3rd Body: Just try to keep your head (Book 1 in the 2nd Darc Murders Collection)

by Carolyn McCray

  He saw an indistinct form scuttle across his vision in front of him, zipping through the intersection of the hallways like some kind of crazy beetle. The figure had been small, too small to be an adult, Trey thought, but then again, the absence of direct light was messing with his vision.

  Wait. Was it possible that it had been Janey? Trey started to call out, but then realized that any sound he made would pinpoint his location. That wasn’t something he could afford right now. Not with Darc MIA.

  It was something that Trey could imagine Janey doing. Sacrificing herself to give Trey an advantage. But the question was, could Trey take that sacrifice in good conscience?

  Yes. Yes he could.

  Mala would kill him if she ever found out, but it was what Janey wanted. Besides, Trey was there to protect her, if it did turn out to be the tiny girl. Any other options left her exposed. Out there alone without any backup.

  It wasn’t fair. Life had already dealt Janey such a terrible hand. Trey wasn’t about to let it get worse. Not here.

  Not tonight.

  Once more, he contemplated the insanity of taking Janey along on outings like this. She loved it, sure, but it wasn’t responsible. Things got brutal in here, and tonight it looked like she might get trapped in the crossfire.

  He parked himself on the very edge of the corner, where the intersection of the hallways made for a maze of cover, available for anyone brave or foolhardy enough to use it. Trey had never thought of himself as that guy.

  Not until Janey got involved.

  He waited, listening for any sounds that might tell him where the next threat was coming from. And then he heard it. A sharp breath, stifled as soon as it was released. Someone was coming. Someone was coming now.

  Counting down from three, Trey bounced on the balls of his feet, making sure he found his balance before taking the move that he knew might lead to him getting shot. It was only death. It didn’t mean anything. But if it saved Janey, it was worth it.

  Three… two… one.

  Trey sprang around the corner, screaming into his opponent’s face as he fired shot after shot into the chest of… wait. Shaking his head, Trey stared at the figure in front of him. Was that Darc?

  No. Just… no.

  Lights came on, flooding the area, forcing Trey to shield his eyes. Blinking through tears caused by both the bright light and his recent actions, he tried to see what he had done.

  “Did I hit you, dude?” he asked, hoping against hope that his partner was okay.

  The only response he received in return was a grunt. Well, at least he was making noise. That was a good sign, right? Although the grunt itself didn’t bode well.

  Fantastic.

  “What were you doing popping out in front of me, anyway?” Trey asked, deciding to go on the offensive. It was time his partner understood just how much his lack of communication might have cost them. They might have lost it all this time.

  A voice came over a loudspeaker nearby. “All contestants please take their guns and vests back to the armory. And thank you for playing at the Family Fun Center.”

  Trey’s vision cleared, adjusting to the way-too-bright illumination that the complex used once the laser tag battles were over. Someone should talk to them about that. Trey was pretty sure he was suffering some sort of retinal damage every time the staff turned on the work lights here. And this was like the sixth round they’d played.

  He felt a tug at his elbow. Spinning around with his heart pounding, he spotted Janey there, her bear clutched in one fist, her laser gun in the other.

  “Don’t do that!” he reprimanded her, but Janey just smiled at him. That was her problem. No respect for authority. For chain-of-command.

  Darc stepped forward, scooping Janey up into his arms like she weighed nothing. Which was not true. Trey had tried to hold that girl more than once, and she was deceptively heavy. He’d had to put her down after a half a block.

  “We were in the middle of fending off a blitz, and you two just disappeared on me,” Trey groused. “They totally kicked our trash.”

  “By my calculations,” Darc intoned, “we emerged victorious. By a margin of nearly three to one.”

  “Yeah… well…” Trey wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “Still, you guys left my right flank completely exposed. I got hit like five times in a row.”

  Janey grinned again, and rolled her eyes at him. That was a new development that Trey wasn’t sure he was liking all that much. Give her a little more time and she’d be getting into that snotty preteen area that made his teeth ache. Okay, she was still like three or four years off, but still.

  “The decision to leave your side was valid,” Darc said, his tone indicating little of what he truly thought of Trey’s complaints. “There was a cluster of opponents on the second level who would have been able to strike our vests at will had Janey and I not cleared them out.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Strategy blah, tactics, blah, winning maneuvers, blabatty-blah-blah.” Call it whatever he wanted, Darc’s ideas amounted to one thing in Trey’s mind.

  Disloyalty to his partner.

  They moved through the labyrinth of hallways and obstacles, looking for the way back to the exit. Trey had no idea where they were. Trying to make his way through the laser tag arena in this place was worse than navigating a casino in Vegas, and those places were designed to keep you in.

  “Hey,” Trey said, perking up. “What do you think the chances are that there’s any pizza left?” Their laser tag session had gotten called just minutes after the pizza had come out, and Trey had only gotten a slice. Well, a slice at the table and a slice on the way into the arena, but he was still hungry.

  But Darc’s next words left Trey’s hopes dashed. “Maggie’s morning sickness is now past. The likelihood of there being any pizza left is less than four percent.”

