Strange Robby

by Selina Rosen

  There was no triumph in Carrie. Maybe it hadn't even dawned on her yet that she might run for DA. Her only concern was that a man she liked and admired was horribly ill. Her only desire was that he make a complete recovery. Spider was glad. She forgot herself and smiled, which was, of course not what she should have done, and Carrie glared at her.

  "What the hell are you so happy about!" Carrie was obviously mad. "It's not worth it to me for Richards to die because I'd like to be DA someday. Hell, I'm not even ready yet."

  "I . . . I know that," Spider stammered. "That's why I was smiling. I was happy that you were so virtuous."

  Carrie nodded. "I'm sorry, Honey. I forget sometimes that you're not always on the same page as the rest of us."

  They had reached the coffee machine. Spider started getting the coffee as it had been ordered.

  "I feel so guilty."

  "You . . . Why?" Spider said.

  "Because you told me he had heart trouble. I should have said something," Carrie said.

  "First off, they would have thought you were crazy," Spider said, handing Carrie one cup of coffee. "That's for Mrs. Richards." She started the next cup. "Second, he knew he had heart trouble, or at least suspected, otherwise I couldn't have got it from him. I can't predict the future. He was worried about his heart . . . Worried that he was going to have an attack the day of the hostage situation in the bank."

  "But his physical gave him a clean bill of health," Carrie reminded Spider.

  "Doctors and tests don't catch everything. He knew he was sick." She handed a second cup to Carrie. "That's yours." She started getting her own coffee.

  "So, is forewarned really forearmed?" Carrie asked.

  Spider grabbed her coffee and they started back.

  "Well?" Carrie prompted.

  "I'm thinking," Spider answered. She thought only a second longer. "It's saved my life at least twice, and helped me save others. So I can't come right out and say no. But it has made it impossible to lead a so-called 'normal' life, who knows how many wrong turns I've made because I knew how someone felt, so I couldn't say yes, either."

  Chapter Nine

  "Surely he gives to a man that is good in his sight,

  wisdom, and knowledge, and joy: but to the sinner

  he gives the task of gathering and heaping up, that

  he may give it to one who is good before God. This

  also is a vanity and a striving after wind." Ecclesiastes 2:26

  Robby stared at the man at the end of the alley. He watched as the man disappeared around the corner.

  Six, six at least. He preys on women, old and young, he doesn't care. He takes from them something that they can never get back; their peace of mind.

  He wrestled the washer into the truck. He had work to do, a family to support. They counted on him for everything.

  They count on me to keep them safe, and here I stand letting a rapist walk away. I can't do it, and I won't.

  He pulled his gloves on tighter and went in the direction he had seen the man go.

  Tommy looked at the clock. Two o'clock in the morning. "Why can't this guy pick a more reasonable hour to kill people?"

  "Scum come out at night," Laura suggested sleepily. "If you prey on scum, you've got to come out in the dark, too."

  He looked at his comlink. "I'd better make like a baby and go. Spider's already on her way."

  "Poor Carrie, this has been a hell of a day for her," Laura said.

  Tommy had to agree. Richards had come through surgery OK, but he had suffered a pretty major stroke, and had struggled to announce that he would not be running for re-election. In a statement dictated at great personal cost, he asked his supporters to vote for Carrie. On her way out of the hospital Carrie had run into a wall of reporters. They asked her if she was going to run. She said yes. They asked her about Richards and about her campaign. Mostly they wanted to know if it was true that she was a lesbian, to which she answered yes. After that they had bombarded her for fifteen minutes until the police were able to pull her through the crowd to her car.

  Tommy had finished dressing. He bent down and kissed Laura. "Hopefully I'll be home before I have to get up and go to work."

  "Be careful. I love you, Tommy."

  "I love you, too."

  "How am I supposed to get worked up about the death of scum like this?" Carrie asked Tommy in a whisper.

  "You just said a mouthful," Tommy agreed.

  Spider had wandered off and was checking out the crime scene. Tommy had worked with her long enough that he knew when she just wanted to be left alone.

  "So, things cool off a little?" he asked Carrie, even though he could guess at the answer.

  Carrie shrugged. "Before or after Spider tore the phone out of the wall and threw it in the pool?" She sighed. "I don't know, Tommy. Maybe I shouldn't run for office. I think I can take the heat, but I'm not sure about Spider. People were calling all evening. Very few of the calls were supportive. Most of them were . . . 'We don't need no fucking dyke running the country'. Ignorant fucks who don't even know what the DA does. Telling me shit like God's gonna strike me dead. Threatening me, calling me a pervert. I've never seen Spider so mad. I was upset, and she knew it, so she started taking the calls. After the third one I heard this popping sound, and the next thing I knew the phone was flying through the air into the pool. Then she crawled up on the roof with a high-powered rifle and sat there for three hours just waiting for anyone to try anything. So I'm guessing the last one was an actual death threat."

