Thursday, January 30, 2020

That Time: A story of the past and future and how they tangle with the present.

... and this time and the time before that.

I'm no detective. I never have been, really. Maybe once in a thousand lifetimes. But not today.

Today, I sling drinks for a living. Whiskey, sour. Crown and Coke. Beer, wine, orange juice or ice water or coffee for the ones with the shakes.

I don't get involved in their stories. Oh, I'll listen, or pretend to. People will tell you that's the best way to earn a tip. I don't know anything about that. I've never been able to decide whether the ever-changing gang of barstool representatives are here for a good ear, or just a good drink.

Don't much matter. Some like to talk, at least until their friends show up. Mostly, I've found people just want to be left alone to nurse the drink.

Who knows, maybe it was different before the tv over my shoulder. The babble box has its uses, I guess. There's no need to talk if you don't want to. Just stare at the box and even the most gregarious will eventually get the point.

I don't mind. I work the day shift, clean up after the night shift, keep my regulars in the style they like. By the time the rowdies show up, I'm home with the old movies and the old records and an old dog whose trick days are long behind him. The night life pays the biggest part of the bar bills, but my time for that sort of thing is long gone, and blessed be the day I hired somebody else to mind those hours of the clock.

Hell, I don't even care that the night till is occasionally a little light. Credit cards have made that a lot harder to get away with, these days. And my current crew's honest, honest enough not to steal so much we go broke. No mortgage, no rent, so long as we cover the lights and the liquor, we're good.

I made a point of building my bar in a place where the city cops don't have any need to visit. The sheriff's deputies show up on the rare occasion, but we don't have any need to grease any palms.

Closest thing to a pub I can make it. The only hard rule I give the night crew is to ease the crowds in and out, but break up the 'gangs', no matter if they're bikers or clubbers, anarchists with an axe to grind or gang bangers looking for another place to lean on. Bad service, call the cops to hassle 'em, whatever it takes, so long as they don't know they're being moved along.

The bikers are the only ones who discover us on any kind of regular basis. We're hidden away, so most rough crowds don't really come to visit except by accident. And I make sure the place is clean, too sterile for them to think it's a good place to set up shop. Most times, they come by a time or two, realize the juke box doesn't play whatever passes for 'hardcore' from the corporate radio stooges, that a snooker table isn't a pool table, and that the daytime and evening crowd just wants a good place to smoke a pipe or cigar, not put up with trouble.

It takes some work, building up a 'local' in the old style. It means the night crew have their waves, the local girl's night out stopping in for a couple glasses of wine before they head out to the 'real' clubs, the contractors dropping in for a beer before they head home. The college kids at one in the morning, meeting up one more time before they sneak back into their parents' houses.

The final shift are usually the late night assignations, the couples who pretend not to know each other in the daytime sneaking in one last half hour before they go back to their other halves.

Like I said, a nice quiet place, a local pub in the old style, or at least as close as I can make it, and I get to enjoy serving my regulars and then going back to the house at night to let my feet and ears rest.

Until she showed up. The victim, I mean, not the killer.

May something or other. Not Maybelline, like the old song or that makeup brand. Older name than that, Maybel? I don't remember, she never said her full name that I could hear, and I don't keep up with the papers enough to have ever caught it again.

She came in for the dart board. We've got a set of them, two electronic and a couple of the older style, and a pretty good set of dart throwers to keep them busy. Especially on Wednesday, there's a regular tournament. I know most of them by face, they usually start showing up right as I'm winding down and heading out the door.

Wayne whatshisname came in with her, I think. Gin and tonic for him, seven and seven for her, and then look out 'cause the lady's got an aim like you wouldn't believe.

Lisa, my nightshift head, told me she took over the place. From then on, for the next couple weeks, if you came in to throw a brace or two, she was the one you were throwing against. She never lost, not anytime that we were open and she was there.

That didn't set off any alarm bells for me. Not then, not 'til later, when I'd had time to think about it. How many dead-eye shots are there, really?

There's a part of me that's known a few. Memories, echoes of something before and after. My grandma always called it the family curse. Some kind of old country magic, the kind that nobody ever discussed with a young priest.

Sharpshooters. That's what she reminded me of. There's a memory, a bunch of guys in the CCC, whiling away the time between the storms of war, trying to feed their families.

This guy used to spend his free time making dimes off his buddies. Little single shot twenty-two rifle, a handful of washers just big enough for the bullet to pass through the hole in the middle. Toss the washer, shoot one through the hole as it passes through the sun.

"Betcha dime the bullet went through."

"Prove it."

Easy enough, put some tape over the washer, toss it again, listen to the other guys laugh when the new guy picks it up and sees the clean new hole in the tape.

It only works on the new guys, and the shooter's patient. Take a dime here, a dime there, don't let any of them feel like you're taking advantage of them.

Problem was, people raised in the country always know they're the best shot for miles around. Most of the time, they were right.

But the shooter was better. It ended for him one cool Arkansas fall evening, sitting on the back porch of this little rocky cabin. They'd fenced off the yard, barbed wire and creosote-soaked posts.

He was taking advantage of the post tops. They were new, but rough cut so he could stand matches in the crevices. Put up a couple matches, walk back to the porch, take the little twenty-two and shoot the heads of the matches off.

That wasn't the trick. There were a couple other guys in the gang who could match that, maybe not five for five, but three for five and he didn't push it.

But one guy did. Big kid, Nebraska husker with the muscles built from arguing with a mule. The kid had spent an awful lot of time putting prairie chickens in his home pot. That twenty-two rifle was just like the one he brought along with him wherever he went.

Five for five, just like the shooter. The shooter hadn't earned a dime off the kid yet. And after he saw the kid was pretty good with the gun, he didn't worry about trying to.

There would be more new guys, and there was no use rubbing the kid's nose in it.

But the kid didn't leave it alone. He'd got it in his head, he was going to take a dime or two back from the shooter.

So the shooter pulled out his trick. "Betcha dime I can light those matches, five for five."

Not shoot the match heads. Light them, in place. The kid took the bet.

