jamieproctor.ca

It was six AM and Liz was on her eighth cup of coffee and her twelfth recitation of why her job wasn’t hell on earth and her last straw when McGuinty picked up the radio, listened, then hung up. 

“It’s go time,” she said.

“The fuck?” Liz blurted out.

“I said it’s g-”

“Yeah, I heard.  I was just wondering WHY.”
“Because it’s go t-”

“Listen to yourself.  Jesus.  ‘Go time.’  Whadda maroon.”  Liz shook her head, drained half her cup, threw the other half out the window, and farted mournfully into the car’s cheap seat.  “Let’s just – let’s just fucking go, okay?  Let’s go.  Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”
“Yes.  Go time.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
McGuinty grinned at her unrepentantly, flipped the switch that started the lights, and plugged in the siren, which immediately started broadcasting angry beluga noises mixed with mating moose. 

Ahead of them, the sleepy little collection of tents and trailers half-stirred, half-froze, shocked into immobility and clumsy panic. 

“Get ‘em,” said Liz around a mouthful of Advil.  She swallowed it dry, coughed herself senseless, and looked up just in time to see a screaming man in Hawaiian shorts and nothing else beach himself on the car hood, arms flailing furiously, sunburn iridescent in the morning light.

God.  She hated vacationers. 

***

With the tremendous energy and boundless enthusiasm of someone who did what they loved for a living, McGuinty leapt from the car with a taser in each hand and plunged electricity-spurting prongs into the fleshy torsos of two silverback lawnchairers.  They writhed and ground their way into the dirt with mouths wide, screams roaring from their red-streaked, flabby mouths, Coronas spewing limes and liquid across the ground. 

“VBI!  Freeze!” she shouted at the convulsing bodies, then drew her baton.  “Cease resisting!” she said, picking one of them up and hurtling him into a tent.  “Cease resisting!  Cease resisting!  WoOOOOOOoohoooOOO!”
Liz stumbled out into the morning, eyes fluttering like dying moths.  She threw up and watched Advil fly into the beach’s sand, shook her head twice, threw up again, and waved one arm at the couple frozen in the act of launching their kyak. 

“VBI.  You’re under arrest for vacationing in an unvacatable vicinity.  G’wan.  Scoot.  Get.  Shoo.”
Very, very, very slowly, the kayak was beached.  Then the larger and more tanned of the two charged, paddle in both hands, sunscreen glistening on his skin. 

Liz watched as he slipped on her vomit and slid head-first into the car’s tires. 

“Stay down,” she said to the world in general as she patted her pockets.  Fuck.  Where were her cuffs?  She brought them, right?  They were in the car, right?  They weren’t at home in the junk drawer, right?  And she’d remembered to fix them, right? 

Ah, shit. 

A helicopter roared overhead – that’d be Eckhart and Zamboni, doing boat control.  Darts streamed like mosquitos from the big drum-fed cannon underneath its fuselage, riddling the gnarled and sun-riddled hides of their prey, injecting them with potent cocktails of sobriety pills and tranquilizers to render them tired, depressed, and bleary-eyed.  The outboarders were dealt with quickly, leaving the yachters afloat in their big canopied bastards as they leaned on their horns and shouted obscenities to the heavens. 

“May you never tan!” screamed an eighty-six-year-old man as Liz cuffed his arms behind his back, using his spine as leverage.  “May you spend every weekend booked solid!  May your spouse cancel on you without explanation or care!”
“Heard it all before,” she told him.

“Eater of overtime!  Rat of the rat race!  Receive no compensation for your unused vacation from now until the end of your days, you maggot of the middle-class!”
“Yeah.  Okay, I’m gonna administer a sobriety test now, you got that?  Hold still.”  She cracked her neck, riffled through her belt, and shot both prongs of her taser into the elder’s spine.

“WAAAAUGH!”

“Yeah you’re sober.  Wait was that the taser?  I didn’t mean to use the taser.  Ah shit.”

Liz squinted at the hubbub surrounding her – the vactioners were being pushed into the shallows of the lake.  Only a few had broken for the trees and they’d been intercepted by VBI agents hidden amongst the ferns and evergreens, decked out in camo jorts and tactical crop tops. 

