Joy to the worlds, p.11
Joy to the Worlds, page 11
He hung two more socks on the wall, and I shook my head. “You realize he’s a myth, right? Santa Claus isn’t real.”
Seb continued his “decorating” until ten socks hung from the wall—one for each of my crew—though one sock dangled half the length of the others.
“What’s with the short one?” I asked.
“Have you ever heard of gherblins?” I shook my head. “Sometimes gherblins creep onto the ship at night and steal the socks my mother knits. When my socks no longer possess a mate, I stow them in a box to send home.”
“So what? You shrank one?”
Seb shook his head. “Someone left the miniature stocking in the cargo bay last year after we ferried a group from Yabanc. I suspect one of their offspring may have mislaid it.”
He slung the empty bag across his shoulder. His mouth-flap split, both top lips forming a half-grin. Coupled with his sunglasses and unusually pale skin, it painted a grotesque picture. My skin crawled like I’d walked through a cobweb.
“Is there anything else you require, Captain?” Seb asked.
I wanted to tell him, explain why I was bothering with Nick. I mean, he was my first mate. I should’ve been able to trust him. Instead, I shrugged it off. “I hate complications.”
“That is completely understandable.”
“Seb?” He turned away from the door frame. “Someone killed that man, and I gotta ask, why do this in the middle of the night? Did it ever occur to you that I might’ve thought you the murderer? Might still?”
His bushy orange wig escaped his hood when he laughed. “Me? Kill Santa? I am not the one experienced in dead bodies.”
“Petrie? Why suspect her?”
“Why not? We are all capable of horrible deeds, are we not? Even you are, I suspect.”
Yes, I am.
He mistook my silence and said, “No offense intended, Captain.” He sauntered from the room, fro first. I was alone with blinking lights and empty stockings, both of which chased my thoughts in circles. Petrie had been on my ship during the murder, or so I’d thought. Besides, no way a woman like her would know a crook like Nick, much less kill him.
As much as I didn’t want to think it, Petrie did have access to all manner of medicines and the knowledge to cover up the crime. It wouldn’t be the first time Nick had steered a new crewmember my way in order to set me up. It was time to find out what Ol’ Nick had been up to in the years since I’d last seen him.
I swore as I trudged back to my quarters. Nothing good would come of this business with Ol’ Saint Nick.
But then, nothing ever had.
The trace report on the sector had noted no fewer than five ships in the area before our arrival, but none of them during Nick’s murder. Just my ship, The Perffaith.
Without access to the Lucky Fish’s computer, a spacewalk in a black hole would’ve been easier than tracing Nick’s movements. Zac could’ve helped, being my local computer expert, but at this point, I couldn’t trust anyone.
Sad truth was, I wanted to trust them all.
The last time I’d seen Nick, he’d been on Europa running “errands” for Junto, the father of Europa’s crime family. I pecked at the handheld screen, which glared in the darkness until I swiped a finger down the side to dim it. A search of his name pulled up a list of warrants, arrest records, and bounties. His current address showed up as unknown. Not exactly surprising, especially if he were still working for Junto.
We’d last met on Europa in a shack that reeked of sweat and mold. Too much condensation and not enough filtration had left the walls a pattern of black and green splotches. The business card he’d given me that day—Raymond Royant, Antiquities Dealer—had a relay code I keyed in. Error messages scrolled across the screen. “No such contact. Would you like to execute a last known trace-run?”
I hit the “no” button and leaned my head against the wall. How do you find a guy who lives off the grid? A green light blinked. “Incoming Call—Unknown Number.”
“Accept call,” I said. No picture appeared—just an empty, black screen.
“Whosit?” a gruff voice asked.
“You tell me since you called. Is this Raymond—”
“And I asked you a question, boy. Whosit?”
I cleared my throat. “Um, this is Mark Banes. If this is Raymond, I met you once with Nick—”
The black screen fizzled a moment until Raymond’s grumpy face appeared. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have sworn he’d been wearing that same flannel shirt when I’d met him a few years’ back. Bloodshot eyes glared at me above a week’s worth of stubble. He sat cross-legged in some shack whose walls were lined with cardboard, and he smacked his screen when it grew fuzzy. “I get ya. Yer that turd who left yer dad when he’s all sick and shit. Rat bastard’s who ya are.”
