Alien Nation #2 - Dark Horizon

by K. W. Jeter

  Red, yellow, and blue; three balls that he already knew would be soft to the touch . . .

  “Hey, George.” He pointed to the box on the table. “Maybe you better come over and take a look at this.”

  He came and looked, then turned back toward the maid. “Do you know anything about these?”

  She nodded. “They came for him yesterday. Somebody brought the package to the door.”

  “Did you sign for the package? Did you see the delivery man?”

  “No—they just rang the bell, and left it there.”

  “We can check with the security down in the lobby.” Sikes knew already that they wouldn’t find out much.

  George turned his head to read the card that had slipped from the box’s lid. “From ‘An Admirer.’ ” He took an evidence bag from his coat pocket and handed it to Sikes. “Bag those. Carefully. They could be the murder weapon.”

  For a picnic, he had expected more than this. Like real food, something to eat. As it was, Noah had consumed most of what had come out of Marilyn’s wicker basket. His teacher had packed the basket, and maybe that had been his first mistake, trusting her on that issue and not bothering to suggest that he and Buck pool their money and maybe swing by someplace for a bucket of chicken and raw organ pieces on their way to the park. So he had wound up eating most of the bag of chips that had been in there, and drinking half the six-pack of Coke, and then finding nothing else but a jar of dinky little cornichons and a couple cartons of—big whoop—low-cal yogurt.

  Maybe that was how Marilyn kept her nice figure. But for him, he was lapsing into severe protein deficiency. Any meal where something hadn’t died for you didn’t seem to count.

  Buck was putting on a good show of not minding. He and Marilyn had hardly even bothered to eat, but had dived right into the Flaubert. Like that was something they just couldn’t wait for.

  “The thing is—” Marilyn had seemed to forget all about Noah being there, holding down the far end of the plaid blanket. “—what I think is really important to remember is that for all of Emma’s silliness—her bourgeois values—she’s ultimately a sympathetic character.” Marilyn, sitting cross-legged in jeans, leaned forward, gesturing with one hand as she talked straight to Buck. “She’s really, to use an overworked phrase, a victim of her society.”

  Buck was right on her wavelength. Noah could just about see the brain cells sparking around in his buddy’s head, as though all those spots were going to go flying off.

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Buck had his paperback copy of Madame Bovary cracked open. “She’s just like everybody else—she wasn’t satisfied with what she had.”

  Just like everybody else—Noah made the voice whiney and mocking inside his own head. If that was how this Emma Bovary had felt, then he could dig it. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had. Or more precisely, with what he was getting.

  “What page is that on?” He had skimmed through most of his own copy, a beat-up paperback he’d found in the used bookstore over by the community college. Some little hotshot had gone through the book with a yellow marker, as though every other goddamn line was of earthshaking importance.

  “It’s not spelled out in so many words, Noah.” Marilyn put on her patient voice again. “It’s a sense, a meaning that you have to derive from the totality of the book. Flaubert is a very subtle writer.”

  “Oh.” Flaubert could bite a trouser rhino, as far as Noah was concerned. ‘Subtle’ must mean a lot of words where nothing happened, until you felt your forehead go thunk on the desk.

  She went back to talking to Buck. “What I think the author was trying to get at was that Emma’s sense of worth came only from material possessions or social status—not from anything internal.”

  “But you could really understand her.” Buck was more excited about this than Noah had ever seen him before. “It’s like he’s so good at making you see things. I read it over in French—the imagery’s even stronger.”

  The two of them seemed to remember his presence again, and looked over at him. “Noah,” said Marilyn, “what were your thoughts on the book?”

  “Well, uh, I haven’t really finished it yet. It’s . . . kinda boring.”

  Buck looked at him in amazement. “How can you say it’s boring? It’s not just the story, it’s all the detail of Emma’s crummy everyday life, and the way it’s all different from what she dreams about—”

  “It’s ’cause you can read so fast. No wonder it doesn’t bore you.” He mimicked Buck’s voice. “ ‘I read it over in French.’ Jee-zuss.”

