“It’s not a loaf of sourdough bread, boss. You don’t just hack into it with an acetylene torch, trying to pull a chunk out of it.” Levy wiped his hands on a rag, itching the tip of his nose with the clean backside of his wrist. “To take a sample like that is going to require some serious precision.” He wiped the motor oil from the ratchet set before he replaced them in the tool cabinet.
“Didn’t we have some lasers?” The chief faintly recalled an invoice for a wide variety of lasers a few years prior. It was an expensive purchase, made about the same time as the requisitions for the slushy margarita machine, leather couch, and a dozen office massage chairs. Given the fact that it was one of the few items ordered with a remotely functional purpose, the chief never bothered to call Levy in to ask him about them.
Levy’s eyes flicked towards the back corner of the warehouse, and the makeshift laboratory he’d built in. “We, uh, used those,” he muttered, more frustrated with his unsuccessful experiments than he was with the fact that the chief remembered the lasers. “Besides that, you’d need something like a 1500-milliwatt class IV for that sort of thing. You’re not going to deli slice an alloy with a convenience store trip beam.”
Although he liked to consider himself a black ops contractor, Levy actually started as a general contractor, hired as an electrician almost a decade prior. He had been one of a few licensed contractors within a hundred-mile radius willing to wire the entire warehouse with a redundant 220-volt power grid for decidedly less than union wages. Of the few, he was the only contractor who could pass the background check. Through a series of shifting change orders and a variety of incidental side projects including wiring various offices with unnecessary equipment of all sorts, Levy came to occupy his own office near the loading dock and framed in a sizable back work room for a shop space.
Although he didn’t remember the exact price, the chief was sure that he hadn’t purchased a crate of Radio Shack toys. “I thought we bought some sort of high-powered lasers?”
Levy wasn’t about to pull his research apart so that the chief could hack at a wad of slag. “If I was running 1500-watt lasers through our power grid, you’d know it.” That he was, in fact, and that the chief had not noticed, was a credit to Levy’s significant engineering expertise.
Vocally antisemitic, yet proudly Jewish, he was an HR nightmare. His constant jokes about suing himself for harassment had kept him safe through multiple rounds of layoffs, mostly because nobody wanted to deal with the possible litigation. In the eight years since the electrician contract, Levy had become essential, slowly entrenching himself in the warehouse. As the motor pool mechanics thinned, Levy became master of his own domain, able to work a variety of positions competently. The chief didn’t particularly care what Levy was working on, so long as most of the vehicles ran and the equipment was well maintained. “There’s nothing you can do?” The chief asked.
Levy threw his arms in the air. “Well, I can blindly hack at it with a cutting wheel and hope that I get deep enough to dislodge the dentures without goring the artifact, or maybe I can just push it to the top of the building and drop it over the edge; maybe it will crack open like an egg.”
“Get it into the back of a truck,” the chief said.
Levy stood over the amalgamated wad of metal which weighed as much as a small car. “How?”
“You’re the engineer, Levy.” The chief dead-eyed his last technician. “Figure it out.”
There was only one other laboratory in Phoenix with that kind of equipment. They’d collaborated in the past, but it was a hell of a lot harder to negotiate a complex forensic extraction without a significant surplus cash flow. Convincing Dr. Barnes to map the contents of the meteorite, and potentially extract the hunk with the partial dental apparatus, was undoubtedly a process that would cost more than Martinez had on hand. If Dr. Barnes had been any other kind of scientist, maybe Martinez could cut him in on the research and confiscate the resulting paper before publication. It was a dirty trick, but it had worked in the past with universities. The problem was that although Dr. Barnes would have the instruments and equipment necessary to perform the delicate operation, he was a roboticist. The Barnes labs built bulky awkward humanoid robots, hoping to automate the service industry. He would be entirely uninterested in the extraction of dental work from an extraterrestrial object. Still, it was worth a shot.
Walking back into the front offices, contemplating how to go about sweet-talking Dr. Barnes into some pro-bono side action, Martinez found O’Connor hovering at the front desk, waiting for him. “Commissioner sent another auditor,” the sergeant said, glancing over his shoulder.
Martinez peered around the corner into the empty waiting room. “Well, where did he go?”
O’Connor hooked a thumb over his shoulder towards the figure sitting patiently with the office door wide open, equalizing the ambient temperatures.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Sergeant, what part of a closed office door is confusing you?”
O’Connor shrugged. “He walked right in.”
For a brief moment, Martinez truly missed the receptionist. A hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet and fresh from cosmetology school, Ms. Reeves had never let a single visitor near his office. O’Connor, on the other hand, pushing two hundred pounds of dumb muscle, with field experience in the Los Angeles gang division, couldn’t stop a lone bureaucratic bundle of twigs with a business card.
