Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [40]
From a homicide point of view it worked like this. On floors 1-50, in official terms, you have human garbage. Black, white, Chicano, Asian—it doesn’t matter. No one cares what happens to these people, except the Narcs and DEA, because this is where most of the drug industry happens. Unfortunately, well over half the cops in these departments are dirty, so they’ll be more concerned with hiding what’s going on than with solving crimes. Complicating matters is the fact that not all the cops on the take are on the same side. It’s generally reckoned that about a third of the homicides on 1-50 are committed by men with badges. The last time one of these was solved was never.
Floors 50-100, you had to start taking notice. Some of these people have proper jobs. So if one of them gets killed, you have to at least look like you’re trying to find out who did it. But chances are you won’t, because no one saw anything, no one knows anything, no one’s going to help the cops if they can avoid it, and anyone involved is probably holed up on one of the floors where the cops simply won’t go. Every now and then, the mayor’ll get a hair up his ass over the hundreds of unsolved homicides in this sector, and there’ll be a show of strength—which basically involves framing enough losers to bring the percentage solved up to an acceptable level. Say ten per cent. So if you’re lucky enough to get murdered during one of these periods, you’ve got a one in ten chance of being—technically, if not actually—avenged. Otherwise, forget it—most people don’t even bother calling the cops for minor misdemeanors like murder anymore.
Floors 100-184 are different. If someone gets killed there, you’re supposed to solve it. But you don’t, most of the time. Sure, you’ve got the subnet and computer-enhanced suspect tracking, print matching, photo analysis. But most of those crimes will have been committed by people out of 1-50, in which case you’ll never find them. They’ll probably have been killed in some other action before you even get close to knowing who they were. A few of the other murders will be the standard deals of jealousy, hatred and revenge, some of which will go down. The rest will have been committed by people who live above 150, in which case you can’t touch them. As soon as a case starts pointing above this magic second line, toward some wayward son or psychotic patriarch, the case is marked “Beyond Economic Repair.”
185 is the mob floor, frequent social visitors to which include every senior policeman, local politician, and businessman. The mob generally only kill their own kind—unless they feel like killing someone else, in which case there’s a set kickback fee to ensure it never goes any further. Any homicide investigation originating out of 185 is dead before it reaches the station.
Nobody gets killed above 185, except by their own hand or by God. Neither has so far proved indictable.
You join the force, for whatever reason, and within days you’ll be locked into place. You choose which club to join: the one creaming money off the drug trade, or prostitution, protection, or the mob—the NRPD is basically an overhead which crime has to pay, Smart cops get recruited in the first weeks. The others will either leave by the end of the month or get killed in the line of duty. Nobody gets a big funeral for that anymore; it’s understood that it means the cop didn’t get with the program. You go stand at crime scenes, you fill in reports, you take money—half of which you’ll have to kick back to someone else—and you run around with a gun in your hand. At night you swap cop