Murder Feels Crazy

by Bill Alive

  Mark scowled. “How’s the diet?”

  Hannigan-Quinn looked startled. Then he glanced down at his oatmeal and sneered. “Some detecting.”

  “You put that much brown sugar on it, you might as well enjoy yourself and have a cookie,” Mark said.

  Hannigan-Quinn flushed. “I hope you enjoy harassing me about my food choices.”

  “I’m just saying, if you think you look stupid walking around with a diet bowl heaped with sugar, wait until you try connecting detectives with a drug death. All you’re going to accomplish here is losing me my one single web client.”

  Hannigan-Quinn’s eyes bulged. “Do you think I’m stupid?” he snapped. “This town is sinking into mayhem, and you’ve been intimately involved with every single death.”

  “Yes. Helping catch the killers,” Mark said.

  “Ha! That’s what you’d love us all to think. Especially one particular sergeant.”

  Mark frowned.

  “One particular blonde sergeant,” Hannigan-Quinn said evenly. “Usually braided.”

  “I got it,” Mark said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t heard the rumors.” He lowered his voice. “Inappropriate fraternization.”

  “I wish,” Mark said.

  “You mean bowling?” I said.

  Hannigan-Quinn gave a smug nod.

  “Wow, really?” I said. “How’d you know about that?”

  “He didn’t,” Mark muttered.

  Hannigan-Quinn flinched and protested, but Mark cut him off.

  “There’s no way you actually think I shot some dude for his heroin,” Mark said. “So what the hell do you really want from me?”

  “What any journalist wants,” said Hannigan-Quinn. “The truth.” He leaned in close toward Mark, tilting up a fierce glare. “You want me to publish a clarification, reassure your jittery client? Fine. Tell me why Sergeant Jensen lets an unlicensed amateur within a hundred miles of a murder case. Tell me why, after your first little ‘suspect party’ that led to the arrest of Calvin Crowley, a librarian found traces of blood on the floor, even though no one was officially wounded.”

  “Really?” I blurted.

  He ignored me. “And tell me why,” he growled, leaning closer and dropping his voice almost to a whisper, “if I ask around about you long enough, I eventually hear the word… empath.”

  Mark stood very still.

  I literally held my breath.

  Losing this client would be very bad. But going public as an empath could be much, much worse. Like, possibly lethal.

  It wasn’t a power you wanted certain people to know you had.

  Mark took a slow breath. Then he said, “Funny. I didn’t peg you as the woo-woo type. But if you want to go on record as ‘investigating’ anonymous reports of psychic powers…” He shrugged, and pretended to study the sidewalk placard with the coffee shop’s menu. “I guess it’s one way to boost circulation.”

  Hannigan-Quinn boiled. His mouth and mustache trembled, like he might start to froth.

  Finally he stammered, “Just wait, you!” He backed into the crosswalk, shouting. “You think I’ve dug up all the dirt I can find on you? I haven’t even started! When I’m through, you’re going to want to move to Bolivia!”

  “What’s wrong with Bolivia?” I said.

  But Mark snapped up, terrified.

  Like some old fear had returned to haunt him… some enemy he’d thought he’d never have to face again…

  I froze.

  But Mark lunged into the street, grabbed Hannigan-Quinn by the shoulder, and yanked him back to the sidewalk.

  Even as the man gasped, a white hybrid smashed past, silent, crushing the coffee and oatmeal he’d dropped to the pavement.

  As it passed, the hybrid veered toward them…

  … but it missed by inches, and it shrieked in a scrape against the curb before it veered and vanished around the corner.

  Mark and Hannigan-Quinn stared after it, panting, and watching the empty street as if the car might erupt back any second.

  Finally, Hannigan-Quinn clutched Mark’s arm. Mark flinched.

  “You saved my life,” said Hannigan-Quinn. “Oh my God. I didn’t hear a thing, but I saw your face, you must have… felt it coming. You… you are an empath!”

  Mark rubbed his eyebrows.

