Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth

DARK HEAVEN Gregory Benford

The body was bloated and puckered. The man looked to be in his thirties maybe, but with the bulging face and goggle eyes it was hard to tell. His pants and shirt were gone so he was down to his skivvies. They were grimy on the mud beach.

That wasn’t unusual at all. Often the Gulf currents pulled the clothes off. Inquisitive fish or sharks came to visit, and indeed there was a chunk out of the left calf and thigh. Someone had come for a snack. Along the chest and belly were long raised red marks, and that was odd. McKenna hadn’t seen anything like that before.

McKenna looked around but the muddy beach and stands of reeds held nothing of interest. As the first homicide detective there it was his case, and they were spread so thin he got no backup beyond a few uniforms. Those were mostly just standing around. The photo/video guy was just finishing with his systematic sweep of the area.

The body didn’t smell. It had been in the salt water at least a day, the medical examiner had said, judging from the swelling. McKenna listened to the drone of the ME’s summary as he circled around the body, his boots scrunching on the beach.

Outside Mobile and the coastal towns, most bodies get found by a game warden or fisherman or by somebody on a beach party who wanders off into the cattails. This one was apparently a wash-up, left by the tide for a cast fisherman to find. A kid had called it in. There was no sign of a boating accident and no record of men missing off a fishing boat; McKenna had checked before leaving his office.

The sallow-faced ME pointed up to a pine limb. “Buzzards get the news first.” There were three up there in the cypress.

“What are those long scars?” McKenna asked, ignoring the buzzards.

“Not a propeller, not knife wounds. Looks swole up.” A shrug. “I dunno for now.”

“Once you get him on the table, let me know.”

The ME was sliding the corpse’s hands into a metal box with a battery pack on the end. He punched in a command and a flash of light lit the hand for an instant.

“What’s that?” McKenna pointed.

The ME grinned up at him as he fitted the left hand in, dropping the right. “I thought the perfessor was up on all the new tech.”

McKenna grimaced. Back at the beginning of his career he had been the first in the department to use the internet very much, when he had just been promoted into the ranks that could wear a suit to work. He read books too, so for years everybody called him the “perfessor.” He never corrected their pronunciation and they never stopped calling him that. So for going on plenty years now he was the “perfessor” because he liked to read and listen to music in the evenings rather than hang out in bars or go fishing. Not that he didn’t like fishing. It gave a body time to think.

The ME took his silence as a mild rebuke and said finally, as the light flashed again, “New gadget, reads fingerprints. Back in the car I connect it and it goes wireless to the FBI database, finds out who this guy is. Maybe.”

McKenna was impressed but decided to stay silent. It was better to be known as a guy who didn’t talk much. It increased the odds that when you did say something, people listened. He turned and asked a uniform, “Who called it in?”

It turned out to be one of the three kids standing by a prowl car. The kid had used a cell phone, of course, and knew nothing more. He and his buddies were just out here looking, he said. For what, he didn’t say.

The ME said, “I’d say we wait for the autopsy before we do more.” He finished up. Homicide got called in on accidental deaths, suicides, even deaths by natural causes, if there was any doubt. “How come you got no partner?” the ME asked.

“He’s on vacation. We’re shorthanded.”

McKenna turned back to the beach for a last look. So the case was a man in his thirties, brown hair cropped close, a moustache, no scars. A tattoo of a dragon adorned the left shoulder. Except for the raised red stripes wrapped around the barrel chest, nothing unusual that McKenna could spot. But those red ridges made it a possible homicide, so here he was.

Anything more? The camera guy took some more shots and some uniforms were searching up and down the muddy beach but they weren’t turning up anything. McKenna started to walk away along the long curve of the narrow beach and then turned back. The ME was already supervising two attendants, the three of them hauling the body onto a carry tarp toward the morgue ambulance. “Was it a floater?” McKenna called.

The ME turned and shouted back, “Not in long enough, I’d say.”

So maybe in the Gulf for a day, tops, McKenna figured as his boots squished through the mud back to his car. Without air in the lungs, bodies sank unless a nylon jacket or shirt held a bubble and kept them on the surface. More often a body went straight down to the sand and mud until bacteria in the gut did its work and the gas gave lift, bringing the dead soul back into sunshine and more decay. But that took days here so this one was fresh. He didn’t have to wait on the ME to tell him that, and except for fingerprints and the teeth that was probably all the physical evidence they would ever get from the poor bastard back there.

The ME caught up to him and said, “He’s real stiff, too, so I’d say he struggled in the water a while.”

McKenna nodded. A drowning guy burns up his stored sugar and the muscles go rigid quickly.

Two uniforms were leaning against his car, picking their teeth, and he answered their nods but said nothing. This far from Mobile McKenna was technically working beyond his legal limits, but nobody stood on procedure this far into the woods. Not on the coast. The body might be from Mississippi or even Louisiana or Florida, given the Gulf currents, so jurisdiction was uncertain, and might never be decided. A body was a body was a body, as an old New Orleans cop had told him once. Gone to rest. It belongs to no one anymore.

People started out in life looking different. But they ended up a lot alike. Except this one had some interesting ridges.

McKenna recalled being called out for bodies that turned out to be parts of long-drowned deer, the hair gone missing from decay. People sometimes mistook big dogs and even cows for people. But he had never seen any body with those long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh on anything. At least those made this case interesting.

He paused in the morning mist that gathered up from the bayou nearby and watched the impromptu funeral cortège escort the body away, prowl cars going first, crunching along the narrow oyster shell road. The kids were staring at the body, the uniforms, eyeing every move.

Routine, really, probably leading to nothing at all. But something about this bothered him and he could not say what.

He drove back toward Mobile with the window open to the pine-scented spring breezes. To get back from Bayou La Batre, you turn north toward U.S. 90. But he kept going east on two-lane blacktop. At a Citgo station a huge plastic chicken reared up from the bed of a rusted-out El Camino, pointing to a Sit ’n Rest Restaurant that featured shrimp and oysters and fresh catch, the proceeds of the Gulf that had long defined Bayou La Batre.

The book that turned into the movie Forrest Gump was set partly around there and the whole place looked it. But Katrina and the hurricanes that came after, pounding the coast like an angry Climate God, had changed the terms of discussion. As if the aliens hadn’t, too.

He watched people walking into the Sit ’n Rest and wondered if he should stop and eat. The sunset brimmed the empty sky with rosy fingers, but he didn’t feel like eating yet. There was a bottle of Pinot Grigio waiting at home and he somehow didn’t want to see people tonight. But he did want to swing by the Centauri Center. The ones around here regarded everybody else as “farmers,” as locals along the coast refer to anyone who lives inland. Tough and hard-working people, really, and he respected them. They could handle shrimp, hurricanes, civil rights, Federal drug agents, so why should aliens from another star be any more trouble? At least the aliens didn’t want to raise taxes.

And he had taken this case off the board right away, back in Mobile, because it gave him a chance to go by the Centauri Center. He kept going across the long flat land toward the bay, looking for the high building he had read about but never seen. The Feds kept people away from here, but he was on official business.

There were boats in the trees. Two shrimpers, eighty feet long at least, lying tilted on their hulls in scrub oak and pine, at least half a mile from their bayou. Bows shoved into the green, their white masts and rigging rose like bleached treetops. Still not pulled out, nine months since the last hurricane had howled through here. The Feds had other things to do, like hosting amphibians from another star.

That, and discounting insurance for new construction along the Gulf Coast. Never mind that the glossy apartments and condos were in harm’s way just by being there.

Just barely off-road, a trawler had its bow planting a hard kiss on a pine. He drove through a swarm of yellow flies, rolling up the windows though he liked the aroma of the marsh grass.

He had heard the usual story, a Federal acronym agency turned into a swear word. A county health officer had the boats declared a public hazard, so the Coast Guard removed the fuel and batteries, which prompted FEMA to say it no longer had reason to spend public money on retrieving private property, and it followed as the night the day that the state and the city submitted applications to “rescue” the boats. Sometime real soon now.

Wind dimpled the bays beside the causeway leading to Mobile Bay. Willow flats and drowned cypress up the far inlets gave way to cattails, which blunted the marching whitetops of the bay’s hard chop. They were like endless regiments that had defeated oil platforms and shipping fleets but broke and churned against the final fortress of the land.

He drove toward Mobile Bay and soon he could see what was left of the beach-front.

The sun sparkled on the bay and heat waves rose from the beaches so the new houses there seemed to flap in the air like flags of gaudy paper.

They were pricey, with slanted roofs and big screened porches, rafts supported meters above the sand on tall stilts. They reminded him of ladies with their skirts hoisted to step over something disagreeable.

He smiled at the thought and then felt a jolt as he saw for the first time the alien bunker near the bay. It loomed over the center of Dauphin Island, where Fed money had put it up with round-the-clock labor, to Centauri specs. The big dun-colored stucco frame sloped down toward the south. Ramps led onto the sand where waves broke a few meters away. Amphibian access, he guessed. It had just been finished, though the papers said the Centauri delegation to this part of the Gulf Coast had been living in parts of it for over a year.

He slowed as the highway curved past and nosed into a roadblock. A woman Fed officer in all black fatigues came over to the window. McKenna handed out his ID and the narrow-faced woman asked, “You have business here?”

“Just following a lead on a case.”

“Going to need more than that to let you get closer.”

“I know.” She kept her stiff face and he said, “Y’know, these wrinkles I got at least show that I smiled once upon a time.”

Still the flat look. He backed away and turned along a curve taking him inland. He was a bit irked with himself, blundering in like that, led only by curiosity, when his cell phone chimed with the opening bars of “Johnny B. Goode.” He wondered why he’d said that to her, and recalled an article he had read this week. Was he a dopamine-rich nervous system pining for its serotonin heartthrob? Could be, but what use was knowing that?

He thumbed the phone on and the ME’s voice said, “You might like to look at this.”

“Or maybe not. Seen plenty.”

“Got him on the table, IDed and everything. But there’s something else.”

The white tile running up to the ceiling reminded him that this place got hosed down every day. You did that in damp climates because little life forms you could barely see came through even the best air conditioning and did awful things to dead matter. Otherwise it was like all other autopsy rooms. Two stainless steel tables, overhead spray hoses on auto, counters of gleaming stainless, cabinets and gear on three walls. The air conditioning hummed hard but the body smell layered the room in a damp musk. The ME was working and barely glanced up. The county couldn’t afford many specialists so the ME did several jobs.

Under the relentless ceramic lights the body seemed younger. Naked, tanned legs and arms and face, the odd raised welts. The ME was at home with bodies, touching and probing and squeezing. Gloved fingers combing the fine brown hair. Fingers in the mouth and throat, doubtless after probing the other five openings with finer tools. The ME used a magnifying glass to look carefully at the throat, shook his head as if at another idea gone sour, then picked up a camera.

He studied the extremities, feet and hands and genitalia. The magnifier swept over the palms and fingers and he took pictures, the flash startling McKenna, adding a sudden whiteness to the ceramic room.

The ME looked up as if noticing McKenna for the first time. “Wanna help?”

They turned the body after McKenna pulled on rubber gloves. A head-to-foot search, careful attention to the tracery of raised yellow-white marks that now had deep purple edges. The bruises lay under the skin and were spreading like oozing ink. The ME took notes and samples and then stepped back and sighed.

“Gotta say I just dunno. He has two clear signatures. Drowning in the lungs, but his heart stopped before that.”

“From what?”

“Electrocution. And there’s these—” He showed five small puncture wounds on both arms. Puckered and red. “Funny, not like other bites I’ve seen. So I got to do the whole menu, then.”

The county had been going easy on full autopsies. They cost and budgets were tight. “At least you have his name.”

“Ethan Anselmo. No priors, FBI says. Married, got the address.”

“Wounds?”

“The big welts, I dunno. Never seen such. I’ll send samples to the lab. Those punctures on the hands, like he was warding something off. That sure didn’t work.”

“Torture?”

“Not any kind I know.”

“Anybody phone the widow?”

He looked up from his notes, blinking back sweat though the air conditioning was running full blast. “Thought that was your job.”

It was. McKenna knocked on the door of the low-rent apartment and it swung open to reveal a woman in her thirties with worried eyes. He took a deep breath and went into the ritual. Soon enough he saw again the thousand-yard stare of the new widow. It came over her after he got only a few sentences into his description. Ordinary people do not expect death’s messenger to be on the other side of the knock. Marcie Anselmo got a look at the abyss and would never be the same.

McKenna never wanted to be the intruder into others’ pain. He didn’t like asking the shell-shocked widow details about their life, his job, where he’d been lately. All she knew was he hadn’t come home last night. He did some night jobs but he had never stayed out all night like this before.

He spent a long hour with her. She said he sometimes hung out at The Right Spot. McKenna nodded, recognizing the name. Then they talked some more and he let the tensions rise and fall in her, concluding that maybe it was time to call their relatives. Start the process. Claim the body, the rest. Someone would be calling with details.

He left his card. This part went with the job. It was the price you paid to get to do what came next. Figure out. Find out.

Ethan Anselmo had worked as a pickup deck man on shrimpers out of Bayou La Batre. She hadn’t asked which one he went out on lately. They came and went, after all.

McKenna knew The Right Spot, an ancient bar that had once sported decent food and that knew him, too. He forgot about the Pinot Grigio chilling at home and drove through the soft night air over to the long line of run-down docks and sheds that had avoided the worst of the last hurricane. The Right Spot had seen better days but then so had he.

He changed in the darkness to his down-home outfit. Dirty jeans, blue work shirt with snaps instead of buttons, baseball cap with salt stains. Last time he had been here he had sported a moustache, so maybe clean-shaven he would look different. Older, too, by half of a pretty tough year. Showtime…

Insects shrilled in the high grass of the wiped-out lot next door and frogs brayed from the swampy pond beyond. There was even a sort-of front yard to it, since it had once been a big rambling house, now canted to the left by decay. Night creeper and cat’s claw smothered the flowerbeds and flavored the thick air.

There was a separate bar to the side of the restaurant and he hesitated. The juke joint music was pump and wail and crash, sonic oblivion for a few hours. Food first, he decided. Mercifully, there were two rooms and he got away from the noise into the restaurant, a room bleached out by the flat ceramic light. A sharp smell of disinfectant hiding behind the fried food aroma. New South, all right. A sign on the wall in crude type said FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FOREIGN SHRIMP.

