Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Read online

  The FUTURIST

  “Unkillable”

  By

  Dean C. Moore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Dean C. Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ACT ONE

  JUST BETWEEN US

  ONE

  Adrian couldn’t get his eyes off the smoke trailing up from the cigarette in the ashtray. It was about the one detail of the scene that didn’t matter. Not nearly as important, say, as the dead body on the bed. The blood spray on the wall that reminded him of the fanning tail of a peacock probably deserved to rank higher on the list of notables too.

  The sliding glass door was ajar.

  There was a breeze blowing that was quite refreshing actually. A not entirely incidental detail when flesh was rotting proximate to one’s nose. Though this early in death, the body smelled more of alcohol than decay. The Johnny Walker Red saturated the room like an antiseptic spray determined to erase all trace evidence.

  The man must have been made to drink it by the gallon as rapidly as he could guzzle it. He would have died from it and it alone.

  Which meant the blood spray was what? An opportunity? A chance to deflect the real intent of the murder onto someone with an m.o. requiring a knife and plenty of blood? There could have been other reasons for it, of course, none so fun. Or so imaginative.

  The room was hot, explaining the open door and the desire for breeze.

  How long had it been hot, the temperature dialed up? Long enough for Dead Boy to sanitize the room with his alcohol-saturated sweat? How much aerosolized alcohol did it take at what temperature exactly for how long to sanitize a crime scene of this size? Note to self: study math or befriend a mathematician. Would alcohol be enough to do it? Maybe not.

  There was a hint of Clorox in the air. The scent masked by a perfumed smell that was likewise fairly mild. Neither was any match for the Johnny Walker Red, certainly.

  Adrian had counted twelve room fresheners on his way in, plugged into the wall sockets, four in the bathroom, six in the main room, and two in the kitchenette. Though he’d made these observations somewhat absent-mindedly. Strange for such a small place, even for the lazy with cleaning.

  If Clorox had been mixed with the room freshener, say nine parts Clorox to one part room freshener… Where was that mathematician when you needed one?

  Maybe his killer was a mathematician, among his many other aptitudes. Or perhaps just a chemist; you had to have a pretty damn good aptitude for math to do chemistry too.

  Crows were flying in and out of the room, staying long enough only to snatch a piece of the body, an eye, an ear, a piece of entrails, and make off with it.

  By rights he should have closed the door, sealed off the scene, protected the evidence.

  But he was in the mood for some comic surrealism. So he let the scene play out. Soon the CSI team would be here, the NYPD and or the FBI, all of which he frequently consulted, and that would be that. Everything which followed would be so orthodox, so by the book. Just thinking of the tedium coaxed a yawn free. Pity homicides were never as interesting in real life as they were in the movies.

  Besides, Adrian suspected the real crime scene staging was what he was seeing right now. Their killer probably had more to say with his pet crows than with any evidence left in the room.

  Pets they were, to be sure. These things had been trained to systematically dismantle a body. It was Adrian’s guess, they’d be all too happy to dismantle him too if he got any closer. He could be wrong about that. He was all too keen to misread a scene of late, if only to escape the ennui of the predictable. Was this killer trying to save him from such a dismal fate? Was the universe truly that kind? Was this the killer’s idea of social outreach? They say a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Certainly Adrian felt his was.

  Would the sliced-off body parts flown away with by the crows lead to additional clues? Clues that would lead to a killer desperate to get caught? Or would they be more misdirection to allow Adrian to build a case against someone not guilty of the crime so he could continue to develop this romance with the real killer?

  And then there was that damn cigarette in the ashtray. It was still smoldering.

  Adrian had never sparked a cigarette just to watch it go out on its own, but he imagined, even unattended, those things didn’t stay lit forever. Five, then minutes tops, and it would be out. So what were the odds he’d be drawn to the scene of the crime, ahead of the police, ahead of knowing what he was actually getting into, only to arrive less than ten minutes after the killer had fled the scene?

  Was he the subject of a frame? With a Luis Bunuel-like flare for the dramatic, as his killer had, why be so pedestrian?

  Adrian already knew one thing. He was going to have to work damn hard to keep the real killer off the FBI’s and the NYPD’s radar, and to frame someone who deserved to go to prison, if not for this crime, then certainly for something far far worse. The alternative was unthinkable. The alternative was to put an end to the budding relationship with a very talented killer doing his best to save Adrian from perpetual ennui. What kind of friend does that to another friend?

  Adrian suspected there was something in Manic’s invitation to the crime scene he was missing that probably offered more clues than anything additional his eyes could alight upon right now.

  He let his mind float back to earlier that day, the series of happenings that had led him here, on his first date with Manic. He didn’t know the killer’s real name, but if he was good enough to lock down a crime scene so tight not even Adrian could unravel every clue in one sitting, well, that required the kind of planning and attention to detail that required tremendous mental energy. And so, Manic, wasn’t a half bad name for his friend.

