Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish (5 page)

"I don't want to hurt you, Nigel, but I will if I have to," said Big Ernie, who had missed the entire conversation.

Itch glanced at Big Ernie to quit the one-liners, but the large man looked like he was having too much fun.

"And I appreciate that, Ernie, really I do," said Nigel. "All the money by Sunday, I promise. You can trust me."

Itch stepped away from the edge. "I don't trust you as far as I could drop you. But you have until Sunday."

Big Ernie lifted Nigel back up onto the ledge and dropped him on the rooftop. Nigel jumped to his feet, brushed off his suit, and ran his hands through his hair. He smiled politely.

"Don't suppose I could interest either of you in a quick cup of tea?"

"Thanks, but we have three more people to hang off buildings today, and it looks like it's going to rain later, so we'd better get to it," said Itch politely.

"Suit yourself. Nice view up here." And with that, Nigel turned and left.

As he walked down the stairs, his heart slowed a bit, and he smiled at the fact that he hadn't been dropped off the building. He did, however, think that the time had come to pay these men back. He wasn't in the habit of borrowing money, but he had needed the fifty thousand for a trip to Vegas. He met Itch and Ernie through some contacts on the street and although he knew their business was completely illegal and technically he should arrest the pair of them, he just couldn't do it. They weren't a bad pair, really, and they knew far too much about him. If he arrested them, then his secret problem would no longer be a secret. But he wasn't worried; he knew how to get the money.

Nigel exited the stairwell and walked calmly through the lobby of the building.

He thought about where he had been going when Big Ernie had lifted him off the street. The station received a call this morning from a Mrs. Jones on Front Street who claimed that her cat had been possessed by the devil. Ordinarily, dispatch would send a uniformed constable to follow up on the report, but something horrific from a past investigation had stuck with Nigel. Something he'd put out of his mind until Mrs. Jones' phone call.

Around a year ago, a disgraced priest had taken to chopping up certain members of his congregation. New Scotland Yard took a few weeks to put two and two together, and once they discovered the answer was clearly four, they then multiplied it by twenty-seven, added one-million-seven-hundred-thousand-three-hundred-and-ninety-one, then divided the whole thing by Pi, which came out with the answer five-hundred-fifty-thousand-seven-hundred-and-thirty-nine-point-nine-one-one-nine-five-five-four-one-one-one and so on. That number was then taken and each separate numeral was assigned a binary language character that was in turn inputted into a child's Fisher-Price music box and played backward. The result was a rendition of
What's New Pussycat
as sung by Tom Jones that caused several middle-aged female members of the police force to remove their underwear and fling the items at the music box. Unfortunately, the result of the investigation meant practically nothing in terms of the case at hand. The powers of New Scotland Yard that be decided that the Mathematical Cryptography Department was not the correct team to solve the murders and quickly dispatched Nigel to resolve the situation as fast as possible.

It took Nigel three hours to figure out the killer was none other than the victims’ priest, Father Jensen. Nigel and a squad of uniforms showed up at Father Jensen's house.

At first glance, the house appeared empty.

After a thorough search, Nigel fell upon the disturbed priest in the attic. Funnily enough, at his time of discovery, Father Jensen sat on the floor half-naked, rocking back and forth and humming the tune
What's New Pussycat
. After several hours of interrogation, which involved Nigel asking questions and Father Jensen drooling uncontrollably in between cryptic answers, Nigel concluded that the priest had begun to question God about a great many things. Apparently, what finally drove him mad was the fact that God had begun to answer him, and they weren’t the answers he expected. Instead of claiming to talk to God, he claimed to have started talking to the Devil who encouraged him to cut members of his congregation up into small pieces.

As two uniformed police officers dragged the priest from the interrogation room, he turned and looked Nigel dead in the eyes and said, "It's the cat. He'll come in the form of a cat and you can't stop him, no one can!"

Since that time, Father Jensen was committed to a lovely mental hospital where he occupied a rather nice, off-white, padded room. The last report Nigel received stated that Jensen had given up talking to both God and the Devil and had instead taken up the fine art of counted cross-stitch.

And so Mrs. Jones' phone call had twitched Nigel's interest. He looked at his watch and decided to get a coffee before going to meet the possibly deranged Mrs. Jones.

Cat possessed by the devil
?
It's going to be one of those days.

The alarms had been going off for some time and Celina McMannis, Assistant Robotics Engineer at Majestic Technologies, London, was fed up. She had been playing with her fiery red hair for a good five minutes in a last, forlorn effort to ignore the blaring sounds emanating from the speakers mounted on the surrounding walls of the lunchroom. It wasn't working.

She always knew the Santa Claus Project was a bad idea, but no one had listened to her. Artificial intelligence just hadn't been tested enough to be put into real practice, especially on such a large scale. Celina flicked through her notebook, filled with little sticky notes with little schematic drawings on them. Several pages contained complex drawings; other pages contained doodles of doggies, for no other reason than Celina had a fondness for doodling doggies.

One page had a picture of a heart with an arrow through it and the initials
CM+DR
sketched in the middle. That being the last remnant of a failed relationship with one Dean Richards, who turned out to be a complete moron who eventually met the nasty bit at the end of Celina's short fuse. Celina’s temper had given her a certain reputation; some people said she failed to have a fuse at all.