The joint had changed. He sat at a table and ordered jambalaya. When it came, too fast, he knew what to expect before the first mouthful.

It was a far, forlorn cry from the semi-Cajun coast food he knew as a boy, spicy if you wanted and not just to cover the taste of the ingredients. The shrimp and okra and oysters were fresh then, caught or picked that day. That was a richer time, when people ate at home and grew or caught much of what they ate. Paradise, and as usual, nobody had much noticed it at the time.

He looked around and caught the old flavor. Despite his disguise, he saw that some people notice you’re a cop. After a few minutes their eyes slide away and they go back to living their lives whether he was watching them or not. Their talk followed the meandering logic of real talk or the even more wayward path of stoned talk. Half-lowered eyelids, gossip, beer smells mingling with fried fish and nose-crinkling popcorn shrimp. Life.

He finished eating, letting the place get used to him. Nobody paid him much attention. The Right Spot was now an odd combination, a restaurant in steep decline with a sleazy bar one thin wall away. Maybe people only ate after they’d guzzled enough that the taste didn’t matter anyway.

When he cut through the side door two Cajun women at the end of the bar gave him one glance that instantly said cop at the same time his eyes registered hookers. But they weren’t full-on pros. They looked like locals in fluffy blouses and skinny pants who made a little extra on the side and told themselves they were trying out the talent for the bigger game, a sort of modern style of courtship, free of hypocrisy. Just over the line. He had seen plenty of them when he worked vice. It was important to know the difference, the passing tide of women versus the real hard core who made up the true business. These were just true locals. Fair enough.

The woman bartender leaned over to give him a look at the small but nicely shaped breasts down the top of her gold lame vest. She had a rose tattoo on one.

“Whiskey rocks, right?” She gave him a thin smile.

“Red wine.” She had made him as a cop, too. Maybe he had even ordered whiskey last time he was here.

“You been gone a while.”

Best to take the polite, formal mode, southern Cary Grant. “I’m sure you haven’t lacked for attention.” Now that he thought about it, he had gotten some good information here about six months back, and she had pointed out the source.

“I could sure use some.” A smile and a slow wink.

“Not from me. Too old. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.”

She laughed, showing a lot of bright teeth, even though it was an old line, maybe as ancient as the era it referred to. But this wasn’t what he was here for, no. He took the wine, paid, and turned casually to case the room.

Most of the trade here was beer. Big TVs showed talking heads with thick necks against a backdrop of a football field. Guys in jeans and work shirts watched, rapt eyes above the bottles pressed to their mouths. He headed for the back with the glass of indifferent wine, where an old juke strummed with Springsteen singing “There’s a darkness on the edge of town.”

The fishermen sat along the back. He could tell by the work boots, worn hands, and salt-rimmed cuffs of their jeans and by something more, a squinty look from working in the sea glare. He walked over and sat down at the only open table, at the edge of maybe a dozen of the men sipping on beers.

It took a quarter of an hour before he could get into their conversation. It helped that he had spent years working on his family’s boat. He knew the rhythms and lingo, the subtle lurch of consonants and soft vowels that told them he was from around here. He bought the next table over a round of Jax beers and that did it. Only gradually did it dawn on him that they already knew about Ethan Anselmo’s death. The kids on the beach had spread the story, naturally.

But most of them here probably didn’t know he was a cop, not yet. He sidled along and sat in a squeaky oak chair. Several of the guys were tired and loaded up with beer, stalling before going home to the missus. Others were brighter and on a guess he asked one, “Goin’ out tonight?”

“Yeah, night dredgin’. All I can get lately.”

The man looked like he had, in his time, quite probably eaten dinner in lot of poolrooms, or out of vending machines, and washed off using a garden hose. Working a dredger at night was mean work. Also, the easiest way to avoid the rules about damaging the sea bottom. Getting caught at that was risky and most men wouldn’t take it.

McKenna leaned back and said in slow syllables, “This guy Ethan, the dead guy, know him?”

A nod, eyes crinkling with memory. “He worked the good boat. That one the Centauris hired, double money.”

“I hadn’t heard they hired anybody other than on Dauphin Island.”

“This was some special work. Not dredgin’. Hell, he’d be here right now gettin’ ready if he hadn’t fell off that boat.”

“He fell?” McKenna leaned forward a little and then remembered to look casual.

“They say.”

“Who says?” Try not to seem too urgent.

A slow blink, sideways glance, a decision made. “Merv Pitscomb, runs the Busted Flush. Now and then they went out together on night charter.”

“Really? Damn.” He let it ride a little, then asked, “They go out last night?”

“I dunno.”

“What they usually go for? Night fishin’?”

Raised eyebrows, shrug. “No bidness of mine.”

“Pitscomb works for the Centauris?”

“Not d’rectly. They got a foreman kinda, big guy named Durrer. He books work for the Centauris when they need it.”

“Regular work?”

A long tug at his beer. “Comes an’ goes. Top dollar, I hear.”

McKenna had to go slow here. The man’s face was closing in, suspicion written in the tight mouth. McKenna always had a problem pressing people for information, and that got around, but apparently not to The Right Spot just yet. One suspect had once named him, Man Who Ax Questions More’n He Should. True, but the suspect got ten to twenty upstate just the same.

McKenna backed off and talked football until the guy told him his name, Fred Godwin. Just then, by pure luck that at first didn’t look like it, a woman named Irene came over to tell them both that she’d all heard about the body and all, and to impart her own philosophy on the matter.

The trouble with teasing information out of people was you get interrupted. It felt like losing a fish from a line, knowing it would never fall for the hook again. Irene went on about how it was a tragedy of course and she knew it weighed upon everybody. That went without saying, only she said it. She looked to be about forty going on fifty pretty hard, and unsteady on her shimmering gold high heels.

“Look at it this way,” she said profoundly, eyes crinkling up above her soulful down-turned lips, “Ethan was young, so that as he was taken up on an angel’s wing to the Alabaster City, he will be still brimming with what he could be. See? Set down at the Lord’s Table, he will have no true regret. There will be no time for that. Another life will beckon to him while he is still full of energy, without memories of old age. No fussing with medicine and fear and failed organs, none. No such stations of duress on the way to Glory.”

He could hear the capitals. Godwin looked like he was waiting for the right moment to escape. Which meant it was the right moment to buy him a beer, which McKenna did. To keep control of the conversation, maybe hinting at an invitation to sit with them, Irene volunteered that she’d heard Ethan had been working on the Busted Flush the night before his body washed up. Bingo.

McKenna bought Godwin the beer anyway.

Up toward the high end districts of Mobile the liquor stores stocked decades-old single malt Scotch and groceries had goat yoghurt and five kinds of oregano and coffee from nations you never heard of since high school. You could sip it while you listened to Haydn in their coffee shops and maybe scan the latest New Yorker for an indie film review.

But down by the coast the stores had Jim Beam if you asked right and the only seasoning on their shelves was salt and pepper, usually lots of pepper for Cajun tastes, and coffee came in cans. There was no music at all where he shopped and he was grateful. Considering what it might have been.

He got a bottle of a good California red to wash away the taste of the stuff he’d had earlier and made his way to the dock near the Busted Flush mooring. From his trunk he got out his rod and tackle and bait and soon enough was flipping his lure toward the lily pads in the nearby bayou. He pulled it lazily back, letting the dark water savor it. In a fit of professional rigor he had left the good California red in the car.

The clapboard shack beside the mooring was gray, the nail holes trailing rust and the front porch sagging despite the cinder blocks loyally holding it up from the damp sand. There was a big aluminum boathouse just beyond but no lights were on. He guessed it was too austere and indeed the only murmur of talk came from the shack. A burst of cackling laughter from the fishing crew leaked out of the walls.

He sat in the shadows. An old Dr Pepper sign was almost gone but you could still see the holes from buckshot. Teenagers love targets.

It made no real good sense to fish at night but the moon was coming up like a cat’s yellow smile over the shimmering gulf and some thought that drew the fish out. Like a false dawn, an old fisherman had said to him long ago, and maybe it was true. All he needed was the excuse anyway so he sat and waited. He always kept worms in a moist loam pail in the car trunk and maybe they would work tonight even if this stakeout didn’t.

The Busted Flush crew was hauling out the supplies for a night run. There was always something to do on a boat, as McKenna knew from working them as a teenager, but these guys were taking longer than it should.

He had learned long ago the virtues of waiting. At his distance of about a hundred meters simple binoculars told him all he needed, and they had an IR filter to bring out the detail if he needed it. The amber moonlight glanced off the tin-roofed shotgun shacks down along the curve of the bay. Night-blooming flowers perfumed the night air and bamboo rattled in the distance like a whisper in his ear.

Then a big van rumbled up. Two guys got out, then a woman. They wore black and moved with crisp efficiency, getting gear out of the back. This didn’t fit.

The team went to the dock and Merv Pitscomb ambled along to greet them. McKenna recognized him as skipper of the Busted Flush from a car fax he had gotten from the Mobile Main library, after leaving the restaurant. His car was more his office now than the desk he manned; electronics had changed everything.

The team and Pitscomb went together back to the van, talking. Pitscomb slid open the side door and everyone stepped back. A dark shape came out—large, moving slowly and in a silence from the Feds that was like reverence.

McKenna froze. He knew immediately it was a Centauri. Its arms swung slowly, as if heavily muscled. The oddly jointed elbow swung freely like a pendulum, going backward. In water that would be useful, McKenna imagined. The arm tapered down to a flat four-fingered hand that he knew could be shaped to work like the blade of an oar.

The amphibians were slow and heavy, built for a life spent moving from water to land. It walked solidly behind the two guys in black, who were forming a screen of what had to be Federal officers. No talk. Centauris’ palates could not manage the shaped human sounds, so all communication was written.

It shuffled toward Busted Flush on thick legs that had large, circular feet. With help at the elbows from the Feds it mounted the gangplank. This was the first he had seen for real, not on TV, and it struck him that it waddled more than walked. It was slow here, in a slightly stronger gravity. Centauris had evolved from a being that moved on sand, seldom saw rock, and felt more at home in the warm waters of a world that was mostly sea.

He realized as it reached the boat that he had been holding his breath. It was strange in a way he could not define. The breeze blew his way. He sniffed and wondered if that rank flavoring was the alien.

It went aboard, the Federal officers’ eyes swiveling in all directions. McKenna was under a cypress and hard to spot and their eyes slid right over him. He wondered why they didn’t use infrared goggles.

Busted Flush started up with a hammering turbo engine. It turned away from the dock and headed straight out into the gulf. McKenna watched it go but he could not see the alien. The shrimp nets hung swaying on their high rocker arms and Busted Flush looked like any other dredge shrimper going out for the night. That was the point, McKenna guessed.

When he finally got home down the oyster-shell road and parked under the low pines, he walked out onto his dock to look at the stars above the gulf. It always helped. He did not want to go right away into the house where he and his lost wife had lived. He had not moved away, because he loved this place, and though she was not here at least the memories were.

He let the calm come over him and then lugged his briefcase up onto the porch and was slipping a key into the lock when he heard a scraping. He turned toward the glider where he had swung so many happy times and someone was getting up from it. A spike of alarm shot through him, the one you always have once you work the hard criminals, and then he saw it was a woman in a pale yellow dress. Yellow hair, too, blond with a ribbon in it. Last time it had been red.

“John! Now, you did promise you’d call.”

At first he could not tell who she was, but he reached inside the door and flipped on the porch light and her face leaped out of the darkness. “Ah, uh, Denise?”

“Why yes, did you forget me already?” Humorous reproach, coquettish and a little strained.

She swayed toward him, her hair bouncing as if just washed. Which it probably was. He felt his spirits sinking. If the average woman would rather have beauty than brains, it’s because the average man can see better than he can think. Denise believed that and so was even more dolled up than on their first date. Also, last date.

“I figured out where you lived, so stopped by.” Her broad smile was wise and enticing. “You didn’t call, you know.”

The vowels rolled off her tongue like sugar and he remembered why he had found her so intriguing.

“I’ve been awful busy.”

“So’ve I, but you cain’t just let life go by, y’know.”

What to say to that? She was here for a clear purpose, her large red handbag on a shoulder strap and probably packed with cosmetics and a change of underwear. Yet he had no easy counter to it.

“Denise, I’m… seeing someone else.” Easy, reasoned.

Her expression shifted subtly, the smile still in place but now glassy. “I… I didn’t know that.”

“It didn’t make the papers.”

No, that was wrong, humor wouldn’t work here. He decided on the physical instead and held out a hand, edge on, thumb straight up, for a shake. A long moment passed while her eyelashes batted beneath the yellow porch light and he could hear frogs croaking in the night marsh.

She looked at his hand and blinked and the smile collapsed. “I… I thought…”

It was his duty to make this as easy as possible so he took her half-offered hand and put an arm around her shoulders. He turned her delicately, murmuring something that made sense at the time but that he could not remember ten seconds later. With a sweeping arm he ushered her down the wooden stairs, across the sandy lawn in the moist sea air. Without more than soft words they both got to the car he had not even seen parked far back under the big oak tree aside the house. He said nothing that meant anything and she did the same and they got through the moment with something resembling their dignity.

He helped her into her car and turned back toward his house. A year ago, in a momentary fit, one member of the sorority of such ladies of a certain age had tried to run him down. This time, though, her Chevy started right off, growling like a late model, and turned toward the oyster driveway that shimmered in the silvery moon glow. He walked away from it, the noise pushing him.

The lie about seeing someone settled in him. His social graces were rusty. He mounted the steps as her headlights swept across the porch, spotlighting him momentarily, like an angry glare. To jerk open the front door and finally get inside felt like a forgiveness.

McKenna got into work early. It had bothered him to usher Denise off like that and he had stayed up too late thinking about it. Also, there was that good California red. Not that he had failed to enjoy Denise and the others in their mutual nonjudgmental rejection of middle class values. Not at all.

But that style wasn’t working for him anymore. He had set out vaguely searching for someone who could bring that light back into his life, the oblivious glow he had basked in for decades of a happy marriage. He had thought that if it happened once it could happen again. But since Linda’s death nothing had that magic to it. Not dating—a term he hated, preferring “courtship”—and most of the time not even sex, his old standby.

