Red. Her irises were the color of Chilean strawberries, face tinted ruby by sanguine neon light. Satori Optical’s byzantine logo hung in the wet sky meters above her body, humming. Call wanted to be sick as he looked at her body, lying face down on the alley, arms turned painfully away. She was the second in the last three days.

- From “The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven)”

 

BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell (me, not that I like to talk about myself in the third person), available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting.

Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle

I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). “Third Sight” was yesterday’s. Today’s excerpt is from “The Sunyata Routine,” where a cop tracks an inhuman killer through the (of course) rainy streets of a future Seattle.

 

THE SUNYATA ROUTINE
(ANOTHER NAME FOR HEAVEN)

Red. Her irises were the color of Chilean strawberries, face tinted ruby by sanguine neon light. Satori Optical’s byzantine logo hung in the wet sky meters above her body, humming. Call wanted to be sick as he looked at her body, lying face down on the alley, arms turned painfully away. She was the second in the last three days.

Black. The sign snapped off. Her eyes were empty black matched by the wet slick of the asphalt beneath her face, looking nowhere. Call tired to break her gaze, but found himself unable to, something familiar there that kept calling him. The pavement beneath her face was dark and glossy, like she had been crying before it happened. With insect precision, the swing arm of the recorder swept back and forth over the body, committing the scene to impervious digital memory.

Red. “Anybody know her?” Call asked, voice dry. He shook some sugared lozenges free from a metal case and put one in his mouth, filling it with a sudden warmth like liquor.

“Yeah,” said Marks. “Mary Li. Partygirl, free agent.”

Free? Call asked himself, skeptical. She didn’t have any identification or money or drugs. Nothing. She was a streetwalker, an anachronism. There were three houses within walking distance of Pike’s Place, all legal and clean. In addition to those were a few other unlicensed houses, every one accessible and looking for good talent. But a few women still worked the streets, God only knows why.

“Some girls still do that. They stick together down here,” Marks said. “You should have seen her friends, all that eyeliner and mascara bleeding down their cheeks. They cried on Ash’s shoulder all the way down to the station.”

“Was she seeing any regulars?”

“No, none of her johns ran the rough trade or crossed the street. Mary was a clean girl, her friends said.”

“Sure she was. Why else would she wait corners?”

Black. The recorder noiselessly pulled back to a ready position, apparently sated.

“Turn her over?” asked Marks.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”  Call already had his rubbers on, not wanting to, but knowing it was necessary. The vultures would be here soon. He should take a look before they swaddled the corpse in their hydrocarbon sheets and hustled it away. Vultures weren’t paid enough to notice little things. He involuntarily held his breath as he turned her over, reaching beneath her armpits.

The recorder resumed its slow scans, centimeters over the body. From behind it hadn’t looked so bad; it might have been just another random death. The other side told a different story. Call read the cuts like a signature. It wasn’t  a slice-take. They were fanatically precise and always knew exactly what they were looking for, besides, they’d make sure that their leftovers were never found. These cuts were definite, but random and probing, as if whoever was cutting wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking for.

“Jesus on a stick,” Marks said, looking away from the body. “Real artist who did this one.”

“Number five,” Call breathed to himself. “Who else knows about her?”

“Nobody much. Not yet. Come morning, it will be on all the channels. They like to see red.”

She had been cut from end to end, tight skin split and peeled back. The Stripper had done this four times before, victims apparently picked at random: two men, three women, none having any relation to the other. The only thing that linked them was someone’s razor. The first one they found was flayed nearly to the bone over most of the body. Somebody had called them ‘strippings’ and the name stuck.

“He got his hands real dirty this time,” Marks said absently as he kneeled down again and looked at her left hand. The intact nails all had porosil insets, each showing an animated abstract, colors and shapes flowing into one another in miniature. Some of the nails were smudged and chipped, fingertips bloodied in defense.

“So did she.”  Call’s pulse quickened. A break. The first one to come their way. The four strippings before Mary were seamless, airtight. There had been no physical evidence other than the incisions themselves, inflicted with a frozen titanium alloy blade, ultraclean surgical quality. No blood, semen or other fluids, skin, hair, nothing. It was as if the Stripper was just the scalpel alone, without a human presence to animate it.

But this might just prove different. If this was physical evidence, then they were halfway to finding the Stripper. Call watched as the vultures stalked in and began cocooning Mary Li’s body, lifting it from the slick of blood in the alley and swaddling it in aqua-green sheeting.

The recorder made one final sweep, centimeters over the asphalt, scene passing through its silicon eye. Call left just as all the grinners were coming on, igniting their white-hot lights and preparing to look caring and concerned for the home audience. Desperation and hope battled within Call again. He’d been suspended between those two poles ever since this assignment had been handed to him. That was four bodies ago.

Call couldn’t get Li’s eyes from his head. He had looked at them too long, until the ghostly afterimage had fused to his retina. He tried to sleep, but found himself unable to catch more than a few hours rest before giving up. Sitting down with all the files on the case, he drank from pot of Mexican coffee and smoked tobacco fresh from Confederation fields in Kentucky.

After a few moments, he realized that they were not Li’s eyes haunting him, but Carol’s. His wife of five years who, six months ago, was not home when Call got back from work. Neither were her clothes or things. It was as if she never had been. Mary Li and Carol might have been sisters, they were so close in looks. Call looked at the body and knew that it wasn’t Carol, but he kept seeing her dead in the alley, stripped bare.

–

“It’s a sure thing that He did it,” said Shapiro. They were standing in the chilly morgue, looking down on the body as it lay there on the stainless grey slab. “Same clean blade. Same patterns of incision, but this time focusing on thoracic and the cardiac regions. Getting to the heart of the matter,” she murmured humorlessly.

