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Planes, Trains, & Automobiles


It was late in the afternoon when John Doh exited the taxi outside his apartment building and staggered up the stairs. A heavy carry-on bag weighed down his shoulder while his other hand dragged a massive suitcase behind him. Some day, he noted, he would remember to pack lightly for business trips. At least his building had an elevator.

He fumbled for a moment with the lock on his front door, then opened it and almost fell inside. The interior of the apartment, sparse and small for a man with his salary, was dark; a single bulb over the oven provided all the active light, and that suited Doh just fine. The heavy slat blinds that hung over the balcony doors kept out the trace amounts of sunlight that attempted an assault on the place.

The luggage dropped in a haphazard manner, Doh turned to the living room, where he lit a single pole lamp and picked up the phone. As much as he wanted to crawl into bed and die, he was obligated to call work and check in. As an inspector for the Environmental Protection Agency, he was often required to travel to investigate plans by various corporations. This time his adventures took him to British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Two separate groups of corporations, one topped by British Petroleum, the other by Octan, had petitioned the American and Canadian governments to grant permission to develop natural gas pipelines from the state of Alaska down to the U.S.-Canada border. Both plans relied on convincing Doh that the impact to the environment would be negligible.

Doh had denied both plans. It wasn't that he was a greenie; it was the fact that both pipelines would cause massive damage to the environment in their construction, the BP plan would destroy thousands of acres of pristine Northwest Territories woodlands for example. Both pipelines would also pose a major risk to populated areas, not a good thing in his opinion. Although an overnight courier had delivered Doh's official report already, he was still required to phone his superior at the San Francisco EPA office with his decision.

"John," William McCoy, Doh's boss, was smiling into the phone. Doh didn't have to see him to know he was smiling, McCoy always smiled. McCoy's smile was that of a highschool jock turned salesman, and he had a personality to match. "What's the word, good buddy?"

"You should have my report already," Doh said. McCoy made him nervous. McCoy was massive, straight-toothed, and attractive, a stark contrast to Doh's five-nine frame, thinning hair, and black-rimmed glasses. Where McCoy was Johnny Weismuller in the "Tarzan" movies, Doh was Michael Douglas in "Falling Down."

"Your report's not here yet," McCoy said. "It's probably still making its way through the channels. Have a good trip?"

"It was fine. Somebody rear-ended me while I was in Maple Ridge, but the rental was insured so it was taken care of."

"Good, good," McCoy said. Doh knew there wasn't an ounce of sincerity to it. "So what's the final status in your report, anyway? We're all curious here."

"I said no on both of them," Doh said. "But you know politicians. There's too much money in this. If they absolutely have to approve one, I recommended the BP pipeline. Octan's follows the Alaskan Highway and I don't care what Tony Knowles says, it just poses too great a risk to..."

Doh paused.

The strip curtains covering the doorway to the balcony scarcely allowed light in on their own, but they were suddenly darkened further by a shadow on the balcony. The door slid open, and the curtains parted, letting the shadow's owner into the apartment and into Doh's view.

He was a variety of oriental, Doh could never tell them apart, and dressed in a black trenchcoat despite the torrid weather. He walked leaning forward, like a cat on the prowl. The only balance to his deadly gait was the fact that his shoulders were bunched up, giving him an Igor-ish appearance.

"Who are you?" Doh asked. He was too stunned by his appearance to react any other way.

"I'm your boss," McCoy said through the phone.

"Please hang up the phone," the man in the coat said.

"I don't know who sent you," Doh told him, a slight trembling to his voice. "But my report is already filed with the EPA."

The man cocked his head sideways like a parrot and smiled a thin, malicious smile. He reached inside his coat and produced a green and white envelope. Doh didn't need to touch it to know that it was the report he'd handed to the courier in Maple Ridge two days ago.

"What do you want with me?" Doh asked.

"Doh? Are you all right?" McCoy asked. "Doh? Are you there?"

Still smiling, the man half-limped over to Doh and took the phone from his hand. Without taking his eyes off of Doh, he hung the phone up. He slid his hand into his coat and produced a large, curved knife, which he held up before Doh's face.

It was at this point that Doh let fly with a high-pitched scream.

"I'm telling you, it's the same thing day in and day out," Ford said. "Nothing but dead bodies and murderers and blood. Just once I'd like to cover the Zoo or protect the mayor while he lunched with the Forty-Niners."

