Aaron Conners - Tex Murphy 02 Read online

  My speeder was still parked outside, which was good. I crossed the parking lot and beeped my alarm off. Gripping the door handle, I pulled up. Suddenly, a white flash blinded me as something smashed into the back of my head.

  UAKM - CHAPTER FOUR

  “My God, Murphy. You look like hell.”

  With some effort, I pushed myself up from a puddle of drool and slumped back into my chair, struggling to focus. The Colonel stood across the desk from me, slowly shaking his head. I hadn’t seen Colonel Roy O’Brien since he’d kicked me out of his detective agency. I’d been one of his young, star recruits, and he’d been my mentor. I owed a lot of what I knew to him. We’d parted on bad terms, though, and had avoided each other since.

  Fifteen years later, he was standing in my office, unexpected and uninvited, and I was seeing three of him. The three Colonels had lost the remaining color in their hair and looked a little thicker through the waist. Their faces had acquired a few dozen additional wrinkles, but the jaws were still firm and thrust forward. The deepset blue eyes hadn’t lost any of their malicious glint, and the acid smiles were every bit as smug and infuriating as I’d remembered them.

  I watched through horribly pulsating eyes and mirage-like waves of nausea as the three old men merged into one. “You caught me on a bad day. I forgot to take my

  Flintstones.”

  I was slurring, damn it. And probably talking too loud. The Colonel stepped around to where I was slumped precariously and sat down with one leg up on the desk. “Looks like I caught you in the middle of a bender.”

  “This isn’t a bender. This is nighttime.” Without warning, my chair lurched to the left, forcing me to grab for my desk and severely disrupting my already impaired

  equilibrium. With no small amount of effort, I forced the room to stop spinning and stretched myself. The Colonel’s proximity wasn’t helping the unsettled feeling in my stomach. Maybe a drink would calm things down. Two bottles floated around my desk. I guessed right and unscrewed the cap. “Wanna drink? This stuff isn’t bad once you get used to it.”

  The Colonel smiled and looked piously toward the floor, his hands folded serenely on his thigh. “No thanks, I haven’t had a drink in eight years.” He glanced back up at me, too quickly. “Yeah, one day I looked in the mirror and decided I needed to make a few lifestyle changes. Quit drinking, quit smoking. Now I’m looking forward to a nice long retirement on a tropical island with a tribe of beautiful young women.”

  It wasn’t an attractive mental image, but everyone has a dream. He chortled and rubbed his hands together.

  “Enough about me, Tex. Tell me about you. How’s everything going? Bad as it looks?”

  I steadied myself as conversationally as possible. “Depends. What is today? Saturday?

  Oh, Saturdays aren’t too bad. I don’t get really suicidal till about Thursday afternoon.”

  I poured about seven fingers of bourbon in the general direction of my glass, then attempted to fix a pointed stare at the Colonel. “So, was there something you wanted?

  Or did you just come by to sprinkle a little salt into the open wounds of my pathetic life?”

  The Colonel chuckled insincerely. “Now why would I want to do a thing like that, Tex?

  Just because you ratted on me, got me suspended, humiliated me in front of peers - you sold me out, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  His eyes burning through me, the Colonel paused to run a hand through his white, still-thick hair. It was a mannerism he’d always used when he was agitated. He stood and walked away, a hand massaging the back of his neck. After a moment he turned back to face me and, slowly, the smug grin reappeared.

  “Of course, that’s all in the past. I quit hating you for it weeks ago. Naturally, I got reinstated and everything worked out fine.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I took an unnecessary slug from my glass and wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve. The Colonel smirked and returned to his perch on the corner of me desk.

  “So what happened? I heard you were doing pretty well there for awhile. Solved a couple of decent cases. What’s your problem? Are you one of those people who can’t live with success?”

  I leaned into my left armrest, away from the old man, and rubbed my eyes with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. “Oh, living with it isn’t the problem. I just can’t commit to anything long-term.”

