The night was dark and cold, and the raindrops left crimson speckles across the mechanically pressed and starched alabaster shirt that I had thrown on this morning, without even thinking about the weather. There was no time to think about ruined clothes, or the growing mounds of laundry that were accumulating around my cramped apartment, pressing in from all sides like soldiers. I was on the beat again, and my contact was late. I had spent enough time in New Brooklyn to know that inventing excuses was inviting disappointment - if you didn’t assume the worst, you were practically asking to be caught with your pants around your ankles.
That’s how I found Darling - flat on his back, head bent to one side, hands gripping a newsograph reader - and his pants firmly around his ankles. There was a small trickle of blood from his left ear, still leaking intermittently when I found him. A stain was spreading across the tile of the dirty bathroom, and I closed my eyes, trying to hide my disappointment from his corpse. Darling had been a good contact, useful, but no angel, known for slumming it in the seedy parts of town. He had a penchant for older sex partners and a nasty smoking habit that I always imagined would kill him long before he developed his first wrinkle. Those wrinkles he adored. There was a noise behind me - someone hadn’t seen the crime scene tape around the outside of the lavatory.
“Crime scene.” I said, pointing to the tape.
“I have to piss.” said the guy, shifting his weight back and forth. There wasn’t enough effort in me to argue, and the look in his eyes told me he was about to add to the mess. I waved him past and he let out a sigh of relief, barely making it to the urinal. I closed my eyes again and imagined what I would tell the corpse’s wife. I probably just wouldn’t. She would never find me in this city anyway.
My friendship with the coroner was almost more trouble than it was worth, but tonight, I was glad to have someone who knew how to operate the equipment. I found it difficult to understand how in 2222 people were still using bonesaws, but the coroner - “The Colonel”, as he liked to be called - had a mastery over his toolbox that never failed to make me flinch. I had seen enough corpses to fill a canal in my line of work, but I could never get used to the way human bodies that had been alive maybe hours ago would get torn to shreds by people who had only the best of intentions, who really believed in the fundamental principles of justice. Unlike the beat cops I had worked with on occasion, the coroners always seemed to be dedicating themselves to a higher purpose. The Colonel was no exception, glancing now and then over to the digital sculpture on his desk of Mariana, one of the 9 Originals, who I had seen him praying to and occasionally cursing in the name of. The long haired figure, rotating slowly on it’s golden pedestal, seemed to give him a sense of strength and resolve which had always failed me. Jealous thoughts left my head as he removed his gloves and goggles and came over to me with a grimace. He clapped me on the back, and I could feel something wet on
“I have some bad news about your friend here.” he said, looking into my eyes. I let my eyes unfocus instinctually - an old trick I had learned on the force, a coping mechanism. The woman who had taught me it had just finished returning a single charred ear to a grieving widow, the owner of which had been caught on the wrong end of an luxtran exhaust port.
“Let the world blur in front of you, and count the different colors that you see. Every shade. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by anything else. Think only of colors.”
I had no real attachment to Darling, but I thought about colors anyway. Steel blue, pale blue, a pale flickering yellow. The Colonel's sallow face looming before me. A pink rose, left on the sidewalk to be stepped on and faded by the sun. His hornrim glasses shone harsh white light at me, and I blinked, realizing he had been saying something the entire time.
“Could you repeat that?” I asked, blinking reality back to life.
“I said, there are multiple subcutaneous hemorrhages around the auditory nerve. He was hit by some sort of sonic weapon.”
I grimaced. I had no great love for Darling, but it turned my stomach to know that he had likely died in agony. Sonic weapons were strictly shadowmarket fare, after the 92’ riots. Enforcers had used sonic weapons on crowds of demonstrators, and leaked footage showed the horrors the weapons could inflict. The public backlash led to a total weapons ban, one of the few to ever be put into effect in the Federalized States.
“I’m sorry, Ito.” the Colonel said, “you know as well as I do that this sort of weapon is almost completely untraceable.”
He handed me a medical report, an old-fashioned carbon copy, white ink on a crimson sheet of paper.
“Hopefully this will help narrow it down.”