  ***

  The morning had started with coffee and criminals: the hoodlums on TV in one of his favorite Bogart films, The Maltese Falcon; the hoodlums outside his door. As to the latter, beyond Adrian’s front window, the bald, Lou Ferrigno-sized neighbor was beating on his golden retriever for straying into Adrian’s yard to pick up his paper, thinking he was caught up in a game of catch with his owner. The poor dog had Alzheimer’s and Adrian was going to return one night and kill his owner for being an insensitive bastard. At least that was the plan until he read in the newspaper about the CRISPR units in every university and virtually every DIY lab. There were several universities and several DIY labs open to the public downtown. Surely he could utilize one of those CRISPR units to give his neighbor a gene-altering virus that would eat his brain and teach him some empathy for his retriever. And they could just take care of one another thereafter in their alternating moments of lucidity. The plan hatched, he shifted his attention to the other crimes in progress going on outside his window.

  To get a better vantage point on the situation, he decided to take a walk.

  It was a quiet suburban neighborhood in Brooklyn. These people’s every waking moment was a crime. It was the only way they could survive the ennui. If there was one thing Adrian knew it was the need to compensate for boredom with acting badly. It was that or go paint a Mona Lisa. Who had the talent and the time? He’d moved here hoping for a little understanding. But suburbanites are short on understanding, long on perfidy. Take the wife cheating on her husband with another chick and their Irish setter; it was a s
trange ménage-a-trois, not the least of which because the dog had more hair than the wife. But since moving to the burbs, he’d seen stranger. Their little drama was playing out just two houses down, the one he was coming up on now.

  Don’t let people tell you the burbs are boring. Boring is just the fertilizer. What suburbanites are is covert, not in your face, like city people, who just don’t know how to hide their craziness. There was, for instance, the distinguished looking, grey fox of a husband embezzling his wife (the one being cheated on by the pussy-licking Irish-setter and the cunt-licking wife). Their eighteen-year-old, long-haired, pot-smoking son is jacking off in his room to slasher films. The teen’s heavily tattooed friend with a defined but shrinking body chiseled by too much crank made the videos for him, which is what makes his friend “so cool.” The friend says the films are karma-free because all he needs to do is find people who are happy to pay for you to end them in suicide-by-proxy. They’ll even sign a waiver. So there’s not even any jail time if they get caught, and forget about the ethical quandaries. Adrian knows this because this is what passes for bedroom talk on a weekday between teens who can’t bother to go to school because mommy’s getting cunnilingus from a dog with a tongue longer than daddy’s dick. Not that suburban kids need an excuse to act out, so maybe that dig wasn’t fair.

  In the same family is sixteen-year-old Elsa with pale skin and doll eyes. She’s pretty vanilla as the rest of the family goes. She made a plaster of paris likeness of Zac Efron to scale with an erect phallus and she humps it in her room every chance she gets. The parents have seen Zac’s hard on (it’s a matter of some debate whether it’s to scale too or not) and think it’s a rather comical way of hanging up her clothes. At least she keeps her room clean.

  All that in one household? Surely they were the exception. Why, yes, they were. They were exceptionally boring compared to the rest of the neighbors.

  Adrian had the dirt on everybody. He had one of those snazzy in-ear hearing-aids the size of a pencil eraser that couldn’t be detected and he used it to jack up his hearing. It was like having one of those miniature satellite dishes you see the Special Ops guys using in movies to hear conversations through walls. But how clumsy is that? Hardly a go-anywhere-anytime solution like Adrian’s. Of course, Adrian had his specially modified by people known only to the FBI. There were a lot of FBI agents running around now, and CIA and NSA and other alphabet soup agents using Adrian’s modified in-ear hearing aids.

  He was a bit of a national celebrity, not just for the odd cases that he seemed particularly dialed into that nobody else could make forward progress on, but because of his little artsy inventions. So they gave him a lot of rope. He could probably be a serial killer himself and they’d find a way to excuse it, or at least to get him to channel his predilections in ways that could help them, say by killing other serial killers.

  But he digressed. He was looking for clues in his mind that pointed to his new suitor, Manic.

  So far he was coming up empty.

  He continued rifling through his memories of earlier that day.

  He had been circling back to the house, nearly through with his morning constitutional and his Peeping Tom via in-ear mike routine, when some stranger accosted him. His FBI entourage, typically invisible, came out of hiding and swarmed the thirty-some, unshaved man like flies on shit before he could get all the way to Adrian. They tackled him to the sidewalk.

  One of the team was rifling through the perp’s pockets. He pulled out something, scanned it, and then brought it over for Adrian’s inspection. Scanner had a nondescript face that would have made him a far more effective criminal than an FBI guy. When committing a crime you wanted people to forget you; when climbing the FBI food chain, you wanted them to remember you.

  “We’ve been aware of this guy for some time now,” Scanner confessed. “Just didn’t think he was smart enough to get past our barrier. But he fooled facial recognition with that makeover.” Adrian glanced away from Scanner at his accoster lying prone and pinned to the sidewalk, his head craned up defiantly, as they were peeling off his face. He had to admit, that disguise might have gotten past him too. Once unmasked it was easier to see why that guy wasn’t slipping past anybody. The face was scarred and the look behind the eyes tormented. He couldn’t have done better having TROUBLE tattooed on his forehead.

