Toxicology. Steve Aylett
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always on cop duty?”
“Any impediment to imitation’d throw you back on your laboring character?”
“Nah. Watch this.” He hauled himself up, stood in the aisle, and started throwing flat, startled shapes with his arms and legs. This galoot danced like a cartoon robot. Then he sat down, panting and chuffed. “Know where I learnt to dance that way?”
“The laughing academy?”
“Nah.” He took out what looked like a cell phone. “Know what this is?”
“Scrambler hotline to the circus?”
“Nah. Two-end scanner. I hear about a ventilation job I go round and scan the floor pattern. All began two years ago. I was flippin’ through crime scene photos—you know, chalk body outlines on the floor? Got this flickerbook effect, like the outline man was dancin’. And I thought—get a choreographer in here, we’re sittin’ on a goldmine. Got dance numbers from every month last year. Multiple homicides I string together for, like, big production numbers. That thing I just did? Combination o’ fifty crime scenes, January, central DC. I’m based in DC but I just hear about the fashionable events in Beerlight, yeah? Vortex, goofy crime scene, chalkline’s a doozy, wanna record it. You from Beerlight? How’s the local color?”
“Red.”
“I get it. You got the chair there? We got gas in Washington. Folk say the killin’ jar’s just as cold-blooded as some homicides, but I think it’s a crime of passion. Yeah rare’s the day I forget to bless those who gave us a blank check on enforcement. Them and the bicthought media. Support us you’re objective, criticize us you’re biased. I could point to a dozen trite precedents. But the respect ain’t there. What happened to faith in a higher authority?”
“Burned in a wicker man?”
“Nah. Average Beerlighter’s got a morality like a ferris wheel. What is it with you people? You hear me, boy? It’ll be shuffleboard and orange walls before you realize you’re runnin’ naked through an alligator ranch ...”
His words had galvanized me into sleep—boredom was always the heaviest rock in the law’s armory. And I dreamt I was a clown driving a dynamite truck. Cliff edges blurred like sawteeth. Siri was sat next to me in red-fleck dungarees. “What did the Twins say?” she asked calmly. “Was it more art than science or was it based on exacting principles?”
“C-c-can’t you see I don’t give a damn about that?” I shrieked, wrenching the wheel, and the tires blew out, waking me.
Tubs Fontanel was dressed the same as Siri from the dream, and looking as astonished as an inevitably snipered senator. Arterial blood misted and swirled between us, settling in a soft rain. I’d blown a hole in my thigh. The retired cop’s bewilderment was perfectly apparent. “What the f ...”
I bowed to his judgment so fast his nose broke. The train was grinding into the station. He was snuffling something about paraffin and death as I leapt to the platform and made for the barrier with a few dozen others. I included a bullet now, and a thin gore trail. Yelling behind me—I turned to see Tubs bent over, gasping, light falling into him and being extinguished. He was a vacuum. Through the barrier, feeling squirly.
As I crossed the concourse everything was incredibly high- res. I could see infringement thresholds overlapping as people jumped queues, threw punches, glared—every head a poisoned chalice. Kirlian stormfronts collided around the rushing crowds. Mindmade law lines crisscrossed the air, weak and tangled as gossamer. As I passed through they shrivelled and vanished like burning hair. I stashed the gat in a locker, and blew.
Back at my barnacle-encrusted office I told the whole thing to my girlfriend and technical adviser, and she said it couldn’t have been more Freudian if the gun had gone off as I went into a tunnel. I told her Freud was projecting, she kicked me in the balls and I blacked out for sixteen hours, waking only when the cops arrived.
“And that’s how I ended up in a yelling cell with you guys,” I told the two interrogators affably.
“So you wouldn’t know why the President was found with his head in the mouth of an embalmed Kodiak bear. Utterly naked and quite dead. Five yards of Chinese firecrackers up his ass.” They showed me photos of the crime scene.
“Can I keep these?”
“Atom, your story ain’t even halfway good. And void without material proof. But we can bust open every last safe locker in Beerlight Grand and if we find a gun, we’ll do you as an accessory to the Siri job. We got you either way.”
The cops soon decided my death was unnecessary—something I’d been thinking for years. I could have said anything and breezed the polygraph, the Siri bullet handling the conscience response. But it wasn’t a heroic dose—the gunshot was accidental, motiveless, self-inflicted. No intent. The Twins were scornful.
Worst of all, the cops had the gun, though they didn’t know it. There were a thousand lockers in Beerlight station, and a gun in every one.
JAWBREAKER
Terry Tantamount lived like a kitten struggling up stairs. He never had the faintest idea of the right thing to say in any given situation. And it seemed there was a very specific right and wrong to this.
“Have I put on weight?”
“Yeah, thank god.”
At a dinner party once he held two lobsters facing each other and puppeted a conversation—even here he didn’t parp the appropriate exchange. People flinched with embarrassment. Sometimes he saw them trying to cover for him but mostly he just saw disappointment, scorn, anger—even disgust.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been asleep all this time.”
“Okay.”
Sometimes the desired answer was clued in the question but it seemed such an absurd shell game—did people think so little of themselves they wanted to be lied to?
“Hey babe, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were jealous.”
“Sure I am, honey.”
In childhood these misfires had the immediacy of a poptart burn but as time lagged it became a dull bruise pummeled over and over. He learned that “How are you?” wasn’t a question, and other basics. But he didn’t understand it and could no more than dip his beak. How to proceed? Grow a pelt of dignity? Feign indifference? It was torment without thunder.
“Republican or democrat?”
“Are those my options?”
Terry’s fanciful notions of honesty and sense made him as popular as a burning tire. When questioned directly about their sources, people displayed such absolute resolve to dodge the issue, Terry usually took pity and relented. If backed into a corner they became hostile or at the very least emphatically dishonest prior to hasty retreat. It seemed they were doing yeoman’s work in someone else’s notions.
“Guess what I’ve got.”
“A deadly hidden agenda?”
At first he thought his girlfriend Yanda could teach him the cues in this baggy pants farce. But she seemed evasive, even ashamed. “Nobody asks questions like that,” she said. But Terry did exist. He had no choice but to assume she didn’t mean it. That way lay madness. Every dawn he said a plain noble prayer for communication.
“What about them Yankees?”
“Yeah, what about ’em?”
But facts are found where temptation is brightest. Terry had noticed Yanda always got a lot of mail—one package minimum. The one time she didn’t, she seemed at a loss. She even yelled at him in the middle of a discussion, “What am I meant to say to that?” It was the only time she didn’t know her own dialogue.
The idea entered his head like a fox bellying under a fence. When Yanda was out