I thanked the Colonel and walked back out into the night. The rain had stopped now, and pools red liquid were being absorbed by little drones with orange spinning lights mounted to their heads. I kicked one as I passed, and it let out an annoyed chirp. It was hard to believe that there was someone being paid to operate those things, sitting on a couch somewhere with a headset, making more in a day than I probably would in a month. But I had tried government jobs before, and I couldn’t stand the mediocrity of it all. The stench of normalcy. The permeating sadness. Nothing short of a premature grave.
The night dragged on from there. I pored over the medical file and the digital readout of the crime scene, but there was nothing there I didn’t already know. Still, I somehow felt I owed it to Darling to try to sift some shred of information out of what little I had in front of me. My eyes began to hurt, and futility was beginning to tug, like fishhooks, on my resolve. I pored and pored, and poured another drink. Eastern whiskey helped me focus, either that, or made it impossible. Tonight was a good night, my eyes shot back open and stared at the information some more. There had to be something here I could use. Subcutaneous hemorrhaging...found in a state of undress...no items on the body. A sonic weapon...whoever did this, I thought, swallowing another burning mouthful, was either wealthy, or they were in deep with a bad crowd. The worst crowd possible.
I awoke with the medical report stuck to my cheek, the half-finished glass of whiskey spilled across the table. The damn readout device had soaked a good amount of it up, and flickered and died before my eyes as I tried to focus them. Focusing, unfocusing, god, life’s relentless. I didn’t feel like giving it a proper send-off, my head was pounding, so I just pushed it off the desk. I went to the fridge and pulled out some food, but I didn’t feel like eating - I just stared at the cereal as the milk and frosted biscuits fused into an unrecognizable sludge. I gazed longingly at the whiskey bottle sitting on my desk as red raindrops began to fall on the windowpane. I knew I couldn’t risk it, but I still put the bottle to my lips, tilted it back. Just a taste, just enough to shock this miserable feeling out of me. Just enough. The golden liquid was millimeters from my tongue when I heard my signaler buzzing. Two short bursts, one long. An incoming call from the Station. I put down the bottle and picked it up off the floor, trying to brush a few gray strands of hair out of my eyes before the communication opened. When it buzzed to life, I was faced with the shimmering 3D image of a hollow-eyed man whose face was fractured with thick creases. His hair seemed to be fleeing from the highest point on his scalp, coming down just above his shoulders like some sort of bizarre cape made of greasy fur. He looked at me with tired disgust.
“I was told you handled the killing over at PaChingo’s” he said. That was the name of the place I found Darling’s body.
“That’s right”.
“Are you aware that you never filed the spatial readout to the Station’s log?”
I was aware. The guy I had let in to piss was a violation of code 3-7-something or other, and the consequences for missing readouts were less of a pain in the ass to deal with than getting written up.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes”
“Well, my mistake.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, still slick with sweat. I had sweat a lot in my sleep ever since I had stopped taking a cocktail of drugs, daily. It didn’t make any sense for the Station to go out of there way to provide evidence on a case as small as this. Typically, it would sit in a pressurized drawer or folder on someone’s computer, at least for a couple months, before someone bothered to tell me.
“Evidence?”
“Yes. A signal from the deceased to his wife. Registered at 1:04 AM.”
She looked at me with the same look I had seen in the eyes of people who had just been menaced on the street. She blinked it away in a flash. The signal started.
“-Oh god, oh god, oh god...honey, can you hear me? I’m..I’m sorry. This shit’s gotten way out of hand. I never should have - I never - just get out of the city, please, I - I never knew they were going to take it this far. You have to get out of the city. It’s going to be a fucking crater by the end of the week. Just get out. I don’t have much ti-”
The message cut off there, and I imagined those had been Darling’s last words. The hologram stared at me, and I stared back. There was a sick sort of gnawing on the inside of my stomach. She seemed to take my silence as understanding.
“Last night, a Class-5 Particle Bomb was stolen from the vault underneath Lake Hemlock. We still haven’t been able to verify the perpetrators identity, but they were quick and efficient. There were only 14 casualties.” She paused to allow the information to sink in, words hanging heavy in the air.
“The deceased Arlo Darling is the only solid lead we have.”
The only solid lead? More like a dead end. There wasn’t a single thing I could share with her that led in any direction. The words got stuck in my throat, and I stood there, lamely, the Particle Bomb, Darling and the heist swirling around me.
