Contents

Title Page - Amazon

Other Stories by M.T. Bass

Dedication

The Three Laws

G. Gordon Liddy

The Warehouse

The Meat Market

Robbery/Homicide

Old School

Maddie

John's Diner

The Fourth Estate

Edgewater

The West Side Market

The Fire Escape Grill

The Grease Monkeys

'Q'

Cutty

The Federales

Mrs. Victim

Prime Time

The Flats

Partners

The West Bank

Lt. Sands

Exit Alley

No Anchovies

Federal Code

Mad Scientists

Infinite Will

Love is a Battle Field

The Clinic

The Baron

Waiting Games

Perchance to Dream

Off the Grid

Crash and Burn

Paperwork

The Darknet

Thank You

About the Author

Also by M.T. Bass — The Darknet: Murder by Munchausen #2

Also by M.T. Bass -- The Invisible Mind: Murder by Munchausen #3

Also by M.T. Bass — Untethered

Also by M.T. Bass — Somethin' for Nothin'-1

Also by M.T. Bass — Lodging

Also by M.T. Bass — In the Black

Also by M.T. Bass — Crossroads

Also by M.T. Bass — My Brother's Keeper

Sneak Preview…

Copyright Information

Murder by Munchausen

M.T. Bass

An Electron Alley Publication

Copyright © 2017 by Electron Alley Corporation

The characters and incidents contained herein are fictional. Any resemblance of persons, living or dead, may, in fact, be a violation of copyright statutes.

www.mtbass.com

Amazon Author Page

Other Stories by M.T. Bass

My Brother’s Keeper

Crossroads

In the Black

Lodging

Somethin’ for Nothin’

Untethered

The Darknet: Murder by Munchausen #2

The Invisible Mind: Murder by Munchausen #3

www.MTBass.net

For Lightnin’ S. Norton

The Three Laws

1. A civilian-owned and operated synthetic humanoid entity may not act in any manner so as to engage in or cause any harmful or offensive contact against a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A civilian-owned and operated synthetic humanoid entity must obey the directives and orders given it by human beings except in those instances where such directives and orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A civilian-owned and operated synthetic humanoid entity may protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Federal Technology Administration Regulations

Obviously, crime pays, or there'd be no crime.

~G. Gordon Liddy

The Warehouse

The abandoned building in the Warehouse District was dark and cold. I didn’t have glass on the AnSub, but we were picking up an RFI signature that was an eighty percent match to the A-VIN profile. My Smith & Wesson eM&P was out and humming in my hand, ready for me to take a shot. Behind us the SWAT team was spreading out into position to monitor our visual feed from outside so they wouldn’t jam the ambient signals with their tac gear. We went passive on our glass as soon as we entered the building.

I looked over at EC, my partner, pressed against the far wall covering the left side of the industrial cavern, which was piled high with discarded junk—desks, chairs, pallets of boxed materials and strange hulking machines that no doubt once fabricated some kind of pieces-parts necessary for the stuff consumers once found they absolutely-positively could not live without in their daily drone lives—all collected from businesses that absolutely-positively no longer existed. The quiet was oppressive and haunting. We both strained for an aural clue to the location of our quarry, since the electronic intel was still too weak to pinpoint within the building.

We slowly wove around the junk, deeper and deeper into the room. I led. EC followed, constantly adjusting the ePD scanning app to search and map the room. I muted the tactical channels and stripped most of the data from my view to let him work the tech and comm. It’s too distracting. I needed to maintain focus. I needed to be able to react.

This particular Android Subject apparently went off the rails and killed a luckless pedestrian on his way to a bodega for some iced tea or bottled water to quench his thirst. A one-in-a-million occurrence, but every so often it still happens. Anyone who believes technology is infallible is a fool. The incident didn’t appear all that nefarious when first reported, but shortly thereafter the Atlas data stream went dark and patrol called our unit in. It quickly became obvious we were dealing with a malware hit, not a malfunction. The luckless pedestrian was actually not so luckless, being on what appeared to be the winning side of a particularly nasty termination suit with his ex, who we suspected had outsourced the final settlement to extra-judicial parties.

It might not make sense, but the beloved Media tags it “Murder by Munchausen.” For a price, there are hackers out there who will reprogram a synthoid to do your dirty work. The bad news: no fingerprints or DNA left at the crime scene. The good news—at least for us—is that they’re like missiles: once they hit their target, they’re usually as harmless as empty brass. The trick is to get them before they melt down their core OS data, so you can get the unit into forensics for analysis and, hopefully, an arrest.

EC’s scanner returned a hard ping. His quick double blink put his cross-hairs up on my lens and I followed his eye line to the northwest corner of the building. I swept my eyes up and down to acknowledge and we slowly headed in that direction. As we moved, the RF signal narrowed and confirmed bogey lock with a low growl in my ear buds. EC swung out from the left and unshouldered his shotgun. Good old-fashioned blast power often came in handy to buy some time. Like I said, usually they’re harmless, but usually just ain’t good enough odds for me.

My Smith & Wesson started flashing yellow in my glass. It took the data hand-off and started frequency ranging, seeking the optimal setting for its electro-magnetic pulse to take down the AnSub. We slowly and methodically cleared the warehouse, aisle by aisle, until we got to the very corner of the building where the android had parked itself, facing out the window towards the city lights. In sleep mode, I could see its right eye’s red optic laser reflect off the window pane as it lazily pulsed. We spread out as quietly as we could with our weapons trained on the synthoid perp. EC pulled the restraining bolt from his webbing and held it up. If we could get it in without discharging our weapons, there was less chance of frying any lines of code that the forensics guys would whine on endlessly about.

I nodded. I had frequency lock on the droid’s GMC—Gyro & Mobility Chip—and kept my weapon pointed at center mass. Precise aim isn’t critical but improves effectiveness and tends to minimize collateral damage to nearby appliances. EC moved in swiftly and smoothly. Since they all, literally, have eyes in the back of their heads, there’s just no sneaking up on a droid like you can a human, so the best thing is to get it over with as quickly as possible and hope their reaction protocol has not been tampered with to ignore the RFID chip in our cop badges.

EC was within arm’s reach when I saw both eyeball scanning lasers reflect off the window pane as the droid came alive. It spun quickly and reached for EC’s neck. I reacted instinctively and double-tapped the synthoid with my Smith & Wesson. It’s like tasering a human and, since it’s just a machine, there’s some entertainment value in watching the spastic jerking of arms and legs as the control signals are scrambled then flatlined.

The AnSub collapsed in a heap. EC kneeled down to place the restraining bolt in the small of its back, then radioed SWAT to stand down. He pulled his Department-issued Google Glass off and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. He looked up and, catching his breath, sighed, “Thanks, Jake. He was going for my throat.”

“All in a day’s work,” I answered, holstering my pistol. The droid’s mechanical strength would have made short work of EC’s windpipe. “Besides, I couldn’t let him ruin that lovely singing voice of yours.”

EC smiled.

I winked back.

He knew he couldn’t carry a tune.

***~~~***

The Meat Market

Misbehaving synthetic humanoids don’t go through the normal booking process, of course, but we still bring them in through the sally port at the district station house to be logged into evidence and lockered up until the forensics guys can do their digital autopsies. The sheriff’s deputies who run the jail are always glad to see us because it gives them a chance to make fun of the one group of regular cops who are even lower on the social pecking order of the station than they are.

“Well, well, well…If it ain’t the Geek Squad, again,” snickered Deputy Ernst, raising his voice to announce our arrival to his squad. Ernst was a hairy ape of a man perfectly well-suited physically to supervise the swing shift band of gorillas in the “Meat Market.”

“Great to see you, again, Deputy,” I said with extra maple syrup dripping from my words.

“Look, guys, it’s the Dynamic Droid Duo.” Ernst’s troop started to gather around him. “Bringing in Suzie Sexbot for solicitation, again?”

I could hear EC grinding his teeth beside me in the squad car. It was the one case we would never live down and the grief we took over it bugged the living crap out of him. But, pervs come in all shapes and flavors. We don’t pick ‘em. “Come on, partner. Take it easy. At least we’re still loved more than Internal Affairs—I think.”

EC hopped out of the car and rushed off to get a gurney.

I got out and opened the rear door on the squad car. I had taken to handcuffing the synthoids when we brought them in as a subtle way of mocking the Meat Market crew. Maybe it was too subtle, so I decided to put on a little show.

“You…have the right to remain silent…”

As I recited Miranda to the droid sprawled in the back seat, I pulled it halfway out of the car and deliberately slammed its head hard on the car door a few times.

“Watch your head, sir.”

I pulled it the rest of the way out and tossed it on the concrete floor in a heap, then pulled out my baton and whipped it to full length.

“…If you cannot afford an attorney…”

I smacked the sprawled out replicant human in the small of its back and the back of its thighs as hard as I could, the slaps of baton metal against synthetic skin reverberating off the concrete block and tile of the sally port. The groans and sighs of the Meat Market apes accompanied my performance as they watched and heard me do what they only wished they could.

“…Do you understand these rights as I have explained them?”

EC returned pushing the gurney and smiling at my antics.

For good measure, I kicked the torso where ribs would be, then took a deep breath and turned to Ernst. “Sorry you had to see that, Deputy. But sometimes it feels good to get it all out.”

I collapsed my baton. We lifted the synthoid up and dropped it hard on the gurney. As we pushed it slowly past the swing shift of the Meat Market, their eyes followed us out with a combination of shock, envy, and animal hunger twitching in their fat faces.

“Feels good. Yeah. Feels good,” I muttered to myself, but purposely loud enough for them to hear.

EC worked hard to suppress a laugh. When we got to the elevator, he asked, “Was that really necessary?”

I thought for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, it was. Sometimes you’ve got to feed the beast.”

“But everyone knows I.A. cleared you of the worst.”

“Doubt is a powerful force, my friend. Like gardens, rumors need fertilizing and reputations need weeding.”

Down in the basement, we transferred custody of our evidence to Gus. I scribbled my name at the bottom of the form and slid the clipboard to EC.

“You got this?” I asked him.

“Maddie?”

I nodded.

“Yeah. Go on. Get out of here.”

“Thanks, partner.” I headed back to the elevator to go up to my old haunt in Robbery/Homicide, where the coffee would be hot and company might be, if not more inviting, at least more visually pleasing — if Maddie was, indeed, there.

***~~~***

Robbery/Homicide

“What? No donuts?” I asked no one and everyone as I loaded up a cup with coffee. Maddie’s desk chair was empty, so I scanned the squad room for her.

“Well, well, well…look what the cat dragged in,” Lt. Sands said as he sauntered over to the coffee pots from his office.

“Hey, boss. What’s new?”

Sands shook his head as he set his official police department cup down to fill it. Our careers crossed paths in Robbery/Homicide—his on the way up, mine on the way down. After the “Incident” and the Internal Affairs investigation, he crafted my out into the Geek Squad, saving my pension and giving my idle hands something to do during what would otherwise be interminably long and empty hours of a forced retirement.

Sands held up his cup and we clinked in mock toast. He took a sip without ever taking his eyes off of me. “Maddie?”

I shrugged, then nodded. Sands knew the back story of how I took all the weight and kept my former partner’s jacket clean.

“She’s around,” Sands said. “What’s new down the alley?”

EC and I had our offices in an annex building literally down the alley from the station house, reaffirming our status as outsiders. It bugged EC because it made him feel like an exile, but I was just as glad to be as far away as possible from the bureaucratic and political bull crap in the House. I’d had my fill of it in my career. “Murder by Munchausen. Hopefully, the forensics geeks will find the signature of the re-code man for us.”

Sands nodded, then said, “We never did work a case together.”

“No, Lieu. Never did.”

“Shame. Maddie says you were good.”

“Still am.” I winked, spying Maddie stepping off the elevator. You couldn’t miss her red hair, even when it was pulled back in a pony-tail, though I preferred it when she let her natural curls free to flow down her shoulders. More of an off-duty thing for her. “Speak of the she-devil.”

Sands smirked and shook his head. He knew. Saw it in my face, no doubt. He turned to go back to his office. “Good to see you, Jake.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sands stopped and scowled back over his shoulder. “Don’t call me sir.”

“Yes, sir.” I cracked a smile.

Sands shook his head and walked back towards his office. He warned Maddie as they passed in the aisle between the desks, “You’ve got a visitor, detective.”

Maddie stopped and looked over at me. She arrested the smile that started curling on her face for the benefit of the squad room and shook her head. She slowed her usual manic pace and took deliberately measured steps towards me. “Detective.”

“Detective,” I answered as politely and officiously as she had greeted me. I shuffled over to her desk. “How is your day going today?”

Maddie exhaled a long, heavy sigh.

“There, there. Tell Jake all about it.”

“Nothing to tell. Just the usual.”

“Ah, humanity at its best being bad.”

“Something like that. So what brings you out of the Alley?”

“Drop off for forensics.”

“Another disorderly droid in public?”

“Actually, murder this time.”

“Oh, do tell. It sounds positively marvelous.”

“Well, no…nothing like what you real cops see every day.” I scanned the crime scene thumbnails spread out on her iSlate screen. “That looks like a nasty one.”

“Hooker in an alley—a real alley. Messy business. Completely unnecessary, but…”

“Yeah, I can see.” I tapped the screen to open the gallery and swiped nonchalantly through the pics, then zoomed in on a body shot. There was something familiar about the mutilation of the body. “Hmmm.”

“What?”

“Ah, nothing. What have you got to go on?”

“Zip. Zero. Nada. The scene was as clean as a whistle with regards to the perp. Too clean. Three days now and the case is starting to stink like fish and unwanted house guests. I really don’t want it to go cold.”

“Hmmm.”

“You don’t think a droid…”

“Nah, too vicious. Too animal,” I mumbled, shuffling the pictures back and forth. It was gruesome, but there seemed to be a signature there. “Unless…”

I’d have to check my library of paper books, but there was something in the messy crime scene I had seen before.

“Dinner?” I asked.

“Yeah…I don’t think so,” Maddie did the Price is Right product arm swing toward her desk. “Gotta lotta work to do.”

“Sure.”

“But…”

“The door will be open. I’ll be up late. I’ve got some research to do.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, yet. Something caught my eye.”

“You’re the best. We could use any help we can get.”

“Sure thing.” I smiled looking forward to later, but wondering what it was I saw that was so familiar in that crime scene.

***~~~***

Old School

“There’s Pinot open on the counter,” I called out when I heard the front door to my flat open and close.

Good, I thought to myself, assuming Maddie got out of the House early. But then the clink of bottles as the refrigerator opened and closed told me it wasn’t her.

“You don’t mind, right?” EC asked as he sauntered into the living room holding up a Shiner Bock beer. “Holy calamari, what’s going on in here?”

I had open books spread out and blanketing the sofa, love seat, leather lounge chair, and coffee table, spilling off onto the surrounding floor. “Research.”

“Whatsamatta, the net down or did you forget to pay your bill again?”

I shrugged. “You can’t think outside the box when you’re locked in the box.”

“That’s what I love about you, Jake. You’re so old school.” EC shook his head. “I half expected to catch you watching Ren and Stimpy or Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”

“Ah, the classics…but, no, Maddie hates ‘em.”

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” EC looked around for Maddie.

“Nah, late night. She’s still on the job trying to crack a hard nut of a case.”

“And is that what this is all about?”

I nodded, looking around at all the mess of open books. I had a pretty extensive library of dead trees. People scoff, but predictive AI searches always lead you to predictable places. Noticing my wine glass was empty, I stood up and stretched out my back muscles. “Yeah. I thought I saw something in the crime pics in the murder book. Something odd about it. Something you can’t put into words, so how do you Google it?”

EC followed me into the kitchen. “Do tell. I love a mystery.”

“Classic hooker in the alley scenario. The mutilation got my attention.” I poured myself a healthy portion of Pinot Noir. “Something about the way the intestines were thrown over the shoulder and wrapped around the neck like a scarf.”

“You’ve got an eye for details. Always have.”

“It’s a blessing and a curse.” I took a sip of wine, then leaned on the island in the kitchen across from EC. “So, what brings you out slumming?”

“Got any snacks? I’m famished.”

“What am I, your butler? Check the pantry. You know where everything is. Might be some nuts or chips or something.”

“Guess I’m still wired from taking down that AnSub. It felt good. And, you know, a real case.”

“Yeah. It did.” I watched EC dig around my cupboards. He pulled out a bag of pretzels and tried one. He gave me a look that told me they were long beyond stale, then tossed the bag into the trash and dug deeper into the pantry. “Still too soon?”

“Huh? What?” EC asked coming up with an unopened bag of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. “These go good with beer, right?”

“I like ‘em. Evidently, it’s an acquired taste, though. Or so I’ve been told repeatedly by a certain female detective.”

“What the hell.” He popped a cookie in his mouth and washed it down with a gulp of Shiner. “So, the hooker? The intestines?”

“Puzzle pieces. You know. And there was a nice neat ‘Y’ incision, so it wasn’t just an unschooled gutting out of rage.”

EC popped in another cookie and crunched it up.

“I thought I might find something in the library.”

“You do have an awesome collection.”

I sighed and sipped my wine. “There’s just something about ink on a page that can’t be replaced or replicated with pixels.”

“But nothing, huh?”

I shrugged my shoulders, mentally leafing through the volumes I had pulled down from the shelves in my study.

“I just didn’t want to go home, yet, you know,” EC finally confessed. “You and I, we had a good day and I didn’t want that to go away yet.”

I nodded. EC lost Pattie, his wife, in a car wreck back in January. “Yeah, it was something, wasn’t it. I thought for sure the droid was going to rip your Adam’s apple out.”

EC chuckled. “It was a stroke of luck nailing him in that warehouse, huh?”

I popped a cookie in my mouth, grabbed the bottle of Pinot, and sat down at the kitchen table.

EC brought the bag of cookies over and we replayed the case and the capture from the top, so he wouldn’t have to go home just yet.

***~~~***

Maddie

After I found the sediment in a second bottle of wine and EC had put a dent into the second half of a twelve pack, he headed back to his empty split-level in the ‘burbs and I ended up in the leather lounge chair staring aimlessly at crime photos from the last century, flipping pages one way and back the other without focus, lost in inebriated thoughts of murder and Munchausen, EC’s friendship and loneliness, a promising law enforcement career gone south, and rebounding into very different kind of partnership with my ex-partner.

The next thing I knew, I woke naked in bed beside her, trying to solve the mystery of just when she had finally gotten to my apartment. All I could remember was sleepily padding after her as she led me to the bedroom. A dream, perchance, but no. No dream. There I was spooning against her, feeling her warmth and her steady breathing against my chest.

I came up from nuzzling into her neck and noticed Maddie’s shield and department-issued service weapon on the nightstand. I always found the Glock to be a rather soulless firearm. It never spoke to me like a 1911 or Colt Python. All they do is work, coldly and efficiently, but I suppose in the rather corporeal world where we spend our days cold, soulless and efficient is what you really want when your life is on the line.

Then it struck me.

“Jake?” Her voice was morning hoarse. “Don’t.”

“Huh? I—”

She grabbed my arm draped across her chest and held me to her. “Stay.”

“Okay.” But in my mind, I was trying to remember where in the puzzle pieces scattered on the furniture and floor the book was with the crime scene photo that had floated to my consciousness.

“I’m sorry I was so late. Sometimes I get a bit obsessed.”

I tightened my embrace.

Maddie sighed heavily. “You know…”

“Shhhh.” Never spoken of and only ever acknowledged in intimate moments like then, there is a toll your soul pays with every homicide you work.

No one wanted to work with Maddie when she was assigned to the district. It wasn’t chauvinism. There were plenty of women in the squad already. But it was more than the discomfort of a change in the familiar routine or the extra burden of showing a newbie the ropes added to the weight of the daily grind of crime solving. Or even the jealousy of watching a thoroughbred fast-tracking her way to a command slot. Nope. Maddie was young and beautiful and, of course, a redhead, with all the usual attendant baggage and a smart mouth to boot. No one—not even some of the female detectives that walk that way—wanted to ride with that temptation every day.

Stupid me tempted fate, though that wasn’t why I found myself at the other end of the alley on the Geek Squad.

Maddie’s phone rang and she instinctively groaned. The ringtone identified it as the station house. She answered it and “uh-huh-ed” her way through the call. I knew the days off we had planned together were toast.

“Another one,” she sighed wearily after she hung up.

I held her for the briefest of moments, then she rose to leave me.

***~~~***

John’s Diner

The best buttermilk pancakes ever in a tsunami of maple syrup. Hard, crisp bacon and a huge glass of milk. That and about a gallon of coffee helped shake the sediment of Pinot grapes out of my brain. I wondered, briefly, how EC was doing. He was pounding down the Shiners pretty hard.

I passively let the sugar and caffeine work their magic on my biologics, gazing blankly out the window at the mid-morning traffic on Detroit Avenue. No crime books. The iSlate dark. Just me and breakfast. At some point, I’d have to decide what to do with my two days off, since my previous plans with Maddie had been overcome by events. But I didn’t have to decide just then.

“So, where’s Red?” Amy asked coyly, sliding onto the booth bench across from me and slapping her paper waitress order pad down on the table. John’s is old school, too. Amy, though, is twenty-something. She slowly pulled an undone strand of blonde hair back off her face. “Flying solo?”

Her tone was a little too perky and a little too pregnant with expectations. Those days were over, though. At least for now. “Murder and mayhem in the big city. You know how it goes.”

“Yeah, Jake. I do know how it goes.” Amy cracked an alluringly half-crooked smile.

I smiled back. Temptation abounds. Just then, my phone started vibrating on the table. I looked at the screen. It was Maddie.

Amy scowled and grabbed her pad. She leaned over the table as she stood up. “I get off at the usual time…”

I watched her pirouette and sashay towards the kitchen.

“Hey,” I answered Maddie’s call.

“Hey. Got a quick minute and wanted to call. You know, sorry and all about having to rush off this morning.” Her jaw was locked unsmiling in crime scene mode. I saw frustration in her eyes.

“Duty calls. I get it.” Not every mate did. It’s one of the advantages of keeping it in the family. “All day pass?”

“Well, if forensics ever moved faster than a snail’s pace,” Maddie said loudly, turning to direct her comments over her shoulder at the crew in bunny suits working the scene behind her. Then back to me, “I could get myself sprung maybe in time before the Fire Escape Grill closes?”

The fire escape in question was the one on the back of my building and the grill, my charcoal Weber. Old school. “I’ll talk to the proprietor and have him keep the kitchen open.”

“Thanks, Jake. I need it.”

“The usual?”

“Yes, please.” She paused, looked off screen to her left, and listened. I ignored the muffled voice and followed Amy with my eyes as she carried an order from the kitchen to a table. “Sorry. Gotta go.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

The screen went dark.

Hadn’t planned on grocery shopping on my day off, but what the hell. I decided to go by the West Side Market. And I’d probably have to pick up all the crime books strewn about the place. No doubt a mood killer for Maddie after a hard day at the office. Great. More domestic chores. But not yet.

I tossed a generous tip on the table and grabbed my stuff. As I passed by on my way to the register, I put my hand on the small of Amy’s back, feeling her young muscles clench in a familiar way.

“Try to stay out of trouble, you,” I said lowly into her ear.

“Is that personal advice…or professional?”

“I’m just a cop on the beat, ma’am.”

“Stop by anytime, officer.”

I paid my bill and left.

***~~~***

The Fourth Estate

“So…where’s your partner?” the inquiring reporter ambushed as I stepped out of John’s Diner.

With the wisps of warm memories of Amy’s body still dissipating in my mind, I reflexively responded by guardedly asking myself, Which partner?

“Ah…yeah…I meant EC.” He had no doubt caught the warmly confused look on my face. “I know from the Atlas scan app that Maddie’s on the job.”

“Are you stalking me now?”

“Slow news day.”

“No, it’s not. It never is. How long?”

“Oh, ‘bout half a short stack.”

“Asshole. Why didn’t you come in?”

“Professional courtesy? Maybe? Didn’t know if you were on duty or not since you were solo and—so, who’s the blonde?”

I followed his eye line into the diner to Amy who was waving at us. I waved back. “Put a sock on it, ya mook. She could be half your age.”

“Yeah, but a man can still dream, can’t he?”

I kept those thoughts to myself.

Jamal was an indie but a good one. He mainly did tech stuff, but he had found a niche for himself in my little corner of the world where electrons collide with corpuscles on the wrong side of the law that kept his byline—E.J. Quick, probably his maiden name—on millions of screens on an all too regular basis. He swears he created the whole Murder by Munchhausen tag. He’s probably right, but I’d never let on that I thought so—or that I even read his stuff, which I did. It was more fratricidal ego hazing than professional discourtesy. Jamal was a good guy. I liked him.

“That was a nice catch on the droid.”

“It’s why the city pays me the big bucks.”

“So, spill. Got the data dump yet?”

I rolled my eyes. “As if…”

“Come on. The vic was Judge Mullaney’s third-second cousin or something. Right?”

“Damn Irish. Kill one and they all take offense. Anyway, you know the lab squidlies in forensics. Their clock speeds ain’t exactly set to the Naval Observatory.”

“But you’ll let your favorite journalist know as soon as the results come in.”

“Journalist? You flatter yourself.”

“Hey, let me get a pic—so my editor knows I’m not just sitting around in my pajamas making stuff up.” Jamal spun and pressed himself to my side, holding out his phone to take a selfie with me. “Is that a pistol? Or are you just glad to see me?”

“Did you at least get my good side?”

“Jake, you don’t have a good side.”

***~~~***

Edgewater

When I’ve got nowhere to be, there’s no place better than being at the lake. Also, public parks are nearly exclusively occupied by humans. Synthoids don’t need R&R, so the few there to pick up trash are uniformed in Metroparks logoed jumpsuits and are easy to avoid.

So, I hoofed it back from John’s to the building that I “inherited” from Mom and Pop, where my apartment was above what used to be their shop. My sister took it over, but couldn’t clean up the mess left behind after probate and I bailed the building out of IRS purgatory with a chunk of my settlement stash. It was okay between us. I had no interest in a flower shop and Karen made an honest go of it, but her heart really wasn’t into floral arrangements either. So, no hard feelings.

But now, the shop was a big empty man cave for my play things. I rolled the Indian Chief Dark Horse out the garage door that led to the alley out back. It’s my preferred mode of travel since motorcycles don’t have a “Rochester” chauffeur mode—and I hate putting my life in the hands of self-driving cars.

I cranked the engine and headed down to Edgewater to hang and watch the waves crash. The sound aurally scrubbed my mind, clearing my thoughts. Funny, how not thinking can help you think.

I sat for a long while on the rocks, then wandered the beach, which was mostly abandoned in the middle of the week—at least ‘til the day was pushing noon, when the people watching got a little more interesting as folks started gathering like lint and hair in a drain trap. You can never turn it off completely, even when you’re off duty. Always making judgments and sizing up intents, whether it be ill or otherwise. An involved couple meeting to share a sandwich. A scattering of businessmen brown-bagging it to seek out a little serenity in the middle of the work day. Teens who should be in school but weren’t, with no ill intent except to escape the educational warehousing for a day. The ones that always draw closer scrutiny are those who sit in their cars, especially on a warm, sunny day. Their visages are always the least social, rarely smiling, staring like hungry panthers at prey. My eye is immediately drawn to the license plate number. Like I said, you can’t turn it off.

But I was off duty, so I walked back, then east out around the marina and the power plant to Whiskey Island. Pumping my legs helped the thought process a lot, too. Somehow, I solved many a tough case wandering aimlessly about the city. There was nothing really to noodle over on my case with EC—at least until the forensics guys finished up analyzing the synthoid’s hardware, firmware, and software. We had the AnSub; we just needed the accomplice who programmed the murder and the perp who paid for it. But Maddie’s case was still festering in my mind, chewing on my gray matter like the waves gnawing and eroding the shoreline.

I got back to the water’s edge on the north side of the island and mindlessly watched an ore boat breech the break wall to head upriver to deliver its mined goods.

“Another one,” Maddie said when she got the call from the House that morning.

I didn’t need to see those photos to know what that meant and the look on her face when she called from the crime scene confirmed it: the same person had committed both murders. It was early, but no doubt the thought had already put down roots in the back of her mind that she may have just caught a serial murder case…and that brings a whole new set of calculations into the equation. Some of it is bureaucratic and procedural and exceedingly annoying—like when do you actually invite the brass to start looking over your shoulder with a microscope at every little thing that you do and when do the federal frat boys at the F.B.I. crash the party and then the whole public relations nightmare with the media. I don’t mind sparring one-on-one with Jamal and his ilk, but standing in front of a pack of hungry news cameras and microphones to feed their pathological need for attention? In a way, it is its own Media by Munchausen. No thanks. Been there. Done that. Been second, third and fourth guessed by every expert out there with their own blog and by-line. But, come to think about it, Maddie would probably look great and sound smart streaming onto all the big screens at the end of the media pipeline. She might like it. Me? Not so much.

On the other hand, the hunter in us all can’t help but feel the adrenalin rush of being on the trail of “big game.” Hell, it’s not even my case, but I got a mainline dose of it just looking at the crime photos. Homicides are usually just messy and emotional, no mystery or matching wits with a mastermind. You’re essentially cleaning up the temper tantrum of a toddler armed with a deadly weapon. But it’s a completely different ball game when the act of taking a life becomes some sick mode of self-expression. And unlike the unsolved cases that can take their toll over time with their lack of answers, a serial case eats you alive because you’re not looking back asking ‘why.’ You know there is a new victim coming, so you’re looking ahead and asking ‘who’ and ‘when,’ feeling powerless to stop what you know will happen.

I knew Maddie’s mind had already started going there, wondering about the third vic.

So, while the hunter in me yearned to join the pack, the lover in me wanted her out. But I knew that would never happen. This was the kind of case careers are made out of…and she knew it, too.

I walked back to my bike with selfish thoughts swirling unverbalized in the back of my head and disrupting any professional attempt to connect dots into a usable and meaningful pattern.

***~~~***

The West Side Market

Mel, the Butcher, saw me coming and waved his cleaver at me. I waved back and slowly meandered down the crowded aisle of the open market, mentally taking note of the produce and bakery offerings along the way to his stall.

“The usual?” asked Mel as I stepped up to his counter.

“Yeah. A couple of Freddies, please.” Mel didn’t know who Fred Flintstone was, but he knew that—whoever he was—he liked his steaks extra thick. I watched him saw off a couple of cowboy rib steaks that would barely fit on the Weber. I mentally drifted back to the butchery in the alley.

“You got a big case?” Mel asked in his thick Slavic accent, noticing my faraway look. “You look like you got a big case.”

“Me? No. No big cases for me anymore.” I shook my head. “Maddie, though…”

“How is Miss Madeline?”

I sighed out loud.

“Jake, Jake, Jake…” Mel shook his head and wagged his butcher knife at me. “Don’t screw this one up, too. She’s a good lady.”

Maddie and I used to stop at the West Side Market for gyros when we were just work partners and wander up and down the aisles scoping out the food items, since we both share a passion for good eating. You wouldn’t think that a career woman cop would be such a good cook, but she knew her way around the kitchen. I found that out later, during my suspension, when she came by to cheer me up with plateful after plateful of gourmet goodies. Truth be told, I’m just an animal flesh searer. She’s the one with the culinary artistry. Mel knew the same thing from her interrogation of him on different cuts of meat, like she was wringing a felony confession out of the butcher.