  Chapter 29

  As we stood together on the sidewalk in our little post-trauma huddle, Hannigan-Quinn couldn’t stop staring at Mark. His eyes roved, greedily nibbling every detail, as if he might suss out the secret of Mark’s power by the wear on his leather jacket.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mark said.

  “I saw you,” said Hannigan-Quinn, fervent. “You felt that driver before you could have seen or heard the car.”

  “I thought you were a skeptic,” Mark snapped.

  “I observe. I just want the truth.”

  “Couldn’t we go for Occam’s Razor here?” Mark said. “The simplest solution is probably true?”

  “You saved my life!”

  I cut in. “Mr. Hannigan-Quinn, does this mean you’ll publish a note that we’re not suspicious and everything’s cool?”

  “Of course!” he boomed. “This explains everything! The public needs to know! You’re an empath detective!”

  “What? No!” Mark snapped. He bent and spoke low. “If you write this up, you’ll get me killed.”

  “What? How?”

  “Are you serious?” Mark said. “Maybe the same people who just tried to kill you?”

  Hannigan-Quinn blanched to the roots of his mustache. “You think that was intentional?”

  “Yes,” Mark said, with evident restraint.

  “But… why?”

  “Why? You spend all your time speaking truth to power, eventually power’s going to get pissed.”

  Hannigan-Quinn started to shake.

  “Listen, you’ve got to talk to Gwen. Sergeant Jensen,” Mark said. “Figure out who that was. In the meantime, please do publish the correction so we don’t go broke, but keep this other thing secret.”

  “But… but…”

  “Look, consider it… a debt of honor,” Mark said. “We’re fighting the same fight.”

  Hannigan-Quinn lit up. “Brothers in arms,” he said, and clasped Mark’s hand… actually, halfway up his forearm, Ben Hur-style.

  Mark forced a smile. “Indeed,” he said, extricating his arm. “We’ll poke around too. Any idea who in particular you might have pissed off?”

  “Oh, pretty much everyone,” said Hannigan-Quinn, brightly.

  “Right,” Mark said. “Okay. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too… brother.”

  Mark smiled tight.

  Back in the car, we traded last waves with Hannigan-Quinn, and then I said, “Who’d you vibe in that hybrid?”

  “Someone bad,” Mark said. “I’m not positive, but… if I’m right… someone I haven’t felt in a long time.”

  “I figured,” I said.

  Mark eyed me. With concern.

  “Figured, not felt,” I said. “Would you relax? Some of us are actually observant.” But his look made me squirm, so I nodded back at Hannigan-Quinn. Who was still waving.

  “You think he’s going to keep it secret?” I said.

  “No way in hell.”

  Chapter 30

  I’d thought Mark would rev up Thunder on a line like that, but nope, he started tapping away on his phone.

  Just sitting in the driver’s seat, parked at the curb, right where a hybrid had nearly stained Main Street with a silent hit-and-run.

  “Um…” I said.

  “We’ve got to sift his recent articles,” Mark said, swiping away at his screen. “Whoever wants him dead, it’s got to be something he wrote.”

  His voice was steady, but I could tell Mark knew lives were at stake. For one thing, he was willingly reading the newspaper’s website. Even worse, he was reading it on his phone.

  “So about
that guy in the car?” I said.

  “I’d rather not say,” he said, still scanning his screen. “Not until I’m sure.”

  “Great. That’s not going to make my mind work.”

  “Trust me.”

  We sat in silence while he searched. My dire reflections meandered toward more immediate concerns, like being late for work. I hadn’t even had a chance to eat breakfast.

  “Don’t worry,” Mark said. “If they come after us next, you won’t need breakfast.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I wonder if anyone sells a lead-lined helmet.”

  Mark smirked, then frowned at his screen. “Huh,” he said. “HQ’s been screeding about the opiates. He did a huge takedown of Katrina’s blog.”

  “I wonder if she even noticed,” I said, leaning over to see his screen. “Oh my gosh… she blogged that stuff about a ‘good batch’?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, if you buy from the right people, heroin magically doesn’t kill you,” Mark said. “Why did no one ever think of this? But look down further. HQ starts blaming Dr. Paul.”