Four for five, one after another, the shooter lit the matches. The crack of the gun hid the crackle of the flame. And the evening sun behind them was bright enough so they couldn't quite see the flames. Each shot, they'd walk out to the post, and the shooter would wait for the kid to acknowledge the blackened match head.

Fifth shot, fifth flame blown out by the evening wind coming up the mountain. And it was the kid's turn.

It was the third match that did it. First two, the kid did good, and the shooter nodded his acknowledgement from the porch. He didn't need to walk out to see how well the kid shot.

But the kid did. He put the rifle down, action open and leaned against the porch rail, walked out to the post and counted 'em off. "One..."

"Two..."

Three didn't come. The shooter already knew it.

He didn't press the kid, though. No point to it. The dimes were for an occasional soda, maybe popcorn and a movie on the rare occasions when they got down the valley to the little town at the bottom. Like everybody else in the gang, the dollar a day went back home to the family.

They found the shooter there the next morning, when reveille sounded and everyone wandered out, gapping and stretching for the morning calisthenics. A single shot through the head, right between the eyes, and the kid from Nebraska was still asleep in his bunk.

The only thing the kid ever said about it was that he didn't owe the shooter nothin', and now he never would. They strung him up a couple months later, last official hangin' in that Arkansas county.

That's how it goes for me. Little flashes of something, stories that might or might not mean anything. Usually they do, though. It just might take a while before I find out what my past and future are trying to tell me.

This time with May the dart thrower, there wasn't an immediately obvious killer. Not one that any of my crew could identify, like that Nebraska kid who couldn't bear to lose. How many people go to a dart tournament expecting to win every throw?

The sheriff's office did their best. They went through our regular dart throwers, came in three weeks running for the tournaments, plainclothes though. They'd interviewed everybody we knew, the detectives just wanted to see if anybody might have been a little too shy to show up with the badges standing around.

That's when the memory of that Ozark mountain murder came back to me. I'd run out of gas, I figured I owed it to the sheriff to make sure I spent a little night time in the bar, helping where I could.

Not that I was much use, the night crowd were mostly strangers to me. I'd spent too much time on the day shift to identify anybody by name. By the time of the third tournament after they found May's body, though, I'd caught enough drink orders from the dart throwers to be slinging 'em up before they asked.

It was the extra hours that put me in the place my mind needed to be. Stumble in after closing time, glad as hell I'd stopped drinking on shift, walk and feed the old dog, pass out in the recliner with him curled up in my lap and Nick Clooney telling me about some Hitchcock marathon they were running.

"Hey, kid, no big deal. Buy me a coke someday, and we'll call it even."

The big kid stared at the ground, working it up in his head. "I don't like owing people."

Not a lot did. Owing people was why we were all up here. Banks not being known for anything except taking whatever they could pry away, especially when they could take five dollars for a penny owed, sheriffs laughing at the auction block.

"You don't owe me nothin', nothin' more than what any of us guys owe each other on the mountain."

The shooter wasn't a gunslinger. But he'd spent more than enough time hunting to know when he was in trouble. The kid was like a bear he'd hit, but not killed. Pissed off and looking for someone to maul.

The kid went back to the gun, set up to shoot the next match. The shooter lit a cigarette, leaned back against the porch post and wondered if maybe he needed to walk inside and let the kid work it out on his own.

He should have. The Nebraska kid shot again, but maybe he was too worked up, or the wind picked a bad time to gust. Either way, the fourth match went unlit.

Sometime between the kid throwing the gun down on the porch, and the kid walking back to the porch with his head down, the waves of anger rolling off him disappeared.

The shooter thought he was safe. The kid had thrown it off, it felt like.

But no, he'd just made his decision. He picked up the gun, loaded up and knelt like he was taking the fifth shot.

The shooter didn't quite notice how far back the kid was from the rail. Not until the kid turned the barrel toward him. The little twenty-two rifle wasn't much, but at five paces away, it was enough.

I turned on the recliner, not awake, just aware of the crick in my neck that would be coming on. Settled back in and worked through what my mind wanted to show me.

Bets. No, debts, implied and stated. Who owes who what? Did somebody owe May, for something in the bar, or something outside the bar? What, though?

The entry fee for the tournaments is always two bits, a quarter. A good night and the winner might make ten dollars. Even a great night, the largest I'd ever heard of was fifteen dollars, and they'd been worried the fire department was going to shut us down for too many for the room. This ain't the Depression, who kills somebody over ten bucks?

Hell, ten bucks don't even get you a full loop around the Beltway, with the tolls closing on two dollars a gate.

I drifted again, worrying at it. But my mind didn't have anything else to say. If there was another memory, foretelling, whatever, to be had, I'd have to work at it first.

Ok, fine. If I couldn't for the life of me see how a ten buck dart pot would stir someone to the killing zone, that just meant that if our bar had something to do with it, then it was the side bets that mattered. The kind we pretended didn't exist.

There are few things that get the Texas state authorities really riled up. But gambling in a bar is awfully high on their list. It's one of the big no-no's, worse than giving out free drinks. A registered dart tournament works, no different than trivia night in the chain bars. So long's the money don't add up enough to matter.

But we can't do anything about the side bets. That's another reason to stick with a regular crowd, as much as possible. People who see each other every week sort of modulate as the friction rubs off the rough edges.

May had been new, though. Who else was new? Or, maybe she set off one of the regulars. Maybe she was the seed crystal for something violent to crash down out of an old metastable stew.

Time to dig out the computer.

I'd passed over the standard security recordings. It didn't happen in our bar, nor in the parking lot. But they'd found her body just down the road. A single shot, right between the eyes. Like the shooter in my memory, and the bullet had been a twenty-two. So, close enough to matter.

Eight in the morning, sun streaming through the blinds, old dog walked and fed, his old partner washed and contemplating the coffee pot. "Hey Erin, I'm gonna have to beg off the bar today. Think you got it, or you need me to call someone else in to cover with you?"

Erin was my daytime barback. College kid, mostly looking for a quiet job that paid next semester's tuition. Good hand with the till and pouring, especially if the traffic was light. "Nah, boss, I got it. Tracy's coming in early anyhow, she's got a deal with Lisa to leave early for her kid's football game."

