Junkyard

by Lindsay Buroker

  She supposed it could have been an accident, given the amount of sharp debris in the junkyard, but it looked more like someone had thrown something at the dog. To scare him away? She clenched her teeth, tears threatening to film her eyes, and tossed him the treat he’d been sniffing.

  He plucked it out of the air, then sat down ten feet away, as if to say he wasn’t going to let her get any closer if she was interested in his injury.

  “You may have to get stunned anyway,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve got a canine tranquilizer on the ship. Unless I can convince you to come voluntarily? How would you like to see my sickbay?”

  Her earstar chimed softly, and Scipio spoke over the comm.

  “Captain? I have located a suspicious hole in the fence near the warehouse. I’m coming to get you, so I can lead you to it.”

  “I’m still in the same spot.” She lowered her voice. “Just give us a few minutes, boy, and I’ll take you to see if we can fix you up.”

  Scipio appeared, carrying his shoes in his hands, his black socks covered in dust, with chewing gum stuck to the side of one. Despite the sock grime, he appeared disinclined to leave his shoes within canine reach.

  The dog’s eyes brightened when he saw the tassels flapping, and McCall didn’t know if Scipio going sans shoes had improved the situation.

  “Follow me, Captain.” Scipio glanced at the dog but did not extend the invitation to him.

  “You can come,” she told him.

  The dog trailed them as Scipio led her toward a portion of the fence that ran adjacent to the side of the warehouse with only a few inches of space between the two structures. Surprisingly, there was a big round hole in the fence. Even more surprising, there was a big round hole in the wall of the building.

  She hadn’t noticed either when she’d peered into the gap between fence and building earlier. And she certainly hadn’t noticed the hole from inside the warehouse, but she recalled that stacks of drums completely lined that wall. She didn’t know how deep the stacks were, but she couldn’t see any light through them from this side.

  “Got an age estimate on this?” she whispered to Scipio, more conscious of her voice now that she knew there was the equivalent of an open window here.

  “Recent.” He pointed out freshly frayed splinters in the wood where the boards had been cut.

  McCall nodded in agreement. “Why make a hole here instead of simply taking things out one of the doors? Do you think this is an area not covered by internal or exterior cameras?”

  “That is likely. Perhaps the footage was not doctored, after all. Perhaps the perpetrators simply knew the blind spots in the warehouse and worked within them.”

  McCall shined her light on the ground, looking for signs that heavy drums—or had the thieves syphoned the syrup from the drums into smaller jugs?—had been dragged out recently. The packed dirt didn’t show much. Maybe a real tracker could have distinguished more, but the ground was too hard for tracks to show, and it was also possible the area had been covered in snow when the theft occurred.

  “And where did the thieves take the syrup from here? Through the front gate of the junkyard to a vehicle waiting there?” McCall scratched her jaw as she thought of the rusty padlock. It hadn’t looked like it had been disturbed in some time, but someone could have cut it and replaced it with an equally rusty one. “I haven’t finished skimming through the footage I snagged from the traffic cameras yet.”

  She grimaced at the idea that she might have to. Even when playing them on fast-forward, it was a mind-numbing task. She was tempted to write a search algorithm that she could apply, then simply have the ship’s computer scan the footage and pick out significant events, but it would be a challenge to teach it to distinguish regular vehicles from nefarious maple-syrup-stealing vehicles.

  “Away,” Scipio said. “Away, junkyard beast.”

  McCall looked over her shoulder in time to see Scipio waving a hand and raising his loafers overhead. The dog jumped up, trying to get them, as if this were a fun game. As McCall had suspected, the shoes were even more appealing now that they were off Scipio’s feet and had gone from being a part of him to being a toy, at least in the dog’s mind.

  “…be the ones to get in trouble,” a distant voice said, someone speaking from within the warehouse.

  McCall held a finger to her lips and scooted closer to the hole in the wall. That sounded like one of the security guards.

  “We didn’t do anything,” a second speaker growled.

  “But we didn’t catch who did.”

  “There wasn’t a nightshift then. How can we be blamed for that?” McCall thought that sounded like the guard with the bionic hand, Mahajan.

  “I don’t know, but somebody’s going to get blamed, and the boss doesn’t like me. I appreciate you letting me in to get my stuff, and if you’re smart, you won’t come back to work tomorrow either. He doesn’t like you any more than he likes me. Can Opener.”

  “That’s because he’s an asshole. Isn’t there a rule against mocking your employees?”

  The voices grew more distant, as if the men were moving.

  “I don’t know, but I’m quitting, and you should too.”

  “That’s going to look suspicious, you idiot,” Mahajan said. “That android was already asking about people who commed in sick today. You’re on his radar.”

  “Shit.”

  A door clanged, and McCall heard it both through the hole and from around the corner of the building. The men were leaving out the front.

  She bit her lip, half-tempted to send Scipio up there to stun them to drag them onto the ship for questioning. If she’d been a law enforcer officially on the case, she might have, but she was simply an imperial subject privately hired to look for missing syrup. If she started stunning and questioning people, she could end up in trouble with the law herself.

