Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  They said all these things as though Sammy couldn’t hear them, or that even if he could, he wouldn’t understand what they were saying. But Sammy did hear them, and although he found he couldn’t talk, he understood everything.

  He couldn’t speak at all. His mind knew the words that he wanted to say, but somehow he couldn’t get the words from his brain to his lips. They got lost somewhere on the way. Frustrating.

  Something had happened to his eyes. They didn’t work right, kind of like looking cross-eyed, or up through the lake’s water at his cousin, doubled and blurry.

  It took him two years to learn to talk again, and he would have to wear thick corrective lenses for the rest of his life. The brain damage was considered minimal by the specialists who had examined and reexamined him over the next decade. Most of the damage manifested itself in physical ways; his vision problems, the limp. But Sammy had gained something as well.

  A neurosurgeon that saw him late in the night on the day he died, first used the word savant; from the French for knowing.

  Sammy woke up to a doctor pulling open his eyelids and shining a bright light into them and moving the light from side to side and up and down. A pretty nurse came into the room. Both the doctor and the nurse looked a little blurry to Sammy, but something about the nurse’s hair, long and shiny and tied back with a pink ribbon caught his attention.

  Sammy, wide awake now, kept shifting from following the bright light to the pretty nurse with the pink ribbon. His hand drifted up to touch it.

  The doctor finally noticed Sammy’s distraction and nodded toward the nurse.

  “Go ahead and let him play with it so we can get this done.”

  The nurse smiled at Sammy and untied the ribbon. She held it out to him and grinned as he wrapped it around his fingers.

  The doctor finished the exam; writing notes on a clipboard when he suddenly stopped writing and looked at Sammy. Sammy didn’t know why the doctor stared at him with such a strange expression. All Sammy did was make the ribbon into the shape hiding inside of it.

  Now the doctor and the pretty nurse looked at him with that strange expression. The doctor took the ribbon from Sammy and examined its new shape. He looked up at the nurse. She shrugged; her eyes wide. The doctor turned the ribbon — now a rose — this way and that, shaking his head. He handed the perfectly shaped flower to the nurse and went to a drawer. He came back and handed Sammy a small stack of bandage squares.

  Sammy felt a part of his mind sort of drift off, while the other part of his mind stayed perfectly in the moment, almost like he had two minds. The white squares whirled and swirled, showing Sammy their true shape. His tiny hands began working on their own — folding here — weaving there — overlapping and tucking and wrapping and piecing together. The cloth was no longer cloth. The squares had turned into colors and then into musical notes, and then into shapes and vibrations and pulses and rhythms. The part of his mind that had moved away seemed like it had been gone for a long time, while the other part knew it hadn’t been any time at all. When they came back together the nurse showed her amazement with a sharp intake of breath.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  The doctor picked up the small shape from Sammy’s palm. “Remarkable. It’s a dodecahedron.” At her blank look he said, “A polyhedron. It’s a geometric, three-dimensional solid with flat sides and straight edges. The dodecahedron is a more precise description of a polyhedron. It’s a twelve-sided shape that… well… it looks like this.”

  “But… how did he do it?”

  The doctor shook his head. In answer he had said a word that Sammy didn’t yet understand — savant. Only he had said another word with it, a word that Sammy did understand, at least a little. He said, idiot — Idiot Savant.

  Sammy put his glasses back on and smiled at the folder. He sat back in his chair and looked at the clock; eleven-twenty. It seemed like an hour or more had passed while his mind sorted and organized the facts of the case, but in reality not even five minutes had gone by. He considered going home, but the prospect of a microwave dinner and a few hours of mindless television didn’t seem worth the effort. Instead, he picked up the next folder on the stack and saw a picture that stopped him. He read her name; Cinnamon Twist, and something about the black and white picture of her face caught his full attention. Beautiful, but there was something more. Just looking at her made the shapes and colors and sounds spring to vibrant life. The words on the page above and below her picture swirled and changed, feeding their meaning directly into his consciousness without him having to read them.

