Alien Nation #2 - Dark Horizon

by K. W. Jeter

  “Good evening, Dr. Bogg.” Martha came out from the farther reaches of the apartment. In her hands she had a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “This came for you today.”

  “Thank you, Martha.” He set the glass down in order to take the package from her.

  Under the brown paper was bright-colored gift wrap. And a card, which he read aloud. “From an admirer.” He smiled at Martha. “Very intriguing, hm? Let’s take a look.”

  Inside the box were three balls of soft cloth, red, yellow, and blue. Their sweet fragrance immediately rose to his nostrils.

  “What are those?”

  He could hold all three of them in the palm of his hand. How quaint, he thought. The simple pleasures that one sometimes becomes too sophisticated to remember. But someone else had; it was really quite touching.

  “Kaif balls,” he said, turning his hand to admire their bright colors. “What some people would call Tencto-nip.”

  He brought them up to his face and inhaled deeply. The scent blossomed inside his head, triggering half-forgotten memories. But only pleasant ones.

  “Wonderful,” he murmured.

  Martha watched him in fascination as he took another whiff.

  “Hmmm . . .” Dr. Bogg closed his eyes in pleasure.

  C H A P T E R 6

  HE HAD TO hand the box to her, to get his keys out and unlock the apartment door.

  “I had a hard time with the movie.” Lorraine dangled the bakery box by the string tied around it. “Technically, I mean. Let’s face it, this is 1996 already. And Michael J. Fox isn’t getting any younger—even with the makeup job, I couldn’t believe he was supposed to be sixteen.”

  It was one of the hazards of living in Los Angeles. Or maybe it was everywhere now—Sikes wondered if there were any places left where, when people went to the movies, they just went to the movies and didn’t come out with these ‘technical’ opinions.

  “Yeah, me neither.” He got the door unlocked and pushed it open. “If they do another sequel, they’re gonna have to sandblast the guy and spackle him a new face.”

  Inside his apartment, Lorraine slipped the string around the corners of the box and popped the lid. “What a feast . . . éclairs, napoleons . . .” They’d stopped at La Belle Epoque, just the next street over from the Los Feliz theater, and gone crazy at the pastry case. She dipped a finger into the box and came up with a dab of whipped cream. “I love these cannoli.”

  “Awfully classy for a guy like me.” He’d gone into the tiny kitchen and started assembling the coffee paraphernalia. “How do you think it’ll sit on top of the nachos and Gummy Bears?”

  She leaned against the side of the kitchen doorway, holding up the bright pink box. “The perfect finish to a delightful meal.”

  Her smile put a possible double meaning on her words. A little wordless tune whistled inside Sikes’s head as he plugged in the coffee maker.

  “My hair’s a mess.” Lorraine brushed it with her fingers. Static electricity from the Santa Anas crackled at her touch. “Where’s a mirror?”

  “Bathroom’s over there.” He pointed down the hall.

  “Back in a flash.” She set the box on the counter. “And don’t cheat—I know how many are in there.”

  No sooner had Lorraine disappeared than somebody knocked at the front of the apartment. He glanced in the direction of the bathroom, wondering if she had heard it in there. Go away, he silently mouthed toward the front door. We’re very busy right now.

  Whoever it was didn’t go away, but knocked again. Sikes crossed the living room in a couple of strides and yanked open the door.

  “Cathy . . .” He stared at her in complete surprise.

  “I know it’s late, Matt—” pleased excitement bubbled over in her words “—but I just heard on the news that they’re running another laser test on the Space Lab. It’ll be visible in five minutes.”

  “Well . . . um . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, then back to Cathy. “Actually, I’m kinda . . . taking care of a few things right now.”

  “Sorry—I know I should’ve called. But I was already on my way to the roof when I thought of you. I mean, the telescope and everything’s already up there—”

  “Cathy!”

  Sikes turned to see Lorraine finishing up brushing her hair as she came from the bathroom.

  “I thought I heard your voice out here. How are you?”

  He could see the gears stall behind Cathy’s eyes, then rev up to speed as she figured out the human female’s presence there.

  “I’m fine.” The gears moved through the first dusting of frost. “And you?”

  “Great.” Lorraine smiled. “Matt and I just went and saw Back To the Future V.”

  “Oh?”

  Sikes nodded. “Yeah, uh, it wasn’t very good. Don’t bother.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lorraine. “I thought it had some cute parts.”

  Now she thought it’d been cute—Sikes felt like sliding out of the room and letting the two females go at it without him.

  “We’ve got these really sinful desserts.” Lorraine stepped back and made a hostesslike gesture toward the kitchen. “Want to join us?”

  Cathy’s nose wrinkled as she sniffed the air. Sikes couldn’t smell the box’s contents this far away, but he knew that her Newcomer senses were sharp enough to.

  “No . . .” She shook her head. “They contain cooked animal fat. I’d probably go into reverse peristalsis.”

  “What . . . ?” Lorraine looked puzzled.

  That got a thin smile from Cathy. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t be pleasant.”

  He knew what she meant. “Yeah, well, they are kinda rich.”

  “I’d better get on up to the roof. Good night.”

