Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust, Page 3

goodnight. She pulled away.”

  “How’d you feel about that?”

  “Well, I thought maybe I’d poisoned the well, but the next time I saw her everything was fine. She even hugged me goodbye. In retrospect, maybe she was pulling away, distancing with the hug rather than let me try to kiss her again, but at the time I was just happy that she still wanted to be friends.”

  “That’s good- not the snub, obviously. That confession. Not because it’s good for the soul, but because admitting what could make you sound like a suspect- a suspect doesn’t do that. You’d be circumspect about it. Play coy or dumb or just make up something, like how you hadn’t really been attracted to women since Sex and the City turned you into a misogynist. And since we're getting along so well, I'd prefer not to have you arrested.”

  “Did Sex and the City turn you into a misogynist, Detective?”

  “Its pull among women is unsettling, but compare it to my gender’s sports fixation and it’s hard to really cast any stones. How long had you and Claire been friends?”

  “A couple of months. Ran into her getting the mail one day, and we just bonded. There was a stray cat outside, gray with white flecks, like dirty snow, and she went out to pet it and I went with her. We ended up getting coffee and sitting outside with the cat, talking.”

  “Describe finding her body.”

  “I've tried going to the gym in the mornings, in the daytime, even evenings, and always it was full of pervy men who didn’t even push weights around as a pretense, just stared. We decided to go at night. We went last Wednesday, and there was this creepy old leathery woman with biceps bigger than her breasts who would not stop hitting on Claire, so tonight was going to be our last try.”

  “I’ve got joint issues, so it takes me a while to warm up. I usually stretch before we go to the gym, so we can warm up together. I came down the stairs, and Claire’s door was open- no, ajar, just open enough you could see a little sliver inside the room. Lights were off, and Letterman was on the TV with no sound on. That’s when I saw Claire, leaned against the foot of her bed, in that svelte little jogging suit I hated because it made me feel less pretty when I was with her.”

  “My first thought wasn’t that she was dead, but that she’d fallen down, or been drinking, or maybe passed out or something. I tried to shake her, but her head snapped back and I knew right then that she should have woken up, should've screamed because that would have hurt her neck. I felt for a pulse before I called the police, but I knew I wouldn’t find one.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “The 911 dispatcher told me to close and lock the doors and windows and wait for a squad car. That’s what I did. And I cried. I didn’t want to touch the body again, or the scene, so I just stood where I was and cried.”

  “What was the first thought you had, after you realized that Claire was dead? Did you see the red scarf around her neck, or some of the bruising?”

  “I remember thinking dying that way, scared, she didn’t deserve that. It was awful for me to lose her like that, but for her- she was my friend, and now she’s dead.” She starts to cry. Without thinking, I put my hand over hers, and she looks up, spooked. She tries to put away the emotion. “Don’t police have conflicts of interest? I’m surprised they let you handle this case.” I give her a puzzled look. “Wait. You didn’t actually know Claire, did you?”

  “I’ve seen her around a few times, but we’ve never talked. I kept meaning to.”

  “I know what you mean,” she swallows, and smiles, but the smile was sad. “She was a pretty girl.” We didn’t talk much after that.

  I walk her back to her room, and that’s where I make a mistake. She kisses me, but I don’t take a page out of the dead girl’s book and duck and weave. Then again, Claire ended up dead and unkissed- seems like a lousy story to crib from. Betty pulls me inside.

  I won’t blow 9½ Weeks worth of smoke at you, but it was intense; it had been an emotional night, and we were both pent up. I might have fallen asleep right after, but her cat starts nuzzling my face. “The cat. Gray with white flecks. This is the stray you first bonded over. You loved Claire, didn’t you?”

  “I think I wanted to.” She falls asleep in my arms; and I'm with her a bit later. I wake up, feeling the tickle of hair on my face. I think it has to be the cat again, but it's Betty’s hair on my face. I look around the room for the cat, and realize I can hear the sounds of cars. The window is open. Did I get hot in the night and open it? Or maybe more important, did her cat get out?

  I look around the apartment, trying not to make too much noise and wake her. But there isn’t any cat food, no litter box. I have a hunch, so I put my pants on and walk down a few floors.