  The Colonel didn’t respond immediately. I looked up at him and saw the priggish look on his face. It made me angry, and the paint thinner coursing through my veins didn’t help. I leaned forward and stuck a finger at him. “You know what I was fifteen years ago? I was a stupid, idealistic kid! If you weren’t such a bastard, you could have tried to understand why I did what I did. I mean, now…now I understand that I was out of line, but it was just an innocent, stupid mistake. You didn’t have to cut me off!”

  The Colonel leaned down and stuck a gnarled finger back into my face.

  “Yes I did! Because apparently you never learned the first rule of a PI: never, ever betray your friends! Friendship goes beyond blood or genetics or politics. You find out who your friends are, then you hold onto ‘em! They’re a precious commodity to people like me and you.”

  With one last piercing stare, the Colonel stood up. He crossed the room, then paused at the door. “You’re too good to end up like this, Tex. You’ve got no excuse.”

  He opened the door. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

  @@@

  The door slammed shut, and I was no longer in my office. I was in a dark place, lying down, a dull ache lurking somewhere close by. I’d been dreaming about the Colonel - or was I remembering a conversation that had actually happened? I couldn’t be sure. My mind was out of focus, and an unpleasant odor was making it hard to concentrate. What was that smell? Vaguely familiar…nauseating…claustrophobic. In my mind’s eye, I saw my Great-Aunt Gertie, who’d been dead for thirty years, I began to hear soft footsteps and low voices.

  Somewhere nearby, I heard a harsh female voice accusing someone of sleeping with her sister. A deep, testosterone-laced voice denied everything. I tried to open my eyes, but it hurt. From the back of my skull, a steady pounding gradually accelerated. My eyeballs felt as though they were swelling up. With a mighty effort, I opened my eyelids.

  Everything was white. I tried to move my head, but it didn’t want to. The female voice was now accusing the man of sleeping with her grandmother. The voice was coming from above me and to the left. The stench in the air was almost unbearable. Suddenly, a woman’s face appeared in front of the white backdrop. The face was long and thin, not unattractive, but haggard. The eyes looked down at me compassionately, and the narrow lips gave way to two sets of uneven, gray teeth.

  “Hello there.”

  I tried to respond, but nothing came out. My mouth, I realized, was parched, and my lips felt dry and brittle.

  “I’ll bet you’re thirsty, huh?”

  The woman’s face disappeared, then reappeared behind a light blue plastic cup. As the water hit my tongue, my swallowing mechanism failed to respond, and I lurched into a coughing fit, which amplified the pounding in my head. After a few seconds, we tried again, and this time the water went down without incident. The woman vanished, and I began to wonder where I was - a POW camp, a lunatic asylum, or worse. Maybe some good Samaritan had carried me from my office and checked me into a detox center. I tried to get my bearings. The last thing I could remember was LaDonna. Or had it all been a rot gut-induced hallucination?

  A man’s face appeared above me. I strained me eyeballs down a saw a clipboard tucked under his arm and a stethoscope around his neck. It all made sense now. The smell, the vision of Great-Aunt Gertie. I hadn’t been in a hospital for years.

  “Hi there. I’m Dr. Berry, and this is Nurse Chase.”

  I had to take his word for it. She was out of my peripheral vision.

  “How’s the head? You’ve got quite a little bump back there.”

  Ah…a master of understatement
. It felt like I was sleeping on a baseball. Abruptly, I remembered being jumped in the parking lot of the Post-Nuclear Café. I felt a hand on my wrist. The doctor was checking my pulse.

  “Fine, just fine.” He looked back down at me. “Your injury was quite serious. You were unconscious for almost two full days.”

  I licked my arid lips and croaked, “Where am I?”

  The doctor was looking at his watch. “Brownsville Regional Hospital. The police brought you in. Apparently, someone attacked you. They didn’t tell us anything else. On behalf of the town, I’d like to apologize. In general, you’ll find us to be good-hearted, law-abiding citizens.”

  I was still trying to grasp what had happened. Then a horrible thought occurred to me.

