PLEASE ENJOY AN EXCERPT FROM MY NOVEL, QUANTUM MOON.
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE OR OVERSIZED TRADE PAPERBACK ON AMAZON.COM.
I DON'T LIKE death threats, especially where environmental tax auditors are concerned, but I have to admit that I considered making one.
When they assigned him to me, I knew Henderson was going to be trouble. He enjoys our encounters because he always wins. I can't take a belch in the park without him finding out. He's the toughest ETA ever to be born. One of these days, I'm going to choke the SOB so hard that his beady, black eyeballs will pop right out of his head and roll around on the floor. Then, I'm going to stomp on them.
It was Tuesday. I'd been called to the mat at precisely 12:03 P.M. You never know when an audience will be mandated, and as for me, I'd been yanked in four times in the last two quarters to discuss things like why my toilet paper consumption was so high.
Henderson is short, bald, plump, and smells like he rations soap at his house. "You've severely exceeded your electricity allowance, again, Marshal Merrick," he said. "If you keep going like this, by the end of the year you're going to be paying some stiff penalties for flagrant disregard of environmental limits." He paused and then visibly warmed to the subject. "Your Class A designation will be pulled if you can't pay the tax. I know I keep repeating myself on this, but if you don't do something, you'll eventually lose your job and someone else whose proven himself frugal and hardworking will move up into your place." He smiled. "I do expect it to happen. Soon."
I placed my hands on his desk and tried to look menacing. "I have a certificate of disease from the Planetary Health Organization," I growled. "You can't dispute the medical records. I need electricity for light therapy to keep my seizures down. How many times do I have to tell you that?"
His voice grew sharp. "It doesn't matter what your problem is. Your petitions to up your electricity allowance have been denied. Repeatedly. You'd think you'd have gotten the message by now."
I sat back in the chair, flustered, frustrated. and sure of my defeat. Taking a breather while he computed my tax, I glanced around at the line of other desks in his big, gray, windowless room. The place was crowded as usual, and as usual, too quiet for the number of people trying to work through their returns. I wondered, again, how they could do it without shouting. In the next moment, I was reminded why—they didn't have an ETA like Henderson.
"Your claim is ridiculous, Ms. Merrick," he said. "Lycanthropy? No one in the Office of Taxation believes that you have such a disease. The physician who wrote the certificate is no longer at the PHO. I checked. He died in one of our assorted plague situations." He tapped his pencil on the desk pad and then added wearily: "It was a swindle on your part from the start. Don't you realize that there are millions of needy people who would give assorted body parts to have as much electricity allowance as you have for the size of your family unit? We consider your claims for more power to be unsubstantiated and frivolous."
"Don't you mean you consider it unsubstantiated and frivolous? My claim is probably lying in the bottom of your in basket."
"You're not endearing yourself to me."
"Look, I support a senior. She has to stay warm, you know."
"Is it my fault that her pension doesn't include a larger portion of electricity credits? She cut the deal with her company when she retired. She should have thought about it then."
There was no talking to this beast, so I stood up to leave. He followed my rise calmly by tilting his chin.
"Where are you going? We're not finished here."
"I am. Call me later with the bad news."
"Don't you want the opportunity to defend your other claims?"
"I really don't care." I took my time zipping up my fake goose down vest. "You know, Mr. Henderson, since you're so good at giving advice, I'd like to return the favor."
"What, then?"
"Never, under any circumstances, hold one of these interviews with me on a full moon, because if you do and you give me more snotty-assed trouble, I'll take my fist and use it to ram your nose into the back of your head." Smiling sweetly, I winked and then fled the office and building, stepping into an afternoon of cold, stinging rain.
I had just flipped up my hood when my communications node nearly deafened me. I tapped down the volume on the earplug, hearing as I did, my partner's voice summoning me to a crime scene. Before going off-line, he said: "You aren't going to believe this one, Ty."
I tend to be a cynic where unbelievable things are concerned, but I'll admit to being one who can be conned into exploring the possibility of something interesting, so I jumped the subway at Viking Street and came out topside into Ward Two, a neighborhood known as Shanghai Alley.
This section of District One is all rickshaws and bamboo shacks. Electricity and natural gas are things that they have a couple of blocks away, but despite the lack of utilities, this section is, undeniably, a special place. The environmental corporations should take a lesson from here about what good air smells like. It shouldn't be bland, because it's too clean. It needs layers and nuances to excite the nose. When you visit Shanghai Alley, you can savor the odors of stir-frying vegetables, grilling meats, and pickled cabbages that remind you of dirty feet. The people create this glorious flood of olfactory sensation without the obvious amenities of the modem world. From what I know, they literally have one can of Sterno per fifty family units. They've leamed to share fire as though it was communal property.