“Yeah, I know. I know. That’s what everybody tells me.”

“Well, then, you should listen to everybody then. Huh.”

“Just throw those Freddies over this way.”

The steaks landed with a satisfying thud on the counter top, like a heavyweight boxer hitting the canvas. I smiled and slipped Mel bank scrip for the meat—more than they weighed out to—that I’m sure went right into his pocket. The government tried hard to take the cash out of society, but that just ain’t how people are in the real world.

“You listen to everybody, my friend. Listen.”

“Sure, Mel. Sure.”

I saluted and wandered on down the aisle, listening instead to the voice inside my head and doing my people-perp watch of the crowd.

I missed it more than I admitted—at least to the outside world—being a people cop, I mean. I guess the Poindexters EC and I go after are people. Barely. Not exactly the usual stuff of crime statistics, anyway. Just not much sport in it really, just digital ones and zeros for evidence, mainly, and a geeky computer nerd at the end of the trail. Maybe that’s why I latched onto Maddie’s case so quickly, but I didn’t really believe that. Just playing iPsych on myself—something that I got too much of a taste of from the Department shrinks.

I mean, just being so close to a real flesh and bloody crime investigation, I could feel the heat of passion, anger, ambition and a tinge of fear, like standing close to a radiator. Truth be told, it’s a pretty intoxicating cocktail. But the bottom line is that there is somebody doing bad things to people…very bad things that have to be stopped. And there was something there in the crime pictures that I saw but didn’t yet see.

The faces in the Market dissolved into a blank, fleshy canvas as I sliced through the crowd like a shark through a school of tuna.

And I’m sure my eyes looked just as cold and empty to the schooling shoppers.

***~~~***

The Fire Escape Grill

Unconsciously, I sorted the books scattered around the loft into two piles as I tidied up the place for Maddie. I had thoughts of running the vacuum, but, well, I got sidetracked by black-and-white eight-by-tens from a hundred years ago or more. I re-shelved the bigger stack of books and towered the other off in an out-of-the-way corner, hopefully where it would stay out of Maddie’s eye line. I surveyed the joint. The place was clean enough. I just had to ensure footprints weren’t left in the dust and that all other possible work-related distractions were properly tucked away out of sight.

I went out to preload the Weber and Frank the Feral Cat was there waiting for me with an impatient look on his face, so first I took care of his needs. He followed me into the kitchen to keep an eye on me like the wary feline that he is. I took his tuna back out to the fire escape and he eyeballed me as I dumped charcoal into the stovepipe starter and stuffed it with scrap paper from the station. As he settled into wolfing down his meal, I sat down on the fire escape and dangled my legs over the edge with a beer, soaking in the long summer sun. In the winter, with the trees stripped of their leaves, I can just barely make out the lake through the cuts between the houses and apartment buildings. Once spring comes, it’s gone, so I watched the traffic and the birds and the occasional pedestrian as I waited, slowly and methodically stripping my mind of thoughts like old paint off of woodwork.

“Hey, Jakie,” Maddie called out what could have been minutes or hours later or maybe even days.

“Out back!” I answered.

A few minutes later, she climbed out on the fire escape with her lawn chair and a glass of red wine. She plopped down and took a long sip. “Hey, Frank.”

Frank acknowledged her arrival with a long, impatient look up from his tuna.

“Oh, my God. That sun feels great,” Maddie exclaimed. “Bring it on. Bring it on.”

“Hungry?”

“Mmmm…I will be.”

“Mel says ‘hi’ and that I should pay attention more—to you, that is.”

“Yeah? Maybe you should take his advice”

I looked back at her over my shoulder.

She smiled wearily.

I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.

“Exact same M.O.” Maddie sighed heavily. “Definitely dealing with a sick puppy.”

I nodded. I understood completely.

“You got anything?”

“A gut feeling.”

Maddie nodded. She understood that if you force it, like a bird in the bush, you flush it and maybe never see it again.

“I—”

“Later. We’ve got all night.” I got up and took her hand to lead her inside to the bedroom.

She didn’t resist.

After, we lay naked for a long while, not speaking, then I got up and lit the grill. I watched the sunset.

Maddie appeared behind me, dressed only in a tank top and a pair of short shorts. Her hard, well-exercised and well-tended body teased beneath the thin fabric. Her hair waterfalled down across her shoulders like I like it. She sipped at the glass of wine she had poured when she first arrived and admired the setting sun. She sighed contentedly.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We don’t call it the Fire Escape Grill for nothing.

Eventually, the coals glowed orange hot and I started searing the cattle flesh. Maddie went in to rattle around the kitchen to prep our side dish. We sat in our lawn chairs in the dusk at the end of the daylight, eating our steaks and talking about sports, work politics, city politics and what we should do on our vacation together in the fall—everything except the five-hundred-pound gorilla of a subject in the room—until we ran out of ways to avoid it, so we went to bed to wrestle more tenderly this time and fell asleep.

“Sands says he’ll hold off going to the brass,” Maddie said when we met at the coffee pot the next morning as she made her way to the shower. “But if it starts getting too much play in the media…”

“He’ll have no choice,” I finished her sentence. “Obviously.”

“Yeah. Managementspeak.”

“Got anything?”

“Precious little, except the profession of the victims and the eviscerations. The Bunny Boys picked up some DNA material, but with the revolving door on their panties, who knows where that will lead.”

“Well, start practicing your media doublespeak.”

Maddie rolled her eyes and took a sip of coffee. “What about your Munchhausen Murder? Anything back from the Wonder Kids?”

“Oh, I imagine Q will have something for us this morning. I’m just glad EC has the patience to endure his techno-babble. I sure don’t.”

“Always at the mercy of technicians,” Maddie whined sympathetically.

“Press ‘3’ for all the ways that technology has not made your life better…”

We dressed and armed ourselves for the work day, then went our separate ways.

***~~~***

The Grease Monkeys

The first stop EC and I made was the back room in our building known as Mechanical where the grease monkeys tear down apprehended synthoids in a half-assed autopsy. Bob and Puff were hunched over our droid bickering like the old married couple they practically were. EC cleared his throat.

“Hey there, guys,” Bob said in his sing-song way, standing upright and wiping fluid off his hands with an oily rag. He was the rounder and jollier of the two. Puff, tall, lean and curmudgeonly, just grunted and kept poking around the wires and tubes in the torso through the abdominal access panel.

“Spring a leak?” I asked, pointing at Bob’s hands.

“Yeah, you know, boy, it’s a funny thing…” Bob smiled and chuckled, adjusting the glasses on his face. “Some of the bio-hydraulic lines in the legs and rib cage were ruptured. Nasty take down, I guess. Huh?”

Puff stood up straight, bringing some kind of electronic module from inside the droid to the tip of his nose to examine, squinting at it to bring its label into focus. “The Dermal-Lite on the back of the thighs had lateral impact impressions…like from a baton.” He squinted my way. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

I shrugged innocently.

Puff looked at EC, catching his smirking half-smile, then grunted and dove back into the guts of the synthoid. “Right. Idiots.”

“So what’s the story on this unit?” EC asked.

“Well, I’ll tell ya, guys,” Bob wound himself up with a deep breath, “it’s a standard Omega Gen-3 chassis, but there’s definitely been some special modifications.”

“Chop-shopped?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—but these guys aren’t hacks. They seem to know their way around bio-robotics pretty well. And they didn’t use cheap gray market replacement parts. All OEM stuff, but they mixed and matched from the Big Three. Look here, a Fanuc Dexterity Control Unit,” Bob pointed into the abdomen of the synthoid, “mated to a Mitsu BLC. And over here’s a GD mobility module.” Bob shook his head. “I don’t know how they got their hands on a military grade mobility pack.”

“But the Gen-3s aren’t as vertically integrated as the earlier designs, right?” EC asked.

“True. True,” Bob’s bald head bobbed up and down. “And swapping out subassemblies is a pretty effective way to get around the embedded RSHA protocols to defeat the Three Laws.”

“Yeah, so, they’re all Frankensteins to one degree or another, right?” I asked.

“True. True. You can’t do it all with just software. But this one—”

“The mobility module,” Puff said curtly. He stood up again, twirling what looked like a hip ball and socket assembly in his hands. He squinted one eye shut towards EC and me. The stare down seemed to last forever.

“He’s right, you know,” Bob finally interrupted. “That’s the wild card.”

“How so?”

“Generals need to know where the grunts are, but not the enemy,” Puff explained without elucidating the matter.

“Yup. Army synthoids aren’t permanently latched to the Atlas grid like civilian units,” Bob said. “Otherwise, troop movements could be seen by the bad guys. I couldn’t begin to tell you how they hacked into a mil spec GMC, but this is definitely post graduate work—maybe even Ph.D. level.”

“Post hole diggers?” I asked to lighten the mood.

Puff glared at me.

“Did you get the black boxes pulled?” EC asked quickly before another staring contest got under way.

“First thing we did, fellas,” Bob answered. “Got them over to Q yesterday morning.”

“Great. Thanks, guys.” EC headed towards the door.

I took a last long look at the tangled innards of the murder weapon. I looked over at Puff. “Serious, huh?”

He ran his fingers through the thick shock of his graying hair. “As a heart attack.”

I nodded and followed EC out.

Puff’s squinting eyes tracked me the whole way out the door.

***~~~***

Q

EC planted himself at his desk and began mining his inbox for word back from the code analysts. I sat down and pulled a pad of paper out of my desk to start my daily “To Do” list. Old school. But scrawling out my hopes and dreams in long hand was always more effective for me than doing it online and stuffing them into a cloud somewhere—who knows where. Out of sight, out of mind—and people wonder why nothing ever gets done.

Our Elba was called “Exit Alley,” back behind the station house in an abandoned warehouse that the city foreclosed on and put forth a minimal effort to renovate in order to get us out of the hair of the “real” cops. It drove EC crazy. I was just as glad to be off the chain of command’s immediate radar—especially now with the cold shadow of a possible serial killer hanging over their heads. Maddie’s case would ratchet the tension in the squad room up for everybody.

Our “offices” were nothing more than a big open bullpen with desks and a few file cabinets. We did have a couple of conference rooms/interrogation rooms along the side wall that got more use out of HR and their endless training sessions, than they did wringing confessions out of reluctant perps. Usually by the time we apprehended a hacker, their will to resist—usually as weak to begin with as their upper body strength—had evaporated. There were four other officers exiled to the Geek Squad. Two of them had actually requested the duty, having come up through IT, white collar crimes, and forensic accounting. None of them had seen the street in their entire crime fighting careers like me and EC. They hung out with Q and his gang on their breaks—as if…

“Bingo! Q’s got something for us,” EC exclaimed and I watched his lips flap as he read the email from our resident forensic programming genius and reverse hacker. Q had some kind of shady past that was never mentioned by anyone in the squad and that tickled my interest not one bit, or byte, depending upon your technical orientation. EC hopped to his feet. “Come on, Jake. He says it’s something we need to see for ourselves.”

I made a show of lumbering reluctantly to my feet and shuffled after EC. The Brainiacs were in another part of the warehouse, in offices much nicer and more climate-controlled than ours, which boiled in the summer and froze in the winter. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Q’s world was one of cubicles and the quiet tap-tap-tapping of keyboards, like a constant depressing rain against a windowpane. He greeted us at the door and motioned us into a severe white conference room with modern white furniture. You almost had to shield your eyes from the glare. The pale green paint somebody viciously picked for our decor was already peeling, even though our side had been renovated at the same time as the lab’s. EC and I sat on one side of the table. Q sat across from us and pulled out a printed out report on…more white paper! How could the Brainiacs sit in such brightness all day long and not get even a hint of a tan?

I sat back in my chair. EC leaned in to listen intently to Q. That wasn’t really his name. I tagged him with it because I refused to engage lab rats on a personal level. Evidently, he actually knew who James Bond was and even Ian Fleming—one point in his favor—and took a shine to his new nickname, so it stuck. He was also able to affect a scruffy unshaven look, being one of the few males in the colony who could actually sprout whiskers, so he didn’t look fourteen. Another point. And if I was being completely truthful, he had a gritty attitude about rules that I found appealing—but I never let on.

“We’ve found some recurring subroutines and library links in the coding that are very interesting.” Q laid out sheets of paper filled with typed gibberish cascading across the page. His index finger darted into different lines of code like peccadilloes until it finally stuck on one line of code highlighted in yellow. “And this call out here is particularly intriguing.”

That’s odd, I caught myself wondering. Q? Paper?

“And why is that?” EC asked with interest.

“Well…” Q shuffled more papers in a file folder and pulled out another couple of sheets. “It is an external call out into a cloud bank that has, well, evaporated.”

Techno mumbo jumbo, I thought. “Okay…”

“It is obviously a ploy to keep forensic evidence out of the synthoid’s firmware by putting it where it wouldn’t be found or would be destroyed after the mission was concluded.”

“How would they do that?”

“It might be triggered by an event, like the crime, or time deadline or even sensor input, like a spike off the RFIDs in a cop badge.” Q scratched his whiskered cheek loudly. “It’s a new twist. Actually, quite creative.”

“Well, where is this cloud bank?” EC asked.

“And that, gentlemen, that is the funny thing…” He folded his hands on top of the papers and stared first at EC, then me.

“What?” I asked impatiently, but not from Q’s transparent attempt to build suspense. My spider senses started tingling at ‘quite creative.’

“Commercial services are required by the Public Utilities Commission to keep LUDs—Local Usage Details—on cloud account activities, which can be subpoenaed.”

“So, we need to get you a subpoena?” EC’s voice betrayed reluctance at the prospect of official paperwork.

“Well, I would say yes, if I thought it would lead us somewhere useful. But I already know that it would be a dead end.”

“And how do you know that?” I asked.

Q rolled his eyes and feigned a Spanish accent, “’Cause we don’t need no stinking subpoenas here.”

“At least not unless we want it to be admissible,” EC noted impatiently. Q was even starting to irritate my partner.

“But there’s no sense in wasting all that time and judicial goodwill when we know there won’t be anything useful to be admissible.”

“And we know this how?” I asked again, a bit more sternly.

Q stared back at me. “I’ve read the I.A. transcripts on your…incident—”

“Those are sealed,” I said. “Or are supposed to be.”

“Yes. Quite.”

“So?”

“Then you do understand.” Q swept up the pages of printed out code. He tapped the edges square on the table and slid them into the file folder. He reached to his belt and pulled off his Android Alpha-Bit and placed it on the table between us like an ante in a poker game.

“That’s not department-issue,” EC noted.

“So, report me.” Q stood up and motioned silently towards the door. “You in or out.”

EC and I pulled the iNodes from our belts and anted up. As far as the Atlas grid was concerned, we’d still be sitting in the conference room with Q.

Q rounded the table and headed out.

EC and I looked at each other, stood up, and followed him out of the conference room and down the hall, offices on the left and a cubicle farm on the right.

When Q got to the end of the hall, he pulled out a burner and tapped swiftly on the screen, then silenced the alarm on the emergency exit and held the door open for us. We all went out into the alley that separated us from the House. Q produced a flat piece of hard plastic from nowhere like a magician, slid it between the latch and the jam, then pushed the door shut behind us. He squinted up at the security camera to make sure its blinking red light was out. He gave us a smirk.

“Lovely aroma,” EC said, sniffing the air and eyeballing the dumpster.

“What can I say? My gang loves Indian food,” said Q.

“So, the cloak and dagger routine…for why?” I asked.

“For why, because the LUD breadcrumbs lead back to the NSA. And Samantha noticed in her pattern analysis that the logic loops therein are, shall we say, bureaucratically bloated and inefficient.”

“Samantha?” EC asked.

“You’d like her. She’s cute.” Q winked.

“NSA?” I asked.

“A lazy copy and paste job. It appears to be a routine to access metadata.”

“But why? How did a domestic dispute gone awry end up in a hack into the NSA?” I wondered out loud.

“Hey. Me, I’m forensics. Remember?” Q asked pointing his finger into his own sternum. Then he wagged his long, skinny index finger between EC and me. “You are the detectives. So, detect.”

“Okay, so email me your findings,” EC said.

“Uh-uh.” Q shook his head and handed EC the thick manila file folder. “Breadcrumbs. I don’t want any knocks on my door—personally or professionally.”

EC and I looked at one another.

Q pulled the emergency exit door open and stepped back inside. “You guys coming back in?”

“Nah. I think I need some air—fresh air,” I said, looking up at the security camera. “I think we’re gonna take a walk.”

“Suit yourselves.” Q pulled out his burner. “I’ll give you a minute or two to clear the alley before I turn big brother back on. This gonna take long?”

I looked at EC. He shrugged. “Give us an hour.”

“Excellent. Since I’m off the grid, I’ve got some errands to run.” Q smiled cryptically. “Ping me once and I’ll clear you back in to adjourn our meeting and get your iNodes.”

Q slipped back into the building.

EC and I headed down the alley to Cutty’s Deli, where we knew we’d be away from prying eyes and ears…and lenses.

I looked back over my shoulder at the security camera and saw the red light come back on.

***~~~***

Cutty

Cutty was a retired cop who developed an expertise in deli meats during his twenty-five years on patrol as well as some pretty strong opinions on the proper assembly of a great sandwich and the improper pollution of coffee with anything other than real dairy cream and real sugar from real sugar cane. His place was always busy, even though it was around the corner and tucked away from the Justice Center. It was a place where plea deals got made, because prosecutors and public defenders checked their indignation as well as the Bill of Rights at the door and where cops spoke freely and frankly about the facts—admissible and otherwise—of their cases clear of the mist and fog of Department policy and political correctness. Although there was no sign on the door, the place was always completely devoid of politicians, both civilian and those wearing blue. Oh yeah, and no one from Internal Affairs—past or present—ever showed their face there. Evidently, Cutty had some history with them, too. Most of the good ones do—or so I’d been told by Cutty. He was my training officer went I first got out of the academy.

EC and I got a booth in the back and it wasn’t long before the ex-cop appeared at our table dressed in a stained white apron.

“Howdy, boys.” Cutty swirled amber liquid in a department mug that had never been stained by coffee—at the station or in its afterlife at the deli—and took a sip. His affinity for Scots Whiskey was well known. “The chili is a particularly good batch today.”

“Are you kidding me?” EC snickered. “I’ve got to ride with this guy for the next five days.”

“I’ll do it. Make it a five-way,” I said to Cutty, pushing away my unopened menu, then scowled across the table at my partner. “EPA and EC be damned.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Then give me a pastrami Reuben,” EC countered. “With slaw.”

“Nice. Fighting fire with fire. It’s going to be an aromatic tour.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

EC smirked.

“I heard you scooped up the droid that iced the judge’s son. Nice work.” Cutty winked. “But…what about the Geppetto pulling the strings?”

“Funny you should ask.” EC tapped the envelope from Q with the forensics report. “Appears to be complications.”

“Always are…Always are.”

“Yeah, but these might be of the federale variety,” I sighed.

“Ouch. Sorry to hear it. No one needs that.” Cutty paused to peer at me over his mug. After another sip, he grinned and added, “Just ask Maddie in a week or two. How’s that case working out for her? Word is that she’ll be surrounded by pressed suits and starched white shirts before too long.”

“Don’t get jealous now, Jake,” EC teased.

“Actually, I feel sorry for the suits. She has a knack for getting her way. Trust me. I know.”

“You’ve always played with fire,” Cutty said.

“I’m not the only one with third-degree burns on his soul.”

“Yeah, but most people wait for the afterlife.” Cutty winked. “I’ll put in your order.”

We watched him head back behind the counter.

“So, what do you think about Q’s report?” EC asked when Cutty was out of earshot.

“A breadcrumb.”

“You want to follow it? Knowing where it could lead?” EC sighed heavily. “I ain’t got the energy to be sparring with DC’s boys—especially if they’re spooks.”

I pondered for a moment. “I wonder what it really means. You heard Q. Anybody can hack into anyone’s short hairs if they want. Why would this guy want? It’s a local judge. A local crime. No need to go all Mission Improbable about it. Maybe, like Q said, he’s just a lazy cut-and-paste kind of guy.”

“Cutting and pasting from the NSA? That’s a special kind of lazy.”

“Inside or outside. That’s the question.”

“I hope it’s outside. You know there’s no way we’ll get any help from the Company minions.” EC arranged and rearranged his silverware.

“Depends upon what he was tapping into and why. Maybe, just maybe, the worker bees don’t want the ruling class to know there’s air leaking out of their tires.”

“And just who would you talk to about that?”

I tapped my chin with my index finger. “Hmmm. I might know a guy who knows a guy.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to know.”

Cutty returned with our lunches. “Bon appétit.”

EC and I traded evil smiles as we prepared to load up our intestines with ammo.

***~~~***

The Federales

EC went back to Exit Alley to retrieve our iNodes and start data mining known associates of the victim and his spouse to prep for our interview. I headed down to Lakeside, then took a right over to East 9th and sat on a park bench across the street from the Federal Building. I took out my latest burner phone and dialed a number inside.

“Yeah, can I get a pizza to go with no anchovies?” I got the response I expected from the familiar voice inside and pocketed my phone. Secret Service, my ass. That place had more holes in it than the Pacific Fleet after December 7th.

The engineers and programmers do a good job and most people can’t tell the mechanical droids from the human drones on the street even at a reasonably close distance. More likely, though, is that they just stopped paying attention, like ignoring regular people in the crowd every day. If you know what you’re looking for, though, you can spot them easy enough. Of course, after the last year or so, I’m a bit more tuned into them, like a fisherman reading the surface of the lake for a school of walleye. They’re still digital creatures, not analogue like us humans, so their movements are just a bit too crisp and hard-edged, even from a distance, mostly at the knees and elbows. Of course, it’s even more obvious when you come face-to-face with one. Too many muscles in the human head, including the big, fat one between the ears. But it’s getting harder, though, because the industry is always getting better, especially with the new active plasma biologic materials they are developing. And research showed that people react subconsciously to rhythms of bodies around them, so the Gen-3s even mimic the diaphragm movements of breathing and have nano-motors to generate pulses in the neck and wrists.

What struck me most, though, as I observed the activities on the plaza across the street, was just how many synthoids there were wandering around the Federal Building. I started making mental notes, as was my habit, and eventually noticed the same droids circulating randomly around the plaza. Ah…security droids. No doubt the first line of defense in any attack against the government. I wondered what my Secret Service pal thought about his job description being automated.

Eventually, my “pizza” got delivered.

“J-man,” muttered the tall, dark-suited civil servant as he wandered by my bench. His eyes were shielded by government issued Ray-Bans. He stopped at the East 9th Street crosswalk and looked up at the traffic camera perched above the signal lights.

I stood up and meandered to the corner, then crossed Lakeside against the light. Cloak and dagger crap. A bit overly dramatic, but a small price to pay.

Eventually, we crossed paths again at Short Vincent Street and headed down Superior Avenue to the library. If you knew where to go, there were still dark holes deep, deep in the stacks, safe from prying eyes. Nineteenth Century literature was an appropriately dim corner of our modern day Orwellian reality.

“You off grid?” He hissed between his glowing gritted teeth. He still had his sunglasses on, like the cheesy Federal LEO that he was.

I nodded.

“Good. So, how’s tricks?”

“Can’t complain.” I shrugged off the question.

“Yeah, well, I could, but where would it get me?”

“Maybe promoted to a GL-9?”

“Funny, Jake. Real funny.”

“Yeah, I’m a riot. That’s what I.A. put in their report. So, now I’ve got that on my permanent record.”

“So, how can I help you today, Citizen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can help you.”

“How so?”

“How about spook code infecting my murder investigation?”

“Huh. Homeland Security? Insecure? Imagine that. Is this that judge’s kid?”

I nodded.

“Interesting…”

“Ya think?”

“No. Not really.” He sighed heavily. “Do you know how many lines of code it takes for the federal government to rule the plebes?”

I shook my head. “Or wait. Is this a joke?”

“Sadly, no. Nobody does. And that’s the problem.”

“I’ll bet it’s gotta be at least as voluminous as the tax code.”

“Yeah, well, at least the private sector is anal about their magic pixie dust.”

“Capitalism. You gotta love it.”

“You’d think, but…You know the only real competition in civil service is in the area of mudslinging and backstabbing.”

“I thought the NSA was a cut above anyway—especially on mudslinging. You know, the new J. Edgars, the ones with brontobyte-sized files on everybody, born and yet unborn, and the total lack of fear or ethics to use them to protect themselves and their own dark wants and desires.”

“NSA? Well, that’s different. Those guys are bad ass.”

“So again I ask, why is their code polluting my crime scene?”

“And how do you know this?”

“Really? You want my source?” I feigned outrage since I knew he knew.

“Q, right?”

“He’s good. At least that’s what EC tells me. And he is actually pretty effective when he’s not in one of his moods.”

“I’m surprised he doesn’t work for them.”

“Him? The NSA? Never.” I shook my head and fingered the bindings of books on the shelf. “Q wouldn’t be caught dead working for The Man.”

He answered with a Federal-sized grunt of indignation. “You got something for me?”

I took out the page with the code that Q highlighted. “Don’t get any Inspector General types involved, okay? I just want to know if this guy is inside or outside of government.”

The Federale snatched the page out of my hands and skimmed over it. “Jesus. How can anyone stare at this crap every day, all day, and not go mad.”

“And not go mad? I think you answered your own question. Q is anything but even-keeled.”

He nodded, folded the page back up and stuck it in his suit jacket. It was actually nice that not everyone in government dressed like a golf pro. “I don’t know where this will lead, but you understand that I’m not sticking my neck out too far on this.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ll chum the waters and see what kind of carp comes to the surface.”

“Carp or crap?”

“Neither one is good eating, so what’s the diff?” He pulled down a volume from the shelf. “Read much, Jake?”

I nodded.

“You would.” He smirked and showed me the cover: Frankenstein by Mary Shelly.

“I’m more of a fan of her husband.”

“Who’s that?”

“Never mind. Let me know if you hear something.” I started to turn to head out of the stacks.

“Hey, hey, hey—what about me? You know how this works: Quid pro quo.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know…something.”

I had to stop and think, really think about selling out Maddie and whether it was worth it, but nah. Sure, he’d score points giving the local F.B.I. guys two floors down a heads-up on a serial killer case coming their way, but it’s Maddie and I hate to admit it: I am sweet on her. And, I hate bureaucratic backscratching—it’s unsightly like the simian grooming on Monkey Island at the zoo; but, ugly as it is, it’s the way of the world. Of course, there had yet to be any quo to quid. Besides, he owed me from last time, so by my scorekeeping, I was still ahead.

“I might have something juicy for you, but not yet.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be good.” I turned and headed out of the stacks, calling back over my shoulder, “Though actual mileage may vary.”

***~~~***

Mrs. Victim

Now that we had the murder weapon and we were starting to get some leads on the reprogrammer, it was time to chat with the judge’s daughter-in-law and, from what EC found in his search, he hinted she might be a doozie.

We made a good Mutt and Jeff team. EC liked doing his homework and researching the hell out of an interview. I preferred to be more of a blank canvas so that my impressions weren’t colored by information already smeared on my psyche. It’s important to get a clean read on a person of interest, and if you’re painting-by-numbers, sometimes staying inside the lines takes your eye off the big picture. EC got it. So did Maddie—at least when we were professional partners. It’s not so easy now. But, you know, things always change.

The Widow Mullaney agreed to see us in their penthouse apartment a couple of blocks down the hill from the bodega where her husband was programmed out of existence. After our formal introductions, EC sat down across the coffee table from her and took out his iSlate. Laying it on the table, he hit ‘Record’ and pulled up his research notes.

I drifted over to the huge picture window that looked out over the mouth of the river from the east bank. Out on the lake, an ore boat hovered near the break wall, waiting for a railroad drawbridge to rise.

I closed my eyes and listened to her voice answer EC’s basic opening who-what-where-when questions—like a polygrapher trying to get a baseline reading. Her voice was smooth and calm, yet her thoughts were carried forward with a strong undercurrent of authority, like a doctor who actually deals with patients on a regular basis—and effectively, too, though she would probably be a nightmare to the nursing staff.

“So, did you and your husband have any registered Personal Services Assistants?” EC asked, going down his list of questions like a head coach calling in the next play in the game plan to the quarterback.

I turned from the window to put a face with the voice in time to see her shake her head in a measured way that didn’t ripple or disturb her straight, shoulder-length blonde hair.

“Of course, the building has several in service for maintenance, housekeeping and, obviously, to patrol the parking garage, but we had no call for a PSA for ourselves,” she answered coolly and evenly.

Her face was cut in a sharp kind of way that matched her voice, giving her beauty a hard, perhaps dangerous, edge. It held an expressionless cast as she spoke, like an eight-by-ten glossy promo shot or an ID badge portrait. She looked up at me with hard blue eyes. I smiled but got no ping back.

“What about work?”

“The usual orderly duty droids at the Clinic. I believe my husband’s law office had them for library retrievals and returns. Typical stuff. Nothing very high-level. I am a geneticist. We don’t do surgical or office procedures, just basic patient management and movement functions. I prefer human staff in my office.”

Right, because getting up in a droid’s grill isn’t nearly as satisfying as berating a fellow human being, I thought to myself. Synthoids are all programmed to take so-called “Droid Rage” completely passively, which doesn’t really work too well in being an emotional pressure relief valve for the human. Though every once in a while it makes for fairly entertaining watching when a registration holder decides to post a vid-log of someone who totally loses it with technology. It’s good there’s no such thing as assault and battery on inanimate objects—they’re basically indestructible to a barehanded human anyway—but it does give one in my line of work pause when you imagine that kind of rage precipitating a domestic abuse call or murder scene. And some people wonder why we still carry guns.

As EC continued on with his questions and Mrs. Victim responded with her emotionally flat-lined answers, I surveyed the room and noted a discernible lack of testosterone in the ambiance.

“So, your husband wasn’t living here anymore, right?” I interrupted.

She broke engagement from EC and looked up at me.

EC knew what I was doing and watched her like a hawk.

I smiled.

She smiled back with the slightest crack of her lips. “Why would you say that?”

I shrugged and did a panoramic sweep of the room. “I just get that kind of vibe.”

“Vibe?”

“Yeah, you know, we’re guys. We still mark our territory like the animals we are. Sometimes it’s an ‘I Love Me’ wall or display case. Other times more subtle: trophies from our life’s adventures…and conquests scattered about.”

Her brow furrowed for the first time during our interview.

“I don’t sense it. Not in this room, anyway.” In reality, the building’s doorman had tipped us off.

Behind the glossy mask, her gears were turning so hard you could practically hear them grinding like a first generation robot.

I smiled.

She finally broke and smiled back with the smallest of shoulder shrugs. “It wasn’t something that we wanted out there for public consumption, even with family.”

“A rough patch? Or something more serious?” EC probed gently.

Mrs. Victim sighed and finally the needles moved. “I think Alec might have overreacted a bit, but…”

“You?” I tried but couldn’t keep all of the accusatory tone out of my voice.

She nodded.

Her hard professional demeanor slipped noticeably, but I wasn’t sure if it was just part of her disarming bedside manner act. “Attorneys?”

She nodded.

Of course, EC had already found that out from the scuttlebutt at Cutty’s, though no paperwork had been filed yet with the court.

