Alien Nation #5 - Slag Like Me

by Barry B. Longyear

  George pulled out his own notepad and leafed to the previous day’s notes. He and Iniko had been up in Coldwater Canyon at Duke Jessup’s house overlooking Micky Cass’s big eye. Jessup hadn’t appeared particularly distraught at the possibility of Cass’s kidnapping, but he appeared to be solidly covered with alibi plate. From the time Cass had last made an appearance until the two days before Martin Fell came into Grazer’s office to raise the alarm, Jessup had been at a national English teachers’ convention in Boston, accompanied by his wife, Lois, and the chairperson of Saint George’s Academy department of English, Randolph Trassler.

  The next thirty-six hours were covered by the Boston PD who had arrested Jessup, along with several other academic merrymakers, for making a public disturbance and damaging hotel property. The remaining time had been filled in and testified to by Mrs. Jessup, the two Jessup children, the Jessup’s housekeeper, Gloria Salcines, and the head gardener from Coldwater Nurseries, Jimmy Lee.

  He turned to another page. There was an incredibly ripe odor coming from former police officer Michael Hong’s alibi. George went back two pages for his notes on the second Mike Hong interview. After everything had been plotted out, the corroborated times filled in, and every benefit of the doubt given, there were still forty hours of former officer Michael Hong’s time unaccounted for. A very critical forty hours, too. They began shortly before Cass missed his first copy drop and went for a day and half after that. Michael Hong’s answer?

  “A fired cop doesn’t have to account for his time, shoo-fly. Maybe I did kill the bastard and just don’t remember.” He had shaken his head and said with a cruel smile, “Naw. I wouldn’t have forgotten killing him. Not him, I wouldn’t.”

  George flipped his notebook closed and placed it in his coat’s inside breast pocket. When they had returned to the car, Iniko had only commented, “Well, forty hours isn’t so hard to lose.” Terribly understanding for one who had been reared his entire life to be a watcher, an Overseer investigator.

  After seeing Hong, while they had been at Jessup’s, Paul Iniko had made a telephone call the content of which he refused to share with George. He then told George to take the car, he called a cab, and left. No explanations; no excuses.

  Iniko couldn’t do that. It was insulting, stupid, senseless. What in the hell was so goddamned secret the FBI man couldn’t share it with a lowly detective sergeant who was on the same investigation? Perhaps now, with the FBI officially running the task force, Paul Iniko’s games would end. Perhaps they’d simply grow worse.

  George looked around the room again, caught Grazer’s eye, and made a gesture toward the door with his head. The captain nodded sympathetically and George stood and turned around. Dobbs was at the door, leaning against it, his arms folded across his chest. He nodded at George and cocked his head toward the hallway. Once they had left the assembly and Dobbs had closed the door behind them, Dobbs called out, “Hey, George.”

  Francisco walked the length of the hallway and pushed through the doors into the squad bay. Once he was at his desk, he dropped into his chair, picked up his telephone, and began punching in a number. Dobbs pushed down on the button, breaking the connection. “What are you doing, Dobbs?”

  “George, we have to talk.”

  “I can’t think of a single thing to say to you, and I can’t thing of anything I want to hear from you.”

  Dobbs took his finger off the button and sat on the edge of George’s desk. “You know, Francisco, you are one hard dude to apologize to.”

  “Apologize?” said George suspiciously. “What do you have to apologize for?”

  “You know. The Slag Slasher thing. You’re right. It is the same. I’m sorry.”

  George shrugged, frowned, held out his hands, and said, “I’m sorry, too, for what I said.”

  “Okay, forget it. It just makes us even.”

  George shook his head. “Not really. I knew what I was doing. You didn’t know any better.”

  Dobbs’s face grew considerably darker. He closed his eyes for a second, and then took a deep breath as he mentally entered a ten count. As he let the breath escape, he opened his eyes and asked, “What about Matt? How’s he doing?”