I trudged onward with hands in pockets and head bent low against the sleet until I came upon the subway entrance at Traveler's Circle. I ducked inside just in time to throw my token at the commuter operator and catch a departing train. The car was packed, but no one spoke; there was no distraction at all, which left me alone with only my irritating internal dialogue to sort through.
I wasn't lying to Henderson. I really am a werewolf, but I prefer to think of myself as a lycanthrope. It lends some medical credence to a condition that seems suspended in the supernatural.
You see, a few years back, I was on a stakeout trying to nab a serial killer. A ward cop and I were assigned to a room across the street from our murderer's apartment. We were trading off surveillance time, and one night I was on duty and freezing my rear end off, so I flipped on the furnace. The next thing I remember was waking up in a health care clinic and finding out that I had been overcome by carbon monoxide. I was lucky the officer returned to bring me some dinner before going home for the evening. He found me unconscious and sliding toward death. He should have let me die, because after I was released from the hospital, I began to have strange seizures, which I refer to as stretches.
They occur throughout the lunar month and their onset is impossible to predict, but I have found that the worse the stress, the more stretches will occur. Sometimes, I'll have upward of ten convulsions; other times, I'll have as few as three. One thing is for certain; these stretches take me into my subtle lycanthropic form. They increase in length and ferocity until the day of the full moon when the transformation becomes complete and for twelve solid hours, I'm suspended in an eerie place where demons dwell.
What happens to me in the course of my transformation is nothing like the stories and vids would have you believe. I've read myths where a person will purposely seek out this disposition by doing such crazy things as wearing a wolf's pelt while drinking the warm blood of a freshly killed animal. According to some of these legends, it's a desirable circumstance in which to be, because it's a chance to control supernatural power akin to that wielded by sorcerers or shamans. Well, if magic sparks fly, I've yet to see them, because my own transformation into a werewolf is not so much a periodic, metaphysical alchemy, but is instead the unsanctioned development of a dark and dangerous psyche.
I, of course, went from doctor to doctor looking for a cure. I kept coming away being labeled as mildly delusional or as having something called a bipolar disorder, which was caused by the accident. Then, one day, I met Dr. Pastore, who said I exhibited all the signs of lycanthropic melancholia. He told me the medical profession didn't know much about this particular madness. They thought of it as an alteration in brain waves, but since little research had been done on the condition since the twentieth century, not much more was known about it.
I have my own theories of lycanthropy, and whether it has to do with the gravitational effects of the moon or the increased hormonal activity of my monthly cycle, it has become a regular part of my life rhythm. Dr. Pastore recommended light therapy to alter my erratic delta brain waves. For the last several months, the stretches have seemed milder, even though it just might be my fancy on the matter.
After several subway stops, I finally jumped off at Ward Eight, the comfortable neighborhood of district officials, professionals, and advisors. Unlike the rest of the locality, there are no power blackouts here and the water comes into the houses via copper pipes and spigots. Whole family units could live on the contents of just one of their trash cans.
Still, they weren't immune to bad weather and the rain came down just as hard in this upper-class section, so I kicked into a jog toward my destination. Five blocks later, I found the home surrounded by emergency vehicles. I wound my way through curious residents, stepped over the crime scene cordon, and identified myself as a district marshal to the uniformed ward cop posted at the entrance.
He checked my badge and let me squish on inside. I paused in the foyer to toss back my hood and drip on the Oriental carpet.
We're talking house here. There were cathedral ceilings so high that they must have had a heating bill from hell. The place was polished teak wood, expensive silk, and sparkling crystal. It was conspicuous consumption at its best, and I was immediately so envious that my mood tripped downward a notch. Compared to this joint, I lived inside a turkey carcass.
My partner, Andy LaRue, ducked around a corner to greet me, and when I saw him, I couldn't help a smile. He's a handsome fellow underneath it all, but he always looks like he's just gotten in from a day spent bin diving. He has curly, waist-length, dark brown hair that usually needs combing, and it's a good thing that his standard issue cammies are black, because he wears a variety of stains upon them. He totes a fifty caliber Magnum Death Piece, which he will gladly show you, just so he can talk about the craftsmanship of the hand-tooled shoulder holster, and from there, he'll go on to explain how this is a dying art form. If you don't interrupt, you'll soon be caught in a noose of useless information.
"How'd it go with the tax man?" he asked.
"About like I expected, Andy. What do we have?"
I could tell by the way he stared at me that he didn't want to turn the subject, but after a moment, he did. "Her name is Maria Raynor. She was the wife of Councilman Jack Raynor. Remember him; the guy who shoved through the district bill on the rotating power program so that all PHO facilities would have electricity on a constant basis?"
"Oh, yeah. He's in charge of public health policy, right?"
LaRue nodded. "I see from your look, you're wondering same thing I am: Why would someone kill his wife instead of him?"
