Accelerated

by Heppner, Vaughn

  She had tested her left wrist, the one I’d grabbed and used to yank her into the cabin. She had said, “You nearly tore my arm out.” These days, I was used to comments like that. Then she had added, “You shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

  That was an odd comment for her. Kay had never been strong. I don’t ever recall her using the gym. She liked walking and swimming as exercise, but never lifting weights. She knew my difference, how I’d changed. She knew I could accidently hurt people, hurt them badly.

  Maybe if it had just been the odd comment, I wouldn’t have remembered. But there had also been her odd behavior on the concrete stairs. How had she managed to keep her balance with a junkie yanking on her purse? And how had she managed to slam him so hard? If I were to guess, Kay had been stronger than she should have been, and she’d shown amazing balance.

  I doubted anyone had duplicated the Geneva accident. I’d been led to believe someone would need to use the Hadron Collider or something equally powerful to do that. Besides, many people had died that day. Those of us who had been exposed and survived, we’d each had different reactions, or gained different abilities. I don’t know that being denser was an ability exactly, or randomly phasing in and out, but what else could people call it? Ability was good enough as a description. No. If I was right, Kay had become stronger some other way. It was only a theory, however, a rather thinly evidenced one. I wanted to test it before I said anything aloud, and the only way I could test it now was to examine Kay’s corpse.

  The newspaper article hadn’t said anything about a funeral, nor had Blake discovered further information about her on the net. The average time hospital morgues kept a dead body was about four days. I needed to get there sooner rather than later.

  It was still early, well before morning rush hour. I used my cell, thumbed in the hospital’s address, read the directions and started down Florence Boulevard.

  I didn’t like the idea of looking at Kay’s corpse. Frankly, I didn’t want to walk into a morgue if I didn’t have to. Except for the battlefield or for those I’d slain, I actively disliked seeing a dead body. The idea of storing the dead…I liked that even less. Maybe that’s why Blake’s stories about the dead had stuck with me like a bad credit rating.

  Blake had once told me about cadaver thieves. Pharmaceutical companies needed the body parts of the dead, while other medical procedures used critical organs. Some Third World countries forcibly harvested kidneys from criminals and sold them to rich Westerners needing organ transplants. Some American criminals fronted as a university’s medical center, collected the dead and resold them to the pharmaceutical companies. Blake had informed me that a corpse fetched two hundred thousand dollars on the black market.

  I wondered how much my body would cash out at, whether my differences would make it more or less valuable.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. Morgues were easy to find. They were almost universally in the basement or the ground floor and near the receiving area, which usually put them near the hospital’s cafeteria.

  It was already warm outside as I locked the car. As I walked toward the entrance, I realized that I needed a plan, a way inside. Likely, the morgue would be empty. Probably, it would have a locked and coded door. Forcing it would give me entry but that would also sound an alarm. If this door was in the basement, I need merely blanket a few lights. That would give me shadows, my element.

  Luck ran against me, however. As I approached the entrance, I heard laughter through the glass. It wasn’t the quiet kind, but loud and raucous, the opposite of what one would expect at a morgue.

  Because of the angle of the sun, I had to use my hands, shielding the corners of my eyes as I pressed my face against the glass. A large woman in an orderly’s gown stood just inside the hall. She had long, blond hair, obviously dyed as she had dark eyebrows. She also had caps on her teeth, at least those I could see. She laughed with her mouth open so I saw most of them. A nametag said she was Alice Smith and by her skin, I guessed her to be in her forties. She spoke into a cell phone. No, she brayed laughter into one.

  Alice Smith stiffened at the sight of me peering through the glass door, and her eyebrows shot up. Even though it was through the glass, I heard her say, “I’ll have to call you back.” She had a loud voice. Then she snapped the cell phone shut and dropped it into a pocket in her gown.

  “Yes?” she said through the glass, all laughter disappearing from her voice.

  I bobbed my head, trying to appear apologetic. I’d have to bluff my way in. “Umm, I’m not sure if this is the right place.”

  “Who are you looking for?” she asked gruffly.

  “Ah…” I glanced right and left, deciding to try to balls it through. “Is this where they keep…the, ah, the bodies?”

  “This is the morgue, yes. Now what do you want? I’m busy.”

  “I’m here to identify the body.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

  “Jane Doe,” I said. Long Beach was part of Greater Los Angeles, and there were more murders these days than ever. Some of the murderers left nameless bodies. The nameless men they called “John Doe” and the woman they named “Jane Doe.” Sometimes, in hard-to-solve cases, the police showed photos or drawings of the deceased on line, hoping someone could identify the dead. Sometimes, people looked at the dead in person at the morgue.

  Alice Smith wasn’t going to cooperate with my deception, however. “You need to go to the check-in counter,” she told me.

  I debated leaving and returning later, maybe tonight. Yet seeing as I was already here, I got stubborn.

  “They told me to come here to the receiving entrance,” I said.

  Alice blinked twice, and seemed to be on the verge of believing me. Why would I bother lying? I decided to nudge her along.

