by Neil Clarke
He knew he had to finish up a report on a domestic slaying from two days back, so he set to it. Most murders were by guys driven crazy by screeching kids and long-term debt and bipolar wives. Alcohol helped. They had figured out their method about ten seconds before doing it and had no alibi, no plausible response to physical evidence, and no story that didn’t come apart under a two-minute grilling. When you took them out to the car in cuffs the neighbors just nodded at each other and said they’d always figured on this, hadn’t they said so?
This was a no-brainer case. He finished the paperwork, longing for that paperless office, and dispatched it to the prosecutor’s office. They would cut the deal and McKenna would never hear of it again. Unless the perp showed up in fifteen years on his front porch, demanding vengeance. That had happened, too. Now McKenna went armed, even on Sundays to church.
Then he sat and figured.
The ME thought the odd marks on Ethan Anselmo might be electrocution. Torture? Yet the guy was no lowlife. He had no history of drug-running using shrimp boats, the default easy way for a fisherman to bring in extra income all along the Gulf. For a moment McKenna idly wondered when the War on Drugs would end, as so many failed American adventures had, with admission that the war was clearly lost. It would certainly be easier to legalize, tax, and control most drugs than it was to chase after them. He had at first figured Anselmo for a drug gang killing. There were plenty of them along the Gulf shore. But now that felt wrong.
His desktop computer told him that the Anselmo case was now online in the can’t-crack site Mobile used to coordinate police work now. There were some additions from the autopsy and a background report on Anselmo, but nothing that led anywhere.
He sighed. Time to do some shoe-leather work.
The Busted Flush was back at its dock. McKenna had changed into a beat-up work shirt and oil-stained jeans. Sporting a baseball cap, he found the crew hosing off a net rig inside the big aluminum boathouse nearby. “Pitscomb around?” he asked them, rounding the vowels to fit the local accent.
A thirty-something man walked over to McKenna. One cheek had a long, ugly scar now gone to dirty pink. His hair was blond and ratty, straight and cut mercifully short. But the body was taut and muscular and ready; the scrollwork tattoos of jailhouse vintage showed he had needed for much of his life. He wore a snap-button blue work shirt with a stuck-on nameplate that said Buddy Johnson. Completing the outfit was a hand-tooled belt with carry hooks hanging and half-topped boots that needed a polish pretty bad.
“Who wants to know?”
The stern, gravel voice closed a switch in McKenna’s head. He had seen this guy a decade before when he helped make an arrest. Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they yanked the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.
“Lookin’ for work,” McKenna said. This guy couldn’t be heading up the operation, so he needed to go higher.
“We got none.” The eyes crinkled as if Buddy was trying to dredge up a memory.
McKenna shifted his own tone from soft to medium. “I need to see your boss.”
Still puzzling over the memory, Johnson waved toward the boathouse. McKenna walked away, feeling Johnson’s eyes on his back.
Pitscomb was at the back of the building, eating hog cracklings from a greasy bag, brushing the crumbs into the lagoon. Carrion birds eyed him as they drifted by on the soft slurring wind, keeping just above the gnarled tops of the dead cypress, just in case they saw some business below that needed doing.
Pitscomb was another matter. Lean, angular, intelligent blue eyes. McKenna judged that he might as well come clean. He showed his badge and said with a drawl, “Need to talk about Ethan Anselmo.”
Pitscomb said, “Already heard. He didn’t come to work that night.”
“Your crew, they’ll verify that?”
He grinned. “They’d better.”
“Why you have an ex-con working your boat?”
“I don’t judge people, I just hire ’em. Buddy’s worked out fine.”
“What do you do for the Centauris?”
“That’s a Federal matter, I was told to say.”
McKenna leaned against a pier stay. “Why do they use you, then? Why not take the Centauri out on their own boat?”
Pitscomb brushed his hands together, sending the last of the cracklings into the water. “You’d have to ask them. Way I see it, the Feds want to give the Centauris a feel for our culture. And spread the money around good an’ local, too.”
