Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  It’s not fair, Gwynn thought as she watched the study door close behind them. I did as much as anyone to figure it out.

  The door opened again, and Justinian stuck his head back in.

  “Besides, if the direct approach fails, you’re the only one of us qualified to infiltrate the witches’ ranks.”

  He winked and closed the door.

  Alas, Gwynn’s espionage skills proved unnecessary. Early the next morning, Master Radolphus summoned the entire college and all the visiting magicians to the dining hall. One of the two elderly witches Gwynn had seen at the banquet stood beside him, her face frowning sternly as the headmaster announced that thanks to the timely assistance of Mistress Hecate and the rest of the witch delegation, the culprit who had infiltrated their ranks and killed Master Horatio had been discovered and handed over to the duke for appropriate punishment.

  The other witch who had been at the head table was conspicuously absent.

  Radolphus revealed no details about how the murder was committed, and the look on his face discouraged anyone who might have been inclined to ask.

  Gwynn’s next visit to Cook, ostensibly to replenish the gingerbread supply, proved more enlightening.

  “Sitting up there at the head table with that other witch, just as snooty as you please,” Cook said. “I recognized her at once. Hadn’t she just spent two days hanging around in my kitchen? Looking for a way to cause trouble. Well, at least she only went after Master Horatio and not someone anyone would miss. And everyone’s saying how clever it was of Master Radolphus and Master Justinian to catch her.”

  “Everyone” presumably included the duke, who reportedly sent a letter of thanks and congratulations to Master Radolphus.

  And the conference would end tomorrow, Gwynn thought, as she climbed the stairs carrying a tea tray and the new bowl of gingerbread cookies. Surely that meant Carima would be leaving?

  She entered and knocked aside a little origami frog to put the tray down on the tea table. She took the plate of gingerbread and went over to the cookie jar.

  Which was already full. It hadn’t been a few hours ago. She knew that. So she’d gone down right after her last class of the day, waited until Cook’s first batch of cookies came out, and brought up the best.

  Come to think of it, those didn’t really look like Cook’s gingerbread. The color was a little darker than the rich, golden brown of the cookies in the bowl she’d brought from the kitchen. The edges were slightly ragged, and the size was a little more irregular.

  Carima. She had no idea how the witch managed it, but she was sure Carima had baked the cookies. And had done something to them, if the little origami animals were anything to judge by. Carima, making one last desperate attempt to ensnare the Maestro in her love spells.

  She heard Justinian’s voice in the quadrangle. He hadn’t stayed, talking with students, or strayed off to have tea with Master Radolphus. In a few minutes he would be in the study. Would he believe her if she tried to warn him? What if he cast a spell of detection on the gingerbread? Would it show traces of a spell? Or was all witch magic, like the little paper birds, impervious to the detection spells they taught at the college? And if he didn’t believe her—or if he did believe her but decided it would be interesting to eat a cookie anyway—

  She had to do something. But what?

  “Well, it looks as if my gremlins have deserted me for good,” Master Justinian said the next afternoon.

  He and Master Radolphus were gazing down at the quadrangle. Gwynn looked up from where she was setting the tea table and peeked over their shoulders. Carima was walking down the path to her carriage, following the porters who carried her luggage. She was trying hard to ignore the half dozen adoring gremlins scuttling after her. They gazed up at her with looks of abject adoration on their wizened little faces; they scrabbled at her dress with their muddy paws, leaving long, dirty streaks; and often they stepped on the heels of her shoes in their eagerness to be near her.

  “Oh, well,” Justinian said. “They were rather getting in the way here. But it is odd behavior for gremlins.”

  “Makes me wonder if she tested some new love potion on them,” Radolphus suggested.

  “If so, it rather backfired on her, don’t you think?”

  “Definitely,” Radolphus said. “Yes, that’s probably it,” he went on. “Witches will fool around with love potions. Ought to be outlawed. They’re almost impossible to detect, and as for counteracting them—well, I wish her luck. Very careless, if you ask me.”

