Seven and One: Part 3 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery

He had to work to find them, but he didn't mind.

That's the thought that bubbled up to the top of my head. He has a goal, Peter Pan does, an idea. Archetypes? Maybe. Either way, he's chasing something beautiful in this fallen world, and so what if he's gotta work a little harder.

It's just part of the chase.

The setting, he's setting off his jewels. His Jewel? No names yet, no faces, free association works when I have the data, when I don't it's noise trapping me into a line of thought, dismiss it.

And get back into the roller derby, girl. Before I break an ankle.

Push, push push, elbows up and drive into the curve, dodge a knee, the hip and the bounce and the shorter gals trying their best to make the tall skinny one lose a step or lose a tendon or three.

It's a great way to spend an evening, and the beer at the end of the night tastes cold and wet, and well earned. By the time I get to the untaping, and the cataloging of new aches and bruises, I'm surprised mostly that the idea that had surfaced was still there. Waiting.

Russ was there, he'd brought Elena, his eldest granddaughter, to witness the mayhem. "Kelli, how you haven't ended up in the ER, I'll never know."

"Dumb luck, or maybe a little bit of skill?" I know what I look like out there, like a spider on ice skates. That's part of the thrill, though. Put a little mind and bodywork into it, stay away from the ladies with torque advantage, and I've got a good workout. And some anger management thrown in free.

Elena's face was lit up like a little Christmas tree. "Papa, can I do this?"

"Can you? Yeah, probably. Are you going to? Not while your grandmother has anything to say about it." He grinned, ruffled her hair and gave her a kiss.

She just shook her head and wandered off to talk to some of the other ladies.

"I don't think you'll stop her that easy, Russ."

"Yeah, we're in trouble there. Connie's never gonna let me live this down."

Or me. Consuela Ortiz is a wonderful lady. But if the two of us had managed to put her so far one and only baby girl into a mindset just this side of murder and mayhem, Connie wasn't going to be nice about it. "You could bring her along next time, give Elena the chance to convince her. And then you're not quite in the firing line."

"Yeah, I'll be sure and tell Connie you're the one to blame for this."

All heart, that Russ Ortiz. "Listen, have you been thinking about Peter Pan?"

He shrugged. But he didn't deny it. Six months gone, the press had stopped showing up. And the higher ups in the department had gone away with the coverage.

Leanna Ringham's parents were still involved. Quiet phone calls, once a week or so, they checked in with me or Russ, knowing there wasn't anything new yet. Needing the comfort of knowing we weren't giving up just because the noise and light of the lookie-loo's had moved on to the latest and greatest headlines.

There's a pace to these cases. The other fifty percent, the ones that don't get solved by the rules of thumb: boyfriends or girlfriends, money, debt. Bad times and bad connections and the obvious tracks to somewhere. We settle into the grind, waiting and hoping, and working every trace we can get our hands on. Even, no especially when we know the hints and traces won't pan out.

I knew Peter Pan wasn't done yet. Did he?

I didn't get the chance to let Russ in on my little epiphany, if that's what it was. He had his little tagalong to keep up with.

Elena had wandered through the rest of my team, and she'd run up against the one lady I'd have figured for "Least Likely To Put Up With Little Ones". Margaret Stimps, a tank on wheels, all elbows and knees and scars where she'd had those joints rebuilt as needed. Bottle blonde, I had not the foggiest clue what Maggie did for a living. Only that whatever the outside world was for her, on skates she was a tornado ready to descend.

She and Elena were thick as thieves when Russ came to claim his granddaughter. "Hey Papa. Looks like you brought us our next skater." Maggie held her hand out, and Elena slapped her palm down on it. "She's all ready to armor up and dive in with us next week."

Russ held his hands out for Elena to grab onto. "You ladies are trying to get an old man into trouble."

Maggie clapped her hand on his shoulder, than tweaked Elena's nose. "Uh-huh. Just remember, you're the one who brought her down to the river. It ain't our fault she dove in to get a drink." Our team bomber chucked her bags over her shoulders, smiled and waved at Elena one more time, and then headed for the exits.

I saw her again just about twenty-four hours later. Alone in her apartment, a spare little place with only a howling little Beagle puppy to mourn Maggie Stimps's passing.

Roger McCall was the officer who'd caught the first call. I got there before the crime scene crew had even unloaded their kit.

"Where's your partner?"

He shook his head. "Family trouble, she's off this week."

Life gets us whether we want it to or not. "Hope it's not that big a deal?"

"Her brother-in-law's stuck in the medical center, some kind of nerve issue they have to cut him open for."

He stood in the doorway, minding traffic until we had a quorum. Little apartment, one room studio, really, except they'd thrown up a wall or two. No one wanted to pay the extra rent.

Roger had the puppy leashed, at least.

"What's your little buddy think of this?"

"He's a lot better now, with someone to keep him company."

That part was the same story as Leanna Ringham, wasn't it? Puppy raises a racket, enough to get someone else, the neighbors maybe, wondering what was going on. A call to the uniforms, please come in and check the nice lady next door's ok?

And here we are. I knew the name, knew I'd be seeing a familiar face in a few minutes. The questions were necessary; they were also a way to hold off that moment when I turned her head my way. "What did the neighbors have for us?"

"Maggie Stimps. She's a coach at Cy-Fair, volleyball maybe? And she's on a roller derby team."

"Yeah. I know about that part. They say that's her only real hobby?"

He was holding the puppy, now. Absentminded petting, like a squirmy stuffed animal. "That's right, said during the season she's out with her kids until ten every night, up at the school or wherever, then the rest of the year she's here or at a derby."

"Any friends?"

"Nobody new. Said she broke up with her girlfriend a few months ago, other than that she's pretty quiet."

We took all her noise, I guess. Well, us and the volleyball team. I wondered who'd get that job, telling her kids. I didn't envy them, whichever one of the principals or coaches got the call.

I couldn't avoid it anymore. Time to see what Maggie could tell us.

No blood. That was the first thing. "How'd you know to call me in?"

"Look at her hands."

And her face. Blisters, loose skin and hair; burns, third-degree. Oil, maybe? A mass of blistered burnt patches on her hands, did she get burned at the stove, stumble, heart attack?

These burns, though. Blisters, skin peeling back halfway up her elbows, and her face was covered from her hairline to the base of her throat. Someone had thrown a pan full of hot oil onto her face, her hands. She'd covered her eyes, that's where her hands got it, the splashback found its way around the shield and onto the cheeks, forehead, chin.

I pulled the gloves on, then ran a finger along the back of her hands. Rubbed the residue that came away. Oil, slick, just a little.

They'd wiped her hands and face, after. There were a few threads from the cloth they'd used, clinging to her hair and the back of her wrists, along with bits and pieces of her burned flesh.

The place didn't smell of anything in particular. No burnt fry cook odor. And there were no other visible wounds. I didn't want to turn her, not with the CSI's coming up the stairs behind me. Time to check out the rest of the apartment.

Especially the kitchen.

Roger and his little furry buddy watched me head that way. "Was I right?" he asked me.

To call me in, he meant.

Unfortunately, yeah, he was right. Maybe it was just an accident, that's all.

Except for there being no pans in sight. No oil spill on the floor, no hot burner left on. No sign of panic because her evening meal had turned to a nightmare.

So. Best case, someone had cleaned up because they didn't want to be involved?

Yeah, uh-huh, they'd gone so far as to make sure there were no dishes in the dishwasher, either. A faint smell of bleach, they'd gotten the spaces in between, hadn't they? No remnants. How far had they gone in the cleanup?

If the oil had been hot enough to burn Maggie's skin, slough it off in pieces, it would have left more than a slick. The place was vinyl and veneer, well kept but old. They might have cleaned up the oil, but they hadn't replaced any of the flooring or cabinets.

I walked the rooms, the bathroom, the bedroom, the rest of the living room where I could get around the crime scene gang. Nothing, no scorch marks.

No smoke marks on the ceiling. Wherever it had happened, Maggie didn't get a faceful of smoking hot oil in the face here in her apartment.

'He didn't need to, but he liked to work to find them.'

Ok, now where did that come from? The night before, at the derby, something like that, but what did it have to do with this? Wait.

"Stop." The morgue team were there, the crime scene investigators were done with the body, they were handing things off and getting ready to move her. "Don't shift her yet."

There was something, what was it? I moved back to the living room, ignoring the looks. "Step back please, just give me a minute. With her."

I'd need some help. The something, what stuck in my mind, was Maggie's hands. She'd brought them up, protection, sure, the oil burns and the skin falling away testified to it. But she wasn't just protecting herself.

She was praying. "I'll need some help. And a camera." I moved back, accepted the camera from the tech, let the coroner's lead come in to the body. "Lift her up to her knees, please."

Rigor made it easy, the coroner's lead tech rotated her up to her knees, and that's when everyone else saw her. She was kneeling, praying, hands up and face to the sky.

I'd said she wasn't posed. I was wrong. I took the pictures, coroner's lead in the frame but I couldn't do anything about that. Maggie's locked pose came through regardless.

