The Boxes Where Dreams Reside by M. K. Dreysen (Neverland Disorder 6: A Detective Kelli Hench Mystery)

For this week's free story, I present Part 6 of The Neverland Disorder: A Detective Kelli Hench mystery.

Detective Hench has a problem. More than one, really.

This week's problem being a particular one: the work builds up on her desk, and sometimes clearing the mess is the best way to let the mind work.

The Boxes Where Dreams Reside by M. K. Dreysen

I should have been worrying about hotel rooms. The where was the how of it. Yolena Scruggs came to the back seat of a Rolls-Royce, faint hints of vomit on the corners of her lips, not by accident.

The cars sat on display in the third-floor meet and greet area of a very high end hotel. Sure, the cameras "just happened" to be down for that weekend. Which said something all on its own, and Russ was chasing that rabbit. But Peter Pan still had to navigate the hotel to put her where he did.

She hadn't died there, in the car. Or, at least, she hadn't begun her end there. I should have been running this through my mind.

Instead, I was chasing down comic books.

Oh my love my addiction. I once lost a year to the goddamned four-color world. Walked into a new shop, Nory had opened up his little mall store because the rent was cheap.

And because his wife had threatened his babies with a lit match. "I'm retired. And I needed something to keep myself busy."

"You needed to clean your shit out of the house before your wife murdered you and sold your collection to pay for her defense," I pointed out.

"That, too." Nory nodded at the boxes behind me. "Hunting for anything in particular?"

Maybe if I'd said "Nah, just killing time," and walked out with a glance toward the hundred and twelve Batman titles, the seventy-two Spider-man titles, the latest foil Superman stunt cover, maybe if I'd just done that, I'd have that year back.

I didn't do it. I'd flipped halfway through the '80's X-Men box when the traitor bird in the back of my brain whispered something about the Wolverine story-line I'd never finished.

Sandman. Spawn. One damned thing after another; I walked out of there, back to my shift at the Sam Goody, with a fistful of latter-day dreams and a new bad habit. A pull list to go along with the smokes.

Nory let us smoke in the back room. This was more than a few years ago. Magic the Gathering was just getting off the ground. So we'd sit in the back, open the latest decks, play cards and smoke and generally pretend for a while that the outside didn't exist.

Somehow or another, I still made my shifts slinging CD's. And I still made my classes.

I had to take out one last loan, the one I shouldn't have had to get, for that year's tuition. Which is why it's my lost year. I'm not sure just how much money I spent in those boxes where the dreams lay.

But I know how long it took me to pay off the goddamned student loans. Sure, only about a quarter of that load can I blame on my year in the smoky back room, the one with the Fantastic Four posters and the vacuum cleaner and other cleaning supplies that Nory made us use to pay the table rent.

The never-ending monthly payment was enough to remind me to stay the hell out of comic shops. Oh, I still wander through; know how easy it is to throw down a couple hundred bucks in a comic shop and never look back?

I don't keep a pull list. That's how I minimize the damage.

This file originally started a couple years back, before Peter Pan and the rest of it. Well after the eight-day wonder of Trevanian and Billings had basically been forgotten by everybody.

Outside of Will's "Attaboy" collection, anyway. But that's another story.

The Mobius Strip thefts started in Burglary, then ended up in my basket. If I reacted to the ways and means the "straight" detectives came up with to try and get my goat, I'd have gone smooth crazy years ago.

Crazier. Right, anyway, the M-Strip is a fixture of Houston's geek parade, it's been taking up its little inaccessible corner off the Loop and Post Oak since Abraham was a pup. You walk into the place and wonder most of all whether you screwed up and took a turn into one of those Halloween haunted houses.

Or the mirror maze at a carnival. The M-Strip's basically a one-way trip. Walk through the door, mind your head because the eight foot Millennium Falcon model hanging from the ceiling could come crashing down just any day now. Duck past a couple of gumball machines, a glass case devoted to mid-grade baseball cards, and then if you keep going, you're into the boxes.

The glass cases keep going, too, on your right along the walls. The grades rise as you follow the box and case lines deeper into the store. Somewhere deep in the bowels, if you make it that far with anything left in your budget, you'll find Action Comics 1 and Detective Comics 27.

I don't think they're really for sale. But they're there, to ooh and ah over. Took my dad once. "Your grandmother threw all of my Sergeant Fury comics away, when I moved out. I had a complete run, at least through to 1970."

Lonnie, the M-Strip mainstay who's been slinging books across the glass since I was in high school, at least, nodded in sympathy. "Story of my world. But that's the reason these are worth anything." He looked across his half-glasses at the boxes where Donald Duck and Howard the Duck, and all the other dreams, waited for time to make the investment. "If we'd all collected our books the way they do now, none of them would be worth anything."

Except inside our heads, I didn't say.

I keep my hands in pockets when I visit the M-Strip. Try to, always have. Oh, I flip through, always, just to let my mind simmer over it all.

The games section catches me; good as new D&D boxed sets from ye olden days. Adventure modules, miniatures. Dice and oh brother if you're a dice nerd the M-Strip's got your number. They put a bin of assorted right there at the entrance to the game shelves. Fill your fists, brothers and sisters, and then when you've filled your arms with half of Steven Jackson's beauties?

The case where you check out with your glories is full of the good dice. Metals, bone, minerals rare and common. All guarded by miniatures.

The dragons have pride of place, they sit on the glass and hang overhead. Reflect off the Franzetta posters.

Yeah, it's a dangerous place, the M-Strip. A place where you leave telling yourself that someday, you'll come back and be able to walk through there and buy whatever you want, whenever you want. When that day comes, you're gonna pull a cart through and you're gonna put whatever you see into it, and you'll neither care for the cost nor blink when the register spits out its murderous total.

The M-Strip's also the place where it started.

"It's not the original comic book" doesn't fit into the standard routine. Not by a long shot. It's too... time consuming. And expensive.

The notes in the file told me how the Burglary office caught it. Lonnie came in with an Amazing Fantasy 15. He set it on the desk, and told his story. "This is Spidey's first appearance. It's worth thousands of dollars. But something's happened to our copy of it. This isn't the one we bought."

"When did you buy the original?" the detective asked Lonnie.

"In the seventies. It's been on display in our shop ever since. The owners don't really even want to sell it."

Just like the others of the big three, Superman and Batman, that took pride of place in the M-Strip displays.

"What makes you think this isn't the book you've always had?"

"Our book was a 9.6 grade. Great book, with just a couple of imperfections. A little tear on the outside corner of page 3, and a tiny stain, probably coffee, on the last page. This one's a ten."

"Meaning?"

"It's too good, it's perfect. Like it's never been touched."

The Burglary detective, a lifer by the name of Gene Theriot, did a little work. Online searches, to find out what a book grade meant; similarly, how much this particular book might be worth. That got Theriot's attention.

It meant, if true, this was a big theft, a lot bigger than the hit and runs that made eighty percent of Gene's sixty hours.

Problem being... "You've just told me this is a perfect book. What's the problem?"

"It's a copy. A mint condition copy, but there's no way it's the real thing."

"If I pursue this, the forensics labs are going to have to test this book. That means they're going to have to remove parts of it to determine whether the paper's right, whether the ink's right. Are you absolutely, one hundred percent certain?"

One hundred percent? Lonnie put his alleged forgery back in the plastic and walked out of Theriot's office faster than... well, as fast as a retail lifer can put one foot in front of another.

Gene would have shit-canned his notes, but three weeks later, Christy came in, with a similar story. Only, her book was Fantastic Four 48, Silver Surfer, and Christy's the floor manager for the Phoenix and the Unicorn, a smaller shop a couple miles closer to downtown.

"This isn't our book. Our book graded out at a 9.4, this one's a 10."

"If I pursue this, I'll have to take the book for forensics testing. Destructive testing. Are you absolutely certain this is a forgery?"

Christy walked, too.

Dennis, from Luna City, came in with a Swamp Thing 1. JoJo, from Auntie's Emporium, brought in their prize pair, Incredible Hulk 180 and 181; same story for all three. "This is too good a copy, it's a 10."

"If I send it to forensics, they're going to have to take destructive samples."

The books went back in the plastic and the complaint drifted to my pile. With a last question from Gene Theriot, scratched on a post-it pasted on the inside of the file folder full of his notes: "Why'd they all walk?"

Shit, that one was easy. Gene's a collector, so he's sympathetic. That's why he hadn't sent his casefile to the circular filing bin. But Gene goes for old motorcycles.

The kind that come to you in pieces, piled in a crate. I worked Burglary with Gene for about three years. He waited every bit of those three years to find one particular original, as-used, Triumph clutch cover. In his world, there was no such thing as mint condition. "If it's too good, it's a copy," he'd told me.

So Gene knew exactly why the comic shop gang were all so worked up.

He just didn't make the catch as to why they'd walk. It's simple. A good grade book might be worth a few thousand.

A mint grade book might be worth a few hundred thousand, for Spider-Man at least. Multiply by ten, it's a bit like the Richter scale. If there was any chance, no matter how small, that they might be wrong, and Lennie, Dennis, JoJo, and Christy would be dividing the value of those books by five, ten. They'd be taking a chance on big money.

If it had been one, say Christy had shown up with this weird story and bailed when it came to Gene having the book tested? Gene would have thrown his notes in the trash and that would have been the end of it.

