Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth

by Neil Clarke

  Then, if you timed it right, they got arrested.

  So then the pressure came off. The hard weight of tension, the slow-building stress fidgeting at the back of the mind—all that came home to roost. They flopped down on the thin pad of their bunk and pulled the rough wool blanket over their faces and fell like the coming of heaven into a deep sleep. Many of them barely made it to the bunk before the energy bled out of them.

  But now think about the guy who didn’t do it. He knows he didn’t do it even if the goddamn world doesn’t. He is scared, sure, because he is far enough into the downstreet culture to know that justice is a whore and lawyers run the whorehouse. And so he is in real danger here. But he also for sure knows that he has to fight hard now, think, pay attention. And he is mad too because he didn’t do it and shouldn’t that matter?

  So he frets and sits and doesn’t sleep. He is ragged-eyed and slurring his words when he tries to tell the other guys in the cell—who have rolled over and gone to sleep—that he didn’t do it. It would be smart to be some kind of Zen samurai and sleep on this, he knows that, but he can’t. Because he didn’t do it.

  On a cell surveillance camera you can see the difference immediately. Get the cell assignments and go to the room where a bored overweight uniform watched too many screens. Check out the numbers on the screens, find the cells, watch the enhanced-light picture. The sleepers faced away from the lights, coiled up in their blankets. The ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t—it didn’t matter much which—ignored the lights and you could see their eyes clicking around as they thought all this through.

  Next morning, he leaned on the sleeper and released the guy who had stayed up all night. Sometimes the innocent ones could barely walk. But at least they were out in the sun.

  The sleepers sometimes took days to break. Some of them had the smarts or the clout lawyers, to lawyer up. But he had them and that was the point.

  He had learned all this, more years back than he wanted to think about, and it would still be true when he was long gone from this Earth.

  He brought in Pitscomb and Rundorf at sunset. Got them booked, photoed, fingerprinted. They gave him plenty of mouth and he just stayed silent, doing his job.

  Into the overnight holding cell they went.

  He had a bottle of Zinfandel and slept well that night.

  Back in at sunup, Pitscomb and Rundorf were red-eyed and irritated.

  His supervisor was irritated, too. “I didn’t tell you to bring them in late.”

  “You didn’t? I must have misheard.” McKenna kept his face absolutely still while he said it. He had practiced that in the mirror when he first made detective and it was a valuable skill.

  He made the best of interrogating Pitscomb and Rundorf but the simple fact that they had stayed awake most of the night took McKenna’s confidence away. The two gave up nothing. He booked them out and had some uniforms drive them home.

  His partner came in that afternoon. LeBouc was a burly man who liked detail, so McKenna handed off some stickup shootings to him. They had been waiting for attention and McKenna knew they would get no leads. The perps were the same black gang that had hit the minimarkets for years and they knew their stuff. The videotapes showed only rangy guys in animal masks. LeBouc didn’t seem to mind. McKenna filled him in on the drowned cases but he couldn’t make an argument for where to go next. The cases were cooling off by the minute now, headed for the storage file.

  McKenna had never been as systematic as LeBouc, who was orderly even when he was fishing. So when LeBouc said, “How’d those phone numbers from the illegal turn out?” McKenna felt even worse. He had noticed them in the stack of paper at Castan’s shack, just before he found the Bayside Boats notepaper. Like a hound dog, he chased that lead down and forgot the telephone numbers.

  He got right on them. One was the Mexican consulate in New Orleans, probably for use if Jorge got picked up.

  One number answered in a stony voice saying only, “Punch in your code.” The rest answered in Spanish and he got nowhere with them. He thought of getting a Spanish speaker but they were in high demand and he would have to wait for days. Nobody in Homicide knew more than restaurant Spanish. He went back to the stony voice, a Mobile number.

  Usually, to break a number you use a reverse directory of published numbers. McKenna found nothing there. There were lesser-known electronic directories of unpublished numbers that link phone numbers to people and addresses. He found those in the Mobile Police database. They were built up nationally, working from anyone who used the number to place a phone order. So he considered pretexting. To pretext, you call the phone company repair department, saying there’s a problem on the line and getting them to divulge the address associated with the account. But you needed a warrant to do that and his credit had run out with Judge Preston.

  If he couldn’t pretend to be someone else, maybe he could pretend that his phone was someone else’s. That would be caller-ID spoofing—making it seem as if a phone call is coming from another phone, rather than his Homicide number. That made it more likely that the target person would answer the call, even if they had the new software that back-tracked the caller in less than a second. McKenna’s office number was not in the phone book but for sure it was in any sophisticated database software. And the stony voice sounded professional, smart.

  Spoofing used to require special equipment, but now with internet phone calling and other Web services it was relatively easy to do. So easy, in fact, that just about anyone can do it. But McKenna hadn’t. It took an hour of asking guys and gals in the office to get it straight. Everybody had a fine time making fun of “the Perfesser” coming to them for help, of course. He developed a fixed grin.

  Once you burned an hour to know how, it took less than a minute.

