Death Ray Butterfly

by Tom Lichtenberg

up well, stay under control, and people like them. Other creatures get tried out from time to time, but usually you ended up with dogs. Kiki was never a dog person. Cats were pretty much useless - she knew that - and she'd become a bit superstitious about birds after her dove adventure. She moved right on to insects. No one's ever been sure how she did it, but she ended up breeding and developing a number of species of curiously adaptive insects. I remember reading about some of them; the roaches that could track down methamphetamine and swarm the labs by the millions, the bees that could sniff out corn syrup, and the ants that marched directly to patchouli oil fields.

  What got her into trouble this time - and not just her - were the butterflies. In some ways they were her crowning achievement, those huge yellow and black monarchs she called Fonticiads. Crazy as it sounds, these overgrown caterpillars had a special sense for prides of unstable dibaryons. Kiki Photescu had somehow anticipated the coming stuff list, and there she was, all ready with the tools when subatomics made it. The feds paid a hefty price for her services; after all, they had generated this new panic and needed something showy to highlight their efforts against it, and these masses of gigantic Fonticiads were just the thing - photogenic, larger than life, and unerringly accurate.

  The day she brought them here to Spring Hill Lake is the day that everything changed. She kept them in special baskets, a whole pickup load of them; must have been a hundred thousand or more all packed together in the back of that old black Chevy truck. Federal agents had their suspicions, but mostly they just moved from town to town, putting on a show. They'd plant some dibaryons in a building somewhere, let the butterflies loose and sure enough, they'd show up right on time for the six o'clock news. Nobody ever said what the problem was with those particles - research even showed them to be harmless, even hypothetical - but that was not the issue. Getting the public on board was key. There was always some new fright cropping up that needed calming and soothing. The feds liked to get some local involvement too, so there I was, part of their bug and pony show.

  This time there apparently weren't enough of the decoy particles to attract the interest of the insects. Nope. They flew straight off in a different direction, headed right down to the waterfront where they surrounded an old abandoned storage warehouse by the railroad yards. Nobody could have guessed that Arab "Cricket" Jones had a thing about butterflies. A pet peeve, if you will; that old saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing a hurricane in the Atlantic. Well, those butterflies were flapping their wings all right, but not in China. They were flapping them right where Jones and his crew were busy packing up crates of very illegal and very unstable subatomics. It was showtime.

  Twelve

  Caught up in the siege were a couple of legendary thugs - Krispy Talbot and Jalapeno Perez. These two were better known for their incendiary work, but it seemed they'd graduated to a more subtle explosive level. The whole scene was straight out of a movie. First the feds dragged out the crackly loudspeakers, demanding immediate and unconditional surrender. The helicopter waited until the news cameras showed up, perhaps in a cost-cutting maneuver. They brought out the spotlights even though it was still broad daylight and everyone knew exactly where the fugitives were. Hell, they weren't even running away. Even though you expected to hear something like "you'll never get alive, coppers", in fact the opposite occurred. Jones and the other two walked out the front door as calm as you please with their hands already over their heads.

  They were quickly surrounded by butterflies, and I thought I could sense the disgust on Jones' face as he swatted the critters away. Talbot and Perez, both giants in stature compared to Jones, grinned sheepishly as if embarrassed at being so easily apprehended. The federal agents moved in, cuffed the men and led them toward the waiting black vans. As he passed by, Jones gave me a wink and a nod and whispered,

  “Not yet, Inspector. Not quite yet.”

  I knew what he meant, but I pretended I didn't when grilled by the authorities. I told them I thought he just meant it wasn't the end, that he'd be back, and indeed he was, in remarkably short order. I learned through connections it was Hobbs, Dennis Hobbs who posted their bond, and not a meager amount at that. I'd already guessed there was some connection there and now I was more certain than ever. But I adopted what they used to call a 'wait and see attitude'. After all, the war on stuff wasn't really my beat anymore. I was only part of the show. I had other matters to attend to.