Four of them? And they none of them dared the forensics team?

Yeah, I should have been mulling over hotels and Rolls-Royces and how you get from one to another unnoticed. What I was doing instead was clearing one of the other hundred and one things on my desk. "Ok, Lonnie, spill it."

"Do I know you?"

No. Yes. Ok, so it's been a while, and there are an awful lot of geeks running around Houston. It's awfully easy, isn't it, to believe yourself more memorable than you are? "HPD, I'm following up on your theft complaint from a few months ago."

"It was more than a year ago." He rolled his eyes. "Don't you have better things to do? Apparently?"

"Let's pretend you're not actively trying to get the only cop that's interested in your complaint to walk away and forget you exist, right? How about we just talk about why you believe someone's stolen your Spider-Man?"

He'd moved the book, from the glass case to a frame hanging on the wall. Which sent my, forgive me, spider senses tingling. If the book was in the case, to the world, that meant it was a haggle away from leaving the store. On the wall, nope forget it.

Messages, in other words. Right there next to Superman and Batman resides the Spider-Man, now. What this told me was that Lonnie had hedged his bet. Sure, maybe the book was real; maybe he'd spent the past thirty years looking at the book, taking it out once every few years, noting again the tear and the stain and dreaming of what might have been...

And the whole time the book had been a 10, right? All just a figment of his imagination, that 9.6 grade. Of course, the independent grade letter sitting in the filing cabinet was one of those differences of opinion between pros. A true connoisseur would be ready to make their own assessment.

Lonnie had talked it through, and decided to take the possibility of hard feelings out of play. He'd put it on the wall. Where those who were family would know "Don't ask" because it's not for sale.

He didn't tell me this. Hell, he almost didn't tell me anything. I waited him out; probably, most likely he gave me the story just to get rid of me. Ten o'clock on a Tuesday isn't the highest traffic hour of M-Strip's week, so there were few prospects wandering the aisle behind me. "Know anything about comics?" he started.

After finding out how little remembered I was in the family, I went with it. "Let's assume the only comics I read come in the back page of the Chronicle."

So he started with grades; a perfect 10 is a book that might never have touched human hands, and it's all downhill from there. Price is sensitive to who did the grading.

"You spend a lot of time arguing over grades?" I asked.

"Does a frog bump his ass when he hops? If we try and sell someone a 10, we'd better be able to back it up."

"Wouldn't someone with that kind of money be in a position to verify the condition?"

Lonnie nodded. "Sure. Except, this book's been sitting in our cabinet with a 9.6 on it for going on twenty years. Everyone who's interested already knows what grade we've claimed. I'm stuck with a book I can't sell, because even if it's the real thing..."

I smiled, halfway. "Every buyer who knows better is going to accuse you of grade inflation to drive up the price."

"Bingo."

"So. You're the expert. Could you forge a perfect copy? Or get someone else to?"

He had to have thought about it. "Yeah. With time and effort, and a book to copy from, you could put it together."

And you wouldn't even need to go through the hassles that guy in Italy did, the one who'd "found" a lost Galileo manuscript in an old library. He'd had to come up with parchment and ink that matched the Renaissance-era chemistry.

Fifty years is a little easier gap to bridge, so far as getting the ink and the paper. And let's face it, so many comic book artists trained themselves to draw by tracing Ditko's work that finding that particular talent wasn't the hurdle it might have been.

A good forensics workup would find the clues. If it was printed, there would be little differences. The paper wouldn't quite match up, not perfectly. The lines, hesitation marks, wouldn't match the known-good versions.

Too bad Lonnie, and the other three with their similar situations, had taken that option off the table. "So you've left me with trying to catch someone and have them confess. When you won't consent to testing the book?" Meaning, "Why they hell would they even talk to me? Any lawyer worth the retainer's going to tell them to shut up and make me prove there's even been a crime committed."

"I pulled my complaint, Detective. If you manage to catch someone, that's your problem, and your wild goose chase. Not mine."

I shook my head. "Lonnie, are you seriously trying to tell me that someone has managed to pull the perfect crime? And you're going to let them get away with it?"

"See what a lifetime in retail does to you, Detective? Now, are you going to buy something or not?"

The song was different, but Christy, JoJo, Dennis, they all sang in the same key as Lonnie.

I had a whole herd of mules, caught between two hay bales and starving to death in collective. Metaphorically, at least. And why wouldn't they? These weren't books that traded hands, these weren't the true moneymakers anyone was banking their business on.

Workaday money and dreams lay in the cardboard boxes lining the aisles of their stores. Those were the golden eggs. The platinum eggs, on the walls and in the "Don't even think about it" cases were just signs that the store owners were geeks of the highest caliber. Signals, that just might part hands when the owners shuffled off the mortal coil. Not a minute before.

And when that happened... Ah. "When that happened, who's going to be left, anymore, to remember that there were once stains, tears, rips on those books?"

I was halfway down I-45, headed to Almeda Mall when the question popped out of my mouth and into my unaccompanied space.

Ever met the guitar player that can "Play every note Clapton" or Hendrix or Van Halen ever played?

Ever wonder why, if they're so good, they're not out there feeling the love? In the stage lights cashing the big checks?

Artists can be like that, as well. The ones that sat in the back of your algebra class, replicating Doctor Strange or the Hulk in painstaking detail. Only...

Like their similarity-type of guitar player, they never quite found their own inspiration? Their own sound? Just about every artist starts out copying. Most of them move past it, especially the ones who burn through the endless gates to get their own book.

Trey Wilmarado was one of the ones who didn't catch that fire. He came into Nory's place like the rest of us. Another comic fiend looking for a place to hang and talk and smoke and hide from the world. Nory put him to work making promo art. Hulk, Spidey, Dream, any character at all, and Trey could bring that character, someone else's character, to your favorite business card, your "Ten Percent Off This Weekend" ad.

And Trey ended up owning the store. I'd moved on; when I graduated UofH, the academy, and got my offer from HPD, I gave up the Sam Goody job and the daily walk past Nory's storefront with it. Chuck, Best Buy tech guru, got himself a promotion and a transfer to the Texas City store. Bea, Tailor, all Nory's regulars had drifted away on the current of the everyday.

Except Trey. He'd kept right on keeping on, covering shifts, drawing up promo art. Buying stock. Being Nory's right hand, in other words. And then, when Nory had his stroke, and Viv finally sold the store, Trey it had been who'd scraped up the loan, from somewhere, and bought the store.

"And that's how I'm still here," Trey told me, when I walked through the shop doors for the first time in damned near twenty years.

"How's business?"

"We get by," he finished.

Right. The doors were open; the Sam Goody was still open, somehow. Macy's, but Palais Royal was about done. Most of the shops in the food court were the same. But I'd be lying if I said I remembered any of the small shops. They were all different, enough that I had to hunt for Nory's, now Trey's, comic shop. It was still in the same spot, just up from what had been J.C. Penny's.

I'd moved on. I guess. "Still drawing?" I asked Trey.

"Every day." He pointed at the posters and the signs; two easels set out front every day, Iron Man and Captain America because when Marvel hands you a billion dollar wave you surf it.

I'd asked Trey, a couple times, why he never caught on with Marvel, Vertigo, somebody.

"I don't live in New York," he'd told me, the first time I'd asked. "I'm not the kind of hack they want," he'd said the second time.

I quit asking about Trey's art after that. The closest I'd ever come to that kind of creativity had been crayons and finger painting. I wasn't about to ask Trey what he was so scared of.

Something else had come out of those conversations, though. On those nights where Nory had closed up the front gates and left us to finish out whichever game we'd got caught up in.

And that was that Trey had worked a little at each of the big 4 comic shops in town. The M-Strip, the Phoenix, Auntie's and the LC. "Problem is, they're all in town," Trey said. "So when Nory opened up, it was a godsend."

At the time, Trey had a little Fiat, the X1/9. Ten years old, then, a hand-me-down from his mom with too many miles on it to brave getting on the freeway every day. That's what his excuse had been to quit UofH and go to Clear Lake, instead.

So, yeah, Nory's shop was just right for that particular comic fiend. Almeda was just a few miles from where Trey's parents lived and he wouldn't have had to get on the freeway to get there.

That part of the story I'd filed away in my memory. To surface again when I started asking myself, "How would you forge a comic book, if you really really wanted to?"

I wondered if even Lonnie knew that Trey might the only person still active in Houston's comic community to have worked for our big 4 comic shops?

And, that Trey was more than capable of copying each of those books. Not only capable.

He'd get off on the challenge of it.

Then, too, there was one other thing. Lonnie, Jo, the others, they'd been the ones who'd twigged to something wrong. Maybe I was asking the wrong question. The managers all saw the retail churn; Trey might have worked six months, if that, at any one of those places before he landed at Nory's.

Who benefited, ultimately, if the forgeries continued hanging on the walls, waiting for memories to fade, for grades to be profitably disputable ten, twenty years out? Not the managers.

Trey owned a comic shop, now, didn't he? And he'd had to borrow money, that much I knew, to buy into that club. "How often do you talk to Joy?" I asked Trey. "Or Umala?"

Owners of the M-Strip, and Auntie's, respectively.

I'd asked Trey about his art; I'd asked him whether he talked to any of the other owners.

