by Joe Hart
“Just get me the poke over there,” he said between coughs. Gray grabbed the pneumatic deliverer and placed it in his friend’s outstretched hand. Without pausing, Danzig pressed the immunizer to his bicep and triggered the device.
A short bark came from the steel pistol and the glass vial inside became cloudy. Danzig coughed two more times and then quieted, breathing in three deep inhalations.
“Forgot to take one yesterday, dry weather makes me feel better than I am.” He wheezed. “Fucking luck, right?”
“Fucking luck.” Gray repeated the mantra and watched his friend.
“I’m just glad you didn’t go with me that day, otherwise you would’ve sucked down that pesticide from the air too, and we’d both be giants from the ’roids,” Danzig said, tapping the immunizer once against the steel tabletop.
“We couldn’t both have been this big, how the hell would we ride anywhere together?”
Danzig let out a laugh that coalesced into a dry cough before finally quieting.
“Sorry,” Gray said.
“Don’t be, laughter’s good for the soul. Maybe it prolongs life too, give me more than the five years the doctors did the other day.”
Gray scowled at the floor, shaking his head once. “They’ll figure something out.”
Danzig sighed and then slapped Gray roughly on the shoulder. “Enough of my pity party, let me see that screw.”
Gray pulled out the baggie containing the silver screw and handed it to his friend.
“Am I going to contaminate anything?”
“Nope, I had it analyzed for DNA this morning. Nothing on it but a smudge.”
Danzig strode across his shop to another workbench that lined the wall. Although neatly organized, the bench’s top was covered with many different apparatus including a digital scale, a row of stainless steel tongs, several curved magnets, and a wide-mouthed crucible.
Danzig set the screw down and pulled a small bottle of clear solution away from the wall and unscrewed the top revealing an eyedropper. With a practiced twitch of his hand, he let one tear of the fluid fall onto the screw.
Nothing happened.
“Well, looks like it’s plain stainless steel. The nitric acid would’ve smoked it otherwise,” Danzig said, tweezing the screw up and holding it beneath a stream of water at a sink a few feet away. After it was washed, he brought the screw under a magnifying glass, turning it several different ways before handing it back to Gray. “Yeah, nothing special about it, you could get it in any hardware store from here to Mexico.”
“Shit,” Gray said, returning it to the plastic baggie.
“Sorry.”
“No problem. Fucking luck.”
“Yeah.” Danzig leaned on his forearms and stared at Gray. “What’s next?”
“You know what I’m going to ask you.”
Danzig shifted a little. “I don’t know anyone that would do something like that.”
“But you do know some who don’t have the Line, right?” Gray said.
“I have customers.”
“Dan, people are dead and more to follow if I don’t find the ones who did this.”
Danzig stood and grimaced, looking at the wall for a moment before answering. “Terry Yantz and his family are way off in the boonies, south on sixty-three about five miles. You’ll see a dried up swamp on the right and then a trail narrower than mine running straight in. Follow it to the end and you’ll find them, but I can tell you right now, Terry didn’t do it. He’s got a family, he’s an intelligent man but they live simply. They stay out of the way of most people. Shit, I wouldn’t know him myself if he didn’t need hand tools repaired every so often.”
“No one knows anyone fully.”
“So you say.”
“So I know.”
Danzig’s posture relaxed and he rubbed the spot where he’d given himself the shot. “Besides interrogating an innocent man, what’s your next move?”
“I think about it all, it’s what I do best.”
“What you do best is talk.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Seen Lynn lately?”
Gray blinked and nodded once, the question blindsiding him. “Yesterday. Came by to pick up a jewelry box. She was headed out on a date.”
“Yeah, I was going to mention I saw her with someone in town last week when I stopped in for supplies.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
Danzig rubbed his forehead, pushing the goggles off completely. “Mark Sheldon.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, hate to say it but they looked pretty cozy at the café having lunch.”
Gray shook his head, looking at the floor. “The fucking DA.”
“Yeah.”
“That just fits, doesn’t it?”
“Why, because you hate the guy already?”
“Pretty much.”
Danzig stood to his full height and grabbed a piece of cable off of the wall, turning it over in his big hands. “You know, it’s surprising, but with the new technology springing up every year, people still rely on things like this for all different kinds of reasons. This steel is an alloy, it’s made from a high content of iron and a low percentage of carbon. Now if there’s too much carbon, or not enough, the alloy becomes too soft or too brittle. Put stress on it and it’ll break, either way. The art of metallurgy is a continual exercise in balance. Without balance, things don’t work.”
Danzig pulled hard on the cable. It creaked, growing taut between his fists, but held.
“You’re terrible at metaphors,” Gray said. Danzig hung the wire back on the wall, shrugged. “But thank you.” Gray looked at a clock above the workbench. “I need to get going.”
“Before you do, I have a couple things to show you,” Danzig said, motioning to follow him.
The two men walked the length of the building to a doorway leading to a smaller room tucked into one corner. The room held sets of steel drums, their gleaming hides reflecting light from overhead. Some of the barrels were misshapen, bulged out and pocked with internal distortions as if someone had taken a hammer to their insides. On the wall hung what looked like a shiny, black sweater, its sleeves and back catching the light. As Gray leaned closer to it Danzig pulled the odd garment off the wall and stuffed it into a nearby cabinet. The sweater made an odd clanging as he put it away.