Dean Richards ended up paying a substantial amount of money to be inducted into the witness protection program where he lived out his days as a semi-happy urine analysis technician under the assumed name of Monty Niggle. The reason for such extreme action came after he made the horrible mistake of sleeping in Celina's bed. Despite Dean’s slightly unfavorable body odor, Celina probably wouldn't have minded him sleeping in her bed; however, the woman sleeping next to Dean, whose most striking feature was that she was not Celina, did cause some discomfort. The discomfort was largely aimed at Dean's testicles, which were rendered completely useless for six months after. Revenge and retribution, in Celina's opinion, were not only a dish best served cold, they also came in anything up to four courses. The infliction of temporary impotence upon Dean Richards was merely the appetizer. Dean decided that he wasn't going to stick around for the main course.

When Celina finally gave up the search for Dean, she decided to swear off men for an indefinite amount of time and threw herself into her work. She applied for several positions; the most lucrative and interesting proposition came from Majestic Technologies. The company claimed to be making an enormous step forward in the field of artificial intelligence and not only that, the owner of the company, a billionaire industrialist, had offered her the job in person.

The alarms stopped.

"About time," said Celina to the empty cafeteria.

The project took five years to be fully developed and then another year to build the blasted little buggers. She sighed to herself and continued twirling her hair as she always did when she was impatient.

The Santa Claus Project was the brainchild of a man named
Neville Bartholomew Snell Jr III. The same Neville Bartholomew Snell Jr III who offered her the job in the first place. Aside from being a billionaire, Neville also had a bad habit of buying everything humanly possible, including those sharp knives seen on late night TV. After a lifetime of spending, he decided that he would like to leave something behind. Something so the people would always remember him.

"Silly old fool," said Celina quietly.

Using a dozen ingenious scientists, the very latest in computer robotic design technology, and a group of teenage special effects technicians, the old fool had developed the Santa Claus Project: a unique and groundbreaking undertaking destined to reshape Christmas and make vast quantities of money for people who were already rich. And maybe bring small pockets of happiness to greedy children. That was the plan. That was not going to be happening anytime soon. Or even at all, for that matter.

Celina got up and wandered around the large lunchroom. She tested one of the exit doors. Still locked. Her cell phone chose that very moment to chirp to life. Thankful for someone to talk to, she happily answered.

"Celina McMannis speaking." A disdainful sneer fled across her face looking for somewhere to hide. "No, I didn't rent that movie. Why would I rent a movie called
Good Loving in the Amazon
?. . . . Well, I'm sure it is very good, I'm sure you watch it every chance you get, but I just don't think it's my kind of movie. . . . I don't care if it's on my account, I don't have it!"

She ended the call with a slight beep and decided that there was a major flaw with cell phones. Any other phone could be slammed down when the user was angry, but with a cell phone, the only option was to get worked up, scream and shout, threaten war and pestilence, and then
beep
, the call was over. The sheer inadequacy of the cell phone made her angry and she threw it across the room where it landed amid the remains of a barely digestible tapioca pudding in the large cafeteria garbage bin.

A mirrored wall had been built into the lunchroom to make it look flashier. The employees used it to look at other employees while they ate their lunches. Celina looked in the very same mirror and wondered if she should start exercising again.

She had a slim figure with broad shoulders, the kind of body torn between playing rugby and dancing the ballet. Oh, how she wanted some yogurt. That was the reason she'd wandered into the lunchroom in the first place.

I'm probably going to get shouted at for this, all for my love of yogurt.
She shook her head sadly.

Celina had overheard one of the guards during her rush to the cafeteria. The last thing security saw on the monitors before the power went off was a black shape climbing the high, electrified security fence. And then everything had gone to hell. Alarms started going on and off; the electric doors began locking and unlocking themselves at will and had great fun doing it.

Having the paranoid disposition of believing she was responsible for everything that went wrong, Celina decided to slip out of the control room, hide in the cafeteria, and get some yogurt while she was at it. She hadn’t counted on the automatic locks trapping her inside the cafeteria or the vast amounts of yogurt that completed failed to be in the fridge. And so here she sat. Wishing she had yogurt.

"I wonder if this has anything to do with the elves," she said aloud to the empty room.

"Pull!" shouted Neville Bartholomew Snell Jr III.

Splash
went the Mexican into the pool.

Thanks to an automated alarm warning system, Neville knew about the security breach at his Majestic Technologies lab just outside of London. He knew very little about the event details, but one thing he knew for sure was that he was definitely not sending the police in there. Not with his top-secret project in the works. The situation was frustrating.

Neville was a marvel of a human being, from the standpoint of most outside observers. Many people threw a tantrum when angry, some sat quietly and fume, others reacted violently, some had outbursts, a lot shouted and screamed, a few broke down and cried. But not Neville. Neville had more interesting and extravagant ways of dealing with his anger. Being one of the top ten richest men in the world gave him the profound right to act completely weird and get away with it without question. When poor people acted weird, they were simply written off as weird and often arrested. Rich people who acted weird were not weird at all. They were eccentric.