  “Hey, Cathy . . .” He called after as she walked down the hallway to the stairs. “Thanks for asking me. Next time, okay?”

  She nodded, and gave a wave of her hand. And was gone.

  “Chocolate?” Lorraine had arranged some of the pastries on a dish. “Or buttercream?”

  He looked over his shoulder at her, then shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Zepeda ambushed him the next morning. She even brought him a cup of coffee, right to his desk.

  “Hey, Sikes—how’d it go with Lorraine?”

  “I ate too much.” He dropped an empty antacid packet into the trash can. “Stomach kept me up all night.”

  “No, jerk, before that. What we were talking about yesterday. I mean, are you cured now?”

  “Cured?” The coffee went down his esophagus like battery acid, but he needed the caffeine jolt. “Cured of what?”

  “This thing you got for aliens.” Zepeda gestured with her own half-empty cup. “Did you and Lorraine . . . you know . . .”

  Sikes gazed at her for a long, silent moment, then sighed and poked through the papers in his IN basket. “What’s happening with the Kaiser case?”

  “Obviously you didn’t.” She shook her head in disgust. “The medical examiner’s got something; wouldn’t tell me what. She’s gonna be coming in to give you something on the judge.”

  “Let me know when she gets here.” Sikes stood up and headed toward one of the other squad-room desks.

  Albert the janitor, minus his usual cart, was at George’s desk. Sikes didn’t know what it signified that George was sitting there in his stocking feet, with Albert holding George’s clumpy cop shoes.

  “I’ll get these so shiny, you’ll be able to see yourself in them!” Albert seemed excited about the whole notion.

  “That’s very kind of you, Albert.” George looked over at Sikes as he approached.

  Sikes dug out his wallet and extracted a fiver. “Hey, Al, how ’bout a doughnut run?” Enough of last night’s sugar and cholesterol had moved through his system to indicate a reload was in order.

  “I’m sorry, Detective Sikes, but—” Albert held up George’s shoes “—I have to go polish these for George.” He turned and walked away.

 
; That was a pisser. “Hey, what’s going on here?”

  George shrugged, looking apologetic. “Albert wanted to polish my shoes. He asked if he could. He said a man in my position should have shiny shoes.”

  “Listen, Albert works for this precinct, not you. He’s not your butler.”

  “Oh?” George leaned back in his chair. “And is he your doughnut fetcher?”

  “What’s this?” He picked up something new from George’s desktop. A heavy chunk of gray-veined marble, with a brass nameplate on front. Engraved were the words DETECTIVE TWO FRANCISCO. Sikes set it back down with a thump. “What, you gotta advertise?”

  “Susan gave that to me. She said, ‘If you got it, flaunt it.’ ” George reached over to straighten the marble piece on the desk. “As I believe humans are fond of saying.”

  “No, what I think you mean is, ‘If you got it, shove it in their faces.’ ”

  George frowned at his hand resting on the nameplate. “Matt, tell me. Do you resent my having passed the test?”

  “Yeah, right; heaven friggin’ forbid I should think such a thing.” He knew he was blowing it, that his temper had shot up his spine to the top of his skull. And he didn’t care. “What I think is that maybe—just maybe—there oughtta be a different standard, a different grading curve or something, for you guys.” He tapped the corner of his brow. “Just ’cause Newcomers all seem to have some kind of hard disk up here, and you spit back everything you’ve ever read, that doesn’t mean you know everything. There’s stuff about being a detective you’ll never know—”

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  Sikes looked next to himself and saw Lois Allen standing there, with a manila file in her hand.

  “If I am,” she said, “that’s too bad. I don’t have a lot of time to wait around right now.”

  He gazed up at the squad room’s water-spotted ceiling. He could feel his pulse ticking at the hinge of his jaw.

  George held out his hand to the medical examiner. “We’d like to see what you have.”

  “This is the workup on Judge Kaiser. We’re definitely looking at a homicide—we found metabolized traces of an endotoxin consistent with some sort of bacterial process, induced from an external source. The bacterium in question produced a constriction of the major airways and subsequent lethal asphyxiation. He was poisoned, in other words.”

  George started leafing through the file. Sikes looked over his shoulder at the papers, then back to Allen. “What would cause that?”

  “It’s something new.” George kept reading. “Genetically engineered.”

  Allen nodded. “It appears to affect Newcomers like botulism does humans. Relatively fast-acting; we managed to do a culture and run some donated-tissue tests. The toxin can be fatal anywhere from eight to thirty-six hours after the initial infection.”

  “Somebody created this.” George laid his hands on top of the file. “To kill Newcomers.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.” An alarm bell went off inside Sikes’s head. “What about George? He was there, at the scene—”

  “There’s no need to worry. From the tests we did at the lab, the bacterium doesn’t seem to be contagious from one Newcomer to another. And it can’t live more than six to eight hours outside a host. So the chances are remote of his having picked it up.”

  George leafed through the file again. “How was Judge Kaiser infected?”

  “Through the lungs,” said Allen. “Somehow he inhaled a high concentration of the bacteria. The topical reaction was particularly developed throughout the nasal tissues, somewhat less so at the back of the throat.”