  “The bandages were supposed to come off this morning. I tried to call him before the meeting in there, but they were right in the middle of it and couldn’t be interrupted.” He pointed at the telephone. “I was about to try again.”

  “In a minute. There’s something I wanted you to see first.” Dobbs walked to his desk, picked up a thick file, and returned, placing the file in front of George.

  “What’s this?”

  Dobbs looked around the squad bay, virtually deserted save for himself, George, a records clerk, and the eternal custodian, Albert. Both the records clerk and Albert were on the other side of the large room oblivious of anything except the work before them. Dobbs bent over and said in a hushed voice, “You know that column Robb wrote where he talked about some big and powerful institution he was about to investigate and expose?”

  “Yes. What about it?”

  Dobbs tapped the file’s jacket. “This is what he was after.”

  “What is it?”

  “Would you believe the FB of cotton pickin’ I?”

  George’s eyebrows jumped up in surprise, then slumped into a frown. “Iniko.”

  “Yeah, ol’ massa Iniko. He was part of an FBI cover-up before with the MDQ business. It looks like he’s still holding down the same old slot.”

  “He has been acting quite suspicious.” George looked up at Dobbs. “Where’d you get this file?”

  “Don’t ask. Let’s just say someone in the command center is real concerned about Matt and that no one really seems to be on the Robb case, despite all this cover-our-asses shit with the task force and the bureau.”

  George’s frown grew deeper. “You mean the investigation is all a sham.”

  Dobbs stood, placed his hands on his hips and glowered at George’s desk top as he bit at the inner skin of his lower lip. “The FBI end of it sure seems to be. Maybe our end of it, too.” He looked up at Francisco. “You ever play poker, George?”

  “Yes. A few times.”

  “You ever been in a game where everybody in it disliked the new player?”

  George shook his head. “No. The games in which I participated seemed rather friendly unless I won several hands in a row. Then the irritation level went up rather abruptly. But that happened to whoever won several in a row. It wasn’t directed at any individual.”

  “Friendly games.” Dobbs folded his arms across his chest and leveled his gaze at George. “Back when I was in the navy, stationed in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, a bunch of us used to play a lot of poker. Some days you’d win, some days you’d lose. We all knew each other and it was a way to kill time and throw money away. One time when the usual crew was settling down to play a game, this new guy comes along and asks if he can sit in. I didn’t like him. I could tell by the looks on my buddies’ faces that they didn’t like him, either. It was just a feeling. There were only six of us, however, and seven is better for poker. Besides, none of us had what it took to tell the guy to get lost and cause a lot of bad feelings.”

  “Anything to avoid a confrontation,” said George.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can relate to that. Back on the ship that was the story of my life. Go on.”

  “It’s not complicated. The guy sat in and within an hour he was cleaned and pressed. He wasn’t a bad player, either. It’s just that everybody disliked him. There was always someone who hung in and called every bluff. If he opened at all, no one called.”

  “In other words, you didn’t allow him to play. You only avoided calling it that.”

  Dobbs nodded. “You’ve got it. That’s what I figure the task force is doing to Micky Cass with this investigation. It’s nothing official. I don’t even think it’s conscious. He threw a turd on the bureau, made the cops look bad. Cops cover cops, Micky Cass is the
enemy, and that’s how that tune is played. I don’t think there’s anyone that was in that room who’s serious about this investigation except you, Grazer, and me.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, me. And you know why that is?”

  “Not because of Micky Cass,” said George. “It’s because Matt’s going to be out there with his neck on the chopping block.”

  “That’s part of it.” Dobbs smiled and scratched his chin. “With me, I think I want to find Cass, also.”

  “You?”

