Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!

by Gary Phillips

  If Liz had known Culver was taking her picture when she went into Adari’s clinic, she might have killed him on the spot. If the looey hadn’t threatened to make her private business public, Liz would have been happy to see Culver’s murderer walk free, even if the Sixth Commandment didn’t give you the option to choose who you did or didn’t murder.

  When Wrexall’s shift ended, Finchley was still in the station. Liz went to her own desk, pretending to busy herself with cold-case files. Liz kept on working through the shift change. Finchley finally left for the day, with a grunt at Liz to let her know she was still on probation, but holding up well. Liz waited until she was sure the lieutenant had pulled out of the parking lot before going over to Oliver’s desk and logging on to his computer. She could have accessed the Culver case from her own machine but she didn’t want a trail following behind her.

  Culver’s password was easy—his star number plus the jersey numbers of his two favorite athletes. Liz loaded the case notes onto a flash drive, logged off, and was in her car before third shift roll call started.

  She drove to an Internet café in one of the busy student neighborhoods. She even paid to park—no point in some meter maid reading her plates and noting that a cop had parked here. I’m a thief, she imagined herself telling Grandpapa, a thief of information who knows my guilt so thoroughly I’m trying to hide my tracks in someone else’s computer. Even as she squirmed, she paid cash for time on a machine.

  The Culver murder was important enough that plenty of people had written notes into the case file. The report from the crime lab: Culver had been killed by one of the sticks used in the posters the protestors had carried along Lake Shore Drive. Someone searching the crime scene had found the shattered pieces of wood covered with Culver’s brains and blood, but they hadn’t found usable prints or any DNA besides the victim’s.

  Oliver had entered his notes on the investigation Dr. Adari had started into Culver’s life and finances. Adari hadn’t discovered anything criminal, although Culver had been taking home close to a million dollars a year from his organization. Oliver had written, “Major motive here,” in the margin. Liz shook her head—that was a motive for Culver to kill Adari, not the other way around.

  She trolled through blogs and social networks for a bit—sometimes killers made coy comments on websites, eager for recognition of how clever they’d been. The anti-abortion vitriol was so extreme across the Net—directed at Dr. Adari, who deserved to be in everyone’s gun sights, according to many posts—that Liz stopped reading it.

  She did find a number of photos of Culver, taken at the protest by his adoring supporters, and now posted as precious icons of his martyrdom. Some of the shots showed him with the four children who’d accompanied him to the march. The two boys were dressed in identical pale-blue blazers and ties, the girls in frilly white dresses with blue ribbons, despite the chilly weather.

  When Liz had gone to the house two days ago, before Finchley took her off the case, the girls still had on the frilly dresses they’d worn to the march and the younger boy, Jimmy, was wearing his pale-blue blazer and a tie. Only the oldest boy had shed his formal clothes for a sweatshirt and jeans. Maybe that was the one place where he could vent a rebellious adolescent spirit. Liz thought of all her teenaged fights with Grandpapa—maybe it would have been better if her only rebellion had been to wear a sweatshirt to Temple.

  The house had been spilling over with children—Arnie’s eight, augmented by a dozen more belonging to the neighbors and in-laws who’d gathered to console the widow.

  Liz had mouthed the conventional phrases to Culver’s widow: sorry to disturb you, but if I could talk to the children who were with your husband this morning? She tried not to flinch from the crucifixes on the walls.

  “I thought you’d made an arrest” one of the neighbors said. “One of the baby killers.”

  Liz shook her head. “We’re just gathering information. That’s why anything the kids saw or heard could help.”

  The women reluctantly brought forward the four who’d been with Arnie. Lucy, the oldest of the Culver children, sixteen, followed by Paul, fifteen, and Veronica and Jimmy, seven and eight.

  “We take turns going with Dad,” Lucy said, when Liz asked why they’d been at the fundraiser with Arnie. “It was Paul’s and my turn, and we’re training the little ones, how to talk to ladies when they’re about to go into death chambers, how to tell them not to kill their unborn babies.” Her voice was soft, matter-of-fact.

