Death Ray Butterfly - Tom Lichtenberg (great novels to read .TXT) 📗

spin at roulette. Kruzel insisted I do something about it. I did. I laughed in his face and enjoyed it. I told him to get out and stop disturbing my peace. But that wasn't the end of it. I figured Hobbs would put an end to Jones once and for all if he had a mind to, but I wasn't in the business of protecting gamblers from the trouble they brought on themselves. Funny thing was, Hobbs never seemed concerned about Cricket. He always let him in, always let him play, always paid him his winnings. That got my attention, eventually. There had to be an angle in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven

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

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

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

You get to the end of the second line and present your papers to the person behind the bullet-proof glass, where he or she will shuffle them for a few moments and then, depending on whether he or she likes the look of your face, will either stamp them with a rubber stamp, or send you outside to wait in an outside line to buy a different stamp from somebody else who takes some money. There's no way out of this, even for a member of the police force, or an ex-member like myself. I could probably get an exemption from the general, but he wasn't very happy with me last time I saw him.

The general had gone to the trouble of bringing me from the future to help him with a case he had. It's true, he wasn't looking for me in particular; I just happened to be there, and there wasn't much I could do for him anyway, nothing much that anyone could have done. He knew, or said he knew, that a three year old girl was going to kill someone, he didn't know who, and he didn't know where or when, but she'd have a gun and she would be doing it deliberately. She was an assassin. A three-year old assassin. It sounded pretty crazy to me. Although I had a nephew once and I wouldn't have put anything past him. My little sister's kid, Wilhelm. Brat used to whack me with a sword every time I came within striking distance. Had a notion to pick him up and heave him across the room. Sister wouldn't have been too thrilled with that so I just put up with it.

The general put me in a nice hotel room. I appreciated that. The lobby was draped with curtains that looked like they were made of gold, and maybe they were. And the lounge chairs, velvet and red, were very cozy. I took some real good snoozes there. Couldn't complain about the liquor either. I was never much of a booze hound but they had some fine Scotch in that place. Every day the general would join me for breakfast and barrage me with questions about my plans. Where to begin? What to do? Where to look? How would what he called "a seasoned investigator" approach such a problem.

All I could do was press him for every detail he could remember about the case. Which wasn't much. On his first trip to the future he'd seen a headline in a newspaper machine, stooped to read the story but didn't have any change to actually buy the paper, and before he could run off to get change he was pulled back into the machine and returned to his own time. The girl had no name. The woman she shot had a name but it wasn't her real one. She was rushed to a hospital. That was pretty much it. I made him tell me the story over and over again.

I didn't get was so urgent about this. Clearly, people running for president got protection, and this candidate, whatever her real name, would have more protection than usual because of the general's discovery, but when I told him this, he became very nervous and finally admitted his real concern was that there even was a presidential candidate. Because, as it turned out, there were no elections to be had. The general and his friends ran the country themselves and were quite happy to keep running it indefinitely. The last thing they needed was an election. I began to get the idea that it wasn't the little girl he wanted to stop, it was the other one, the candidate. I was in no hurry to help him. Politics has never been any of my business.

People who cheat. That's another one of my peeves. The general was out to cheat history. That's almost as bad as people who take on some enormous challenge and then do everything in their power to make it easier, like sailing around the world and going in an enormous yacht with all the comforts and conveniences. Why bother? Might as well stay at a nice hotel for a few days until the machine pulls you back and returns you to your own time and place.

Eight

I'm not used to having all this time. It's bugging me. I was so busy for so long I never stopped to think about what I'd do when I retired, so when the time came it took me by surprise. I hate to be one of those reminiscers always going on about the old days, but I do miss the action. There weren't too many boring days back then. Now it's all I've got. The memories come flooding back sometimes, a bit scattered I have to admit but they do come in a rush all jumbled up. My assistant, Kelley, probably thought that talking it all out like this would help me