  The site even had a code breakdown for the number, too. When stony voice answered, McKenna typed in the last four digits of the number again and in a few more seconds he got a ring. “Hello?”

  McKenna said nothing. “Hello?” the voice of Dark Glasses said.

  It took a while for his supervisor to go through channels and pin a name on Dark Glasses. The next morning Dark Glasses was in Federal court, the FBI office said. So McKenna found him, waiting to testify.

  “May I have a word in the hallway?” McKenna sat down in the chair at the back of the court. Somebody was droning on in front and the judge looked asleep.

  “Who are you?” Dark Glasses said, nose up in the air. He wasn’t wearing the glasses now and it was no improvement.

  McKenna showed the badge. “Remember me? You were with Mr. Marine.”

  “Who?”

  “You didn’t say you were a lawyer, too.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your office. The FBI, remember?”

  The lawyer inched away but kept his chin out, first line of defense. “I’m waiting to testify on a Federal case.”

  “Murder crosses boundaries.”

  The bailiff was looking at them. He jerked a thumb toward the doors. In the hallway Dark Glasses had revived his lawyerly presence. “Make it quick.”

  “This is about one of your cases, Jorge Castan.”

  “I don’t discuss my cases.”

  He moved to go past and McKenna casually put a hand on his chest.

  “You have no right to touch me. Move away.”

  McKenna just shook his head. “You know what’s up. Your case got himself murdered, looks like. The second one like that in a week. And the Bar Association Web site says that before you got hired into the FBI you were an immigration lawyer. And you must know that your case was an illegal or else you’re dumber than you look.”

  “I do not take a liking to insult. You touch me—”

  “You’re in serious trouble if you know what’s really up. See, murder is a local crime unless you can show it has a proper Federal issue that trumps l
ocal. Do you?”

  “I do not have to—”

  “Yes you do.”

  “There is not one scintilla of evidence—”

  “Save it for the judge. Wrong attitude, counselor.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “What I’m talking about, yeah. I hear it all the time. You guys must all watch the same movies.”

  “I am an attorney.” He drew himself up.

  “Yeah, and I know the number of the Bar Association. Being FBI won’t protect you.”

  “I demand to know—”

  Dark Glasses went on but little by little McKenna had been backing him up against the marble walls until the man’s shoulder blades felt it. Then his expression changed. McKenna could see in the lawyer’s face the schoolboy threatened by bullies. So he had gone into the law, which meant good ol’ safe words and paper, to escape the real world where the old primate signals held sway. Dark Glasses held his briefcase in front of his body in defense, but the shield wasn’t thick enough to stop McKenna from poking a finger into the surprisingly soft Dark Glasses bicep. “You’re up at bat now, lawyer.”

  “As an attorney—”

  “You’re assumed to be a liar. For hire. Almost rhymes, don’t it?”

  “I do not respond to insults.” He was repeating his material and he tilted his chin up again. McKenna felt his right hand come halfway up, balling into a fist, wanting so much to hit this clown hard on the point of that chin.

  “You knew to go looking for Jorge in jig time. Or maybe for the people who knew him. Why’s that?”

  “I—I’m going to walk away now.”

  “Not if you’re smart. One of those who knew him is an illegal, too. Maybe you wanted to use that to shut her up?”

  “That’s speculative—”

  “Not really, considering your expression. No, you’re working for somebody else. Somebody who has influence.”

  “My clients and cases are Bureau—”

  “Confidential, I know.”

  “I have every assurance that my actions will prove victorious in this matter.”

  McKenna grinned and slapped an open palm against the briefcase, a hard smack. The lawyer jumped, eyebrows shooting up, back on the playground during recess. “I—I have an attorney-client relationship that by the constitution—”

  “How ’bout the Bible?”

  “—demands that you respect his . . . protection.”

  “The next one who dies is on you, counselor.”

  In a shaky voice the lawyer pulled his briefcase even closer and nodded, looking at the floor as if he had never seen it before. A small sigh came from him, filled with gray despair.

  It was a method McKenna had worked out years ago, once he understood that lawyers were all talk and no muscle. Good cop/bad cop is a cliché, only the lawyer keeps looking for the good cop to show up and the good cop doesn’t. Bluff is always skin deep.

  The lawyer backed away once McKenna let him. “You better think about who you choose to represent. And who might that be, really?”

  “My client is—”

  “No, I mean who, really? Whose interest?”

  “I . . . I don’t know what you mean. I—”

  “You know more than you’ve said. I expect that. But you still have to think about what you do.” A rogue smile. “We all do.”

  “Look, we can handle this issue in a nice way—”

  “I’ll try being nicer if you’ll try being smarter.”

  McKenna slid a business card into the suit handkerchief pocket of Dark Glasses Lawyer. “Call me. I find out the same stuff before you do, and that you knew it—well, I’ll be without mercy, Counselor. No quarter.”

  McKenna stepped aside and let the lawyer flee from the playground. Dark Glasses didn’t look back.

  McKenna’s supervisor leaned back and scowled. “And you did this because? . . .”

  “Because two drowned men with strange scars don’t draw FBI without a reason, for starters.”

  “Not much to go on.”