If there was any sign that these questions weighed on him, it was that he left his bottle of Windex on the end of the glass case. He still wiped the nonexistent fingerprints. The towel still made its motions. But the spritz, and the faint ammonia hints drifting on the wind, dropped away. "Did you hear?" he asked. "About Richard?"

The owner of the Phoenix and the Unicorn. "He's not sick..."

"No, not that. Not any worse than usual, anyway. No, the rumor's that he's having money problems. Christy's been around a couple times, asking if I've got room in the shop for her."

Trey found his courage then; or, at least, he remembered his Windex bottle.

"That's a shame," I said. And it was. The Phoenix wasn't the oldest of the big 4. I think M-Strip has that honor, or Auntie's. Luna City, they'd been the ones to expand, I think Mike and them have half a dozen locations now. Auntie's and M-Strip own their buildings, that's their ace-in-the-hole against the dark times.

The Phoenix had always been the smallest, they were the shop that always seemed to be hanging on by a thread. I meant it, though. It would be a shame when the big 4 shrank to 3. "Richard's asking ya'll to buy his stock from him, isn't he?"

I got a big dose of Windex, enough so I had to wipe the mist from my face. I guess it went along with my nosiness.

Trey shrugged in partial answer. Then. "I guess, if I'm ever in trouble, I'd rather my books stay local. All in the family, right?"

That's how it turned out; a few months later, Richard's stock, really Christy's because she'd been the one doing most of the buying recently, started showing up in the other stores. Mike's shops got the lion's haul, but even Trey's shop filled out a few bins with book runs he'd been shy on. Christy landed on her feet, running the day-to-day at Trey's shop.

And wouldn't you know it? A 9.6 grade Amazing Fantasy 15 appeared in the "Expensive but it's For Sale" case at the M-Strip again.

If there's a crime there, it's an unreported one. Mike's crew don't display all of their big books. The Luna City managers rotate their prizes; I've heard them say they hope to keep the customers on their toes. Maybe next time you come in, the message says, the book you've lusted after since you were thirteen won't be there, anymore. Maybe now's the time to cash in some of that vested tech stock windfall. Before someone else does.

Auntie's, Umala's shop, you'd be hard pressed to find their "good stuff". Oh, it's there, and the regulars know it. It's just that you have to hunt for it. M-Strip, and Trey, keep the goods on front and center display. Umala makes you work for it.

And none of them have, so far, breathed a word of the scam, if that's what it is. Trey's probably no longer in debt, outside the family at least. Richard, if he was part of it, died not long after he sold his stock; he'd gone thirty years on retrovirals, long after he'd ever expected to survive.

And the grade 10 books hide away in plain sight. Tripwires, I suppose. I'm putting my notes together, here. For my successor, if they manage to outwait me. For me, if they don't. I'm sure there's some sort of agreement. Maybe Trey's paying a little money to his silent partners. Or maybe his silence, the one that came one tense moment after I asked the question "Which one of them came to you first?", is his payment.

Richard sold his stock, and managed a landing spot for Christy, before he passed. The others, will they be so lucky? One heart attack, one bad day on the slopes, and it'll be a kid or a grandkid who's looking at the Wall of Fame, thinking of the headlines that came out from the last time someone auctioned off a pristine, mint copy of Spider-Man's first appearance. And then the auction house will send their experts around to take a good hard look at this prize no one's ever known of.

I'll be there, or my colleagues will, when the wall breaks.

Peace Offer

Meet Lenny. He's the new kid in class. Easy smile. Fun stories.

You'll know Lenny well. And soon.

And Lenny most definitely wants to know you...

Peace Offer by M. K. Dreysen is now available at all your favorite retailers (and libraries, too! Make sure and ask for it.).

In print format: Peace Offer can be had from Amazon at this link.

In ebook format: Peace Offer can be found at Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Amazon. Click on the link of your choice!

(Check with your librarian/library e-book database, Peace Offer is available through Overdrive and other e-book library services, ask for a copy!)

...a place in the past we've been cast out of...

The Pretenders: Back on the Chain Gang; Christine Hynde, songwriter

Stuff I've been enjoying lately.

Medusa In The Graveyard by Emily Devenport.

This was a very fun follow-up to Medusa Uploaded; two books, and whether Devenport plays further in the series or not, the story's at a good place to stop regardless.

These are, broadly, generation ship stories where the end of journey comes into view, and then into reality. As well, these are spy stories, and legend transmission stories, and stories of where and how the rubber meets the road when humanity and our wonderful idiosyncracies develop into the future.

It's mad, wonderful stuff, this. I'm glad to have dove in and gone for the ride, thank you Emily for a pair of good reads.

Covid-19 thoughts, at least for this day in May.

Preliminaries: For friends and family, and those willing to trust. Or maybe just suspend disbelief. So, general only by accident, because this site, my only space on the web, exists behind a pen name. Such is life.

Oh, and if my boss ever stumbles across this: we'll call it community outreach, and I'll leave our job out of it.

Throat clearing done. Ok, as you'd expect, and as at least a few of you probably are doing as well, I've been hip deep in the data coming from Covid-19 for the past few months. We're all still in the 6 month to a year period where we're learning the fundamentals, but the epidemiologic progression now seems fairly well established, enough for standard analytics to be in agreement and replicable across a variety of models. The curve fitters and smarter-than-thous are out and about, so the noise for useful numerical results is going to be loud from now on, at least in the usual quarters. Cosma Shalizi provides a good place to check both sides of the analytic mind when digging through the details.

Johns Hopkins maps/dashboards have been a good daily picture; Johns Hopkins git repository are go-to for consistent, updated, well-formatted data files.

What do we see? Roughly, the early stages of endemic onset, at the global level and the big regional levels, U.S. most definitely included. A daily growth rate that has been consistent, growing slightly, and controlled now, rather than contained. An R number of just more than 1 globally, just below 1 for the U.S. in the immediate recent past, with the caveat at the U.S. level that the recent abatement for New York and neighbors is dominating that result. Other regions in the U.S. are still growing in case loads.

Our region, R is still just above 1; the governor of my state is proceeding apace with relaxation, and the results are clear: new case rates are growing, active case loads are growing, death rates are growing. This decision appears to have been based on cherry-picking, with a few days of R below 1 convincing them to go ahead with relaxation of the lockdown. And, now that the case loads have increased, our state doesn't seem interested in slowing their roll in the face of the developing warning signs.

Vaccines? I keep up with Derek Lowe for reported details on the nuts and bolts. Broadly, vaccines in trials now are those that were on the shelf. Meaning, those were the vaccines various silverbacks have been pushing for the past few years, and are pushing now because the spotlight has come shining. Actual vaccines targetted at this specific vaccine will, at best, enter trials this fall. There are exceptions, of course, but we're way early here.

Where are we headed? Regional outbreaks throughout the summer in the U.S., and likely globally. No real fall in total caseloads, and a steady state of active cases, which will make a general fall/winter breakout very much in play.

Vaccines: fastest previous de novo vaccine development was 5 years. Current vaccines in trials are showing the usual combination of "ok, we didn't kill anyone immediately" and "huh, so no real effect?" for off the shelf combinations. If we get lucky? Two years. Which would be fantastic by previous standards. Unfortunately, I have to suspect that, given the numbers of vaccines in play, and the political pressures involved, at least one of the vaccine candidates is going to hit Phase 3 trials, or be shoved to general use, with skipped steps, and the horrific consequences that go along with it. The word Thalidomide doesn't show up as often (at all) as I would expect given the pressures evident to speed things along.

The song is the same: I compare U.S. response against the 1918-1919 flu epidemic, and find a broadly similar overall response. Which can be depressing, it indicates the decades of public health improvements have regressed. However, it also pulls me back when I start to blame particular actors for a given behavior. The setup and broad populace do not appear to allow for any more sophisticated response than we're seeing.

That said: the governor of my state made decisions to phase out of lockdown in concert with the administrators of our medical center. I suspect they're the ones cherry picking the data that put rosy glasses on the thing. I won't use the language I would need; at least one of the hospital presidents admitted on camera that they pushed this because they were at less than 50% bed capacity.

Meaning, the hospital administration suits are engaging in a state-wide experiment to determine how to maximize the number of beds they can fill while minimizing the spread rate which will result. In nominal terms, they were reporting losses and putting staff on furlough. So when the governor asked their opinions, Cthulu wept with joy, for corruption spreads as desired. If you want a demonstration proof of one of the reasons I left that world, I can provide no better.

We're in some variation of the current conditions for something like 3 or 4 years, and much of that will be voluntary in the face of desparate pleas to go back to normal. Face mask use in my area is spotty already, and I suspect that confrontations over this are going to ramp up, especially as the steady death toll continues to build.

Now you know, as well, why I've kept my mouth shut. And I know the real experts have been doing similarly. Normally, pessimism and cynicism are to be avoided; for the next few years, they appear to be very much necessary. At least for the brief time needed to calculate the risks and likelihoods.

Housekeeping note: Formatting has been changed a bit beginning with this week's story, I'm putting blurb and story into a single post now (see previous post). I also messed up the formatting on initial posting of Carlotta's First Case, so if it hurt your eyes trying to read it the first time, give it a second look now, the story should be a lot more presentable now.

For your free story this week, I give you Carlotta's First Case. (I'm also moving these things to a single post, but that's housekeeping).

Here: meet Carlotta. She's young; she's working on a few things.

