Free Critical Space by Greg Rucka Page A

he shook his head slightly and patted my shoulder once. "I'll be outside."
    I stayed standing until he had left and the door was shut.
    "Take a seat, Mr. Kodiak," the second voice said.
    "This is very Tom Clancy," I said. "I'm impressed. Why don't you turn on the lights?"
    "Not yet," the first voice said. "Sit."
    I contemplated staging a minor protest, a stand-in, then realized that would accomplish nothing other than to eventually hurt my feet, and so I finished pulling out the chair and did as ordered. As soon as I was down, there was a soft chirp from the laptop and the clouds and sky disappeared, replaced with a crisp color image of what appeared to be the exterior of some sort of storage facility. The containers were large, painted dark orange, in some sort of compound. The center container had its doors open, and a lot of bright light was shining on the entrance. In the background, above the line of tops of the containers, the sky was the color of an overripe plum.
    "This was taken last night in Dallas," the first voice said. "A rental company called Total Storage. The photograph was taken by the Dallas Police Department."
    There was another chirp; the exterior photograph was replaced by an interior of the container. The colors were vivid but dark, in the way that all crime scene photographs seem under- and overexposed at the same time. The container was large, filled to perhaps half capacity with boxes and crates of varying size. On some of the boxes were brand names I recognized -- Toshiba, Sony, Zenith -- but most were unlabeled. It didn't matter. The boxes weren't the focus of the photograph.
    The bodies were.
    There were three of them, men. They looked to be roughly in the same age group, between late twenties and mid-thirties, and all were similarly dressed in the Texas casual I'd seen so much of when I'd been in El Paso. Cowboy boots, jeans, T-shirts. One of them wore a denim jacket. All had been shot.
    The floor was raked slightly on all sides surrounding a small drain set at the center of the container, designed to keep any water that might leak in from pooling near stored objects. The lights shining on the scene made the blood that had flowed to the drain look like tar.
    From behind the projector one of the two coughed, and the laptop chirped again, and the projector put up a new picture, a close-up of a Hispanic man. He had been shot in the head, from the side, and most of the top of his scalp was missing. It looked like he'd taken the bullet at close range, perhaps even point-blank.
    "Joaquin Esteban Alesandro," the second voice said.
    Another chirp, and the Caucasian man was now painted on the wall. Best as I could tell, he'd been shot four times, a tracking line that ran from the sternum up to the center of the face. The grayish white of bone was visible where a couple of rounds had stripped flesh and gore away. A discarded revolver was on the ground near his right hand.
    "Richard Montrose," the second voice said. "And no, he didn't get a shot off."
    The image changed; the last victim appeared on the wall. Unlike the other two, he lay facedown. The exposure was a little dark, but it appeared he had taken a bullet to the base of his skull. Probably while he had been on his knees.
    "Michael Ortez," the second voice said.
    The laptop chirped; the image dissolved into the Hallmark blue sky and white clouds once again.
    "Never heard of any of them," I said.
    "We doubted you had," the first voice said. Each time he spoke it sounded like he'd just run up a flight of stairs. "The murder weapon was recovered at the scene. A Smith and Wesson Model ninety-nine, nine millimeter. No prints."
    "All three men were suspected by the Dallas PD in a string of burglaries over the last couple of years," the second voice said. "Electronics, vehicles, jewelry, guns -- anything they could sell, but no narcotics, no drugs. Nonviolent offenders, as far as that goes. You following?"
    "I'm following," I said. Funny how the mind works.