Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

7.

  We found a White Spot on Broadway, so empty it hummed, and by our manner convinced the waitress our need was serious. She brought us a full pot each, and even managed to turn up a couple of human-sized cups somewhere. Once she was sure we were liberally supplied with cream and sugar, she left us alone, without bothering to ask if we wanted anything else with that. I grabbed the check she put down, and set the amount plus a hundred percent tip under my saucer before adulterating my coffee.

  Nika took hers black, so she was already refilling her cup by the time I took my first sip. She said, “This is whack.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Zandor has told you all about this…Allen?” She said the name as if it were a synonym for evil. Maybe it was.

  I grimaced. “As much as I’d let him. And I wish I’d cut him off sooner. I just didn’t take in what I was hearing until I’d heard too much.”

  She nodded, staring down into her cup, only half hearing me. “Yeah. That business about using a drug that’s a perfect painkiller…”

  Frequently, when someone says something I don’t understand, or something I think they must surely have got wrong, I just nod and let it pass. I wish I had this time. But she looked like she was starting to tune me out. Perhaps it offended my ego. “You mean perfect pain enhancer.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  That’s all she said. Just those three words, and she was willing to drop it and move on.

  Not Einstein. “What would a sadist want with a painkiller?” Then she looked up from her coffee cup and I saw her eyes. “Oh shit, you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”

  I think you have to clench your teeth to make your jaw and temple twitch at the same time. “Yes, I am going to tell you, Russell. I want you to know exactly what you’ve dragged us both into.”

  “Look, I’ve got it,” I said frantically, “He’s a monster, he studies pain, if de Sade was a Marquis he’s the fucking King—”

  “The drug utterly obliterates all pain, for twelve hours. He injects it in a victim. He works on them for eleven hours, doing his best to break every single bone they have. Then he tells them how long they have before the drug wears off, and sits back to savor the show. Sometimes he lies and says they have two hours, just to be—thank you.”

  She was thanking me because I had turned my head. By luck I happened to turn into the booth instead of toward the aisle. By even better luck there wasn’t much in me but coffee, and not much of that yet.

  Finished, I lifted my head and looked around dizzily. Nobody in sight. “It was a reflex,” I said. I rinsed my mouth with the water I had not asked for, and added another five hundred percent to the tip under my saucer. Then we moved to another booth, bringing our pots and cups.

  She said, “We’re never going to take this guy if we can’t even bring ourselves to think about what he is.”

  My dizziness vanished at once, but the ringing sound in my ears increased. “What you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

  I don’t think she knew the joke, but she got the gist. “You son of a bitch, do you think you get to just drop this in my lap and walk away? You made your report, like a good citizen, and now your part is done?”

  “Well—shit, Nika, you’re a cop, right?”

  “Why did you pick me up on the street? You wanted a cop, why didn’t you just dial 911? Or walk into police headquarters?”

  “Hey, let me tell you something about walking into police headq—”

  “You didn’t file a report because you don’t have shit.” She realized she was too loud, and drank off the last of her second cup of coffee in a gulp. Somehow it enabled her to lower her volume without losing any intensity. “You know what I mean. You don’t have much information, and every scrap of it came from a mind reader.”

  “God damn it—”

  “It’s not that I mind looking like an asshole. Even if we assume every word is true—and Jesus, I’ll be awhile making my mind up on that one—and even if somehow I could get a Crown Attorney to come down here some night and convince her it’s all true, it wouldn’t be enough for her to apply for a search warrant. It wouldn’t be enough for my sergeant to authorize the manpower for an investigation.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Investigate what? If everything Zudie says is gospel, what you’ve got is an allegation that a person unknown intends to commit felonies on other persons unknown at an unknown location on an unknown date. How horrible the alleged felonies are is irrelevant.”

  “Not to the victims,” I snapped back. Sometimes even I myself am awed at my dumbness.