“What was that?”
“Top secret. Not ready yet.”
Gray didn’t press him further and followed as the huge man proceeded deeper into the room.
Danzig stopped before a table holding a hardness tester. On the machine’s small platform was a large ball bearing, compressed by a pointed indentor. The machine’s gauge read all zeros.
“This is something new I’ve been working on for over a year. It’s an alloy of stainless steel and M-Core.”
Gray squinted at the sphere. “You alloyed the stuff from Mars?”
Danzig’s smile creased his entire face. “Yep. Took me a bit to get the mixture and temperature right, but I think I’ve perfected it.”
“Looks delicate,” Gray said, motioning to the zeros on the hardness tester.
Danzig raised his dark eyebrows. “It’s zeroed out because it maxed the machine.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope, and watch this, this is the real treat.” Danzig decompressed the ball bearing and held it out to Gray. It felt like a polished egg in his hands. There were no markings visible on its surface to indicate the extreme pressure it had been under moments ago. “Now step over here and put it in that funnel system.”
Gray walked to where Danzig indicated and traced a steel tube that ran in a descending arc, then shot straight down into one of the sealed barrels. Gray placed the bearing into the tube and watched it roll out of sight. The sound of the sphere traveling was like a fly buzzing inside a light fixture. Then there was a gap of silence before a quiet ting.
The barrel’s sides expa
nded with a bang so loud Gray put his hands to his ears and flinched halfway across the room. Numerous bulges appeared in the drum’s sides and the ticking of steel re-settling filled the air.
“What in God’s name was that?” Gray asked, glancing wide-eyed at his friend.
Danzig’s deep laughter overtook the clicking metal. “I call that a Tin-Snipper. It’s completely stable under constant applied pressure, but if dropped above a distance of five feet onto a hard surface—” Danzig cupped his fists together and then sprung his fingers apart. “Boom.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“Like I said, it took me a year to perfect. It’s got the same explosive power of a standard grenade but three times the shrapnel.”
“You’re a mad scientist and you’re going to blow off a hand someday.”
“Yes mother.” Danzig laughed and guided Gray over to the far corner of the room. “Almost forgot, I have something for you.” The huge man picked up a smooth-handled knife from a shelf and handed it to Gray. The weapon looked almost exactly like the one he carried, the blade hidden inside the handle itself. Gray made to push the release button on the back and felt Danzig grip his wrist.
“Hold on, let me tell you about that. First off, it’s made mostly from meteor nickel with a dash of tungsten carbide.”
Gray glanced up from the knife. “How the hell did you get your hands on a meteorite?”
“Got a contact in Texas, a star hunter. Found one last spring a few hundred feet off the coast of Corpus Christi. Now what makes this unique is the cooling factor the nickel underwent upon impact. It hardened the molecules perfectly, so perfectly it took me three months to figure out a way to superheat it and bind it with the carbide. I wore out sixteen diamond files shaping the blade too.”
Gray looked down at the knife and triggered the button.
A seven-inch bit of slender steel shot from the handle so hard it nearly recoiled out of his hand.
“Holy shit,” Gray said, studying the blade. Its color reminded him of oil pooled on water in the right light.
“Gas deployed, good for a hundred and fifty openings, then you have to have it recharged, which I can do for you. That alloy is hard enough to cut through a quarter inch of stainless steel and you could still shave with it on the other side.”
“What if the damn thing goes off in my pocket?”
“It won’t, the button can only depress if the grip is pinched on either side, almost impossible to deploy otherwise.”
Gray pushed the button again and the blade retracted soundlessly into the handle.
“Thanks Frankenstein.”
“Only the best for your birthday.”
Gray paused before sliding the knife into his pocket.
“You forgot, didn’t you?” Danzig said.
Gray nodded. “I thought about it last week, but with everything in the past couple days…” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, but thank you for remembering.”
Danzig put a hand on his shoulder and stared down at him from his towering height. “One other thing before you go—if you need me on this in any way, I’m more than willing to help. Those people didn’t deserve to die that way and I’d have no qualms doing what needs to be done to whoever’s responsible.”
Gray squeezed his friend’s hand once. “One thing’s for sure, either I’ll find them, or they’ll find me.”
Chapter 10
When Gray pulled up to the station his stomach sank as he saw the car parked in his spot.
He shook his head, sighed once, and got out of the cruiser.
The air conditioning inside the building wasn’t working properly. The temperature seemed the same, if not higher than outside. Sweat sealed Gray’s dark shirt to his body and he pulled off his baseball cap as he entered, smoothing his hair back. Mary Jo sat behind the station’s main desk, an array of monitors surrounding her. A headset rested in her auburn and graying hair, her skinny fingers danced over a multifunction screen on the desk. She looked up at him as he entered.
“He’s in your office.”
“You let him wait in my office?”
“No, I did no such thing, he went in himself, blew past me before I had words out of my mouth.”
Gray rapped his knuckles once on the desktop.