“What’s the Centauri do out there?”
“Just looks, swims. A kind of night off, I guess.”
“They live right next to the water.”
“Swimming out so far must be a lot of work, even for an amphibian.” By now Pitscomb had dropped the slow-South accent and was eyeing McKenna.
“How far out?”
“A few hours.”
“Just to swim?”
“The Feds don’t want me to spread gossip.”
“This is a murder investigation.”
“Just gossip, far as I’m concerned.”
“I can take this to the Feds.”
Again the sunny smile, as sincere as a postage stamp. “You do that. They’re not backwoods coon-asses, those guys.”
Meaning, pretty clearly, that McKenna was. He turned and walked out through the machine oil smells of the boathouse. Buddy Johnson was waiting in the moist heat. He glowered but didn’t say anything.
As he walked past McKenna said, using hard vowels, “Don’t worry, now. I haven’t chewed off anybody’s arm in nearly a week.”
Buddy still didn’t say anything, just smiled slyly. When McKenna got to his car he saw the reason.
A tire was flat, seeming to ooze into the blacktop. McKenna glanced back at Buddy, who waved and went back inside. McKenna thought about following him but it was getting warm and he was sticking to his shirt. Buddy would wait until he knew more, he figured.
He got his gloves from the trunk, then lifted out the jack, lug wrench, and spare. He squatted down and started spinning the nuts off, clattering them into the hubcap. By the time he fitted the spare on the axle and tightened the wheel nuts with the jack, then lowered it, he had worked up a sweat and smelled himself sour and fragrant.
The work had let him put his mind on cruise and as he drove away he felt some connections link up.
The Pizottis. One of them was a real professor, the kind he needed. Was that family fish fry tonight? He could just about make it.
Since Linda died he had seen little of the Pizotti family. Their shared grief seemed to drive them apart. The Pizottis always kept somewhat distant anyway, an old country instinct.
He drove over the causeway to the eastern shore of the bay and then down through Fairhope to the long reaches south of the Grand Hotel. He had grown up not far away, spending summers on the Fish River at Grammaw McKenzie’s farm. To even reach the fish fry, on an isolated beach, he decided to take a skiff out across Weeks Bay.
The Pizottis had invited him weeks ago, going through the motions of pretending he was family. They weren’t the reason, of course. He let himself forget about all that as he poled along amid the odors of reeds and sour mud, standing in the skiff. In among the cattails lurked alligators, one with three babies a foot and a half long. They scattered away from the skiff, nosing into the muddy fragrant water, the mother snuffing as she sank behind the young ones. He knew the big legendary seventeen-footers always lay back in the reeds, biding their time. As he coasted forward on a few oar strokes, he saw plenty of lesser lengths lounging in the late sun like metallic sculptures. A big one ignored
the red-tailed hawk on a log nearby, knowing it was too slow to ever snare the bird. By a cypress tree, deep in a thick tangle of matted saw grass, a gray possum was picking at something and sniffing like it couldn’t decide whether to dine or not. The phosphorus-loving cattails had moved in further up the bay, stealing away the skiff’s glide so he came to a stop. He didn’t like the cattails and felt insulted by their presence. Cattails robbed sunlight from the paddies and fish below, making life harder for the water-feeding birds.
He cut toward Mobile Bay where the fish fry should be and looked in among the reeds. There were lounging gators like logs sleeping in the sun. One rolled over in the luxury of the warm mud and gave off a moaning grunt, an umph-umph-umph with mouth closed. Then it opened in a yawn and achieved a throaty, bellowing roar. He had seen alligators like that before in Weeks Bay where the Fish River eased in, just below the old arched bridge. Gators seemed to like bridges. They would lie in the moist heat and sleep, the top predators here, unafraid. He admired their easy assurance that nothing could touch them, their unthinking arrogance.