  “Bad news, guys . . .”

  Sikes looked up from the file spread on George’s desk, and saw Zepeda approaching with a single sheet of paper.

  She held it out. “We got another Newcomer corpse. The symptoms look just like Judge Kaiser’s.”

  “All right.” George took the paper from her. “We’d better get going.” He stood up from the desk.

  Sikes pushed him back down with a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe we better go get your shoes back first.”

  Albert carefully folded up the sheets of newspaper he’d spread out. He’d set everything in place—the shoes, the polish, the brush and soft rags—on the farthest table in the station’s dining room, so he wouldn’t be in anybody’s way. There wasn’t space, not really, in the janitors’ back rooms, with all the mops and floor buffers and dusty, chlorine-smelling cases of scrubbing cleanser. Not if he was going to do a good job, the kind of job Detective Two Francisco deserved.

  He’d only gotten to do half the job—the left shoe—when Officer Zepeda had swooped in and snatched up the shoes. She’d said something about George needing them back right then; he’d had to go running after her with the loose shoelace she’d left behind.

  Still, he supposed one shiny shoe was better than none. He set the folded newspapers down, and twisted the lid on the polish to make sure it was good and tight. Maybe all the people who’d stand on George’s left side would look down and know that he was a Detective Two. And then they could tell all the people standing on his right. It might work—as long as somebody knew.

  “Hello, Albert.”

  He looked up and saw May, the girl who worked in the station’s kitchen making all the sandwiches and the little salad plates wrapped in clear plastic.

  Her whole name was May Flower, and he thought that was perfect, because she did seem so pretty to him. Once, when she had first started work here, her name had been May O’Naise—and he had supposed that was okay, too, in a way, because of the sandwiches and stuff. But Officer Zepeda had gotten mad about it, saying that it was a stupid joke, and offensive, and just the kind of thing that those clowns running the Newcomer Relocation Centers thought was so goddamn funny. A joke, like their giving a four like him the human-type name of Albert Einstein. He still didn’t see what was funny about that—he knew that the human Einstein had been an important person, and fours were important, too; there couldn’t be any Tenctonese babies without fours—but he hadn’t argued with her. And then she had brought in the forms for May to change her name, and had taken her down to the courthouse with them. And that had been that.

  “Hello.” He smiled back at her, letting his hands go about their work of getting all his things bunched together. He had spread the newspapers out so there wouldn’t be a mess for her to clean up. “I was just about done here.”

  “That was nice of you. To do that for George.”

  “Well, he’s important now. So we should be proud of him.”

  May stepped closer to him, and touched his shoulder. “I’m proud of you, too, Albert.”

  That puzzled him. “Why?”

  “You keep everything so neat and clean around here—it’s a big job.”

  Was it? He’d have to think about that.

  Sometimes—most of the time—it took him a lot longer to think about the same things other people did, Newcomers and human. Like the way some people ran and some people walked, but they all got to the same place eventually.

  Right now he wanted to say something else to May, but he hadn’t thought of it yet. Or he had, but he hadn’t thought up the words. That was always the hard part.

  “May . . .”

  She was still smiling at him, and waiting.

  It would have to wait awhile longer. From the corner of his eye, he had spotted Grazer coming into the dining area. The human captain had that tight-lipped, fuming look all around him that usually meant he was going to start yelling about something.

  Albert scooped up the shoe-polishing stuff. “I’ll talk to you later.” Then, before she could say anything, or Grazer could catch him, he was headed out the other door.

  Later . . . He dropped the brushes and rags onto his cart. Smiling to himself now, because he knew what he’d tell her.

  The maid sat in one of the apartment’s other rooms—the place seemed to have the square footage of a football f
ield—dabbed her eyes, red from crying, with the corner of her apron. Sikes could hear the soft, distant noises as he watched George examining the corpse on the thick living room carpet.

  “I don’t think you oughtta be in here, George.”

  His partner, wearing a surgical mask, looked up from the late Dr. Peter Bogg. “You heard Lois.” The mask slightly muffled George’s voice. “The bacterium isn’t contagious. Besides, I’m protected.” He touched the white cord tied behind his spotted head.

  “Come on—we don’t even know what we’re dealing with here.”

  “Matt, as Detective Two, it’s incumbent upon me to spearhead this investigation. It’s my responsibility.” He stepped back from the corpse. “We should talk to the maid.”

  A policewoman in uniform brought her in. Sikes showed his badge, then slid his wallet back into his hip pocket. “I know it’s difficult for you right now, but we’d like to ask you a few—”

  “I’m Detective Francisco,” said George. “I’m in charge of the investigation.”

  The maid didn’t catch the irritated glance that Sikes shot his partner.

  “Poor Dr. Bogg . . .” Her words came between sniffles. “Such a lovely man . . .”

  “When was the last time you saw him alive?”

  “Yesterday. Yesterday evening, when he came home. I was off this morning. When I got here, he was already . . . he was already dead.”

  Sikes listened to her answers as he wandered back across the living room. A small box sat on the coffee table, in the middle of torn and crumpled gift wrap. He took a pen from his jacket pocket and pushed the box’s cardboard lid aside.