Powers of Detection

Powers of Detection Page 5

by Dana Stabenow

  Even when you’re dead, there’s no rest for the wicked.

  Lovely

  JOHN STRALEY

  It was a piece of good luck. Gunk had been hungry when he came upon the dead thing sprawled under the wharf. It was opened up, with its insides showing to the air, a fine scent rising from the blue-grey bowels, where the last thing it ate would be waiting to be eaten again.

  Gunk had spent the morning looking around, singing a soft tune to himself. Humming helped make his eyes sharper, Gunk was convinced of that. In fact, he thought he always heard a little chime each time he found a lovely piece of meat. He had no idea if the sound was actually in the air, like the sound of rocks falling down a slope, or inside himself, like the rumbling of his guts, but he was sure that there was a sound associated with finding a sparkling piece of meat.

  At first the insides of any animal seem shiny. This is what had caught Gunk’s eye as he had been standing on the lip of a Dumpster back behind the fish plant. It was the sparkling of fat along the red incision. It appeared like a gem back in the darkness under the wharf, and he heard his mysterious little chime. This was a summer kill, no doubt about that. In winter, fresh blood on the snow was an impossible scarlet, not nearly the same as the spilled blood of a grey-green summer. Blood in winter was a hunger red. This summer kill showed more fat, white fat . . . and the blood was more a greasy shadow on the rocks, with hardly any color at all.

  The dead thing was tucked back up under the shadow of the dock, where the pearls of water were all drippy and bright, plunking down into the ocean. The dead thing hadn’t been there an hour ago, Gunk was certain, because as hungry as he had been he would surely have seen it.

  Gunk hadn’t heard any loud noises. None of the other real creatures had startled or risen up from their places. Gunk was beginning to worry about the body. He had heard stories of real creatures eating things and getting sick. Sick enough to die. And it was suspected that it was from eating these unlucky dead things. He walked around, looking at it from every angle he could. All big animals looked awkward after death, but humans looked even worse, as if they had fallen down and broken apart on the inside. Finally, Gunk spread his wings a bit and hopped on the top of the human near where its eyeholes were still open.

  The eyeholes looked too good, and he started in on them, taking short hard jabs with his beak to get to the tasty juice and the really lovely hard muscle behind. He didn’t care if it was unlucky; some opportunities just had to be taken.

  A human being came stumbling up the rocks. This one was alive, and very fat. He seemed to be almost as happy as Gunk to find the dead thing.

  “Hey! Hey! Get back!” Gunk said to him, but of course this clumsy walker ignored him.

  “Goddamn it, Harry,” the fat man said to the dead thing. “You are going to get us in a bunch of trouble.” This man ran his hands all around the dead thing as if he were looking for something good to eat. He seemed agitated, and for a minute the raven became concerned that he was going to take the tasty dead thing away.

  “I know you have it here. Come on, old son, too late to be keeping secrets from me now,” the fat one said. Then he jerked his hand out and held something up in front of his flat ugly face. Green leaves, all the same shape and size. The man’s eyes opened wide, and for a moment Gunk thought he was going to eat the leaves, which would be very strange.

  “Hey! Hey! Hey! Take those things away if you want! Just get the hell away from my dead thing!” Gunk said, but the fat man ignored him.

  “Shut up! Shoo!” the ugly one said.

  “Hey, hey, hey . . . cut that out!” Gunk yelled back.

  Gunk wanted a few minutes alone with the dead thing. He wanted to get some of the fat under the skin and some of the lovely-smelling food cooked down in the intestines before he called the rest of the real creatures over. The only thing worse than not finding food was wasting it by letting it sit too long and letting some other nasty animal get to it. The real creatures would make the best use of the dead thing. It upset him that this human being was trying to get rid of him.

  The fat man rolled the dead thing over and kept searching it. He stuffed the leaves in his own pocket, then rolled the dead thing down the slope toward the water. The ugly one stuffed rocks into the outer folds of the outside skin where he had gotten the leaves.

  “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Gunk yelled.

  “So long, buddy boy,” the fat one said. Then he rolled the dead thing into the deep water.

  “Doo doo!” Gunk screamed. “You big basket butt! What the hell are you doing!” The raven was livid. He hopped up and down, then walked straight up into the air by the man’s face. “Hey! Hey! Waste! Waste! Waste!”

  Gunk was so mad he decided to follow the ugly one until the ugly one killed something else. He hadn’t taken any food at all, and this fat man must certainly eat a lot, so it seemed clear to Gunk the fat man would have to kill something again soon. Gunk would be ready. He would rush right in and not wait for this stupid basket butt to waste another beautiful dead thing by giving it to the skittery little sand fleas and the sad swimmers who flew on the surface of that other world.

  The fat man waved him off. “Gawh! Get the hell away from me!”

  Gunk hopped on the wires above the street, following the fat man as he lurched along on his strange round legs.

  “You can’t lose me, fat boy!” Gunk yelled. “Don’t even try! Go and kill something else and hurry up about it.”