  Claire’s apartment is empty. Nobody’d been back since the uniform left, leaving yellow tape across the frame. I thought I’d seen it earlier, but now I don’t have to go looking, I can smell it. The cat’s litter box is in a little closet with the washer-dryer combo unit. And in the kitchen, there's food and a water bowl. I try shaking the food, saying, “Here, kitty.” No cat.

  I go back into the bedroom. The window is shut, but I wonder…

  Sure enough, as soon as I open the window, that gray and white cat hops up on the sill with a chirpy little meow. “So this is where you live,” I say, as the cat rubs against my chin.

  One of the floorboards behind me creaks, and I know it's Betty, before she even speaks. I turn to see her, holding a knife. But her voice betrays her, and even as the words dribble out gravity tugs at the knife. “You didn’t have to care… you’d never have known if you didn’t care. Why couldn’t you just care about me? Why was she so special?”

  “I do care. But you killed her. And that’s really a bad circumstance to begin a relationship in.”

  “Oh; I hadn’t really thought about that.” She sets the knife down on the dresser. “She liked you, you know? You noticed her, and she noticed. I think she was waiting for you to talk to her.”

  I feel like an idiot for not having seen it sooner. “You thought we were involved in some kind of a love triangle, so you decided to murder the other side. That is romantic in the most fucked up way possible.”

  “I’m sorry. I felt bad, hiding things from you.”

  “I’m murder police. Nobody tells me the truth. Not even me. You’re an excellent liar, by the way, avoid all the usual tells. You’re pretty, too, which helps, but I think I have to put you in prison.” I take her hand, and very gently put my cuff around her wrist. “I never would have figured it out if it weren’t for the cat. You couldn’t stand leaving the cat there, with the body. That cat meant something to you, because it was from when you first met Claire. You really loved her, didn’t you?”

  “I think I wanted to. I wanted to love you, too.”

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  Colossus

  “Record. Microphone test. Check?”

  “’Microphone test.’ Complete.”

  “The voice recording is a system redundancy, in case, for whatever reason, the video fails. I’ll start with a brief, lay-person's introduction to our ADS, an atmospheric diving suit. Unlike previous generations, it isn’t built as a wearable submarine, keeping one atmosphere of pressure until crush-depth. Instead, it helps lower the general pressure; at lower pressures it’s less effective than conventional ADS, but at higher pressures more effective. As an example, I am now at 1.05 bar, roughly five percent greater pressure than sea level. The suit is designed for two hours exposure at 1.2 bar, and equipped to allow for in-water decompression after the dive. The suit is water-tight, and can easily withstand the summer water temperatures at Antarctica, keeping the interior at roughly 50° Fahrenheit; for cold protection I’m wearing a sweater my wife made me. We fought over a name for the suit until October, when my son died in a car accident; we agreed to call it TROY.”

  “Damn, can’t wipe my eye. I’ll have to… make a note of that for the engineers. The purpose of the dive, and the reason for t
his ridiculous video apparatus on my shoulder is recording the environment and perhaps catching a rare deep-sea glimpse of mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid. The import of this expedition is that no dive has taken place this deep beneath the ice shelf of Antarctica.”

  “1.1 bar. The innovation I’m most proud of in this suit, and the one that makes this journey feasible, is a complicated pheromone duplicator. It releases pre-programmed chemical solutions into the water to simulate squid pheromones, including those known to induce passive states and fear responses. Pheromone groups known to cause aggressiveness have been left out of the configuration, for obvious reasons. The colossal squid is known for attacking sperm whales, the largest toothed animals on earth, so having a peaceful defense system was necessary for the expedition. The mechanisms involved could not have been designed without the tireless efforts of Dr. O’Shea and his fellow researchers from Auckland University of Technology, and frozen samples taken from Te Papa Tongarewa’s 2007 specimen.”

  “Currently, I’m outputting a steady stream of fertility pheromones; they won’t attract the larger female of the species, but there’s a chance I’ll at least be able to interact with one of the males.”

  “1.2 bar. At this depth, it’s impossible to see without a light source, which only affords a few feet of visibility, so