"Before, or after?" I asked him. Here, peak of rigor, all he had to do to keep her in place was hold his hand on her back.

He waited for me to finish the pictures, then he felt her joints. "After, I think. Maybe she was like this to start, but they'd have had to have re-posed her when rigor started."

"More than once?"

"Probably. It's not a switch, it's a process. Pose her, wait for the relaxation, do it again, until the lock really set in. A couple hours from onset, at least."

She'd left, we'd left the arena about ten, ten-thirty. Give it a couple hours for leeway here or there, wherever she'd been, then they'd brought her back here.

And sat 'til sunrise. Patiently rearranging her limbs. One by one. "And she fell over, then."

He nodded. "Right, as soon as they got what they needed, got her set into this pose. They'd have walked away, and she'd have rolled right over without anyone to hold her in place." He illustrated by taking his hand away, just far enough for Maggie's body to roll over and meet it. "You done?"

"Oh. Yeah, go ahead."

The CSI techs broke out the vacuum. They'd have done it anyway, but now we all knew where the most likely place for evidence was going to be. Right next to her, where the killer had spent hours building something. Vacuum the floor, and her body, eliminate me and Roger and themselves from any hair fibers or skin particles. And the dog.

The puppy held still and quiet, in Roger's arms but wide-eyed and paying attention. He gave one little whine, a little howl, when they took Maggie away.

I worked through my list. Maggie's ex-girlfriend, she'd been in Atlanta with family. Whatever the breakup, Rachelle was heartbroken when I called her. Teary, "Where do I come to see her?"

No leads there. "She was quiet, we were quiet. Most nights, she'd have something to do with her girls, or the derby. Any free time, she'd rather curl up on the couch and let the t.v. drone on than just about anything."

"Any friends over, old lovers maybe?" Game nights, movie nights, anything where there was a crowd...

"Not really. When she was younger... she said she'd ditched that part of her life years ago, and was relieved to do it."

Ok. "What about family?" That was a heartbreaker, too. An old one, though.

"The boys, her brothers, they're all that's left. Maggie's parents passed away years ago, I don't think she ever had the chance to come out to them. Or wanted to, even. The boys, well. I think we saw them once, her nephew had a soccer match up in Nacogdoches a couple years ago. We made the drive, it was as close to a family reunion as..." Rachelle stopped to blow her nose. "We had a good time, it was one of the good ones, really. Maggie was shocked."

"How so?"

"Wally and Rich, her brothers." She stopped again. "They're good people, but they're small town. They accepted Maggie, me. They just never knew what to make of us, that's all."

Richard echoed that, when I called him, and then when I made the drive up to Bryan. He wasn't snuffling, more like leaking tears, he'd wipe them when he noticed, otherwise they were tracks running down his face. "We, Wally and I are twins."

He pointed at the pictures on the wall behind him, the foyer was a family gallery. The twins and Maggie, three little tanks even as kids. Beaming in every picture, towheads posing in front of Christmas trees, tractors, a duck blind.

"How much older was she?"

"Five years. Just old enough to give us hell, young enough not to think we were too much trouble to play with."

"Did your parents know?"

"About her being a lesbian? Dad did, he didn't care, so long as she was happy. But Mom, well."

Dad had been around the world in the Navy. Mom on the other hand. "If she ever made it farther than Houston or Dallas, I'll eat my hat." Deacon's daughter, raised in the Baptist church. "A good woman. She was just naive, that's all. Dad just didn't want to disturb her, talking about it. Besides, I don't think Maggie even wanted to admit it to herself, not until they were both gone."

"You're saying your father knew before Maggie did?"

He shrugged, a gentle smile coming through the still-running tears. "Yeah, I think so. I wish he'd had the chance to tell her it was all right."

"Did you?" Maybe I shouldn't have asked it. I wasn't a therapist. But I did have to know how Richard and his brother fit into this.

"Couple years ago, up at Stephen F. Austin, Wally's youngest, Will, played a soccer tournament; Maggie and Rachelle came up. It was the first time we'd all been together in I don't know how long. I tried to tell her, best I could, all I could get out was that I loved her." He gripped his hands together, smooth calloused diesel mechanic's hands with grease permanently embedded in the creases. Like he was holding on to his sister. "I'm no good at that kind of thing."

Wally and his family were out of state, Michigan. "He moved up there years ago, he works for a small town water department. Been there, what, twenty, thirty years now?"

I had to do that interview by internet video. Wally Stimps was the image of his brother. Down to the quiet tears that started rolling as soon as he realized why I was calling. "Rich told me. I can't believe Sissy is gone."

Maggie'd always been there, big sister. "When's the last time you talked to her?" I asked.

"Couple months back. I called to let her know Will is getting ready to be a father."

"How was she doing?"

He shook his head. "Rachelle had just left. I think Will's news was the first good news she'd had in a few weeks. Her volleyball team's done well over the years, gone to State good and regular, but she told me they'd hit a patch. All her seniors graduated, and the other kids aren't up to that level yet."

I'm glad he didn't ask about the roller derby team then. We weren't much more than a way to blow off steam; success we measured in how few bruises we picked up on any given night.

One night a week, three or four months out of the year, and I'd known precious little of this. Rachelle's face I knew, now that I thought about it, but just as a presence in the stands cheering us on. If Maggie had ever introduced her, I didn't remember it. "Was that normal for you and your family?"

Wally held his hands up to the camera, not an excuse, just... "I can't explain it. We're all like that. Rachelle was the first of Maggie's girlfriends that I actually got to meet, and that just the one time."

The thing sort of wound down; there were no ghosts to chase in that family. Not any apparent to me. No screaming matches, no threats to the family honor. Small town, sure, protected, probably. Deadly?

I didn't see it. Rachelle didn't know the names of any of Maggie's other lovers, short or long term. So that was out. And however much Maggie may have been a tank on the skates, there were no grudges, not in the local roller derby community.

I checked, I didn't rely on my own memories. Half a dozen other permanent clubs in the regular tournaments, probably another dozen or so that popped up regularly enough. Most of them, the captains remembered us and Maggie, enough to say "Uh-huh, that's right", or similar.

None of them had any bad blood. Was it worth chasing? Maybe, but only if nothing else came up. If there's a couple dozen people, all of them doing some variation of "Nice lady, I remember her. No, ma'am, we had rough games sometimes but shook hands and walked away enjoying the ride", digging for the possibility one of them might be lying is harder than it sounds. Fishing expeditions look great, but they take resources I don't have. There were half a dozen other cases on the roll at the time, active and doing.

Whatever happened to Maggie, I owed her more than chasing the goose trails. That could wait; if we ended up on the cold case pile. Until then, let's keep it to the more likely paths.

Family, the handful of friends I knew about... none of them giving any indication, and none of them giving me reason to mistrust their story.

Right. So back to basics. Maggie leaves the arena, bag of stinky clothes and headed for home and shower, maybe a cold beer. She's the quiet type, none of her co-workers had seen or heard anything saying she'd been out cruising the bars in the wake of Rachelle leaving, so she'd stuck to her habits. Homebody.

How's someone get her out of that habit at ten o'clock at night?

"Who hates someone that much?" is how the CSI lead tech had thought of it, at the apartment.

"It's not hate." Not really, not from where I sat. "Think about it. They'd have had to embrace her, close up, full on, for hours. Holding her hands. Holding her pose. Bearing her weight every minute of it. Could you do that, hold up their dead body in your arms, for someone you hated?"

That wasn't hate. Love, obsession.

Passionate dispossesive? There were three candidates. Someone who loved her more than anything.

Someone who was driven by her.

Last? The craftsman. Professional, in approach if not in bankroll. Someone who needed her for the work.

Hate wasn't in it. Once she was gone, someone who hated her? They'd be done and gone, as fast as possible. Just like the accidental killer, but they were of no concern, given the way they'd treated the body.

How would the Lover get Maggie out of her routine? Personal. A greeting, in person, the half-remembered somebody, where had Maggie seen that person before?

The Obsessed? A call; not the first. Oh, no, there would have been contact before. Email, text, phone, letters written painstakingly by hand, cut from magazines decades old, chalk or crayon, something. But a call, it would have to be, or something similar, immediate.

The Indifferent? Anything at all, but that one shared the need for it to be immediate. They wouldn't have needed to contact her before.

That one may have picked her out just weeks ago. The Indifferent, the Killer, would be exquisitely aware of what happened if they got caught. Care, pick out the target, make sure she didn't have any outside entanglements. Move on at the least suspicion; but not from Maggie. She'd been perfect.

The call, the call, the common denominator wasn't it? No cell phone in evidence, so I called around until Sprint found her for me, and released the phone records. About two weeks after Maggie was gone, I sat on the floor of my office, an ancient yoga mat protecting my hips and knees, and poured through who and what and when of Maggie's cell phone life.

Which is a lot easier than it used to be. I don't need to keep someone on line, patiently entering numbers as I ask for them and doing the lookups. I key in the numbers and get the name back in seconds.

