That Nietzsche Thing

THAT NIETZSCHE THING

by

Christopher Blankley

Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Blankley

Smashwords Edition

other books by Christopher Blankley

The Cordwainer

The Bobbies of Bailiwick

The Bobbies of Bailiwick and the Captive
Ocean

Zombpunk: STEM

Zombpunk: ARROW

The Raft (The Case of the Barefoot
Detective)

www.zombpunk.com

Chapter 1

The girl was dead and no fooling.

Back in the day, I was a cop. It’s important
that you know that, or little of this crazy story will make any
sense...no, scratch that,
none
of this crazy story makes any
sense, so you’ll have to bear with me.

I was a cop, and the girl was most certainly
dead.

How did Dickens put it? Dead as a doornail?
Well, she was that and then some.
Dead
dead. I saw my share
of corpses working Homicide, so I knew dead. And she was the
genuine article. Dead.

Got that? Good, because it’ll get important,
real quick.

I was a cop, but that didn’t really mean all
that much. I’m not going to pretend like I was a good cop. I wasn’t
a bad cop, as in a crooked cop. I was honest. Honest as I could be.
What I mean is that I was nobody’s idea of a smart cop. Not by a
long shot.

Right when Geneing was at its height, cities
like Seattle were so desperate for warm bodies in uniform they were
handing out badges and guns to almost anyone. And it was steady
work with a civil service salary. Nothing to sneeze at.

But it was mostly just cleaning up the
corpses. Tagging and bagging. It wasn’t like there was any reason
to investigate anything, we always knew the identity of our killer
before we ever found a body: Geneing. Nine times out of ten,
somebody ended up dead, it was because of Geneing. It didn’t matter
if Genies ended up stabbing each other in a fight, or one stepped
out into oncoming traffic. It was always Geneing that killed them.
Different symptom, same disease.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes.

So, it was mostly paperwork. I could do
paperwork. And I didn’t mind the blood. Lots of people got sick at
the sight of the blood.

The girl’s death stuck out queer because
she’d truly been murdered. A real crime. Sure she was a Genie, and
nobody was ruling that out as a cause of death. But somebody had
actually gone to the trouble of killing this girl. A few somebodies
by the look of the body.

A real murder was newsworthy. Even back then.
Long before I was able to reach the crime scene, the TV trucks were
already there. They were like sharks in the water for that sort of
stuff. Anything that was a little sensational and could grab a few
rating points. And the girl was sensational, alright. Just the
stuff for the dinner hour news: young, pretty, dead and thrown in a
dumpster. That’s what they called pay dirt.

By the time I arrived, the uniforms had
everything cordoned off the scene with their reams of yellow tape,
and the news cameras were rolling beyond the perimeter.

I was the entirety of Homicide that evening.
I’d have to go it alone. Just my luck to accidentally stumble on
some real police work.

I remember buying myself some time, lighting
up a Kools. TV always liked that shot, it was always guaranteed to
get me on the news: Homicide detective looking stoically down at
the victim, methodically tapping out a cigarette. Just like in the
movies.

But for once, I wasn’t doing it for the
cameras, I actually needed a moment to collect myself. When I laid
eyes on that girl, I had to take a second or two to choke back a
throat full of bile. That girl was in a bad way, even for a
Genie.

I’d learn the next day that she’d been kicked
around, but good. Her neck was broke and her jaw crashed. She’d
been worked over by some sort of giant animal or a group of guys
with bats.

But at the scene, all I could see was the
blood and the flesh in amongst the trash bags of the dumpster. She
was naked and twisted all to hell. The sight made me regret my
chosen profession a little. But it was my job to fish her out of
there. And I had to do my job.

Like I said, I was cop, but that didn’t
really mean all that much. I just cleaned up messes. Mostly.

The next day, the coroner’s report arrived
along with a whole rash of shit from my captain. Turns out the girl
was rich, or at least from a rich family with connections to the
NeoCons in the other Washington.

The 24/7 news was showing their video in a
tight loop with me lighting up and looking down into that dumpster.
The Feds went ballistic. White House lit a fire under the FBI,
which lit a fire under the chief, who lit a fire under my captain
that ended up burning my ass.

If shit rolls downhill, I found myself in the
lee of a valley, because I got my asshole reamed, but good. What
kind of idiot was I? Standing over a dead body and smoking like
that? Didn’t I know who the dead girl was?

I didn’t, and for once it actually mattered.
Suddenly, for the first time in years, people were paying attention
to how I did my job. I wasn’t used to that.

The girl’s name was Vivian Montavez. Her dad
had been a senator once-upon-a-time, but what he was now was the
guy who’d came up with the so-called Latin Strategy, the plan that
had changed the NeoCons from a bunch of dumb-fuck, backbench,
old-school-tie radicals into the dominant political movement in
both local and federal politics.

Turns out old Edgar Montavez was the guy
who’d brought the Hispanic vote into the NeoCon tent, whole and
complete. And by the 2050s, the Hispanic vote was all that decided
elections. That made old Edgar big. President Cassidy basically
owed the guy his job.

Edgar Montavez’s daughter showing up dead in
dumpster on my watch was seriously bad news.

See, the NeoCons weren’t much more than a
single issue outfit: they were the party that said it was really
ready to finally get serious about drugs in America. Not like the
namby-pamby, hippie-dippy, dope-smoking Progs.

The NeoCons were going to get something done
about Geneing, The Latinos heard this and turned out at the polls.
After all, they were dying in droves, just like the rest of us.
Black, white, brown, Christian, Jew, Geneing didn’t give a shit.
Immigration policy, voting rights, minimum wages laws be damned,
the Latinos were ready for the government to crack down hard on the
Gene pushers, or whoever was putting their kids in coffins. And
they voted for whoever promised to get it done.

