D. Schmidt - They Ate the Waitress?

He circled his apartment building, looking for a parking space. All of the nearby spots were filled, forcing him to park two blocks away. Someone must have been throwing a party. As he trudged up the hill to his apartment, he vowed revenge against the orange motorcycle parked in his usual space. “I can’t believe this! That guy doesn’t even need a whole space. Can’t he just park on the sidewalk? – Wait, what’s that in the sky? Is that… a pool table?”

Of course, it would make no sense for a pool table to be falling from the sky. Technically, it was a billiard table. He leapt out of the way, landing in some nearby azalea bushes.

The table crashed to the ground, spraying felt-covered shrapnel. He picked himself up, brushing off his jacket. Scouring the ground, he found a piece of debris with the name “Amidon Game Rental” engraved on a brass plate. “Looks like someone just lost their deposit.”

Coming home, he stepped through the door and carefully wiped his feet on his Schlock Products™ self-cleaning doormat. Its chemical coating dissolved dirt, mud, grass, rubber, leather, cotton, and eventually, human skin. It kept your carpets from getting dirty, but you had to move quickly.

He brought his transmitter into the living room, where he copied the footage of Clayton West’s apartment to his computer and sent it to Margery Sweeney. A light on the computer flashed, alerting him to a new video mail. Todd Sweeney appeared on the screen. He was sitting in an overstuffed, leather chair, apparently in his office. A large oil painting on the wall behind him showed a smiling, white-haired man. A brass plaque identified the man as “Our first volunteer.”

“Mr. Wergild, one of my waiters has not returned to work since the day you came to the restaurant. If he is the killer, he might have discovered the investigation and become too scared to return.”

“Or perhaps,” Nick thought, “he found a new job, one that doesn’t involve serving People Burgers.”

“I need you to surveil him. His name is Aaron Spinner. I am sending you a recent photo and a map to his house.”

“It looks like the killer is Clayton West,” Nick thought, “but it’s Sweeney’s money, so I’ll do what he wants… Aaron has already met me once, but he didn’t know I was a manhunter, so I should be okay. Plus, he must see dozens of customers each day. What are the odds he’ll remember me?” Nick didn’t consider himself very memorable. Some of his best friends hadn’t talked to him in decades.

He printed a copy of Todd’s map and walked to the door. Sensing him approach, the coat rack tossed his jacket into the air. Catching it deftly, he stepped outside.

Todd’s records were out of date. The apartment building listed as Aaron’s address had been torn down several months earlier. Apparently it had been full of mold, asbestos, and snakes. Fortunately, there was another address on the records. At Aaron’s request, Todd sent a third of his paycheck to the Dale Brothers’ Youth Shelter. “Those shelters are only for the unemployed,” Nick thought, “but it’s worth a shot. It’s open to the public, so I should get inside with no problems.”

The youth shelter was an immense, underground building that had once been a government missile complex. There were three subterranean silos connected by tunnels, for a total of sixty thousand square feet of space. There were about four hundred beds, most filled with homeless teenagers and runaways. The shelter also had a few dozen cribs, for those teenagers who had trouble remembering how condoms worked.

Walking down the long ramp into the complex, Nick heard the sound of music coming from the chapel. The midweek service was starting. He hurried into the chapel and took a seat near the back.

The preacher was a short, burly man with skin like fried ham. He wore a rumpled, wool suit that looked like it had been rescued from a newly-buried corpse. More than once. “Children, children,” he said, already perspiring heavily under the stage lights, “people are selfish! People say, if I can’t make a dollar helping others, why should I? But we need to be there for each other!” The large man wiped a meaty hand across his brow. He opened a leather-bound Bible to read aloud from Second Kings, chapter six.

“In a time of great famine, the king of Israel surveyed the land. The king passed by when a woman cried out to him, ‘Help me my lord, oh my king!’ And the king said, ‘What is wrong?’ And she replied, ‘This woman said to me, give your son, so that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. So we boiled my son, and we ate him. I said to her the next day, give me your son, that we may eat him. But she has hidden her son from me!’ …You see, children? Selfish!”

Coughing loudly, the preacher paused to pour himself a drink of water. “And that, my children, is why Jesus said to love your neighbor! As he said in the book of John, chapter six : ‘I am the bread from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever. The bread that is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. Whoever eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real meat and my blood is real drink. He that eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, dwells in me, and I dwell in him.’ And in Ecclesiastes chapter six, verse seven, we read this…”

After the long and rather disturbing sermon, Nick waited by the door, watching the crowd line up to leave. Finally Aaron appeared, stopping to shake the preacher’s hand on his way out. Aaron looked as if he hadn’t showered in days. Nick couldn’t quite hear what he said to the preacher, but they were both smiling. It looked like Aaron had appreciated his message.

Cautiously, Nick followed Aaron to the parking lot, watched him get in his car, and followed him to the highway. A few miles later, they drove past a rundown farmhouse that Nick recognized from a documentary he had seen a few years earlier, America’s Greatest Crackpots. It was the home of Lester Brown, a man who claimed to have invented the printing press, gunpowder, periwinkles, and Belgium. In reality, he had only ever invented one thing: the commbang. The commbang was a combination comma and exclamation point, used whenever a writer needed an emphatic pause.

At last, Nick stopped across the street from Aaron’s house. Aaron Spinner lived in an old, Victorian-style home near the cemetery off of highway 205. Nick’s navigation system said that the house was owned by an Edith Spinner.

Before that, the place had been a funeral home, back when people had been buried whole instead of just cremated. The increasing price of land meant that cemeteries no longer offered individual plots. Instead, most people ended up in columbariums, concrete filing cabinets for urns. Forty-three people could fit in the space of one old-fashioned grave. Only the extremely wealthy weren’t cremated. Most of them had their bodies shot into space, to spend eternity flying through the cosmos. Nick always wondered if someday aliens would contact the earth to say “Hey, stop sending us your garbage!”

He put on a cheap, disposable necktie and a phony Vancouver Bank and Trust ID badge. Strapping an electronic clipboard to his arm, he strode confidently to the door and banged the knocker.

Aaron answered immediately. “What? What’s the problem?”

“Mr. Spinner?”

“Yeah, I’m Aaron Spinner. More importantly, who are you?”

“I’m Rick Welding with Vancouver Bank and Trust. Our records show that you are six months behind on your mortgage payments. We will repossess your house next week if you don’t pay up.”

Aaron shook his head like he was making a martini in his skull. “What do mean? My mother bought this house twenty years ago directly from the former owner. She never had a mortgage.”