I have a 20k story that was supposed to be for a 10k story. I passed both stopping points. by quite a bit.
Since 20k words is probably longer than 100,000 characters, I was wondering if I should post the story to OneDrive or just chop it up.
You can add an attachment here, I think? Hit Reply and look for ‘Attachments and other options’ under the text box. (Sounds like something I’d like to read!)
I can?
Ooo! 
I can!
Thank you Huskyteer!
(Learn something new every day!)
Dammit, it’s too large. I’ll try it as an RTF… my aplogies for any formatting twitches… !!!
How is an RTF bigger???
I’m going have to try this after work. Have a good day all!
Brooklyn Blackie And The Rainbow In The Dark
by Bill Kieffer
It was the stairwell that had trapped and killed Kelsey Onyx in the end.
Narrow and no better lit than most of the buildings in the shadow of the New Amsterdamn Bridge, he could not turn around and face the shooter. The first bullet had slammed into the back of his head. It came close to hitting the sweet spot at the base of his skull that would have killed him instantly. It was only the pain of the steps pressing into his body at a dozen awkward places that told him he’d survived the shot; that he wouldn’t become a 300 pound lump of unmoving reptilian flesh.
His large, thick green and black tail, whipped about stiffening with pain, screaming for him. His army training told him to get down, lower targets are harder to hit. He was halfway up the stairs, an easy target. Every vulnerable spot he had at or above eye level of the shooter.
He panicked, turning black in primitive display patterns.
The tail smashed into the wall, into the balusters of the old Victorian railing. He needed to present a smaller target, his thick skull and massive arms would block most small gun fire from fatal wounds. But here, stretched out, he was a dead man.
He refused to die without facing his attacker. He managed to turn on his side and look down on the shooter.
It was another bearded dragon, smaller and pale green. Drained of all color and emotion, it held a tiny gun in its hands, a pencil of all things to work the trigger.
The little gun sparked three more times. Even as Kelsey made eye contact with his killer, a bullet made a more direct contact. His left eye popped, his eye lid burned away, the little slug of lead ripped his brain apart as it bounced about.
The identity of his killer ripped his soul to pieces simultaneously.
One bullet found an artery in his inner right leg, nicking it. The final bullet missing the threshing man entirely, as the pencil broke and the gun jiggered as it fired.
Kelsey collapsed on the stairs, blood leaking from him in three spots. The shooter said something the large dragon slid to the bottoms of the steps, his tail now limp and useless. Words meant nothing to him now.
The smaller dragon put something on its head and simply left him there.
He was dying, but he’d been dying before, in the Last Great War, on the fields of Galloland. Bearded Dragons are a long time dying and none of it pleasant.
There were huge gaps in his mind but he knew his children were at risk now. He had to save them. He forced himself to climb those steps.
Before he made it to the top, there were warm hands on him. He forced his one remaining eye open… a big hairy black face stared at him. It was a smaller wolf and a big dog. He had to trust it; there was no one else. It spoke and asked questions with concern. Yes, he could trust this mammal, this Canid, this man.
He could hear the tanks moving in the distance. Some officer barking orders in a language he didn’t understand. They were getting closer. He had a mission… he focused on that. He took the thick envelope from his pocket and pushed it at the other soldier. “You have to… get this to… Blake… Black. He’ll know what to do.”
The soldier said something. Affirmation, a question, but Kelsey couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He couldn’t hear him over the whistle of incoming shell fire.
Something hit them, too close. Dirt rained down on them and the world went black and red, the pain mercifully cut off for Kelsy as the red faded to black and the black to darkness.
And then there was a rainbow beneath it all, faint and translucent, almost invisible against the eternal night.
He followed it home.
¤
They call me Brooklyn Blackie. I’m a private detective making my living on a shoestring and a prayer. It’s a choice. I could live higher on the food chain, but I got issues. My love life, for example, is complicated. Frowned upon, you could say. I’ve seen too much to really care what others think.
Also, I have issues with authority. My friends who have known me for a long time will go all Freud on me and say that I have “Father issues.” I would not argue with them, but it goes deeper than that. I’ve seen what power authority can lend the maddest of men.
I’ve been home from the war overseas for two years now and the mark of Witness to Genocide still stains my soul. I imagine the mark is eternal. I expect that it will never leave me.
But I know love, and I have it from people who knew me before the stain. They think they can cure the soul sickness within me. I sometimes doubt that, but I know they can ease my burden.
The night before, my burden had eased considerably. The smile never left my muzzle. My tail would have wagged, if I let it out. I was cleaning my 45, that April morning. I did not want hairs in the works.
I was expecting a new client; not everyone wants to see your tail flapping about. It wasn’t the 30’s any more.
I didn’t think I needed the gun, but four years in the army imprinted some habits in you. Cleaning my gun when I was nervous was one of them.
It’s been three days since I had a case. March had been light, too. My shoelaces were looking a little frayed and I was running out of things to cut back on. The new client, Mr. Onyx, was coming in at a good time. I only hoped he wasn’t some whack-a-doodle or it was something a bit more serious than his wife cheating on him.
Lucy Hoke poked her feathered head in. White foot long feathers raised in a smile. “Put your toys away, kiddo,” she cried in her Avi voice. All the sound and inflection came from her throat, not her inflexible beak. Like most of her people, she seemed a little shrill. “New Amsterdam Taxi pulled up outside.”
I smiled back. She was worth a look or two. Pretty feathers, bright eyes. Not my type, but in the afterglow of the previous night, I thought I might smile at everyone and everything.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” she chided. “Wipe that look off your face before you scare the client away. You look smarmier than the greeter at a whore house.”
“You mean the Starter?” I chuckled.
“How would I know?” she screeched, “I’ve never been to one!”
We loved teasing each other. A starter sets up tee time at a golf course, so it was almost the same job. I was about to admit that I didn’t know either (not that she would have believed me), when I heard a noise that might have been a car backfiring. I would not have even heard it, had the door been open. This used to be a part of a dental suite. The walls weren’t quite soundproof, but they came close.
Lucy, in the door frame, spun her head almost 180 degrees. It made my stomach lurch when I saw a Avi do that.
Then, the pounding started. It was followed almost immediately by the almost musical percussion of the ribs of the railing getting hit in a strange series. I stood up to hear better. It was obvious that it was coming from inside our building and I hoped for one fleeting moment that some street kids were messing around in the entryway. School day or not, this was Brooklyn. Truancy was a common hobby for the local kids, always looking for the edge they didn’t expect to find in school.
Three gun shots in rapid succession told us both that it wasn’t kids. Lucy stepped out of the doorway, hand to her beak, turning her head back to me. I understood that look. I was usually the one in the middle of gunfire.
I opened the top right hand desk drawer and wiped the disassembled 45 into it. I closed it and turned on the trick lamp Dice had made for me. I opened the left hand drawer and took out the 38 revolver, my weapon of choice in that it was traceable to me.
The 45 was for… other choices.
I bolted for the door, eager to engage the shooter. Lucy fluttered behind me, nervous and brave, but unarmed. “Call the police,” I hissed at her and she stopped as if she wasn’t sure that she heard me correctly. I’ve asked her to do a lot of things for me in the last year or so; but I don’t think I’ve ever asked her call the cops. NOT to call the cops, yes, but never to invite them to the party.
She realized in a moment what I needed and got on the phone. I stepped through the door to the waiting room I shared with Dr. Shadrach. There were three adults and his office manager up and out of their chairs. I herded them away from the office door that opened up on the landing directly at the top of the stairs. The office manager took them into one of the exam rooms in an uncharacteristic show of wits.
I cracked the door open and I heard grunts and the struggle for breath. The reflection in the glass door didn’t reveal anyone. I slid out onto the landing, gun up defensively, but downward towards to staircase.
No shooter but the victim was there, struggling up the staircase on his hands and knees.
He was the largest Bearded Dragon I’d ever seen out of a uniform. He almost filled the width of the staircase. If a bull walked on two legs, he’d be built like this guy.
I holstered the weapon and jumped by his head. His remaining eye moved with me but had trouble focusing on me. I tried talking to him. Nothing, except to flinch when I touched the back of his head. Someone knew how to take out a dragon like this quick, but had flubbed the shot. They’d been off by an inch or so. If he hemorrhaged here, he’d take hours to die.
I wondered if the gunman had tried to be merciful.
I plugged the hole with my handkerchief, knowing I’d get a new one at Yuletide. Knowing it wouldn’t be enough to save him.
I poked at his shirt and jacket, looking for signs of the other two bullets, not seeing any wounds. I tried to make him more comfortable; but there wasn’t much room and he was too heavy for me.
“Lucy!” I cried out, hoping her invisible bird ears could hear me through our closed door. “I need gauze…” I almost asked for a tourniquet, but what was I going to do with it? Cut off circulation to his head? “Lots of it!” I yelled out to her. She’d bully the doc into coming out, too.
My yelling seemed to revive him a bit. He focused on my face with the one eye and didn’t seem to like what he saw. I tried to remember what a solid black face meant to a Rept that changed color to expressed himself. Aggression and dominance, I thought. Oh, joy. His hands twitched with pitiful submission gestures, but then he got hold of himself and pushed an envelope into my hands.
“Get dhish… to Blake… Black… he’ll know what to do…” the dying man said.
“Listen, I’m Blake Black… I’ll take care of this. The ambulance is on the way… just try to stay still.”
But I could see his eye was already glazed and twitching with shock setting in.
Suddenly his legs spread apart and the right leg shook like a jack-hammer. His trousers split and blood geysered out all over the stair well and down the steps. The walls were painted in blood within moments. His tail folded like a wet noodle as he passed out and it was only his left leg getting caught in the railing that stopped him from sliding all the way down.
One or both of the missing bullets had found his femoral artery. It made for a quick death, in most species. For my 10am, it took nearly a whole five minutes.
Lucy came out of the dental office, paused for only a moment, and then jumped sprightly to the railing with her talon feet and slid through the blood on the railing to the steps just below his feet. She plugged the right leg with a wad of gauze, but it was almost assuredly too late.
“Hey,” a male voice said as I stood, watching Lucy do her bit to save our client. I hadn’t know much about him, other than his name. I promised myself that by the end of the day, I’d know much more.
“Hey,” a male’s voice behind me complained again. “How am I supposed to get downstairs, now?”
I pointed at my office door. “Go in there and cross the room. On the other side, you’ll see the backway stair.” The whiner left as I peeked into the envelope.
There were about 100 pictures of our 3rd president’s summer home and an assortment of other bills that made up $500 total. There was also four little black braids. I looked at my client again. There weren’t a lot of Repts that could afford a retainer of this size, and he wasn’t quite dressed like one.
I certainly didn’t know what to make of all the two dollar bills… yet. This might represent his life savings.
The whiner came out of my office. He was a tuxedo cat whose black upper lips had an unfortunate resemblance to the Mad Man’s famous mustache. His black and white tail lashed back and forth in self-adsorbed irritation. “That’s the fire escape, I can’t go out that way.”
I walked over to him and I think he noticed for the first time, that I was almost as covered in blood as the stairwell. Or maybe it was the holstered weapon. He held his ground, even when I got within arms-length of him.
“I’m not going to climb down the fire escape.” He repeated, like it was so obviously beneath him.
I gave him my movie star smile. All teeth and all perfect, with happy puppy ears forward. No growl.
He took a step back.
I scraped a batch of blood off my shirt with my empty hand and then flicked it on his face. He blinked with a full body flinch. I’m short for a wolf, but I’ve got the big hands and the longer reach of my brothers. The cat was surprised when I grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him into me.
He failed against me weakly. This could have been fun for me another time. Well, it was fun for me in that dark way that comes up from deep inside me since the war. But I didn’t like to feel that way.
Or, to be more honest, I didn’t like that I liked feeling like that.
“You know,” I told him with a purr, “You should probably stay until the police get here. I’m sure they will want to talk to you.”
I pushed him back. He landed on all fours, sorta crab walking like they make you do in gym class. I suppose some stereotypes are true. The look on his face was priceless, as was the double-take when he looked down on himself, all covered in blood.
Oh yes, the police were going to want to talk to him now.
Prissy took the fire escape with the swiftness of a mountain cat.
But the warm feeling did not last, because Mr. Kelsey Onyx had been wrong.
I had no idea what to do with the little black and gray braids he’d given me.
¤
It took two stout bears from the coroner’s office to move the body off the staircase. They only slipped on the blood once. The landlord was there almost the instant the way was unblocked, hosing it down from the utility sink in Dr. Shadrach’s office. It was hardly modern police procedure, but the cause of death couldn’t be clearer and I had already walked two officers through everything, before Detective Lachie McDonald showed up. I walked him through it more slowly, because he had questions. Smart guy this detective.