So Denise’s sad approach, the stuff of every teenage boy’s dream, had been too little, too late.

He was still musing about this when he got to his desk. Homicide was a big squad room in worn green industrial carpet. The work pods had five desks each and he walked past these because he at last had gained a sheltered cubicle. The sergeant’s desk was nearby his lieutenant’s cubicle and framing the whole array was a rank of file cabinets. No paperless office here, no. Maybe never. At least there was no smoking anymore, but the carpet remembered those days. Especially after a rain, which meant usually.

The morning squad room buzzed with movement, talk, caffeine energy. Homicide detectives always run because it’s a timed event. You close in on the perp inside two weeks or it’s over.

And here was the ME folder on Ethan Anselmo. Once you’ve studied a few hundred autopsy reports you know you can skip the endless pages of organs, glands, general chemistry, and just go to the conclusions. Forensic analysis had a subreport labeled GSR, which meant gunshot residue, that was blank.

The ME was confused. Heart stopped, lungs full, much like a drowning victim who had fought the ocean to his last. But the strange ridges on his skin looked like nerve damage, seared as if in an electrocution. The punctures McKenna had seen just obscured the case further.

McKenna hated muddy cases. Now he had to assign cause, focusing the ME report and the background he had gotten last night. He didn’t hesitate. Probable homicide, he wrote.

The usual notices had gone through, assigning case and ME numbers, letting the Squad and Precinct Captains know, asking if there seemed any link to other cases—all routine. Section Command and District Office heard, all by standard e-mail heads-up forms, as did Photo and Latent and Lab.

He took out a brown loose-leaf binder and made up a murder book. First came the Homicide Occurrence Report with Mobile Main as the address in the right upper corner. Then the basics. A door that opened wide with no sure destination beyond.

McKenna sat back and let his mind rove. Nothing. Sometimes an idea lurked there after he had reviewed the case; not now.

He knew he had to finish up a report on a domestic slaying from two days back, so he set to it. Most murders were by guys driven crazy by screeching kids and long-term debt and bipolar wives. Alcohol helped. They had figured out their method about ten seconds before doing it and had no alibi, no plausible response to physical evidence, and no story that didn’t come apart under a two-minute grilling. When you took them out to the car in cuffs the neighbors just nodded at each other and said they’d always figured on this, hadn’t they said so?

This was a no-brainer case. He finished the paperwork, longing for that paperless office, and dispatched it to the prosecutor’s office. They would cut the deal and McKenna would never hear of it again. Unless the perp showed up in fifteen years on his front porch, demanding vengeance. That had happened, too. Now McKenna went armed, even on Sundays to church.

Then he sat and figured.

The ME thought the odd marks on Ethan Anselmo might be electrocution. Torture? Yet the guy was no lowlife. He had no history of drug-running using shrimp boats, the default easy way for a fisherman to bring in extra income all along the Gulf. For a moment McKenna idly wondered when the War on Drugs would end, as so many failed American adventures had, with admission that the war was clearly lost. It would certainly be easier to legalize, tax, and control most drugs than it was to chase after them. He had at first figured Anselmo for a drug gang killing. There were plenty of them along the Gulf shore. But now that felt wrong.

His desktop computer told him that the Anselmo case was now online in the can’t-crack site Mobile used to coordinate police work now. There were some additions from the autopsy and a background report on Anselmo, but nothing that led anywhere.

He sighed. Time to do some shoe-leather work.

The Busted Flush was back at its dock. McKenna had changed into a beat-up work shirt and oil-stained jeans. Sporting a baseball cap, he found the crew hosing off a net rig inside the big aluminum boathouse nearby. “Pitscomb around?” he asked them, rounding the vowels to fit the local accent.

A thirty-something man walked over to McKenna. One cheek had a long, ugly scar now gone to dirty pink. His hair was blond and ratty, straight and cut mercifully short. But the body was taut and muscular and ready; the scrollwork tattoos of jailhouse vintage showed he had needed for much of his life. He wore a snap-button blue work shirt with a stuck-on nameplate that said Buddy Johnson. Completing the outfit was a hand-tooled belt with carry hooks hanging and half-topped boots that needed a polish pretty bad.

“Who wants to know?”

The stern, gravel voice closed a switch in McKenna’s head. He had seen this guy a decade before when he helped make an arrest. Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they yanked the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.

“Lookin’ for work,” McKenna said. This guy couldn’t be heading up the operation, so he needed to go higher.

“We got none.” The eyes crinkled as if Buddy was trying to dredge up a memory.

McKenna shifted his own tone from soft to medium. “I need to see your boss.”

Still puzzling over the memory, Johnson waved toward the boathouse. McKenna walked away, feeling Johnson’s eyes on his back.

Pitscomb was at the back of the building, eating hog cracklings from a greasy bag, brushing the crumbs into the lagoon. Carrion birds eyed him as they drifted by on the soft slurring wind, keeping just above the gnarled tops of the dead cypress, just in case they saw some business below that needed doing.

Pitscomb was another matter. Lean, angular, intelligent blue eyes. McKenna judged that he might as well come clean. He showed his badge and said with a drawl, “Need to talk about Ethan Anselmo.”

Pitscomb said, “Already heard. He didn’t come to work that night.”

“Your crew, they’ll verify that?”

He grinned. “They’d better.”

“Why you have an ex-con working your boat?”

“I don’t judge people, I just hire ’em. Buddy’s worked out fine.”

“What do you do for the Centauris?”

“That’s a Federal matter, I was told to say.”

McKenna leaned against a pier stay. “Why do they use you, then? Why not take the Centauri out on their own boat?”

Pitscomb brushed his hands together, sending the last of the cracklings into the water. “You’d have to ask them. Way I see it, the Feds want to give the Centauris a feel for our culture. And spread the money around good an’ local, too.”

“What’s the Centauri do out there?”

“Just looks, swims. A kind of night off, I guess.”

“They live right next to the water.”

“Swimming out so far must be a lot of work, even for an amphibian.” By now Pitscomb had dropped the slow-South accent and was eyeing McKenna.

“How far out?”

“A few hours.”

“Just to swim?”

“The Feds don’t want me to spread gossip.”

“This is a murder investigation.”

“Just gossip, far as I’m concerned.”

“I can take this to the Feds.”

Again the sunny smile, as sincere as a postage stamp. “You do that. They’re not backwoods coon-asses, those guys.”

Meaning, pretty clearly, that McKenna was. He turned and walked out through the machine oil smells of the boathouse. Buddy Johnson was waiting in the moist heat. He glowered but didn’t say anything.

As he walked past McKenna said, using hard vowels, “Don’t worry, now. I haven’t chewed off anybody’s arm in nearly a week.”

Buddy still didn’t say anything, just smiled slyly. When McKenna got to his car he saw the reason.

A tire was flat, seeming to ooze into the blacktop. McKenna glanced back at Buddy, who waved and went back inside. McKenna thought about following him but it was getting warm and he was sticking to his shirt. Buddy would wait until he knew more, he figured.

He got his gloves from the trunk, then lifted out the jack, lug wrench, and spare. He squatted down and started spinning the nuts off, clattering them into the hubcap. By the time he fitted the spare on the axle and tightened the wheel nuts with the jack, then lowered it, he had worked up a sweat and smelled himself sour and fragrant.

The work had let him put his mind on cruise and as he drove away he felt some connections link up.

The Pizottis. One of them was a real professor, the kind he needed. Was that family fish fry tonight? He could just about make it.

Since Linda died he had seen little of the Pizotti family. Their shared grief seemed to drive them apart. The Pizottis always kept somewhat distant anyway, an old country instinct.

He drove over the causeway to the eastern shore of the bay and then down through Fairhope to the long reaches south of the Grand Hotel. He had grown up not far away, spending summers on the Fish River at Grammaw McKenzie’s farm. To even reach the fish fry, on an isolated beach, he decided to take a skiff out across Weeks Bay.

The Pizottis had invited him weeks ago, going through the motions of pretending he was family. They weren’t the reason, of course. He let himself forget about all that as he poled along amid the odors of reeds and sour mud, standing in the skiff. In among the cattails lurked alligators, one with three babies a foot and a half long. They scattered away from the skiff, nosing into the muddy fragrant water, the mother snuffing as she sank behind the young ones. He knew the big legendary seventeen-footers always lay back in the reeds, biding their time. As he coasted forward on a few oar strokes, he saw plenty of lesser lengths lounging in the late sun like metallic sculptures. A big one ignored the red-tailed hawk on a log nearby, knowing it was too slow to ever snare the bird. By a cypress tree, deep in a thick tangle of matted saw grass, a gray possum was picking at something and sniffing like it couldn’t decide whether to dine or not. The phosphorus-loving cattails had moved in further up the bay, stealing away the skiff’s glide so he came to a stop. He didn’t like the cattails and felt insulted by their presence. Cattails robbed sunlight from the paddies and fish below, making life harder for the water-feeding birds.

He cut toward Mobile Bay where the fish fry should be and looked in among the reeds. There were lounging gators like logs sleeping in the sun. One rolled over in the luxury of the warm mud and gave off a moaning grunt, an umph-umph-umph with mouth closed. Then it opened in a yawn and achieved a throaty, bellowing roar. He had seen alligators like that before in Weeks Bay where the Fish River eased in, just below the old arched bridge. Gators seemed to like bridges. They would lie in the moist heat and sleep, the top predators here, unafraid. He admired their easy assurance that nothing could touch them, their unthinking arrogance.

Until people came along, only a few centuries before, with their rifles. He suddenly wondered if the Centauris were like this at all. They were amphibians, not reptiles. What would they make of gators?

A gator turned and looked up at him for a long moment. It held the gaze, as if figuring him out. It snuffed and waddled a little in the mud to get more comfortable and closed its big eyes. McKenna felt an odd chill. He paddled faster.

The other wing of the Pizotti family was on the long sand bar at the end of Weeks Bay, holding forth in full cry. He came ashore, dragged the skiff up to ground it, and tried to mix. The Pizottis’ perfunctory greetings faded and they got back to their social games.

He had loved Linda dearly but these were not truly his kind of people. She had been serene, savoring life while she had it. The rest of the Pizottis were on the move. Nowadays the Gulf’s Golden Coast abounded with Masters of the Universe. They sported excellently cut hair and kept themselves slim, casually elegant, and carefully muscled. Don’t want to look like a laborer, after all, never mind what their grandfathers did for a living. The women ran from platinum blond through strawberry, quite up to the minute. Their plastic surgery was tasteful: eye-smoothings and maybe a discreet wattle tuck. They carried themselves with that look not so much of energetic youth but rather of expert maintenance, like a Rolls with the oil religiously changed every 1500 miles. Walking in their wake made most working stiffs feel just a touch shabby.

One of them eyed him and professed fascination with a real detective. He countered with enthusiasm for the fried flounder and perch a cousin had brought. Food was a good dodge, though these were fried in too much oil. He held out for a polite ten minutes and then went to get one of the crab just coming off the grill. And there, waiting for the next crab to come sizzling off, was Herb. Just in time. McKenna could have kissed him.

It didn’t take too long to work around to the point of coming here. Herb was an older second cousin of Linda, and had always seemed to McKenna like the only other Pizotti who didn’t fit in with the rest. He had become an automatic friend as soon as McKenna started courting her.

“It’s a water world,” Herb said, taking the bit immediately. He had been a general science teacher at Faulkner State in Fairhope, handling the chemistry and biology courses. “You’re dead on, I’ve been reading all I could get about them.”

“So they don’t have much land?” McKenna waved to the woman who loved detectives and shrugged comically to be diplomatic. He got Herb and himself a glass of red, a Chianti.

“I figure that’s why they’re amphibians. Best to use what there’s plenty of. Their planet’s a moon, right?—orbiting around a gas giant like Jupiter. It gets sunlight from both Centauri stars, plus infrared from the gas giant. So it’s always warm and they don’t seem to have plate tectonics, so their world is real, real different.”

McKenna knew enough from questioning witnesses to nod and look interested. Herb was already going beyond what he’d gotten from TV and newspapers and Scientific American. McKenna tried to keep up. As near as he could tell, plate tectonics was something like the grand unified theory of geology. Everything from the deep plains of the ocean to Mount Everest came from the waltz of continents, butting together and churning down into the deep mantle. Their dance rewrote climates and geographies, opening up new possibilities for life and at times closing down old ones. But that was here, on Earth.

The other small planets of our solar system didn’t work that way. Mars had been rigid for billions of years. Venus upchucked its mantle and buried its crust often enough to leave it barren.

So planets didn’t have to work like Earth, and the Centauri water world was another example. It rotated slowly, taking eight days to get around its giant neighbor. It had no continents, only strings of islands. And it was old—more than a billion years older than Earth. Life arose there from nothing more than chemicals meeting in a warm sea while sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.

“So they got no idea about continents?” McKenna put in.

Herb said he sure seemed to miss lecturing, ever since he retired, and it made him a dinner companion not exactly sought after here among the Pizottis. McKenna had never thought he could be useful, like now. “They took one up in an airplane, with window blinds all closed, headphones on its ears. Turns out it liked Bach! Great, huh?”

McKenna nodded, kept quiet. None of the other Pizottis was paying any attention to Herb. They seemed to be moving away, even.

“The blindfold was so it wouldn’t get scared, I guess. They took off the blindfold and showed it mountains, river valleys, all that. Centauris got no real continents, just strings of islands. It could hardly believe its clamshell eyes.”

“But they must’ve seen those from space, coming in. Continents and all.”

“Not the same, close up.”

“So maybe they’re thinking to move inland, explore?”

“I doubt it. They got to stick close to warm, salty water.”

McKenna wondered if they had any global warming there and then said, “They got no oil, I guess. No place for all those ferns to grow, so long ago.”

Herb blinked. “Hadn’t figured that. S’pose so. But they say they got hurricanes alla time, just the way we do now.”

McKenna poked a finger up and got them another glass of the Chianti. Herb needed fueling.

“It’s cloudy alla time there, the astro boys say. They can never see through the clouds. Imagine, not knowing for thousands of years that there are stars.”

McKenna imagined never having a sunny day. “So how’d they ever get a space program going?”

“Slow and steady. Their civilization is way old, y’know, millions of years. They say their spaceships are electric, somehow.”