I rolled my eyes visibly, even for a bad connection. Fool had to know he’d been played. But then, Nick played everybody. “Nick wasn’t sick. It was his usual spiel. Look, I’m not here to argue the merits or lack of them with you. I just wanna know where he is.”
“He left.”
“When?”
“I dunno. Do I look like his secretary? Damn bitch was hot, too. Hotter than me.” Raymond took a swig from a bottle he’d been storing between his knees. “Yer hair’s shorter than that time you visited Nick.”
I ran a hand over my brown head. “He still working for Junto?”
Raymond flinched but nodded. The screen flickered then went dark, and the dissonant tritone of a disconnect assaulted my ears.
The last time I’d seen my father, he’d given me some song and dance about being terminal. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that line of bull. Nick’s one skill was looking out for number one—that was him. Whether he’d owed Junto’s boys money or had bought into some get-rich-quick-scheme, he’d come running to Gran and me when he was low on cash. Or booze. Or both.
And I’d run just a little bit further into space and away from him.
I thought I’d run far enough. Seems as though he’d found a way to run to me.
Nick’s death and my lack of sleep left me with visions of drunken bums dancing in my head like a bad 3D flick while I contemplated calling Junto. I had a good hour before the 02:00 meeting with the crew. I sighed and put in a call to the Callisto Space Station.
I’d repeated my request to five lackeys before I reached someone physically stationed on Europa, then to another lackey before reaching the Family proper. “I know you don’t wanna tick off your boss, but see, he owes me one,” I said to the funny little man on my screen. His mustache—if one could call a pencil-thin line above one’s upper lip an actual mustache—twitched. “Tell him Captain Mark Banes would like to call in a favor.”
The screen went a hazy, snowy gray for another minute or two before the man himself appeared. He’d lost a good fifty pounds since I’d last seen him, and his comb-over was more wilt than comb. I grinned like we were old friends. “How’s life in the Family, Junto? You’re looking good.”
He didn’t return my smile but wagged a thin finger at me. “Where is he?”
“Where’s who?”
Junto leaned so close to his screen that his nose near bumped against it. “Your father, who do ya think? Sonofabitch stole some priceless antiquities from...a client. He was s’posed to deliver them to me, but he got all chicky. Took off with the goods.”
“Nick’s anything but a coward,” I said.
My left eye twitched. I tried to ignore it.
“There’s somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ me. Now I know I owe you a favor, which I’m willing to make good on, but I can’t help you if you’re lyin’ to me.”
“Let me guess. This is what he stole.” I held up the snow globe. This time, his nose touched his screen, and I got a shot of more nose hairs than I needed.
“Where is he? Don’t make me—”
“He’s dead.”
Junto’s lips tilted up at the corners. So he already knew that, did he?
I continued fishing. “Found him dead on a beat-up ship out here in the Theros cluster. What was Nick doing on the Lucky Fish?”
“I assume hidin’ from me.”
“And it’s just a coincidence that I happened upon him?”
Junto leaned away from the screen for a moment of whispering with some shadow in the background before he returned. “Look Mark, I’ll tell you what I know, because we’re...friends, but after this we’re square. I won’t owe you shit. Got it?”
It wasn’t a fair trade, and the rat bastard knew it. “Fine. Tell me everything.”
“Normally Nick made good on his deals, one way or another, but sometimes he gots to thinkin’ he could skip the middle man. Took off with that globe-thingy you got, some honest-to-god books—”
I cut him off. “I mean no offense, Junto, but I already know what he took. Get to the bit about him being all corpsified on the Lucky Fish.”
Junto’s eyes narrowed. “My sources say he’d fooled that captain into thinkin’ he was more than some two-credit con artist.” He waited for me to react, and when I merely shrugged, he asked, “What? No love for honest Nick?”
“Say what you want. He was a con man. I’ve got no warm fuzzies for him.”