“I don't have a lot of time, and we have a lot of other people working on this. I’m granting you gold-level authority clearance to pursue this case. Signal the evidence you’ve collected - it goes straight to the top.”
I nodded. There was so little I could do, and from what I had just heard, my entire world could be ripped away from me at any moment. I’d always imagined the end would come, and I’d be powerless to stop it. I had accepted that long ago. Now, the opportunity to prevent it was dangling just out of reach, maddeningly close to possibility. That was worse, somehow, than the inevitable. It was worse than not knowing - knowing something, but not knowing what to do. I called up the Colonel to see if he had missed anything on the initial analysis of the body. The signaller deedled for about half an hour with no response before I shut it off. He was asleep at this hour, and anyway, I hadn’t had any breakfast. How was I supposed to break things down in my head while my stomach was eating itself?
I stared down at my black coffee and the half-eaten bagel shaped like an infinity symbol. I was kidding myself to think this was what I needed to get started, but I didn’t have any better ideas. The world I had spent the last 20-odd years living was teetering on the brink of annihilation. It was too much to grasp on an empty stomach. I stared into the crowd, parceled out around the antique linoleum tables, eating, arguing and laughing. They had no idea what was bearing down on them. I wanted to get up and scream, tell them to run, get as far away as they could before it was too late, but what good would that do. If there’s one thing that the city had taught me, it’s that it would take more than a crazy guy shouting about the end of the world to break them out of their routines. I finished my meal in silence and paid the clerk, heading out into the sun-streaked fog.
I had two leads, two very shaky leads, and I headed back to PaChingo’s - it was closer to the coffee shop. It was one of those days where the sun seemed reluctant to warm the air, the cold seemed to whip through the air with a purpose. Outside of the club, I saw a few figures milling around. One of them wore a black-and-white hooded fur coat that I recognized instantly. Mrs. Darling. I wasn’t ready for this yet. I urged my muscles to turn, fast, and break away from the meeting, but her eyes - deep brown, peering over top of some flashy rectangular sunglasses - met mine, and the pang in my heart held me in place. This was going to hurt. My hand lept instinctively to my pocket, where I usually kept a few vials of the sauce - a concentrated blend, altogether far beyond the doctors recommended daily minimum dosage. The pocket was empty - I had likely taken them out during last night's haze. That would certainly explain the headache that had been seeping into the corners of my vision. Damn...I wasn’t ready for this.
“Detective?” Mrs. Darlings voice cut through my thoughts.
“Mrs. Darling, Hi. I was just about to come see you.”
“You don’t say. Well, you can walk me home. I’m sure you’ve got questions.”
She turned to the two patrolman she had been talking to.
“Good day, officers. You know where to find me.”
We had only taken a few steps before she began.
“Don’t worry about breaking the news to me, Detective. Those two lovely gentlemen already expressed their deepest sympathies at his tragic parting.”
She looked over to me, and I could see she had decided she was not going to cry about this.
“You knew what he was like, Detective. We’re married, but...it’s just a title. It’s been that way since before you met either of us. So I don't feel the way a grieving widow maybe ought to feel.”
I nodded. I didn’t know exactly what she was going through, but I knew it wasn’t exactly heartbreak.
“Arlo was a reckless, stupid man. If we hadn’t been married, he would’ve drowned in his debts years ago. He just could never help himself. I never hated him, but he was impossible to love. He broke every promise he made to me many times over. But I could never hold him accountable for any of it...it was just too painful to watch him suffer.”
We walked past a small below-ground park, chirping birds only just audible above the rushing vehicles and blaring advertisements.
“We used to meet here sometimes,” she said, gesturing at the park, “Get coffees. Watch the birds.” she let out a long breath.
“I’m gonna miss him. He was a friend. No matter how much trouble he caused me.”
“I’ll miss him too.” I said, feeling as though my conversation skills had been amputated. This was all much more personal than I was used to.
“He didn’t deserve to go like that.”
“I always thought, this is how it would happen,” she said, and I looked away, pretending not to see the droplets that had collected on her eyelashes.
“Shot in some...some seedy dive.”