  An exotic dancer, she’d just started work at Elephant Guns, a high-class strip club on the east side of Colorado Boulevard. Sammy’s duties included background checks on all dancers and gambling establishments and liquor license holders in the city. The file said she’d worked in Vegas and Chicago before coming to Colorado. No criminal history as an adult.

  None of that mattered just now, not to Sammy. All that mattered was the way her eyes stared into his, the way her look took him back to that day so long ago.

  Sammy was totally, inexplicably and completely captivated.

  And it didn’t even matter that she stood only three feet, five inches tall.

  10

  Sarah Hampton

  * * *

  The Test

  * * *

  The rookie sat in the passenger seat next to her. He looked even younger this close up. Like a high school senior. If she had seen him at one of the clubs she would definitely have carded him. What was the world coming too? Babies for cops. Sheesh.

  She wondered if he would make it as a cop. A genuine war hero, Chuck said so, and if he impressed Chuck then the kid must be impressive. Still, military work was one thing; police work could be a completely different animal. Soldiers tended to need more supervision — direction. They were so used to following orders they sometimes didn’t know how to give them. So the kid might be great shakes on the battlefield but a dud on the streets.

  Sarah shook her head, trying to ignore the pang of guilt that poked her conscience at her own hypocrisy. Truth was she didn’t think herself worthy to wear the badge. She loved the job, but how crazy that they’d let her come back; as a cop at least. She could understand it if they’d made her a dispatcher, or front desk officer — but as a cop on the street — carrying a gun — after what she had done? She’d fired seventeen bullets at a running cat, almost hitting paramedics, her own sergeant and innocent civilians. And it wasn’t even PMS. What kind of insane organization would let her be a cop after that?

  Enter the ACLU.

  One week after flying the cuckoo’s nest, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of Sarah Hampton against the Gunwood Police Department for wrongful termination due to a medical condition induced by job related stress. The suit further stated the Gunwood Police Department had violated Sarah’s constitutional rights and sought fifteen million dollars in restitution, back pay, pain and suffering and punitive damages. The City Attorney for Gunwood caved a few days later and they settled out of court for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and Sarah’s job. The ACLU claimed fifty percent of the settlement as its fee. The Federal Government took fifty percent of Sarah’s remaining half in taxes. Gunwood and Cherokee County took another ten percent for their coffers, and the loony bin that masqueraded as a hospital gobbled up twenty thousand for itself (so much for Obama Care), leaving Sarah with a little over seventeen thousand dollars. She socked it away in the bank and went back to work, all the while wondering at the absurdity that a woman who, just a few short weeks before, had been a slobbering wacko getting her brain fried with a jillion volts of electricity should be allowed to take back such enormous responsibility.

  She pulled the cruiser onto Colorado Boulevard going southbound. Eleven-thirty on a Friday night and the clubs were jammed. The heat was miserable, making the undersides of her breasts itch, under the vest where she couldn’t reach. She eyed Elephant Guns as they drove past and pointed a finger
out the window, taking aim at the giant neon sign that sported a busty woman winking seductively and wearing only a cowboy hat and carrying an elephant gun.

  “That’s one of our classier strip joints,” she said to the rookie, “but don’t let the tuxes on the bouncers or the high dollar enhancements on the strippers fool you. The bouncers are still thugs and the strippers whores. Drugs and sex bring in more money than booze and lap dances any day. You get brawling in there, never make the mistake of thinking the staff’s gonna help you. You show ‘em your back, they’ll supply the knife.”

  “Thanks,” said Dominic. “I’ll remember that.”

  “The city of Gunwood is only one point six square miles, but it has more bars, clubs, and joints than any city in Colorado. We get more fights and more violent crime per capita than any city in the whole US of A, except maybe Combat City, up north.

  “I always thought of Colorado as a kind of bedroom community,” said Dominic.

  Sarah grinned. “Yeah, it is, in most places. But Gunwood’s kind of like a little pocket of Hell in the midst of Heaven.”