McKenna couldn’t imagine electric rockets. “And they’ve got our kind of DNA.”

Herb brightened. “Yeah, what a surprise. Spores brought it here, Scientific American figures.”

“Amazing. What sort of biology do amphibians have?”

Herb shrugged and pushed a hush puppy into his mouth, then chewed thoughtfully. The fish fry was a babble all around them and McKenna had to concentrate. “Dunno. There’s nothing in the science press about that. Y’know, Centauris are mighty private about that stuff.”

“They give away plenty of technology, the financial pages say.”

“You bet, whole new products. Funny electrical gadgets, easy to market.”

“So why are they here? Not to give us gifts.” Might as well come out and say it.

“Just like Carl Sagan said, right? Exchange cultures and all. A great adventure, and we get it without spending for starships or anything.”

“So they’re tourists? Who pay with gadgets?”

Herb knocked back the rest of his Chianti. “Way I see it, they’re lonely. They heard our radio a century back and started working on a ship to get here.”

“Just like us, you think about it. Why else do we make up ghosts and angels and the like? Somebody to talk to.”

“Only they can’t talk.”

“At least they write.”

“Translation’s hard, though. The Feds are releasing a little of it, but there’ll be more later. You see those Centauri poems?”

He vaguely recalled some on the front page of the paper. “I couldn’t make sense of it.”

Herb grinned brightly. “Me either, but it’s fascinating. All about the twin suns. Imagine!”

When he got home he showered, letting the steam envelop him and ease away the day. His mind had too much in it, tired from the day. Thinking about sleep, when he often got his best ideas, he toweled off.

The shock came when he wiped the steam from the mirror and saw a smeary old man, blotchy skin, gray hair pasted to the skull, ashen whiskers sprouting from deep pores. He had apparently gone a decade or two without paying attention to mirrors.

Fair enough, if they insult you this deeply. He slapped some cream on the wrinkles hemming in his eyes, dressed, sucked in his belly, and refused to check himself out in the mirror again. Insults enough, for one day. Growing older he couldn’t do much about, but Buddy Johnson was another matter.

At dawn he quite deliberately went fishing. He needed to think.

He sat on his own wharf and sipped orange juice. He had to wash off the reels with the hose from the freshwater tank as waves came rolling in and burst in sprays against the creaking pilings. He smelled the salty tang of bait fish in his bucket and, as if to tantalize him, a speckled fish broke from a curling wave, plunging headfirst into the foam. He had never seen a fish do that and it proved yet again that the world was big and strange and always changing. Other worlds, too.

He sat at his desk and shuffled paper for the first hour of the morning shift. He knew he didn’t have long before the Ethan Anselmo case hit a dead end. Usually a homicide not wrapped up in two weeks had a less-than-even chance of ever getting solved at all. After two weeks the case became an unclaimed corpse in the files, sitting there in the dark chill of neglect.

Beyond the autopsy you go to the evidence analysis reports. Computer printouts, since most detectives still worked with paper. Tech addenda and photos. All this under a time and cost constraint, the clock and budget always ticking along. “Investigative prioritizing,” the memos called it. Don’t do anything expensive without your supe’s nod.

So he went to see his supe, a black guy two months in from Vice, still learning the ropes. And got nothing back.

“The Feds, you let them know about the Centauri connection, right?” the supe asked.

“Sure. There’s a funnel to them through the Mobile FBI office.”

Raised eyebrows. “And?”

“Nothing so far.”

“Then we wait. They want to investigate, they will.”

“Not like they don’t know the Centauris are going out on civilian boats.” McKenna was fishing to see if his supe knew anything more but the man’s eyes betrayed nothing.

The supe said, “Maybe the Centauris want it this way. But why?”

“Could be they want to see how ordinary people work the sea?”

“We gotta remember they’re aliens. Can’t think of them as like people.”

McKenna couldn’t think of how that idea could help so he sat and waited. When the supe said nothing more, McKenna put in, “I’m gonna get a call from the Anselmo widow.”

“Just tell her we’re working on it. When’s your partner get back?”

“Next week. But I don’t want a stand-in.”

A shrug. “Okay, fine. Just don’t wait for the Feds to tell you anything. They’re just like the damn FBI over there.”

McKenna was in a meeting about new arrest procedures when the watch officer came into the room and looked at him significantly.

The guy droning on in front was a city government lawyer and most of his audience was nodding off. It was midafternoon and the coffee had long run out but not the lawyer.

McKenna ducked outside and the watch officer said, “You got another, looks like. Down in autopsy.”

It had washed up on Orange Beach near the Florida line, so Baldwin County Homicide had done the honors. Nobody knew who it was and the fingerprints went nowhere. It had on jeans and no underwear, McKenna read in the Baldwin County report.

When the Baldwin County sheriff saw on the Internet cross-correlation index that it was similar to McKenna’s case they sent it over for the Mobile ME. That had taken a day, so the corpse was a bit more rotted. It was already gutted and probed, and the ME had been expecting him.

“Same as your guy,” the ME said. “More of those raised marks, all over the body.”

Suited up and wearing masks, they went over the swollen carcass. The rot and swarming stink caught in McKenna’s throat but he forced down the impulse to vomit. He had never been good at this clinical stuff. He made himself focus on what the ME was pointing out, oblivious to McKenna’s rigidity.

Long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh laced around the trunk and down the right leg. A foot was missing. The leg was drained white, and the ME said it looked like a shark bite. Something had nibbled at the genitals. “Most likely a turtle,” the ME said. “They go for the delicacies.”

McKenna let this remark pass by and studied the face. Black eyes, broad nose, weathered brown skin. “Any punctures?”

“Five, on top of the ridges. Not made by teeth or anything I know.”

“Any dental ID?”

“Not yet.”

“I need pictures,” McKenna said. “Cases like this cool off fast.”

“Use my digital, I’ll e-mail them to you. He looks like a Latino,” the ME said. “Maybe that’s why no known fingerprints or dental. Illegal.”

Ever since the first big hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, swarms of Mexicans had poured in to do the grunt work. Most stayed, irritating the working class who then competed for the construction and restaurant and fishing jobs. The ME prepared his instruments for further opening the swollen body and McKenna knew he could not take that. “Where… where’s the clothes?”

The ME looked carefully at McKenna’s eyes. “Over there. Say, maybe you should sit down.”

“I’m okay.” It came out as a croak. McKenna went over to the evidence bag and pulled out the jeans. Nothing in the pockets. He was stuffing them back in when he felt something solid in the fabric. There was a little inner pocket at the back, sewed in by hand. He fished out a key ring with a crab-shaped ornament and one key on it.

“They log this in?” He went through the paperwork lying on the steel table. The ME was cutting but came over. Nothing in the log.

“Just a cheap plastic thingy,” the ME said, holding it up to the light. “Door key, maybe. Not a car.”

“Guy with one key on his ring. Maybe worked boats, like Anselmo.”

“That’s the first guy, the one who had those same kinda marks?”

McKenna nodded. “Any idea what they are?”

The ME studied the crab ornament. “Not really. Both bodies had pretty rough hands, too. Manual labor.”

“Workin’ stiffs. You figure he drowned?”

“Prob’ly. Got all the usual signs. Stick around, I’ll know soon.”

McKenna very carefully did not look back at the body. The smell was getting to him even over the air conditioning sucking air out of the room with a loud hum. “I’ll pick up the report later.” He left right away.

His supe sipped coffee, considered the sound-absorbing ceiling, and said, “You might see if VICAP got anything like this.”

The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer would cross-filter the wounds and tell him if anything like that turned up in other floaters. “Okay. Thought I’d try to track that crab thing on the key chain.”

The supe leaned back and crossed his arms, showing scars on both like scratches on ebony. “Kinda unlikely.”

“I want to see if anybody recognizes it. Otherwise this guy’s a John Doe.”

“It’s a big gulf. The ME think it could’ve floated from Mexico?”

“No. Local, from the wear and tear.”

“Still a lot of coastline.”

McKenna nodded. The body had washed up about forty miles to the east of Bayou La Batre, but the currents could have brought it from anywhere. “I got to follow my hunches on this.”

The supe studied McKenna’s face like it was a map. He studied the ceiling again and sighed. “Don’t burn a lot of time, okay?”

There were assorted types working in homicide but he broke them into two different sorts.

Most saw the work as a craft, a skill they learned. He counted himself in those, though wondered lately if he was sliding into the second group: those who thought it was a mission in life, the only thing worth doing. Speakers for the dead, he called them.

At the crime scene a bond formed, a promise from the decaying corpse to the homicide detective: that this would be avenged. It went with the job.

The job was all about death, of course. He had shot only two perps in his career. Killed one in a messy attempt at an arrest, back when he was just getting started. A second when a smart guy whose strategy had gone way wrong decided he could still shoot his way out of his confusion. All he had done was put a hole through McKenna’s car.

But nowadays he felt more like an avenging angel than he had when young. Closer to the edge. Teetering above the abyss.

Maybe it had something to do with his own wife’s death, wasting away, but he didn’t go there anymore. Maybe it was just about death itself, the eternal human problem without solution. If you can’t solve it you might as well work at it anyway.

Murderers were driven, sometimes just for a crazed moment that shaped all the rest of their lives. McKenna was a cool professional, calm and sure—or so he told himself.

But something about the Anselmo body—drowned and electrocuted both—got to him. And now the anonymous illegal, apparently known to nobody, silent in his doom.

Yet he, the seasoned professional, saw no place to go next. No leads. This was the worse part of any case, where most of them went cold and stayed that way. Another murder file, buried just like the bodies.

McKenna started in the west, at the Mississippi state line. The Gulf towns were much worse off after getting slammed with Katrina and Rita and the one nobody could pronounce right several years after. The towns never got off the ropes. The Gulf kept punching them hard, maybe fed by global warming and maybe just out of some kind of natural rage. Mother Earth Kicks Ass, part umpty-million.

He had the tech guy Photoshop the photos of the Latino’s face, taking away the swelling and water bleaching. With eyes open he looked alive. Then he started showing it around.

He talked to them all—landlords and labor in-between men, Mexicans who worked the fields, labor center types. Nothing. So he went to the small-time boosters, hookers, creeps in alleys, button men, strong-arm types slow and low of word, addicts galore, those who thrived on the dark suffering around them—the underlife of the decaying coast. He saw plenty of thick-bodied, smoldering anger that would be bad news someday for someone, of vascular crew-cut slick boys, stained jeans, arms ridged with muscle that needed to be working. Some had done time in the bucket and would again.

Still, nothing. The Latino face rang no bells.

He was coming out of a gardening shop that used a lot of Latinos when the two suits walked up. One wore a Marine-style bare-skull haircut and the other had on dark glasses and both those told him Federal.

“You’re local law?” the Marine type said.

Without a word McKenna showed them his badge. Dark Glasses and Marine both showed theirs, FBI, and Dark Glasses said, “Aren’t you a long way beyond Mobile city lines?”

“We’re allowed to follow cases out into the county,” McKenna said levelly.

“May we see the fellow you’re looking for?” Mr. Marine asked, voice just as flat.

McKenna showed the photo. “What did he do?” Mr. Marine asked.

“Died. I’m Homicide.”

“We had a report you were looking in this community for someone who worked boats,” Dark Glasses said casually.

“Why would that interest the FBI?”

“We’re looking for a similar man,” Mr. Marine said. “On a Federal issue.”

“So this is the clue that I should let you know if I see him? Got a picture?”

Dark Glasses started a smile and thought better of it. “Since there’s no overlap, I think not.”

“But you have enough sources around here that as soon as I show up, you get word.” McKenna said it flatly and let it lie there in the sun.

“We have our ways,” Dark Glasses said. “How’d this guy die?”

“Drowned.”

“Why think it’s homicide?” Mr. Marine came in.

“Just a hunch.”

“Something tells me you have more than that,” Mr. Marine shot back.

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

They looked at each other and McKenna wondered if they got the joke. They turned and walked away without a word.

His bravado with them made him feel good but it didn’t advance his case. His mind spun with speculations about the FBI and then he put them away. The perpetual rivalry between local and federal always simmered, since the Feds could step in and capture a case when they thought they could profit from it. Or solve it better. Sometimes they were even right.

He prowled the Latino quarters. Hurricane damage was still common all along the Gulf Coast, years after the unpronounceable hurricane that had made Katrina and Rita look like mere overtures. He worked his way east and saw his fill of wrecked piers, abandoned houses blown out when the windows gave in, groves of pines snapped off halfway up, roofs ripped away, homes turned to flooded swamps. Weathered signs on damaged walls brought back to mind the aftermath: LOOTERS SHOT; on a roof: HELP; a plaintive WE’RE HERE; an amusing FOR SALE: SOME WATER DAMAGE on a condo completely gutted. Historical documents, now.

Hurricanes had hammered the coast so hard that in the aftermath businesses got pillaged by perfectly respectable people trying to hang on, and most of those stores were still closed. Trucks filled with scrap rumbled along the pitted roads. Red-shirted crews wheelbarrowed dark debris out of good brick homes. Blue tarp covered breached roofs, a promise that eventually they would get fixed. Near the beaches, waterline marks of scummy yellow remained, head high.

Arrival of aliens from another star had seemed less important to the coast people. Even though the Centauris had chosen the similar shores in Thailand, Africa, and India to inhabit, the Gulf was their focus, nearest an advanced nation. McKenna wondered what they thought of all the wreckage.

The surge of illegal Mexicans into the Gulf Coast brought a migration of some tough gangs from California. They used the illegal worker infrastructure as shelter, and occupied the drug business niches. Killings along the Mobile coast dropped from an average of three or four a day before to nearly zero, then rose in the next two years. Those were mostly turf wars between the druggies and immigrant heist artists of the type who prey on small stores.

So he moved among them in jeans, dog-eared hat, and an old shirt, listening. Maybe the Centauris were making people think about the stars and all, but he worked among a galaxy of losers: beat-up faces, hangdog scowls, low-hanging pants, and scuffed brown shoes. They would tell you a tearful life story in return for just looking at them. Every calamity that might befall a man had landed on them: turncoat friends, deadbeat buddies, barren poverty, cold fathers, huge bad luck, random inexplicable diseases, prison, car crashes, and of course the eternal forlorn song: treacherous women. It was a seminar in the great themes of Johnny Cash.

