The Peripheral

27

She woke in the dark, to the sound of men’s voices, close by, one of them Burton’s.

She’d gone to Pharma Jon, picked up her mother’s meds, ridden back, helped her make dinner. She and Leon and her mother ate in the kitchen, then she and Leon did the dishes and watched some news with her mother. Then she’d gone up to bed.

Now she looked out the window and saw the rectangular bulk of the white Sheriff’s Department car by the gate. “Four?” she heard her brother ask, just below her window, on the walk to the front porch.

“Plenty for this jurisdiction, Burton, believe me,” said Deputy Tommy Constantine. “Hoping you won’t mind coming along with me and having a look, just in case you might know them.”

“Because they wound up dead on Porter, and I live out on the end of Porter?”

“It’s a long shot,” said Tommy, “but I’d appreciate it. My week’s just gone seriously sideways, with these dead old boys.”

“What do they look like?”

“Two pistols, a brand-new set of steak knives, zip ties. No ID at all. Car was stolen yesterday.”

Flynne was getting dressed as fast and as quietly as she could.

“How were they killed?” Burton asked, like he’d ask about an inning in a baseball game.

“Shot in the head, with what I’d take to be a.22, from the size of the holes. Plus there’s no exit wound, so anyway we’ll get bullets.”

“Made to sit still for it?”

Flynne was pulling a clean t-shirt over her head.

“Where it gets complicated,” Tommy said. “Chinese four-seater, they were shot from outside. Driver got it through the windshield, one beside him got his through the door window on his side, one behind him through the rear door window, one behind the driver through the rear window, back of the head. Like somebody walked around the car, popped ’em one at a time. But it looks like two of them were holding pistols when they were shot, so why weren’t they shooting back?”

Flynne was scrubbing her face with a wet wipe. She used yesterday’s t-shirt as a towel. Then she dug her lip gloss out of her jeans and put some on.

“Got a locked-room mystery on your hands, Tommy,” Burton said.

“What I got on my hands is State Police,” she heard Tommy say, as she went out into the hall, touching the National Geographics for luck, and down the stairs.

She didn’t see her mother as she went through the house, but this time of night the medication tended to keep her asleep.

“Tommy,” she said, through the screen door, “how are you?”

“Flynne,” Tommy said, smiling, taking off his deputy hat in a way she knew was only half a joke.

“You two woke me up.” She opened the screen door, came out. “Don’t wake Mom. There’s dead people?”

“Sorry,” said Tommy, lowering his voice. “Multiple homicide, assassination-style, about midway between here and town.”

“That’s builders settling scores?”

“Probably is. But these boys stole themselves a car outside of Memphis, so they’d come a ways.”

Memphis brought her up short.

“I’ll go look at them for you, Tommy,” said Burton, watching her.

“Thanks,” said Tommy, putting his hat back on. “Nice to see you, Flynne. Sorry we woke you.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

He looked at her. “Dead people with holes in their heads?”

“State Police and stuff. Come on, Tommy. It’s not like much ever happens around here.”

“If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d get a backhoe, dig a hole big enough, shove the car in, them in it, and cover it up. Weren’t nice people. At all. But then I’d be left wondering if whoever did it might not be worse. But we got a new coffeemaker for the car. Coffee Jones. Choice of French or Colombian.” He stepped down off the porch.

They followed him to the big white car and got in.

She was finishing her little paper shot of Coffee Jones French espresso as the lights and the tent and the State Police car and the ambulance came into view, Tommy slowing. She was up front with him, passenger side, the Coffee Jones unit squatting on the transmission hump between them. There were two of those stumpy bullpup guns racked below the dashboard, above her feet.

The tent was white and modular. They’d sized it to fit the vehicle, which wasn’t very large. Bigger than the rental car Burton and Leon had taken to Davisville, but not by much. The State Police car was a standard black Prius Interceptor with that origami-looking bodywork that Leon called go-faster folds. The ambulance was the same one she’d ridden in when they’d had to take her mother to the hospital in Clanton. They had big lights up on tall skinny orange poles, their feet weighted with sandbags.

“Okay,” Tommy said, pulling over, to someone who wasn’t there. “Got a resident to try for an ID, but I doubt he’ll know ’em. Still dead, are they?”