  Marilyn sat up straighter on the picnic blanket. “Hey, I think it’s wonderful that Buck wanted to read it in the original.”

  She would. Noah held back the next words, the even angrier ones, that were about to pop out of his mouth. Time to fall back to the other plan.

  “Yeah . . . yeah, you’re right. That’s cool.” Noah swallowed the knot in his throat. “I just didn’t have time to do that ’cause I was reading some other stuff. Rereading it. ’Cause I thought it had a lot to do with this Flaubert guy, and Madame Bovary, and . . . and all that stuff.” He leaned forward, making the pitch. “It seems to me that like Franz Kafka said a lot of the same stuff.” He reached around behind himself and dug out the beat-up copy that Detective Sikes had laid on him. “I mean, it’s like really all the same thing, isn’t it . . .”

  He went rattling on, the words coming slower and slower as he realized that Marilyn was looking at him as if he were the one who’d turned into a giant bug. Not even in disgust, but just sincere puzzlement.

  “Noah . . .” Marilyn shook her head slowly. “I really don’t think Kafka has anything to do with Flaubert. At least, not in connection with what we’ve been talking about—”

  Screw this. Noah looked up at the sky, scrubbed bare of clouds. “What am I doing this for?” he said aloud. It was all crap, including that jerk-off Sikes’s big-deal advice. Kafka; what a joke. Like some burnt-out cop sitting in his funky apartment had the inside line, on women or anything else. “Who needs it?” He threw Sikes’s book into the center of the blanket as he stood up.

  “Noah, wait—”

  “I get enough of this in school.” He gave an apple-polisher kiss to his clenched fist, and displayed it to Buck. He turned on his heel and strode down the green hillside, to the narrow paths that led out of the park.

  Silence ticked by as Buck watched Noah disappear into the shade under a distant grove of trees.

  “So . . .” Marilyn took a deep breath and picked up her hardbound copy of Madame Bovary. “There’s a real sense of foreboding in the book. It’s going to end disastrously—you just don’t know how . . .”

  C H A P T E R 7

  “I CAN’T GET her to stop crying.”

  Vessna, the newest addition to the Francisco family, lay on the living room couch. Her small legs kicked as her face puckered and reddened with the force of her wailing.

  “I tried everything.” Emily looked in frustration at the infant.

  “It’s not your fault,” Susan told her older daughter. “Her droonal flanges are coming in—it’s painful.” She picked Vessna up, holding her close to comfort her. “Hush . . .” she whispered close to the baby’s ear valley. “It’s okay . . . it’s okay . . . hush.”

  Vessna went on crying, inconsolable.

  “Thank goodness.” Susan turned with the baby in her arms. Her husband, George, had just come into the living room; she had heard him rummaging around in one of their bedroom closets. “You always have the magic touch with her.”

  “Here, I’ll take her.” George had something in one hand; Susan recognized it as a kaif ball, an old pea green one that she thought they’d thrown out a long time ago. With the baby nestled in the crook of one arm, George held the ball close to Vessna and rubbed its soft fabric with his thumb.

  There must have been still a little of the pleasant kaif scent left in the ball—Vessna’s little hands grasped it, hugging it to herself. Her crying dwindled
to a soft whimper.

  “Well, that worked.” Susan didn’t approve of handing children kaif balls every time they stubbed their toes—she didn’t want to be like these human mothers who kept pacifiers stuck in their kids’ mouths all the time—but she supposed it didn’t hurt once in a while. She watched her husband cooing at Vessna, then turned and headed upstairs to finish the clean laundry she’d been sorting out.

  George stroked the baby’s forehead with a fingertip. “Calm down, little leopard-kitty.” That was the pet name his other daughter, Emily, had come up with when she’d first seen her new sister, with her head spots just like the baby Earth animal she’d seen on the Disney Channel. He clicked softly in his throat to her.

  The little hands loosened their grip 0n the kaif ball. Not even whimpering now, though Vessna’s china blue eyes did open a little wider at the sound of the front doorbell ringing.

  “I’ll get it,” said Emily.

  George followed after her, murmuring a Tenctonese lullaby to the baby cradled in his arms.