The most holy of holies, the Friday night game. The high school was only big enough for six-man, so you'd better know that people noticed if you missed a game. Not that I blamed her, those six-man games are more fun than should be allowed. "Tell her not to forget her chair, last time they almost threw her out for screaming from the sidelines."

Erin laughed at that. Tracy's a full on momma-bear, big beautiful black woman with a broadcast shout that reaches the cheap seats. The folding chair at least let her and Morgan sit in the back where the crowd kept her from rushing the field. When Lisa put the game on over the bar speakers, depending on where they'd set up the mikes, you could hear Tracy good and loud and clear when she got on a roll.

Good, cleared the day for myself, it was time to call up some old magic.

My grandma would have asked the wind. And it would have answered back. But I didn't get fresh raw cream delivered to the house every day. My choices were pretty much limited to what I could hack out of the electronic ether.

The recordings I'd given the sheriff's office access to were our bar cameras, inside and out. They'd gone through them, looking for violence, arguments, anything that stood out on the night of May's murder.

They'd struck out. If the killer had been in the bar that night, they'd been like that Nebraska kid in my memory, calm and ready, nothing more.

So. There was no way I'd have the time, all by myself, to go through weeks of digital backtrail looking for something that might just look like casual conversation. If my subconscious was telling me anything useful, it was that only May and her killer would have known what was coming.

How do I track down something so casual? Let the computer do the work for me, a little image recognition, at least as best I could manage, May's face was the only one that mattered. Map out her network, the people she'd bumped in to over the past few weeks.

Not that image recognition is all that reliable, even now. But it's enough for a first pass, cut down the terabytes to gigabytes, then reconfirm and let the box work on the acknowledged dataset.

It's a tedious process. I had to remind myself to get up, walk around, drink water instead of coffee. Walk the dog. Eat. Take a nap and see what the box has to say for itself.

A peculiar sort of meditation. No ritual, no incense or prayers. Tap tap tap the keys, stare at the screen 'til your eyes blur.

But it worked, sort of. The day passed until I was sitting in the near dark, sundown passing and the in-between settling in. I'd set the final collection of video snips the computer had collected to run continuous, first day to last of May's visits to the bar. I made a bag of popcorn, poured a beer, and settled in to watch the final product on high speed.

The program ran with two outputs. The videos, and in the corner, a little network map, a spider-web of abstraction spreading out with names. The intersections, the nodes where the lines of connection met, grew in size depending on how many times May had talked to the person each node represented.

I didn't pay attention to that map, yet. I didn't try and think. I just watched.

Big black dude, weekend biker, guy's a dentist with an allowance from his wife for the only hobby he's ever lusted after, the big Harley with the loud pipes. Cognac, the good stuff, keeps me buying it even if he's only up for a big snifter filled once and sipped through the dart tournament once a week. He's good, usually finishes top three. Wide handsome grin, not even advertising for the day job, just happy to be here throwing darts.

Little tiny woman, Bangladeshi I think, her and her husband started coming in regular when the kids graduated, she's a holy terror on the dart board. Tea, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, never sweet, she's another of the regulars at the top of the tournaments.

Neat guy, well cut suits and patent leather shoes, gets his hair trimmed at the place down the street and comes in for whatever craft beer we have on tap. Not really a dart thrower, but he's learning. Don't think he's ever finished in the top ten. Hear his boyfriend is a chef, the dart tournament's a good way to kill time until the Wednesday shift closes out. Guy got hooked, though. He watches the others, looking for the tricks of the trade.

Bit by bit, clip by clip. The names on the map didn't correspond to anything, I didn't know any of them, and didn't yet want to spend the time chasing them down. Settle for "A, B, C, ..." for the moment.

Just the dart crowd. There were incidental contacts, little pushes here and there, May interacted with humanity. The non-incidentals, though, were all the dart throwers.

And the bar crew. But none of them would have had reason to...

What was Erin doing at the bar on the night shift? He wasn't running drinks. No trays, in front of the bar nor behind it, and he wasn't throwing darts.

I said there wasn't any real way for us to handle the side bets. Not without getting our hands in it, and that was the big no-no. Had Erin spotted a crack to slip through?

He needed money for tuition, that much I knew.

I keep a schedule board for my gang to map out their times on. Nothing formal, I don't much care what they get up to, so long as the shifts are covered. The board's just there so that everyone can look at it, see ahead of time where they might be able to jump in and work a little extra, or take off for a couple days because there's plenty of hands on deck.

Erin had us trained for his schedule. He worked days at the bar, kept his evenings clear for night classes. After a few false starts, he'd done good keeping up, every semester writing out his schedule.

Lisa takes a picture of the schedule board, once a week, and emails it to all of us. She calls it "closing the board". I pulled up the last picture.

Erin's Wednesdays were clear, all across the board. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday lab days, they were all taken up and marked out. But tournament night was free.

I paged the computer screen over to another desktop, set the video program going again from the top with Erin as the center of a new web. It was going to take a lot longer, but once I started this, I couldn't afford to miss his regular shifts. Focusing on the dart tournament would leave a lot of possibility space open for interactions to hide in. I hit the button and went back to looking through May's network.

Roughly twenty people. That's what her network in the bar mapped out to. Four of my gang, the rest the dart regulars. And then the world, if none of those twenty had anything to do with her murder. Could I eliminate any of them?

No sound. But the dentist was only ever on the line with her. One two three darts and someone went to sit down and wait for next. Three nights, all three nights the dentist only met up with her in the next to last round, and all three nights he went to sit down for the loser's bracket.

Standing on the line was the only time he'd been anywhere near her, and as far as I could tell, he never said anything to May besides "your turn" and "nice throw". Cut him out of the network and go on, quick pass filter for now.

The other lady, our regular champion, she was even more restricted. The only time the computer could map her talking to May was in the final set of each tournament. So she was out, as well.

The newer dart guy, the one who'd dove in like a duckling with his first feathers, he was more involved. Talk here, question there. He liked to buy a drink for the winner when he lost.