He snatched up the pencil half I pointed out to. He caught on instantly to my point about the pencil and the wound placement. His Highlander accent was almost gone, but Terrier hadn’t gone fully Brooklyn yet. “Good call, Laddie. Bearded Dragon mostly likely know the best kill shots for a Bearded Dragon, eh. They’ve got huge monster hands. Yet, the slugs we’re pullin’ out are but wee things.” McDonald made a considering noise that was pure Highlands. “Well, there’s enough blood on here that ruined any tiny partial print we might ha’r gott’n. But ye ne’er know. The othey half mi’be forgotten in a pocket or a hidin’ in a pants cuff. Migh’ be the difference b’tween a conviction or not.”
“Whoever our gunmen is, he must be an very good shot.” I said. “Maybe military.”
“Better than you?”
That was a good question. I stood were we thought the gunman had, in enough so that the door could shut behind him. The average Bearded Dragon was taller than I was… I had to step to the left to get a good shot to the base of his skull.
I looked to where the pencil half as ended. “I think our shooter was left handed.”
The white furred detective agreed in such a way to remind me that that wasn’t the question.
“I could have made that first short as well, or better,” I said. “But a flailing man? No, I would not have been able to get the eye shot, nor the femoral artery.”
“One of those shots missed, took out a railing dowel.” He reminded me.
I nodded. “The pencil broke. Or maybe they were just lucky shots.”
“Miss Hoke said he exited the taxi alone. That right?”
I spread my arms wide and shrugged. “The window in my office overlooks the alley.”
“And what were you doing between 9 and 10?”
I’d been over this with the two officers before, but a detective is listening for different things. I liked to think I would know, but I still wanted to hurry this along. The blood was drying on my chest and legs and sticking to my fur inside my suit.
“I had a vitamin tonic for breakfast, which tasted horrible so I cut it with whiskey and hash & eggs. I bought a newspaper and toothbrush. I got here and got a lecture from my employee for being late. I brushed my teeth and cleaned my gun. Lucy said here’s here. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Then he’s dying in my arms, doing an imitation of a Tejas oil well.”
“Do you always clean your gun before seeing a new client?”
I blinked, cutting off the answer in my throat. The two officers had flinched at my glib answer, “My father always said ‘Idle Hands are the Devil’s Plaything.’” Waterbury’s fantasy had taken on a life of its own, in a way it never had when it was my fantasy alone, but that was another story.
“Old Army habit,” I said instead. “It helps center me.”
The Terrier looked up at me, blank face. I took it to mean one or both of the officer’s had given him the less honest answer. I also got the sense that here was a Canid that woke up every morning perfectly centered and had no patience with sad sacks like me.
My impulse was make a joke or poke at him to put him off balance or to get chummy. But I went with my instincts instead and stared at him steadily waiting for his next question.
Highlanders have history of being barbarians for centuries, full of rage and emotion. The modern Highlander grows up with only two choices die working in the mines or work up a cunning plan to get off the rock.
This Terrier hadn’t died in a mine, so I had to assume that he was at least as smart as me. I’d save the smart mouth until he deserved it.
After a moment of thought, he asked, “And, when the victim made the appointment, did he happen to say why he wanted to see you?”
This was a sticky situation; McDonald was sharper than the usual shields I worked with. I went ahead with Plan A, it was the closest to the truth.
I held up one of the little four inch braids of string. Black with six strands of gray strings mixed in what appeared a random way, but was consistent with the other braids exactly. “He said it was a ‘family matter.’”
I didn’t know much about Chromatics, but I felt confident enough with this bluff. You learn a lot when you have to share showers and locker rooms with mixed species. I never got much beyond the ribbons showing the family or the “color” of your aura or whatever mystic mumbo-jumbo labels they had for going with their caste system, but I was a quick study.
I had to be, because right at the moment, I had maybe 100,000 suspects to sort out.
And that was just the “Black” Chromatic Repts in New Amsterdam.
Ʊ
Upstairs, in my office, Lucy was nervous that one of the officers were casing my office. My desk lamp was still , so I told her to relax. “That’s why they call them officers, Honey,” I said softly giving her a wink. “It’s not exactly the crime scene, but its a ‘office of interest.’ They’ll probably toss the dentist’s office, too.”
“Probably not,” The Terrier said, as if I should know what he was about to tell me. “I was warned about you, Mister Black. You’re smart enough, but your mouth is smarter. You got friends in high places, even the police commissioner’s in your back pocket. There’s a lot of my people that would pin this murder on you just to be rid of you, even with witnesses that place you in the dentist’s seconds after the gun shots. You’re damn lucky I am not one of them.”
I smiled. “It’s nice to have a fan; but really Lucky, if I can call you that…”
“No, it’s Lachie,” he interrupted.
“OK, sorry, Lockey --”
“And, no you fool, you cannae call me by my first name, if you insist of mispronouncing it in some juvenile attempt to keep me off balance.”
I was off-balance for a moment but I think I kept my smile up for just a bit longer. “Detective McDonald, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you.”
He gave me a look and I didn’t know what it meant until he started rambling off loose facts and figures. Polyglot. Aide to General Dwight Einhorne. Marksmenship scores. Even my reading comprehension levels in seven languages. It would have impressed me if it was someone I was about to meet, but hearing these facts about me just made my hackles rise. These were all directly out of my military records and I find my palms sweating waiting for him to mention how close I had come to getting a medical discharge. But he stopped short of that, and I could not tell how much he knew.
“You see,” the Terrier detective said. “I did some digging on you.”
Rick would have been proud of me for not making a Terrier joke, but my act had been busted, at least momentarily. I just gave him my blank face, grateful that my trousers hid my tail going between my legs.
An elevated train passed next to the building, and everything rattle. My pencil holder rattled across my desk until it suddenly stopped over the electro-magnet Dice had installed in my desk. No one noticed that everything else was still doing the jitterbug a full five seconds longer. Except Lucy, who had flinched.
The bear officer was too busy looking behind a family portrait that my parents had splurged on years, back when I thought both my parents were my parents and my little brother wasn’t even a chocolate bar in my father’s back pocket yet.
The building stopped shaking and the bear poked gently around, even picking up a pencil or two off the floor and replacing it on my desk. He didn’t notice how they rolled a little and then just stop. I could hear, I didn’t have to see it. I think I only stopped my ears from moving towards the desk by concentrating on the smaller dog’s stare.
“Do not play me for a fool, Black,” the Terrier growled again, "And I will treat you like I would treat any other former flatpaw.
“I would especially like that courtesy, Detective.” That was probably the most sincere thing I said all day.
The Terrier turned to the Bear. The officer shook his head, “No.”
McDonald nodded once. “Nestor, go join Franklin in canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses, then meet me at the precinct at 3pm.” He turned to Lucy. “Can you lock up and make your way home? Or do you need a ride home?”
“I’m fine thank you,” Lucy said, “If I get dropped off by a police car, I’ll never hear the end of it from my landlady.”
The Terrier smiled like a gentleman, but slid a look my way to indicate that the longer she worked for me, the more likely being driven home by the police was.
“And, you, Mr. Black, will come with me.”
Oh, if only I had a dime for every time someone had said that to me.
Ʊ
I followed the Terrier to his car, a black, unmarked '46 Fleetmaster. I felt remarkably unclean looking into its mint, seemingly never used backseats. Of course, the blood I was covered with was almost dry, so that explained that. “Detective, We don’t want to mess up your clean backseats. How about I go home, put on some clean clothes and meet you at the station in about an hour?”
McDonald had walked around the to driver side of the car where the noon sun made his fur seem even whiter. He stopped in the process of opening his car door. “You’re not walking four blocks covered in blood. Even the most jaded Brooklyner’s going to call the police over a walking crime scene like that. Just get into the front seat.”
He climbed in and I glanced at the passenger seat that was covered in notebooks, pencils, and about a dozen coffee cup lids. The dashboard held almost three dozen more trapped up against the windshield.
I felt a genuine smile jump on my face and got into the front passenger side. Sitting in the passenger seat in the front was a token of respect. Even Waterbury would have had me seating in the backseat just to remind me of our positions, and I know he liked me.
Of course, I’d forgotten about the Terrier’s shorter legs and arm. The front seat was as much a couch as the back. It was an uncomfortable ride, made all the more disturbing because it quickly became clear that we were not heading to the station. I had the reach and training to take him in a fight, if this turned into a domination pissing contest type of thing.
But he had a badge and a brotherhood in blue behind him.
I didn’t want a 38 from my gun in his chest. There’s no winning in my winning that way. I had just reconciled myself to playing this by the ear and just hoping for the best, when we suddenly pulled up in front of the apartment building where I lived.
This was a new twist. Detective McDonald was out of the car and on the sidewalk as I peeled myself out of the front seat. “Something the matter, Mr. Black?”
I pulled a coffee cup lid off my butt and tossed it in the gutter to wait for the street cleaner. I blushed, half expecting McDonald to arrest me for littering for something to hold me with. The Terrier just raised an eye brow and tilted his head. “Well, honestly, I was thinking for a moment that you were taking me to some place for a special talk.”
The Terrier smirked. “Acch, Laddie, I want you to shower and change so we can go visit the Widder Onyx. I figure the best way to keep you in line is to keep you with me the entire time.”
“You knew my address.”
“I remember everything I read.” He gestured to my front door, where the kids on the stoop were staring out me in wide eyed horror, but were unmoving. “Kids,” I said smiling as I stepped closer, “This is inspector McDonald. He’s a truant officer…”
Six little species ran off in three directions at that, leaving my steps clear. I went up the empty steps with the good detective chuckling behind me.
The third floor apartment was little more than a kitchen, dining room, a bedroom, and a bath. I unlocked the door and let it swing open with a bang.
“You better be back with some coffee!” a woman’s voice called and realized that maybe I should made sure the coast was clear.
“Blanche, I got com–”
Then she was in front of, covered only in her tan and brown fur. Except for her shaved décolletage, the fur alone provided enough modesty. Her perfect Alsatian jaw dropped opened and she was fussing all over me before I could warn her about the detective.
I glanced back, saw him with a hairy white hand over his eyes and an embarrassed grin on his face. Blanche ignored him as if his covered eyes made him invisible to her as well. “Blanche honey, this is not my blood. I’m ok.”
“OK, come into the bedroom and let me check you over.” She dragged me into the bedroom and shut the door. I was grateful to see that Rick was gone.
“Do you need to climb out the window?” she whispered next to my ear.
“No, I’m good, this guy seems to be a straight arrow.” I pointed to my dresser, “Get the scissors out of the top drawer, would you? I think you might have to cut me out of this.”
“Suit or fur?”
“The fur, please, just the fur.” I knew the odds of getting all the blood out was pretty steep, but, hey, it was a dark suit and I was trying to live at or below my means.
I asked Blanche, if she knew anything about the Chromatics. She knew a little. From the Repts that came into the River-Rat, it seems all the color bands were treated very much like the average Mammal treated Horoscopes. Some were a lot more serious than others about it, but that might just be the type of Repts that came to a mostly Warm nightclub. She also thought they had secret names of some srt, too. Not much, but then it was more than I had known despite my sleeping with a few over the years.
In the end, there was very little cutting, but I thought I might have lost another white collar shirt. Blanche promised to get the whole sorry mess down to the Nettoyage à Sec, while I was in the shower. She found her clothes and I slipped out in my bathrobe.
McDonald was snooping and making no secret of it, nor apologies, as I went from the bedroom to the bathroom. He just waved politely.
I had a bar of the Gallo-milled soap that Rick preferred, but I went with the lye soap I used on my clothing usually and sometimes the floor. It still took awhile to get the blood out, even with the stiff bristle brush.
If I ever got chummy with Rick’s crew, I’d have to ask them how they got the blood out. In the war, the blood and gore eventually caked off your uniform. I didn’t want to wait that long, we were going to see the “Widder” Onyx.
I came out of the shower and found Blanche, dressed in last night’s clothes, chatting away with Detective McDonald on my couch, chatting away. The Terrier gave me a friendly face. “Took you long enough, Laddie. Thank goodness, Miss Johansson was here to keep me entertained.”
Blanche got up with a playful smile on her face. “I’m sure he was just waiting to see if I was going to join him in the shower.”
My grin grew wide when I realized what she was doing. She grabbed me and I could only grab her back and kiss her so passionately, that if it had been in a movie, the film-stock would have melted. If there was a Broadway play about kissing, she would have been a star. She broke off with promise of a raincheck for more tonight, grabbed the Sardi’s bag that had my blood stained clothes in them, and told the Terrier what a pleasure it had been.