Then a droopy-eyed guy at a taco stand said he had seen the man in the picture over in a trailer park. McKenna approached it warily. If he got figured for a cop the lead would go dead.

Nearby were Spanish-language graffiti splashed on the minimart walls, and he passed Hispanic mothers and toddlers crowding into the county’s health clinic. But the shabby mobile homes were not a wholly Hispanic enclave. There was a lot of genteel poverty making do here. Pensioners ate in decrepit diners that gave seniors a free glass of anonymous domestic wine with the special. Workers packed into nearby damaged walk-ups with no air conditioning. On the corners clumps of men lounged, rough-handed types who never answered questions, maybe because they knew no English.

McKenna worked his way down the rows of shabby trailers. Welfare mothers blinked at him and he reassured them he was not from the county office. It was hard to read whether anybody was lying because they seemed dazed by the afternoon heat. Partway through the trailer park a narrow-chested guy in greasy shorts came up and demanded, “Why you bothering my tenants?”

“Just looking for a friend.”

“What for?”

“I owe him money.”

A sarcastic leer snaked across the narrow face. “Yeah, right.”

“Okay, I got a job for him.” McKenna showed the photo.

A flicker in the man’s eyes came and went. “Huh.”

“Know him?”

“Don’t think so.”

“You don’t lie worth a damn.”

The mouth tightened. “You ax me an I tole you.”

McKenna sighed and showed the badge. After a big storm a lot of fake badges sprouted on the chests of guys on the make, so this guy’s caution was warranted. County sheriffs and state police tried to enforce the law and in byways like this they gave up. Time would sort it out, they figured. Some of the fakes became hated, then dead.

To his surprise, the man just stiffened and jutted his chin out. “Got nothin’ to say.”

McKenna leaned closer and said very fast, “You up to code here? Anybody in this trailer park got an outstanding warrant? How ’bout illegals? Safety code violations? I saw that extension cord three units back, running out of a door and into a side shed. You charge extra for the illegals under that tent with power but no toilet? Bet you do. Or do you just let it happen on the side and pick up some extra for being blind?”

The man didn’t even blink.

McKenna was enjoying this. “So suppose we deport some of these illiterates, say. Maybe call in some others here, who violated their parole, uh? So real quick your receivables drop, right? Maybe a lot. Child support could come in here, too, right? One phone call would do it. There’s usually a few in a trailer park who don’t want to split their check with the bitch that keeps hounding them with lawyers, right? So with them gone, you got open units, buddy. Which means no income, so you’re lookin’ worse to the absentee landlord who cuts your check, you get me?”

McKenna could hear the gears grind and the eyes got worried. “Okay, look, he left a week back.”

“Where to?”

“You know that bayou east about two miles, just before Angel Point? He went to an island just off there, some kind of boat work.”

Floating lilies with lotus flowers dotted the willow swamp. Tupelo gums hung over the brown water as he passed, flavoring the twilight. The rented skiff sent its bow wash lapping at half-sunken logs with hides like dead manatees.

His neck felt sunburned from the sour day and his throat was raspy-dry. He cut the purring outboard and did some oar work for the last half mile. The skiff drifted silently up to the stilt house. It leaned a little on slender pilings, beneath a vast canopy of live oaks that seemed centuries old. The bow thumped at the tiny gray-wood dock, wood piling brushing past as he stepped softly off, lashing the stay rope with his left hand while he pulled his 9mm out and forward. No point in being careless.

Dusk settled in. A purple storm hung on the southern horizon and sheet lighting worked yellow magic at its edges. A string of lights hung along the wharf, glowing dimly in the murk, and insects batted at them. Two low pirogues drifted on the tide and clanked rusty chains.

The lock was antique and took him ten seconds.

The room smelled of damp dogs. He searched it systematically but there was nothing personal beyond worn clothes and some letters in Spanish. The postmarks were blurred by the moisture that never left the old wooden drawers. But in another drawer one came through sharp, three weeks old from Veracruz. That was a port town down the long curve of the eastern Mexican coast. From his knowledge of the Civil War era, which was virtually a requirement of a Southern man when he grew up, Veracruz was where Grant and Lee nearly got killed. Together they went out in a small boat to survey the shore in the Mexican war and artillery fire splashed within ten yards of them.

Lots of fishing in Veracruz. A guy from there would know how to work nets.

He kept the letters and looked in the more crafty places. No plastic bag in the commode water closet. Nothing under the filthy pine floor. No hollow legs on the flimsy wooden chairs. In his experience, basically no perp hid anything in smart-ass places or even planned their murders. No months of pondering, of painstaking detail work, alibi prep, escape route, weapon disposal. Brilliant murders were the stuff of television, where the cop played dumb and tripped up the canny murderer, ha ha.

The storm came in off the Gulf and rattled the shack’s tin roof. In the musty two-roomer he thought as mist curled up from great steaming sheets of rain. Drops tapped on leaves outside the window and the air mixed with sharp, moist smells of bird droppings. He stood in the scrappy kitchen and wondered if this was a phony lead. The Spanish letters probably wouldn’t help but they were consistent at least with the Latino body. Still, he was getting nowhere.

His intuition was fuzzy with associations, a fog that would not condense. The battering shower made him think of the oceans rising and warming from the greenhouse gases and how the world might come to be more like the Centauris’ moon, more tropical sea and the land hammered with storms. Out the streaked front window he wondered if aliens swam among the quilted waves, living part of their lives among the schools of fishes.

This thinking went nowhere and his ankle had acquired red dots of flea bites. He looked out the back window. The rain tapered off and he saw now the gray of a FEMA trailer back in the woods. A breeze came from it. Frying peppers and onions flavored the air with pungent promise.

He knocked on the front door and a scrawny white man wearing jeans and nothing else answered. “Hello, sir,” plus the badge got him inside.

In a FEMA trailer even words take up room. You have to stand at a conversational distance in light-metal boxes that even a tropical storm could flip like playing cards. His initial urge was to hunch, then to make a joke about it. Mr. Fredson, a gangly six foot two, stretched out his arms to show how he could at the same time touch the ceiling with one hand and the floor with the other. Hangers in the small closet were tilted sideways to fit and beside them stood a short bronze-skinned woman who was trying not to look at him.

“I was wondering if you knew who lived up front there.”

“He been gone more’n a week.”

“Did he look like this?” McKenna showed the picture.

“Yeah, that’s Jorge.”

“Jorge what?”

“Castan,” the woman said in a small, thin voice. Her hands twisted at the pale pink fabric of the shift she wore. “You la migra?”

“No ma’am. Afraid I got some bad news about Jorge though.”

“He dead?” Mr. Fredson said, eyes downcast.

“’Fraid so. He washed up on a beach east of here.”

“He worked boats,” Fredson said, shaking his head. “Lot of night work, fillin’ in.

“Mexican, right? Wife in Veracruz?”

“Yeah, he said. Sent money home. Had two other guys livin’ up there for a while, nice fellas, all worked the boats. They gone now.”

McKenna looked around, thinking. The Latino woman went stiffly into the kitchen and rearranged paper plates and plastic cups from Wal-Mart, cleaned a Reed & Barton silver coffeepot. Fredson sighed and sat on a small, hard couch. The woman didn’t look like a good candidate to translate the Veracruz letter, judging from her rigid back. To unlock her he had to ask the right question

“Jorge seem okay? Anything bother him?”

Fredson thought, shrugged. “I’d look in over there sometimes when he was out on the Gulf for a few days. He axed me to. Lately his baidclose all tangled up come mornin’.”

“Maybe afraid of la migra?” McKenna glanced at the woman. She had stopped pretending to polish the coffeepot and was staring at them.

“Lotsa people are.” Fredson jutted his chin out. “They come for the work, we make out they be criminals.”

“We do have a justice system.” McKenna didn’t know how to work this so he stalled.

“Jorge, he get no justice in the nex’ world either.” Fredson looked defiantly at him. “I’m not religious, like some.”

“I’m not sayin’ Jorge was doin’ anything dishonest.” McKenna was dropping into the coast accent, an old strategy to elicit trust. “Just want to see if he died accidentally of drowning.”

Fredson said flatly, knotting his hands, “Dishonest ain’t same as dishonorable.”

He was getting nowhere here. “I’ll need to report his death to his wife. Do you have any papers on him, so I can send them?”

The woman said abruptly, “Documento.”

Fredson stared at her and nodded slowly. “Guess we ought to.”

He got up and reached back into the packed closet. How they had gotten a FEMA trailer would be an interesting story, but McKenna knew not to press his luck. Fredson withdrew a soiled manila envelope and handed it to McKenna. “I kept this for him. He weren’t too sure about those other two guys he was renting floor space to, I guess.”

McKenna opened it and saw inside a jumble of odd-sized papers. “I sure thank you. I’ll see this gets to her.”

“How you know where she is?” Fredson asked.

“Got the address.”

“Searched his place, did ya?”

“Of course. I’ll be leaving—”

“Have a warrant?”

McKenna smiled slowly. “Have a law degree, do you?” His eyes slid toward the woman and he winked. Fredson’s mouth stiffened and McKenna left without another word.

He crunched down his oyster-shell road in the dark. Coming around the bend he barely saw against the yard light two people sitting in the glider swing on his porch. He swung his car off into the trees. He wanted to get inside and study the papers he had from Fredson, but he had learned caution and so put his hand on his 9mm as he walked toward them. The gulf salt tang hung under the mimosa tree. A breeze stirred the smell of salt and fish and things dead, others spawning. Sugarcane near the house rattled in the breeze as he worked around to the back.

He let himself silently into his back door. When he snapped on the porch light the two figures jumped. It was Denise and his distant relative, Herb. Unlikely they knew each other.

McKenna opened the front door and let them in, a bit embarrassed at his creeping around. Denise made great fun of it and Herb’s confused scowl said he had been rather puzzled by why this woman was here. McKenna wondered, too. He thought he had been pretty clear last time Denise showed up. He didn’t like pushy women, many with one eye on his badge and the other on his pension. Even coming to his front door, like they were selling something. Well, maybe they were. He grew up when women didn’t ask for dates. Whatever happened to courtship?

Not that he was all that great with women. In his twenties he had been turned down more times than an old blanket. He got them drinks and let the question of why Denise was here lie.

They traded pleasantries and McKenna saw maybe a way to work this. Herb said he’d been in the neighborhood and just stopped by to say hello. Fine. He asked Herb if he knew anything new about the Centauris, since the Pizotti fish fry, and that was enough. Herb shifted into lecture mode and McKenna sat back and watched Denise’s reaction.

“There’s all kinda talk on the internet ’bout this,” Herb said with relish. “Seems the Centauris deliberately suppressed their radio stations, once they picked up Marconi’s broadcasts. They’d already spotted Earth as a biological planet centuries ago, see?—from studying the atmosphere. They’d already spent more centuries building those electric starships.”

“My, my,” Denise said softly.

Herb beamed at her, liking the audience. “Some think they’re the origin of UFOs!”

Denise blinked, mouth making a surprised O. “The UFOs are theirs?”

“The UFOs we see, they’re not solid, see? The Centauris sent them as a kind of signaling device. Pumped some kind of energy beams into our atmosphere, see, made these UFO images. Radar could pick them up ’cause they ionized the gas. That’s why we never found anything solid.”

McKenna was enjoying this. “Beams?”

Herb nodded, eyes dancing. “They excited some sorta atmospheric resonance effects. They projected the beams from our own asteroid belt.”

Denise frowned. “But they got here only a few years back.”

“They sent robot probes that got here in the 1940s. They’d already planned to send a one here and land to take samples. So they used the beams somehow to, I dunno, maybe let us know somethin’ was up.”

“Seems odd,” Denise said. “And what about all those people the UFOs kidnapped? They did all kinds of experiments on ’em!”

Herb’s mouth turned down scornfully. “That’s just National Enquirer stuff, Denise.”

McKenna smiled so he could control the laugh bubbling up in his throat. “Learn any biology?”

Herb said, “We’ve got plenty land-dwelling reptiles, plenty fish. Not many species use both land and sea.”

Herb took a breath to launch into a lecture and Denise put in, “How about gators?”

Herb blinked, gave a quick polite smile and said, “The bio guys figure the Centauris had some reptile predators on the islands, gave what they call selection pressure. Centauris developed intelligence to beat them down when they came ashore, could be. Maybe like frogs, start out as larvae in the water.”

Denise said wonderingly, eyeing Herb, “So they’re like tadpoles at first?”

“Could be, could be.” Herb liked feedback and McKenna guessed he didn’t get a lot from women. Maybe they were too polite to interrupt. “They grow and develop lungs, legs, those funny hand-like fins, big opposable thumbs. Then big brains to deal with the reptiles when they go ashore.”

McKenna asked, “So they’re going to hate our gators.”

“S’pose so,” Herb allowed. “They sure seem hostile to ’em around Dauphin Island. Could be they’re like frogs, put out lots of offspring. Most tadpoles don’t survive, y’know, even after they get ashore.”

Denise said brightly, “But once one does crawl ashore, the adults would have to help it out a lot. Defend it against reptiles. Teach it how to make tools, maybe. Cooperation, but social competition, too.”

Both men looked at her and she read their meaning. “I majored in sociology, minor in biology.”

Herb nodded respectfully, looking at her with fresh eyes. “Hard to think that something like frogs maybe could bring down big reptiles, eh?”

Denise tittered at the very thought, eyes glistening eagerly, and McKenna got up to get them more drinks. By the time he came back out, though, they were getting up. Herb said he had to get home and they discovered that they didn’t live all that far from each other, what a surprise then to meet out here at this distance, and barely noticed McKenna’s good-byes.

He watched them stand beside Denise’s car and exchange phone numbers. Now if only he could be as good a matchmaker for himself. But something in him wasn’t ready for that yet.

And what else have you got in your life? the unwelcome thought came.

Work. Oh yes, the Jorge papers from the FEMA people.

Jorge had stuffed all sorts of things into the envelope. Receipts, check stubs, unreadables, some telephone numbers, a Mexican passport with a picture that looked a lot like the corpse.

He was stacking these when a thin slip fell out. A note written on a rubberstamped sheet from Bayside Boats.