“Hey!  Anyone got a spare sobriety test?” she called. 

McGuinty threw a pair of brass knuckles over her shoulder without looking as she sprinted into the water and tackled a roaring bikinist into the reeds. 

“Thanks,” said Liz.  “Now sir, I’m going to hit you until you tell me it stops hurting, okay?  This is very scientific.”
She started being scientific.  Overhead a slight breeze blew, perfectly accentuating the warm sunlight.  The air smelled of flowers and opened beers.  In the distance, a loon wailed. 

God, it was so beautiful that she wanted to throw up again. 

***

The last holdout was under siege.  A canoeist wearing three lifejackets: armour-plated, indomitable, insane.  Froth spewed from paddle and mouth as she thrashed and surged in the midst of the lake.  The helicopter could not stop her; the VBI scuba experts could not hold her.  A harpoon gun was being set up onshore by the artillery team. 

Liz was on her ninth cup of coffee.  McGuinty was working off her high by wandering around the cages saying ‘stop resisting’ to the perps and kicking them. 

“They aren’t resisting,” Liz pointed out.

“That’s not the point.  Stop resisting.  Stop resisting.  Stop resisting.”

Liz poured her coffee into the dirt, watching with no interest but total concentration as it drowned an ant.  “I’ll be right back,” she said. 

“Where you going?  Stop resisting.”
“Walkabout.”
“Stop resisting.  ‘Kay.  Stop resisting.  Stop resisting.”

Liz walked about.  She walked about the car cordon, with its flashing lights and gnashing teeth.  She walked about the perimeter, where the earth was torn and ravaged by frantic sandals and desperate tanners.  She walked about the lake, where the ripples from the last efforts of the skinny-dippers to avoid capture were still spreading in pretty little concentric rings as faint as a dove’s breath. 

She looked left and right and up and down and all around and then she slipped her pants down and sat in the sand and picked up a discarded beer can and took a long, cold swig. 

The suntan lotion was in her belt, in an empty pepper spray can.  Deniable, undetectable.  She took some and spread it on her palm. 

“Thank fuck it’s Friday,” she said.

The approach had been silent, flawlessly so.  But the gasp wasn’t even close: loud and unrestrained. 

McGuinty didn’t try to hide.  She stood frozen amongst the bushes, eyes wide with shock.

“What the fuck.”  It was a flat statement, a confrontation and an admission of a thing that should not be. 

“I can explain,” said Liz.  And THAT was a dead assertion, a denial that was listless in its believability. 

“What the fuck,” said McGuinty.

“I can explain,” said Liz.

“What the fuck.”
“I can explain.”
“What the fuck.”
“I can explain.”

“What the fucking fuck,” said McGuinty, and that was the inflection point.  The stall had ended; things were about to start happening again. 

There was a ‘thunk,’ fat and meaty and liquid.  The harpoon gun had been fired, and hit.  It made McGuinty’s eyes half-dart away, and in that flicker Liz moved.

The gun was already in McGuinty’s hand, but that just made it an easier target for the pool noodle.  It was slapped clear into the middle of the lake, and as she tried to recover it before it made it all the way Liz’s other hand came around and it was holding the crude stub of the beer can.

COORS LIGHT turned into CRS LT as it crumpled against McGuinty’s skull.  Beer flew everywhere, mixed with just a tinge of blood, but the wound was minor.  The surprise was the real impact, and that was what led them both to roll over and over into the shallows and stay there until the bubbles stopped. 

Sound bled back into Liz’s awareness.  The canoeist was screaming as she was reeled in to shore, thrashing and roaring and laying about with her paddle.  She had a few more seconds to hide  McGuinty’s body.  Blame it on a rogue sunbather she’d stepped on.  That’d do it.  Everyone knew she was a deadly eye in a brawl but totally useless at spotting things right in front of her nose.

But she could do that in five minutes.

Just five minutes.

Sit down again.  Toes in the sand.  Eyes on the sky.  No mosquitos, no traffic, no phone.  Across the bay the canoeist’s calls ended in the wet and muffled thumps of a ten-body pileup.  Somewhere in the distance, a loon politely inquired as to what the hell was going on, and it was beautiful in every way. 

