I usually have more than one story going at a time. It's still a bit rough, but I wanted to share...
-Scott
---
One
It was October and it was raining,
which was right and proper for Seattle.
AJ MacLeod was wearing handcuffs and riding in the back of a police car,
which was not. He was also apparently
dead -- at least as far as the Seattle press was concerned -- but that was
easily remedied by demonstrating to the nearest doctor that he had a pulse.
The handcuffs might be a bit
trickier.
Twenty minutes ago, he was in a
school library interviewing a potential student for the MacLeod Academy, where
he was headmaster, when the vice principal busted in and accused him of being
an imposter. MacLeod had a bad habit of
losing his wallet and keys anyway, so he had very little to proof to counter a
news anchor that insisted he was dead in the street on Queen Anne.
Anger. Shouting. Handcuffs. Cops.
It was probably just as well he had
chosen to be an academic instead of going into the family business. He would
have made a lousy smuggler and a worse embezzler.
As they waited their turn on the
entrance ramp for Interstate 5, a man standing on the corner smiled at him and
waved. The man held a sign that simply
said “Calm Down” and people were stopping to hand him money even though the
sign didn’t ask for any. MacLeod thought
the advice was probably worth a couple of bucks too, but he doubted the
detectives would allow him to roll the window down.
He didn’t have any cash on him
anyway.
“So, aside from looking for new ways
to make my life miserable, why is the Seattle press so sure that I’m dead?”
“Because someone killed you,” one of
the detectives answered. “Looks like it was an accident, if that makes you feel
any better.” It had been the redhead
whose name he hadn’t caught in the kerfuffle at the school. The unnamed detective’s
eyes were watching him in the mirror.
“Come again?”
“You’re dead, MacLeod.” His partner
answered. Detective Liu -- a head shorter than his partner, nattily dressed,
delivering orders with a faint lingering accent of Hong Kong, Chinese tinged
with British English. “A man coming out of an alley in lower Queen Anne was
struck by a car this morning around dawn. Had a whole pack of your business
cards in his coat and no other ID on him. Had your pocket watch too.”
“Pocket watch.”
“Has your name engraved in it,” the
detective nodded. “Heavy, expensive. Probably an antique.”
That made no sense whatsoever, but
he’d get to that in time. His main concern wasn’t a vagrant with a bunch of
fake business cards.
“And how exactly does that lead to this
matched-set of bracelets?”
“We keep them chained together so
you don’t lose one of them,” the redhead quipped. “Wouldn’t want to break up
the set.”
Liu snorted at his partner’s tone. “If
I hadn’t handcuffed you, I would still be standing there arguing with that
principal.”
MacLeod knew he was right. The woman
had been insistent that MacLeod must have come to her school for some deviant
purpose. She’d only quieted when Liu had slapped cuffs on his miscreant wrists
and led him away.
The sky had begun to spit on them as
they entered Seattle. It was just enough
to turn on the wipers but not enough to give them a good glide across the
glass.
The squeak was beginning to
aggravate MacLeod’s headache.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, detective.”
“Which part?”
“The cards, the watch… all of it.”
“I assure you, it most certainly is,”
Liu said. “I saw the body and the watch,
we’re headed there now.”
“I’m not saying he can’t have
business cards, just that they can’t be mine,” MacLeod explained. “I don’t have a business card -- if I want to
give someone contact information, I just use the school brochure. And I haven’t
owned a watch in decades.”
“What about your cell phone?” Liu
asked. “Don’t they all have clocks on
them?”
“It’s still not a watch.” MacLeod said.
“Anyway, what difference does it make? I
don’t have a gold cell phone with my name engraved on it, and neither has any
watch I’ve ever owned.”
“I’d have thought a school principal
would need a good watch to keep track of the class times and suchlike,” the
redhead mused.
“Headmaster,” MacLeod muttered.
“Anyway, we have people to keep track of that kind of thing.”
The conversation subsided as the
brake lights of every car in front of them flashed. Almost without slowing, the red-haired
detective cut across three lanes of slowing traffic and hit the James Street
offramp at speed, drawing protests from the wet asphalt and the drivers they
cut off. Moments after they turned off
the exit ramp onto James, the radio lit up with aid calls. There was a multi-car accident at the Yesler
exit that was backing up traffic in every direction. Seattle’s aging freeway system was gridlocked
in every direction.
“Lucky,” Liu grunted.
“Instinct,” the redhead countered.
The detective piloted the unmarked Crown
Vic through the surface streets of the International District as the viaducts
overhead turned into parking lots.
MacLeod watched the business signs pass written in an array of every
imaginable oriental alphabet. Seattle’s answer to Chinatown, the ID was a
multicultural bazaar, where a variety of civilizations met, blended, and
occasionally clashed.
They turned when they reached Fourth
Avenue and continued North under the shadow of the stadiums and the cluster of
parking lots, home-renovation and architectural salvage warehouses that
clustered around them.
Local legend had it that Seattle had
been built on seven hills, like Rome.
