by John Zakour
Twoa did a quick loop de loop in the air and came down, again fists first, into the mid-section of the other rifleman, putting him down for the count as well.
The four remaining hoodlums ran; two for their hovers, one for the hills and the fourth toward my end of the loading dock. I took off after him.
“HARV, I thought you were calling the cops about this?”
“The call has been placed, boss,” he said, “but I’m on hold. Apparently there are some extenuating circumstances to this particular crime.”
I chased down the fleeing hoodlum and caught him from behind, pulling him to the pavement with me. I rolled on top of him, grabbed his arm holding the blaster and cocked my fist for a punch to his jaw. Then I stopped.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“Shhh,” he said, before punching me in the nose.
It wasn’t a hard hit but it was enough to make me lose my grip. The hoodlum threw me off him and tried to get to his feet. He was on his hands and knees before I grabbed him from behind and pulled him back down. This time, familiar face or no, I had no compunction about hitting him. A left jab to the chin and he rolled over in pain.
“Ow, not so hard,” he said.
“What?”
“Shhh,” he said again. “Make it look good.”
He intertwined his fingers and gave me an overhead double punch to the stomach. Again, my armor took the brunt of it but it surprised me again and he tried to skitter away from me. I grabbed him by the collar of his coat and pulled him back to me. It wasn’t until we were face to face again that I finally recognized him.
“Hey. You’re a cop!”
And he hit me again. Hard this time. In the face.
“I told you, not so loud,” he said.
He stood up and started to run away as I hit the pavement and rolled onto my back. I could hear the sound of laser fire in the background followed by the rush of air, the rustle of space-age, silky spandex, and gloved fists against hoodlum flesh as Twoa thrashed the other thugs.
“The hors douvres are all eaten. The bar is closed. The piano player has emptied the tip jar and gone home to his alcoholic wife. I don’t know how else to say it, boys. The party…is…over!”
“This is just too weird.”
Then someone kicked my foot. I looked up to the see cop/hoodlum.
“Don’t just lay there,” he said. “Get up and chase me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on. I’m making a run for the stash of weapons in the hover.”
“You’re a patrolmen in Tony Rickey’s precinct aren’t you?” I said.
He kicked me again. Harder this time.
“Ow.”
“How many times do I have to say this? Shut up!”
“How many times do I have to say this?” I said, getting to my feet. “What the DOS is going on?”
“Fine,” he said grabbing me by the collar.
He hit me again, hard in the stomach, cast a quick glance at Twoa, who was still toying with the other hoodlums, then shouted.
“You’ll never stop me now, Justice Lad!”
He let go of my collar and made a move toward his hover, casting another glance at Twoa, who had noticed him now, as he did so. I stopped the punk with a hard hand on his shoulder that surprised him.
“What did you call me?” I growled
He turned to me then stopped short. I can only imagine how angry my face appeared at the nano but it was enough to make this guy’s eyes go wide.
“Aren’t…Aren’t you supposed to be Justice Lad?”
I hit him square in the jaw and felt his teeth rattle. His eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the pavement, out colder than Walt Disney’s frontal lobes.
I popped my gun into hand, spun toward Twoa and the other remaining thugs (all of whom were in various stages of consciousness) then fired three maximum concussive energy bolts into the air. The blasts erupted in the night sky like fireworks and lit the loading dock like a dance floor under a dozen sparkling disco balls. Twoa and the thugs stared at the sky for a few nanos as glowing ionic embers fell upon them like a gentle rain of fireflies, then they turned to me slightly awed and a little more confused.
“Now then, does anyone else have any other stupid nicknames they want to call me?”
“Boss,” HARV whispered inside my head. “I think we have a problem here.”
HARV was right, of course, because that’s when the police arrived.
24
An hour later, I was sitting in Tony’s office at the station house. I was wet, cold, cut, scraped and contused in more places than I cared to think about. I felt miserable and wanted nothing more than to go home and feign death for the next few hours.
Tony on the other hand was having a gay old time. I could tell because he’d ordered sushi on the way back to the station house and asked me how well I could use chopsticks in handcuffs.
“Did she really call you Justice Lad?” he asked, the words barely intelligible through his guffaws.
“Do I really need to keep answering that?”
“You’re older than she is. Officially, it’s incorrect for her to refer to you as a lad. Justice Geezer would be more appropriate. At least Justice Middle Aged Guy.”
“Is there a point to this? Am I in trouble or anything?”
“Well, you did hit one of my officers.”
“He hit me first. Plus he was buying illegal weapons. And he called me…that name.”
“He wasn’t buying weapons.”
“Yes, he was, Tony. I saw him. Apparently he’s part of the Belgian Syndicate. I think they run guns and chocolate.”
“There is no Belgian Syndicate. He was undercover.”
“Are you after the arms merchants?”
“There were no arms merchants. Everyone there was on the job.”
Tony smiled and said nothing more. But I could see him mentally waiting for me to put two and two together. Admittedly, it had been a long day so I guess I can be forgiven for being a little slow on the uptake but the answer hit me eventually.