“What are they doing there?” she asked, pointing. Two biggish white quadcopters were hovering about nine feet above the road, beside the white tent, making those small plotting movements, mostly still but with the odd precise twitch in one direction or another. They were probably about the size of the one she’d flown in the game, which she never had seen. They were making a lot of noise between them, and she was glad it hadn’t happened any closer to the house.

“The big ones are mapping data off the little ones,” Tommy said, and then she saw the little ones, pale gray and swarmy, a lot of them, flitting a few inches above the surface. “Sniffing for tire molecules.”

“Plenty on that road, I guess,” she said.

“Map enough, something recent might show.”

“Who called you?” Burton asked, seated behind Tommy, in the Faraday cage where they put prisoners.

“State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity, but I told ’em that was you and your friends playing games.”

“Appreciate it.”

“How long you intend to be playing?”

“Hard to say,” said Burton.

“Kind of a special tournament?”

“Kind of,” said Burton.

“Ready to have a look, then?” Tommy asked.

“Sure,” said Burton.

“You can stay in the car, Flynne. Want another coffee?”

“No,” she said, “and no thank you. I’m going with you.” She got out, noticing how clean the car was. Department’s pride and joy, she knew, only a year old.

Tommy and Burton got out, Tommy putting his hat on and checking the screen of his phone.

There was Queen Anne’s lace grown up flat and level, a carpet of flowers, from the bottom of the roadside ditch, hiding the fact that there was a ditch at all. She must have walked past this spot hundreds of times, going to school, then coming back, but it hadn’t been a place. Now, she thought, looking at the lights, the square white tent, it looked like they were making a commercial, but really it was a murder scene.

A policewoman, State, in a white paper hazmat suit, half unzipped, was standing in the middle of Porter, eating a pulled-pork sandwich. Flynne liked her haircut. Wondered if Tommy did. Then she wondered where you got a pulled-pork sandwich, this time of night.

Two figures in hazmat suits emerged from the tent, one of them dangling, in either hand, a pistol in a large zip-top freezer bag. One pistol was black, the other a multicolored fab job, ghetto-style, yellow and bright blue.

“Hey, Tommy,” said the one with the guns, muffled by the suit.

“Hey, Jeffers,” said Tommy. “This is Burton Fisher. Family’s lived up the road since about World War One. He’s kindly agreed to see if he’s ever laid eyes on our customers before, much as I assume he hasn’t.”

“Mr. Fisher,” said the hazmat suit, and then its goggles looked at her.

“His sister, Flynne,” Tommy said. “She doesn’t need to see the customers.”

The hazmat suit passed the freezer bags to the other one, then undid zips on the goggled hood. A pink, closely shaved head, blinking. “Prints came back on all four customers, Tommy. Nashville, not Memphis. Lots of prior. About what you’d expect. Muscle for builders: grievous bodily harm, plenty of suspicion of homicide but nothing that’s stuck.”

“Burton can have a look anyway,” said Tommy.

“We appreciate your time, Mr. Fisher,” said Jeffers.

“I need to suit up?” Burton asked.

“No,” said Jeffers, “these were for before we did the yucky parts. So we wouldn’t contaminate them.”

Burton and Tommy ducked into the white tent, leaving her with Jeffers, as the other cop was carrying the pistols away.

“What do you think happened?” she asked Jeffers.

“They were driving along the road,” said Jeffers, “headed in the direction you came from. Tooled up to kill somebody. No ID on any of ’em, so they left that somewhere, to pick up later. Then, we don’t know. Front wheel’s in the ditch, hit it pretty fast, and they’re all dead, shot in the head from outside the vehicle.”

She watched the little molecule-hunters darting close to the road. Under the lights, they cast shadows like bugs.

“So if he ran off the road, say somebody blocked it,” Jeffers said, “ambush, shot the driver first, he went into the ditch, then maybe a couple of ambushers ran over and shot the other three before they could respond.” He looked at her, glumly pop-eyed. “Or,” he said, “anybody around here drive a trike?”

“A trike?”

He shrugged in the hazmat suit, in the direction of the drones. “We’re getting some tire tracks out of particulate collection. Looks like three wheels, but it’s just borderline so far, too faint.”

“Can they do that?” Flynne asked.

“When it works,” Jeffers said, unenthusiastically.

Burton emerged from the tent, Tommy behind him. “Anonymous-ass strangers,” Burton said, to her. “Ugly ones. Wanna see?”

“Take your word for it.”

Tommy removed his hat, fanned his face with it, put it back on. “I’ll drive you back now.”