There was a hoof print on what was left of his face and severe crushing to the arms and torso. There was a bend in his right leg that was nothing like natural. Most likely, he’d been killed and then trampled for a good long time.
“It wasn’t. Someone killed my pa. I’m telling you.”
There was plenty of blood too. The hole in the guy’s shoulder looked a lot like something an upset longhorn might make. The abdomen was torn. Blood and feces mixed, but I didn’t smell it in the dry heat. I couldn’t smell anything.
The flies did, though. They had already started to swarm on this fresh feast. They caked the corpse’s eyes and gut. They swarmed around the kid and me, checking to see if we might be good for eating soon too. We might be, I thought, but not yet. There was a crow circling overhead that might have had the same idea. I figured it might be a good idea to finish up before the coyotes and buzzards showed up to the party.
My glow cube dinged a positive ID on the body. It was Daniel, all right. Daniel Brown of Dead Oak, Texas. Registered as married and joint owner of the Brown Ranch.
“Sorry, kid. It’s yer pa.”
“You listening to me? I fucking know it’s my pa. Someone killed him. You gonna do anything?”
I let the glow cube finish a scan of the area. Then I turned it off. I had seen everything I needed for the day. It was a long flight back, and I didn’t feel like dawdling in that dry heat all day.
The kid stood up and walked over to me.
I raised an eyebrow at him and picked my teeth with a blade of grass. The kid stepped up, right in my face. Brave, considering I probably outweighed him by a good twenty kilos.
“C’mon sheriff. You slacking or what? Look at the goddamn body.” His hair spikes almost came up to my chin.
“Saw it. Looks like your pa got himself killed.”
Nothing in the evidence supported the theory that Daniel Brown was murdered. It was, however, perfectly natural for boys of a certain age to cling to such ideas as a way to cope with the tragedy and disappointment. Coping was fine, I believed, but the sort of coping that I suspected the kid was gearing up for most likely involved guns and revenge. Any sort of questioning might further support his wild theory, and while I would have appreciated his perspective on the matter, I just didn’t want to risk it.
In short, I had somehow managed to survive until that day without figuring out that being dismissive and aloof was not a wise or effective way to handle boys of a certain age.
“Shit, they just hire stupid ones to be the law these days, huh?”
I looked at him, stared at him right in the eyes. The kid was mad. I brought two fingers up to my lips and gave out my loudest whistle. “Kid,” I said. “I looked at the body. Your drunk pa got himself trampled by your damn cattle.”
The kid looked at me hard, like he wanted to hit me. I was ready for it. I would have dropped him to the ground. I don’t hold back for kids. Some of the augments these punks have are as dangerous as they are freaky.
But he backed down. “It was murder, jackass.”
My cruiser was coming fast, responding to my whistle. I raised my army-issue black metal arm and stared at the kid. Right on cue, the cruiser dropped a line, and I felt the prehensile grappler as it latched onto my arm and yanked me into the air. It lifted me into the passenger seat. My job was done there.
Being a sheriff was hard work sometimes. It was dangerous and people didn’t always like you. Sometimes it was fighting hard for justice day after day in the unduly hot deserts of southern Texas. Some days it was just gritting your teeth and muscling through as fate and hatred and technology all work against you as best they can.
Some days it was easy.
A sea of black windmills in the rearview mirror swallowed the Brown Ranch. Despite my best efforts, a smile crept across my face. It was an open and shut case. No violence, no detective work, no gangsters or punks. I figured that this was an easy case and it was going to be an easy day.
I was wrong.
Damn wrong.
Chapter 2
“It’s murder.”
I glared up at Contrisha Chin, the new deputy, and spat a wad of snuff into a can on my desk.
After visiting the Brown Ranch, I had made a few rounds through town and settled down in my dark office. The walls were gray cinderblock, with all the decorations you’d expect from a small-town sheriff’s office. There was an overfull trashcan next to a sleek metal desk. The place smelled of stale tobacco smoke and electricity, and for good reason. The office was part of a small underground complex built to withstand any of form of natural disaster and all but the worst man-made ones.