“Thank fuck it’s Friday,” Liz said again.  And it didn’t work quite as well, but there was always Saturday ahead, wild and untamed.  And a rarest of prizes: a Sunday empty of guilt. 

God, she loved the long weekends. 

The phone rang, tinkled, strummed, plucked, wailed, and thundered.  It had almost worked itself up into a full frenzy by the time a liver-spotted hand gently lifted it from its cradle.

“Kettlemaster Kuble, maker of fine instruments, ages zero to infinity welcome, ages ten and up recommended.  How can I help you?” inquired the man himself, dusting away a speckle of dust from his bathrobe.  He’d been meaning to pull it out of storage for months. 
“This is Mr. Meeyer calling on behalf of Morton Throllop Tempor II, Jr.  I would like to purchase a grand piano.”

“Oh my.  A special occasion?”
“The birth of his sixtieth offshore subsidiary.  He’s having a small party to celebrate for himself.”

“Hmm,” said Kuble.  He fiddled with the telephone’s cord in contemplation.  “May I suggest something slightly grander than a grand piano?  We have several grander pianos, and if I put in a special request to a man in Bologna I could, perhaps, with a bit of luck –”

“Do it.”
“Done.  There will be a Grandest Piano en route to your master’s address by this Thursday.  You’ll need an empty soccer field to house it, an artillery barrage to play it, and seven thousand pounds of raw meat a day to feed it.”
“Wonderful.  Mr. Tempor is appreciative.”
“Thank  you!”
“Good-bye.”

Kuble made to put the phone down, then jumped half a foot as it started screaming before it was fully seated in its cradle. 

School season, probably.  Always was this sort of fuss when band class first launched.  At this rate he’d never get to that bath he’d planned on Monday.  He’d picked out his soap and everything.  Ah well. 

“Kettlemaster Kuble, local provider of furious, friendly, and flying instruments of all types, colours and crimes.  How may I assist you today?”
“I need an instrument for my son to play.”
“Well, we have a broad selection.  Piano?”
“No room in the house.”
“Violin?”
“Too waxy.”
“Oboe?”
“Too whiny.”
“Kazoo?”
“He’s allergic to them.”

“Xylophone?”
“I hate the letter x.”
“Trombone?”
“He’s already played that and I didn’t like it.”

“Well ma’am, this one will be completely different.”

“What?  They’re the same damn instrument, aren’t they?”

“Ma’am, with all due respect, the human skeleton contains two hundred and six different bones.  Most trombones – made by morons – don’t even contain ONE.  I can promise you that your son has never played a trombone worthy of the name.  Now, will you be wanting something in a pelvis or more of a vertebral type of…ma’am?  Hello?  Hello?”
Kuble put down the phone.  “Dabbler shitheads,” he said absently.

Then he ran a bath.  For his nerves.  And a good thing too, because it was only a quarter-full before the phone was rattling fit to burst in its cradle once more. 

“Kettlemaster Kuble, formerly Kuble, Krass, and Klombo and also Sons.”

“What happened to those nice young men anyways?  You know they never call.  But they call more often than you.  You know my birthday was last week – Rosie called.  How are you doing?  You know I worry about you.  Did you ever hear back from that nice man from the bank?  The weather’s been awful lately but you know it takes more muscles to frown than to smile.  Edith’s being a real bitch again, pardon my French.  I can’t believe what they feed us here.  It’s been nice talking to you goodbye and give Franklin my love.”

“Goodbye, mother.”
“How dare you,” she said.  And she hung up. 

***

Kuble’s tub was made from the husk of a great old timpani grandfather, shucked free like a snakeskin.  It held water as well as it did heat, and it was a fine thing to recline in and contemplate the cosmos and bubbles and the past and bubbles and the future and bubbles and whether or not that funny lump on your arm was getting bigger or if that was just your imagination. 

It also had no phone, which meant that he barely had time to turn the faucet off before he had to toddle outside and downstairs and upstairs and to the handset in the office.  One of these days he had to get one of those cord-less devices people used nowadays. 