She's sitting in her front yard minding her own business...

Carlotta's First Case by M. K. Dreysen

When the bus pulled up across the street, Carlotta didn't look like she was paying attention to it. She was just the little girl playing in her front yard.

The guy who got down from the school bus and went into Mrs. Davis's house could be forgiven for not paying attention. The girl didn't look like someone he had to pay attention to. She had her bike next to her, that much he saw, and what looked like dolls scattered all over. Maybe she was arranging them so she could load the basket up and take them somewhere, that's about all the guy knew. Or thought of, before he opened the door and went about his business.

Carlotta was paying more attention than that. Her bus was the regular one for the neighborhood, she and Janelle were the only ones who got down for this block. And their stop wasn't right there in front of the house, it was up the street at the stop sign. Mister Brown pulled his bus diagonal to the intersection, to make sure everyone saw him and did the right thing before he'd let Carlotta and Nellie step down.

A few years from now, Carlotta would be just about the only person in the world, other than her grandmother, that Janelle would let call her "Nellie". For now, her parents and Carlotta were allowed, but Janelle was working on the first two.

Carlotta had to deal with other things. Mom had started asking her to "Act like a young lady. You know, maybe just for practice." Dad giggled when Mom said it, like there was a joke Mom didn't want him telling in front of people.

The bus across the street wasn't for the high school kids, either. That one got home an hour or so before the little kids did, the big kids started earlier and finished earlier. Why'd the bus come by, then? And why'd the driver get down to visit Mrs. Davis? It's not like she needed a ride to school. Not anymore. Carlotta thought maybe she'd been a teacher, Ms. Leonard had asked Carlotta once if she ever visited Mrs. Davis, and to say "Hi from Celene" when she did.

Carlotta had let Mrs. Davis know this. Carlotta was like that, she wanted to make sure that when someone asked her to do something, she put in a good effort to do it.

Dad giggled when Carlotta told her parents about the bus driver, the one who drove the wrong bus up to Mrs. Davis's house. Mom told Dad to hush, "Carlie doesn't need you giving her those kind of ideas yet. Carlie, sweetie, I'm sure it was just an old friend of Mrs. Davis's, maybe a driver she knew from when she worked at your school, come by to visit her." Mom stepped over to look through the kitchen window, where she could see Mrs. Davis's house through the limbs of the beech tree in their own front yard.

Carlotta could have told her the bus wasn't there anymore. The driver hadn't stayed all that long, maybe about the time it took two, three of the afternoon cartoons to run. Carlotta had looked for him. Janelle was busy with swim lessons this afternoon, and Carlotta had finished her homework at school, so she'd had plenty of time. The driver had come out of Mrs. Davis's house and walked straight back onto his bus. Without looking around at all, Carlotta noticed. Straight on, start up the bus again, and then he'd gone.

"I wonder if I should go visit, see how she's doing?" Mom asked.

"She might not thank you, if she had a good afternoon," Dad responded, still smiling. "Then again..."

"Hush you," Mom told him. "Carlie, you sure you're finished with your homework, young lady?"

That again. "Yes, ma'am," Carlie responded. She didn't roll her eyes. That gesture wasn't part of her vocabulary. Yet.

Mom did end up crossing the street to Mrs. Davis's house; she did it the next morning, right after she'd walked Carlotta and Janelle to the bus stop.

That's why the police cars were pulled in front of Mrs. Davis's house when the two girls got down from their bus that afternoon. "I wonder what happened?" Janelle asked.

"Maybe Mrs. Davis had a heart attack or something," Carlotta answered. "Your dad will know."

Janelle's dad was a police officer. Not a detective, Carlotta thought, but he'd been one. Now, he did more office work, Carlotta remembered him telling her. "I wish I could go back to that," he'd said. "Running the place doesn't have the same day to day excitement."

"Want me to tell you what he says?" Janelle asked, before she turned up the walk to her front door.

Carlotta nodded. "After dinner?"

The end of the school year approaching, the days were getting long enough now that they could do that. Go in, finish homework, eat dinner, then come back out and do something that wasn't school. Play with Janelle's Lab, Ginny, a red-coated mix who would chase a tennis ball for as long as daylight, or Carlotta's arm, held out. That was the most likely, because Janelle's mom loved to have the girls tire "That fool mutt" out before bedtime.

Mom had the story about Mrs. Davis, as it turned out. "She's dead?" Carlotta asked.

Mom was through crying, mostly. She kept a box of tissue next to her, dabbed at her eyes every now and then when she realized the tears were coming. "I stopped by this morning, after you girls left. Her car was there, so when no one answered the door..."

Mom would have called 911 regardless. The front door was unlocked, though, so when she tried it, a half-hearted effort because "I didn't think I'd be able to get in", she went in, phone in one hand "Because I'd need to get an ambulance there quick, if she'd fallen and hurt herself."

Mrs. Davis did look like she'd fallen. Her body lay in the shower, half in half out with the curtain hanging over her. "I felt her pulse, the operator asked me to, and then I went out to wait on the front porch until they came. I couldn't bear to sit there with her like that, that poor old woman."

Carlotta understood. As long as she could remember, Mrs. Davis had been there. Oh, they didn't spend every day with her, but every so often, Mom would go across and drink a cup of coffee with her, bring cookies, or maybe Mrs. Davis would bring some fried chicken to them, "Because I love it, and you can never cook just a little bit of fried chicken."

Dad didn't cry, but he did hold Mom's hand all through dinner.

Carlotta remembered something, just before she left to go meet Janelle. "Was the shower on?" she asked Mom.

"No, sweetie. I guess she turned it off, then slipped on her way out. Why?" Mom didn't turn, she and Dad were still sitting knee to knee, keeping each other company at the dinner table. They'd start clearing the dishes in a bit.

Carlotta hoped Ginny would keep her busy through that part of it. She'd be taking out the trash as payment, but that was ok. "I just noticed you didn't say anything about it. If she'd fallen in the shower, I thought maybe the water would have to still be on when you found her." Mom would have turned the shower off, Carlotta thought. Automatic, so she didn't get wet when she tried to help Mrs. Davis.

The detail stayed with Carlotta, while Janelle told her dad's version of the story, then while Carlotta filled in the gaps that lead to Janelle's father's team and the red lights. They were still working over there, Janelle's dad had walked across to check on his crew after dinner.

"Kind of hard not to, with them right there."

When she and Janelle spread out, Carlotta in Nellie's yard and Janelle in Carlotta's, so they could throw the ball between them and let Ginny chase it back and forth, Carlotta still wondered.

Why the shower hadn't been running. And what the bus driver from yesterday might have to do with any of this.

About the time Ginny finally ran out of energy and decamped to the porch, Janelle's dad walked back across the street. "Time to go in, girls, daylight's about done." The sky was well into red, the sun set just over their back fences and wasn't visible at all now in the front yards.

"Mister Childress?" Carlotta started.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Did Mom tell you about the bus driver?"

"No, ma'am, Carlotta." He turned to her, and Carlotta saw Janelle's father become something else, then.

Chief Childress. Former detective, chief of their little town's police department. He didn't condescend to her. He sat down next to Ginny on the porch, put one hand on the panting pup, and patted the empty space next to him. "Why don't you tell me, Carlotta. Make sure you don't leave anything out, and tell it exactly as you remember it."

So she did that. Janelle sat down next to her, held her hand, almost just like Dad had held Mom's hand at dinner, and Carlotta told Mr. Childress, Chief Childress, everything that she remembered. "And it wasn't our regular bus. This was someone different, it wasn't Mister Brown."

"Did you see the number?"

"22... 224, I think."

"Are you sure it was an Appletown school bus?"

"Yes, sir, I'm sure." Their school buses all had it there, Appletown Independent School District painted on the side. The only school district she'd ever known. "There was one other thing."

Chief Childress was looking across the street; his crews were all gone now, the last lights turned off, and only Mrs. Davis's empty house left to look at. "Yes, ma'am?" He didn't look down; Janelle squeezed her hand, whispered "He's like that, when he's working."

"Mom said the shower wasn't running, when she found Mrs. Davis." Carlotta wasn't sure that would matter.

Chief Childress turned away from the empty house. "Carlotta, I think maybe you should know something, but I need you and Janelle to promise me something."

The children looked at him, and even Janelle saw her father as Chief Childress, then. It was something in his eyes, and the weight on his face, around the cheeks. "We promise," Carlotta said.

"Yes, sir," Janelle followed.

"I need you two to keep this to yourselves, not even Mom," and Janelle nodded, "Or your mom and dad," and Carlotta nodded as well. Chief Childress looked from one to the other, and then he turned back to Mrs. Davis's house. "You're both too young for this. But I think you should know it, anyway." And so he told them.

That Mrs. Davis's body wasn't wet. "Her hair was dry, so was her body. Someone killed that lady, girls. I think you both should understand that, hear it from me, before you hear it at school after the rumor mill gets ahold of it."

He didn't tell them about the used condom his crew had found floating in the toilet next to Mrs. Davis's shower stall. The one with just enough DNA that it would end up closing the case. There were some things Chief Childress would take to his grave before talking about with his baby girl and her best friend. He just hoped, in that moment, that Carlotta's story would give him, and Mrs. Davis, the break they needed.

