A Knife in the Dark

Author: Corey McCullough is an independent copy editor, proofreader, ghostwriter, and author. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his amazing wife Vanessa and their two beautiful daughters. His favorite pastimes are reading, writing, playing video games, spending time with his best friend (Vanessa), and, most of all, being a dad. Night lasts for days on the planet Jannix, and when the sun goes down over a city brimming with corruption and organized crime, no one can be certain they will see another dawn. Retired police detective Jack Tarelli has turned to the bottle to cope with these long nights ever since the unsolved murder of his wife, but when he's called to the home of an enigmatic starship tycoon just hours after a high-profile homicide, he knows his longest night yet has just begun. Led on a chase deep into the shadows of a city that never wakes, the hard-nosed and uncompromising Jack finds himself on the trail of a killer whose true motives shrouded. Was it revenge for an interplanetary business deal gone wrong? Or something more personal? As connections to Jack's own bloody past rise to the surface, it becomes clear that this is more than a search for answers. It's a race against time. And the body count is going to rise long before the sun. A Knife in the Dark is a gritty tech noir story combining elements of "used future" science fiction and film noir in a fast-paced, futuristic thriller.

Corey McCullough · Sci-fi

Not enough ratings

41 Chs

Chapter 9: Weapon of Choice

Exiting the factory, I pull up my collar and adjust my hat against the cold rain. I weave through the cops standing guard, leaving them and their patrol cars behind and walking down the street. I'll hail a cab in a minute. Sometimes a walk in the rain does the mind good.

Even though I managed a peek at those pictures, I can't help but wonder how much more I could have learned from a firsthand look at the body. Albright wasn't just in a hurry; he clearly meant to send a message by having it taken away before I got there. To show he wasn't going to be pushed around. I'm just grateful I was able to learn as much as I did.

First impressions: Something strange is going on.

In any homicide investigation, you're generally dealing with one of, or some combination of, three options. Blades, firearms, and particle beam weapons.

Standard pistols, rifles, and shotgun firearms are the most common choice among Amber City killers. "Firearm" is a misnomer. Classic firearms used a spark and flammable powder to create a miniature explosion, propelling a projectile-like a metal bullet-down the length of a gun barrel. Modern firearms, however, use synthetic bullets launched by means of artificial acceleration. The same tech used in the antigravity boosters of automobiles and airships is used to accelerate a slug down the barrel. Rather than the potential energy contained in a shell full of powder, the energy processes are initiated by the weapon itself with a rechargeable power pack. The result is the same, but ballistics is now a science of physics, not chemistry. Antigrav-accelerated bullets are affectionately nicknamed "akslugs," and rather than the explosive bang produced by firearms of yore, the discharge of a power pack is like a whisper, making akslug weapons as quiet as they are deadly.

A smaller percentage of crimes involve particle beam weaponry. Particle beam weapons are deadlier than akslug firearms, but thanks to the higher price tag, fewer make it to the streets. Particle rifles and particle pistols emit charged particles in the form of a concentrated, short-burst beam. These blasts are capable of burning through flesh, bone, and nearly anything else. Where a bullet can rip, tear and destroy, a particle beam will burn and disintegrate matter in its path. They work best at medium range. Beyond that, the beam will bloom, spreading out and diffusing into a less harmful cone of light, then fading away altogether. While these weapons might seem unstoppable, the modern personal magnetic force field-a scaled-down version of the tech used by starship shields-was designed specifically to defend against particle beams. If properly calibrated, a personal force field covers a person's body like a second skin and can defend against a full power pack's worth of point-blank blasts from a particle pistol before needing to be recharged.

In this case, the lack of burns rules out particle beams; no need to scan for radiation. Nathan Harland's knees and elbows were all but destroyed, leading me to believe that the killer used either an akslug shotgun, or a handgun at very close range.

This was not a dispute that got hot or a stick-up gone wrong. Nathan Harland was killed with calculated, carefully chosen shots. Nathan Harland was not murdered. He was executed.

Content with my walk in the rain, I wave my hand over a nearby signal pylon. It illuminates with white light, and within seconds, a set of headlamps breaks off from the zigzagging traffic lanes high above to come whizzing down in my direction.

Typically, the next step in the investigation would be to case the neighborhood, ask a lot of questions, search around, that sort of thing. Like Albright said, there's no one around here but vagrants and drug addicts, but they can be valuable sources of information. Now's not the time, though, because four big men in trench coats have been following me since I left the factory. And they're getting closer.

I don't think they're cops, and I don't know what their game is, but I'm not sticking around to find out. Against one, maybe even two, I might try my luck. But four to one? Unfair odds for any man.

As the cab lowers to a hover beside me, I hazard a glance over my shoulder just in time to see them take a seemingly casual turn down an adjoining alley. I step into the cab and shut the door, and we take off.

"Take her down a couple blocks, then circle back," I tell the driver. "Nice and slow."

When we come back around, I press my nose against the glass, trying to see down into the street below. The signal pylon is dark; they didn't hail a cab to follow me. That's about as much precaution as I can take, so I give the driver an address a couple streets down from home, and he redirects the cab toward the other end of town for some much-needed sleep. I wish I was still young enough to pull all-nighters, but a guy needs his rest.

PREV INDEX Next