Mr. Paulson wore a cheap gray suit that was a size too big, and a decade out of style. Sitting upright in his chair, with a Naugahyde brown briefcase closed in his lap, he looked every bit the sort of pencil-necked prick that the commissioner had sent over the past several years, but a sort of budget version. That this no-account paper pusher might hold the key to the next round of government funding lent him a certain gravity that he would otherwise be incapable of. He glanced around the chief’s office as if he were taking stock of the office furniture, planning an eBay sale. If they shut down the offices, the deep finish of the solid mahogany desktop might fetch a few dollars, but the display shelves full of blingy crystal law enforcement trophies would inevitably end up in a box, waiting to be discarded. Martinez sighed heavily, rubbed his chin, and prepared to grovel; he stood straight, strolling casually into the office as carefree as if it were a company picnic. “Mr. Paulson, sorry to keep you waiting. Busy and all.”
Mr. Paulson glanced over his shoulder at the empty offices and chuckled lightly.
“How is the commissioner?” the chief asked, feigning polite conversation.
Mr. Paulson rose briefly, to shake the Chief’s hand. Martinez noted the cold clamminess of the auditor’s grip, a perfunctory gesture so unconvincing that it seemed an insult. Mr. Paulson sat again, clicking open the latches on his briefcase, rifling through the contents. “I’m sure I don’t need to explain why I am here,” Mr. Paulson mumbled, skipping the niceties. He withdrew a yellow legal pad on a battered clipboard and set it before him on the makeshift desk of his briefcase.
“Of course not,” Martinez leaned back in his chair, affecting a nonchalant lack of concern, “but I thought we just had an audit six months ago?”
Mr. Paulson nodded absent-mindedly. Martinez noticed that Mr. Paulson tended to avoid eye-contact, eyes flitting about the room. “I’m here in regard to some budgetary irregularities in this past quarter.” He opened his briefcase again and fingered through a file of loose paperwork. Withdrawing a few pages, he passed them across the desk. Both redacted as well as highlighted in various sections, they resembled a cipher hidden in a contemporary art piece. The highlighted items reflected company meals on individual accounts, random gas card purchases, and one incredibly expensive interagency fund transfer for something listed as a ridiculously long string of capital letters, authorized by B. Levy of the Terrestrial Investigation Group’s motor pool. Big ticket item aside, this was the first time that an auditor had delved into the personal expense accounts of the agents. Given that there was only a half dozen employees left, including the cleaners, it was fair to assume that individual audits were considerably easier than they had been in past years.
“Mr. Levy is our chief engineer. His research has been integral to our ongoing investigations,” Martinez said. What he really meant was that Levy had dicked with the air conditioners and somehow managed to lower the ambient temperature in the warehouse to sufferable levels. As to the rest of Levy’s experiments, so long as the chief didn’t ask a lot of questions, Levy wouldn’t file a complaint with the ACLU.
“Needless to say,” Mr. Paulson quipped without looking up, “when a low-level contractor purchases a sophisticated piece of surplus counter insurgency combat equipment, National Security issues are raised. I can’t imagine why a superfluous investigative group would necessitate that caliber of firepower.” Mr. Paulson glanced up from his page, freezing Martinez with a cold stare.
Martinez, choking back his indignation with the phrases: ‘low-level’ and ‘superfluous’, leaned forward, knitting his fingers before him on the desk. “Understandably so,” said Martinez, clenching his jaw. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he forced an affable smile. “Let’s give you a little tour to show you around the place, and we’ll go ahead and ask Mr. Levy about that purchase when we get back there.”
Mr. Paulson chuckled to himself, clipping the various expense reports under his yellow legal pad. That involuntary chuckle had already become uncomfortable to Martinez, like a running inside joke that he obviously wasn’t in on. “Are you a coffee drinker, Mr. Paulson?” said the chief, suddenly deciding that the frugality of their coffee brand choice might impress the auditor.
Mr. Paulson chuckled softly again, marking something on his yellow legal pad for no apparent reason. “No, thank you.” He followed Chief Martinez out into the hall. “This really shouldn’t take too long—no more than a day or two—I would appreciate it if we could get straight to work and avoid the ass kissing efforts.” Mr. Paulson scribbled something on his notepad, cradled in the crook of his arm, briefcase dangling awkwardly from his fist. Although it appeared heavy, he seemed unwilling to set the briefcase down anywhere but carried it like a toddler might cling to a security blanket or favorite stuffed animal.
Martinez gritted his teeth, a few steps ahead of the auditor. “Naturally,” he grumbled.
Opening the door to the warehouse, the chief and Mr. Paulson found Levy engaged in trying to load the meteorite into the back of the truck. He had the rock strapped in a knotted nest of yellow nylon truck straps, hanging from an engine block crane as he pushed against it, attempting to swing the impossibly heavy mass into the back end of a flat black SUV with a dented front left fender. “Hey,” Levy called. “Gimme a hand here?”
Mr. Paulson chuckled softly and scribbled a note on the yellow legal pad. Martinez glanced around the garage, hoping to spot a gallon of gasoline to pour over the offices full of archived cases.