Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy

by David Spencer

  The harness guy would probably be an expert crisis negotiator, too. But Matt was the one who had done Slag Time. He didn’t think he ought to wait anymore.

  Man . . .

  He turned to face Carl Orff.

  Almost nondescript, really. Bookish. A thin, nice-guy face, small nose, open-necked blue denim sports shirt, gray slacks neatly pressed, rubber-soled black shoes keeping a grip on the ledge. Wasn’t much of one either, ever so marginally shorter than the length of Carl’s foot.

  Carl’s collar, and the pleat of his pants, flapped wildly in the breeze—had Matt thinking that if he blew in the guy’s direction, a little make-a-wish-birthday-candle puff of air, that would be enough to do the guy but good.

  “Hey, Carl,” Matt began, cucumber cool. “Name’s Matthew Sikes. Call me Matt if you like. Need to see ID?”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Carl said. Nice of him.

  “I hear tell you wanna talk.”

  “No, I want to send a message to my wife. I thought I had made that clear.”

  “Better if you deliver it firsthand.”

  “If you try to talk me down, I won’t waste any more time with you.”

  “You have to do what you want, Carl. But! have a job to do. If it means anything to you. I’m not getting out there with you. I’m real happy from in here. Real happy. I just thought I’d mention that. It’s a pretty nice place to be, relatively speaking.”

  “Maybe for you. I have nothing left in there.”

  “You have a son who loves you.”

  “No, he loves Hal.”

  Hal. Had to be the name of The Other Man.

  “Maybe so,” Matt conceded. “I wouldn’t know. But he loves you, too. Children have an infinite capacity for spreading it around. Not such a bad thing, really.”

  “I can’t face him now.”

  “Why, because you took him? He barely understands that. What you’re doing now? A little tougher, I admit, but you gotta get it in perspective. He wants to face you.”

  “It’s not just today. It’s everything. It’s my . . . bitch wife. We’re supposed to have bonded for life, do you know that about us?” Matt clocked the pause before the word bitch; Orff was uncomfortable with the word. Seemed to be a genuinely genteel personality who was so unused to channeling his anger healthily—so unused to even acknowledging he had it—that when enough was stored up, it cracked him open and emerged twisted, distorted.

  “Tell me about Bea.”

  “Why don’t I just tell you why she left me, and that’ll save us some time. I can . . . get going and you’ll know all you need to picture her clearly.”

  “. . . I’m listening.”

  “We all had our functions on the slave ship. We were all bred to do specialized jobs. Me, I was a botanist. Well, Matt, nothing grows on Earth the way it grew in the ship or the way they say it grew on Tencton. I couldn’t find work doing what I know how to do. What I love to do.”

  “That’s rough. What did you live on?”

  “Not much. The pittances I brought home from unskilled labor jobs. Those that I could keep. I tried washing dishes at a diner. Got sick smelling all that meat on the grill . . .”

  “No offense here, Carl, but let me cut to the chase, okay? It wasn’t enough of a life for Bea and so—”

  “She was out, shopping for clothes at a garage sale. Met this guy. Hal. He made a good living, he was fascinated by her and . . .”

  “One thing led to another.” It was all Matt dared say. Interspecies relationships had not yet become common, and at this juncture they were not viewed as simply interracial but as a genuinely perverse aberration.

  “She said it was because he was happy. He was doing what he wanted and it made him happy. She said I had become bleak. That I hadn’t been happy since . . . since we’d been on the ship. Can you imagine that? Being happy on the ship? Funny thing . . . relatively speaking, she was right.”

  Ever so gently. Matt modulated his tone; it was not so casual anymore. He wanted to lay in a foundation . . . very carefully.

  “People crack under pressure, Carl. It happens. Sometimes it’s nobody’s fault.”

  “How can it have just happened? How can I have just missed it? I’m an educated man!”

  Matt didn’t immediately have an answer for that one, and it disturbed him. Groping, he said, “And you think jumping tells your wife that she destroyed you? I’ll tell you what it really does. It tells your son that your education is useless. That everything is hopeless. Is that the legacy you want to leave him?”