  Thunderous barking came from right behind her, and McCall thunked her head on the edge of the hole.

  The dog took off running along the fence line, or as close as he could manage around the piles of junk. He reached the corner and barked at the men who were likely walking to the vehicle park.

  McCall rubbed her head.

  “He is a noisy junkyard dog,” Scipio observed quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  “It sounds like those two men are not responsible for the crime.”

  McCall almost nodded in agreement, but… “Are we sure they didn’t know we were listening? We weren’t keeping our voices down before we saw the hole. They may have heard us first and staged their conversation there, pretending they hadn’t.”

  “It is possible. Do you wish to snoop inside next?”

  “No. We would have to break a lock for that since Dunham didn’t give us a key. We can snoop around some more tomorrow.” McCall was tempted to suggest they snoop further in the junkyard, but the dog returned to them and flopped down on the ground, not on the side with the jagged piece of metal sticking out. “We need to help our new friend first. Have you, by chance, ever downloaded a veterinary routine?”

  Scipio lowered his loafers and issued her Displeased Expression Number One.

  Part III

  McCall sipped espresso as she sat in her office and watched the traffic camera footage at ten times normal speed. She had tried coding a search algorithm, but as she’d feared, it had been too difficult to instruct the ship’s computer in regard to what looked suspicious. Numerous delivery vans visited the warehouse every day, dropping off supplies for the sugarhouse, and others came to pick up drums of syrup. In addition, large farm and logging vehicles rolled down the street many times a day on their way to their rural destinations.

  “What’s this?” she murmured, leaning forward in her chair and swiping her finger through the display to pause the playback.

  A black ship had appeared on the nearest traffic camera. It had flown over the maple trees, the back fence, and hovered over a towering debris pile in the middle of the junkyard.


  “Zoom in on the ship,” she ordered the computer.

  It complied to the best of its ability. The camera had been focused on the street, and the ship had stopped at least a hundred yards inside the junkyard. It was only luck that it showed up at all.

  “Identify the model of the ship,” she said, hoping the computer could tell from the blurry outline. She didn’t see any identification, so it was unlikely she could look up the owner, but this could be the starting point she’d sought. The time display on the footage informed her that this had happened at two hours past midnight local time. The dark ship wouldn’t have been visible to the human eye if not for the lights along the perimeter of the junkyard.

  “Unknown model,” the computer informed her.

  “Unknown?”

  “Affirmative.”

  That was strange. It wasn’t as if there were that many manufacturers of spaceships in the system. The sys-net had information on anything large enough to have been produced in even a limited run.

  “It is a spaceship, right?” McCall asked. “Not simply an aircraft local to this moon?”

  The computer answered by displaying “ninety-five percent certainty” that it was a spaceship, along with a list and table of reasons for the assessment.

  McCall tapped the holo controls, ordering the footage to play at normal speed. The ship didn’t hover for long before a hatch opened. Something fuzzy rolled out of it and fell onto the debris pile. No, not fuzzy. Furry.

  She cringed as the junkyard dog struck down—he must have fallen twenty feet—and then tumbled down the side of the pile and out of sight. The hatch closed and the ship flew away.

  This must have been when the dog was impaled. She glanced at the date stamp. Thirty days ago. Damn, the dog had been running around with that shard in his side for four weeks? He must have kept bumping it and causing it to bleed anew. The poor thing.

  McCall dashed aside tears and, struggling for scientific detachment, backed up the video to when the hatch had been open. Who had pushed the dog out?

  Though she zoomed in as much as possible, it was too blurry to see anything with certainty. She glimpsed what might have been a person’s gloved hands, but it might have been a robot or an android too. She never saw a face, nor did the back side of the ship reveal any identification as it turned and flew away.

  At no point did the black vessel approach the warehouse or stop again to pick up any cargo, not within sight of the traffic camera. There was another street-side camera farther up the road from the warehouse that would have collected footage of the ship if it had landed on the other side. Her own ship was currently displayed on it.

  As McCall rolled the rest of the footage, she checked the spaceport’s logs for that night. Only two ships had landed or taken off, and neither was black, model unknown.

  Did that ship and the poor dumped dog have anything to do with the maple-syrup mystery? Or was the dog a second, unrelated mystery? Why would someone have dumped him in a rural junkyard? If he’d been a guard dog and become too much of a nuisance to keep around, why not kill him? She would never do such a thing, but she had no trouble imagining imperial security shooting a dog.

  Not that the ship she’d seen had imperial markings on it. It hadn’t had any markings at all.

  McCall growled and watched the rest of the traffic-camera footage. It caught up to real time, with nothing else of note happening.

  “Either I blinked at an inopportune moment or the theft happened longer ago than Dunham believes.”

  It wasn’t a question, so the computer didn’t answer. And, since she was alone in her office, nobody else did either. That was typical, but the silence made her think of the dog. Funny that she could imagine him lounging on the deck and snoring while she worked. But a spaceship wasn’t any better place for a dog than a junkyard. Where would he run? Would he do laps around the cargo hold? Would she have to get a doggie treadmill to set up alongside hers in the tiny exercise cabin? And where would he… do his business?