  “That’s right,” Nika said. “That’s why I can’t drop it. And why you can’t either. I’m an ordinary citizen in this. I’ll have no police infrastructure behind me, no authority, no special advantages. Hell, with what I’ve got, I can’t even get Zudie access to the sketch artist he wants. I’m going to have to work on my own time, and when that’s not enough I’ll have to take sick time.” She leaned forward. “There’s no way I can do it alone, Russell.”

  I was so agitated I forgot my stomach was tense and poured more coffee. This is actually interesting: it may give you some idea of what level of dumbness I mean. I decided not to add cream and sugar, because she took hers black, to show that I could be macho, too. And then with my next breath said, “Nika, look at me. Do you see a commando? A Navy SEAL? Travis McGee? Do you see even a good crossing guard? I’m two meters tall, I mass seventy kilos with my coat on, and I look like a newspaper columnist. Who’s fifty-mumble years old. The nastiest weapon I’ve ever used was an ad hominem argument. The last time anyone tried to harm me physically was in a dodgeball game. I would have been a coward during Vietnam, but fortunately I was 4-F so it never came up.”

  She let me run down, waited patiently until I was done, and another several seconds to be sure. Then she leaned even closer, and said very gently, “A family is going to be butchered like pigs, to amuse a bug. You know it. You’re either going to try and stop it, or you’re not. The rest of your life, you’ll either be someone who tried to stop it, or someone who didn’t.”

  “But—”

  She sat back in her seat. “Look, I am far from a mind reader, but even I know you’re not going to walk away from this. So can we please stop dicking around now, and start getting some planning done?”

  There was no help for it. I was just going to have to tell her. I took a sip of coffee—grimaced, and added cream and sugar. The time for macho posturing was past.

  “You’re right,” I told her. “I’m not going to walk away. I’m going to help in absolutely any way I can. But for you to do your planning, you need to be clear on the ways I can’t help. Not because I ‘don’t want to get involved.’ Not even because I’m afraid of this clown, although I am. Just because I can’t.”

  “So? What ways are those?”

  I sighed. “Basically, pretty much anything physical.”

  She gave me the look cops give civilians who insist on making idiotic wisecracks in a serious situation. “What—”

  I gave up and just spit it out. “I have collapsing lungs.”

  Now it was the look cops give civilians who start speaking in tongues.

  “I am subject to sudden lung collapses. It’s called spontaneous pneumothorax. I had my first one at fourteen, and I’ve probably had two or three dozen since.”

  “Nemoj me jebat!” She sat back in her seat and poured the last of her coffee. I could tell it wasn’t hot enough, but she drank some anyway. “What’s it like?”

  “Like an elephant sitting on one side of your chest. Fortunately to God I’ve never chanced to have both go down at once. You take air in tiny sips, and each one hurts like hell.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “It used to be a week or two of agony in a hospital, and then two or three weeks tottering around the house like a very old man made of cornflakes and Elmer’s glue. Twenty years ago I had some major surgery, and now the worst it usually gets is two day
s of sharp pain, spent lying down at home, and the rest of the week getting back up to snuff. But for those two days, lifting a full cup of coffee to my mouth is a big deal.”

  “How often do you get one of them?”

  “There’s no telling. I’ve gone three years without one. Another time I was three weeks in hospital, then when they let me go, I blew the other lung in the parking lot.”

  “What brings it on?”

  I shrugged. “Different things. Lifting more than twenty kilos or so. Straining to loosen a nut, changing a tire. Running more than a certain distance flat out. Sometimes it just happens, for no discernible reason at all, while I’m reading a book.”

  “What causes it?”

  “Just lucky, I guess. I was born with bubbles all over my lungs, just like a bald tire. Every so often, one pops.” I pointed upward, then let my finger droop while making a tssshhhwwwwww! sound, to indicate a deflating tire.

  Her face was a tug of war. You poor bastard versus terrific: a crip for backup, pretty well matched. I didn’t care which won; either was offensive to me. I made up my mind that whatever she said next, sympathy or disdain, I would use it as the pretext for a tantrum.