Pretty much the same thing we all do, at home, when we get an unknown number on the caller ID and run to Google. Difference here being, in my official capacity, I get the answers straight from the horse's mouth.

Well, most of the time it's that easy. The big carriers, I just cycle through their software. It's the little ones that take longer.

And of course, that's what the killer, assuming that's who'd called Maggie at ten-thirty that night, right as she'd have been starting up her car and heading out to the casa... that's what they'd done. Bought a burner from some small time network, not even Wal-Mart this was the corner gas station variety, fifteen, twenty bucks and they'd have an hour tops of cell time.

Plenty for the work they needed, and straight into the trash it goes. Me?

Sure, it was a dead end. No search engine magic to solve my case for me. But I knew now how they'd done it. When.

The arena parking garage has cameras. I had a time; we'd already watched Maggie walk from the elevators to her car, fire it up and roll for the exits.

Now, the timestamp matching the phone records, was there a pause there, one we hadn't paid much attention to before? A couple minutes, there, the video rolling and Maggie's car waiting at idle.

It was an older, four-door sedan, Toyota Corolla, mid-size and mid-life and reliable as an old penny. I'd called it a warm-up pause, first time through. And maybe it was, her habit. Keep the old 'yota running right, treat it right, and it wouldn't keel over somewhere and leave her stranded on the side of the road.

It also made a perfect time to call, now didn't it? For someone who'd spent a little time watching her. Observing Maggie. That was, in fact, exactly the right time to call.

Oh, but how would, did, they know? Watch, learn. Doesn't do them any good, now does it, unless they know she's there. Listening to the grumble of a hundred thousand miles or so of scar tissue warming up in an underground garage. Pushing the buttons on the radio. Maybe searching the messages on the phone, looking for Rachelle? Who knows, but someone watching.

Problem with a camera system attached to a public arena: too many people to nail down. This wasn't four hours later, the last kid out of the ball park and not even the janitors left to stick out. Maggie was in her car with stragglers still coming down out of the stands. Half a dozen people came out of the elevator. Any one or none could have been the...

If I'd been there, where would I have wanted to spend my time? In the garage, that's the old school way, right? Not even, no one's going to take the chance on a rent-a-cop asking a question, starting with "Why aren't you upstairs instead of hanging out down here?" The paranoid maybe, the Obsessed or the Lover, they'd be the type to hang out in the car, especially if they've made a mistake, gotten too close to her.

The Indifferent would have been in the stands. That one knew they'd be safely anonymous, sitting in the stands with a dog and a beer and a bucket of popcorn after the break. Would they have been cocky enough to have come down in the elevator with her?

One car. One car had left, after Maggie. I counted. Seven people came out of the elevator, two of them had ridden together, the first car to leave. The other six, four came past the camera, then Maggie, and then the last. Toyota Corolla, then a Honda Civic.

I didn't remember if that's the way it happened in terms of history, which car came off the lot first. That's the way it happened that night. Had the Civic's driver been sitting there, watching Maggie? The number pre-programmed. The button under their thumb. Waiting to go, in that magic moment? I thought maybe so. I thought maybe that would work just right. Call, watch her leave. Follow her, to wherever it was that had been agreed to.

This was someone who'd bought a burner phone to cover their tracks. But that was easy, wasn't it? Cheap. The Civic was no rental; they'd known better than that. Five minutes and we'd have been knocking on someone's door. So, stolen, bought for cash.

No Civics that night with those plates reported stolen. Cash? Maybe, but it was only two years old. And Hondas didn't lose their value that much, how many people drop seven or eight thousand in cash, just for a throw-away car...

He'd made just two mistakes. Will. Maggie's nephew. Everything else, he'd approached it almost perfectly.

College kids with a new baby on the way don't have the cash to spare to feed their hobbies. So he'd driven his car, knowing, wrongly as it turned out, that a public arena would hide his car in a sea of anonymous fans.

His only other mistake? Hugging his aunt's body for hours. The DNA strands were precious and few, but they were there. Carefully vacuumed away, a handful of the hairs from his beard, broken away and embedded in the collar of her shirt. Where he'd used his chin to help hold her in place.

Love? Yeah. Obsession, yes. Was he the Indifferent Killer? Not yet. I think we caught him on the brink. His aunt, his godmother. His uncles, they loved their sister and her ways, not theirs, were hers.

Will, he loved his aunt, as well. Enough so that he couldn't just accept her life, her desires. We found out Maggie's old lovers, because Will kept a list. Where they were now, where they'd come from. Names, addresses, a list a list with dates. All I could assume is that those dates corresponded to breakups, that's what the one next to Rachelle's name looked like. I didn't show the list to her, when we found it. There was no need.

He begged to confess. Fought with his lawyer, the public defender because Wally couldn't afford better. Got up on the stand and told the judge and the jury exactly why he'd done it. That his aunt was going to hell if he didn't do what his father and his uncle couldn't bring themselves to do. Protect Aunt Maggie from herself.

The jury wasn't impressed. They looked at his confession, the DNA evidence, the pictures of Maggie's skin and hair sloughing away.

They convicted him before lunch. Sentenced him to the needle the next day.

Coming this evening: Seven and One, Part 3 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery.

...You can't trust nobody, you might as well be alone...

Bessie Smith: Long Old Road. Bessie Smith, songwriter.

Hey, it's February Release Day! In this case, Collected: Volume 1, by M. K. Dreysen. Six short stories, and if you've been following and reading for a while, it's a nice way to revisit some old friends, and ancient enemies, in an easy to get format. Enjoy!

Reader: herein find six short stories, little tales to light your way. Explorations of the dark; with a few adventures of the day.

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 1 holds Short Stories and Tales, and is available now in both print and ebook formats, from your favorite retailers.

For the print version, Collected: Volume 1 is available at Amazon.

For an ebook version, Collected: Volume 1 is available at Smashwords, Books2Read, Lulu, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Kobo.

Very Old, and Very Tired - A Story of Who We May Yet Meet at the End of Days

See that man there, the one walking beneath the empty limbs of what might be
a winter-blasted forest?

He doesn't flee anything. He's old, he's seen many things, and few of them
engender fear in him. Especially not here, not now.

He instead walks toward something. Something, some feeling, an urge that
has bothered him lately.

And by lately, I mean, for all of this particular lifetime. Since his birth
on this planet around this dying sun, he has his whole life felt, heard...

An urge. No, a song. One of regret, and perhaps, exhaustion.

The universe is dying, you see. And that man there, the one walking through
trees that will see no spring?

He is the last being of consciousness left in the universe. For this is the last
star yet burning, and the last planet left to feel its rays.

The people of his world left, decades ago, when their oracles
told them that the sun was in its last great cycle. It was the most grand of
gestures; the entirety of the planet, every last soul, gathered themselves
and their energies, and built the greatships necessary to evacuate the
masses.

Unlike some other worlds, there were few holdouts. Watching the stars wink out,
one by one, focused the attention of all but the most hardened. Survival
instincts eventually kicked in.

When the last boat lifted, and the last greatship boosted beyond the gravity
field, there were only a bare handful, perhaps thousands, left of a population
that had been verging on a billion. Not a large world, in the old measure,
but not a small one, either. The politicians were justifiably proud of
themselves.

Until their oracles spoke prophecy, data, again. When the
data revealed the gaping emptiness of the universe after the stars winked
away, the politicians wept, and beat their breasts in collective, and demanded
that the oracles return them all to their homes.

Unfortunately, the technology of their greatships required a gravity well to
boost from. So the last of the Flying Dutchmen sailed as a fleet
into the blackness, with a collection of politicians and disgraced
astrophysicists as figureheads, wired to the front of their ships.

Somewhere around the time the last of their reaction mass fluttered from their
gasping engines, their old sun entered its last major fluctuation period. The
waves of heat and energy plastered the old planet.

There were no more growing seasons. And only the creatures of the deep water,
and the caves, survived the radiation storms.

The less-old man watched and monitored from a cave he had moved himself to
as soon as the greatships left. He wasn't an oracle, but in times past he
had worked as a scientist. And he'd known all too well what the result of
staying on the ground would be.

But the empty starfields, and the basic engineering of the greatships, had
harmonized with the song of regrets in the back of his mind. And he'd chosen
the less sure path.

And the caves. There was no question about the type of star, and how it would
die. There had been far too many of them to study over the past centuries. The
oracles, before the madness of the end took over, were well studied. So
he took to his cave, and tried not to think about the others, the ones who'd
stayed, but didn't seek the shelter of the caves.

And when the radiation poisoned survivors of the first wave began attempting
the shelter of the caves at last, the few yet left alive were far too
delusional to survive the lack of food, now that there were no more plants
to grow.

But eventually, the fluctuating stage passed, and the now-old man could come
out of his cave.

He wanted to watch the end. The timing was well known. There would be only
just enough time to witness. No need to worry about radiation poisoning.

Not when you'll die, one way or another, so very very soon.

The song was a memory. A chorus of old lives and memories, stretching perhaps
back to the beginning of things.

