Sgt. O’Connor was definitely not supposed to be an administrative assistant, and he knew it. A real administrative assistant would understand how an office landline worked, how many scoops of coffee to put in the coffee pot, or how to load a nice heavyweight beige marble cardstock into a photocopier to print updated copies of a resume. He hit the tray select again and hit print on the awaiting file. The copier clenched out an 11x17 inch edition with only the bottom half of his resume blown to children’s book size, on a sort of glossy paper. He crumpled it and tossed it into the overflowing blue plastic recycling bin beside the copier.
Seven years of driving a cruiser around downtown LA before he finally made sergeant, and when he was due for promotion, Martinez approached him about a swank position with a government-funded private investigation firm. That it was only barely recognized as a branch of legitimate federal law enforcement and came with a long list of career-ending black ops caveats hadn’t deterred him from the career change. The pay increase was significant and moving to Phoenix seemed like a good idea at the time. To convince his wife, Mary, that it was a good idea, they visited Phoenix to take a tour of the city and the facilities. It happened to be March and the weather was mild.
The real estate market was ridiculously cheap compared to the City of Angels, and Mary loved the idea of moving to a quiet suburb with volcanic rock yards and little succulent gardens. After a tour of the city, and a private tour of the new offices, he and Mary returned to the hotel room with a sprawling view of the desert hills. They discussed quickly and excitedly and made love in a king-sized bed with crisp white sheets, watching a thunderstorm roll towards them, loving the sheer majesty of the wide-open spaces and unencumbered vistas. They didn’t hear a single police siren or gunshot in the entire three days that they were there. A week later he was in his new office. Two weeks after that, she was directing the “Strapping Lads” moving company crew on the proper placement of their living room furniture. It was terribly romantic, briefly.
The summers in Phoenix weren’t nearly as pleasant as they had hoped. The first summer, when she’d had enough of the 120-degree days, Mary left to spend a few days with her sister, back in Los Angeles. Three years later, Sgt. O’Connor was paying half the rent on a beach-adjacent house where Mary would spend the entire summer. He, on the other hand, would spend the entire summer driving six hours back and forth across the hottest, most desolate stretch of highway in the corner pocket of the country, dodging tumbleweeds and jackrabbits in the sticky sunbaked cab of a black Crown Victoria.
“But hell,” he muttered to himself. “At least the money is good.” An alarm sounded behind the copier and something in its guts made a strained grinding noise. As occupied as he was, he didn’t notice the chief pulling into the parking lot.
Chief Martinez walked into the offices, greeted by the familiar blast of wind from the blower directly above the front door. Whether it had been installed to keep the hot air from getting in, or just to blow the cold air out, Martinez did not care. Walking from 120 heat through a blast of frigid air was like diving into a winter pool. He had never much liked it, and he liked it less as his hair thinned out. It would undoubtedly be the next piece of equipment that he unplugged. He picked through the unsorted pile of mail on the corner of the front desk, sifting through a collection of coupons, ads, and various catalogs that no one had bothered to cancel when they were laid off.
Most of the cameras were shut off when they lost the last of their security detail. The few that still worked were mostly just there so that Martinez could keep his eyes on the staff when he was out of the office. The metal detectors had been shut off for a couple of years because everybody in the place, and just about everyone who had reason to stop by, had a concealed weapon and a permit to carry it. Most of his staff were former LA police officers who had spent years on duty. When the alarm went off, inevitably a few of them would pull their pieces and the resulting standoffs became tiresome.
Terrestrial Investigations Group had been a lightly subsidized independent contracting firm until the turn of the century. A few years into the new millennium, their division was scooped up as a second, illegitimate cousin to the newly established Department of Homeland Security. And then there were resources. The early aughts were good for business.
The offices abutted a giant warehouse and hangar full of hand-me-downs from Iraq and Afghanistan. The military was tossing away armored transports like plastic solo cups at a patio party. A few dents and dings, a little sand up the wheel wells, but with a flat black paint job, they were exactly what people expected from a black ops extraterrestrial investigation unit. They had an armory that the suckers back at the LA precinct would have creamed their pressed polyester pants for. They had a lightly weaponized Blackhawk helicopter and a highly decorated ex-Army combat pilot, just in case of some sort of high-speed aerial pursuit. There was a fleet of stealth black assets that required a team of mechanics, engineers, and operators so large that they had their own holiday party every year. He hand-picked his investigative team from the best in every department. They were the men in black and they were heavily armed, just in case. If the Marine corps couldn’t handle Al Qaeda, Martinez went to work every day feeling fairly certain that he and his team could find Bin Laden, if asked.