Though there were actually numerous hills in the city, only seven bore
names which extended to the neighborhoods on their slopes and one had actually
been taken down in an early feat of cityscaping. Queen Anne was the tallest of the original
seven, a steep promontory in the midst of an ambitious metropolis. The hill had
- before the dawn of the skyscraper - held a commanding view of all the land
around about from Lake Union to the Northeast to Elliot Bay to the Southwest
and the Ballard Locks that connected them.
Timber barons, mining tycoons,
industrialists and the owners of the vast ‘mosquito’ fleets that plied the
waters of Puget Sound had littered the hill with magnificent homes. MacLeod’s nefarious ancestors had been among
them. He watched the houses pass, indifferent to their age and
magnificence. Across the Sound and
culturally light-years away from his present location, the headmaster’s house
on the grounds of the school his grandfather had founded was far grander than these,
impressive though they were by Seattle standards.
The car paused at the base of Queen
Anne Avenue where a uniformed patrolwoman jotted their names for her clipboard. A few reporters were loitering nearby and the
cameras snapped to attention when one of the television anchors spotted MacLeod
in the backseat. The two detectives gave
names and badge numbers and the woman stared at MacLeod through the back window
as she made due note of their passengers.
MacLeod grimaced and wondered which cop
had leaked the story of the death of the last scion of the area’s most infamous
family. Whoever it was he dearly wanted to have a quiet word with them
somewhere away from the cameras.
The Crown Vic’s aging engine whined
as they climbed the steep hill, leaving the media behind at the barrier. Liu pointed toward the curb and his partner
parked the massive car at a 45 degree angle between a Seattle PD cruiser and a
Medical Examiner’s van. MacLeod sat and
fumed as they waited for Liu’s partner to come around and open the door.
The detectives gave them a moment to
stretch and orient themselves while Liu conversed in low tones with someone in
a King County coroner’s jumpsuit. Halfway
up the hill, an ambulance sat in the middle of the street with its doors open,
waiting for the Medical Examiner to tell them they could haul the body away.
Liu finished his conversation and gathered
them into a huddle by the grill of the Crown Vic before leading them over to
the accident scene.
“You ready for this?” Liu asked. “You know you can make the ID down at the
morgue on a closed-circuit video screen if you want to.”
“If you didn’t want me to ID the
body, why did you drag me all the way over here?”
“So they could see you.” Liu nodded toward the covey of reporters
now gathered in the middle of the road, held back by the policewoman’s
barricade. “We could issue press releases all day telling them you were alive
and well, but it won’t make more than a passing mention on the news tonight
unless you show up on the scene.”
“Your chief’s okay with that?” MacLeod raised an eyebrow at the detectives.
“Introducing civilians to your crime scene?”
“You’re an expert witness, a consultant…
hell, with your background I could come up with any number of reasons to drag
you out here.” Liu said. “At any
rate, we’re about to wrap here. The ME
only stuck around because I asked her to.”
MacLeod shrugged. The prospect of meeting his doppelganger
posthumously didn’t excite him, but it didn’t bother him that much either. He
had done a stint in medical school and if anything could make a corpse boring,
it was dissecting one every day for a year.
The redhead walked around the car and helped him out. MacLeod resisted the urge to rub his wrists as the cuffs came off. They hadn't really been that tight.
“What’s the story?” he asked.
“What’s the story?” he asked.
Liu nodded to his partner, who
flipped open a notebook and took the question.
“Near as we can figure, the dude
broke into that house up there.” The red
head nodded in the direction of one of the old homes nearby. “Neighbors tell us
the owners are in Hawaii, but we haven’t been able to reach them yet. The place
looked ransacked but nothing looks stolen except some food out of the fridge.”
“That house?”
“Yeah, why?” Liu nodded, frowning at the tone of MacLeod’s
voice.
“It’s strange is all,” MacLeod
frowned up at the Victorian edifice. “I
know the place.”
“How?”
“My great granddad owned it once
upon a time,” MacLeod stared at the house for a moment, lost in thought. “His dad built it with money he bilked out of
honest miners up in the Yukon. It was
left it to me, but I sold it before I left for college.”
“Riiiight,” Liu glanced at his partner. MacLeod’s nonchalance about his family’s
sordid history seemed to put him off-kilter. “There any other Ashleigh
MacLeods in your family besides you?”
“My granddad was my namesake, and
he’s gone,” MacLeod said. “The next
closest male cousin’s name is Edgar.”
“No, I was wondering if maybe the
watch was found in the house,” the detective persisted. “Like that television show where they lay out
all the crap they find in the walls and stuffed under the floorboards of old
houses.”
MacLeod shrugged, he didn’t watch
television.
“Ah,” MacLeod nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
They led him across the road to
where the ambulance was parked, blocking the cameras from seeing the dead body,
which had been bagged and moved to a gurney.
At a signal from Liu, one of the people in the Medical Examiner’s
jumpsuit unzipped the body bag and pulled back the flap.
The dead man was a good twenty years
older than him, which surprised him. Who could possibly… MacLeod’s brain froze
as he studied the man‘s profile for a moment.
