Punktown: Shades of Grey (11 page)

“They’re endangered, Yu—we have our orders!”

“Peck is endangered! Never mind, you prissy little puke, I’ll go to him myself!” Yu stabbed the key to summon down the elevator. A labored rattling like a washing machine full of wrenches came from behind the door. Damn old tenements.

“Don’t abandon your position until more back-up arrives! We have to keep that lift covered!”

“You come cover it; I’m going up.”

“Listen…”

“Bite it.”

“
Listen,
Yu…”

“Listen to what?”

“Peck,” said Russet, from the fourth floor. “He isn’t screaming any more.”

Yu listened. The younger man was right: no more screams were being broadcast from Detective Raymond Peck’s headset. But in straining his ears, Yu thought he heard an odd rustling, as of dry autumn leaves across a sidewalk. Then, a wet sloshing sound, close to the police officer’s mike. What the hell kind of thing was there with him? Was it merely nosing around or attempting to speak over the mike…and if it were that, was it surrendering, or mocking the other two law enforcers?

Detective Yu Li had never met, nor even seen a picture of, an Ophluu. Neither had Russet. Paxton—nicknamed, not necessarily with fondness, Punktown by its inhabitants—was an Earth colony on the planet Oasis, but a melting pot for a vast variety of beings representing every whim and invention of nature and evolution. Though Yu had no doubt at least glimpsed most of these species, new ones were ever venturing to Punktown for the first time. The Ophluu was one such race. He had never been called to examine an Ophluu corpse, had never arrested an Ophluu law-breaker, and had never even heard of their kind before this afternoon. Both detectives had no idea what the criminal they had come here to confront looked like.

Which was unfortunate, considering the nature of the criminal’s activities.

Behind Yu, a door hissed open a few inches. He heard a baby squalling in there as he whirled around to point his sleek silvery .00
Osprey
. He saw a drab woman peeking out at him—a Choom, native to the planet, human-like but for the ear-to-ear mouth, which suddenly widened immensely in horror.

“Police,” Yu snapped. “There are dangerous animals loose in the building; for God’s sake keep your door
locked!
”

The door hissed shut and he heard the lock bleep. Festering tenement hive; if it were a decent place there’d be a security alarm to warn all the tenants to remain safely inside. There were kids in this building. Hopefully, those people on the upper floors had heard Peck’s terrible wails and would pay heed to their warning.

At last, the lift clunked heavily to the ground floor and the graffiti-slathered door rasped open. Russet must have heard it over his headset, because he said, “Yu, I mean it, if you abandon that post I’ll have to report you to the Chief!”

“Be my guest, puke. And I’ll report to all our friends down at the precinct how you sat on your thumbs while Peck was being killed.”

“We don’t know he’s dead.”

“You’re right. You should go see if we can still save him.”

Yu entered the elevator, and the door, just as spray-painted on its inner surface, rasped shut. With a lurch, it began to rise so unevenly he might have thought sweaty slaves were hoisting it up on chains.

“I can’t move, damn it! That thing is still right there on the landing, looking down at me!”

“If it’s an animal it may be passive. You might be able to get past it without hurting it.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it—how do I know if it’s a cow or a shark, you know what I’m saying? Or the Ophluu, for that matter.”

“Why don’t you just sit down and take a nap, then, Russet? That seems to be all you’re good for right now.”

“I’m defending this stairwell so nothing gets past me!”

“While the Ophluu could be escaping onto a fire escape, or breaking into someone’s apartment to take a hostage.”

“Help is on the way!”

“We can’t wait for it.”

Something thumped onto the top of the elevator then, causing Yu to plaster his back against the wall and point the Osprey at the ceiling in both fists.

The ceiling was a white plastic mesh, and through it he saw a black writhing shape, as if an immense eel squirmed up there. It had to be one of the illegal animals, though how it had found its way into the elevator shaft he had no idea. Had it escaped the Ophluu’s apartment via an air vent, or was it poisonous and the Ophluu had tossed it into the shaft on purpose as a threat to him? Yu was tensed to fire, endangered species or not, but before his nerves could get the better of him he saw the eel-thing slither to the side of the ceiling mesh and drop away. At least, he hoped it dropped away down the shaft, and would not be waiting to spring onto him when the door slid open again.

Earlier today, working undercover and posing as a buyer, Peck had gone to the Ophluu’s apartment supposedly to purchase an exotic animal for a pet. A tip from a Punktown pet store had alerted the police to the Ophluu’s black market trade in rare and endangered animals, primarily from his home world. Some were sold as exotic pets, mostly to wealthy clients who, as Yu figured it, saw the creatures as another status symbol—something to show off at parties with their paintings and their sculptures. But other beasts were sold to apothecaries to be killed and used for various medicines, their benefits real or imaginary
;
everything from aphrodisiacs to hallucinogenics. Some of the illegal animals Yu had previously seen change hands in Punktown had been plucked to decorate tribal costumes, skinned to make rich women’s fur coats, trained as guard dogs for drug dealers, pitted against each other in gambling den arenas, eaten as delicacies, sacrificed at rituals and even kept as lovers.

Peck had known what the Ophluu looked like. If only Yu had asked him! But they had thought this would be an easy bust.