Three days later, Carlotta left Janelle at her front walk, just like normal, and made her way into her kitchen. Where she found Chief Childress sitting with her parents, drinking coffee in the evening light.

And, as it turned out, waiting for her. Chief Childress, because he was still that and not back to Mister Childress yet, he was still working, told Carlotta, "I've come here to let you know that we caught the man who killed Mrs. Davis."

Carlotta put her backpack down, giving herself time to think. "It was that bus driver, the one who didn't belong."

"Yes, ma'am. And you're the reason we caught him."

"Will she need to testify?" Dad asked. Carlotta could see the worry on Dad's face; he didn't want her to have to do that. Testify in front of the jury, like the detectives and the lab team had to on the murder shows.

Chief Childress chuckled, causing both adults, and Carlotta, to turn back to him. "Nope. Carlotta won't need to speak to anyone. Mr. Jennings has a camera on his front porch. Seems he's been losing deliveries from Amazon."

Mister Jennings was Mrs. Davis's neighbor, the one directly across from Janelle's house just like Mrs. Davis was just across from Carlotta and her parents.

"Oh, thank God," Mom replied. She was teary again, reaching for the tissues.

It was the first time, Carlotta would always remember, that she'd ever seen her parents really and truly worried for their little girl. She stored the moment away, to think about later, while she walked back with Mister Childress to visit Janelle. And tell her what had happened.

Before they walked up the porch steps, to let Ginny out from behind the screen door, Carlotta stopped the Chief. "Mister Childress?"

"Yes, ma'am?"

"I think you might need to know something, about those packages Mister Jennings has been missing, the ones from Amazon?"

The Chief turned to his newest detective. "Go on."

"There's a car that follows the Amazon driver, when he comes in the evening..."

This is the time to start believing in yourself...

Sade: When Am I Going To Make A Living, Sade Adu and Stuart Matthewman, songwriters

Stuff I've been enjoying:

Clive Barker's The Thief of Always. This one feels a bit different than most of Barker's other books and stories. In blunt terms, PG or PG-13 rather than R or X, which is the obvious difference.

I don't like saying this is a kid's book; Clive does, however, unveil this story from a child's perspective.

I wonder... look. Let's say you're a saxophone player. Eventually, if you're playing, you're going to tangle with Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane, or Sonny or Harry or... Guitar player? Plug into Hendrix, or Segovia... you get the point.

Every artist tangles with their influences. I wonder if this book was the one where Clive Barker addressed himself to Ray Bradbury. You'll spot that one about three paragraphs in, I think, so I'm not giving any secrets that the preview button, or a quick scan of the first chapter if you're standing at a bookshelf, won't reveal.

I don't enjoy the "If you like So-and-So, you'll love this" tag lines myself. Which is why I'm dancing around, trying not to say "If you love Ray Bradbury, this is Clive Barker's tribute!" Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, that's not my place to say, I didn't write The Thief of Always.

I just loved the story. Fell into the gap-toothed smile the purveyor of dreams withheld tempts our hero with, and I was in to the end.

And I loved that, whether Barker conjured it apurpose or not, The Thief's home, where memory and life and time have been looted from their rightful owners, sits in a close-spun part of that same twilight country where Jim Nightshade and William Halloway and Mr. Dark found their own confrontations.

My collected short stories. As I go along, I'm gathering up the short stories I've published, here at this blog at the moment, elsewhere as they occur, and publishing them. If you've enjoyed my shorter stories, follow the links below and you'll find them again in e-book and print format.

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 1

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 2

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 3

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 4

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5

Stuff I've been enjoying:

In the way of mental housekeeping. I need to put up a few notes on books, videos, the other things that I've found that made me smile recently.

Mark Evanier has been running a series of chat videos the past couple of weeks. It's a bit of a ComicCon series in brief. As I understand it, Mark's working on something that will actually be ComicCon in pixels, so many of these videos are his way of practicing the tech to get that accomplished.

That's the purpose; the fun for me has been watching Mark spend time with Sergio Aragones on the one hand, and a whole crew of voice actors, including Secunda Wood, Phil LaMarr, and company (come for the lockdown procedures, stay for the Goldilocks and the 3 Bears rendition of a thousand voices...).

Mark's had other videos up, those two were just the ones I've had the time to sit and watch. And giggle. There's a lot to be fascinated over; I had one of those lightbulb moments when Mark had the voices crew actively switch characterizations/voices in the middle of the read. That made me think about flexibility and reaction, that one did.

The Missing Mile by M. K. Dreysen

Oh, it's there, if you're driving it you see every yard. According to the state and the county and the federal government, it ain't there. There's mile marker sixty-two, and there's mile marker sixty-two again, and what connects them?

Yards and yards of concrete, that's what. Traffic buzzing by, all oblivious to that which they pass.

Hang around at night, and what happens? No wrecks. There are no crosses in the median here, no skid marks on the tarmac, none of your torn down signs or tread marks in the grass and gravel. The racers don't line up at one end and scream out their mile times over this stretch. The drunks always take the turn before, each way, and go around. It's one of the few places in New Mexico you can do that, safely go around without having to travel a hundred miles out of your way.

The hawks pass it by every day, and the vultures, and they know there's never a roadkill buffet. But they do it anyway. The blackbirds fly in spring, they swirl off to the south where the fields lie. Buzz the little grove of trees off to the north and the subdivision beyond. Watch carefully, and you'll see them part. Half the flock one way and half the flock the other as the group of them passes that mile. The one that isn't there.

Go to the state engineering library, pull out the maps, break out your ruler and your notebook and your pencil, and start measuring.

You won't add up to the same number you'd get if you were to drive the stretch between New Mexico and Texas. Just short of the border between the two, where the signs tell you you're about to speed up, or slow down coming west, and the GPS greets you with a happy little "Welcome to New Mexico" or "Welcome to Texas", that's where the mile lives.

This isn't aliens, that's Roswell, a good hour or two, depending on the oilfield traffic, north and west. They'll give you all the aliens you can handle, and more than that these days. Stop in, have a cup of coffee, read the billboards and order the enchiladas half and half.

Over here though, there's no place to stop, and the locals don't think about it, talk about it. Leanna Rodriguez has tried for sixty years to get the county to fix the mile markers. She sends her letters, makes her phone calls, drops in on whichever wet behind the ears state rep is in office this year.

Every third year or so of this, and the state sends a crew. They start at the last red light, mile sixty, and they replace every mile marker in between that light and the state line.

Every time they do it, mile sixty-two and mile sixty-two get brand new signs. Clean, clear, reflective at night and legible in any weather that doesn't include blizzard or duststorm conditions. And always, no matter how much Leanna complains about it, the signs always insist, just like the state engineering office insists and the Bureau of Land Management insists and the Department of Transportation insists, that the number of miles along that particular stretch of notated highway is fixed and immutable and exactly ninety-seven point seven miles. And not a twittle more.

Always, there's an extra mile there, between sixty-two and sixty-two. Hiding in plain sight.

Trina didn't find the mile on purpose. She'd flown into El Paso because that's where Grandma lived, and if she didn't take advantage of the company travel to stop in with her grandmother she'd have to hear about it 'til the end of time. She flew out of Midland because, one, why not, and two, the way things were going she'd be working the Carlsbad area for the next few years so she might as well get familiar with the options.

The trip to Ruydoso would have to wait for next year. When the bank account had built up to the point where a condo on the mountain for a weekend wasn't too big a hit. And, when the peace of mind that came with the positive ledger balance would mean a weekend with her grandmother and her aunts and uncles could be spent not worrying about the questions she was only just beginning to be able to answer.

Hit seventy-five on the cruise control and ride.

The crack in the windshield, where the rock bouncing along off the back of a gravel truck met the glass, drilled down through the road hypnosis. Trina jumped in response to it; even she admitted her reflexes didn't kick in for what seemed like second after second after... and then she did kick into it in time to yank the wheel back to middle standard. Her heart caught up to her then, as well, and the only sound wasn't the road noise or the college radio station.

The beat of her pulse drowned it all out, hard and loud and all-encompassing. When that faded, just a touch, her breaths filled the gap.

She was most of the way through the mile before the traffic cleared and she could pull over. Off into the grass where no one could sideswipe her, and they wouldn't have to pull over unless they wanted to. She wasn't all that worried about the glass, sure the chip was there but it hadn't spread yet. And she'd be turning the thing in, just over an hour and a half from now if the phone was truthful.

She got out of the car because she needed to know if her legs were up to it, or if they'd just collapse out from underneath her. The shock was there, now the adrenaline dump had passed and the weariness and the nausea came on. 'Just keep your head down and keep breathing,' she told herself. So she did that for a while, grateful for the first time for the heat of the desert, pushed into her face with every passing truck and car. It wasn't pleasant, right now it was concrete and in the moment and it felt like the only thing between her and a faceful of caliche rock.

Trina reached for her water bottle, and that's when she realized she wasn't alone.

"Miss, are you ok?" asked the little old lady.

Trina spit her mouthful of water out, all over the inside of the driver's door but at least she didn't put it in the lady's face. For the second time in as many minutes, Trina's heart shoved up and took over everything. She pulled the bottle down, watching it crinkle where her fingers gripped the thing with far too much force but control wasn't anything, right now the only thing she had control of was her bladder. Maybe.

"Miss?" the lady asked again.