As a younger, more cynical man, he might perhaps have sought some bit of
psychological assistance for this affliction. Hearing voices is rarely
considered a rewarding pastime, in civilized times.

Alas, even his computers could no longer help him. Not that he'd have asked.
He was well familiar with the hum, the ever present babbling. That noise
was part of him, now and ever.

He just didn't pay close attention to them. Not if he wanted to get anything
done. And right now, what he wanted to get done was find a nice place to set
a fire, and spend the night.

Preferably, with a good view. You know, sparks overhead, maybe a nice beach
with surf booming below. Like that.

He'd chosen his path well. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a collection
of sailors stretching back eons thrilled to the sight of black cliffs
and rolling surf. Gathering tree limbs for firewood along those
cliffs was a habit familiar to many lifetimes.

Long back in the queue of memories, admittedly. It had been eons of eons
since firewood was anything other than an affectation, in any part of the
universe. But the habits of the ancients surged to the fore; when his mind
searched through the memories, the knowledge was there.

It always had been, when he'd needed knowledge and assurance.

Striking the fire alight, flint on steel, was another old feeling new again
beneath the red of the dying sun. He blew the faint spark to life amidst
shavings and old dry bark, and the oldest of friendly enemies roared to life
beneath his breath.

He sat on a log, pulled a backpack loose from his shoulders. Among other
things, it contained a six pack of beer, tobacco and a pipe. In a distant
part of the universe, on a planet the oracles had long ago dismissed as the
home of humanity in the face of so many more interesting theories, both items
marked stages of civilization, the beginning, and the beginning of the
industrial and technological reach for the stars.

In his other life, the old one had never much had the time to really dig in
to the reasoning the oracles used to dismiss that long-gone planet as
humanity's cradle. But when he popped the wire and ceramic stopper loose from
the glass bottle, and puffed his pipe alight, a gentle sigh across lifetimes
accompanied the smoke drifting aloft, and the sip of fermented beverage. And
the debates he'd followed at laughing remove dissolved in the contentment
of fire and sunset and a good walk now finished.

The beer and the pipe were soon enough gone; he drifted, in and out of sleep,
there where the only light now, with the moon in its new phase, was from
the fire. The spark rising on the wind played against a black screen, no
starlight.

Midnight came, and with it, something unexpected. A figure sat down across
from him, cloaked and hooded. Tall, almost his height, skinny beneath the
covering robes.

The old man pondered the darkness, wondered what face his interlocutor wore
beneath its cowl. Working up the energy to ask was difficult. But
eventually, he sat up, pushed himself into something like a vertical seat.

And asked, "Does this mean I need to make some coffee? I don't have all that
much, I was saving it for tomorrow morning, really."

"I apologize for interrupting your nap," the figure responded. A neutral
vocal range, neither tenor nor alto.

"If you've a good story to share, I'll not begrudge you." He set about
putting a kettle together, and stirring up the fire. There was enough and
more than enough wood; he'd spend some time tomorrow building up the burn
pile.

The figure gestured at the kettle. The fingers waving at the end of the
hand reminded the old man of someone...

His memories, all of them back to the beginning, thrilled in response to
the shape of those fingers. They all of them remembered someone whose hands
resembled those of the stranger. The old man ignored the feeling though.

He'd practiced not thinking about the person that the figure's hands reminded
him of. Even here, and now, there was no mileage to be had going down that
road. She'd made her decisions, and he'd made damned sure that there was no
depression for him to fall into as a result.

Practice, and plenty of other things to do. And yes, family of his own.

Every memory calling in his mind seemed to have some version of this loss.
Male, female, young old didn't matter. There was always a person missing, a
love not love, friend moved on, aggravating pain in the ass who dropped off
the face of the earth, gambling partner who quit showing up for the Vegas trips.

Some friend whose loss always seemed to leave a hole in the ether that the
past lives spent the rest of time working around.

"And here we are, at the end of days. Drinking coffee." He sipped from the
cup, watching the steam rise to obscure the hooded figure across the fire.
"I don't believe you're here, though. I think you're just a figment of
an old, tired brain's imagination."

His companion accepted this without comment, focusing on holding the cup
in companionable silence.

"If you're not a figment, there's a good chance you've chosen an unfortunate
form to visit me in. She died many years ago, before the greatships left."

The figure opposite passed the cup within the hood. He listened closely for
a sound of sipping, but there was only the crackle of the fire. The hand
withdrew an empty cup, then set it aside.

His companion crossed arms beneath the robe, leaving only the
image of Death, reclining against a rock.

A dim memory bubbled up through the lifeline to the top of the old man's mind.
"Aren't I supposed to offer you a game of some sort? Maybe play for a bit more
time? There are places where you're supposed to be amenable to persuasion."

The figure seemed to sigh. Then it pulled the hood free, and the old man
was staring into his own face. Younger, maybe? No, just more full, less
stressed and drawn against the past few years of loneliness. This Death image
stretched his hands to each side, wide and wider. Then he said to himself,
"Look. What you say might well have been true, in other times and other places.
But here, where even the stars have passed beyond ken?"

"Even you're dying, then?"

"Aren't I you? And you, me? Of course we're dying. As is our mother. This is
the end of things. And it is our turn."

"Don't we need to watch? Shouldn't our mother, this universe, have someone
to bear witness?" The chorus within thrilled to this. They had built, lifetime
by lifetime, one small deed after another, to something.

To be here, and know that some small amount of that work was left yet to
do... unified the memories, the good and the bad and the indifferent.

His other self, Death, forever companion, reached out to grasp his shoulders,
and turned him then to face the rising sun. "Look, and see."

The old red orb cleared the horizon. For the last time. As the hands released
his shoulders, the red sun grew and grew... long minutes passed as the wave
of energy grew to encompass all.

And the last sun grasped the last witness, and the universe passed on.

Watch this space; later this evening, a story for you. On what we may yet meet, the words we may yet speak, at the end of things.

...I'd rather meet the me down the road, to lead me through the fog...

Alabama Shakes: Future People. Blake Mills, Brittany Amber Howard, Heath Allen Fogg, Steven William Johnson, Zachary Riley Cockrell, songwriters

My Turn in the Barrel - A Story from the Idiot Land of Teenagerdom

Just as the light is dying in the fire, sparks reaching for their ultimate
big brothers winking a million light years away.

An island in the middle of a salt water lake. Rabbit Island.

A couple of nitwit kids, discussing the important things in life.

"I hate that, first thing after you wake up in the morning, having to take
a piss through a hard-on."

Laugh from the other side of the fire. "Yeah, lean over the bowl and hope
you don't piss on the wall."

Or, later...

"I stood behind Gail the other day, lined up for lunch, she pressed back into
me, she's just tall enough for the cup of her ass to rub across my dick." He
fell quiet thinking about the pressure, and the warmth.

"Yeah, Pam was behind me, I could feel her nipples through my shirt."

The discussion turned to cigarettes, hanging out on the roof of the school
after the scout meeting let out, smoking and acting like we knew what we
were doing.

There were a handful of us, the latchkey brigade, time on our hands and trouble
on our minds.

At least the rest of them had the full family complement. Someone had
misplaced my nuclear family pieces, somewhere along the way. I had to make
do with just me and my mom.

And half a dozen kittens our cat had laid in my mom's closet. On top of her
dress shoes for work.

The island's part of a little chain that runs from the bottom of Lake
Charles halfway to the gulf. Most of the islands aren't big enough to do more
than jerk the engine handle out of your hand when you hit them going too
fast, glorified sand bars.

But there's a handful solid enough to hold trees and grass and defy the tides.
You can camp on them, which is what we were doing.

Of course, most adults would have been smart enough to wait 'til duck season,
when at least you didn't have to worry about the fucking mosquitoes. We were
tough, we thought. And we were going through a phase. Mack Bolan books,
special forces, navy seals. Spare cash went to the adds in the back of Soldier
of Fortune and trips to the Army surplus store.

Back when the Soviet Union was still hanging around, and every boy we knew
figured that we'd end up being drafted into World War III, so we might as
well get ready for it. Our dads had all had their turn in southeast
Asia, the draft wasn't in place but it was only a matter of time.

After all, why else would D.C. be spending all that money on nukes, if they
didn't want to use them? No way were they going to let their dicks hang out
ready to be cut off, they'd line up a couple million warm bodies ready to die
to protect their tough guy attitude. Can't let the Russkies win, son, you've
got to be ready to do your bit.

We bought that shit, back then. They're always selling, and kids are always
ready to buy. Especially when there was a whole industry telling you how
heroic your dad was for dying in the jungle.

My dad caught a bullet sitting in the passenger seat of a helicopter. He was
coming home.

And he did, I guess. At least no one could spit on him. Pine boxes are good
for something.

Boy Scouts were supposed to be the good boys, and girls on the distaff side.

We weren't really that good at it.

Oh, Jason ended up as an eagle scout, and if I'd had the patience to finish
out my project, I'd have got there too. The camping part, and getting the
badges doing rough science and engineering, that we could do.