I put a hand briefly on her shoulder. The patrolmen probably hadn’t told her the whole story - how Arlo had been snuffed by an experimental black-market weapon. I wasn’t sure if that was something she wanted to hear right now. My intuition was failing me - I kept looking for some signal, a sign of what to say next. Silence fell over our conversation.
“You seem a little...shook up,” she said, eyes studying me carefully.
“It was a long night.” I replied, brushing off the question.
We rounded a corner, and Mrs. Darling’s shop lay ahead of us. “Let’s talk inside.”
Darling’s Timepiece Repair was just like the other holes-in-the-wall in the Orange District - a cramped one-level emporium, with shelf-lined walls crammed from floor to ceiling with goods. In this case, it was old fashioned clocks...plastic and rubber digital alarm clocks, sleek black wall-mounted timers, even the occasional glass-and-gear timepiece with hands, that went tick...tick...tick. We sat down around a table strewn with a half-finished breakfast, as well as some miniscule tools and parts. I found myself at a total loss for words, again. Mrs. Darling stared down at the half finished breakfast like she was trying to convince herself to give it another shot.
“What did they tell you?” I said finally.
“Oh, the usual, I guess. ‘We’re terribly sorry to inform you that Mr. Darling was found, murdered in the bathroom of PaChingo’s, please take all the time you need, we just want to ask you a few questions about his activity over the past week.’ I told them no one had any reason to kill him, other than the usual. He had so many debts I could never keep track of them all.” She sighed and held her hands up to her temples. “Oh, Arlo...” she sighed. I wanted to reach out and squeeze her shoulder again, but I couldn’t reach from where I was sitting, so I patted the table in front of her. She didn’t notice.
“His creditors wouldn’t kill him.” I said, looking around at the dusty timepieces. “Dead men can’t pay their debts. No one’s come after you for money, right?” She shook her head.
“Not a soul”. I felt the rough stubble on my chin, pondering.
“Arlo must have been involved with something behind your back. I don’t know how much I should tell you, but...the weapon that killed him - it was sonic weaponry. No loan shark is packing that kind of heat. I know you probably don’t have any leads on this, but -”
She held up a quivering hand to stop me. Her face was drawn tight, and her eyes flashed with a rising panic.
“Last friday.” She said, “When he came back, I found an entry stub for the Redriver Club in his jacket.” She reached into her pocket, and pulled a crimson slip from a thin black case.
“He’s got so many outstanding debts, he’d never make it past the first screening, unless he was invited.” She handed the slip to me. It bore the Redriver logo, a pair of mirrored R’s with a winding river running between them.
“I thought maybe some big shot creditor was trying to give him a spiel about paying his debts on time. I didn’t know why they’d waste the money on getting him into a fancy club like that. But if he was killed with a sonic gun...someone with that kind of firepower would easily have the money to mingle in the Redriver.” She looked at me, studying my reaction. Probably trying to get me to tell her more secrets that could see me shitcanned. I thought about telling her about the bomb, but that was too much. I didn’t feel like spending the rest of my life in a 6 by 8 windowless room if we all lived through this mess.
“Listen, you should probably get out of the city.” I told her, trying to make my warning seem measured and calm as I got up and headed towards the door. “If it’s not creditors, then you might be next on their list. There’s no telling what they’ll do next, and they obviously have the resources to track you down.” Mrs. Darling smiled, but her eyes were cold.
“I appreciate the concern. I have some contacts in the Underground, I can lie low with them for a little while.” I tried to hide my disappointment, but she noticed something.
“What do you know?” she asked, standing up and stepping in front of the exit.
I looked at her eyes, and behind the strong features, I saw the expression of a pleading widow. I let my eyes unfocus and took in the colors - dark greyish browns, sandy yellows, metallic blues...
“I’ve told you all I can,” I said, straining to keep the emotion out of my voice. “Take care, Mrs. Darling.”
As I walked out, I barely heard her whisper after me, “Call me Mercy, Detective.” The door chime jingled as I left.
I looked at the ticket stub in my palm on the transport across town to the Redriver Club. I couldn’t imagine what was waiting there for me, so preparation seemed like a waste of time - that could just be the hangover talking. Whether it was going to end up being foolish or not, though, I was gliding across town towards the only thing close enough to a trail to be able to follow.