  “Yesterday I hit a couple of used-book stores until I found that old paperback of Griffin’s, Black Like Me. I never read it before. It was a gutsy thing Griffin did, George. It was before I was born, but I could taste the fear, the shame, the unfairness of it all. Maybe for the first time I got a hint at what my parents had to endure every day for most of their lives.” Dobbs nodded. “What Micky Cass is doing is gutsy, too. Important. More important even than cops taking care of cops. It’s doing the right thing.” He reached down and tapped the jacket of the file. “Watch your ass, George. There are some big names in there.”

  Francisco drummed his fingers on the file for a moment, then looked around the squad room. “Where’s Kirk?”

  “Over at DMV trying to hunt down Archie Panek’s four-by-four.”

  “How did you two make out with Goober and friends?”

  Dobbs shook his head. “Kirk thinks he’s hot on the trail, but I don’t think these guys are insane enough sober to do anything, and they sure as hell don’t seem to be able to handle anything drunk.”

  Francisco nodded, leaned forward, and opened the folder. “Thank you for this.” He looked up at Dobbs. “But you never said why you and your poker buddies disliked the new fellow who wanted to sit in on the game.”

  A streak of guilt flashed across the detective’s face, followed by a sad smile. “He was white.” He smiled sadly at the use of the term. “White. Anyway, that’s where our heads were at back then. Now that I think about it, he was kind of gutsy, too.”

  C H A P T E R 1 6

  MATT STOOD NAKED, his eyes shut tightly.

  Ivo Lass had said, “When you first behold yourself as a Newcomer, know all your feelings and know as well why you feel as you do.”

  “Tall order,” he muttered as he opened his eyes. He looked into the full-length mirror attached to the closet door in his hospital room at Mt. Andarko’s. He looked, but he didn’t look. He studied the reflection in the glass of a mark high on the wall behind him; he examined a flaw in the mirror where a flake of silvering had fallen away; and he scrutinized a scratch in the glass near the bottom of the mirror as though determining the extent of the scratch, its origins, and the motivations of He Who What Done the Scratchin’ somehow contained the key to the secrets of the universe.

  “I am jerking around,” Matt muttered.

  Each surreptitious peek at himself with his peripheral vision startled him. It was as though a stranger were in the room and Matt Sikes was curiously absent. “Sort of an in-body out-of-body experience,” he joked, attempting to laugh himself out of how he felt.

  He moved his gaze until it was centered on the eyes in his reflection. The special mood sensitive contacts had turned green. Still the pain. Emotional pain. Old stuff never expressed. As the Hila had taught him, he closed his eyes and focused on the swirls and flashes produced by the pressure of the fluid in his eyes on his optic nerves. After a moment there was a brightness, and he dove into it, allowing it to fill him, surround him, calm him.

  He opened his eyes again and the green was gone—for the moment. The causes of the pain were still with him. Old tapes. Emotional baggage. All of life’s garbage that he had never taken out.

  There was a strange smell in his nostrils. It was something of rot—an old fishy stench that left him as soon as it arrived. The green was back in his eyes. It was like a fuel gauge for pain, and right then Matt was registering a full tank.

  Again close the eyes.

  Again the light, letting it flow around him, remaining suspended in it, listening for wordless peace. He felt his skin tingle and then grow warm. The muscles in the back of his neck and shoulders relaxed, and he opened his eyes again. Once more the green was gone.

  The eyebrows, too, were gone. He touched them with the fingers of his right hand. They had been shaved, treated with a hair growth retardant, and covered with a thin film of Realskin. He could feel it and it was his skin now. His nose, his cheeks, his head . . . his head.

  He stared at the spotted baldness facing him and allowed feelings of shock to fill him. He had imagined it a hundred times. Seeing it, however, placed him on a new plane of reality. This was no disguise. This was him.

  Moving his fingers across the top of his spots, Matt felt for the tiny video recorder that had been implanted beneath his new skin. He examined very carefully the area where it was supposed to have been implanted but could not detect it. He lowered his arm and looked down the length of his reflected body. Looking at the front of his left thigh, he smacked it with his open hand and watched where his fingers had struck. No redness appeared, only a pale anemic pink. He looked into the image’s eyes again. He was not a human disguised as a Newcomer. He was a Newcomer with some rather eccentric memories of being a human.