  “What?” I said, trying not to wonder if Dr. Paul was making Ceci laugh even as we spoke. “Why?”

  “See? HQ says people like Katrina would never have started in the first place if Dr. Paul hadn’t brought in the ‘culture of dependency’.” Mark kept tapping. “Whoa… he really went all in on the Dr. Paul screeds. Here’s another pill mill editorial… and another… and another…”

  “But they’re just articles,” I said. “Dr. Paul doesn’t seem the type to go around plowing into journalists.”

  I admit, I felt a glimmer of pride at trying so hard to be fair to the guy.

  “Not personally,” Mark said. “But he could hire it out.”

  “A hit man who drives a hybrid?” I said.

  “You could do worse than keep your engine silent.”

  “Why not just shoot him?”

  “Maybe the hit man needed it to look like an accident. Maybe it was the same hit man who’d already shot Golitsyn last night.”

  “Wait, but Golitsyn also drove a white hybrid!” I said. “That’s too weird. Could it be, like, a company car? Like Golitsyn was killed by his own people?”

  “Maybe,” Mark said.

  “Or,” I said, “they could just both like white hybrids.”

  “Don’t we all,” Mark said.

  “We still don’t know who would want to kill Golitsyn,” I said. “Not Dr. Paul, right? That’s just crazy.”

  “Could be. But cheap local heroin might not be so fantastic for his pain clinic.”

  “Oh my gosh.” Moments ago, I’d secretly relished the option that Dr. Paul might be awful. Now that it seemed plausible, my stomach dipped. “You really think he’d kill someone?”

  “Look, opiates are all over the news as it is, but with these HQ articles, now it’s personal. Every overdose and addiction we have around here gets connected to Dr. Paul. His face. His business.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Meanwhile, cheap local heroin probably reduces demand for his pills, especially for people with insurance problems. Dr. Paul wants heroin out of here worse than Gwen does. He needs a clean Back Mosby with a clean pain clinic. That means no Golitsyn. And no HQ screeds.”

  “Wow,” I said. “He really does have a major motive to attack them both.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But how would you ever get proof?”

  Mark smiled, and started to dial.

  Chapter 31

  “I know there’s no proof, Gwen,” Mark snapped. “That would be why I’m calling you.”

  I squirmed. We were still parked on Main Street, getting mighty chilly even with the sun out, and Mark had been failing with Gwen here for at least ten minutes.

  “I get that you’re busy, I have seen a crime scene, remember? Just have someone else do it. What? I just want you to pull this guy’s financials! How leveraged is he on that new clinic? Has he been losing business with this heroin surge? And if he did hire a hit man… hold up… you weren’t here, Gwen, that car was doing sixty on Main Street! Look, why can’t you check for a big cash pull?… What?… Oh, come on. This has nothing to do with Dr. Paul and Pete!”

  I squirmed harder. Then I nudged Mark.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “Work,” I whispered.

  Mark huffed, but he fired up Thunder and started driving while he fought.

  “What?” he said. “Maybe I don’t want to go talk to some guy who might have hired a hit man. Whatever happened to keeping civilians out of harm’s way?”

  “Don’t remind her!” I said.

  Mark groaned. “There must be some other way to impress you, Gwendolyn.”

  I cringed.

  Gwendolyn? Didn’t he know never to call her that? Had I forgotten to tell him how much she hated it? How she’d had this Social Studies teacher who wouldn’t stop calling her Gwendolyn, no matter how much she asked, until Gwen finally gathered proof he was embezzling from the school and got him fired? When she was thirteen?

  Mark’s eyes narrowed. “I see,” he said quietly. “You have a lovely day too.”

  He hung up.

  Oh, crud, I thought. He just totally fried their date. At a minimum.

  He pulled up to Valley Visions, staring ahead and steaming.

  I ached to ask about the date, but I decided to use tact. Also, I was scared. I opened my door, then leaned back with casual unconcern. “So,” I said. “She’s not a big fan of the Dr. Paul theory?”

