I leaned back in my chair and mulled. Maybe they'd had some kind of relationship? Wouldn't be unknown for a rich 90-year-old to keep a pretty young woman around for a bit of slap and tickle in return for cash now and the strong possibility of more later. And then the old biddy had signed everything over to her and conveniently dropped dead.
Maybe. Or maybe Alisha had helped her along a bit.
Wasn't my case anymore.
Wasn't getting paid anymore.
Even if I was getting paid, which I wasn't, it wouldn't be in the interests of my client to have her daughter arrested for murder.
And I still hadn't finished working out the best strategy on this Control-Combo deck.
Screw it. I put on my hat and got ready to go out.
* * *
The old lady's private doctor was one Elias Applebaum, and he had a small practice in WeHo. The walls of his office mostly held black-and-white pictures of him posing for the camera with old rock stars, presidents, people I didn't recognize. A glass-topped coffee table held some glasses, while a small glass-fronted refrigerator in the corner was well stocked with glass bottles of sparkling water. Everything transparent.
Applebaum himself was in his sixties, well preserved, with a smile practiced for so long it had burned its way into his face. He was already walking to the door, hand extended to greet me. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Valentine,” he said. “I so rarely meet the transformed. How may I help?”
He gestured to a seat by the coffee table. I took it, and he settled himself opposite.
“Am I right in thinking that you signed the death certificate for Miranda Swain?” I asked.
He continued to smile. “Yes, that's correct. Ms. Swain died of natural causes.”
“What sort of natural causes?”
“When we're old, Mr. Valentine, there is usually more than one thing going wrong, even with the best of care. Heart disease was the underlying cause of death, but there were several other conditions that could have led to it. But you can get all of this information from the CDPH, as I’m sure you know.” If anything his smile got wider at this point. “So what can I do for you?”
“I’m working a case at the moment and wanted to know a bit more about Ms. Swain's state of mind.”
Now that was interesting. A little slip of the smile? A slight drop in the temperature of the room?
I continued. “If there's anything you can tell me about how she was when you saw her last, it would be a great help. In particular, if you noticed anything unusual.”
“The last time I saw her alive would have been two weeks ago. It wasn't for her usual checkup though; she called me in.”
“What did she want?” I asked.
“To tell me that she expected to die.”
I took a moment or two to process that. Then repeated it back to him. Mostly to buy myself some more processing time, if I’m honest. “She expected to die.”
He nodded. “She told me that she was feeling old, and that she would probably pass soon.”
“Was she ill?”
“No, she was in quite good health considering her age, and I expected several more years of life from her.”
“Why do you think she called you?”
“I've seen older patients get ready to pass on, certainly. It's as if they're aware that their bodies are failing, and they're preparing for death. But Miranda…” He looked up and met my eyes. “No. I don't believe she was ready to die. Even though she said that she was.”
“So if the death was suspicious why didn't you ask for an autopsy?”
His eyes met mine, and this time the smile was gone. “My clients pay me very well. And I've learned not to ask them questions, or try to thwart their wishes. Alive or dead.” And then the smile was back as if it had never left. “Is there anything else I can help you with? A checkup perhaps? If you pass Isabella the name of your insurance company on the way out we'd be glad to welcome you to our practice.”
I could see he wasn't going to tell me anything else. Except perhaps that I needed some expensive treatments. I got up. He shook my hand again as I left.
“If there's anything you need, Mr. Valentine, do call again.”
“Thanks.”
I got halfway to my car before the phone rang. I pulled it out and answered. “Valentine.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Valentine. I hear you've been trying to find me.”
“Who is this?” I asked. But I already knew the answer. He must have called her the moment I left the office.
“This is Alisha Williams. If you'd care to come up to my house, I've got a proposition for you. One that could work out extremely lucratively.”
“I like lucrative,” I said.
“Good. Perhaps if you could get here in about an hour?” She gave me an address I already knew.
I agreed, and she hung up.
* * *
The gates of the mansion swung open for me as I approached, and I drove the car straight through. Obviously someone had been looking out for my arrival.
The driveway curved up and around before halting in front of the main body of the house. I pulled the car up in front and knocked on the door, which was answered by a big man in a starched white shirt that failed entirely to conceal his muscles.
“I've got an appointment with Alisha Williams,” I told him. He didn't say a thing. Just turned around and started walking.
I followed him in, closing the door behind me as I went.
The butler? bodyguard? led me through to a large room, all in white. White rugs on a white floor, white walls leading to a white ceiling. Mirror on the wall over the fireplace, enormous glass doors leading out onto the grounds. Furniture feng-shuied around the place, mahogany and ebony. A room drained of color.
The furniture included a chaise lounge upon which Alisha Williams reclined. I hadn't even realized people still owned chaise lounges. But there she was. Reclining. Legs were good.
“You wanted to see me?” I asked.
She nodded. “Just the once.” I figured from that she'd had experience in this indirectly-threatening-people business.