“We don’t have to tell you how these dots lay out on the page, do we?” EC pressed a bit. “It just happens all too often.”

She looked back to EC, more guarded now.

“Prenup, I presume?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Another dot, then.”

“I see.” Her voice turned icy, so much so I swear I could see her breath. “Well, then, I suppose I should talk to that lawyer of mine about these dots you seem intent upon connecting.”

“Now, Missus Mullaney—” EC tried to calm the waves.

“That is Doctor Mullaney,” she scolded, then stood up.

EC sighed, then stood up.

I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and took a last look about the penthouse.

“I think we are finished here.” She addressed us curtly as if we were hospital staff.

“Yeah…for now.” My eyes tracked back to hers. No more smiles.

EC swept up his iSlate and we left the Mullaney apartment.

“I’ll bet she’s a hell of a good doctor,” EC said on the elevator ride down.

“Scare the sick right out of you,” I agreed.

***~~~***

Prime Time

“Uh-oh,” EC muttered through gritted teeth as he spied the news vans from channels three, five, eight and nineteen parked haphazardly out front like they were fire trucks and the station house was ablaze. Instead of hoses, axes and water cannons, cameramen wrestled with cameras, microphones and anchorettes-in-waiting. We cut down to St. Clair and came around back. For once, I bet, he was glad to be exiled down the alley. I wondered if Maddie might be wishing the same thing by the end of the day, but I doubted it.

We don’t have a lobby or a desk sergeant, just a cubed off entryway with a couple of intentionally uncomfortable chairs. In one, Jamal sat smiling like a loon.

“Look EC, a reporter,” I said in a hushed, reverent voice as if I had spotted an extinct spotted owl. “You hardly ever see one around here.”

“Yeah. It’s kind of like finding honesty at City Hall,” Jamal snickered.

EC grunted. He waved his badge over the keypad to unlock the door and went inside, leaving me alone with “the Press.”

“So, whatsamatta? Didn’t you get invited to the really big show?” I teased.

“Since when did any truly useful information ever get released or exposed at a really big show? It’s just a kabuki dance for the cameras.”

“And that brings you here? For why?”

“So, how’s Maddie handling it?”

“Don’t know—and probably won’t ‘til later. Haven’t seen her since we went on duty.”

“Well, you tell her that if she ever needs a friendly ear to talk to…”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, well…”

“Seriously. You are here, for why?”

“You know that Sands and PR weren’t going to take any questions from me, so what’s the point? I can replay the stream and get what I need from the talking heads at my leisure—with a strong drink in my hand—and then I’ll have the exact same info everybody else has without standing around pathetically begging for scraps.”

“And being the crusading pursuer of truth, justice and the American way that you are…”

“Actually, I came across an interesting tidbit about Mister and Missus Mullaney that I, oh, I don’t know, thought might have some currency on the information meat market.”

“Oh, well, then, step into my office.” Instead of sweeping my badge over the keypad, I held open the door out to the alley.

Jamal threw out his lower lip in an exaggerated pout.

“Trust me, you don’t want to go in there.” I shook my head. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

“And a danish?”

“And a danish,” I sighed wearily.

With the press vans out front, the food trucks parked around back. Even so, they probably did a better trade, what with the rush of blue soon to be scurrying out to stay off camera. I bought Jamal his low-fat latte and a bear claw. I got black coffee. We wandered to the back corner of the fenced-off parking lot and sat on the hood of a patrol car.

“Good luck,” the reporter said, surprisingly sincere.

“With what?”

“Prime time.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. This kind of thing can swell a gal’s head, what with all the attention and notoriety. I’ll bet she’ll look great on camera—not like you.”

“So you’re saying I should be worried?”

“You tell me.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Maddie’s definitely on her way up the food chain, but in her heart and soul, she’s a cop, not a suit. It’s in the family DNA.”

Jamal nodded and gnawed at his pastry. “But…”

“But what?”

“That incident down in The Flats.”

“What about it? I was cleared. Officially.”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah. So?”

“How discreet are you guys—you and Maddie? You know that my intrepid colleagues will spare no drop of rare and precious journalistic sweat to dig up dirt to juice their ratings and page views. And you, my friend, are dirt. Internal Affairs may have cleared you, but they didn’t clean you up any.”

“Hmmm.”

“I know you can take it. What about Maddie? Especially, if there’s not a quick arrest and the investigation starts to drag on. It’s good to be the hero. Not so much being the goat day in and day out—especially when bodies are piling up.”

“I guess we’ll see, huh? She’s a good detective.”

“Those ain’t the skills she’ll need for this.”

I took a loud sip of coffee.

“Anyway, good luck.”

I shrugged. Truth be told, Jamal’s reporting on the incident precipitating my suspension was fair. Not necessarily pretty, but fair.

“You know that the judge’s son was not such a nice guy. With his family connections on the bench, he had things pretty well stacked up against his soon-to-be ex. She doesn’t have much juice outside the Clinic.”

“Yeah, we picked up on that right from the start.”

“Did you also pick up on his extra-curricular marital activities?”

“Ah, no. Do tell.”

“I believe it kind of fouled up his lawyer’s play with the pre-nup,” Jamal smiled. “They did a good job of keeping it under wraps for a while, but it’s not something the judge can sweep under the rug. Unless…”

“Unless the missus was wading in the same waters.”

Jamal shrugged. “I hear that some of the women were, shall we say, hourly workers.”

I nodded. “So he had needs, needs that maybe his hygienic and antiseptic obsessed wife did not care to indulge in. It happens.”

“Sure, but here’s where it gets interesting: Maddie’s second victim.”

“Oh no…” I froze in mid-java sip.

“Oh…yeah.” Jamal polished off his bear claw, licked his fingers and took a huge gulp of his latte. “I don’t think it will come up today in the presser. Not likely anyone even knows yet. You didn’t. Does Maddie?”

I lied with a shrug of my shoulders.

“But, rest assured, eventually someone’s going to step off the sidewalk and into the gutter with me on this one.”

“And how did you come to have this tasty morsel?”

Jamal put his shocked face on. “Do I ask you for the recipe to your Cajun rub?”

“Fair enough. But what are you going to do with that info?”

“Well…I just don’t know yet. I’m working on a story, but the timing has to be right. If I release it right now, it will get lost in the thundering hooves of the media stampede heading Maddie’s way right…about…now.” Jamal looked over at the station building. A tide of uniformed officers ebbed out the back door towards the food trucks. He chuckled to himself. “Oh what a tangled web we weave…”

“…when first we practice to believe.” I hid my concern over Jamal’s information behind my coffee cup.

“Well, right now, it’s actually just a thread that needs to be pulled a bit more. We’ve got to stay ahead of those pancaked-faced Bozos and Bozettes to find out what it means.”

“What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?”

“You don’t think this information is of value to you personally, as well as professionally.”

I nodded slowly. It was—or would be.

“Just remember who’s your pal.” Jamal pulled out his phone and surfed to the stream of the press conference going on inside the House. He held the phone up so I could see the screen. “You want to watch?”

I shook my head. I’d hear about it later. First hand.

Jamal smiled. “And you thought the geek squad was going to be low profile. Sucker.”

I looked at Maddie answering a question. She looked good, even on the small screen.

“When was the last time a camera crew came down the alley to your offices?”

“Well, let me think—like never.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that.” Jamal looked at his phone. “She looks good. You’re a lucky guy. You’ll need it.”

“Good luck with what? The press? Or Maddie?”

“Both, my friend.” Jamal hopped down off the hood of the squad car and sauntered off. “Thanks for the bear claw.”

***~~~***

The Flats

I sat in the dim twilight of the dying day on my sofa, staring at the stack of books in the corner that deserved a serious second look—especially now with Jamal’s G2—to compare to the crime scene shots of Maddie’s now infamous “film at eleven” worthy murders. Before, my interest in her case was a personal, say, curiosity. Now EC and I were going to get sucked into the media wave like into a rip tide. I hesitated before diving in.

The case that brought so much grief into my life was, of course, political. Maddie and I had “inherited” it because the Captain wanted to put fresh eyes on a high profile murder, after consuming so much time and department resources with so little results. We had been on a streak and just put away a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick shaker in short order, after they had killed a wife, a lover, and the last one a rival by smashing in his head with—wait for it—a candlestick, respectively and in that order. Instead of the gratitude of the city, we got a case that stank like the garbage truck servicing all the downtown restaurants.

Dr. Mullaney’s apartment overlooked the Flats—the industrial lowlands around the river stitching its way up from the lake like a nasty knife wound that has always been the cultural equivalent of the Chilean Triple Junction, where commerce, crime and the creatures of haute couture have long collided for fun and profit. Amazingly, one of the dinosaurs from the Industrial Revolution times still spits out steel, fed by the ore boats off the lake. The rest lay abandoned. One has been turned into a hydroponic vegetable hothouse and tilapia farm, but the stink of industrial agriculture isn’t much better, just different. On the West Bank, establishments cater openly to the baser needs of the city’s citizens: liquor, drugs and women. Safely separated by the river, the East Bank is home to condo boards and gourmet cuisine that is really just a facade to the well-heeled’s pursuit of the same baser needs. Crime, like magma, oozes between the cultural tectonic plates into the streets and alleys on both banks of the river. Most times it gets left alone, until blood is spilled.

Maddie’s pedigree hearkened to the East Bank. I’m more a West Bank Joe—more Harbor Inn than Ritz-Carlton. Maybe that’s why the Captain gave us the case. He knew I’d bulldog my way through the bull crap, but that Maddie would keep me on a short enough leash not to pee on the wrong hydrants. The best laid plans…

I just remember sitting in the interrogation room after I shot the Councilman’s son as the weight of the city’s political machine just began to bear down on me. I could feel Maddie’s presence on the other side of the glass. It was almost telepathic, but we were always connected that way somehow. I could hear in my head the counterpoint of her thoughts, cursing me and thanking me for going into the parking garage alone and coming back out with four fewer bullets in my Glock. The Councilman’s son deserved it. It was a good shoot, but, still, he was a Councilman’s son. Hell, the Councilman deserved it, himself, being as dirty as he was, but that wasn’t our case. We just needed to find out what happened to Sara Ann. And we did. Unfortunately, I scorched my career in Robbery/Homicide in the process.

It was ironic, then, that my current case centered on the East Bank luxury condo of a judge’s wife and Maddie’s victims were West Bank working girls. And now, again, we’d be going down into that circle of hell known as The Flats. Only this time we did not ride as partners.

I needed to do my homework. So first I watched a replay of Maddie’s press conference in the growing dark, then flipped on a light and cracked the books.

***~~~***

Partners

“Did you see?” Maddie blurted out the first thing when she got to my place that night. She was uncharacteristically bubbly. “How’d I look?”

I looked up from my book. “Mmmm…a little too, um, formal for me. I prefer your Casual Friday Night look.”

“Yeah. I had to go out at lunch to buy this stupid thing.” She looked herself up and down in the dark pinstripe pantsuit, then shook her head. “I gotta get out of this monkey suit.”

“You did good,” I called out after her as she went into the bedroom to change. I meant it. She handled the press like a trainer holding the leash at the Westminster Dog Show. But that wouldn’t last long. And like an overbred AKC pedigree, media types have a mean streak lurking in their DNA: MDS—Media Derangement Syndrome. “What did the brass think?”

“The weasel from downtown said I need to work on tightening up my answers to questions.”

“Corporate is never happy with what anyone does outside their building.”

“But Sands and the Captain were pleased. At least Sands said so.”

Lt. Sands was a standup guy, but the Captain weather vaned freely with the political winds. That’s how he got there. “Good.”

Maddie came back barefoot and dressed in only a classic Joe Montana Forty-Niners jersey three sizes too big for her. He was making a big comeback in the NFL. Robots don’t get concussions, but after the initial battle bot novelty wore off, the League realized that they needed on-field personalities to keep the fans engaged, so they started mining the Hall of Fame to give their rosters some soul. She carried a couple of wine glasses filled with a red of some sort and offered one to me. We clinked and drank, then she nested in against me on the sofa. She softly hummed a tune I didn’t recognize as she sipped again.

I knew I had to tell her what Jamal told me. I also knew it would dampen her mood—to say the least. Hell, I wasn’t happy about it. Working a case is hard enough without complications and entangling a serial spree with another high profile murder vic was definitely a complication—for me as well as Maddie. I didn’t have to imagine how she would take it. Partners know. But I had to tell her…eventually. Right time. Right place. And now didn’t seem to be the right time, until she forced my hand.

Maddie’s gaze eventually settled on the stack of books in the corner like dust in a moonbeam. She stopped humming and sipped. She was thinking about her case. I knew I had better get it over with because waiting would only make it worse.

“The press came to see me today, too.”

“Yeah? What did Jamal want? Did he need you to sneak him into the presser?”

“You know him. That’s not really his scene.”

“What is his scene exactly?”

“European soccer, jazz, cordial liquors, stamp collecting and African artifacts.”

“Eh…What did he want, then?”

“Well…”

I could feel her body tense against mine.

“Evidently, my victim was patronizing one of your victims. Number Two, to be exact.”

Maddie turned around to face me and scowled. “Arrrggghhh. Great. Just great.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“How does he know?”

“Say what you want about Jamal, he’s got a genuine bloodhound’s nose on him.”

“And I’m sure he’s keeping it under his hat—for now, anyway.” She took another sip of wine. Definitely not humming now. “And what does the weasel want?”

“What do you think? He wants a scoop. Just like everybody else in the biz.”

“Vultures.”

“Well, at least we know—thanks to Jamal—and maybe we can get out in front of this thing.”

“Do you think our cases are linked?”

I thought for a moment. Of course, they were linked but only coincidentally—At least that’s what I hoped. “Just in a Strangers on a Train or ships in the night kind of way. Look, I don’t want in on the spotlight. No way. I’ve had my share. But since when did facts ever matter to a reporter?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. And God forbid they find out about us off-duty. It will be a damned soap opera.”

I sighed. She was right. Jamal was right. But it’s like getting stuck in the middle of a corn field in a hail storm: There’s nothing you can do, really, but stand there and take the beating. Even so, I had to try. “But we can at least stay ahead of the storm.”

“Do you think I should tell Sands?”

“Maybe I should talk to him. You know, unofficial like. That at least gives him an out for not telling the Captain. He’s the one that I’d be worried about.”

Maddie nodded. She sipped, then furrowed her brow. “Corporate definitely won’t be happy.”

“Hey, we’re not partners anymore—not on the job—you know what I mean. We don’t even work in the same squad.”

“But when it comes to facts, Corporate is even worse than journalists. Then, of course, there’s city hall.”

“Yeah. Rock, meet Hard Place. Hard Place, Rock.”

“Damn it.” Maddie launched herself off the couch. The wave in her wine crested the glass and sloshed on the floor. “Damn it, Jake.”

“Hey. It wasn’t me. At least we got a heads up from Jamal before it hit the wire.”

“Damn.”

I sighed. I nodded.

Complications. I took a gulp of wine and asked myself, There’s always complications, aren’t there?

“Damn it, Jake,” Maddie half scolded, half whined, more defeated than angry.

“I know. I know.” After a long gap of dead air between us, I asked, “Are you staying?”

“You know I am,” Maddie sighed.

Outside, the rumbles of a storm out over the lake bowled their way inland.

***~~~***

The West Bank

With Jamal’s information, EC and I worked the late tour, prowling the West Bank. We parked down by the Powerhouse and took the boardwalk along the river north towards the lake. Mid-week, the place was quiet, which somehow made the dark a little bit deeper, a little more ominous. It sucked up sound like a sponge, dulling the occasional traffic noise of a car or truck crossing into or out of the city on the bridges high above.

The West Bank decor was still brick and steel. Lots of old buildings long ago converted from their industrial utility to low rent liquid havens for those looking to escape the daily grind of their working lives, mostly blue collar folks who work with their hands doing the inglorious dirty jobs that society still needs which take a human touch—plumbing, landscaping, putting up new walls or tearing old ones down—or a younger crowd not yet accepting their slavery to a paycheck at jobs they tell themselves are only a stepping stone to something better. Their delusion breeds an angst that seeks out baser pleasures like rainwater following a watershed. The Tiffany tease of the East Bank lights on the ripples of the river only stokes those feelings of class envy. Sometimes into ambition. Sometimes towards something darker.

Hell, it’s a paycheck for EC and me.

“I read the interviews on Maddie’s case,” EC said with a heavy sigh. “Had to have Q hack the servers downtown. Corporate has things buttoned up pretty tight.”

“Yeah. It figures. I’m glad he’s on our side.”

“He’s not on our side. He just likes putting it to The Man.”

I glanced sideways at EC. “And we’re not on the same side?”

“I don’t want to take sides. I just want to do my job.”

“Fair enough.” I looked across the river to Dr. Mullaney’s high-rise and its tall wall of picture window views of the dark side EC and I prowled. “But good luck with that.”

EC grunted.

“At least it’s not raining.” Nothing worse than doing a foot canvas in the rain. “So what’s our play?”

“Swing down to the Crystal Palace to talk with the girls, then work our way back up river.”

I sighed heavily. Strip clubs were never my cup of tea. You just can’t ever scrape all the pheromones off the soles of your shoes. “To the crime scene?”

“It’s on the way.”

“Hmmm…” We stopped and leaned on the rail to watch an ore boat thrust its way into the river. “Kind of phallic, huh.”

EC grunted. The ore boat passed by us so close we could practically touch it. A sailor, silhouetted against the rail by the deck lights, stared down over the side from fifty feet above.

“So, how is Maddie taking all this?” EC asked cautiously.

“About like I am.”

“Am I going to need a jumbo-sized bottle of aspirin?”

“Just might. By the time this all shakes out, you just might.”

The ship made the ninety degree turn up the crooked river towards the steel mill. We watched it disappear around the bend, then headed across the parking lot to the Crystal Palace.

We flashed our badges to the bouncer and went to the bar to wait for the owner, Fast Eddie, to come out of his office. His nickname wasn’t complimentary, having more to do with his staying power than his mental acuity. Fast Eddie is a sprinter, not a marathon man. If desperation has a smell, it is found in the heavy, smoky air of strip clubs—even well-maintained ones like the Palace that like to put on an upscale air. Onstage a heavily tattooed blonde worked a meager weekday crowd, mostly foreign sailors who were almost as bored as she was, mechanically going through the motions like a first generation droid. Funny how some vices never leave the human realm. Nobody ties up robots for fun.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Fast Eddie oozed out as he approached us. “Business or pleasure? After all, pleasure is our business.”

EC ignored him and held up his phone with a picture of Maddie’s second victim on the screen.

“One of the dead ones,” Eddie said breezily. “I already talked to a lady cop about her and gave up everything I know—which is nothing really. She didn’t work here—on the inside anyway.”

“What about this guy?” EC swiped a picture of our victim onto the screen.

Fast Eddie looked at the picture and smiled. “Of course, the judge’s son. He’s dead, too. Such a shame. There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

“Good customer?” I asked.

“He hosted a few soirées…mostly for out-of-town business associates, I’m guessing. Though it is our strict policy not to care about whether our receipts find their way onto an IRS form or not.”

“On account?” EC asked.

“He was always good for it,” Fast Eddie answered with a shrug.

“And dear old dad?” I asked.

“It was a chip I had not yet called in. No need. I run a clean operation…for the most part, anyway. But you know what they say: ‘If you’re not breaking some law, sometime, you’re not drawing breath.’ Damn politicians.”

“And the judge’s son with the girl?”

“All of our entertainment is on stage—as far as I know and care to. But if a good client wants to bring a magic act in for his private party, who are we to say no?”

“She ever perform her magic tricks for his business associates?”

“Like, ‘watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat’ kind of act?” Fast Eddie grinned a toothy smile. “I think she might have done a hat trick or two…or three for the boys. But certainly not here in our establishment.”

“And all the party goers were from out of town?”

“Did you have to sign in? We don’t keep a guest register.”

I smiled. “Of course not.”

Fast Eddie smiled back. “You understand, then. We uphold the constitutional right to privacy.”

“There is no such right,” EC muttered.

“Well, I’ll have to update our employee handbook, then.”

“Do you think there was anything going on between her and the judge’s son?” I pressed.

“Not in my job description. That’s yours.”

“Did the parties stay on this side of the river?”

“There are a few places one can go in the apartment buildings up the hill. But surely you know already that some, ahem, gentlemen are known to keep a vacation home there.”

“Which one?”

“The Bridge Apartment building, I believe.”

“So much for the right to privacy,” EC snickered.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but like doctor-patient confidentiality, I don’t believe that right survives death.”

“You must have a good lawyer,” I noted.

“Did. We did have a good lawyer.”

I should have known.

The music died and the tattooed blonde marched off the stage.

“Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Duvola,” I said.

“Come again, anytime, fellas. Next time, I’ll comp you a drink.”

EC and I grinned, nodded and then exited the Crystal Palace back into the dark, a little more enlightened.

“Always something, ain’t it?” EC muttered more to himself than as a legitimate inquiry.

We cut across the parking lot and into a ravine of brick between old warehouse buildings. EC drifted to the opposite sidewalk as we swept the block for any signs of commerce. There were a couple of working girls outside of McCarthy’s, but their claims of ignorance were confirmed by EC’s scan of Maddie’s canvas interviews.

We hit the river and crossed the swing bridge to the east side. Upriver a mile or so from the lake, the East Bank quickly shed its ritzy glitter. Seagulls swirled in a cloud behind the ore boat, feasting on the chum whipped, grated and pureed by the ship’s prop blade. Their screeching haunted the night air as we approached the alleyway where Ms. Demont met her demise.

EC swept the alley with his flashlight. The crime scene tape was long gone. Rain and industrial grime had washed away or covered the evidence not needed to be collected by Forensics. There were enough casual graffiti doodles to indicate that the alley saw regular foot traffic.

EC sighed. “Not exactly the Poconos.”

“No heart-shaped beds, I take it.” I surveyed the facades of the neighborhood: a welding shop, a janitorial supplies distributor and, across the street, an empty building available for lease or sale. “Not likely she came all the way here from the Palace. Maybe Mickey’s up the block.”

“Yeah. Mickey’s.” EC said sadly. “That was in the reports. Zero. Zip. Nada.”

I looked down the alley. You get a feel that doesn’t come through on the crime scene pics. It was a perfect place for delivery on a cheap sexual transaction…or for dispatching a human life. We had been there for ten minutes and not a soul nor a vehicle had passed by. That was plenty of time for the crime—and the gratuitous evisceration.

At the end of the street, a man turned the corner and stopped short at the sight of us by the alley. He turned on his heels and went back the way he came. EC and I swapped a look and followed after him.

At the end of the block, we saw him disappear into Mickey’s.

“Dumbass shouldn’t be wearing a jersey,” EC chuckled, as we headed down the block to the bar. “Fifty-seven. Who’s that?”

“Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” I stopped following professional sports a long time ago.

We pushed into Mickey’s. The place was barely open for business. Number 57 was sitting at the far end of the bar staring hard into a pint of lager.

EC and I went down and pulled up stools on either side of the man in the jersey.

He looked right towards EC, then left at me. Then back into the head on his draft.

“You come here often?” I asked, all friendly-like.

He shrugged. “Once in a while.”

“After work?” EC asked.

“Yeah. After work. Never before, though.”

“So, why did you turn tail and run?”

“Uh, two guys hanging around a dark alleyway where a murder took place? What do you think?”

“Fair enough. Did you know the girl?”

“Cops, right?”

EC showed his shield.

Number 57 sighed heavily. “I’d seen her around.”

“Ever make use of her services?”

Jersey guy just shrugged.

“We ain’t vice,” EC noted.

“Yeah. She discounted on slow nights.”

“Red-light specials?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you see her the night she died?” EC asked.

“Like I told the other cops—but hey, what happened to the lady cop from the TV?”

“We’re working a case on the East Bank,” I said with just the right amount of disinterest. “Might be related. Might not.”

“So, did you see her the night she died?” EC asked again.

“Like I told the other cops, I didn’t see anything.”

“But you were there, right?”

“I was coming back from the other side to meet some of my buddies. But I didn’t see anything.”

“Right.” I rolled my eyes.

“The file says you saw her and her john duck into the alley,” EC asked.

“I was coming back from the Harbor Inn and I saw her follow somebody into the alley. I stopped short cause I didn’t want to interrupt. The sailors off the boats are usually pretty quick, but they get a bit testy when their shore leave is interrupted. So, I thought I’d wait it out and have a smoke.”

“That’s it?”

“She was breathing heavy and moaning. Getting all hot and bothered, then suddenly it stopped.”

“What stopped?”

“Her breathing heavy. It was, like, totally quiet. Then I heard some sounds. Clinking sounds, like metal on concrete or brick. And some wet sounds. Sloshing like.”

“Then what?”

“Then what what?”

“What did you do then?” I enunciated each syllable slowly.

“You read the file. I beat feet back across the river. To heck with my buddies waiting at Mickey’s. I got pals on the other side, too, you know.”

“That’s it? You turned tail and ran…again?” EC asked, barely masking his disdain.

“I don’t need any grief from those foreigners who work the boats. And I don’t need any grief from you. I told you the same thing I told the other cops: I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything and I didn’t want to then—or now. Are we done?”

EC shook his head in disgust. He looked across at me. “Weasel.”

I gave him a nod, but something was gnawing at my gray matter. “Totally quiet?”

“Huh?”

“You said she was breathing heavy and moaning, then it went totally quiet.”

“Yeah. You could hear a pin drop.”

“What about him?”

“Him who?”

“Sailor boy.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“Did you hear him?”

“Hear him what?”

“Moan or groan or breath heavy or even grunt. It takes two to tango, you know.”

As Number 57 thought for a moment, a puzzled look came over his face. “You know, come to think of it, no. I didn’t hear him at all.”

EC’s eyes widened. “Nothing at all?”

“No…Nothing. Nothing at all. He was one quiet dude…whatever he was doing.”

“Dude, huh?” I looked at EC and shook my head. “Maybe not so much.”

EC squeezed his eyelids shut and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger.

“What do you mean?” Number 57 asked.

“Totally quiet?” I asked again.

“Like church.”

“Right. When was the last time you came to Jesus.”

“Hey, it’s not like you really have to be reminded. Once would be enough to know. My mama took me all the time when I was a kid. Over on Fulton.”

“Like church?”

“Like a silent prayer to the baby Jesus himself.”

“Damn,” was all that EC said.

And I agreed.

EC and I called it a night.

***~~~***

Lt. Sands

After a long walk back to the car and a quiet ride up out of the Flats, EC dropped me off at home. It was four in the morning. I was too wired to sleep and Maddie was at her place, so there was no sense in going to bed—for business or pleasure. After a bird bath in the sink and dragging a brush across my teeth, I went down to the station to park myself on the couch in Lt. Sands’ office to wait for him to show up. I wanted to get to him first thing. I must have drifted off trying to figure out exactly what to say to him and how to say it, like I promised Maddie I would do.

When I roused myself from a rather lewd dream about Amy at John’s Diner, my hand was cramped in a death grip on my phone and my nose was filled with the smell of fresh coffee. Lt. Sands was at his desk swiping his way furiously through the overnight arrest reports, like he did every morning. It pays to know what’s going on in your own sandbox, even if it’s not part of your caseload. Nothing happens in a vacuum—as I was just about to inform the brass. He might be on the bottom rung, but Lt. Sands was still management.

“Morning, sunshine,” Lt. Sands said cheerfully followed by a long, loud sip of coffee. He didn’t look away from the arrest reports. “Late night?”

“You can’t really keep regular hours when you’re chasing bad guys. After all, they don’t.”

“So, did you catch any bad guys?”

“Eh…not so much.” I sat up.

“You take yours black, right?” Sands pointed at the end table where a cup of coffee steamed to my right.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, well, I had to leave for a moment while you finished your dream about one of my detectives—at least that’s what I assumed, but then again you didn’t actually call out her name in the throes of your passion.”

I sat up and pulled my cup of coffee in front of my face. I breathed in the vapors deeply and sighed them back out again.

“Better exercise your Miranda rights, Jake.”

I nodded and sipped.

“I don’t mean to appear unhappy to see you…but why were you sleeping in my office?”

“I need to talk to you about Maddie’s case.”

“Did you talk to her about talking to me?”

“I kind of did.”

“Do you really want to get involved?”

“No. But I don’t really have a choice.”

Lt. Sands finally looked up from the arrest reports at me. I got his attention.

“My vic and one of her vics crossed paths. Number two, to be precise.”

“Casually, socially or professionally.”

“Professionally, it appears.”

He sighed heavily, impatiently. “Out with it.”

“Do you want all the gory details? Or just the headlines.”

Lt. Sands thought for a moment. “Is it relevant to either case?”

“Could be. Don’t know for sure yet. Was there any DNA on number two?”

“There was all kinds of DNA in that alleyway, if I recall. It was a Darwinian cesspool.”

“What about on the vic?”

Lt. Sands paused for a beat. “There was…”

“Huh. I’m surprised. Of course, maybe it wasn’t the AnSub—I mean, the perp.”

“Why is that?”

“Just trying to make sense of a couple of things.”

Lt. Sands looked back at his screen and pulled up a report. “We were surprised, too, ‘cause it matched out to a dead guy—like a really, really, really dead guy. Like a hundred years ago dead.”

“What the—”

“Exactly. Collected in an unsolved case back in prehistoric times when the technology was new.”

“Where? Here?”

Sands scrolled down. “Nah. Boston. A murder case, too—how’s that for a coincidence?”

I shrugged, but in my mind I was paging through my stack of books back at the apartment.

“The original allele panel was pretty fractured, but tech went with the theory that it might actually be a residual transfer of familial material, but the genealogy trace dead ended in the last millennium. It was probably just a bad sample collection in the original case.”

“Yeah. Okay. That’s probably it.” Though I really didn’t believe it. Inside the box thinking.

“So, about the connection with your case.” Sands folded his hands in front of me and looked me dead in the eye. He was a good cop and knew there was something more.

There was, but I hadn’t even told Maddie yet. I met his stare and held it.

“Jake…?”

I shook my head slightly.

“Right.” He looked away to straighten items on his desktop.

“I just wanted to give you a heads up on the vics. I’m not crashing Maddie’s case, but it’s out there.”

“In the press?”

I nodded.

“Great.”

“Just one guy has it and it’s under wraps for now, but I can’t keep a lid on it forever. I got promises to keep.”

“Do I want to know?”

I thought for a moment and shook my head. “Honestly? Probably not. Not yet.”

“Great.”

“You tell me how you want to handle this and I’ll do it.”

Lt. Sands just nodded. “Let me think about it.”

I got up to go.

“And maybe you can check your wet dreams at the door next time.”

I felt my face flush, so I chopped out a quick Boy Scout salute, then left.

***~~~***

Exit Alley

I walked down the alley—“Exit Alley” as it was known in the House. Regular cops called it that because it leads to the “Geek Squad” offices, which they viewed as a revolving door out of a career in public service for any “real” cop. Maybe it was, but that would be a slow turning door for me. I wasn’t going anywhere fast or soon—personally or professionally. I’ve got nothing else better to do. So in my mind, I went all Sartre on the situation during idle moments of the day—like just then as I waited for EC to show up for our tour—pondering its ramifications as “Existential Alley,” a contested frontier borderline between humanity with all its messy mental and emotional implications and the creepy shadow world of…Robantiy? Binarykind? Digi Sapiens? A cold, bloodless and soulless man-made species untouched by the finger of God walking upright amongst us.