  “His legacy is this world. This damn, damned world. It absorbs you—then it takes things from you. It starts with your name . . .”

  “Let’s say you’re right. Hell of it, let’s just say you’re right. Who’s taking Chuck’s father away from him? You can make him think it’s the world. And he’ll go through life believing it, and who knows what he’ll do when he gets to be as old as you. Assuming he does. But you and I both know, Carl, that the world doesn’t make you go out on a ledge. This bit of injustice is yours. You own it.”

  “No, she brought me to it!”

  “How, Carl? You’re an educated man!”

  The turnabout silenced Carl for a moment. Then he hung his head, chin touching his chest. The movement made Matt catch his breath. Under these circumstances, it could literally be enough to overbalance the guy.

  “Marriage,” Carl said softly, “is supposed to be sacred in the eyes of Celine and Andarko. She betrayed ours. But reverence for one’s offspring is supposed to be just as sacred. And that’s where I’ve failed.” He blinked away tears. “I couldn’t even afford to come here to do this today . . . I spoke to Chuck on the phone last night. He has a little toy safe. I asked him to empty it and bring the bills to school . . .” He sniffed and sighed hugely. “Ohhh, dear. It’s time to do this . . .”

  Carl began to shift his feet, and Matt shouted, “No, wait! Wait!” And when Carl did wait, Matt said, “Talk to me about Celine and Andarko.”

  “It would take too long to—”

  “No, I know who they are. I mean . . . what do they mean to you . . . right now?”

  “They are . . . the ones who see what I have done. I can live out my life awaiting and dreading their judgment or . . . I can simply face it now. I’m useless to my son if I’m damned.”

  “Who says you’re damned?”

  “All the covenants I’ve broken. Can you imagine they’ll forgive me?”

  Matt’s next words came out of his mouth with no particular speed; they were, in fact, meticulously formed on his tongue and teeth, beautifully modulated, elegantly delivered. But he barely believed he was saying them. He felt utterly detached from them, as if hovering three feet in front of himself, thirty-two storeys above the ground, watching his performance.

  “Better than that. I think they’d approve.”

  Long silence now. Matt had seen jumpers go in just such silences. But Carl turned his head as far as it would go toward Matt.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Matt hadn’t a clue. But the hook was in. He sensed it. And improvised recklessly.

  “Look, what you did . . . the deed, I don’t know, iffy, I suppose . . . but the motive . . . to send a message . . . about the sanctity of the family. You’ve done that. How can they not get behind that? And so far nobody’s been hurt. It’s called having your cake and eating it too. Doesn’t happen too often.”

  It was bullshit. It was circular logic. It was nonsense. It was against every sensible fiber in Matt’s body.

  “. . . okay . . .” said Carl in a very small voice, reaching out a hand for Matt to grab.

  It was working.

  Jesus Christ.

  “Tug!” Matt yelled, and as he extended his arm out, he felt the reassuring grip of Tug around his waist, anchoring him, and he reached, reached, felt Carl’s stretching fingers, leaned forward, came around with the other hand, gripping the belt line, guiding Carl back an inch at a time, and it seem
ed to go on forever, but when Carl was safely in front of the window’s opening, Matt pulled for all he was worth and Carl fell in, on top of him. Whereupon everything seemed to happen very fast: Chuck running into his father’s arms, the harness guy and his partner from emergency services, who must’ve been there through most of it, swooping down to collect Carl Orff and son. Chuck waving gratefully at Matt as they carried the boy out, and Tuggle helping Matt up, slapping him on the back, shouting, “You are one talk-’em-down mofo!”

  And Tuggle was right. He was.

  But the victory was both sweet and sour.

  Because he knew he hadn’t done it without help, and at that, help from the last person in the world he wanted to acknowledge or credit.

  But he also knew that he would not be at peace with himself unless he found a way to do so.

  In the right way, for him. And at the right time.

  “Matthew, it’s time.”

