping that someone needed his assistance on the Kelly shooting. Normally, someone would. Today was different.

  Giving up his hope of finding something to work on, he signed off from the CPD computer, stepped from his car and into the tree enshrouded courtyard of his condominium complex. As he approached his door he came upon an old man that he had not seen before, sitting on a lawn chair next to a large, sad-faced dog. The landlord had warned Frank of a new tenant, an eccentric, the landlord had labeled him.