“Kettlemaster Kuble, instruments and tools for instruments, acquitted on all char-”

“Hey listen shut up they’re almost onto me listen I need a tuba grande at Smith & Cox in five and I need it El Loco-style, got it?  Do it on time and you get fifteen percent; fuck me over and I swear to Christ you’re going down with me, and I don’t just mean as an accomplice.  Password is ‘ginjuicer’ and you’re looking for a short fat guy that looks a bit like Boris Johnson.  Got it?  Good.  See you in hell FUCK SHIT DUCK”

There was a large and severe explosion and the line went dead.  Kuble shook it a few times, shrugged, and dialed his warehouse. 

“Paula?  Little ‘Bang-Bang’ Chitty called us just now.  The usual, please.  And tell him to change his password now and then for security purposes: they’re meant to be one-time devices.  Bill it to the usual account.”

“Sure, whatever.”
“Thank you, Paula.”
“Fuck off.”
“Goodbye.”

Kuble walked back into his bathroom and checked the temperature with his hand.  Yes, still just about perfect.  It was time. 

The phone rang and he sighed from the bottom of his feet all the way up to his skull and out his eyesockets and by the time he was done he was at the phone again and it had been ringing uninterrupted for the past six minutes. 

Nothing to be done.  He picked it up. 

“Kettlemaster Kuble.  The only game in town.”

“This is Jagermister Northwestern Secondary School, and we need you to provide a complete set of woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments for our band.”
“What happened to the set I provided last year?”
“They ate the class in the middle of the Christmas concert.”
“Did you feed them meat?”
“Yes.”
“Poultry, goat, beef…?”
“Sheep.”
“Oh.  Well, that could’ve given them a prion disease.  They may have a taste for flesh.”
“They ate the audience too.”

“Probably should notify the authorities.”
“We locked them in the auditorium and have been trying to starve them out.  The budget’s so tight these days.”
“Yes indeed.”
“That reminds me, you’re replacing these free of charge, right?”
Kettlemaster Kuble hung up, grumbled with the despair of a much younger man, and checked his bath’s temperature. 

It was cold, of course.  Typical, just typical.

He still drowned himself in it, because waste not want not.  But really, was it too much to ask? 

On the hundredth day, they were down to hardtack.

On the hundred-and-tenth day, they drew half water.

On the hundred-and- twelfth day, the lookout swore he saw it, fell from the crow’s nest, and broke his neck.  Fevered by lack of water, they decided.

On the hundred-and-fifteenth day, the new lookout called again.

“WHITE WHALE.  STARBOARD.  WHITE WHALE.  STARBOARD.  SHE’S BLOWING.”
And so she was.  A proper giant flume of water and dead air, gasped up from lungs bigger than humans, baked and wrung out and flattened by hundreds of feet and hours underwater.  And all of it spiralling out of the humped head and back of a beast that shone a sickly, murky white. 

The captain walked on deck.  Slowly, with care.  Each beat of his peg-leg a steady drum, his eyes lighting up harder and fierier with every step. 

“After it,” he said.  And that was all the orders given, and that was all the orders needed.  The sails flew, the men hauled, the boats launched, the harpoons flew, and the spray filled the air and the lungs and the hearts of bodies alive and dead as flukes hammered wood and metal bit blubber and in the end for all its size and all its fear and all its fury the metal won out and the great white-domed creature shuddered and dove for the final time, barrels and all, sinking like a stone and dropping out of sight and reach forever.

“It is done,” said the captain.  Nobody countermanded him, nobody spoke of wastage and loss, nobody griped for a good kill lost to the depths.  They rowed back to the ship in silence, they ate their evening meal in peace, and for the first time in forty years the captain went to his berth quietly, and spent the night in a sleep so thorough that he might have been a corpse or a newborn. 

The past was, finally, past. 

At least, until the dawn of the hundred-and-sixteenth-day, when the lookout called, checked himself, rechecked himself, then called. 

“WHITE WHALE.  STARBOARD.  WHITE WHALE TO THE STARBOARD BOW.”
Which was a terrible way for the captain to wake, frankly. 

***

It put up less of a fight this time, which may have been to be expected – and a good thing too, since they had fewer boats and fewer irons (and fewer men).  But the hate was back in the heart and eyes and tongue of their captain, so they bent themselves to their tasks with a will – a fearful, trembling will, but a will nonetheless – and where there is a will there is a way, and so it was, and was, and was done.