  “The ME says he can’t identify the small puncture marks. Or what made those funny welts.”

  His supervisor made a sour grin. “You know how much physical evidence is worth. It has to fit a filled-in story.”

  “And I don’t have enough story.”

  He spread his hands, the cuff sliding up to expose part of his arm tattoo, rosy barbed wire.

  McKenna had read somewhere that an expert is one who has made all the possible mistakes in a narrow field. A wise man is one who has made them widely. It was supposed to be funny but it was too true for that.

  So he followed his good ole friend Buddy Johnson home from work that evening. Buddy liked his pleasures and spent the first hour of his night in a bar. Then he went out back to smoke a joint. It was dark and Buddy jumped a foot when McKenna shined the flashlight straight into his eyes.

  “Gee, that cigarette sure smells funny.”

  “What? Who you?”

  “The glare must be too much for you. Can’t you recognize my voice?”

  “What the—Look, I—”

  McKenna slipped behind him, dropping the flashlight to distract him, and got the cuffs on. “We’re gonna take a little ride.”

  McKenna took him in cuffs down a scruffy side alley and got him into Buddy’s own convertible. Puffing, feeling great, he strapped Buddy in with the seat belt, passenger side. Then McKenna drove two quick miles and turned into a car wash. The staff was out front finishing up and when they came out McKenna showed them the badge and they turned white. All illegals, of course, no English. But they knew the badge. They vanished like the dew after the dawn.

  Game time, down south.

  Even with cuffs behind his back, Buddy kept trying to say something.

  “Remember letting the air out of my tires?” McKenna hit him hard in the nose, popped some blood loose and Buddy shut up. McKenna drove the convertible onto the ratchet conveyor and went back to the control panel. It was in English and the buttons were well-thumbed, some of the words gone in the worn plastic. McKenna ran up a SUPER CLEAN and HOT WAX and LIGHT BUFF. Then he gave a little laugh and sent Buddy on his way.

  Hissing pressure hoses came alive. Big black brushes lowered into the open seats and whirred up to speed. They ripped Buddy full on. He started yelling and the slapping black plastic sheets slammed into him hard and he stopped screaming. McKenna hit the override and the brushes lifted away. Silence, only the dripping water on the convertible’s leather seats.

  McKenna shouted a question and waited. No answer. He could see the head lolling back and wondered if the man was conscious.

  McKenna thought about the two drowned men and hit the buttons again.

  The brushes hardly got started before a shrill cry came echoing back. McKenna stopped the machine. The brushes rose. He walked forward into the puddles, splashing and taking his time.

  “You’re nearly clean for the first time in your life, Buddy. Now I’m gonna give you a chance to come full clean with me.”

  “I . . . They ain’t gonna like . . .” His mouth opened expectantly, rimmed with drool. The eyes flickered, much too white.

  “Just tell me.”

  “They really ain’t gonna like—”

  McKenna turned and started back toward the control board. The thin, plaintive sobbing told him to turn around again. You could always tell when a man was broke clean through.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Nearly to Chandeleur.”

  “The islands?”

  “Yeah . . . long way out . . . takes near all night. Oil rigs . . . the wrecked ones.”

  “What’d you take out?”

  “Centauris. Usually one, sometimes two.”

  “The same one?”

  “Who can tell? They all look alike
to me. Pitscomb, he bowed and scraped to the Centauri and the Feds with him, but he don’t know them apart either.”

  “Pitscomb have anything to do with Ethan’s death?”

  “Man, I weren’t workin’ that night.”

  “Damn. What’d the rest of the crew say about it?”

  “Nothin’. All I know is that Ethan was on the boat one night and he didn’t come back to work next day.”

  “Who else was with the Centauri?”

  “Just Feds.”

  “What was the point of going out?”

  “I dunno. We carried stuff in big plastic bags. Crew went inside for ’bout an hour while we circled round the messed-up oil rigs. FBI and Centauri were out there. Dunno what they did. Then we come back.”

  McKenna took the cuffs off Buddy and helped him out of the car. To his surprise, Buddy could walk just fine. “You know Jorge?”

  “Huh? Yeah, that wetback?”

  “Yeah. You’re a wetback too now.”

  “Huh? Oh.” Buddy got the joke and to his credit, grinned. “Look, you don’t nail me on the dope, it’s even, okay?”

  “You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Buddy.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s fine. Keep your nose clean from here on out or I’ll bring you back here to clean it myself.”

  He hung his head. “Y’know, you’re right. I got to straighten up.”

  “You’re straight with me right now.”

  They even shook hands.

  A take-charge raccoon was working the trash when he hauled in on the oyster shell road. He shooed it away and then tossed it a watermelon that had gone old anyway.

  Then he sat on the porch and sipped a Cabernet and worked himself over about the car wash stunt. His wife had once told him, after he had worked up through being a uniform, then Vice and then bunko and finally Homicide, that the process had condensed him into a hard man. He had never said to her that maybe it was her long illness that had made him quiet around the house, wary and suspicious . . . but in the end maybe it was both. He had never been interested in small talk but had picked up the skill for getting witnesses to open up.