  Emily pulled open the door, revealing Zepeda and a uniformed officer.

  “Beatrice . . .” He was surprised to see her. “What brings you around here?”

  “We need you down at the station.” Zepeda looked grim-faced, her words clipped. “We got in a letter claiming responsibility for both Judge Kaiser’s and Dr. Bogg’s murders.”

  “I thought we’d already had a couple of those.”

  Zepeda nodded. “Yeah, but we’re pretty sure this one isn’t a crank. There were enough details to indicate some kind of involvement on the part of whoever wrote the letter.”

  He realized that Emily was still standing next to him. He handed Vessna to her. “Emily, take the baby upstairs.”

  Emily held the sleeping baby against her shoulder. “Why can’t I stay and hear?”

  Zepeda shrugged apologetically. “It’s gonna be on the news, anyway.”

  “All right, then.” He knew there was no way of shielding Emily, or any of his children, from the ugly parts of this world. Behind him, he could hear his wife coming down the stairs.

  “The letter’s from some organization calling itself the National Purist Front.” Zepeda read the details from her notepad. “Nobody’s heard of it before now; we don’t have anything in the department files with that name attached. Anyway, what this so-called NPF says is that the Kaiser and Bogg killings were the first in what’s supposedly going to be a continuing campaign to ‘execute’ prominent Newcomers.”

  He had pulled his coat from the entranceway closet; he shrugged it on, turning toward Susan as he did so. “I’ll try not to be gone long.”

  She stepped closer to him, a look of concern on her face. “George . . . you’re as prominent as any Newcomer.”

  That was true; there had already been a quick piece about his promotion on the local news, and a reporter from the Times’s metro section had called to arrange a phone interview.

  “Chief Amburgey’s already thought about that, ma’am.” Zepeda tilted her head to indicate the uniformed officer at her side. “That’s why Officer Dial is here. The chief’s ordered protection for all Newcomer civil servants above D-six, and their families.” The officer nodded crisply.

  “Don’t worry.” George gathered Susan and Emily together in his arms and hugged them. “This’ll all be over real soon.”

  Zepeda was waiting for him out in the driveway. He could sense his family watching as he walked toward the car.

  He had his hands full with coffee and two doughnuts stacked. Sikes set them down on his desk, then took the first steaming hit of the morning and felt the caffeine jump-start his brain.

  Now he could talk. He leaned back with the top doughnut and looked over at George. “You’re here early. Don’t you know that Detective Twos get to sleep in?”

  George didn’t even look up from the files on his desk. “I’m waiting for an analysis report from SID.”

  “On what?”

  Albert came along the squad-room aisle, bearing a cup with a tea bag string and tag hanging over the side.

  “You heard about that letter from the National Purist Front—” He glanced up as Albert set the cup down. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, I did. Eventually. Zepeda told me when I came in.”

  Albert came close to giving a little bow as he said, “You’re welcome.”

  Sikes rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. This deferential-respect business was getting old fast.

  “I asked SID to run some tests.” George dunked the teabag up and down by its string. “Comparing the NPF letter with the previous threatening ones that Judge Kaiser received.”

  “That was a real stroke of genius. Boy, I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Sikes let the sarcasm drop. “So, uh, why didn’t you let me know?”

  “I am letting you know.”

  “I mean, before now. Partner.”

  The phone on George’s desk rang. “It’s nothing to get worked out about. I assumed that you were still asleep at home, and I didn’t want to wake you. That’s all.” He picked up the phone. “Detective Francisco.”

  Yeah, right. Sikes bit and chewed dry crumbs.

  “I see . . . Thank you, Lois.” George hung up. “That was the medical examiner.”

  “So she calls you. That’s the way it works now, huh?”

  With exaggerated care, George lifted out the teabag and dropped it in the trash can. “Allen’s lab confirmed our suspicion. The kaif balls had been dosed—there were still traces of the bacterium on them. By sniffing them, the victims inhaled the lethal agent.”

