Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Holy shit,” said Dar. “Three thousand rounds…and Saboted Light Armor Penetrators. Christ, Ned, I’m not going off to war.”

“Aren’t you?” Ned said, closed the long box, locked it, and lifting the box off the stack, handed Dar the key.

Dar was in heavy traffic on the I-5 heading back into town, wondering whether to stop and pick up a burger or just go straight home to sleep, when Lawrence rang him.

“They found Paulie Satchel, Dar.”

“Good,” said Dar. “Who’s they?”

“Eventually the cops,” said Lawrence, “but first it was the Hampton Quality Preprocessing people.”

“Who the hell are the Hampton Quality Preprocessing people?” said Dar. “And can this wait?” He felt like a thief with the Light Fifty and boxes of ammo under a tarp in the back of the Land Cruiser. He had sweated through his Oxford-cloth blue shirt during the routine drive out of Pendleton and he still expected Marine guards to come roaring after him any second.

“No, it really can’t wait,” said Lawrence. “Can you meet me at this destination?” He gave an address in an industrial section on the south side of the downtown.

“I can be there in about thirty minutes in this traffic,” said Dar. “If I absolutely have to.” It was a shitty neighborhood and he had images of his Toyota Land Cruiser being stolen and the Bloods or Crips suddenly gaining .50-caliber semi-auto firepower.

“You have to,” said Lawrence. “If you haven’t eaten, don’t.”

It had been three hours since the “accident” and they had not extricated Paulie Satchel’s body yet. After one quick look, Dar understood why.

Darwin had never given much thought as to how hamburgers were stamped out—he knew that they arrived frozen and preshaped at all of the franchise burger places—but now he saw that Hampton Quality Preprocessing was the place. It was a large, clean, new plant in a crowded, dirty, old industrial neighborhood.

Dar showed his credentials to the people demanding it. Lawrence had already been at the scene earlier and led him on a five-cent tour through the plant. “Loading docks for the beef to arrive, that room’s where it’s cut and separated, grinding room there, this area’s where the extruded raw hamburger is put on a five-foot-wide stainless-steel conveyor belt that runs through the wall into the stamping room.”

The stamping room was where Paulie Satchel—the one possible witness to Attorney Jorgé Murphy Esposito’s final moments—was entangled in the machinery.

Besides a medical examiner finishing some paperwork in one corner, there were two plainclothes detectives there—Dar knew Detective Eric Van Orden—and five other men wearing white coats over their business suits and surgical masks over their faces. Lawrence introduced them as three executive representatives of Hampton Preprocessing International, headquartered in Chicago, and two of their own insurance investigators.

“Nothing like this has ever happened in one of our plants, anywhere, never,” said one of the men behind the masks. “Ever.”

Dar nodded and he, Lawrence, and Detective Van Orden stepped closer to the body. What made the scene especially grisly—besides the fact that Paulie Satchel had been squeezed headfirst through a three-inch maw of a hamburger press—was the river of raw hamburger meat, no longer so fresh, that surrounded his sprawled body like a river current of raw flesh.

“He’s been working here for three months under the name of Paul Drake,” said Detective Van Orden.

“Perry Mason’s chief investigator on the old shows,” said Dar.

“Yeah,” agreed the cop. “Satchel was a little weasel with a lot of TV-watching time on his hands between liability claims. He always got some shit job to tide him over until the insurance checks arrived. We’ve got aliases on him as Joe Cartwright, Richard Kimble, Matt Dillon, Rob Petry, and Wire Palladin.”

“Wire Palladin?” said Lawrence.

Van Orden gave a twitch of a smile. “Yeah, remember Richard Boone in the old Palladin series? The gunfighter all in black?”

“Sure,” said Lawrence. “Palladin, Palladin, where do you roam…” he sang.

“Well,” said Van Orden, “the card that the gunfighter used to hand out on the show read ‘Wire Palladin, San Francisco.’ Paulie was never exactly rocket-scientist material. He must’ve thought that Wire was Palladin’s first name.”

Lawrence gave the headless, armless body a reproving glance. “Everybody knows that Palladin didn’t have a first name,” he said to the corpse.

One of the company insurance men came over and began to speak urgently through his mask. “We know of you, Dr. Minor…know your work…and we don’t know who has called you in on this, but you should know right now that although this plant was highly automated—Mr. Drake should have been the only person in the room at the time of the accident—there are at least eight mechanical safeguards against such an accident occurring while the employee was cleaning the input orifice of the stamping container.”

“He was cleaning the stamping container?” said Dar.

“It was on his schedule for early this afternoon, when the acccident occurred,” said Van Orden.

“Eight safeguards,” repeated the insurance man. “As soon as that T-eleven restraining grate was lifted, the entire line was programmed to automatically shut down.”

Dar ignored the split infinitive and said, “How about the other seven…safeguards?”

“No way that he could stop the line and lift that gate and open the compression claws to clean the stamping container without the failsafe devices shutting it down,” said a company executive who had joined the insurance man. “You can imagine our shock when we found all of these built-in safeguards either bypassed or eliminated from the machinery.”

The detective sighed and pointed to the mass of machinery and maze of circuitry inside the opened stamping-press panel. “This wasn’t new,” he said. “Paulie was too stupid to bypass these things, and the murderer certainly didn’t spend hours tinkering with the machinery before starting the press on Paulie.”

The company man and the insurance man took a horrified step back when they heard the word murderer. Perhaps it was the first time the detective had used it.

Lawrence pointed to the Rube Goldberg rewiring. “This has been like this for years,” he said. “The fail-safes obviously slowed down the process too much, so they just bypassed all this crap and had the operator—Paulie in this case—shut off the power back there.” Lawrence pointed to a huge red button at the far end of the line. “And then he could clean the stamping press entrance five times as fast and they could get back to production.”

“Can someone turn the line and the press back on from outside this room?” asked Dar.

The five company people shook their masked heads so vigorously that sweat actually flew through the air.

“And Paulie was supposed to be working alone?” said Dar.

“He was working alone today,” said Van Orden. “Signed in at one P.M. as usual. Would have ended his shift at nine.”

“Other workers been interviewed?” said Dar.

Van Orden nodded. “The line shut down at the usual time when Paulie cleaned the press. There are only five other workers in the building…it really is highly automated…and four of them were all outside together, taking a smoke break, when the…event…occurred.”

“What about the fifth man?” asked Dar.

“He was working in the back room there and has a perfect alibi,” said Lawrence.

“None of these guys saw anyone enter the building,” said Dar.