"You're a homicide detective," Jake said.

"I know that," Ford said. "I'm just getting sick of these double shifts. Ever since Carlita went on vacation I've had to work both afternoons and evenings."

"Working days isn't bad," Jake replied. "You get out, get to see the sun a little. And witnesses are more likely to talk."

Ford turned the radio on the patrol car dashboard up a little louder and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the catchy Carffee jingle that was playing. Jake, for his part, was irritatingly chipper today. Ford had arrived at the station yesterday to find that not only had Jake returned from the hospital, having fully recovered from his baseball bat-induced concussion, but had also been assigned by Miller as Ford's temporary partner.

"I'm making Cisneros your temporary partner," Miller had told him. "At least until Jones returns. Try not to corrupt him too much."

After promising to keep Jake out of harm's way, Ford checked out a patrol car and they left. Since it was early in the day, at least by Ford's world view, they'd spent the next two hours lunching at Pete's Mongolian Pizza Buffet, just down the street from the Ripley's Museum, before being called out to their first murder as partners. It was a grand day indeed, Ford thought to himself.

"Carffee!" the announcer baritoned. "It's like coffee... but not!"

"The product is bad enough," Jake said. "Their new ad campaign is ridiculous."

"Too Much Carffee Man?" Ford asked. "He's cool!"

"What's with the bottle of Carffee on his head?"

"Because he's a super hero," Ford said, then thought about it. "I'm guessing."

"Is it part of his head or is it a helmet?"

"I dunno," Ford frowned.

As Ford pulled the patrol car off of Lyon and onto Burbank, he frowned again at the thought of the Misery Machine, now currently at Gary's Tow & Fix-it. The van had earned its nickname by virtue of more than just it's green color and resemblance to the van of "Scooby Doo" fame. It had the odd habit of maliciously, and with premeditation, breaking itself in the middle of the night. On more than one occasion, Ford had awakened to find odd bits of motor scattered on the ground and, although they resembled no known parts for a Ford conversion van, the Misery Machine would refuse to start.

This morning, when Ford tried to start the van, the engine made a stifled, constipated grunt, then dropped random parts onto the ground between the front tires and went back to sleep.

"I need a vacation," he told Lorna as she drove him to work in her Volvo. She'd spent the night before at his apartment, as she had the previous two weeks. Prior to that, their relationship was on a proper dating schedule, with very few planned sleep-over parties. Lately, however, and much to Ford's consternation, they'd gotten into a regular routine, and Lorna had spent more and more time at his place.

Her Volvo, coincidentally, had almost twice as many miles as the Misery Machine, yet had never been in for so much as an oil change in the eleven years she had owned it.

"I need to go someplace quiet," he mused out loud when she made no reply to his earlier statement. "Maybe Canada. It's quiet there, right?"

Once at the station, Ford checked out a prowler. He hated driving prowlers, often complaining that they made traffic around him drive at exactly the speed limit. Jake, his newly assigned partner, had a car, but it had no radio in it. Not that Jake would use his '61 Corvette convertible for something as dangerous as police work anyway. The car was barely used to get Jake to and from work.

"You've got a babe magnet," Ford pointed out to him one afternoon. "But you never use it. You don't even take the thing to car shows."

"There are people at car shows," Jake said, as if that answered it. "People have fingers and like to touch things."

"Sometimes I wonder about you," Ford replied.

When they'd arrived at the scene of the murder, the street had already been blocked off by SFPD beat. Ford, oblivious to any sense of order set up by the on-scene crew, pulled right up to the curb outside the apartment building and got out. Mike Webber, one of SFPD's forensic scene analysts, greeted them at the door of the fifth floor apartment.

"Jake, Chris," he said, nodding to each of them in turn.

"What's the word, Mike?" Ford asked.

"White male. 43. Sliced clean and quick with a long, thin blade."

"That's a pretty good guess at the murder weapon," Jake said.

"Not a guess," Weber said, pulling a sealed bag out of a cardboard box. "Murderer left the weapon, like he didn't care if we found it."

"Anything stolen?" Ford asked.

"Not as far as we can tell. The victim's boss was on the phone and may have heard the killer before the phone was disconnected. The woman across the hall heard screaming and called nine-eleven. If the killer did take anything, it wasn't big."