  “The doctor told me to—”

  “Doctor Sutra?” she asked.

  “Yes. That was his name.”

  Alice muttered angrily, shaking her head. Then she grabbed a clipboard hanging to the side and buzzed open the door.

  I stepped inside and she shoved the clipboard at me.

  “Sign there,” she said.

  I used the pen hanging from a string attached to the clipboard, and dutifully scrawled across the designated area.

  She snatched the clipboard from me. “Robert Berry,” she said, reading it.

  “That’s right.”

  She scowled. “Do you have some identification?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, extracting a fake driver’s license from my wallet.

  With her thumb, she clicked the pen several times. Then she shrugged and wrote down the fake driver’s license number. After hanging the clipboard back onto the wall, she nodded her head, and said, “This way.”

  I followed her down the hall, and my stomach tightened the closer we approached a large green door. She glanced at me before she opened the door and then ushered me within. The west wall was full of what appeared as giant drawers. In some of them lay the cold dead, the temperature lowered to retard decomposition.

  Big Alice approached one of the drawers.

  “Kay Durant,” I said quietly.

  “What?” she asked over her shoulder, with her meaty fingers already clutching a handle.

  “Her name was Kay Durant.”

  Alice Smith let go of the handle and faced me. “Kay Durant is not Jane Doe.”

  “I was told to come here and—”

  “Doctor Sutra told you this?” Alice asked sharply.

  “Before I spoke to him, a police officer said you had a woman in her thirties, pretty and—”

  “What was the officer’s name?” Alice demanded, looking more suspicious by the moment.

  “Sergeant Cole,” I said.

  Alice muttered to herself. Then she said in an accusing voice, “Jane Doe was brought in on the fifteenth. Kay Durant was brought in on the nineteenth.”

  “How did Kay die?”
r />   “No!” Alice said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but—”

  “I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot,” I said. “Kay was important to me. Yesterday, I learned she died. Frankly, I suspect foul play.”

  “So do I. You.” Alice headed for the door we’d just come through. “We’re leaving.”

  I’d handled this wrong, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. Money often solved a multitude of problems. So, I pulled out my wallet and withdrew a hundred dollar bill.

  “Alice,” I said, “I represent an organization—”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think my job is worth a lousy hundred dollars?” She laughed loudly as she pulled out her cell phone. “You know what I’m going to do. I’m calling the police—”

  I took three steps and snatched the cell phone. It was an older model that flipped open. I snapped it apart with a twist of my hands.

  “I apologize, Alice.” I said evenly. I shoved the two pieces into my coat pocket. I took out three more hundreds, combining them with the original one.

  There were red spots on Alice’s doughy cheeks. “How dare you break my phone? I ought to—”

  I grabbed her nearest wrist and squeezed so she gasped in surprise and obvious pain.

  “I can squeeze harder,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  I pressed the four hundred dollars into her hand and then folded her fingers over them. “These are yours—for the broken phone. You understand that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “If that isn’t enough, I can add more.”

  She frowned.

  “Make it three hundred more,” I said.

  She moistened her lips as if she was going to start threatening me again. So, I squeezed her wrist to remind her of the other option. I could feel her bones grinding against each other.

  “Please,” she whispered, wincing in pain.

  “I want to see Kay Durant.”

  Alice shook her head.

  I frowned, uncertain what to do now. Despite my threats, I wasn’t going to break her wrist. Alice was proving cagier and tougher than I’d expected.

  “I’d like to show you,” she said in a rush, perhaps misreading my frown. “But they’ve already shipped out the body.”

  “Shipped where?” I asked.

  Alice swallowed, nervously glancing at her wrist. “I don’t remember, but I can show you the paperwork.”

  I let her go. She gasped as she cradled her wrist.

  I withdrew another three bills and spread them out so she could see them. “These are for your broken cell, nothing more. We’re clear on that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “The cell breaking was an accident,” I said.

  “No. You broke it on purpose, but I’m going to let it go. Now do you want to see the paperwork or not?”

  I studied her, and finally said, “Yeah.”

  A few minutes later, we were in another room at a computer. With a few clicks, Alice brought up Kay Durant.

  “See?” Alice said. “We shipped the body to Switzerland, to Geneva. It went out yesterday morning.”

  I pulled out a recorder and spoke the Swiss address, the airline and the transshipment number.

  “You’ve been helpful,” I said, as I clicked off the recorder and shoved it into my coat. “Thanks.” I put the three extra bills by her keyboard.

  She grabbed the money and stuffed it away.

  “Walk me to the door and buzz me out,” I said.

  Swiveling in her chair, Alice regarded me. “My brother is a weightlifter, and by the looks of it he could twist you into a pretzel. But I’ve never had anyone grab me as hard as you did back there, and my brother and I used to wrestle.”

  “Steroids,” I said. “I inject them straight into the muscles. Sometimes I get steroid rages.”

  Her features tightened. Then she got up and walked me to the door. She pressed a button and it buzzed. I took my leave, hurrying for my car, certain she was going to call security.

  ***

  It was hot by the time I climbed into the Ford. I powered down a window and looked for a place to buy a Coke.

