Smith's Monthly #12 Read online

  After a moment the woman’s appearance shifted. The Patty-look sort of melted and formed into a woman who had long, black hair, a very, very thin face with a long, thin nose, and eyes that were coal black. She had on a white pants suit and was as thin as any supermodel I had ever seen. She towered over all of us because not only was she tall, but she somehow managed to stand on six-inch heels.

  Laverne said nothing.

  Finally Morrígan smiled at Laverne. “Fine, if you want to be that way, I came to ask a favor of Poker Boy.”

  Morrígan smiled at me, then went back to staring at Laverne.

  I figured if my heart was ever going to explode out of my chest at any point in my life, now was the time. I was stunned I hadn’t just fainted dead away under that look. The woman was totally terrifying. I hadn’t been this scared in any recent memory. And that was with three of the most powerful gods in existence standing beside me.

  “You could have just come to me,” Laverne said.

  “And you would have agreed?” Morrígan asked, smiling.

  “Of course not,” Laverne said.

  Looks like I was off the hook at least for the moment.

  “That’s why I had to take a chance on approaching Poker Boy directly,” Morrígan said. “But he is as good as his reputation and saw me coming, clearly.”

  I think I had just been complimented by an enemy of Lady Luck. Not something I would ever want as a poker player.

  “So what was the favor?” Laverne asked, her voice perfectly level and very, very cold.

  “I wanted him to teach me how to play poker,” Morrígan said.

  “I assumed as much,” Lady Luck said. “Why?”

  The idea of teaching that woman anything, let alone poker had my knees weak again. I would rather have five guns pointed at my head than do that.

  My warning chill was doing tap dances up and down my spine.

  Morrígan laughed, but there was no real humor in the laugh and it brought no smiles to anyone around me. It just made the cold shivers on my spine increase. I was shivering so hard from my danger warning sense, it was lucky my foot wasn’t pounding on the ground like an excited dog.

  I was going to need to figure out a way to turn that warning signal off when I needed to.

  “You might know I have been hanging around with Ares lately,” Morrígan said.

  I wanted to shout “The God of War!” But somehow I managed to stay silent.

  “I heard you have been living together since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Laverne said.

  “Yeah, he got depressed,” Morrígan said, “He was so looking forward to that war. He thought it would have been epic. I’ve been trying to nurse him back to health.”

  “I’ll bet,” Laverne said.

  “So we’ve been playing some poker and I’m tired of losing,” she said.

  “He cheats,” Laverne said flatly. “Get a new deck of cards that he has not touched and see how you do.”

  Morrígan stood there staring at Laverne for a very, very long moment. Laverne just stared back. For a moment I thought they had stepped outside of the time bubble and were frozen in the instant of time like everyone else in the lobby of the MGM Grand.

  Then Morrígan smiled a very mean and angry smile and slowly shook her head. “That bastard.”

  And then she vanished.

  It was as if the sun had come out after weeks of rain and I had won the lottery all in one instant. The cold chills that had been running up and down my back suddenly vanished as well.

  “I hate her,” Lady Luck said.

  “But you might want to let her win some now,” Burt said, chuckling.

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” Laverne said.

  With that they both vanished.

  Stan just stood there shaking his head. Then he laughed and turned to me. “Nice job.”

  “What did I do?” I said, still feeling stunned.

  “You saw her coming,” he said. “That’s amazing. It’s not many people who can see through a Banshee’s disguise, let along Morrígan’s, the war goddess. And you got out of time without her noticing at first. Impressive against a god that powerful.”

  “And she’s living with Ares? Right?” I asked. “The same Ares of war fame?”

  “Yup,” Stan said, “as long as they keep themselves entertained with each other and out of the spotlight, the planet is a lot safer.”

  “Until they get mad at each over a poker game,” I said, suddenly feeling less hopeful for the survival of the human race.

  “Yeah, until that,” Stan said, thinking it was funny now.

  “And she and Laverne have issues, clearly?” I asked, trying to get my mind wrapped around what had just happened.

  “From way, way back,” Stan said, laughing. “A long story I’ll tell you about sometime, at least the parts I’ve heard. It predates me by a few hundred thousand years.”

  He patted me on the back. “Again, great job. Who knows what kind of problem or major war you just avoided.”

  “Thanks, I think,” I said.

  He laughed and vanished.

  The pounding sounds of the real world came crashing back in around me as he let go of the bubble outside of time. The fine patrons of the MGM Grand Casino and Hotel were back in motion, laughing, talking, and being very human.

  And right now that felt wonderful.

  I moved over and leaned against the stone pillar, trying to slow down my racing heart. Patty looked up at me and smiled before going back to helping her customer.

  Somehow my poker face allowed her to not notice that I had just escaped an encounter with a very dangerous woman. And who knew what else would have happened if Morrígan had gotten to me.

  But how in the world was I going to tell Patty what had just happened in an instant in time right in front of her?

  She was never going to believe me.

