The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Why yes, did you forget me already?” Humorous reproach, coquettish and a little strained.

  She swayed toward him, her hair bouncing as if just washed. Which it probably was. He felt his spirits sinking. If the average woman would rather have beauty than brains, it’s because the average man can see better than he can think. Denise believed that and so was even more dolled up than on their first date. Also, last date.

  “I figured out where you lived, so stopped by.” Her broad smile was wise and enticing. “You didn’t call, you know.”

  The vowels rolled off her tongue like sugar and he remembered why he had found her so intriguing.

  “I’ve been awful busy.”

  “So’ve I, but you cain’t just let life go by, y’know.”

  What to say to that? She was here for a clear purpose, her large red handbag on a shoulder strap and probably packed with cosmetics and a change of underwear. Yet he had no easy counter to it.

  “Denise, I’m … seeing someone else.” Easy, reasoned.

  Her expression shifted subtly, the smile still in place but now glassy. “I … I didn’t know that.”

  “It didn’t make the papers.”

  No, that was wrong, humor wouldn’t work here. He decided on the physical instead and held out a hand, edge on, thumb straight up, for a shake. A long moment passed while her eyelashes batted beneath the yellow porch light and he could hear frogs croaking in the night marsh.

  She looked at his hand and blinked and the smile collapsed. “I … I thought …”

  It was his duty to make this as easy as possible so he took her half-offered hand and put an arm around her shoulders. He turned her delicately, murmuring something that made sense at the time but that he could not remember ten seconds later. With a sweeping arm he ushered her down the wooden stairs, across the sandy lawn in the moist sea air. Without more than soft words they both got to the car he had not even seen parked far back under the big oak tree aside the house. He said nothing that meant anything and she did the same and they got through the moment with something resembling their dignity.

  He helped her into her car and turned back toward his house. A year ago, in a momentary fit, one member of the sorority of such ladies of a certain age had tried to run him down. This time, though, her Chevy started right off, growling like a late model, and turned toward the oyster driveway that shimmered in the silvery moon glow. He walked away from it, the noise pushing him.

  The lie about seeing someone settled in him. His social graces were rusty. He mounted the steps as her headlights swept across the porch, spotlighting him momentarily, like an angry glare. To jerk open the front door and finally get inside felt like a forgiveness.

  McKenna got into work early. It had bothered him to usher Denise off like that and he had stayed up too late thinking about it. Also, there was that good California red. Not that he had failed to enjoy Denise and the others in their mutual nonjudgmental rejection of middle class values. Not at all.

  But that style wasn’t working for him anymore. He had set out vaguely searching for someone who could bring that light back into his life, the oblivious glow he had basked in for decades of a happy marriage. He had thought that if it happened once it could happen again. But since Linda’s death nothing had that magic to it. Not dating—a term he hated, preferring “courtship”—and most of the time not even sex, his old standby.

  So Denise’s sad approach, the stuff of every teenage boy’s dream, had been too little, too late.

  He was still musing about this when he got to his desk. Homicide was a big squad room in worn green industrial carpet. The work pods had five desks each and he walked past these because he at last had gained a sheltered cubicle. The sergeant’s desk was nearby his lieutenant’s cubicle and framing the whole array was a rank of file cabinets. No paperless office here, no. Maybe never. At least there was no smoking anymore, but the carpet remembered those days. Especially after a rain, which meant usually.

  The morning squad room buzzed with movement, talk, caffeine energy. Homicide detectives always run because it’s a timed event. You close in on the perp inside two weeks or it’s over.

  And here was the ME folder on Ethan Anselmo. Once you’ve studied a few hundred autopsy reports you know you can skip the endless pages of organs, glands, general chemistry, and just go to the conclusions. Forensic analysis had a subreport labeled GSR, which meant gunshot residue, that was blank.

  The ME was confused. Heart stopped, lungs full, much like a drowning victim who had fought the ocean to his last. But the strange ridges on his skin looked like nerve damage, seared as if in an electrocution. The punctures McKenna had seen just obscured the case further.