  Tommy didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry, Carrie. Listen, I'll talk to Spider."

  "Can you talk to every idiot in this city? Because I've got to tell you that I was happy to see the phone gone, and the whole time I was trying to talk her down off the roof I was wondering if maybe she wasn't right where she needed to be," Carrie said. "You know, every time I think we have evolved farther than this I realize that we never should have crawled out of the mud. It's the same old shit. When people have a belief that is hard to defend and impossible to prove, they either persecute or kill the people who disagree with them. That's why mankind becomes more and more stupid. Because all these self-righteous idiots keep destroying anyone with a brain." She walked away mumbling something about breeding a generation of culls.

  Tommy started looking over the crime scene just because he wanted to make sure he looked busy.

  Spider was talking to one of the Feds, but this time she didn't look agitated. In fact, they seemed to be having a normal conversation, which would of course make it abnormal.

  Spider had approached Harry Sullivan with caution.

  "Harry, can I talk to you for a minute?" she asked. He nodded and walked over to her.

  "What is it, Webb?" Obviously he was ready for an argument over something.

  "What's up with the idiots in black?" she asked.

  "You mean the So-what-if guys?"

  "Damn! I thought I coined that."

  "Sorry to disappoint you. We've been calling them that for years," Harry said.

  "So, what the hell are they?" Spider asked.

  Harry shrugged. "I've been doing this for fifteen years, and this is only the third time I've ever seen them. Never for this long, either. They usually come in, a bunch of evidence comes up missing, and they're gone. Every time it was a case like this. Someone was using a weapon no one could identify."

  "Anything else?" Spider asked.

  Harry looked at her and smiled an all-knowing, smug smile.

  She wanted to slap it off his face. She sighed. "All right, all right, but you're going to think I'm nuts. That's the only reason I haven't told anyone what I think."

  Harry nodded.

  "It's not a weapon. I think this guy, maybe he's some sort of mutant or shit. I think he sees evil. Justice is blind, but this guy isn't. If he was an ex-cop, or even active, he would have shown up on the comlink system by now. It's a simple process of elimination. You know that because you know how the system works. Ou
r boy is not a cop, he knows these people are crooks because he sees it."

  "OK Webb. So far what you're saying makes as much sense as anything else I've heard, but what about the weapon?"

  "You'd better have some good shit for me, Harry," Spider said. She looked around again to make sure no one was watching them. "All right. First, if there was a weapon like this it would be on file somewhere. There would be some information on it. The FBI would sure as hell know about it, and it's obvious that you are as clueless as we are. The only thing that I could find on my link that would come close to delivering this kind of damage weighs about six hundred pounds. If our boy were carrying something around like that, someone would have seen him—and it."

  "I have the same information. We were thinking maybe some other country had developed . . . "

  "And you guys don't know about it? Not very damn likely. I think this guy is the weapon. Now, I don't know how he came to be—or why. But I think he's pyrokinetic. I think he sees their evil and has the power to do something about it."

  The G-man wasn't laughing. "The SWTF guys were bugging me, too. So I started sifting through some old files. You know, anything I could find that might give me some clue as to why they were here now. I came across a file marked . . . ." He looked around quickly and then, just to be on the safe side, pulled her out of line of sight of anyone. "The project was called Better People through Chemicals. Their idea of a joke or something. It was a locked file, and took a sixth level clearance, which I don't have. I got in, not going to say how. It was a list of names and dates. I thought at first they were dates of birth. But then I came across the word 'fertilization'. I noticed a pattern—five fertilizations at a time. Every three years."

  "What the hell was it?" Spider asked.

  "I think the government is dabbling in genetic engineering. I think the Strange Weapons in Strange Weapons Task Force are people. I think these guys show up when one of their 'weapons' gets away from them." He looked around again. "They're following you because they think you know who their weapon is. If you do, you'd by God better play dumb, because if you tell them what you just told me, there's a real good chance you're gonna wind up dead."

  Spider nodded. "That's what I thought. There is no winning with them. Don't find him and they follow you around, and you don't know what they're going to do. Do find him and they kill you because then you know too much."

  "You said it, sister," Harry said, shaking his head.

  "Sounds to me like you'd better watch your back, too," Spider said.

  "Believe me, I already am."

  Neither one of them had gotten enough sleep to make them really happy about being at work. Spider was driving. Tommy was almost asleep, and they were heading down to the morgue to talk to the coroner so that he could tell them what they already knew. Microwaved brains.

  A bus went by. Someone had hit Richards' campaign photo in the chest with a red paint ball.

  "Now, ain't that sweet," Spider hissed.

  Tommy looked over to see what she was talking about and grunted his agreement.

  "What were you and Sullivan talking about last night?" Tommy asked.

