Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Last Refuge of Scoundrels - Another Exerpt Post
Once again I have more words to write than I have time to write them. The story in my notebook is too long to transcribe right now and there are four or five essays percolating that I haven’t been able to bring to fruition yet. But I want to dump more brainlint on you, my cherished readers, so I’m going back to the well for another chunk of my unfinished opus, Avagadro’s Number. For those of you keeping count, this is exerpt number 4. You may now stop counting, and may all your Christmases be white.
Agent Fraser’s enthusiasm for her employment could only have been tempered by the bleak scene which she had foretold at the intersection of Pandora and South Power. One streetlamp shone over four broad, unpaved, littered lots. Dustdevils rose from them all, reaching to touch the streetlight and dissipating weakly before quite making the stretch. Cardboard boxes and rusting parts of refrigerators and washing machines lay scattered like termite mounds. Cans and bottles had been taken away by entrepreneurs, but piles of rotting papers and vegetables, scrap wood, broken toys covered the ground. For more than a half a block in every direction, vacancy reigned. Even the sidewalks seemed lonely. The women sat in the car, unenthusiastic about the next step of their investigation.
“Do you have to go through all that trash?”
“I’m prepared to. I don’t think he’d put such important information in a random pile of garbage, though.”
“So where did he put it? What’s to search?”
“The wires.” A utilities pole stood next to the lamppost, with a big grey fusebox and four thick crossbeams strung with line 30 feet above the street. The sounds of the city were muted and distances seemed magnified in the clear night air. Agent Fraser swung out of her car and opened the trunk with her key. She took out a canvas bag with a Muni Power logo on it and brought it to the utilities pole.
Draping the bag on a stubby police call box cowering between the powerline pole and the lamppost, she took out a length of rope and held it in her hand. She put the carrying straps of the utility bag over each of her shoulders, the bag hanging in front like a bib. She passed the rope around the pole and leaned back, holding the rope in both hands and pressing her knees against the wooden trunk. Pulling forward sharply on the rope, she hiked her legs up a few inches and caught the pole with the rope a few inches higher yet. Her feet were off the ground. Within a few moments she had hitched herself up seven or eight feet, where metal footpegs had been driven into the wooden pole for easy climbing. She scrambled up the pegs and stood by the fuse box, the wires above her and below her by only a few feet, well within her reach. Just a yard or so from her face, across the empty space above the intersection, the streetlamp was shining its jaundiced light through grimy glass.
Agent Fraser reached into her pocket and pulled out a key, with which she opened the fusebox. “Looking good,” she muttered as she looked inside. Her voice sounded very small and it seemed to fall like wet paper to Alma’s ears. “Telephones and electric. Interesting. Maybe something.” She reached into her bib and pulled out a black box and some headphones. Attaching the box to the fusebox with wires, Agent Fraser spent the next half hour standing like a crane on the footpegs high above the silent street, listening to her headphones, switching and dialing on her black box every few moments.
Eventually, Agent Fraser wordlessly removed the headphones, put her equipment back into her bib, and climbed down off the pole, dropping from the last peg to the ground with a little grunt. “Nothing.”
“You’re kidding; nothing at all after all that time up there?”
“Lots of phones. Nobody’s talking about anything. You can’t really tell much from the power lines, but there wasn’t anything to indicate any abuses. I don’t think this is where the action is.”
They looked around again; if the action was to be found anyplace at all, it seemed unlikely to be this intersection. Still, Glovebuster’s note had been clear enough once they’d understood what it said.
“How about that call box?,” Alma asked. Agent Fraser had been leaning against it after her long perch among the powerlines. She stood away and looked it over. The box was blue and faded, and looked as if it had been carved out of iron instead of cast from it. A metal standard with desultory ornamentation pushed through the concrete, holding a one foot by two foot box about four feet off the ground. It read “Police Call Box” on the front, had a locked door that swung open, and a blunted point like a Kaiser’s helmet on top.
