Chapter One-Death Letter Blues

The Mojave Blues

by

DS Baker.

Chapter One.

“I got a letter this mornin, how do you reckon it read?

It said, "Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead"

I got a letter this mornin, I say how do you reckon it read?

You know, it said, "Hurry, hurry, how come the gal you love is dead?"

Death Letter Blues by Son House.

As much as I love Las Vegas, there is nothing sadder than a Mojave Desert Town in the middle of winter. Most of the trees look like dead arms sticking out of the ground. Then there is the wind. Montana might get snow tail high on a tall bear, but down south the wind blows from the end of November to the first of May. All the south facing fence lines accumulate the detritus or flotsam and jetsam casino fun books and cast off cabaret fliers generate. By February there are little multicolored confetti rainbows of litter telling you of who has the best sex show or the cheapest hot dogs all over the town.

Sitting behind the Steam Engine Casino off of Boulder highway with their backs facing Lamb Blvd, sits the Parkdale Housing tract, an oasis of normality in an otherwise slanted town, with solid clean mid sixties ranch style homes shivering in a cold Mojave winter's night.

Twenty seven thirty three Lawndale St at four forty five AM January seventeenth, was just an average place, with a winter dead yard full of manicured crab grass and a skeletal fruitless mulberry tree with crazy women's hands rocking in the breeze.

  Karen Kitowski was feeling contented. The kids were for once on their best behavior. No screaming or fighting over who got to play with the Christmas puppy or running and telling her of the misdeeds of the other. She and Robert had gotten up early in the morning and even though it was going on bedtime she was still warm inside from their love making. It had been a good day.

     The Kasha and Pierogi comfort food her Chicago Polish Grandmother had taught her, had gone over really well in the cold evening, and everyone had decided to call it a night worn out from a winter’s day of work and school. Robert put the kids to bed as she finished up their dinner dishes.

     Later she put on Robert's favorite flannel nightgown of her’s and she snuggled into bed with her husband’s arms wrapped around her. It felt like she had been asleep for hours when some sort of strange music woke her up.

     At first she only thought she had heard it in her dreams. Like a sort of residual song echoing in her head. It was a soft reedy sound coming from her living room. It called to her. She tried waking up Robert but he only snored louder than he usually did. She felt this growing panic in her breast, which began to fight the need to see what was making the noises she was hearing. She didn't know what it was but it made her fear for her family. 

     She fought the alluring hypnotic sound as long as she could. Nothing she did seemed to wake her husband up. The compulsion only grew stronger inside of her. She crawled from her marital bed and walked silently down the hallway past her children’s bedrooms making sure each bedroom door was shut tight. Past their bathroom and there, just there at the end of the hallway was a soft glow of light. As if several candles were lit. The flickering light reminded her of the prayer candles at St Viator's where they attended.

     She heard the song again and against her will her limbs seemingly moved of their own free willful purpose, she stepped around the corner into the soft light of a dozen glowing black candles. Standing in the middle of this circle of light was a man. A obviously naked man, she thought at first, then Karen rapidly changed her mind.

    He was an absolute horror. There were two orbs of jet in place of eyes, and he said, simply and clearly, “You are mine!”

     Oh my god! She thought, or screamed in her head. She couldn’t make a noise. Her throat had seized clenched tight.

  His head rotated back and forth examining her in an animal sort of way as he approached her, it looked like his skin had been peeled from his body.
  No! Ohmygod! He is wearing someone's skin!
     The flayed hide hung around this monsters neck like a cape.
  Oh! Jesus No! Karen Kitowski screamed in her head as warm urine ran down her leg as this red demon’s bloody barbed wire encrusted hands reached for her...

****

There was nothing to set it apart from any of the other houses, with two exceptions. The outside Christmas lights were still up and shining, because the children loved the lights, and a monster had come calling in the dead hours before dawn. While the father and two small children had slept, the wife and mother of this small family had been brutally tortured, crucified and then eviscerated.

****

Robert Kitowski a local plumber-pipe-fitter awoke after his fingers had been dipped in something warm, which in turn had made his kidneys send a warning signal to his brain, he needed to pee. He rolled over on his side and put his feet down on the carpeted floor. For some reason the smell of iron and copper hung in the air of his bedroom like a fine fog, it made his nose itch. His eyes were heavy and didn't want to open or register what he was seeing.
"God damned! I feel like I have a hangover!"
It didn't register this smell. It just made his nose itch. Kitowski looked over his shoulders where his wife Karen should be lying and didn't see her. He turned on the bedside lamp and his world came abruptly to an end. There hanging above their marital bed, was his wife pinned to the wall like a human butterfly. He lost control of his bladder and he voided himself.

