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

He thumbed the phone on and the ME’s voice said, “You might like to look at this.”

“Or maybe not. Seen plenty.”

“Got him on the table, IDed and everything. But there’s something else.”

The white tile running up to the ceiling reminded him that this place got hosed down every day. You did that in damp climates because little life forms you could barely see came through even the best air conditioning and did awful things to dead matter. Otherwise it was like all other autopsy rooms. Two stainless steel tables, overhead spray hoses on auto, counters of gleaming stainless, cabinets and gear on three walls. The air conditioning hummed hard but the body smell layered the room in a damp musk. The ME was working and barely glanced up. The county couldn’t afford many specialists so the ME did several jobs.

Under the relentless ceramic lights the body seemed younger. Naked, tanned legs and arms and face, the odd raised welts. The ME was at home with bodies, touching and probing and squeezing. Gloved fingers combing the fine brown hair. Fingers in the mouth and throat, doubtless after probing the other five openings with finer tools. The ME used a magnifying glass to look carefully at the throat, shook his head as if at another idea gone sour, then picked up a camera.

He studied the extremities, feet and hands and genitalia. The magnifier swept over the palms and fingers and he took pictures, the flash startling McKenna, adding a sudden whiteness to the ceramic room.

The ME looked up as if noticing McKenna for the first time. “Wanna help?”

They turned the body after McKenna pulled on rubber gloves. A head-to-foot search, careful attention to the tracery of raised yellow-white marks that now had deep purple edges. The bruises lay under the skin and were spreading like oozing ink. The ME took notes and samples and then stepped back and sighed.

“Gotta say I just dunno. He has two clear signatures. Drowning in the lungs, but his heart stopped before that.”

“From what?”

“Electrocution. And there’s these—” He showed five small puncture wounds on both arms. Puckered and red. “Funny, not like other bites I’ve seen. So I got to do the whole menu, then.”

The county had been going easy on full autopsies. They cost and budgets were tight. “At least you have his name.”

“Ethan Anselmo. No priors, FBI says. Married, got the address.”

“Wounds?”

“The big welts, I dunno. Never seen such. I’ll send samples to the lab. Those punctures on the hands, like he was warding something off. That sure didn’t work.”

“Torture?”

“Not any kind I know.”

“Anybody phone the widow?”

He looked up from his notes, blinking back sweat though the air conditioning was running full blast. “Thought that was your job.”

It was. McKenna knocked on the door of the low-rent apartment and it swung open to reveal a woman in her thirties with worried eyes. He took a deep breath and went into the ritual. Soon enough he saw again the thousand-yard stare of the new widow. It came over her after he got only a few sentences into his description. Ordinary people do not expect death’s messenger to be on the other side of the knock. Marcie Anselmo got a look at the abyss and would never be the same.

McKenna never wanted to be the intruder into others’ pain. He didn’t like asking the shell-shocked widow details about their life, his job, where he’d been lately. All she knew was he hadn’t come home last night. He did some night jobs but he had never stayed out all night like this before.

He spent a long hour with her. She said he sometimes hung out at The Right Spot. McKenna nodded, recognizing the name. Then they talked some more and he let the tensions rise and fall in her, concluding that maybe it was time to call their relatives. Start the process. Claim the body, the rest. Someone would be calling with details.

He left his card. This part went with the job. It was the price you paid to get to do what came next. Figure out. Find out.

Ethan Anselmo had worked as a pickup deck man on shrimpers out of Bayou La Batre. She hadn’t asked which one he went out on lately. They came and went, after all.

McKenna knew The Right Spot, an ancient bar that had once sported decent food and that knew him, too. He forgot about the Pinot Grigio chilling at home and drove through the soft night air over to the long line of run-down docks and sheds that had avoided the worst of the last hurricane. The Right Spot had seen better days but then so had he.

He changed in the darkness to his down-home outfit. Dirty jeans, blue work shirt with snaps instead of buttons, baseball cap with salt stains. Last time he had been here he had sported a moustache, so maybe clean-shaven he would look different. Older, too, by half of a pretty tough year. Showtime…

Insects shrilled in the high grass of the wiped-out lot next door and frogs brayed from the swampy pond beyond. There was even a sort-of front yard to it, since it had once been a big rambling house, now canted to the left by decay. Night creeper and cat’s claw smothered the flowerbeds and flavored the thick air.

There was a separate bar to the side of the restaurant and he hesitated. The juke joint music was pump and wail and crash, sonic oblivion for a few hours. Food first, he decided. Mercifully, there were two rooms and he got away from the noise into the restaurant, a room bleached out by the flat ceramic light. A sharp smell of disinfectant hiding behind the fried food aroma. New South, all right. A sign on the wall in crude type said FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FOREIGN SHRIMP.

The joint had changed. He sat at a table and ordered jambalaya. When it came, too fast, he knew what to expect before the first mouthful.

It was a far, forlorn cry from the semi-Cajun coast food he knew as a boy, spicy if you wanted and not just to cover the taste of the ingredients. The shrimp and okra and oysters were fresh then, caught or picked that day. That was a richer time, when people ate at home and grew or caught much of what they ate. Paradise, and as usual, nobody had much noticed it at the time.

He looked around and caught the old flavor. Despite his disguise, he saw that some people notice you’re a cop. After a few minutes their eyes slide away and they go back to living their lives whether he was watching them or not. Their talk followed the meandering logic of real talk or the even more wayward path of stoned talk. Half-lowered eyelids, gossip, beer smells mingling with fried fish and nose-crinkling popcorn shrimp. Life.

He finished eating, letting the place get used to him. Nobody paid him much attention. The Right Spot was now an odd combination, a restaurant in steep decline with a sleazy bar one thin wall away. Maybe people only ate after they’d guzzled enough that the taste didn’t matter anyway.

When he cut through the side door two Cajun women at the end of the bar gave him one glance that instantly said cop at the same time his eyes registered hookers. But they weren’t full-on pros. They looked like locals in fluffy blouses and skinny pants who made a little extra on the side and told themselves they were trying out the talent for the bigger game, a sort of modern style of courtship, free of hypocrisy. Just over the line. He had seen plenty of them when he worked vice. It was important to know the difference, the passing tide of women versus the real hard core who made up the true business. These were just true locals. Fair enough.

The woman bartender leaned over to give him a look at the small but nicely shaped breasts down the top of her gold lame vest. She had a rose tattoo on one.

“Whiskey rocks, right?” She gave him a thin smile.