  McKenna hated muddy cases. Now he had to assign cause, focusing the ME report and the background he had gotten last night. He didn’t hesitate. Probable homicide, he wrote.

  The usual notices had gone through, assigning case and ME numbers, letting the Squad and Precinct Captains know, asking if there seemed any link to other cases—all routine. Section Command and District Office heard, all by standard e-mail heads-up forms, as did Photo and Latent and Lab.

  He took out a brown loose-leaf binder and made up a murder book. First came the Homicide Occurrence Report with Mobile Main as the address in the right upper corner. Then the basics. A door that opened wide with no sure destination beyond.

  McKenna sat back and let his mind rove. Nothing. Sometimes an idea lurked there after he had reviewed the case; not now.

  He knew he had to finish up a report on a domestic slaying from two days back, so he set to it. Most murders were by guys driven crazy by screeching kids and long-term debt and bipolar wives. Alcohol helped. They had figured out their method about ten seconds before doing it and had no alibi, no plausible response to physical evidence, and no story that didn’t come apart under a two-minute grilling. When you took them out to the car in cuffs the neighbors just nodded at each other and said they’d always figured on this, hadn’t they said so?

  This was a no-brainer case. He finished the paperwork, longing for that paperless office, and dispatched it to the prosecutor’s office. They would cut the deal and McKenna would never hear of it again. Unless the perp showed up in fifteen years on his front porch, demanding vengeance. That had happened, too. Now McKenna went armed, even on Sundays to church.

  Then he sat and figured.

  The ME thought the odd marks on Ethan Anselmo might be electrocution. Torture? Yet the guy was no lowlife. He had no history of drug-running using shrimp boats, the default easy way for a fisherman to bring in extra income all along the Gulf. For a moment McKenna idly wondered when the War on Drugs would end, as so many failed American adventures had, with admission that the war was clearly lost. It would certainly be easier to legalize, tax, and control most drugs than it was to chase after them. He had at first figured Anselmo for a drug gang killing. There were plenty of them along the Gulf shore. But now that felt wrong.

  His desktop computer told him that the Anselmo case was now online in the can’t-crack site Mobile used to coordinate police work now. There were some additions from the autopsy and a background report on Anselmo, but nothing that led anywhere.

  He sighed. Time to do some shoe-leather work.

  The Busted Flush was back at its dock. McKenna had changed into a beat-up work shirt and oil-stained jeans. Sporting a baseball cap, he found the crew hosing off a net rig inside the big aluminum boathouse nearby. “Pitscomb around?” he asked them, rounding the vowels to fit the local accent.

  A thirty-something man walked over to McKenna. One cheek had a long, ugly scar now gone to dirty pink. His hair was blond and ratty, straight and cut mercifully short. But the body was taut and muscular and ready; the scrollwork tattoos of jailhouse vintage showed he had needed for much of his life. He wore a snap-button blue work shirt with a stuck-on nameplate that said Buddy Johnson. Completing the outfit was a hand-tooled belt with carry hooks hanging and half-topped boots that needed a po
lish pretty bad.

  “Who wants to know?”

  The stern, gravel voice closed a switch in McKenna’s head. He had seen this guy a decade before when he helped make an arrest. Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they yanked the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.

  “Lookin’ for work,” McKenna said. This guy couldn’t be heading up the operation, so he needed to go higher.

  “We got none.” The eyes crinkled as if Buddy was trying to dredge up a memory.

  McKenna shifted his own tone from soft to medium. “I need to see your boss.”

  Still puzzling over the memory, Johnson waved toward the boathouse. McKenna walked away, feeling Johnson’s eyes on his back.

  Pitscomb was at the back of the building, eating hog cracklings from a greasy bag, brushing the crumbs into the lagoon. Carrion birds eyed him as they drifted by on the soft slurring wind, keeping just above the gnarled tops of the dead cypress, just in case they saw some business below that needed doing.