It wasn’t that far to Bayside Boats. He went there at dawn and watched a shrimp boat come in. When he showed every man in the place Jorge’s photo, nobody recognized it. But the manager and owner, a grizzled type named Rundorf, hesitated just a heartbeat before answering. Then shook his head.

Driving away, he passed by the Busted Flush mooring. It was just coming in from a run and Merv Pitscomb stood at the prow.

His supervisor said, “You get anything from SIU on these cases?”

“Nope.” The Special Investigations Unit was notoriously jammed up and in love with the FBI.

“Any statewide CAPs?”

CAPs, Crimes Against Persons, was the latest correct acronym that shielded the mind from the bloody reality, kept you from thinking about the abyss. “Nope.”

“So you got two drowned guys who worked boats out of the same town. Seems like a stretch.”

McKenna tried to look judicious. “I want a warrant to look at their pay records. Nail when these two worked, and work from there.”

The supervisor shook his head. “Seems pretty thin.”

“I doubt I’ll get much more.”

“You’ve been workin’ this one pretty hard. Your partner LeBouc, he’s due back tomorrow.”

“So?”

A level gaze. “Maybe you should work it with him. This FBI angle, these guys coming up to you like that. Maybe this really should be their game.”

“They’re playing close to their vest. No help there for sure. And waiting for LeBouc won’t help, not without more substance.”

“Ummm.” The supervisor disliked the FBI, of course, but he didn’t want to step on their toes. “Lessee. This would have to go through Judge Preston. He’s been pretty easy on us lately, must be gettin’ laid again…”

“Let me put it in the batch going up to him later this morning.”

“Okay, but then you got to get onto some more cases. They’re piling up.”

He had boilerplate for the warrant application. He called it up and pasted in I respectfully request that the Court issue a Warrant and Order of Seizure in the form annexed, authorizing a search of premises at… And such as is found shall be brought before the Court, together with such other and further relief that the Court may deem proper. The lawyers loved such stuff.

Merv Pitscomb’s face knotted with red rage. The slow-witted Buddy Johnson, ex-con and tire deflator, stood beside Pitscomb and wore a smirk. Neither liked the warrant and they liked it still less when he took their pay company records.

Ethan Anselmo was there, of course, and had gone out on the Busted Flush, a night job two days before the body washed up. No entry for Jorge Castan. But some initials from the bookkeeper a week before the last Anselmo entry, and two days after it, had a total, $178. One initial was GB and the other JC.

Bookkeepers have to write things down, even if they’re supposed to keep quiet. Illegals were off the books, of course, usually with no Social Security numbers. But you had to balance your books, didn’t you? McKenna loved bookkeepers.

“Okay,” his supervisor said, “we got reasonable grounds to bring in this Pitscomb and the other one—”

“Rundorf.”

“—to bring them in and work them a little. Maybe they’re not wits, maybe these are just accidents the skippers don’t want to own up to. But we got probable cause here. Bring them in tomorrow morning. It’s near end of our shift.”

There was always some paperwork confusion at quitting time. McKenna made up the necessaries and was getting some other, minor cases straightened out, thinking of heading home.

Then he had an idea.

He had learned a good trick a decade back, from a sergeant who had busted a lot of lowlife cases open.

If you had two different suspects for a murder, book them both. Hold them overnight. Let the system work on them.

In TV lawyer shows the law was a smart, orderly machine that eventually—usually about an hour—punished the guilty.

But the system was not about that at all. The minute you stepped into its grinder you lost control of your life and became a unit. You sat in holding cells thinking your own fevered thoughts. Nobody knew you. You stared at the drain hole in the gray concrete floor where recent stains got through even the bleaching disinfectant sprayed over them. On the walls you saw poorly scrawled drawings of organs and acts starkly illuminated by the actinic, buzzing lights that never went out. You heard echoing yells and cops rapping their batons on the bars to get some peace. Which never came. So you sat some more with your own fevered thoughts.

You had to ask permission to go to the toilet rather than piss down that hole. There was the phone call you could make and a lawyer you chose out of the phone book, and the fuzzed voice said he’d be down tomorrow. Maybe he would come and maybe not. It was not like you had a whole lot of money.

The cops referred to you by your last name and moved you like walking furniture to your larger stinking cell with more guys in it. None of them looked at you except the ones you didn’t like the look of at all. Then it was night and the lights dimmed, but not much.

That was where the difference between the two suspects came in. One would sleep, the other wouldn’t.

Anybody who kills someone doesn’t walk away clean. Those movies and TV lawyer shows made out that murderers were smart, twisted people. Maybe twisted was right but not smart, and for sure they were not beasts. Some even dressed better than anyone he had ever seen.

But like it or not, they were people. Murderers saw all the same movies as ordinary folk, and a lot more TV. They sat around daytime making drug deals or waiting for nighttime to do second-story jobs. Plenty of time to think about their business. Most of them could quote from The Godfather. The movie, of course. None of them read novels or anything else. They were emotion machines running all the time and after a job they blew their energy right away. Drank, went out cruising for pussy, shot up.

Then, if you timed it right, they got arrested.

So then the pressure came off. The hard weight of tension, the slow-building stress fidgeting at the back of the mind—all that came home to roost. They flopped down on the thin pad of their bunk and pulled the rough wool blanket over their faces and fell like the coming of heaven into a deep sleep. Many of them barely made it to the bunk before the energy bled out of them.

But now think about the guy who didn’t do it. He knows he didn’t do it even if the goddamn world doesn’t. He is scared, sure, because he is far enough into the downstreet culture to know that justice is a whore and lawyers run the whorehouse. And so he is in real danger here. But he also for sure knows that he has to fight hard now, think, pay attention. And he is mad too because he didn’t do it and shouldn’t that matter?

So he frets and sits and doesn’t sleep. He is ragged-eyed and slurring his words when he tries to tell the other guys in the cell—who have rolled over and gone to sleep—that he didn’t do it. It would be smart to be some kind of Zen samurai and sleep on this, he knows that, but he can’t. Because he didn’t do it.

On a cell surveillance camera you can see the difference immediately. Get the cell assignments and go to the room where a bored overweight uniform watched too many screens. Check out the numbers on the screens, find the cells, watch the enhanced-light picture. The sleepers faced away from the lights, coiled up in their blankets. The ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t—it didn’t matter much which—ignored the lights and you could see their eyes clicking around as they thought all this through.

Next morning, he leaned on the sleeper and released the guy who had stayed up all night. Sometimes the innocent ones could barely walk. But at least they were out in the sun.

The sleepers sometimes took days to break. Some of them had the smarts or the clout lawyers, to lawyer up. But he had them and that was the point.

He had learned all this, more years back than he wanted to think about, and it would still be true when he was long gone from this Earth.

He brought in Pitscomb and Rundorf at sunset. Got them booked, photoed, fingerprinted. They gave him plenty of mouth and he just stayed silent, doing his job.

Into the overnight holding cell they went.

He had a bottle of Zinfandel and slept well that night.

Back in at sunup, Pitscomb and Rundorf were red-eyed and irritated.

His supervisor was irritated, too. “I didn’t tell you to bring them in late.”

“You didn’t? I must have misheard.” McKenna kept his face absolutely still while he said it. He had practiced that in the mirror when he first made detective and it was a valuable skill.

He made the best of interrogating Pitscomb and Rundorf but the simple fact that they had stayed awake most of the night took McKenna’s confidence away. The two gave up nothing. He booked them out and had some uniforms drive them home.

His partner came in that afternoon. LeBouc was a burly man who liked detail, so McKenna handed off some stickup shootings to him. They had been waiting for attention and McKenna knew they would get no leads. The perps were the same black gang that had hit the minimarkets for years and they knew their stuff. The videotapes showed only rangy guys in animal masks. LeBouc didn’t seem to mind. McKenna filled him in on the drowned cases but he couldn’t make an argument for where to go next. The cases were cooling off by the minute now, headed for the storage file.

McKenna had never been as systematic as LeBouc, who was orderly even when he was fishing. So when LeBouc said, “How’d those phone numbers from the illegal turn out?” McKenna felt even worse. He had noticed them in the stack of paper at Castan’s shack, just before he found the Bayside Boats notepaper. Like a hound dog, he chased that lead down and forgot the telephone numbers.

He got right on them. One was the Mexican consulate in New Orleans, probably for use if Jorge got picked up.

One number answered in a stony voice saying only, “Punch in your code.” The rest answered in Spanish and he got nowhere with them. He thought of getting a Spanish speaker but they were in high demand and he would have to wait for days. Nobody in Homicide knew more than restaurant Spanish. He went back to the stony voice, a Mobile number.

Usually, to break a number you use a reverse directory of published numbers. McKenna found nothing there. There were lesser-known electronic directories of unpublished numbers that link phone numbers to people and addresses. He found those in the Mobile Police database. They were built up nationally, working from anyone who used the number to place a phone order. So he considered pretexting. To pretext, you call the phone company repair department, saying there’s a problem on the line and getting them to divulge the address associated with the account. But you needed a warrant to do that and his credit had run out with Judge Preston.

If he couldn’t pretend to be someone else, maybe he could pretend that his phone was someone else’s. That would be caller-ID spoofing—making it seem as if a phone call is coming from another phone, rather than his Homicide number. That made it more likely that the target person would answer the call, even if they had the new software that back-tracked the caller in less than a second. McKenna’s office number was not in the phone book but for sure it was in any sophisticated database software. And the stony voice sounded professional, smart.

Spoofing used to require special equipment, but now with internet phone calling and other Web services it was relatively easy to do. So easy, in fact, that just about anyone can do it. But McKenna hadn’t. It took an hour of asking guys and gals in the office to get it straight. Everybody had a fine time making fun of “the Perfesser” coming to them for help, of course. He developed a fixed grin.

Once you burned an hour to know how, it took less than a minute.

The site even had a code breakdown for the number, too. When stony voice answered, McKenna typed in the last four digits of the number again and in a few more seconds he got a ring. “Hello?”

McKenna said nothing. “Hello?” the voice of Dark Glasses said.

It took a while for his supervisor to go through channels and pin a name on Dark Glasses. The next morning Dark Glasses was in Federal court, the FBI office said. So McKenna found him, waiting to testify.

“May I have a word in the hallway?” McKenna sat down in the chair at the back of the court. Somebody was droning on in front and the judge looked asleep.

“Who are you?” Dark Glasses said, nose up in the air. He wasn’t wearing the glasses now and it was no improvement.

McKenna showed the badge. “Remember me? You were with Mr. Marine.”

“Who?”

“You didn’t say you were a lawyer, too.”

“Who told you that?”

“Your office. The FBI, remember?”

The lawyer inched away but kept his chin out, first line of defense. “I’m waiting to testify on a Federal case.”

“Murder crosses boundaries.”

The bailiff was looking at them. He jerked a thumb toward the doors. In the hallway Dark Glasses had revived his lawyerly presence. “Make it quick.”

“This is about one of your cases, Jorge Castan.”

“I don’t discuss my cases.”

He moved to go past and McKenna casually put a hand on his chest.

“You have no right to touch me. Move away.”

McKenna just shook his head. “You know what’s up. Your case got himself murdered, looks like. The second one like that in a week. And the Bar Association Web site says that before you got hired into the FBI you were an immigration lawyer. And you must know that your case was an illegal or else you’re dumber than you look.”

“I do not take a liking to insult. You touch me—”

“You’re in serious trouble if you know what’s really up. See, murder is a local crime unless you can show it has a proper Federal issue that trumps local. Do you?”

“I do not have to—”

“Yes you do.”

“There is not one scintilla of evidence—”

“Save it for the judge. Wrong attitude, counselor.”

“I don’t know what—”

“What I’m talking about, yeah. I hear it all the time. You guys must all watch the same movies.”

“I am an attorney.” He drew himself up.

“Yeah, and I know the number of the Bar Association. Being FBI won’t protect you.”

“I demand to know—”

Dark Glasses went on but little by little McKenna had been backing him up against the marble walls until the man’s shoulder blades felt it. Then his expression changed. McKenna could see in the lawyer’s face the schoolboy threatened by bullies. So he had gone into the law, which meant good ol’ safe words and paper, to escape the real world where the old primate signals held sway. Dark Glasses held his briefcase in front of his body in defense, but the shield wasn’t thick enough to stop McKenna from poking a finger into the surprisingly soft Dark Glasses bicep. “You’re up at bat now, lawyer.”

“As an attorney—”

“You’re assumed to be a liar. For hire. Almost rhymes, don’t it?”

“I do not respond to insults.” He was repeating his material and he tilted his chin up again. McKenna felt his right hand come halfway up, balling into a fist, wanting so much to hit this clown hard on the point of that chin.

“You knew to go looking for Jorge in jig time. Or maybe for the people who knew him. Why’s that?”

“I—I’m going to walk away now.”

“Not if you’re smart. One of those who knew him is an illegal, too. Maybe you wanted to use that to shut her up?”

“That’s speculative—”

“Not really, considering your expression. No, you’re working for somebody else. Somebody who has influence.”

“My clients and cases are Bureau—”

“Confidential, I know.”

“I have every assurance that my actions will prove victorious in this matter.”

McKenna grinned and slapped an open palm against the briefcase, a hard smack. The lawyer jumped, eyebrows shooting up, back on the playground during recess. “I—I have an attorney-client relationship that by the constitution—”

“How ’bout the Bible?”

“—demands that you respect his… protection.”

“The next one who dies is on you, counselor.”

In a shaky voice the lawyer pulled his briefcase even closer and nodded, looking at the floor as if he had never seen it before. A small sigh came from him, filled with gray despair.

It was a method McKenna had worked out years ago, once he understood that lawyers were all talk and no muscle. Good cop/bad cop is a cliché, only the lawyer keeps looking for the good cop to show up and the good cop doesn’t. Bluff is always skin deep.

The lawyer backed away once McKenna let him. “You better think about who you choose to represent. And who might that be, really?”

“My client is—”

“No, I mean who, really? Whose interest?”

“I… I don’t know what you mean. I—”

“You know more than you’ve said. I expect that. But you still have to think about what you do.” A rogue smile. “We all do.”

“Look, we can handle this issue in a nice way—”

“I’ll try being nicer if you’ll try being smarter.”

McKenna slid a business card into the suit handkerchief pocket of Dark Glasses Lawyer. “Call me. I find out the same stuff before you do, and that you knew it—well, I’ll be without mercy, Counselor. No quarter.”