There were brown flakes of dried blood in the deep creases of his
face. He could just see the edges of
some sort of heavy scarring.
In the back of his mind, a
long-dormant horror began to stir.
Even with the distortion of the
damage and post-mortem lividity combined with the new array of scars that
hadn‘t been there the last time they’d met. It had been twenty-five years, but
MacLeod knew that face.
“Can I… can I see that watch?”
“You know this guy, MacLeod?” Liu’s
voice was sharp. MacLeod couldn’t look
away from the corpse. His hands were
shaking.
“The watch. Please.”
He knew what it was before the
plastic evidence bag was thrust into his hand.
He didn’t even need to take it out to identify it. It was a plain gold gentleman’s watch, the
weight alone should be enough to tell anyone the case was solid gold. He pressed the button that released the
watchcase and manipulated the evidence bag so that there was room for the cover
to spring open. Under the roman twelve,
the face of the antique watch bore the signature A.W.W. Co, Waltham, Mass in block letters. There was no chain or fob to go with it. His fingers pressed the plastic flat against
the inner wall of the case to better make out the inscription.
Ashleigh James MacLeod, MD
Dum Licet Utere
His vision darkened at the edges,
constrained until all he could see was the Latin epigram engraved below the
name.
Dum Licet Utere
His brain unraveled the neat,
orderly Latin into untidy, evocative, English without his conscious
consent. A voice echoed from his
furthest memories, a whisper as old as time spoke the words. His heartbeat pounded in his ears as his eyes
floated back to the scarred and bloated face of the dead man, drowning out
whatever Liu was saying to him. The Medical
Examiner grabbed his shoulder. MacLeod could see his mouth move, but couldn’t
hear the words.
While time is
given… MacLeod staggered to his feet… use it… He
shrugged off the hands that grabbed at his jacket as he lunged for the nearest
curb.
His hearing and vision returned
after what felt like an hour of floating in a gray fog. The acrid stench of bile and coffee assailed
his nose, combining oddly with the scent of fresh-mown grass. He always skipped breakfast on the morning of
a school visit. All he’d had in his
stomach was coffee.
Strong hands rolled him over onto
his back. Wet blades of grass tickled
the back of his neck as rubbery fingers pried his eyelids open and a shaft of
white light stabbed into his cornea.
MacLeod muttered something he hoped came off as gratitude and pushed the
paramedic away from him as he sat up.
Liu, his partner, a paramedic, and
the man from the ME’s office stood in a semicircle, blocking his view of… of
the body. He refused to touch that
thought yet.
The paramedic was talking.
“…just different seeing them in situ,” her voice sounded
smug. “We get doctors in all the time who
think they’ve seen it all. Half of them
still blow their cookies.”
“Sir, you passed out, you should lie
down until you feel better.” The guy in the ME’s jumpsuit laid a latex-gloved
hand on his shoulder.
“It was just a vaso-vagal reaction,”
he raised his finger where the man had clipped a pulse-oxygen monitor over his
fingernail. The red numbers were slowly
climbing back into the normal range.
“See? I’m fine.”
He was lying.
The monitor couldn’t measure how far
from fine he actually was.
“You okay there, MacLeod?” Liu
called. He held the bagged watch in his
hand, staring down at it. MacLeod
averted his eyes before the detective could look up, catch him staring.
“The vagus nerve gets tripped by
stress and causes all sorts of problems.
Low blood pressure, nausea, vomiting and fainting,” MacLeod spoke to the
ME and the paramedic, not ready to deal with the detective yet. “Vagus is from Latin, it literally means wanderer, because it wanders all over
your body from crotch to cocked hat, as my granddad used to say.” The Paramedic caught the pulse-ox clip
MacLeod tossed at her.
“Should you be doing…” The redheaded detective trailed off at his impatient wave.
In the gap between the detectives he could see the body bag. The thready voice from his memory still
whispered Latin poems in his ears.
“What is it?” Liu looked annoyed and
it took MacLeod a moment to realize his rank of onlookers was also shielding him
from the cameras at the bottom of the hill.
“Weak stomach,” the paramedic
enthused, but Liu shook his head.
“Not this guy, he’s seen more dead bodies in situ than you have,” Liu hooked a thumb at MacLeod. “He’s not telling us something.”
“Dum licet utere.” MacLeod didn’t offer a translation. “The inscription was my great-granddad’s
motto. He had it engraved on the watch
he gave his son - my granddad - when he graduated medical school. Doctor Ashleigh James MacLeod Senior, but since the watch was
engraved before I was born no one had appended that designate to his name yet.”
“So how did this guy get it?” Liu
glanced up at the house, thinking about what his partner had said earlier. “Did he find it in there?”
“No,” MacLeod covered his face with
his hands. “His father gave it to him
when he got his MBA.”
It took Liu only a moment to connect
the dots.
“Jeez, MacLeod,” he turned and
looked at the body for a long moment, noting the facial features, the
similarities. He looked up, horror on
his face. “That’s your old man, isn‘t
it?”
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Pages to Type is a blog about books, writing and literary culture (with the occasional digression into coffee and the care and feeding of giant robots).