Out of the Black (2 page)

"Not a good sign." Ping muttered, putting on his smile. He crossed the street and approached the redhead at an easy pace.

"Lieutenant Bannon, homicide. What've we got here?" he said smoothly, attaching his badge to his jacket's exterior pocket. The officer's apprehension didn't dissipate immediately. Instead of the embarrassed relief Ping expected, the redhead raised his tablet and entered a few commands. The cop continued his hard appraisal of Ping until the tablet chirped, verifying his credentials. Then the officer's face softened into a mix of poorly concealed relief and more than a little professional embarrassment. Though the big cop's delayed reaction was both expected and somewhat satisfying, Ping could tell that this guy was not used to letting his game face slip, certainly not to reveal fear.

The cop's game face now portrayed amusement: "Bannon eh? And a solid Irish cop too."

As a social ritual, Ping had always been intrigued by the relationship between fear and banter. "I prefer the term 'Chirish American'." he said affably.

"Why'd you drop the 'O' Mr. O'Bannon?" The officer continued with an easy, likable smile crossing his weathered face. "Y'know, ya can't hide the Irish... it's written all over your face."

Ping had heard all this before. Though he looked entirely Chinese, he was one quarter Irish. His Irish granddad had met grandma in Hong Kong while attending school. The school had grown into a way of life for him and he'd stayed. Dad met mom at another school in Beijing. Ping had heard all the Irish cop jokes.

"My parents Americanized the name when we immigrated from China... didn't want to sound too ethnic, I guess." he said with his most serious face.

The officer's smile widened, "Sergeant Malloy O'Flannahan at your service..."

"You're kidding."

The sergeant raised an eyebrow and hooked a thumb at his nametag. Still smiling, he turned toward the destroyed car. "Come on, let's get the unpleasant part over with and we can get back to discussin' the green isle of our heritage."

Ping followed. "Is that music?"

The sergeant nodded without turning. They moved closer and the rhythms of Bob Marley began to shift and flow around them through the cool night air. "You like reggae, Detective Bannon?"

"I prefer the modern stuff... better produced."

"Uh-huh. What we've got here are two extremely dead bodies in the car, eight to twelve more on the street under the bridge, and..."

"Eight to twelve?"

"How many potatoes go into a bowl of stew?"

Ping was still chewing on that when he saw the first potato. It was part of an arm, lying at the end of a bloody radius that emanated from the car. It looked as if it had been burnt black.

Suppressing a "What the...", he bent to examine it. He noticed that the arm looked more than burnt; it was the color of a deep pond on a moonless midnight- shiny and wet.

When he was fifteen, he'd gone to camp with his brother somewhere in Virginia. After they'd gone canoeing, the camp counselors had surprised them by checking their feet for leaches. The real shock was the black, oily flesh they discovered between Ping's toes. The counselor had used a smoldering punk to burn the leech off. It didn't hurt, but it was unbearably gross to his 15-year-old mind: sharing a bloodstream with that
thing
. Now, 24 years later he stared down at the same oily flesh in the shape of an arm. "What the..."

"Yep," said Malloy, interrupting from above. "Come on. The fun's just begun."

As Ping stood to follow, he couldn't completely shake free of his walk down memory lane. He found himself thinking about how the world had shivered and lost focus as all his thought compressed to the glistening dark spot between his toes. He'd woken later to the teasing laughter of his brother. "You okay kid?" the camp counselor had asked through the fog of returning reality.

Malloy was staring expectantly at him. "You okay?" he repeated.

"Sorry. Just thinking."

Malloy gave him a resolute nod "We've done a lot of that, too."

"All the bodies like that?" Ping asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

"No two alike."

"Any ID?"

"We haven't touched anything," Malloy checked his tablet, "forensics should be here in fifteen."

The other officer joined them as they reached the front of the destroyed car. He was an efficient looking black man in his twenties. An ugly pale scar crawled from the bottom of his left ear to his collarbone- Ping wondered how he'd survived whatever had caused that, and why he hadn't had the scar removed. The patrolman's arms were so corded with muscles that he looked like he could crush the black maglite he held. Black points and curves mostly hidden by collar and short sleeves suggested a hidden mosaic of tattoo beneath his shirt. "Rodriguez" was on his nametag.

