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an Inspector Stremalon story |
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"What is this?" said Vatilda that evening, frowning fiercely as she studied what she had found on her computer. She was surfing the Internet and had just come across the story of the naked succubus sex slave murders on the police Poindextering site. "Stremalon! This has your name on it! What have you been doing? How do you explain this?"
"It's a Pondextering site," said Stremalon. "Poindextering is - " "I know very well what Poindextering is," snapped Vatilda. "What I want to know is why you have written this, this - this lewd description." And she rapped the computer screen with one scaly claw. "I do wish you wouldn't use your claws on the screen," said Stremalon, pained. "I've told you before, those plastic LCD screens, you can so easily scratch them, they - " "Stop evading the issue!" said Vatilda. For a person who reproduced so often and so readily, she had surprisingly conservative views on sex. "Look!" she said. "Is this your work? Or was it put online by that misbegotten partner of yours?" Stremalon looked, obediently, though he already knew what was there to be read. She was a succubus, a device of flesh made for pleasure, pure and simple. As the intoxicating fragrances of evening swayed the world around her, she drank in, ecstatically, the visionary walls of the Caprice Vaunting area. Damn! Something was missing! A whole bunch of stuff was missing, in fact! The heavy sex scene, the knifing scene, the evisceration scene. It was that deletion-on-upload bug kicking in again, the IT people had sworn black and blue that they had fixed it, but obviously they hadn't. "This is necessary," protested Stremalon. "How can the public have an honest chance to Poindexter if they don't know what's happened?" "It's just gratuitous pornography," said Vatilda. "It was Huckster," said Stremalon. "Huckster did the texting, I'm not responsible for his input." "Oh, don't tell such ridiculous lies," said Vatilda in disgust. "It's all your own work. Giftbox! Come here and see what your lecherous father has gone and done now!" "No!" said Stremalon in alarm. But it was too late. His latest daughter had already scrambled up onto her mother's lap and was speedreading her way through the Poindextering text. "Oh, can I bet, can I bet?" said Giftbox excitedly. "Five dollars on Admiral Gizzard! Yes, and five bucks on his house guest!" "It doesn't work like that," said Stremalon. "Nobody can guess actual individuals. Not at this stage of the game, anyway." Initially, market players were supposed to speculate on the killer's location, ethnicity, age and occupation. The police were supposed to take it from there. Poindextering, after all, was only supposed to be a cheap substitute for the psychic advice that the police had long been in the habit of taking. "The odds aren't very good," said Vatilda, clicking through to the Prime Suspects page. "But I'll give you the money." "This is absurd!" said Stremalon. "She'll be going to school tomorrow," said his wife, tapping at the keys to create an account for little Giftbox and to transfer money to it. "She'll have to know how to handle money by then." "No, I mean it's absurd to be guessing the suspect," said Stremalon. "This early! If ever!" But people were, people were. Why? Then Stremalon realized why. Of course. It was all that controversy over the Computerized Public Scrutiny Scheme being run by Spyglass. It had made Admiral Gizzard one of the most hated men in the city of Krantankertus. The kind of financial voting which had taken Admiral Gizzard to the top of the suspects list did not look like honest guessing. Rather, it looked like a legal way to libel people in public. "It's libel!" said Admiral Gizzard. "That's what it is!" Gizard's voice echoed from the marble walls of Lingus Gastle. Inspector Stremalon's attention was only half on Admiral Gizzard. He was drinking in the interior of the building. The purity of unblemished stonework! This was where Stremalon wanted to live. This was where he wanted to have his - "Are you listening to me?" said Gizzard. "Everyone's a suspect," said Stremalon. "That's the nature of police work." "Then police work is not suitable for Poindextering," said Gizzard. "You mean your hurt feelings are more important than seven dead women?" said Stremalon. "They weren't women," snapped Gizzard. "They were succubi. Meat engines. Drunk half the time, wanton sluts. Made to be ripped open, if you ask me." "I see," said Stremalon, carefully. "I see." Unbeknownst to Gizzard, Stremalon was taping this. As soon as he got back to the office, he would be uploading a transcript of the conversation to the Poindextering site. "Made to be ripped open" - the public wasn't going to like that one little bit. "I hold you responsible for this," said Captain Prim, gesturing at the TV, which was showing pictures of the smouldering ruins of Lingus Gastle. The mob had dispersed, but nobody had yet removed the various pieces of Admiral