  Matthew looked up from the book, realizing he had been fixated on the same paragraph for minutes, maybe longer, not taking any of it in, his mind elsewhere. But George’s voice had reached into his memory and pulled him back into the real world, where the immediacy of events came back to him in a liquid rush—

  the stakeout

  the drugstore

  Bob Sled

  the dealer

  the case

  the monitor

  —and betraying no outward signs of adjustment, his eyes flicked to the small TV set between them, whose screen had just gone from snow to a black-and-white wide shot of Bob and the back of some guy at the counter. The guy carried a deep briefcase, suitable for the transport of pharmaceuticals.

  They were speaking in concertedly hushed whispers, too softly for Matt and George to distinguish words from the camera’s hidden microphone. George adjusted the volume on the set. It didn’t help much, but it wasn’t worth fretting about. The camera contained a Super 8 cassette, and the corner of their monitor screen said REC, so they knew it was all going on tape. The soundtrack could be electronically filtered and enhanced later. Right now all they needed to see was the exchange of goods and cash.

  As they waited, George kept up a running dialogue with the young Newcomer rookie, Paul Bearer, who was in the store . . .

  “Can you see him from where you are?” George’s voice crackled softly into Paul’s left ear.

  “Mmm-hm,” Paul answered, the object of his life to keep articulated speech to a minimum, to make any vocal sounds that issued from him seem as if he was merely gettin’ down with the soun’ of his mean tape machine.

  “Anything seem to be happening yet?”

  “Mm-mm,” he replied, that one a negatory. So far they were just talking. The mark, as far as Paul could tell, wasn’t especially remarkable: average height, not quite six feet; between thirty-five and forty; hair as black and shiny as the casing on a new stereo; gray jacket and slacks, white shirt, black tie. The conservative outfit implied a working stiff or a fellow who had little imagination. Not that the two were mutually exclusive, but you hadda remember, this guy was a maverick operator; his bailiwick was a designer drug; and that suggested he was capable of some mercenary invention. Unless, of course, he worked for somebody. Somebody bigger. Couldn’t rule that out, not yet.

  Paul pretended to browse the shelves, shifted his angle of view enough to get a lingering bead on the man’s face. Combined with the hair, the facial features bespoke black Irish or Italian, though Paul would have laid odds on the latter: intense eyebrows, cruel good looks (that is, his handsomeness did not seem particularly benevolent), and thin lips set in a constant, tight grimace when he wasn’t talking . . .

  Which he seemed to be doing far too much . . . because dumpy little Bob was looking worried.

  Paul retreated a ways and risked simple speech.

  “Something’s going on. Don’t like it.”

  “Elaborate,” George’s voice said.

  “Supposed to be a simple transaction. Right? Why the hell are they talking so long?”

  “And you can’t hear them?” A reasonable question. Paul, having a Newcomer’s super-sensitive hearing, should have been able to pick up the conversation easy. But there was a detail they hadn’t counted on.

  “Fans.”

  “What?”

  “Free-standing fans, two of ’em. They circulate the air great, but they’re cuttin’ out the highs.” The “highs” were the higher frequencies that carried sibilants and hard consonants. “From here it just sounds like enthusiastic gibberish.”

  “Can you move in closer without being conspicuous?”

  “Gonna try.”

  The dealer was gesticulating a little now. Previously he’d been a cool customer; he hadn’t done anything like that before. Little Bob Sled was flapping his arms a bit too. But tight, like he was trying to keep a lid on things, control ’em.

  Felt wrong, felt wrong.

  Then Bob Sled shrugged with angry reluctance, and the dealer followed him into the back of the store. Where Paul had no access.

  “Fuck,” he said in Tenctonese.

  It didn’t seem the time to discuss decorum with the young officer. Mentally marking that as a subject more appropriate for later discussion, George said simply, “We saw.”

  The two words were heavily weighted. The back room of See Gurd Nurras was not wired for sound, had, in fact, no surveillance equipment of any kind. And why?

  Because Bob Sled had assured them that the exchange of merchandise and money always happened at the counter. The mystery man came in as a salesman and left as a salesman; to the naked eye, there was nothing untoward going on, just a normal restocking of supplies. Routine.

  And now the routine had been altered. Whatever was going on back there, they had no way of knowing.

  “What do you want me to do?” came Paul’s voice over the walkie-talkie. Tinged with a little impatience, a little desperation, and with good reason. There was a serious judgment call to be made here.