It was the attitude we never quite got a handle on. Walk into winter camp
with a boombox on one shoulder and an axe on the other, four boys doing our
best imitation of a Coppola movie introduction, and you start to get a bit
of a reputation.

We didn't bring the attitude to Rabbit Island, though. There wasn't anyone
to show off to. And, no matter what kind of dipshits we might have been to
everyone else, for us we did the right thing.

It was that or get thrown in the lake until you cooled down. Either way.

Eric and Lewis were asleep. Eric's parents were dentists, Lewis's dad
an architect. What they were doing hanging out with me and Jason I have no
idea.

No, I remember now. It was the games. D&D, Star Frontiers, Top Secret. We
were game geeks, and we were band geeks, and we all had a couple hours every evening to hang out in the church's rec room and play games until
our parents came to pick us up.

The island was a natural extension of all that. Game geeks, scouts in the same
troop. The oddballs, the agnostics in a Catholic school where the vast
majority of our peers still bought the party line.

We had each other's backs. We had to, no one else would.

The island trip was a lark. Jason's dad had an old johnboat, an Evinrude
pull start with about a half a gallon tank. We carried the johnboat down to
the bayou running behind Jaime's house, threw the engine on the back. Then
ourselves and our junk and we were off for an adventure.

The bottle hidden in my bag was a first. The cigarettes were easy, no one
batted an eye when you bought a pack 'for my mom'.

Getting a bottle meant I had to sneak it out of my grandmother's pantry. Easy
enough to do, she'd never miss it, Christmas was the only time she used it
for the egg nog, and she's just assume one of her sons had taken it.

It was a pint of Jim Beam. We didn't know anything to do with it except pass it
around the fire, sipping from it and lying to each other about how good it
was.

I guess we were lucky there were four of us, and it was half empty to begin
with. Any more than that, and we wouldn't have made it off the island.

Not that Jason did, not really. I think he's still there, in some ways. In
a lot of ways.

Eric and Lewis asleep, Jason and I talking in the dark, where neither of
us could be embarrassed by what we were saying. I don't know anything about
how girls do it, but boys have to talk about this shit, too. Hard ons, and
the fact that you wake up in the morning with a full bladder and a rock
hard barrier to empty it.

Girls, the great mystery. I haven't seen any of the girls we went to school
with since we graduated. My wife isn't from here, and boy am I glad of that.
Jason found a girl, an army brat who's 'from' Missouri with a lot of stops
in between.

Eric and Lewis shook the dust from their shoes five minutes after graduation,
and I haven't seen them since. And I don't blame them for it. Most of the
town's shocked as hell that I came back.

I had to. I can work from anywhere, but gravity and the weight of the island
called me back. Told me I need to be at home.

Booze, cigarettes, music. We were arguing about the difference between Cream
and Rush. Jason'd picked up the bass that summer, he was a french horn and
occasional piano man before that, but the electric bass was devouring him
now. So, Geddy Lee.

I turned him on to Jack Bruce. Eventually, it took him a while, but last time
I saw him Wheels of Fire was his current obsession. Like Paul McCartney
cruising L.A. with Pet Sounds on a turntable in his trunk, you can never quite
tell when an album's gonna catch you. The ultimate time machine.

Or like when I read the covers off Huckleberry Finn, or Dune, or
Swiss Family Robinson. Obsessions. That summer, I fell into computers. I
had an XT with a breadboard and a head-full of 8088 assembly.

It passes the time.

The fire reached for the stars, and the bugs reached for our faces. The
constant buzz. "What was that?"

Foghorn, tug boat pushing barges up the channel for the plants on the west
bank of the lake.

Little bit of wind, constant companion on the water at night.

Water splashing. Against the side of a boat? We'd pulled the john boat up
the beach, well above the high tide line. No way it was ours.

And we'd have heard an engine.

Young and dumb, I reached for a knife. Jason brought a hand-axe, one of
those multi-use things, just big enough to cut up driftwood for the fire.

"Do we..." "Shh..." Lewis and Eric slept on.

Barefoot, no moon, just the glow of the light behind us. The sand crunched
under my feet. I just hoped I didn't step on an oyster shell, they
cut to the bone and hurt like a son of a bitch.

I led the way down to the beach. Nothing about bravery, we weren't
thinking that way, I just happened to be closest to the little path through
the salt grass.

'Try and walk on the outside of your feet,' I told myself. I remembered that
from somewhere, some story talking about how to make sure you stayed quiet.

Not that it mattered, barefoot over sand in the dark, we might just have been
quiet like the ninja in our dreams.

There were shadows on the beach. I stopped, just behind a scrub willow with its
roots sunk beneath the sand to the gumbo mud. Jason stepped around, just
enough to see for himself.

Shadows, two figures and a boat. They were pulling on the boat, higher sides
than our johnboat. It was one of those big black rubber inflatables, the
engine pulled up high out of the water.

Jason knelt, one knee down in the sand. I followed him.

"Damnit, Jean. What the fuck are we doing out here?"

"Pissing on a grave. What the hell do you think we're doing?"

"At least let me light the lantern."

"Not 'til we're off the beach."

The one with the unlit lantern led the way south, toward the Gulf. Thankfully,
away from where we'd set up our camp.

We waited. The shadows disappeared, a bare few yards down the beach.

But we knew when they got off the beach. The lantern was bright enough to tell
us that much. I could see their faces, and the cigarette the big one lit from
the lantern flame when he got it going. Big kerosene storm lantern, the kind
with the pressurized jet you had to pump.

"Jean, really?" I could hear the smile in Jason's voice, even if I couldn't
see it.

Jean, indeed. If you need an alias, there are worse choices than Jean
Lafitte. Just don't expect anyone between New Orleans and Galveston to take
you seriously.

We followed their path down the beach. With the lantern lit, so long as we
stayed quiet...

We were pretty good at that. We'd had some practice. There was this tradition
of raiding the houses that neighbored the boy scout camp...

The island wasn't big enough to hide anything on. And it wasn't permanent
enough to bury anything. You can't do much with a waterline just a foot down.

We thought. The big one had set the lantern down, they both started digging.
When the shovel blade hit steel, it rang over the whole island.

After a bunch of work, the two men grunted, cursed, carried a fifty gallon
barrel into the lantern light. One of the big old drums, not the blue plastic
ones they have now. It'd be green in the daylight.

The clamp ring was rusted shut, but they'd brought a pry bar and hammer.

Whatever was in the barrel, it must have been worth something, 'cause they
weren't paying attention to the noise any more. The barrel rang with each
strike.

Until it pinged when the ring gave way. Then it started back up again; the
lid was rusted in place.

Jason and I had both quit laughing. We were enthralled. What the hell could
those two dudes want?

We didn't have to wait long. With the lid off, the one who called himself
Jean reached in and pulled out a plastic bag. Just one.

I don't know whether I believe that pirates ever buried treasure. Not back
in the old days. But we found out what sort of treasure a modern pirate would
bury.

The plastic bag was a two gallon ziploc bag, and inside it was what we guessed
was a kilo bag of cocaine. It had to be, that was the money drug then. What
made Miami Vice.

The guy had barely reached into that barrel. How many millions of dollars
worth of white dreams were sitting in the middle of Lake Charles, on a barrier
island that could disappear with the next hurricane?

Jason grabbed me, my arm just below the shoulder. I'd been about to step out
into the light.

Pure shock. There's no way in hell our little corner of the world was that
important.

Oh, sure, if you need something smuggled there's an awful lot of marsh between Mobile and Brownsville. An awful lot of beach and little canals and bayous that, back then, were well away from the DEA's control. Out of sight, out of mind.

We just never believed that anyone would actually take advantage of it. Yet
here we were, moonless night watching a couple of would-be cocaine cowboys
raid their stash.

"Think they'll notice, Jean?"

"Nah, no way. Think they've got inventory numbers? The bags are in there like
rice in a sack. We got this."

Ok, raiding someone else's stash. I turned to Jason, could just see him
shake his head and pull me back toward the sand.

We waited them out. Obviously, they weren't hear to explore the island in
the dark. We laid down in the grass above the boat. I prayed I didn't find
an anthill in the dark. Fire ants would have made the wait a hell of a lot
more torture than I could have dealt with.

God smile on a fool, we got lucky. It didn't take long for them to put the
barrel back in the hole. "Jean, do we cover the hole with something?"

"Tide, wind, a couple days and no one's gonna ever know we were here. Carlos
won't send his boys for another month. By that time, we're in L.A. with models
and bands and shit."

"I always wanted to rock and roll. We're gonna be famous."

MTV had a hell of a reach back then. And Guns 'n Roses, Motley Crue, all the
rest of the strange brew in L.A. had cast their spell.

Apparently everybody in the country knew where to go if you wanted
to turn a quick buck with a kilo of Peruvian marching dust burning a hole in
your pocket.

I sat there in the dark, watching those two idiots make their way back to
their boat, wondering just how on earth they thought that Carlos, whoever
he was, didn't know the same thing? How many people knew where that barrel
was?

