Alien Blues (2 page)

Maybe hot dogs? A fine thing for a half-Jewish guy to be feeding his children. But the pickles would be kosher.

David stood up and stretched. His partner, Mel Burnett, sat at the desk butted in front of his. Burnett yawned and scratched the back of his neck. His hair was brown, thick, and wiry; badly in need of a cut. He was short, but solidly built, barrel-chested. His face was burnished by heavy sunlight, and his eyes were blue. Like Rose's.

“You going already?” Mel said.

“Rose is going out of town again. Got to get home so she can make her flight.”

“Another animal rescue, huh?”

David shrugged, aware that Della Martinas was listening.

“Don't she give you the details?” Mel said.

“Somewhere in California.” He glanced at the glassed-in office in the corner behind his desk. Captain Halliday looked up, caught his eye, and grinned with the usual psychotic cheerfulness. How the man could be consistently upbeat in the gloomy precinct room was puzzling.

The air was thick with the faint hum of printers, and the light was harsh and bright. Marks and dents in the floor were proof that the desks had stayed in perfectly spaced rows for many years, but the precinct's days of symmetry were long gone. Desks were clumped together haphazardly, making hash of available space.

The building was done bunker style, built when they were still putting up offices hand over fist. The floor was white linoleum with black flecks, the walls grey concrete block. And there were no windows.

David wondered how cops could think without windows to stare out of.

Mel rubbed his stomach, right over the belly button. “I'm hungry.”

“Come to the farm,” David said. “Have supper with me and the kids.”

“Naw, I don't feel like fooling with the brats tonight.”

“Go ahead, flunk unclehood.”

“They'll swarm, and I'm beat.” He rubbed his eyes and looked around his desk. “Hey, where's my Coke? Della!”

A dark-skinned woman looked up. She was pretty, with a rich, smooth complexion and long, wiry black hair plaited in corn rows. She took a slow swallow from a can of Coke.

“What you want, Burnett?”

“Nothing, Della girl. Just looking for the can I was using as an ashtray.”

Della smiled. “You don' smoke, sweetheart. Maybe you should take it up. Soft drinks aren't good for you—too much sugar.”

The phone rang. Mel picked it up.

“
What
.” Mel grimaced. “Hell, yeah, this is Homicide Task Force. Don't you know who you're calling?” He grinned at David. “Naw, Silver ain't here. This is Burnett.” Mel listened for a moment and grabbed a pencil. His voice changed.

“Give me that address again.”

David went back to his desk.

“Got it.” Mel looked up. “Another one.”

David's stomach felt odd. “Machete Man?”

“Looks like. Victim's alive.”

“What?”

“She got away.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“
Last night
?”

“Didn't know it was our boy. DNA match just came through.”

The printer purred and started up.

“That'll be our report,” David said. He bent close to his terminal. “Message, Rose. Crime scene at …” He leaned over his desk to look at Mel's scratch pad. “Twenty-three eighty-nine Spenser. If you can't wait, bring the kids in. Leave them in a priority car with a uniform. Sorry, babe.”

David glanced at Halliday. He was reading the report and a look of dark malevolence flitted across his face. So much for good cheer.

The parking garage was hot and humid. Sweat popped up along David's forehead and across his shoulder blades. He hated the way the city smelled and felt at the end of a hot day. A humid breeze blew trash across the buckling sidewalks and into the gutter. This time of day the colors were bad—shades of dirt, all the dingy hues.

Even the people were dingy. Lately he saw them as formless grey hulks, with dark holes where there ought to be faces. He had to look hard to find the faces. In the morning he could find them easily—at the end of the day, not so easy.

The car was hot inside, and it smelled like cigar smoke and old plastic. David steered them into the road grid and hit the priority vehicle switch. Like magic, traffic flowed out of his way.

Mel rattled the report. “Looks like they had it down as B and E. Guy scraped his head getting in the window—they got hair root and blood.”

“An embarrassment of riches.”

“Says here the victim—a Millicent Darnell—got away clean.”