To have one of the NeoCons’ own succumb to
the plague, show up dead in dumpster, reeking of
genetically-modified endocrines...that shit was bad.

So, I got down to business. I didn’t have to
be told to do it. Very quickly, any evidence that Vivian Montavez
had died in that back alley got conveniently lost or stolen. I knew
how to do my job. I knew how to sweep something like that under one
big-ass, motherfucking rug. I knew how to play the game. I changed
names on death certificates and falsified reports. Vivian Montavez
vanished, replaced by just another Jane Doe. A Gene Genie. One of a
million.

Whatever, it didn’t really matter. The girl
was dead, after all. Dead and no coming back. I doubted she’d care
what name was on her toe-tag when she slid into the furnace. The
senator would never claim her body. She was too hot to touch. She’d
burn with the rest of them, the dozens upon dozens of corpses
Homicide cleaned up weekly, incinerated en masse in the Morgue’s
regular Wednesday-night fry. All the better to hide the evidence.
Once the body was gone, so was Vivian.

Or so I thought. But I’d miscalculated
something. The agitating from DC kept shaking our quiet little
tree, right up until the girl’s body went missing. Then, holy hell
broke loose.

And I sat right in the middle of it.

It’s hard to say what exactly happened. No,
scratch that, I know exactly what happened, but I’m not going to
tell you at this point because you’d call me a fool. At the time,
when the girl’s body vanished from the Morgue, I had no more
fucking idea what was happening than you do now.

Of course, the powers-that-be screamed
conspiracy. The Progs had snatched the girl’s corpse before we
could incinerate the evidence. That didn’t seem likely to me, but
whatever, it was a working theory.

The Feds came down on the situation like a
ton of bricks. The FBI found some pretext for having jurisdiction
in the case, I can’t remember what. Next thing we know, it’s like
Mogadishu in downtown Seattle. Black semi-trailers rolling in, and
armed SWAT storming the Town Hall. We were suddenly a city under
siege. They sent everybody but Seal Team Six. And I bet they had
them on standby, sitting on a carrier off the coast.

The FBI brought in one of their new “Response
Units.” Nice name for an occupying army. They setup Ops right in
front of the Town Hall, blocking off Sixth Avenue. The
semi-trailers transformed like Voltron into a sprawling complex of
communications, logistics and command. Everywhere men in dark suits
were talking into headsets, as IT geeks tapped away at consoles. It
was a thing of beauty to watch, like watching a well-executed,
synchronized drill team go through its routine.

Everywhere, people were toting iron. Men in
body armor, sporting FBI in big yellow letters, carrying assault
rifles and submachine guns. If they planned to shoot dead everyone
in Seattle and sort the corpses, they were ready. Otherwise I
didn’t see the need for all the guns. It made everyone tetchy, as
you can imagine. But the NeoCons did nothing in half measures. To
them, everything was a war.

This was when my life really started to get
complicated. This was when I met Constantine.

Chapter 2

“
You
are Detective Fonseca?” Special
Agent Constantine said across the foldout table. He looked me up
and down like I was something he’d scraped off his shoe.

Maybe I was; we sure contrasted: Constantine
in his tailored black suit, me in corduroys and my vintage,
fur-lined, leather bomber. I took my smokes out of my pocket and
flipped open the lid of the box. Constantine proceeded to scowl in
a fashion that told me, in no uncertain terms, that smoking was not
allowed in his GI Joe Mobile Command Center.

“That’s right,” I replied, putting away my
pack of Kools. I only wanted a smoke to have something to do with
my hands. They felt like two slabs of pork hanging from my arms. I
had no idea what to do with them.

“Sasha Isaac Fonseca?” Constantine rolled my
name around in his mouth like he was chewing on marbles. “What sort
of name is that?”

“Sephardic Jew,” I said, not really thinking
about who I was talking to. “Via North Africa and Mexico,
pre-Porfiriato.”

Oh fuck. That had done it. Now Constantine
was giving me that look, the look like I was one of
them
. I
wasn’t totally sure exactly which “them” I was silently being
accused of being, a kike or beaner. Did it matter? Ascension to
power had not meant the NeoCons had lost their Social Conservative,
Good Ol’ Boy, Southern roots. If the special agent ranked anywhere
in the NeoCon’s New World Order, he’d be a true believer.

“But I was born in Cleveland, if that helps,”
I added, feeling the need to apologize for my lack of WASPness. I
tried putting my hands in the pockets of my jacket, but that was no
good. It was uncomfortable sitting in the chair like that, so I
pulled them out. Man, I needed a cigarette.

“You were the LI on this case?” Constantine
held up a printout that was undoubtedly the Montavez case.

“I guess.” I played dumb.

“Female, twenty-three,” he read. “No
identification or distinguishing marks...a Jane Doe?”

“That’s right.” I scratched the stubble on my
chin.

Constantine leaned back in his folding chair
and looked me over. “A Jane Doe who up and walks out of the Morgue
in the middle of the night. All on her own?”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about
that.”

“No, you wouldn’t. But you’re the lead
investigator on a murder case without a body. Doesn’t that interest
you at all, Fonseca?”

“Sure,” I said, sarcastically, “that’s
real
interesting.”

Constantine didn’t like my tone. “Aren’t you,
at least, a little curious as to what has happened to her?”

“No, not my department.”

“Oh?” Constantine crossed his arms and gave
me a self-satisfied smirk. “How’s that?”

“I’m Homicide,” I chuckled. “She’s dead. She
can’t get murdered
twice
.”