Like his partner, he didn't look like he was used to being afraid. He glanced at Ping's badge and gave a nod of recognition. "Welcome to the twilight zone," he said with a tight grin.

"I hear it's a dimension of mind," Ping said, glancing at the strings of interlacing automatic weapon craters in the concrete wall behind the car. Bob Marley continued to wail from the damaged car's powerful speakers. The music seemed to resonate in every molecule of the chilled night air. It filled any pause in the conversation, slid around each word. "Let's get together and feel all right."

"You notice this?" Rodriguez used the maglite to illuminate a spot on the overpass above the car.

What Ping could make out looked like pieces of the car's roof, mangled and fused to the infrastructurof the bridge. Dark viscous liquid dripped from several protrusions.

"That's not..." He stopped as he made out the shape of a twisted leg protruding from the wreckage above him. Its black shoe was untouched by the destruction.

They moved through the minefield of physical evidence, skirting piles of biology and destroyed metal. At last, they reached the car, approaching the driver's door from the front. The roof had been blown off from the back, but about ten centimeters of damaged metal clung to the windshield's upper frame. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks, most of which emanated from the roughly horizontal cigar shaped hole directly in front of the driver. Jagged shards at the bottom of the frame were all that remained of the car's side and rear windows.

At the driver's door, the interior of the car appeared for the first time. The first glance revealed two bodies: the driver and a passenger in the back seat. The driver was buckled in, but the passenger was on the floor of the back seat, mostly hidden from view.

"What's wrong with this picture?" Malloy asked with a sideways glance.

"What isn't?" Ping answered, but then he noticed: "This wasn't an explosion."

"Something blew off the top without destroying the interior of the car," Rodriguez said.

There were several slashes in the seats and blood everywhere, but no burn or shrapnel damage. The passenger side airbag had deployed and now lay spent over the empty passenger seat. The driver's airbag hadn't deployed, but that was likely because the steering wheel was gone.

The driver was indeed "extremely dead"- slumped forward and to the right in his harness, his head was mostly missing. From the pattern of... tissue... on the passenger's door but not the deployed airbag, it appeared that he had died before the car hit the wall. In his left hand, the driver clutched the detached steering wheel. Upon closer inspection, the wheel was deformed as if it had been wrenched off.

Ping blinked and shook his head, "Looks like the driver died before the car hit the bridge."

Malloy nodded, "The shot probably came through the window. What do you make of the steering wheel?"

"Souvenir?" Rodriguez said around abbreviated breaths. The air was tinged with the smell of the butcher shop.

Ping blunted his visceral reaction to the carnage by pulling his tablet from its holster and getting to work. He expanded it to notepad size and switched it out of standby. He detached the stylus and brought up a new incident report. He used the tablet's three-dimensional scanners to record the contents of the car. He paused occasionally to scratch notes and diagrams, linking them with the images. "I'll need a download of your raw reports."

The two officers entered the necessary commands on their tablets. Ping's tablet chirped twice in acknowledgment of the inbound data feeds. He would review and incorporate them into his report later.

"We already did the full survey," Rodriguez said.

Ping nodded absently from behind the shelter of his tablet as he finished surveying the front seat and moved on to the rear.

When looking from the front, he hadn't noticed the damage to the back seat- four holes in a tight configuration at about chest level- definitely bullet holes. They were probably fired from outside the driver's door, from about where he was now standing. On a hunch Ping turned around and looked down. He stood at one end of another bloody skid mark radiating away from the car. At the far end was what might have once been a body- so much for the shooter.

He snapped some images and turned his attention to the car's second occupant. Not much to see there; at least not much to want to see. Patterns of blood on the seats implied that the victim had probably been standing when he was killed, but whoever had done it had stopped to make very, very sure that he was dead. Ping gritted his teeth and documented. He hoped that he would never get used to stuff like this.

