Death Ray Butterfly

Chapter Five

The crimes that go on nowadays, you can hardly believe it. We have people stealing skin - literally swiping the skin off your forearm, just to scrape the data and passwords that are embedded there. Not to mention the leg bones worth a fortune on the international market, shipped here from Ethiopia and Madagascar and God only knows where else. Then they got people cracking pacemakers for the serial codes and doing what they call 'spot-checking', which is a fancy term for mimicking gestures to control a personal auto-bot.

I don't even know what half these crazy crimes are but at the bottom of it it's always money, so that's one thing I do understand. Money and the screwed-up human being. It's always one thing or the other. Now with all the people in the world it's no wonder they're always talking about the remote personality control. A big city needs it. You can't have a hundred and fifty seven million people in a small space going about their business on their own!

Once they instituted that it was just a matter of time before the hoodlums and the lowlifes started working the angles around it. They can tap your wavelength, mess you up real good. You see these people staggering around now because somebody jacked their life and put them in a mood. You got them lying around on benches wondering where the hell they are, and then their families come and find them and take them back to Starters so they can get their tune up back to normal.

Mental technicians, there's a job. Down to a science, this business of what they call 'life ordering' and 'predisposition'. I'm lucky I got out of it because I retired in time and they were saving the cops for last in any case. Someone's got to be alert when everyone else is sleeping, or might as well be. They tell me that the innovators have a special plug-in to keep them going. Got to have new stuff, you know, always got to have new stuff.

One time I was in a room somewhere, I'm forgetting where it was exactly, and I look outside the window, and I'm way above the street, and down there I see people walking and just like that, somebody just popped in, just popped right in. Weren't there but a second before and kept on walking like they'd been there all the time. I was rubbing my eyes because I couldn't believe it and I didn't tell nobody about it for a while, not even my assistant, Kelley. I know what I saw, though. It was real as you and me. Well, real as me in any case. I 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.