Ford nodded, then walked around the apartment, looking at random things as if they were important. First, he shook the toaster, then ordered a scene analyst to bag the crumbs as evidence. Then, he put on rubber gloves, went into the bathroom, and returned with the plunger.

"There might be evidence on that," he said, handing it to Webber.

"This knife looks asian," Jake said, ignoring him. "Maybe a yak hit?"

"No," Ford said. "It's far too clean for yakuza. Besides, who is this guy? The yak like to hit rich white guys when they're not killing each other or cutting their own fingers off. This guy's got an apartment the size of my van. Where's the body?"

Webber pointed him to the victim, who was lying on his back next to a small end table. Two large, red slashes lined the front of what had once been a white shirt, with a third one across the front of his neck. The phone on the table next to the victim had been hung up, by the killer presumably. As Ford walked over to the table, the phone rang. He slipped on a glove, then picked it up.

"Hello?" Ford said to the phone. "No, I'm sorry, Mr. Doh can't come to the phone right now. He's indisposed. Yes ma'am. Yes ma'am. This is Detective Ford with the SFPD."

Jake and Webber, standing to the side, stopped what they were doing and watched.

"No ma'am, he's not in trouble," Ford continued. "Not with us, anyway. Did Mr. Doh have any enemies that you knew of? Yes ma'am, I know I phrased that in the past tense. Hello? Hello?"

"He's un-freakin-believable," Webber said.

"Yeah," Jake agreed. "It's like watching clowns have sex. It disturbs you to the very core but at the same time you can't stop watching."

"That's exactly it," Webber nodded. "That's Ford to a T."

"Hello?" Ford said, one more time, before hanging up the phone. "She hung up on me."

After carefully setting the phone back on its cradle, he turned his attention to the apartment once more. The curtains on the windows were thick, and they were all drawn. The blinds hanging from the doorway out to the balcony moved in and out on a light breeze.

"Hey, Mike," Ford called. "Scene been touched much since you got here?"

"Other than dusting and bagging, nothing. Why?"

"Well," Ford said, scratching his chin. "Here's a guy who takes pains to block out all the sunlight from the windows - notice the thick curtains on these windows and the blankets in the bathroom and bedroom. Yet he leaves the back door open? Doesn't make sense."

"You think the killer flew in?" Jake said. Some of the officers standing around laughed at the suggestion.

"I don't know," Ford replied. "Jake, why don't you make yourself useful and go get the security tapes."

"Right," Jake said.

His hand still cupped on his chin, Ford pushed through the blinds and out onto the balcony. Burbank was one of any number of thin, wobbly streets in this city, and the older buildings frequently had balconies on the upper levels. Many had fire escapes running up and down them, but Ford couldn't see one on this building. As he looked over the edge of the balcony, his hand rested on a large, tan and white mottled feather. He picked it up and started playing with it absently as he thought.

The apartment was situated at the corner; a lane of trees lined the other side of the street, making up for the noise of Richardson just a block away. Up and over the trees to the opposite end of Richardson was the dome of the Palace of the Fine Arts, a monumentally hideous structure that combined several fine architectural schools without using a single good point of any. However, the museum was in a clear view between the trees and surrounding buildings of the apartment. If someone had climbed up the side of the building to the balcony, it's just possible that the famous "Exploratorium Roof Cam" might have caught it.

"Where you off to?" Webber asked as Ford walked, head down, through the door. Webber was standing next to the book shelf, winding up a toy train with "Skunk Train" written on the side.

"I need some Carffee," Ford said..

"I don't know how you can drink that stuff," Weber replied, shaking his head. Ford was about to reply, then heard the music coming from the toy train.

"This guy's got terrible taste in home decorating," he said, then walked out the door.


Great Christopher Lowell's Ghost!

Corporate conspiracies? Murderous hunchbacks in trenchcoats? Bad parodies of Shannon Wheeler? Where is this all leading?

Our story continues in

Black Gold/Blue Moon, Chapter 4


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About Christopher Ford, Amateur Paranormalist

Christopher Ford, Amateur Paranormalist, is a work of speculative fiction. No philosophies are implied or endorsed by this work. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, except public figures, is purely coincidental and no infringement is intended. All materials on the Christoper Ford page, including text, images, and site design are © 2000/2001 ~Steve-o and may not be reprinted without permission.

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