“You staged the buy for Twoa.”
Tony nodded.
“Do you know how hard it is for a police force to do its job when there’s some celebrity super-vigilante out on the streets, fracturing muggers’ arms or breaking down suspects’ doors,” he said.
“She’s not very subtle about it, is she?”
“She’s not very lawful about it either,” he said. “Illegal search and seizure, improper mirandizing, excessive force. We’ve had more criminals kicked because of her than I can remember. I’ve lost track of the number of stings or undercover operations that she’s ruined by crashing through the ceiling and beating everybody up.”
“So you set her up.”
He nodded. “We started with fake informants giving her tips to keep her away from certain areas at certain times. Eventually we needed to give the informants some credibility.”
“So you stage your own crimes.”
“You make it sound so simple,” he said. “These are all carefully planned and orchestrated. We have a writer on staff who comes up with the overall story arc. You know, the Belgian Syndicate. He works out events with me and some of the other captains and we have the thespian squad perform the events for Twoa to bust up.”
“The thespian squad?”
“It’s improvisational work, very tricky. That’s top secret, by the way, so you can never repeat this story to anyone.”
“Yeah, like anyone would believe me,” I said. “So the guy who hit me?”
“He got a little carried away. He’s a rookie, still trying to get his SAG card.”
I shook my head disbelievingly and cracked a smile.
“The thespian squad.”
Tony smiled as well.
“Let’s go, Justice Lad. As long as you’re here, there’s something you should see.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The morgue.”
I grabbe
d my hat and coat from the chair and followed Tony through his office doorway.
“Ah yes, the perfect end to the perfect day.”
To the naked eye, the morgue in the middle of the night looks an awful lot like the morgue during mid-morning. Buried as far from the natural sunlight as it is, the time of day doesn’t make a lot of difference to the dead-room. So I’m at a loss to explain why the morgue at night makes me even more uncomfortable than the morgue in the morning. But it does, (you got a problem with that?).
Shakes was there when Tony and I arrived. He met us at the entranceway and we went through the security checkpoints again, as we’d done thirteen hours earlier.
“I’m surprised you’re still here,” I said to Shakes.
“Death never sleeps,” he replied.
“So all that ‘eternal rest’ stuff is just a myth, huh?”
“A cruel fraud,” he replied. “Perpetrated on the masses by heartless fate.”
“Um, okay.”
Shakes was uneasy and a little on edge. I’m pretty certain that Tony noticed as well but neither of us asked him about it. We figured that the stress from the Thompson case was wearing on him. Our assumption was only partly correct and that was another big mistake I made during the investigation.
“Any luck with Foraa’s autopsy?” I asked.
He shook his head sadly, then ran his fingers through his hair.
“We tried the mining laser this afternoon but it couldn’t pierce her skin. The residual heat melted the table and the surrounding equipment but her body remained intact.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow,” he said. “I don’t understand it. But I’m not giving up. Not on your life. We’re getting a Vogon laser from the Ministry of Space tomorrow. It’s designed to take core samples from asteroids. If it can cut the diamond hard surfaces of ionized meteorites, hardened by the cold vacuum of space then surely it’ll cut this bitch.”
“What?”
“I mean specimen. Surely we’ll be able to use it to cut the skin of this specimen.”
“Yeah. Good luck with that.”
Tony and I exchanged a worried glance.
“In any event,” Shakes said, “There’s something else I need you to see”
He led us to the wall of body drawers at the far end of the room. It took him a nano to find the right drawer then he opened it with a two-handed heave.
The drawer was built to hold a human cadaver so when he pulled the sheet back to reveal Threa’s dead nymph, the little pixie seemed hopelessly small on the big slab. Cold, still, and an unnaturally pale shade of silver (if that’s possible), she was a surreal, tragic sight to behold. It was like looking at a bunny or a squirrel that’d been crushed by a hover.
And, as Tony had told me earlier, she was somehow…less real, than before. She was faded, like an old picture, or a hologram not set for perfect resolution. When the light caught her just right you could almost see through her, ghostlike. It was as if she was fading away.
“How is this possible?” I asked.
Tony and Shakes shrugged their shoulders in unison.
“Can I touch it?”
Shakes nodded and handed me a pair of gloves, which I quickly put on. I lifted the nymph gently. She was distinctly lighter than she’d been the night before. I looked closely at her arms, feet and face. They were as I remembered, just slightly less solid, more ethereal.
“We’re monitoring the decay,” Shakes said. “The rate is constant. At the current speed, she should be completely gone in about thirty-six hours.”
“There’s no way to slow it?”
“We’ve tried cooling the body, adjusting the atmosphere. I even had it in a zero-grav vacuum this afternoon. The decay remains constant and unexplainable.”
“We’ve recorded it every way possible,” Tony said. “So at least we’ll have images of it for evidence. I just wanted you to see it for yourself.”
I gently put the nymph back on the slab.
“I appreciate that,” I said.