  “Nope.”

  “So are we going to go talk to him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah.”

  My tact supply was running out even faster than usual, but fortunately Mark took a turn.

  “There’s more than one way to get Dr. Paul’s financials,” he growled.

  “Like how?”

  He turned and pinned me with a glare. “I’m assuming you don’t have plans this Friday?”

  I gulped. My blood froze. I managed to croak, “You don’t mean…”

  Mark smirked. He didn’t even have to say it. Three little words…

  Linux User Group.

  Chapter 32

  I keep hoping we can make it through one of these cases without needing help from the computer geeks.

  The problem is, they’re too darn useful. They can hack pretty much anything.

  In fact, they’re probably reading this as I type it. (Hi guys.)

  Whenever we get stuck and need some crucial tasty morsel of information, Mark has the bright idea to ask these Linux wizards to magick it out of the Internet for us. The problem is, my continuing encounters with these guys may be having serious cumulative long-term side effects. These may include, but are not limited to: deepening feelings of tech inferiority, increasing paranoia toward the government, and recurring nightmares about being trapped in the Star Wars trash compaction scene and unable to escape without “recompiling the kernel”.

  (I have no idea what this actually means. In the dreams, I have to reassemble giant corn cobs, and if one kernel’s out of place, we all squash.)

  But at least these dudes can save us a lot of trouble and danger.

  Except that this time, that’s not how it went down.

  Not even close.

  Main Street on the Friday night before Thanksgiving was almost busy. As Mark and I hoofed it to the game store for the Linux meeting, we passed at least three separate Christmas shoppers, hustling through the cold with their dangling gift bags swinging the pendulum of holiday cheer.

  Inside the game store was a whole different reality.

  Possibly literally… these tables of dudes might have been arguing over their little cards of spells and monsters for centuries, untouched by time. Was it really “November” here? Who could say?

  Well, no, there was a scruffy dude wearing a big stuffed turkey hat. Fine.

  As always, Mark led me past the gamers and the shelves of obscure German board games that could each easily cost
me a full day’s work before taxes. As always, I hesitated at the ratty door in the dark back hallway.

  As always, Mark grabbed the knob anyway.

  “Duly noted,” he said.

  “Wait, what?” I said. “I didn’t even think anything!”

  “I’m an empath, remember? You’re feeling plenty.”

  Through the thin door, the ruckus of some Very Important Geek Argument was already reaching its unclipped claws into my soft, defenseless brain.

  I remembered reading somewhere that your brain floats in some weird fluid in your skull, and it basically has the consistency of butter.

  “Gross,” Mark said. He edged away from me.

  “Can’t I please sit this one out?” I pleaded. “Don’t you know anyone where just being in the same room with them is like… like…”

  “Sure,” he said. “Pretty much everyone.”

  And he shoved the door wide open.

  The geeks went silent.

  At first, I thought the old room hadn’t changed a bit. The same long tables groaned under the same everlasting bachelor festival of mammoth chip bowls and endless soda. The dominant life forms were still the enormous laptops, their thick cords snaking a shared root system that entwined the room. Their droidish odor still seeped with the rich aroma of male armpit… you know, I wouldn’t want to go back to public smoking, no way, but there must have been some automatic odor control…

  Anyway, all that was a moment’s notice. Then I saw what had changed.

  The silent geeks looked… guilty?

  Like the Chemistry teacher had walked in, just as their latest mixture was really going to blow.

  Then I saw the head of the table. The big head chair was empty.

  “Where’s Zack?” Mark said.

  “Is minding store,” said Brzezinski, the one with the Polish accent. He avoided meeting Mark’s eyes, which was pretty easy to do, since his glasses have that techie camera thing that makes him look like he’s trying to fit in at a cyborg party, but he didn’t really have much of a wardrobe budget.

  Mark frowned. “Zack is skipping?”

  You do remember Zack, right? The tall skinny loud black dude with the retro glasses coolifying his graying temples? The fearless leader of the Linux Group? The guy who always calls Mark the “prodigal son”, whatever that means?