  Pitscomb was another matter. Lean, angular, intelligent blue eyes. McKenna judged that he might as well come clean. He showed his badge and said with a drawl, “Need to talk about Ethan Anselmo.”

  Pitscomb said, “Already heard. He didn’t come to work that night.”

  “Your crew, they’ll verify that?”

  He grinned. “They’d better.”

  “Why you have an ex-con working your boat?”

  “I don’t judge people, I just hire ’em. Buddy’s worked out fine.”

  “What do you do for the Centauris?”

  “That’s a Federal matter, I was told to say.”

  McKenna leaned against a pier stay. “Why do they use you, then? Why not take the Centuri out on their own boat?”

  Pitscomb brushed his hands together, sending the last of the cracklings into the water. “You’d have to ask them. Way I see it, the Feds want to give the Centauris a feel for our culture. And spread the money around good an’ local, too.”

  “What’s the Centauri do out there?”

  “Just looks, swims. A kind of night off, I guess.”

  “They live right next to the water.”

  “Swimming out so far must be a lot of work, even for an amphibian.” By now Pitscomb had dropped the slow-South accent and was eyeing McKenna.

  “How far out?”

  “A few hours.”

  “Just to swim?”

  “The Feds don’t want me to spread gossip.”

  “This is a murder investigation.”

  “Just gossip, far as I’m concerned.”

  “I can take this to the Feds.”

  Again the sunny smile, as sincere as a postage stamp. “You do that. They’re not backwoods coon-asses, those guys.”

  Meaning, pretty clearly, that McKenna was. He turned and walked out through the machine oil smells of the boathouse. Buddy Johnson was waiting in the moist heat. He glowered but didn’t say anything.

  As he walked past McKenna said, using hard vowels, “Don’t worry, now. I haven’t chewed off anybody’s arm in nearly a week.”

  Buddy still didn’t say anything, just smiled slyly. When McKenna got to his car he saw the reason.

  A tire was flat, seeming to ooze into the blacktop. McKenna glanced back at Buddy, who waved and went back inside. McKenna thought about following him but it was getting warm and he was sticking to his shirt. Buddy would wait until he knew more, he figured.

  He got his gloves from the trunk, then lifted out the jack, lug wrench, and spare. He squatted down and started spinning the nuts off, clattering them into the hubcap. By the time he fitted the spare on the axle and tightened the wheel nuts with the jack, then lowered it, he had worked up a sweat and smelled himself sour and fragrant.

  The work had let him put his mind on cruise and as he drove away he felt some connections link up.

  The Pizottis. One of them was a real professor, the kind he needed. Was that family fish fry tonight? He could just about make it.

  Since Linda died he had seen little of the Pizotti family. Their shared grief seemed to drive them apart. The Pizottis always kept somewhat distant anyway, an old country instinct.

  He drove over the causeway to the eastern shore of the bay and then down through Fairhope to the long reaches south of the Grand Hotel. He had grown up not far away, spending summers on the Fish River at Grammaw McKenzie’s farm. To even reach the fish fry, on an isolated beach, he decided to take a skiff out across Weeks Bay.

  The Pizottis had invited him weeks ago, going through the motions of pretending he was family. They weren’t the reason, of course. He let himself forget about all that as he poled along amid the odors of reeds and sour mud, standing in the skiff. In among the cattails lurked alligators, one with three babies a foot and a half long. They scattered away from the skiff, nosing into the muddy fragrant water, the mother snuffing as she sank behind the young ones. He knew the big legendary seventeen-footers always lay back in the reeds, biding their time. As he coasted forward on a few oar strokes, he saw plenty of lesser lengths lounging in the late sun like metallic sculptures. A big one ignored the red-tailed hawk on a log nearby, knowing it was too slow to ever snare the bird. By a cypress tree, deep in a thick tangle of matted saw grass, a gray possum was picking at something and sniffing like it couldn’t decide whether to dine or not. The phosphorus-loving cattails had moved in further up the bay, stealing away the skiff’s glide so he came to a stop. He didn’t like the cattails and felt insulted by their presence. Cattails robbed sunlight from the paddies and fish below, making life harder for the water-feeding birds.

