“You were listening outside again, weren’t you?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were a moron. “What do you think? I wanted to know what you guys were gonna do. Which wasn’t what I expected, but I guess it was okay. Might’ve been better if you’d gone ahead and shot him.” He scratched his jaw. “You sure he’s gonna let you be? More important, is he gonna let me be?”
“I suspect he’ll have no choice,” Pop said. “You see, I’ve already asked my new Navy comrade to inquire with his high-placed friends regarding a transfer for the lieutenant colonel. So whether he asks for one or not, one will soon be suggested to him. Assuming he doesn’t find himself in Dutch before that happens. Because whenever the general returns, I may be having a conversation with him as well.”
The Cutthroat gave a snorting laugh. “You are one strange fucking excuse for a corporal.”
“That I am,” Pop said. “And you brew the goddamnedest cup of coffee I ever drank. Next time, I’ll make my own.”
But the Cutthroat was already heading down the boardwalk. “Leave my six beers outside my shed,” he called back. He glowed in the golden shafts of light from The Adakian for a few seconds, and then was gone.
Pop turned to me. “It was kind of you to walk back with me, Private. But unnecessary. I may seem like a frail old man. But despite my white hair and tuberculosis-ravaged lungs, I do manage to get around, don’t I?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” Pop said. He pointed at me with his bottle of Johnnie Walker. “What did I tell you about ‘sir’ and enlisted men?”
I held out my hand. “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to salute you.”
He gave me a quick handshake. His grip was stronger than he looked.
“It’s been a long and overly interesting day, Private,” he said. “And I sincerely hope, you dumb Bohunk, that I only encounter you in passing from now on. No offense.”
“None taken.”
He turned to go inside. “Good night, Private.”
But I couldn’t let it go at that.
“That Navy boy is dead,” I blurted. “It was the colonel’s fault, and we’re letting him get away with it.”
Pop stopped just inside the lean-to. “Maybe so.” He looked back at me. “But sometimes the best you can do is wound your enemy . . . and then let him fly away.”
“Is that what happened?” I asked. “Is that what it meant when you showed him the feather?”
Pop rolled his eyes upward and grinned with those bad teeth.
“That didn’t mean a thing to me,” he said. “But it meant something to him.” He checked his wristwatch. “And now I really do have a newspaper to put out. Any more silly questions?”
There was one.
“How can you do that?” I asked.
Pop frowned. “How can I do what?”
All the way back from the colonel’s office, I had been struggling with the words in my head. I wasn’t good with words. And Pop already thought I was stupid. So I knew I wouldn’t say it right. But I had to try.
“How can you go back to what you did before?” I asked. “How can you do anything at all now that—” I closed my fist, as if I could grab what I wanted to say from the fog. “Now that you know what happens.”
Pop’s shoulders slumped, and his eyes drifted away from mine for a moment.
But only a moment.
Then his shoulders snapped up, and his eyes met mine again. They were fierce.
“Because I’m not dead yet,” he said. He turned away. “And neither are you.”
He opened the door with the words The Adakian stenciled on it. He raised the whiskey bottle, and a roar of voices greeted him. Then the door closed, and the long day was over.
I started back down the boardwalk. I thought I might go back to the bay and just watch the water all night. I’d probably get cold as hell without a coat, even in July. But as long as there wasn’t a williwaw, I’d survive.
In the morning, at chow, I would tell my squad leader that I was all his.
Epilogue
There was buzz for the next several days about the Navy murder, and I eventually heard that they arrested a seaman named Joe. But no one ever questioned me, and I never heard what they did with him. And I didn’t try to find out.
I saw the Cutthroat only once more, at a distance, just a few days after the fifth of July. He was boarding a ship at the dock in Sweeper Cove. It didn’t look like he was sneaking on. So I think he probably made it back to Fort Richardson and finished the war with the Alaska Scouts. But I don’t know.
The lieutenant colonel left Adak less than two weeks after that. I didn’t hear where he had been sent. But a few years after V-J Day, my curiosity got the better of me, and I made some inquiries. I learned that he had gone to the Philippines and had died at the outset of the Battle of Leyte in October 1944. A kamikaze had hit his ship, and he had burned to death. He never received his promotion.
I never spoke with Pop again. I saw him around throughout the rest of July and the first part of August, because he was hard to miss. I even passed by him on Main Street a few times. Once he gave me a nod, and I gave him the same in return.
That was all that passed between us until Pop was transferred to the mainland. We had all heard it was happening, since he was the camp celebrity and there was a lot of debate as to whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he was going. But no one seemed to know just when it would occur.
Then, one evening in August, I came back to my bunk after a long day of working on a new runway at the airfield. And there was a manila envelope on my pillow. Inside I found the bent eagle feather and a typed note:
CLEARING OUT JUNK. THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT THIS. YOU OWE ME A ZIPPO. P.S. WHEN YOU BRAG TO YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT HAVING MET ME, DO NOT CALL ME “POP.” D. H.
I have not honored his request.
Toward the end of the war, I heard that Pop had made sergeant and been reassigned back to Adak in early 1945. But by then I was gone. I had been sent south to rejoin my old combat unit and train for an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Then came the Bomb, and I was in Nebraska by Christmas.
