Invasion from Uranus (10 page)

In the enclosed space, the blast was so loud I couldn't hear it at first. Then sound painfully returned and the shock wave smacked me flat. Acrid smoke tore at my lungs. The ground quaked. The building shook. A rush of heat cooked me to the bone. The ceiling cracked, chunks of stone falling everywhere. I abruptly understood that this was no illusion and braced myself for death.

A short eternity later the rumbling world finally settled back into place. There was no sign of the Count except for a few smoking bones, and a melted cell phone. For the first time in three months, I allowed myself to relax and said goodbye to my partner
 .  
We got him, buddy. We got him
 . 

Rising from the rubble, Shorty, Chubby and Skinny dusted themselves off and came over, carefully picking their way through the charred wreckage.

"I'm glad you survived, Mr. Alvarez," the skinny fellow said, offering me a canteen. "We have been following you since O'Hare Airport, Chicago."

I gagged on the water. "Huh?" I asked brilliantly.

"As you seemed to be tracking the vampires much better than we ever had, I saw no reason to interfere with your progress until some intervention was needed. Actually a most impressive job, considering your lack of formal training."

My thanks consisted mostly of four-letter words.

Unperturbed, he opened a leather wallet, showing me a badge and ID card. "FBI," he announced. "Special Agent Richard Anderson, on permanent assignment to Bureau 13. This is George Renault and Mindy Jennings."

They were feds. "Bureau 13?" I asked.

Wearily George rested the stock of his machine gun on the floor. "We're a covert division of the Justice Department."

Covert my ass. But not entirely stupid, I was getting the general idea. "And you handle criminals like these guys." I jerked a thumb at the smoking corpses.

"Yep," Mindy said, wiping her sword off with a bit of cloth before sheathing the rainbow blade. "But believe it or not, our biggest problem is personnel. Just can't find enough trained people who won't faint when facing vampire bank robbers, werewolf motorcycle gangs or toxic waste mutant assassins."

They waited. The next move was mine. What the hell. A short life, but a merry one.

"Okay, deal me in," I sighed.

Smiling, Richard flipped open another commission booklet. The ID card inside this had my driver's license picture and read: "Special Agent Edwardo Alvarez, FBI." It was dated two months ago. Smooth. I was going to like these guys. However, there was still one very important question that had to be answered immediately.

"Can I get down now?" I asked, rattling my chains.

"First and foremost, let me say that I love Mysteries in general, and specifically the wonderful 'Spenser' novels by Robert B. Parker," Nick said with conviction, his eyes darting about endlessly, sweat trickling down his pale face.

From somewhere in the building there came the muffled sound of frenzied chopping, and then a pronounced silence.

"However, nothing is safe from a friendly satire, not even a literary colleague who happens to be a NY Times best seller," Nick said with a wry chuckle. "Sorry, Bob, it had to be done."

I was sitting in my office reading Proust and lifting weights when the door was suddenly thrown open and in walked an old woman. Flowery hat, silver gray hair cut shoulder length, an azure prom dress, no stockings, white Nike sneakers with a purple swoosh.

"I need help, Mr. Pensive," she said, closing the door behind her.

As the crack narrowed, I craned my neck to get a good glimpse of the nuclear physicist across the hallway working in her bikini and then she was gone from sight. The topless towers of Ileum safe again for the moment.

"That's Pensive," I corrected her for no sane reason. "With a hard 'e', just like in name of the Olde English poet Spenser."

She had no reply to that. Hell, neither did I.

"I'm April Wallace, and it's my wee doggie, Sigmund," the old woman blubbered into a Hermes scarf with silk tassels and a subdued waterfall pattern interwoven into the material. "He's gone and I kinna find him anywhere."

I ignored the Scottish accent; you could buy those anywhere, and concentrated on the details of the case. A lost dog, eh?

Swiveling my chair about, I stared out the window at the busy streets below filled with gorgeous women in costly clothes and a bunch of rich old fat guys who ruled the world. The girls were more interesting. A lost dog. It must be the mob again. I could feel it in my bones.

"I'll take the case," I said just as the office door was thrown open and in walked an entire platoon of Navy SEALS heavily armed with automatic weapons.