  “Ah, Heaven and Hell,” said Dominic.

  She shook her head. “I heard you were something of a Bible thumper.”

  “No thumping,” he said. “Just making conversation.”

  “Well, you won’t make any headway with me. I’ve been a cop for way too long to think an all-loving God could screw up bad enough to make a mess of a world like this.”

  Dominic smiled. “I’ll tell you a secret, He’s not all-loving, and we’re the ones who messed everything up.”

  “Oh, so you read God’s mind? You know his every thought?”

  “No, not His mind, but I did read His book.”

  She grinned. “Is that like staying at a Holiday Inn?”

  “Sort of.”

  She held up a hand. “Save it for the hookers, dopers and pimps. And even then do it off duty. Separation of church and state and all that. From now on, consider yourself the state.”

  He smiled. “So considered.”

  “This can be a tough town so you need to keep your mind in the game at all times.” She gave him a once over. “You carrying a spare gun?”

  “No.”

  “Rooks. Don’t they teach you anything in that academy?”

  “I’m going to get one,” he said. “I’m just a little strapped for cash at the moment.”

  “Trouble handling your finances?”

  “No,” he said, sounding defensive. “It’s just that there are a lot of expenses starting out. The gun, the cuffs, the leather, the boots. Plus I found a pet I hadn’t intended on and there’s a vet bill and shots and licensing fees, and…”

  “Save me the sob story,” she said. “But you get a spare gun as soon as you can. Let’s just hope you don’t need it tonight.”

  “You think we might?” He sat up a little higher in the seat, his eyes scanning.

  Sarah recognized the look. “Sgt. Creed said you’d seen some action in the Marines.”

  “A little. There’s some tough towns over there too.”

  “You have any problem with getting in and mixing it up?

  Dominic grinned. “Nope.”

  “Good. I don’t like cops that go picking fights, but I won’t stand for a cop who runs away from one.” She pointed at a smaller building with a billboard sporting a smoking double-barreled derringer. “That’s The Dirty Derringer. It’s a nasty dive; never go in there alone.”

  “What about that one — it’s all blacked out?”

  Sarah looked; Gatling Gams, the club where she’d lost the evidence, her sanity and her freedom, and where John Doe had lost a lot more. Still closed but scheduled to have its grand opening on the Fourth of July.

  She thought she heard an all too familiar sound and looked in the back seat, but it was empty. She looked at the rook, hoping he hadn’t noticed.

  “It’s not open yet,” she said, “so don’t worry about it. The open ones will give you plenty to worry about.”

  He laughed. “Okay, what about that one?”

  Sarah grunt-laughed. “Snipers?” She turned the wheel, pulling into the parking lot. “See for yourself.” She parked and they got out. Sarah slipped her Diamond Wood baton into its ring. She stopped him at the door.

  “Ever seen a naked woman?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean outside of a magazine.”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “You look like one. Besides, you’re a self-admitted bible thumper.” She opened the door. “Just didn’t want to be the one to pop your cherry.”

  The rookie shook his head. “Well, thanks for raping my virgin ears.” He took three steps into the dark interior of the establishment and stopped.

  Sarah would have bumped into him except she had been expecting exactly this reaction. A wall of noise hit them head on; catcalls, whistles, laughing, oohing and ahhing, shouting, swearing, blaring music. The three stages were bathed in different colors of light — red — yellow and blue. Multi-colored spots roved the audience, illuminating a face here, hands there, an arm, a torso — there and gone. Mostly men, but a few women scattered about.

  The kid’s jaw dropped, his eyes, big round receptors taking in everything.

  “Pop!” said Sarah with a grin.

  Snipers prided itself on the talent and nastiness of its strippers. Most of the women were from overseas, a high contingent from the Philippines. They could do unique things with parts of their bodies that most American women would consider geometrically impossible.

  Sarah used the rounded end of her baton to close the rookie’s jaw. “A lot of the military types like it here,” she shouted next to his ear. “Fights aplenty.”

