I never spoke with Pop again. I saw him around throughout the rest of July and the first part of August, because he was hard to miss. I even passed by him on Main Street a few times. Once he gave me a nod, and I gave him the same in return.
That was all that passed between us until Pop was transferred to the mainland. We had all heard it was happening, since he was the camp celebrity and there was a lot of debate as to whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he was going. But no one seemed to know just when it would occur.
Then, one evening in August, I came back to my bunk after a long day of working on a new runway at the airfield. And there was a manila envelope on my pillow. Inside I found the bent eagle feather and a typed note:
CLEARING OUT JUNK. THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT THIS. YOU OWE ME A ZIPPO. P.S. WHEN YOU BRAG TO YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT HAVING MET ME, DO NOT CALL ME “POP.” D. H.
I have not honored his request.
Toward the end of the war, I heard that Pop had made sergeant and been reassigned back to Adak in early 1945. But by then I was gone. I had been sent south to rejoin my old combat unit and train for an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Then came the Bomb, and I was in Nebraska by Christmas.
Now, as an old man, I take the bent eagle feather from its envelope every fifth of July. Just for a minute.
My life has been good, but not much of it has been a surprise. I saw most of it coming a long time ago.
But then Pop slapped me awake. He slapped me awake, and he kept me from seeing the end.
I’ve always been grateful to him for that.
I don’t know whether he was a Communist. I don’t know whether he subverted the Constitution, supported tyrants, lied to Congress, or did any of the other things they said he did.
But I know he wore his country’s uniform in two World Wars. And I know he’s buried at Arlington.
Plus one more thing.
Just today, decades after I first saw that hardback copy on another guy’s bunk . . .
I’ve finally finished reading The Maltese Falcon.
And you know what? I wish I could tell Pop:
It’s pretty goddamn good.
Some of Bradley Denton’s stories have been collected in the World Fantasy Award-winning collections A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians. His 2004 novella “Sergeant Chip” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His novels include Wrack & Roll, Blackburn, Laughin’ Boy, Lunatics, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well On Ganymede (soon to be a motion picture: www.aliveandwellmovie.com).
The Case: Three apparently lovey-dovey couples commit dual suicide in the span of two weeks. But for the third pair . . . well, there are seriously irrational components to their behavior indicating mental tampering by black magic.
The Investigators: Harry Dresden—wizard-for-hire, private detective, and Special Investigations consultant for the Chicago Police Department—and Sergeant Karrin Murphy of the CPD.
LOVE HURTS
Jim Butcher
Murphy gestured at the bodies and said, “Love hurts.”
I ducked under the crime scene tape and entered the Wrigleyville apartment. The smell of blood and death was thick. It made gallows humor inevitable.
Murphy stood there looking at me. She wasn’t offering explanations. That meant she wanted an unbiased opinion from CPD’s Special Investigations consultant—who is me, Harry Dresden. As far as I know, I am the only wizard on the planet earning a significant portion of his income working for a law enforcement agency.
I stopped and looked around, taking inventory.
Two bodies, naked, male and female, still intertwined in the act. One little pistol, illegal in Chicago, laying upon the limp fingers of the woman. Two gunshot wounds to the temples, one each. There were two overlapping fan-shaped splatters of blood, and more had soaked into the carpet. The bodies stank like hell. Some very unromantic things had happened to them after death.
I walked a little further into the room and looked around. Somewhere in the apartment, an old vinyl was playing Queen. Freddie wondered who wanted to live forever. As I listened, the song ended and began again a few seconds later, popping and scratching nostalgically.
The walls were covered in photographs.
I don’t mean that there were a lot of pictures on the wall, like at great-grandma’s house. I mean covered in photographs. Entirely. Completely papered.
I glanced up. So was the ceiling.
I took a moment to walk slowly around, looking at pictures. All of them, every single one of them, featured the two dead people together, posed somewhere and looking deliriously happy. I walked and peered. Plenty of the pictures were near-duplicates in most details, except that the subjects wore different sets of clothing—generally cutesy matching T-shirts. Most of the sites were tourist spots within Chicago.
It was as if the couple had gone on the same vacation tour every day, over and over again, collecting the same general batch of pictures each time.
“Matching T-shirts,” I said. “Creepy.”
Murphy’s smile was unpleasant. She was a tiny, compactly muscular woman with blond hair and a button nose. I’d say that she was so cute I just wanted to put her in my pocket, but if I tried to do it, she’d break my arm. Murph knows martial arts.
She waited and said nothing.
“Another suicide pact. That’s the third one this month.” I gestured at the pictures. “Though the others weren’t quite so cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or, ah, in medias res.” I shrugged and gestured at the obsessive photographs. “This is just crazy.”
Murphy lifted one pale eyebrow ever so slightly. “Remind me: how much do we pay you to give us advice, Sherlock?”
I grimaced. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” I was quiet for a while and then said, “What were their names?”
“Greg and Cindy Bardalacki,” Murphy said.
“Seemingly unconnected dead people, but they share similar patterns of death. Now we’re upgrading to irrational and obsessive behavior as a precursor . . . ” I frowned. I checked several of the pictures and went over to eye the bodies. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, hell’s bells.”
Murphy arched an eyebrow.
“No wedding rings anywhere,” I said. “No wedding pictures. And . . . ” I finally found a framed family picture which looked to have been there for awhile, among all the snapshots. Greg and Cindy were both in it, along with an older couple and a younger man.
“Jesus, Murph,” I said. “They weren’t a married couple. They were brother and sister.”
Murphy eyed the intertwined bodies. There were no signs of struggle. Clothes, champagne flutes, and an empty bubbly bottle lay scattered. “Married, no,” she said. “Couple, yes.” She was unruffled. She’d already worked that out for herself.
“Ick,” I said. “But that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“These two. They were together—and they went insane doing it. This has the earmarks of someone tampering with their minds.”
Murphy squinted at me. “Why?”
I spread my hands. “Let’s say Greg and Cindy bump into Bad Guy X. Bad Guy X gets into their heads and makes them fall wildly in love and lust with one another. There’s nothing they can do about the feelings—which seem perfectly natural—but on some level they’re aware that what they’re doing is not what they want, and dementedly wrong besides. Their compromised conscious minds clash with their subconscious and . . . ” I gestured at pictures. “And it escalates until they can’t handle it anymore, and bang.” I shot Murphy with my thumb and forefinger.