  I turned my gaze to the high ceiling of the lobby. “Stan, can you meet me and Patty at the Diner in thirty minutes? Milkshakes are on me. I need help explaining what just happened. I’m still not sure myself.”

  I could hear a low, rumbling chuckle echo over the noise of the lobby, then his voice, “Sure thing, kid.”

  Patty looked up and frowned. She clearly had heard Stan’s voice as well.

  “Long story,” I mouthed at her and she frowned, but went back to work with the customer.

  A long story that had only taken an instant to happen.

  And a story I had a hunch wasn’t over just yet. Morrígan playing poker against Ares just couldn’t turn out well. If not this century, then maybe next. That was the nature of the war of a poker game.

  Especially now that Morrígan wanted to win.

  Sometimes a detective can see with more than just his eyes. And sometimes a detective must take steps to stop murders, steps that seem harsh in the cold light of day.

  A woman, killed in her own bedroom, brutally skinned like an animal, seems to be just another victim in a ritualized killing. But to one special detective, she plays a much larger roll than victim.

  She might very well be a savior.

  BUTCHERED WHALE

  ON A RED BEDSPREAD

  YOU COULD SAY it wasn’t a pretty sight. I never would, but you could say that, and I’m sure it would be the truth. I never say anything about how something looks, because I am blind. But I “see” just fine in other ways.

  I can tell you a mile away that there is a dead raccoon rotting in the heat on the side of a road. I can tell you what the last shudder of a common fly with its wings ripped off sounds like. I can even tell you what it feels like to shake a lying man’s hand.

  But telling you exactly what a dead whale on a red bedspread in a small bedroom looks like just isn’t possible for me to do.

  But I do have enough to visualize it.

  I know the bedroom was that of a woman who wore perfume and used Ivory soap to wash her clothes. I know the bedroom has one bed, a dresser to the right of the door, and a window on the street s
ide.

  I know the woman is dead on the bedspread.

  My partner, J.P. Rancher shuddered beside me, meaning the sight in front of us was just plain ugly. J.P. very seldom shuddered at the sight of a dead whale. But for some reason this one made him shudder.

  I knew J.P. almost as well as he knew himself. For instance, this morning, before coming to pick me up, he’d had sex with his girlfriend. He hadn’t told me, but he slurred his words slightly, laughed at everything, and just reeked of passion. I may be blind, but I know a happily-screwed man when I smell one.

  “That bad, huh?” I asked in response to J.P’s reaction.

  “Yeah,” J.P. said, softly. The last word was more like a sigh than a word.

  “Man or woman?” I asked, trying to get him and me back on track. I knew it was a woman, but I had to get him focused as well. We had a job to do.

  “Woman,” JP said.

  “How big?”

  “Small, maybe five-one. One hundred and ten pounds. No fat. Nude. She had been a looker...”

  “…before this,” I said, finishing his sentence. “Standard death?”

  “Yeah,” J.P. said, “harpoon through the chest, then the hunter skinned and gutted her.”

  There was bile mixed with blood and fecal matter in the smell. “The hunter must have nicked an intestine. Sloppy work.”

  “Yeah, real sloppy,” J.P said.

  “Lamp?”

  “Gone,” J.P. said. “Looks like it used to be on the bed stand.”

  “I’ll bet the house was tossed as well,” I said. “This hunter was a rookie.”

  “Got it in one,” J.P. said. “I’ll get all the standard crime boys into action. With someone this new we might get lucky.”

  I nodded as J.P left my side. My hearing was so good I could have listened to his conversation in the next room, but I knew almost word-for-word what he was going to say. So instead I stood there in the middle of the room and studied everything.

  The smell was that of blood and shit and fear.

  The room was stuffy, the air still, so clearly the windows were closed tight, with no drafts.

  I took a deep breath of the thick air and made myself relax into the place. I used my senses to search out the light smell of breakfast made and cleaned up after hours before.

  I imagined the woman, opening the front door and being surprised by a hunter, who shoved her to her bed and shot her with a harpoon. I imagined the skinning, the ceremony of taking the lamp, the final slashing of the skull to destroy the clone link before the hunter left.

  But J.P had not mentioned the skull slash. Was this hunter that sloppy?

  Of course, I knew there was another thing missing. In all the whale deaths I had investigated, there had always been a clear odor, at least to me, of fish. This room had no such smell.

  J.P claimed he could never smell it, but he was a sighted person and he hadn’t learned how to use his nose and other senses like I had.

  Without even looking, I knew this wasn’t a whale that had been killed. The person on that bed, harpooned and skinned, had been human.

  I did not smile.

  I stood and waited for my partner to come back into the room. I knew better than to move around a crime scene, no matter how good I was at getting around without sight. I needed J.P. to get here and help me outside, and he was still giving orders in the next room to the techs.

  Having a human killed in a ritual whale ceremony confused issues greatly. Detectives had to figure out why this poor woman had been targeted as a whale? Had it just been a mistake? Or was this a copy-cat killer by someone who wanted her dead?