  He pointed to a long legged woman on one of the stages, his eyes never wavering or blinking. “Is — is that even legal?”

  “In Gunwood everything’s legal, kid. So long as none of the guys touch the girls the little ladies are free to indulge their artistic expression to their imagination’s delight.” Sarah scanned the room. “They ain’t the best looking strippers in the city, but they win on muscle control, agility, flexibility…” she paused, watching a Filipino with long black hair and a lightning bolt shaped scar crossing her forehead — the scar reminded her of Harry Potter — what she was doing didn’t, “…and perversity hands down.” She craned her neck to the side in sympathetic reaction to the woman’s antics. “No pun intended.”

  Snipers was packed, standing room only.

  “Let’s check the bar,” Sarah shouted to him. “Or would you rather just stare?”

  The rookie shook his head as though waking from a trance. He nodded dumbly and Sarah pushed her way through the throng of bodies, glancing back to make sure he didn’t get lost in the crowd. The waitresses were practically naked. The bartenders were both bald and skinny, wearing black shirts with long ties. The bouncers were also bald, but big — really big — all five of them. Sarah pushed their way to the end of the bar, opened the side door, slipped behind the counter and head checked for the rookie to follow. The bartenders nodded at her, neither looking especially happy about her being there, but both resigned to the fact they couldn’t do anything about it. One of them had gotten mouthy with her years ago, challenging her authority to go where she pleased — it only happened that once.

  Sarah started picking up bottles and shining her flashlight through the glass.

  “What are you looking for?” shouted the rook.

  Sarah held up a finger, telling him to wait while she panned through a few more bottles; “This,” she said, holding up a three quarters full bottle of Seagram’s Whiskey.

  “Bugs,” she shouted. She raised the bottle and shined her light. Pickled flies, spiders, gnats and a hodge-podge of swirling wings, legs, and antenna bumped and bobbed along the bottom seal of the bottle.

  “No way,” said the rookie.

  Sarah waved the closest of the bartenders over and pointed out the bio-debris. “Not good, Marko,” she
yelled into his ear. “This will have to go to the liquor board.”

  “You don’t need to yell, Officer Hampton.” He jutted his chin toward the back where Sarah knew there were offices. The three of them went around the bar and through a door. As soon as the door closed, the decibel level dropped by two thirds.

  “Look, Officer Hampton, I can’t afford another violation. Eric already told me one more this year and I’m canned. Besides, Seagram’s taste better with a little wildlife thrown in.”

  “Funny,” said Sarah. “You know the game; what have you got?”

  He blew air out his nose. “A couple a dealers or a guy with warrants; that’s it, take your pick.”

  “What are the dealers dealing?”

  “Meth, low grade crap they make in their basement — small time.”

  Sarah thought for a minute. “They here now?”

  “Naw, but I could set it up for tomorrow.”

  She looked at Dominic then back at the bartender. “What’s the warrant?”

  Marko shrugged. “Felony is all I know. Dude was braggin’ to his lap dancer that the cops would send him back to the pen if they knew he was here. Said he’s hotter than an A-bomb and was goin’ on about how the cops ‘round here was too stupid to find him.”

  Sarah smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Don’t play with me, Marko.”

  He held up his hands. “Honest, that’s what she said.”

  “Okay, so where is Mr. A-bomb?”

  “Stage three, right up front.” He pointed with another jut of his chin. “The big guy with the pony-tail and the too tight tee shirt.”

  Sarah casually glanced over and spotted him, hooting and whistling at a girl in cowboy boots and silver six-shooters and literally nothing else. She was riding the stage pole like it was a horse.

  He looked the type, and he would probably fight. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, the splint hadn’t been off all that long and she liked the straightening job the nose doctor had done on her. It actually looked better than before getting hit with the beer mug. Still, the rookie had to be tested and better sooner than later. She wanted an idea of how he would react if things turned south. Military or not, a lot of guys thought themselves tougher than they really were. For Sarah seeing was believing. She gave her nose a last caress and hoped it would feel as nice a few minutes from now.