And then he'd go somewhere that passed out of the computer's reckoning. He'd thrown against May just twice, though. Not a lot to go on, there. The only difference between him and the others was the slightly more involved way he liked to acknowledge the winner. Otherwise it was just the same.

Stand up, take your shot, lose to the lady and move on.

Oh yeah, May was a sharpshooter. Not showing off, just winning. I couldn't judge from the camera angle, but she just kept putting up the points. So if she hit bullseye, she never showed it in her reactions.

No reason to. Like the shooter in my dream, she didn't need to rub anyone's nose in it. She just needed to win. And she always made the throws to win.

I drummed my fingers on the keyboard, impatient. Got up, walked the dog, wolfed down a sandwich.

The computer flashed a notification, finally. Just before midnight. "erinMap finished, 3 hours 47 minutes 28.3 seconds."

Just before midnight. The witching hour. Well past my normal bedtime. I was tired, grumpy at even the thought that one of my gang might be up to something funny.

Groan, stretch, bitch and moan and cuss and get back to the keyboard, damnit all to hell.

Focus came back, slowly. I dove into the video.

He was running the numbers. That much came clear, right away. Person to person, connection to connection. Anytime a pair stepped up for their turn in the ringer, there was my boy, shuffling along in the background looking for the action. Slow, bit by bit, he reeled in the brackets.

Our very own office bookie, like the one who runs from desk to desk Friday afternoons writing down the football wagers. And then disbursing the proceeds Tuesday morning.

First two tournaments, everything went fine. Third tournament, and no one wanted to bet against May, the shooter. Bad part of making your bets with a bunch of people who know what they're looking at. They know when they're beat.

But Erin couldn't stay away, couldn't take the warning. When the cops took my video map and showed it to him, he explained the part I could imagine, but not hear.

"I had to make the action." He ended up taking all the bets against May on his own.

He'd have made it, though. But May threw a wrench in his gears. The first two tournaments, he'd approached her just like the rest, and she'd blown him off. "Ten bucks was enough to cover her bar bill, that's what she told me," Erin said to the sheriff's deputies.

Except for that last night. "I asked her, not expecting her to bet. But she surprised me."

It was there on the camera. You couldn't see the value of the bill she'd handed him, but you could see the pass. "She put a hundred in."

And he'd miscalculated. One too many bets, one hundred dollars he didn't have and never would. On the video, by the time she'd got to the last throw, her win was nothing but a formality. So he was there in the background, settling up with all the other bettors. "By the time I got back to her, I was broke."

"What'd she say?"

" 'Don't worry about it, kid. Drinks are on you for a while.' "

He looked down at the table in the interrogation room. The sheriff's office showed me the tape, later. In that moment, I could see that bullheaded kid from Nebraska superimposed over Erin's body. "I don't owe her nothing, now," Erin finished. And that was the last anyone heard from him.

He's sitting on death row up in Huntsville. I don't know if he'll ever walk the line, like his doppelganger or previous incarnation or whatever, but at least they caught him.

Grandma always called this thing 'my ghosts'. I don't know if she ever thought she'd lived a past life, and her ghosts were the echoes. She was pretty religious, even with the old country charms and spells hanging around the family blood. She could have thought they were God-given, visions sent to help her help someone else. She never talked about that part of it.

But she always told me, "Son, they're never through with you. There's an awful lot of past, and even more future. And my ghosts have an awful lot to say about it. But there's one special time you need to be prepared, and listen, even more than you ever have before."

"What time's that, Grandma?"

"When you think they've finished telling you a story."

I remember that warning. It's hard to forget.

I'm sitting in my chair again. I still get the paper every day. I've got an online subscription to the Chronicle, but mostly I use that for digging through the archives. The daily news I like to read with the ink rubbing off on my fingers, and the paper rustling while I chase down the interesting stories.

There's not much going on today. Buried in the back pages of the local section, there's one headline that catches my eye. Erin's first appeal's been bounced by the courts. The defense attorneys did their best, but there's nothing much for them to hang their hats on, and the appeals court let them hear about it.

Dog's been walked, so I lean back in my chair and let the nap come.

The memories don't even wait for me to get all the way asleep. I'm floating, waiting high over a porthole as Africa rotates away beneath me. There's a body, tied down so we can work on it in freefall. I'm taking blood samples, but the color of the skin gives fair warning of at least part of the story.

Oxygen deprivation; sallow color, broken blood vessels around the nose and cheeks, and in the pupils when I peel them back. Bells are screaming in the back of my head. A malfunction would be bad enough, you won't get too many tourists on an orbital hotel if they hear that the life support in your room can kill you.

That's when the maintenance chief checks back. "The mechanicals are fine. But someone's monkeyed with the control systems."

"Monkeyed with, how?" I ask the disembodied voice.

She stops to doublecheck. "Computer trail says she fed it a new program, last night. A worm, looks like."

"You're saying she did this to herself?"

"That's what the computer thinks."

I wake up, then, staring at the ceiling. Spend the rest of the night awake, wondering what my ghosts are preparing me for now.

Coming later to this fine... er, well, it's an establishment anyway ;).

Any rate, look here a little later and you'll find a story I call That Time. It's a story of where you find yourself when the past and the future make for an uncomfortable present...

I saw a face in the shower door...

Concrete Blonde: Ghost of Texas Ladie's Man; Johnette Lin Napolitano, songwriter.

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Today's a New Book Release Day for me! First Glimpse, by M. K. Dreysen, is now available for your reading pleasure! Keep reading for more info...

Wayne has a good job, in a quiet place. The kind of job that gives him all the time he needs, and plenty of space to enjoy it. All he has to do is tend the Pile: a Cold War relic, a nuclear waste dump that has, so far, found no cause for trouble. Only... the Pile has been whispering. It has a demand. A small one. Just a tiny little thing, an opening for something from within the Pile to pass through. Wayne's definitely not ready for his first glimpse of what might come through...

First Glimpse, the first novella in the new series What Comes Through, is available now, in both print and ebook formats.

(follow one of the links below to your favorite format and retailer)

For a print version: First Glimpse is available at Amazon.