“I hope that wasn’t directed at me,” Mary Jo said, her fading eyebrows rising.
“No ma’am, just like the sound it makes.”
Gray stepped away from the desk and walked down the narrow hall, hot air pushing at his head from an overhead vent. The bathroom door on the left stood open, a smell of old urine and disinfectant leaking out. On the right a window looked into a small office, a large desk standing in its middle, top covered in stacked papers. A man in a dark suit sat in the chair facing the opposite wall, greased hair plastered down to his head in a style resembling lawyers Gray had seen in the cities years ago. When he walked through the door, the man glanced at him.
Mark Sheldon had an overly handsome face with eyes light blue and a nose that you could cut a straight line with. His even teeth flashed white, once as he stood, more sneer than smile.
“Sheriff, how are you this morning?” The district attorney extended a hand that Gray shook quickly, not wanting to think about if it had touched Lynn, or where.
“Busy, what can I do for you?” Gray settled in behind the desk as Sheldon did the same across from him.
“Just stopped by to see how things were going with the Jacobs case.”
“It’s going. We’re exploring a few different aspects at this point.”
“Which are?”
“Gathering leads in the form of suspects.”
“And those are?”
Gray blinked once at the other man. “We’re compiling them this morning.”
Sheldon nodded, his eyes closed, fingers steepled. “Gotcha, and the coroner’s report?”
“Should be on my computer before noon unless Tilly ran into something.”
“Tilly?”
“Dr. Swenson.”
“Ah.”
The seconds ticked by and Sheldon smiled, nodding to the silence.
“Is there something I can do for you?” Gray finally asked.
“Yes, there most certainly is,” Sheldon said, sitting forward. “You can remember who the one person is that can remove you from your elected job, Sheriff. And that’s me.”
“Well, I very much appreciate you stopping in to refresh my memory, though I think you’re speaking out of turn since the county board has that right, but I have a case to work on.”
“Oh yes, you do,” Sheldon said, still smiling. “You have this case to work on, this very normal, very average breaking and entering gone wrong. Mitchel explained to me some of the hints you’ve made in the past and let me tell you, Sheriff, fairy tales like the ones you’ve got in your head will do nothing but hurt this town and its people.”
Gray unclenched his jaw before a tooth cracked. “With all due respect, Mark, get the fuck out of my office unless you’re prepared to handle this case yourself.”
Sheldon’s smile flickered and then died under Gray’s stare. He stood from his chair, brushing his suit pants of nonexistent wrinkles. “I know why you came back to your hometown, I know your theories weren’t popular in Minneapolis either. But if you think you can shove your deranged fantasies onto a smaller town like Shillings, you’re dead wrong. This place will eat you up and spit you out if you try peddling that shit to the public. You’d be out of this office with hell on your heels before you could say ‘boo’.”
“The door is what you walk through to leave.” Gray pointed before turning to wake his monitor. He heard Sheldon’s dress shoes snap across the floor and pause at the entry.
“Enjoy your last term in office, Gray, and I’ll enjoy Lynn later tonight.”
Gray looked down at his feet below the desk and counted to one hundred, listened to Sheldon’s car start outside before he glanced up. The first thing he saw was the digital temp control mounted
on the wall. It read 86 degrees.
Gray stood and put his fist through the screen.
The plastic smashed into spider-webbed lines and plaster cracked around the control’s base. Mary Jo’s voice came through the small speaker on the side of his monitor. “Are you all right? Did you fall down?”
Gray sat in the chair, gave his knuckles a look and leaned back. “Peachy. Send Joseph in when he gets back, we have work to do.”
Chapter 11
“Are you feeling okay, son?”
Ryan jerked out of his trance, the plate holding his bagel before him coming into focus. He looked up at his father who held his coffee cup below his chin, blowing away the steam, his eyes soft and beseeching.
“I’m fine,” Ryan said, reaching for his breakfast. His stomach flipped at the thought of eating anything.
“You look a little pale. Did you sleep okay?”
“Yeah, great.” Ryan summoned a smile.
His father nodded, sipped his coffee, his sandy hair catching the morning light. “You know, I was thinking it would be nice to go to the lake over in Semingford when I have a stretch off. Maybe rent a cabin there and spend a weekend like we used to. What do you think?”
“Yeah, we should, definitely.”
His father set his coffee down. “What’s wrong, son, you can tell me.”
Ryan almost laughed. “Nothing, Dad, I’m fine. Maybe I am a little under the weather.”
“Want to come into work with me, I can fit you in right away this morning.”
“No, that’s fine. I’ll just rest.”
“Okay.” His father glanced at his watch and stood, pouring the remainder of his coffee down the kitchen sink’s drain. “Gotta go, I should be done sometime early tonight unless the ER is shorthanded today, then it might be later.”
“Sounds good.”
“And tell your brothers that it’s their turn to clean the house today, you’ve been doing it more than your fair share.”
“Sure, thanks, Dad.”
“Love you,” his father called over his shoulder as he left the kitchen and disappeared through the entryway.
Ryan listened to his father’s BMW start in a muffled hum inside the garage and then pull out, the rattle and clank of the garage door shutting again.