  "You really don't want to know that, Tommy," Spider said. "I'll just tell you this. The So-what-if guys that have been following us and bugged our car are nobody to fuck with."

  Tommy nodded. Since he wasn't one hundred percent sure that he didn't have one of those tiny little bugs on him, he wasn't going to press the issue. He looked out the window. It was a beautiful spring day. Not too warm and not too cold. He'd like to take Laura and a blanket, go to the park and just hang out. That was the problem with life; 'responsibility' got in the way of enjoying it. You were constantly doing what you had to do instead of what you wanted to do.

  Tommy's whole life had been that way.

  "When I was a kid, maybe six or seven, Uncle Lop Sing was hiking in the woods. Way off in the middle of nowhere he found this old campground that had been built by the WPA or the CCC, abandoned and forgotten years before. Not even the road had been maintained, so that you had to hike five miles to get there. There were eight small rock cabins and one huge meeting building. It became a family tradition that once a year the whole family would hike up there together and stay for two weeks. It was a beautiful place with a running creek, and it was so quiet. The whole family was together. My mom and my aunts would cook huge meals. My uncles would fish and play ball with my cousins. I always wanted to fish, too. I always wanted to play catch. But my father said it was a waste of time. It was one thing to go on vacation, and another to stop training. So while everyone else was playing, I was training. It was my responsibility. Since all of my cousins were girls, I had to carry on the tradition. It was my duty."

  "Duty sucks," Spider said, with no elegance but a whole load of camaraderie.

  "I always wanted to go there and just play catch," Tommy finished with a sigh.

  "Then why don't you?" Spider asked.

  Tommy just stared at her, mouth open for a second, then he laughed. "You know . . . maybe I will."

  Spider readjusted the rear view mirror. The SWTF guys were right behind them. She turned quickly and drove down what she knew was a blind alley and they followed.

  "Spider! What the hell!" Tommy screamed as he was thrown up against the side of the car.

  Spider braked to a stop, jumped out of their car and ran back to the car that had pulled in behind them. She got there before the SWTF men had a chance to back up.

  "What the hell is she doing?" Kirk asked.

  "Calling our bluff," Jason answered.

  Kirk rolled down his window as she approached them. Her partner was not far behind her. "See how well they work together? Now why can't we be more like that, Jason?"

  "Because I don't like you, and you don't like me," Jason said bluntly.

  Spider knelt on the ground beside their car so that she was looking in the window. Tommy stood at her shoulder.

  "OK, I'll bite," Spider started. "Why are you spooks following us?"

  "Orders, detective. I'm sure you understand orders," Kirk said heavily.

  "No, can't say that I do. Why are they ordering you to follow us? Why did you bug our car?" Spider said.

  "Orders. I hate to bust your bubble, detective, but we don't have to tell you anything. We don't have to give you any reasons. We don't even have to smile when we say fuck you."

  Spider smiled at him a moment. Then she jumped to her feet, grabbed him by the collar, and jerked him quickly up so that he was half way through the window. She then shoved him into the car roof until his back made a funny little popping noise.

  Tommy hurled himself across the hood and slammed the car door into Jason as he got out of the car, successfully pinning him in the doorway. Then Tommy held him there, giving him a look that dared him to so much as breathe funny.

  Spider glared down at Kirk. "I know people like you. You've been in my face my whole fucking life. You think you've got some kind of power over me. That you can kill me any time you like. Well listen up you fucking walking carcass. I could kill you anytime I like."

  He tried to look away, and she jerked on him till he was forced to look at her.

  "I could snap you in two right here right now, and feel no remorse. So, if you want to play fucking games, then you play fucking games. But let me warn you. I'm like a dog; if you try to corner me, I'll eat your fucking face."

  She let him go and started walking away. Tommy did, too, although he kept his eye on Jason, who, for his part, put his hands in the air indicating that he didn't want a fight.

  Kirk moved his hand toward his gun.

  Spider spun in a single motion, her gun in hand, pointed at his head. She smiled at him. "And bang! bang! would make you dead."

  Kirk put his hands up, then lowered himself into the car. Jason got back into the car, too, and they backed quickly out of the alley.

  Spider put her gun away, and Tommy slapped her, palm down in the shoulder, hard enough to rock her back.
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  "Are you fucking out of your tiny little mind?" Tommy screamed. "Did you not just tell me that you don't fuck with those guys?"

  "I was torn," Spider said.

  "Torn!" He popped her in the shoulder again. "What the fuck does that mean? One minute you're telling me that they are bad juju guys, and the very next minute you're pulling them over and kicking their asses. Which I'm here to tell you is going to piss them off."

  "I was afraid to do nothing," Spider said. "I was afraid to do nothing, and afraid to do anything. I was torn. Now whatever happens, at least I'll know what caused it."