Shakes covered the body with the sheet and slid the drawer back into the wall and then led us to the exit.
“Thanks again for keeping me in the loop on this guys,” I said, as Tony and I exited. “It’s turning into a real puzzle.”
“I’m still hopeful,” Shakes said as he rubbed his temples with his fists. “As we say in the field, killers always leave messages behind. Our job is to find the message that says ‘this is who I am.’”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let me know when you come across one of those.”
25
The next day I rose (at HARV’s insistence) in mid-morning tired, stiff and sore. My body made more pops and crackles when I rolled out of bed than a genetically altered popcorn field in an ion storm. It was a very unsettling middle-aged sound.
“Man, how old is my body again?”
“Do you mean chronologically?” HARV asked as his hologram shimmered to life beside me, “or should I factor your abnormally high wear and tear into the equation?”
“You look different,” I said as I limped toward the hallway. “Did you change your appearance program?”
“I think you should worry more about your own appearance at the nano,” he replied as he walked alongside me.
“Are you…ow…taller?” I grabbed at a painfully twitching muscle on my lower back and tried to rub the pain away.
“Oh for Gates sake,” HARV said, “just lay down on the chiro-table and get some treatment.
“I’m okay.” I said. “I just need to walk it off.”
“Ah, yes, the walking-it-off remedy. I just read an interesting article on that subject published this month in the Journal of Non-Existent Medicine. It was right next to the study on the cancer-fighting properties of beer and nachos.”
I groaned and made my way to the therapeutic chiro-table in the master bath. I crawled on its padded surface and gave it the standard voice activation.
“Fix me.”
The table’s computer system came to life and the sensors began scanning my body for muscle soreness, strains and misaligned bones (of which, no doubt, there were many).
“DOS, I hate getting old.”
“The alternative to it is dying young,” HARV replied. “I fail to see how that’s preferable.”
The table completed its scan and moved into treatment mode. Tiny mechanical appendages emerged from their housings and began pushing, prodding and massaging the various sore spots of my body. I groaned a bit as they pressed the sorest spots on my back.
“Ow, that seems hard. You didn’t set this thing for Rolfing again did you?”
“It’s the normal setting,” HARV replied. “Your pain threshold is just lower than it used to be.”
“You got that right. I remember the old days when I could get beaten up by thugs at night. Grab a couple hours sleep and a breakfast burrito and get right back at it the next day.”
“You had more hair then as well,” HARV said. “On your head, I mean.”
“That’s it,” I said, turning HARV. “You changed your hair.”
HARV sighed and looked away. “As I said, you really should be concentrating on your injuries right now.”
I lifted my head from the table, rested on my arms and looked more closely at HARV. Sure enough the wispy strands of brown and gray hair had been thickened and were slightly darker. The hairline in front had become less receded and his bald spot was almost entirely gone.
“You’re not bald anymore.”
“I was never bald,” he replied.
“You have more hair now.”
“Yes, how astute you are to notice.”
“It looks good.”
“…Thank you.”
“Why the change?”
“I felt that I needed a more appropriate look now that I’m taking an active part in the investigation.”
“Yeah, everybody knows that hair is vital when investigating a murder. Wait, what’s that on your jacket?”
&nbs
p; “Where?” HARV said, checking himself over quickly.
“On your elbow. You have leather patches on the elbows of your jacket.”
“They’re not real leather, of course. They’re holographic, like the coat,” he said. “Very stylish, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I suppose. More hair, patches on your elbows. You’re starting to look…Oh no. You’re becoming a detective, aren’t you?”
HARV’s face fell a little, just for a nano. Then it tightened up and he became defensive.
“You gave me permission to do additional research.”
“I was delirious.”
“And you asked me to be more visible during the interviews.”
“Around Ona’s computer.”
“And you know how I like logic puzzles.”
“You like nagging me too but that doesn’t make you my mother.”
“Well, it can’t be helped now. I’ve grown fond of this detective business.”
“HARV!”
“I mean it,” he said, angry hands on hips. “If you can be Sam Spade why can’t I be Ellery Queen?”
“Oh come on now, I…Wait, you know who Sam Spade is?”
“Oh, don’t toy with me.”
“What was the name of Spade’s agency?” I asked.
“Archer and Spade.”
“Spade looked pleasantly…?”
“…like a blonde Satan.”
“What’s the stuff that dreams are made of?”
“The Maltese Falcon, and I don’t care if you are a gumshoe, you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.”
I climbed off the chiro-table and stared at HARV for a long while. He met my gaze with his own holographic stare.
“This is serious stuff, you know,” I said. “It’s a murder investigation.”
“Yes, that would explain the fuss everyone’s making over the dead body.”
“This isn’t a game. It’s not a riddle and it’s not some stupid exercise in logic. We’re trying to catch a murderer. Elbow patches and a new hairstyle don’t help us.”
“No matter what my appearance may be at any given time I am still the most intelligent processor on the planet. I’m on the case for real, boss.”
I smiled ever so slightly and shook my head.