  The day carried a slurry of scents from the fish plant and the dump up the hill. Gunk liked this section of the waterfront even if he had to compete with the dim-witted eagles and the bothersome crows. There were black mushrooms of garbage in the backs of buildings, and now and then he was lucky enough to find a dead dog in the ditch. Once he had even found a hapless eagle who had gotten too close to the transformers on the buzzing power poles and had cooked himself up and fallen onto the street for Gunk to find.

  Gunk’s world was a gorgeous curve and tumble of rock and waterways, lumps and swales, places of shade and sunlight, updrafts and calm. The world glittered and curved from Gunk’s perspective, and everything human beings did transformed into hard angles and bossy lines that cut across anything in their way. Maybe that was why the fat one was so stupid and wasteful.

  Gunk stopped yelling at him, thinking that it might ruin the human’s hunting luck. Gunk had learned this by following brown bears. If one of the real creatures spoke too loudly, whatever it was the bear was hunting would overhear and go to ground or disappear up into the mountain. It was bad for the bear and for Gunk, so he shut up and flew down the street to the wire high up on the intersection. He’d wait for the man. Humans were easy to follow because of their love of straight lines and hard edges. They always stayed on their paths, and you could always hop up ahead to the next intersection. It was sad in a way. Humans were even more predictable than the bears.

  “Gunk! What? What? What?” Tawk called out to him from a low alder tree above his favorite garbage can.

  Gunk said nothing. He tried to be invisible because he didn’t really want to have to deal with Tawk while he was waiting for the fat human to kill something else.

  “Hey Gunk! Hey Gunk! Hey Gunk!” Tawk came and settled next to him, causing the wire they were both on now to sway.

  “Gunk! Gunk! Hey! Hey! Hey!” Tawk said. Tawk was one of the real creatures, but he was not exceptionally bright. “I heard there was a big dead thing somewhere down by the water shadows. Did you see it?”

  “No,” Gunk said, not taking his eyes off the fat man.

  “I thought I could smell it, but I wasn’t sure,” Tawk said, then he followed Gunk’s gaze, knowing that he was watching something important.

  “Does that fat man have somethin
g . . .”

  “Listen, Tawk,” Gunk cut him off quickly and pointed with his beak back toward town, “there is music in the big building. Someone playing piano. It’s really quite lovely. I just heard it. You should go and listen.”

  “Really?” Tawk said, standing alert as if the music was happening right then, right now. “Big building, you say?” And before Gunk gave him an answer Tawk was away.

  Real creatures love nothing so much as music. Tones rising and falling tickled a real creature as if those sounds contained the voices of all their relatives. When real creatures heard music they could barely think straight, so caught up were they in the flying tones. They loved music almost as if it were invisible food. In the summer the real creatures gathered near the back of the big building when the Dumpsters were full from the tourist lunches, and human beings played music inside with the doors open. Gunk didn’t want to tell poor Tawk that it was only a school group listening to a recording of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations. Tawk couldn’t tell the difference between the Goldberg variations and a piece of cherry pie, but at least he wasn’t distracting Gunk any longer.

  Yes, real creatures love nothing so much as music . . . unless it is some tasty dead thing ripening in the sun. When Gunk turned his attention back to the street, the fat man was gone. “Awww,” said Gunk. Then he flew down into the street, to the stop sign where the streets crossed. There was no fat man. He flew to the top of the dead spruce behind the ball field. No luck. Then he flew to the buzzing electric pole near the hospital. Nothing.

  Deer can disappear up inside a mountain, and river otters can turn themselves into water, but everybody knows human beings cannot disappear. They can walk into buildings or crawl inside noisy machines, but they never leave without a trace. So the fat man must be in one of the buildings back on the street where he had been distracted by that stupid Tawk.

  As he began gliding through the air, Gunk was feeling guilty about how he had treated Tawk. Tawk was kind of slow, and Gunk certainly didn’t want to share the first few minutes of his dead thing with him, but Tawk was a real creature, after all, a real creature and a loyal friend. He would be sure to let Tawk know when he found the new dead thing. He would let him know after he had had a few minutes alone with it.

  Gunk found the place he had last seen the fat man, and he landed in the middle of the sidewalk and began waddling down the street. Sometimes you had to get close to the ground and look carefully. “Hey!” he said softly, not wanting to be heard by any other real creature. “I’m looking for a fat man who smells like a dead thing. Anybody seen anything?”

  The dog tied up in the muddy yard lifted his tired head and looked over. “Nope. Wasn’t paying attention. Sorry.” And he put his head back on top of his dirty paws.

  “Me. I might have seen him,” a skinny brown cat with scars running across her face said from under the sagging wooden stairs. “What’s in it for me?” She watched Gunk with a steady gaze. Cats cannot be trusted unless you are certain you are out of their jumping range, or offering them something well within the realm of their own self-interest.

  Gunk took two short hops backward. “He killed a human being just a bit ago, but he wasted it. I’m assuming he’s a decent hunter and must be going to kill something again soon.”

