Death Ray Butterfly

by Tom Lichtenberg

  Three

  So where the hell was I? Somebody's going to have to go through this someday and do something about it, put it all in order, or not. What do I care? I'm just doing what they tell me. Seems like it's always been that way. Regulations and rules. Follow the procedures, fill out the paperwork. I spent half my career just staring at a piece of paper with a pencil in my hand. Summarize, they tell you, as if you can take the constellations of events, the coincidence of all those lives colliding at that very point, all of the accidents, alignments and misfortunes that it takes for every little thing that ever happened to happen at all. It astounds you if you have any sense whatsoever.

  If that old lady had gone only one mile an hour slower or faster and if that city bus had stalled out only one or two seconds before and if that grocery cart wheel wasn't crooked and bent and if that umbrella, lying in the street, and if that young man had trimmed his sideburns just a hair, and if the sun had come up in the south and the cosmic dust had settled on a different rock ... you can drive yourself crazy thinking about stuff like that.

  The boys on the beat never let me forget a word of it. Maybe I'd been in a coma or something for a moment, but once it got around, there I was, reputation and all. Stanley K. Mole, finder of lost souls, of Alma Perdida, the only police inspector in the force to witness the quantum mystery. That's when they started piling all those cases on my desk, beginning and ending with the coldest of the cold, Reyn Tundra.

  I never let it bother me. At least I wasn't stuck on traffic duty, like Sergeant Oliver Jamm was after his close encounter with the alien grape. I wasn't pensioned off like Captain Zanzig Neese was after she was caught coddling cadavers in the cooler. I may have gone off my rocker but I got back on pretty quick and I stayed back on that rocker ever since. I take it all with abiding grace if I do say so myself and I do. Say so myself.

  They called the cases cold but I called them hard, and I was a hard case myself. Back since I was a kid, is what my dad always said. That boy's a hard case, got a hard head. All because I rode my bike down Ganges Hill without any brakes, just flew off into the hedges at the bottom, put my faith in God. Caught me all right, but scratched the hell out of me too. I still have the lacerations on my chest, been sixty years by now. Me and Smidge McCullers used to do that trick, him on roller skates even, the rickety four wheel kind. One summer we swore to conquer that mountain, limbs be damned, and damned if we didn't. Old Smidge could have used that kind of perseverance later on in life. Never did amount to much, did Smidge. Last time I saw him he was spending time alone, a lot of time, in solitary.

  Don't we all? Shoot, here I am walking around the backyard with this dumb old black box in the palm of my hand, getting my sweat all over it and chatting up a storm. Feeling kind of stupid. Like Smidge McCullers. Now that boy was dumb. I remember one time I had to stop him from jumping off the roof of a six story building. Said he could make it, was sure he could, and wanted that twenty five cents I bet him but I took it back. Gave him the damn quarter just to save his life. That's what I call being a friend.

  Four

  My assistant, Kelley, is pestering me to talk about the girl Racine. People love to talk about her nowadays, since she got all mixed up in things and became so famous, and who was it who knew her way back when when she was nothing , just getting started out? I guess I had my chances to nip that sucker in the bud, but what are you going to do when the kid is only twelve and facing life for a butchery so appalling that no one could believe it?

  She was some kind of orphan I'm told, raised by the criminal mastermind known sometimes as Dennis Hobbs. Hobbs always claimed he worked for Jimmy Kruzel but I always suspected it was the other way around. Kruzel was kind of wimpy for an organized crime boss, always sniveling his way through interviews, whining about the room being cold, or the chair being hard on his butt. Kruzel owned all the riverboat gambling it's true, but I think it was in name only. Hobbs had something on him and was using him like a front man.

  Hobbs himself, though, what a piece of work. Man was wide as he was high and spoke in such a low voice and so softly you could never make out what the hell he was saying. Sounded more like the distant rumbling of a freight train than an actual human being talking. I remember some nights getting so pissed off I had to leave the room and turn on the TV just to hear the sound of an intelligible human voice.

