Death Ray Butterfly

don't actually know about you.

  There are strange things like that so I would never be surprised by anything anymore. You could tell me there are people who believe in billion year old souls living deep down in volcanoes that came here from another universe and I would nod and say, could be. Who knows. I've seen lost souls, and even found one, once upon a time.

  She was just a corpse when I met her, a body laying up there in the woods around Pink City. She'd been in that state for quite awhile, nothing but bones were left. I don't know why they called me to the scene, because I wasn't in Lost Persons at the time, but Captain Cameroon - Rendira Cameroon - she thought of me, and asked for me specifically. I came up on to the scene - just a gully in the woods, nothing special, pile of bones there in a ditch. Cameroon comes out and shakes my hand, she says,

  “Mole, I got a feeling about this one. There's something missing here.”

  “Looks like a whole lot missing”, I told her, “like a case, for one thing.”

  “Oh, she was killed all right”, says Cameroon. “Shot right through the back of the head, execution-style, like they always say. Small caliber, close range. She was kneeling, hands tied behind her back.”

  “So who done it”, I asked facetiously. I was being rude because Cameroon seemed to have all the answers. Turned out she did.

  “It was Curly and Rags”, she told me. “Curly already confessed. Been on his conscience now for seven years. Couldn't live with himself anymore. Even turned his own brother in as the shooter.”

  “Hobbs' boys”, I nodded, and Cameroon agreed.

  “He cut them loose”, she continued. “Hobbs didn't do nothing for them. Let them go.”

  “So what's missing?”, I asked her, and that's when she shook her head.

  “Who she was”, she says.

  “Now wait a minute”, I tell her. “Didn't Curly tell you who she was?”

  “Claims he doesn't know”, she replies, “and Rags, he won't talk. Doing the time but in silence. Boys convicted of killing no one! No one with a name, that is. So that's why I wanted you, she said. I can't find out who she was. There's nothing on her, dental records nothing, missing persons nothing, federal agents nothing. You might say she's a real lost soul.”

  “I bet her family'd like to know”, said Cameroon.

  “I bet they would”, I told her.

  Turned out to be a real puzzler. I won't bore you with the details now. Damn near drove me crazy, I can tell you that much.

  Six

  Maybe the case that dogged me the most over the years was Arab "Cricket" Jones. I can't even remember the first time I had to deal with that guy. It seemed like deja vu all over again every time he came to my attention. One time it was Jimmy Kruzel complaining about Jones - I can see him clearly now, sitting on the swivel chair in my office, swinging back and forth and scratching his nose, whining about how this nasty little man kept showing up on his riverboat casinos and swindling him out of all his money. Jones' modus operandi was legit, which only annoyed Kruzel even more. The guy would come in, gamble, and win every time. There had to be something wrong.

  Jones won at everything and literally every time. No one could remember a single losing hand at cards, a single losing roll at craps, a single losing spin at roulette. Kruzel insisted I do something about it. I did. I laughed in his face and enjoyed it. I told him to get out and stop disturbing my peace. But that wasn't the end of it. I figured Hobbs would put an end to Jones once and for all if he had a mind to, but I wasn't in the business of protecting gamblers from the trouble they brought on themselves. Funny thing was, Hobbs never seemed concerned about Cricket. He always let him in, always let him play, always paid him his winnings. That got my attention, eventually. There had to be an angle in it.

  Okay, it didn't get my attention directly. I was never going out looking for cases - they had a way of finding me on their own. This time it was a squirrely private detective who bothered me about it. I hate private detectives, especially these corner cases, like this one, Shrimpie McDaniel. He was a short, fat club-footed gay Eskimo with a Fu Manchu mustache and a mouth on him like you wouldn't believe. Usually came in on a case after the crime lab assholes had totally screwed up the evidence so the real police, meaning me, couldn't locate a single uncontaminated shred of it. I don't know whoever told those lab guys they were supposed to be solving crimes! As far as I know, their job's to measure things and mop up blood. Sure enough there's some in every case who can't help but step all over the scene. Then they call in some loser like Shrimpie to cover their ass, pretend it was all his fault in retrospect. I'm on to that game. Seen it for years.