  “Where’s my backpack?”

  The doctor shrugged and glanced in the direction of the nurse. “I didn’t see a backpack, did you? No, I don’t think so. There’s a new Z-Mart down on Main Street. I’ll bet you can pick up a new one there. And their prices are generally quite a bit lower than you might expect.”

  Damn it. I closed my eyes and tried to think. Who would’ve jumped me? I was almost certain I hadn’t been followed from Mexico City. Maybe it’d just been some drunken drifter, obliterated by a fifth of Cuervo, looking to hit someone. Or it could’ve been some rowdy local teen, rolling an unsuspecting out-of-towner for beer money. I was actually hopeful that whoever had hit me had been after my wallet. Maybe the statuette was still back in the parking lot and had been picked up by someone at the diner. If it was gone - I looked down at my wrist, still pulsating under the doctor’s fingers. There was my watch. It was no Rolex - in fact, it was a cheap piece of crap that only worked under certain climatic conditions. But if I’d been the victim of a simple robbery, they would’ve taken it. Damn.

  After the doctor finished checking my vital signs, the nurse gave me a pill the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Several minutes later, everything went into soft focus, and the pain in my skull receded. I struggled onto my elbows and sat up against the metal headboard.

  Now what? If the statuette was gone, I was screwed. Maybe the police had picked it up.

  Maybe.

  I spent the next four hours in medical limbo. Despite my obvious desire to leave, the doctor and nurse were hesitant. Apparently, they felt the medication they’d given me could have antisocial effects. I told them that keeping me locked up could result in violent seizures, but the nurse brandished a hypodermic and held me at bay throughout the afternoon.

  Resigned to waiting, I reached for the TV remote. I didn’t have an idiot box in my office, and I hadn’t intentionally watched television since Nickelodeon had replaced Ren and Stimpy with Three’s Company. As I surfed restlessly, special news reports kept popping up with earnest-looking correspondents describing a bombing in Los Angeles.

  There was nothing especially newsworthy about a bombing, especially in LA, but this one had obliterated CAPRICORN headquarters. I’d heard about CAPRICORN, but had always been under the impression that it was just another left-wing agency, concerned with suing the NRA and making frantic speeches laced with sound bites and peppered with alliteration.

  The reports were informative. I knew, of course, that relations between Mutants and Norms had become more and more strained over the past year. I also knew a little about the Crusade for Genetic Purity, which had grown from a radical right-wing rec room full of anti-Mutant extremists into a mainstream organization with lobbyists, PR people, and a shiny, new temple-esque structure in downtown Phoenix.

  According to reports, Norms were flocking to the crusade, which held the belief that Mutants were subhuman and were polluting the world’s gene pool with faulty genetics.

  Some of the most admired minds in the world had affiliated themselves with the crusade and were backing what they called a eugenics movement, which seemed to involve classifying people by their genetic makeup.

  The reports went on to say that, recently, CAPRICORN had officially joined the Mutant League in countering the growing power and influence of the Crusade for Genetic Purity. The media usually depicted the crusade in a dubious light, hinting that it had been behind the bombing and subtly accusing the crusade’s leaders with backhanded compliments and innuendo.

  One news show went into detail about the president of the Crusade, the Reverend Claude Sheppard. Apparently, the good Reverend had a somewhat checkered and

  mysterious past. The program also described the process of initiation for joining the crusade and told how aspiring members had to pass a genetic screening. Once accepted, members advanced through a series of sixteen levels of indoctrination. Eventually, they could reach the ultimate stage of enlightenment, at which point they were invited onto the Moon Child, an orbiting resort station for the spiritually elite. On the Moon Child, members would undergo the final rites, which would result in them receiving the Good Housekeeping Pure stamp of approval.

  I’d never taken a gene screen, as they called it, but I knew I was a Norm, though I’d never considered it an issue. I made my home in a primarily Mutant section of the Old City, and most of my friends were Mutants. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to me.

