2020 by Robert Onopa Read Free Book Online Page A

party at Forest Lawn. I’d picked up the ashes from GD Tower and was carrying them on the passenger’s seat. They were resting in a beautiful onyx urn. I rounded a corner, my suspension let out a squeak, a groan, and I found myself remembering my first encounter with the judge’s ashes in the Model 986 Urn. I started seeing him as a rival again. Instinctively, I reached for the glove box, pulled out the plastic bag containing the ashes of Balthazar, my old Lab, and exchanged them for the ashes of the judge. The idea that the urn containing the judge’s ashes would make a noise during interment spooked me more than I can explain. I know what I did was unethical; I couldn’t help myself.
    Anyway, the modest ceremony went well. Unix had arranged for Scottish Pipers, and a representative from NASA stood in uniform and saluted. Keiko achieved her closure.
    The thing is, after the dinner at Espagio’s, when I was driving back to Westwood with Keiko, swinging up Santa Monica Boulevard?
    I swear I heard something from the glovebox: a creak, a pop, a long high note that sang eerily into the gathering night.
    Keiko looked at me.
    “Balthazar,” I said. “Hush.”

The Swan

    T HE COLUMN OF BLACK SMOKE WAS VISIBLE from ten clicks away, dense and billowy, shifting in the wind like a dye marker in ocean currents.
    Photochemical colors in the twilight sky: mauve and filthy pink. The old Army turbocopter rattled through the airspace above coastal L.A., descending gradually toward the source of the smoke in Long Beach Harbor.
    Standing in the open door of the copter’s cargo area, one hand on a safety strap, Voorst squinted south through the haze at the continuous string of makeshift harbors where houseboats seemed every year to multiply like algae in a pond. He guessed densities of five or six thousand per square kilometer, half the rigs illegals, population out of hand.
    The way the picture was never seen on CBS or VNN ate away at him like an ulcer. As they swung upwind of the column of smoke—it hung below them now three thousand feet like some fantastic butte in Monument Valley—he pulled himself across the cabin, took a deep breath, then leaned out the opposite cargo door, trying to make out what was going on near the source. The pattern of debris and smudge spread clearly from a large ship, one he maybe recognized: rusty white decks, an out-of-service pool, a blue hull—a passenger liner auctioned off years ago and anchored in the harbor as one of the transient hotels, the QE III.
    The copter weaved down alongside the column and his stomach tightened, the sensation like floating down a precipice untethered. Now he could make out the big Virtual News Net uplink out on the breakwater. The shoreside traffic was gridlocked, the sealanes so crowded even a SoCal Harbor Inspector like himself (but what did Harbor Inspectors matter anymore?) had to hitch a ride through the air.
    This was the third harbor fire in a week. One up in L.A. proper, the other down in Balboa.
    A soft wall of black came rushing up and they wafted into the smoke. In the darkness the copter’s interior screens brightened and he checked the image going out over VNN—he was used to the way they altered a landscape, accustomed to seeing some of the live-aboard scows bled out of harbor shots, but now it looked like they’d moved the source of the fire too. On the VNN screen the smoke rose from a Brazilian bulk carrier anchored in the industrial harbor northwest. Voorst ground his teeth. The acrid edge to the air belonged to burning petrochemicals, not the cargo of Amazon mahogany whose loss the smooth-voiced anchorman was describing. Still, even the VNN summary screen showed the crowd—people with bundles, transients being driven off—fighting with Army cops. “Hey, Stringer,” Voorst shouted against the whine of the turborotor “ Stringer . Your men gonna have the area secured by nightfall?”
    The fiftyish sergeant, his name in block letters above the