  “And this means what to me?” The cat hunched low on all fours.

  Gunk hopped up on the handrail of the porch. “When I find the new dead thing, I will tell you about it first. I’ll tell you where to find it, and I’ll give you five minutes before I tell the other real creatures.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Seven,” Gunk said immediately, in a tone that betrayed just enough impatience. “And only if what you tell me turns out to be accurate.”

  The cat stretched and licked her front paw. “Fine,” she said, “he went in the door across the street. Just a few minutes ago.”

  “Thank you,” Gunk said, and he stood up straight to glide over.

  “And . . .” the cat added, “someone else followed him in there.” And she motioned with her flat nose to the automobile left running in the street.

  Why hadn’t he noticed it before? There was that weird hissing of voices coming from inside, and no one was sitting in it. The car had lights on top, and they were alternating blue and white. “Awww,” Gunk said. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

  The doors, of course, were shut tight, and the windows were down. He could hear human beings talking through the windows. He walked straight over to the glass and knocked once. “Hey, Hey, Hey. Any dead thing in there is mine!” He couldn’t believe that another human being was going to get to his prize first. The fat man was in there, he was sure. He walked stiffly to the window and craned his head as far as he could around the corner of the window frame. There was another man in the house. This man had a big leather belt and a bunch of jangly things hanging from it.

  He had to get inside. Gunk looked around, and the very top window was open just a crack. Now, usually real creatures will not go anywhere there is not lots of sky, but this was an emergency, so he pushed through the crack and walked down to the edge of the stairs. He looked down and saw no one, so he risked flying down to the next stair landing. There he saw the fat man slumped in a chair and the other man with the creaky leather belt standing over him. The standing man was angry. The fat man had both hands on his lap. He had taken off his coat and it was resting just under his hands. It didn’t look or smell like there was fresh blood anywhere. Gunk could make out the faint smell of the old dead thing this stupid, wasteful man had rolled into the ocean back under the wharf. It gave Gunk hope that there wasn’t a new, lovely dead thing yet.

  “Come on, Stan. It’s a little hard for me to believe that you just found the money on the sidewalk,” the standing man said.

  “I don’t care what you find hard to believe. It’s the God’s truth.”

  “Stan, you know you’re not under arrest. I’m here in your own house to ask you to tell me the truth. It will go a lot easier for you if you do. It will go a lot easier for his family if we recover his body. Where did you put him, Stan. Please tell me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Officer.”

  “So that’s your story then? You found the five hundred dollars you say he owed you lying on the sidewalk in front of his business?”

  “It’s not my story. It’s the truth. Now I’m asking you again, either put me under arrest or leave.”

  “Well, Stan, I’m going to leave for a minute anyway. But I have to tell you I’m going to have a lot more questions.”

  “I ain’t afraid of questions,” the fat man said, still sitting in his chair, but with one of his hands now under the coat that was lying across his lap.

  “Okay then, I’ll be going,” the standing man said, and he turned his back on the fat man with his one hand under the coat on his lap. Gunk noticed that the sitting man seemed a bit more relaxed, and that worried the hungry bird.

  The standing man was almost out the door and Gunk could stand it no longer.

  “Hey! Hey! Hey! Kill him. Kill him. Kill him,” Gunk screamed from the top of the staircase.

  The sound scared the fat man, and he jumped out of his chair with a gun in his hand.

  “Drop it . . . NOW,” someone yelled, and Stan looked for a long moment at Gunk on the stairs. He looked at him as if he recognized both him and what was coming next.

  “Well somebody shoot, for crying out loud!” Gunk screamed, while the fat man turned with the gun still in his hand and two loud blasts came from the doorway. Blood spatter as lovely as
summer-ripened raspberries sprayed across the room.

  It wasn’t until the smoke had cleared and the chiming in his head had stopped that Gunk realized that there was music playing. The police officer pressed his hand down into the fat man’s throat and shook his head slowly back and forth. All Gunk could hear was the sound of a cello. The great fat man had been listening to Pablo Casals playing one of the Gamba Sonatas, and when the police officer left the room Gunk found himself quite alone with the corpse of this wonderfully abundant human being. It was nearly perfect. He was dimly aware of the sirens and footsteps outside, but Gunk didn’t care, even if he couldn’t see the sky or hear the treacherous cat padding down the stairs for her payoff.

  “Lovely, lovely,” he said to himself, and as the sonata came to rest he waddled over to the dead man’s open eye and just before plucking it out he added one more time: “lovely.”

  The Price

  ANNE BISHOP

  “Well, shit, sugar. Someone had a party and didn’t invite me.” And it was the kind of party I used to like. Nasty.

  And yet, as I stood in the doorway, looking at what had been a nicely decorated sitting room, I felt edgy, uneasy. There’s no law against murder among the Blood, and if I’d come upon a room like this when I lived in the Realm of Terreille, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But in the Realm of Kaeleer, the Blood still live by the Old Ways, and the whole dance of Protocol and power usually works to keep confrontations from becoming fatal.

 

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