  Back when my grandfather was growing up, people were still discriminating on the basis of race. It seemed strange to think about, but there had actually been a time when people of color were forced to use separate facilities and were banned from certain places. Now, here was a racially mixed organization picking on a different group because its genetic structure wasn’t the same. In my mind, it was just another playground scenario gone bad in the hands of adults.

  And as far as I was concerned, the Crusade for Genetic Purity wasn’t any different than the hundreds of other hate groups that had come before it. The KKK, the Nazis’ Final Solution, South African Apartheid, Bosnian Ethnic Cleansing, the West Coast Gang Wars, the Asian Scouring, the African Tribal Siege, the Middle Eastern Alliance.

  In every case, the destructive movement had been suppressed. After World War III, everyone looked around at what they’d done and seemed to decide that we were down to our last thread. Then came the post-war generation, and “Mutant” became a new check box on the census form. Originally, it was used to classify war veterans for benefit purposes. Then came the second generation, and the children of the Mutants were born into the same classification. Now, at the start of the third generation, when the Mutants were beginning to make up a substantial portion of the population, genetic

  discrimination had started to rear its ugly head.

  It wasn’t something I planned on getting worked up about, but I hoped that the crusade would, like its predecessors, takes its fifteen minutes, then disappear. But I sensed that this time, it was different. To a lot of people, Mutants represented something bad, the visible evidence of man’s stupidity and mortality. They were society’s scar tissue.

  The afternoon came and went, and the pounding in my head slowly changed from a sledgehammer to a hard rubber mallet. The sun was about to call it a night when the nurse came in with my clothes and announced that I could leave. I got dressed and found my wallet untouched in my back trouser pocket. That was a bad sign. Whoever had jumped me hadn’t been interested in taking my cash. I didn’t have much hope that I’d find my backpack.

  When I checked out, I gave the desk nurse my address and told her to mail me the hospital bill. It was going to make a nice addition to my collection. Eventually, I hoped to have unpaid bills from all fifty states and Puerto Rico.

  I called the police from the hospital. They picked me up and took me back to my speeder. My backpack was gone - the countess’s statuette and twenty-nine thousand dollars with it. I gave the police the information they needed to fill out a report, but it was useless. They had already interviewed the people in the diner, and no one had seen anything. I spent a couple of hours checking around on my own, but it was as if the incident had never happened. No one had seen or heard anything. If it had happened in my town, I would’ve had connections to consult and a gr
apevine to listen in on. Here in Brownsville, I had squat. There was nothing left to do but fly home.

  @@@

  I reached New San Francisco with mixed feelings. It was something of a relief to be home, but my head was pounding and my stomach was tied up in knots. I wasn’t sure if I should tell the countess that her statuette had been stolen a second time, but I’d tell her what happened and maybe she could get a Brownsville flatfoot to pick up the trail. I began rehearsing my pitch, how the whole miserable experience had cost me most of my retainer and that I’d appreciate it if she’d at least compensate me for time spent and bodily injury. Once again, I had ignored the credo of smart business: Get it in writing.

  It was after midnight when I landed my speeder in front of 2429 Filmore. The

  neighborhood was dark and quiet. Before leaving the speeder, I paused. Maybe it would be better to come by first thing in the morning. No, I wanted to resolve this situation as soon as possible.

  As I walked to the door, I passed a Century 22 For Sale sign planted in the front lawn.

  An unpleasant tingling went down my spine. I climbed the front steps and rang the doorbell. After the third ring, I moved to one of the front windows and peered in. It was pitch black inside, but from what I could make out, the room appeared to be absolutely empty. I checked all the entrances and finally had to break a window at the back of the house to get inside. The power was off. Using my Zippo as a tiny torch, I walked through the mansion.

  It was completely cleaned out. With the exception of some cardboard boxes and several small potted plants, there was nothing…until I reached the sitting room, where I’d met the countess a week before. Everything was the same as it had been. I walked to the fireplace and touched the ashes. They were cold. Week-old cold. I’d been set up.