“They’re actually Muni Power property,” Fraser said, as she peered into the keyhole and fumbling with her keyring. “We lease them to the police. No money changes hands. It’s a paper transaction, but no one pays much attention since they put radios…”
Fraser had selected a key from her ring and placed it in the hole in the door on the box. Turning it, she froze in position. She shook and strained, her eyes starting from their sockets; her pupils shrunk to pinpoints in the dim streetlamp’s glow. Her left hand was spasmodically stretched to the limits of her sinews; her right hand, holding the key, was vibrating and starting to smoke. Her lips began to foam and she barely choked out a gurgle of surprise. She snapped the key in two and fell to the ground, eyes still open, still and quiet now.
Alma rushed to her side, but only in time to confirm the obvious. She sat on the ground and held the dead agent’s hands in hers. Frazer’s were preternaturally warm; Alma’s were icy cold. She rocked back and forth on her haunches. “Oh God; Oh God...” she muttered, her breath clouding the night air, mingling with the smell of burning wires and seared flesh. Agent Fraser didn’t seem to be entirely de-electrified, even though she was stone dead; she lay sprawled by the callbox, in a tense and uncomfortable position, her hand still frozen in a grip on the broken half of the key to the call box.
Alma looked around at nothing everywhere. She felt, though, as if a presence had joined her, or was about to. She felt totally exposed, her only friend a corpse. The street light seemed to snicker at her, but it was just the sound of the electricity in the wires over her head.
But the snickering was getting louder. At first she thought that it was just her paranoia, making her think the sound was more intense. Then she realized that she wasn’t paranoid – she had seen two lives struck down in a single evening. She had been threatened, accosted, and stranded. She was in trouble with the cops and her story was so bizarre even she didn’t believe it. Everything bad was really happening. There wasn’t any time to be paranoid. She had enough to worry about as it was.
So she looked back up at the wires buzzing over her head. They were definitely louder. They were getting louder by the second. Then a spark flew out from the insulator on the top crossbeam. It was a harbinger. The next half-dozen sparks came out of the next-to-bottom wires in a loud burst. Then the central fusebox blew open. Inside, an electrical fire raged. Chunks of burning equipment were falling near her. She sat, shielding Agent Frazer’s head in her lap, staring at the inferno as sparks rained down around her and the high tension wires began to fall, hissing like snakes. The call box beside her was smoking. Things were getting worse.
Alma stood and checked her options. There was nothing to commend any escape route; all four directions seemed equally dangerous, unknowable, suspicious. No path seemed safe anymore. A siren resolved in the darkness; she knew it was coming to investigate an electrical fire on South Power Street. Regardless of knowing the safest way out, she knew that she had to choose a direction and take it. Fast. That meant the car. Unfortunately.
Alma grabbed the keychain from Frazer’s hand. It was still hot. She fumbled with it, looking at each key in turn to find one that looked like it would run a car. The siren was quite distinct now, and a flashing red light pulled around a corner several blocks down to the left; against the utility poles it seemed to cast malevolent shadows, like fingers reaching out to her in the night. But it was only a single fire truck - that, she could handle. She turned and checked down to her right - several vehicles coming around a corner near the horizon, with the red flashers joined by blue and white ones as well. Bad sign.
She ran to the car, grabbing the longest key on the ring in blind desparation. It fit the door and the ignition. She locked herself in and surveyed her new environment. Contrary to popular opinion, she wasn’t actually totally ignorant of affairs of the wheel. She’d watched hundreds of people drive, some meticulously, some drunkenly, even amorously once in a while. She knew what had to be done, what it would look like if she did it right. Just give the key a turn - the starter cam screamed in protest, already engaged. Alma yelped back, threw the car into reverse, and slammed back squarely into the call box. It hit the ground, and all the streetlights around went dark. The only illumination was from the dozen or so fast-approaching sets of headlights converging on the fire, corpse, and wreckage.
Everything else was dead black - no lights shone, not even Alma’s own headlights, which she was unable to find in the unfamiliar car. Consequently, she couldn’t see much, and had an excellent excuse, once she located “drive,” for accelerating at maximum speed down the street in front of her and smashing
into a utility pole about 50 yards down along Pandora street. She was unhurt. As for her excuse, the police were not interested in it.