  Besides the clone chip in the skull behind the left ear, there was no real difference between whales and humans. And the clone chip had been made to look like skull bone on any scan.

  So it was impossible to know the difference at a glance. And I believed there really was no difference. Intelligent beings were intelligent beings, but my viewpoint was still in the minority around the world.

  Whale intelligence had been first put into cloned human bodies thirty years before in an underground lab in Greenland. The theory was that the twenty scientists in the lab were looking for a way to help save the whales from extinction. I personally think they were just making excuses to justify their working on clones.

  The scientists were shocked to learn that whale intelligence could be transferred, unlike human brains, and that the whales were as intelligent as humans. With a human cloned body and training, whales quickly learned a human language and how to function completely in the general population.

  And they liked it, at least most whales did. They wanted to stay out of the water, they wanted to keep their fingers, their ability to move around freely on land.

  Without telling anyone what they were doing, the scientists in the underground lab worked for years to grow and transfer as many whale intelligences into human cloned bodies as they could. These whales were then sent out all over the world to live normal human lives, with the only drawback being they had to have a certain light every night for a number of hours to stay healthy.

  I had been dealing with whale killings for years and I still didn’t completely understand the light. But with the hunters, the lights were the real trophies. The skin was the only proof offered to other hunters in the ritual celebration at their lodges. But each lamp was placed in a spot of honor, with the hunters name on it.

  It had become illegal to kill whales in human cloned bodies shortly after the news of their existence became public. But arresting humans for killing what many considered to be nothing more than animals was not a popular job. J.P. and I had been doing it for years, and we had gotten used to the names and the anger and the lack of respect that came at us. We were catching killers and that was all that mattered to us.

  Over time I started to understand what made humans in general so angry at the whales. It wasn’t that they were clones. It was because they were alien in nature and had a chance of living forever.

  The early scientists discovered a way to move whale intelligence not only from a whale’s body to a human clone, but from one human clone to another. For some reason scientists have yet to figure out how to move human brains from one to another, let alone do it for a second time, so we humans are still stuck with a short hundred years of life, while whales can possibly go on living forever.

  A lot of people don’t much like that.

  By five years ago the anger against whales in general had become so great that there were only a few thousand natural whales left in the oceans. But who knew how many there were living and having children in secret tanks and labs to be put into cloned human bodies.

  And like the old days in the south, organizations had been formed to keep the whales in their place, to get rid of the whales if possible. They were called hunting lodges, and they developed their own rituals that they followed with every killing.

  I very much wanted to skin every member of those lodges, just as they skinned the whales.

  J.P.’s footsteps told me he was headed back toward me.

  “We have a problem,” I said, lifting an arm in the general direction of the body. “She wasn’t a whale.”

  “What?” J.P. asked.

  “Unless whales have managed to get rid of the underlying fish odor, that woman was completely human. Is her skull caved in?”

  “Yeah,” J.P. said. “Let me check it.”

  I could sense that J.P had waved for a tech to come into the room to help him, and after a moment a man with a slight after shave habit who had had bacon for breakfast entered the small bedroom.

  I knew the guy stared at me for a moment, then turned his breakfast breath away to work with J.P over the body.

  “Shit!” J.P said after eight seconds.

  “No clone chip, right?” I asked.

  “No clone chip. She was human.”

  “Third one this month,” I said. “Detectives with the human division seem to have a problem on their hands.”r />
  The tech snorted and said nothing. I liked to use the words “human division” when talking about human crimes, even though J.P. and I were the only members of the “whale division” of the force.

  No one much cared that a whale got killed. No real cops moved to close down the hunting lodges. Some cops were even members. But after more and more humans died they were going to care. Of that I had no doubt.

  And then, maybe, the whale hunting would be stopped by the decent people of the world. I could only hope, because it was a large sacrifice some people were making to have this change happen.

  I didn’t know the woman spread out harpooned and skinned in front of me, but she had given her life for the cause of humane treatment for whales. Other humans would do the same until the hunting lodges were a thing of the past, and the law dealt with whale hunters like they did any other sick killer.

  “Looks like we’re done with this case, partner,” I said. We never took cases in which humans were killed. The whale deaths kept us busy enough.

  “Sure does,” J.P. said. “Let’s get out of this mess and let the next detectives in line take the ball.”

  J.P. touched my elbow and with only slight pressure made sure I made it out of the room and the house without stepping on any evidence. With luck the detectives would catch this killer and string him up.

  I got to J.P.’s car and slid in as he talked to the cop we were leaving in charge until the new set of detectives got there.

  I was glad that we had not been in that home long enough for me to get to know much about the victim. She had been killed by the stupidity and fear and hatred that had grown in our culture against the whales. I had had very little to do with it.

  Granted, I had given her address twelve days ago, a perfectly random address, to someone on the internet who I knew would pass it on as a possible whale home, and then have it passed on again, and then again, through underground meetings in five countries, until it found a hunting lodge in this city and a sick killer who would do the job.

  My involvement could never be traced, that much I made sure of. I hadn’t done the killing, I had just given out an address.