  “What is that you have in your hands?” Adrian asked Scanner.

  “The canister is essentially a nanite-bomb. You drop it, it explodes, sending nanites everywhere. The blast can take out an entire neighborhood, or at least that’s what our engineers tell us. The microscopically-sized robots chew through about that much before they break down or just run out of gas. We let him continue his work in hopes he’d get the runaway effect perfected. He threatened to take out the whole planet with it. We were curious to see if he could perfect the nanites to that degree.”

  “So, who’s the menace, him or you?” Adrian’s scolding tone probably felt to the FBI rube like he was throwing battery acid all over his cool fascination.

  “Ah, don’t be that way, Adrian. Just intellectual curiosity is all. If we could figure out how he did it, we might figure out how the next bastard is going to do it.”

  “So, you’re a bunch of saints then?”

  “Well, that’s how we see it. But judging by your tone…”

  Adrian smiled half-heartedly. “Relax, soldier. I know how the game is played. It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves from time to time just how insane it’s gotten.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  They both glanced back at Face. They had him with his hands cuffed behind his back and practically levitated off the ground, there were so many FBI guys clutching him.

  “Good work, fellas!” Adrian said, raising his voice to make sure the whole team could hear. “Can’t tell which cases are more interesting any more, mine or yours.” The agents perked up. They went from feeling down on themselves for nearly failing at their jobs to feeling on top of the world. Adrian honestly couldn’t say why he was of a mood to throw them a bone. Considering his day hadn’t even started yet and that protective bubble around him only intensified the nature of reality, rather than insulated him from it. Hell, the nightly news was a far better insulator from reality, he thought cheekily.

  “I just wanted you to be proud of me, Adrian!” Face shouted, struggling to get free of his shacklers.

  “He’s not proud of you, asshole, he’s proud of us,” one of them growled at him.

  “Come on, guys, you’re going to tell the media the great Adrian Maslow stopped me, right? Not you guys. You guys are nothing.”

  Adrian shook his head and walked off, his back to Face, who was making some pained noises, no doubt in response to the agents not caring much for his remark.

  Adrian really didn’t connect the earlier incident with The Crow Caper until now. It was just possible that the perpetrator, who killed the guy in the flat Adrian found himself in a short while later and trained the birds, had found a way for Adrian’s accoster to penetrate his protective bubble by turning him into the Face. Surely, Adrian’s life would seem all the more boring once he’d been reminded of all the juicy cases no longer reaching him, being filtered by his team as not worthy of reaching the great Adrian Maslow. Not worthy, maybe, but hell, a B-grade crime or an A-grade crime like this one involving the nanite bomb executed by a B-grade criminal still beat the hell out of nothing at all.

  Adrian didn’t get the impression that Face had the least sense he was being played any more than Adrian realized at the time he was being played. So, he felt there was no point in pursuing Face, a.k.a. End Times in a Nano Mist Canister Guy, any further.

  Soon after leaving the drama of Face behind him on the sidewalk, Adrian returned home.

  He remembered smelling the pot of coffee on the kitchen counter and deeming it too ripe for serious consideration. He poured some into a thermos, and slipped the thermos into his trench coat. Possibly the lab boys could find a strai
n of bacteria in it that could cure cancer. Or perhaps they could isolate the poison meant for him? Maybe Face hadn’t been the only one to penetrate the barrier around him this morning. He made himself a fresh pot of coffee.

  The fact was there had been nothing else out of the ordinary about his morning. If truth be told, he’d been drawn to the crime scene because he routinely listened to the police radio. And there had been chatter of crows flying in and out of a high-rise window. They were flying in empty-beaked, and flying out with something in their craw. It could have been dog food. But big black ass birds that had scared the hell out of him ever since he was a kid… this he had to see. It was time to chase down those demons.

  Hard to pin that chance piece of radio chatter on his suitor. Then again, there was the woman’s voice that had made the 911 call. The tremor in it, meant to indicate a very old and fragile woman. Only it wasn’t an old woman. It was a young, very much in-shape person pretending to be an old woman, and doing a great job at it. But Adrian was an opera fanatic. And he knew just what an accomplished voice was capable of. The performance was so good he still couldn’t tell the cops whether the voice he heard was a woman’s or a man’s, despite it being deliberately disguised to sound female. He’d seen enough operas with males playing female parts and vice versa to know, this was not as difficult as you might think, though not particularly easy, either.

  Yep, he’d been quite certain before he even jumped in his car and raced over to the crime scene that it was the murderer making the 911 call. There are people who listen to Cher, gay guys mostly, who are convinced she’s singing directly to them through her lyrics, like she’s channeling their pain somehow. That’s how Adrian felt listening to Manic on the line.

  Every Sherlock needs his Moriarty. Maybe Manic was his.

  The only thing putting a crimp in Adrian’s sleuthing was he wouldn’t put it past himself, or some twisted part of his psyche, to invent the guy if he didn’t actually exist. So the possibility that Manic’s mystique could be part of a psychotic break couldn’t be ruled out. No matter how elaborate the ideation. In fact, last he checked, elaborate ideation was part of the diagnosis.