Her breasts had been removed, her lips cut away from her face. She had been crucified to the wall above the headboard with railroad spikes. And as a final insult she had been gutted like a trout. Her internal organs and intestines made a gross waterfall of human misery onto the bed. Robert Kitowski let out a silent scream as his wife's eyes made contact with his and tears began to run down her cheeks as she died. At that exact moment two men in business suits burst through their bedroom door with guns drawn.

****

My name is Marcus Greene, and my partner Leo O'Brian arrived ninety seconds after whoever had teleported out thanks in part to our wormhole detection equipment monitoring the Vegas valley area. We had been alerted an unauthorized pirate portal had been generated. No sooner than we had arrived, Robert Kitowski attacked my partner. We knew he was not the culprit. Not unless a pipe fitter had suddenly developed a level of technology 40 years more advanced than what 99.57% of the planet was capable of developing. I shot him with a stun round from my service weapon and eased him to the ground.

As an officer of an as yet publicly disclosed government agency, (Inter-Dimensional Police Force) I have broad reaching powers, with a massive depth of technology to draw on. Because of certain codicils and treaties, my department has the ability to make things disappear from the public view or make it so a person disappears from society.

My DA or digital assistant, sent through our shared private communications channel, <Marcus we need to get the survivors or family members out of here!>
I instantly agreed and soft popping noises of displaced air could be heard in the background as two children were 'ported out of their warm beds. The Kitowski family had just unwillingly entered into the hardest to crack witness protection program in the universe. When we make you disappear, it is as if you have never been born. In the case of murder, the IDPF automatically sets up witness protection protocols. If at a later time things have stabilized then they are returned to their normal lives if at all possible. Thinking about it in the moment, it didn't look like this was going to be the case, and I thought our Digital Assistant's made the right decision.

Leo and I, we are interdimensional cleaners. Some call us cops. We call ourselves the janitors. Thanks to the killer, we had one hell of a mess on our hands to clean up this morning. Getting the innocents out of the way was the first step in containing and cleaning what he had left us. It started like most of my days, early. The before dawn kind of early. I got up, got dressed. Did the three “S” of basic body maintenance, and kissed the wife and my sleeping daughter as I walked out the door and got in my truck. I drove across a deserted and shut down Vegas at 04:00 something AM. The strip may not sleep but the suburbs roll back the sidewalks precisely at 10:30 and the people living here are not seen again, until the sun comes up over Frenchman's mountain. I made all my lights and managed to stop off at Hank's on the Corner of Nellis and Boulder Highway, where I picked up a dozen heart attack pills for the office. Headed down Boulder Highway to Charleston Blvd and north to the FBI building on Charleston one block east of Sixth Street.

The day shift doesn't officially start until 06:00 AM PST. Leo and I come from the old school way of thinking. Fifteen minutes early, you are on time. Thirty to forty minutes or so, gives you time enough to read the newspaper, eat a doughnut, drink a cup of coffee and have a smoke before getting down to the nitty gritty of the day.

After pulling into the FBI parking lot, I walked in and said hello to the swing shift receptionist Bob, who although he has known me for five years kept a finger on the trigger switch of a mini claymore mine embedded in the front of his desk. Performed a retinal scan to prove I am who I say I am. Offered Bob a doughnut. He took a jelly filled. Deposited my sidearm in the pass through and walked through the sally port as the scanner checked me for anything that shouldn't be there. I Grabbed my weapon, the glazed fat pills, and walked to the conference room door.

Punched the appropriate code into the keypad and stepped through the threshold portal into our real headquarters underneath the Weapon Gunnery Range at Nellis Air Force Base some fifty miles south by south east And said,“Babalooo...! I am Home Leo! Leo You Got Some Spaining to do!”

Leo as I surmised was already in the break room making coffee for the two of us. Just as I crossed the threshold, alarm klaxons began their electronic hooting noise. Someone or something had just made a pirate jump into or out of our reality. We were a long way away from having total portal control on Terra number nine hundred and thirty seven, but we had passive sensors located all over the planet and in near earth orbit. So something moved we knew about it. We just couldn't stop it yet. Leo beat me out of the break room at a dead run heading for our control station.

This being Vegas station, nothing seemed to be too outrageous or maybe the outrageous was now the mundane. Vegas had always been the place where scumbags and the criminally insane fled to, only now they were coming from multiple realities.