Robots were great when they were securely locked behind their safety cages in automated factories, picking and placing, welding and painting, doing all the mindlessly repetitive and hazardous labors that previously led to injury, death, labor unions and civil lawsuits. Nobody gets sued when a machine wears out its bearings. Nobody strikes when new technology threatens the job description of last generation AI. No unemployment benefits are paid out when a one-trick robot is no longer needed to satisfy the material needs of fickle human beings in a free market economy.

Everybody sneers at what I do: solving crimes they’ve convinced themselves aren’t real crimes, because they’re not real living, breathing perps. But the vics are real enough. Oh, sure, the judge’s son’s homicide made lead story headlines, but that was because of the victim and who he was—or more correctly who his father was—not because of any human interest in the perpetrator. Robotic criminals have no personalities. No Jack the Ripper. No Charlie Manson. No Ted Bundy. Just a cold, hard machine, with means but no motive; no behavioral profiles; no evil smiles; no dark empathetic links to the hidden urges in our own psyches that draws us to them with an unseen force like metal to a magnet. Nobody goes out to get a beer with the paint robot in a car factory. The public doesn’t hungrily follow news feeds about malfunctioning machines, like they do Maddie’s case. No simpatico. No ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ as victim…or killer.

But I knew. The hundred-year-old DNA in Maddie’s case was a real clue. So was the statement of Number 57 from Mickey’s about hearing the physiological grunts, moans and heavy breathing of Maddie’s victim but not her perp. And, especially, the stylized staging of internal organs that hearkened back to the very first serial murderer ever in London during the late 1800s and an unsolved copycat spree a hundred years ago in New England. I’ll bet the “real” police up at the other end of Exit Alley didn’t even look into that hundred-year-old case file.

Murder by Munchausen stories in the press were regarded like messy car accidents: the fleeting horror of mangled metal and flesh, not the cold shadow of evil showing its ugly face that great narratives are made of. Maybe not so much anymore.

I knew things were about to change. It would make Jamal happy…and wealthy.

I pondered my aimless doodles of arrows, cubes and fighter planes on the pad of paper. Just then EC waltzed in. I knew he would not be happy about my theory—but inconvenienced unhappy, not mad unhappy like Maddie and the brass will be.

EC saw my face and abruptly stopped at my desk.

“Jake?”

I shook my head and sighed.

“Crap.”

***~~~***

No Anchovies

EC and I sat at Cutty’s waiting for our “pizza with no anchovies” to be delivered. Even though it was nine in the morning, the lingering dredges of the night tour made the place almost half full. It was about the quietest time of the day for the deli—just what we needed for our meet.

It doesn’t matter how dressed down a Fed gets for casual Friday, they still reek of arrogance, like PGA Tour pros smacking balls at a local hacker’s driving range. He marched up to our table, his back ram-rod straight, and peered down at us with a look of disdain that had been long ago practiced into the standard DC default resting bitch face.

“Men.”

EC and I looked up at the federale towering over us.

“Have a seat,” I offered.

EC just stared up at the Secret Service man dripping with superciliousness for us, for Cutty, and for citizenry at large.

“No time. No need.” He dropped a thick envelope onto the table between EC and me.

“Actually, I’m surprised to see you here—out here in public.”

“Yeah, well, you start asking the wrong questions, you draw attention to yourself, the wrong kind of attention.”

“Our spook friends?”

He nodded. “I was warned. Now you are, too.”

“Another black mark on my permanent record.”

“You owe me.”

“For what? The black mark?” I tapped the envelope. “Or this?”

“For the warning.” He turned to leave.

“Hey, what about your quid pro quo?”

“I’ll take an I.O.U. on that, Jake. I wouldn’t touch anything you’ve got right now with a level A hazmat suit. I have a pension to consider.”

We watched the door ooze shut behind the Secret Service agent. The ego level of the deli retreated from the red line on the dial.

EC looked at the envelope, then up at me. “Great. Now, we’ve got the Feds mad at us.”

“They are always mad at someone. It might as well be us.”

I reached for the envelope, but EC grabbed my hand. “Not here.”

“Where?”

“Your place?”

I nodded.

“What are you doing bringing his kind in here?” Cutty stood over us and barked out his question. “I run a respectable establishment.”

“Sorry, Cutty,” EC said in sing-song fashion, like a four-year-old busted by his dad for stealing cookies.

Cutty growled. “I hate those guys. They tip lousy and generally piss off the staff with their demands.”

“How did you ever know?”

“Well, for starters, do they have those Ray-Bans surgically implanted or did he inherit his momma’s eyes?”

“So, Cutty, can we get a couple of pastrami Reuben’s to go with no anchovies?”

“Anchovies? There ain’t no anchovies on a Reuben.”

“Exactly.”

We got our sandwiches and left.

***~~~***

Federal Code

Back at my place, we tore into the envelope. Lots of pages with lots of words and lots of trademark Federale black magic marker redaction. Reading it was like a ride in an antique manual clutch-type car driven by a novice—jerky stop-and-go. I let EC plow through it and went to get the stack of books piled away in the corner.

I sorted through the first few, discarding them to the side, until I came to a yearbook-looking tome of Twentieth Century crimes. I turned to the page I had already bookmarked about a serial killer case from the late Twentieth Century in Boston. Unsolved, all the victims were working girls who were strangled then gutted in back alleys down by the bay. There were only five, so the case never caught on nationally—not at a time when Bundy and the Green River killer were running rampant. Besides, the killings stopped abruptly, so without any fresh blood the news media flamed out and quickly lost interest in a story going nowhere. I guess not much has changed. There was some initial rumble about it being a copycat crime for Jack the Ripper, but that didn’t seem to get much traction with John Q. Public outside of Boston. Beantown was hyped up about it for a few months, but pretty soon the lack of empathetic victims, a single-digit body count, and a perp that suddenly went Rip Van Winkle, just like the original, wasn’t shiny enough to distract people from their daily lives.

The thing was, though, that the killer’s signature wasn’t just a ripoff of old Jack from 1880s London. He went one better and looped the intestines around the victim’s neck and made it look like a half-Windsor knot—just like Maddie’s vics, who were also all working girls, who were also killed down by a waterfront—just not in Boston. Great. A copycat of a copycat. I read through the case, looking to see if there was any DNA evidence. Back then, the science was there, but there was a pretty limited database to match against, so it ended up being merely confirming or exclusionary evidence. The detectives back then actually had to detect. There was DNA. Unmatched, therefore unsolved.

“Great,” I blurted out to myself.

“What’s that?” EC looked up from the government file.

“Looks like Maddie’s case has some strings attached—back a couple of centuries or so.”

“Huh? What does that have to do with our case? Sure, our guy may have patronized her establishment, but he was dead when she hit the pavement. And that’s her headache. There ain’t enough aspirin in a Drug Mart to get me to want to share that pain.”

“Yeah, but I got a gut feel it’s a Geek Squad deal.”

“Come on, Jake. She’s got a perp with a blood thirst. Androids don’t got blood, so they don’t get a thirst for it. They’re just machines.”

“Yeah, but they are machines programmed by warm-blooded creatures.”

“What are you saying?”

“You saw her crime scene and her vics?”

EC nodded. “So?”

I spun the book around and slid it towards EC’s end of the couch.

He looked at the pics and nodded, then turned the pages. “Crap.”

“Sands told me they have DNA—DNA that doesn’t ping anyone still drawing breath or ever has since it started becoming part of birth records.”

“How can that be?”

“Right. How can that be.”

“But it gets a forensics hit off the old CODIS system?”

“To an unsolved case in Boston.” I tapped my index finger on the crime scene photos in the open book between us. “But that guy’s been six feet under for a long, long time.”

“Exactly, so why would that DNA show up now and show up here…and how?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Man, nobody’s gonna want to hear this.”

“Think about what the guy at Mickey’s said about what went down in the alley that night. What if somebody—maybe some medical spook type—reverse engineered biological material off the alleles from CODIS to plant at a crime scene? Alleles that match a crime from, say, Boston, from, say, the last century?”

“And then programmed a droid to re-enact the crime.”

I nodded. “And where does our victim’s wife work?”

“The Clinic.”

“In Genetics.”

“Damn.” EC shook his head wearily. “Got any aspirin?”

“I don’t believe in headaches. Like luck and leprechauns.” I got up and headed to the kitchen. “But I’ve got beer.”

“That’ll do.”

I came back with a couple of cold ones and handed a long neck to EC. “So, what did my friend at the Secret Service dig up for us?”

“I think we’re going to have to have Q take a look, but from what I can tell, it looks like the code was used to ghost the AnSub on the Atlas Grid by tapping into it and swapping out metadata. Not exactly something that’s easily done—spook level stuff for sure. Only someone with an NSA tie-in or back door could pull it off. But that way, the droid could move undetected throughout the city—or the country for that matter, a Class B felony for starters. You just can’t have machines out there unidentified and untracked, but this guy did it.”

“I wonder if Maddie even thought to pull the Atlas metadata for the Flats.”

“Why would she?”

“Yeah. Why. Nobody’s thinking Munchhausen for her crimes.” I took a long pull of Shiner Bock. “But maybe they should.”

“I don’t want any part of it.”

“Me neither, partner. Me neither, too.”

“But we don’t really have a choice, do we?”

I shook my head. “Let’s go roust Q.”

***~~~***

Mad Scientists

Back at Exit Alley, Q poured over the stack of papers from the Feds. He looked up and shook his head. “Damn it, I really wish we had gotten the original digital files on these, ‘cause the back channel data would be a tapioca treat for sure. But, if they came from where I think they did…”

“Spook Central?” I queried.

Q just looked at me, speechless for once, without a smart-aleck come back. His face was dead serious, a look not often seen.

“So, this isn’t going to help?” EC asked impatiently.

“I didn’t say that.” Q cracked a mad scientist grin. “I’m just going to have to get creative.”

“How’s that?”

“Why don’t you just leave that to me. It’s like Chinese takeout: you might not want to see the kitchen if you want to enjoy the meal.”

“Like if you’re a cat lover?” I asked.

“Tastes just like chicken,” Q smirked. “What I can tell you right now is that this is a very clever fellow. He’s found a way to create digital shadows in Atlas and move through them. That’s not a huge deal. It can be done, eh, easy enough for a mad genius like me, but usually, it causes disturbances in the metadata that can be observed, like little digital ripples in the Grid’s space-time continuum. You can’t see the fish, but you can see him move beneath the water—if you know where to look and what to look for. The beauty of this fellow’s hack is not the shadows but the backfill. He’s not only figured out a way to move without being seen but to digitally brush the sand back over the footprints of his mechanical minion.”

“So, not your typical chop-shopper.”

“I should say not.”

EC pinched his eyes shut and massaged the bridge of his nose.

“From the pizza our delivery boy gave us, do you think the spooks are on to him?”

Q scoffed out loud. “Come on, Jake, you’re talking about guys that fish with hand grenades. This is eloquent and subtle…and beautiful.”

I looked at EC, who shook his head in mild disbelief at Q’s reverie of rapture over machine code.

“But not too subtle for you, right?”

Q smiled his mad scientist grin. “This craftsmanship is definitely not bureaucratically inspired. It’s art—it’s not only art, it’s Picasso. A game changer.”

“Can you find him?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. This is primo, major league stuff.”

“So what do we do?”

“Do you know how gulls and terns fish? They loiter on high and scan the surface, waiting for a flash of light, a reflection of the sun off the shiny scales of their prey.”

“And how are you going to do that without help from the Feds.”

Q rolled his eyes. “I don’t need their help. The grid is like Swiss cheese—full of holes.”

“So what then?” asked EC curtly. Even he was losing patience.

“I need to do my trolling without them seeing and knowing.”

“Good luck with that, then.”

“Huh.” Q was suddenly distracted.

“What is it?”

“Well, it seems like such a…I don’t know, such an incongruity. This is truly Mensa mad scientist quality stuff.”

“Yeah? So?”

“To kill a spouse in a bitter divorce? You don’t hire Michelangelo to whitewash a fence.”

“The Pope did.”

“Yeah, well, in our day and age, that’s what they make droids for.”

“What? To kill spouses? Or to paint?”

“To paint. But killing spouses is chop shop level stuff. Not museum quality art.”

“Well, you did say that he’s a mad scientist.”

“I did. Quite mad. Mad like me. After all, I’m a scientist, too.”

“Takes one to catch one?”

“Give me a few days to dig into this.”

“And while you’re at it…” I wrote down the dates and times of Maddie’s murders and passed the scrap of paper to Q. “No footprints or breadcrumbs on this.”

“Your case?”

I shook my head. “You don’t want to know. Corporate is all over this, so don’t even look for it. Just see if you see any flashes in the grid.”

“Maddie’s—”

“Don’t ask. Don’t think about it. Just let me know.”

Q nodded, read the dates, then got up and fed the paper into a shredder. “That’s the beauty of the old analog ways—you can actually destroy things and make them go away for good.”

“Yeah. Kind of like murder.”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

***~~~***

Infinite Will

Machines might have infinite will and patience but zero passion. Without any will to break nor passion to succeed, I never found synthoid sports of much interest. No glory in victory or grace in defeat, just battle bot mayhem. The sports world had devolved into sterile weekly contests of grinding gears and Herculean hydraulic strength, devoid of any creativity and lacking in the pleasures of the unsuspected and unexpected. After all, the “coaches” were just programmers relying on statistical analysis for their play calling, so the games and competition had become merely mechanical logic contests played out in modern day coliseums. No doubt that is why the leagues reached back into their hall of fames to resurrect personalities to graft onto their atheledroids, but, even still, sports is about as engaging as computer models of the weather. At least for me.

Maddie’s case made me realize that, like synthoid sports, I had been just going through the motions in the Geek Squad. Android crime was more puzzle than pursuit of perps, real perps. Maybe the cops up the alley were right. Maybe that was really why Maddie’s case piqued my interest.

Sure, we had our victims and all, but even a petty criminal has some passion driving him to try to rob a C-store or break into someone’s suburban castle—even if it is a pharmaceutically induced passion. They are still driven creatures, not logic executing machines that look eerily human-like. Solving the crimes that found their way down Exit Alley to me and EC was mostly mechanical and formulaic. The machines had their grid logs and they had their flash memories that Q and the boys pulled and decoded for us. Then, the hunt was on to go out to find them and pick them up like a repo man, not a detective. Even the murders by Munchausen. Most times…

Something was definitely different now. I didn’t so much know it as I sensed it. I couldn’t sort it out at my desk in the sterile cubicles of Exit Alley, so I bolted to wander the streets and let my feet do my thinking. I eventually ended up in Public Square in time to sit like a rock in the rapids of rush hour as the city drained of its drones…and droids.

I sat and picked the synthoids out of the crowd like spotting four-leaf clovers in an unkempt lawn. They are there, but most people can never find them. I let the ones that are different catch my eye. Same with droids. You can’t really search for them. You have to let yourself see them. Unlike four-leaf clovers, though, there are far, far more of them in the crowd. Suddenly, I felt the oppressive invasion of our lives by machines. Of course, technology was everywhere scraping away always on our humanity, making us more and more dependent on it, addicted to it really. I imagine the empty vacuum of all your data going dark is like the junkie’s crash as he comes down off his high. We have to have our data fix, just like he’s got to have his chemicals.

The industry has its statistics about market penetration for their PSAs. They also have their “heartwarming” anecdotes of all that they do for mankind, for the sick, the needy and, especially, the children. All the dirty work. All the dangerous work. All the jobs that were once done by the poor souls in some dark corner of the world colonized and enslaved—physically in the ancient times, economically and culturally over the last century—whose lives were infinitely more wretched than the “civilized” folks who exploited them for their own comforts. I briefly wondered whatever happened to those less fortunate citizens of the world, but then I went back to visually picking digital fleas out of the rush hour crowd. Even though humans still far outnumbered synthoids, they seemed a malevolent presence, like cancer cells waiting, perhaps multiplying with the bad habits of their host.

But now, instead of just mindless agents of harm driven by hacker code at the behest of a calculating spouse, I sensed the manifestation of a passion to do evil. In the cases that Maddie and I were working a glint of that passion, of that evil beneath the surface, caught my eye—like Q described about the way gulls and terns fish. I had seen the flash in our crimes and now looked in vain for it again in the legions of machines that moved among us.

The hacker or bureaucrat or spook who was pulling the strings on these droids that killed a judge’s son and the sex workers on the West Bank was doing more than providing a service, more than just automating murder. He was chasing his own internal demons through these machines. I wondered if there was true satisfaction by proxy. There would have to be. Droids malfunction and droids can be programmed to execute a crime, but to become a serial killer, there has to be a driving human passion that comes from somewhere deep and dark within a disturbed human psyche.

I waited for Maddie to meet me and witnessed the infection of society, wondering if the good doctor who had her husband killed knew who she was working with…or was wrestling with her own demons.

***~~~***

Love is a Battlefield

Maddie came at me out of the sun like an ancient Japanese Zero pilot from some World War a long, long time ago. “So…you come here often, sailor?”

She knew I did. We spent a lot of time together sitting on the bench by the Soldiers and Sailors monument, observing the foot traffic in Public Square when we were partners on the job. Sometimes to decompress. Sometimes to talk out a case. Most times just to people watch and have a few chuckles at humanity’s expense. I still came quite a bit, though mostly alone anymore. I shaded my eyes and tried to look up into her face. It had been a while—a week, maybe? Or more, since we connected. It happened, though usually for a day or two, when we both got caught up in cases that were intensifying towards an arrest.

“I got your favorite.” She held out a bag of warm cashews and a red delicious apple like we used to get inside the Rapid Transit station. “Angelo says ‘hey’ by the way.”

“Thanks.” I took a bite of apple and tossed back a couple nuts. “Pull up a bench.”

She sat down beside me. “Boy, it’s been a while since we hung out here. What’s up?”

I munched and thought. Everything is a negotiation with Maddie, a mini-battle. She was definitely feisty and always testing boundaries. Not like Amy at John’s Diner. That was simple. Maddie always took forethought and planning and maneuvering.

“How’s your case going?”

Maddie sighed heavily. She stroked the top of my thigh as she scanned the crowd in the Square. “Kind of all consuming…but I guess I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Sorry, Jake.”

“Comes with the turf.”

Maddie nodded and sighed. “How’s yours?”

“Looking seriously at the wife. Gonna follow up at the Clinic campus tomorrow.”

“What I wouldn’t give to have an angle to chase. We’re buried in leads from John Q. Public.”

“Yeah, the press will do that for you. Any of them any good?”

“Not yet. At least Sands has thrown out some overtime for patrol guys to help on the phones. Still…”

“He told me about the DNA.”

“Yeah, a dead end.”

“Yeah…or maybe not.” I offered Maddie some cashews, but she declined, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s signal.

“What are you talking about? There’s no database match.”

“Did you check the case file for that DNA?”

“It was a murder in Boston—from ages ago. Unsolved.”

“Did you check out the crime scene photos?”

Maddie shook her head. “They weren’t online. Never scanned in, probably, but I browsed the murder book.”

“Curious about the DNA match.”

“It’s not a great sample. They didn’t get a complete panel, so it wasn’t really a true match. You know how the science was back then.”

I looked at Maddie. “You know it’s a copycat, right?”

She held my stare, then looked away. “I doubt it, Jake. Too obscure. Just your ADHD imagination working overtime.”

We watched a wave of pedestrians flood the crosswalk, then drain until the last drip of humanity hit the curb as the light went green and traffic started into the intersection.

I took a loud bite of apple. She was too good an investigator to believe what she had just said.

Maddie swiveled her head back and forth taking a last quick look at the Square, then patted my thigh. “I gotta get back. I’d love to stay and just hang out. Really, I would, but…”

“But duty calls.”

“Maybe this weekend?” She grabbed my hand and took a bite of apple.

“You bet.”

She smiled and planted a wet sticky kiss on my forehead, then left.

I watched her go and wondered if Q had gotten a glimpse of our Munchhacker as he moved through the clouds.

I didn’t want Maddie’s case, but it was coming at me. She’d see that too, eventually—if she didn’t already.

I ignored EC’s texts and calls. Once the rush hour finished draining the city, I went back home alone for the night.

***~~~***

The Clinic

EC moped the whole way over to the East side where the Clinic campus sprawled out over fifty city blocks with towering monuments to Neurology, Cardiology, Ophthalmology, Cancer and the good doctor’s specialty, Genetics.

Only when the cruiser pulled into the parking lot did he say anything. “So, what gives?”

“I know. I know. I should have answered, but I…but I tried to talk to Maddie yesterday.”

“No go?”

“She ain’t buying it—at least not consciously. I think some small suspicion might be gnawing at the back of her mind, though.”

EC sighed heavily. “I don’t want any part of her serial killer party.”

“Hmmm…” I kept my thoughts to myself.

“So, what do you hope to find here?”

“Well, there’s no money trail. And Doctor Mullaney doesn’t seem to have much of a social life at all, so there’s got to be something going on at work. Not to mention the hundred-year-old DNA in Maddie’s case.”

EC grunted. “Well, Q’s hack into her patient files came up empty handed.”

“So, we see what we see. Good old fashion police work.”

“I hate stakeouts.”

“Come on, man, it’s why we make the big bucks.”

“And I hate hospitals.”

I just nodded, remembering the vigil over Patty’s last hours. I raised my fist. “On three?”

EC mirrored me. On three, my paper covered his rock, so I got to wander the halls while he parked himself in a far corner of the huge waiting area outside our person of interest’s office. I got back to spell him at eleven.

“Got to get some serious air,” my partner said over his shoulder as he beat feet for the nearest exit.

I settled in for my shift of watching paint dry. Genetics is definitely white collar health care. No bloody lab coats or body parts being hauled away in plastic bags emblazed with the old Dow Chemical biohazard symbol. Dr. Mullaney was actually something of a modern day witch doctor who brewed up genetically modified flora and fauna extracts based on patient genome modeling to treat infectious diseases and molecular disorders. It was all voodoo to me, but her intimacy with DNA gave me pause.

Unlike the ER, the foot traffic in and out of her office was leisurely, mostly patients with the occasional lab-coated colleague, scrub-suited nurse, polo-shirted administrative type or latex-gloved housekeepers with their cleaning carts coming and going—much more quickly than the time required for a consultation. Synthoids passed by, but never entered her suite of exam rooms. I passed the time browsing online for dead trees stained with ink and watching the ebb and flow of her clients in search of a cure.

At eleven-thirty sharp, Dr. Mullaney emerged from her office and headed towards the cafeteria. I blended into a clot of patients and loved ones headed in that general direction and followed her. Finally, a change of scenery.

Her heels clicked on the tile floor of the corridor with the hypnotic regularity of a metronome. My mind drifted and I didn’t take notice of the man in the jumpsuit pushing a maintenance cart towards us until the ritardando in Dr. Mullaney’s pace closed the gap between us and I thought she might notice me. Instead, their eyes met and locked, pulling their heads towards each other as they passed until she shook her head ever so slightly and picked her pace back up to andantino.

Pretending to consult a building directory, I watched the man follow Dr. Mullaney’s retreat over his shoulder. When he looked back, I read disappointment and frustration scrawled in his furrowed brow. My spidey sense tingled.

I quickly texted EC to hand off the tail of Dr. Mullaney and waited for the maintenance man and his cart to pass by. The patch on his jumpsuit declared his name to be Jeffrey. I inventoried him quickly: Caucasian; late twenties or early thirties; approximately six foot tall; lean, maybe a hundred eighty pounds—maybe; sandy hair; dark eyes. It was the eyes. They were not only dark in color but harbored a human darkness behind them.

Reeling Jeffrey out enough to be discreet, I followed his long and winding path through the maze of Clinic corridors. Just as doubt began to percolate in my mind, he parked his cart next to a synthoid that had broken down outside the Radiology Department and was twitching like it had Tourette’s Syndrome.

As I passed by, Jeffrey tapped the droid’s diagnostic port and stared at the screen of his iSlate.

***~~~***

The Baron

The alley cam was off. Q, EC and I huddled close to the door to keep from getting rained on. Even though we were outside the building, the discussion unfolded in hushed tones.

“M.I.T.?” Q asked.

“Full ride,” EC answered. “Never finished, though.”

“I knew the Baron was top shelf in the gray matter department. Gotta be to worm-hole the NSA servers.”

“Jeffery also had some issues with anger and small animals in his youth. He never really did play well with others.”

“And you’re sure this is the guy?”

“Yeah, he really hits the sweet spot on a BAU profile,” I added.

EC scowled, then asked Q, “You think you can do it?”

“I can. But ‘should I’ is the question.” Q’s eyes darted my way without turning his head. “You got paperwork on this?”

EC groaned a little under his breath.

“Ah, so suddenly you’re a bureaucratic purist?” I teased.

Q turned and sneered in my direction. “Only when it’s my ass on the line.”

“Come on, man. You do this kind of stuff all the time for shits and giggles.”

“Corporations are paranoid patsies. Trolling their waters is like cruising PTA meetings for MILFs. If you get lucky, nobody’s going to say anything afterwards for the sake of the kids.”

“Kids?” EC wondered.

“Customers—whatever.” Q sighed. “This is different. They play for keeps. I kind of like having my life…unperturbed by big brother’s intrusions.”

“Look, we’re not asking you to go out and attack the ramparts—”

“What’s a rampart?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be a wuss.”

“Hey, I’m the one playing tunnel rat and going in after him. Not you.”

“We’re not asking you to steal state secrets,” EC blurted out in frustration. “Just follow his footprints.”

“Yeah, into the creepy spook house at the end of the street. It’s one thing to play peeping Tom and look into the place over the fence or through a window. Another thing altogether to go in the front door, wander around and come out the back way.”

“Well, how is he doing it?” I narrowed my eyes at Q. “Mister Super Genius…”

“This guy is pushing code through the Atlas Grid structure to commit murder—”

“So you say,” Q cut EC off.

“No. So you say. That’s what you told us,” EC snapped impatiently back at Q. “This guy has figured out a way to drop and pull command libraries into droids to commit crimes. That data traffic has to move on the grid, in and out of the cloud, right?”

Q finally, reluctantly nodded. “I told you he’s ghosting the grid and not leaving any breadcrumbs. I didn’t know he’s worm-holing through the NSA servers in Utah.”

“You’ve seen the Baron going in, but you can’t trace when or where or how he comes back out. We just want to know when and where that code is hitting the grid on the download.”

Q blew a long, wispy exhale. “But you know where this is going to lead. Corporate is going to come down on us like a ton of bricks, especially if we lay a big stink bomb on their high profile case.”

We all looked down the alley at the station house.

“But we might just save a life,” I said softly.

“Damn.” Q beat his fist against the wall. “You always go all Superman righteous and moral on me.”

EC Smiled.

Q turned on his heels and pulled open the door. “I’ll set up the bloodhound code. But I have to put a self-destruct into my algorithms, just in case the NSA starts knocking on our—on my door. So, I’m not making any guarantees.”

“How soon?” I asked.

“It’ll be up tonight.” As Q went inside, he called over his shoulder. “Good luck.”

“Yeah. Right.” I looked at EC. “If it wasn’t for bad luck…”

“I wouldn’t have no luck at all…”

The security camera light came back on.

And so we waited.

***~~~***

Waiting Games

Waiting is always the worst part. Waiting for Mechanical. Waiting for Q. Waiting for the Baron to come out of his wormhole again.

I passed the time nursing a plate of ravioli and a half carafe of Chianti at Maria’s.

“Hey, sailor…buy me a drink?” Jamal flopped himself down across from me in the back booth that over the years had come to have my name on it.

I grunted. Why does everybody call me ‘sailor?’

He took out his phone and snapped a pic of me shoveling down a ravioli. “I hear this place serves great paparazzi.”

“For your editor?”

“He insists. Otherwise, my expense report gets kicked back—unpaid, of course.” Jamal filled the wine glass at his place setting from my carafe. He took a sip and scowled. “House wine.”

“Snob.”

“Yeah, but you’re paying and I’m not proud.”

When Maria’s daughter, Gina, came by our table, Jamal ordered a plate of Carbonara. I nodded when she drained the last bit of Chianti into my glass and held up the empty carafe.

“Why is it you always show up around meal time?”

“Do I?” Jamal asked, acting innocent.

“Like a buzzard on road kill.”

“Hey, I pride myself on being a professional. So, detective, how goes the war on crime?”

“You know. Hurry up and wait. Our Clinic guy moonlights at the VA and EC is connecting the dots between hardware serial numbers from their spares inventory and our droid perp. Thank God I’ve got a partner who likes doing puzzles.”

“So, Maddie’s gonna cross the finish line first, then, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

Jamal sat back with a silly smile on his face as Gina delivered his dinner. “You really should make more of an effort to stay informed on current events.”

I watched the reporter dig into his pasta.

“In fact, I’m just fueling up on my way to the big press conference to announce an arrest.”

“You know it’s bull crap.”

“Now, now. No sour grapes, Jakie.”

“You don’t arrest synthoids. And I’m here to tell you this one just won’t stick on a human.”

“Your DNA copycat theory?”

I nodded.

“I like your story better, but they must have something good to assemble the media.”

“Don’t buy it, man.”

Jamal just smiled around a mouthful of garlic bread. “I never do. Just like dinner. Hey, you don’t mind if I take a copy of the receipt, do you?”

“Double dipping?”

“It helps pay the bills.”

“In our business, it’s called fraud.”

“Come on, Jake, neither of us wants the IRS looking over our shoulder.”

I shrugged.

Jamal slurped up the last piece of fettuccine off his plate and wiped the sauce from his chin. “Gotta bolt. Don’t want to be late for the really big news.”

“Don’t buy it.”

“Hey, you know me. Just keep me in the loop on the truth.”

Gina came up to the booth. “One check or two?”

I looked at Jamal. “Put it on my tab.”

“You’re a prince, Jake.” Jamal grinned and diner-dashed to the front door before I could change my mind.

I finished my wine, stewing in the news about Maddie’s case. Then, I wandered back to the building and fired up my iSlate.

Maddie got her pretty face plastered all over the local news feeds. Watching the stream of the press conference, I hadn’t seen so much brass in one place since the last time I was at the range. The Commissioner stood at the podium claiming victory over evil with the Captain Caldwell so close his bad breath might have been fogging the Commissioner’s cuff links. Maddie hung back with her partner, Lieutenant Sands, and the rest of the task force at the back of the dais.

While the Commissioner prattled on about the greatness of his department, I scanned the arrest reports. Responding to a call to roust the city’s dreck from the posh East Bank and herd them back to the other side of the river, a patrol unit found a bloody knife in possession of one of the homeless interlopers. Well, maybe possession is a bit of a stretch. Let’s just say they both occupied the same pile of trash out back of Sammy’s restaurant. The blade was the right size and shape to have been handy in eviscerating a corpse—or carving medallions of beef tenderloin. The homeless man was correctly aged and Caucasian to fit the F.B.I. Behavior Analysis Unit profile, with the requisite history of mental issues and a sketchy track record of taking his prescribed medications. As for an alibi, well, he didn’t really seem to know where he was in the present moment, let alone weeks and months ago at the time of the crimes.