This time they riddled the thing with barrels and took its heart at the surface, lances turning its death-plume bright red and speckling them all with rich, living blood.  The captain’s boat was closest, and as he looked into the beast’s dying eyes the men all swore independently and secretly that he fare looked as though he’d been drinking from it.  His beard was a hearty red that had never grown upon his face, even before age had grizzled him as pale as the whale’s hide. 

They took it apart over days and nights, every piece of blubber, every jot of flesh, every dram of oil.  The bones they could take they took aboard, and they burned them as if they were kindling, then coals – spreading them into the air as rankest soot.  The captain stood closest to the flames and the wrinkles on his face smoothed; from the ashes or something deeper inside nobody could say. 

At length there was no whale.  At length there was no fire.  And at length, once again, the ship did what it never was meant to do, and lay idle with the sweet tenderness of accomplishment and the anticipation of the future. 

***

On the hundred-and-twenty-sixth day, the lookout shrieked and threw himself from the rigging into the waves, and sank without further incident.  If his replacement hadn’t been clambering up the rigging at the moment he might never have been missed; as it was it was a mystery for only the handful of seconds it took for the man to scan the horizon.

“Whale,” he said, to himself, to double-check.  “White whale.  Port this time.  But the white whale.”

Then he said it again.  And again, but louder.  And again, but rising into an ungodly shriek, and again, and again, until eight men were sent aloft to drag him down, two to each limb.  He fought them not, but his fingers and toes were rigid with a tension from hell and needed to be pried loose each at once and all together. 

The captain did not watch this.  The captain gave no orders.  But he watched the horizon with a face that didn’t belong to a human being or any living thing at all, and things proceeded as he wished.

The chase.  The boats.  The lance.  The death.  He held it himself this time, twisted it deep with muscles that shouldn’t have held the strength they did, mouth turning and working itself into strange shapes as the life eeled out of the beast’s core in shudders and convulsions.  It died painfully and quickly, and he would not stop, did not stop, was still worrying and tearing at the body as the men harvested it and boiled it and butchered it.  When they cut loose the last of the carcass to the sharks he seemed fane to dive after it, and his hands on the lancer were covered in more blood than just the whale’s.

***

On the hundred-and-thirty-eighth day, the lookout came down from the crow’s nest and spoke calmly to the first mate, who consulted with the second mate, who spoke to the third and fourth mates, and who knows what decisions would have been made if the captain hadn’t stirred himself to the deck and demanded answers from the lookout in person.

It was on the starboard, to stern.

***

On the hundred-and-fiftieth day (port, bow), the blades came out well before the boats were launched, and the guns, and the words. 

The captain had no gun.  He had no words.  But he had something much worse inside of him, and that was enough to make it an indecisive affair where the crew took their sides by fear and fought for terror, and that was probably what set the ship ablaze.  Nothing catches flame quite as nicely or quickly as fear.

One hundred miles away, just over a few horizons, there was a small island with a pleasantly swirling offshore current, good for plankton and small fish.  And there the birds dove and swirled and spiralled and shat in brilliant white, upon sea and wave and the sun-dappled and dozing backs of any passing whales, who had learned centuries ago that this was a good place to daydream.

There would be fewer of them for a little while, but the past is a small and squalid place, and there are always plenty of futures to hope for. 

It was a little after ten AM when Evermind came by my stand. 

“Hello, my friend Leslie!” it said brightly, all ten legs at eager attention and its thorax at a jaunty angle.  “Are you very busy?”
“Kind of,” I said distractedly.  I’d just put on the last of my first full batch of lunch wieners, and now I was trying to figure out how many buns I wanted ready and waiting.  “Make it quick.”
“I have been murdered!”

“Yeah that’s niwait what?”
Evermind beamed happily at me, then fell over stone dead. 

I went back to unpacking buns until Evermind came back, this time in a cleaner-form. 

“Told you not to do that in front of the stand,” I told it.

“Sorry,” said Evermind apologetically with one mouth as it fed the runner-form into its primary mastication pinchers.  “But I was so excited!  My friend Leslie, I’ve been murdered!  Just like in one of your mystery novels that you so generously have shared with me!”
“How does that even work?”
“I have no idea!  That is why we must find the murderer, to understand how they did such a thing.”
“’We’?”