Gizzard from the tree branches on which they had been impaled. "I was only doing my duty," said Stremalon woodenly. "You murdered him!" said Prim. "You incited the mob and you murdered him!" "If you're going to take that attitude, then I'll claim him as an official kill," said Stremalon. "What do you mean?" said Prim. "You're not going to try and tell me you're under quota, are you?" "I am," said Stremalon. In Torture Mungus, police regulations were very picky. You could get in a lot of trouble if you exceeded your legal limits. However, equally, you would get in trouble if you didn't meet your quota. A mere rookie was tasked with the responsibility of killing only one civilian per year. Because of Stremalon's seniority, however, he was required to kill seven. He was well short of the quota, and, recently, he had become aware that Internal Affairs had started to take an interest in him. "Then how many people have you killed this year?" said Prim. "None," said Stremalon. "None?" said Prim, in astonishment. "Zero," said Stremalon. "Then I think you're in big trouble," said Prim. "You're heading for prison, that's where you're heading. And you know what happens to police officers there." "Yes," said Stremalon, who had good reason to know - the Mincing Machine Murder at Guantanamo had been one of his very first cases. "So," said Prim. "It looks like you're doomed. Well, don't expect me to help you. I'm not going to permit the death credit. You're still seven short. Now get out of here!" Stremalon left Prim's office, and was intercepted by Huckster. "We just got a call," said Huckster, looking tense. "What kind of call?" asked Stremalon. "A place in Qintus Jaftaloo," said Huckster, fumbling out his notebook. "Let's see ... number nine, Yellow Milk Road. There's a succubus there, drunk by the sound of it. Says she just killed a man with an ashtray. Says he was trying to strangle her." Manual strangulation - all seven of the victims in the naked succubus sex slave murders had been strangled to death. But - Yellow Milk Road? That was nowhere near Caprice Vaunting. It wasn't even anywhere near the Jizlam Ova. When they got there, however, everything clicked into place, even before they stepped inside to take a look at the crime scene. Yellow Milk Road ran beside one of the dozens of little canals that branched off the Jizlam Ova. And there was an Elite River Taxis hovercraft moored at the landing just down the steps from number nine. "Admiral Gizzard was an innocent man," said Huckster, somberly, "cruelly murdered by the mob." Inspector Stremalon looked at his partner curiously. Why was Huckster taking this so seriously? Maybe he still valued the sanctitity of human life, or something like that. After all, Huckster had only been working for the Krantankertus police for five and a half years. Stremalon, by contrast, had been doing the same job for close to two and a half centuries, and he no longer took the small stuff so seriously. "Well, anyway," said Stremalon, calmly, "let's go inside and tidy up the details, shall we?" When Stremalon got home that night, a process server ambushed him on the doorstep. The estate of Admiral Gizzard was suing him for having engineered the admiral's unlawful death. In the mail box, Stremalon found a letter from the bank. His credit cards had been cancelled and they were foreclosing on the mortgage. Unless he could refinance, the bank would be sending the bailiffs around in three days to seize possession of the house. Inside, Stremalon found a note from his wife. She had left him, taking their daughter Giftbox with her. She had also taken the TV, the stereo and the matrimonial cactus collection. "That's life, I guess," said Stremalon, and went downstairs to the basement where his illicit billiard table awaited him, the most gloriously perfect table which he had built himself, topping it off with the theoretically unobtainable green baize which he had obtained from Doctor Dicasso. Stremalon chalked a cue (you could buy cues in any local weapons shop), put the balls (which had originally been part of a set of mathematical models) on the table, lined up a shot and smiled. Why was he happy? "Because it's gone past the stage of being manageable," said Stremalon, explaining it to himself. Yes, after two hundred and forty seven years, five months and twenty-three days, life in Torture Mungus had finally succeeded in knocking him down, and was now making ready to trample him. With the result that it was too late to worry. "Bliss in failure," said Stremalon. Since stress was the intrinsic core of life in Torture Mungus, that "bliss in failure" statement sounded uncomfortably close to blasphemy, and Stremalon half-expected Someone or Something to strike him dead with lightning. But nothing happened. So, smiling, he lined up the cue and made his shot. This story, "The Naked Succubus Sex Slave Murders", made its first appearance when posted online by Hugh Cook on 2003 August 03 Sunday. Copyright © 2003 Hugh Cook - all rights reserved. |
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