"He would make a great target, that's for sure. A whole lot of people are going to go cold this winter because of him."
"Jack claims that he was out of the district this week and he just got home this evening. According to the forensic tech, she appears to have been dead for almost two days."
We strolled deeper into a plush living room where we were met with antiques, electronic equipment, and house plants that you couldn't eat. Hanging over the stone fIreplace was a six-foot, flat-screened vid. The response team on the case was large and there were folks working all over, except for a few who stood in the middle of the crime scene glued to a broadcast of an interdistrict soccer tournament. Mrs. Raynor was lying dead on the couch right beside them.
A good, hearty stink blended with the sweet odor of cadaver de toilette, a spray disinfectant. Ever since my accident, I've not appreciated this smell though I encounter it in some form nearly every day. Death, alone, is bad enough, but when you mix it with perfume, you have a serious air pollution problem.
I hunkered down beside a photographer who was taking some close-ups of this enormous woman. He muttered something about needing a wide-angle lens to get her whole body in the picture.
The victim lay on her stomach and her dark hair was flung forward to cover a portion of her face. She was naked, except for a pair of white socks and a large, brightly colored, woven bag hanging about her neck. Her left hand was draped over the side of the couch and looked as though she had tried to reach a plastic tub half full of melted ice cream.
Not only was she dead, her body had been mutilated, as well. Long, vertical panels of skin and muscle located on her butt and thighs had been sliced away with what appeared to be surgical precision.
"I take it Councilman Jack is being sedated and such?" I asked.
"Health Care Facility Twenty," LaRue answered. "He was pretty shaken up."
"From what I've seen and heard of the man, I can't imagine that."
"I'd say you're right, but his act was convincing."
Mrs. Raynor had died the way she had fallen. The rolls of fat eclipsing her torso were purple with lividity, the postmortem circumstance where the blood pools at the lowest point of the body. Rigor mortis looked as though it had come and gone.
"Cause of death," LaRue announced, "was suffocation. Without disturbing the body, it appears that she has a rather large spoon lodged in her throat. From what we can tell, this artwork on her backside was done shortly after she died. At this point, we can't fInd any detectable signs of struggle."
I nodded, disconnecting from my review to admire the beauty of the wood on the French doors. "Was the security system knocked out or just turned off?"
"Hard to tell. The house's computer processor was down when we got here. The electrical field fizzled at some point. We're canvasing the neighborhood for anyone who might have seen something going on over here, but 1 don't expect much."
"Have you had a chance to have a good look around?"
"Oh, yes. You may fmd the kitchen interesting." He led me down a short hall decorated with family photos and handmade flower wreathes. We were met by several investigators lurking over spills and bread crumbs.
I was amazed. The galley was huge and the appliances were state of the art. There wasn't an ice cooler or propane burner in sight, but there was a restaurant-size refrigerator and stove, a dishwasher, rubbish compactor, and more consumption gauges than I'd ever seen in one place in my whole life. The meters were all fully functional, keeping a register of the number of times the fridge was cracked and the amount of natural gas used when the oven was heated. There was even a counter on the sink to measure the water flowing down the drain. I wondered briefly what we'd find in the bathroom.
Now, being the kind of person who does what she can to scam the system, I found all these indicators to be a little excessive, even for a wealthy family unit who could easily afford the waste taxes. I guess I must have stared with an open mouth, because LaRue laughed.
"Bizarre, isn't it?" he said.
"Do you actually think this guy lives under all the restrictions he votes in?"
"It looks like it. Maybe it's a political thing. You know, he doesn't want the ethics board to get the idea that he's on the take."
Two ward cops grubbed through the trash can. I wiggled by them to check out the pantry. "Were the cupboards razed?"
"I doesn't appear so."
He came over to lean against the wall, shielding me from the officers with his bulk. I yanked open the closet door to see what provisions might be inside.
It was a wonderland of food, stocked to the hilt: instant dinners and cans of soup, packets of freeze-dried vegetables and bottles of carbonated soda.
A voodoo bottle hung from a brass hook just inside the door. These containers are filled with dirt from a graveyard, a bit of dried grass, old buttons and paper clips, and then lined with a special magical incantation to ensure that a thief couldn't come along and steal food, because if he did, he would grow sick in the belly and die. It's pure bullshit, but it did make me wonder what was inside that charm Maria had around her neck.
"Would you look at this stuff?" I whispered.
"Fantastic, huh?" He turned toward the investigators. "Take it in the other room, gentlemen. I want to talk to the district marshal in private for a moment."
They all shook their heads knowingly and did as they were ordered, slamming the kitchen door behind them. LaRue swiveled his attention to me once more as I unzipped my jacket and held it open so he could help me load up the oversized pockets sewn inside.