Until people came along, only a few centuries before, with their rifles. He suddenly wondered if the Centauris were like this at all. They were amphibians, not reptiles. What would they make of gators?
A gator turned and looked up at him for a long moment. It held the gaze, as if figuring him out. It snuffed and waddled a little in the mud to get more comfortable and closed its big eyes. McKenna felt an odd chill. He paddled faster.
The other wing of the Pizotti family was on the long sand bar at the end of Weeks Bay, holding forth in full cry. He came ashore, dragged the skiff up to ground it, and tried to mix. The Pizottis’ perfunctory greetings faded and they got back to their social games.
He had loved Linda dearly but these were not truly his kind of people. She had been serene, savoring life while she had it. The rest of the Pizottis were on the move. Nowadays the Gulf’s Golden Coast abounded with Masters of the Universe. They sported excellently cut hair and kept themselves slim, casually elegant, and carefully muscled. Don’t want to look like a laborer, after all, never mind what their grandfathers did for a living. The women ran from platinum blond through strawberry, quite up to the minute. Their plastic surgery was tasteful: eye-smoothings and maybe a discreet wattle tuck. They carried themselves with that look not so much of energetic youth but rather of expert maintenance, like a Rolls with the oil religiously changed every 1500 miles. Walking in their wake made most working stiffs feel just a touch shabby.
One of them eyed him and professed fascination with a real detective. He countered with enthusiasm for the fried flounder and perch a cousin had brought. Food was a good dodge, though these were fried in too much oil. He held out for a polite ten minutes and then went to get one of the crab just coming off the grill. And there, waiting for the next crab to come sizzling off, was Herb. Just in time. McKenna could have kissed him.
It didn’t take too long to work around to the point of coming here. Herb was an older second cousin of Linda, and had always seemed to McKenna like the only other Pizotti who didn’t fit in with the rest. He had become an automatic friend as soon as McKenna started courting her.
“It’s a water world,” Herb said, taking the bit immediately. He had been a general science teacher at Faulkner State in Fairhope, handling the chemistry and biology courses. “You’re dead on, I’ve been reading all I could get about them.”
“So they don’t have much land?” McKenna waved to the woman who loved detectives and shrugged comically to be diplomatic. He got Herb and himself a glass of red, a Chianti.
“I figure that’s why they’re amphibians. Best to use what there’s plenty of. Their planet’s a moon, right?—orbiting around a gas giant like Jupiter. It gets sunlight from both Centauri stars, plus infrared from the gas giant. So it’s always warm and they don’t seem to have plate tectonics, so their world is real, real different.”
McKenna knew enough from questioning witnesses to nod and look interested. Herb was already going beyond what he’d gotten from TV and newspapers and Scientific American. McKenna tried to keep up. As near as he could tell, plate tectonics was something like the grand unified theory of geology. Everything from the deep plains of the ocean to Mount Everest came from the waltz of continents, butting together and churning down into the deep mantle. Their dance rewrote climates and geographies, opening up new possibilities for life and at times closing down old ones. But that was here, on Earth.
The other small planets of our solar system didn’t work that way. Mars had been rigid for billions of years. Venus upchucked its mantle and buried its crust often enough to leave it barren.
So planets didn’t have to work like Earth, and the Centauri water world was another example. It rotated slowly, taking eight days to get around its giant neighbor. It had no continents, only strings of islands. And it was old—more than a billion years older than Earth. Life arose there from nothing more than chemicals meeting in a warm sea while sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.
“So they got no idea about continents?” McKenna put in.
Herb said he sure seemed to miss lecturing, ever since he retired, and it made him a dinner companion not exactly sought after here among the Pizottis. McKenna had never thought he could be useful, like now. “They took one up in an airplane, with window blinds all closed, headphones on its ears. Turns out it liked Bach! Great, huh?”
McKenna nodded, kept quiet. None of the other Pizottis was paying any attention to Herb. They seemed to be moving away, even.