Once the Commissioner and the Captain were done boasting about their leadership, Maddie stepped forward to take questions. The camera definitely loves her. Most of the questions were pretty routine and she handled them with ease, though the attractive info babe from Action News 5 got a scratch from Maddie’s claws when she asked a particularly stupid question about lab results. Of course, the blood work wouldn’t be back from the lab yet.

I was about to click off when Jamal stood to ask whether the suspect had any medical training in his background. Her hesitation in answering was so slight that unless you knew Maddie and could read her expressions like I could, the assembled reporters all missed that the question had snagged on a lingering doubt in her mind.

“We are still working to assure ourselves that all the blanks on Mr. Steinmauer are filled in accurately,” she stonewalled.

Before she could move on, Jamal called out, “And is all of the DNA accounted for?”

“Oh, man…” I moaned out loud. The old Boston DNA information had never been released by the police. I swore that Maddie’s glare bored right through the cameras directly into my chest.

“As I told Channel Five, we are still waiting on lab results,” she replied curtly.

After the exchange, I clicked off. Even if the blood on the knife came back as a match to any one of Maddie’s victims, that wouldn’t close the deal for me. My gut feeling on seeing their guy’s mug shot was that this perp wouldn’t make the grade for the murders. There was confusion in his eyes, not evil.

Out back on the fire escape, I turned a lawn chair towards the west and parked myself in it with my feet up on the hand rails to watch the sunset, hoping Q’s bloodhound code would pick up the Baron’s scent.

Between sips of Cabernet, I pondered how the ancient Greek mythological aether eventually turned out to be real: the invisible radio waves that filled the space between me and the horizon were literally the breaths of the government gods that lorded over all of us. We were all tethered to the Atlas Grid with our iNodes or Alpha-Bits, trading the immediate gratification of human whims for the unseen manipulation of our Gamma waves by the malicious winds that blow only that information and those options across the face of our gaze that some AI algorithm has determined for the sake of society or commerce is best for the greater good. We’re just digital fish swimming in a sea of data, not realizing how wet we are.

I ignored an incoming call from Maddie. Even though the presser had ended, her tour was far from over. There was paperwork to be done, no doubt, and I didn’t want to take away her adrenalin high. On a more selfish note, not being up for an emotional scrum at the moment, I didn’t want to face her wrath for sharing confidential info with Jamal.

Out there in the aether, everything human floated above and around us like a binary shadow of our world. Moving through it all the time was the natural evil of men, though typically it was merely a reflection of corporeal. A few used that shadow world to move their ill intents out and beyond themselves.

The sun went down. I refilled my glass, waiting for the ping that meant Q’s digital hunt had flushed our quarry.

***~~~***

Perchance to Dream

I nodded off and slept fitfully on the couch, alternating between a recurring dream of Amy—the same one I had in Lt. Sands’ office—and a new nightmare I’d never had before. Some people’s dreams are surreal like a classic Tim Burton movie, but mine are usually hyper-realistic, almost flashbacks, especially when they’re work related. So much so I’d kid Maddie there should be overtime on my pay stub for them.

I should have been reliving the warehouse takedown of the bodega AnSub with EC, but I didn’t know where I was and my partner was nowhere to be found. Outside, I prowled down an empty city street through the cones of light thrown down by street lamps, in and out of blinding light followed by a hood of total darkness. I couldn’t tell if I was headed somewhere or just going in circles. The storefronts were dark and unmarked. Animal sounds like out of a jungle bounced off the brick and concrete, hauntingly human at times, but only compounding my disorientation. Gripping so hard on my Glock the checkering dug painfully into my palms. No glass. No comm. No partner. No backup. No choice but to keep moving forward, but not knowing why. Sweating, but not hot. Gulping air, but not winded. Every muscle taut, then wound tighter yet as a door to my right creaked open, spilling a dim light into my path. Back to the entryway wall, I followed my Glock through the doorway and slid right into my recurring dream of Amy. She lay naked on my bed, but was melting into a pool of red on the floor like a Salvador Dali clock, flowing lazily toward a rear door that I could see led back to the street I had just left—

Until the iCore notification from Q hit my phone in 911 mode.

As I came back up to break the surface of reality, grabbing at the air with my lungs, my mind’s eye glimpsed a blurry silhouette disappearing into the darkness between the street lights.

I peered squintily at the screen for Q’s message, but it was blank except for the record of his call and the time: two-forty in the morning. As I scratched away the sleep from my face and groin, trying to figure out why there was no message or data, the phone 911ed me again. Heart and respiration rates back to near normal, I dialed the Alley offices.

“Jesus, Q, don’t you ever sleep?”

“I’m an avid napper, Jake.” Q’s voice was void of his usual surliness and disdain. “The Baron’s come back out of his lair.”

“Great,” I growled with sleep still caught in my throat. “Where?”

“Right where you thought it would be. The West Bank near Columbus and River.”

“You got an A-VIN on the synthoid?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Great send me the coordinates.”

“No. Get a pen and write them down so they can’t be hacked.”

“Right. Good thinking.” I reached into the nightstand and pulled out paper and pen. Old school.

Q dictated the synthoid’s chassis identification number and the GPS latitude and longitude.

I confirmed the information in a read back and started shifting gears to spur myself into action and get down to the Flats with EC.

“Hey, Jake…”

“What?”

“I was actually able to decode some of the data payload…”

Q usually wasn’t so dramatic, but there was something in his voice I had never heard before: fear. “Q, what is it? I gotta get going.”

“I did an extraction on the facial recognition targeting mask. I’m sending that to you now. Look at it.”

My phone dinged. I looked at the screen. “Are you sure?”

“Bytes don’t lie, Jake. It’s her. Maddie’s the next vic.”

Q was right. The composite image on the screen was a dead ringer for her. “Where is she right now?”

“The I/O board and the grid show her up at her desk in Robbery/Homicide.”

“No doubt still doing paperwork on that homeless guy they nabbed.” I was painfully alert. “Who else knows? Did you tell EC?”

“Nobody else. I didn’t want this leaking out of the messaging servers.”

“You get down the alley to the House and keep her there. No matter what. And message EC to get his ass into the Flats. I’m not going to wait to meet up with him.”

“Right, Jake, but what should I tell her?”

“I don’t know. She definitely won’t want to hear any of this.”

“You know I won’t be able to make her stay.”

“Tell her you found something suspicious with her kid sister’s credit activity or something. Do a quick search and pull something out of your ass. Just keep her there in the House. If she knows what’s really going on, she’ll want to jump into the deep end.”

“I…Okay, Jake. I’ll figure something out.”

“Just keep her safe in the House.”

“Right.”

After a quick birdbath, I strapped up and grabbed my “Go” bag. I’d take the Department sedan. I could put it into chauf mode to enter the data Q gave me as it navigated me to the West Bank.

Halfway there, I got a call from EC. “Jake.”

“What?”

“Q said she’s not there.”

“What do you mean she’s not there?”

“He said her iNode has been hacked and ghosted. According to the desk sergeant, she left sometime after midnight.”

“Get there. Get there now.”

“Right, Jake.”

I killed Rochester, went cherry top and hit eighty down the Shoreway towards the Flats.

***~~~***

Off the Grid

I killed the lights and siren after I blasted through the West 25th Street exit and hit the hill down the Superior Viaduct, descending into the Flats, descending into my own personal hell, praying I would find a serial killer synthoid before he found my girlfriend.

I slammed on the brakes at Center Street to take the corner without squealing the tires, then crept towards the swing bridge to the East Bank. I manually turned off the headlights. The hybrid went all electric and I silently prowled into the dark blocks like a cat hunting in the night.

“Damn,” I exhaled and slammed on the brakes. The EMI from the traction motors.

The synthoid’s sensors were no doubt tuned to detect intruders across all bandwidths—heat, light, auditory and radio frequency. If I spooked him, he might bolt into the night…or he might hurry to finish the job.

Q’s ping coordinates blinked on the dash map at Lockwood and Columbus, on the other side of the river. I’d have to go the rest of the way on foot.

The street was lined with junkers and delivery trucks parked for the night. I slid the Interceptor in behind a step van in the space next to a fire hydrant. Before I powered down, I glassed up and pinned the locations of Maddie’s crime scenes to its map. EC’s techie ways would have been helpful just then, but I didn’t have time to wait for the cavalry to show up. I powered down my iNode and tossed it on the passenger seat, along with my shield with its RFID chip. To hunt the hunter, I’d have to go completely off the grid, too.

My mind thrashed with unpleasant scenarios, wondering if Maddie was really in the Flats—but she’d have to be or why else would the data payload for her assassination hit the AnSub down here? And just blocks away from her crime scenes. Why did she come back? An arrest had been made. The city was made safe again—or so it had been told by the brass at the press conference. Some doubt must have struck a nerve in Maddie like a cavity gone bad to bring her down into the Flats in the middle of the night to revisit her victims’ murders. And I knew exactly the crime scene where she’d be: the alley where her case and mine crossed paths.

It wasn’t until I got to the river and reflexively checked my six that I saw the pools of light cast by the street lamps. I was living the nightmare that Q’s call woke me from less than an hour ago.

I stepped out on the swing bridge, its ironwork casting shadows in the moonlight like a holographic spider web as I crossed the river.

On the East Bank, I pressed myself to the facade of an empty storefront and scanned the street ahead. There was no sign of a department sedan anywhere around the entrance to the alleyway two blocks down.

I unholstered my eM&P and slid forward in the shadows.

A rodent rustled down the sidewalk, hugging close to the building, unseen like me, I hoped. Second thoughts scurried like rats in my mind. I should have tried to warn Maddie by text—but no; since the Baron had clipped and cloaked her data stream, it would have only alerted him that we were on to him and nearby to help. Maybe I should wait for EC. Maybe…

Shoe leather shuffling softly on pavement scratched the quiet night from the alley up ahead. I stopped and squatted down behind the back fender of a grimy Chevy Volt with historic plates on the opposite side of the street. I watched the alley entrance, enhanced in eerie thermal black and white detail on my Google Glass.

Maddie emerged from the alley and leaned against the wall looking in, contemplating the crime scene. Her curvy body was still a half silhouette.

I unconsciously grit my teeth, gnawing the dilemma I faced. I could warn her now and save her in this moment. But the Baron’s drone would still be out there, loitering in the crowd, waiting with cold and infinite machine patience to execute the implanted code, when I wouldn’t be there—when no one would be there to stop it. Or I could bait the trap with Maddie.

I stayed behind the fender and watched. She’d hold it against me but wouldn’t hesitate to do the same…maybe.

I manually opened up the pulse bandwidth on my eM&P—there’d be no time to scan for the optimal frequency—then waited.

Time just stopped. It could have been sixty seconds. It could have been an hour. Sirens from up above spilled down from the city into the Flats. Maddie looked up over her shoulder at the lighted skyscrapers. It could have been an armed robbery in progress—or any number of other crimes that warrant a Code 3 response.

Somehow I knew, though, it was EC riding to the rescue but sure to foil my ambush in the process.

Maddie surveyed the murder scene again and pushed her shoulder off the wall. She took a step back into the alley. My glass suddenly flared up with a sharp glint, a street light caught on mirrored metal at just the right angle to explode off my lenses. When the blossom of light faded like a firework, I caught the thermal shadows of Maddie being pushed hard into the alley.

I bolted from behind the Chevy and dashed across the street.

The angle was right to keep me out of the synthoid’s rearward vision, but I could see him grab her jacket and lift her off the ground, feet frantically, futilely trying to find traction in the air.

The synthoid twisted Maddie like a baton and tossed her ahead, arms and legs flailing as she tumbled deeper into the alley, followed relentlessly by the Personal Services Assistant now programmed to be her murderer.

I took a deep breath, exhaled halfway, then spun around the corner to the alleyway. I double tapped the droid with my Smith and Wesson. In the interminable wait for the chamber charging sequence, I could only observe the synthoid was merely slowed in his advance on Maddie, who was crabwalking back from one mechanical fist raised above to strike down and crush her skull and the other clutching a large boning knife to finish the inherited killer’s signature.

I watched helplessly as the gap between human and machine closed, fighting the instinct to pull the trigger again too soon and send weakened EMP rounds that wouldn’t stop the assault.

The synthoid’s fist began to fall.

My eM&P shuddered against my palm and flashed green in my glass.

I pulled the trigger once, then again.

The cumulative effect finally locked the fist in midfall.

The alley was a frozen film noir scene in my glass. A panicked femme fatal. A serial killer. Sirens growing louder in the background.

The synthoid began thrashing spastically. The butcher knife clattered to the pavement. The droid finally collapsed in a heap.

Maddie’s hyperventilating swelled slowly in my ears.

I let out the last of my own held breath, then inhaled deeply.

The acrid odor of ozone told me the synthoid’s circuitry had been fried, so there would be nothing for Bob or Puff or Q to find.

I went to Maddie and held her in my arms as the street outside the alley filled with the noise of police cars arriving at the scene of a crime, after the fact, as usual.

***~~~***

Crash and Burn

“Idiot!” Puff erupted like an angry Vesuvius, spewing a hot lava flow of obscenities until he sputtered into insensibility and dove back into the synthoid’s innards.

I just stood there and took it…deservedly, but Maddie was safe. Scraped, scratched and bruised a bit, but alive. Also, unfortunately, just as livid with me as Puff. About telling Jamal things I shouldn’t have. About throwing a huge monkey wrench into her case. About using her like I did to be Munchausen bait. About…

“Yup, yup, yup,” Bob muttered, shaking his head. It’s a fish fry inside there. “Nothin’ left but ash and bones. Ash and bones…”

“We’ll tell Q,” EC said with a heavy sigh, giving me a sympathetic sideways glance.

We pushed out a side exit on the House into the alley—Exit Alley—and slowly walked back to our offices.

“Wow. I think it’s official now. You’ve got the whole world mad at you.”

“The whole world?”

“Well, not me…yet.” EC grinned a bit. “But I’m sure I could come up with a reason or two. If you want to do a thorough job of it.”

“Yeah…Well…”

Up ahead, Q waited for us under the unblinking surveillance camera, watching us approach like a wary alley cat.

“There was nothing,” EC sighed wearily. “Zero. Zip. Nada.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say nothing,” Q replied cryptically. “Hey, Jake, sorry about Maddie.”

I shrugged. “Collateral damage. Comes with the turf sometimes.”

“I mean—I couldn’t help it. You know how she is. She made me show her.”

“Show her what?” I asked.

“And what do you mean you wouldn’t say exactly nothing?” EC growled.

Q tapped the screen of his phone and turned it towards us so we could watch a synthoid-eye video of Maddie’s attack. “She made me show her. I—I…”

I shuddered at the panic on Maddie’s face and the brute terror in her screaming which never registered in my ears that night. And in just how close I’d come to really losing Maddie—to the morgue.

“Jesus. What the—”

“My bloodhound code caught the stream before Jake zapped it.”

“Well, I guess that explains a thing or two.” I looked away from the video.

“We’ll get this guy, Jake. We’ll get him.” EC’s voice dripped with anger.

“Funny thing about the feed.” Q pocketed his phone. “It split. One terminated into the Baron’s iNode so he could watch it live—”

“That’ll close the deal on a warrant,” EC interrupted. “That and the money trail.”

“What money trail?” Q asked.

“I finally found how Dr. Mullaney paid for the hit on her hubby. She laundered it through the Clinic with purchase orders for lab supplies to an LLC the guy owned,” EC explained. “Can you put a BOLO lock on Atlas for him? We don’t want him to get away.”

“Sure.”

I hit pause on the video replay of Maddie’s attack running in my mind. “What was funny about the feed?”

“It split. Like I said, one feed went to the Baron’s phone. The other disappeared into the darknet.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Q said with concern.

“Was he archiving it?” EC asked.

“Maybe…” Q looked directly at me. “Or someone else was watching.”

“Who?”

“It’s the darknet, Jake. Nobody good.”

“Don’t lose this guy,” EC warned.

“I won’t.” Q looked at me one last time and muttered over his shoulder as he went inside, “Sorry about Maddie.”

Yeah. Me, too.

***~~~***

Paperwork

Sometimes the wheels of justice move slowly…and sometimes not so much. While EC and I waited on the paperwork mill in the prosecutor’s office, Maddie’s perp was quickly deemed legally incompetent, which officially closed her serial killer case without the inconvenience of a trial. At least the poor sap who took the fall in the media got the mental health services he needed. Our off-the-books shadow investigation stayed in the shadows and off the books. The brass tidied up by declaring the assault on Maddie to be a PSA malfunction, not malware. And without any evidence to the contrary from Puff, Bob or Q, it stuck.

Deep down, though, she knew. She was too good of a detective. It was just another one of those situations that bureaucracies don’t handle very well: too messy with too many loose ends and too much potential for radioactive media fall out—the kind that causes career cancer. Maddie knew the game. But that didn’t help heal things between us.

Anyway, the city was officially deemed safe from a serial killer and everyone moved on…except for me, EC and the Baron.

Of course, Jeffery stopped showing up for work at the Clinic and the VA, but Q had a DDB—Digital Denver Boot—on him, so he wasn’t going anywhere while we waited on the paperwork. Neither was Dr. Mullaney.

***~~~***

The Darknet

Maddie’s call came through at three AM. Of course, I had changed her ringtone.

“Jesus. Why does crime always have to happen in the middle of the night,” Amy complained hoarsely, then rolled over away from me and hugged her pillow.

“Yeah?” I answered, trying to be as discreet as possible.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Maddie said matter-of-factly. “I’ll send you the details while you drag yourself out of…when you’re on the way.”

“Right.”

Maddie was on familiar turf: The Flats.

I crossed beneath the crime scene tape and walked towards her standing guard over the covered body, holding the bunny suit crew at bay from their forensic harvest.

She nodded to the Medical Examiner to pull back the sheet from the body. “Looks like your case is closed, too.”

Jeffery’s corpse lay on the pavement. “But…he didn’t do that to himself.”

Maddie peered up into the dark night sky. “You don’t have to say it, but you will, won’t you. You can’t help yourself.”

I just stared at the eviscerated body that was the object of our arrest warrant with his intestines wrapped around his neck like a fine silk tie. The only thought that floated up in my mind was the darknet.

“What did you call him? The Baron?”

I nodded.

“I guess he’s still out there.”

The darknet…

***~~~***

Thank you for reading my story.

***~~~***

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About the Author

M.T. Bass lives, writes, flies and makes music in Mudcat Falls, U.S.A.

www.mtbass.net

Amazon Author Page

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to The Darknet Page on Amazon.com

It was the case of a lifetime…but then it went sideways on her. The serial killer Maddie put behind bars might have been crazy but it turns out he was innocent, and now she finds herself hunting robot killers in the Artificial Crimes Unit. Worse yet, she's partnered up with Jake, her former lover.

When androids are hacked and reprogrammed into hit men, Maddie and Jake investigate and track down the hackers. But now, an evil genius is using droids to recreate the infamous Jack the Ripper murders.

"It might not make sense, but the beloved Media tags it 'Murder by Munchausen.' For a price, there are hackers out there who will reprogram a synthoid to do your dirty work. The bad news: no fingerprints or DNA left at the crime scene. The good news—at least for us—is that they’re like missiles: once they hit their target, they’re usually as harmless as empty brass. The trick is to get them before they melt down their core OS data, so you can get the unit into forensics for analysis and, hopefully, an arrest." [excerpt from Murder by Munchausen]

Artificial Intelligence? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Artificial Evil has a name…Munchausen.

***~~~***

Chapter 1 — The Baron

Jake crossed beneath the crime scene tape and walked towards me as I stood guard over the covered body holding the bunny suit crew at bay from their forensic harvest. He does have the best poker face of anyone I know, but—ugh! I could practically smell it on him: the blonde waitress from John’s.

I nodded to the Medical Examiner to pull back the sheet from the body. “Looks like your case is closed, too.”

Jake peered down at Jeffery’s corpse on the pavement. “But…he didn’t do that to himself.”

I gazed up overhead at the fat, heavy clouds glowing gray from the city lights. “You don’t have to say it, but you will, won’t you. You can’t help yourself.”

He stared at the eviscerated body that was the subject of an arrest warrant in his Munchausen murder with its intestines wrapped around the neck like a fine silk tie.

“What did you call him? The Baron?”

Jake just nodded.

“I guess he’s still out there.”

“Yeah…in the Darknet.”

“Huh?”

Just then Lt. Sands came up behind us. “Well, this looks like nothing but trouble.”

I had called him, too.

“What? Me or the dead body?” Jake asked with a smirk.

“Dead bodies are easy.” Sands put his hand on Jake’s shoulder. “They don’t break any regs, and they don’t smart off.”

“Hi, Lieu. I thought you should know, too.”

“But he got here before me.” He squeezed Jake’s shoulder hard.

“Well, maybe he didn’t have anything better to do at the moment,” I said, staring Jake down. Still, the best poker face ever.

“You know how it is.” Jake gave Lt. Sands a fake wince, then winked. “Most people call 911. I am 911.”

Lt. Sands rolled his eyes and shook his head. “So, what am I looking at, Maddie?”

“No doubt, a big fat ‘I told you so’ coming our way, courtesy of the Geek Squad here,” I said.

“We need to get started,” whined one of the Bunny Suit Boys behind us. “Before it rains again or we’ll lose evidence.”

We backed off, and I waved them forward to process the crime scene.

“You know what this means, right?” Lt. Sands asked us as we huddled apart from the crowd of technicians.

I looked at Jake.

He smiled that crooked, knowing smile of his. “Partners again, huh.”

I clenched my eyes shut and shook my head. Damn it.

“Well, you kids have fun. I’m going back to bed.” Lt. Sands could barely suppress his chuckling. He turned to leave. “Tomorrow afternoon. In my office. We’ll talk. You detectives have a good night—well, morning, now.”

I opened my eyes and caught Jake laughing.

“Come on. It won’t be that bad, will it?”

I pushed past Jake to supervise my crime scene.

Of course, it wasn’t that Jake was a bad cop or difficult to work with. When we were professional partners, we made a good team. Just now…

I suddenly caught movement out of the side of my eye. Rapid footsteps hit the wet pavement. Jake ran by me, and before I even thought about it, I instinctively took off after him like a partner would.

In the dim glow of tired, old street lamps, a short figure fled up the sidewalk ahead of Jake. I slipped between two parked cars to cross the street so I could cut him off if he veered to the left.

No thinking. Just running.

Another block and our runner instinctively paused as if to look both ways for traffic at the deserted intersection. Jake closed the gap between them quickly.

The perp looked over his shoulder and bolted quickly my way, caught sight of me, and zig-zagged back the other way right into Jake’s path.

Instead of tackling, Jake grabbed his collar like the scruff of a dog’s neck, and they twirled in a weird, contorted ballroom dance kind of way around and around and around until they tumbled into a heap on the pavement.

I crossed back over and drew down with my Glock…on a kid. So young I couldn’t tell at first if it was a boy or a girl, especially dressed street-person style in layers of grimy tattered clothes.

Jake scrambled to his feet and held the kid by the collar like a trophy-sized walleye. He panted, “I think we just might have a witness.”

I shot him a look, holstered my weapon and knelt down to eye-level just out of a pre-teen’s arm reach. I saw by the eyes and soft facial features it was a young girl. “Are you okay?”

The kid shrugged and wriggled futilely in Jake’s grasp.

“Hey, settle down,” Jake commanded, with a shake of the girl’s collar.

Our eyes met again. I always liked how he and I were on the same wavelength. Almost like ESP, we were instinctively working the kid Good Cop/Bad Cop. I missed it. It wasn’t there with Walker, who took Jake’s place when he got suspended for shooting the Councilman’s son or now with Sanchez who was still back at the crime scene. I couldn’t even begin to imagine her chasing a perp down the street. And what would the point be? She’s a good cop and all but probably runs a four-hour mile—or maybe “waddles” would be more accurate.

“Hungry?”

No response, except in the eyes.

“Yeah. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

We led the kid back towards the crime scene but stayed well outside the tape. Jake took her to my unmarked car and sat her in the back seat—Sanchez would be sure to gripe about the body odor.

“Don’t make me cuff you.” Jake made his point with a poke to the shoulder but stood blocking her escape path.

“I’ll be right back.” I smiled, looked towards Jake, and rolled my eyes for the kid’s benefit.

On my way to the food and coffee, I instructed a patrolman to discretely circle around and stand guard down the street and out of sight from the sedan in case the kid tried to take off again.

I grabbed a couple of donuts and a bottled water.

“Whatcha got going on over there?” Sanchez asked, slapping her notepad against her ample thigh like an impatient meter maid.

“I don’t know. Some kid who bolted out of the alley, there. Might have seen something. Maybe.”

“I’ll call Protective Services.”

“Yeah, but maybe give me a few minutes head start with her to see if there’s any there, there.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. I haven’t met a social worker yet who likes coming out in the middle of the night.”

“Thanks.”

“Good thing you called him.”

“Huh?”

“Jake.” Sanchez smiled. “Foot races ain’t my thing. I don’t think I’ve actually run since the academy.”

“Yeah. At least he’s good for something.” I smiled back.

“Whatever you say, honey.” Sanchez laughed out loud. “I’ll see if I can light a fire under Forensics so we can get out of here before morning rush hour.”

When I got back, Jake drifted away from the sedan to give us some space. Kneeling again, I offered up the donuts. The kid grabbed them both and ate the first one with a fierce animal intensity, then seemed to remember her manners and took a dainty bite out of the second one.

“Thanks.”

I nodded. “You know the drill, right? We have to call them.”

The kid gave a heavy sigh and washed a bite down with a sip of water.

“You have to?” she whispered.

I nodded. “What name will you give them?”

“Um, Amy, I guess.”

I had to grit my teeth hard to keep from screaming. “Anywhere close to your real name?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“In case I want to check in on you.”

“I won’t be there long. Never am. And they never come after me.”

“Did you see what happened?” I motioned towards the taped off crime scene with my head, then looked at Jake who hovered just out of ear shot over on the sidewalk. “Trust me, he won’t let it rest and can make life miserable if you let him.”

Amy looked at Jake, then back to me. “It was one of them.”

“Them?”

“You know. A robot.”

“How could you tell?” I had a hard time picking them out myself.

“Not many of ‘em down here under the bridges. They kind of stick out.”

I sighed. The Baron.

“Yeah. I hate them, too,” Amy said, then finished off the second donut.

***~~~***

Go to The Darknet Page on Amazon.com

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to The Invisible Mind Page at mtbass.net

"...he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

~Adam Smith, 1776

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.”

~Nikola Tesla, 1926

“…so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. I have called this substratum the collective unconscious.”

~Carl Jung, 1931

***~~~***

Chapter 1 — The Baron

He savored the cruel irony of it all as he watched through the observation window in the Intensive Care Unit: Jake, the synthoid hunter, was being kept alive by machines.

Jamal, dressed in green surgical scrubs, pulled his phone out and tapped on the screen. Waitress Amy’s head jerked around to the bed next to Jake’s as the alarms on that patient’s medical monitoring equipment began to flash and bleat.

“Code Blue to ICU bed nine,” an emotionless automated voice announced over the public address system. Soon after nurses and doctors swarmed the bed.

Jamal did not wait to watch the patient die.

In his glass-walled office in Exit Alley, one of the three cell phones neatly lined up on the credenza behind his desk dinged out Morse Code for the letter ‘V’, causing him to look away from the lines of computer programming language filling his laptop screen. He pulled a fourth burner phone from his shirt pocket and called the IT department at MetroHealth Medical Center, then called EC with his police issued iPhone.

“Just now. In bed nine, next to Jake.” Q listened, then hung up.

Maddie looked around Cutty’s Deli as EC, sitting across from her at a back booth, took a call. It was one of the few places where she felt safe anymore. To her, it was like home—her childhood home—warm with fond memories: of lunching with her dad once a week ever since she was twelve years old; of “Uncle” Cutty’s career counseling that tipped the scales in her decision to go to the police academy instead of law school—an act of defiance to her father’s urgings, but one that warmed his heart nonetheless; of endless debates on so many arcane subjects with Jake over coffee when they were partners in Robbery/Homicide. She knew it was a false sense of security, nevertheless Maddie felt safe at Cutty’s.

“That was Q,” EC said, setting his phone down on the table. “He’s been monitoring the data traffic in ICU. There was an inbound spike and the patient next to Jake died.”

“The Baron? Is he there?”

“Even if he was, I doubt he stuck around.” EC sighed. “We should probably check it out, though.”

“In a minute. Okay?” Maddie fingered the rim of her nearly empty coffee mug. “Let me, ah, finish my coffee.”

“No hurry.” EC wanted to say more, but couldn’t find the words.

Shackled to the metal bed frame, a child sat stoically staring at the door, almost as hungry for freedom as she was for food. Amy hoped someone missed her, but doubted it—after all, she was homeless and had no real family. Even if anyone did miss her, who of them would come to her rescue? Her social worker? That thought brought a wry smile to her young face. Maybe the female detective…

Though medically shackled to his hospital bed by a chemically induced coma, Jake’s mind floated freely through his own subconscious, like a Freudian derelict riding the waves of swelling and ebbing dreams and memories. He was aware of waitress Amy’s presence there beside him and commotion at the next bed over and even, vaguely, briefly of some malevolent presence nearby, but Jake seemed to stir or blink only when Maddie came to visit.

.

***~~~***

Chapter 2 — Richard Speck

It sat on a bench outside the dormitory of nursing students, waiting with its kind’s infinite patience. Originally acquired and programmed for landscaping at the Cleveland Clinic, the synthoid was one of a brigade of units which had been hacked and Munchausened, then returned to their menial daily services to mankind to await the Baron’s call.

There was no adrenalin surge behind the extremely life-like facade of humanity when that call came. Data packets, sent scatter-shot through the Atlas Grid, coalesced at the location outside the Cole Eye Institute, where it methodically trimmed and shaped the immaculate shrubbery around the building. To avoid Q’s metadata sniffing algorithms from detecting a download spike in the grid, the information came in digital sprinkles over the course of its human handler’s work shift, slowly building a malevolent intent to be executed that night. In the middle of the afternoon, it left the topiary unfinished to melt into the hospital shift change and disappeared.

Personality modules were a Gen-3 feature upgrade, which is why the earlier models were initially preferred. Swapping out a few IC chips and uploading hacked firmware was a relatively easy way to turn a quick buck with an automated contract killing. But evil innovates, too, and the same features that made synthoids even more human-like in their behavior also helped create robotic assassins which could better camouflage their malicious intents and evade the reach of the Artificial Crimes Unit by melting into and moving undetected through the humanity that surrounded them. For the Baron, it allowed for a greater measure of artistic expression in programming the synthoid’s behavior to not only recreate infamous crimes of the past, but to mimic the behavior of their perpetrators, which intensified the thrill of watching the video feed through the eyes of Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy or, this particular evening, Richard Speck. Jake wasn’t the only history buff and it amused Jamal that London police had photographed the eyes of Jack the Ripper’s victims, hoping to capture the last thing they ever saw: their killer’s face. If only Scotland Yard could have imagined the future.

The Gen-3 personality modules also supported the ANSI Adaptive Artificial Intelligence Protocol #9 to enhance the artificial human experience of real men and women who interacted with synthoids. The constant writing and rewriting of code in the personality/experience loop formed unique individual synthoid consciousnesses, which manufacturers uploaded to their servers for product improvement teams to study. In Munchausened units, that feed was hijacked and routed to another portal in the Darknet to build a collective id of evil.

