Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Tank walked over to the bar without addressing anyone, Lucia in tow. Kitty steeled herself for another tense interaction the only way she knew how. She pasted her trusty smile to her face and stuck her chest out. The tiniest hint of a smirk twitched the corner of Lucia’s mouth at this, and the bartender instantly regretted her choice. Trying to dazzle Tank with her ample charms had never been effective and doing it in front of Lucia suddenly felt very risky. She converted to a slouch immediately though she kept her expression as friendly as possible.

  “Hey, Tank,” she said cheerfully. “Bar’s closed, but you want anything?”

  In the seven years she had worked there, Tank had never once bought a drink. Kitty would have been too frightened to charge him for one if he tried.

  “Tell your boss I’m here,” came the grumbled rejoinder.

  Lucia rolled her eyes and dragged Tank back by his sleeve. “Thank you, Kitty. What Roland here meant to say was: ‘Maybe some other time, thank you very much. Would you tell Rodney I have arrived, please?’” She patted the giant on his arm. “He’s still learning how to be a person.”

  Something strange happened in that moment. Kitty had seen all kinds of fantastic and wonderful things in her short life. None of them shocked her more than what happened next. Roland Tankowicz, The Fixer, the scariest thing in all of Dockside, suddenly looked very sheepish. He glanced up and addressed Kitty directly with an awkward politeness that managed to be far more frightening than his usual gruff demeanor.

  “Ah, crap. Sorry, Kitty. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I’m just caught up in work stuff. Your boss brings out the worst in me, sometimes.”

  Kitty blinked. She did not know how to respond, or if she was supposed to respond at all. That was more consecutive words than Roland had ever spoken to her before.

  “Uhm...” she stammered. “It’s okay, really. He doesn’t exactly bring out the best in anyone. I’ll let him know you’re coming in so he can open the doors.”

  “Thank you, Kitty.”

  Lucia poked him sharply in the ribs.

  “Oh, and you look lovely this evening.”

  Kitty just stared. The sheer weirdness of this interaction now surpassed anything she had a reference for.

  “Uh... Thanks?” It was the best the poor girl could manage under the circumstances. Then she looked up, realizing what must have happened to cause this bizarre conversation. “Mindy told you, huh?”

  Lucia answered, “Mindy would never betray your confidence like that.” Then she winked. “Unless of course it meant she got to make Roland appear foolish. Then all bets are off.”

  Kitty hung her head to hide her embarrassment. “Oh my God, I am so going to kill that little bitch. I’m really, really sorry, Tank.”

  Lucia’s laugh was musical. “Don’t be too hard on her. She simply told Roland to stop scaring you.”

  Roland added, “Apparently I have an intimidating presence.”

  “You think?” Kitty could not handle any more surprises tonight. She certainly would never look at the big fixer the same way after this. Exactly how she would look at him in the future, she could not say. But it would be different that much was undeniable. She gave up thinking about it and shook her head in confusion. “Let me just tell the boss you’re here.”

  She switched to her comm and relayed the information. Then she turned back to the bizarre duo at the bar. “Okay. Rodney says it’s all unlocked for you.”

  “Like that would make any difference,” Roland rumbled with a menace so pure it made Kitty’s guts clench once again.

  “He’s kidding,” Lucia said with a sigh as she shuffled Roland toward the door at the end of the bar.

  “No, I’m not,” the big man protested as they moved away.

  The Dwarf’s drab office hunkered behind two doors at the end of the long bar. The first door led to a corridor. The corridor led to another door. Rodney claimed this kept the bar noise from disturbing him when he worked. Roland was not as easily fooled as that. The old soldier recognized a manufactured choke point when he saw one, and he correctly surmised the short hall only existed to funnel attackers into a neat file so they could be efficiently killed. The tactician in him approved of such things, mostly because Rodney’s fatal funnel had never slowed him down for an instant.

  A big hand slapped the control panel for the first door and it slid to the side with a polite whoosh. The hallway beyond was barely wide enough for Roland to get through without turning sideways. The door at the far end had been left open, and the pair could see Rodney McDowell seated at his broad desk staring at a wall of terminal screens.