“Raymond’s right. You’re quite the bastard. I like it!” Junto laughed with his arms wrapped around a much smaller gut. “Once I found his hidin’ spot, I sent some of my boys to recover the goods.”
“You sure that was all they were there to do?”
“If I wanted Nick dead, there’s all manner of folks I coulda sent. I wanted the loot. That’s it.”
I shook the snow globe before the screen. “I assume the goods are valuable. Why’d your boys leave without them?”
“Fool captain of the Lucky Fish believed Nick. Can you imagine? Thought your old man was some freakin’ saint or some shit. Captain refused to give me what I was owed, so my boys got...messy. Ship was in pieces when they boarded. Weren’t any trace of Nick or the goods.”
“You didn’t look very hard.”
Junto smiled into the screen. “You know everything I do.”
He was lying. If he’d wanted the goods, he’d have taken them. Or asked me to fetch them seeing how I was holding them. I wouldn’t push a man like Junto too hard—doing so would only result in my death if I were lucky, and the deaths of my entire crew if I were not—but I could certainly play a little.
“Seeing as how you’ve gone and lost your goods, what’s in it for me to return them? I could part—”
Junto severed the connection before I’d finished. While I had the why to Nick’s appearance on the Lucky Fish, it didn’t tell me who had killed him or their reasoning. Junto’s boys had been long gone by the time Nick had asphyxiated.
I swiped a hand across my screen to lock it. I’d hoped it would be unnecessary, but maybe the search among my crew would yield more answers.
Before I could shadow my eyes from the twinkling lights, Lissa’s pile of braids blocked the brightness. “Morning, Captain.” Rather than return to her seat, my security officer paced.
The rest of my crew straddled benches along either side of the table. Bags drooped beneath most eyes, and no one paid any mind to the socks tacked to the back wall.
“It’s not even 02:00 yet,” I muttered and hooked a stool leg with my foot. When it scraped across the floor, Seb flinched and sent a splash of some red sludge over the rim of his mug. “Everyone’s a mite jumpy this early morning.”
Lissa cleared her throat. “Not surprising given the circumstances and lack of sleep.”
“Fair enough. I did a little digging about our corpse. Seems he had a run in with Junto and the Family.”
“Our stiff was a mobster? Cool.” Jake threw up his hands at my glare. “Or not cool. Shame on him. Bad Mr. Mobster.”
I rapped my knuckles on the table. “Enough. Junto’s boys were long gone when we arrived, so they weren’t the killers. Someone on my ship murdered Sant—I mean, Mr. Johnson. Maybe it was self-defense. Maybe it was spur of the moment. Either way, we got a corpse on our hands and not a whole lotta answers.”
“Are we sure it was one of us?” Lissa asked, and I nodded.
“Analysis says we were the only ship within three hours of the Lucky Fish at the time of death. Someone on The Perffaith killed him. I want everyone interviewed, Lissa. Where they were, what they were doing—report to me by noon.”
“There is not any need, Captain.” When Seb stood, his eyes hiding behind oval frames, my gut played a round of slug-it-out with my esophagus. “I think we know who our killer is.”
Many feet shuffled beneath the table. “Considering we don’t have much more than a mob connection and an autopsy, I find that surprising, Seb.”
Zac whispered, “The autopsy. It would be easy to—”
“To what? Lie? Break my oath? Is that what you’re suggesting?” asked Petrie. Her end of the bench slid sideways as she rose to her feet. When she leaned across the table toward Zac, Lissa’s hand on my arm stopped my own forward motion.
“Might as well see what shakes loose. This has been brewing all morning,” Lissa said.
Without so much as a glance in our direction, Seb said, “Peter, I—”
“It’s pronounced Pe-tree, not Pe-ter.”
“Petrie then. You cannot deny how easy it would be for you to doctor an autopsy. You have access to needles and medicines we do not, and—”
For all her plain looks, Petrie’s body size made for an imposing figure as she leaned close enough to kiss Seb. The tips of her shoulder length hair hit his chin, and he flushed to match the blinking lights. “Why would I risk my career to kill a stranger?”