At eleven PM, it rose from the bench and entered the dormitory. The bodies of nine women would be found the next day, having been strangled and stabbed to death. Unlike 1966, no eyewitness was left alive, though the phrase “Born to Raise Hell” was written on the wall in blood.

***~~~***

Go to The Invisible Mind Page at mtbass.net

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to Untethered Page at Amazon

Am I the only one bothered that our children are penned up and medicated, but chickens, cows and pigs need to be “free range” and drug free?

At District High School #6241, Connor wants only to get close to Liz, the cheerleader whose locker is just across the hall, and forget the suicide of his father in jail, but his family’s dark past and a rebellious nature force him to the fringes of student social circles and into an unlikely alliance to fight back against a tyranny of conformity.

***~~~***

Excerpt from Untethered

“Connor…Connor…Hey, Connor!”

The boys were gathered haphazardly on the tabletop and benches of the park picnic table like crows meeting up around discarded food scraps. Payne smoked. Jeff carved his name in the tabletop with a pocket knife. Frank sipped an energy drink and Adam stared out at the lake. Connor warily eyed a white Chevy Tahoe with decals that said "Homeland Security," "Federal Protective Services" and "POLICE" as it slowed and turned off Lake Road into the parking lot.

The five were part of a loose and officially unsanctioned group of high school friends who called themselves the Uns, as in un-involved and un-interested in what went on within the concrete block walls or on the fenced-in grounds of District High School #6241. The group played “The Fives” over who would stay behind to carry their RFID embedded student ID cards to class, while the rest of the Uns played good old fashioned hooky. Jay was the one stuck back in class that day. Frank told them that as long as their badges registered as present in class for attendance the district got their money from the government, so the school administrators didn’t worry about whether they were really in Ms. Easley’s Phonics Ed class or Mr. Burn-out’s Social Justice Studies class. Frank’s dad was on the school board or something, so they believed him and it seemed to be true—none of the teachers or principals really cared. Otherwise, they would have used biometrics to keep track of the students.

The white government Tahoe pulled into a parking spot next to the flag poles which surrounded an ancient artillery piece from some long-forgotten battle fought over a hundred years ago to make the world safe for democracy or something. It was placed there as a punctuation mark to the state designated name for the green space on the shoreline: Veterans Memorial Park. Connor had never paid much attention to the government vehicles from Homeland Security and the Border Patrol which paraded up and down Lake Road, until the night his father insisted that Connor and his mom go for a walk along the beach without their cell phones and he told them that there was trouble at the clinic: Medical Review Board officials were displeased with the fact that he sometimes treated people without the proper paperwork. It didn’t matter that he provided his services free and paid for supplies and medication out of his own pocket. Connor asked what it all meant and his father claimed he didn’t know, but Connor did not really believe him. A few weeks later, his dad was arrested. Before the trial could begin, he was found dead in his jail cell. Officials called it suicide. Connor and his mother felt differently, but they were careful to keep those thoughts to themselves. After that family walk on the beach, the Uns always left their cell phones in their lockers whenever they went off campus and Connor began to take notice of not only white government Tahoes everywhere, but the many different colored uniforms mingling among people at shopping centers, restaurants or the mall: brown, blue, black, tan, dark green.

“Hey, Connor, let’s get out of here,” Payne said.

One by one the boys left the picnic table and scurried down the embankment to the rocky shore of what was once called Lake Erie. It had been renamed the Wilson Sea in honor of some dead President. All of the Great Lakes had been renamed, since building a new Mount Rushmore would cost too much, take too long and require so much effort. It was easier for the government to just take what was already there.

Connor eyeballed the Homeland Security SUV one last time, then followed down the hidden escape path that the Uns had scouted and used whenever their presence in the park was noticed by the authorities or nosy passersby.

Payne, Jeff, Adam and Frank cut up along Hellman’s Creek to head back to the school. Connor kept going along the shoreline towards downtown. He would meet up later with the Uns after school at Dutch’s Landing on the river and get his cell phone and school ID before he went home.

Dutch’s Landing was a sprawling resort with a marina, hotel, swimming pool, restaurant and an outdoor bamboo Tiki bar that sat on the bend the shoreline made as the Black River emptied into the Wilson Sea. According to the stories told by Connor’s mom and dad, Dutch’s Landing was once extremely popular and always alive with people partying nearly every night through the summer months. Folks sailed their boats up the river and docked right next to the Tiki bar to eat, drink and be merry long into the morning of the next day.

Now the resort was closed down and long ago abandoned by everyone except for the “Bridge People” and teenagers who played a game of human three-card monte with the local police and lazy Homeland Security guards, constantly moving around the huge property—the Bridge People to find a place for their tents for the night and the teenagers to find a place to hang out with some privacy. An informal alliance of the two trespassing groups had won this particular battle in the surveillance war by a scorched-earth strategy of destroying any and all video cameras the city put up anywhere and everywhere in Dutch’s Landing until the Municipal Manager and the City Council eventually lost interest and decided to divert those funds to other pet projects. Nobody really cared what went on at Dutch’s Landing after that.

Connor walked through the Tiki bar and tried to imagine the place as his mom and dad described it before regulations and cold, hard economic realities strangled it: full of life, noise, fun, music and happiness. Now it was spooky, though—like a ghost town. At first glance, the bamboo festooned bar looked ready for bartenders to show up for the night. The stage just needed a band to set up and play. Tables, chairs and bar stools waited patiently for patrons to fill them again to eat, drink and be merry. Lounge chairs and dead palm trees lined the nearby swimming pool for sunbathers and swimmers to surround with their umbrella-shaded drinks. But the swimming pool had long ago been emptied of any water except for dark rainwater clouded with algae and rotting leaves. The tables, chairs and bar stools were splattered with sea gull shit. The stage was tangled in cob webs. The bar was frosted with thick grimy dust, sprinkled with rodent feces.

“Hey there,” a man’s raspy voice called out.

Connor stopped dead in his tracks. The voice caught him by surprise, but its tone and tenor did not have the hard, blunt edge of authoritarian malice in it. His eyes searched the bar area for its source. He found a silhouette around the corner of the bar, occupying the last bar stool. The man raised a bottle to his lips. He savored the sip loudly as he set it back down on the bar in front of him.

“Connor? Right?”

Connor warily stepped into the shadows towards the bar. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, the man came into sharper view. From his ragged, haphazardly matched clothes, he was obviously one of the Bridge People. Though scruffy and unkempt, his face and hands looked washed and clean. The man’s lips parted in a friendly, though weary, half-smile.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad, man.” The Bridge Person raised his bottle in a toast, then took another sip of amber liquor. “He was a good guy.”

Strangely, Connor did not feel threatened by the man, but his confusion at the Bridge Person’s familiarity with him and his father was clearly etched on his face.

“He helped my, ah, friend when she fell ill,” the man explained. “I saw a picture of you on the credenza behind the desk in his office. I asked and he talked about you a bit.”

“He helped you?”

“My friend, actually.”

“Why?”

The man squinted back at Connor. “Nobody made him. Nobody even asked. He reached out. He let it be known that people in need could come to him.”

“He risked everything for…”

The Bridge Person smiled and chuckled under his breath. “You mean for the likes of me? Yeah. He was one of the last—maybe even the last—true man of medicine left around here.”

“But…Why?”

“I guess because he was just a good man. That’s all. Don’t really need any more reason. Do you?”

Connor thought for a moment. “Do you live here?”

“Nah.” The man shook his head. “I live over in Tent City under the Bridge. Nobody I know lives here. Just the outcasts from us outcasts.”

“What’s your name?”

“They call me Coop.”

“What about your friend?”

Coop sighed heavily. “She didn’t make it. The Doc tried as best as he could, but couldn’t turn back the cancer.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s just how it was meant to be, I reckon.”

“What about you?” Connor asked. “Are you a good man?”

Coop shrugged. “Not for me to say, really. A man can’t lay claim to it himself. He can only work at it.”

Connor stared at Coop.

“In fact, I don’t know as I would believe anyone who would actually claim that for himself to my face.” Coop took a sip and watched Connor carefully over the top of the bottle. “I’ll bet that’s what they said, when they came to you and your mother.”

“Who?”

“You know. When they came to tell you that they had to take away the Doc. They had to do it. It was the right thing to do. It was for the good of all. Huh?”

Connor met Coop’s stare and slowly nodded.

“Do you trust them?”

Connor just stared.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t either.” Coop stood up, capped the bottle and slipped it into the pocket of his ragged coat. “And you’d be right not to.”

“Who can I trust?”

Coop laughed. “Trust can’t be picked like fruit off a tree. It’s gotta be earned. You gotta find it in people and mine it—work it, then guard it like gold.”

“Can I trust you?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

Connor stared at Coop.

“Look, son, I’m nobody. I got nothing and the folks I know got no pull either. So, what good’s that trust anyway? What good is it for you? I mean, what is it going to get you?”

“I—I don’t know.”

The two regarded each other carefully.

“The Doc tried to help me—help my friend. If you need help, well—I don’t know what I can do, but…anyway.

Connor nodded.

“Your mates will be along any time now, so I’ll shove off.” Coop turned to leave, then stopped and looked back at Connor. “You know how to find me? I got no phone. Don’t want one neither. I’m long since done being electronically leashed up like a dog.”

Connor nodded.

“Okay then.”

Connor watched Coop leave, then went over to the swimming pool and kicked stones into the fetid water as he waited for the rest of the Uns to bring him his school ID badge and cell phone.

***~~~***

Go to Untethered Page at Amazon

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to Somethin’ for Nothin’ Page on Amazon

People ask me where I get the ideas for my books. In this case, I recall reading about Alaska bush pilots for fun. I must have watched Animal House and Treasure of the Sierra Madre around that time and…a few months later—Eureka! The words for the prologue and first chapter just started spilling out of my head. (“Clean up on aisle five.”)

Anchorage, 1976 — Albert and Waxy flunk their Intro to Philosophy midterm and drunkenly decide to drop out of The Ohio State University and go to Alaska to “strike it rich” working on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. After Albert’s father cuts off his credit card, they get bartending & dishwashing jobs at an Anchorage bar, where Albert becomes involved with the bar owner’s girlfriend, CiCi, who is also the lead singer in the house band. Albert “acquires” a union card to get a pipeline job for himself, but then learns that Waxy has become part of a crazy scheme with Jimmi the Pilot, Beantown Bob and Moe the Eskimo to find and recover a long lost government payroll from an Air Force cargo plane that crashed in the Alaska Mountain Range decades ago.

Seriously, what could go wrong? Love & Betrayal…Murder & Mayhem…Friendship & Double-Crossing Partners in Pursuit of Buried Treasure…

***~~~***

Chapter 1 — High Street

The blue bus is calling us…

Albert and Waxy woke one Thursday morning to the guttural gurgling of diesel engines. Albert’s blue Ford panel van was parked between a North American moving van and a Monsanto chemical tanker—a portentous sign, they both later concurred—at an Indiana rest stop just across the border from Ohio on Interstate 70. Waxy and Albert emerged from the van with a vacuity of will and comprehension so common to those suffering a hangover.

“Where the hell are we?” asked Albert.

Waxy squinted his eyes and sniffed the air. “Indiana? Maybe?”

“Oh God, I knew it. We’ve died and gone straight to hell.”

“It could be worse.”

“How in the hell is that?” Albert scowled and stared hard at Waxy.

“I don’t know.” Waxy shook his head. “I miss it.”

“Miss what?”

“Home.”

“AAAAIIIIRRRRRGGGGHHHH! GO DIRECTLY TO CLEVELAND! DO NOT PASS GO! DO NOT COLLECT $200!”

“You know what I mean.”

“For Christ’s sake, we’re not even two hundred miles from Columbus. We haven’t even been gone twelve hours, yet,” Albert exclaimed in disbelief. “Besides, it’s Ohio. O-Hi-O, Waxy. Remember? That four letter word with three syllables.”

“Huh?”

“Ohio, boy, Ohio. The Buckeye State, where that veritable Imperial Wizard of the Big Ten, Woody Hayes, reigns supreme. Home of the Rubber Capital of the world and the Pro Football Hall of Fame—the one hundred forty-seventh and two hundred sixty-third wonders of the world, respectively. Give me a break already, will you? Don’t tell me you want to go back-back-back there! Don’t tell me that you really, really want to be known as one of the only two human beings on the planet to legitimately flunk out of The Ohio State University. Have you forgotten about garfing that God damned midterm in Kragies’ Torment of the Soul 101 yesterday? She’ll crucify us, Waxy—nail our asses to the God damned cross. We won’t be able to get jobs pumping gas at a piss-ant Sohio station by the time she’s finished her Inquisition with us. As Immanuel Kant would say, ‘get real already.’ Face it, we’re screwed.”

“Well, yeah, but-but I sure don’t want to stay in Indiana.”

“Go west, young man, go west,” Albert whispered seductively.

“Is Alaska west? Or North? Or northwest?”

“Details, Waxy, don’t bother me with details. Get a focus on The Big Picture.”

“Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting.”

Waxy wasn’t very good at all at focusing in on The Big Picture. Albert was the idea man and that suited Waxy—and Albert, too—just fine.

The Big Picture came to be defined in ever broader, ever more artistically abstract strokes as Albert and Waxy made their way down High Street hitting every bar across from the OSU campus that was open at 10:30 in the morning from the North Berg to the South Berg immediately after “garfing” their Introduction to Philosophy midterm examination. The Big Picture had its genesis in shots of Yukon Jack bourbon, which Albert and Waxy washed down liberally with Moosehead Lager beers.

“Look at that label! Look at that God damned label, Waxy! Have you ever in your life ever seen anything as ugly as that moose?!” Albert pointed to the label of his beer bottle. His voice had the timbre and decibel rating of a Pratt and Whitney jet engine roaring at take-off power in Waxy’s ear. “They’ve got to have Paul Bunyan-sized balls to put something that hideous on a beer bottle and still expect people to drink it! Yup! Genuine Paul Bunyan-sized testicles with sperm cells as big as rainbow trout! Waxy, my man, that’s where we belong! In the land of the ug-ug-ugliest member of the deer family and brew masters with the biggest balls in this quadrant of the Milky Way! It’s gotta be! It’s Jack London’s call of the fucking wild! It’s just gotta be! Look at that son-of-a-bitching Bullwinkle bastard! Look at him and tell me we don’t belong! We’ll be sucking down caribou milk and snarfing eagle eggs over easy with a side of reindeer back bacon for breakfast! Put hair on a hairless ass! Look at this! Look! When have you ever seen an uglier hunk of shag carpeting? Look at him. Am I right or am I right or am I right?”

“No man of reason can dispute this,” Waxy slurred as he squinted hard at his own bottle of Moosehead Beer.

The main ingredients of The Big Picture included collecting obscenely excessive amounts of money, Arctic springs welling up with honey-sweetened sour mash whiskey straight from the center of the earth, and clutches of Scandinavian-looking Eskimo women named Annika, Inge, Karena and Rika clawing at Albert and Waxy’s naked bodies. The more he drank, the more animated and enthusiastic Albert became, albeit the more Salvador Dali-like his vision of getting rich working on the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline became.

Waxy, being of like mind and intoxication, measured Albert’s skewed vision of reality, riches and adventure against his own mundane high school existence in Delaware, Ohio; the abrasion of a liberal arts course of study at Ohio State University on his pragmatic, agrarian sensibilities; and the prospects of going to work on the second shift in the local luggage factory back home when his utter failure to comprehend the Humanities was verified in his hastily scribbled blue book by Professor Kragies. He came to the one and only conclusion a man who had sucked boiler makers for six hours straight possibly could: “Who cares if the mule is blind, let’s load up the wagon.”

“Huh?” asked a perplexed Albert.

“Why the hell not!”

“Now you’re talking.”

Their Manifest Destiny came to be symbolized in the soft, almost whispered a cappella chant, “The blue bus is calling us…”—a line from Albert’s favorite song off of his favorite album by his favorite rock band, “The End” by The Doors.

On the way to the bank to close out their accounts:

The blue bus is calling us…

On the way to the package store to buy provisions for their long, cross-continental pilgrimage:

The blue bus is calling us…

Back to their dorm room to gather only their most essential belongings, including swim suits, Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett posters, as well as cassette tapes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Rolling Stones and, of course, The Doors:

The blue bus is calling us…

Watching their text books, piled along the banks of the Olentangy River, doused with gasoline and burning brightly:

The blue bus is calling us…

All the way to Indiana:

The blue bus is calling us…

Thursday morning at the rest stop, after squinting silently into the sun for what seemed like hours, Albert began chanting their mantra:

The blue bus is calling us…

Calm immediately crossed their troubled countenances. Peace reclaimed their souls. Their thoughts became focused on The Big Picture and the mission they shared. Their lives came to have purpose and meaning again.

Albert and Waxy got back into Albert’s blue Ford panel van and merged onto Interstate 70, westbound.

***~~~***

Go to Somethin’ for Nothin’ Page on Amazon

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to Lodging Page on Amazon

Lodging — bending of the stalk of a plant (stalk lodging) or the entire plant (root lodging)

The high Kansas plains are scarred with mile-long runways that I’ve marred with many a rubber skid mark. They were used to train the thousands and thousands of pilots and crew members needed for World War II. Perusing the Wichita Eagle-Beacon one morning during harvest season I read about ‘lodging’ which is the bending of the stalk of a plant (stalk lodging) or the entire plant (root lodging) and the germ of an idea for a story took root (so to speak).

Fast forward decades later: Mrs. V was one of Lola’s dearest lady friends who lived to be 100, reading voraciously by increasing the font size on her Kindle to the redline. The anecdote she shared of Mrs. V reading the biography of Keith Richards (“He was a good boy, because he loved his mum”) finally crystalized that story. Mrs. V passed away in 2016.

While World War II engulfs every nation on the globe, Rebecca and her high school friend Sarah can only dream of escaping a dreary, wind-blown existence in western Kansas, until their boring, stodgy old hometown fills with handsome young men learning to fly Army Air Corps bombers known as Liberators, and their lives are suddenly filled with temptation and, perhaps, true love.

***~~~***

Excerpt from Lodging

“Grandma… Grandma! Can she even hear me?”

“She comes and goes. Some days are better than others.”

“What is she looking at out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Grandma!”

Of course, I could hear them. But sometimes it is easier to pretend not to. How do you tell your family — your children and your children’s children that their lives are — or maybe, were unintended. That they might never have been.

I don’t know if “unintended” is the right word. Accidental? Like getting shot with a ricocheted bullet.

I loved Bill. I did. Captain Billy — the pilot of my soul. We had a good life and we were happy. But, he wasn’t the one. He was the one who came back, but he wasn’t the one.

A ricocheted bullet…

***~~~***

It is funny how children can be so oblivious to deprivation. My best friend, Sarah, and I were so. The world was at war and we were yet young girls in high school, still filled with the wonder of life, not caring about rationing or war bonds or newspaper headlines. And suddenly the world seemed to be coming to Liberal — boring, stodgy old Liberal, Kansas. West of town a giant airfield was cultivated out of the wheat fields. Soon after, the sky filled with airplanes and the streets flooded with young men from all over the country coming to our town to learn to fly the planes they called “Liberators” — from New York, from California, from Florida, from Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco — places Sarah and I could only dream of, trapped as we were on the empty high plains in the middle of North America.

We used to ride our bikes out to the Army Airfield and wade into the fields of grain to lie down at the end of the runways like lodging wheat to feel the roar of the huge bombers shake our bodies. Fear tingled our toes as they swooped in to land, so close — so close overhead that we could see the rivets. So close, we could feel the heat of the exhaust of those grumpy, growling engines. So close. So big. So close.

The planes came so low overhead we could see the faces of the boys in the bubbles — the bombardiers, nose and tail gunners. It wasn’t long before they noticed Sarah and I and they began to smile and wave at us. They pressed their faces against the Plexiglas or hung out the side when the tornado of air off the wings and propellers tried to lift the hems of our dresses. Sometimes — just sometimes, we kind of let our fingers slip just a little and the caboose boys — that’s what we called the tail gunners — would give us a big grin and a thumbs up. Of course, that was a secret that only Sarah and I…and the Army Air Corps shared.

***~~~***

Go to Lodging Page on Amazon

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to In the Black Page on Amazon

The decade you love to hate…or hate to love. If any time period in American history deserves the Catch-22 treatment, it is the Sixties.

Kansas City, 1965 — Y.T. Erp, Jr. can't wait to leave for college at the University of California, Berkeley to escape not only the work, but especially all the phlegm-brained idiots at his father's aerospace company. Leaving behind a pregnant auburn-haired cheerleader, a sensuous red-headed siren plotting to usurp his familial ties, and his two best friends — one who ends up in Vietnam and the other in the Weather Underground — his "trip" on the wild side of the Generation Gap takes him from the psychedelic scene of Haight-Ashbury to the F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted list. Meanwhile, his father is consumed by the task of managing his unmanageable team in the quest to help fulfill a President's challenge to "land a man on the moon."

***~~~***

Chapter 1 — The Memo

M E M O R A N D U M

January 4, 1965

TO: ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS

FM: Y.T. ERP, SR.

From this time forward, all right-handed people will be left-handed. Left-handed personnel will assume right-handedness.

Ambidextrous persons will be dealt with individually.

Sincerely,

Y.T. ERP, SR., PRESIDENT

ERP INDUSTRIES, INC.

YTE/www

***~~~***

“Good morning, Mr. Rangely.”

“Hi, Dirk.”

“Hello, Mr. Rangely.”

“Good, er, ah…”

Like those born into the species Homo politicus, Dirk Rangely, Vice-President/Marketing, had come into this world with the innate understanding that the “Common Folk”—no matter how repulsive or disgusting they were—needed constant attention and frequent hand-holding, for they formed the true basis for power with a capital ‘P’. On their broad and often sweaty shoulders were laid party platforms, legislative initiatives, foreign policies and economic reforms. At Erp Industries, Inc., the “Little Guys” ultimately did the real work that got product built and shipped, triggering the invoices that generated the company’s income out of which Dirk Rangely drew his handsome salary and against which he filed his excessive expense reports. This concept of practical/materialistic/exploitive reverence for the “Little Guys” was by now so ingrained into Dirk Rangely that it had become encoded in his DNA molecules to curse future generations of Rangelys like other families were cursed with Huntington’s Chorea or Dwarfism.

Dirk Rangely’s peculiar genetic trait manifested itself as his tall, trim figure glided effortlessly—Dirk Rangely rarely engaged in any activity actually requiring effort—through the manufacturing plant on his self-appointed mission to greet every person he saw in his quick, New England accent with the phrase: ‘Hi-there-how-are-you-today, [insert name here if known]’. He even encouraged the workers to call him by his first name, though many were reluctant to do so, more out of respect for his position than out of respect for Dirk Rangely himself. This canned phrase had evolved during his lifetime into a completely reflexive response to external stimuli, over which he could exercise no control and into which he could inject no feeling. It, too, was undoubtedly DNA encoded, and Dirk brimmed with pride each time he heard the first words out of his children’s mouths: “Hi-there-how-are-you-today?”

This particular January morning, though, Dirk Rangely seemed to walk through the plant in a daze, mumbling incoherently to himself, “H-the-ho-r-yo-toda…”

He was so curiously oblivious to the friendly, grass-roots hellos he so consciously cultivated that a buzz of whispered conversation followed in his wake like the wind through the dry, summer grass of Kansas prairies. Mort Mortenstein, Vice-President/Finance, noticed that those distant horizons upon which Dirk Rangely usually fixed his steely, Marketing gaze were evidently clouded. Mort Mortenstein clenched hard on his pipe, baring his teeth in a hungry grin.

“So, have you read the latest Memo?” Mort Mortenstein probed cautiously as he met Dirk Rangely halfway down the hall at the drinking fountain. Neither he nor Dirk Rangely noticed the young man bent over the drinking fountain sucking at the loop of cool water.

“Memo??!!” Dirk Rangely blurted out in anguished surprise, betraying the root of his sullen mood. Dirk Rangely had not actually read Y.T. Erp, Sr.’s latest memo, but he had eavesdropped on two people discussing its potential ramifications in the company cafeteria, and had quivered with horror at each of their envisioned scenarios. He carefully surveyed Mort Mortenstein’s shorter, pudgier body and the three-piece suit that strained in places to contain it, momentarily awed at this self-inflated accountant’s ability to detect another person’s open psychological wound and stick his finger directly into it. “Oh, er, sure—of course. You, Mort?”

“I most certainly did,” answered Mort Mortenstein earnestly. He pressed his advantage. “Do you think it will help our position in the marketplace?”

“Huh? Who the hell can tell, Mort?” Dirk Rangely said, gingerly passing his hand over the top of his head covered with thick, yet restrainedly curled, salt-and-pepper hair. “I’m beginning to worry about the Old Man and his cryptic memos.”

“He works in mysterious ways, to be sure,” Mort Mortenstein said, adjusting his ever-present, yet never lit pipe from the right side of his mouth to the left. “But let’s not forget his New Year’s Memo of 1957. He quite literally saved the company.”

“Well, I’m not really that worried about the Old Man,” hedged Dirk Rangely, suddenly sensing danger. After all, Mort Mortenstein’s department was in charge of Payroll with a capital ‘P’.

“A stroke of genius to sell size three-sixty O-rings as Hula Hoops after that Navy contract went down the tubes.” Mort Mortenstein chuckled around the stem of his pipe, which added sinister overtones to his laugh. “The books never looked so good—as black as spades.”

“Did I say worried? Actually, that was a poor choice of words,” Dirk Rangely squirmed.

“Then, there was the Memo of 1958.” Mort Mortenstein was relentless. He ground his teeth on the stem of his pipe, causing the hairs on the back of Dirk Rangely’s neck to rise. “We called it the Sputnik Memo. Now, that was a memo.”

“Of course, maybe the Old Man has been under a lot of pressure lately.” Dirk Rangely glanced feverishly up and down the hall for escape from this conversation with Mort Mortenstein. He might have been able to bow out by taking a drink of water, but that idiot was there, apparently trying to drain the Missouri River single-handedly.

“And then, the Memo of 1964,” Mort Mortenstein intoned softly. He took the pipe from his mouth and pointed the stem directly at Dirk Rangely’s heart like a deadly weapon. “I shed a bitter tear. We all did.”

“I’ll bet lawyers are behind all of this right-hand/left-hand stuff.” Tiny beads of sweat began to form on Dirk Rangely’s upper lip. “Or it could be Engineering.”

“Well, Dirk, I’d love to stand here and shoot the breeze all day long with you, but I’ve got numbers to crunch.” Mort Mortenstein stuffed his pipe back into his mouth and smiled savagely, pleased with himself at so unnerving a fellow executive. He walked past Dirk Rangely, giving him a hearty slap on the shoulder. Dirk Rangely thought he heard Mort Mortenstein chuckling to himself as he walked back to his office in Accounting. “And the Memo of 1960—what a sense of humor. What a sense of humor!”

“You know, the Company benefit plan does not cover accidental drownings in a God damned water fountain,” Dirk Rangely barked at the youth still hunched over the drinking fountain. When the boy stood up and turned around, Dirk Rangely found himself face-to-face with Y.T. Erp, Jr. It was quickly becoming one of those days. “Christ Almighty—just joking, son—just joking. You know, a joke, eh? So, how about that Mort? What a character, eh? Of course, how much can you say about a man whose favorite Marx brother is Zeppo?”

Y.T., Jr. shrugged his shoulders.

“So, anyway, you’re still around, eh?” Dirk Rangely put his arm around Y.T., Jr.’s shoulders and began walking down the hall, pulling the teenager along with him. “Are you down on the shipping dock still?”

“No, sir. I’m working maintenance with the Sugarman,” Y.T., Jr. said respectfully, while at the same time eying Dirk Rangely with suspicion.

“Oh yes, that’s right. That’s right. I recall now, but, hey, shouldn’t you be back at old Harry Truman High?”

“I took an early graduation so that I can start college sooner. Classes don’t start until the twenty-fifth, so I’m putting in a few more weeks here at work for extra spending money.”

“College, eh? Ah, yes.” Dirk Rangely’s eyes suddenly focused far down the hall at nothing in particular. Y.T., Jr. was amazed at how glassy Dirk Rangely’s eyes had become on cue and wondered if this man had ever been allowed to attend any institute of higher education anywhere. “Well, believe me, the days you spend haunting those ivy-covered halls will be the best you’ll ever know. So, which university will you be attending?”

“University of California at Berkeley.”

Dirk Rangely stopped dead in his tracks, knowing that Y.T., Sr. had been a Harvard Man after which he had been a Navy Man (not Annapolis either?) before he became the Old Man, and wondered what to make of this apparent act of disrespect and rebellion on the part of the younger Erp. Dirk Rangely vaguely recalled news reports a few months back concerning students in California stirring up trouble over something typically inane like Civil Rights or Free Speech. If he wasn’t careful, he could get sucked into the middle of an Erp family civil war right there and then. This day had certainly been fraught with danger—first the Memo, then Mort Mortenstein and now this. Dirk Rangely hoped that it was not portentous of the rest of the year to come. Rising to the occasion, he smiled down at Y.T., Jr. and said as sincerely as he could, “Well, I’d love to stand here and shoot the breeze all day long with you, but I’ve got numbers—I’ve got a million and one things to do. Remember what I said, college days will be the best days you’ll ever have,” Dirk Rangely smirked and gave Y.T., Jr. a hearty slap on the shoulder. As he began walking down the hall, he called back to Y.T., Jr., “Good luck to you.” And then under his breath he muttered, “You’ll need it.”

“Good morning, Mr. Rangely,” a secretary said as she passed Dirk Rangely in the hall.

“Hi-there-how-are-you-today, Margaret?” Dirk Rangely responded like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

Y.T., Jr. watched Dirk Rangely say hello to everyone he passed in exactly the same way. He wondered if Berkeley, California, would be far enough from Kansas City and if January twenty-fifth would come soon enough to get him the hell away from the abundance of phlegm-brains surrounding him before they drove him crazy. Y.T., Jr. turned around and began walking in the direction opposite to the one in which Dirk Rangely had been leading him—in the direction he had been originally going—towards the Engineering Department.

“Damn!” Dirk Rangely exclaimed as he slammed the door to his office shut. “How could I have made such a mistake? How could I have let myself be so cornered—and by all people, cornered by Mort? And then! Then, getting ambushed by Little Erp like that!” Dirk Rangely paced furiously and began to soliloquize to the snarling Siberian tiger’s head mounted on the wall behind his desk that he had gotten for a song at a church rummage sale to raise money for Christian Missionary work in Africa after bartering the poor priest insensible and embarrassing his wife into a severe case of hives. “What dark hours are these from which we must forge our days? What troubled waters are these we must navigate on our jour—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Rangely,” said Jo Ann, Dirk Rangely’s secretary, over the intercom into his office.

“Yes—yes, what is it?” Dirk Rangely exclaimed breathlessly, spinning around on his heels to face Jo Ann’s voice as if she were actually in the room.

“Arthur Needleman on line three.”

“I’m in a God damned meeting as far as Needleman is concerned,” Dirk Rangely snapped at the little green box on his desk.

“Yes, sir,” the box responded with Jo Ann’s voice, then stopped hissing.