  “Your teachers are okay with you missing school?” Liz asked.

  “We’re home-schooled, so the atheists can’t force us to deny Christ crucified the way they do in school.”

  The words seemed to be spoken by rote, auto-pilot. Liz wondered why the parents didn’t send the children to Catholic school—there were more than enough to choose from—but she knew she shouldn’t get into an argument with the children, or the mother.

  “So two of you stayed at the harbor to hand out literature, and two of you went with your dad?”

  “Jimmy and I, we were at the harbor. Paul and Nicki, Veronica, they went on down the path with Daddy. Daddy was checking on the pickets—our people get discouraged sometimes standing all alone. You can’t believe the horrid things Christ haters shout out of their cars. One of our ladies was even crying. Nicki cheered her up, didn’t you?”

  The eight-year-old nodded without speaking. Paul and Jimmy were silent, too. When Liz asked what they’d seen or heard on the lake path, they just shook their heads.

  “The lady you gave the flier to, the one who threw it at your daddy, did you see her on the lake path?”

  Nicki and Paul shook their heads again.

  “Were you together the whole time?” Liz asked idly.

  Nicki gasped, as if Liz had guessed a secret, but Lucy said, “Of course they were together the whole time.”

  “I thought you stayed up by the yacht where the fundraiser was,” Liz said. “What did you see, Nicki?”

  “I didn’t see, I couldn’t see, there was a fog,” the younger girl said, breathlessly. “I thought I lost Paul but he was right next to me the whole time. I started to cry, I mean, I almost started to cry.”

  “That’s right. You’re a big girl and only babies cry,” Lucy said.

  Liz tried to probe, gently, sure she’d seen something that frightened her, but Lucy kept answering for her sister, until one of the adults said the children had been through enough. No more questions.

  Now, in the Internet café, Liz tried to think it through. The child had seen something, but what? Had she run away from her brother, the way children do—geese, seagulls, boats, all more interesting than one more abortion protest in a life that had clearly been filled with them—and been scolded? Or had she seen her father’s assailant?

  It was eleven p.m. now. Liz tried to fight down her panic. Think, think, there’s a clue in here someplace. Her own notes—the woman who’d discovered the body had said she thought she heard a child crying.

  Nicki, Liz thought. The little Culver girl who thought she’d lost her brother in the fog. She’d started to cry when she was supposed to be cheerful. What an abominable way to treat a small child!

  Panic, and now anger. Two bad companions for a detective. Liz unplugged the flash drive and went back into the night.

  She drove back to the crime scene, but it was too dark to see anything. Liz’s brother owned an apartment downtown; he’d given Liz a key when he left for Denmark. She crossed the park and let herself in, slept a few hours in his guest bed, but as soon as the sky began to lighten, she went back to the bench where Culver’s body had been found.

  The wind had shifted in the night; the fog that had shrouded the city for the last week was finally gone. Liz paced restlessly around the lakefront and the harbor. The benches were filled with the homeless, their possessions carefully laid beneath them to avoid midnight predators. Liz checked each man she came to for a sign of life, but she didn’t try to waken them,
not until she’d covered a quarter of a mile and found one of them with a pale-blue blazer folded under his head.

  Finchley himself drove out to La Grange with his detectives and the jacket. He let Liz join the team, but told her she was still on probation; she was not to say anything.

  When Mrs. Culver came to the door, Finchley showed her the jacket. “We think your son, Paul, lost this in all the confusion on Monday, ma’am, but we want to make sure it’s his before we send it to the lab for tests.”

  In the background, he could hear the children, the oldest girl, Lucy, explaining an arithmetic problem to a small child just out of his sight; a Spanish lesson streaming over the Internet in a corner of the living room. The children were so used to adults coming and going at all hours that they didn’t pay attention to the police, until Nicki, passing by with a peanut butter sandwich, screamed, “Paul, they got your jacket.”