  “Yes, she’s often careless, isn’t she?” Justinian said, glancing briefly at Gwynn. “Do you suppose Mistress Hecate knows how much of a help Carima was to us in solving Horatio’s murder?”

  “I hope not,” Radolphus said. “That would be bad for Carima’s career—and possibly her health. I know I didn’t tell, though I suppose Hecate might have guessed. Still, not our problem. Let’s have the tea now.”

  The two mages settled by the table, and Gwynn began pouring tea.

  “Oh, Gwynn, did you bring the gingerbread?” Justinian asked.

  Radolphus frowned as if he thought that rather an odd question—probably because Justinian had paused on the verge of sinking his teeth into one of the cookies in question to ask it.

  “Yes,” Gwynn said, glancing up. “And the scones for Master Radolphus.”

  “Good,” said Justinian, completing his bite. And then through a mouthful of gingerbread, he added. “Light a few candles, tadpole. It’s getting dim in here.”

  Gwynn smiled. She produced the little brass dragon from her pocket, aimed it at a candle, and pressed the catch.

  “Grrroarrr!” squeaked the dragon, as the little flame from its snout lit the candle.

  “The dragon!” Justinian said, reaching for it. “It’s all together again? How did that happen?”

  “I put it together last night,” Gwynn said.

  “You did? How?”

  Gwynn shrugged. How could she possibly explain? The pieces just fit a certain way, that was all. She could no more explain to the Maestro how she had reassembled the dragon than she could explain casting a mage-light spell to Cook, but she could do either trick with ease. So far she hadn’t figured out how to fold the little paper birds and animals, much less endow them with spells—useful spells, of course, not nasty, silly ones like Carima’s. But she had collected another whole box of them to experiment with, when time permitted. One way or another, she’d learned a lot from the conference.

  “Amazing!” Justinian exclaimed, pressing the catch and watching with delight as the plume of fire shot out. Asmodeus, about to jump into the Maestro’s lap, was alarmed and sat down on the floor beside Gwynn instead.

  Gwynn took a bite of her scone. The cat looked up at her in a hopeful manner—not exactly begging, but indicating his willingness to dispose of any unwanted little bits she might happen to have lying about. She smiled, recalling the eager faces of the gremlins as she’d fed them every last crumb of Carima’s gingerbread. She fed Asmodeus a bit of buttered scone.

  “But how on earth did you get it to work again?” With the dragon, Justinian took aim at several of the little origami animals that were still lying around.

  “It was just out of oil,” Gwynn said, offering the cat another bit of scone. “I filled it again after I reassembled it.”

  “That’s marvelous!” Justinian said. “Look, Radolphus, isn’t this marvelous!”

  “Yes,” said Radolphus, folding his hands contentedly in his lap as he watched Justinian incinerating another little paper figure. “I rather think it is.”

  The Duh Vice

  Michael Armstrong

  “If you’re smart, you’ll just ignore me and walk away,” Novak said right before I arrested him on six counts of resource-allocation waste in the first degree.

  Months later, when I was warming my ass over a little nub of what he called the Duh Vice up there in my suck-ass little shack near Boundary, I realized he had been right. Wha
t the heck did I know last winter, when I got a call out to Novak’s place to check out a citizen tip of resource waste?

  I’m a cop, a Rawhide, the petty little bureaucrats who hassle good citizens about keeping their thermostat set too high. Yeah, I get grief for doing my job. OK, here’s the deal: when the United States government figures out how not to piss off the world so we can get some of its spare energy, I’ll retire. Until then, I’m the guy who knocks on your door at 2 a.m. because you’re using more than your fair share of energy. You don’t like it? Move to Canada.

  Which was how I got called out to Novak’s place that crisp winter day. Not that I told Novak that, but his neighbor, a real dickhead named Stark, had ratted him out. Stark was one of those reserve-police-officer wannabe cops who had taken fifteen hours of training and become dangerous enough with a remote thermal sensor to fink on his neighbors. If Stark hadn’t said Novak was leaking over 1,000 BTUs an hour, I wouldn’t have bothered. We Rawhides don’t get out of bed for anything less than 500.