I was mad as hell. Trish was in the doorway of my office, trying to ruin what might have been the start of a very good nap.
The girl was easy on the eyes; she had all the right proportions that a city girl was likely to have. Her skin was a deep mocha. Her hair was nearly black and curly in a way that even the fancy tech of the city wasn’t likely to have simulated. Of course, the plastic sheen of her skin told me it was not completely unaltered, but chances were she was sporting her original tone, and I appreciated that.
Her arms and fingers were wholly artificial, an artistic idea of what perfect limbs ought to look like. I hated Trish. She was just a kid who’d been sent up from Austin the week before. I got this feeling about Trish whenever she talked. It was like breaking glass and screaming puppies. It gave me a headache. She annoyed me, but more importantly I knew it was odd for Austin to send reinforcements or even acknowledge our existence.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose and pulled in a deep breath. It was smoky in the dingy office. Trish was smoking one of those skinny little cigarettes that people smoke when they want to look like they’re smoking but don’t give a damn about the contents of their drug of choice. It was a sweet smoke—smelled like cinnamon. It also gave me a headache.
My eyes wandered to the top drawer of my desk. The need for a drink was almost overpowering, but I wasn’t going to get anything out with Trish in the room.
My glow cube sat in a shiny, black cradle on the desk. I knew Trish was accessing it wirelessly through her brain implant, but I had to look at things the old-fashioned way. A detailed hologram of the murder scene was projected above the desk. I fumbled with the controls and managed to zoom the image in to get a closer look at the victim’s ruined face.
There were burn marks, dozens of them all over the guy’s skin and clothes. I’d missed it before because they weren’t deep. I couldn’t tell what they were from, but they shouldn’t have been there. The guy had been trampled, not burned. I leaned forward and the image flickered.
“The burn marks are one thing, but check out the heart,” Trish said. She got a far-off look and I saw the deep green irises of her eyes flash bright for a second in the dim room.
Her voice didn’t actually sound like broken glass. It was a fine voice—light and untroubled by the cruel heat. It just happened to be a significantly higher pitch than I would have liked to hear at that particular moment. I had no problems with female companionship, though I did prefer the company of men. Contrisha Chin just had a voice that bothered me. I ground my teeth together and tried my best to ignore the voice but acknowledge the words.
I waved my hologram so that it would display the crushed and mangled innards of Daniel Brown. It didn’t. I tried again.
“You have the feed set too low.” Trish smirked.
A person may have interpreted her comment as nothing but helpful, but in my mood I heard mockery. I swiped an exaggerated form of the gesture again, hoping it might work. Nothing happened.
“These older units were notoriously touchy.”
I scowled at her and she winced. Using my bulky metal hand I jammed three fingers into the image and yanked it into position, zooming in closer by splaying all three finger apart. The grisly image of a crushed human heart hovered between us.
“Looks pretty mangled to me.”
“Yeah, but look how it�
��s mangled. Oxygen levels are low in the muscle tissue, like he had a heart attack. Also, the puncture on the left ventricle is from that broken rib. Judging from the damage, though, this happened after the heart had already stopped beating.”
I grunted and peered at the image as if I could see exactly what she was talking about. “So, it’s a heart attack?”
“Yeah, yeah! Exactly!” Somehow she failed to see how this meant it still wasn’t murder. “A heart attack when this guy had a full neurocranial augment and emo-regulating nanomachines? Doesn’t that seem fishy to you?”
I leaned back in my dingy leather chair and put my feet up on the desk. “Nope.”
“Seriously?” She gave me a look that only reaffirmed my feelings for her.
“Seriously.” I put my hat on over my face to block out the light and folded my hands over my chest.
“Look, J.D., at the burns, along with the heart problems, and did you notice his mem chip is missing? Those don’t just vanish, you know. I think this guy was tortured with fire and possibly some physical torture. When that didn’t work, they hacked his augments and jacked him from the inside, causing the heart attack.”