  The doorway was suddenly filled with children; as in Peter Pan, they seemed to tumble from every doorway, every piece of furniture. Mrs. Culver looked around her in bewilderment.

  “Paul, is this your jacket? Did you lose it at the protest on Monday?”

  The boy’s face was very white. He stared at it for a minute without speaking, then his face contorted into sobs.

  His mother frowned at him. “We don’t cry in public, Paul, we control ourselves for the sake of Jesus, who died for us without crying.”

  “I’m tired of Jesus!” Paul shouted.

  His brothers and sisters gave a collective gasp and shrank from him.

  “I don’t want to be a show child, I don’t want to be in court so everyone can see you had a million children and never used birth control, I don’t want to go to marches and clinics, I want to play football and have a life like other guys my age! I told you this a million times, I told Dad, but neither of you ever gave a damn about any of us! We were just props to you, props you could show off in public. He sat there on that bench starting to lecture me on my duty to the unborn and I said, ‘What about your duty to the born, to us, your children,’ and he hit me! He hit me one time too many.

  “I picked up that sign, that stupid picture of all those bleeding babies. He worshipped those bleeding babies but it didn’t matter how many times he made us bleed! And you, you just said, amen, praise Jesus to whatever he said, so I hit him, I wanted him to see how it felt, and I just kept hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. Then Nicki started to cry because there was blood on my jacket. So I dropped it in the harbor and took her for an ice cream, and the rest of you can go kneel down and say your rosaries but my only prayer is, ‘Thank God that bully can’t hit any of us again.’”

  Back at the station, Liz asked Finchley what would happen to Paul.

  “He’s still a minor. There’s a lot of psychological stress. If they get him a good lawyer he might have a chance.”

  “Whoa, that mother!” Billings said. “She’ll skin him and fry him herself if the state doesn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, that was my impression, too,” Finchley agreed. “Marchek—what were you doing at the crime scene this morning, when I’d given you a direct order to stay away from the case.”

  “Uh, sir, I couldn’t sleep, I was taking a walk” What did the Torah say about an incomplete truth that resulted in a lie? Liz couldn’t remember.

  “Marchek, if I was Mrs. Culver, I’d hand you over for disciplinary action. I am even less merciful than she is—I’m putting you back on the street with Billings. But if you ever again have private contact with a witness to a crime, whether you run into them sleep-walking or meet them in your synagogue, and you tell me about it first. Or you give me your badge. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Liz saluted and left the room.

  “What was that about?” Oliver demanded.

  “I was showing off,” she said to Oliver. “He didn’t like it.”

  G’neivat daat, that was it. Theft of the mind. She’d just told another half-truth. Maybe quarter truth. She’d tell Grandpapa the whole story tonight and see whether he thought the Torah gave her any wiggle room.

  The Lunatics

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  They were very near the center of the moon, Jakob told them. He was the newest member of the bullpen, but already their leader.

  “How do you know?” Solly challenged him. It was stifling, the hot air thick with the reek of their sweat, and a pungent stink from the waste bucket in the corner. In the pure black, under the blanket of the rock’s basalt silence, their shifting and snuffling loomed large, defined the size of the pen. “I suppose you see it with your third eye.”

  Jakob had a laugh as big as his hands. He was a big man, never a doubt of that. “Of course not, Solly. The third eye is for seeing in the black. It’s a natural sense just like the others. It takes all the data from the rest of the senses, and processes them into a visual image transmitted by the third optic nerve, which runs from the forehead to the sight centers at the back of the brain. But you can only focus it by an act of the will—same as with all the other senses. It’s not magic. We just never needed it till now.”

  “So how do you know?”

  “It’s a problem in spherical geometry, and I solved it. Oliver and I solved it. This big vein of blue runs right down into the core, I believe, down into the moon’s molten heart where we can never go. But we’ll follow it as far as we can. Note how light we’re getting. There’s less gravity near the center of things.”

  “I feel heavier than ever.”

  “You are heavy, Solly. Heavy with disbelief.”

  “Where’s Freeman?” Hester said in her crow’s rasp.

  No one replied.

  Oliver stirred uneasily over the rough basalt of the pen’s floor. First Naomi, then mute Elijah, now Freeman. Somewhere out in the shafts and caverns, tunnels and corridors—somewhere in the dark maze of mines, people were disappearing. Their pen was emptying, it seemed. And the other pens?

  “Free at last,” Jakob murmured.

  “There’s something out there” Hester said, fear edging her harsh voice, so that it scraped Oliver’s nerves like the screech of an ore car’s wheels over a too-sharp bend in the tracks. “Something out there!”

  The rumor had spread through the bullpens already, whispered mouth to ear or in huddled groups of bodies. There were thousands of shafts bored through the rock, hundreds of chambers and caverns. Lots of these were closed off, but many more were left open, and there was room to hide—miles and miles of it. First some of their cows had disappeared. Now it was people too. And Oliver had heard a miner jabbering at the low edge of hysteria, about a giant foreman gone mad after an accident took both his arms at the shoulder—the arms had been replaced by prostheses, and the foreman had escaped into the black, where he preyed on miners off by themselves, ripping them up, feeding on them—

  They all heard the steely squeak of a car’s wheel. Up the mother shaft, past cross tunnel Forty; had to be foremen at this time of shift. Would the car turn at the fork to their concourse? Their hypersensitive ears focused on the distant sound; no one breathed. The wheels squeaked, turned their way. Oliver, who was already shivering, began to shake hard.

  The car stopped before their pen. The door opened, all in darkness. Not a sound from the quaking miners.

  Fierce white light blasted them and they cried out, leaped back against the cage bars vainly. Blinded, Oliver cringed at the clawing of a foreman’s hands, searching under his shirt and pants. Through pupils like pinholes he glimpsed brief black-and-white snapshots of gaunt bodies undergoing similar searches, then blows. Shouts, cries of pain, smack of flesh on flesh, an electric buzzing. Shaving their heads, could it be that time again already? He was struck in the stomach, choked around the neck. Hester’s long wiry brown arms, wrapped around her head. Scalp burned, buzzz all chopped up. Thrown to the rock.

  “Where’s the twelfth?” In the foremen’s staccato language. No one answered.

  The foremen left, light receding with them until
it was black again, the pure dense black that was their own. Except now it was swimming with bright red bars, washing around in painful tears. Oliver’s third eye opened a little, which calmed him, because it was still a new experience; he could make out his companions, dim redblack shapes in the black, huddled over themselves, gasping.

  Jakob moved among them, checking for hurts, comforting. He cupped Oliver’s forehead and Oliver said, “It’s seeing already.”

  “Good work.” On his knees Jakob clumped to their shit bucket, took off the lid, reached in. He pulled something out. Oliver marveled at how clearly he was able to see all this. Before, floating blobs of color had drifted in the black; but he had always assumed they were afterimages, or hallucinations. Only with Jakob’s instruction had he been able to perceive the patterns they made, the vision that they constituted. It was an act of will. That was the key.

  Now, as Jakob cleaned the object with his urine and spit, Oliver found that the eye in his forehead saw even more, in sharp blood etchings. Jakob held the lump overhead, and it seemed it was a little lamp, pouring light over them in a wavelength they had always been able to see, but had never needed before. By its faint ghostly radiance the whole pen was made clear, a structure etched in blood, redblack on black. “Promethium,” Jakob breathed. The miners crowded around him, faces lifted to it. Solly had a little pug nose, and squinched his face terribly in the effort to focus. Hester had a face to go with her voice, stark bones under skin scored with lines. “The most precious element. On Earth our masters rule by it. All their civilization is based on it, on the movement inside it, electrons escaping their shells and crashing into neutrons, giving off heat and more blue as well. So they condemn us to a life of pulling it out of the moon for them.”