Hard Luck Hermit

“So, let me just start off by saying thank you for your service to the universe,” the uniformed officer said.

“Not really feeling the gratitude, bud,” Kamak said, as he glanced at the locked door to the office and the armed guard standing by it. As an accommodation for their “service to the universe”, their questioning was being done in an office instead of a holding cell, but they were still technically under arrest. Corey was just glad they didn’t have to wear handcuffs.

“We can only allow so many disruptions to the typical procedure,” the cop said. “But let’s get back to business. You recall the entrepreneur, Loback Loben?”

“Yeah. Hired us as security for a party,” Kamak said. “I assume he’s dead.”

“Very,” the cop said. “I understand you and he did not exactly part on friendly terms.”

“He nearly shot a waitress right in front of me, so yeah, I didn’t like the guy,” Kamak said. “But the kind of guy who’d shoot a waitress for kicks probably had a lot of enemies. Why are we suspects?”

The cop reached behind him and grabbed one of two sealed envelopes. He carefully checked the label to make sure he was opening the right one before removing a crime scene photo of a discarded handgun with the energy cell removed and set aside. A small splash of blood was visible in the corner of the photograph, a morose reminder of the larger context.

“I believe you pulled a trick like this on him just before you departed,” the cop said. He flashed the photo to Kamak for a second before handing it over.

“Same gun and everything,” Kamak admitted. “Okay, that doesn’t look good, got to acknowledge that.”

“Hey, hold on, what about the waitress that almost got shot?” Tooley asked. “Doesn’t she rank higher than us on the suspect list?”

“She took the money and ran,” the cop said. “Resettled her family on another planet. We already checked her out, confirmed her on an interstellar cruiseliner in FTL at the time of the murder. About as rock solid as alibi’s get.”

Tooley nodded. Those cruiseliners carried thousands of passengers, and they never stopped or slowed down between destinations. Getting off of one midflight was all but impossible.

“Well, when did this murder happen? We’ve had our ship parked at Centerpoint for the past couple swaps, you can probably check your own security logs about it.”

“We already did,” the cop said.

“Then why the fuck are we here?”

“Because if you have proven anything beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is that you are very, very creative problem solvers,” the cop said. “If you wanted someone dead, you could do it.”

“Come on, man, we know some tricks, we can’t defy the laws of physics,” Corey said.

“Mostly,” Tooley said. Some of her flight maneuvers scraped the edge of the physically possible.

“Mostly,” Corey agreed. “I’ve been in and out of phone calls with the Uplifting office of whatever it’s called for swaps now, they’ve probably got a mile’s worth of bureaucratic documents to prove it.”

“Maybe.”

The cop circled around his desk and sat on the front, in a transparent attempt to appear affable.

“Look, we’re all on the same team here,” he said.

“We are not on your team,” Kamak said.

“Your ‘team’ tried to kill us several times,” Doprel said.

“Your ‘team’ was working for the people we saved the universe from, if you need a reminder,” Corey concluded. The cop visibly deflated a little with every rebuttal.

“Fuck. We can cut the horseshit, then,” the cop said. His Good Cop demeanor evaporated in a second. “Did you do it or not? We’ve got orders to cover it up if you did, so who gives a shit.”

Kamak wasn’t entirely sure he believed that, but he also had nothing to hide.

“We had absolutely nothing to do with this,” Kamak said. “No coverup necessary. So you should probably put a little effort into actually solving this crime.”

The cop gave Kamak a dirty look, and Kamak gave him an even dirtier look. Only a few people in the universe had dirtier looks than Kamak.

“Can we go now?”

“Actually, in the interest of further exonerating ourselves,” Farsus said. “We could take up the case ourselves.”

“That doesn’t actually exonerate you at all,” the cop said. “If anything that’s more suspicious. You could easily cover up your own crime if you were the ones investigating it.”

“But why would I suggest it knowing you would make that assumption?”

“Because you knew I’d think-”

“Shut the fuck up,” Kamak said. “We’re not doing this snarky ‘I know you know I know you know’ routine. Look, we didn’t do the crime, but somebody clearly tried to make it look like we did, or at least wanted to make some kind of connection. We have a vested interest in this.”

The unloaded gun was just too specific for Kamak to think it was a coincidence. That was, at the very least, a nod in their direction.

“How’d the guy die, anyway?”

“You don’t want to know,” the cop said.

“If I didn’t want to know I wouldn’t have asked,” Kamak said. “What, they cut the guy’s dick off or something?”

“Poor guy probably wished they’d stopped there,” the cop mumbled.

“Jesus,” Corey said. “What the fuck did they do to Loben?”

The cop glanced backwards at the envelopes still behind him.

“Farsus, you’re into the gory stuff, right?”

“It’s an academic interest, but yes,” Farsus said.

The cop popped the second envelope open and removed its contents, making sure to keep them face down the entire time. He kept his chin up and averted his eyes the entire time he handled the photographs and held them out to Farsus.

“Take a look at those,” the cop said. “Maybe there’s some kind of cult sacrifice ritual shit in them you can make sense of.”

Farsus flipped the photographs over, as everyone else in the room watched his face. He raised an eyebrow and stroked his prodigious beard as he thumbed over the first photograph, then flipped to the second. He occasionally let out a contemplative hum as he flipped through the seven different photographs he’d been handed. With a final nod of understanding, Farsus returned the photographs to the cop, still face-down.

“Anything you can tell me?”

“I have never seen anything so heinous in my life, and whoever is responsible for this should be eliminated as swiftly as possible by any means necessary,” Farsus said. “If and when you capture the culprit, I would like to be invited to their execution so that I can confirm their death with my own two eyes.”

“What the fuck did they do to that guy?” Tooley said. She held a hand out to grab the photographs. “Let me see-”

Before she could lay a finger on the crime scene photos, the blocky red fist of Farsus closed around Tooley’s wrist in a vicelike grip, and he glared at her like the grim visage of death itself.

“Don’t.”

It took a lot to make Tooley back down once she’d set her mind to something, but something about the look in Farsus’ eyes made her stop and pull her hand back. She sank back into her seat, haunted by the very idea of what could make a man with a collection of spines react like that.

“May we leave?” Farsus asked. “If I consume a large amount of alcohol soon enough I may be able to damage my short term memory sufficiently to muddy my memory of those photographs.”

“Go ahead,” the cop said. “Drink a few for me and the boys. We’re stuck looking at these all week.”

Farsus stood up, gave the cop a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, and left the office. Kamak and the rest of the crew left in turn, all of them casting one last nervous glance at the apparently cursed envelope before shutting the door behind them.