  So Shrimpie comes in and tells me there were two Cricket Joneses at Kruzel's at the same time the other night. Absolutely two identical Joneses. Not brothers, not twins, not cousins - the same. And one of them was sticking out of the other one's trousers. I told Shrimpie to stuff it. Obviously he'd seen the bottom of too many bottles that night, but he swore on his mothers' graves, after letting me know he had three moms; a birth mother, a foster mother, and later an adoptive mother, all of them oddly passing away within a week of each other though hundreds of miles apart. Strange.

  Arab Jones was at the blackjack table, standing behind the players, when the second Arab Jones popped out of the first one's pants, and strolled over to the bar. Every one who saw it dropped their jaws. Whatever that means. Like 'chiseled features'. Whenever I hear that I always have to say, are you kidding me? Who the heck drops their jaw? Shrimpie brought in the dealer, and he brought in some other witnesses, and they all swore on Shrimpie's mothers' graves that they were telling the truth.

  “So what?“, I wanted to know. “So the guy's some kind of magician, is that a crime? Is that worthy of my attention? And why are you telling me instead of rounding him up and selling him into the circus like a freak?”

  Shrimpie says it's because I'm the one who gets the weird ones. It's my reputation, I'm telling you.

  So what am I supposed to do, pay a visit to this Cricket Jones and ask him how many of him there are at any given time?

  “Get out of here”, I roared, and Shrimpie beat it. But it wasn't the last I was to hear about Arab Cricket Jones. Some time later I get a package in the mail and inside was a note from Jones himself, along with what looked like a plastic cigarette lighter. In the note he tells me to be very, very careful, that it's disposable, and there's only a limited number of turns you can take, and that each of the parallel universes you can click to is very much like the one right next to it - just a teensy bit different - and the further you get the more the differences add up, but you never know, he underlined, you never know which direction you'll click into - backwards or forwards, it made no difference - or even how many layers at a time.

  I stared at that note and I stared at that lighter. I came close to burning the first and melting the other. Wish I had. Might have saved me a lot of grief later on.

  Seven

  Now that I'm here - where I think I am, at least, it's hard to know for sure - I have a lot of time to think about things, and I've found that the more time I have to do that, the more they bother me. Things in general, that is, like marching bands - i don't know why, but they make me feel like throwing and breaking things. Then there's rich people looking for bargains. It just bugs me. If you can afford to buy something and you want it, then buy it. Don't try to get it cheaper, especially when the person you're haggling with is probably earning almost no money at all. Or when the news people tell you things that you know aren't true, and they know aren't true, and they know that you know, but still they tell you anyway, such as the price of something is due to "supply and demand". It's nonsense but they keep on trotting it out on every occasion.

  I've got lists and lists of peeves, pet ones and otherwise. Like professional announcers who mispronounce words, even famous people's names! Or they accentuate the wrong word in a sentence. The other day I heard somebody saying IG-nub-bull, instead of ig-NO-bull. And these are people who are
paid to say things right. Now there's people who launch their booster packs right in your face, never mind the noise and dust. And the doctors who give you diseases so you don't get them later on and they call it "good for you".

  I was in a place the other day where I had to wait in one line just to be able to wait in another. I had to submit my papers for inspection. You have to carry them around, and they do these spot checks, where they'll haul you off to the stadium for the night if you don't happen to have them on you, and that's not enough. No, you have to go into their offices every three months to get your papers renewed. You wait in the first line so you can wait in the second line, and in between the two lines there's a man who takes some money. You have to give him the money or else he'll put you back to the end of the first line.

  You get to the end of the second line and present your papers to the person behind the bullet-proof glass, where he or she will shuffle them for a few moments and then, depending on whether he or she likes the look of your face, will either stamp them with a rubber stamp, or send you outside to wait