I gave it a long pause. “Sure.”
She was right, of course.
That pissed me off.
“Also,” she continued, “he wasn’t drunk. There was plenty of alcohol in his stomach, but it hadn’t penetrated to the rest of his body or his brain. It looked like his nannies were purging the blood stream and keeping him from getting drunk. So, the alcohol was there, but drunkenness was not the reason that he got trampled by his herd of longhorns.”
Another long pause. “Sure.”
“Well, you gonna do anything? Open an investigation?”
“Sure.” I decided several minutes previously that I was going to open an investigation. I was just being difficult to piss her off. There was no reason I had to be the only one pissed off.
Her jaw was set hard. Her lips were so tight I could bounce bullets off of them. That might have been true. I wondered how that might work. Modified skin could come in all sorts of different forms, but it was almost always bulletproof. It’d probably still break her sparkling teeth. A weak smile crossed my face. I was normally a decent guy, but something about pretty upstarts from the city with mysterious agendas found the worst in me.
“What’s the first step, boss?” she asked, emphasizing boss in a way that might’ve contained an ounce or two of sarcasm.
“Not a lot to go on. Might want to start with figuring out who didn’t like the guy. You check the Hub, where he did his business, and I’ll ask down at the Goat.”
Her eyes narrowed. She knew I was giving her the harder of the two assignments. The Hub was where every rancher from a few hundred kilometers around came to turn his goods into cash. It was the only place in town that was busy twenty-four hours a day. The place was crawling with all sorts of traders, merchants, and anybody who had something to sell. Most of it was legal, but every once in a while I had to go bust something up. It had been a while since there’d been any trouble down there. Over the years, I had earned a sort of respect among the locals, but they knew not to say too much when I was around. I was sending Trish in because chances were that people there would be more likely to talk to her. Something about being pretty and young had a certain effect on most of these ranchers.
I sat for a bit and let the silence inform her that it was time to leave. She did, but she wasn’t happy.
There was a certain kind of logic swimming around my head. The Dry Goat was a tavern. If I went there right away I’d be tempted to get a drink and I didn’t think it would be a good idea, considering the job I was going to need to do.
This logic, bad as it was, prompted me to open the top drawer of my desk and pulled out an unmarked steel flask. I bit my lip. I wanted it in the way a person wants to fall right after he’s walked off a cliff.
I stood and walked to the office door and closed it. Hanging on a hook behind the door was my duster, so I reached in the pocket and pulled out a small metal marble. It was an e-cuff, one of the few pieces of tech that I was genuinely good at operating. In truth, those e-cuffs were my only real physical advantage over the teched-out goons of feral Texas. I gave it a twist and attached it to the metal of my arm. It snapped on as if it were a really strong magnet, which might’ve actually been what it was as far as I knew.
A jolt ran through my body. Every muscle contracted, even those that had to fight other muscles to do it. After a second I regained a little movement, but my left arm—the black metal one—dropped to my side, completely limp. E-cuffs were great for disabling augmented criminals. They were also pretty good at disabling the nannies that prevent an honest augmented human from properly feeling the effects of alcohol. Replacing an arm is easy, but getting it to integrate nicely into a living being is not such an easy task. My one replaced arm involved a modified clavicle, spinal implants, and a dozen other minor structural changes designed to keep the heavy lifting that I can do from tearing the rest of me apart. It also involved about a million tiny machines that cleaned my blood, reversed minor tissue damage, and kept my neural pathways as clear as they could possibly be from the poisons and the toxicity that all of that integrated tech brought on. Those were the nannies, or nanomachines. There was a nanny factory somewhere in my hardware half that kept my blood swimming with the things.
I unscrewed the flask with one hand and took a swig, fighting the reflexive sneer that good, strong liquor usually summons. I didn’t quite succeed, but I followed it with a deep second gulp anyway.
By the third swig I was starting to feel better.