  Stark had come by the Resource Allocation Department station with his little readouts, an infrared video, and even a cheap-ass blurry digital photo of Novak sitting in his living room in T-shirt and shorts. I could tell by his smarmy little smile he thought he’d nailed the guy, and if his tip resulted in a conviction, he’d get the reward of one hundred resource-allocation points.

  Good citizen, my ass. Stark was looking to be able to jack up his thermostat another two degrees.

  “So, you gonna check it out, huh?” Stark asked me.

  I was investigating a major violation of the 2017 Resource Allocation Act, some guy who’d found a stash of honest-to-goodness gasoline and had been seen running a snow machine out in the Caribou Hills—I mean, a two-stroke, internal-combustion sled, not one of those electric snow coaches. I didn’t really have time for penny-ante crap. But Stark knew someone in the department, I never could figure out who, and his tip had landed in my in-box with a note from the chief, “Check this out.”

  I didn’t know Novak. He’d moved to Della on the ass end of Alaska a year ago, got himself an approved one-bedroom, nine-hundred-square-foot cabin for him and his son. “His retard son,” Stark told me, but I’d pulled the APSIN records on the Novaks, and his son checked out as having Williams Syndrome, kind of a rare developmental disability—only we were supposed to say “differentability”—that meant the kid was high end in some abilities, low in others. You know, like most of us, only more so.

  I let Stark tell me all sorts of gossip about Novak he couldn’t have known unless he had a password into the Alaska Public Safety Information Network, then I shooed him out of my office and told him I’d get back in touch with him later. I ran a 10-97 and Novak came through clear, no wants, no warrants. Just for kicks, I ran his court history.

  Six arrests for RAW 6 to RAW 2. No one had ever gotten him on RAW 1, but he’d been arrested for resource-allocation waste in three states over the past eight years. No convictions, and on one of the cases, he got a civil settlement for false arrest.

  Now that was peculiar. I should have listened to the little voices in my head that said something was hinky. Only when I got out to Novak’s place and stopped at the top of his clean-shoveled path, I didn’t listen to the voices. No, I just stared at the screen on my little handheld monitor and saw all the dials going off the charts.

  A Marine likes to say his KA-BAR knife is his best friend. A state trooper swears by his little buddy, the Glock 27, with its random-burst fléchette rounds. We Rawhides keep a handheld strapped to one hip, keep the batteries charged, and upgrade the software every thirty days.

  My handheld told me I had a real solid case of RAW 1. In my fifteen years with the RAD, I’d only gotten two RAW 1 convictions, and with good reason. People like Stark think it’s real easy to steal resources, but the truth is, the system is so ironclad, you have to be either smart, sneaky, or bold to grab more than your fair share of resources.

  You get calories based on size, physical need—like if you were a manual laborer—and age. Every calorie you bought got tracked against your monthly allotment, and if you went over, tough. You couldn’t buy food. After a month or two of going hungry at the end of the month, most people figured it out. Same thing with energy. The grid fed your allocation, and if you used too much, the power shut off.

  Most RAW charges came about when someone tried to tinker with the system, either jigger the power meter or try to get extra calories on a stolen or hacked account. The 2017 Act allowed for individual initiative, on the idea that maybe some entrepreneur or inventor could come up with the Holy Grail, unlimited cheap energy, so just being warm, fat, and happy wasn’t enough for a RAW charge. You had to catch someone stealing resources.

  Except what most people didn’t know was that there was a maximum cap to what anyone could have, I mean, outside the ration. That’s how I nailed Novak. See, the law figured someone might get clever, might put in a few inches of insulation, keep up on weather-stripping, maybe jigger a personal vehicle’s electric motor to get 15 percent more juice out of it. That was the cap: 15 percent. Someone could be 15 percent overweight, or 15 percent warmer, or go 15 percent faster or farther, but anything over that was de facto waste.