  In the three months since Maggie had told Trey that she was expecting, just about every morning had started off with her huddled around the toilet, throwing up anything that she had been foolish enough to put in her stomach the night before. She’d tried not eating food after ten pm, then eight, then six. Nothing had helped.

  But those days were past. Now every time Trey came home, he had trouble finding anything edible in their apartment. Just two days ago, Maggie had gotten so desperate that she’d started eating some old Twinkie that had been left in the pantry as long as Trey had lived there with her. Did those things ever go bad?

  They finally found the exit to the arena, and as they opened up the doors leading to the armory, the sounds of the rest of the Family Fun Center bled through the walls to envelop them in sound. Kids’ voices laughing, crying and screaming, the beeps and chimes of the video games, the grumbling undertones of the weary parents.

  This was what Trey had to look forward to.

  Yay.

  “Look,” Trey finally said, hanging up his vest and gun, “just because Maggie’s got a bun in the oven, it doesn’t mean that…” he trailed off as he noticed Darc’s uncomprehending look. Well, it was as much of a look as Darc ever gave. Trey had needed to sort through some pretty minute facial changes, learning to cope with Darc’s Asperger’s. “Bun in the oven. Fetus in the womb.”

  “That is an inaccurate metaphor for the process of gestation,” Darc replied. “The fermentation of the yeast would be more precise.”

  “Buddy, whatever, it’s what people say.”

  They exited the armory and came out into the chaos of the amusement center. As Trey made a beeline back to their table, Janey grabbed on to his sleeve, forcing him to stop.

  She pointed to the scoreboard that hung right outside the exit to the laser tag area. There, in bright lights, were their scores. Sure enough, their team had beaten the other by a margin on three to one. Score another one for the savant detective.

  Trey searched for his score, but couldn’t seem to find it. No, wait. There it was. All the way at the bottom.

  “Dude!” he griped. “I came in last place?” How
had that happened? There had been a kid in a wheelchair on their team, for crying out loud. That was it. He was never playing laser tag again.

  But then he looked into Janey’s face. She looked radiant. Like she was glowing with an inner fire, almost.

  It had been her idea to come out here. Even when it came to kid’s entertainment, Janey looked for the stuff that was as close to the edge as she could get.

  No, actually, that wasn’t true. As Trey thought about it, the things Janey pushed for were always the kinds of activities where she would either gain skills or learn things. And, apparently, one of the things she wanted to learn to do was be a sharpshooter.

  Trey looked up at the board again, but this time for Janey’s name. And then he found it. Second from the top. Only Darc had scored higher.

  Amazing kid. He reached down and ruffled her hair. Janey grinned at him and punched him playfully in the gut.

  “No fair. Cheap shot,” he fired back at her.

  They made their way over to the Rocky and Bullwinkle-themed restaurant and found Mala and Maggie, who were hovering over the remnants of the pizza. Remnants might be an overly ambitious word to describe what was left. Crumbs and a grease spot were more accurate.

  Maggie looked up at Trey and must have seen the frown on his face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want more?”

  “No, no. I’m fine,” he answered and was about to continue with the idea that they order dessert when his cell phone rang. Darth Vader’s theme. Captain Merle.

  Snapping his fingers at his partner, hoping to get Darc’s attention, Trey answered the call. “Detective Keane.”

  “Keane, we caught a weird one. I need you and Darc out there. Now. I’m texting you the address,” came the deep voice on the line. There was no further conversation, just a dial tone as the captain hung up the phone.

  Looked like they were leaving, dessert or no.

  * * *

  The atmosphere of the Family Fun Center was a cacophony of sound for Darc. Under normal circumstances, he would avoid a place like this in the way one might avoid the Ebola virus. However, Janey had wanted to go.

  And that had ended all thoughts of going elsewhere.

  The fact that something, or specifically someone, could turn off his thought process was troubling. The swirling grey threads that radiated out from this chain of events wove themselves throughout Darc’s mental processes, interfering with the smooth flow of the colored bands of logic that were his mainstay.

  And yet, for all that, Darc knew he would do nothing to stem the tide of grey. Janey, and on a different level entirely Mala, had been allowed to infiltrate the inner workings of his mind in a way that Darc had never before experienced.

  If he were to note this kind of interference in a computer system, he would attribute it to an aggressive virus and treat the entire matter as an attack on that system, or some sort of subversion of it. And yet in this case he was not a passive participant in the process, but one that now sought out opportunities to experience the troubling effects of the grey wash that emotions brought on.

  The sounds beat at him, battering him from all angles. Through this concerted attack, Trey’s words filtered into his awareness, brought to his attention by the threads of logic that were his only salvation in moments such as these. The strands separated out the separate frequencies of the sound waves, bringing certain ranges into close observation for Darc to inspect.

  It was almost as if he saw, rather than heard, when his partner spoke to him.

  “You doing okay, buddy?” Trey asked. “You’re getting that look you sometimes get.”

  “What look?” Darc responded. As far as he was aware, his face was expressionless, except for those moments when he remembered to force his muscles to shape themselves into a specific form. And even then, he had been told the result was not effective. He had long since abandoned the exercise as a fruitless endeavor.