  Hauled that bastard in so many times, it wasn't funny. Then he had this little girl he was always towing around. Said he had to take her to school, pick her up from school, help her with her homework, always some excuse he thought would get him out of coming down to the station. Crazy. There'd be some killings on the docks and everybody knew that Hobbs was in it up to his elbows. We'd come around, me and some rookie partner they were always saddling me with, and I'd be like, come on Hobbs, time to take a ride, and he'd go, heck, officer - son of a gun was always calling me 'officer' like he didn't know my name and rank - I got to take my little girl to her dance recital tonight. She won't stand for it if I don't take her. Come on, officer, give a dad a break.

  Like I gave a damn about giving breaks! I'm a cop, for Christ's sake. But he'd get those big old sad eyes going and my partner, always some wet-behind-the-ears little flake, he'd get all sobby into it too and I'd just have to leave it, come back later. And damn if that little girl of his wasn't up to her knees in blood as well. Heard the strangest things about that kid, like she was literally born of the devil and some devilette, whatever you call those female demons, I forget the term. Long straight black hair, black eyes, thin as a rail, pale as a ghost, that Racine came out of nowhere and was always tagging along her adopted papa Dennis.

  She never said much, neither. Times I brought her in, always for murder or attempted murder - she never did anything less, never anything petty or small about that kid - she would never say a word. Knew her rights. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever even heard her voice back then outside of pleading "not guilty, your honor". They never sent her up for anything, never had the evidence. never had the witnesses. Clean as a whistle, every time, but the word was she had killed at least a dozen times, and rarely only a single person when she'd done it. Usually a spree. They said she used a variety of weapons on her criminal occasions; guns, knives, swords, machetes, whips, chains, poison, acid. Girl had a repertoire.

  Course she vanished, that's how she got famous. Vanished but kept popping up from time to time, like the spirit she resembled. Rumors every day, years later, people claimed they'd seen her, same as she always used to be; somewhere between fifteen and twenty, you could never be sure, though she had to be more than fifty by then. Last I saw that Racine she was smiling at me from the back of a getaway car. Like always, she was getting away!

  Five

  The crimes that go on nowadays, you can hardly believe it. We have people stealing skin - literally swiping the skin off your forearm, just to scrape the data and passwords that are embedded there. Not to mention the leg bones worth a fortune on the international market, shipped here from Ethiopia and Madagascar and god only knows where else. Then they got people cracking pacemakers for the serial codes and doing what they call 'spot-checking', which is a fancy term for mimicking gestures to control a personal autobot.

  I don't even know what half these crazy crimes are but at the bottom of it it's always money, so that's one thing I do understand. Money and the screwed-up human being, it's always one thing or the other. Now with all the people in the world it's no wonder they're always talking about the remote personality control. A big city needs it. You can't have a hundred and fifty seven million people in a small space going about their business on their own!

  Once they instituted that it was just a matter of time before the hoodlums and the lowlifes started working the angles around it. They can tap your wavelength, mess you up real good. You see these people staggering around now because somebody jacked their life and put them in a mood. You got them lying around on benches wondering where the hell they are, and then thei
r families come and find them and take them back to Starters so they can get their tune up back to normal.

  Mental technicians, there's a job. Down to a science, this business of what they call 'life ordering' and 'predisposition'. I'm lucky I got out of it because I retired in time and they were saving the cops for last in any case. Someone's got to be alert when everyone else is sleeping, or might as well be. They tell me that the innovators got a special plug-in to keep them going. Got to have new stuff, you know, always got to have new stuff.

  One time I was in a room somewhere, I'm forgetting where it was exactly, and I look outside the window, and I'm way above the street, and down there I see people walking and just like that, somebody just popped in, just popped right in. Weren't there but a second before and kept on walking like they'd been there all the time. I was rubbing my eyes because I couldn't believe it and I didn't tell nobody about it for awhile, not even my assistant, Kelley. I know what I saw, though. It was real as you and me. Well, real as me in any case. I