  And what she said was, “Okay. Then you can be the brains of the outfit. What’s the plan?”

  My mouth dropped open. It was several seconds before words started falling out. “Me? You’re the cop, for Christ’s sake. Catching the bad guys is your area of expertise. What do I know about police work? Stories my uncle told me, almost certainly lies, and television. If I’m the brains, we’re an idiot.”

  She shook her head stubbornly and began ticking off points on her fingers. “One: an idiot could not have figured out a way to convince me a man named Zandor Zudenigo can read people’s minds. Two: there are no experts in tracking someone like Allen. He has nothing to do with normal police work. This is going to be more like disease control. Three: you’ve been thinking about this for a day longer than I have. You must have come up with something by now. So what have you got?”

  Something about the way she’d pronounced Zudie’s name caught my attention. I remembered her odd exclamation when I’d first told her about my lungs. “Nika,” I asked suddenly, “what nationality are you? By extraction, I mean.”

  “My grandparents were all Croatian.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Wow, that’s amazing. Did you know that—”

  She grimaced and nodded. “Yeah yeah yeah, Zandor and I talked about it. A Serb and a Croat going after a monster together, big whoop. You civilians think irony is interesting. You ought to get out more.”

  I spread my hands. “My point exactly.”

  “God damn it, Russell, what have you come up with?”

  I sighed, lowered my head, and rubbed the muscles at the base of my neck. It doesn’t work much better than tickling yourself. “Okay. Sherlock Holmes said to start by eliminating the impossible. We have no way to identify or locate the intended victims that I can see. Clean-cut, good-looking families of four are thick on the ground in Point Grey.”

  She said, “If there’s a way to identify or locate the perpetrator, I don’t know what it would be. All we know is his first name is Allen—at least, we’re pretty sure it’s a first name—and he wrote a successful piece of software sometime in the last twenty years and he flies a small plane that may or may not be registered in his name and which he may or may not be licensed to fly under his own name and he knows a quiet spot along the Sea to Sky Highway.

  “On TV I would type those five data into a computer, and in less than three seconds it would produce three possibles, or five if the show was an hour and a half made-for-TV movie. But there’s no such magic database in the real world, is there? Jesus, I can’t even interface with the computer systems of any of the other local police forces without a major hassle, let alone get RCMP data.

  “Let’s say Allen has a pilot’s license. Big whoop: so does every fifth male in British Columbia, and there will be a lot of Allens. I know absolutely nothing about the computer industry, and even I know three rich software guys named Allen, and how long would it take me just to find out which ones have ever been in Vancouver? We have a matter of days, and maybe only two. Weekend days, when nobody’s in the office.”

  She was right. I had not allowed myself to think through just how impossible this task was. I’d told myself all I had to do was find a cop, convince her, and then make supportive noises. “So you don’t see anything we can do?”

  “Well…not much. But it’s just slightly better than nothing. I hesitate to say it, it’s so lame.”

  “Give.”

  “We have no chance of finding the perp or the vics in any useful amount of time. But we’ve maybe got a hundred-to-one shot of finding the crime scene.”

  Flames danced in her eyes. “How? All we know is it’s somewhere this side of Lillooet. After that, nobody calls the road the Sea to Sky anymore.”

  “I know this is nuts, okay? But Zudie told me he saw the place, in Allen’s mind. He saw the turnoff from the highway.”

  The flames damped themselves back to glowing coals. “Jesus Christ, Russell, you’re talking about more than two hundred kilometers of highway. There must be a couple of thousand curb cuts along the way: logging roads and dirt roads and deer trails and country driveways and—”

  “I know, I know.”

  She was exasperated. “Well, just how fucking good a description do you think Zudie’s going to be able to give us of the fucking turnoff?”

  I shrugged. “I told you it was a long shot. But think about it: for a start, he can tell us which side of the road it’s on. That eliminates half your curb cuts right there.”

