Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

street-dwellers—tales of asteroids approaching from galaxies far away or electromagnetic pulse bombs from North Korea soaring across the Pacific.

These days there were both men and women in the camps on the rugged hillsides beside the freeway, and their tents were equipped for long hauls, sometimes concreted or hammered into place and sometimes equipped with large pieces of furniture. Tents and shacks were fed power from nearby warehouses and some lit by television sets or battered laptops. The people who lived here weren’t crazy, but were mothers and fathers who had been thrown out of foreclosed McMansions, and young people who turned to crack in college to try to stay awake and ended up on ice because it was cheaper and they were hooked. They were protesters, activists, children of the earth, the awakened, the oppressed, the misunderstood. Sometimes they rented space to travelers in their tiny, misshapen hovels, and some Christmases they hung them with lights. The homeless people Jessica saw now as she walked up the shoulder of the I-10 could afford guns, had a code of conduct, and knew their rights when it came to territory and police intervention.

But if there was one thing that hadn’t changed in all the time Jessica had been a member of the LAPD, it was the way homeless men pissed. For all the sophistication that came with being homeless these days, running water was not included, so men from the camps still pissed in soft-drink bottles, and threw those bottles down into the tree-lined ditches separating the highway from the businesses alongside it. They did this to keep the smell away from the camps. Urine stink was the silent enemy of the panhandler. One whiff and the businessmen trapped in their cars on the way into the city rolled up their windows and looked straight ahead.

She crossed the top of the embankment, pulling nitrile gloves onto her hands. She headed toward a camp made from colorful slabs of a ruined billboard, stained bedsheets, and blue tarpaulins. Through a doorway made in what she was sure was a slice of Matthew McConaughey’s nose, she could see an old man sleeping on a thin, green mattress. It was early, but haze lingered permanently over the city beyond, a rusty gauze speared by the buildings of Downtown.

A man was standing by a tree, shirtless, the backs of his jeans brown from hours of sitting and ragged at the ends. Jessica stopped a few feet away from him. He turned as he was screwing the cap on a Gatorade bottle filled with foamy yellow liquid.

“I’ll pay you a buck for that,” Jessica said.

The guy stared at her.

“For this?” He held up the bottle of piss. Jessica nodded, took the garbage bag from her back pocket and shook it out, held it open. The man dropped the bottle into the bag, his face twisted in confusion.

“Know where I can find any others?” she asked.

The man pointed down the hill, and as expected Jessica saw dozens of bottles lying scattered or grouped together in the shade, like oil barrels spilled across the surface of the sea.

“Help me collect them all,” she told the man. “A buck for each one that goes in the bag.”

The man nodded and made his way down the hill. Jessica followed him carefully, stepping over a pile of broken glass and rotting food.

JESSICA

Diggy sat in the passenger seat of Jessica’s Suzuki, watching the house on Tualitan Road that had once belonged to Blair Harbour. Jessica glanced at him now and then, the morning sun bouncing off Diggy’s yellow shirt like white light on water. The shirt was covered in blue rubber-duck images, each the size of a quarter. The forensic scientist rubbed his hands together nervously, his brushy hair almost touching the roof of the vehicle.

“I don’t understand why my presence is required in this particular situation,” Diggy said.

“It’s Brentwood,” Jessica said. “Most of these people have only seen cops on TV. They’ll be expecting two nicely dressed men. We might get away with one Latina and a guy wearing … whatever the hell it is you’re wearing.”

He looked at his shirt. “I designed this shirt.”

“Don’t give up your day job, Diggy.”

“My shirts are terrible. It’s deliberate.” He smoothed the front of the shirt, making the small blue ducks dance on his chest. “The disparate colors and novelty images are supposed to confuse the eye, distract the brain. That’s because there’s actually a Fibonacci golden spiral hidden in each of these shirts.”

“A what?”

“It’s a nerd thing.”

“Where’s the spiral?”

“There.” He pointed to his right nipple.

“I don’t see it. I just see ducks.”

“That’s because you’re not the love of my life.”

“Are you telling me you wear those terrible shirts because you’re trying to attract the love of your life?” Jessica scoffed.

“I’m confident she’d see past the distractions and recognize the sequence. She’d be looking at me long enough, and would be of the kind of mind, to do so.”

“Have you heard of Tinder?”

“You’re not serious.”

“This is a weird clash of romantic fantasy and science, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Lots of animals use visual or auditory performances to attract their mates. Male pufferfish, and some other types of cichlids, construct geometric patterns on the sea floor to attract females, such as radially aligned ridges and valleys made from sand, rocks, and sediments. If the female sees a design she likes, she goes there to lay her eggs.”

“I sure hope a female human lays an egg on your shirt very soon, Diggy, because my eyes are burning out of my skull.”

“I don’t want to do this.” He sighed, looking at the house across the street.

“Well, we’re here now.”

“Is it possible you just want me here because you prefer working with a partner?” Diggy asked. “The brain likes patterns, particularly symmetrical ones. You’ve been working with an assigned partner for more than a decade, usually a male one. You might feel lopsided without a Watson to your Sherlock.”

“Fuck you, Diggy,” Jessica said. “I don’t need a dick within arm’s