Thanks to risky experiments done by ultra black R&D experiments at the tail end of the cold war, we the USA had opened a portal transmission to the rest of the Terran Federation of Aligned Realities, which in turn ensured we were now getting head cases from nine hundred and thirty six systems and over five hundred squib or partial worlds that existed in the quantum foam between the different realities.

IDPF was what was stenciled on the back of our assault overalls and tactical jackets. It was our job to keep the peace and give this version, of the old blue marble a chance to get used to the idea that we are the junior partners in a firm that was over half a million year old.

I dropped the doughnuts in the break room and ran after my partner to the ready room. Leo O'Brian had beat me there, and he was standing with his hands placed on either hip, studying a GPS readout of the Vegas Valley area.

He looked at me and said, “Dunno what it is mate, but something with a truly wonky signature just went off behind Boulder highway in East Vegas.

We have an internal surgically implanted device lodged in our Mastoid bone and a very small neural net processor unit.

A soft ping announced a message, <Lt. Green?> Our Station Artificial Intelligence Officer Sibylline commed me on my mastoid channel.

<Yes, ma'am?>

<I am sending the coordinates to your DA unit Max. Do you wish to travel directly to the location?Or do you and Sgt. O'Brian wish to travel in your vehicle?> Sibylline said in her smokey Creole New Orleans accented voice. If Bourbon and silk could have a sound it would be our station's AI's voice.

<Directly ma'am if that is not too much of an issue?> I said as I made hand gestures to my partner. We have worked together for the past five years. We use an abbreviated form of American sign language. It cuts down on a lot of unnecessary chatter.

We walked over to the transitional portal chamber we use. One of the first agents at Vegas Station had been a Brit with a wry sense of humor, who had painted the chamber to look like an antique Blue British Police Box.

Max my Digital Assistant who is also an artificial intelligence, started making this whooshing noise in my mastoid implant, which sounded exactly like the noise the blue police box made in the TV show, and then overlaid it on a tract by some glam rocker from the seventies. I told him to shut it down or I would make a toaster out of him. He turned up the volume.-Bastard.

Upon arriving Leo and I drew our service weapons and walked quietly throughout the house clearing one room after another. Over the secure channel Leo, myself and our two DA's share, I could hear his assistant Molly reciting the Lord's prayer softly in the background. Max was softly cursing in Yiddish and Hebrew. The smell of death and blood spilled permeated the air.

I opened the door to the master bedroom, and saw Mr. Kitowski sobbing in mute horror at the spectacle of his crucified and mutilated wife. He saw us standing there and with a strangled cry launched himself at us. I shot him with a stun round and caught him as he fell.

Leo's eyes went from warm brown to obsidian. His face lost all expression, and his lips thinned out as he clamped them tightly together. I looked him in the eye made a nodding gesture and stepped over the prone body of Mr. Kitowski. I walked into the bathroom and emptied my stomach of anything I had yet to digest in the past 12 hours. Leo shortly followed suit.

One of the beautiful things about having digital assistants work with you, who are in fact granted the same policing powers and responsibilities the bipedal meat sacks have, they can make stuff happen while you are focused on the task at hand or busy tossing your cookies all over someone's bathroom.

Max and Molly grabbed both of the kids in transportation bubbles. David aged nine years and his sister Susan aged seven ere both ported directly to a warm set of beds in our infirmary section of headquarters. There Shramertz our stations dedicated medico was waiting on them and was ready to calm two small kids who might not understand why they were waking up in someplace other than home. Mr. Kitowski on the other hand, was ported to Bona Dea mental hospital in the Terra prime system number zero, zero, one.

Sibylline had called one of our best agents, agent Jan Downs and had her ported directly from her condominium, as we sealed off the house and property. She and her digital assistant Zachary, coordinated with our assistants and she began the process for recording and assessing the crime scene.

Leo and I, went to the back door and opened it up and made sure there would be only one entrance and exit from the Kitowski's home for us to potentially contaminate.

Jan Downs had been a US Army Captain in military intelligence, working out of a shit hole operations center in Northern Iraq that was so bad it gave shit a bad name. She could crack the hardest bent nosed Fedayeen Baathist on the planet without breaking a sweat. She had an intuitive side to her personality that allowed her to have a feel for what happened, and how it happened at a crime scene that bordered on the super natural. She had stepped through fields of dead bodies at ethnic kill sites without so much as flinching. Walking into the Kitowski's bedroom she took one look at Karen pinned to the wall and ran to the bathroom.