“This can’t be happening to me—I can’t let this happen to me. Am I losing my edge? I can’t let this happen,” Dirk Rangely muttered to himself. He began pacing his office again like a caged animal. He now ignored the tiger’s head as he became absorbed in his favorite worry: that he was losing his ‘edge’. Dirk Rangely loved to liken himself to a saber, the cutting edge of Erp Industries, Inc., and to keep himself sharp, he constantly ran himself over the whetstone of his past failures and indiscretions. “Imagine, talking to Mort—to Mort! That sniveling bean-counter! And then, on top of that, telling him what I was thinking, not what I wanted him to think that I was thinking. And about the Old Man no less! I can’t let this happen. Jesus H. Christ, I’m getting senile like the Old Man. I can’t let that happen until I’m the Old Man, and then it will be my unalienable right to get senile if I damn well see fit to do so. I will have earned it by then. But a senile Vice-President of Marketing, that won’t do—no, that just will not do at all. It wouldn’t be tolerated. Hmmm, but what if the Old Man really is getting senile? I might have to act senile to prove to the senile Old Man that I am capable of moving up into the Big Office. But at the same time, I can’t really get senile, or I wouldn’t be sane enough to run Erp Industries. Of course, if I did get senile accidentally, it would be the perfect excuse to cover anything up. I’ll have to stay sharp and develop a sound stratagem for this.”

Dirk Rangely began to feel a faint throbbing at his temples. The time arrived for decisive action. He checked his watch, but it was only nine-thirty in the morning, too early to head down to Dante’s for some attitude lubrication with the usual 10W40 Tanqueray martinis. Dirk Rangely paced around behind his desk and sat down. He opened the top right-hand drawer to get out a packet of Alka-Seltzers. He broke two tablets in half. He worked up a mouth full of saliva and dissolved the halves one at a time in his mouth. The effervescent action against the roof of his mouth made him feel giddy. When he had finished, Dirk Rangely sat up and surveyed the fine oak grain of his desk top.

“What to do what to do what to do,” Dirk Rangely sang to himself softly, feeling much relieved that he had banished a troublesome headache and the irksome memory of his conversation with Mort Mortenstein from his mind in one fell swoop. But soon he became distressed when he discovered his finger aimlessly circling a knot in the grain of his desk top. His desk was so neat, while everyone else’s was cluttered with reports, recommendations, statistical charts, P & L Statements, Inventory Control Sheets, Production Run Projections, Production Run Summaries, Daily Totals, Weekly Totals, Monthly Totals, Year-to-date Totals, Supply Requisitions, Specifications, Drawings, Bills of Materials, Expense Vouchers, RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Document Change Notices, Document Documentation Notices, various memoranda, letters and who knows what else.

Anyone could look important and competent sitting at one of those desks, and Dirk Rangely wondered if, perhaps, for effect he should do something about the pathetically neat condition of his own desk top. It might not have been such a good idea to instruct Jo Ann to keep all that kind of—of—of stuff out of his office. He wondered what in the world she had done with it all. Maybe it was all crammed into the bottom drawer of that file cabinet out there by her desk that was always locked so that he could never open it up to see what she kept inside. Perhaps if he just asked her politely enough, Jo Ann would let him use some of that stuff to good effect whenever he needed a few props to enhance his aura of competence and efficiency—but no! Dirk Rangely pounded his desk top with his fist dramatically. He was no paper pusher. He was a top-level corporate strategist. Let all those other paper tigers wrestle with their reports and recommendations and whatevers, he had more important things to do.

“Right, Rudyard?” Dirk Rangely spun around and rhetorically asked the tiger’s head on the wall behind him. Dirk Rangely had occasional bouts with alliteration that Alka-Seltzer did not seem to relieve. He turned back to his desk and took a deep breath. On the other hand, he wavered; it wouldn’t be so bad to at least have a few pink telephone messages waiting for him that he could read with an exaggerated scowl on his face before crumpling them in his fist and tossing them into the nearest wastepaper basket in full view of everyone. Or even, if an occasional letter or Telex cable showed up in his in-basket—but no! Dirk Rangely shuddered at the dangerous tenor of his thoughts. He really was getting senile!

Letters and cables usually demanded responses and if there was anything worse than exposing one’s thoughts in conversations with people like Mort Mortenstein, who existed only for the chance to inflict some mortal injury on a fellow worker’s career, it was being irrevocably committed to some indefensibly stupid position or senile opinion in writing.

Dirk Rangely tried repeatedly to shrug off these troublesome thoughts, but his shoulders just got sore as he became more and more concerned about the nothing on his desk, and, considering how difficult it is to get nothing out of one’s system, Dirk Rangely’s stomach began construction again on an all-weather ulcer, despite the two Alka-Seltzers he had just taken. Dirk Rangely knew what he needed: a good, thorough leafing through a trade magazine, the only paper product he allowed into his office besides Kleenexes. Ah, there was something so magically relaxing about flipping each page and studying those soothing four-color vignettes of sleek jets, streaking sports cars and alluring females—the very stuff that full-blown daydreams are made of. But drat, no mail yet today. Dirk Rangely started drumming his fingers on his desk top faster and faster and faster, until they were literally galloping in place.

“What is the problem here? What is the problem what is the problem?” Dirk Rangely sang softly. Suddenly, he reined in his stampeding fingers. “That’s it! Of course! I’m spending too much time in the plant! What am I doing here anyway? I should be out on the road.” Dirk Rangely jumped up and ran over to the door. He pulled it open enthusiastically and called out to his secretary, “Jo Ann, book me on the early morning flight out to the coast. Drop everything and get it done right away.”

“Which coast?”

Dirk Rangely immediately slammed the door closed. “Damn insolent secretary! Why do they always have to be second guessing you?” He thought for a moment, then opened the door again. “Los Angeles. And call Needleman out there and tell him I’ll be out to discuss his forecast.”

“Yes, sir.” Jo Ann smiled.

Dirk Rangely could not be sure, but he thought he saw Jo Ann smile and wondered what it might have meant. No matter. He confidently slammed the door closed, taking comfort in the knowledge that decisive action had been taken and that a business trip was in the works. His spirits could not be dampened now, not even by the fact that he thoroughly despised Arthur Needleman, the West Coast Sales Manager, and often wondered seriously whether Needleman was not, in fact, an agent for the KGB, especially after that night he had gotten Dirk Rangely lost in Los Angeles’ heart of darkness with some dubious directions written out on a cocktail napkin.

Dirk Rangely went back to his desk and sat down to pause reflectively. There was no time like ‘estimated time en route’, he reflected. Dirk Rangely always felt “five miles closer to heaven” every time he sat strapped into a Boeing 707 window seat with a line of midget Tanqueray bottles at parade rest, an in-flight magazine filled with glossy daydreams, and a pair of headsets pouring out the insipid kind of music that so moved his very soul every time he rode an elevator. If only he could be a pilot himself, then his whole job would be to fly from one place to another. As it was now, whenever he got to wherever he was going, Dirk Rangely had to go to work. When he became the Old Man, he would certainly do something about that. Leaning back in his chair and crossing his feet up on top of his desk, he closed his eyes to muse about how things would be when he, Dirk Rangely, became the Old Man.

Suddenly, Dirk Rangely put his feet down and sat up straight. He searched through his desk drawers until he finally found an old, forgotten pad of blank paper. He took his Cross pen from his shirt pocket and, fingers trembling, slowly turned it so the point was exposed. He took a deep, deliberate breath. Dirk Rangely began writing his name, slowly and awkwardly, over and over and over again with his left hand. When he had filled the first page, he flipped it over and began again. It was no use, though. By the fifth page, his hand ached and Dirk Rangely still could not even decipher the twisted and tortured scribbles of his own name. He tossed down his Cross pen in disgust.

“Why can’t I just be right-handed, like I always have been?”

***~~~***

Go to In the Black Page on Amazon

Also by M.T. Bass

Go to Crossroads Page on Amazon

Cleveland, 1977 — Grappling with a foreign policy crisis, the U.S. Government targets a hapless rock-'n'-roller as a Russian spy in a classic case of mistaken identity for an innocent, 'Wrong Man' hero…or is he?

Think of an unholy fictional union between the Rolling Stones and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

Unlike any novel you have ever read, this one has a soundtrack. After all, a story whose characters are musicians should have…well…music. Right?

***~~~***

Click to Watch Crossroads Video

Chapter 1

The telecommunications machine rang through and connected. The print head tracked backwards across the page slowly, its drive motor whirring harshly.

"I know. I know. I know. My head, too," he said, believing the machine was letting out a primal scream of electronic pain.

DECCI WPAFB, the machine in Dayton answered the call. His machine began transmitting. Sure that the message was going out properly, he leaned back in his chair and quickly dozed off, ignoring the noise of chattering machines sending and receiving teletype messages. The door to the small office overfilled with machines opened and a girl with long blonde hair stuck her head into the room.

"Hey. Hey you. Wake up. It's break time. You can sleep after we get back."

"Oh, huh? Right. Just give me five," he said, blinking his eyes and sitting up straight in his chair. "I've got to get this one out before we go. I'll be out in a flash."

"Okay, I'll wait," she said and pulled the door closed after her.

He rubbed his eyes with his fists. Absently pulling at the end of his mustache he looked at the message printing out, but it slowly unfocused and disappeared from sight as his eyelids dropped.

"Naughty, naughty. Caught you twice today." The girl was back again. "I just wanted to ask if you are going to need a ride home from work tonight."

"Yeah. Sure. That'd be great," he yawned.

"Okay." She disappeared and closed the door.

Sitting up straight in his chair and concentrating intensely, he read the message that was printing out as it was being transmitted to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio:

DECCI WPAFB

OHIO BELL TELCO

100 ERIEVIEW PLAZA

CLEVELAND, (216) 526-1718

04-18-77, JM

****EXPEDITE****EXPEDITE****

TO: UNIT COMMANDER, D CLASS/SEC II

RE: CIRCUIT ROUTING TROUBLE NOTIFICATION

ORG: MTL

TERM: WPAFB/NORAD TRUNK FEED

CLASS: DATA, 4-WIRE HARD, PRIORITY II

WARNING -- DOWN LINE FAILURE ENROUTE MODEM COUPLING PER E.C.O. #77-316.

WARNING -- TLD/OUTAGE CONDITIONS STATIONS C-9, C-11, D-4, E-5, F-1, F-2.

ATT/BELL LABS WILL COORDINATE SERVICE LINE IMPLEMENTATION BETWEEN CANADA BELL AND OHIO BELL.

LONG LINES ACCOUNT COORDINATOR HAS BEEN NOTIFIED PER PRACTICES AND STANDARDS PT. 1, SEC. 2.6, PARA 6A.

CANNOT PROVIDE IN-SERVICE DATE AT THIS TIME. ATT WILL ADVISE SECTION CHIEF, WASHINGTON BUREAU WHEN INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.

REGARDS,

C.N.DEVAULT

NETWORK ENGINEERING SPECIALIST

OHIO BELL TELEPHONE COMPANY

****EXPEDITE****EXPEDITE****

END OF MESSAGE

OBT 0845 EST

At the end of the message, the bells he normally coded into the paper tape to wake himself up rang. He switched the machine to manual mode.

PLS ACK, he typed.

DECCI WPAFB, was typed back slowly, letter by letter. The machine fed up the paper to the next page.

SO, GOOD MORNING, GENERAL. HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS BRIGHT AND SUNNY DAY, he typed.

OH I'M DOING PRETTY GOOD, the machine answered back. HOW ABOUT YOU?

EXCEPT FOR THE FEELING THAT SOMEONE SNUCK INTO MY BEDROOM LAST NIGHT AND STUCK A TIRE PUMP IN MY EAR AND INFLATED MY HEAD TO 60 PSI, I'M DOING OK.

OUT CRUISING AGAIN? NO WONDER. FOR SHAME. FOR SHAME.

YEAH, I'M MY OWN WORST ENEMY SOMETIMES. I GOTTA GO RIGHT NOW -- BREAK TIME, YOU KNOW.

ARE YOU WORKING ALL DAY TODAY?

YUP. ALL DAY LONG. OH BOY! OH BOY!

I'VE GOT MORE TO SEND, BUT THEY WANTED THIS ONE TO GO RIGHT AWAY. SOME HOT STUFF NO DOUBT. HOW ABOUT IF I RING YOU UP LATER AND TYPE AT YOU SOME MORE THEN?

OK. I'LL BE HERE. DON'T GOT NOWHERE TO GO. I'LL BE WAITING.

SAY HI TO CINDEE AND THE REST OF THE TROOPS FOR ME. TALK TO YOU LATER -- JOEY.

LATER--SIGNING OFF--CASSIE.

The page ejected up and out of the machine. The machine went dead. Joey went on break.

***~~~***

"AHHHHHHHHH!" Lenny screamed as loud as he could from the passenger seat. "I don't want to die I don't want to die I don't want to die!"

"Whoa, could you ease up a bit? My ear drums only flex so far, you know," Will said, staring out the windshield, keeping his eyes on traffic as he drove.

"You know," said Lenny, now sounding as if he were about to calmly tell Will of an interesting article he read in the Plain Dealer that morning, "You know, I have promised myself that I am not going to die in Cleveland — there is no way, I promised myself, I just won't do it."

"Lord, will you look at that." Will took a deep breath as if smelling the air. "Cooking those ribs right out on the street corner. I think we should turn off the factory air and roll down the windows so we can partake in all the sights and smells of springtime in the big city."

"Are you crazy?" Lenny was screaming again. "Are you fucking nuts?"

"You know, my mouth just starts to watering when I think about those ribs. I mean, they have to be good. They just have to be," Will drawled in his dude ranch-sounding voice. "And if anybody can cook ribs up right, those old coots can. I'm half tempted to stop for a slab, eh? I'm telling you they just have to be good. The best, I'll bet."

"Oh my god oh my god oh my god," Lenny said to himself, looking out his side window. "It's not like we're too obvious — the two whitest guys to be found in a twenty mile radius and we have to be riding in a frigging, bright red pick-up truck for Christ's sake!"

"Why don't you just get a looser grip on your reins, there. I swear, you'd break a poor horse's neck for sure. Just relax. I ain't saying we got to eat them here. We can get the ribs to go."

"I don't care what Face says, I don't care how good it is, no dope is worth dying for — watch out for that old guy stepping off the curb there, you hit him and we're in for it, there wouldn't be enough left of us to roll up into a number and smoke."

"I'm not going to bushwhack nobody," Will said, looking over at Lenny.

"Jesus Christ! You just ran a red light!" Lenny screamed. He started rummaging through the glove compartment. "Where's my cyanide pill, where is it? They'll never take me alive — never, I've seen what happens to the safari hunters in Tarzan movies, I've seen it."

"What are you stampeding the herd about this time?"

"You don't know, do you? You don't know, huh?" Lenny laughed in nervous disbelief. "I'll tell you, I'll tell you what happens, the natives grab you, see, and then they tie one of your legs to a fire hydrant or something and then they bend down a telephone pole or a street lamp until the top touches the ground and they hold it down and tie it to your other leg, see. Then the musician natives beat on the hoods and fenders of the sacred, abandoned Cadillacs while the others dance themselves into a frenzy around and around and around in circles until at the very zenith of their tribal insanity, they let loose the telephone pole and zip, it zings back up into the air and you get ripped in half, right up the middle — if your head goes with the part of your body up into the air on the top of the street light, it's considered a good omen, that the sacrifice has been accepted by the gods, but if your head stays with the part of your body still tied to the fire hydrant, it means a hard winter will come to fill the streets with many, many pot holes."

“Man, oh, man — that is bad. Do you hear yourself? Do you even know how awful that sounds?”

“Hey, I’m an equal opportunity asshole — and, so, that goes for you, too, you cow-poking pile of steer manure.”

"You are acting crazier than a rattlesnake cut in two."

"I'm crazy? What about you? You're the one that insists on taking Kinsman to get across town — you are the one that's nuts."

"Oh well, nothing like an early morning ride through injun country to get the blood pumping out to the extremities. No harm done. Now look, see that MacDonald's up there? After that is Shaker Heights."

"Shaker, ah, wonderful Shaker — a haven for the weary traveler."

***~~~***

Warren woke up, but kept his eyes closed. It was blissfully quiet. He savored the zero db surrounding him. Warren always slept best when he sacked out on the floor of the studio. There were no windows to let in any light. The thickly carpeted floor was firm, but comfortable. The insulated and padded walls, along with the acoustically tiled ceiling stuffed with rock wool, kept outside sounds out and absorbed any sound in the room like a drop of water on a dried out sponge.

Warren rolled over on his back and looked up at the ceiling. A stray beam of light came in through the control room window and reflected off of the microphone stands gathered in the corner by the piano. Warren put on his glasses and stood up to look into the control room. It was empty. He scratched his mussed up hair and tucked in his shirt tail that never stayed in his pants. Putting his shoulder to the thick, heavy door to push with the weight of his entire body, he stepped out into the brightly lit office.

"Karl?" Warren called out hesitantly. "Karl, are you here? Is that you?"

Warren looked in the tape library room and in the maintenance room, but no one was there. He looked at the desk and saw a half-smoked cigar that had been left to die in the ashtray. He crushed it out and opened the outside office door to air out the cigar smell. Karl had come in to work on the books that morning and did not even know that Warren was there in the studio. Warren stuck his head into the control room and saw that Karl had forgotten again to turn off the control board, the power amps, the turntable and the reverb unit. He shook his head and went to make a pot of coffee for himself.

"Shoot!" he muttered to himself as he yanked off the note, which was taped to the top of the coffee maker. "Warren, don't leave the machine on 'brew', because you will burn out the heating element. Signed, Karl — he's so darned worried about his precious Mr. Coffee machine but he goes off and leaves all the lights on and forgets to turn off half the stuff in the control room."

Warren crumpled up the note and angrily threw it away in the trash can by the desk. He momentarily forgot about making the pot of coffee and absently turned on the answering machine to check for messages. There were two. He recognized his mother's voice right away.

"Warren, are you going to stay at that studio all night? I asked you to pick me up some cigarettes and milk on your way home. You better not forget or your brothers and sisters won't have any breakfast tomorrow before school. You better not forget."

A four hundred hertz tone sounded.

"Warren, you better turn off this goddamn machine and answer this goddamn phone or I'm going — "

He silenced her harsh, angry voice by turning off the machine.

***~~~***

"I'm off on my appointed rounds," Joey said, holding up a handful of teletype messages for his supervisor, Andrea, to see. He paused at the door and said dramatically for all six of the girls that worked in his office to hear, "Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor gloom of night nor gum stuck to the bottom of my shoe, nor Jean Dixon's predictions in the National Enquirer nor any — "

"Go," Andrea ordered with a tolerant smile.

"Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera," Joey said as he walked out of the Corporate Information Center where he worked. He walked down the hall to the elevators and pushed the 'up' button, then stepped over to the doorway to the nearby Steno Pool as he waited.

"May I help you, troublemaker?" asked Helen, one of the clerks.

"Just checking to see if there was a life guard on duty here."

"Huh?"

The bell for the elevator rang and Joey ran back to get on before the doors closed. He pushed fifteen and sang softly to himself on the empty elevator:

Click to Watch Won’t Get Fooled Again Video

The elevator stopped at the tenth floor. He slid into a back corner and watched as an older black lady pushing a mail cart got on.

"Hiya, Dorothy. How are you doing today?" Joey asked.

"Oh, I can't complain. Can't complain," she said, pushing the eleventh floor button.

"Well, I surely could," he said with a big smile, "But nobody will ever listen, and believe me, I've tried. They just won't listen."

Dorothy shook her head and laughed.

"It makes me feel like singing the blues. Would you teach me how, Dorothy? I'll bet you've got a voice like Billie Holiday."

"If I did, I wouldn't be pushing this here cart." The doors opened on the eleventh floor and she pushed her cart out. "Besides, you're not black enough to sing the blues, son."

"I could learn to be black. I'd study real hard," he called out after her as the doors closed. He rode up to the fifteenth floor and got off. He went into the Secretary/Treasurer's office. He held up two teletype messages for the secretary to the Secretary/Treasurer to see and said, "Bad news — the phone company didn't make the rent payment last month and they want us all out of here by Friday."

"What are you talking about?" The secretary grabbed the messages out of Joey's hand.

"You know, on my last pay check, the decimal point was still in the same place. Now, you promised me you would move it over to the right a few digits."

"I never promised any such thing. Now be quiet so you don't disturb Mr. O'Toole."

"That's okay. I understand," he whispered, enunciating every syllable carefully. He winked and gave the secretary an okay sign with his hand as he backed up towards the door. "Mum's the word — but next pay check, then? Right?"

"Go on. Get out of here."

"That's okay. I have to give the Man his morning news from Big Mama back in New York and boy is he going to be hot when he finds out that we're getting evicted. Then your boss is really going to have some ‘splainin’ to do."

Joey sang the chorus as he waited for the elevator to take him down to the executive suites on the fourteenth floor, “And I'll get on my knees and pray, we won't get fooled again.”

***~~~***

"Ah, cubicle, sweet cubicle," Will said, stepping into his own partitioned space at the Physics Department of Cleveland State University. "Is this really that to which I aspire? Oh Lord — if you be — I sure could use a sign."

Because Will forbid the janitors from cleaning up his cubicle at night, it resembled an unkempt garden. Crumpled notebook papers seemed to sprout up everywhere like weeds. Notebooks and open books were piled all about like rocks and boulders. Green and white striped computer paper grew like ivy off the desk onto the bookcase then down across his side chair and onto the floor. It seemed to be making its way towards the door. Will never knew when he might need to find that one thought, note or formula that he might have too hastily discarded because it did not fit into the theory he was working on at the moment. It was an utter mess, but Will was confident that he thought he knew where almost everything was, perhaps.

"Now where are those god dang smokes?" Will asked himself aloud as he sat down at his desk. He began to search through the papers that covered his entire desk to a depth of five or six inches. He found his calculator. He turned it on and squinted at its faint LED display. He shook it and squinted again. "As reliable as an injun full of whiskey. Now what am I going to do? Where are those batteries? I know I bought some, now where are they?"

Will continued his search through the papers, now looking for his calculator batteries. He expanded his search into the dark unknown depths of his desk drawers. A tall, slender brunette appeared at the doorway to Will's cubicle. She seductively leaned against the doorway, her clinging dress pulled tight across her hips. She brushed her long, black hair back over her shoulders and silently watched Will search. He muttered unintelligibly to himself as he shuffled papers back and forth, all the while oblivious to her presence behind him. Everything outside of the immediate problem was tuned out.

"Ah ha! Dr. Marlboro, I presume," Will exclaimed with delight, accidentally finding the red and white box of cigarettes instead of the batteries for his calculator. He put one in his mouth. He felt the pockets of his flannel shirt. "Aw crap, now where are those god dang matches?"

"Here," said the tall brunette, bending over beside Will and flicking a Bic lighter in his face.

"Oh Lord, is this my sign?" he mumbled around the cigarette in his mouth. He took in the view her low cut dress offered.

"What?"

"Nothing." Will lit his cigarette. "Thanks."

"Did you get all your papers and references in for the little field trip the good doctor has planned?" She pushed all of the papers off of the chair beside Will's desk onto the floor. She kicked them out of her way and sat down, sinking into a slouch and slowly crossing her long, firm legs.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm, um, ah, sure I did." Will began shuffling through the papers on his desk again, keeping an eye on her legs as he searched. No matter how hard he tried, Will's brain always turned to inert matter in front of Mona, the Physics Department Secretary. "I'm, ah, sure I did. Just give me a minute, okay?"

"Sorry, but you don't have a minute. Dr. Milhouse wants to see you right away. He was looking for you this morning, but you were nowhere to be found."

"Right now?"

Mona nodded.

"Crap. I ain't even seen a paper — what did the Tribe do?"

"So, where were you this morning, hmmm?"

"Nowhere — just, ah, running errands. Did they win, I hope?"

"What do you think?"

"Damn. Who whipped them?"

"Baltimore, eight to three."

"Milhouse will be out to bushwhack my ass. They dropped the whole five game series."

"Say, Will," Mona paused and pursed her lips, "where's the weirdest place you've ever done it?"

"Done it?"

"Yes, done it." Mona smiled with half of her mouth and turned her head away to look sideways at Will.

"Aw, Mona… " Will looked at her dark, almond-shaped eyes, her straight black hair, her low-cut dress and her long slender legs. "I ain't got enough lariat to lasso this one right now. I've got to go see Dr. — "

"I've done it on an autopsy table with a medical student at Case University." Mona slowly licked her lips. "Sends a shiver up your spine."

"I'll bet." Will swallowed hard.

"Well, they were stainless steel, and you know how cold that can get." She stared at Will.

"Yeah." Will stared at Mona. The ash on his cigarette grew long and fell onto the papers on his desk. He broke off his stare and tried to brush away the ashes so that a fire would not start.

"You have to go see the good doctor, Will. Right away." Mona stood up quickly and walked out.

***~~~***

Lenny sat at the kitchen table with the telephone loosely held to his ear. He doodled: a stick man with arrows going through his body in every possible direction, with more arrows on their way, some about to strike, others still half-way to their target, launched from off of the page. And when the stick man could hold no more arrows, Lenny resurrected him for another wave on a clean part of the paper. Nikki came in and dropped her canvas book bag by the back door.

"I'm starved," Nikki said, going over to the refrigerator. "Anything edible in here?"

"Hey, what can I say? Enter at your own risk," Lenny said, still doodling.

"Are you guys practicing again tonight?"

"As soon as everybody shows up."

"You guys practice all the time — and when you're not practicing, you're playing out somewhere in some crummy bar."

"That's my thing, you know?"

"Yeah, but every night this week and last week, too. You never have any time to think about anything else — including us."

Lenny shrugged his shoulders. "So, you gonna stick around for practice?"

"Nah," Nikki sighed. "I might as well just go home and get my lesson plans done. Who are you talking to anyway?" she asked, pointing at the phone.

"Does it look like I'm talking? Who is it that you call on the telephone for the expressed purpose of not talking?"

"Ernie?"

"Count Ernie's Horror of the 3-D Hold of No Return — showing now at a theater near you."

"Did he call? Does he have a job for you?"

"Yeah, he's got us as the opening act for the Burns and Allen reunion tour. The deal's been set, he's just got to work to get everybody's hands out of their pockets so they can shake on the deal — George just won't work unless he shakes hands with somebody — anybody, he doesn't care."

"Really? Wow, that's great — wait a minute." Nikki stopped digging through the refrigerator and looked over the door at Lenny. "Wait a minute. Gracie Allen is dead. Doesn't Ernie know — ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. What a space cadet I am."

"So how was the war in the trenches? What's new with the wee folk in Berealand?"

"Do you know what Principal Kermit Pike commanded today? He told me he would not tolerate any drug-oriented music whatsoever in the classrooms at his school. And I asked him what he meant by 'drug-oriented music' and he said whatever it was I was playing in my classes. He didn't even know what we were listening to, and I tried to explain that not all rock music —"

"You should have told him that Benny Goodman used to take off his mouthpiece and cram his clarinet up his nose to snort cocaine — that's how he hit the high notes, you know."

"Well, I'll tell you, I sure gave him a piece of my mind. I told him he could take his — "

"Ernie — Ernie," Lenny said into the phone, waving at Nikki to be quiet. "Oh my God, it speaks. Ernie, this is Lenny from — yup, that's right — so how are you Ernie? I heard that you were in an automobile accident and lost the use of your index finger, I figured that's why you hadn't called. Any good news from the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic? Will you ever dial again? I hear they can work wonders with digits there."

"Lenny, you're going to make him mad again," Nikki warned.

"Uh-huh." Lenny shrugged his shoulders. "Ernie, don't call me babe, okay? It bugs me — it just bugs me — so where the hell are all the jobs? What in the hell do you mean, too loud?"

"Is that the wedding he had you play down in Medina?"

"I told you that, and you told us they wanted to rock, that they really wanted — well, Ernie, if we're too loud for you, then you are too old for us."

"You're going to get him really mad."

"Yeah, sure, I know you've been busy, but the point is that we're not busy at all, which means you haven't been doing diddly for us — no, I don't want to hear about Joey Bishop."

"Joey Bishop?"

"I know you're a big, important agent — goddamn it, Ernie, you tell me that frigging Bob Hope story one more time and I'm going to reach right through this telephone and choke you like a duck — I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it!"

"Lenny, humor him. He lives in the past."

"Ernie, do you know what I'm doing right now? I'm taking down my copy of the Guinness World Book of Records, and I'm looking up — yes, here it is — Ernie Kingman, you have just immortalized yourself by becoming the human being to commit the most stupidities in a single life time, it's a record which will stand for decades — nay, centuries to come."

"Oh God, no. No, Lenny, no."

"What's that you say? We'll never work again in this town? Well, you know what? I can solve that little dilemma. That's right, I can solve it by firing you, because right now you are the biggest reason we aren't working in this town — parting is such sweet sorrow, but, tell you what, we'll survive. Bye-bye Ernie — and, hey, Ernie, send us a Christmas card, okay? You know, around the end of the year." Lenny slammed the receiver down.

"Lenny, I can't believe you did that. Why in the world did you fire Ernie?"

Lenny crumpled up the piece of paper with the little stick man and the arrows and tossed it into the trash can.

***~~~***

"Thanks for buying me dinner," said Alice, the blonde from Joey's office.

"What, for this? Hey, no problem. It's only MacDonald's. I owe you for all the rides home from work anyway. Besides, I have to eat out, and I don't like to eat alone. It's depressing, you know?"

"Why do you have to eat out?"

"I just don't think I can hack another dinner of potato salad — not Will's potato salad, anyway. You can smell that stuff all the way down to the bus stop." They walked over and sat down at a booth that overlooked the traffic on West One Hundred Seventeenth Street. "You know, it's kind of crazy. A couple of years ago, I was, like, just coming into these places to make time with the counter girls and to try to figure out a way to get into their little panties after they got off work. Now my little sister — she's sixteen — works at one of these places back home in Dallas."

"Face it, Joey, you're getting old."

"Yeah, old at twenty-three. Give me a break. But I'll tell you what, my sister's some kind of lead counter girl or something, and they have got her really, really pumped up on MacDonald's — like, Yeah! Go Team Go! Grill Them Burgers! Fry Them Fries! Shake Them Shakes! Ra-Ra-Ra! I swear it's all she talks about. She even walks around the house humming the MacDonald's theme song from the TV commercials. You know, You deserve a break today," Joey sang.

"Oh, I'll bet it's not that bad."

"Oh no? My parents are seriously considering hiring de-programmers to kidnap her off her shift and re-brainwash her back to normal. You laugh, but it happens. Look at how the phone company brainwashes us every day."

"Come on, Joey, they don't brainwash us."

"You don't know about the sub-auditory tones, do you?" he asked in a hushed voice.

"The what?"

"The sub-auditory tones," he whispered. "You probably think that stuff coming out of the ceilings is just Muzak, huh?"

"What's it supposed to be?"

"It's simply an excuse to broadcast the sub-auditory tones that go to work on the frontal lobal areas of your brain to minimize aggression and to make you generally placid, receptive to management suggestions and highly productive in terms of telephony."

"Come on. I've never heard these tones you're talking about."