And how many of them were getting ready to show up on steady video rotation,
video broadcast to the world twelve times a day for the next six months? I
might have only been fourteen, but even I knew there was always a catch.

We listened to them, talking about the videos they'd bankroll, the models
they'd fuck, the fame they'd be rolling in. They had it all planned out.
The stories rolled across the water as they rowed their rubber boat back
to the mainland.

We'd still be there, stuck in awe and laughter. But eventually reality kicked
in.

I said before that we weren't all that good at the attitude part of being
Boy Scouts. I like to think we made up for it, that night.

I'd brought a knife, the kind with a hollow handle that held a flint,
a first aid kit, a wire. Jason'd brought his axe. Lewis had brought a
trenching tool. I snuck back into the camp, where Eric and Lewis were still
snoring away, and borrowed his little shovel.

Then Jason and I dug up the barrel, underneath the light of an old 6 volt
flashlight.

And we dumped every bit of it into the lake.

I wonder if anybody ever found any of those bags? I doubt it, most of them
were taking on water before we got to the bottom of the barrel. Neither
one of us wanted to take a chance with punching holes in them to make sure.

By the time the sun was coming up, we could roll that barrel into the lake
and watch our little packets of mischief make their way for the Gulf.

The other thing I said was that I think Jason never quite left the island.
That's not really true.

There was a part of him that questioned whether or not we should have taken
our own little piece of the pie. Sell off a bit, here and there, pay for
college maybe. Or even just pay for a car that didn't die every couple thousand
miles.

It ate at us, in different ways. By the time Jason turned eighteen, he'd
cleared his end of it, joined the army. He made full bird colonel in the sands
and mountains of the Middle East.

I buried myself in binary, html, digital this and systems that. I watched
others make their big score, the accident of being Yahoo employee number
fourteen, or a Google investor before anyone knew what a search engine was.

It eats at you, lottery dreams like that. So far as I can tell, striking it
rich doesn't have anything to do with talent, or skill.

All you need is the sort of dumb luck a bunch of teenagers had one night when
we watched a couple of dime store pirates help themselves to a pocket full of
powdered kryptonite.

Not that I'm complaining. It wasn't the last time I did something like that.
Not too many years after that, I'd moved down to Corpus with my mom to finish
my last couple years of high school. The Soviet Union had fallen apart, in
an astonishing display of how many lies our side and theirs could tell.

Rumor had it that Carlos bought a submarine in Vladivostok. Cheap.

People who worked on boats laughed at the rumors. But then one night we were down in the four-wheel drive section of the national seashore, Padre Island.

And a homemade torpedo motored up onto the beach, full of the same sort of
little white packets as that barrel in the middle of Lake Charles.

But I always promised Scott I'd never tell that story, not 'til long after the
guilty are long gone and buried, and there's no one to come after us anymore.

This week's story coming later today: My Turn in the Barrel.

It's... well, it's a story from the idiot's land of teenagers. Remember when you were about that age, and exceedingly foolish? Yeah, well, about that...

...You can help yourself, but don't take too much...

Billie Holiday: God Bless the Child, Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr., songwriters

R. M. Danelev, Esquire. - A Story of Teamwork and Looking Over Your Shoulder The Whole Time...

"Damn, Randi. What's your problem with this?"

She talked to herself when she was working a job. And when she was working
on anything else, for that matter. It was a bad habit she'd picked up in
school.

Professors talk to themselves a lot, when they're standing up at the board,
trying to pound a little knowledge into thick skulls.

"Fine." She pushed the hand-drawn maps away, covered them over with the
hand-written notes.

It didn't last. "Right, try it again. The guards work nights only.
During the day they monitor the video and sound systems, so they don't scare
the high end custom..." But she couldn't sustain the thoughtstream. There was
a path there, a line that would let a motivated crew in and out, but she
just couldn't see it.

"What would Gene say about it?"

Her mentor, first partner, trainer. He'd mostly kept himself to himself. If
Randi talked, Gene zipped his lip.

Unless there was reason to talk. "Randi, you have to work the thing with your
hands. Pictures, drawings, all that's great. But when you have to open the
lock..."

"You have to get out the tools and go to work," she finished. "But how in
the hell do you work an alarm system?" she asked the memory.

"You build one yourself," memory replied.

Which meant warehouse space. Plywood, lumber, tools. Wiring and sensors.
Online ordering and delivery?

For ninety percent of it. She pulled an empty notebook free of the pile,
a pen from the cup on the drafting table, and wrote out her list.

In the end, even renting the space she could do online. Deposit and three
months rent from a high dollar gift card, and she could pick up the keys at
the property manager's office. Which was a convenient hour away from the
rental space. Nice of them to map out their properties on the website like
that. "Oh, honey, we've got a drive-by security service for all our units.
You don't have to worry about a thing."

"I'm just asking for my insurance company. They've got their list, I'm sure
you get that all the time."

"You know it. The agent had his auditors here just last month. Here's your
keys, Ms. Lace. Just let me know if you have any questions."

"Ms. Lace" left to check out how closely the warehouse space matched the
internet floor plan. But she waited until she was home again to take the
wig and false glasses off. "Practice every chance you get" was another
of Gene's lessons. "Don't let bad habits sneak in."

Now she had a business address. Getting deliveries meant she had to set up
a little office space in the front. And arrange for some help. "Hey, Marlan.
I'm setting up a model for a test run. Got some time on your hands?"

"Just me, or you need the others?"

"Just you. Let's keep it small for now."

He was a big dude, wide and tall and looking like a lot of bad road. She
thought about the tattoos on his arms. "Marlan, how'd you like to own a
business? It means you have to dress the part."

He chuckled, a bass rumble that overwhelmed the phone's speaker. "How'd I
pick the short straw?"

But he did show up in engineer's dress uniform, khakis and plain white
button-down shirt. He'd even dug up a set of steel-toed boots. "My cousin
works the ship channel, and he's always complaining about OSHA. I figure
I'd best look like I've been through the same rigmarole."

The few people who stuck their heads into the warehouse bought his
self-description. "I'm an engineer, and I needed a place to build mock-ups
for some designs. That's my sister-in-law, Miranda, have you met her yet?"

The electronics and building materials were all delivered in a couple of
weeks, and then it was down to business. "Layout and through-lines. I want
to know what the all-seeing, all-knowing computers think about it."

"The microphones and lighting are going to be off."

"That's what the drop ceilings are for," Randi pointed out.

Marlan didn't think much of that, "but at least we don't have to drill out
the walls to run the cables."

It took the two of them a couple more weeks to get everything set up, and
a laptop hooked to the ad-hoc security systems.

"I used standard off the shelf parts. The only difference between this and
the stuff their security company uses is lifetime and quality."

"How did you get the name of their security company?" he asked.

She laughed. "Would you believe they advertise it? The salesman must have
cut a deal, you know, lower rates for a few stickers and a link on the
website."

"And the security company was nice enough to give you a quote?"

"All the bells and whistles, yes sir. Standard packages for just about
everything, and they know that insurance companies are reading the quote,
so they make sure and tell you who makes their equipment. I'm just glad I
used a burner address and phone number, I'm sure they're calling every
day or so looking to see if I'm ready to sign a contract."

When they were powered up, and the video cameras and the microphones were
tuned so they could watch the occasional moth fly through, then it was time
to call in the others. Yala and Squeak, Sami and Dave.

"I'm still surprised you all answer the phone," Marlan said the first night
they could all get together. "It's not like you haven't got better things
to do than listen to this nitwit."

Randi flipped him the bird, and then called out her questions. "Get past
the front door camera. Walk through the front hall without the mikes picking
you up. Get through the back door without the guards cluing in." Like that.

Take it apart, piece by piece. Put it back together, if you can. It overlaps,
that's the way they design security.

But your team overlaps, too. And better, and faster given the magic of
wireless tethered phones. Randi realized what she'd been missing, sitting
there with pen in hand and her maps and notes.

The team. She wasn't directing them, any more than Duke directed his orchestra.
They were directing, but she was playing along, cuing and cluing and
signaling when and how loud.

Sami and Squeaks ended up working together, unusual. Big tall woman with
a basketball player's grace, pairing off with the little bitty man with
the bass voice. Sami was usually more comfortable working alone.

Yala and David worked together occasionally, so that wasn't odd. But how
were they going to break the back door, she'd blow away in a strong
wind, and he had the standard computer geek's physique? Ah, of course, tech
and tools, she'd 'acquired' one of the electronic door breaks from somewhere,
and he had a pull cart with pony torch and battery powered saws.

"Marlan, where do you fit into this dance?"

"Backup, Randi, but I don't think they're gonna need it. Besides, someone
needs to drive the van."

"You don't think I'll have time to jump in from the back?"

"Too little room in the timing. Not your fault, really, but we'll need to
be able to move from front door to back door while you're still talking
to them."

And that's the way it went down, after their rehearsals had spotted the flaw
in the way the security was put together. Squeaks was the one who realized
why. "The manager wants to be able to get back to the safes without setting
the alarms off. Somebody wants to be able to work in the back after hours,
but still get in and out without worrying about the cops showing up."