Then she was gone, like the whirlwind she ever was.
God, she loved having an audience. I haven’t had a goodbye kiss like that since the war.
Ʊ
I found black suit with gray stitching that I’d brought back from Italy and Detective McDonald suggested black clothes all around. I found a black pull-over with broad gray stripe across the chest. He found a old black hat with ear slats that rubbed my wolfish ears the wrong way.
I looked like a moron.
Then, he handed me a small black book, I saw in the mirror the method to his madness. With the mismatched but monochromatic outfit against my deep black fur, I looked like some poor Chromatic convert. I might have tried it myself if I knew anything about Chromaticism.
“What’s your plan, McDonald, lull her into confessing her sins to a fake preacher?”
The detective smiled and shook his head. “Chromatics don’t do confession. Every Chromatic is expected to live as a preacher, but not to preach. Only the prophets may verbally preach.” He had me put on a fingerless glove on just my left hand. “No, I want you to look like a Chromatic-Fabulist; someone who follows Mosaic but still finds comfort in Aesop’s Tales as allegory.”
“There’s such a thing?”
“Yep, Chromatics accept Xrist, Aesop, and Mosaic as prophets. Chromatics live their lives as Allegory, it’s just a different way than we are used to. All you have to remember is that always accept everything with your right hand. If she offers you food or drink, always accept, even if it bowl of mealworms. Pretend eat at least one with your right hand. It’s just good manners. She may correct you, because you’ll appear as a student to her. Just say please and thank you.”
I nodded at the wisdom of this. “I see. So, we can make my ignorance work for us”
“We can at least keep it from working against us. And, yes, if you can take her aside after I interview her and ask if there’s anything we should know that she couldn’t tell me, that we be helpful,” the detective said as we went down to the Fleetmaster.
“But why would she trust me not to tell you?”
“Didja not understand what I told ye so far? Band business stays in the band. We can act on what she tells you but me and you can’t talk about it. She might tell ye that Flint Stone accused the victim of cheating at cards, and then you would tell me that we should talk to his friends, like Flint Stone. If you were a good Black Chromatic.”
“What if I were a bad Black Chromatic?”
“Traditionally? You’d be surrounded and stoned to death.”
“Well, as long as it’s safe, I’m in,” I quipped. “But what if our gunman’s not a Black?”
“Well, we can be pretty sure the Onyx’s problem was a Black Band issue. He went to a detective named Black; you had an Avi answering the phone, he probably thought you were part of the Brotherhood with your name.”
“Blake Black isn’t that colorful.” We turned onto the New Amsterdam Bridge, heading for the Big City. The gray jungle seemed almost colorless against the bight blue sky. Sunbleached stones in tans, grays, whites, and faded browns piled up ways that seemed random so far away.
“Blake Lyndon Black paints a picture. Blake means light or dark, in the Old Anglo, depending on who you ask. Lyndon is a tree, obviously. So the picture of you might be someone in the shade of the tree, beneath a darkening sky. It’s vague, but that’s how they like it.”
“Not so obviously, I never knew lyndon was a tree. As far as I knew, I was named after some poets.”
“That’s another difference,” McDonald said with a chuckle, “Chrommatics aren’t named after anything. At hatching, they get their father or mother’s name, and one of those ribbons. If a name weren’t required for the Hatching Certificate, the parents would probably just number them. Those little braids are more their name. They earn more as they grow older, building a more complex picture name.”
“Weird,” I said, thinking more about the view of the city as we drew closer, then the naming rites of the Chromatics. Traffic wasn’t quite at a standstill, but it was moving steadily at a crawl. I realized that I was looking for something in the cityscape, but I didn’t know what it was.
Then a red produce truck passed us, heading into Manhatten, and I realized that I was looking for bloodsplatter.
The world looked sort of strange and alien for a bit there, not covered in blood.
Ʊ
I don’t usually have an audience, but I fell into it easily enough as we crossed into the financial district, heading uptown, as I went over what I knew… what we knew.
Kelsey Onyx had only three braids hanging from little silver hoops piercing his scales. They were covered in his blood, so the colors were hard to read. The three were longer and braided differently then the little black and silver braid I’d given the Detective. McDonald thought this meant that Onyx was a recent convert.
I guessed, a shot in the dark, that one was for his marriage, to go with the wedding band tattooed on his right digitus medicinalis talon, and the other one was for going to war or returning from war, because I’d gotten a new Alph glyph upon my return. McDonald thought those as good as any.
He cautioned me to use the victim’s Chromatic name until invited to be more familiar. Chalcedony Onyx. Chalcedony was the rock black onyx is cut out of, McDonald explained, which alone made a good picture image for a convert.
“I only read non-fiction,” the Highlander explained when I asked him where all his trivia came from. “If I get a hankering for fiction, I read the political section of the newspaper.”
We both agreed that what the victim had wanted me to do for him, whatever is was, might not have anything to do with his death, but right now, that was really all we had. But right now the odds felt good.
Sadly, that was all we really knew so far except for the address Lucy and then McDonald had gotten from the dead Rept’s wallet.
There was a few minutes of silence as we drove up Broadway, so I turned to McDonald and asked him if he’d found what he’d been looking for in my place, and what was that, if I might ask. I kept my tone light, so he’d know that I wasn’t really offended.
I’ve been known to snoop myself once of twice.
“In the six months, there were seven vigilante killings that made use of a 45 in Nova Yorke. Your name came up in connection on three of those. More than anyone else. So, I wondered if maybe you had a 45.”
“I sometimes investigate very bad people. It’s very rare that very bad people have only one enemy.”
At a traffic light, the Terrier turned to me and asked me point blank, “Do you have a 45, Blackie?”
I thought about answering honestly, but my common sense wouldn’t allow me to be that open with someone that I’d just met. “I would hate to lie to you, Lachie, but I’m not one to incriminate myself needlessly.”
A glimmer of annoyance burned in his eyes for a moment, but the light turned green and he had to drive on. After two long blocks, we were driving past Central Park, with its horse drawn carriages, raccoon walkers, and hot dog wagons.
“I owe you an apology, Blackie,” McDonald announced as a crossing guard stopped us for a parade of third or fourth grade children crossing the street. A class trip so city children could experience a little nature. I doubted things were back to normal yet for the Children of Furope. “I had bought into all the rumors about you. And obviously, not all of them are true.”
Thoughts of the devastated cities of Furope and their children had left me a little distracted or I might have realized what he was talking about faster. “What rumors?”
Detective McDonald seemed to think about for a moment, and answered in measured tone, “The kind of rumors that imply it wouldn’t be a naked woman I’d find in your home.”
I had to smile and laugh at that. He could work with me if he thought I might be a homicidal vigilante but a homosexual vigilante and he was going to give me trouble. I didn’t know what to say to that so I just laughed harder.
In a moment he laughed, too, and then told me to shut up, and we drove on in almost friendly silence.
Like I had told him earlier, I’m not one to incriminate myself needlessly.
Ʊ
The Onyx’s lived in a three story walk up on the edge of Harlem where Washington Heights began. It was a half Cold neighborhood, with children of all ages and types played together outside until the street lamps came on. The young Repts moved with surprising speed when they moved at all – except, of course, for the Shelled People, who moved steadily and almost somberly. The young Mammals were little kinetic balls of energy that seemed always in motion. The young Avi children held court, as they did even in my day, plotting, planning, supervising… but always darting back into their homes for grub after any decent energy expenditure on the streets. None of the young Birds deigned to eat the bugs about them.
I’d never realized that Washington Heights had gotten so Middle Class and integrated. I was also surprised that school had gotten out. It was already 3:30; more than half the day had flown away.
“Put that smile away,” McDonald said as he opened his door. “We’ve got a widder to see.”
“Right.”
I stepped out of the car and I stepped into character.
It wasn’t so hard to emote some awkwardness when everything I wore was so mismatched. Expensive, foreign cut suit, with a tight t-shirt, and a hat that pushed my ears back like I was cringing. I worried the book in fingers, one of the few obvious unconscious gestures that the Warm and the Cold share.
I stopped hiding my surveillance. I made myself overtly nervous while stopping short of projecting paranoia. I had to trot to catch up with McDonald who barely glanced back as he reached the steps to Kelsey Onyx’s building. A lot of scratches from a lot claws on the steps over the years. Two obvious tracks; up and down, each keeping to the right, there was even a worn line of the right and left for large dragging tales.
McDonald walked up the middle of the steps. I spared his backside a distasteful look and then followed, keeping to the right. The Chromatics live as preachers; keeping tradition is a sign of faith, no, an expression of faith.
Hey, you never know who’s looking.
He opened the wide door and held it open for me as I caught up again. It was cool in the hallway, with the steps almost right in front of us to the left, a hall way to the right. The row of mailboxes built into the wall suggested a more Victorian period, except for paint jobs on each. 6 mail boxes, 6 apartments, 6 families, but only three colors. Four of the boxes where black with various color accents. There was an orange box and a green box, each with their own little accent designs.
Or, I should say, Orange, Green, and Black.
The mail box for 2A had the word Onyx in the name slot and a one each wide rainbow of sorts curving across the bottom in a dynamic stripe of orange-brown earth tones. It suggested a stratified rock, I suppose.
None of the black mailboxes had a stripe of gray on it… I supposed I had known that it wasn’t going to be that easy.
Ʊ
The narrower stair showed its wear and tear and a few replaced slats stained a slightly different color than the rest of the staircase. I wondered if the building was all big, huge hulking Bearded Dragons. I wondered how they had passed each other on the staircase. One would have to stop and let the other go, obviously. There was probably a tradition for that, too.
2A was right where you would expect it to be and McDonald knocked with assurance.
A heavy thread approached the door on the other side, and it opened a third of the way to reveal a near duplicate of Kelsey Onyx staring back at us. I only knew it was his wife, his widow, his women, because she wore a black hijab around her head and neck. The head scarf was sheer with looping streamers of gray threading about the edges. She had managed to cover all of her spiked scales that gave her breed its name. The rest of her was covered in layers of black fabric.
Her head did not bob in greeting and the hands were lost in the folds of her fabric. I felt as if we were late to the party, interrupting the hostess as she was cleaning up.
“Mrs. Onyx?” McDonald asked and he received a slow nod up and down. “I am Detective Onyx and this is Blake Lyndon Black. May we come in for a moment.”
If she picked up on the formality of his speech, she did not show it. Perhaps, I thought, she was used to formality. Perhaps her whole life was scripted by formality and tradition.
If so, we were about to go into unrehearsed area.
She invited us in by opening the door further and stepping back as gracefully as anyone could with 25% of their body mass in their tail. I had thought Kelsey was upper middle class because he had taken a taxi to see me. His address made me question that, and the now that I was in his home, I had known I was right.
The walls were a light gray with black macrame hangings here and there. Knotted and braided threads hung off randomly that suggested South American knot language. Or they might have just been pretty, I was no scholar.
Rich cushions of various sizes and shapes filled up the livingroom, all centering around a low table about four feet long and almost half as wide. A glittering mosaic of shattered tile and glass made up the table top in an grand spiral pattern. It looked like an artisan piece, if not a museum piece, easily worth as much as McDonald’s Fleetmaster.
“My children are not feeling well,” she said in a soft whisper that seemed in contrast to her size, “Please speak softly.” She made a gesture towards the cushions, inviting us to sit. No, skin showed but her palms.
Thankfully, I’d stayed in a few Furopean hostels with a similar arrangement. I bobbed my head in the three movement gesture that Repts used as a simple thank you, hoping tradition hadn’t overridden biology. McDonald, who seemed to know more about Chromaticism than I, hesitated for a moment as if unsure how to sit on a cushion. But it was only a moment, and I’m sure that was just to build me up as a fellow Chromatic.
“My husband is not here, but I expect him back shortly.” she said with no hint that we were intruding at all. Almost as if we were expected, she further made us welcome by offering tea or some dates. I looked nervously at the white Terrier as I accepted the tea with and head bob in three subtle jerks. Right handed, of course.
McDonald looked back and sighed and then he asked Mrs. Onyx to sit down. She placed the tea pot on the mosaic tiles. “I am terribly sorry, Mrs. Onyx but your husband will not be returning,” the homicide detective told her, keeping his voice soft in deference to the sick children in the other rooms. “He was shot this morning and he died shortly before the ambulance could arrive.”
She blinked. She rose unsteadily to her feet. Her head began bobbing again with emotions that I could not identify. I noticed her hands, curling then flexing, talons snagging. The skin around her eyes turned a dark gray, and then she was a whirlwind her tail slamming about the room. Pillows flew about the room and she tore the black knot work off the wall and screamed into it, covering her face.