McKenna stepped aside and let the lawyer flee from the playground. Dark Glasses didn’t look back.

McKenna’s supervisor leaned back and scowled. “And you did this because?…”

“Because two drowned men with strange scars don’t draw FBI without a reason, for starters.”

“Not much to go on.”

“The ME says he can’t identify the small puncture marks. Or what made those funny welts.”

His supervisor made a sour grin. “You know how much physical evidence is worth. It has to fit a filled-in story.”

“And I don’t have enough story.”

He spread his hands, the cuff sliding up to expose part of his arm tattoo, rosy barbed wire.

McKenna had read somewhere that an expert is one who has made all the possible mistakes in a narrow field. A wise man is one who has made them widely. It was supposed to be funny but it was too true for that.

So he followed his good ole friend Buddy Johnson home from work that evening. Buddy liked his pleasures and spent the first hour of his night in a bar. Then he went out back to smoke a joint. It was dark and Buddy jumped a foot when McKenna shined the flashlight straight into his eyes.

“Gee, that cigarette sure smells funny.”

“What? Who you?”

“The glare must be too much for you. Can’t you recognize my voice?”

“What the—Look, I—”

McKenna slipped behind him, dropping the flashlight to distract him, and got the cuffs on. “We’re gonna take a little ride.”

McKenna took him in cuffs down a scruffy side alley and got him into Buddy’s own convertible. Puffing, feeling great, he strapped Buddy in with the seat belt, passenger side. Then McKenna drove two quick miles and turned into a car wash. The staff was out front finishing up and when they came out McKenna showed them the badge and they turned white. All illegals, of course, no English. But they knew the badge. They vanished like the dew after the dawn.

Game time, down south.

Even with cuffs behind his back, Buddy kept trying to say something.

“Remember letting the air out of my tires?” McKenna hit him hard in the nose, popped some blood loose and Buddy shut up. McKenna drove the convertible onto the ratchet conveyor and went back to the control panel. It was in English and the buttons were well-thumbed, some of the words gone in the worn plastic. McKenna ran up a SUPER CLEAN and HOT WAX and LIGHT BUFF. Then he gave a little laugh and sent Buddy on his way.

Hissing pressure hoses came alive. Big black brushes lowered into the open seats and whirred up to speed. They ripped Buddy full on. He started yelling and the slapping black plastic sheets slammed into him hard and he stopped screaming. McKenna hit the override and the brushes lifted away. Silence, only the dripping water on the convertible’s leather seats.

McKenna shouted a question and waited. No answer. He could see the head lolling back and wondered if the man was conscious.

McKenna thought about the two drowned men and hit the buttons again.

The brushes hardly got started before a shrill cry came echoing back. McKenna stopped the machine. The brushes rose. He walked forward into the puddles, splashing and taking his time.

“You’re nearly clean for the first time in your life, Buddy. Now I’m gonna give you a chance to come full clean with me.”

“I… They ain’t gonna like…” His mouth opened expectantly, rimmed with drool. The eyes flickered, much too white.

“Just tell me.”

“They really ain’t gonna like—”

McKenna turned and started back toward the control board. The thin, plaintive sobbing told him to turn around again. You could always tell when a man was broke clean through.

“Where’d they go?”

“Nearly to Chandeleur.”

“The islands?”

“Yeah… long way out… takes near all night. Oil rigs… the wrecked ones.”

“What’d you take out?”

“Centauris. Usually one, sometimes two.”

“The same one?”

“Who can tell? They all look alike to me. Pitscomb, he bowed and scraped to the Centauri and the Feds with him, but he don’t know them apart either.”

“Pitscomb have anything to do with Ethan’s death?”

“Man, I weren’t workin’ that night.”

“Damn. What’d the rest of the crew say about it?”

“Nothin’. All I know is that Ethan was on the boat one night and he didn’t come back to work next day.”

“Who else was with the Centauri?”

“Just Feds.”

“What was the point of going out?”

“I dunno. We carried stuff in big plastic bags. Crew went inside for ’bout an hour while we circled round the messed-up oil rigs. FBI and Centauri were out there. Dunno what they did. Then we come back.”

McKenna took the cuffs off Buddy and helped him out of the car. To his surprise, Buddy could walk just fine. “You know Jorge?”

“Huh? Yeah, that wetback?”

“Yeah. You’re a wetback too now.”

“Huh? Oh.” Buddy got the joke and to his credit, grinned. “Look, you don’t nail me on the dope, it’s even, okay?”

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Buddy.”

“Huh?”

“It’s fine. Keep your nose clean from here on out or I’ll bring you back here to clean it myself.”

He hung his head. “Y’know, you’re right. I got to straighten up.”

“You’re straight with me right now.”

They even shook hands.

A take-charge raccoon was working the trash when he hauled in on the oyster shell road. He shooed it away and then tossed it a watermelon that had gone old anyway.

Then he sat on the porch and sipped a Cabernet and worked himself over about the car wash stunt. His wife had once told him, after he had worked up through being a uniform, then Vice and then bunko and finally Homicide, that the process had condensed him into a hard man. He had never said to her that maybe it was her long illness that had made him quiet around the house, wary and suspicious… but in the end maybe it was both. He had never been interested in small talk but had picked up the skill for getting witnesses to open up.

Now he felt very little after working Buddy over. He had done it with a vague intuition that the kid needed a wake-up call, sure, but mostly because he was blocked in this case. And he couldn’t let it go. Maybe it helped fill the emptiness in him, one he felt without shame or loss, as not a lack but as a blank space—an openness that made him hear the wind sigh and waves slosh not as mere background but as life passing while most people ignored it, talked over it, trying to pin life down with their words. He listened at nightfall, sitting out here on the warped planking of his wharf, to the planet breathing in its sleep. A world never fully revealed, a planet with strangeness at its core.

The next day he and LeBouc worked some ordinary gang-related cases. And planned. LeBouc was a fisherman and would go out for just about any reason. Not a hard sell. And neither of them could think of anything else to do. The FBI had called up their supervisor and bad-mouthed McKenna, of course. But they wouldn’t reveal anything more and tried to pry loose what McKenna knew. The supe stonewalled. A Mexican standoff.

Just before twilight McKenna sprayed on exercise shorts plus shirt. This was a semi-new techie product, snug and light, and he wanted to try them. The shorts were black, the cheapest spray-on, with spaced breather holes to respire sweat through. His belly was a bit thick and his calves stringy, but nobody was going to see him anyway if he could help it. The smart fibers itched as they linked up to form the hems, contouring to his body, the warmth from their combining getting him in the mood. He drove to the boat ramp just west of Bayou La Batre, huffing the salty sunset breeze into his lungs with a liberating zest.

LeBouc was there with an aluminum boat and electric motor and extra batteries, rented from a Mobile fishing company. Great for quiet night work, spotlights and radiophone, the works. LeBouc was pumped, grinning and stowing gear.

“Thought I’d do some line trawling on the way,” he said, bringing on a big pole and a tackle box. He carried a whole kit of cleaning knives and an ice chest. “Never know when you might bag a big one.”

McKenna’s shoes grated on the concrete boat ramp as the water lapped against the pilings. The boat rose on the slow, lumbering tide. A dead nutria floated by, glassy-eyed and with a blue crab gouging at it. Business as usual at the Darwin Café.

They used a gas outboard to reach the estimated rendezvous point, to save on the batteries. McKenna had planted a directional beeper on the Busted Flush in late afternoon, using a black guy he hired in Bayou La Batre to pretend to be looking for work. Right away they picked up the microwave beeper, using their tracking gear. With GPS geared into the tracker they could hang back a mile away and follow them easily. LeBouc was a total non-tech type and had never once called McKenna “the Perfesser.”

LeBouc flipped on the Raytheon acoustic radar and saw the sandy bottom sliding away into deeper vaults of mud. Velvet air slid by. The night swallowed them.

It was exciting at first, but as they plowed through the slapping swells the rhythm got to McKenna. He hadn’t been sleeping all that well lately, so LeBouc took the first watch, checking his trailing line eagerly. LeBouc had spent his vacation deep-sea fishing off Fort Lauderdale and was happy to be back on the water again.

LeBouc shook McKenna awake three hours later. “Thought you were gonna wake me for a watch,” McKenna mumbled.

“Nemmine, I was watchin’ my line. Almost got one too.”

“What’s up?”

“They hove to, looks like from the tracker.”

They quietly approached the Busted Flush using the electric motor. The tracker picked up a fixed warning beacon. “Maybe an oil platform,” McKenna said. LeBouc diverted slightly toward it.

Out of the murk rose a twisted skeleton. Above the waterline the main platform canted at an angle on its four pylons. A smashed carcass of a drilling housing lay scattered across its steel plates. Three forlorn rotating beacons winked into the seethe of the sea.

LeBouc asked, “How far’s the shrimper?”

McKenna studied the tracker screen, checked the scale. “About three hundred yards. Not moving.”

LeBouc said, “Let’s tuck in under that platform. Make us hard to see.”

“Don’t know if I can see much in IR at this range.”

“Try now.”

The IR goggles LeBouc had wangled out of Special Operations Stores fit on McKenna’s head like a fat parasite. In them he could see small dots moving, the infrared signature blobs of people on the shrimper deck. “Barely,” McKenna said.

“Lemme try it.”

They carefully slid in under the steel twenty feet above. LeBouc secured them with two lines to the pylon cleats and the boat did not rock with the swell so much. McKenna could make out the Busted Flush better here in the deeper dark. He studied it and said, “They’re moving this way. Slow, though.”

“Good we’re under here. Wonder why they chose a platform area.”

Many of the steel bones had wrenched away down on the shoreward side of the platform and now hung down beneath the waves. The enviros made the best of it, calling these wrecks fish breeders, and maybe they were.

“Fish like it here, maybe.”

“Too far offshore to fish reg’lar.”

McKenna looked up at the ripped and rusted steel plates above, underpinned by skewed girders. His father had died on one of these twelve years back, in the first onslaught of a hurricane. When oil derricks got raked in a big storm and started to get worked, you hooked your belt to a Geronimo wire and bailed out from the top—straight into the dark sea, sliding into hope and kersplash. He had tried to envision it, to see what his father had confronted.

When you hit the deck of the relief hauler it was awash. Your steel-toed boots hammered down while you pitched forward, face down, with your hard hat to save the day, or at least some memories. But his father’s relief hauler had caught a big one broadside and the composite line had snapped and his father went into the chop. They tried to get to him but somehow he didn’t have his life jacket on and they lost him.

With his inheritance from his father McKenna bought their house on the water. He recalled how it felt getting the news, the strange sensation that he had dropped away into an abyss. How his father had always hated life jackets and didn’t wear them to do serious work.

McKenna realized abruptly that he didn’t have his own life jacket on. Maybe it was genetic. He found some in the rear locker and pulled one on, tossing another to LeBouc, who was fooling with his tackle and rod.

LeBouc said, “You watch, I’ll try a bait line.”

McKenna opened his mouth and heard a faint rumble in the distance. The boat shuttled back and forth on its cleat lines. Waves smacked against steel and shed a faint luminous glow. He could see nothing in the distance though and sat to pull down the IR goggles. A hazy shimmer image. The Busted Flush was coming closer, on a course that angled to the left. “They’re moving.”

There was a lot of splashing nearby as currents stirred among the pylons. The three figures on the deck of the shrimper were easier to see now.

The IR blobs were right at the edge of definition. Then one of them turned into the illumination cone of a pale running light, making a jabbing gesture to another blob. He couldn’t quite resolve the face, but McKenna recognized the man instantly.

Dark Glasses stood out like a clown at a funeral.

The man next to him must be Pitscomb, McKenna figured. The third form was fainter and taller and with a jolt McKenna knew it was a Centauri. It moved more gracefully at sea than on land as it walked along the railing. Its sliding gait rocked with the ship, better than the men. It held a big dark lump and seemed to be throwing something from the lump over the side.

McKenna focused to make sense of the image. The Centauri had a bag, yes—

A grunt from nearby told him LeBouc was casting and an odd splash came and then thumping. The boat shifted and jerked as he tried to focus on the IR images and another big splash came.

He jerked off the goggles. His eyes took a few seconds to adjust. There was fitful radiance from the surf. LeBouc was not in the boat.

A leg jerked up in the water, arms flailed in a white churn. Long swift things like ropes whipped around the leg. McKenna reached for the oars secured along the boatline. A sudden pain lurched up in his right calf and he looked down. A furred cord was swiftly wrapping itself up his leg, over his knee, starting on his calf. Needles of pain shot into his leg. The sting of it ran up his spine and provoked a shudder through his torso. His leg twitched, out of his control.

The wrapping rope stopped at his thigh and yanked. He fell over and his knee slammed hard on the bottom of the boat. Another cord came over and hit his shoulder. It clung tight and snarled around him. The shoulder muscles thrashed wildly as the thing bit through his plastic all-weather jacket and his shirt. Pain jabbed into his chest.

Other wriggling strands came snaking across the bowed deck. He wrenched around and hit his head on LeBouc’s tackle box. He thought one of the things had grabbed his ear but it was the latch on the box, caught in his hair. A hollering came and he realized it was his own ragged voice.

His hands beat at the cord but prickly spines jutting out of it stung him. That jolted him badly and he tried to pull himself up to get a tool. The tackle box. He grabbed a gutting knife. With both hands he forced it under the edge of the cord across his chest. The ropy thing was strong and fought against the blade. He got some leverage and pulled up and the blade bit. The pink cord suddenly gave way. It flailed around and the main body lashed back at him. He caught it on the point of the knife and drove it into the side of the boat. That gave him a cutting surface and he worked the knife down the length of the thing. He sawed with all his strength. It split into two splices that went still. Stroking along it he sliced it in two, clear up to the housing at the stern.

The shooting pain in his calf he had made himself ignore and now he turned to it. The cord had sunk into his jeans. He pried it up as before and turned the blade. This one popped open and drooled milky fluid. He hacked away at it, free of the lancing pain. It took a moment to cut away chunks. They writhed on the boat bottom. With stinging hands he reached into the tackle box and found the workman’s gloves. That made it easier to pick up and toss the long strands into the sea. They struggled weakly.