For an ebook version: First Glimpse is available at Kobo, Smashwords, Lulu, Barnes & Nobles, Draft2Digital, and Amazon.

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Connected, Unconnected - A Kelli Hench Mystery - Neverland Disorder Part 2

I hate the three in the morning calls. They're bad enough for normal reasons.

Answering for work just makes it that much worse.

For this one, though...

"Russ, I swear to God, if you got me out of bed for a party girl..."

"Trust me, Kelli. She didn't take the pills on her own."

I plead insanity due to lack of sleep. Don't get me wrong, I always take
the side of the corpse, especially when its a girl who looks like she's still
young enough to have borrowed her mom's clothes for a night out.

It's just that I'm not usually on the list for catching these cases.
Not when they look so obvious.

Like Ginny Baciagalupe's untimely end was supposed to look. Party girl,
almost expensive black evening outfit, more on the high business end of the
rack, not the high end trashy section of Macy's. Curled up in the corner
of an almost expensive hotel room, one of the new downtown hotels that's
come in in the past few years with the new arena.

Pills on the bedside, trails of what we're sure will test out to high grade
cocaine on the marble counters in the bathroom. The usual set dressing.

No condoms.

Girls' night out, maybe?

"Ok, Detective Ortiz, Detective Hench, here's how we got here." Officer
Shay Jackson brought me back to the moment. "The night desk manager clues
to the fact that Ms. Baciagalupe should have checked out at noon. She told
me and Officer McCall they'd have just charged her card for another night,
but the place was filling up and they needed the room. Apparently Prince
played the Toyota Center last night, and they'd booked the room for another
guest."

I wondered if Russ had already heard the spiel. I also wondered if maybe
I should pay more attention to who's coming through town. It's not like I'd
have all that many more chances to go see his Purple Majesty play live.

I focused back in on Jackson. "The maid couldn't get into the room with her
pass key, so the manager had to open the deadbolt. That's when we got the call."

I wondered how far into the room they got before they noticed. Ginny wasn't
very big, five foot nothing. I stepped back to the door. "Do you know if the
lights were on when they came in?"

Officer Jackson tilted her head at me, then radioed her partner. McCall was
downstairs with the manager. McCall answered back almost immediately. We all
listened to him over Jackson's squawk box on her hip. "She says the desk lamp
was on, she turned on the light at the door switch, and that's when they saw her."

I had it in my head. Peel away Ortiz and Jackson, the impatient tech
team standing in the hallway behind me, turn down the lights...

Yeah. Black outfit, corner of the room, probably at first the maid and the
manager would have seen just a pile of clothes. Turn on the overhead lights,
keep walking...

I moved next to the dresser with the tv on it. "McCall, was the tv on, the
radio, anything like that?"

A couple minutes, then his static-filled answer. "No, ma'am. Just the one
light, nothing else."

Ortiz waved at me, like he wanted me to keep going while he eased out into
the hallway to talk to the techs.

God, I hate early morning. Maybe I should have stopped for a coffee downstairs.

Instead, I bent down where I was at. Then even further, 'til I could get a
good look at the floor between me and the body. What's missing?

"Shay, Roger, did anybody pick anything up? Pills, bottles, anything at all?"

She probably shook her head, until she realized I couldn't see her from where
I was. "No ma'am. McCall?"

He took the time to ask the manager, not just going with the automatic
response. But he said the same thing.

"Uh-huh. Shay, see any pills, other than what's on the nightstand?"

The nightstand, the empty pill bottle and cap sitting next to it. Officer
Jackson stepped around behind me, craned her neck as best she could to see.
"No ma'am. The pill bottle on the stand there, and there's what looks like
cocaine on the counter in the bathroom."

I put my hands down first, then laid my head on the floor so I could look
under the dresser. Then I turned over and lifted the bedspread to look
under there.

Neither one of them were hiding anything but a couple dust bunnies the
cleaning crew had missed. Certainly not any pills.

Like the kind you'd spill if you were looking for a little fix. Or, the way
it often happened, the handful that got away when you were looking for that
one last, great big fix, the biggest hit of all.

Not what I'd expect, in other words. Where was the hesitation, the oops
before the big event?

Her face told me something else. "Is Russ back?"

"Yeah, Kelli, I'm here. You see it?"

Yeah, I saw it, them. The story that Russ had read to say that she hadn't taken
the pills all on her lonesome. I resisted the urge to reach for her face, to
turn her head back and forth to read the story complete. Not that I needed to.

The bruises on each side of her jaw gave mute testimony.

Bruises. I mimed holding her chin, forcing her head back, the other hand
holding the pills to force down her throat...

She should have fought. I moved in close now, close enough to see the smudges
in the foundation on her face, the smears of her makeup matched the bruises.
And the stress marks, down each side of her throat.

Push them down her throat, hold her head in place with the one hand, massage
her throat with the other, force the reflex...

"Did the coroner's team do anything yet? Are we free here?"

Mary Sullivan stuck her head in from the hall. "We got our pictures, Detective,
and the coroner team's been in for their initial exam. Liver temp, rigor,
she's been there since about yesterday morning, almost twenty-four hours
now."

Her face, the part I couldn't see, would wait. I went for her hands first.
Turn them over, no strain marks, no tearing under the skin.

No blood under the nails cut just short? "Did you chew your nails, Ginny?"

I think she did. Chewed, but not so much that she couldn't keep them neat.
Just long enough, if she'd fought, she could have gotten purchase enough.
Where was the fight?

Time to look at the pill bottle. "Adderall."

High-tech speed for the smart set. Controlled high, barely legal if she had a
scrip, and there were always doctors ready to help someone else find that
little kick. "Maybe she kept her fingernails short for a more practical
reason."

"What's that?"

"Maybe she spent time at a keyboard. Do we know anything about her yet?"

We're not too far removed from the time when the only answers that question
would have provided were from a driver's license. But the Web giveth plenty,
whether we want it to or not. "Online profile says she's a college student,
computer science and math."

That may matter, later. For now, Ginny's body is more immediate. Hmm.
"Hey, Mary? Can we get that coroner's tech in here for a minute?"