I looked at her as she came out to the hallway where Leo and I were standing and said, “Funny Jan, I had the same reaction.”

We walked back into the bedroom. The three of us were making hard eye contact with each other as we stood at the foot of the bed. None of us wanted to look up. And yet... we were compelled. The only word I can use is, compulsion. Against our will we gazed at the horrific martyrdom of Karen Kitowski. Her death affected all of us in a way that (we collectively meaning all three of us) had never experienced before.

Leo looked at Jan and I and said, “Right. I am going to take this confabulation back out to the hallway.” He promptly spun on his heels and walked out of the room Jan and I quickly followed suit and marched after him. We had Sibylline put in a call to our forensic specialist and coroners. I began making phone calls. I called our station commander Major Casey and made a situational report of what we knew, what we didn't know. I didn't even bother giving a suspected idea of who or why, it was just such a bizarre tableau. Whatever it was about this crime was really sticking to us.

Finally it got so bad this creeping feeling of overwhelming dread, the three of us finally had to pull out of the house proper and go stand on the back porch. There was a this sense of an expanding bubble of evil, seeming to emanating from the crime scene.

LG Vernon is a tall angular woman with black hair, two big dark brown eyes behind even bigger pair of glasses, which gave the appearance of an Owl looking for every detail. Most people forget an Owl is the most successful avian predator on the planet. Vernon who was once a border patrol officer down on the US/Mexico border, had on more than one occasion been engaged in firefights with Narco-Traffico Gangs. After taking an AK-47 round to the vest, during a remarkable cross border incursion, which culminated in her giving three pieces of filth, tickets to the bone shed; Vernon decided maybe a change in career might be in order. I don't know how exactly she got recruited out of her offices in Wyoming but, she was here with her floating robotic crime scene processor. She immediately went to work processing the crime scene. Once activated it floated off on an antigravity field and began digitally scanning the entire house from kitchen door to murder scene. Green and red lasers projected from it as it began humming along. Vernon, stood at a workstation which had unfolded from the cargo container her CPU or Crime Processing Unit had come in. We used to kid her and ask if it spoke the binary language of moisture evaporators. But no one was kidding this morning. We were barely talking to each other.

Marko Rodic our on-call coroner had once been a recon commander in the Samothracian Polity wars of '97, nailed what it was that was bothering us as he walked over to where Leo, Jan and I were standing. “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” He paused for a moment as he wiped his face with a handkerchief, “ Boys I hate to tell you this but you got Pharmakia working here.” he said wiping his sweating face, as he fingered a set of prayer beads hanging from his right arm.

Leo looked at him and said, “Pharma whatsit?”

“Pharmakia. The Grecian word for Witchcraft, Sorcery, bad juju, whatever the hell you want to call it. Been awhile since I smelled magic, but once you do, you never forget it. The killer hexed that woman and anyone who would come in contact with her. He crossed himself in the Eastern Orthodox fashion.

Up to this point, magic and me had not been good friends. However I had married a fairly powerful magic user. Which constantly caused me to challenge the 'reality' I know, the one that is possible and the one directly in front of me. I had seen strange things happen in the past five years. Strange enough to know magic worked. Knowing it worked and being comfortable with it are two completely different fur coats all together. In our line of business, when the coroner tells you a body has been cursed or hexed, you listen to them.

Which as far as my partner Leo was concerned explained why everyone was so shaken up by the crime scene. View enough murders, car accidents, suicides...dead bodies, and seeing another corpse can be disturbing but usually not enough to cause everyone who see's it to go puke their toenails up. The really bad murders take on a surreal cast like you are looking at a movie or special effect exhibition. They did not as a rule cause everyone involved to become ill. I had another call to make. Rodic wasn't going to remove the body from the location until our Vernon our CSI expert finished.

Inspector Vernon pulled the three of us together, after giving Rodic and his team the OK to pull Mrs. Kitowski down off the wall into a body bag.

Vernon said to us, “Look folks like you have a very seriously deranged bad guy. The blood angels on the wall were caused by compressive forces on Mrs. Kitowski's body. Yes he literally squeezed the blood out of her skin. I don't know how he did it without waking everyone up for six miles, but he tortured that poor woman and only at the last second did he gut her. Even with the mutilation of her gender, she was alive. He crucified her and then slit her open like a carp. There are no, as in nada, nothing in the way of DNA that doesn't belong to the Kitowski's. Furthermore we tested the age of the blood by comparison and found out he carried her around the house like a human stamping machine and eventually moved her into the bedroom. This guy besides being sick, has phenomenal strength. As strong as at least three men. Could be drug induced or something else. But he used her like a rag doll. ”

As Inspector LG Vernon stood there telling us, what she had discovered, her right hand had grabbed her antique Colt M1911 .45 on her belt and was reflexively gripping and squeezing the weapon's checkered walnut grip.

