Read Online Terminal Island by John Shannon - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: John Shannon
Ads: Link
up with her before long.
A faint smell gathered as they came down, like an electrical circuit overheating, and then they emerged into a tiny universe laid out before them at waist level. It looked like a model of something from the 1880s, with dusty western one-street towns, picturesque buttes, wooden trestles, and even a tiny herd of cattle. A fair-size city ran right up against the far wall, and all of it was lashed together by model railroad tracks.
The real situation, however, seemed to be on the far side of the room, where Steelyard stood at the rim of his tiny universe, glaring down at its other half, which apparently had suffered a nuclear strike. Enough remained to suggest what had been houses and the tangled wreckage of taller buildings. Every single structure was crushed, right up to some arbitrary dividing line through the middle of the room, but it was clearly not meant to be that way.
Jack Liffey looked at the room’s owner.
Steelyard nodded glumly. “Twelve years of work.” Something looked a little funny about his eyes, and he kept rubbing his shoulder, as if he’d wrenched it. “All from scratch. Even the rolling stock. No kits. No fucking kits.”
That seemed to matter to him. “Why does the destruction stop in the middle?” Jack Liffey asked.
“It was an idea. That half of the layout is nineteenth-century and steam. The part over here was modern, diesel-electric. It’s all HO scale and you could still run from one century to the other. It was just an idea,” he concluded glumly.
“Why do you think the old stuff was spared?”
His eyes came up, reddened, flattened from within like the eyes of a big wounded dog. “Do you think I have a fucking clue?” He went straight up the steps, and the policewoman watched him go, then turned to Jack Liffey.
“Please pardon him. This was his baby.”
“No kidding.”
“I mean it was really important to him. Somebody figured out how to make him hurt. There was no sign of forced entry, and the alarms were all bypassed, we don’t know how. Oh, there’s a chair missing, too. He used it as his Engineer Bill chair over there. Nothing special, just a beat-up old ladderback that he’s had for years.”
“Was there one of those Japanese playing cards?”
She nodded. “The five of whatever little girls call those suits. I think you haven’t even heard about the four yet, Mr. Liffey.”
“Jack, please. I haven’t.”
“It was presumably the same perpetrator or perpetrators who sank the Petricich fishing boat last night, right at its dock. It was a wooden vessel, and the police divers said somebody just went down into the engine room and shot a big shotgun hole clean through the hull. It probably took half an hour to go down, plenty of time to get out. The perp stuck the four to the boat’s dockside locker with some kind of Special Forces throwing knife.”
“And the five?”
“It was over there by the train controls, pinned to that little park lawn with Ken’s own X-Acto knife. Crime Scene has both the card and the knife now.”
“What did it say on the card?”
“The battle is engaged.”
“Ah.”
She scowled into a coffee cup. “Could I get you some coffee? This has gone cold.”
“No, thanks. But suit yourself.”
She trudged up the stairs as Maeve bent over to inspect the wreckage, her hands behind her back as if avoiding leaving fingerprints. “Some of it was crushed downward,” she said, “like with a big mallet, and some of it was swiped off like with a baseball bat.”
“We probably won’t be able to outdo the cops in the clue game, hon, but that’s all right. You can keep looking.” He studied the devastation himself. It disturbed him somewhere deep inside—it was like seeing the effects of a terribly unequal barroom brawl, some defenseless midgets collapsed against a bar with shiners and torn shirts.
“Isn’t it a bit odd, a grown-up man putting so much time into model trains?” Maeve suggested
A faint smell gathered as they came down, like an electrical circuit overheating, and then they emerged into a tiny universe laid out before them at waist level. It looked like a model of something from the 1880s, with dusty western one-street towns, picturesque buttes, wooden trestles, and even a tiny herd of cattle. A fair-size city ran right up against the far wall, and all of it was lashed together by model railroad tracks.
The real situation, however, seemed to be on the far side of the room, where Steelyard stood at the rim of his tiny universe, glaring down at its other half, which apparently had suffered a nuclear strike. Enough remained to suggest what had been houses and the tangled wreckage of taller buildings. Every single structure was crushed, right up to some arbitrary dividing line through the middle of the room, but it was clearly not meant to be that way.
Jack Liffey looked at the room’s owner.
Steelyard nodded glumly. “Twelve years of work.” Something looked a little funny about his eyes, and he kept rubbing his shoulder, as if he’d wrenched it. “All from scratch. Even the rolling stock. No kits. No fucking kits.”
That seemed to matter to him. “Why does the destruction stop in the middle?” Jack Liffey asked.
“It was an idea. That half of the layout is nineteenth-century and steam. The part over here was modern, diesel-electric. It’s all HO scale and you could still run from one century to the other. It was just an idea,” he concluded glumly.
“Why do you think the old stuff was spared?”
His eyes came up, reddened, flattened from within like the eyes of a big wounded dog. “Do you think I have a fucking clue?” He went straight up the steps, and the policewoman watched him go, then turned to Jack Liffey.
“Please pardon him. This was his baby.”
“No kidding.”
“I mean it was really important to him. Somebody figured out how to make him hurt. There was no sign of forced entry, and the alarms were all bypassed, we don’t know how. Oh, there’s a chair missing, too. He used it as his Engineer Bill chair over there. Nothing special, just a beat-up old ladderback that he’s had for years.”
“Was there one of those Japanese playing cards?”
She nodded. “The five of whatever little girls call those suits. I think you haven’t even heard about the four yet, Mr. Liffey.”
“Jack, please. I haven’t.”
“It was presumably the same perpetrator or perpetrators who sank the Petricich fishing boat last night, right at its dock. It was a wooden vessel, and the police divers said somebody just went down into the engine room and shot a big shotgun hole clean through the hull. It probably took half an hour to go down, plenty of time to get out. The perp stuck the four to the boat’s dockside locker with some kind of Special Forces throwing knife.”
“And the five?”
“It was over there by the train controls, pinned to that little park lawn with Ken’s own X-Acto knife. Crime Scene has both the card and the knife now.”
“What did it say on the card?”
“The battle is engaged.”
“Ah.”
She scowled into a coffee cup. “Could I get you some coffee? This has gone cold.”
“No, thanks. But suit yourself.”
She trudged up the stairs as Maeve bent over to inspect the wreckage, her hands behind her back as if avoiding leaving fingerprints. “Some of it was crushed downward,” she said, “like with a big mallet, and some of it was swiped off like with a baseball bat.”
“We probably won’t be able to outdo the cops in the clue game, hon, but that’s all right. You can keep looking.” He studied the devastation himself. It disturbed him somewhere deep inside—it was like seeing the effects of a terribly unequal barroom brawl, some defenseless midgets collapsed against a bar with shiners and torn shirts.
“Isn’t it a bit odd, a grown-up man putting so much time into model trains?” Maeve suggested
Similar Books