  My immediate concern was a fellow by the name of Kram Fletcher. I had been tailing him for a few weeks, convinced he was the same person I formerly knew as Filcher Peron. Peron had slipped through my fingers many years before in as crazy a case as I'd ever come across. He'd been operating in the area of involuntary conversions, taking ordinary people who belonged to one church or another, and sliding them into a different one altogether. He was a slick operator who had no loyalty but would work for whichever evangelical was hot and willing to pay. In those days, ratings were king, and ratings were determined by numbers, kind of like the popularity of television shows or opening weekends for movies. Most of the churches around the state had signed up with the RTN, the agency responsible for rating and ranking religions.

  What Peron was up to wasn't strictly illegal but it sure wasn't kosher either. He used chemical inducements along with straight up cash. It was also rumored he was able to transmit convertability through immediate semen injection. He called it a "transfer of energy" but it was clearly more than that. Not a few susceptible women found themselves inexplicably attending a temple not of their typical persuasion. Many were so astonished by their own actions they resorted to desperate measures, even to the extent of praying and paying for candles to be lit, activities which hadn't been seen in ages. Peron had vanished along with a tidy sum of money for which he had allegedly not yet fulfilled his obligations.

  Now there was Kram Fletcher. The moment I saw his picture on the screen I just knew he was Filcher Peron, and yet it was going to be damned hard to prove. Fletcher had a full and complete personal history, along with witnesses, many of whom had known him his entire life, all forty seven years of it, including his parents, his siblings, his friends, wife and children. Filcher Peron, on the other hand, had just as full a life (up to the point of his disappearance) with a completely different set of individual testimonies. It was only intuition on my part, and as it turned out I was completely mistaken, but it bothered me quite a bit for quite a while. I followed that Fletcher person, pestered his associates and family, grilled his employer and co-workers - this guy was a mechanical engineer, responsible for the safety of obsolete farm equipment - and generally made a terrible nuisance of myself. I'm not proud to admit it, but I am far from perfect. As my assistant, Kelley, likes to say, I'm often wrong but never in doubt.

  Thirteen

  My assistant, Kelley, keeps badgering me to get to the juicy stuff. Okay, okay. I like a good story as much as anybody else, but sometimes it can get a little confusing, so you're going to have to bear with me. What Kelley means by the 'juicy stuff', is, of course, the murder that didn't happen, or that did happen but maybe not. Of course it all went down on Jimmy Kruzel's riverboat. Seems our friend Mr. Jones showed up again not long after he got bailed out of the subatomic particle charges. Not only showed up, but all dapper and bragging about how no one could touch him, no one could stop him. He had a secret and was going to change the world.

  He was drawing a crowd, which he often did. He was commanding the bow of the boat and standing on a half barrel, making this speech, must've been a hundred people gathered around, at least it seemed there were a hundred witnesses I had to interview, each with his own particular version of events, events that no two of them seemed able to agree upon completely. The one thing they had in common was that Kruzel didn't like it, not one bit. He came down out of his captain cabin up top and pushed his way through the crowd, some said, but I had my doubts. Kruzel was a weakling and a coward; chances are he merely begged and pleaded his way
through to the front, employing that whiny obnoxious voice to squeak people out of his way. In any case, he came right up in front of where Jones was pontificating and shouted at him to get down, get out, and get lost.

  Jones got down, all right, and that's where things happened; what things exactly, it is very hard to say. Some claim that Kruzel pulled a knife. Again, I found that hard to believe. Kruzel was never known to pull anything on anybody ever. And yet, when I got there, Jones was bleeding from a stab wound to his left bicep. Some said that Jones whipped out his blade first. Never did find out for sure, really. The lab guys got there before me and wiped the sucker clean. Not a print, not a drop or even a speck of blood remained on the thing. Lab guys. They'll get you every time.

  The crowd pulled away, opened up as Kruzel collapsed in a puddle of blood and died right then and there before anyone could get a doctor or a medic on the scene. The timing seemed a bit odd. The first call went in to emergency about fifteen minutes after the