I noticed that the butler hadn't moved from behind me. It's the kind of thing you start to get a feel for in this job. I moved forward into the room, out of his reach.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“I'd like to hire you, Mr. Valentine.”
“Missing person? Divorce? Process serving? I do a discount for cash up front.”
“None of the above, Mr. Valentine. A retainer. Should I ever need to call on your services in the future.” She named an amount. Had I been able to whistle, I would have. The lips on the rex just aren't good for it. Still, we all have to take the rough with the smooth.
“That's a lot of money,” I said.
“Think of it as a good will bonus,” she said.
“I don't really have that much good will towards you, Ms. Swain.”
“So obvious?” she asked.
I felt the butler behind me again and shifted myself to a place where I could see the two of us in the mirror. He was a lot closer to me this time. Obviously getting bored of the game.
“I've made the transition myself. It takes a few weeks to get used to the new body. I see that you haven't got all the muscles working right yet.”
She raised her new arm and admired it, the slight shake in it as she held it up for inspection. “Yes, I've noticed that. Still, I’m enjoying putting it through its paces.” She looked back at me again. “To business. Alisha Williams is now a very wealthy woman, Mr. Valentine. More than wealthy enough to take you off the streets for good. Ideally, by paying you to go away. But there are other alternatives if you are determined to stand upon principle.”
The butler's reflection had acquired a gun. There was no way that I could turn around in time to punch him or try to take it away. He'd shoot me in the back before I got halfway through the turn.
“What happened to the original Alisha Williams?”
&nbs
p; “She was cheap. Storage is expensive. If you'd like to give me your bank details, we can move on.”
“Murder doesn't bother you.”
“Not if it doesn't bother you.” She waited for a moment to see how I took it. I must have passed. “It must be difficult, making a living with a body like that. All sorts of prejudice.”
“Why didn't you pay off her mother?”
She smiled. I imagined the previous owner of that face smiling through it. I think it would have seemed beautiful. Here, it looked like what it was — muscles working an unfamiliar face, the rictus of the resurrected clawing their way back to life from their graves.
“These people come here unwanted and unloved. Her mother cannot go to the police. And no one will miss either of them.”
“No one of importance, you mean.”
She showed her white teeth. “Exactly. Someone like yourself would be a bit more difficult to make disappear. But not impossible. It would be easier for both of us, however, if you simply take a job working for me. I can make sure you're financially comfortable again, Mike. And all you have to do is nothing.”
I told her where she could go, and the muscles stopped fighting to control her face, leaving it slack for a moment. It looked like a death mask. It was. There was the truth of the woman in front of me; a body stolen from a dead girl, worked by a monster.
“Kill him,” she said.
But even as she said it I was moving.
Think about your Tyrannosaurus rex for a moment.
Everybody knows they've only got little arms. It's one of the things you picture when you think of them — big head and teeth, little tiny rubbish arms. So short that they wouldn't be able to throw a punch very well. So you might not worry too much about getting close. Especially if you had a gun.
I threw myself backwards towards the butler. His reflection looked surprised as I crashed into him, knocking him over and pushing his arm wide. He must have pulled the trigger on the way down because there was a thunderclap in my ear and a brass casing flew in front of my eyes. I heard the woman wearing Alisha Williams scream, which I wasn't expecting given the fact she'd obviously set this up in the first place. Maybe she was just surprised by the loud noise.
Other things were more immediately concerning, though. I rolled over onto the butler's gun arm so he couldn't use it and punched him in the face until he got quiet. Tiny arms, yes, but if you're on top of someone and can get the weight of your body behind them, not as bad as all that. He went to sleep and I took the gun from his grasp, after which I sat up to look for the faux Alisha. I thought she might have got away from the room in the confusion.
She hadn't. She was still sitting on the chaise lounge, that beautiful mouth an O of shock and disappointment, twitching. The round had gone in through the shoulder, shattering bone and exiting into the wall. Blood spattered from the exit wound, splashing red across the monochrome room like an artistic statement. The blood continued to pump from the wound, spreading across the white floor and pooling up against the expensive rug, staining it crimson. Even Swain money wasn't going to be able to save that.
The butler was out of it. I caught my breath and stood up. “Help me,” she whispered. The words came heavy, choking.
I thought about calling an ambulance.
I could staunch the flow of blood, keep her alive until medical help arrived. She must have seen me thinking about it, because she looked right at me out of those beautiful eyes that had belonged to a beautiful young woman and whispered, “Please.”
I sat down on one of the chairs and watched her lie there, listening to her breath scrape gently in and out. It wasn't comfortable.
I thought about getting the phone out of my pocket. But it was a long way away, and I was tired.
The thing about this body I wear: sometimes it makes people think you're something different, something other. Something to be scared of. Sometimes they think you're a monster.
Sometimes I am.
It was another five minutes before I made the call. By then she was gone.