  Sikes’s phone rang. “Well, I’ll be dipped.” He swiveled his chair around. “Somebody remembered me.” He picked it up. “Sikes here.” He looked up and saw Zepeda standing at the side of his desk, a file in her hands. Before he could take it, she had walked on past. “Oh, hi, Cathy.” From the corner of his eye he watched as Zepeda handed the file to George.

  “From SID,” said Zepeda.

  “Tonight?” It took a moment for him to drag his attention back to the phone conversation. “Sure. Yeah, I’d like that.” Cathy rattled on a bit longer. “Okay, see you then.”

  Zepeda walked by his desk as he hung up. “Just like my cousin Raphael . . .”

  “Matt, we’ve got the analysis on that National Purist Front letter.” George held up a sheet of paper from the file. “The writer used an inkjet printer, probably an inexpensive Taiwanese model. With a misaligned print head—there’s a distinctive skew mark on most of the capital letters.” He traced down the paper with a fingertip. “And the same skew mark appears on one of the threat letters received by Judge Kaiser. That letter was signed.” He laid the paper down. “So we have a definite suspect now—Michael Bukowski.”

  Sikes nodded. “I saw him when he was in here for preliminary questioning. A real mental case.”

  George flipped to another section of the file. “Bukowski works maintenance in Griffith Park.” He closed the file and pushed his chair back from the desk. “Let’s go pick him up.”

  They spotted him on a green hillside, picking up trash with a canvas bag and a grabber stick.

  Bukowski spotted them at the same time, his head lifting and gaze scanning around like that of a forest animal catching the scent of hunters approaching.

  “Come on, he’s seen us.” Sikes pulled George away from thanking the crew foreman who’d brought them out to the spot.

  Dirty paper plates and fast-food wrappers spilled from the mouth of the canvas bag as Bukowski dropped it. He flung aside the grabber stick, backing up a few steps, then turning and breaking into a dead run down the hill.

  “Stop!” George called after the suspect. “This is the police!” They had gotten halfway down the hillside; below, they could see Bukowski vault over a low stone wall and scramble into the thicker brush beyond. George turned and ran back toward the car they’d left on the park’s service road as Sikes tried to keep from falling as he raced downhill.

  He caught himse
lf against the wall; hands braced against the stones, he could see through the tangle of foliage to a path winding below. There was Bukowski, plus a bicyclist in black racing shorts and lightweight Bell helmet, tilting his head back to drink from a plastic squeeze bottle. Bukowski knocked the bicyclist stumbling onto the grass, then scooped up the fallen machine.

  “Hey—”

  Low branches scraped across Sikes’s face as he dived through the last of the brush. He stumbled onto the path just as Bukowski got the bicycle into motion, wobbling at first, then picking up speed.

  “Hey, that’s my bike!”

  The car, with George at the wheel, slammed to a stop a few feet away. Off the narrow path, the right-side tires tore muddy ruts in the grass.

  “Matt—get in!”

  Sikes grabbed the door handle on the left. “I’ll drive—”

  “Get in the car!” shouted George.

  The car was already rolling. The bicyclist scooted back against the nearest tree; Sikes barely had time enough to get the rear door open and scramble inside.

  He clambered over the seat and dropped into the passenger side as George punched the accelerator. “What the hell are you doing—” He got himself upright, his shoulder slamming against the door as the car swerved. “You’ve never driven pursuit!”

  Grim-faced, George stared straight through the windshield. “Just hang on.”

  The car slammed across a gully in the path. The front wheels went momentarily airborne as they crested the next rise. In the distance ahead, Bukowski leaned the bicycle around a sweeping curve.

  The pathway fed into one of the park’s roads open to motor traffic. George had gained a few yards on the straightaway, flooring the accelerator. Bukowski flew past the stop sign at the hill’s bottom, digging into the bike’s pedals, hunched over the bars. A Toyota emerged from the mouth of the tunnel ahead, barely managing to swerve and avoid hitting Bukowski.

  “Watch it—” Sikes braced his hands against the dash as George swung the car hard left. A quick glimpse of the faces inside the Toyota as George swerved around, the car’s rear fender scraping the other’s grille and taking out a headlight.