by John Moralee
Along the bottom of the canyon, the rocks were spread out fairly evenly, ranging from little pebbles to ten-feet across. He thought of walking on the moon, where he’d looked specifically for unusual formations. He was a trained geologist. Those rocks must have broken off the canyon walls, rolling to their present locations. He saw a cluster of rocks that didn’t fit with the terrain. They were on the high ground in a pile. The rocks should have rolled down. It looked uncannily like a burial mound. Each rock could be carried with two hands. He lifted rocks and tossed them aside. He found more rocks underneath, but he persisted, lifting and throwing rocks until he reached a layer of dirt covering something in a hollow. He bent down, carefully not to touch anything with his hands. He blew the dust away. He was not surprised when he saw the material of a man’s suit.
It looked like the suit Toby Dane had been wearing on Friday. He moved some more rocks, exposing more and more of the suit, stopping when he saw the blood-matted hair on the back of a head. He straightened up, suddenly feeling his age.
“I found him,” Nolan called to Kelso.
“You did?” Kelso said.
“Yes! My phone’s in my jacket. Will you bring it? I’ll call the police.”
“Uh – sure.” Kelso started walking across the rocky ground. He wasn’t bringing his phone, though. He was holding something else. The steel caught the sunlight, revealing what it was.
It was a large wrench.
*
“What are you doing with that wrench, Kelso?”
Kelso stopped. “Nothing. I thought … we might need it. Mark the spot, you know.”
It was a poor excuse. Kelso started walking forward, trying to smile. His smile looked too wide, never reaching his eyes.
Nolan stood his ground. He had a height advantage. He also had a load of rocks as weapons. “You’re going to kill me, Kelso?”
“No,” Kelso said. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Then put the wrench down.”
Kelso looked down at the wrench as if he had suddenly noticed he was holding it. “This is harmless, man. You don’t think I’m going to hit you with it, do you?”
“Did you kill Dane?”
“What? No.” His face was sweaty. “Look. I didn’t kill anybody. Now I know where the body it, I can blackmail Swanson. You and me – we could blackmail him together. What do you say?”
“If I say no, does that mean I get the wrench treatment?”
Kelso scowled. “I need that money, man. You don’t understand. You, you have money. Me, I’m poor.” Kelso started walking towards him, wiping sweat from his nose and forehead. It was pouring off him. He was muttering something to himself, something like, “Don’t be a loser, Kelso. Hit him.” Kelso looked like he was struggling to work himself up for doing it, but he was raising the wrench now, readying himself.
“Listen to me, Kelso. Right now, you haven’t done anything illegal. You could sell your story to the papers, appear on TV, get a movie deal. But if you try to kill me, you blow those deals.” Appealing to Kelso’s greed wasn’t working. The mechanic was still coming. Nolan fixed him with a wolf-like stare. He was older than Kelso, but his body was strong and fast, lacking Kelso’s flabby gut. He picked up a fist-sized rock, raising it ready to pitch like a hardball. “I’ve been to the moon and back, Kelso. You think I’m afraid of you? I eat guys like you for breakfast. Do you really want to fight me?”
Kelso hesitated. Sweat dripped into his eyes.
Kelso lowered the wrench – but held onto it.
“A movie deal? You think I could play me?”
“Yeah,” Nolan said. “Who else?”
Kelso dropped the wrench. Then he dropped to his knees and burst into tears. “I’ll always be a loser. I just wanted to win one time. One time.”
*
“She knows,” Gina’s mother said.
“How is she?”
Her mother shrugged. “She wants to ask you some questions. Alone.”
Nolan went into the hospital room, sitting down beside the bed. Gina was sitting up, supported by pillows.
“Geoff …”
He squeezed her hand. She looked very young without make-up, like a sick little girl. “My mother says Swanson confessed. Did he … Did he say why he did it? Why he killed my Toby?”
Nolan told her what Judith had learned in the interview. Swanson, rejecting the advice of his lawyer, described how he had been enraged by Kelso’s remarks. He had gone to room 303, knocking until Toby opened the door. He accused him of sleeping with his wife. Toby’s denials further enraged him. He grabbed Toby and slammed him into the wall, much harder than he had slammed Kelso. Toby died instantly from a cracked skull. Swanson put Toby’s body into his own suitcase and cleaned up the room. Swanson then went to his own room, placing Toby’s suitcase into his larger one, so nobody would see it. In the morning he had the hotel take it downstairs. He had no time to drive it anywhere until after lunch, when he took the body to a place familiar to him, where he hoped nobody would find it. He dumped the rest of Toby’s possessions in another location on the way back. He could not remember where. He said he was very sorry for what he had done.
“What will happen to him now?”
“They made no deals with him. He’ll probably go for a temporary insanity defence, but Judith doesn’t think any jury will believe it. He’ll get a life sentence if he pleads guilty, death by lethal injection if he doesn’t.”
“I don’t care about that, Geoff. All I ever wanted was for my baby to have two parents. He’s stolen that. Confessing doesn’t bring back Toby. Nothing does.”