“The blindfold was so it wouldn’t get scared, I guess. They took off the blindfold and showed it mountains, river valleys, all that. Centauris got no real continents, just strings of islands. It could hardly believe its clamshell eyes.”
“But they must’ve seen those from space, coming in. Continents and all.”
“Not the same, close up.”
“So maybe they’re thinking to move inland, explore?”
“I doubt it. They got to stick close to warm, salty water.”
McKenna wondered if they had any global warming there and then said, “They got no oil, I guess. No place for all those ferns to grow, so long ago.”
Herb blinked. “Hadn’t figured that. S’pose so. But they say they got hurricanes alla time, just the way we do now.”
McKenna poked a finger up and got them another glass of the Chianti. Herb needed fueling.
“It’s cloudy alla time there, the astro boys say. They can never see through the clouds. Imagine, not knowing for thousands of years that there are stars.”
McKenna imagined never having a sunny day. “So how’d they ever get a space program going?”
“Slow and steady. Their civilization is way old, y’know, millions of years. They say their spaceships are electric, somehow.”
McKenna couldn’t imagine electric rockets. “And they’ve got our kind of DNA.”
Herb brightened. “Yeah, what a surprise. Spores brought it here, Scientific American figures.”
“Amazing. What sort of biology do amphibians have?”
Herb shrugged and pushed a hush puppy into his mouth, then chewed thoughtfully. The fish fry was a babble all around them and McKenna had to concentrate. “Dunno. There’s nothing in the science press about that. Y’know, Centauris are mighty private about that stuff.”
“They give away plenty of technology, the financial pages say.”
“You bet, whole new products. Funny electrical gadgets, easy to market.”
“So why are they here? Not to give us gifts.” Might as well come out and say it.
“Just like Carl Sagan said, right? Exchange cultures and all. A great adventure, and we get it without spending for starships or anything.”
“So they’re tourists? Who pay with gadgets?”
Herb knocked back the rest of his Chianti. “Way I see it, they’re lo
nely. They heard our radio a century back and started working on a ship to get here.”
“Just like us, you think about it. Why else do we make up ghosts and angels and the like? Somebody to talk to.”
“Only they can’t talk.”
“At least they write.”
“Translation’s hard, though. The Feds are releasing a little of it, but there’ll be more later. You see those Centauri poems?”
He vaguely recalled some on the front page of the paper. “I couldn’t make sense of it.”
Herb grinned brightly. “Me either, but it’s fascinating. All about the twin suns. Imagine!”
When he got home he showered, letting the steam envelop him and ease away the day. His mind had too much in it, tired from the day. Thinking about sleep, when he often got his best ideas, he toweled off.
The shock came when he wiped the steam from the mirror and saw a smeary old man, blotchy skin, gray hair pasted to the skull, ashen whiskers sprouting from deep pores. He had apparently gone a decade or two without paying attention to mirrors.
Fair enough, if they insult you this deeply. He slapped some cream on the wrinkles hemming in his eyes, dressed, sucked in his belly, and refused to check himself out in the mirror again. Insults enough, for one day. Growing older he couldn’t do much about, but Buddy Johnson was another matter.
At dawn he quite deliberately went fishing. He needed to think.
He sat on his own wharf and sipped orange juice. He had to wash off the reels with the hose from the freshwater tank as waves came rolling in and burst in sprays against the creaking pilings. He smelled the salty tang of bait fish in his bucket and, as if to tantalize him, a speckled fish broke from a curling wave, plunging headfirst into the foam. He had never seen a fish do that and it proved yet again that the world was big and strange and always changing. Other worlds, too.
He sat at his desk and shuffled paper for the first hour of the morning shift. He knew he didn’t have long before the Ethan Anselmo case hit a dead end. Usually a homicide not wrapped up in two weeks had a less-than-even chance of ever getting solved at all. After two weeks the case became an unclaimed corpse in the files, sitting there in the dark chill of neglect.