"Back off, Pensive!" a burly sergeant growled while his troopers posed and sneered in a menacing manner meant to instill fear into the very furniture.

Standing, I ripped open my shirt exposing a mass of rippling muscles from my days as a professional sumo wrestler and part-time gandydancer. They gasped in shock which gave me the chance to yank open a drawer and extract a tactical nuclear weapon.

"Back off?" I repeated, pulling the pin. "I'm Balador at the gate, babalu!"

The troops cowered at my literary allusion and departed simpering, but happily leaving the door ajar and I got another good look at the physicist oiling her long, lean, tanned, bare legs. Oh death, where is thy sting?

I got April's phone number, in case I ever decided to give her a report, and I rushed to work. Heading for the only real gym in town, I stopped halfway there and went to Big Boy's Gymatorium. As always, Big Boy was there, six feet two

inches of solid muscle, selling packs of imported sweat to the downtown yuppies who wouldn't know a real punch in the face if it hit them.

"He here?" I asked, keeping my words small because he was too. At six feet four, those missing two inches made him a dwarf compared to the might and majesty of I. Or was that me?

"In the back," Big Boy said gesturing with his tiny head.

Going past the endless array of machines designed to make workouts more efficient, which I would have none of, I found Onyx in the back room packing the speed bag with Harvard Classics. He was exactly as tall as me, exactly as

smart, exactly as strong, but I was more sensitive, and he was richer. I know who came out better in that trade. Uh huh.

I helped him hang the bag on a wooden beam and we both started beating the crap out of the lumpy canvas with our bare hands. Gloves were for sissies. And used car salesmen. And glove salesmen. And I mean salespeople. And why do I start so many sentences with the word And?

"Got a problem," I said as we toweled each other off and went to the steam room. Actually, there was no steam room at Big Boy's because it was upscale and palliardic. But we both could fit into the hot water heater and enjoyed a good boiling before toweling each other off again, arming ourselves with major

artillery and getting dressed.

"Aside from being a slice of white bread?" Onyx asked, his bald teeth gleaming as if freshly brushed. There was a hint of an accent in his speech, but that was merely a holdover from his days as a billionaire software tycoon from the dirty streets of South Boston.

"Don't white bread me, greenie," I snapped in a non-bigoted, friendly manner.

The mega-billionaire assassin said nothing, seeming to sense everything occurring in the entire world, then he nodded and almost pretended to give me a smile. "Okay, but I want half your fee."

"Ain't getting paid for this one."

"Again? You never get paid for any of them. How you live?"

I throw my arms wide. "Faith, Hope and Charity,"

"Those triplet whores working the Combat Zone?"

Menacingly, I brandished a straight razor, "And if those ho bitches be lates again wid my money..."

Checking the B1 Bomber hidden under his coat, Onyx barely mimicked the ghost of mirth, then shook his mighty head. "Let's go find a dog."

Once outside, Onyx immediately disappeared from sight, but I knew he was close and would watch my back because we were both real men, and that's what real men do. Hell, even at this moment, I was watching a real man in Dallas, and he was keeping an eye on a real man in Brooklyn. Don't ask me how. It was

just something we did without truly understanding. Was there really a brotherhood of man? You betcha, Red Ryder.

Stopping at a neighbor deli for a ham and Proust sandwich on nine types of bread and imported Tibetan decaf mustard, I ate my snack while jogging directly to police headquarters and contemplating the myriad wonders of Bostonian history, and how Sir Lancelot got such a raw deal on the whole babe issue.

Hey, yes means yes in my book. End of discussion. Just ask Johnson and Boswell.

I found Lt. Quint sitting motionless in his office as usual. The man never seemed to go anywhere or do anything unless I was on a case.

Pierpont Quint was dressed in surgical garb, with latex gloves, inspecting a photo cube of people who came with the cube. He lived alone, but liked to pretend they were his wife and family, and I never had the heart to tell him different.

"Need some info," I said sitting in a chair and angling it more towards Quint.

Wordlessly, he screamed in horror and pointed at the chair with a quivering finger. I shifted it a few millimeters this way and that until it was perfectly perpendicular to the desk, the walls of the precinct house and the lines of latitude girdling the planet.