  That hadn’t been the way to handle Alice. She might go to the police, and that would complicate matters. Money often unlocked doors, but it also made people curious, and it made them wary.

  I soon forgot about Alice and the morgue as I thought about Kay’s corpse airlifted to Switzerland. The move implied the Shop. Did the Chief first ship the body to Geneva so he could later send it by train to Milan? It looked like the Chief was one step ahead of me.

  Why hide the body?

  If Kay had new abilities, if her corpse showed those abilities, that was reason to hide it. It made me wonder if the Shop or Polarity Magnetics had tried to recreate the accident in Geneva. Were they attempting to make more…super-people? It was looking more and more likely.

  The heat coming off the street and the pollution stinging my nose made me power up the window. It was hotter in Long Beach than in San Francisco, much more than the four hundred miles should have warranted. One of the things I loved about the Bay Area was its cooler summer weather. Mark Twain had said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” The nearly constant breeze in Frisco swept away the pollution better than here.

  As I cruised through the streets, I noticed that the women here showed more skin. Many wore pink or white shorts and had ultra-tanned legs. Everyone wore sunglasses, so I fit in perfectly. Well, maybe not perfectly. I passed some used car lots and noticed names like Hernandez and Reyes. There were more taco shops than burger joints.

  It was midmorning already and I passed lowriders with mariachi music blaring, or rap with its rhythmic drone. The colors were brighter in Long Beach, the shops a bit more rundown like a Latin American country. Too many had iron bars over the windows. As compensation, perhaps, the faces were friendlier and there was a sense of life. The graffiti on various walls was stylish and often artistic. Sometimes, however, it reminded me of a bear scratching a territorial tree in the woods.

  My cell buzzed. I looked around to see if there were any cops. Finding none, I took it out, checked and answered.

  “How goes it, Blake?”

  “Good enough,” he said. “The police were cooperative; they answered all my questions.”

  Maybe I should have let him handle Alice. “Did you learn anything interesting?” I asked.

  “Everything happened just as the newspaper described it,” Blake said. “It was strictly by the numbers.”

  I frowned. “Were the police lying to you?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “They were hiding something?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “Do you know what?”

  “No.”

  “They weren’t cooperative then,” I said.

  “They answered all my questions.”

  “With lies,” I said.

  “No. I’m sure they laced the lies with the truth, which is quite different from lying outright.”

  “Sure,” I said. Why had the cops lied to Blake? Had the Chief pulled some strings?

  “The one bright spot is that I did discover the witness to Kay’s death,” Blake said. “Mr. Juan Ortega told the police he heard a squeal of tires and the thud of the car’s impact. It seems Mr. Ortega had just left a movie theater with his wife. He works at a Midas shop on Hunter Street.”

  “Do you have the address?”

  Blake rattled it off.

  I told him what I’d learned at the morgue.

  “Switzerland?” he asked.

  “I want you to go to the airport and check out the story,” I said. “I’ll speak with Mr. Ortega.”

  “Give me that information again,” he said.

  I took out my recorder, pressed play and shoved the speaker against the cell phone.

  “Got it,” Blake said when I came back on. “Talk to you later.”
/>   “Be careful,” I said.

  He paused. “Is there any reason I should worry?”

  “I don’t know. This shipping to Switzerland—just be careful.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I will. Talk to you later.”

  “Later,” I said. Then I began searching for Hunter Street.

  -9-

  After taking a wrong turn and detouring too far because of several one-way streets, I pulled into a Midas parking lot.

  I heard the whirl of a pneumatic wrench. A blue Mustang in the shop was up on a lift as a mechanic rotated its tires. Oil, gas and grease mingled in a familiar odor, one that always reminded me of Afghanistan and military truck parks where I’d spent too much of my life waiting.

  I asked for Juan Ortega.

  The mechanic grunted as he yanked the tire and let it drop, controlling the bounce and then rolling it to the front. He let the tire plop onto its side, wiped his oil-stained hands with a rag and stared at me.

  “Juan Ortega,” I said.

  He shrugged and turned away.

  I looked around and spied a beefy man with a Pancho Villa mustache and ponytail. He wore a blue Midas shirt with the name “Ortega” on the front.

  “Juan Ortega?” I asked, as I approached.

  He nodded curtly.

  I held out my hand. He hesitated and then shook hands. He was shorter than I was by a couple inches, in his thirties and had a weightlifter’s arms and chest.

  “I’m Gavin Kiel,” I said. “I was a friend of the…of the dead woman.”

  His manner cooled so it almost became outright hostility.

  I took off my sunglasses, wondering if that had made me too standoffish. I had to squint because of the bright light, even though we were in the depths of the Midas Shop.

  “I already told you people all I know,” Ortega said in heavily accented English. “Next time I just walk away.”

  “I’m not with the police.”

  He sneered. “Polarity Magnetics, I know,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’m from San Francisco. I read about Kay’s death yesterday and came as quickly as I could. We were friends, close friends. She came to me a week ago, in some kind of trouble. Now she’s dead.”