  There was a knock at the door, and he felt some small portion of his head warp as he reached for his robe. Everything he could intellectualize told him that he needed no robe. Everything that was the body of Matt Sikes was covered with Realskin. Everything he felt, however, said he was raw naked, and the nakedness was of a more extreme degree than he had ever felt before. As he tied the sash to his bathrobe, he called to the door, “Yeah?”

  “Matt?”

  The door opened a crack and Cathy Frankel poked in her head and looked. When her gaze located Matt standing before the mirror, she went speechless. Matt turned slowly and looked at her. “Well?”

  She entered the room, closed the door behind her, and leaned her back against it. She studied his face, his head, the portion of his neck and chest visible through the open top of the robe, and his hands.

  “Well?” he repeated. “What is it? Am I a freak? An obvious nugah? Spit it out.”

  “No, darling,” she said quickly as she pushed away from the door and walked to his side. When she stopped she did not touch him. Instead, she examined his face very closely. “Celine’s mercy, Matt, but you are absolutely beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” he repeated, catching his echo as he did so.

  “What is it, Matt?”

  “Nothing. I’m trying to shake the question marks out of my talk. It isn’t easy.” He pointed at his own face. “Wouldn’t handsome be a better word?”

  She frowned, touched a finger to her cheek, and cocked her head as she studied his face. “No. Not handsome. You are beautiful. I love your skin. How do you get it that way?”

  Matt snorted out a bitter laugh. “How? I buy it by the goddamn square yard. How in the hell would I know? I just got the stuff.” He pointed again at himself. “Well, what about it? I’m serious.”

  She nodded slowly. “From what I can see, Matt, it looks excellent. Even your hands.”

  Matt looked up at her. “They didn’t just cover my hands.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Everything?”

  For a moment he felt the skin beneath the skin blushing. “Yeah. Everything.”

  “May I see?” she said, maneuvering to stand in front of him, very close. Her long, delicate fingers parted his robe and reached around his waist until her hands came to rest upon the small of his back. “How does this feel, Matt?”

  “It feels.”

  She looked into his eyes and asked, “Did you say everything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know it works?”

  Matt raised his eyebrows and smiled wickedly. “Oh, they brought in a Tenct sex therapist and she put me through the usual rehabilitation exercises: spaceman on top, alien on a bone, Cool Whip and waders�
��”

  She pushed away from him. “I don’t think that’s very funny.”

  He pulled her back and held her closely. “It works. If you need proof, keep feeling me up and you’ll be getting a rude nudge real soon.”

  “Now?” she asked, a smile of her own tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  “I think we’d better go home, first. You know how loud we Tenctonese get when we’re getting it on.”

  “Seriously, Matt. Can you go home now?”

  “My time’s my own until tonight. That’s when Matthew Cross, alien boy journalist, goes undercover in Chayville and hangs with the bangers.”

  A worried look crossed her face. “Matt, what about the training?”

  “I’m trained. Just as long as I don’t have to give a speech, I’m debah.”

  “How can you be so certain? It took Ellison Robb eleven weeks.”

  “Do you get any weird vibes off me?”

  “No.” She frowned and looked thoughtful for a moment. “That’s strange. I never did.” Looking into his eyes, she repeated, “I never did. Why?”

  Matt shrugged and glanced down. “As far as my mentor, Ivo Lass, is concerned, there are all kinds of slaves in the universe. I was just lucky enough to be one of them.”

  The room’s telephone rang and Matt disengaged one of his hands from Cathy’s waist, reached out, and picked up the handset. As he placed it against his earfold he was again startled at how natural it seemed. “Yes?”

  “Matt?” answered George.

  “Yeah? What’s up?”

  “We just got the word. It’s Micky Cass. They think they’ve found his remains.”