But that was the early aughts.
From down the hall, Martinez heard a few clattering swats from the break room, followed by a few tinny beeps and some low muttering. He found Sergeant O’Connor apparently trying to either dry hump or sumo wrestle the office copier.
“Sergeant?”
The Sergeant released the machine and froze under the chief’s inquisitive gaze.
“It’s jammed,” O’Connor said.
Martinez blinked at him. “Have you tried asking nicely?”
O’Connor shrugged and nodded. “I even blew in its ear a few times.”
Martinez stared blankly at O’Connor. “Well then, perhaps you should unjam it.”
If O’Connor wasn’t an administrative assistant, he damn well wasn’t a copy machine technician, either. Looking the chief straight in the eye, he reached out with a flattened palm and swatted the side of the printer again.
Martinez hung his head. He set the small stack of mail on the empty desk beside him, walked over to the printer, and popping the latch on the face of the machine, opened a small plastic door to the inner workings. O’Connor watched his commanding officer reach into the machine, and with a quick tug, he yanked O’Connor’s freshly printed resume from the workings. Martinez closed the hatch and pressed a few buttons on the touch screen. A green light blinked at the ready. “There.”
O’Connor watched the page in the Chief’s hand. It was only slightly crumpled, but the chief hadn’t looked at it yet.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Martinez rubbed the bridge of his nose, his thick glasses bouncing against his knuckles. “Try to act like you work here, O’Connor.”
“Nobody else does.” He glanced around at the empty desks.
“It’s an elite division, Sergeant; not a flock of migrating penguins.”
“We used to have a girl at the front desk.”
“We used to have an air-conditioned Stryker command vehicle with satellite uplinks and a .50 cal gun on top.” The chief crumpled the page without glancing at it and tossed it towards the growing pile of crumpled wads spilling over the floor. “Which of those two do you think I miss more?”
Relieved that the chief hadn’t bothered to read it, O’Connor watched the only decent copy yet tumble down to the floor. He absentmindedly rested his wrist on the handle of his Desert Eagle and pouted like a toddler protesting bedtime. “I had the highest conviction record in my precinct, Chief.” He didn’t have to wear his sidearm, but he liked it. He still liked having a badge. He still liked his Crown Vic. He was still a law enforcement officer, sort of. “I’m not a secretary,” he whined.
Martinez pulled a mug from the dish rack, sniffed at it, and set it on the counter. “You know who has the best conviction record in your precinct now, O’Connor?” He emptied a little packet of Irish cream into the mug and tossed the little green plastic cup into the trash. “Sweeney.”
“Sweeney!? He’s a glorified meter maid!”
“He’s got good numbers and a great record.” Martinez sniffed the coffee pot for freshness. “Your old commissioner won’t let me have him yet, but he isn’t ignoring my calls, either.”
“Sweeney?” O'Connor's voice rose an octave, almost pleading.
Martinez shrugged. “At least he’d tuck his shirt in.”
O’Connor glanced down at the untucked portion of his polo shirt. Dress codes might be lax compared to the precinct, but in the past year, they’d slipped further. The days of crisp black suits were long gone. In the heat of the Arizona desert, most of the agents were happy to shift to chinos and polo shirts. He glanced back at the puddle of crumpled pages littering the floor and started tucking in his shirt.
Martinez regarded the slipping sergeant with a blend of frustration and pity. “Get back to work, O’Connor.”
O’Connor shuffled out of the breakroom and back to his office, gritting his teeth at the possibility that he might have to work with that smug East coast transplant, Sweeney. He was a traffic cop, a speed trap in starched short sleeves. Getting a conviction on a speeding ticket in Southern California was as easy as pulling onto the freeway at the right hour, provided you wanted to do all that paperwork. He slid into his high-backed Italian leather ergonomic desk chair, listening to the gentle hiss of the hydraulics as it nestled softly to a comfortable position. He pressed the massage power button and adjusted it a little higher. “New cases, Chief.” O’Connor hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating a fresh stack of bankers’ boxes beside the front desk.
The boxes which had arrived sporadically for over a decade were ostensibly a collection of case files containing eyewitness accounts, official government briefs, any corroborating evidence, as well as the first draft of an official government statement. They were to be reviewed, researched, amended, altered, filed, or lost, if necessary. As the years wore on and as the staff thinned out it became fairly evident that the accounts were often gibberish field reports written by a beat cop with a high school education, the briefs and evidence were redacted beyond readability, and the government statement was one of three standardized form letters. The case was sent to their division as an efficient way to be both filed and lost. The shelves in storage were already full. As such, a few of the unused back offices had become cold case boneyards with little organization. Without a significant clerical staff to process the files, the current action plan seemed to be to keep filling empty offices. If the Russians or the Chinese ever showed up, the last agent out had to throw a match in there.