It was an incredible, emotive performance you don’t see in a Rept too often. I could not help but feel bad for her. If she had fur, I’m sure she would have pulled it off in her despair.
There was a soft series of coughs and moaning from down the hall and she stopped even more abruptly then she had started. She left to see to her children, knowing that they were all she had left.
The Detective and I looked at each other and I almost laughed. We both wanted to snoop around so bad, but didn’t dare. The apartment was laid out rail car style so the hallway was part of all the bedroom without a single door. We would get caught.
We both lapped at our tea delicately, right handed, of course.
Ʊ
In a few moments, the widow returned. The children had quieted and she was once again an unreadable, somewhat animated statue. “Please,” she said softly, “Tell me what happened to my husband.”
So, McDonald stood up and walked her through what had happened. The appointment, the arrival by taxi, and the three bullets. He made it seem that his death was sudden and almost painless. She seemed distant and almost as if none of this impacted her. The layers of fabric hid any gestures that might have given a clue to her mood. Most Repts are placid… except when they aren’t. But this women worked at extremes. Block of wood one moment and fireworks the next.
As if catching the thought, her expressionless eyes snapped to me. “And why was my husband coming to see you? What do you do?” It was the softest spoken accusation I’d ever had thrown my way.
“I am a researcher,” I improvised, and it was hardly untrue. I glanced at McDonald, hoping he was better at reading me then I was reading her. “And we were hoping that you could tell us why he would come to see me.”
I got her to blink. I think she might have even relaxed. “I can not. My husband holds patents and stocks… held patents and stocks. He hasn’t done much since he returned from war… hadn’t… done anything, in fact, since returning from the war, except buy a car and play with his children.” She stopped and looked up towards the ceiling, showing the white, sharp scales on her pale gray neck. I looked away as if to avoid offending her modesty.
“He never told me where he was going. The children were not feeling well this morning. I insisted on his taking a cab so that I might have the car in case they got ill. I feel that I am to blame for this. He agreed because the children were everything to him.” She made a gesture of prayer to the ceiling. “May God forgive me, but I was happy to have some time to myself”
I had not wanted to stare, because her very colorless would have been remarkable enough to make me stare in a normal situation. I wondered if she was on some tranquilizer or mickey, but her tone never matched her words.
“Does it matter why he was there, gentlemen?” She asked the ceiling softly. “The matter could not have been anything important enough to kill my husband. It must be a random shooting. Why are you not asking all the witnesses?”
“We have and we are interviewing witnesses. It was not a simple shooting.” McDonald said. “I believe that you husband was assassinated. It was either someone who knew him or someone who had a serious hatred of Bearded Dragons.”
A flash of anger seemed to twist her face in such a way that made me think she would have spit on the detective if she’d been built that way. Repts aren’t just Cold Beings, they were also pretty Dry. “There is no shortage of suspects who hate us enough to kill. Why isn’t one of my people investigating this? Why did you wait so many hours to come and speak to me?” There was a growl in her voice that, in a more emotive Mammal might suggested the edge of approaching hysteria.
McDonald indicated me. “Mr. Black is a Chromatic student and a figure in the Brooklyn Rept community.”
The widow, easily massing as much as her husband, focused her red hot anger on me. I flinched and I will readily admit that not all of it
was an act. I wanted to glare at McDonald, bastard that he was for tricking me into this position, but I held the Bearded Dragon’s stare.
I spoke in click-clack then; a terrible Wet Mouthed version, more slap and smacking then clickped grunts and popping that passed for the street lingo for Repts how found standard Aenglish too dull or impossible to pronounce, but perfectly understandable, if one made allowances. Or so Dice told me.
I blessed her in the Name of Mosaic, and told her that his readings would give her comfort. I threw in a little blessing from Aesop, too, remembering McDonald’s suggestion that I might lean on that too.
It wiped the anger off of her face, and confusion flickered across the giant wedge that was her face. I thought that I might have loused up the loose grammar of click-clack, but as I was a student, one might expect I’d try to impose order into it.
I got some satisfaction from McDonald’s dropped jaw as the widow and I engaged in talking about her husband. Most of it was nothing. Her husband had invented a little mechanical timing devices that regulated traffic lights and other things. That, with other patents, meant that he didn’t have to work, at least at a nine to five job.
When he was drafted, he tried to get into the Army’s R&D research division but they made him a grunt instead, ignoring his university degree and his talents. It was only the thoughts of coming home to his children that kept him alive, though out the ordeal.
I nodded, I had known several men like Kelsie on the front-lines. I lucked into advancement and being able to pick up most Furopean languages with the exception of German lubricated my luck. But I saw many better educated and smarter people than I go out to catch bullets day after day.
I asked her when he converted. And it was as you might think, a man, even the Coldest Man, wanted something to live for, knowing he was going off to war, something to come home to. She’d known Kelsey for a long time… he was not a modest man, but he was a smart man, a kind man, and she agreed to marry him if he took the Mantle of Mosaic, to become Black, and assume the place of her first husband.
It was romantic, in a very formal way, I suppose.
Still speaking in click-clack, I asked her if there was anything that we should know that she could not tell McDonald.
She paused and considered. She then asked me a question in return, “What did my husband ask you to research?” in her surprisingly delicate clacking speech.
I spread my hands and twitched them to indicate frustration and quiet anguish. “I do not know. He merely told my girl that it was a family matter.”
She seemed to exhale, releasing her tension. She pulled her hijab back across her neck, and her talons danced a moment in a short display of discomfort. “My husband was not a modest man… but neither was he a secure man. He was a jealous man, despite the fact that I was with him almost every minute of every day, he thought I must have cheated on him while he was away, that in fact I was still betraying him. I did not.”
I thought to inquire further, but my tongue was beginning to sting at the tip. Besides, my expertise of click-clack was not subtle enough to ask what I needed to.
For example, what the little braids had to do with that.
Ʊ
McDonald told her that he needed her to come down to the station, to identify the body. He offered to have me watch her offspring, but she declined, preferring to have her neighbor in 2B watch them.
Pity, it would have made for some good snooping time.
She offered to follow us in her car, one designed for her frame, but McDonald insisted and the backseat of a Fleetmaster was large enough for her.
I had McDonald stop and let me out in Times Square. I told him that I had some research to do. He gave me a mild glare. He hadn’t understood a thing we had said in click clack and I hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with him. Still, he knew I had my own investigation to run. I gave Mrs. Onyx my card and I told her that she could call me if she needed anything. I promised to give McDonald a call after dinner.
He drove off and I walked towards the Eisner Building, wondering how I was going to track down a possibly imaginary lover of the least feminine creature I had ever met.
I found Dice in front of the Eisner Building, working his shoe shine stand. He “whistled” an Italian love song as he worked on an office worker hiding behind a newspaper. Dice produced the sound almost as well as any phonograph. Impressive, when you realized he had no lips to actually whistle. His throat muscles were amazing, but not at the level of Lucy. It was the kind of perfect mimicry that gave Repts a terrible reputation for not being creative.
These people had never heard Jazz or Blues, or ignored where it had come from.
Dice would rather sing Jazz, but the Italian Love songs brought him much better tips.
Dice shared this stall with two other shoeblacks, both of whom were taking breaks before the five o’clock rush started. Dice spared me a glance and said to take a seat, he’d be done in a moment. It only took me a second to realize why he was being so formal. I hid a grin and sat down awkwardly as he finished up with his current customer. Soon enough he was finished, and moved to me. He looked at my shoes and they were admittedly very dusty, having been in the closet since my last funeral… no, wait, I’d worn them to a court case a few weeks ago. Without a word other than a promise to make them presentable, my Italian Turtle friend began to clean and then shine my shoes.
He started whistling an Italian love song almost immediately. I took off my hat scratched at the chafing along the back of my ears. Still keeping the blank face, I asked, “Say, Dice, don’t you know any Jazz songs?”
Dice started and looked up, still not seeing me for me, so I gave him my patented puppy-dog smile, swiveling my ears forward. “Brooklyn!” he gasped, “I did not recognize you… who dressed you like this? In these awful shoes?”
I laughed at that. Dice and his uncle had a proprietary interest in my footware. “I made a new friend today.”
Dice smiled behind his beak. “Oh, well I can’t wait to hear about it when we are somewhere safe.”
“It’s not like that. I got a new case and I’m working with a Brooklyn Detective name Lachie McDonald.”
Dice went back to shining my shoes. “Why’d you bring the cops into it?”
“I didn’t have much choice. My new client caught some lead outside my office and then made like a geyser… he was just about the biggest Bearded Dragon that I had even seen… he certainly had more blood inside him than anyone I’d seen die.”
Dice whistled. “If you’d been wearing your lucky shoes, none of this would have happened.”
I’d been wearing those “lucky” shoes when I’d gotten client all over me. I knew the luck wasn’t in the shoes, so much as it was in Dice. “Yeah, I’ll wear them tomorrow,” I said, picturing his face when he saw the dried blood encrusted in all the wrong places. It could be amusing. “Maybe my luck will change.”
“Well, dressing like a normal schmoe might help. So what’s youse working on?” Dice was trying to pick up a New Amsterdam accent with limited success. The limits of his mimicry, I suppose.
I brought him to speed, hoping I could avoid spending the night in the library, researching. I asked him what he knew about Chromatics and it wasn’t much. In Europe, they tend to take over a village or two, with streets taking on names of the rainbow. While Dice had been intimate with more Repts than I had, I seemed to have gotten more slices of the color wheel then my younger Turtle friend.
Neither of us seemed to have had very pious conquests, in any case.
Dice brightened up just as he was finishing my left and final foot. “You know, even the pious and the upper class cheat. Take your Father for example.”
I growled. “He’s not my Father.” Dice knew the truth of my real father, so I hated when he brought it up. It was one of the real open wounds of my life. I’d ruined my chances with the man who raised me. My mother’s husband had always wanted to be close to me, but he had seven other sons who hadn’t given him a life-time of grief. It was a hard course correction and the currents were against both of us.
Dice made a waving away gesture acknowledging my statement without recognizing it as a rebuttal. It was the same gesture his Uncle had made against most of Dice’s lame excuses in the cobbler shop.
“My point is, when every one else cheats, it’s usually with someone of a different species. It just makes cutting it off that much easier and I’m told that woman are more forging about that sort of thing.”
I nodded, without voicing any qualifiers. Of course there were exceptions, but really, by and large, he was current. Popular literature was full of such things. An Inter-species Rake was a popular Romance Novel figure. Still, I didn’t see his point.
“Chromatics don’t do that.” Dice said with glee. “They stay in the same color and often in the same species. The husband wouldn’t think of himself as Cuckolded, even if the eggs belonged to someone else. The lover would be a Proxy for him. Bringing an egg to hatching is harder than raising a child. That’s where most of us bond, with the egg, not the chick.”
“Are you sure?”
Dice nodded and held out his webbed and clawed hand for his two bits. I gave him one of Kelsey’s 2 dollar bills. I needed to get back to Harlem. If that sort of cheating was the cultural norm, a new convert like Kelsey Onyx might have anticipated or appreciate that his wife wasn’t cheating on him, just mating with his proxy.
In my book, that was a good enough reason for Kelsey to murder someone.
I just didn’t see it as a good enough reason to get Kelsey himself murdered.
Ω
There were four Black mailboxes. Not counting the Onyx, there were three families I could speak to in the building: the Kohl’s, the Ariégeois, and the Ebony. It was almost dinner time by the time I started knocking, although the street lamps hadn’t come on yet.
Not one of the three other Black families were Bearded Dragons. I was crestfallen, just a bit. If Kelsey thought his wife was cheating, the closest male Bearded Dragons would be his first suspect pool.
Males had answered all three doors, all invited me in when I told them that Kelsey had died. All offered tea and Pony Ariégeois invited me to stay for dinner. I accepted tea and declined dinner, citing dietary issues. They were only so many locusts and dates that a Wolf can eat before embarrassing oneself.
All three uniformly declared that Kelsey had approached them with his suspicions. All three had told him that, as far as they knew, Jewel Onyx had not cheated on him. Not knowing how to ask delicately, I just came right out and asked if there might have been a proxy involved. Kohl and Ebony had answered me almost word per word that they witnessed no such mating and would not speculate on such things. It had the feel of a pat answer. I wore out my welcome at each, pressing for more details. I apologized, citing that I could not let a criminal get away with murder, which they didn’t like but accepted. After all, I was clearly not an officer of the law.