The Ophluu had never made trouble before or Yu would have taken note of them. But when they had moved in for the shackle, and Peck had gone up ahead to set things in motion, something had gone wrong. Somehow, the Ophluu had realized what was happening. Unless one of the creatures had escaped and attacked Peck, and maybe even hurt the Ophluu also, but Yu doubted it was that. Still, at least some of the animals were now free. There was the thing Russet could see on the stairs, assuming it wasn’t the Ophluu, and the eel-thing that had fallen onto the elevator. Were they escaping…or had the Ophluu released them to create pandemonium, so as to cover his escape? Indeed, had he released the animals knowing that it would confuse the enforcers’ identification of him?

The elevator ground to a halt at the fifth floor.

The Osprey hummed, charged up but on pause, its solid .00 projectiles available to enforcers only—except when bought on the black market. They would fairly explode when they struck a body, since one never knew what species of body one had to bring down, as now. Because their effects were so devastating, the projectiles themselves didn’t need to be large, so the Osprey carried thirty of the small pellets in its handle cartridge. They offered Yu some measure of comfort when the
scene before him was unveiled by the sliding elevator door
.

The murky hall stretching before him was lined with twelve doors, six to a side. At its end was a metal door to the fire escape, but it didn’t seem to have been opened. A light tube overhead fluttered with wild pulsations. And a creature like a man-sized toad that had been half torn
inside-out
by a malicious child squatted on the stained carpeting about halfway down the narrow hall, facing in Yu’s direction.

Some kind of guard dog?

Its body was a translucent bladder with a dim, amber-colored glow inside it. Dark organs could be discerned within, pulsing like a number of shadowy fetuses. The creature’s limbs were solid enough, and ended in ominous skeletal appendages like the hands of a corpse. Yu had no doubt that those bone digits could be thrust easily into an enemy. As for the head—it was an anemone, nothing more.
A nest of writhing canary-yellow tendrils.

The Ophluu? Those hands, skeletal as they were, did look capable of the dexterity needed by an advanced being. And those bunched hind legs; might they not support the toad-thing in a bipedal stance? Not that all intelligent races were bipedal, by any means…

Though he felt ridiculous doing so, Yu told the creature in a firm voice, “Don’t move—police!”

The creature showed no reaction one way or the other. Was he merely addressing some mindless beast? Suddenly, Yu had a little more sympathy for Russet’s predicament on the level below.

He let his eyes trail beyond the beast to the doors in the hall. The last four on the right, B-9 through B-12, all belonged to the Ophluu; at least he knew that much from Peck. He wished the owner of the tenement had been called in, so that he could describe the tenant of those rooms. The owner had permitted the Ophluu to open up the walls separating those four apartments, thus creating one large warehouse of sorts for his collection. The owner could not be ignorant of the criminal’s activities, was no doubt nicely compensated for his cooperation. Yu would see to it that the bastard was dragged down to the precinct house as soon as he got out of this mess.

How’d the Ophluu get the critters up and down, though, here on the fifth floor? Yu imagined many were small enough to carry in boxes, and that the larger specimens, like his friend the toad-thing, were brought up here via this very elevator. God knew the floor of it was stained enough to be the inside of an animal’s pen, not to mention the stink, now that he thought of it. Then there was the fire escape as well. Was it the kind with stairs, or a lift itself? Yes
;
Yu took another quick look at it over the creature blocking his path.
The lift variety.
So the Ophluu’s choice of lodgings was not so illogical after all.

“Move!” Yu growled at the creature. He didn’t feel as foolish snapping orders of that sort, which one might yell at a recalcitrant animal as well as at a more evolved creature. He gestured with the Osprey. “Out of my way! Go! Go!”

Slowly, still gripping the silvery pistol in both fists, he began edging his way down the gloomy corridor.

“Go! Go on! Get out of my way!”

A door on the left hissed half open, and a balding Choom man in an undershirt and briefs squeezed half out to see what the uproar was about. “Look,” he was bellowing, “I have a third shift j—” His eyes had fallen on the Osprey, and it was as though its barrel suddenly gagged him. He began to duck back inside. It was a good thing he did, for he hadn’t seen the toad creature behind him tense its powerful hind legs.

“Inside! Get inside!” Yu cried, and squeezed back on his trigger.

As the creature launched itself into the air that Medusa head of tentacles spread wide like the petals of a sunflower, revealing a gaping black maw without teeth. The skeletal claws of the creature spread wide as well.

Yet in mid-air, the .00 projectiles found its flank, and punctured that glowing bladder. The door to the Choom’s apartment bleeped locked even as the creature thudded against it, carried forward by its momentum. But the thing that slumped to the carpet was already dead. The anemone tendrils only convulsed for seconds, like a nest of dying worms, and though no blood came from the ruptured belly, the glow had gone out of it.

“God
damn
,” Yu hissed. Though there was no doubt the thing would have done the Choom some serious harm, he still regretted having to kill the beast. Unless, of course, it had been the Ophluu himself, in which case he didn’t mind as much.

He went to look closer at the thing. No, not the Ophluu, he decided. Its startled spring at the Choom had been too unthinking.

He buzzed at the Choom man’s door.

“Who’s there?” a voice demanded from a grille speaker.

“Police. I want to know what your neighbor looks like.”

“Which neighbor?”

“The Ophluu. The one with the animals.”