Now, as an old man, I take the bent eagle feather from its envelope every fifth of July. Just for a minute.
My life has been good, but not much of it has been a surprise. I saw most of it coming a long time ago.
But then Pop slapped me awake. He slapped me awake, and he kept me from seeing the end.
I’ve always been grateful to him for that.
I don’t know whether he was a Communist. I don’t know whether he subverted the Constitution, supported tyrants, lied to Congress, or did any of the other things they said he did.
But I know he wore his country’s uniform in two World Wars. And I know he’s buried at Arlington.
Plus one more thing.
Just today, decades after I first saw that hardback copy on another guy’s bunk . . .
I’ve finally finished reading The Maltese Falcon.
And you know what? I wish I could tell Pop:
It’s pretty goddamn good.
Some of Bradley Denton’s stories have been collected in the World Fantasy Award-winning collections A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians. His 2004 novella “Sergeant Chip” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His novels include Wrack & Roll, Blackburn, Laughin’ Boy, Lunatics, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well On Ganymede (soon to be a motion picture: www.aliveandwellmovie.com).
The Case: Three apparently lovey-dovey couples commit dual suicide in the span of two weeks. But for the third pair . . . well, there are seriously irrational components to their behavior indicating mental tampering by black magic.
The Investigators: Harry Dresden—wizard-for-hire, private detective, and Special Investigations consultant for the Chicago Police Department—and Sergeant Karrin Murphy of the CPD.
LOVE HURTS
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br /> Jim Butcher
Murphy gestured at the bodies and said, “Love hurts.”
I ducked under the crime scene tape and entered the Wrigleyville apartment. The smell of blood and death was thick. It made gallows humor inevitable.
Murphy stood there looking at me. She wasn’t offering explanations. That meant she wanted an unbiased opinion from CPD’s Special Investigations consultant—who is me, Harry Dresden. As far as I know, I am the only wizard on the planet earning a significant portion of his income working for a law enforcement agency.
I stopped and looked around, taking inventory.
Two bodies, naked, male and female, still intertwined in the act. One little pistol, illegal in Chicago, laying upon the limp fingers of the woman. Two gunshot wounds to the temples, one each. There were two overlapping fan-shaped splatters of blood, and more had soaked into the carpet. The bodies stank like hell. Some very unromantic things had happened to them after death.
I walked a little further into the room and looked around. Somewhere in the apartment, an old vinyl was playing Queen. Freddie wondered who wanted to live forever. As I listened, the song ended and began again a few seconds later, popping and scratching nostalgically.
The walls were covered in photographs.
I don’t mean that there were a lot of pictures on the wall, like at great-grandma’s house. I mean covered in photographs. Entirely. Completely papered.
I glanced up. So was the ceiling.
I took a moment to walk slowly around, looking at pictures. All of them, every single one of them, featured the two dead people together, posed somewhere and looking deliriously happy. I walked and peered. Plenty of the pictures were near-duplicates in most details, except that the subjects wore different sets of clothing—generally cutesy matching T-shirts. Most of the sites were tourist spots within Chicago.
It was as if the couple had gone on the same vacation tour every day, over and over again, collecting the same general batch of pictures each time.
“Matching T-shirts,” I said. “Creepy.”
Murphy’s smile was unpleasant. She was a tiny, compactly muscular woman with blond hair and a button nose. I’d say that she was so cute I just wanted to put her in my pocket, but if I tried to do it, she’d break my arm. Murph knows martial arts.
She waited and said nothing.
“Another suicide pact. That’s the third one this month.” I gestured at the pictures. “Though the others weren’t quite so cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or, ah, in medias res.” I shrugged and gestured at the obsessive photographs. “This is just crazy.”
Murphy lifted one pale eyebrow ever so slightly. “Remind me: how much do we pay you to give us advice, Sherlock?”
I grimaced. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” I was quiet for a while and then said, “What were their names?”
“Greg and Cindy Bardalacki,” Murphy said.
“Seemingly unconnected dead people, but they share similar patterns of death. Now we’re upgrading to irrational and obsessive behavior as a precursor . . . ” I frowned. I checked several of the pictures and went over to eye the bodies. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, hell’s bells.”
Murphy arched an eyebrow.
“No wedding rings anywhere,” I said. “No wedding pictures. And . . . ” I finally found a framed family picture which looked to have been there for awhile, among all the snapshots. Greg and Cindy were both in it, along with an older couple and a younger man.
“Jesus, Murph,” I said. “They weren’t a married couple. They were brother and sister.”
Murphy eyed the intertwined bodies. There were no signs of struggle. Clothes, champagne flutes, and an empty bubbly bottle lay scattered. “Married, no,” she said. “Couple, yes.” She was unruffled. She’d already worked that out for herself.
“Ick,” I said. “But that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“These two. They were together—and they went insane doing it. This has the earmarks of someone tampering with their minds.”
Murphy squinted at me. “Why?”
