“Don’t worry about shifting. No hills around here.” I lowered the seat about an inch.
“Don’t you need magnetic shoes?”
“Works without ’em.” She mounted the bike not too ungracefully and wobbled off. By the end of the block she seemed to be in control.
She turned around the corner and was gone just long enough for me to start worrying. Then she came flying back around the same corner and stopped right in front of me with a little chirp of rubber, smiling.
“When you make your first million, buy me one?”
“Half million,” I said. “You approve?”
“It’s hardly like a bike at all. But why no computer shift?”
“Well, it adds weight, I guess a pound or so. One more thing to go wrong. It doesn’t take long to master the gears.”
“Lots of levers,” she said doubtfully. Only five, really, and you didn’t use the “overdrive” one until you were going twenty-five or thirty miles per hour.
“I’ll run you through them later. Tomorrow? I could use some air-conditioning.”
“Your place or here?”
“Airco’s off at mine, but…” I took out my phone and punched the home utility number and turned it on. “It’ll be cool in half an hour. Get some lunch at the Mill?”
“Sure. You put the bike on the car and I’ll get my stuff. Spend the night?”
“Twist my arm.”
“That would be different.” She went halfway down the walk and turned. “I’m, um, a little indisposed?”
Probably the yeast thing again. “That’s okay. I love you for your mind.”
“Sure, you do. Head, anyway.”
Actually, her mind was working well. After lunch we went back to my place and she read the most recent chapter.
“So is he really an alien? From where?”
“I’m glad you can’t tell yet.”
“But, like, do you know?”
I shook my head. “What do you think?”
She topped off her tumbler of wine. “Well, I have an unfair advantage. I do know the author.”
“I hear you’ve slept with him.”
“Not that well. He snores.” She riffled through the pages, mumbling, “Alien, human, alien, human…”
She set the manuscript down and tapped it three times. “I’m gonna take a chance and say ‘none of the above.’ Most of the rest of it, I’ve read several times, and this new part doesn’t change anything basic. He’s neither fish nor fowl. You can’t tell whether he’s a nut job who thinks he’s an alien or an alien who acts like a nut job. True?”
I leaned back and smiled at her.
“So are you a Cheshire cat or a Schrödinger one?”
I tried not to react to the good guess, but think my eyebrows shot up.
“It’s not that mysterious. I remember the conversation. But I wonder what you’re going to do with it. In real life, sooner or later you open the box, and the cat is either dead or alive.”
“But a story isn’t real life,” I said. “I could leave the box closed.”
“And the reader never finds out whether Hunter is an alien or not? I don’t think your average reader is going to like that.”
I shrugged. “Why should the reader know more about the story than I do?”
Gun in the Box
1.
Kit never needed an alarm to get up early. I came half awake when she quietly got out of bed and dressed in the dark. I mumbled something and she gave me a sleepy kiss and slipped out the front door. Her car door didn’t slam; I remembered she was letting me use the car for the day tomorrow.
It could have been a minute later or an hour when the doorbell rang. Funny, I thought; she should have had a key.
I put on some pants and was grabbing a T-shirt when a car door did slam. The car squealed away from the parking lot and then squealed again as it tore out onto Second.
Not Kit. I opened the front door a crack and peered out, the car long gone.
A brown cardboard box more than a yard long lay on the doormat. I picked it up—heavy—and turned it over. No address or postage. I took it inside and put it on the dining room table and turned on the overhead. Low light for romance; I clapped it up twice.
The box was secured with a single piece of broad strapping tape. Too strong for my thumbnail, so I got a knife from the kitchen rack.
Inside, packed in crumpled paper and inflated plastic bags, was a gleaming new M2010AW-9, exactly the same rifle I’d used in the desert, though I’d never seen a new one.
I reached to pull it out but then stopped. What the hell was going on?
Under the sink there was a box of throwaway plastic gloves some previous tenant had left. I stripped off a pair and put them on clumsily, feeling melodramatic. This thing was going straight to the police, and if there were fingerprints on it, they wouldn’t be mine.
It had a good smell, gunmetal and walnut wood. I liked the wood stock, even though it was heavier than the more modern one, and some guys said it had harder recoil, without the spring. But it felt like a rifle.
I took it out and set it on the table. There was also a box of twenty-five rounds of match-quality .300 Magnum ammunition, with a round battery taped to the top. That would be for the scope, night use. A threaded chrome cylinder that must be a silencer; at least that’s what they looked like in movies. A plastic bag with a dozen paper targets.
It had a shorter magazine than we had used in combat. I thumbed the release and found that it held six rounds and a folded-up note. Plain bond paper, printed out in what appeared to be 20-point Courier:
I will pay you $100,000 to do what you once did for privates pay. Youre target will be a bad man. You will agree that the World is a better place without him.
Down payment in the butt stock.
I will be in touch.
Deficient in grammar, but intriguing. I got a small screwdriver and removed the butt plate. On top of the cleaning supplies, ten of the new $1,000 bills, neatly folded into thirds.
That was military. Bedding, uniforms, ponchos, all folded in thirds. The friendly sergeant we’d had in sniper school said by the time we got out of the army we’d be folded in thirds.
For a person with pretty bad spelling and grammar, he certainly had lots of money. I creased the bills so they would lie flat, and brought the desk lamp and magnifier over to study them.
Ten dead Kennedys. I’d never seen one before, except for pictures when they started circulating them a couple of years ago.
They didn’t show any wear, but then not many people would crumple one up and stuff it in a pocket. Rumor had it that they were manufactured with nanocircuitry that broadcast the location of each bill. The government denied that with just the right degree of “Who, us?”
If they were counterfeit, an amateur like me probably couldn’t tell. I took the magnifying glass and examined Kennedy’s right eye on each one, and they all looked the same. The paper had authentic-looking threads, but I’d seen how counterfeiters could bleach out a one-dollar bill and photoprint any denomination onto it.
The e-mail hoax. A few months after I got back, I got a bunch of e-mails that tried to hire me to kill the president. But that was a kid, Timmy something. He’d never confessed, but went to juvenile court and got a suspended sentence.
Could they be related? I ought to find out what became of young Timmy. Maybe he came into money.
I picked up the phone. Don’t use 9-1-1 unless it’s an emergency. I clicked on the directory. Call the Iowa City cops or the state troopers? Or Coralville or the Kampus Kops, for that matter. Or go straight to the FBI or Homeland Security?