Monsters Got Blamed for Murder, So I Relived the Victim's Last Hour novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Directive Seven
A Crack opens on the morgue dock as a block club carries in a murdered shot-caller, Halina reads his last hour, and she writes HOMICIDE over the Bureau's order while the killer stands in her doorway: "You haven't opened him yet."
The hum reached the loading dock before the pickup did.
I felt it in my back teeth first, a note too low to hear, and then in the soles of my shoes.
It was 1:51 on a Sunday morning, and I was waiting on the Cook County morgue's dock for a dead man.
Eight years ago this month the first Crack had opened in a truck-stop lot in Joliet.
Since then the county had logged about six hundred a year, in sidewalks, basements and parking lots, and every one let something through.
Whoever stood nearest did the shooting.
The night diener set her hand flat on the dock rail.
She had wheeled the dead across this dock for thirty-one years.
"Ninety seconds," she said, "and he isn't even inside yet."
A pickup swung in off Harrison Street with HONORE STREET BLOCK CLUB hand-painted on the door.
Five men stood in the bed with rifles, and at their feet lay a body wrapped in a church quilt.
That was Terrence Bayne, fifty-one, who had run the club's Crack-watch rota for twelve years.
His paperwork was already on my clipboard, written by the Fissure Bureau in the first winter.
Any death at a Crack was monster-related, with no autopsy and a yellow tag, and a Bureau courier cremated the body inside seventy-two hours.
The county signed because the Bureau paid it eleven million dollars a year.
Bayne had been dead four hours, because the club had sat with him in their church and refused the courier.
Between the pickup and the dock, a hairline seam drew itself across the asphalt and began to glow blue.
It widened to a finger's width.
The first fold came out flat as newsprint and stood up thick.
It was the size of a calf, hairless and gray-pink, its hide ridged in welts, and its mouth opened in three hinged plates.
Under its jaw hung a milky gland the size of a plum, the pearl, which a licensed buyer paid nine hundred dollars for.
The men in the truck bed opened fire.
Deloris Cato dragged me down behind the autopsy cart and then went for the cage where the county kept its twelve-gauge.
A Bureau examiner had rated me Class B, support, no combat value.
He was right, so I stayed down.
Over the cart's edge I watched the retired Marine with the bad leg put two rounds into a fold's jaw hinge.
At 2:17 a white frost line ran down the seam, and the Crack sealed.
A Bureau pickup rolled in ninety seconds later, because a tag crew waited at every firehouse.
The man who climbed out wore an orange vest and carried a tag gun on one hip.
On the other hip hung a steel drag hook with an orange handle.
He ran a wand over each carcass, clipped on a numbered ear-tag, and counted aloud.
"Forty-one eight-ninety-two. Ninety-three."
He chewed a cinnamon toothpick and nodded to the club men.
My phone buzzed at 2:31.
"Colleague," Dr. Pashek said, "Honore Street has delivered a Directive case."
"You will not touch him. The courier takes him at six."
I went into the cold room anyway, because I had seen the wound in Bayne's side when they lifted him out.
My skill was called Last Hour.
With my bare hand on the dead, I lived their final sixty minutes through their own senses, in eleven minutes of my own.
In four years I had used it twice, on a shooting victim and on a child, and I still carried both of them.
I peeled off my right glove and laid my fingers on Bayne's wrist, and a window opened in the air for me alone.
[Halina Mroz. Contract deputy examiner.]
[Last Hour, Level 1. XP: 0 of 300.]
[Carried: 2 hours. Capacity: 12.]
The XP had said zero for four years, because I had never once tried to prove what I saw.
Then the cold room went away.
It was 8:34 on Saturday night, and I had his eyes, his hands and his bad left knee.
Bulbs were strung between the porches on Honore Street, and a plate of ribs sat in his hand.
A hum box squealed on a neighbor's porch.
"Cards up," he said, and the whole block moved, children down into basements and men up onto stoops.
The seam opened between a Buick and a Silverado at 8:41, and eleven folds poured out.
He shot low, at the jaw hinge, the way he had taught half the block.
A boy of fourteen on the neighbor's steps dropped one with a .22, and Bayne said "Good," and felt it all the way down.
At 9:04 the frost ran.
He wrote the count in a spiral book with carbon paper under the page.
Eleven folds at four hundred dollars of Bureau bounty each, for the club's roof.
At fold seven he stopped.
A gold band sat on its left forefoot, grown so far into the toe that the bone had closed around it.
He cut it loose with his pocketknife and read it under his glasses.
Inside the band was engraved D+K 6-14-14.
"That's the ring off the flyers," he said aloud, and I felt his chest go tight.
The man on those flyers had been missing since March, and his wife had papered the block with his picture.
A man in an orange vest stood over the carcass, chewing a cinnamon toothpick.
"I'll need that logged, Mr. Bayne," said the tagger.
"It goes to his wife."
"Of course. Bring it to the truck and I'll wand it for you."
Bayne tucked the ring in his work glove instead.
In the book he wrote: Found, ring, left forefoot, grown in, D+K, tag 41,887.
At 9:25 he tore the carbon sheet loose and pressed it into Deloris's hand as she left for her shift.
She tucked it in her purse unread.
At 9:34 he stepped into the alley behind the neighbor's garage to call the missing man's wife.
The tagger followed him in.
"A word about the ring," the tagger said.
The hook went in under Bayne's ribs on the left, four steel tines one inch apart, and I felt each one.
The tagger took the ring out of his glove and the spiral book out of his shirt pocket.
"Nobody looks at a Crack kill, Terrence," he said, almost gently.
Bayne's last want was for the wife to have that ring, and for Deloris to have her pages, and he was glad of the pages.
Then the cold room came back, and I was kneeling on the tile with my hand still on his wrist.
[Carried: 3 hours. Capacity: 12.]
All of it was true, and none of it would ever count as evidence.
The man from the alley was out on my dock right now, tagging the last fold.
On my clipboard, the cause of death was already typed: MONSTER-RELATED (DIRECTIVE 7).
If I left it, Terrence Bayne would be ash by Tuesday, and the man with the toothpick would tag the next Crack.
If I crossed it out, the Bureau lost its cremation and Pashek risked his eleven million.
My one-year contract, which ended October 31, would end sooner.
The contract also carried my county health plan, which paid my mother's arthritis prescription, thirty-eight dollars a month.
I stood, crossed out MONSTER-RELATED on the steel counter, wrote HOMICIDE, and signed it at 3:04.
The cold room door opened behind me.
"Doc?" said the tagger, a clipboard of his own in his hand. "Bureau needs your signature on the transfer."
His eyes went to my form on the counter and stopped there.
I watched him read the one word I had written, and I smelled cinnamon.
"You haven't opened him yet," he said.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend