Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  “It comes from another dimension,” the kid said.

  I looked up. Tim Novak stood there staring at the cabinet. He had a big grin on his face, like father, like son. “I found it one day when I was, uh, playing with some toys. There was a leak between null spaces and I just grabbed it and pulled it into our dimension.” Tim looked down at his right thumb and forefinger. “It burned! It did. I shoulda used pliers.”

  “Uh-huh.” I looked over at the Novaks, and the way Dad looked at his little boy, I could see that the old man believed what the kid said. Not me, though.

  “Sure is hot,” I said.

  “If I didn’t pipe heat off of it, it would melt into the ground,” Novak said. “When it was smaller, that’s how I excavated the basement.” He waved at the walls, the floor. “I have heat coils running through all the walls, through the floor, even the roof. You might have noticed there wasn’t any snow on the roof? On the walkway? Heating coils there, too. The walls are R-3, basically the insulation of Sheetrock and wood.”

  Novak opened another little cabinet, with all sorts of dials and wiring. “There’s a little steam turbine in there. I generate my own energy, trade it to some people for, well, stuff.” He pointed at my handheld. “Go ahead, call your dispatch, ask them to check with the power company. I’m sending energy back into the grid, fifteen times my monthly allocation. That’s positive energy, in excess of my ration.” Novak crossed his hands over his chest. “Still think I’m violating the law?”

  “Something’s not right,” I said. “Something’s just not right.”

  Novak shrugged. “So arrest me. That’s what six of you bozos did. And ten of you didn’t. Those ten are the smarter ones.”

  In the end, though, it wasn’t my call. I transmitted my report, bumped it up to the chief, and I don’t know, Stark must have been in really good with the chief, because a few minutes later, the order came back.

  Arrest the bastard.

  Yeah, and even though it was the chief’s call, guess who’s now sitting in a guard shack at Boundary, checking visas of Canadians coming into the States for a little of that fast and easy American nooky? Yeah, it’s the cardinal rule of bureaucracy: the bosses get all the glory, the grunts get all the blame.

  So, I called in backup, got almost the whole department, forensics and engineering and the chief himself, even Stark along as a reserve office to sign people in as they came and went. They tore up Novak’s floor. They punched holes in his walls. They tore up his steam turbine, disconnected the cooling pipes—because that was what they were, really—and would have taken the Duh Vice, except it got so hot no one could handle it, and it started to melt through its stand.

  Even though I was the investigating officer, I got shoved aside as more and more big-shot cops came in to take over the case, then bigger-shot cops came in to take over the case from them, until after three days of this, with me standing guard by then, and no one allowed to enter or leave without federal clearance, by God, federal clearance, well, eventually the black ops guys showed up.

  We all knew about them. The suits. The guys in the crisp white shirts, the dark glasses, little Bluetooth ear sets so tiny you could hardly see them. Those guys. Spooks and dark agents, people so weird and funky and mysterious I couldn’t even sign them in by name, just checkoff codes, Agent 1, Agent 2, Agent 3, and the big cheese, Agent 4, who everybody called Mr. Smith.

  OK, what was really hinky was that Novak knew them. They came in and bantered with him, joked around with the kid, called them Jim and Tim. After a while they shut the door on me, and I stood out there in the arctic entryway, sitting on a rough bench, the front door open since it was still so damn hot. I got hotter and hotter, the heat blowing through that flimsy little inside door, blowing over me and making the subzero air outside steam. I realized then what had happened. Our cops had disassembled the Duh Vice, and the black ops guys were putting it back together. After a while they all came out, said good-bye to Novak, and escorted me to my patrol van.

  Well, they let me have the dignity of walking with them, but I knew what the little taps on the shoulder meant, the little push on the elbow. They were escorting me.

  Back at the station, the chain of command unfolded in reverse. The director of the Resource Allocation Department took over the chief’s office, then he called in his deputy director, and she called in the director of enforcement, and he called in the chief, and he called in the lieutenant. The lieutenant called in the sergeants, all three of them, then they called in the senior officer, then they called in me, the junior senior officer and the investigating officer, until we were all crammed in there, with Mr. Smith standing behind all my superior officers, and everyone staring at me, the investigating officer.

  They made a point of telling me that—the directors, the colonel, the chief, the LT, sarges 1, 2, and 3. “He’s the investigating officer,” as if I was the one who called in trouble, as if I was the one the who made the command decision to arrest Novak.

  OK, I got it. I was the arresting officer of record. Which was how I wound up there in the office with the whole organizational chart lining up to grind me into the carpet. One by one they chewed out my ass, and when they were all done, the chief handed me my transfer papers for a post I for damn sure didn’t remember putting in for, but there it was: Boundary.

  After I looked at my papers, after I saw my career fade away like steam rolling off Novak’s Duh Vice, Mr. Smith excused everyone, took over the chief’s office, and sat me down, “officer to officer,” he put it, so I would understand.

  Oh, I understood by then. I had figured it out. But Mr. Smith had to explain it to me anyway.

  “You should have just let Mr. Novak be,” he said. He shook his head. “I guess it’s our fault, really. When he moved here, we should have warned you. The RAD.”

  “Warned us?”

  “To leave him alone. To pretend like the Duh Vice never existed.”

  “What device?” I asked.

  “You’re learning fast,” he said. “Too late.”

  “Yeah, too late.” I looked at him. “But why?” I knew why, but Mr. Smith had to tell me. I wanted a senior agent of the United States government to tell me why I was to shut up about the energy source that could save our country, that could give us unlimited cheap energy, that could restore our rightful power in the world, and maybe, just maybe, kick some Canadian butt.

  “Because we don’t need it. The Duh Vice.”

  “Don’t need it? While people are shivering in houses set at fifty-eight degrees? While the U.S. gross national product has declined 750 percent since 2010? While people are going without good medical care—”

  “Oh, shut up, you little ninny,” Smith said. “Yeah, we’re poorer—poorer, but not poor. Yeah, we aren’t the Top Dog in the world anymore, like it’s 2008. Yeah, we’ve had our trade cut off because the world hates America. So what? No one is trying to blow us up. No one is trying to pick a fight with us. Europe and China get to be the world’s policemen, and Americans don’t have to die trying to bring democracy and freedom to suck-ass little countries who’d rather be told what to do by priests and mullahs and dictators anyway.”

  “But—”

  “But,” Smith raised a finger. “It’s taken us decades to convince Americans not to be the wasteful assholes we once were. We’re not a nation of fat slobs. We walk and exercise and eat right and live longer. Healthier. Happier… yes, happier. We don’t waste food, waste resources. Our rivers and lakes and oceans are clean again, you can breathe fresh air, you don’t risk death in high-speed car accidents. It’s a better world. Think about it. If we gave America cheap energy, what would happen?”

  I thought about it. I could sleep warm at night. I could eat a full meal every day and not just at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I could travel outside of Alaska. I could go someplace warm. I stayed quiet, though. I couldn’t argue with Smith, not with his guns and his power and the mysterious black ops. I knew the system.

  Som
eone had to be hosed. That someone was me.

  “Yes, sir,” was all I could say. “I understand.”

  So here I am in my shack, trying to keep warm. Actually, doing a damn good job of it. Novak further explained the Duh Vice to me, at least in a way I could understand. He said it was like a hernia between dimensions or worlds of folds of worlds, I never did quite get it. The Duh Vice slipped from one world to another, and where it slipped, it protruded like the inside of the sun, white-hot and warm and with unlimited energy. Little Timmy, the guy with the spooky eyes, had poked open the hole and pulled the Duh Vice out. No one figured out how he did it, but it didn’t matter. The Novaks had all the power they needed.

  And so did I. See, that was what I got for my silence, for sucking up my assignment to Boundary. I got the little shack. I got the day-in and day-out duty of checking passports. I got the job and the pension and the godforsaken loneliness. But I also got the Duh Vice.

  Or part of it, anyway. Sometimes it got too big, Novak said, and he’d figured out a way to pinch off a little bit of it, like sourdough starter. It would get bigger and bigger with time, and when that happened, there was a number I should call and either Novak or Smith or someone would come and pinch off another little part of the Duh Vice and take it away. I don’t know where. There was talk the U.S. had this super-secret project to build a star drive, but that was just talk.

  All I know was, there in my little shack, with the big basement hollowed out under the trapdoor, and the little tropical paradise with the fish pond and the palm trees and the orange trees, there inside, for once, I was nice and warm.

  Nice and warm, indeed.

  Weight of the World

  John Straley

  The fat man rubbed his belly in the sun. He was happy, after his long night of work, feeling the warmth easing out over the Tasman Sea.

  A black dwarf with Maori tattoos covering his torso walked up to the fat man with a frosted glass of beer.

  “Congratulations, sir,” the little man said without looking up into his face.

  “Thank you, Clive,” the big man said without taking his eyes off the rising sun. “It goes without saying that I’m grateful to you and the crew. Heck of a job this year. Top rate, really.”

  “Too kind, sir,” he said, and backed away, with a stiff, half-bent bow.

  As he watched the little Maori go, the fat man recognized his nagging irritation with his little employees: their fingers wriggling like link sausages at the end of their arms, and the constant tinkle of bells… and even though the little buggers sometimes made his skin crawl, he had to admit they were his family. “We are all freaks here,” the fat man had often thought while working at his bench, surrounded by hard-scrabbling little men with their wheezy voices, “and there is nothing any of us can do about that.”

  The delivery team always ended their long night’s work there, at Young Nick’s Head, along the coast of New Zealand. By a fine trick of geography and the arbitrary date line, it was one of the first pieces of land to greet the new day. Of any sunrise over dry land, it was the closest to the first. He leaned his head back and took a long drink of beer, wiping his mustache with the back of his hand.

  They would rest on the beach for a few weeks. The crew would take care of the equipment and the stock. He would sleep and settle his frayed nerves, then the preparations would begin again, as they always did… returning as relentlessly as this promised sunrise. He was tired, he had to admit it. The responsibility, the millions of intricate moves and judgments he had to make in pulling it off year after year, were beginning to take their toll.

  “Let it go…” he said aloud to no one but the surf birds skimming the edges of the waves. Then he heard bells frantically cackling up the trail behind him.

  “Sir…” the Maori dwarf said, clearly out of breath, “I think you better come… no… I’m sure of it, sir.” Then he turned and ran off, leaving behind only a puff of dust like a bad odor.

  The fat man let out a long sigh and lingered for a moment. Clive’s tone of voice worried him, and the fat man was tired and wanted to stretch out his feeling of satisfaction for another year done.

  “Sir?” the little voice called out from down the hill.

  “Coming,” he mumbled as he filled his beer glass.

  He walked down the trail and reached a grassy flat. A smaller man lay sprawled at Clive’s feet. His legs and arms were splayed out like a broken marionette that had fallen from the sky. The fat man slowed down, but the bulk of his great belly kept him moving toward the scene.

  “I just found him like this, sir,” Clive said, his cartoonish voice scratchy and pitched higher than normal. “I didn’t touch a thing. I swear.”

  The big man knelt and looked at the head of the tiny sprawled creature. The back of his skull was soft and pulpy red. A bloody rock sparkled like a ruby in the middle of the trail, where someone with tiny blood-spattered feet had run through the dust.

  “Holy Moly,” Santa Claus said, “this elf is dead!”

  “It appears so,” Clive said.

  Santa Claus didn’t speak for several moments. “Well,” he said as he drained off his beer in three gulps, “put something around the body to keep everyone away from him, then gather the others down by the water.”

  Clive was choking back his tears. “What should I use for perimeter tape, sir?” the distraught dwarf said.

  “It doesn’t matter, Clive,” Santa said softly. “I suppose we have some ribbon left over. Get James to help you.”

  The dwarf wandered off, still stunned. The fat man stood up and took one last look at the sun easing over the water. It was a fine cool morning of what promised to be a warm day.

  “Dear Lord,” he said aloud. “Little Cletus…” And he put his empty beer glass into the massive pocket of his sweat-stained red pants, stood up, and walked down to the water’s edge.

  The delivery team was made up of six: four elves and two dwarfs, who traveled with him on the night. Each had his job: navigation, gift preparation, list minding, and engineering. Cletus had been the gift-preparation elf. He rode with the sack. The dwarfs both sat second chair. One was a navigator, and the other was a wrangler, who looked after the stock. The fat man drove and did the deliveries. It was a busy night, of course, and all of them were tired. In a normal year they would spend the weeks on the beach in New Zealand, sleeping mostly, eating what they brought with them, and watching the reindeer wander the hillside, feeding and rolling in the dust, their harnesses off but for a garland of bells around their necks so they could be easily found when it was time to go north.

  It was one of the most pleasant moments of their brief hiatus, walking out to the beach on that first morning of that new year. All of the elves and dwarfs stripped down to their shorts and the fat man himself without his shirt on, the sun blasting down on them, the rush of the waves, the smell of the warm sea, and the sound of the bells tinkling high up on the hillside. It was the moment he looked forward to all year.

  That moment would be cut short by all the messiness. “Poor murdered elf,” the fat man said aloud as he lumbered down the warm sand. “Poor… poor thing.” Then he stopped short in front of the small gathering.

  “Everyone here, Clive?” Santa Claus asked the young Maori dwarf.

  “Well, sir… Cletus… of course… Cletus… is, well…”

  “Dead, Clive. I wasn’t really expecting him to be in the muster. Anyone else?”

  “I cannot find Young Bob, sir.” Clive could not bring his eyes to meet the fat man’s. Young Bob was the list-minder elf. He was called “Young” Bob because of his advanced age. He might, in fact, have been the oldest living creature on the crew. There were probably bristlecone pines that were as old as the list minder.

  “And the list?”

  “Gone, as well, I’m afraid, sir.”

  The fat man rubbed his beard and looked around at the rest of the crew. They looked all the more frail for their fear, and their worry. There they stood wit
h their plump little limbs to the sunshine, their faces feeling the first real warmth of the year, and all of them looked to him with their faith and loyalty intact. He felt a twinge of guilt at his earlier irritation.

  “The list is blank now, isn’t it, sir? What could anyone possibly want with a blank list?”

  “I don’t know, Bunny,” the fat man said to the Jamaican wrangler dwarf with the red-and-green ribbon entwined in his dreads. “Just get the stock together now. There will be one missing, but that’s all right. Don’t waste time looking.”

  He looked at the others. “Make all preparations, and load poor Cletus into the sleigh. We’ll rest on the ice and feed the stock on grain for a few weeks.” They started to walk slowly up the beach, leaving the meandering tracks of creatures who didn’t really want to go anywhere. “I promise you, boys, we will have a proper vacation after we get this all sorted out. And double rations of beer for the trip home… for all but the navigator.”

  A halfhearted cheer rose from the beach fringe, and the little men wandered toward the harness pile.

  Like many things surrounding Christmas, not even Santa understood everything. The physics of compressed speed and time, how he managed to travel so far and so fast in the given time, was a mystery, and he was at a loss to explain his ability to travel up and down through narrow chimneys and sections of ducting. He did not know the mechanics of such things. Much like faith itself, the magic of their lives was too exquisite to question. It was simply possible and he did it.

  But the list was a much more troubling mystery. There were not two lists of children in the sleigh. That had long ago become too cumbersome. For the last hundred years all children were assumed to be good, so a census was taken. It had been a wonderful change when it was first introduced to Santa Claus, who didn’t like the thought of the naughty children being slighted on Christmas morning. It had weighed on him for centuries. It seemed punitive and unloving to exclude a child from the rewards of the birth day of the Savior. Santa had even begged to be able to deliver gifts to children of different faiths, but that was met with disapproval from the old guard. Children of different faiths were not added to the naughty list, they were simply ignored. No, the naughty list had been reserved for children of the faith who were somehow not deemed worthy of a gift.