David opened his window. The vendors were closing down and the city smelled like a fairground at the end of a run—old greasy food, sweat, hot metal. A man packed up displays of cantaloupe, watermelon, and strawberries.

David wanted to get the kids some fresh melon. He started to push the pause command, then changed his mind. Money was a little tight this week. He ought to leave everything in the account, in case Rose needed something.

She never did. When she hired out to the animal activists, she didn't work cheap. She never took anything with her, money or clothes. She'd leave in a worn pair of jeans, nothing more than a purse slung over her shoulder. And a day or two after she got back, a deposit was made in her personal account. Those deposits had bought them the farm.

“Where is the Darnell woman?” David asked.

“Next door. Residence of a Mr. and Mrs. Roderick Pressman. He made the call.”

Traffic was heavy with commuters heading out of the city—the Friday exodus. It was still light out. David shut his window. The air conditioner battled the hot, stale air.

In a few hours the signs would be lit, and the broken pavement thick with predators. Up and down the streets, innocents would weave their way in and out, unaware and vulnerable.

The car slowed and paused. A new BMW with an adapted roof eased into traffic ahead of them.

“
What
!” Mel glared out the window. “Since when did those bellybrain Elaki bastards get priority over a police vehicle?”

David chewed his lip. He could see the faint grey shimmer of the Elaki behind the wheel. Their Ford slid in behind the BMW. They seemed to be headed the same way.

“Assholes are like horses. Never sit—not even to sleep. Ever hear of a horse driving a car? They ought to be hauled around in vans.” Mel rubbed his stomach.

The car bore right and David swung the wheel.

Commercial areas gave way to residential. Small houses, old and deteriorating, lined both sides of the street. The trees were large and the shade pleasant. David steered the Ford right again, and then left. The BMW stayed ahead.

A two-story wood-frame house had the yellow-green crime stamp glowing on the door. David checked the address—2389 Spenser.

The BMW pulled into the driveway. David stopped the Ford in front of the house.

A guy in blue jeans and a grey cotton sport coat stood in the front yard. His hair was blond and long, and a bald spot was spreading from the back of his head. He wore sandals, his shirt was pink and yellow, and an earring swung from his right ear.

Cheerful, David thought.

The man turned, looked at the BMW, then grinned at David.

David walked over curiously, noting the ID clipped to the man's belt.

“David Silver.” He offered a hand.

“I know.” The man's grip was firm. “Nice to meet you, Detective. I'm Vern Dyer.”

David frowned. He knew that name.

“Oh, yeah,” Mel said, shaking hands. “You work vice, don't you? I heard of you.”

“Been inside?” David asked.

Dyer smiled and flicked his ID with a broken thumbnail. He was tan, his face lined and tired. His eyes were brown and intelligent—bloodshot at the moment.

“No authorization. Can't get through the seal. If you don't mind, I'd like to go in with you. Take a look around.”

“How come?” Mel asked.

Dyer shrugged. “I'm on my own time, following a hunch. Something related to another case. Probably nothing.”

The door of the BMW flipped up, and they watched as an Elaki slid out of the front seat. He turned from side to side, balancing on a broad-based fringe that was covered by muscled scales. The Elaki teetered forward in the breeze, poised like a toe dancer, fringe folded backward. He rippled across the grass toward David, the fringe scales contracting and releasing like the belly plates on a snake.

Sunlight glinted in the tiny jewellike scales that made up the outer skin.

A light breeze ruffled David's hair and rippled the Elaki.

The Elaki was deep grey, with pinkish hues toward his middle where the brain was located. David thought Elaki looked like huge stingrays walking upright. They averaged a height of seven feet, but they were no more than a couple inches thick—thin and flappy. Their oxygen slits made a happy face pattern at the midsection.

David caught the light lime smell of the Elaki. Someone had told him once that to an Elaki, humans smelled like strong cheese.

“Look at the ID,” Mel said, under his breath.

The Elaki had a departmental badge hanging under his breathing slits. David wondered how it stayed on.

The Elaki slid close.