"Or an escape path, in case they need to get out?"

The little man considered it. "Yeah, I could see that. Someone's in the
back, working on the designs or whatever, and the others lock up without
knowing you're there. How do you get out, if you can't get good cell service
'cause you're locked in the vault?"

"How many know about it, do you think?" Randi asked. She worried that they'd
end up with an eyewitness.

"Half dozen? All the jewelers, the ones that work with the stones every day,
plus the owner and her every day manager. Anybody who has to lock up regularly."

Most of the stones the storefront held were generic, but high end stuff.
Collectible jewelry aimed at the custom buyer with a lot more than two months
salary in mind. But most of that work was still bought from the big names
in New York and Paris, and sold on for a markup.

The good stuff, the stone cutting and polishing, there were two master jewelers
working for the store, and they worked in a special part of the vault that
was set up with their tables and tools.

"What's the latest you've seen anyone leave, Randi?" Marlan asked.

"Midnight, twelve thirty." She didn't have to tell him about the time she'd
spent pouring over video surveillance, insuring that no one else was working
nights.

Computers certainly made it a lot easier, you didn't have to sit in a van
watching through binoculars anymore. You just have to set up the right
collection of pocket cameras, and you didn't even have to pick up the cameras,
a good wireless router took care of the feed and she could watch the videos
on fast-forward over coffee.

Still a tedious job, but a lot easier than it used to be.

All of them were old enough to remember how it was done in 'ye olde days',
though. There was a collective feeling of both relief and shudder at the
thought of ever going back to that.

Marlan ticked off on his fingers. "After about eight, there's three people,
then. The owner or her manager, a clerk running the front end, and one of
the jewelers. And the only way you'd know the jeweler was there?"

"Was if you knew how the store worked." Sami jumped in. "Which means that
they're going to look at the store staff first, if we pull this off."

"I'm beginning to think that's part of why we were hired," Randi said. "If
this goes according to plan, their world is going to be turned upside down."

"Jesus, Randi. Whoever hired us, don't ever get on their bad side, 'k? I
don't want to know what they'd do to us."

Every one of them started worrying, then. Even more than usual, that is.

Two weeks later, Dave was the one who finally called it. Randi had the van
pulled into the warehouse now, and she and Marlan ran their end of rehearsal
completely from the wireless feed, while the rest did their dance.

"All right, guys. We've done this several days in a row now without tripping
the stuff we know about. If we keep going this way, all we're gonna manage
is to get complacent." Dave was drenched, nerves making him sweat, on top
of the fact that the warehouse didn't have much of an a/c.

That, and the fourth time running through the breaking and entering that
night.

"Besides, you've been using this dummy code for the safe. When are you going
to give us the real thing?"

It was the one part of the job she couldn't control. The safe used a lock
with a digital control panel, an odd little upgrade. The keypad itself looked
normal, but the guts of the lock held a full computer system. The whole
point was to generate a two-factor security system, enter your own pin number,
and then a random code that the computer sent to a pre-programmed cell phone number.

If your phone number matched the pin number, you got a text, entered the
random number generated just for you, and you're stardust, you're golden.

Miss the number three times, though, and not only were you locked out, but
the cops were on their way. Enough room for the occasional finger fatigue or
brain fart, but not enough to crack the system in real time.

"I don't have it. And unless you want to break into and out of this place
as many nights as we have to for you to crack through that lock's wireless
access point?"

Dave shook his head, emphatically. "No way in hell. It'd take me a month,
two hours at a time like that."

Sami was the one to ask the next obvious question. "What are we taking,
Randi? Given the amount of time and effort involved here, we're not just
after a bag full of diamonds."

"We're not withdrawing this time. We're making a deposit."

Marlan barked his laughter, the rest of them just shook their heads. They'd
all worked with Randi for a long time, so they were used to the oddball sorts of
jobs they got hired to do.

And, all of them knew better than to ask why. Randi insisted, from long
practice, that they never know what the point of the job was. All they needed
to know was what and where. How was their business, and she only ever asked
for something when she absolutely had to. In this case, a phone added to
the access list for the computer lock.

But what, that they had to know. "We're adding a set of diamonds to their
collection. They'll need to be scattered one by one through the rough cut
stones, no more than one or two in a given drawer or bag, so they don't twig
to the difference unless they do a full weight inventory. Even then, the
stones are light enough and few enough they should chalk it up to an accident
of labels."

"Fakes?"

"Nah, they're real. And I stopped right there when she wanted to explain how
neat her plan is. I think we can all guess that they've figured out some way
to track the stones, but I don't know and don't want to know how."

Marlan snorted at that. "This may be one time you could break your rule,
Randi. We've been paid with rough cut stones before, it'd be nice to know
how to work around their trick, just in case it matters down the road."

She nodded, but didn't answer because the phone she'd asked to be listed on
the computer lock's access list buzzed. Just once, a message coming in.

Randi picked it up and swiped the little icon. She read the numbers out loud,
"1071 428 9000."

She passed the phone over to Dave. He checked the numbers, nodded, and
gave the thumbs up. "It matches the standard setup for the lock."

"Sami, Squeaks? Yala?" The other three nodded, then got up to start packing
their tools into the van. "Marlan?"

"That leaves the stones, Randi. Where do we go to get those?"

She smiled, an anxious tension making the corners of her mouth wrinkle to
belie the expression. "Now, that's a goddamned good question."

One that had an equally good answer. When the team assembled the next
day, just at sunset since they had taken to the night shift, Randi found
that a heavy cardboard envelope from FedEx had been slipped through their
mail slot.

She wasn't surprised that the return address pointed to a particularly
remote region of the upcountry of Idaho, and that there were half a dozen
rough cut diamonds set into a foam cutout and sealed inside a plastic
sleeve.

She handed the package over to Yala, their resident expert. She settled
into the desk, and pulled out a loupe and pocket flashlight. There were just
half a dozen stones in the folder; she gave each a detailed lookover.

"Call 'em two and a half carats each, they'll polish up to about a half carat
finished. Good quality, good color, all nice and symmetric and well chosen. The
sort of collection you'd pick on purpose to set off a better large stone,
especially a nice big sapphire given their grades. None of them are etched.
Want me to put 'em under a scope?" She put the stones back into their foam set, one by one. None of them had turned on any more lights, so they all watched the glitter of the rough cut diamonds against the pink and brown of Yala's hands, almost like a mime show.

Randi looked at Marlan, who shrugged in turn. "You know what I think about
it. I guess the real question is, did they tell you to leave them alone?
No warnings about the dark deeds that will befall you if you do?"

"No, they didn't. Which worries me. Why are we being paid good money to
break into a custom jeweler's, just to give them the kind of diamonds they
could pick up tomorrow?" She waited until the faces of her team, indistinct
in the shadows, convinced her.

"Do it, Yala. Give them the treatment you would if that's the way we were
being paid. Meantime, the rest of us have work to do."

Yala nodded, then went to her car to get her other tools.

The others settled into their routine; Yala working on other things didn't
much slow them down. They were used to each other, and taking up the slack
was necessary to prepare for anyway.

Randi essentially forgot what Yala was up to in the midst of the run. Until
Yala got tired of yelling for her, and came up to the middle of the practice
run with a laser pointer and one of the diamonds. She didn't bother to tell
anyone what she was doing, she simply held the diamond over the laser, held
them up in the air and pushed the button.

Most of the beam simply scattered, bits of green light speckling the
false ceiling tiles. The rough cut diamond didn't have the clarity to allow
the beam easy passage.

But in the middle of the speckled lights on the ceiling, there was a definite
pattern. A three dimensional, layered something, almost an image that the
eye could identify, almost noise, but with that indefinite order from random
noise that called out "made with purpose and forethought".

"It's a hologram," Yala said. "Etched one atom at a time, there's a tiny little
message buried in the middle of each one of the stones that can only be
seen with a laser."

"They're all different?" Randi asked.

"Yeah," Yala confirmed. "I can't tell you what the pattern means, it's not
a qr code or barcode. It's three d, for one thing. But in addition to that,
it's not anything standard that I can identify right away."

Dave perked up at that. "Want me to work on it?"

Randi didn't have to look to her team for this one. She'd already made the
decision to learn what was going on to protect them; now it was
in for a penny in for a pound. "Record them, in as high a resolution as you
can. Video, whatever combination you can put together that lets you
reproduce them at will. We've got a couple days to play with, but I have
a feeling that won't be enough, even if we had a supercomputer for you to
play with."

Dave nodded. "Sami, I'm gonna have to pick your brain, and Yala's." The three
of them walked up to the front of the warehouse to set to work, while
Randi and the remainder set about cleaning up the tools.

"Don't worry about the job, boss. We've got it covered. And the distraction
will help get our minds clear ahead of it." Squeaks sounded almost like he
was trying to convince himself, a bass rumble that threw Randi off because
it sounded more like he was talking to himself and she could barely understand
him.