Trina could answer now. She hoped. "Um," she tried. "I think so." She tried to stand then, everything mostly worked, but she grabbed the top of the door just in case.

"What happened?"

Trina had to think that one over. A couple minutes and the reason for the season was already out of her mind. And then it came back, the rock rolling down off the back of the truck, one bounce only and then it was headed for her face and the only thing that mattered then was the integrity of the glass but her mind didn't know that her body couldn't care less the only thing it wanted to know was why she didn't react to the great big rock headed for their face...

"I caught a rock from the back of a gravel truck," Trina responded. Finally. "I guess I had to make sure everything was ok."

"Stupid oilfield trucks. I've had to replace my windshield three times in the past two years." The lady shook her head. "All the money they bring in now, it'll be gone tomorrow, and in the meantime do they pay for the damage they do?"

'No we don't,' Trina admitted inside her own head. Not that the trucks were her end of the business, but the stuff they were all drilling for sure was. That was the reason she was out here, after all.

And there was for sure no reason to get involved in...

"You work for one of the oil companies, don't you sweetie?" the lady said. "It's ok, my son's a welder, if it wasn't for the oilfield he'd be off in Houston or Corpus or somewhere." She'd have kept going, but a truck was pulling in behind her car. "Oh, look, it's that nice Mister Watkins, he teaches History at the high school."

Mister Watkins got down from his truck and walked up to join the other two. "You two ok?"

"Right as rain," the lady replied. "This young lady had a moment, she caught rock from the back of a gravel truck and stopped to make sure her rental was ok. And then I stopped, and now you're here."

Watkins nodded. "Couple cars pulled over out here and you never do know if someone needs a little help." He walked around the front of Trina's car, shrugged and came back. "Doesn't seem like anything they'll charge you for. Shoot, way things are around here, they might have to start giving bonus money for cars that come back without chipped windows."

The older lady stood there, Trina stood there, Watkins stood there, all three of them looking back and forth between the car and each other, and swaying as the wind from the passing cars forced them to balance in place. Trina broke the silence, or tried to. "I'm ok, really, but I do need to..."

And that's when the taco truck showed up. "You folks ok?"

Mister Watkins laughed at that. "You know what, I think we are all pretty ok. How's your supply, Ricky? Got a half dozen or so ready to go?"

"As a matter of fact," Ricky replied. "I do. I've even got a little chicharron, just for you." He disappeared into the back of the truck.

Trina held her hands up even as Watkins reached for his wallet, and stopped her mid-opening with his off hand. "Nope, I insist. You've had a bit of a rush just now, and you probably didn't even schedule in time before your flight to get any lunch. A taco, and I promise you Ricky's got the cleanest and best truck in this part of the world, and you'll be right back on the road with a full stomach and a little better understanding beneath you."

Trina would have, should have turned him down anyway. But her stomach chose that moment to remind her that the airport food, as much as it had improved, wasn't likely to be worth the wait.

And she might not have the time to even get that much, the way things were going. 'Might as well get the taco and get on down the road, Trina,' she told herself.

"I might need an extra pair of hands," Watkins called out from the side of Ricky's truck. Ricky had laid out three cold sodas, the half dozen promised tacos, salsa for each and a handful of napkins to catch it all in.

Trina shrugged to herself and walked up to the truck.

By the time she got back to the rental car, two sodas in one hand and tacos in the other, she and the little old lady and Watkins and Ricky had picked up another three or four people, or maybe more. They were all standing in line at Ricky's side window.

"He must make good tacos, then," Trina said. "A line like that comes out of nowhere."

The lady said "Thank you," caught her tacos and soda from Trina, and continued. "First bite and you'll figure out why they all pulled over."

Which, when Trina did get a bite, she had to agree. The salsa was fresh, cold, then hot as a rattle-snake with a ruptured disk, the meat was tender brisket with that smoke taste teasing her nose, a little avocado and cilantro and lime to go along with it, and the tortillas...

"Oh, wow," she mumbled around the bite, and the overstuffed rest of it in her hand that she juggled to keep contained in the tortillas.

"Told you," the other lady said around her smile and her own bite.

"I really do have to be going," Trina said when she'd swallowed her mouthful. "I didn't leave myself a lot of time, and the way the TSA is these days..."

"Don't worry," the lady responded. "You've got more time than you know."

And by now, there were a good twenty cars and trucks strung out along the shoulder. To go along with the taco truck. "Only thing we're missing now is a beer truck," Trina said.

"Wrong time of the year for it," the older lady replied. "Come back in September, October really, after the first good cold front comes through and lays the dust down, that's when you'll see a beer truck pull into our little stretch of road."

Trina didn't answer that. She was afraid to, like if she chased too far down the rabbit hole she'd find something she didn't want to find.

That, or she'd summon a margarita truck.

As it turned out, what did come in, and parked right in front of Trina's rental, "It's the only space left" as the driver helpfully pointed out, was a snowcone truck. Shaved ice and too much grape flavor in a paper cup with the syrup dripping down over her hands, and Trina waited to get hers until the line had wound down.

"Might as well wait," she told Watkins when they finally did get in line. "I can't leave until she's gone, anyway." The back of the truck, the way it was angled in front of her bumper. If they'd been on concrete, Trina could have backed and filled and made it just fine, but here she didn't trust the caliche shoulder. That stuff had a way of twisting out from under the tires, as she'd found out when visiting some of the derricks on her list.

Besides, the lineup for the snowcones blocked her in even more than the truck did. "Hola, Maria," Watkins said when they got to the front of the line.

"Howdy, Greg," the snowcone slinger responded. "Rainbow for you?"

"Yep," he said. He started to reach for his wallet again but Trina caught him. She already had a twenty in her hand, and that might have been the only thing that stopped him.

"I'll have a grape, please."

"Thank you both. How'd we all end up here this time, Greg?"

Greg Watkins gave Maria the summary of the events. The line had wound down a bit, but Maria had that look, like she could pack ice and drain syrup and give a dissertation on the weather, the traffic, and the likelihood of the Lobos making the tournament in March without breaking a sweat. "Huh," Maria responded when Watkins finished. "At least it wasn't like last time, you remember, Greg?"

"I do," Watkins responded with a smile and a shake of his head.

Trina looked from one to the other. Maria answered her unspoken question for her. "Porta John truck had a bit of an accident, let go half his load at the Texas state line."

Watkins was waving his hand in front of his face. "You could smell it for miles, just about. Except right here. All the traffic pulled over, we had the whole mile filled, this was the only part of the highway where you could take a deep breath without worrying what you'd be tasting when you did it."

Maria laughed when Trina's face showed her skepticism. "He's telling the truth, ma'am. The wind must have been blowing just right, maybe."

"Or maybe it's our little mile," Watkins put in.

"Most likely," Maria said, "But you don't have to go making her think we've spent too much time in the sun."

Trina laughed. "I'm thinking at this point that I'm the one who's been out in the sun too long." She reached for her phone, automatically, to get the time, but she'd left it in the car. "At this point I guess I'm going to end up getting a room in Midland tonight."

"Why?" Maria asked.

"No way I'm making my plane now," Trina responded. "Another hour and a half of driving, I'd put in a couple hours for security like they tell you to, but that's all used up with tacos and snowcones."

The other two smiled at each other. Watkins answered for them both. "You'll be ok, miss. We promise."

"That's just what the other lady said," Trina replied. "I'm not saying I don't believe ya'll..."

"We know you're going to need a little believe-me backup before you buy in," Maria said. "For now you'll just have to trust us." She looked down the line of cars and trucks stretching down the shoulder, the snowcone truck the head of the line. "About half full this time, not too bad for a Wednesday morning now."

"Yep. And I'll be able to get back before the end of my lunch hour."

"If you ever wonder why he's so dedicated about going out for lunch, there's your answer," Maria told Trina. "Either way, I think we've just about fueled everyone up for the rest of the day." And she started in on pulling her window screens down and closing everything up.

Ricky was doing the same thing with his taco truck; the little crowd took the hint and spread out for the climb-in and saddle-up.

Trina shook her head. "How often do you all end up doing this?" she asked Watkins as they walked back to her rental.

The older lady was still there at the driver's side door. "I took the opportunity of a place to sit, young lady. Hope you don't mind?"

Trina didn't have to touch her pocket to check her wallet and the keys to the car. She could see her cell phone sitting on the dash, and her bags were all in the trunk, safely undisturbed. "Not at all."

Watkins leaned in to the conversation. "The young lady asks how often we get together for our little shindigs, here on the mile."

The older lady pulled herself out of the car. "About every three months, more or less. Some years it seems like it happens more often, but then when we all get together the next time and start counting and telling stories..."

"It always works out to about once a season," Watkins finished. "Depending on when you get through here again, keep your eyes out."

"You never know when a Porta John truck will spill?" Trina asked.

The other two laughed and laughed; the three of them shook hands all around, and then it was time for Trina to climb back into the rental and move on. She was resigned to another night on the road.

As it turned out, though...

See, when the road hypnosis was still in control, and then the panic took over, when Trina rolled past the first mile sixty-two marker, her phone and the clock on the car both rolled to 10:01 a.m., precisely.

When Maria's snowcone truck pulled out, and Trina put it in gear and followed her, when the rental rolled past the second mile sixty-two marker, both the cell phone and the car clock clicked another minute over.

To 10:01 a.m., precisely.

