Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“And if you don’t get a large enough dose?”

“Ms. Jones…”

She cut me off hard. “If you don’t?”

“Then it takes longer, but you still die. There are convulsions. The skin flushes and turns purple. Eyes bulge. They say it’s something like having a heart attack.”

“Rashmi?” She laid her daughter’s name down gently, as if she were tucking it into bed. “How did she die?”

Had the cops shown her the crime scene pictures? I decided they hadn’t. “I don’t think she suffered,” I said.

She tore a long strip off the napkin. “You don’t think I’m a very good mother, do you?”

I don’t know exactly what I expected her to say, but this wasn’t it. “Ms. Jones, I don’t know much about you and your daughter. But I do know that you cared enough about her to hire me. I’m sorry I let you down.”

She shook her head wearily, as if I had just flunked the pop quiz. One third does not equal .033 and Los Angeles has never been the capital of California. “Is there anything else I should know?” she said.

“There is.” I had to tell her what I’d found out that morning, but I wasn’t going to tell her that I was working for a devil. “You mentioned before that Rashmi had a friend named Kate.”

“The Christer?” She tore another strip off the napkin.

I nodded. “Her name is Kate Vermeil. I don’t know this for sure yet, but there’s reason to believe that Rashmi and Kate were married yesterday. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Maybe yesterday it might have.” Her voice was flat. “It doesn’t anymore.”

I could hear stirring in the next classroom. Chairs scraped against linoleum. Girls were jabbering at each other.

“I know Rashmi became a Christer,” she said. “It’s a broken religion. But then everything is broken, isn’t it? My daughter and I… I don’t think we ever understood each other. We were strangers at the end.” The napkin was in shreds. “How old were you when it happened?”

“I wasn’t born yet.” She didn’t have to explain what it was. “I’m not as old as I look.”

“I was nineteen. I remember men, my father, my uncles. And the boys. I actually slept with one.” She gave me a bleak smile. “Does that shock you, Ms. Hardaway?”

I hated it when grannies talked about having sex, but I just shook my head.

“I didn’t love Sunil, but I said I’d marry him just so I could get out of my mother’s house. Maybe that was what was happening with Rashmi and this Kate person?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

The school bell rang.

“I’m wearing white today, Ms. Hardaway, to honor my darling daughter.” She gathered up the strips of napkin and the sandwich and the carton of milk and dropped them in the trashcan. “White is the Hindu color of mourning. But it’s also the color of knowledge. The goddess of learning, Saraswati, is always shown wearing a white dress, sitting on a white lotus. There is something here I must learn.” She fingered the gold embroidery at the neckline of her kameez. “But it’s time for recess.”

We walked to the door. “What will you do now?” She opened it. The fifth grade swarmed the hall, girls rummaging through their lockers.

“Find Kate Vermeil,” I said.

She nodded. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

Itried Kate’s call again, but when all I got was the sidekick I biked across town to 44 East Washington Avenue. The Poison Society turned out to be a jump joint; the sign said it opened at nine P.M. There was no bell on the front door, but I knocked hard enough to wake Marilyn Monroe. No answer. I went around to the back and tried again. If Kate was in there, she wasn’t entertaining visitors.

A sidekick search turned up an open McDonald’s on Wallingford, a ten-minute ride. The only other customers were a couple of twists with bound breasts and identical acid-green vinyl masks. One of them crouched on the floor beside the other, begging for chicken nuggets. A bot took my order for the twenty-nine-cent combo meal—it was all bots behind the counter. By law, there was supposed to be a human running the place, but if she was on the premises, she was nowhere to be seen. I thought about calling City Hall to complain, but the egg rolls arrived crispy and the McLatte was nicely scalded. Besides, I didn’t need to watch the cops haul the poor jane in charge out of whatever hole she had fallen into.

A couple of hardcase tommys in army surplus fatigues had strutted in just after me. They ate with their heads bowed over their plastic trays so the fries didn’t have too far to travel. Their collapsible titanium nightsticks lay on the table in plain sight. One of them was not quite as wide as a bus. The other was nothing special, except that when I glanced up from my sidekick, she was giving me a freeze-dried stare. I waggled my shiny fingernails at her and screwed my cutest smile onto my face. She scowled, said something to her partner and went back to the trough.

My sidekick chirped. It was my pal Julie Epstein, who worked Self-Endangerment /Missing Persons out of the second precinct.

“You busy, Fay?”

“Yeah, the Queen of Cleveland just lost her glass slipper and I’m on the case.”

“Well, I’m about to roll through your neighborhood. Want to do lunch?”

I aimed the sidekick at the empties on my table. “Just finishing.”

“Where are you?”

“McD’s on Wallingford.”

“Yeah? How are the ribs?”

“Couldn’t say. But the egg rolls are triple dee.”

“That the place where the owner is a junkliner? We’ve had complaints. Bots run everything?”

“No, I can see her now. She’s shortchanging some beat cop.”

She gave me the laugh. “Got the coroner’s on the Rashmi Jones. Cyanide-induced hypoxia.”

“You didn’t by any chance show the mom pix of the scene?”

“Hell no. Talk about cruel and unusual.” She frowned. “Why?”

“I was just with her. She seemed like maybe she suspected her kid wrestled with the reaper.”

“We didn’t tell her. By the way, we don’t really care if you call your client, but next time how about trying us first?”

“That’s cop law. Me, I follow PI law.”

“Where did you steal that line from, Chinatown ?”

“It’s got better dialogue than Dragnet .” I swirled the last of my latte in the cup. “You calling a motive on the Rashmi Jones?”

“Not yet. What do you like?” She ticked off the fingers of her left hand. “Family? School? Money? Broke a fingernail? Cloudy day?”

“Pregnancy? Just a hunch.”

“You think she was seeded? We’ll check that. But that’s no reason to kill yourself.”

“They’ve all got reasons. Only none of them makes sense.”

She frowned. “Hey, don’t get all invested on me here.”

“Tell me, Julie, do you think I’m doing a pretend job?”

“Whoa, Fay.” Her chuckle had a sharp edge. “Maybe it’s time you and Sharifa took a vacation.”

“Yeah.” I let that pass. “It’s just that some granny called me a fluff.”

“Grannies.” She snorted in disgust. “Well, you’re no cop, that’s for sure. But we do appreciate the help. Yeah, I’d say what you do is real. As real as anything in this cocked world.”

“Thanks, flatfoot. Now that you’ve made things all better, I’ll just click off. My latte is getting cold and you’re missing so damn many persons.”

“Think about that vacation, shamus. Bye.”

As I put my sidekick away, I realized that the tommys were waiting for me. They’d been rattling ice in their cups and folding McWrappers for the past ten minutes. I probably didn’t need their brand of trouble. The smart move would be to bolt for the door and leave my bike for now; I could lose them on foot. But then I hadn’t made a smart move since April. The big one was talking into her sidekick when I sauntered over to them.