Evermind’s eyestalks looked everywhere but at me for a second.  “I told the police at first, and they told me to contact the garbagemen.  Then the garbagemen told me to contact the police.”
“Did you tell them it was murder?”
“Yes but they didn’t care.”
“Most people don’t bounce back quite as readily after a murder as you, Evermind.”
“Bounce like a what?”
“Never mind.  You PROMISE this won’t take long?”
“Not long at all – especially with your expert assistance, my friend Leslie!” said Evermind, chitin standing at attention and vibrating with eagerness.

“I just read lots of shitty thrillers, you know.”
“Yes!  Lots!  Making you an expert.”

I gave up and swung the little sign on my stand from OPEN! to BACK IN FIVE!!!  You just couldn’t say no to that face.  Or the other ones in its lower abdomen. 

“Okay,” I said.  “Take me to the crime scene.”
“Wonderful!” cried Evermind, aquiver with violent enthusiasm.  “You’re standing in it.”

“I’m sorry?”
“Yes!  I was murdered in town!”
“More specific than that, please.”
“Oh.  About three blocks south.”

I pursed my lips.  “So… in one of those shady little backalleys the up-and-up restaurants stuff their dumpsters in?”
“You are entirely correct!  I was having lunch.”

***

The crime scene was a mess.  Evermind’s feeder-form had been a big one, rounded and full of delicious nutrients to share with itself.  Something had gone at it with…Christ it was hard to tell.  I wasn’t a police officer; I didn’t even do my own butchering.  It looked like it had been stabbed with a shotgun and then fired into over and over. 

“Behold!  The crime scene!”

“Sec.  Gotta throw up.”
“Of course.”
Luckily there was a dumpster handy.  Luckier still that I was too preoccupied to smell whatever was brewing in it.  “Okay.  Ok.  O.  Right.  Alright, describe what happened.”
“I was murdered!”
“In more detail please.  If possible.”
“Well, I was processing more nutrients from the dumpster you just vomited into.  This is a convenient place to leave a feeder-form – there’s always a nice meal handy, and it’s right along my main trunk.  Under normal circumstances I’d have a runner-form here every three minutes on the minute.”
“You’re not going to starve are you?”
“Only a few dozen of me.  It’s very surprising though!”
I looked at the corpse, then opened the dumpster again. 

“Shall I describe the wounds to you?”
“Hrlllrlpppghgl.”
“There is a powerful incision on the left-”

“SLORT!”

***

“Alright,” I said.  “You can put me down now.”
“Sure thing, my friend Leslie,” said Evermind in the great grey monotone of its hauler-forms.  I’d passed out after the second vomiting fit and in the middle of the third paragraph of a very detailed autopsy, and woken up being courteously held upside-down so my breakfast would leak out my mouth instead of down my windpipe. 

“Alright.  Alright.  Okay.  So… you have no idea what did this to you.”
“No.  I was alone when it happened, and didn’t see who did it.  The blow came from behind me.”

“We need witnesses.  Anyone who might’ve seen what happened?”
“Trudy might have.”
I squinted up the seven feet of chiseled Evermind-abdominals.  “Trudy?”
“My neighbour, Trudy.  She lives two dumpsters down from my murder scene.”
“Oh.  We should talk to her.”

“Excellent.  Onwards.”
“Yeah.”

“My friend Leslie, are you going to get up anytime soon.”

“Yeah I just need a moment.”
“Because I can carry you.”
“I’m aware.”
“It would be no problem.”
“It’s fine.”
“Because I know you’re dying to solve this-”

“One minute.  Please.”

***

I knocked on the dumpster for a good twenty seconds before it opened. 

“What?!  Can’t you see it’s noon!”
“Eleven-thirty,” I said. 

“Whatever,” said Trudy, crossly.  “What’re you doing making such a racket?”
“We’re investigating a murder,” said Evermind.

“Oh yeah?  Whose?”
“Mine.”

Trudy stared at it, then at me.  “The hell?”