I spread my hands. “Let’s say Greg and Cindy bump into Bad Guy X. Bad Guy X gets into their heads and makes them fall wildly in love and lust with one another. There’s nothing they can do about the feelings—which seem perfectly natural—but on some level they’re aware that what they’re doing is not what they want, and dementedly wrong besides. Their compromised conscious minds clash with their subconscious and . . . ” I gestured at pictures. “And it escalates until they can’t handle it anymore, and bang.” I shot Murphy with my thumb and forefinger.
“If you’re right, they aren’t the deceased,” Murphy said. “They’re the victims. Big difference. Which is it?”
“Wish I could say,” I said, “But the only evidence that could prove it one way or another is leaking out onto the floor. If we get a survivor, maybe I could take a peek and see, but barring that we’re stuck with legwork.”
Murphy sighed and looked down. “Two suicide pacts could—technically—be a coincidence. Three of them, no way it’s natural. This feels more like something’s MO. Could it be another one of those Skavis vampires?”
“They gun for loners,” I said, shaking my head. “These deaths don’t fit their profile.”
“So. You’re telling me that we need to turn up a common denominator to link the victims? Gosh, I wish I could have thought of that on my own.”
I winced. “Yeah.” I glanced over at a couple of other SI detectives in the room, taking pictures of the bodies and documenting the walls and so on. Forensics wasn’t on site. They don’t like to waste their time on the suicides of the emotionally disturbed, regardless of how bizarre they might be. That was crap work, and as such had been dutifully passed to SI.
I lowered my voice. “If someone is playing mind games, the Council might know something. I’ll try to pick up the trail on that end. You start from here. Hopefully, I’ll earn my pay and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“Right.” Murph stared at the bodies and her eyes were haunted. She knew what it was like to be the victim of mental manipulation. I didn’t reach out to support her. She hated showing vulnerability, and I didn’t want to point out to her that I’d noticed.
Freddie reached a crescendo which told us that love must die.
Murphy sighed and called, “For the love of God, someone turn off that damned record.”
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Captain Luccio said. “We don’t exactly have orbital satellites for detecting black magic.”
I waited a second to be sure that she was finished. The presence of so much magical talent on the far end of the call meant that at times the lag could stretch out between Chicago and Edinburgh, the headquarters of the White Council of Wizardry. Anastasia Luccio, Captain of the Wardens, my ex-girlfriend, had been readily forthcoming with the information the Council had on any shenanigans going on in Chicago—which was exactly nothing.
“Too bad we don’t, eh?” I asked. “Unofficially—is there anyone who might know anything?”
“The Gatekeeper, perhaps. He has a gift for sensing problem areas. But no one has seen him for weeks, which is hardly unusual. And frankly, Warden Dresden, you’re supposed to be the one giving us this kind of information.” Her voice was half-teasing, half deadly serious. “What do you think is happening?”
“Three couples, apparently lovey-dovey as hell, have committed dual suicide in the past two weeks,” I told her. “The last two were brother and sister. There were some seriously irrational components to their behavior.”
“You suspect mental tampering,” she said. Her voice was hard.
Luccio had been a victim, too.
I found myself smiling somewhat bitterly at no one. She had been, among other things, mindboinked into going out with me. Which was apparently the only way anyone would date me, lately. “It seems a reasonable suspicion. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”
“Use caution,” she said. “Don’t enter any suspect situation without
backup on hand. There’s too much chance that you could be compromised.”
“Compromised?” I asked. “Of the two people having this conversation, which one of them exposed the last guy rearranging people’s heads?”
“Touché,” Luccio said. “But he got away with it because we were overconfident. So use caution anyway.”
“Planning on it,” I said.
There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Anastasia said, “How have you been, Harry?”
“Keeping busy,” I said. She had already apologized to me, sort of, for abruptly walking out of my personal life. She’d never intended to be there in the first place. There had been a real emotional tsunami around the events of last year, and I wasn’t the one who had gotten the most hurt by them. “You?”
“Keeping busy.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I know it’s over. But I’m glad for the time we had together. It made me happy. Sometimes I—”
Miss feeling that, I thought, completing the sentence. My throat felt tight. “Nothing wrong with happy.”
“No, there isn’t. When it’s real.” Her voice softened. “Be careful, Harry. Please.”
“I will,” I said.
I started combing the supernatural world for answers and got almost nothing. The Little Folk, who could usually be relied on to provide some kind of information, had nothing for me. Their memory for detail is very short, and the deaths had happened too long ago to get me anything but conflicting gibberish from them.
I made several mental nighttime sweeps through the city using the scale model of Chicago in my basement, and got nothing but a headache for my trouble.
I called around the Paranet, the organization of folk with only modest magical gifts, the kind who often found themselves being preyed upon by more powerful supernatural beings. They worked together now, sharing information, communicating successful techniques, and generally overcoming their lack of raw magical muscle with mutually supportive teamwork. They didn’t have anything for me, either.
I hit McAnnally’s, a hub of the supernatural social scene, and asked a lot of questions. No one had any answers. Then I started contacting the people I knew in the scene, starting with the ones I thought most likely to provide information. I worked my way methodically down the list, crossing out names, until I got to “ask random people on the street.”
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