  The big man clumped down to the office and shouldered his way inside with a crooked stumble. Lucia followed him, leaving enough distance for Roland to maneuver his bulk through the small door. At nine-hundred-and-forty pounds, Roland was not the sort of man one wanted to have stepping on the toes. When he had finally squeezed into the dim office, Lucia swept in with much less difficulty and far more grace.

  Roland waited for Lucia to start the conversation because her conversational skills eclipsed his own by several orders of magnitude. He was neither stupid nor slow, but more than one person had commented on the rhetorical shortcomings of his brusque manner. Lucia achieved better results when tact was called for than he ever could.

  Even by his standards, Lucia’s greeting was on the nose. “You know how much I love it when you send us cryptic messages, Rodney. Just cut to the chase and tell me what’s going on. How bad is this?”

  Rodney ‘The Dwarf’ McDowell was a short, stocky, and hirsute man. Looking every bit like his moniker, he reveled in the character of an honest-to-goodness dwarf. His large bionic claw of a right arm shattered this image, and his penchant for obnoxious suits seemed incongruous as well. Nevertheless, his beard flowed from his face in bright white waves, and his thick brogue was so exaggerated it sounded more farcical than anything.

  “Hard ta say, lass. Maybe it’s a bloomin’ catastrophe, maybe it’s just a fookin’ garden-variety mess. The consequences are gonna be far-reachin’ either way. I ken tell ye that for free.”

  Lucia simply waited, not rising to the bait. When The silence stretched long enough to convince The Dwarf that Lucia’s mood did not support bantering, he stated the situation plainly.

  “Somebody has murdered The Madame.”

  For Roland, there was no need to specify which of the hundreds of madames plying their trade in New Boston he referred to. New Boston was home to many brothels and many pimps, but there existed only one Madame worth the implied capital M.

  Lucia, on the other hand, required clarification. “I’m still new in town.” She looked up to Roland and then back to The Dwarf. “People get murdered in this town every day. Do either of you care to enlighten me on what that means for us?”

  Roland answered. “It means the largest trade guild in New Boston just got decapitated.”

  Rodney nodded. “Right after we got the other guilds set up, too. It does nae feel like any sort of coincidence to me.”

  “I guess this is pretty bad, then.” Lucia made the assessment without inflection. Her eyes had taken on a distant, unfocused look while millions of tiny machines living in her brain began the process of assembling scenarios and outcomes. “Anyone in a position to take over for her? Is this a power play by a rival?”

  “Nobody had an angle on Madeleine,” was Roland’s blunt response. “She had all the shops sewn up and under her wing more than twenty years ago. Her system kept everyone happy and kept the money flowing all around. She was very popular, actually.”

  “I did nae much care for her,” Rodney quipped unhelpfully. “Greedy bitch.”

  Roland ignored this. The Dwarf calling someone greedy hardly carried any weight. Roland filed it in the same category he might file financial advice from a hobo. He addressed Lucia’s question instead. “I helped her a lot in the old days. She wanted a reputation as a leader who protected her flock all the way down to the streetwalkers. Making
that happen was a good gig for me at the time.”

  The Dwarf snorted a mean laugh. “And a fine job o’ that ye did, boyo.” He looked to Lucia and pointed at the big man. “I remember when some C-level executive from Cambridge Holdings got fried on blaze and carved up one o’ the girls over on Westline. Madeleine sics yer big bald boyfriend on the poor git.” The shaggy head shook, and his ice-blue eyes gleamed. “Tank here tracked him down to his own fookin’ mansion and broke his goddamn back.” Rodney pantomimed breaking something over his knee. “A hundred-and-ninety million credit income this bastard brings in, and the Uptown fooker still gets his vertebrae mushed by a Dockside fixer wearing a ratty jacket.” Rodney shook his head at the memory. “When word o’ that got around, Madeleine’s operation had no problems recruitin.’ Once he had repeated his tender ministrations to a few more o’ the high-falootin’ fookers—” his bionic claw waved dismissively, “—everyone else Uptown caught on to the new rules right quick, too.”