“It is not my business to say.”
“Don’t think I don’t know, Seb.”
She broke eye contact when I knocked my fist on the table. “Enough double-speak. If you know something, either of you, get to it. Otherwise, sit down and shut up. We’ve got better ways to spend our time.”
“Seb’s been spying on me. Late at night when he thinks no one’s watching,” said Petrie, and Seb hissed.
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
Lissa, who had been calm a moment before, paled. Petrie gripped Lissa’s shoulder. “Lissa and I are lovers. Alphans are not known for their tolerance of...well....”
I closed my eyes. Onboard relationships—damned things never ended well. At best they fizzled out, and at worst, they burned a hole through the ship. A picture of the Lucky Fish’s bridge came to mind.
Beside me, Lissa was a confident woman who wore her strength physically as well as mentally. My chief medical officer—Petrie-Dish Extraordinaire as I called her—was an old friend but the complete antithesis of Lissa. Petrie embraced her curves like she had middle age, with shy apologies. The idea of Lissa hooking up with someone suffering under insecurities made little sense to me.
But then, nothing about the past twelve hours made any sense.
Petrie bit her lip as she awaited my response.
“As a general rule, I dislike onboard relationships. However, I see no reason for concern here. What Petrie and Lissa do in their spare time is their own business,” I said.
Seb’s shoulders slumped forward as Petrie turned away from him. If his mouth-flap could’ve frowned, I’d bet it would’ve. Lissa kept herself angled between him and Petrie, and her finger brushed the taser clipped to her belt.
“Lissa will interview folks, then I’ll interview her. She’ll send me the reports by noon.”
“I’d suggest we search rooms as well,” said Lissa.
I waved a hand at her. We weren’t there—yet. There had to be an easier explanation to this than murder.
“And who gets to interview you, Mark?” asked Zac.
Lissa said, “I will.”
“But what if you two are in cahoots? I hate to suggest it, but if we’re all suspects, we’re all suspects. And you two have a somewhat colorful past.”
Zac was right. I hated when he was right. I rubbed my temples and answered, “You can all interview me. Fair?”
“Whatever you say, Captain.”
The edge to his voice confused me. I glanced around the table only to be met by furrowed brows and deep frowns. Trouble was brewing like a solar flare. I was gonna have to deal with this quickly.
The Perffaith’s sensors showed the majority of my crew on the Lucky Fish as they should’ve been, the exceptions being Zac and Petrie. Sensors indicated both had left The Perffaith when Seb had spotted the heat source.
Another blip—this one from Petrie—pinged my inbox before noon. I don’t know what I’d expected the medical report to tell me beyond what I already knew—carbon monoxide poisoning, adrenaline injection, blah-blah medical jargon—but her write-up gave an alarmingly accurate portrayal of Nick’s life. I reread the last paragraph twice to be sure I’d gotten it right.
Liver cirrhosis indicates a heavy drinker. Scarring of the lungs and esophageal tissue indicates heavy tobacco use. No indications of drug use in the blood or tissue. Five cysts 2 cm. in size were removed from the lungs, and two 1 cm cysts were removed left of the trachea. Tests revealed these cysts to be malignant in nature. Patient suffered from Stage IV lung cancer at the time of death. No evidence of standard cancer treatment was found.
Damn. My old man hadn’t been lying after all. I closed the report and put in a call to Zac.
He stood beside a pile of scanners, their motherboards spread out across the table. “Whatcha need, Captain?” asked Zac.
“Meet me in the captain’s station in five minutes.”
As I walked to the bridge I passed Jake, who stared at his shoes. No one on the bridge paid me any mind. Once the door to the captain’s station slid shut, I settled in behind my desk and pulled up my recent research. “Officer Zac Curtis requests entry,” the computer announced a few moments later.
“Approve.”
The door slid open, and Zac stepped inside. “I figured you’d call me down sooner or later.” When I cocked an eyebrow, he added, “I’ve done all I can to try and salvage the Lucky Fish’s computer, but the data’s too dang damaged—”