She commed her own AI who was sitting like a piece of toast in the top of her portable forensics processing unit, and “Bill” began downloading their joint report to our DA's and to Sibylline back at the station.

She finished running through the highlights of her report and looked at us and said, “Jesus. Been a long time since I felt like I needed the services of a priest. Y'all go easy. You have my report.” With clenched teeth, she and her floating arsenal of crime fighting awesomeness packed up their gear, folded their tent and got the hell out of Dodge as fast as they could.

Luckily for me, my phone call had reached a poker playing buddy of mine, and he agreed to come to the scene. Although I can tell you I anticipated monumental amounts of bitching and sniveling.

Dr. Yueh Chen was to all practical appearances an aged Chiropractor and Acupuncturist who had an office on West Sahara and Rainbow. What he was in reality was a freelance magic user who once was an IDPF undercover agent in the non-aligned Squib Worlds. He consulted with us on the odd case.

Ten years ago he showed up in Vegas, and decided to officially retire. But being Han, the idea of retiring equaled being dead. So he started up his own stick 'em with needles and bone popping operation. He was actually quite good at it. I would go in for adjustments and a game of poker with him at least once a month. It wasn't too long we were both too deep into each others pockets to pay off our gambling debts and for all intents and purpose we had a quasi familial relationship. My daughter called him Uncle Chen.

Dr. Chen was also my conduit into all things magical in and out of my father-in-laws court. Four years ago, a year into my first tour of duty when I had been a young idealized agent, I met a lovely Chinese lady in London at a symposium. I killed a Svandarsk Assassin Troll sent to kill her, and six months later we are married. It was only after we got married in the Guildhall in London did I find out the man wearing the Savile Row suit glaring daggers at me was in fact the Emperor of Wuhan. No pressure there, or the Lady I was married to was his heir and diplomatic representative.

I heard a loud popping noise, like some kid popping a large wad of bubblegum in their mouth, when Max chimed,<Yueh is here.>

Sure enough, A seedy white haired Asian man had appeared on the back porch with us. Yueh looks like the actor who played the bad guy in “Big Trouble in Little China.” He was dressed in his normal attire. A white lab coat with his name written on it and his signature ugly, and I mean butt ugly Hawaiian print shirt, a baggy pair of what used to be called Gurkha cargo shorts and thin little flip flops. It didn't matter if if was a hundred degrees out or thirty, this is what he wore. He also kept a cigarillo lit all the time. His smokes always smelled of strawberries. He claimed it helped him concentrate. The only thing different in his appearance today, he was carrying his demon hide leather bag. Imaging a horrible demon face which had been skinned off of its skull with hair still attached and turned into a bag. Yeah grotty gerbil boogers doesn't cover how ugly his bag is.

“Ni Hao Ma?” He asked as he started to walk towards me and then stopped dead in his tracts vibrating like a tuning fork. “Yen Lo Wang!” He cursed. Calling on the King of the Dead is not something one does normally in Han culture on this reality or any other.

“Damn and blast Marcus, I got bad news for you and yours.”

“Yeah? What's the skinny?” I asked as I watched him sit down heavily on a faded white plastic lawn chair.

“Marcus, I know this scumbag. I have traced this guy before. He got away from me in '88. This is a serial rapist murderer who is wanted on nine systems. Goes by the name of Michael d'Amour aka The Surgeon. Likes to torture his victims, we thought then and I continue to think he is a psychic vampire. Feeds off of his victims emotions and pain. He is a real sick twist. Got barb wire running through his brains. Last I heard through the grapevine he had been investing some serious stalking time in the Scandinavian countries. But by then I was working the diplomatic scene over at your Father-in-law's court.”

“Can you canoodle his noodle and back track his jump?”

“Not this time. Not with this sick boy. I got caught flat footed on this one. I need to be prepared. And I don't want to more's the point. Even if you got me reactivated, this guy is nuts, as in a poster child for evil. In fact I know some imps of hell who have picked up pointers from this guy. Everyone of his jumps I tried to follow, had booby traps and active defenses; he is a real rare breed of cat. He is a hybrid. Extremely rare. He uses magic and technology combined. Generally people are inclined to one or the other. Working both seems somehow counter-intuitive. But this freak has learned to do both.”