“I am from Family of Puzzle Solvers. Which of you is from the David Silver?”

David realized he was looking at the happy face pattern of breathing slits on the belly. He raised his gaze to the Elaki's eyes, housed on two pronglike sections at the top.

“I'm Silver.”

“Please. I am your Elaki adviser.”

“We don't need any goddamn advisers,” Mel said, staring into the Elaki's midsection. David put a hand on Mel's arm.

The Elaki waved winglike fin tips in something like a shrug.

“Captain Halliday should have explained for advance knowledge. I will study with you this case.”

David looked at Dyer, who was staring at Mel's feet. No help there.

“I understand that there have been Elaki assigned to administrative areas within the department,” David said. “But this is an active investigation Mr., um, Puzzle. Perhaps if you'd return to your … office, or whatever, we can straighten this out later. I'll be glad to give you a call tomorrow.”

The Elaki's left fin tip flowed into a shape resembling three thick, short fingers. He raked them across the ID, making a staccato of taps. David was reminded of an elephant scooping peanuts with a ripple of his trunk.

“There is no mistake, Detective Silver.”

“I think there is,” Mel said.

The Elaki headed for the front door, the grass flattening under him.

David shrugged. “Let's see if he can get in.”

The Elaki swarmed up the cracked concrete steps and opened the door.

“Looks like he's got authorization,” Dyer said.

“I'm calling the captain.” Mel headed for the Ford.

“Mind?” Dyer asked.

David wondered what vice wanted with Machete Man. Dyer didn't seem to want to share his thoughts, but he didn't look like a thrill seeker either.

David waved him on. “Please.”

TWO

It was stupid, David thought. Everybody elbowing their way inside, clomping through the tired old house. But there was always the need to see for yourself.

The car door slammed.

“Talk to the captain?”

“Not there,” Mel said tersely. He charged up the steps.

David felt sorry for Mel, and a little sad. Mel's father, a gifted software analyst, had been crowded out of a high-level job, thanks to the Elaki. The aliens' infiltration of fieldwork was something David had been dreading.

The Elaki had come to Earth with slightly superior technology, and vastly superior mastery of the “soft” sciences. They were a strange mix of benevolent arrogance, eager to help with what interested them, but keeping their own society separate. Still, they had cured the myriad manifestations of schizophrenia, rescuing a lot of people from the streets and making David's job easier. And they were well on the way to curing eating disorders.

They had taken over a lot of businesses, too, because they were better at them. An Elaki doctor was more compassionate, much more competent, and much less likely to withhold treatment due to the status of national health accounts, or an unwillingness to shake the status quo. And they had wonderful ointments for the uncomfortable and disfiguring rashes people sometimes suffered after AIDS.

They seemed to be advising everywhere—national politics, local politics, in the AMA, the NHO, Amnesty International, Literacy For All, the Educator's Forum, even the Police Benevolent Association. They also worked with numerous agricultural groups, and had found a way to control Japanese beetles.

And now police fieldwork.

David concentrated on the house. Was there something about it that would draw the twisted attention of Machete Man?

The victims were certainly an eclectic bunch. No real similarity, other than the usual one—vulnerability. And this killer had spread from young women and men to the aged,
and
, most unusual, was killing interracially. The last victim had been Oriental.

The house looked lonely, but David knew that was not an objective opinion. If a house did not have a bike in the driveway, or a stuffed animal abandoned in the grass, to him, it was lonely.

He didn't want to go in. It would be hard to concentrate under the eye prongs of the Elaki, and in the swell of hostility emanating from Mel.

He went to the house next door and knocked. There was a yellow ceramic heart on the door, with “The Pressmans” lettered in green.

The door sensor buzzed. “Good evening, sir. This is the residence of Ron and Sybil Pressman. Please state your business.”

David held his ID up to be scanned. “Detective Silver. I'm here to see Mrs. Darnell.”

The door opened. The man peering out was heavy and short. His hair was oily and mussed, and his shorts were rumpled khakis with mud stains on the front. David smelled beer on the man's breath.