  A knock sounded at the door, and she rose to stretch her back. It was well past midnight according to local time.

  “Come in, Scipio.”

  He opened the hatch and stepped inside. “I can confirm that your random assignment of sex was correct.”

  “For the dog? It wasn’t random. I knew he was male as soon as he flung himself against the fence. What female would do such a thing?” She smiled, but it was a weak joke. Her mind was still on the image of the dog being pushed out that hatch.

  Scipio cocked his head. “There are many species in which the females are more aggressive than the males. Had the dog been protecting a litter of pups—”

  McCall lifted a hand. “Never mind. How is he doing? Were you able to remove that piece of metal?”

  She felt guilty for foisting the surgery on Scipio, but she didn’t have the ability to download software to instantly teach herself how to perform a new skill. Nor did she like the sight of blood or the insides of bodies, human, canine, or otherwise.

  “Yes,” Scipio said, “but you may wish to come look at his X-rays and examine him before he wakes up.”

  “Examine him?”

  She envisioned holding a med-lyzer to his furry chest or probing orifices with instruments. The latter sounded particularly unappealing. Then she realized Scipio might have found something that would explain why the dog had been dumped.

  She followed him to the ship’s small sickbay, cabinets, counters, and a single examining table the extent of its furnishings. Seeing a huge unconscious dog lying on his side on it was a strange sight. As was the shaved fur around the wound. At least the metal protrusion had been removed and the wound sealed and smeared with QuickSkin.

  “The shard was a relatively recent wound, but he’s suffered numerous other injuries in the past.” Scipio pointed to X-rays hovering in a holodisplay behind the exam table. “He’s had numerous cracked ribs, a fractured skull, and the tip of his tail was cut off, perhaps caught in some machinery. It is possible an accident caused the other wounds, but it is also possible the injuries were not accidental.”

  McCall’s eyes welled with sympathetic tears as she looked from the dog to the X-rays and back again. She stepped forward and stroked his thick, furred neck.

  “I only sanitized the area directly around the wound before operating on him.” Scipio looked pointedly at her hand.

  “What?”

  “He may harbor all manner of bacteria. You should wear a glove when touching him so you don’t contract a disease.”

  She snorted but admitted, “His fur is a bit crunchy.”

  “Have you found any further leads in regard to the maple-syrup heist?”

  McCall went back to stroking the dog’s neck, crunchy fur notwithstanding. “Unfortunately, no.”

  She couldn’t help but wonder if that ship was related, but since she hadn’t seen it take off with tons of maple syrup, she couldn’t assume it was.

  “I stand by my earlier belief that this is an inside job, but nobody listed on the payroll has a criminal past. I have a short list of suspects simply based on suspicious activity, and I intend to poke into their personal records to see if any are in untenable debt or may be potential targets for blackmail, but this whole setup is making me wish I was more comfortable with—and a lot better at—questioning people directly.”

  She shuddered at the mere idea of being confrontational. Sometimes, when her nerves were frayed and she was tense, she snapped at people, but she preferred to avoid arguments and hurt feelings whenever possible. She preferred avoiding people whenever possible. Talking to Louis might be all right, since he would most likely burble about his passion for maple trees instead of asking questions or getting defensive over her questions. Maybe she could chat with him in the morning.

  “I can question the suspects on your list and assess the likelihood that they are telling me the truth,” Scipio said. “By analyzing human body language, I can determine whether someone is lying with sixty-eight-per
cent accuracy.”

  “That’s not bad.”

  “I am less adept at determining human motivations for committing crime.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She had a list of typical motivations hanging on the wall by her desk, and she sometimes had to glance over and remind herself. So little of what motivated other people even interested her. All she wanted from life was the freedom to go where she wished and do work that challenged her and that she enjoyed. Now and then, she thought about what it would be like to have a life companion, but she was so horrible at dating that she didn’t even try. When she had added Scipio to her ship, it had provided the unintended benefit of giving her someone to talk to when she was lonely. She wondered what her mother would have said of her making friends with an android. The poor woman had never quite understood McCall or her sister McKenzie. They were too much like their father, aloof and hard to live with. Hard to love, she supposed, though Mom had done her best.

  “Do you wish to rest before the workday starts inside the warehouse and sugarhouse?” Scipio asked. “I have observed that you function optimally when you get at least seven-point-five hours of sleep a night, and it is already late.”

  “So I do.” She was somewhat amused that her new android friend thought it was his job to take care of her. “I may poke deeper into those people’s backgrounds first though. I especially want to comb through Dunham’s credit records, as it seemed to bother him that the maple syrup is worth so much and he apparently earns little after expenses and taxes. I could envision him stealing his own syrup, selling it on the black market, and stashing the earnings somewhere he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on them. I have to admit it bemuses me that there’s a black market for syrup. A few days ago, I never would have guessed.”

  “Would Dunham have hired you if he had stolen it himself? Would he not have preferred to let the slow-acting and possibly indifferent local authorities deal with the crime?”