  “Fabulous. Now we’re down to a thousand. I repeat, you’re talking about over two hundred klicks of—”

  “I’m talking about maybe four hours of video, total,” I said.

  Her mouth fell open. Her face went blank for a few long seconds. Then suddenly the coals in her eyes burst back into flame, and she began to smile in spite of herself. “We make the run, I drive, you shoot, we get the tapes back to Zandor, he tells us where the spot is—”

  “Then we just stake it out.” I waited for her reaction.

  Her smile froze in place—but her eyes kept crackling. “Go on.”

  I locked eyes with her. “We stalk him like an animal. We set up a couple of blinds in a crossfire, and we stake the place out with long guns. I can’t shoot for shit so you better get me a shotgun. As soon as he steps out of his vehicle we kill him. We bury him and any evidence we want gone. At some point on the drive back to Vancouver, we end up having a conversation with the victims, and if we are very lucky they will all be smart enough and grateful enough to keep their mouths shut tight for the rest of their lives. Comment?”

  She stared back at me in silence for a long time. Finally she said, “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Nika, I just don’t see any other—”

  “God damn it, neither do I! I still don’t think I can do that.”

  “If we don’t, if we just spring out of hiding and shout ‘Surprise!’ the worst we’ve got him on is four counts of kidnapping…and no good way to explain how we stumbled on it. Rich prick, good lawyers, he’d be back out in the world in a couple of years, pissed off and feeling he’s got something to prove.”

  She shook her head slowly back and forth, once. “That’s vigilante talk. I’m a cop. A cop can’t think like that. A cop shouldn’t think like that. I’m not even a judge, and I’m damn sure not an executioner.”

  I mimed clapping my hands. “I sincerely applaud every word you just said. You’re talking to a no-shit card-carrying member of the Civil Liberties Union. Up until yesterday, I’d have agreed with you absolutely.”

  She was still shaking her head. “It’s the kind of principle that’s not situational,” she insisted. “It’s always true.”

  “And why is it always true? Why should a cop never take the law into her own hands?”

  “B
ecause she shouldn’t,” she said, her voice rising.

  “Stop knee-jerking and think about it: why shouldn’t she?”

  “Because she might be wrong!”

  I let that one hang in the air for a while. “Because…?” I prompted finally, and waited until I saw her get it before I said it aloud. “Because she can’t read minds.”

  She said nothing.

  “This once, she knows she isn’t wrong.”

  “God damn it—”

  “Or am I wrong? Do you doubt anything Zudie told you is the gospel truth?”

  She took a deep breath. “No,” she admitted. “But I took an oath—”

  “There’s a higher responsibility than that oath, and you know it.”

  “Have you ever killed a man?” she snapped.

  “Once.” I could see that surprised her. Well, it surprised me. “A long time ago, when I was a kid. I didn’t plan to. Another kid tried to kill me with a knife on the street. He had very bad luck. Have you?”

  She looked down at her coffee. “No.”

  “But you’re trained to. You’ve prepared yourself for the possibility. That puts you at least two steps past where I was that day in the street.”

  “How can we just stalk another human being?”

  “If he were a human being, we couldn’t,” I said. “As it is, I don’t see that we have any choice. If we let that bug walk away with a few years for kidnapping, everything he does after that is on us.”

  She had no reply, but I knew she was still unconvinced.

  I said, “I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t think we’re up to it.”

  She frowned. “You think he could shoot both of us dead while we’re holding guns on him?”

  “I think we might be incredibly lucky to get shot dead. Think about who we’re talking about.”

  I reached her with that one. Too hard; I reached across the table and took her hand. After an instant’s hesitation, she let me.

  “Look, sleep on it,” I said. “If you tell me we have to try and take Allen alive…well, I guess I’m willing to try, if you get me a shotgun and a good Kevlar vest. But I’ll tell you right now, if I see you go down, I plan to shoot myself in the head. And then there’ll be nobody to stop him.”