  When I came up to Novak’s house, my handheld showed he had an energy leakage of 33 percent. That’s leakage, not overuse. His walk not only had been shoveled clean of the previous week’s three feet of snow, but the concrete was bare—steaming, in fact. When I knocked on his door and Novak opened it enough for me to get a quick read on the interior, his inside temperature was a toasty seventy-five degrees, 22 percent above the thermal allocation. I looked down at my handheld’s readout, downloaded the readings to dispatch, and smiled.

  “Mr. Novak?” I asked.

  Novak stood there in shorts, no shoes or socks, and a light cotton T-shirt. There was a little drop of sweat on his forehead. Inside. In winter.

  “You want me or my son?” Novak waved over at his kid, no more than thirteen, snacking away on a huge bowl of cornflakes. It had been a long time since I’d seen a pudgy kid, but there he was, a genuine potbelly and little puffy fat cheeks. The kid wasn’t even wearing a T-shirt, just shorts.

  “You, sir.” I showed him my badge and identification.

  Novak nodded. “I wondered when that schmuck Stark would rat me out. Well, come on in, do your investigation.” He grinned. “You might want to take your coat off. It’s a little toasty inside.”

  Novak led me through the arctic entryway—the inside door to the house standing wide open—and into the great room. I could see it had the standard design of a nine-hundred-footer: main room, kitchen off to one side, a door to a bathroom, and a bedroom at the other end. Only the center of the room had been dug out, down into the crawl space and into a basement, so the middle was like a big cathedral ceiling. Not that you saw those anymore, two-story inside rooms, but I’d read about them in books. There was a tiny pond, big bright lights shining down from the ceiling, and all sorts of tropical plants—even palm trees—growing inside the house.

  Once for a vacation I’d saved up five years of travel points and taken two weeks in Florida. Walking into that room was like walking outside from the airport into a tropical night. This big waft of warm, humid air hit you. I quickly took off my coat, my sweater, my boots and socks, and was down to an undershirt and pants. And I was still sweating.

  The place was off the charts. Forget about going over 15 percent. If my readout was right, Novak was using 250 percent of his monthly energy allocation. He had to be damn clever to steal that much energy—either damn clever or outright bold. He leaned forward and looked at my readout.

  “You might want to get that checked out,” he said. “I’ve got the latest upgrade on a handheld—a Rawhide gave it to me in that little civil suit you no doubt have read up on—and mine says I’m actually at 267 percent.” He grinned, that same smarmy grin he’d given me before. He actually looked like he was enjoying this.

&nbs
p; “I’ve got you on RAW 1,” I said. “Slam dunk. You’re looking at an unclassified felony. Every day is a count, so if I record you for the next month, that’s enough counts to put you away for life.”

  “Uh-huh,” Novak said.

  “You don’t seem concerned.” I waved over at his lard-ass son. “What about chubby there? How’s he going to find cornflakes if you’re in federal prison?”

  “Probably the same way he does now,” Novak said. “Trade them for carp.” He waved at the pond, and I could see little orange fins swimming through the water. The guy was growing fish inside the house. Tropical fish! I did a readout on the water and got back a temperature of eighty-five degrees. The water was warmer than the house.

  I shook my head. “Novak, I don’t think you get it. I’ve got you busted. I’m gonna call it in. You’re in big trouble. Really big trouble.”

  “That’s what the last six Rawhides said.” Novak got up, waved at a little box humming away in the corner of the room. “Why don’t I show you the Duh Vice?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  Later, I thought I should have just left it at that, but what did I know?

  “The Duh Vice,” Novak said. He opened up a cabinet the size of a washing machine, and I saw a dull silver globe about the size of a basketball. Copper tubing ran around it, one line coming up from the bottom of the box, swirling around the globe, and the other end going down. “The Device, we’d say, but I like how Tim says it.” He waved at his son, who’d now finished his cornflakes and watched us with big huge pale blue eyes. “It’s Tim’s invention, or rather, discovery.”

  “What does it do?” I asked. Stupid me. I should have shut up.

  “It gives off heat.”

  I ran a probe over the globe, and got a reading… well, part of the globe was six hundred degrees, and another part of it was even hotter. I mean, hot, like the inside of a blast furnace.

  “But how?” I could see it gave off heat like a mutha, but where did the heat come from?