Numbness crept up his leg and across his chest. He felt elated and sleepy and wanted to rest. His eyes flickered and he realized that his face was numb too. Everything was moving too fast. He needed a rest. Then he could think about this. Figure it out.

Then another pink rope came sliding over the gunnel. It felt around and snaked toward him as if it could sense his heat or smell. He felt the tip of it touch his deck shoe. Sharp fear cleared his mind.

The knife came down on it and he pounded the point along its length.

Without cutting it into pieces he lurched toward the gunwale. With a swipe the tie line popped away from its cleat. He leaped over a section of pink rope and cut the second line. He could barely see. With his hands he felt along the stern and found the starter button and helm. The outboard caught right away. With a strum the engines turned over and he slid the throttles forward to rev the engines into a quick-start warmup.

He veered among the pylons. With a click the flashlight glare made the scene jump out at him. There were pink strands in the water.

No sign at all of LeBouc.

He hit the throttle and shot out into open water and reached for the radiophone.

The worst of it was the wait.

He stung in running sheets of fire all over the right leg and chest. The thing had wrapped around his calf like a bracelet. He wondered why the ME never said anything about the corpses being pumped full of venom and only then realized that he had felt electrical shocks, not stings. His leg and arm had been jerking on their own. He fingered the trembling muscles, remembering through a fog.

He got away from there into the darkness, not caring any more about the Busted Flush. Eventually he thought that they might be following the sound of the outboard. He shut it off and drifted. Then he called the shore and said he was headed in on the electric. By then he was flopping on the deck as debilitating cramps swept through him. Breath came hard and he passed out several times.

Then a chopper came out of the murk. It hovered over him like an angel with spotlights and an unfurling ladder. Men in wet suits dropped onto the deck. They harnessed him up and he spun away into the black sky. On the hard floor of the chopper a woman stood over him with a big needle of epinephrine, her face lined with concern. He could not get his thick tongue to tell her that this case was something else. She shot him full of it and his heart pounded. That did clear his sluggish mind but it did not stop the shooting jolts that would come up suddenly in his leg and chest and in other places he had no memory of the pink rope being at all.

She gave him other injections though and those made the whole clattering chopper back away. It was like a scene on late night television, mildly interesting and a plot you could vaguely remember seeing somewhere. She barked into her helmet mike and asked him questions but it was all theory now, not really his concern.

The next few hours went by like a movie you can’t recall the next day. A cascading warm shower lined in gray hospital tile, McKenna lying on the tiles. A doctor in white explaining how they had to denature something, going on and on, just about as interesting as high school chemistry. They said they needed his consent for some procedure and he was happy to give it so long as they agreed to leave him alone.

He slowly realized the ER whitecoats were not giving him painkillers because of the War on Drugs and its procedural requirements. A distant part of him considered how it would be for a lawman to die of an excess of law. Doctors X and then Y and finally Z had to sign off. Time equaled pain and dragged on tick by tick.

Then there was Demerol, which settled the arguments nicely.

The next day he found a striping of tiny holes along his leg. More across his chest. He guessed the corpses had sealed up most of these when they swelled, so they showed only a few tiny holes.

The ME came by and talked to McKenna as though he were an unusually fascinating museum exhibit. At least he brought some cortisone cream to see if it would help and it did. He recalled distantly that the ME was actually a doctor of some sort. Somehow he had always thought of the ME as a cop.

Two days later a team of Fed guys led him out of the hospital and into a big black van. They had preempted local law, of course, so McKenna barely got to see his supervisor or the Mobile Chief of Police, who was there mostly for a photo op anyway.

In the van a figure in front turned and gave him a smile without an ounce of friendliness in it. Mr. Marine.

“Where’s Dark Glasses?” McKenna asked but Mr. Marine looked puzzled and then turned away and watched the road. Nobody said anything until they got to Dauphin Island.

They took him up a ramp and down a corridor and then through some sloping walkways and odd globular rooms and finally to a little cell with pale glow coming from the walls. It smelled dank and salty and they left him there.

A door he hadn’t known was there slid open in the far wall. A man all in white stepped in carrying a big, awkward laptop and behind him shuffled a Centauri.

McKenna didn’t know how he knew it, but this was the same Centauri he had seen getting onto the Busted Flush. It looked at him with the famous slitted eyes and he caught a strange scent that wrinkled his nose.

The man in white sat down in one of two folding chairs he had brought and gestured for McKenna to sit in the other. The Centauri did not sit. It carefully put a small device on the floor, a bulb and nozzle. Then it stood beside the man and put its flipper-hands on the large keyboard of the laptop. McKenna had heard about these devices shaped to the Centauri movements.

“It will reply to questions,” the man in white said. “Then it types a reply. This computer will translate on-screen.”

“It can’t pronounce our words, right?” McKenna had read that.

“It has audio pickups that transduce our speech into its own sounds. But it can’t speak our words, no. This is the best we’ve been able to get so far.” The man seemed nervous.

The Centauri held up one flipper-hand and with the device sprayed itself, carefully covering its entire skin. Or at least it seemed more like skin now, and not the reptile armor McKenna had first thought it might be.

“It’s getting itself wetted down,” the man said. “This is a dry room, easier for us to take.”

“The wet rooms have—”

“Ceiling sprays, yeah. They gotta stay moist ’cause they’re amphibians. That’s why they didn’t like California. It’s too dry, even at the beach.”

The Centauri was finished with its spraying. McKenna thought furiously and began. “So, uh, why were you going out on the shrimp boat?” Its jointed flippers were covered in a mesh hide. They moved in circular passes over pads on the keyboard. The man had to lift the awkward computer a bit to the alien, who was shorter than an average man. On the screen appeared:

<>

“Is that what attacked me?”

<>

“Your young are feeding?”

<>

“Why don’t we know of this?”

<>

He could not look away from those eyes. The scaly skin covered its entire head. The crusty deep green did not stop at the big spherical eyes, but enclosed nearly all of it, leaving only the pupil open in a clamshell slit. He gazed into the unreadable glittering black depths of it. The eyes swiveled to follow him as he fidgeted. McKenna couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I, I can’t read your expression. Like Star Trek and that stuff, we expect aliens to be like humans, really.”

The alien wrote:

<Trek drama we studied. To discern how you would think of us.>>

“You don’t have our facial expressions.”

<>

“Of course. So I can’t tell if you care whether your young killed two men on fishing boats.”

<>

“We don’t know! Our government has not told us. Why?”

The man holding the computer opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it. The alien wrote:

<>

“People are okay with your visit. They might not like your seeding our oceans and moving in. Plus killing us.”

This time it took a while to answer:

<>

McKenna blinked. “Is that a religious idea?”

<>

“Uh, sky?…”

The computer guy said, “Mistranslation. I saw that one with the astro guys last week. The software combines two concepts, see. Sky—means astronomy, ’cause their world is always cloudy, so the night sky is above that—and history. Closest word is cosmology, astronomy of the past.”

McKenna looked at the alien’s flat, unreadable gaze. “So it’s… science.”

<>

McKenna could not see where this was going. He had read some pop science about something called dark energy, sure. It supposedly was making the whole universe expand faster and faster. “So what’s it… this dark heaven… do?”

<>

McKenna blinked. “You mean we… our minds… send out their…”

<>

“This sounds like religion.”

<>

McKenna was getting in over his head. He felt light-headed, taking shallow breaths, clenching his hands. “You don’t regret that those men died?”

<>

“Around here murder is a crime.”

<>

“Look, even if spirits or whatever go someplace else, that doesn’t excuse murder.”

<>

“Being dead matters to us.”

<>

The Centauri blinked slowly at McKenna with its clamshell opening in the leathery, round eyes. Then it stooped to get its sprayer. From its wheezing spout moisture swirled around all of them.

The giddy swirl of this was getting to him. “I, I don’t know where to go with this. Your young have committed a crime.”

<>

McKenna stood up. The damp scent of the alien swarmed around him. “Some more than others.”

He barely made it to LeBouc’s funeral. It was a real one, with a burial plot. At the church he murmured soft words to the widow, who clung to him, sobbing. He knew that she would later ask how her husband had died. It was in her pleading eyes. He would not know what to say. Or what he would be allowed to say. So he sat in the back of the whitewashed Baptist church and tried to pay attention to the service. As LeBouc’s partner he had to say something in the eulogies. A moment after he sat down again he had no idea what he had said. People looked oddly at him. In the graveyard, as protocol demanded, he stood beside the phalanx of uniforms, who fired a popping salute.

At least LeBouc got buried. He had washed up on a beach while McKenna was in the hospital. McKenna had never liked the other ways, especially after his wife went away into cremation. One dealt with death, he felt, by dealing with the dead. Now bodies did not go into the earth but rather the air through cremation or then the ashes into the sea. People were less grounded, more scattered. With the body seldom present, the wheel working the churn between the living and dead could not truly spin.

God had gone out of it, too. LeBouc’s fishing friends got up and talked about that. For years McKenna had noticed how his friends in their last profile became not dead Muslims or Methodists but dead bikers, golfers, surfers. That said, a minister inserted talk about the afterlife at the grave site and then the party, a respectable several hundred, went to the reception. There the tone shifted pretty abruptly. McKenna heard some guy in a seersucker suit declare “closure” just before the Chardonnay ran out.

On his sunset drive back down by the Bay he rolled down the windows to catch the sea breeze tang. He tried to think about the alien.

It had said they wanted privacy in their reproductive cycle. But was that it? Privacy was a human concept. The Centauris knew that because they had been translating human radio and TV dramas for a century. Privacy might not be a Centauri category at all, though. Maybe they were using humans’ own preconceptions to get some maneuvering room?

He needed to rest and think. There would for sure come a ton of questions about what happened out there in the dark Gulf. He did not know what he would or could say to LeBouc’s widow. Or what negotiations would come between Mobile PD and the Feds. Nothing was simple, except maybe his slow-witted self.

What he needed was some Zinfandel and an hour on his wharf.

A black Ford sedan was parked on the highway a hundred yards from his driveway. It looked somehow official, deliberately anonymous. Nobody around here drove such a dull car, one without blemish or rust. Such details probably meant nothing, but he had learned what one of the desk sergeants called “street sense” and he never ignored it.

He swung onto the oyster drive, headed toward home, and then braked. He cut his lights and engine, shifting into neutral, and eased the car down the sloping driveway, gliding along behind a grove of pines.

In the damp night air rushing by he heard the crunching of the tires and wondered if anybody up ahead heard them too. Around the bend before the house he stopped and let the motor tick, cooling, while he just listened. Breeze whispered through the pines and he was upwind from the house. He eased open the car door and pulled his 9mm from the glove compartment, not closing it, letting the silence settle.

No bird calls, none of the rustle and scurry of early night.

He slid out of the car, keeping low under the window of the door. No moon yet. Clouds scudded off the Gulf, masking the stars.

He circled around behind the house. On the Gulf side a man stood in shadows just around the corner from the porch. He wore jeans and a dark shirt and cradled a rifle. McKenna eased up on him, trying to ID the profile from the dim porch light. At the edge of the pines he surveyed the rest of his yard and saw no one.

Nobody carries a rifle to make an arrest. The smart way to kill an approaching target was to bracket him, so if there was a second guy he would be on the other side of the house, under the oak tree.

McKenna faded back into the pines and circled left to see the other side of his house. He was halfway around when he saw the head of another man stick around the corner. There was something odd about the head as it turned to survey the backyard but in the dim light he could not make it out.

McKenna decided to walk out to the road and call for backup. He stepped away. This caught the man’s attention and brought up another rifle and aimed straight at him. McKenna brought his pistol up.

The recoil rocked his hand back and high as the 9mm snapped away, two shots. Brass casings curled back past his vision, time in slow-mo. The man went down and McKenna saw he was wearing IR goggles.

McKenna turned to his right in time to see the other man moving. McKenna threw himself to the side and down and a loud report barked from the darkness. McKenna rolled into a low bush and lay there looking out through the pines. The man was gone. McKenna used both hands to steady his pistol, elbows on the sandy ground, knowing that with a rifle the other man had the advantage at this distance, maybe twenty yards.

He caught a flicker of movement at his right. The second man was well away from the wall now, range maybe thirty yards, bracing his rifle against the old cypress trunk. McKenna fired fast, knowing the first shot was off but following it with four more. He could tell he was close but the hammering rounds threw off his judgment. He stopped, the breech locking open on the last one. He popped the clip and slid in another, a stinging smell in his widened nostrils.

The flashes had made him night blind. He lay still, listening, but his ears hummed from the shooting. This was the hardest moment, when he did not know what had happened. Carefully he rolled to his left and behind a thick pine tree. No sounds, as near as he could tell.

He wondered if the neighbors had heard this, called some uniforms.

He should do the same, he realized. Quietly he moved further left.

The clouds had cleared and he could see better. He looked toward the second guy’s area and saw a shape lying to the left of the tree. Now he could make out both the guys, down.

He called the area dispatcher on his cell phone, whispering.

Gingerly he worked around to the bodies. One was Dark Glasses, the other Mr. Marine. They were long gone.

They both carried M-1A rifles, the semiauto version for civilians of the old M-14. Silenced and scoped, fast and sure, the twenty-round magazines were packed firm with snub-nosed .308s. A perfectly deniable, non-Federal weapon.

So the Feds wanted knowledge of the aliens tightly contained. And Dark Glasses had a grudge, no doubt. The man had been a stack of anxieties walking around in a suit.

He walked out onto the wharf, nerves jumping in the salty air, and looked up at the glimmering stars. So beautiful.

Did some dark heaven lurk out there? As nearly as he could tell, the alien meant that it filled the universe. If it carried some strange wave packets that minds emitted, did that matter?

That Centauri had seemed to say that murder didn’t matter so much because it was just a transition, not an ending.

So was his long-lost wife still in this universe, somehow? Were all the minds that had ever lived?

Minds that had lived beneath distant suns? Mingled somehow with Dark Glasses and Mr. Marine?

This might be the greatest of all possible revelations. A final confirmation of the essence of religion, of the deepest human hopes.

Or it might be just an alien theology, expressed in an alien way.

A heron flapped overhead and the night air sang with the chirps and scurries of the woods. Nature was getting back to business, after all the noise and death.

Business as usual.

But he knew that this night sky would never look the same again.