  Technically Bob Sled was now helping the cops, and that meant he was under their protection. But he had just walked out of their reach—unless Paul was to burst into the back room, gun drawn, and ID himself. Unless George and Matthew were willing to risk scuttling the investigation for the sake of Bob Sled’s questionable life. And that meant assuming that the little druggist was even in danger. For all they knew, there was just a simple conversation going on in there, maybe not even a particularly heated one.

  They could break in on it, but they’d never be able to prove what the mark had said to the druggist before they did, not in court; that would be hearsay. (Yes, there was the tape, but they didn’t know what it would yield yet, and suppose it provided them with nothing . . . ?)

  They could search the mark’s briefcase, but they’d be on shaky legal ground without a warrant for that specific purpose. If the guy had the bad drug on him, and some bleeding-heart judge thought they’d violated his civil rights, the entire case was null and void: fruit of the poisoned tree. If the guy didn’t have the drug on him, they would have just given him a warning to lay low, defeated their own purpose. Worse still, he could decide to be a troublemaker and sue for illegal search and seizure.

  All this ran through the minds of George and Matthew in the space of a blink—and, once it had, George decided to forget chiding Paul for his expletive altogether. There was a poetic simplicity to the way he’d summed up a complicated situation.

  George exchanged a look with Matthew, whose eyes reflected his own concern. A split-second decision was required. Gamble right, they could emerge heroes. Gamble wrong, they became stains on the escutcheon.

  But Matthew’s eyes reflected George’s instinct, too. Reinforced by a tight, quick shaking of Matthew’s head back and forth.

  George spoke again into the walkie-talkie.

  “Do nothing,” he ordered.

  Stabilite was a designer drug. And a very specialized one at that. They were gambling that the nature of the drug might indicate the crimin
al disposition of the dealer—unsavory but not lethal.

  “But—” Paul’s voice began.

  “Wait, and proceed as planned,” George said, firmly.

  “Roger,” said Paul, tightly, and proceeded to do just that . . . for seven minutes, minutes in which every second held the possibility of Bob Sled’s body on the back room floor, in a growing pool of his own pink blood.

  He was starting to wonder if he shouldn’t just say to hell with orders, be a renegade, pull his concealed pistol, save a life while he could—

  —when the dealer emerged from the back room—

  —alone—

  —two seconds later followed by Bob Sled, looking disappointed, but none the worse for wear—

  —seen by George and Matthew on the monitor in their cruiser, and heard clearly for the first time, too . . . for as the dealer was leaving, he was saying in full voice, “I’m sorry it couldn’t work out,” and Bob Sled, hand raised in melancholy farewell, replied, “I’m sorry, too.” Unheard by them, Matt, in English, used the same word the young rookie had uttered not eight minutes before.

  “It didn’t go down,” he growled. “Son of a bitch, it didn’t go down!”

  Which was probably true, but nonetheless, George, his mouth poised over the walkie-talkie, barked the word “Go!”—

  —and Paul Bearer moved into action. Looking the other way, he stepped into the aisle the dealer was exiting, and their bodies collided.

  “Sorry, man,” Paul mumbled.

  It was a brief collision, no harm done, not particularly memorable as pedestrian mishaps go, but the dealer found it a little startling. He was either in a vaguely unpleasant mood or just generally a vaguely unpleasant fellow, for he pointed to Paul’s earphones and said, “You know, if you took those damn things off, you wouldn’t be so oblivious.”

  To which Paul lifted an earphone and said “Whut?” as dumbly as he could. Whereupon the dealer made a dismissive gesture at him and continued on his vaguely unpleasant way.

  Never suspecting that a small device, no bigger than a cuff button, had been deposited into the inside right breast pocket of his jacket, traditionally the least used pocket of right-handed men (who tended to use their good hand to reach over to the left breast pocket), and therefore the last to be searched or emptied. The device would send a simple signal to a receiver in the car occupied by Detectives Sikes and Francisco. As long as they could stay within ten blocks of the signal, give or take, they would be able to follow the dealer anywhere he went.