Pony’s answered was less pat and sent his mate’s tail thumping in a Gecko’s display of displeasure. “I was his guide,” he said with only the slightest pause to glare at his wife. “I explained some issues he had problems adapting to. In many ways, he still saw us as an outsider sees us. I may not have explained some of these very well, but he did not seem to feel betrayed as you suggested, but more confused. I could not, of course, easily allay his confusion.”
“Of course not” I had said as if I had understood everything. I understood enough. It would be easy enough to see confusion lead to frustration. Frustration to rage was another foreseeable leap. But none of that lead to Kelsey getting shot in the back of his head.
I asked one last question, “Was Kelsey a very emotional man? Prone to anger or threats?”
The wife grumbled something in click-clack but I ignored it. My face might have given me away a bit, because Pony blinked slowly as if considering his answer. After a moment, he said, “No, he was a thinker. If anything, he thought too much.”
I thanked them both and left.
I think Mrs. Ariégeois might have said something like, “Not like his crazy wife.” But I wasn’t sure.
Ω
As I was about to leave the building, it occurred to me that the Widow Onyx hadn’t asked any of the other Blacks to watch her sick children while she went off Brooklyn to identify her husband’s body. She’d asked her neighbor, the Orange, “Alizarin Chungwa,” according to the brightly colored mailbox.
That didn’t quite jibe with my admittedly limited understanding of Chromatic culture, but what did I know?
I went back up a flight and knocked on her door. A brilliant Gecko sport with skin in bright yellow scales with angular black spots that looked more like tiger stripes open the door. Her exposed neck and belly were creamy white. She wore a thin red scarf that wrapped around her neck loosely and where one end draped down her arm, it was transparent enough to turn orange.
Her eye-shadow covered more than that scarf.
“Wow,” I said, and she deserved it. She smiled back and me, as if expecting that wow and knowing that she deserved it.
I took my hat off, tossing off the character I’d been playing all day. A dame like that would eat a little scholar up. Not that I wouldn’t mind being chewed up a bit, but I did have a job to do. “Miss Chunga? I understand that you’re watching the Onyx children.” I didn’t make that second sentence a question on purpose. “May I speak to you about Mr. Onyx for a moment?”
She blinked and she smiled, showing the flat perfect teeth that Sports sometimes have. “Sure, I was about to check on them. Why don’t you come with me?”
She pushed past me and I swear her tail brushed up against me on purpose just below the belt.
“I thought the children were sick and needed quiet rest.”
Alizarin stopped at 2A and gave me wry look. “Foolish woman gave her kids a cabbage head each this morning, and, of course, the three boys just ate them like they were candy.”
“Oh, of course.” I said, but I hadn’t know that. Rept kids think cabbage is candy? I suppose I would think that, too, if I were on a high insect diet. “You’d think she’d know better.”
“Of course, she knew better,” she assured me and stepped inside the Onyx apartment. “But she was desperate to keep her man home this morning. He’s absolutely devoted to those kids, even if he thought they were runts. I was surprised he went out.”
I followed her into the next railcar like room where the children slept. I looked at them and did some math in my head. They did seem a little small considering both their parents were spike covered mountains.
“Do you suppose she knew something bad was going to happen to him this morning?”
“Gosh, no… she’s just a fretter.” I smiled at her use of “gosh.” She made it seem cute, precious, and cutting all at once. “At worst, she was expecting to be caught in a lie. Not murder.”
I sat down on the cushions and I invited her to do the same, “What lie was she worried would be found out?”
“Make yourself at home,” she quipped and then plopped herself down into the pillows. “You know, the lies that aren’t a lie until someone can’t quite swallow it. I am not a big fan of them myself, but it’s just about the only pragmatic thing our people do, and it’s an honest enough thing… if everyone is on the same page.”
I nodded, wishing I had started with this saucy Gecko. “Was Kelsey on the same page?”
“No, he was not. And it wasn’t his fault. Julie had pretty much trapped him before he went to war, hinting she probably was gravid. He was gone almost four years. Those kids ain’t three, I tell you.”
“They did look a little small,” I admitted, “But I don’t know kids.” Jewel Onyx had seemed too prim and proper to resort to that type of coercion, but then it was quiet desperation that often generated the worse crimes. But I couldn’t be concerned with her romantic motives, or ack there of. “Was Kelsey angry enough to kill or make threats?”
“Oh, I wish. Until I saw him playing with his children, I would not have believed he had a passionate bone in his body.”
“Is there anything wrong with the children? Other than them being too small?” Or young, I added silently.
“Not really… well, you must have noticed that Julie’s a rather oversized Dragon.”
“She carries it well.” I said.
“Yes, she does. That was one of the things that attracted Kelsey to her. He wanted to build a Breed… or maybe rebuild a Breed. He expected bigger children.” She spread her arms wide. “Much bigger children.”
I laughed. “What did he expect? Dinosaurs?”
Alizarin dropped her hands and flicked her eyes back and forth to the kids room. “Yes. Yes, eventually, he did.”
Ω
Because I had knocked on everyone else’s door, I knocked on 1A, the apartment beneath the Onyx’s. I imagined that Mr. and Mrs. Moss might know something. Everyone liked to complain about the people that lived above them. Especially when they had kids running back and forth all day and night.
They invited me in, brightly adorned Magpies in green painted feathers, lots of those little braids, and not much else. Their little tea table were higher of the ground than the others and were made of green sea glass, jade, and malachite mosaic. I had no idea which was the Mr. and which one the Mrs., and they moved too fast back and forth to keep track of, so I gave up.
We spoke in Click-Clack because their Aenglish was too rough for me to follow at their speed. They forced tea on me. Dew and Fern had known him the victim from his old days. They had introduced Kelsey to Jewel, for exactly the reason that Liz upstairs had stated. Jewel was a tank of a Beard Dragon and a widower that was looking for a new husband. She was very old world that way.
They asked me if the doctor had been to see them yet. And I said no, and Fern… or maybe it was Dew… said “well, she wasn’t going to invite the doctor over while her husband was there.” And other said, “No, no, you’re right, she wouldn’t, not in the mood he’d been in.”
I drank my tea right handed and tried not to react to what might be my first true clue today.
They were able to tell me more of Kelsey’s story. Jewel Onyx had rather modestly underestimated her husband’s worth. Not only was he an inventor, but he’d been buying up empty lots and decrepit buildings all over Harlem long before the war. Now with the housing shortage, he was selling those lots at a great net increase.
He did want to create a new Breed. It nothing as sinister as recreating ten story tall monsters, but he believed in diversity and zoomanity. Commonality led to weakness.
As Eugenics rationales go, it wasn’t so bad. But I wasn’t being paid to judge the victim but to bury the murderer.
They announced that they’d heard Jewel’s thread on the landing. I knew too many Birds to even question them on that.
I asked for the name of the doctor Onyx kids had because I didn’t know any Chromatic doctors outside of Brooklyn, They gave me the name of Dr. Black, but they told me that THIS Dr. Black was from Brooklyn.
I thanked them and I was about to leave, but I could hear a heavy thread on the stairs and I looked out the peephole to see Jewel Onyx carrying a foot locker down the stairs. Odd… widows don’t usually throw out their dead husband’s things at least for a few days. I turned back to the Mosses and asked, “Any chance you might have Jewel’s phone number… I don’t believe it’s listed.”
Well, that caused a flurry of activity, as well a little back and forth about Black snobbery and aloofness between, as if they’d forgotten I understood Click-Clack. By the time they got me the number and had it written out on a scrap of paper, Jewel was back in her apartment. I thanked them both and promised to stop by again.
Ω
Mrs. Onyx gave a start when she answered the door. It was, almost, the most emotion I’d seen from her all day.
“Hello, Mrs. Onyx. My sympathies on you loss. May I come in to talk about your husband?”
She stepped back, wooden-faced and yet graceful. Her face a thousand miles away but her tail and legs carrying her bulk with ease. I saw that she was more than just well proportioned. I tried to imagine what she must have been like on a good day, full of life and eagerness, rather than a widow’s despair. A man could do worse.
“Please come in, Mr. Black,” she said. Her hand waved slowly in the direction of the pillows on the floor where I had very recently flirted and flirted well with an Orange Rept Gecko. “I haven’t broken the news to our Boys yet, and it is a Male’s Duty.”
I stopped myself from lowering to the floor, surprised. From the stress on the word “Male,” I assumed that this was a Family Male’s Duty. I was far from being family… but, of course, the Band of Black was another kind of family.
“I am honored, but aren’t there other Blacks in the building, who are closer in heart and hearth?”
She shook her head, no. “They hated my husband as an outsider and blamed me for bringing him into the Tribe. He was not a very good student of Mosiac, but he was a good and dedicated Father to his Children. In a way, you who knew him the least, knew him best.”
The opposite had seemed true, especially with Pony and his wife, but I wasn’t about to debate that with the “Little Widder.” Let her learn that I was a snooper later.
It wouldn’t be the first time a widow asked me to break the news to a victim’s children. But at that very moment, all I could think of was the Fable of the Old Man and Death; and that wasn’t an appropriate tale at all.
Stalling, I asked, “What are their names?”
Jewel Onyz blinked rapidly and frowned, “They haven’t been named yet. They haven’t chosen their names. We just call them Children or Child or Boy. Isn’t that how you were raised?”
At least honesty could help me here. “I was raised as a Fabulist, I’m afraid, and I am still without children.”
She grunted and her grace was gone. She stomped the few feet to the children’s room and then announced, “Children, your father is dead and not coming back.” Then she swung around so quickly that her tail sliced into my trousers.
The three boys stayed stock still until their mother was out of sight. Then they exploded with the manic speed that scares most Mammals silly. But I saw it for what it was, pain, horror, fear and loss.
Ʊ
In a moment, I had them under control. The little green guys, naked but for the little loin clothes and a the little braid badges on their chests, pushed up against me with the little hiccups that pass for Rept tears. Their hands were under my shirt, in my fur, feeling the heat coming off my chest.
All kids love Dogs and at this moment. I was happy to be the Dog, the Shepard, the Protector. There would be time to be the Wolf later. But for now, I did not have to say anything. They listened to my heart beat. I clicked and I clacked, just to make comforting noises.
Their Mother peeked in on us once or twice. I think she felt some guilt. In grief, people have been known to lash out. I felt bad that her children flinched back from her. Felt it; unseen, tiny details in tiny dragons.
I took out a little black braid and compared it to the little braids on the little tykes chests. They were all the same, all different from the mailbox. I didn’t understand. One of the children, flinched and I saw him staring at the braid I held. I decided to use a time honored adult trick.
“Do you know what this is called?”
A little green and white hand took it delicately. “Tzitzis,” he whispered. He hiccuped and glanced guiltily towards the living room, then with a quiet dignity he began unbraiding the little black strings… I tried to stop him gently, but his brothers, seeing that I was going to stop him hiccuped in unison. With a gentle touch on side of my muzzle, the two boys almost literally held my tongue for me.
They diverted their attention between the unfolding strings and the living room, as nervous as a pair of worms in a half-eaten apple.
In a moment, in the midst of all the black strings, a small rainbow was exposed. In the Chromatic creation myth, a Rainbow had appeared to tell those in the Ark that this world was the Promise Land. I’m surprised, actually, that I don’t see more Rainbows in Chromatic art and culture.
So the braids are little puzzle boxes. Cute.
The Unbraider held the rainbow out to me and gave me the most heart-breaking look.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
Ok, I was wrong. As soon as I said that, he hiccuped and then I got the most heart breaking look ever.
The heavy thread of their Mother came our way and the children burst away from me like Bill the Lizard in three directions and they were tucked in tight like peas in a pod. Still as corpses.
She looked in on them, pleased to see them in bed. “Poor Babies, they need their rest. They’ve had a hard day.” She whispered with almost no inflection. “Come to tea at the table, Cousin.”
I left the children alone in the dark.
“You’ve also had a hard day.” I said, as I lowered myself to the table."
She placed a cup of tea in front of me but my eyes were already floating in my head. I took the Highlander’s advice and gently lapped the air over the tea. She sighed heavily watching me drink, turning away.
“This is the second husband I have ever lost,” she said with a voice filled with sadness. “I don’t know why this keeps happening to me.”
It seemed rude to point out that this had actually happened to her husband, not to her, but I knew what she meant. Three children that did not seem to like her overly much and now she would be the soul support.
“It is a sad thing,” I said lamely. “I am glad the Detective did not delay you overly long.”
“No,” the widow said lowering herself to the ground. “I was able to provide Detective McDonald with a motive. Once I asked to see his things, it was quite obvious.”
My ears perked up and I concentrated on pretending to drink tea to control the rest of my face, then I put my cup down right handed. “How so?” I asked softly.