Quint relaxed and gave me a cold hard cop stare that nobody could duplicate but other cops, some lawyers, a few door-to-door-salesmen, most street gangs and every member of the Mafia. I stared back and the air crackled with the force of our unspoken determination and true grit.

"Info about what?" he growled, hugging the photo cube and rocking gently to secret songs. "I got other cases to solve, Pensive. Don't exist simply to assist you."

"Sure you do," I beamed.

He grunted, the non-word speaking volumes. "Okay, whatcha need."

Hmm, bad grammar, maybe he really was a top cop.

Just then, for a split second, Sergeant Ordinary Guy stuck his head into the office casting us both into hard relief, basking in the clear normal light of a guy who was a cop. Then he left, and we were alone again, with only time and space to fill the terrible void of our existence. Maybe that's why we fought

crime. Maybe not. I wasn't sure. Did it matter?

"I need a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and some hard data on dog napping," I quipped.

"Let 'em lay"

"That's sleeping dogs."

"Ah! Oh. Really? Well, I hear there's big money in stealing dogs and then returning them to their owners for a fat reward," Quint said lugubriously. "Maybe you should go talk to criminals, not cops. What do we know of such sordid things?"

Talk to the criminals, eh? It was just crazy enough to work. Looks like I had no choice but to go see the head of organized crime for the entire greater Boston area. Joe Bronze, a pure Sicilian of Chinese extract who ruled the Irish streets and German board rooms of old Mass with an iron fist in an iron glove. He was tougher than a fried lie, but not as tough as that army of retired Navy SEALS he had working for him.

Zoot alors
! Could that have been the same Navy SEALS I encountered just minutes ago? If not, it would be a hell of a coincidence, and as everybody knows a coincidence makes an ass out of you and me. This must be what they call in the crime novels a clue. Philo Vance, eat your heart out. But it had been so long since I last found a clue, I wasn't sure.

Going to the Research Library of the precinct, I pushed aside a pile of Des Cartes to find the collected Dick Tracy Crimestoppers comic strips written by Tank McNamara. Yep, what I had was a clue all right, and as Thoreau had once said to Cotton Mathers, That ain't hay, brother. Uh huh. True words, indeed.

I glanced at my watch, solid silver, dotted with Brazilian emeralds and tiny silk tassels. But I was so manly nobody thought me gay, all I had to do was flex and they all ran screaming into the night. Except for the one true love of my life, Dr. Yentil Goyboffer. I loved her, in spite of her weird first name. Unlike me. Hell, I was proud of my first name. Nobody else had one like it. And that always made me remember how surprised Leo had looked when the bullet took him.

As I hadn't eaten in almost ten minutes, it was time for lunch. Going outside to my car, I climbed into the brand new, gunmetal blue, Lamborghini. Best car Detroit made. Buy America! Buy bonds! A cold trickle of rain water was already trickling down through a tiny crack in the ragtop, and I adjusted some of the duct tape holding the leather seats together before driving off into the wild melee of the insane streets of Boston. A town without pity. Especially for lost dogs.
Et tu Brute
?

Arriving at Le' Eatery, I parked the car, rescued a kitten from drowning, and entered the restaurant, vindicated and alive once more, feeling loose and full of oxygen. The maytrade... ma'trde...the head waiter swung the velvet rope aside to let me ahead of the waiting crowd. It cost a fortune for a glass of water here, but since I never paid any of my bills I could afford to eat here three or four times a day.

Dr. Goyboffer has already there, holding a microscopic sliver of bread in her hand, slowly absorbing it by sheer osmosis. Even from across the room, her eyes laughed with hidden wisdom, her long flowing hair smelled of rain, her stockings like snow and her feet tiny rainbows. She was dressed in clothes so

nice they looked shabby and ordinary. The very pinnacle of fashion was my yummyhuggysweetybunny.

I grunted hello as I came close, and when she smiled, the entire restaurant lit up as if a thousand flashbulbs had gone off. Temporarily blind, I stumbled to the table and ordered a small roasted ox in johnny cake sauce and a keg of Ol' Hoover, the best damn beer ever brewed by the FBI in a dam.

"Why don't we live together and have a child?" Yentil asked, as the dancing red lights slowly faded from my eyes. But that was how she opened every conversation with me. She was a silly little thing, but could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. Smart too. I saw her brain once in an x-ray. Big.