  He cut toward Mobile Bay where the fish fry should be and looked in among the reeds. There were lounging gators like logs sleeping in the sun. One rolled over in the luxury of the warm mud and gave off a moaning grunt, an umph-umph-umph with mouth closed. Then it opened in a yawn and achieved a throaty, bellowing roar. He had seen alligators like that before in Weeks Bay where the Fish River eased in, just below the old arched bridge. Gators seemed to like bridges. They would lie in the moist heat and sleep, the top predators here, unafraid. He admired their easy assurance that nothing could touch them, their unthinking arrogance.

  Until people came along, only a few centuries before, with their rifles. He suddenly wondered if the Centauris were like this at all. They were amphibians, not reptiles. What would they make of gators?

  A gator turned and looked up at him for a long moment. It held the gaze, as if figuring him out. It snuffed and waddled a little in the mud to get more comfortable and closed its big eyes. McKenna felt an odd chill. He paddled faster.

  The other wing of the Pizotti family was on the long sand bar at the end of Weeks Bay, holding forth in full cry. He came ashore, dragged the skiff up to ground it, and tried to mix. The Pizottis’ perfunctory greetings faded and they got back to their social games.

  He had loved Linda dearly but these were not truly his kind of people. She had been serene, savoring life while she had it. The rest of the Pizottis were on the move. Nowadays the Gulf’s Golden Coast abounded with Masters of the Universe. They sported excellently cut hair and kept themselves slim, casually elegant, and carefully muscled. Don’t want to look like a laborer, after all, never mind what their grandfathers did for a living. The women ran from platinum blond through strawberry, quite up to the minute. Their plastic surgery was tasteful: eye-smoothings and maybe a discreet wattle tuck. They carried themselves with that look not so much of energetic youth but rather of expert maintenance, like a Rolls with the oil religiously changed every 1500 miles. Walking in their wake made most working stiffs feel just a touch shabby.

  One of them eyed him and professed fascination with a real detective. He countered with enthusiasm for the
fried flounder and perch a cousin had brought. Food was a good dodge, though these were fried in too much oil. He held out for a polite ten minutes and then went to get one of the crab just coming off the grill. And there, waiting for the next crab to come sizzling off, was Herb. Just in time. McKenna could have kissed him.

  It didn’t take too long to work around to the point of coming here. Herb was an older second cousin of Linda, and had always seemed to McKenna like the only other Pizotti who didn’t fit in with the rest. He had become an automatic friend as soon as McKenna started courting her.

  “It’s a water world,” Herb said, taking the bit immediately. He had been a general science teacher at Faulkner State in Fairhope, handling the chemistry and biology courses. “You’re dead on, I’ve been reading all I could get about them.”

  “So they don’t have much land?” McKenna waved to the woman who loved detectives and shrugged comically to be diplomatic. He got Herb and himself a glass of red, a Chianti.

  “I figure that’s why they’re amphibians. Best to use what there’s plenty of. Their planet’s a moon, right?—orbiting around a gas giant like Jupiter. It gets sunlight from both Centauri stars, plus infrared from the gas giant. So it’s always warm and they don’t seem to have plate tectonics, so their world is real, real different.”

  McKenna knew enough from questioning witnesses to nod and look interested. Herb was already going beyond what he’d gotten from TV and newspapers and Scientific American. McKenna tried to keep up. As near as he could tell, plate tectonics was something like the grand unified theory of geology. Everything from the deep plains of the ocean to Mount Everest came from the waltz of continents, butting together and churning down into the deep mantle. Their dance rewrote climates and geographies, opening up new possibilities for life and at times closing down old ones. But that was here, on Earth.

  The other small planets of our solar system didn’t work that way. Mars had been rigid for billions of years. Venus upchucked its mantle and buried its crust often enough to leave it barren.