  It was a sad consequence of her descent from a cushy corporate job in Uptown that Lucia no longer got surprised by these stories. Roland’s exploits during Dockside’s formative years were the stuff of legends among the hoods and thugs of their dingy district. She had heard so many of these tales at this point the sordid details of them no longer rattled her as much as they probably should. Maiming wealthy johns was about as benign a thing as Roland ever did. At least they had survived the ordeal. Probably survived, anyway.

  Lucia switched gears. “How about enemies?”

  The Dwarf’s reply was instantaneous. “Lots. Hundreds. Thousands even.”

  “Including you,” Roland added.

  “What of it, ye great big shite-stain? Madeleine was popular with the whores, sure. But she was piss-poor at makin’ and keepin’ friends. There wasn’t a man alive she wouldn’t fook over if she could make a copper penny doin’ it.” He shifted in his chair to lean forward. “But I’m bloody well committed to this arse-backward trade guild thing we got goin’ here. I’m the bloody president of the Dockside Trade Association, for fook’s sake! If I killed the crazy doxie, then I sure as hell picked a stupid fookin’ time to go about it!”

  Lucia had to concur. Rodney was mean, selfish, greedy, lecherous and a host of other unsavory adjectives. However, her own experience with the man dictated that nowhere within this extensive catalog of personality flaws would one find ‘stupidity.’ Destabilizing the oldest and most successful trade guild in Dockside was just bad planning for someone who profited from that same business model.

  She rubbed her face, suddenly weary. “Okay, then. We have thousands of suspects and no clear motive. Sounds like a real mystery. You want us to look into it?”

  “No, lass. I invited you down here because I wanted to stare longingly into Roland’s bloody eyes.” His face scrunched into a deep scowl. “Of course I want ye to look into it! Aren’t ye supposed to be the fookin’ fixers around here?”

  “You know our rates, then. I’ll invoice you weekly.”

  “Yeah, I know your goddamn rates. Right fookin’ usurious, they are.” It looked, for the briefest of moments, like Rodney might add some sort of derogatory epithet to the end of that last observation. His mouth opened, and he inhaled as if to speak. Then his eyes caught hers, and he was reminded of the other times his temper had run him afoul of the pretty woman with the pink stripe in her hair. Lucia Ribiero’s penchant for kicking The Dwarf’s teeth in was now a bit of a cliché in Dockside. For the sake of both his pride and his orthodontia bills, he switched directions and grumbled, “Just sort it all out then. Ye can send the goddamn bills here.”

  “Thank you,” Lucia said, a sweet smile on her face.

  The angry little man felt an urgent need to get the last word in so he added, “I want to know who, and I want to know why, ye get me?”

  “We’ll look into it, Rodney,” said Roland. “We will let you know what we find. Send all the information you have over to us.”

  “Right. First ye might as well head over ta her office. The cops are there right now, maybe ye can squeeze ‘em for some fookin’ ideas before they pack up and forget all about us again.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sam Parker had a bona fide bloodbath on his hands. Dockside’s youngest and newest detective did not appreciate a twelve-person massacre on his beat less than four weeks into the posting. But unlike his fellow policemen, Dockside was home for Sam. The crime was less a shock and more a disappointment when viewed from his jaded perspective. He considered himself lucky it took this long for something awful to happen, and he accepted his fate with depressed resignation.

  Bright blue eyes scanned the grisly scene inside The Madame’s office with a scholar’s attention to detail. He soon fell into a familiar rhythm of noting and cataloging clues, connecting disparate observations into plausible sequences. He narrated his thoughts out loud, ostensibly to his partner for input.

  “Single gunshot the forehead. Looks like bead, probably eight-millimeter.”

  His partner grunted in confusion. “Eight? You figure that big a gun?”