Trina was halfway to Midland before that fact clicked into place. "I guess I should be glad I didn't try and reserve a room already," she told the empty car.

This week's free story brings you to a place that's almost not quite there. And yet it's as real as the mile markers drifting by... I call this one The Missing Mile.

Trina's just doing the boring part of the job: marking miles until the airport.

Only, there's this piece of New Mexico between that has other plans...

No clue of what's happening to you...

Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine: Rhythm Is Gonna Get You; Gloria Estefan and Enrique Garcia, songwriters

It is a poorer world indeed without Little Richard in it.
I am just glad to have shared a world with such a mighty, wonderful person, and personality. I couldn't have ever come up with such a character.
But Richard Penniman did...

Half A Rye by M. K. Dreysen - An R. M. Danelev Story

The conversation was one of those types; long on talk, short on information. The man and the woman filled the empty spaces with food and tea and water, and people watching. The deli was busy, the perfect place to let the words get lost in the buzz.

She asked him, when they got to the point where they were both starting to worry about cleaning up and getting out, "Do you want the job done, or not?"

He hemmed and hawed. She was used to it. They always did this. When it came down to the money. "Cheap, fast, good, pick two," she continued.

"I'm an engineer, I know the catechism," he replied. "Fast and good is best if I can get it."

"Which means you can afford it," she said. "I like that. It's always nice to work with someone who's ready to pick up their responsibilities." She gave the theatric sigh. "Unfortunately, I think fast is off the table for this one. So you're getting the discount by default."

He didn't ask why there would be no fast resolution. He knew the answer, he'd set her the problem, after all. And he'd worked the idea himself, projects and plans were bread and butter, the things that paid the bill she'd hand him. "How much, then?"

There were no standards for this sort of thing. The costs were always more than she'd anticipate, up front; the risks similarly vague. No worries. "Ten grand now," on top of the five she'd charged just for meeting, "Here's the account number." She passed him a piece of paper, empty on both sides except for the routing and account numbers. "Twenty when I'm done. Look for the account numbers in your mail."

She left that place then, and him settling the check behind her. Her mind wanted to work the problem, get started. She made it focus on the immediate. Was she being followed? Drones, the flyspecks she'd never notice, except that she'd trained herself to look for them anyway. She used them, she knew what they could do.

Cars that showed up more often than they should? The old standards worked because they worked.

She didn't see anyone following her. Maybe that meant she and the man whose name she didn't know were clear. Maybe it meant the company he worked for hadn't yet twigged to the fact of his duplicity.

And maybe if she looked under her pillow in the morning she'd find change from the Tooth Fairy. Sure, the dude's company might not have people following him around on the street.

That didn't mean they weren't keeping track of him. Given what he did, the projects he worked on, she could book it. Big-time companies with property to protect didn't let their engineers far off the leash. They couldn't afford to, not when there were governments the world over ready to kill for what was in the dude's head. And competitors willing to do worse.

No, it was given. His emails were logged, his phone calls as well. Every trip; his passport tracked, his accounts monitored. The dude wasn't in any danger of getting out from under the umbrella they'd crafted. Company man living over the company store, all but indentured.

And he was looking for the big score, the one that would free him. Send him down the road to a beach somewhere warm. One of the quiet ones, no cell phones and by God no major corporate presence.

She'd spent her own time in the life, she knew how it was done. That was the part where "Fast" was off the table. She'd get him his score all right. It just wasn't going to happen quickly. It might have to wait until he'd shown a little faith.

Maybe she'd push it until the day he walked off the job, told them he'd found a community college that needed an E.E. to fill in the night classes; could be he'd stumbled over a little startup working on prosthetics for the poor and the disabled. Whatever it was, Randi just might make him sweat until he'd plunged into the unknown before she stole the thing, sold it, sent him the proceeds. Less commission and the thirty-five already deposited, of course.

The dude wasn't public-facing. No social media accounts, those were right out. No jobhunter websites; he was probably listed in his professional society directories, too bad she didn't care enough to pay the fees and find out. No matter, he'd whispered what it was, and she was tech, she knew enough to guess at the value of the project. A board, not a quantum computer itself, just a communications board. That would let the bits on the inside talk to the bits on the outside. The kind of thing that was expensive now, cheap tomorrow, but would eventually be ubiquitous, and rolling in a few pennies on the dollar every time another copy shipped out.

By the standards of the bigwigs at his company? Nothing major, the thing was a sideline. By the standards of a forty-year man who'd never quite been in on the IPO's and the big money splits?

Oh, it would do. If he could cash in, it would do nicely. There were only two problems. He had to get it out to the world, and he had to time it so that the competitors didn't have their own projects getting ready to roll. If Apple and IBM and Microsoft all had their own versions, maybe not perfect but good enough, why would they pay for his? Why would they care?

Right now they would care, because they, and the others in that class, had only whiteboards and powerpoint presentations. He had the board, sitting in his little corner lab, counting electrons and photons and, best of all, putting out the numbers just as his simulations predicted. Wait six months? Yeah. Wait six years and the opportunity would be gone. He was smart, her dude, but he wasn't unique. Not when everyone and their dog knew where the next generation of computers were going, and were throwing money to lay the weeds down and build the path to that future.

Assuming the guy wasn't a plant. A dangle, bait on the hook for someone foolish enough to come along and take a big bite of.

Which was her second problem. Preparing for the doublecross. But that was ok. For now, it was time to get the crew together.

"We'll need the plans, and we'll need the prototype," she told them. "And we'll need to put together the bids."

Sami volunteered to find the bidders. Marlan took on the acquisitions side of the project. "Careful of the timing issues," she told them both. "We need room to maneuver."

Marlan shrugged. "No promises, Randi," the big man said. "But you know that."

She did, they all did.

She took the unstated part of the problem. The other half, the one where they ended up with a trail of private security folks and FBI and CIA agents.

She wrote email, worked contacts new and old. Security teams, management, human resources, there were handles all over the place, she turned them all. Until she got the first meeting, the pitch over lunch. And then the second meeting. The one where she bid the contract for grey-hat services. "Stress tests."

Randi had shaken the tree until she'd found the vice-president with the budget and the interest. Same company as the guy, the engineer, who'd brought her the gig, but not his boss. A branch or two over on the hierarchy.

"I'm most worried about our manufacturing lines," the lady told her. "Anybody who can read patents can figure out what our boards look like. It's putting them together where we make our money, though."

Randi didn't scoff. She wasn't the one stuck running the company, why question where the manager put her time and worries. "If I'm to be comprehensive, I'll need to work on the other divisions. Their interfaces with the fab lines are also points of vulnerability."

The manager nodded her agreement. With one caveat. "My authority runs out at half a million."

'Ok, a million,' Randi translated to herself. 'With the proper leverage.' Not that the board would fetch that. Setting up a real auction was out of the question, under the circumstances. "I'm sure we can keep it in budget," Randi said out loud.

Marlan greeted the news with elation. And stress, because it didn't matter how soft the net was, they still had to walk the rope up above. "Well, if we do end up on somebody's cameras, we've got a story to go along with it. Best not though." He walked Randi through his plans. The building, the cameras, well, the cameras they both assumed were there. The security team, onsite twenty-four seven. Hi-tech they were, all the tools would be hidden from casual viewing but they'd be there.

Randi noticed something, about halfway through the walkthrough. "Wait, where am I in this?"

"In the van with me, as usual. We'll be down the street at the Mall."

"You're making everyone walk?" The building where the engineer worked his magic wasn't part of some giant complex. It hid in the trees; she didn't know whether they still called the Woodlands a mixed development or not, but that was the effect. Office buildings sheltered by the pines, precious few roads through the trees, neighborhoods suggested but never found unless you knew where to drive. "Why not just pull into the parking lot? There are people there all day long, right?"

"In theory, yes. In practice, the only one I've seen work nights, besides the janitors, is a woman with agoraphobia. Half a dozen cars in the parking lot, and the cops pull through two, three times a night. We'd stick out like a clown at a funeral."

The thing that impressed Randi the most was the detail about the engineer working nights. Agoraphobia, sure it was an ADA accommodation, the company says, "Set the schedule you need to." Marlan finding that information, well that's why she loved her team.

She had a few edits, though. A tweak, here and there.

On the night. "I'm doubling my rates," that was Squeaks' comment. "You're making me do real work tonight, Randi. We talked about that."

She and Marlan sat in the van, about a mile and half away from the site. "You're telling me you can't do a night's honest work, Squeaks?"

"It sort of goes with the territory, doesn't it?" his partner, Dave tonight, put in. "We work nights so we don't have to. Work, I mean."

"Gentlemen of leisure?" she asked.

"I'd love to be so," Dave continued. "But first I've got to deal with this crap job my boss shoved on me."

Sami'd worked the lines to set it up. First, she tracked down the janitors, the contract and the company filling it. Then, she'd done a one and done, show up, get a temp gig, find out who and where the HR for the janitor company was hiding. Ghost away after a couple days, then spend a week or two making noises, showing up saying, "Just coming to get my check, I'm not causing trouble."

Put a USB stick into a convenient port when no one was looking, they all being distracted by finding her paperwork and making her just go away. Pull the stick's payload up and get the back door open, just a crack. Enough so that Sami could make a tweak to the schedule. Well, a couple of tweaks, three or four false trails so it wouldn't be obvious, if anyone ever came looking, which one of the buildings had been the target. They'd put it together, of course, if the tech company made a nuisance of themselves.

