another day another dollar. But it has a bearing upon what happened the following afternoon when I got an out-of-town yell from the Caere Twins. These bottle-bald cuties were crime stylists who monitored the scene for crimes that went outside the known taxonomy of offense. A wholly new crime was rare and precious as white gold. They were camped out in Washington with the theory that a target moved least at the axis. I split the border to face with them in an apartment so small they had to sleep in the mirror. The place really served as a digital gun foundry. Forcing the gun scene from industry to desktop, the Crime Bill had freed it up for limitless configuration. The Twins were among the many who innovated firearms on the fly.
“Siri sent an ‘eyes only’ letter,” they chirped in unison. “With real eyes.”
The Twins gave me some tech laced with sarcasm so heavily encrypted it never really thawed into effect. It was like being flogged with a double helix. I finally extracted the fact that Siri had sent them an email just before her crescendo, but the feed had been jacked to their forge at the time and the message funnelled into a blank skeleton gun which had lain ready for impression.
“What was the message?”
“A command trail,” they said. “Two million keystrokes.”
“All this theory’s like eating hair,” I whined, impatient. Then the truth sunflared over my brainlobes—the only way to achieve the offense density Siri craved was to hack it, initiating a thousand thefts, frauds and intrusions in a split second. The program she created to do it now informed the design of the gun cooling in the Twins’ forge. They opened the panel and retrieved a firearm resembling a tin ammonite with a chicaned barrel and pupstock Steyr grip. Spiral cylinders were real fashionable then. All part of life’s kitsch tapestry.
“Etheric sampler in the butt,” said the Twins. “This gat’s her legacy and culmination, shadowboy, her tub of warm ashes. She’d want to be home.”
“You mean I should take it back and scatter the ammo? No, not me. The cops are right about a gun eventually getting used whether or not there’s a reason.”
“True of theirs, shadowboy. Be careful.”
My car had been replaced with an inflatable replica which burst when I put the key in the door. So I was on a clunker train to Beerlight. Carriage to myself until this big guy in gut braces bellies in. Looks at the empty seats, then lumbers right over to me, dropping down opposite. Regards me with a head like a throw cushion as the light and dark pass over us both.
“Staring is its own reward.”
“It certainly is.” In the pocket of my full-length void coat, the ammo-guzzler zinged against my palm.
“Shave the fuzz from the face of a moth, and what do you get?”
“Fatty Arbuckle?”
“Think again.”
“You?”
“On the nose. Tubs Fontanel’s the name. Fontanel by name, fontanel by nature. Retired cop but I keep my eyes open. Know why I consider myself always on cop duty?”
“Any impediment to imitation’d throw you back on your laboring character?”
“Nah. Watch this.” He hauled himself up, stood in the aisle, and started throwing flat, startled shapes with his arms and legs. This galoot danced like a cartoon robot. Then he sat down, panting and chuffed. “Know where I learnt to dance that way?”
“The laughing academy?”
“Nah.” He took out what looked like a cell phone. “Know what this is?”
“Scrambler hotline to the circus?”
“Nah. Two-end scanner. I hear about a ventilation job I go round and scan the floor pattern. All began two years ago. I was flippin’ through crime scene photos—you know, chalk body outlines on the floor? Got this flickerbook effect, like the outline man was dancin’. And I thought—get a choreographer in here, we’re sittin’ on a goldmine. Got dance numbers from every month last year. Multiple homicides I string together for, like, big production numbers. That thing I just did? Combination o’ fifty crime scenes, January, central DC. I’m based in DC but I just hear about the fashionable events in Beerlight, yeah? Vortex, goofy crime scene, chalkline’s a doozy, wanna record it. You from Beerlight? How’s the local color?”
“Red.”
“I get it. You got the chair there? We got gas in Washington. Folk say the killin’ jar’s just as cold-blooded as some homicides, but I think it’s a crime of passion. Yeah rare’s the day I forget to bless those who gave us a blank check on enforcement. Them and the bicthought media. Support us you’re objective, criticize us you’re biased. I could point to a dozen trite precedents. But the respect ain’t there. What happened to faith in a higher authority?”
“Burned in a wicker man?”
“Nah. Average Beerlighter’s got a morality like a ferris wheel. What is it with you people? You hear me, boy? It’ll be shuffleboard and orange walls before you realize you’re runnin’ naked through an alligator ranch ...”
His words had galvanized me into sleep—boredom was always the heaviest rock in the law’s armory. And I dreamt I was a clown driving a dynamite truck. Cliff edges blurred like sawteeth. Siri was sat next to me in red-fleck dungarees. “What did the Twins say?” she asked calmly. “Was it more art than science or was it based on exacting principles?”
“C-c-can’t you see I don’t give a damn about that?” I shrieked, wrenching the wheel, and the tires blew out, waking me.
Tubs Fontanel was dressed the same as Siri from the dream, and looking as astonished as an inevitably snipered senator. Arterial blood misted and swirled between us, settling in a soft rain. I’d blown a hole in my thigh. The retired cop’s bewilderment was perfectly apparent. “What the f ...”
I bowed to his judgment so fast his nose broke. The train was grinding into the station. He was snuffling something about paraffin and death as I leapt to the platform and made for the barrier with a few dozen others. I included a bullet now, and a thin gore trail. Yelling behind me—I turned to see Tubs bent over, gasping, light falling into him and being extinguished. He was a vacuum. Through the barrier, feeling squirly.
As I crossed the concourse everything was incredibly high- res. I could see infringement thresholds overlapping as people jumped queues, threw punches, glared—every head a poisoned chalice. Kirlian stormfronts collided around the rushing crowds. Mindmade law lines crisscrossed the air, weak and tangled as gossamer. As I passed through they shrivelled and vanished like burning hair. I stashed the gat in a locker, and blew.
Back at my barnacle-encrusted office I told the whole thing to my girlfriend and technical adviser, and she said it couldn’t have been more Freudian if the gun had gone off as I went into a tunnel. I told her Freud was projecting, she kicked me in the balls and I blacked out for sixteen hours, waking only when the cops arrived.
“And that’s how I ended up in a yelling cell with you guys,” I told the two interrogators affably.
“So you wouldn’t know why the President was found with his head in the mouth of an embalmed Kodiak bear. Utterly naked and quite dead. Five yards of Chinese firecrackers up his ass.”
