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

McKenna shouted a question and waited. No answer. He could see the head lolling back and wondered if the man was conscious.

McKenna thought about the two drowned men and hit the buttons again.

The brushes hardly got started before a shrill cry came echoing back. McKenna stopped the machine. The brushes rose. He walked forward into the puddles, splashing and taking his time.

“You’re nearly clean for the first time in your life, Buddy. Now I’m gonna give you a chance to come full clean with me.”

“I… They ain’t gonna like…” His mouth opened expectantly, rimmed with drool. The eyes flickered, much too white.

“Just tell me.”

“They really ain’t gonna like—”

McKenna turned and started back toward the control board. The thin, plaintive sobbing told him to turn around again. You could always tell when a man was broke clean through.

“Where’d they go?”

“Nearly to Chandeleur.”

“The islands?”

“Yeah… long way out… takes near all night. Oil rigs… the wrecked ones.”

“What’d you take out?”

“Centauris. Usually one, sometimes two.”

“The same one?”

“Who can tell? They all look alike to me. Pitscomb, he bowed and scraped to the Centauri and the Feds with him, but he don’t know them apart either.”

“Pitscomb have anything to do with Ethan’s death?”

“Man, I weren’t workin’ that night.”

“Damn. What’d the rest of the crew say about it?”

“Nothin’. All I know is that Ethan was on the boat one night and he didn’t come back to work next day.”

“Who else was with the Centauri?”

“Just Feds.”

“What was the point of going out?”

“I dunno. We carried stuff in big plastic bags. Crew went inside for ’bout an hour while we circled round the messed-up oil rigs. FBI and Centauri were out there. Dunno what they did. Then we come back.”

McKenna took the cuffs off Buddy and helped him out of the car. To his surprise, Buddy could walk just fine. “You know Jorge?”

“Huh? Yeah, that wetback?”

“Yeah. You’re a wetback too now.”

“Huh? Oh.” Buddy got the joke and to his credit, grinned. “Look, you don’t nail me on the dope, it’s even, okay?”

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Buddy.”

“Huh?”

“It’s fine. Keep your nose clean from here on out or I’ll bring you back here to clean it myself.”

He hung his head. “Y’know, you’re right. I got to straighten up.”

“You’re straight with me right now.”

They even shook hands.

Atake-charge raccoon was working the trash when he hauled in on the oyster shell road. He shooed it away and then tossed it a watermelon that had gone old anyway.

Then he sat on the porch and sipped a Cabernet and worked himself over about the car wash stunt. His wife had once told him, after he had worked up through being a uniform, then Vice and then bunko and finally Homicide, that the process had condensed him into a hard man. He had never said to her that maybe it was her long illness that had made him quiet around the house, wary and suspicious… but in the end maybe it was both. He had never been interested in small talk but had picked up the skill for getting witnesses to open up.

Now he felt very little after working Buddy over. He had done it with a vague intuition that the kid needed a wake-up call, sure, but mostly because he was blocked in this case. And he couldn’t let it go. Maybe it helped fill the emptiness in him, one he felt without shame or loss, as not a lack but as a blank space—an openness that made him hear the wind sigh and waves slosh not as mere background but as life passing while most people ignored it, talked over it, trying to pin life down with their words. He listened at nightfall, sitting out here on the warped planking of his wharf, to the planet breathing in its sleep. A world never fully revealed, a planet with strangeness at its core.

The next day he and LeBouc worked some ordinary gang-related cases. And planned. LeBouc was a fisherman and would go out for just about any reason. Not a hard sell. And neither of them could think of anything else to do. The FBI had called up their supervisor and bad-mouthed McKenna, of course. But they wouldn’t reveal anything more and tried to pry loose what McKenna knew. The supe stonewalled. A Mexican standoff.

Just before twilight McKenna sprayed on exercise shorts plus shirt. This was a semi-new techie product, snug and light, and he wanted to try them. The shorts were black, the cheapest spray-on, with spaced breather holes to respire sweat through. His belly was a bit thick and his calves stringy, but nobody was going to see him anyway if he could help it. The smart fibers itched as they linked up to form the hems, contouring to his body, the warmth from their combining getting him in the mood. He drove to the boat ramp just west of Bayou La Batre, huffing the salty sunset breeze into his lungs with a liberating zest.

LeBouc was there with an aluminum boat and electric motor and extra batteries, rented from a Mobile fishing company. Great for quiet night work, spotlights and radiophone, the works. LeBouc was pumped, grinning and stowing gear.

“Thought I’d do some line trawling on the way,” he said, bringing on a big pole and a tackle box. He carried a whole kit of cleaning knives and an ice chest. “Never know when you might bag a big one.”

McKenna’s shoes grated on the concrete boat ramp as the water lapped against the pilings. The boat rose on the slow, lumbering tide. A dead nutria floated by, glassy-eyed and with a blue crab gouging at it. Business as usual at the Darwin Café.

They used a gas outboard to reach the estimated rendezvous point, to save on the batteries. McKenna had planted a directional beeper on the Busted Flush in late afternoon, using a black guy he hired in Bayou La Batre to pretend to be looking for work. Right away they picked up the microwave beeper, using their tracking gear. With GPS geared into the tracker they could hang back a mile away and follow them easily. LeBouc was a total non-tech type and had never once called McKenna “the Perfesser.”

LeBouc flipped on the Raytheon acoustic radar and saw the sandy bottom sliding away into deeper vaults of mud. Velvet air slid by. The night swallowed them.

It was exciting at first, but as they plowed through the slapping swells the rhythm got to McKenna. He hadn’t been sleeping all that well lately, so LeBouc took the first watch, checking his trailing line eagerly. LeBouc had spent his vacation deep-sea fishing off Fort Lauderdale and was happy to be back on the water again.

LeBouc shook McKenna awake three hours later. “Thought you were gonna wake me for a watch,” McKenna mumbled.

“Nemmine, I was watchin’ my line. Almost got one too.”

“What’s up?”

“They hove to, looks like from the tracker.”

They quietly approached the Busted Flush using the electric motor. The tracker picked up a fixed warning beacon. “Maybe an oil platform,” McKenna said. LeBouc diverted slightly toward it.

Out of the murk rose a twisted skeleton. Above the waterline the main platform canted at an angle on its four pylons. A smashed carcass of a drilling housing lay scattered across its steel plates. Three forlorn rotating beacons winked into the seethe of the sea.

LeBouc asked, “How far’s the shrimper?”

McKenna studied the tracker screen, checked the scale. “About three hundred yards. Not moving.”

LeBouc said, “Let’s tuck in under that platform. Make us hard to see.”

“Don’t know if I can see much in IR at this range.”

“Try now.”

The IR goggles LeBouc had wangled out of Special Operations Stores fit on McKenna’s head like a fat parasite. In them he could see small dots moving, the infrared signature blobs of people on the shrimper deck. “Barely,” McKenna said.