  “Okay, maybe not a look per se,” Trey conceded. “But more like you’re vibrating at the frequency you get right before you do something really… how should I put this? Umm… asshat-ish?”

  “That is not a word.” Idioms, turns of phrase, colloquialisms… they seemed to operate on the same plane as the grey shapes and forms of his emotional landscape. Trey used them all of the time, but Darc never seemed to grow accustomed to them.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.” Trey held open the door for a woman and her child, changing the muscles of his face into what appeared to be some sort of grimace. No, no. The likelihood was that it was intended as a smile.

  The woman and child were in Darc’s way. The lines of logic were leading him directly into their path. He kept walking, not altering his direction or speed, and the woman was forced to let go of her child’s hand and dart out of his way, pushing her child in the opposite direction to keep Darc from running him down.

  Strange that she would not be more active in accommodating someone of Darc’s size and stature in a crowded establishment such as this one. The woman made an expression that appeared similar to Trey’s earlier grimace as her child began to make an unpleasant noise. Perhaps she was pleased to have been given an opportunity to shed herself of the youth, whose cries were at a frequency that was not comfortable for the human ear.

  “Dude,” Trey said, punching Darc in the arm. “That’s what I was talking about. That was an asshat move. Don’t you see that?”

  “I do not understand.”

  Trey released a long breath of air. “I know. And that’s the problem.”

  Darc did not reply to that statement. It had not been a question, so no response seemed necessary. The grey landscape threatened, pushing in on the borders of his colored lines of logic. He pushed back, forcing the incursion to retreat.

  Staring at Darc for another long moment, Trey finally spoke again. His tone had altered in a subtle way. Darc could track those changes, hear the differences in timbre, pitch and volume, but the result was mired in grey.

  “You had been doing so well. It’s like you’re choosing to go backward.” Trey shook his head. “And I wish you would tell me why.

  His partner’s face was more still that Darc was used to seeing it. There was less overt movement of the facial muscles, and yet Darc was somehow able to tell that Trey was disappointed. There was a long pause, during which no words were spoken.

  And then Trey got into his Land Rover, the door squeaking as it opened and closed. Darc remained outside the vehicle in the cold, moist air, feeling the push of the atmosphere against the warmer skin of his bald scalp. The lines of logic calculated the rate of the loss of heat along that organic barrier, a process that moved along in the background of Darc’s perceptions.

  It had always been there. It worked for him. It allowed him to perform as a detective in a way that no one else could. Darc knew and acknowledged that fact.

  But the grey…

  He had made these journeys into that formless territory inside his own mind. Terrifying trips of emotional openness that left him exposed to the raw workings of the world around him, stripped of the logical process that was his strength and shield.

  Breaking into the group home where Janey had been held, that first moment she’d been taken from him after all that took place in the Seattle Underground. Finding Mala and rescuing her from Van Owen, who had taken her captive. Acknowledging his overwhelming grey feelings for both, and the disorientation that came along with them.

  It was too much.

  Darc opened the door to the vehicle and stepped inside. The lines of light had pointed the way, and their logic was simple. All that was needed was to follow.

  * * *

  One of the many games of chance in the Family Fun Center screeched at a frequency that could decalcify bone. Tickets began spewing out of the machine, much to the delight of the child playing it. Perhaps with all of those tickets, the player would be able to get… a plastic slap bracelet, or something equally as trivial.

  Dr. Mala Charan had discovered several things this eveni
ng. One of which was that she did not enjoy the Family Fun Center. Or laser tag. Not even a little bit.

  Having gone through enough experiences in the real world, where she was holding a gun and trying to navigate the adrenaline rush that came along with mortal danger, Mala felt no desire to mimic that feeling when it wasn’t a necessity. To be honest, she couldn’t understand why Trey seemed to love it so much.

  Darc was, as always, a blank wall. There was no way for Mala to know for sure whether or not the tall detective had enjoyed himself, as there was nothing but his neutral affect on which she could base her opinions.

  Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Mala questioned their budding relationship. The dating thing they’d started to figure out, at least to the point that they could now go grab a bite to eat without Darc mortally offending someone in the restaurant. Well, most of the time.

  Okay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Ever since Darc had found out that Maggie and Trey were pregnant, it seemed as if his emotional disconnect had grown, and even in moments gotten downright aggressive.

  Just as Mala didn’t have to read Darc’s expressions to know that he hadn’t really enjoyed the Family Fun Center… he was autistic, for crying out loud… she didn’t have to hear it from the detective’s lips to know that he was troubled by the new development in Trey’s life. Trey’s life with Darc’s ex-wife.

  That was a situation that had been worked through enough that Mala was confident it wouldn’t cause major issues for the two partners, but any therapist worth their salt knew that just because you’ve worked something through, it doesn’t mean it will never crop up again. And it seemed to be doing so right now in a significant way.

  Janey rushed up to Mala and Maggie, grinning as she held out the hand that wasn’t holding her bear for more tokens. Mala smiled back and gave her the last of the coins that were in the little plastic cups they’d been given when they’d ordered their pizza earlier that evening.