“When Chalcedony was a young boy, the banks collapsed across the country. He never learned to trust them, so he always carried an envelope full of 2 dollar bills… two hundred dollars at least. Simple theft was the motive. Detective McDonald said he had a plausible and likely suspect.”
I made a non-committal sound and gave myself a headache willing my ears to stay upright rather than falling flat against my head. “You don’t say.”
“I do. Plus the bills were sequential, so thief and murderer will be easy to find.”
Well, not all the bills were sequential, I thought, but enough were. Not disclosing my retainer was shady enough to cause me a little trouble. Plus there was the suggestion that I wasn’t the Blake Black the victim had been looking for.
My retainer, it could be argued, had never been intended for me. And I was beginning to think it was true. And I think I knew who it was for, but that hadn’t solved the case for me.
“A few hundred seems little money to end a life for.” I said in, I hope, a wise voice.
“A soldier’s salary seems too little to risk one’s life for, yet men do so all the time.”
“Amen to that, Sister.” I raised the tea in a cheer. With a moment or or two of hesitation, she clinked her tea cup against mine. I might have broken character, but it was time to get out of there anyway.
Ʊ
I went right to the basement, of course. I wanted to snag that chest. With my luck, tomorrow would be garbage collection day in this part of Harlem. The basement, being a communal area, was unlocked. Like the other floors, the basement was divided into two halves, one for the building super’s apartment and other half for storage, the boiler room, and the ash cans. The super’s apartment was unoccupied, with a note tacked to the door in the flowing script of The Homeland and what was obviously a phone number.
I worried that foot looker was locked safely into the Onyx’s storage shed, but a little searching found it an ash can buried under debris. The victim’s widow hadn’t just thrown it away, she had hid it from sight.
I’m afraid I was quite noisy, trying to get that foot looker out of the can. I’d hadn’t realized the industrial sized footlocker was non-standard issue in Jewel’s claws for she was industrial sized, too. The huge neo-plantigrade feet of large Repts, and her husband was surely on of the largest, required large and durable boots. Hence, Rept footlockers came in three sizes. It was an amazing variety for military minds to agree to, but when you wanted cannon fodder that could actually stand up to cannons, you accepted certain things with pragmatism.
It was heavy and dropping it into the can seem to have wedged it in there. Eventually, I gave up and decided to just steal the whole can and cut it open at my office. The dental office would have some sharp cutting tools I could borrow before they opened.
“Hello?”
I went for a gun I didn’t have and then found myself facing either Dew or Fern Moss, who was either Mr. or Mrs., male or female. The Avi had a look on hir face that was either concern or amusement.
“Hello, Dew?” I said taking a guess and sitting casually on the ash can as if a Cannid knocking trashcans over in the evening was a common, every day occurrence. “Could you call me a cab, please? They might not let me on the bus with this.”
“How about I drive you?,” The Avi answered in Click-Clack. “By the time I find someone to understand me, you could walk home.”
“It’s a long drive to Brooklyn, are you sure?”
“It’s a longer walk. Besides, it’ll be nice to talk to someone without Fern finishing my sentences.”
Dew Moss helped me carry the ash can outside to his car, a 1939 Warchief that could have doubled as a tank if someone mounted a gun turret on it. Even together, we could not free the footlocker from the can. We only tried for a few minutes; I was afraid Kelsey’s wife would look out the window and see what we were doing.
The Warchief’s trunk was big enough to hide bodies in, so the can fit nicely.
On the way to Brooklyn, Dew told me that he knew that I was fraud. “It was just little things, like the way your left hand twitched whenever we handed you something. Plus, there’s a cadence to Chromatic Click-Clack that you just aren’t using.”
“I hope you aren’t upset, but I am trying to catch a killer.”
“Kelsey was a good man.” Dew said. “It is good to see Mammals interested in his death, trying to solve it and not just assign blame to the first Rept they’d met.”
I suspected Lachie McDonald was only interested in solving his string of vigilante murders by pinning them on me. My client’s murder at my doorstep had been a convenient excuse for him to harass me. I sat in silence for a moment, wondering if I should tell the Avi the truth of the matter.
“It’s not like when Jewel’s first husband died. The ME said heart attack and we all protested. Even Dr. Night said it was poison. Not a single police man came to interview anyone. There was just a phone call, ‘Do you think your husband was poisoned, Fertile Loam? No? Ok, thank you, you can pick-up the body tomorrow morning.’”
I looked at the bird. He was able look back at me with the one eye while keeping the other on the road. “What? That’s her image name… Hidden Potential.”
“She has an alias?”
“Pseudonyms. All our ‘names’ are pseudonyms of our true selves. In her first marriage, she called herself Fertile Loam. In her second, Jewel Onyx. Before she got married, she called herself Potential Black, or something similar.”
I was quiet for a moment, digesting that. “Dr Night? Is he the Dr. Black you told me about?”
Dew Moss nodded and then pointed both eyes forward in time to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a drunken Mouse stepping off the curb. “Yes, to the Black Band, he’s Dr. Black. To the greater Rept community, he’s Dr. Blaka Neti. When he writes a letter or thesis, he’s Dr. Blake Night. The Darkest Light.”
“Would Kelsey have realized who Dr. Night was if someone referred to him as Dr. Black?”
“He should have. Why wouldn’t he?”
“And if he ask who the father of his children was?”
Dew was quiet for a moment. “Well. He was, of course.”
“What if he asked who fathered his children?”
Dew was quieter ever longer. “Only Jewel could answer that question.”
We sat in silence a bit longer as I thought about this.
Dew perked up suddenly as we got on the New Amsterdam Bridge, an exaggerated smile on his face so I could read it. Or maybe he just thought it was that funny. “You know, I just realized, to an outsider like Kelsey, you and the Doctor had the same name.”
I didn’t think it was that funny, but then what did I know? I was an Outsider.
Ʊ
I directed Dew to my office and was only slightly surprised to discover Detective McDonald and two uniformed officers waiting for me on the stoop. I had expected them to be waiting in my office the place torn up looking for Kelsey’s stash, but then I’d already decided that he was a little classier that Waterbury.
Lachey looked at me as I got out of the car, his eyes stern and tired, as if I’ve someone betrayed him. “I know why you’re here,” I said, “I have something in the trunk that you’ll want to see.”
The Terrier nodded his head to the uniform officers, both Bearded Repts that would have seemed large before Kelsey Onyx was shot dead in my building this morning. He used his muzzle to indicate that they should follow the Bird to the trunk. They trusted me alone with the McDonald, so that was a plus.
“Urra’nae going to give me any trouble if I cuff ye, are ye Pup?”
“Of course not, but it’s not necessary.”
“I take murder seriously and you can’t be seen getting privileges because of who your father is.”
“I understand.” I put my hands in front of me as I contemplated telling him the truth of the matter. My relationship with my real father was so crazy that I barely believed it. He’s a detective, he can figure it out if he wants to.
The cuffs went on and closed, the sound of them being lost in the clatter of the garbage can/foot locker as the uniformed Dragons pulled it from the Magpie’s trunk. Still, I felt them locking deep within my soul. The sound of the shackles fluttered in my heart like a captured firefly in a jar. I’d worn cuffs before, the last time because I had to beat an inebriated rapist out from under my tail.
My father. The rich rapist, closet pervert.
I had to force myself bring my attention away from that horrible night less than a year ago. McDonald had me by the scruff, lowering me into the backseat of the patrol car. I had thought he was just trying to leverage me with Kelsey’s stash to get more information from me on his vigilante theory, but this wasn’t that as all.
The White furred detective glared at his matching uniformed Repts dragging the can noisily down the sidewalk to their trunk in the black and white. “Pick that up! I said we were going to to this as discretely as possible.” They complied, startled.
The Highlander looked back at me, grouchy, up past the old dog’s bedtime. It was 8 or 9pm, after all.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Male Child Onyx,” he said not too harshly and slammed the door on my little black nose.
Ʊ
In 1948, a suspected murderer of a child was likely to suffer a bit more “accidental” softening then a mere whack on the nose. With this in mind, I could not help but notice that we were not heading to the Brooklyn police station. I thought I was soft enough as I was, thank you. I tried to not to think about it, or my stinging muzzle.
I wondered which of the little boys were dead. The boy that untied the black braid and showed me the colors within, I thought. Not that I could tell them apart from the ten minutes I spent with them. That one seemed the bravest.
The one most likely to tell. The one that had, in fact, told me his secret – except that I had been too ignorant to understand the rainbow he showed me as anything other than a pretty symbol of God’s Promise.
I think I understood now.
“Say, neither one of you wouldn’t happen to be Chromatic, would you?”
The uniformed Repts in the front seat remained silent; but the passenger turned and glared at me for the entire time we were crossing the New Amsterdam Bridge.
I had my murderer. I did not think I had enough to convict. Nor did I think I was going to fast talk my way out of this.
I was more than a bit relieved when we landed in front of the Harlem Precinct House without any side trips. Not that I could rule out a little softening in-house. I knew from experience there were enough random tools in the House to make a Union Hall jealous.
After all, this used to be my Precinct when I still wore a uniform.
In short order, the two Repts dragged me up to a Homicide Interview Room where I met Lt. Waterbury and Detective McDonald. My former mentor and former lover gave me a curt greeting and a warning look from his little black Pig eyes that I did not need.
“Blackie,” McDonald started and then stopped to stare at the ash can one of the Rept uniforms dropped in front of him. He looked into the can, saw the footlocker wedged tightly in there, and looked at me like I had ruined his night on purpose.
“Blackie,” he started again, “I’m told you’ve already met Lucky McDonald?”
“Lachey,” both the Highlander and I corrected at the same time.
“Lock-Key. Sorry, Detective. He’s going to sit in on this interview because it’s late and you may have some information pertaining to a murder he’s investigating and that this boy’s murder may be connected to the father’s killing.”
“I do.” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Do you have a can opener?”
Beady Porcine eyes stared at the oddly packaged evidence as if it was mocking him. He attempted to get the foot locker out of the can for a good three minutes. If it hadn’t been mocking him before, it was mocking him now. He gave up before he could seriously embarrass himself, his face was an amazing shade of red. Blushing and flushing so easily was one of things I’d always like about him. I missed provoking him sometimes.
The Pig poked his head out of the interview room and asked one of his uniforms to get him some cutting tools. “Oh, come on, Phil, I know for a fact that there’s bolt cutters behind that filing cabinet.”
“Things have changed since I took over Homocide, Blackie. Considering your current predicament, I would think you’d appreciate that.”
I did.
While we were waiting for Waterbury’s rookie to return with some tools, McDonald walked us through my bloody morning and then explained that I went off on my own about 4:30pm.
“I was hungry,” I explained. I then gave him the run down, including talking to our mutual Turtle friend, Dice. I didn’t have the exact minutes, but I told them about the Orange Liz and the Mosses. I told them how their mother had made the children cry. I told them how one of them unfurled a little black badge or Tzitzit, which earned a dark look from from the white head of the Highlander. I explained air-lapping of the tea the Widow Onyx had offered and then how I discovered the footlocker downstairs. My story of defeat at liberating the chest from the can and making so much noise that Moss came down to see what was going on, especially pleased Waterbury.
It once again proved that Waterbury knew when to stop and I, simply, did not. I knew from experience that Waterbury thought this made him a better cop. I thought it just meant that he’d live longer.
Then I told my story again, only this time with interruptions and cross examinations from the detectives. They couldn’t shake me; I had nothing to hide, until McDonald ask me out of the blue if I had any connections with his Vigilante killer.
I met McDonald’s gaze and held it. I could feel Waterbury watching my ears intently, waiting for a tell. I wanted to tell McDonald, I wanted his approval. I liked him.
And then I realized that I liked him because I saw him on some stupid level as a Father Figure. I had enough Father Issues to keep three analysts busy full time. I wanted the unconditional love that I never got from the Wolf who raised me, the Dog who beget me, or the shiny Canid hero who rescued me from a cult. Even Waterbury, three years older than I was, had been a father figure of sorts to me.
Even one of them had betrayed me and scarred my soul in various ways.
“No,” I said, not letting my voice betray me.
If my ears gave me away, Waterbury kept it to himself.
We sat there silently. McDonald waited for me to expound on my monosyllabic answer. I no longer wanted to do any more verbal fencing tonight. I turned to Waterbury and met his small dark eyes instead. “Why do you think I killed a child?”
“The mother accused you, Blackie.” Waterbury said. “She said you stole his money and demanded the rights to his patents. Threatened to kill her and the children if you didn’t sign them over, and to prove you were serious, you poisoned her son.”