Shapiro was a short, round woman who always wore a dark red sash with fringe that tickled the noses of the cadavers she looked over. She had coarse features, dark eyes and an insistent, nasal accent that grated Call’s nerves.

“Look at this, though,” she said. She leaned in and grabbed Li’s left hand with her pudgy fingers. The insets were all turned off, now dull gray. Li’s fingers were stained an unmistakable dirty maroon underneath the edges of her nails. “No, the third finger, Call.”

He looked closely at the spot that Shaprio was pointing out. There was a ragged tear in the skin of Li’s ring finger. It wasn’t much at this scale.

“Injury sustained during the attack?” Call asked. “You have a blowup of that?”

Shapiro nodded as she brought a flatscreen over from another table. She flipped through a few possible views then decided on one before handing it to Call. Onscreen, the tiny wound seemed huge and deep, a canyon of flesh. “The cut was caused by her hand slipping over something during the attack.”

Call looked away from the monitor. “Do we know what?”

She reached back to another table and handed something to Call. “Uh-huh,” Shapiro chirped. “This.”  Inside a plastic sleeve was a tiny piece of something digital. The item couldn’t have been more than a half centimeter square, if that big at all.

“Silicon?” Call asked.

“Take a look here,” Shapiro said as she pointed to the screen and pressed a button. The finger wound was replaced by an extreme magnification shot of the chip. It was really a fragment of a larger unit, one of its perimeters sheared raggedly.

“Taash induction feed,” Shapiro commented. “Cadillac tech. Top of the line.

“Induction feed?  What the hell for?  Li wasn’t wired.”

Shapiro shook her head in the negative. “Not where that thing was jammed. Not at all.”  She circled around the room, chewing on the end of a stylus in puzzlement.

“So she got it off him…Why would he have an induction jack on him?” Call wondered aloud. “Maybe it wasn’t his in the first place. Could she have picked it up somewhere beforehand?”  This was beginning to look like a spurious clue, eating away at any hope of breaking the case through this avenue.

“Sure. Anything’s possible, Call.”

He was ready to leave, wanting to get out of the room with the dead girl. She was watching him, even through the sheet that was covering most of her. Even though her eyes were closed, Call saw black ringed with a fringe of red iris in his mind. “What about the blood?  Anything there?”

“Oh, you’ll like this,” she said with a   Not only was there blood, but the tiniest smidge of tissue attached to it. And it isn’t Li’s skin, either. I’m running a trace through LIsP on the sample to see if we can get an ID.”

“If he’s logged in their databases,” breathed Call with resignation. About eighty percent of the population had been tagged at birth and cataloged by the League IntelligenceS Program as standard procedure. Most if not all law-abiding and normal citizens dutifully entered themselves and their children on the rolls. Of course, Call wasn’t expecting anything, since he rarely ever dealt with the law-abiding or normal. “How long on their search, Shap?”

“Shouldn’t be long now. And if they got a name, then we got this bastard.”

“No. All we’ll have is his name, Shap. Just his name.”  Call walked listlessly out of the morgue and up the stairs to the commissary. He ordered a bowl of noodles and shrimp and more coffee, which he consumed halfheartedly. He stopped eating for a few moments, trying to gather all the energy that he had somehow lost in the last few months. Marks sat down in the cubicle, across the plastic laminate table from Call.

It took Call a moment to respond to Marks’ greetings.

“Hellooo….Earth to Jimmy Call. Earth to Jimmy, come in, please.”  Marks smiled when Call finally snapped out of it and focused on his face. “You were really zoning out on me, there.”

“Sorry. Just thinking.”  Call took up his chopsticks and began to pick at the salty noodles and broth.

“You get yourself into trouble doing that.”

“Thinking about Carol.”  Call looked intently into his soup, almost ashamed.

Marks tried to look sympathetic, but failed to cover up the disgust in his voice. “Look, Jim. People get divorced all the time. Sure, it bites, but you have to realize that it just doesn’t work out sometimes.

“I know that. I know. Just that I wonder if there was anything else I could have done. Something I could have said.”  Call smiled idiotically.

“You would have to be someone else. Someone that you weren’t.”  Marks stabbed his plastic fork into a whitish slab of fish. “What’s eating you, Call?  All this happened months ago. You’ve been separated half a year for Christ’s sake.”  Marks sliced at the food on his plate angrily.

“Didn’t you look at that girl’s face last night?  Look real close?”

“I guess I must have missed something that you saw. Care to tell me?” Marks said around a forkful of meat.

“Mary Li and Carol, they looked alike, like sisters. Didn’t you pick that up?  I thought you did, and just didn’t want to say anything.”  Call got up and stood, ready to leave. “I gotta go. In a few, okay?”

Marks just nodded silently, feeling stupid for not seeing the obvious. The anger he had just a few moments ago seemed insubstantial now, like a shadow.

When he got up to his desk, Call found a few sheets of hardcopy in a plastiback folder sitting atop the spotless blotter. Scrawled on the presstone back of the folder was a note from records divsion. RE: SDP, Case 577292-43. The strippings. Call absently wiped the folder’s casing, blanking the surface. He sat down heavily and opened the folder.

Pawn, Jasper 32 years of age cyberneticist working with Wisdom systems Seattle, WA, no previous arrests, served in Land Forces with R&D, average physical attributes, address in the Towers, an upscale building with a view. Pawn was reduced to numbers on a record, abstracted. All he would ever be was right there in black and white.

The Stripper? thought Call. Not likely. He’s not even the type to consort with walkers. If at all, he goes to very clean houses and probably has unimaginative sex with white girls. But for some reason, his blood was all over Mary Li’s fingers. Or at least, LIsP thought so.

 

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