Trish would probably take hours at the Hub, so I knocked back another burning mouthful. What was her story anyway? The best answer I could come up with was that she probably screwed something up terribly in Austin, and she was out here serving some sort of penance. I knew I needed to be back to the station by the time she returned so there would be no awkward questions. She didn’t need to know how this job affected me. I thought about how meeting that kid on the ranch had brought back so many bad memories.
Bad thoughts led to more bad thoughts. I wasn’t a happy drunk. I closed my eyes, but images of the war flashed before me. I opened my eyes, but I saw myself staring at Daniel Brown’s mangled heart. The holo flickered at me and ignored my futile attempts to shut it down with my one working hand.
So, I stared at it and took a deep drink. I closed my eyes again, but the grisly image of Mr. Brown’s heart was seared onto the backs of my eyelids. I thought another drink might erase it, but it didn’t. I thought one more drink might move me to action—get me up and after Brown’s killer. It didn’t. One drink after another failed, but I was nothing if not stubborn.
Then the flask was empty and I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise.
An hour had passed. I swore and tried to shake my fist at the clock, but it was my left fist and it didn’t move. I cursed at the damn metal thing for a full minute before figuring out what was going on.
I pushed my thumbprint against the E-cuff. It beeped, turned green, and fell off.
My heart raced in my chest, and I heard its incessant drumming drowning out the world. My panicked lungs wouldn’t stop trying to pull in more air, even though they were full. I couldn’t exhale. White-hot fire shot through my chest. My muscles seized up and my skin began to tingle.
Dry heaves wracked me as I lay in the fetal position on the concrete floor.
The nannies tended to kick into full gear when they powered back up to find a person full of poison.
“Jesus,” I swore at nobody in particular—myself, maybe. The room had stopped spinning and the unpleasant feeling of dizziness was being slowly replaced with a gut-wrenching self-hatred. I swallowed it. As far as I could tell, that was the best thing to do with it.
I stood up, grabbed my duster, and picked up my hat from the floor, where I hadn’t remembered dropping it. I needed to make a quick trip down to the Dry Go
at and make it back before Trish did.
Like any addict, I never really understood why I drank. It didn’t make sense to me why I sometimes needed the drink to do my job. Maybe it was because it was a hard job that was full of futility and frustration. Really, I think I believed that deep down there must have been some sense of pride or duty in my soul. There must’ve been some love of country that drove my need for justice. After all, I had sacrificed so much for that ideal. There must have been something that I somehow thought would come back to me if I drank. It was bad logic. I felt nothing when I drank.
All I felt was numb.
Chapter 3
The station was quiet. Outside of my office and to the left was the jail. A short hallway and heavy steel door led to a longer hallway featuring several holding cells featuring various levels of ridiculously heavy security. Some of the modders that I sometimes had to contain there were so jacked up that we couldn’t expect to hold them in a standard box of metal and concrete. The jail was empty that day. One of my goals as the sheriff was to keep it that way. Any criminal worthy of real punishment was either executed or shipped to the city for a trial. Dead Oak was too small to have its own judge, or that was what the officials in the city told us. Those who weren’t sent away to trial were usually fined and released quickly.
To the right was a powdered glass doorway, which I passed through before realizing my mistake. Deputy Johnson was there, losing some sort of argument.
“I’m sorry, Miss Meriwether,” he said. “There just isn’t anything we can do. Pastor Sharpe hasn’t broken any laws, far as I can tell.”
There were others in the waiting area. A man I recognized as Old Jack was spinning a coin on an end table, while his grandson Young Jack and a deeply tanned stranger watched. Old Jack and Young Jack were here far too often, usually with complaints about Jack, who most people called Just Jack. You wouldn’t want to call him that to his face. Just Jack made a living out of distilling liquor and raising rabbits. Liquor tended to give Just Jack an ugly temper, and he never did agree with the way Old Jack took over custody of Young Jack. Also, he hated rabbits.
Justice in an Age of Metal and Men Page 2