A Word from Piers Beckley
It's just possible that – in addition to its more obvious interrogation of the nature of performative versus innate identity through the medium of dinosaurs – you may have spotted that this story is also a love letter and homage to the hardboiled detective fiction of the early part of the 20th century.
The works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane have always inspired and thrilled me, whether in short stories, novels, or films. In these tales, the protagonist's weary and cynical attitude to the world is a construct, put in place by the detective to protect an inner self which believes that there is such a thing as justice, even if it is hobbled by the self-interest of men and women.
The hardboiled hero believes that there must be some good in the world, despite the evidence that they see to the contrary. They know that there is a right thing to do, even when everything and everyone seems set against them. And they understand that sometimes it's necessary to stand up for what you believe in and who you are, regardless of what that may cost you.
The heroes and antiheroes of these stories stand firm in the conviction that to take a stand against what's wrong in the world and to fight against the darkness – even if you must use its own methods against it – is to bring a small piece of justice in the world.
And sometimes that's enough.
If you enjoyed this story and want to find out more about my other work, you can visit my website www.fatpigeons.com or find me on Twitter as @piersb.
Please Accept My Most Profound Apologies for What is About to Happen (But You Started It)
by Seanan McGuire
TO THE CITIZENS of our fine metropolis:
Hello.
You don’t know me, although you should: I’ve lived among you for years. You’ve sat next to me on the bus. We’ve eaten at the same McDonalds. The woman in the Ian Malcolm T-shirt at the midnight showing of Jurassic World who started sobbing when the overture began? That was me. (Although I challenge anyone who remembers what it is to be twelve years old and committed to the fantasy not to start crying when the music goes “da-da-DAH-da-DAH” and the Park gates open and they realize that they’re finally, finally going home.)
But I digress.
It is important you understand that I am one of you. I am no imported menace, come from some far shore to trouble your day-to-day lives. I am homegrown. I went to school with your children, enduring their taunts and endless attempts to make me conform to their surprisingly sophisticated ideas of “normal.” How lucky they were to have parents like you, who would enforce gender and social norms so stringently that a girl in blue jeans with a book about dinosaurs became an obvious target for reeducation! How unfortunate I was to have an absent father and an alcoholic mother, neither of whom was in a position to make me stop distinguishing myself from the mob.
This is where my therapist would say that I have a rare combination of Oedipal and Electra Complexes, with a dash of abandonment complex to spice the mix. I do not wish to have sexual congress with either of my parents, and never have, but their absence has shaped my life in ways I could not prevent. Maybe if they’d been there, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today.
This is, in any rational world, an oversimplification. I think I would still be some variation on myself. I think the things about me that have brought us to this point were inborn. I was not made by Nature to be an herbivore, or even a carnivore, red of tooth and claw. No, I was made to a greater purpose.
I was made to be a comet.
I was twelve years old when Jurassic Park came to the theater near my house. I stole five dollars from my mother’s purse, using it to purchase a ticket (ostensibly to the bloodless, safe children’s movie playing at the other end of the building) and a box of popcorn before I slipped into a red-upholstered seat, and into the flickering splendor of my future.
I do not need to describe the film to you. I want to. Please understand, I
want to more than I want anything else in this moment. Dinosaurs are what my therapist terms my “special interest,” and I have what can only be described as a Pavlovian desire to share them with the world. I want to tell you about every second of my experience. Not just the movie itself—I could recite the movie, word for word, scene by scene, but why bother? You can stream it yourself, through any one of a number of services. You are an intelligent person, whoever you are, or you wouldn’t be the one reading this letter: I assume that, as an intelligent person, you have already sought out and devoured one of the great cinematic masterpieces of all time.
But it’s not just about the movie. It’s about the way I reacted to it, the way my skin got tight and my breath got quick and my heart seemed simultaneously to be freezing and catching fire. It’s about the way I stopped shoveling popcorn into my mouth halfway through, forgetting to chew, forgetting to breathe, because what I was seeing was taking up so much of my attention that I could barely remember that I wasn’t there with them, running through the jungles, smelling the hot breath of raptors on my neck.
It’s about belonging. It’s about looking into a filmmaker’s vision of what life was like millions of years ago, and suddenly, absolutely knowing what it was to belong.
I tried to tell the other kids at school. Some of them liked to brag about how they went to the movies every weekend, how their parents always bought them candy and let them put gallons of butter on the popcorn, drowning it, preserving it like a mosquito trapped in amber. I thought that for sure they would have seen the movie, and that it would give us something in common, something we could throw between us like a rope. It would anchor me, and they would use it to pull me into the safe harbor of the norm. We would have a shared experience. I would be accepted.
It is not pride which leads me to say that I am of immense intellect, especially when compared to the average citizen of our city. I am a genius by any measure. I have made errors in my lifetime, as have we all, but they have always been failings of ambition or of understanding, not of intellect.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 28
