Billy tossed the duffel bag at Stella’s feet. But when she reached down he spun the gurney. It struck her arm. The pistol popped up into the air, dropped down onto Bullock’s chest, and slid toward the floor. Although his wrists were strapped to his sides, Bullock made a lucky grab and hooked the weapon in his astonished fingers. Suddenly he heard glass break and, as Stella lunged for the weapon, he felt a shard of glass against his jugular.
“Stop or he’ll shoot,” ordered Billy, adjusting the gurney to keep Stella in the line of fire.
Stella stopped. “A Mountie’d never shoot a defenseless woman,” she said, halfheartedly.
“A Mountie better,” said Billy, pressing down on the glass.
“Steady on here,” ordered Bullock with gruff authority.
But Stella ripped the gurney out of Billy’s one-handed grasp and spun it. Now he was the one looking down the business end of the pistol. When Billy started forward, Stella grabbed her shoe and tapped Bullock on the temple with the heel. “Stop,” she ordered. “Or he’ll shoot you down like the filthy little teenager you are.” Now they were deadlocked in a struggle for the gurney, grunting and puffing with effort.
“You’d better both come along quietly,” suggested Bullock.
“The Blue Bread of Happiness works,” insisted Billy through gritted teeth.
“Get real, kid,” said Stella. “My mother peddled the stuff for years. She knew what was going on. You’re from a long line of con men, going all the way back to Sieur Athanate de la Perpétuite, who came over with Champlain in sixteen-oh-eight. The family always kept a kid in the attic. It’d be bad for business for Athanatos the Eternal to die.”
Stella butted the stunned young man with the gurney, knocking him to the floor. Then she hopped around to maneuver Bullock into place. Tap, tap went the heel against his temple. “Stay down there or he’ll shoot,” she warned.
“Can’t shoot what you can’t see,” said Billy, jumping up with a small fire extinguisher he’d found under the workbench. The foam hit Bullock full in the face and blinded him. Stella, her forearm across Bullock’s chest, tried to keep control of the gurney, while with her free hand she scooped the foam out of his eyes.
“Dad said we never die,” panted Billy. “Every so often we just retire to Peacock Island and the next generation takes over.”
“Dream on,” said Stella, clearing the last of the foam from Bullock’s eyes.
“Yeah?” answered Billy loudly. “Yeah? Did you actually see a cigarette in Dad’s hand?”
Stella stopped. “Come to think of it, I didn’t,” she admitted. “He was kind of smoldering all over like he’d stuffed cigarettes in his pockets.”
“As for spontaneous combustion,” said Bullock, trying to get control of the situation, “I find that I concur with Leibig on the matter.”
Suddenly Billy changed tactics, jumped up on the gurney and clambered wildly toward the service revolver in Bullock’s holster. But when he drew it out, Stella grabbed the lanyard that was attached to the gun butt and yanked hard. The weapon flew from his hand, slammed against the wall, and discharged, striking a laboratory propane tank. The explosion hurled the gurney against the far wall.
Bullock regained consciousness in a cellar aflame. The force of the explosion had torn him free from all the straps except the one on his left ankle. Stella lay nearby against the wall, the back of her head wet with blood. Bullock couldn’t find a pulse. He crawled toward the stairs to the outside, dragging the gurney. On the way he found Billy Athanatos crying with pain and trying to save money from the burning duffel bag. Half pulling, half shoving, Bullock got the protesting young man up the stairs, the gurney bumping along behind him.
Billy sat on the curb with his seared hands between his knees, sobbing. Bullock glumly worked to undo the strap binding him to the gurney, wondering if it wouldn’t be better, when he was done, to walk right back into the fire and burn up like good old Mavis’s nest egg. Maybe the “Killed-in-the-Line-of-Duty” pension would make up for things. Bullock looked at the flames and sighed. Around him the neighbors were starting to gather. In the distance he heard a fire engine.
“Boy,” said Billy through his tears, “talk about rotten luck. No formula. No five million. No house. What have I got?” With tender hands he reached inside his coat, pulled out a wad of money, and counted. “A measly sixty seventy thou.”
Bullock grabbed the money. “Threatening a Mountie with cheese and rats is a federal offense, Billy,” he said, as he counted out twenty thousand dollars. “But I’m going to let that pass.” He handed back the rest of the money. “Got to go, Billy,” he said. “If I wait around, they’ll put me on traffic control. Tell them about Stella and everything. Tell them they can get in touch with me at headquarters. I’ve got to get to the bank before it closes.” He stood up and walked away.
“You’re not off the hook, you know,” shouted Billy. “When I don’t show up with the five million, Lady Chin-Chin will start diving on her own. She’ll find the formula and she and that crew of hers will rule the world.”
Sure, sure, Billy, said Bullock to himself, rubbing his ear thoughtfully. By godfrey, maybe it was his responsibility to go up to the Arctic after them. On the other hand, if the Blue Bread of Happiness worked and The Sea Monoceros really existed, then the giant Ice Worms existed, too. Why not just leave Lady Chin-Chin and the salvage crew to the terrible mercies of the Ice Worm Queen?
Pre-Mortem
by Dixie J. Whitted
Gemini
by Gerald Pearce
Gerald Pearce was born in England and raised in the Middle East. At the age of ten, he discovered mystery fiction, including EQMM, which was then available on the newsstands in Baghdad, and started to write his own stories. After attending college in the United States, he wound up in Hollywood where he wrote teleplays for The Wonderful World of Disney and many distinguished science fiction and fantasy stories. His first novel-length mystery was published by Walker Books in 1990. He joins us now with an engrossing tale involving a question of identity...
1
Old Mac was dead, and only Tom Bell grieved enough to wear old jeans and a yellow turtleneck to the funeral.
The one other break in the solemnity was provided by Mac’s granddaughter Katherine, who was sleekly elegant in a beige dress, no jewelry, a white lace mantilla over her pale thick hair. Tom Bell imagined sharp no-color eyes watching her out of gray faces. So right for a girl not yet nineteen. Black would have been... ostentatious. He also imagined those eyes on the heavy-framed black sunglasses Katherine had worn even in the church. Been crying her eyes out. Poor kid. Actually she’d worn them at her father’s insistence to hide not grief but indifference.
The cluster of people who had sat through the service in the church Mac had never attended now gathered at his graveside. Middle-aged or older, gray-faced, soberly dressed, faces congealed into masks of corporate gravity, they were there, Tom thought, to say goodbye to a pioneer of times past and to fix him firmly in a niche to match their needs, from which he could no longer bother them.