The tech looks barely older than our victim.

"I need you to open her mouth for me."

He's pure nerves, getting his gloves on, then the forceps. I wait behind
him, far enough so I'm not looming, nor blocking his light. When he gets her
jaws apart, little by little, that's when I lean in, pocket flashlight in
hand. "Ah, now there you go."

There are a handful of pills stuck in her throat, a dissolved mess on
the back of her tongue. I stepped back so Sullivan can take a picture with
the good camera.

My mind wanted to go back to the immediate, the focus. Run through how it
happened, what she did. How she got here. So I let it.

She's stoned, drunk, maybe...

"Russ, can you see anything on her social media that's health related?"

"Not really. Well, unless you count the American Diabetes Association. She's
got links to them on her list."

Diabetic? "Mary?"

"Got it, Kelli." Suitcase in the closet, handbag on the table in the corner.
Pocket insulin injectors, a couple in the bag and a couple more in the little
suitcase.

Diabetic shock?

I step back to the bedstand to check the obvious. The label on the
bottle's scratched, worn. The Adderall part's clear enough, already saw that,
but where's the name?

The address I can make out, it matches Ginny's address on her license. But
the name's been worn away too much for me to read. The date on the bottle's
way off, the prescription filled a year ago.

"Russ, maybe there's a roommate?"

Not that she has her girl listed as a roomie on the profiles. But the inference
is easy enough. Russ is on the phone as soon as he's confident we're not
sending McCall and Jackson's compadres to an empty apartment.

Out of date prescription... "Hey, Russ? We're gonna need to go through that
apartment. And with the roommate's cooperation, if she's up to it."

The look he gave me said it all. He rolled his eyes, but he told dispatch
to have the officers hold tight and be ready to meet us there. "How long,
Kelli?"

It took us another hour or so to finish up in the hotel room. Not that I found
anything else that stuck out to me, but I don't always get the chance to
go over the scene myself. Usually, I'm stuck reading secondhand reports.

After leaving the room to Mary and her crew, we stopped at the desk on the
way out.

"No ma'am, she was the only one listed on the registration. She booked the
room last week, just for last night and done." The night manager shrugged.
"A conference, a concert, we get a lot of people like that, take a room for
a night or two so they don't have to get back on the freeway."

I ignored what I knew, or what I thought I knew, while I let the car follow
along behind Russ. I needed to enter the apartment on neutral ground, no
biases.

Two of the department's finest were waiting for us. Good thing, otherwise
we'd have been stuck calling somebody to let us through the gate.

"When you were in college, did you live in a place like this?"

I rolled my eyes. "Best I could do until I graduated was sharing space with
five in a three bedroom house in Montrose. You?"

Russ shook his head. "I lived at home as long as I could. Only way I could
scrape the tuition."

The skyrise was new, ish. Money, developers moving inside the loop,
chasing the new imports and their relatively good paying jobs. I fought myself,
a surge of jealousy at this kid's parents and their money paying for a little
easier life than I'd had.

The roommate set us straight, once she got through a little of the
shock. "Ginny paid for this," she told us, waving at the apartment. "She
had some royalty money from Intel, she worked for them over her summers since
back in high school."

Royalties?

"Yeah, she's smart, she was on a chip design team she couldn't tell me about.
It was enough, with her scholarship, to get a good place."

Turns out, Ginny was a National Merit kid with a full ride. The computer
science and math was a double major, and still she'd had enough time, brains,
and luck to get her name on a patent with Intel on her summer breaks.

In other words, what the hell was she doing with a mouthful of amphetamines?

The roommate's name was Abigail. And that's where the interview hit the rough
patch.

"Oh, man, what am I gonna do? I can't afford this place by myself? And Christ,
who's gonna call her mom?" She broke into tears, and we almost lost her.

Russ was the one who brought her back to the immediate. He gave her something
concrete to work on.

"Adderall? Ginny didn't take anything like that, she couldn't. She was
diabetic, she really watched her food and everything."

"Abigail, how long have you been here, with Ginny?" Russ asked. He sat
across from her, close enough to be able to look her in the eye, but not so
close he'd intimidate her by accident.

She thought about it. "About six months or so. Since the start of the fall
semester. She's two years older, we were in band together in high school and
she told me the space was mine as soon as I said I was coming to U of H."

"Do you know who her roommate was, before you got here?"

She laughed. Well, half laughed, it turned into a cough because she was still
crying. "Yeah. I know who her roommate was." She stopped to wipe her face
on her sleeve. "The klafte, Ginny called her. The bitch."

"Sounds like quite a story," I said.

"You have no idea."

"But was she so nasty that Ginny wouldn't have met her for a night on the
town?"

Abigail shook her head.

But then. "Well, maybe." Now when she shook her head, I could see that Abigail
wasn't so sure. "Ginny could be awful forgiving. She trusted people, even
when she shouldn't have."

We went through the rest of it, the other questions. Boyfriends, debts.
I didn't push, and neither did Russ.

Whatever had happened, the girls were too modest, too ordinary. This case was
going to take some work, there was no use pushing Abigail hard up front.

Besides, we still had to call Ginny's parents.

That aftermath took a couple weeks to settle out. The parents, divorced and
on the sort of terms that meant we only ever saw Dad, or Mom, but not both
in the same room at the same time. Middle class, Dad was a non-degree engineer
at one of the plants on the ship channel, Mom an office manager downtown,
both of them still a bit shocked that their little girl had turned into a
pocket genius and made it to the full scholarship and paying for her own
apartment route.

All of them, parents and child, were telegenic. The story was too good for
the camera crews to ignore, so Russ spent a good part of his time babysitting
reporters. Patiently explaining, over and over again, that this wasn't a
crime of passion, there was no bloody gun, we were going to have to do real
detective work.

"But, whoever you are, wherever you are, we won't stop until we catch you."

The police chief liked that bit, so Russ didn't get the usual visit from the
higher ups, demanding action and results. Or, at least, something to say in
front of the cameras.