“Just roll with it,” I said wearily.  “Did you see anything?  Hear anything?”
“When?”
“That’s a good question.  Evermind?”
“Exactly nine twelve AM.”
“I was asleep.  Like I was before you started up with your damned racket just now.  Why the hell would I notice something if I were asleep?”
“Evermind was being murdered sixteen feet away from you with some sort of giant blade or firearm?”
“None of my damned business, frankly.  You heard the sounds this one makes when it’s eating?  I don’t pay attention anymore.  Maybe the retired guy did it, now fuck off and leave me alone.”

“The retired guy?”
Trudy’s dumpster slammed shut about a centimeter shy of my fingers. 

I looked up at Evermind’s sensory plate.  “The retired guy?”
“Oh yes.  LMT-CQ04281.  He’s in the square we walked through to get here.”
“I didn’t see anyone else around.”
“He lives in the exact center of it, my friend Leslie.  You can’t miss him.”

***

“You know, this is a bit awkward,” I said.

HOW.

“I thought you were a statue at first.”

OH.  THAT HAPPENS A LOT.  DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

“Yes sir.”
NO NEED FOR THAT.  I’M RETIRED AND YOU’RE NOT UNDER MY COMMAND.
“Yes sir.”

WHAT CAN I HELP YOU TWO WITH.
“I’ve been murdered,” said Evermind proudly – or as proudly as it could emote with a voicebox shaped like a little grey rubik’s cube. 

WELL DONE.  WHO DID IT.

“You don’t know?”
I HAD MY INFRASONAR DECOMISSIONED OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE PRIVACY OF MY FELLOW CITIZENS.  MY SENSORY RANGE IS LIMITED TO SIGHT AND SOUND, AND I LACK EASY ACCESS TO THAT ALLEYWAY FROM MY POSITION.  THE BEST I CAN OFFER IS I HEARD SOUNDS INDICATING A FATALITY AT THE MOMENT EVERMIND HAS ALREADY DESCRIBED TO YOU.
“Damnit.”
TRY ASKING THE FISH AND CHIPS PLACE.
“I’m sorry?”
THEY HAVE A CAMERA POINTED AT THEIR DUMPSTER.  LIABILITY REASONS.

“Oh.  Sure.  Thank you.  Sir.”

LMT-CQ04281 waved farewell to us and then settled back into a crouching position, all seven meters and sixteen tons of it.

“I thought most of the war criminalizer droids went to quiet places.  Mountain peaks.  Oceanic trenches.”
“Oh, the CQ-models prefer more urban environments.  The right balance of open sightlines and confined horizons is essential to a proper and healthy state of mind.”
“You talk a lot?”
“Absolutely.  We’re best friends.”
“How many best friends do you have again, Evermind?”
“Approximately 38% of the population of this planet, my friend Leslie.”
“Way to make me feel special.”
“You’re welcome,” said Evermind.  And then it reached the end of its hauler-form’s life cycle and expired on the pavement next to me. 

***

“Look,” I said in exasperation, “there’s been a murder.”
“If it’s THAT thing,” said the waiter tersely, “it’s just pest control.”
“That is very hurtful,” said Evermind’s observer-form from my shoulder.

“Shut up.  You’re more eyeball than anything right now, I don’t have to pretend to like you.”
“Oh come on we just need thirty seconds of security footage.”

“Get out or I will call the police.”
I took a moment to decide whether or not I’d regret never eating fish and chips here again.  It wasn’t a long moment. 

“Catch,” I said. 

“What?” said the waiter.

“What?” said Evermind. 
I gently plucked Evermind from my shoulder and lobbed it underhand into the waiter’s lap. 

“AUGH!” said the waiter.

“Oh goodness!” said Evermind.
“Good catch.” I said.  And I walked into the backroom while the waiter was trying to detach sixteen sucker-covered tendrils from their arms.  Six monitors, two of which were turned off.  Three of them were security cam footage.  One of them was pointed at the dumpster, Evermind still sprawled in front of it.

I rewound.

Password?
I entered ‘password1’ and to the everlasting shame of my species it worked, and I beheld the face of the murderer as it finished gutting its prey, because it stopped and turned to the camera and waved with a big happy smile.

“Happy birthday, my friend Leslie!” said Evermind, on the monitor.

“Happy birthday, my friend Leslie!” said Evermind, in the hands of the waiter. 

“GET OUT!” said the waiter.

“Oh for FUCK’S sake,” I said. 

***

And to top it all off, I missed the lunch rush.