In Chief Martinez’s opinion, the golden years ended shortly after Obama got elected. Ground troops were replaced with drone strikes and surplus personnel supplies dried up. There was still funding, but the Police departments started picking up the pentagon’s hand-me-downs. The budgets shifted like desert sands, and the DHS eased back on funding a covert division of “tinfoil hats” with predictably little congressional outcry. It helped that no one knew that the division existed. It was a hell of a lot easier to defund the men in black than it was to defund the Pentagon’s darlings. The fact that during the previous decade there had been little call for any of the amassed military assets didn’t help their case.
Division reviews and audits consistently demonstrated departmental waste. Captain McGoohan was spending fuel and ammo taking the Blackhawk out on drunken coyote target practice in remote sections of the Arizona desert. When asked to justify the expenditure, Cpt. McGoohan shrugged and said: “Night vision targeting system testing.” While the auditing panel was satisfied with that answer, they were not as impressed when he answered: “For my fragile post-war mental health,” to questions about the leather couch, mini fridge and margarita slushy machine on another requisition invoice. When the chief asked him privately, Cpt. McGoohan responded flatly: “If we don’t spend it, they’ll stop sending it.” It was an unfortunate fact that the chief could not argue. After Bin Laden got himself killed, the belt tightened further, and the staff cuts started.
Martinez grabbed his mail off the desk as he meandered down the hall, glancing through the few envelopes in his hand, careful not to spill his coffee, but confident that none of the envelopes were terribly important. He flipped through his keys, trying to balance his load when O’Connor rolled back out of his office.
“Oh, Chief,” O’Connor leaned back in his high-backed leather desk chair. “Some official docs and a package arrived for ya.” He smiled defiantly and disappeared back into his office.
O’Connor had been such a promising recruit. Top honors. He was the best that the LAPD had to offer; or, at the very least, he was the best that the commissioner was willing to lose.
“Empty the recycling bin, O’Connor.” The chief glanced at the collection of envelopes in his hand and turned back down the hall.
O’Connor didn’t even bother to lean back and look out. “I’m not a janitor, either, Chief,” he called.
The chief stopped again. “Then try emailing your resume and quit wasting my printer ink.” Satisfied with the resulting silence he continued to his sanctuary.
The chief kept his private office just a few degrees cooler than the rest of the offices. If they insisted upon opening his door every five minutes, for every little detail, he could afford to keep his own room at a frosty 65 degrees. With the blinds drawn to avoid the late afternoon sun his office was sacrosanct, his private space. Stepping from the hall into his office was less like diving into a pool and more like slowly wading into a lake, a gentle transition to a comfortable temperature. As he turned the corner, he found his door propped open a few inches and the lights on inside. He pushed gently and the door swung wide.
Just inside the door, a beach ball-sized lump of charred and twisted rock sat on a tiny pallet in the middle of his office, resting in the crumpled cellophane nest of the clear plastic stretch wrap that it had arrived in, but had since been peeled away and left there.
“O’Connor?”
The sergeant rolled his chair back into the hall again.
Martinez gestured towards the new decorative rock feature.
“It’s a meteorite,” O’Connor shrugged.
“I get that.” He looked it over. “Why is it in my office?”
O’Connor hopped up and hustled over, pushing past the chief to point out a spot on the top of the ball, somewhere near where Iceland should be on a globe. “There are teeth in it, Chief. Human teeth.”
On a closer inspection, Martinez could definitely see three human molars, slightly singed, embedded in the rock and metal. “In a meteorite?” He poked at the charred bit of ceramic, like an archipelago of porcelain falsies, embedded in a hunk of supercooled molten metal alloy that fell from space to earth a few miles outside of Tucson, Arizona just a few days ago. “How in the hell?”
“Beats me, sir.” He shrugged. “Top file is metallurgical composition and lab reports; file underneath is eye-witness testimony.” He pulled the bottom file and flipped it open. “Blew a little business park to bits. Check out the crater pics.” He nodded, smiling brightly.
Martinez glanced down at the file on his desk, clearly stamped “Top Secret” and looked up at O’Connor.
The sergeant shrugged. “Nobody sends real Top-Secret files through FedEx.”