The three of us, Leo Jan and myself stood around for a few minutes cursing and venting. Real tension had built up and even with my implants, I had tightness in the back of my neck that was working itself into a full on migraine. Everything was going gray. Yueh walked up to me and grabbed my face. Using his thumbs he pulled down the lower lids of my eyes and glanced into each one. He then felt my neck and jawline, gently turning my head from side to side. He then repeated the process with Jan and Leo.

Reaching into his disgusting Demon bag he pulled out a jar of Dr. Yueh Chin's patented Heavenly Simple Holistic Peppermint Candies of Peace and Contemplation, and handed us each one and told us to put them in our mouth. We did so and the stress and horror of the morning's events began to fade away.

“Make sure you pass these around to all the people who were here this morning.” Yueh said as he handed Jan the jar, closed his bag and started to walk away.

“Wait that's it?” I asked starting to feel like I was getting the brush off.

“No its not it! I worked with an Orthodox Priest out of Novo Kosovo named Zimke. He made Deacon Detective, working against Turkomen Necromancers on #642. I'll call him and tell him you need to have his services. The kids a stomping battle magus.” He said without missing a beat as he walked out into the backyard of the Kitowski's, and began pacing out a circle in the dead crabgrass, equal distance between two Elms with skeletal branches which for some reason reminded me of a dead woman's hands.

I was pissed off and angry for reasons at the time I couldn't quite qualify. “That's it? You are going to walk away from this? You know we don't have any available magus working out of Vegas.” I all but yelled into his face.

Yueh stood quietly rigid for a moment, with his eyes a million miles away and then slowly with a great deal of control, said with very pronounced enunciation, “Marcus when I investigated this bastard back in the eighties, I almost died three times. Three times he came within a hair's breadth from removing my head from my shoulders. I will call Zimke and do some snooping around on the side. But I was retired when you called me, and if anything, I am just as retired now. Good day.” And with that he summoned a traveling circle and faded from view.

We pulled up the Kitowski's lawn chairs Jan, Leo and I. We put our digital assistants in a circle on the cheap plastic outdoor table and began comparing notes on what we had. The real turd floating in the punch bowl was this “Michael d'Amour or The Surgeon” had obviously been around for a while and had been smart enough to shuck and dive his way out of getting slotted by one of our own.

<Max? What can you dig up on this A-Hole?>

<Not much Marcus. There are reports discussing his activities in Europe, but for some reason, I can't access them, nor can Molly. They are locked out at a much higher classification than any of us present have the clearance for.>

<Can you send out a query to Major Casey?>

<Molly has already done so, and I am sending out request for information from the Stockholm Station. As they are the station having jurisdiction.> Max replied with his efficient professional middle management voice he uses when he is actually working on a case.

And unlike a Television Show, we didn't have a window of time like 48 hours to track down a killer this involved magic and a wormhole. There would be no rousting out the usual suspects. The three of us sat around for a half an hour or so, going over what we did and didn't know. Compiled it all into a report and filed it with IDPF HQ in Terra zero, zero, one. And cc a copy to our own station. Leo and Molly called in a crew of Cleaners and secured the house. 

The cleaners who showed up were contractors called the O'Sullivan Brothers out of South Boston. They pulled the carbon monoxide poisoning trick on the neighborhood, and made it look like they had hauled four bodies out. Leo acted as a Sheriff's Deputy and locked down the house. And that was the end of a most unsatisfactory day.

****

I stood in the backyard and looked at the Kitowski's home. It was going on Two PM in the afternoon and the outside was lit in the peculiar cast of light only found in the Mojave during the winter. Where it seems like it is perpetually morning here until the Sun slides behind the Spring Mountain range. Until a Devil decided to call this was until this bright shiny morning a real home. There were kids toys on the back porch, a small shed in the back corner of the yard which butted up against Lamb Blvd. The grass (all Crab by the way) had been cut back before winter had turned it to the color of hay. There were roses along three sides of the fence. All neatly trimmed and in planters with edging. The fence on the property was old but maintained, and there was even a BBQ grill that was clean and ready to use. All in all a tidy little household in a working class neighborhood, where a family had been living. Now it was a shell of a home after hell had come calling. I vowed right then and there I was going to do my utmost to extract some measure of justice from this bastard... I planned on making a bracelet out of his teeth.

****