But her nerves had passed around the group, like a cold in the family. "I'm
mostly worried about making sure we don't get caught in the blowback from
this. We're not the targets, I hope. But that don't mean we're clear of
the possibilities."

Squeaks giggled, at odds with his earlier comment. "I've always wanted to
retire to a small, quiet corner of the world."

"I think we're going to have to work for it, Squeaks. Whoever's involved in
this, I'll be goddamned if I'm letting them peg us into their little cribbage
game."

The computer and electronics experts of the group worked on getting whatever
code was etched into the interior of the diamonds mapped out. The other
members of the group cleaned up the site, and then sat down to twiddle their
thumbs.

Which was a lot more satisfying than it used to be, as well. Any cell phone
had all the entertainment they could want. Marlan and Squeaks eventually gave
up on that and dealt themselves a game of gin. Randi just alternated surfing
the web and pacing.

Eventually, Dave wandered over to let them know what they'd been able to
put together. "We can't read the diffraction pattern directly, that kind
of equipment is pretty easy to get, but it takes a while. It's standard lab
gear, but by the time we'd get it delivered our due date would have passed."

"Meaning we won't have any way to record it?" Randi asked.

"Not what I said. I just won't be able to record the pattern directly from
the laser. But we will be able to get high def video, from all angles. Yala
and Sami already have the equipment here, they've both got cameras with the
video resolution we need. So long as we can sync the recordings, I'll be
able to reproduce it at the same level as we can see it."

Marlan objected, then. "What if there's something about the way the thing's
etched that you can't see with the naked eye?"

"Then we won't get it. But we don't have time to do it the right way, guys.
This is the best we can do overnight."

Randi cussed, Marlan cussed, even Dave and Yala and Sami hated it, but they
were right. They basically had the rest of the night to play with the stones,
and then they had to move on the break-in.

Given the way the client had set the whole thing up, none of them
wanted to find out what would happen if they busted their schedule.

They spent the rest of the evening recording the holograms from each of the
stones, in as many angles and as much notation as they could. Somewhere around the time the sun came up, Dave threw in the towel, and even Sami admitted that there was nothing else she could do with them.

"Whatever the images are code for, we'll have to deal with them later. For
now, we've got a job to deliver on. Let's make sure we've got everything
we need packed up, get a good night's sleep, and then tomorrow night we're
doing this thing. One way or another, we're done with the diamonds." Randi
wasn't naive to the unknowables that they were taking on, but she knew
they had to start performing the job they were being paid for.

The rest, well. If the person hiring them tried to set them up, she'd have
to return the favor. Her team were perfectly capable of extending their talents
to the challenge. It wouldn't be the first time.

She was the last one to leave. The van and its tools were all locked away.
Each of them worked with their partner to make sure everything needed was
in place. The warehouse itself was emptied out, except for the old desk, a
surplus from the local school district. The lease was through the end of
the month, the keys they'd drop in the mail tomorrow on the way out the
door.

She locked up on the way out, and unlocked on the way in the next night.
The team came in behind her, in a staggered pattern of around ten minutes
between. Sure, it took more than an hour for everyone to get in, but they'd
all discovered the utility of doing so, since it at least gave the possibility
for stragglers to escape if something went wrong.

Depending on the circumstances, they'd have arranged easy signals. Hotel rooms, light patterns. Office suites, a door stop. But at the warehouse, they'd yet to settle on a workable signal set. And once they were all there, loaded
up and leaving the place behind, there was no point to worrying about it.

"Marlan," Randi said. "No, Squeaks. We need to think about how we never quite
put together a workable set of signals for that place. It means that we're
vulnerable when we end up in a similar workup down the road. When you get the chance, let's see if you can figure out something that might work well."

"I think I can figure that out. And, of course, I've got all these backtalkers
who'll be happy to tell me what I do wrong."

"Of course, but somehow it always works out well, anyway."

Marlan drove; he'd volunteered for the gig to begin with, just to shortcut
the inevitable arguments from everyone else. Besides, he didn't mind the
wait. It gave him a chance to practice his observation.

Randi's tension amped up, from the moment they left the warehouse, until
the moment the rest of her team walked out of the van door. Then the tension
leveled off, anxiety giving energy to the doing of the job.

Sami, Yala, and Squeaks fanned out into the parking lot, giving Dave space
to get the door open. They'd mapped out the view of the cameras, knew that
the camera focused only on the door. The company monitoring had insisted,
given the amount of foot traffic that passed by until the mall the store
was in closed.

But the company didn't monitor video in real time; they only took the recordings from onsite if they were called in by the actual alarm. The team wore uniforms consistent with the mall security. Except for the masks they pulled down over their faces.

Dave phished the lock, and the rest of the crew slid through into the
store beyond.

Randi watched a pair of laptops. The first held a mosaic of videos, lapel
cameras from each of the team giving her a bug's eye view of their actions.

The second was a blank screen waiting... for Sami to make her way, one pace
at a time, through the path they'd mapped out. When she got to the safe, she
also found the media computer holding the data from the camera feed. When
Dave moved in behind her, she moved to work on the safe, while he looped
a custom emf hook over the network cable feeding into the back of the
security computer.

Which lit up the other computer screen in the van. Now Randi got a view
from the store's video feed. A half-dozen screens; she reached out to go
to work. Since Dave didn't have enough room to hack the thing in real time,
not with the delicate footwork required to get to the safe, Randi took
over here. With the physical connection established, all she really had to
do was rewind the feed, just so. And pause, like such.

And wait. The three team members had the safe open. Inside was a simple
workman's space, just large enough for a half-size drafting table with
magnifiers and lights, a couple of carefully mounted microscopes, and
then a floor to ceiling collection of dial-locked drawers.

"Shit," Randi muttered.

"No worries," Yala whispered back. "The jewelers use those for bulk storage.
There's a set of drawers underneath the table for their working stones."
She pulled the drawers open, carefully, one at a time, until she found
a set of working stones that matched up.

"They're just piled in, I think."

"Either way," Randi said. "Just as long as there's room, and it doesn't look
too obvious."

Sami shrugged, bouncing the camera around. "Not my workbench, so I can't say. What do you think, Yala?"

"We're good." She used a stainless rod, just a little thicker than a pencil
lead, to push the stones around, then she poured the bag containing the
unmarked stones out into the cup. She gave the stones a stir, randomizing
the arrangement as best she could, then put the rod away and waved at
the door. "After you?"

Sami and Dave didn't wait, they proceeded for the exits, Dave stopping to
pull the emf loop from the network line. "Randi, is that script ready?"

"Got it, count it down." She had a script loaded at the command prompt.

"3...2...1" Dave counted, as soon as Yala passed him. Randi hit the return
key, the script started its own countdown, and Dave pulled the emf loop.

"Get going Dave, everybody. You officially have three minutes." She'd timed
their progress in, then added a minute to give them a margin for error.

The team hauled it to where Squeaks waited. He pushed the door open, and
with thirty seconds to spare they climbed into the van.

The script in the store's computer finished its countdown, modified the time
stamp and video feed by inserting just the right amount of empty feed, and
then restarted its recording.

Then it wiped itself, and so far as the computer was concerned, nothing
happened that evening that looked remotely out of the ordinary.

The rest of the night went according to the plan, as well. Drop off split
up head for the hills and we'll see ya when we see ya. They had ways to
correspond if necessary, and when the money was on the table again. But
otherwise, there was no need for any of them to know more than they had to,
once everyone got out of the van and walked away.

Randi headed for the beach. Oh, not a tropical getaway. It's sort of a dead
giveaway, when you hop a plane for Fiji.

Computers can build patterns, after all. And the setups the big dogs use
have all the time in the world to detect you.

No, Randi preferred low key. Head to the Gulf Coast, no more than a couple
hours drive and she was feet in the sand, beer in the cooler, and a fishing
pole to fool with when she got bored. She thought this time she'd spend the
time getting more familiar with kite fishing.

That, or pick up a simple drone and try it that way.

The cell phone she carried didn't have any connection to anything. Not to the
job, certainly, and she'd made sure long ago that family ties were cut and
left to drift. One of the best parts of her job was that when she was off,
it was a good long few months, with lots of time to herself.

Before she went back home to become R. Levdane, Professor of Engineering, and left her extracurricular activities for the next semester break. Inevitably,
she knew, there would be an anonymous request passed along, word of mouth
being the best advertising, and a corresponding set of deposits in a series
of escrow accounts.

And then it would be time to put the team together again, and joust again
in the grey world.

A story will be here for your entertainment later this evening; I call this one R.M. Danelev, Esquire.

It's about the way a team works together; the smooth operating machinery of a well-determined plan.

And the way the whole crew looks around for the handbasket when something odd crops up...

...it wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl...

Concrete Blonde: It's a Man's Man's Man's World; James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome, songwriters

(I list writers as ASCAP lists them; read the wiki for this song and you may come away with a different opinion about just who should be primary (or perhaps, only) on this particular song...)

(which further adds a layer of meaning to the lyrics, when you think about it from Ms. Newsome's perspective...)