“Well, that’s overly dramatic.” I scratched an ear, hitting my muzzle with my cuffed hand. “It’s a damn stupid plan. Why would you even think I would do that?”
“Your fingerprints are on the cup with the poison.”
The tea I pretended to drink…
I had a guardian angel squeezing my bladder that day.
Ω
I was aware that I’d be out of handcuffs by now if Detective McDonald wasn’t interested in me. “You know, I was rather surprised at the manpower you threw at a Rept’s murder so quickly. It makes sense now… Onyx’s death was only an excuse to get into my business. Do you want to really solve this murder or not?”
The Highlander tried to intimidate me, a tough little scrapper who escaped the coal mines of his his cold and harsh native land. I grew up the smallest of eight boys on the lower west side of New Amsterdam. I figured my inner core was as strong and tempered by hardship as his was.
Eventually, he said, “My job’s to catch murderers and keep the streets safe.”
Waterbury rubbed his snout to hide a smile twitching at his thin pink lips. He’'d often said the same thing in our conversations, but allowing that if he had to make a choice, he’d settle for safe streets over murder convictions. “Blackie, let’s get back to this little lizard’s death. If you didn’t kill him, who did?”
I felt the massive uniformed bodies behind me twitch at the phrase “little lizards.” It wasn’t exactly a slur, but it was not a polite turn of phrase either.
“The same person who killed Kelsey.” I said with the assurance who barely escaped being murdered by the accused himself. “Jewel Onyx, aka Potenial Black aka Fertile Loam.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I can with two things… Dr Black aka Dr Night aka Darkest Night.”
“What the hell is it with you Lizards and collecting aliases?” This Waterbury addressed to the Brooklyn Dragons. Their tails slapped the ground lightly, restrained anger kept in check because Waterbury was a superior. Not their superior, so I hoped Waterbury would shortly remember that he had better political skills than this.
“It’s not a Rept trait, it’s a Chromatic thing,” the Highlander jumped in, defending his fellow officers. “And neither of these men are Chromatic.”
“I’m just saying, it’s bad enough that they all look alike. Now I’ve got to remember all these different names they have?”
“Phil,” I said cutting him off before he could pick a fight with McDonald. I knew for a fact that he was more cosmopolitan than he was acting. He was, in part, trying to protect me. In another part, he didn’t want to share credit with him for the bust. Hell, he wouldn’t even want to share credit with me.
But there was also a part of him that was distancing himself from the vigilante killings, most of which involved getting justice for Repts who could not count on the system to serve them well. If at all.
I suspected McDonald would see this as protesting too much. Which it was, of course. Waterbury would not long survive the quiet scrutiny that McDonald would bear on him. While I had women in my life, Phil had only men and the Highlander seemed to have an aversion to homosexuals.
“Phil, stop testing him. He’s like Oberon. You can trust him.”
For a moment, the name was lost on Waterbury. Then his eyes widened slightly as he remembered Archie Oberon, a hostel owner in Galloland. We’d been backpacking together across Furope before the war. Oberon was a friendly, curious older Stoat who went out of his way to get to know us better. He encouraged Phil to share; which Phil did, thinking the attention was a good sign. It hadn’t been.
Phil had taken quite a bashing before I showed up with the law. As we weren’t landowners, we were the ones that had to leave town or face jail time.
Phil understood my meaning quickly enough. “Dr. Night is on his way here. If you’re a good boy, I might even let you ask him a question or two.” He slipped into full police professional. “What’s the other thing?” he said as if ignoring my statement.
“I need to open that footlocker.” I said pointing to the can with the chest wedged into it.
“As soon as Capaldi gets back here with some tools.” Phil said. “What’s in the foot locker that you want to show me?”
“Us,” McDonald asserted himself.
“It’s better that I show you.” Which meant I don’t know, but they let it go at that, at east for now. I looked behind me at the Bearded Dragons and indulged for a split second in imagining them with their clothes off. “You guys look strong enough. Can you pop the square peg out of that round hole?”
They looked at McDonald, who nodded, and they stepped around me gathered up the can. In the warm building, they’d shaken off the night chill that made them drag the can earlier tonight. Within seconds, the galvanized steel split at the seam with sound of a gun shot. The foot locker hit the ground with a heavy double thud as it landed on the short end and then fell flat on its long bottom.
The Dragons were looking for a place to set the ruined can when the door to the interview room burst open and two uniformed officers burst in the room, guns drawn. Cat and dog, they both instantly shot at the standing Dragons, even as Waterbury was standing up, shouting for them to stand down.
Luckily, one shot went wide. The other bullet (from the Cat, I later learned) had hit the taller Dragon directly in the chest. It blinked and then, glaring at the Harlem cops, began folding the thin steel sheets of the can into a rough book sized package. His partner took a seat, calmly, as if used to his fellow officers shooting at him.
The bleeding Dragon handed garbage can to the Dog, who could not take his eyes off the trickle of blood going down the Rept’s uniform.
Waterbury cleared his throat, grateful that Bearded Dragons were so very hard to kill. “You, get a doctor.” He told the Cat. “File that as evidence for the Onyx killing,” he told the Dog. Neither of them moved, frightened that they’d almost killed a man, frightened, too, that he hadn’t really even flinched.
Waterbury raised his voice. “Then I want you to write up a report. I want you to ticket each other for discharging your weapons within the city limits and then I want you to go home for the rest of the day.” Waterbury turned to the bleeding Dragon. “Do you want to press charges, Son?”
The injured Dragon blinked slowly. His knuckles and his tail turned black with rage, but not anywhere the other police could see. “Are they going home with pay or without pay?”
“Without,” Waterbury said and now the Dog and Cat turned to him a matching pair of stricken looks. Getting sent home without pay was the worst thing you could do to a cop.
You know, next to actually shooting them point blank.
The standing Dragon shrugged. “Poor, scared Mammals, they couldn’t help themselves.”
Waterbury glared at the shooters. “I want swift actions out of my men, but let’s remember that your guns are a last resort. Now… Doctor, evidence, tickets, and then home. And if you don’t pay those fines, I’ll bust you down so far you’ll be seeing the sun from beneath the boardwalk.”
I had the chest open before Waterbury’s speech was over. As long as I was picking locks, I considered taking off the handcuffs but I doubted McDonald would let that pass. There were the usual souvenirs from the Last Great War, but most importantly, there was a thick pile of letters tied together with a ribbon. I started reading these almost immediately. I handed a few to McDonald and then to Waterbury after he got a smallish Bearded Dragon to look after the shot Dragon.
The letters were all from Jewel and they steadily, week after week, reached out to Kelsey and told a wonderful tale of life in America and how she and the children could not wait until he returned home. She told him of his three children and how they were growing. Things they were doing and things they were saying.
I recognized some of the dialogue from that radio program that started and ended with “Dad” coming to the breakfast table and then ended when he left for work. My mother used to listen it back in the day.
The children I’d seen were nowhere near as robust as she portrayed them, but any mother might do that. Children filled a mother’s life like little demanding gods, especially, I suppose, when their father was away, at war. All mother’s inflated their children in the retelling.
But the earliest of these letters were a good year older than these children. These children were happy. They had names. The children who lived in the flowery script on the scented paper were not the sick, quiet, obedient, and worried children that I had met in the railroad rooms.
Upon returning home, Kelsey Onyx must have been disappointed to discover that his children were so small and quiet. Maybe he thought that Jewel, like a normal mother, had inflated her children without realizing it. Maybe he tried to look pass that. Both eventually, he had to realize that his children were just to small to be his, but too young.
And, maybe he had to realize that Jewel was neither a normal mother nor a normal woman.
I looked in the footlocker and I found a note pad. In blunt small letters, I saw the steps someone had to take to get his wife committed. I saw my phone number and address near the notation of “Third party document behavior over a period of time.” That made me feel better about the post-mortem retainer, but I still worried about my name being so close to Dr. Blake Black.
I handed the note pad to McDonald.
I stood up and walked across to the Bearded Dragons were in a little cluster as the smaller one (my height) finished up the bandaging to the chest wound.
“Doctor Blaka Neta?” The Herpetologist turned to me, a question on his face. Then his face went black on the edges as he looked me up and down. All black wolves are rare enough that he must have recognized me from any description Jewel Onyx might have given him. The clothes made me stand out, too. “I know these children are your get.”
It was indelicate, but I didn’t think Waterbury was really going to let me ask him the questions I wanted to ask.
“You’re that Dog, Blake Linden Black.”
I nodded, as he was half right. As I drew a breath to ask him for the truth, he slapped me across the room. My teeth were loosened from the impact with his empty hand and I saw little birdies when my head slammed into the chair I had sat in earlier. Handcuffed, I hadn’t been able to break my fall.
The three Dragons were fighting in those short speedy bursts Mammals often found frightening. It would have ended sooner if they weren’t treating the doctor carefully. Plus, one of the uniforms did have a chest wound. That had to hurt despite his stoic poise.
Waterbury and McDonald looked up from the letters they were reading. “You ok, Blackie?” Waterbury asked politely.
“Just ducky,” I growled as I got back on my feet.
The uniformed Repts held the smaller Dragon still. I staggered back over to him as he struggled. “OK, I probably deserved that.”
“Probably?” McDonald asked without looking up.
I stalked back to the chest and found the very first letter that announced the hatching of Jewel’s children. As I limped back, the Doctor snarled at me, “You murderer! If Jewel hadn’t known the symptoms of Baneberry poisoning, you’d have killed three of her children.”
“That’s an odd way of saying… three of her children…” I paused just outside of arms reach of him. “Just how many children do you think she has?”
“Six. Four males. Two females. All from the same nest.” He focused on Waterbury and yelled out, “Is this how things are in Harlem, you let the suspects question people?” His Creole accent was thicker now.
“Hush,” the Pig replied, “I’m reading. I don’t usually let my suspects get beaten up in my house, so unless you want Mr. Black to press charges against you, you’ll answer his questions.”
I held out the letter to the good doctor. “Read this.”
He shook himself free of the uniforms and took the letter. He squinted and pulled out heavy eye wear that he placed on his broad, flat muzzle.
“Gordo,” McDonald called out. “What kind of prescription are those?”
“Nearsighted,” Dr. Neta called out. The unharmed Dragon plucked the lenses from the doctor’s head, and looked into them appraisingly.
“He’s pretty blind in the left eye, looks like,” the flatpaw announced. He placed the eyewear back on the head of the disgruntled doctor.
“Then he’s not our shooter,” McDonald announced with some interest.
“What shooter?!” The doctor almost crumpled the letter in his anxiety.
“Just read this part of the letter.” I pointed to the announcement portion.
He read, his lips reading, and then he stopped… “Three males?”
“Yes, now check the date of the letter.”
Instead of turning black with anger, the doctor went directly to a pale yellow. The letter fluttered to the floor.
“I read the other letters, Doc. She doesn’t mention hatching six more kids a year or so later. Of course, if she had some children with her, you’d have never agreed to studding her… or being Onyx’s proxy, would you?”
“You’re wrong,” he whispered. He made the same leap I had made, but then he tried to turn back in midair. “She must have… given them away… she wouldn’t…”
I held out the little badges that I hadn’t given McDonald. One of then was the unfurled tzitzit with its rainbow exposed. He hiccuped once and then twice. His left claw reached out to the unknotted strings and pushed then about gently with a sharp but clean claw tip until he found the six silver strings that marked his get. His children.
“This should be with them… to carry them back home. Back to God.” he whispered.
“We need your help, Dr. Black.” I said firmly.
He nodded and hiccuped again.
Ω
It was nearly 10pm by the time Jewel Onyx came to the police station. The surviving children were with Alizarin and Jewel drove herself here. She did not blink an eye when Waterbury had one of Brooklyn Dragons valet park the car for her.
She practically cooed at his gentle and unrelentingly sympathetic attention as the young Porcine officer brought her up to the third floor.
There was only one interview room with two way mirrors and that doubled for the line-up room. We were lucky that a line-up wasn’t needed that night. Waterbury even pulled out a special seat for her. It was just a metal ramp used in the motorpool’s garage to help raise up cars that needed engine work with cushion strapped on it. It worked well.
It should. Dr. Black had suggested it, knowing Jewel as he did.
Once things were settled, Waterbury dropped the second part of the plan. “Mrs. Onyx, this may bring only a small piece of mind, but in attempting to apprehend the Canid you knew as Blake Black, shots were exchanged and Mr. Black was fatally wounded. He’s dead.”
This delighted the Dragon and Waterbury played on her reactions like a fiddle. He was going to be a great politician some day, my Pig. He got her to retell her story and, believing that I could not contradict her from beyond the grave, my part in this fiasco just grew beyond belief.