Gina stared at the ceiling and tears welled on her eyelids, which she did not blink. It was as if her body, in its grief, had forgotten its basic functions, like the simple act of blinking. She did not react when Nolan stood up, walked to the door and called her mother in. He left them alone.
He walked out of the hospital. It was dark outside. He got a taxi back to the hotel, too tired to hear what the driver was saying. Nolan wished he could help Gina.
As he thought about Gina, looking so vulnerable in her hospital gown, he realised how foolish he had been. He was in Las Vegas - a city built on lies. He should have recognised the truth when he saw it.
There was somewhere he had to go.
*
The real killer opened the door, surprised to see him.
“Geoff, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you.”
“I have to leave now,” she said. “I have to make arrangements for my husband.”
He stood in her way. “I know it was you.”
“Me?” Lucinda said. “What are you talking about?”
“When Toby Dane was found, he was still wearing his suit. But Dane went to bed over two hours before your husband did. Dane would have taken off his clothes for bed. That means when he heard Swanson knocking, he would have answered the door wearing something else. Your husband could not have killed him in his suit. Now, why would you husband dispose of a body if he didn’t kill him? You know the answer. The question is, do you want Harlan to be convicted of first-degree murder, which, I believe, has a death penalty in Nevada?”
“I never wanted to lie,” she said. “Harlan told me to. He thought he could solve it.”
“What really happened?”
“Dane and I were alone in the corridor. He asked me if I would agree to being hypnotised by him. He was convinced my abduction memories were false memories. He wanted to prove it. I would have said no, but I was mad at Harlan for behaving like an arrogant fool. I went into Dane’s room. I lay down on the bed and he sat across the room. He put me into a trance. I don’t remember what happened during it. The next thing I saw was a Grey standing over me. I was scared. The Grey was going to attack me, I was sure. I pushed it away. It grabbed me. I totally freaked out. I pushed it into the wall. Hard. It stopped attacking me then. It was over in two, three seconds. I saw it wasn’t a Grey any more. It was Dane. I’d killed him. He was probably trying to wak
e me from the trance when I … when I saw him as an alien. I went to my room and waited for Harlan. When I told him what I’d done, he said he would take care of it. He got rid of the body. For me.”
“You’ll have to tell the police that,” he said. “You can’t let your husband take the blame.”
She nodded. “I know. I really thought he was an alien, Geoff. I’d never hurt a human.”
The convention ended a day early. Freda was not happy. She wanted to nail someone’s ass to the wall – Nolan’s. He was lucky she was in New York. Clients had turned to stone under her gaze.
“Don’t blame me,” he said, sighing. “Blame the aliens.”
He hung up before she could yell.
Bonus Feature
Afterburn
(alternative version)
Author’s note: Why are there two versions of this story here? I decided to rewrite the original before publishing this collection, making improvements, but the changes resulted in a completely different story. I could not make up my mind which is better, so I’ve included both ...
Ken’s home could not be seen from the road. Blossoming cherry trees hid it from Geoff Nolan’s view until he had driven up the driveway. Then he could see the ranch-style house surrounded by a lush Japanese garden filled with flowers, rocks and ponds. When Nolan stepped out of his car, he looked around at the garden his friend had created, wishing Ken was there to greet him.
But Ken had died last week.
Ken’s widow Judy was in the garden. She was wearing a long white dress that made her look like an angel. Its sheer whiteness radiated the hot Florida sunshine like a lighthouse beam. She was sitting in the shade of a gazebo, drinking fresh lemonade, watching the butterflies and bees dancing around the orchids and bougainvillaea.
To reach her location, Nolan walked over a small footbridge above a pond, glimpsing silver and orange carp in the deep water. There was a strong Japanese influence to the garden, a country Ken had loved, because Ken’s first wife, Alice, had lived in Tokyo, where he met her while in the US Navy.
Judy was Ken’s third wife. She was a young kindergarten teacher Ken had first met two years ago when he visited her school. She had been twenty years younger than Ken, but that had not stopped them falling in love - a fact Nolan found inspiring.
(There was still some hope he would meet a loving woman just like her. Nolan did not consider himself too old to marry the right person, just too old to marry the wrong one.)
Nolan had last seen Judy at the NASA reunion celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. She had been happy then, but now she looked like a grieving woman pretending everything was fine. Judy was wearing sunglasses that may have been necessary in the sunlight, but not in the shade. Seeing him, she waved him across and tried smiling.
“Geoff! I’m so glad to see you!”
As Nolan climbed up the stone steps into the gazebo, he wished he’d been able to attend the funeral, but he’d been in hospital having a prostate operation. He felt as if he’d betrayed his friend by not attending.
Geoff Nolan and Ken Mayer had been astronauts in the Apollo programme during the early 1970s, when everyone’s dream was to walk on the moon and look back at Earth in wonder. They had experienced something a mere handful of people had, creating a unique life-long bond. Standing on the moon – the moon – had been a religious experience. That communal event had made Nolan and Ken the best of friends forever. And now Ken was gone, just like the shattered dreams of generations.
“I’m sorry about missing the funeral. I would have come to it, but …”
“You were ill,” Judy said, standing up to kiss his cheek. “There’s no need to apologise, Geoff. Ken knows how much you cared for him. Please sit down. Have some lemonade.”