Of course, that meant I felt the pressure. Well, more like I put the pressure
on myself. But that's another part of working the sorts of cases I do, the
slow, difficult to solve ones. The ones you spend weeks, months,
years with family members and friends, quiet and desperate, still holding
out hope that this time, this call, will be the one that sets them a little
bit free.

Real detective work started with finding Ginny's former roommate.

"Leanna. I don't know her last name, only that she used to go to Rice."

As it turned out, Leanna didn't go to our local big name university; at least,
not any more. She got kicked out when one of the sociology professors had
to take out a restraining order.

Swinging from a lady's gutters at three in the morning, stoned drunk and
naked, screaming bawdy limericks involving the professor's presumed bedroom
habits, is apparently enough to get even the more liberal side of academia
to cut you loose from the friendly confines of campus. Who knew?

After that, Ms. Leanna Reollic disappeared off the face of the planet. Well,
the official planet. But I wondered.

When I was in school, I'd known a few Leanna's, a few Ginny's. In our little
world, the crazy, the weird, the outcasts, at least when I was that age,
always seemed to drift to one particular area of town.

Was the Montrose District still home to our little tribe of nitwits? Or, well,
their kids?

As it turns out, yeah, in between the new stores, the new restaurants, the
outer skirts of the same deep pocket development programs on each side of
Montrose, there were still a few places for the lost ones.

An old house here, a dive bar there. Not the places the hipsters came to when
they needed a new place to discover. Nope.

The places where the lost went to because they could find nowhere else to go.

And, the places where a cop stuck out like a sore thumb. It took me a couple
days, afternoons wandering from place to place. But I found her, in a
rambling barn of a house just across the street from Numbers. It had been
a bar, cafe, used bookshop, a rotating cast of ready to be bankrupt businesses
on the ground floor, for as long as I could remember.

The upstairs rooms rented by the month, if you knew who to ask and could
hang on through whatever level of noise this month's tenant downstairs brought
to the party.

No one there knew Leanna Reollic by her given name. At best, she was the
madwoman who lived in the attic space, coming out only when the party at
Numbers ramped up to her level of engagement.

"Huh. She's the house drug dealer?" Russ had the same instinct I did.

But, as best as I could tell, she wasn't. "Not that they'd own up to it, if
she was. But they didn't get nervous when I asked. They were, well..."

"Amused?"

"That's it. They've got a ghost in their attic. And she's not Casper, or
even Beetlejuice, so they were happy to tell me some stories."

The stoner, the owner's nephew in charge of collecting the rent and keeping
the noise below arrest levels, told me Leanna once spent a month in the attic
without coming out at all. The nephew had even put threads, pieces of hair,
on the door to see if she was sneaking out when he wasn't around.

"It got to the point where I wondered if I needed to call you guys, maybe
she'd died in there. But I banged on the door, and she screamed at me to go
away, so I just let her be."

"Is there a bathroom in there?"

"Half, a sink and a toilet. Half fridge and a microwave, too." He shook
his head at that. "I guessed she was like one of those guys in Japan, the ones
who never leave their apartments, have you heard of them?"

A booklady, a cat, and her collection of costume jewelry from Ren Faires across
the land lived in the only two bed apartment in the place. More expensive
than the one bedrooms, she told me, but at least it gave her a place to
keep the cat box.

And it was the first room their upstairs ghost passed getting down from the
attic.

"She comes and goes a lot more than the others know. I get half her packages
from Amazon, but she needs fresh stuff. She usually goes down to HEB, first
thing in the morning while the rest of the house are still sleeping it off."

I'd figured something like that. Much as the rumored ability of Amazon or
their competitors to deliver fresh groceries might seem like living the
dream for the wired set, it had yet to pay off in reality.

But something else the booklady said... "What kind of packages?"

"Her medicines, mostly. Mail-order pharmacy importing half their stock
from Vancouver, it's half price or better."

"What do you do with the packages?"

"Leave them in front of her door. No one else goes up there, so they're pretty
safe."

Russ and I were drinking coffee in his office. Unlike mine, he worked his
tail off to clean the desk and keep his notes organized. He even had the
drawer where he kept his working case notebooks, the big yellow legal pads,
organized, so he could pull the Ginny book out and lay it on his desk while
we were kicking ideas around.

So, I saw it on his face, first, the realization. The faint connection, and
then he scrambled to go back through his notes, looking for the other half of
the memory.

"Adderall, an old prescription with Ginny's address on it."

"And Abigail told us?"

"Ginny was diabetic, and disciplined about it. To the point where she watched
anything else she took like a hawk so it wouldn't interfere with her
insulin." He flipped a couple more pages, scanning for anything else that
might jump out from his chicken scratch shorthand.

When he confirmed his memories of the case, he leaned back in his chair,
stared at the ceiling. "So, what do we do next? We don't really have enough
to swear out." He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. "Not for any
of the judges I know."

I ignored the implied question. My cases don't usually have the immediacy
of what Russ works on, so the judges in town are even more inclined to make me
do it right, cross every "i" and dot every "t".

Instead, I smiled and hit him with the obvious. "When's the last time you went
clubbing, Russ?"

I wish I was an artist. I'd hang a picture of the look on Russ's face right
then in front of the whole department, so everybody could go to work and get
a laugh in before the day starts. Sadly, I'll just settle for the memory. It
was pretty much the book definition of incredulous.

Not that I meant we were gonna get dolled up for a night on the town. Imagine
Russ in tight pants and a silk shirt... No, just no. And I don't want to
admit how long it's been since I dug out a skirt on purpose.

But we were going to hide in Numbers, and wait for the ghost across the street
to show up.

The architecture of the place lends to it. There's three bars, main room,
back porch, and upstairs. The upstairs bar isn't supposed to be an observation
deck.

It just works that way in practice. From memory of my days going in and out
of there on a regular basis, we like to pretend that we don't ogle each other
like the straights do.

But it's only pretend. Numbers is the place where the Doors' "People are
Strange" is the most descriptive song available; it's the place where everyone
meets, the borderland. Gay, straight, black, white, club kids and cowboys.
Wherever any group rubs against another, Numbers is the safe space to meet
and pretend.

A fairy dances through occasionally. But she's inviolate, the most protected
person in the room.