When his tablet contained all the information he could get about the car, he turned toward the bullet-pocked wall. He was documenting the placement of the shots when Malloy spoke. "We got here 'bout twenty minutes ago. Traffic dispatched us to check out the intersection's Big Brother. It went offline about an hour before and wouldn't respond to remote diagnostics.

Ping nodded, "Just coincidence, I'm sure."

"Yeah... Someone didn't want to show up in the background of a traffic violation video. The Bro' took a round powerful enough to scrap it. You'll find a link to its logs and a scan of the scrap in the feed I gave you."

"Witnesses?" Ping asked, knowing the answer.

Malloy bit his lip, shook his head.

"We saw something..." Rodriguez said, eyes lingering on the car's interior, "something fast."

Ping looked up from his work, giving Rodriguez his full attention; he left the question unasked.

After a pause, Rodriguez continued, "I didn't get a good look..."

"Just a good scare, hey?" Malloy interrupted, looking amused, his game face nearly impenetrable.

With an effort, Rodriguez looked away from the car and faced his partner. "You know, your terror squeak was quite... distracting." His game face was back too.

"I got a touch of the asthma, Junior!" Malloy came back.

"Children..." Ping eased into the friendly sparring with the patient-but-firm voice he'd perfected while counseling troubled families. His gaze settled on Rodriguez.

"Yeah... well, we'd found the bodies there," Rodriguez said, pointing to a ragged crater in the concrete behind the patrol car.

"Mortar round?" Ping said, staring at the raised lip around the destroyed concrete.

Rodriguez shrugged, but his eyes better conveyed the extent of his confusion.

"Not unless the mortar fired people," Malloy said, shaking his head.

Ping was about to ask him what he meant, but Rodriguez continued, "So we were already... concerned, you know? I had the flashlight and pistol out- sort of easing up on the back of the car. Then there's this sound... and like a blur of motion, and something explodes out from behind the car."

"Explodes?" Ping stopped scribbling on his tablet in mid-note, "What exploded?"

"Not like 'boom'," Malloy said, "but moving like it'd been shot out of a cannon... It really freaked him out." He pointed to the overpass, "Rod here took a shot at it- see the h way up there in the bridge?"

"What freaked me out was that 'asthma' of yours." Rodriguez said as if re-explaining a math problem to an eight-year-old, "I thought maybe you were dyin'. You sure that wasn't the terror squeak?"

"Asthma." Malloy droned.

"Terror squeak." Rodriguez's smile broadened.

"So this guy flew up to the bridge?" Ping asked, unimpressed.

"Nah," Malloy smirked, "he went off south. Rod here just shot up."

Rodriguez shook his head, "It was between the car and the wall. It bolted out just as I looked down into the car. I'm seeing all this blood, and there's this blast of sound like a flag in high wind, and I see something jet out from behind the car, out of the corner of my eye. I bring my gun up quick, but then there's this really unsettling 'asthma' coming from the chief here," he gave Malloy a mischievous glance, "Anyway, I lost my footing on some kind of stuff I really don't want to think about..."

"...and the bridge gets what's coming to it." Malloy gave a knowing nod.

"You keep saying 'it' and 'something'," Ping said, "do you mean 'he' or 'she'?"

"All I saw was a blur." Rodriguez shook his head.

"I just saw a blink," Malloy said, "dark and fast. It coulda' been a man..."

"Except men don't move like that." Rodriguez finished.

The storm was coming.

Face turned down against the light rain, Anne plodded homeward under a black canopy of lowering clouds. The tops of the surrounding buildings were already lost in the lowering sky and light showers had darkened the pavement. Nature's latest prank at Anne's expense was all set up and it was almost time for the big, wet punch line.

When she woke late in the afternoon, the day had been cool and bright, but deep clouds had moved in with the night. By the time she arrived at work, the sky was filled with the promise of rain. Now, walking home in the fulfillment of that promise, Anne trudged through the thousand small aches that any exertion cost her. Her blue sweater, though perfect for the early evening chill, was completely ineffective against the early morning rain. Socks wet, feet itching, she felt just a little sorry for herself. Usually she tried to be positive, but sometimes the funk crept in and ruined her day.