"Of course not." He looked around the MacDonald's dining room suspiciously. "That's because they're sub-auditory. You can't hear them. Once you're under their spell, though, the supervisors go to work to mold your personality to make you a better worker, to instill the ideals of the Company in your head, to make you willing to give your life for universal phone service."

"Really? I didn't know that. Do they really do that?"

"Sure. Why do you think I work back in that little office with all of those machines? The noise they make effectively masks the sub-auditory tones, rendering them ineffective. Hey, I'm not going to be a phone company zombie."

"Are you serious? I can never tell when you’re serious."

Joey smiled and took a bite of French fries.

"Well, if you aren't going to be a phone company zombie, then what are you doing there in the first place?"

"Why does anybody work?"

"Yeah, but you went to college, right?"

"Yup. Yup. I are, what do you call, a college gra-du-ate."

"Well, how come you have a lowly group three job in our office? You should be a manager or something, shouldn't you?"

"Bite thy tongue. Me? A boss?"

"Then what are you doing there at all?"

"You know, I should be really good at answering questions like that."

"Why's that?"

"Because of my hobby."

"What hobby?"

"Did you ever try to figure out what character you are when you watch television? I do. That's my hobby."

"You can't be a character. You just watch TV. How can you be in it when you are supposed to be watching it?"

"See, every story has got to have a point-of-view. That's like a set of eyes that sees everything in the story that's going on. And when you sit and watch the tube, you are a point-of-view, a set of eyes. I just think about looking at the scene that's happening on the screen like what I am seeing is really happening in front of me — like it's not a picture, it's real and I should fit into what's going on somehow.

“Did you ever think about soap commercials for instance? I always think, who in the hell am I supposed to be here? I see I'm in this shower with a girl and she's blabbering away at me bright and cheerful the first thing in the morning, and of all things, she's talking about soap. Now, I have to figure that maybe I'm some guy she picked up in a bar the night before, right? And I must have been real drunk, because I don't even recognize her — though I might have a slight sense of deja vu, you know? But she's not bad looking — they never are. And maybe I'm really tired or it's just real early in the morning and I'm still semi-comatose. After all, I'm letting her go on and on and on about soap. Or maybe I'm just keeping my mouth shut and hoping that once we leave the apartment I'll never see her again, because of her bizarre sexual habits.

“Sometimes I think, hey, maybe I'm Norman Bates in my little granny dress and I've got a knife from the kitchen and I'm going to stick her like Janet Leigh, but she keeps telling me about the soap and how creamy and mild it is and I'm so crackers, I can't stick a woman while she's talking about soap. Sometimes, there's another guy in the bedroom you can see through the door. Who the hell is he if I'm there? Maybe I picked up his wife and he came home early from a business trip and I have to hide in the bathroom like a Three Stooges movie and she comes in to take a shower to keep him out. I'm worried about her husband mangling me if he comes in and finds me and she's going on and on about the soap."

"Really?" Alice looked at him suspiciously out of the corner of her eye.

"There's all kinds of possibilities, and it's fun making up all those stories. After all, who cares about the soap, really? So, you might as well make good entertaining use of the dead spots between the programming."

"I don't know if I can ever believe you." She shook her head. "So, you never did tell me what you're doing working at the phone company."

"Let's just say that it's a commercial message, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming in just a moment."

***~~~***

Warren's haven was the control room, that small, padded room full of electronic equipment. He could lock himself in there with the beings he could relate to best — the old, reliable two-track, the temperamental four-track, the muscular eight-track — someday there would even be a sixteen track. The space was there already. He could lock himself in there with those he knew best and lock out the rest of the world, freeing himself of the annoyingly irrational people that always seemed to be after him for one illogical reason or another. His machine friends were not like that at all. They had their roles rigidly specified for them, and if they got out of character, he could diagnose and treat their problems with a voltage output meter, a screwdriver and a soldering iron. He could make them all as good as new: heads clear, motors humming and meters bright and full of life.

Warren's favorite time to work was late at night. Nobody else was in the building and nobody was likely to call on the phone. Sitting in the control room with the overhead lights off and only the meter lights, the equipment power bulbs and the red, green and amber LEDs glowing around him, he could immerse himself totally in his work. In the dark, his hearing was a hundred times more acute. He could hear a gnat cough. Sounds being magnetically etched onto the tape became a physical sensation that he could actually feel, not just the movement of a needle he could watch.

His favorite work was the post-production mixing of music master tapes. The annoying job of getting the musicians to put the music down on the tracks correctly was over. He could then do his work. He could take all of those musical parts and mix the voices and the instruments into a whole finished song, ready to be played on the radio, ready to be heard by people. Without him and his creativity, all of the musicians' efforts would be nothing more than random noises and sounds littering the universe for a brief moment before disappearing forever. He was the one that brought order out of their chaos and preserved the songs against time.

Unfortunately, it was the commercial work that paid the bills and kept the juice flowing to run the machines. Right now, he had to get back to work to finish the editing on the first section of a marketing seminar tape for Exxon. It was not exactly the most exciting work, but it was work he could do alone in the control room. It was satisfying to work with his hands and satisfying to complete an editing job, sit back and listen to his own magic efforts at making the announcer's speech absolutely perfect — you would never even think the speaker ever took a breath. Warren enjoyed the work well enough, and he got to be with his mechanical friends. What more could he ask for? He sat in front of the two-track with headphones on and listened to the tape until he heard an offensive gasp or stutter. Then, he stopped the tape and rocked the reels with his hands to find exactly where the offending sound was, marking its boundaries with his orange grease pencil. Once marked, he pulled down that section of tape and slit the noise right out with a razor blade, then mended the cut ends with editing tape. When Warren finished with the last of that section, he rewound the tape to the beginning to listen for any last minute fixes. There was something very soothing and hypnotic about simply watching the reels turning on the spindles. He stopped the rewind and pushed 'Play'. He stood up to stretch his legs as he listened. He took a drink of Coke, throwing back his head and lifting the bottle up over his head.

"All right, give me all the money in this joint," said a voice from behind him.

Warren felt the sharp jab in his back and coughed up a swallow of Coke. It came back up through his nose. He recognized the deep, clear voice and was not afraid. It was a familiar voice. It was the voice on the tape. But the violation of his sanctuary surprised and upset Warren. Part of the Coke in his nose drained into the back of his mouth, and he sucked it down his lungs. He coughed and hacked, trying to get it out.

"Hey, Tiger, what do you say? Gave you quite a scare, huh?" Bob, a dumpy, balding man in his fifties, slapped Warren on the shoulder. "So, hey, I was on this side of town and I thought I'd stop in and see when you wanted me to do those over-dubs."

Warren could only cough, trying to get the Coke out of his lungs. He was still coughing when he got to the house. He knocked once and went right in. The television was on in the living room, but no one was there watching it. Upstairs, a radio was blaring out The Kid Leo Show on WMMS. He walked through the living room noticing the posters of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, P-51 Mustangs and Linda Ronstadt on the walls. He was careful not to bump the coffee table that might topple the case of empty Rolling Rock beer bottles gathering there for the past week. He dropped his bass off next to his amplifier in the dining room and went to get a beer out of the refrigerator. No one was in the house, so he went out into the backyard to watch Lenny and Will argue vehemently about whether the shuttlecock had landed in or out of bounds.

Alice pulled up and parked her Trans Am in the street in front of the house. She and Joey got out and walked up to the front door.

"I forgot my books in your car. Let me see your keys for a minute. You can go on ahead and help yourself to a beer or a soda out of the frig. I'll be in in a sec," Joey said.

The front door was open, so Alice went in. Joey went back out to the car to get the books he had bought downtown during lunch. Just as he was about to lock the car door, he heard a blood-curdling scream. It sounded like Alice, but why would she be screaming, he wondered. Joey stopped and tried to figure out whether it was because of Will or because of Lenny. As he stood next to the car thinking, another scream — like a gut-shot Comanche, as Will would say — came out of the house. No, not both of them. They wouldn't both do that, Joey told himself as he closed the car door and headed for the house.

Joey came into the living room from the entry way just as Will, Lenny and Warren came in through the back of the house. Alice had squeezed herself into a far corner of the room and seemed to tremble with fright.

"Joey! Get it out of here! Get it away!" Alice screamed hysterically.

In unison, they all stepped closer to see what was generating such fear in Alice.

"Fyodor! Bad boy! Bad boy!" Lenny scolded.

At Alice's feet, snapping its jaws and hissing menacingly, was a three-foot long alligator.

"Ali, it's okay. It's just Fyodor, our watch-alligator," Joey said. "He won't hurt you."

"Watch-alligator?" Alice asked softly. What Joey had said was like a calming slap to her face.

Will stepped into the kitchen. He came back into the living room waving a hunk of unsliced bacon. "Come on, Fyodor. Come on you rascal. Let's go. Ain't no call to be harassing such a pretty young thing." Will waved the bacon at Fyodor. "Come on you. I may admire your taste, but I swear, your manners ain't for shit."

Fyodor turned and scurried after Will, following him through the dining room and into the kitchen. There, Will picked him up by the tail and carried the alligator down to the basement where Joey had built an artificial swamp for him to sleep in.

Alice, still a bit dazed from being greeted in the living room by a live alligator, meekly followed them all out to the back yard. Not even the dining room full of amplifiers, keyboards, microphones and drums registered as she passed through. She mechanically took the beer Joey offered her. They sat down together on the back steps and watched Lenny and Will continue the argument that had been briefly interrupted by her screams.

"See, we brought him back with us from Ft. Lauderdale when we were down there for spring break," Joey tried to explain.

***~~~***

Go to Crossroads Page on Amazon

Also by M.T. Bass

My Brother’s Keeper Page on Amazon

Hollywood, 1950 – Former P-51 fighter pilot A. Gavin Byrd is on location for a movie shoot, when he gets a call from the police that his older brother, a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, has been found dead on his boat. The Lieutenant in charge of the investigation is ready to close the case as a suicide from the start, but “Hawk” doesn't buy it and decides to find out what really happened for himself.

With help from a former starlet ex-girlfriend, a friendly police sergeant whose life was saved in the war by his brother and a nosy Los Angeles Times reporter, Hawk's search for the truth takes him through cross-fire, dog fights and mine fields in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Burbank and Las Vegas, and leads him into some of the darker corners of his brother's patient files and private life that he never knew existed.

***~~~***

Chapter 1

“What? You mean that’s it?”

I was already sitting at the end of the bed, lighting up a smoke and thinking hard and fast. “Well, I’ll tell you, sugar, I’ve been on the shelf aging like a fine bottle of bubbly—so to speak—and you just shook me up good and popped my cork.”

“Why you—”

“Hey, come on, we’re supposed to rest between rounds. Wait for the bell, will you?”

As luck would have it, just then the phone rang.

“Don’t you answer that, Hawk.”

But, of course, I did.

***~~~***

“I got the distinct impression that I was interruptin’ somethin’,” snickered Sgt. Vince Allegro of the Los Angeles Police Department when I met him at the marina. Allegro always was observant as hell. He also had an annoyingly knowing smile that he used to great advantage in dislodging information from witnesses and suspects, who, if they were lying, usually broke down and told him the truth or, if they were telling the truth, usually elaborated to prove it—and all Allegro had to do was smile. It was magic, but whenever he turned it on me, I felt like slapping the chubby little cop silly. I guess I deserved it, though; for in his eyes I was deliciously wicked in my ways and was an invaluable source of fantasy handouts for him to use in passing the time on late night stakeouts. “And don’t think I had an easy time of it, tracking you down at that motel.”

“I was on location for a couple of days.”

Allegro smiled his patent pending smile.

“Well, Vince,” I said, “she was the cutest little twenty-two year old, MGM contract player you ever saw. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, a figure that would befuddle Einstein and long, long legs with thighs that have had the benefit of a lifetime of dancing lessons.”

Allegro held up his hands, needing a moment to savor and digest the morsel I had just tossed his way. His round face flushed and glowed. His eyes glazed over and the ends of that knowing smile twitched spastically.

“You know how eager and how full of enthusiasm those young starlets are. I’ll tell you, your call saved me from the kind of death every man dreams of.”

“Come on, Hawk, give me a break.”

“So, you scrambled me. What’s up with the Dorian Gray?”

Allegro had to take a moment to catch his breath. I guess I had laid a good one on him.

“Well, the Coast Guard found your brother’s boat adrift up the Santa Barbara Channel. They’re towing it in now.”

“And you dragged me away from paradise just because—’’

“Hawk, they said there’s a body aboard: male, Caucasian, late thirties—early forties.”

“Stitch?”

“I don’t know,” Allegro said gravely. “That’s what I came down to find out. It wasn’t my call.”

Allegro had been an orderly in the Army during the war and had followed Stitch as he island-hopped across the South Pacific. Stitch saved Allegro’s leg from amputation after the six-by-six he was driving hit a mine. So, there was more than professional concern in his voice. I asked, “Who got the call?”

“Lieutenant Peletier.” Allegro pointed to a tall, sandy-haired man in a three-piece suit who was gesturing and directing police officers this way and that, even though there was nothing to do until the Coast Guard arrived with Stitch’s boat. “What a macaroon.”

“That pompous ass? Great. What’s he doing pulling down routine calls?”

“This could make a big splash in the daily rags, so I guess somebody upstairs wanted to put an officer with photogenic qualities on the case. You know, to make the Department look good. Too bad he hasn’t done a lick of legitimate police work in five years.” Allegro shrugged his shoulders and turned his back to Lt. Peletier. “I called you down cause I figured you’d want to know right away. Besides, it was only going to be a matter of time before the Department pulled your chain for a positive ID on whoever it is that’s on board.”

“Thanks Vince. I appreciate it.”

“Can I buy you a cup of joe?”

“Sure.” We walked back to Allegro’s car and, out of a thermos, he poured two mugs of official LAPD Detective Division coffee that was made barely tolerable for human consumption by the generous portion of scotch whiskey used to sweeten it. “Ah, Vince …“

“It’s okay. I’m off duty.” Allegro grinned slyly. “Hey, you remember that guy who raped and murdered that school teacher?”

“Sure, the one I flew up to the state pen last week.”

“That’s the one. He didn’t even make it to the weekend before the boys on the cell block took care of him.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth.”

And so we waited for the Coast Guard to come. When they finally docked the Dorian Gray, Lt. Peletier whipped his charges into a frenzy of activity. Allegro and I had another cup of coffee while the lab guys did their chores, taking pictures, cataloging clues and dusting for prints. Then, before the coroner’s boys moved in, Allegro took me on board.

“Hold it just one damn minute, mister,” Lt. Peletier said as he grabbed my elbow. “Just who the hell do you think you are, trespassing on my crime scene?”

“Next of kin, for an ID of the body,” Allegro pitched in and ushered me out of the Lieutenant’s grasp.

While Lt. Peletier and Allegro tried to sort out their irreconcilable differences, I took a look at the body. It was Stitch all right, laying face down in a pool of blood. He had been shot in the head. I caught Allegro’s eye and nodded. He seemed to suddenly lose interest in his conversation with Lt. Peletier. I stepped back to the stern of the boat and blankly watched the Medical Examiner’s boys wrap up the body and take it away.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Hawk,” Allegro said sincerely when he came over. “Tell you what, why don’t you just hold tight here and I’ll talk to some of the Lieutenant’s boys and see what they’ve come up with so far.”

I nodded and sank into a deck chair facing out over the stern towards the marina channel. I could pick out Allegro’s voice behind me, but I didn’t listen. I always felt that Stitch had a head start on me in life and now I didn’t know if he had finished the race and won or if I would win by default. I watched all of the boats bob at their moorings and tried not to think. The Army Air Corps had trained me well for that. In the event of an emergency, the mind automatically reverts to a checklist and, without thinking, step-by-step clicks through it. In the event nothing makes the problem go away, you can always bail out and gently float to safety under the blossoming canopy of your parachute—roll inverted; climb; pop canopy; release belts; push and kick the stick forward. And you’re safely thrown free and clear of impending disaster.

“Hawk, here’s how it looks to the boys,” Allegro said as he came around from behind me and sat on the stern of the boat. He nervously rubbed his fat thigh. “No sign of a struggle. No real evidence of anyone else being aboard tonight. Nothing apparently missing—still had his wallet with a little cash in it and his watch and rings and stuff. Stitch’s own thirty-eight was found at his side. The boys already know what the autopsy and ballistic reports are going to say and nobody’s willing to bet against Stitch’s prints being on the gun. The boys are talking suicide real serious.”

I just shook my head and watched the boats bob in the marina.

“It’ll be an open and shut case. The Lieutenant won’t even get his hair mussed on this one.”

I just shook my head again in disbelief.

“Hawk, you’ve got to look at the evidence.”

The police were already bailing out and floating down to safety with their “suicide” parachute. I knew better and I wasn’t going to give up on my brother. “Evidence is a cop putting the cart before the horse.”

“Yeah, but it’s all we ever get to go on.”

“But I know better.”

“Yeah, so do I.” Allegro sighed heavily. “But Peletier will have this case wrapped up neat as can be in a week—ten days at the outside. And I just told you what the disposition will say.”

“Peletier and his disposition can rot in hell.”

Allegro nodded slowly. “But there’s not much I can do about it. It’s his case and he’s a lieutenant. I’m just a sergeant. My hands are tied, Hawk.”

“Mine aren’t.” I looked up into Allegro’s face and knew he would help me. “Get me the reports?”

Allegro looked down at the thigh that he had been nervously massaging. “I wouldn’t have this leg if it weren’t for Stitch.”

“Get me the reports?”

Allegro nodded.

“How long will the boat be off limits?”

“A week, maybe ten days—till the disposition.”

“Can you get me aboard tomorrow for a look-see?”

Allegro looked at Lt. Peletier and squinted his eyes as if he were sizing him up. “Day after. Let a bit of the dust settle. Besides, Peletier will be stuck in staff meetings all day Monday, so he won’t be around to bother us.”

“What about Stitch’s home and office? Will they be sealed?”

“I doubt it. They’ll give them the once over, but that’ll be about it.”

“Good. Thanks, Vince.” I stood up to go. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

“Hawk, let the boys do their job, okay? Peletier’s a pain in the butt, but he’s got a job to do. I’ll get you the reports and I’ll get you back on the boat, but just don’t get in his way. It’ll just make waves which won’t help anybody. And keep me up on what you are doing—and what you need. Maybe I can help here and there.”

“Sure, Vince. I’ll see you.”

Allegro nodded, then turned away quickly. He was shaken. So was I. I walked slowly down the dock without looking back. A lot of nice boats around here, I thought to myself, a lot of nice boats. It was two in the morning and the rest of the marina was quiet. When I got to the end of the dock, a crowd of reporters and photographers had already gathered and had begun to push and jockey for position while they waited for Lt. Peletier to make a statement. News travels fast.

I slipped by unnoticed. Even in death, Stitch would set a front-page standard.

***~~~***

Go to My Brother’s Keeper Page on Amazon

Sneak Preview…

Jungleland

Sweating it out in the Belgian Congo as a civil war mercenary, with Sparks turning wrenches on his Douglas A-1 “Spad”, Hawk splits his time flying combat missions and, back on the ground, sparring with Ella, an attractive young missionary doctor, in the sequel to My Brother’s Keeper. Available 2019.

Chapter 1 - Ella

Oh my God, it was hot. Always so damn hot. I couldn’t wait to escape my cot under the mosquito netting in the morning to get off the ground, even though I knew it wouldn’t be any cooler when I got back and landed. Relief—even temporary relief—was worth every second of it.

The jungle was simply gorgeous in the first light from altitude. Lush and green, mist frosted the treetops making Africa the mystical land I had read about in my youth and watched Johnny Weismueller swing through in all those Tarzan movies. In my adolescent day dreams, I was always the great safari hunter.

Now, I was a hunter of sorts—but for much bigger game than lions and elephants—leading a two ship mission up a valley northwest of Lubao near the border between Katanga and the Republic of Congo. We were flying Douglas A-1 Skyraiders, out on an early morning search and destroy mission. It was pretty good equipment for a mercenary, but then again the Belgian government was much better funded than their former colony thanks to the Union Minière’s healthy profits from copper, gold and uranium—not to mention the CIA. And they paid better, too. Most of the guys I had flown with in England against the Germans who stayed in the service, went on to make noise in jets over Korea. I’m sure that was exhilarating, but just not the same. This would be the closest I could ever get to climbing back into my P-51 Mustang again to sortie against Messerschmidts and Heinkels.

On my wing was Ira “Lucky” Lindemann. If you wanted to irk him, you used his first name. He accepted “Lucky” as the lesser of two evils, having been given to him in mockery of Charles Lindberg’s moniker by his Marine Corps buddies in the Black Sheep Squadron. We flew a loose formation, weaving up the valley, searching for soldiers of the former Force Publique—now the First Republic’s Army—that our “intelligence” claimed was moving south. It was a messy business on the border, what with bandits and tribesmen moving in and out of alliances with the soldiers depending on the greedy inclinations and the moods of their leaders that day. I didn’t try to sort it out. I just flew in the direction they pointed and laid down ordinance where they wanted it. There was nothing so far and we lazily drifted up and down the valleys northwest of the base. If there were hostile soldiers or bandits in the area, we sure didn’t want them paying a visit to our home away from home. They were known to be particularly ruthless and unforgiving. There’s no Geneva Convention in jungleland.

Lucky and I stayed off the radio, using hand signals to avoid announcing our position to eavesdropping ears below. We loitered in a loose formation, burning off fuel as slowly as possible to stay on-station—and up out of the heat—as long as possible.

Lucky called ‘bingo’ first and we turned back towards the southeast. Long patrols over the South Pacific was good experience for learning to lean out the fuel flow, but nothing like actually having to pay for the gas put into the wing tanks out of your own pocket like I did in Alaska.

Sparks was there waiting on the tarmac, hands on his hips, surrounded by the ground crew recruited from the locals, as I taxied in, followed by Lucky. Somehow, Sparks could tell just from watching us on final approach that we hadn’t seen any action and hadn’t fired our guns or launched any rockets, so he started motioning the guys into position to refuel us once we were idling by the tank farm.

I swung the tail around and stood on the brakes. The crew started climbing all over the wings, dragging a pair of hoses to the fill ports. Lucky did the same to my right and his crew mobbed his plane as well.

Sparks climbed up next to the open canopy, a map in his hand being battered by the prop wash. He yelled in my ear, “It’s a pisser, God damn it. New intel. Damn brainiac idiots.”

I took the map and nodded. From the markings, our quarry was now evidently to the northeast, so we’d patrol up that way next, heading east initially, then following the Lualabo River north once we got to it.

Sparks slapped my shoulder and went to check that the fuel caps were secured. It would not have been the first time that all the fuel got sucked out of the tank from ground crew carelessness. They meant well, but the Afrika Corps recruits that he had to work with definitely weren’t as good as regular Air Force crews, so Sparks kept a close eye on them.

I waited for Lucky’s crew to finish, then we taxied back out to the end of the runway. Maybe ‘runway’, ‘airport’, and ‘base’ were too kind to the scar of land cleared out of the jungle for us to fly out of to help the Belgians keep a hold on their mining interests in Katanga. I didn’t really care about the politics or economics. Only the flying. Lucky was used to the primitive conditions from his island hopping days in the South Pacific, but it was pretty crude compared to what I enjoyed in merry old England.

Without sliding the canopy shut, I advanced the power and started my take-off roll. Lucky was at my four o’clock and we climbed out, then turned east. The day was starting to heat up with the air getting bumpy, pushing us a little higher. We had a few months to go before the rainy season, so we flew nearly every day. When we got to the river, it was low and narrow in its banks, but still one of the best landmarks for pilotage. Lucky and I turned north and began leaning out the mixture for best endurance.

Of course, it was no different here in Africa: hour after hour of nothing but the drone of your engine turning gasoline into noise, punctuated by mere minutes of the unmatched intensity of doing battle. Only in this conflict, our focus was targets on the ground, not dogfighting—like at the end of the war, when the Luftwaffe had been decimated and what opposition they did throw up was quickly smashed. At that point, we were like the Bears pummeling a hapless Northwestern junior varsity team.

It was another three quarters of an hour before anything happened. Sweeping southwest of the village of Nogabi, we started taking ground fire out of the jungle. The First Republic soldiers were mostly raw recruits, whose aim and firing discipline were so poor that they were often more an annoyance than a threat, but over the winter months they had started to improve somewhat. They almost always forgot, though, that tracers work both ways, so once they opened up on us, they basically painted a bull’s eye on themselves.

“Break left,” I radioed Lucky and yanked the stick back and to the left in a climbing turn to circle around on the enemy location. I searched back over my shoulder for a road or trail leading out of the area to anticipate their possible direction of movement. There was a small scar coming down off the hill to the southeast.

As we came around three hundred and sixty degrees, lining up on the small section of the jungle sprouting red and green tracer rounds, the intensity of the fire began to wane as the troops understood what was about to come their way.

“Take the road. Southeast,” I said to Lucky.

He clicked his mike twice to acknowledge the one-two punch plan and began to drift back to be able to follow up my initial attack on the enemy positions with rocket fire on them as they inevitably fled down the road.

I banked hard and began to dive down on the hilltop. The tracers began to concentrate on my nose. I returned fire with my guns, spreading the field of fire left and right with a little dance on the rudder pedals. I felt the Spad shudder and buck a bit as rockets left the rails. I followed the plumes of their engines halfway to the target before I had to pull up, but noticed that the intensity of the enemy fire had waned considerably.

“Way to go, Batman,” Lucky radioed. “Let me just clean up this little mess you made.”

Behind me Lucky strafed the road, and fired his rockets in so close that he seemed to clip the top of the fireball from the warhead explosions.

I circled back and took a path coming back up the road, stitching it with .50 caliber fire. Lucky followed in my wake for one more pass, just to be sure. As we joined up to circle the position, I noticed some misting from Lucky’s right wing. He had taken a round in the fuel tank—an infamous golden BB—so I told him and he beat feet back to the base before all the gas leaked out of his tanks.

I still had a couple of hours of fuel and some unexpended ordinance, so I lallygagged my way home, exploring every nook and cranny of interest along the way. I half-heartedly kept an eye out for targets of opportunity, but mostly looped, rolled and yo-yo-ed over the jungle, practicing manuevers and enjoying the relative coolness of altitude. There wasn’t really much need to hurry back. I’d only have to loiter over the field waiting for the ground crews to deal with his wounded bird and maybe clean up the runway, if he leaked fuel or oil all over it.

I headed southwest and swung back around in a half-assed patrol of the jungle surrounding the base down that way. There was little out there, aside from a couple of villages and a mission cut out of the trees. I didn’t see any activity and really didn’t expect to. With the range on our planes, we were pretty safely tucked away from the border strongholds, though it never hurt to take a look-see to be sure that the intel on that wasn’t as bad as their other information. Me and Lucky would probably be the first to know if they were close enough to overrun us, when Congolese soldiers sat down for dinner with us in the mess tent. Mainly, I just enjoyed the flying part—and its cool relief—while I could, until the reality of fuel burn brought me back to earth.

It was over an hour when the base finally called all clear, so Lucky must have made it back okay. I landed about forty-five minutes later. Taxiing back to the hardstand, I noticed a woman standing next to Sparks chewing his ear off and pointing at me. He dutifully absorbed the abuse, as if a long suffering spouse, watching me shut down White Hawk II out of the side of his eye. He held her back with his arm as the prop blade spun down and finally stopped.

I slid back the canopy. The woman wriggled out from around Sparks blocking move and headed towards me.

Sparks shrugged his shoulders at my hand motion query. He folded his arms over his chest to watch the show.

The woman didn’t even walk around the wing, but stooped to cut underneath to take a more direct line towards me. She disappeared under the leading edge and appeared at the aileron, then followed the trailing edge back to the fuselage, looking for the hand hold to get herself up on the wing.

I turned in the cockpit and watched her step up onto the wing and climb the incline up to me. I started to slide myself up to get out, getting my butt up on the top of the seat back, but she got to me and blocked my way out.

“Just who do you think you are, mister?” she barked angrily with the authoritative voice of a medical professional at the very top of the heap. I had heard that tone in my brother’s voice more than a few times.

I just pulled off my helmet, but left my mirrored Ray Bans on. Behind the lenses, I carefully surveyed her gorgeously animated face—even in anger, her lips wrinkled in a bit of a smile, as if this was half show, half genuine indignation. Her red hair was neatly pulled back in a ponytail, showing a freckled, fair complexion which had not yet been weathered and tanned by the sun, so she was new in country. Most of us outsiders knew each other well, but I didn’t recognize who this was. I had heard about a new doctor at the mission, though never imagined it might have been female.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“I mean originally—not born and raised.”

She scowled and punched my arm with her fist…hard.

“Ow!” I guessed she had at least one brother.

“Was that you—of course it was. Who else would it have been.”

I unscrewed the plugs from my ears and the volume level on her voice got louder. Over her shoulder, I saw Sparks shake his head and smile.

“Listen, mister—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” I finally interrupted, holding up my hand, palm out like a cop stopping traffic.

She stopped talking and stared hard at me. She punched my arm again.

I cocked my head to the side. “Really?”

“Where in the hell do you get off shooting up my house calls?”

“Hi. I’m Hawk.” I offered a handshake.

She slapped it away.

“All right. Doctor, I presume?”

“You’re damn right.”

“I’m still Hawk.”

“As if I cared.” She scowled at her own reflection in my sun glasses. “You could take those off.”

“I could.”

“You might have killed someone.”

“Well, I hate to tell you this, but that’s kind of the point when you’re getting shot at—you shoot back and not to tickle their toes.”

“I wasn’t shooting at you.”

“I didn’t say it was you. But tracer bullets don’t naturally fall up from trees.”

“But, I —”

“You should be careful out there.”

“I’m not part of that whole thing. I’m just here to take care of families.”

“Yeah, well, soldiers and bandits have families, too.”

“Can you take those sun glasses off…Please?”

I did.

“Thank you.”

“Try again? I’m Hawk.”

She sighed mightily. “Doctor Mickleson.”

“Why so formal? We’re at least a thousand miles from the nearest maitre ‘d.”

“Doctor Mickelson.”

“Fine, then. If I ever need a prostate exam, I know who to call.” I stood up on the seat to let myself out the other side of the fuselage.

She pouted when I turned away, then behind my back I heard, “Ella. Ella Mickelson.”

I turned back and held out my hand again. “I am pleased to meet you, Ella.”

She eventually shook my hand, but clearly didn’t like it.

“And I am sorry about any misplaced ordnance that might have come your way. I had no intention of injuring any civilians…or you.”

“Yeah…well…please be more careful next time.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” It was still morning.

“No, thank you.”

She spun on her heels, hopped down off the plane and marched away towards a muddy and battered Range Rover.

“Glad to meet you, Ella.” I called out. And I was.

But Dr. Mickleson ignored me and peeled out in her Range Rover, nearly spraying Sparks with clods of red clay.

“I guess she told you, doncha know,” Sparks said when I came up beside him. He smiled an evil, knowing grin.

“You know, I think I feel a fever coming on.” I put the back of my hand to my forehead.

“Maybe you should have that looked at.”

“Hmmm. Maybe you’re right.” We watched Ella get swallowed up by the jungle. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

***~~~***

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 by Electron Alley Corporation

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Edited by Elizabeth N. Love

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