Everyone else is vulnerable. By choice, it's the only place most of them get
to be themselves. To the point where leaving, going back out into the real
world, is shock enough that none of your new friends will protect you from it.

In the end, we spent three days, nights, sitting in the upstairs bar, waiting
for our ghost to come visit the borderland. The bar, the barkeeps and the
waitstaff, knew we were there. We'd warned them all, aside from the fact that
we stuck out.

But sticking out was normal here. There's always a handful of observers
wandering the floor with a look of "I cannot believe these people actually
exist" on their face. That we were the suits who kept coming back three days
in a row was unusual, but not really unprecedented.

When I was a kid running those floors, we were part of a tenure case for
a sociology professor up at U of H. She spent a month watching, recording,
thinking about us, and then wrote a textbook about the experience and her
conclusions. From what I understand, it's now given out for the therapists
getting their grad degrees, part of their standard curriculum for helping
parents understand how to deal with kids who are just slightly off bubble.

These days, it's the same crowd but not. Russ knew about Numbers, more from
reputation than experience, but he'd been in and out enough not to be too
caught up in people watching.

She came in to "Redemption Song", on the third day, just after one in the
morning when the bartenders were getting geared up to run people off. That
last mad rush with last call looming.

We'd have missed her, except for the part where she was dressed up like
a member of the Queen's entourage, and she'd only stopped in for a drink
with the peasants as a way to while away the pleasant hour.

I mean, evening gown, hair done up in a pearl net with ringlets artfully
turned, a hint of a veil suggested even, opera gloves, the whole works. It
was as though she were expecting to make a performance.

I saw her first, but I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. After a
few minutes, I managed to pick up my mind and turn it back to the printout
of her old Rice ID on the table in front of Russ. Like half a dozen other times
over the past couple hours, I leaned over, just to make sure.

And there was no question. "It's her, Russ, just over there."

"What's she wearing?" he naturally wondered.

"Don't worry, you won't have any problem picking her out of the crowd." I had
to give him warning, at least a little bit.

He giggled, shook his head. "She dresses up just like my granddaughter."

This case was back a few years ago, six years before we met Peter Pan. Back when
Russ only had one granddaughter. I think Elena was about four, maybe five
at the time, still into the dressing up like a fairy princess stage.

"Let's just hope we don't have to dress you up to match," I said.

I heard the chuckle, then the scrape of his chair.

We both knew from the outfit she was wearing that approaching Leanna directly,
in the middle of the end of night crowd at Numbers, was a mistake. Instead,
we just headed across the street.

We had the advantage of knowing where she was going home to. No sense not taking
it.

Looking back at it, both now and during and after her trial, I wonder if she
knew. Who told her? Abigail, the booklady?

Hell, the stoner nephew. I'd lived in similar places, I knew how protective
people were, the little culture that formed.

The evening gown was her armor; she performed her part, and we performed ours.
It was after two in the morning, after the parking lot behind Numbers cleared
out, and the remnants of her audience had flown off to the House of Pies or
Taco Cabana or whatever other all nighter was open for the haggard and wound
up.

She didn't invite us into her attic. She sat, contrary to the gown, two
steps up from the bottom of the stairs, me a step or two up, Russ a step
down from her. We ran through it, why we were there, why we suspected her
hand in Ginny's death.

She admitted it. Oh, not in detail, and not enough either of us would have
felt comfortable swearing to it in court, but it was enough that we stopped
her, gave her the Miranda, then waited.

"I loved her. I hated her. Why did she kick me out, and then call me, email
me?" Leanna was confused, hidden away behind her attic door.

I could sympathize. When the lawyers started in on their battle, and the D.A.
put together his package for the judge, I got the chance to read the emails
Leanna was talking about.

Ginny was gentle, but she was clear. Whatever Leanna had thought was going on,
Ginny wasn't interested. Ginny's only mistake was, she didn't realize when Leanna had
gone from heartbroken to something more, something committed to the lefthand
path. Ginny was too young? No, but too trusting for sure.

The jury recognized it; even the D.A. didn't complain too much when the defense
found an expert to point out how deep into herself Leanna had crawled. "Will
she ever come out? Most likely, no."

Committed to an institution for life was the jury's say, and the judge agreed.

Why am I thinking about Leanna, when I'm in the middle of chasing Peter Pan?

Because, as it turns out, I'm on my way to interview Leanna again. Something
sticks out in my mind, about Peter and his Neverland approach.

I think he's part of the Numbers crowd. I think Leanna might have heard of him.

I fear that I know him.








today's story for your pleasure, part the second of the Neverland Disorder - Connected/Unconnected - A Kelli Hench Mystery

...with doubt the vicious circle turns and burns...

Patti Smith Group, Because the Night, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen songwriters

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Odd Positions by M. K. Dreysen

This was the post where my story Odd Positions was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, coming October 2020.

Later, for your reading pleasure, Odd Positions - A Story of What We Get Into when life has other plans for us...
...your dead end dreams don't make you smile...
The Runaways, Cherry Bomb, Joan Jett and Kim Fowley songwriters

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Forest Dwellers by M. K. Dreysen

This was the post where my story Forest Dwellers was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, coming October 2020.

Look here shortly for a story I call Forest Dwellers.

...turn around to find me no returns...

Aretha Franklin, Good To Me As I Am To You, Aretha Franklin and Ted White songwriters

Monday, January 6, 2020

State of the writer, circa January 2020? Road weary.

I've been quiet, except for posting stories, because I've been on the road for the day job quite a bit since Halloween. This wasn't the schedule that many keep; it was enough so that writing time was precious. And so fiction took my attention, rather than any attempt at blogging.

I'm content with this, the fiction is the thing after all. For me, anyway. This year will be, if my poor foresight is accurate, similar. I've things to do on several fronts, so my stories will take up my free time.

Publishing, as well. I've plans and works to send forth, and time if I stay careful and aware so as to give those stories wings.

Friday, January 3, 2020

Protons Streaming by M. K. Dreysen

This was the post where my story Protons Streaming was originally published. Look for it now in M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, coming October 2020.

Thursday, January 2, 2020