  Parker sighed. Lonnie Pritchard represented everything that was wrong with Dockside cops. He was skinny, yet fat at the same time. Scrawny legs poked out from under a prodigious gut while his narrow sloping shoulders completed the look of a man who avoided exercise at all costs. His eyes were heavy and bloodshot, and his lips trembled when he spoke. Sam Parker may not have been a detective for very long, but he had grown up in Dockside and he could spot a man in the thrall of blaze addiction from a mile away. Parker hated cops like Pritchard, and the Dockside division of New Boston PD was infested with them. Detective Pritchard could be bought or sold for the price of a fix by any thug in town. Parker suspected it happened often enough to make him sick. His thoughts turned sour. But then again, why should old Lonnie be any different from the rest of the Dockside cops?

  He dismissed his internal grumblings as unhelpful and answered the question. “Look at the splatter pattern. Beads heat up to like eleven-hundred degrees in flight, well past the Draper point.” As soon as he said it, Parker realized that Lonnie had no idea what the hell Draper point meant. “It’s the temperature where stuff starts to glow from heat, Lonnie.”

  “Right,” Pritchard said, doing a poor job of feigning comprehension. “It’s why they glow and burn shit.”

  Realizing this was as much comprehension as he was going to get from the man, Sam moved on. “Five-millimeter doesn’t push as much fluid, so you tend to get more burn damage on the exit wound and fragments. The bead stays on the front edge of the compression wave as it travels through the body.”

  “Okay...”

  “Eight-millimeter has sixty percent more cross-sectional area than five.”

  Lonnie did not bear the look of a man who understood why this mattered.

  “It pushes more fluid, Lonnie. Carries more energy but dumps it faster. The hydrostatic bubble exits before the burning bead does.” Parker pointed to the mess of brain and skull fragments still stuck to the carpet. “No burns on the splatter, but plenty inside the skull wound itself. Ergo, the bead stayed behind the bubble.”

  “Wow.” Pritchard did not sound legitimately impressed. “They sure do learn you kids good at that fancy Uptown academy.”

  Sam hated that tone. Guys like Pritchard were always so quick to dismiss the hours of study and rigorous physical training he had put himself through to get that scholarship. Law enforcement contracts were big business, and Synergy Enforcement Products only sent the most promising candidates to their state-of-the-art training facilities. Sam had earned his spot and the right to work for any precinct in New Boston. He surprised them all when he chose a rough post like Dockside. But this was his home, and he came here because he wanted to work this beat. This made Sam unique and put him in stark contrast to Pritchard and his ilk. Those were the cops abandoned here due to stupidity, laziness, or corruption too egregious to work any other post. Being both smart and honest did not help, as both tr
aits remained unheard of in Dockside law enforcement. The rest of his division treated the young man like an invader.

  Parker was angry, and he was young. He had no special immunity to the flaws of either youth or wrath, and he could occasionally succumb to a bout of childish pique. This proved to be one of those occasions.

  He stood, enjoying how his height allowed him to loom over his partner. Square-jawed and bright-eyed, Sam was well aware of how he appeared to others and it would be a lie to say he did not enjoy the effect. Well over six feet tall, the rookie detective had significant width at the shoulder and a narrow waist. Simultaneously lean and muscular, his physique resembled that of a star athlete or an elite soldier. At the academy, his classmates had often accused him of employing gene therapy to achieve his impressive proportions. It was an understandable misconception for anyone who saw Sam with his shirt off. However, when the other cadets found out he hailed from a longshoreman’s family in Dockside, they were forced to concede that expensive augmentations were unlikely. Sam simply had good genetics and the kind of work ethic that would break a lesser man.

  He allowed his physical presence to cow his partner, who did his level best to appear un-cowed. When he saw the tiny-yet-noticeable flinch from Pritchard, Sam relaxed and chided the older man. “Maybe if you studied harder and went to the gym once or twice you could go too.” Then he turned back to the crime scene. “But since that ain’t gonna happen, let’s just solve this case.”

  Happy to not have Parker in his face anymore, Pritchard returned to his normal apathetic default. “Fuck it. Just call it in, write the damn report, and let’s be done with it. We both know no one is solving this shit.”

  Parker counted to ten in his head, giving himself time to control his mounting frustration. “Not solving this? Do you even know who this is, Pritchard?”

  “Some whore?”

  “Holy shit, Lonnie. You have been working this beat for like, ten years. How do you not know who this is? Are you the worst cop ever, or what?”