Ken knows how much you cared for him. Knows. The present tense. Judy still thought of Ken as alive. He did, too, Nolan realised. The shock suddenly hit him, knocking the energy out of him.
He sat down on a wicker chair and gladly accepted a glass of lemonade so he wouldn’t have to talk. Neither said anything for a long time. Butterflies fluttered around his head like puppets on strings, sudden jerky movements moving them on the cool breeze. In the distance the Gulf was streaked white and blue, rippling with waves the texture of denim. He could hear lawnmowers and sprinklers somewhere far away. It was a gloriously pretty day, so contrasting their sombre moods that he almost felt like laughing or crying or both.
Judy removed her sunglasses, revealing her dark eyes. “Geoff, what do you know about how Ken died?”
“Not much,” he admitted. “All I know is what I read about in the newspapers – that it was some sort of flying accident involving a test plane.”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s what Peter Falcon told me too.” Peter Falcon was the CEO of DART - Dynamic Aeronautics Research Technologies – a private company with a big contract with the US military. For eight years, DART had employed Ken because an ex-astronaut was an excellent propaganda weapon to attract new contracts, much like a sports star was good for a fashion label. “He said Ken lost control of the plane and crashed. But I believe he was covering up what really happened to him.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Ken wasn’t his normal self in the last few weeks before he died. He was distracted at home, like something worrying was on his mind. I was concerned, Geoff. He wasn’t sleeping. He wouldn’t make love. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, but I suspected it had something to do with his job because everything else hadn’t changed. Something bad happened at DART. That’s why I need you to look into his death for me.”
“I don’t understand, Judy. What can I do?”
“Some of Ken’s things are still in his office at DART. I haven’t wanted to collect them yet. But you could go there instead of me. With your connections, I was hoping you could talk to the other employees and find out the truth. Maybe you could even have a look at the classified files on what happened?”
“You mean by spying for you?”
“Not for me – for Ken. I know you can do it, Geoff. Will you help me learn the truth?”
It was above and beyond the call of duty, but it was for Ken. Nolan reached over the table and gripped Judy’s small hand. “Okay. I’ll see what I can find out. But promise me that if I find out it really was just an accident, you’ll accept it.”
Judy whispered, “I promise.”
*
Back in his car Nolan made a call to an old NASA buddy who now worked in the Pentagon.
“Tommy, I need a big favour. I’m down in Miami visiting Ken’s widow. The company he worked for – DART – they have military contacts for you guys. They won’t tell Ken’s wife Judy the details of how he died.”
“That’s wrong.”
“I know. Listen, I’m hoping you could send me a copy of the crash report. I’m staying at the Rosewood Hotel.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Tommy?”
“I’ll see what I can do. No promises.”
“Gotcha.”
“Next time you’re in Washington give me a call, man.”
“I will,” Nolan said. Hopefully Tommy would be successful – but in the meantime Nolan would have to do his own digging.
*
That afternoon Nolan drove twenty miles on a highway cut through bleak marshland. His destination was down another road where he encountered a group of thirty or forty protesters camped outside a security checkpoint. They looked like young college students and older hippies.
When they saw his car, they started waving PEACE NOW and STOP DART DESTROYING MOTHER EARTH placards. A bare-chested Native American man with long black hair pointed a camera at his vehicle and took a picture of him. He was accompanied by a screaming white girl aged about seventeen screaming obscenities. She had pink hair and peace symbols tattooed on her wrists. She looked at him with hate in her eyes.
Nolan drove on, keeping his eyes on the gates ahead, which w
ere the only way in through a security fence.
Nolan stopped and talked to an armed guard. The guard checked his ID and asked him the reason for his visit before making a radio call to someone. After waiting a couple of tense minutes, Nolan was issued with a visitor’s pass.
“Just park your vehicle in the green zone, sir. Mr Falcon himself will meet you at the entrance to building A1.”
The building was an imposing black edifice with black windows that reminded Nolan of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He could not see the entrance until he was approaching the doors, which opened automatically, allowing him into a cool lobby where Peter Falcon was waiting to shake his hand.
“It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Geoff. I’m Peter Falcon, CEO of DART.”
Peter Falcon was a big, beefy Texan with a firm handshake and a strong jaw line. He wore a Gucci suit and a somewhat incongruous DART cap, like a coach for a minor-league baseball team.
“I’m real sorry we’re meeting in these circumstances, Geoff. Losing Ken was like losing a brother. He talked about you a lot. It’s a real honour meeting you in the flesh.”
“Thanks,” Nolan said. “What’s going on outside?”
“You mean with Ripley’s Rabble?”
“Ripley’s what?”
“Ripley’s Rabble. That’s what I call them. Ripley’s a professor who started a protest movement against DART. An environmental nut. He hates DART. Blames us for everything wrong with our country. He started protesting ten years ago when DART bought this land for development. At the time it was just a piece of useless marshland. We’ve changed it into something useful to the local community. Now we employ over 5000 people, but Ripley and his rabble only care about the loss of some mosquito-infested marshland. Forget them, Geoff. They’re not important. Let me show you to Ken’s office.”