“He’d been coming around for weeks, on and off, sniffing after my tail,” she said at one point. In the dark, behind the mirror, McDonald gave me an “attaboy!” slap between the shoulder blades. I glared down at the Highlander, visible only because of his snow white facial fur and hands.
I’d been poisoning then for a long time, apparently, trying to worm the patents and stocks out from Kelsey’s control. That’s why the children were so small and undeveloped… and they used to be so robust! She contradicted himself a few times and Waterbury never let on. He encouraged her to speak, taking her mighty claws in his pink hands. His black nails, scraping delicately against her dagger likes claws, innocently send an attractive signals up her nerves and into her brain stem. He’d seduced enough Repts in Furope to know what he was doing.
She said Kelsey had gone off to Brooklyn to buy me off or to make me just stop. I obviously had Kelsey killed to win her. To claim her.
It was, as I had noted earlier, all about Jewel Onyx being the center of attention. No mention or McDonald or her children being so sick that she needed the car to perhaps drive them to the hospital.
Waterbury said he was just going to type up his notes and he’d be back in five minutes. She could sign the paperwork and then leave, to get on with her life.
She was practically purring when Waterbury left the room. It sounded like my office when the EL was running overhead.
In a moment, the small Herpetologist poked his head in and then slipped into the room. Jewel stood up in shock. “Dr. Black?”
“Jewel,” the doctor began. “I had heard that they’d dragged you in. I came to lend moral support, Jewel.” He was a terrible actor, but repeating her name seemed enough for the narcissistic woman.
He was our third trap.
She immediately began “a woe is me” performance
I looked down at the wire recording. We had at least 20 minutes left.
The doctor let her ramble on, gaining speed for about five minutes be he realized he had a script to follow. He burst in as soon as she stopped to catch her breath. “This guy, Black, I don’t think he work alone.”
“Don’t be silly, Blaka.” she said dismissively.
“No, I’m serious, this Mongrel was in the army with Kelsey. Weapon secrets. Kelsey had information on secret weapons. That’s what this… DOG… was after.”
Intrigued, despite herself, the larger Dragon stopped moved and delicately, turned her head slightly sideways before nodding. “That’s… not… right –”
“They tell me he’s got friends in the police force. They are coming to kill you and the children to get those secrets… to avenge that Dog’s death… you must leave town!”
“OK,” Jewel agreed, eyes wide. Not in fear, but because part of her liked this story. She was watching this play out on the mental stage in her mind. “OK.”
“And I’ll take the children.” The Doctor finished. “Your husband is dead, there’s no reason to lie to anyone. Those 5 remaining children are mine, they will be safe with me, they MUST come with me.”
Jewel’s head snapped up. She looked horrified in a way that she’d never showed before. Of course, we’d never really surprised he before just now. “No, you can’t.”
“The band will stand by me. They know these children are my get. Death follows you everywhere.”
We could see, Jewel was thinking fast and not liking these thoughts. “At least leave me the girls!” She begged.
“No, it’s too late. I already sent the police for the children.”
“No! You’ll never find them. I won’t let you!”
“They’ll be with that Orange you befriended. Who else would watch them for you?”
“I hid them,” she screeched with a dominate series of head bobbing. Her head look very much like an old battle axe shaken in the direction of the doctor’s head. “You’ll never find them! You can’t have them!”
“Why? You never wanted females.” The doctor pulled out a stack of letters tied with a ribbon. The real letters were safely away, marked as evidense. “That’s what you told your husband.”
“I never told him that,” she said, her voice as flat and as unemotional as the first time I met her. My warning bell went off and I waved the posse onward from the room.
“You did,” the doctor was saying, “When you presented three boys, no girls, as your ultimate fantasy of family life, that’s exactly what you were saying.”
Jewel pounded on the table and her tail knocked the 35 pound metal ramp across the room with hardly a pause. “That wasn’t my fantasy! That was his! That was Kelsey’s! I wanted girls!”
“Then where are the girls?” McDonald stood in the doorway.
“There are no girls!” Jewel screached.
“I’ve seen the birth certificates, Mrs Onyx,” the Highlander said. “You hatched six children. Four boys, two girls.”
“He was going to divorce me! I had to do it.”
I pushed pass McDonald. “He was not… he was going to get you help. To put you in the hospital. For all that you were a murdering monster, he still loved you. He forgave you.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She didn’t seem surprised that I was back from the dead. Reality was a very fluid thing for her.
“We found the gun, Jewel.” Waterbury announced, holding the tiny gun up, along with the broken pencil she’d used to fire off the bullets. “We even found the baneberry leaves under the front seat.”
This was our first trap. Valet parking at a police station. No true criminal mastermind would fall for a thing like that. Only the insane.
Waterbury plopped a confession for her to sign on the table before her.
Ω
The next night, Rick and Blanche made a small fuss over me. Two nights in a row. I was going to get spoiled, if I didn’t hurt so much.
Rick was laughing at me and the cops for not realizing that a three hundred pound plus Dragon should not be confronted in a crowded room with only one exit.
Blanche hushed him and dabbed at the swellings around my eyes. “I’m sure he feels beaten up enough as it is.”
“You ain’t kidding, Sister,” I said in my best Brooklyn accent. I’m sure I sounded more authentic than Dice did. “Anyway, we did get her to admit that she followed her husband’s cab to Brooklyn in her car and then shot her with her neighbor’s gun. She grew up poor, hunting for meat to put in the family stew, so she was a good shot.”
“And that’s why I am never getting married,” Rick said, crawling over me to kiss Blanch on her muzzle, chewing daintily on her whiskers. I squirmed and I knew he enjoyed my discomfort. Eventually, he found a spot not too badly abused.
He began gently abusing it to his own satisfaction and mine.
Her left hand joined his. “Women are crazy, emotional beasts.”
“Oh, thank Aesop,” I whimpered. I licked their intertwining muzzles above my head before they could pull apart.
Love wasn’t easy and it was often more complicated than one intends. Love didn’t always bother to read the labels or to color within the lines. Sometimes, Love kills.
Not that I think what Jewel did, she did for Love. No, I think what she did, she did for Want of Love.
-end
I like the realisation of this world - it’s a convincing alternate Earth with well thought out animal people who aren’t just people in animal suits. I also love Blackie, and his name!
I do think, though, that there’s maybe too much complicated detail for a story this length to carry. Expanded to a novel/la with some subplots carried to completion, or as part of a collection set in the same universe, it could work. If not, I’d suggest simplifying a few areas. My thoughts on what could go:
Avis/birds - are these the same? I’m not clear from Lucy’s description. Lucy herself fades out a bit midway through the story.
I’m not sure we need the extra complication of Waterbury on top of the antagonism of Lachie (I love Lachie!).
Black’s family history and his need for a father figure don’t seem to mesh that well with the rest of the story.
The footlocker/trash can debacle seemed an unwieldy way for Blake to get his evidence.
The cat and dog bursting in and shooting the Repts slowed down the scene’s progress towards the solution of the mystery, which annoyed me. Do we need this? It doesn’t seem to showcase anything we haven’t had demonstrated already.
I do like the detail of the cold making the Repts sluggish, but that could fit in somewhere else.
Other bits that don’t add much to the story: the detail of the dentist’s office nearby, the tuxedo cat incident.
What is Onyx’s killer putting on their head as he dies?
When you’re using elements of a strange world as part of a mystery plot, you need to make sure the audience doesn’t feel cheated by significant facts they couldn’t possibly have known. I felt this way about the unravelling of the braid, because we don’t see Blake make that leap, and also about the word ‘get’ suddenly making an appearance in the scene with the doctor.
Thanks Huskyteer! 10k words always seem like a lot when I start, so I allow myself to be detailed and to let things flow. And flow… as I may have mentioned, I have a vague plan to collect a bunch of reptile related mysteries and call it COLD BLOODed Murder, but I am flaky and prone to hide under furniture for no obvious reasons. So… trying not to over commit.
AVI are the sentient avian species. They can’t fly and most speak “in the throat” rather than forming sounds. Birds would be the flying animals, and not the politest word for an Avi. In the story I submitted to Ocean she was weak in the first version, too. In the radio dramas I am so found of, Lucy would be laughing at him and the police for thinking confronting a Dragon in a small crowded room with one exit was a good idea, but I wanted to show off Rick and Blanche…
Waterbury is the Homicide Captain in Harlem. Their relationship falls apart in the Menu story so I think I wanted to show him while it was good.
I think I will blame the trash can scene on cold meds… but part of me likes it
The dental office was established because I was going to have the secretary there hide the envelope and the badges, because she understood patient/client confidentiality. Then it turns out I didn’t need it and I’m not sure how much confidentiality was a thing back then.
I think the Tux cat thing is one part me wanting to show how strong a personalty Blackie is and one part him saying that he really, really hates Hitler and one part being impatient with people who see Repts as less than “human.” In hindsight, it probably makes him seem too much the bully.
Jewel put on a wig after she killed her husband. But that was a clue I never added in. So, may need to smooth that out. The Orange Liz is the type to wear a head fur wig and claim it’s as good as traditional head covering.
Thank again, these are all important thoughts and I can work on this. Mando has a betaread peculating on this so when I combine them I should have something useable.
I will preface this by saying I am an absolute beast with details. Totally take or leave what I put here at your leisure. I’m a stickler for animal details in particular. Comes from having worked at a zoo.
First, the good stuff:
You’ve got an awesome concept and a really solid world here. I love the alternate world and the parallel timelines you present. The characters felt consistent and the plot moved along at a good pace.
The Critique:
~Use of “to be” verbs, remove them when you can! Removing them will really strengthen the writing.
~Bearded dragon, do you mean like the lizard? If so, they aren’t usually green; shades of orange, tan, brown, gold, and yellow. If you mean something else, clarify this point. People familiar with reptiles may find this confusing.
~Vary sentence length. You’ll notice this is when you read the story aloud. I love the noir feel to the story, but the repetitive sentence structure makes the story plod along rather heavily at times.
~Description! Especially with the Avi characters, this is a must. Where are their wings? Their tails? Among birds, those are as important as tails and ears on a mammal! Are the wings also hands? Do they have hands and feet like a human and wings on their backs? Or do they use their feet the way humans use their hands? Flesh out these details!
~When first introducing Blake Black, give him a specific species, even if you simply name-drop “canine” in the first two or three lines. Gives the reader a form to work with for the new narrator.
~Use of “kiddo” Lucy uses to Brooklyn feels wrong. “Boss” might feel better?
~Wounds and first aid–hemorrhaging means the victim is dying very fast, not very slow. Death by bullet wound means one of two things: fast death by massive damage or slow death by infection. As gruesome as it is, this is one area that requires good research. People unfamiliar with such wounds may not pick up on it, but anyone with a medical background will notice. And since the character was in a war, he would most definitely know a little basic field first aid.
~In general, only humans show their teeth as a sign of goodwill. Blake flashing a movie smile sounds good, but it runs the risk of removing an iconic canine gesture from your repertoire. Part of what makes using furry characters so unique and fun is the use of those iconic animal behaviors and traits!
~Watch your tense. A few times, it switched from past to present and back to past.
~Click-clack language–need some clarification on that one. Most reptiles don’t make much noise (hissing, mostly) and aren’t usually capable of making click noises. They lack the jaw/mouth parts for it. Other herps, like frogs, can make clicking sounds, but most things with scales are pretty soft-spoken beasties. Even the roar/rumble of crocs and gators, although most of the real sound is below human hearing. Now, a reptile capable of human-grade speech can make those noises, but it feels a little off.
Like I said, you’ve got a great start here! You just need to put a little more description into it. 
Thank you for your POV and comments, Searska!
I can’t wait to be able to revise the story. My Avi have no wings, just feathered arms. It hadn’t occurred to me that readers would be looking for them (or tail feathers for that matter). Silly me!
I plan to use all your suggestions! Thank you.
I was thinking of submitting this to the Tor.com Novella thing…
http://www.tor.com/page/submissions-guidelines#novellas
But they say this.
We do not accept works that have been previously published elsewhere, in any venue. This includes all forms of digital self-publishing.
:’(
so, maybe I am misreading that?
Oh well, it makes my targeting decision easier.
Don’t be so quick to give up. If this is the only place you’ve posted this story, you should be still good to submit it elsewhere.
Not giving up on the story. Just on Tor. Their submission page isn’t working, so it’s like fate. I was having a very tough time making decisions and priorities. So, that helped decide.
Of course, if my ToT3 tale doesn’t jell, I can still work on it.
There are publications that don’t consider boards like this ‘self-published’ because only members can view it. I would at least send an inquiry, if nothing else. The worst that’ll happen is they’ll say no.