So, on the night, four of the janitor teams in the area found themselves with paid holidays. Sami'd appended notes to each, "Paid time off" for company reasons. Private parties, that's the rumor that went around the janitors, not that they cared much because a paycheck and a night to sleep in was nothing to complain about. Just so long as the companies didn't leave them a mountain of trash to clean up.

Randi and her team weren't going to leave a mess. They had standards.

Borrowing a van wasn't necessary. The usual janitor team drove their private cars to their gig, they'd all been badged into the building. Sami's other trick was replicating the other half of the deception. "Yes ma'am," she told the HR rep at the tech company. "We've got a few temporary staff we need to badge into your facility. No ma'am. Well, one of the new hires will be full time, I think, after the new year, when Sandy retires." Amazing what Sami picked up in just a couple days working with the janitors. "We're rotating staff, as well, making sure we've got you covered for sick days and so on. Tomorrow? Yes ma'am, I'll be happy to come in tomorrow, should I send you the files?"

While she still had the email address that went along with the deception. The HR team had been happy to work with her. "We very much appreciate that, you're so thoughtful. Most places, they'd just shortstaff us if someone couldn't show up."

"We're always working to give our clients the most professional work we can," Sami responded.

Sami walked out with half a dozen badges. "They'll expire Saturday night, of course," the HR lady told her.

"Do you need me to send them back to you when they're done?" Sami asked.

"No, not at all. This way, when one of your new hires needs to fill in for our permanent team, we can just renew the badge and they're good to go." The lady gave Sami the big smile, the one that said she was doing Sami a favor, matching the one that she thought she was getting from the janitor company.

Sami didn't disappoint her. "That will be a big help, thank you! And thank you again for all your help with this."

Since she'd shown up on cameras, Sami wasn't part of the team that hit the tech company on the night. That fell to Squeaks and Dave and Yala. Three person team, matched up to the three janitors who worked the four story building every night. Sami had promised they'd deliver a full staff, and she tried always to keep promises.

The other question she'd made sure to answer, was how the agoraphobic engineer figured into the picture. "Oh, her? She stays in her office all night. I make sure to knock when I need to get into her office, close the door behind me. She's nice, a sweet lady." So Sami warned Yala.

"I treat her with kid gloves?" Yala asked.

Sami shrugged. "I don't know the woman, all I know is that she stays in her office while the janitors are working. Mena said she talks to her all the time, she just makes sure she doesn't sneak up on her."

"I'm not sure about this," Yala said. "Do I need to mask up?"

"We'd have to put some weight on you to look like Mena," Sami replied. "Just remember the story, you're a temp learning the ropes."

Yala kept up her stream of worries; since she was the one showing her face, everyone on the radio understood her concerns. She'd work through it, they all knew. They'd just all have to listen to her do it.

Just the way the team worked, Randi reminded herself. Like her and Marlan, sitting here in the van trying not to grind their teeth down to the nubs, watching video streams listening to chatter counting down the hours. "Who's bright idea was this anyway?" she asked the air in the van.

Empty air because Marlan wasn't one to rub her nose in her own impatience.

The whole thing was tedium more than it was an exciting hit. Dave took the top floor, all offices, the place where the managers of the tech company, the vice-presidents but not the one that Randi had talked into funding a grey-hat hack team, that was another part of the company, this was the R&D division. The interface was there of course, that was the whole point, she had brief for her team to go anywhere hit anything that might put the v.p. at risk, so this counted, please God let this count.

Yala was on the next floor down, the one with the night shift of one. More offices, the design team, where their guy had had his office. Not his lab. Just his computer, still up and running, gathering dust in the office just two doors down from the lady with the fear of open spaces and people. Yala did her thing, plugged the USB drive into the port and went about cleaning up the rest of the floor.

Marlan sighed relief when the breaker program called home. Not to send data, the drive had more than enough space to store what it needed, the program just pinged Marlan's phone with a random port access sequence. It told him it was starting its business, copying everything on the drive.

The labs were on the second floor. Squeaks worked that one, where the rest of the night's business rested on his shoulders. He didn't have clean room access, but he didn't need it. The rest of the lab spaces were all open to his badges, the workstations where half-built boards, pieces of computers and boxes of chips, wiring diagrams decorating whiteboards and coming together in red and green and black and blue bits of wire on benches scattered around the floor. "Which one was it again?"

Marlan and Randi rolled their eyes; neither one of them rose to the bait. Yala did, though. She was getting ready to knock on the engineer's door, her nerves were at their highest pitch so far. "You're kidding right? Dude, if I have to come down there and roll your ass over..."

"Sorry, Yala, I'm getting there, I'm getting there. We're flying slow, right, just cleaning the offices, right? How's the drive doing?"

Marlan keyed the mike, two quick bursts and a slow one. Enough for the team to know they were getting where they needed to be.

Squeaks had made sure he knew where their target sat, like it was almost as forgotten as the guy who'd put it together. Just another board, this one finished at least, half a dozen wires sprouting from it. Their target wasn't plugged in, it sat in a protective clear plastic sleeve, on a shelf in the back with a few other completed projects. Squeaks left it there while he went about the rest of his business. Cleaning the lab space.

Yala knocked on the door. Waited for "Come in" from the other side, then slowly snuck her head around the jamb. "Ma'am, I'm filling in for Mena tonight, my name's..."

The radio reception was poor, so the rest of the team heard a mumbled staticky conversation with no details. They all held their breath, waiting, until the vacuum cleaner roared to life and drowned out everything else. The collective sigh over the link would have made Yala laugh, if she could have heard it over the sound of the vacuum. When she was done, she said "Thank you", closed the door, and trundled back down the hall. "She was nice," she said.

Randi and Marlan shook their heads. The uniforms would have to do their work, would do their work because that's what uniforms and hats did, anonymized and made everyone wearing one just another part of the crew, part of the background.

The rest of it was just waiting. For the second set of pings, knockbacks telling Marlan the program had finished transferring all their guy's files; that Marlan could send out two slow pulses and a fast one over the radio. Then Yala pulled the cord and stuffed the drive into her pocket. Finished up, with a knock on the only closed door on her floor and a "Good night" and a mumbled "Good night" from the other side, and then it was time for Yala to get on the elevator with Dave.

And meet Squeaks and his cart on the second floor. "Finish up the first floor?" "Yep." "Might as well do it right."

The first floor was bathrooms, conference rooms, a lobby and the elevator bay. Vacuuming and a quick swipe here and there and they were all out of there just about three in the morning, a good eight hour shift like clockwork. Or like they'd planned it or something. Squeaks put his backpack with the board stuffed inside it over his shoulders, and the three of them got out of that place.

Marlan and Randi met Squeaks at the pre-arranged spot, a hospital just up the road where all-night comings and goings didn't mean anything special. Squeaks passed them the backpack, and then they were all on the road again. The van, the rest of the cars, they'd return to the rental companies they'd got them from.

And then Randi began the rest of the operation. Well, she would have begun it, except that she'd already prepped the v.p. of the tech company for the possibility. "You and your team really do deliver. It was that easy?"

Randi met the lady at the company's other main campus in the Houston area, way out toward Katy. The company had followed all the latest trends and built a nice cafeteria for their high-tech, high maintenance workforce. Randi was comfortable making the meeting, the open design of the first floor didn't allow for a really intrusive level of snooping. Not to the level it would have taken to detect the contents of the bag at her feet.

She wasn't badging into the upper floors, where the scanners and the x-ray machines were hidden discreetly in bays just past the elevators. That was the v.p.'s problem. If she came up with a good price, of course. "No, it actually wasn't all that easy."

Randi wasn't interested in giving away all her secrets, either. There'd been a few other finished projects sitting on the shelf next to their guy's work. If she gave away too much, there wouldn't be any ripe fruit for picking at a later harvest date. Not that she was aiming for anything in particular. Randi just liked to keep her options open. "My team's good at their job, though."

"I'll need a complete rundown, a report to send along to my security teams. They need to know the holes to plug."

'And you need a justification when you're defending the money you're about to spend,' Randi added to herself. "I'll be happy to put a report together. It's all part of the service." She'd just have to make sure she left herself a backdoor, that was all.

The negotiations were almost too easy. In the end, Randi had guessed right. The v.p. had more purchase authority than she'd wanted to admit to. Then again, Randi reminded herself, it was one thing to ask a consultant to put together a threat assessment.

It was another thing entirely to have that board sitting there, stolen so cleanly that the R&D division had yet to discover it missing. The v.p. paid up the million without blinking.

Randi walked out of the building split between emotions. Glad, that she'd never promised the guy one way or another who she'd sell the thing to. And, kicking herself for not asking for more. She was halfway home before better sense took over from the momentary flush of greed. "Team's paid, our guy gets his retirement topped off, and we get out of this clean."

She celebrated by stopping by the deli where she'd met the guy in the first place. They made a killer corned-beef on rye.

This week's free story is the second R.M. Danelev story. I call it Half A Rye.

This one's a story of how, when you set out to work a job on the boss, things don't always turn out the way you planned.

...You had to be there...

Gladys Knight and the Pips: Daddy Could Swear (I Declare...), Johnny Bristol, Gladys Knight, and Merald Knight, songwriters.