Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel

  “DEAD IN THE WATER”

  DAN DEADMAN SPACE DETECTIVE BOOK 3

  BARRY J. HUTCHISON

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Your Free Starter Library

  Oh! I Almost forgot…

  Also by Barry J. Hutchison

  Copyright © 2018 by Barry J. Hutchison

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published worldwide by Zertex Media Ltd.

  www.barryjhutchison.com

  ONE

  IN SOME CIRCLES, the Jonta Exodus was considered to be one of the planet Parloo’s all-time classic automobiles.

  These circles, however, were populated entirely by the deluded and the deranged, and their opinions were widely ridiculed. In truth, the Jonta Exodus was arguably the worst car ever produced on any planet anywhere in the universe, and after successfully managing to get rid of one of the fonking things, Detective Dan Deadman was dismayed to have recently found himself the unlucky recipient of a second.

  Right now, the car was stopped in a ‘No Parking’ zone outside one of the more disreputable drinking establishments in the city of Down Here. The driver’s seat was empty. The passenger seat and an indented tray in the dash were not.

  “Think he’ll be OK?”

  According to her fake ID, her name was Oledol Lodelo, but everyone in her extremely limited social circle called her Ollie. She squirmed anxiously in the Exodus’s rigidly unforgiving passenger seat, her eyes flitting from the door of the bar to the six-inch-tall man sitting in the dash indent.

  Artur was… well, she wasn’t really sure what he was, exactly. He was small and bearded, swore a lot, and spoke with a funny accent. He owned an impressive range of doll-sized dresses and was currently wearing a cheeky off-the-shoulder black number with a white bow tied off at his hip. Hairy toes poked out of his plastic sandals, the pinhead-sized toenails yellow with fungus.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Dan.”

  “Oh, that big gobshoite. Yeah. Course. He’ll be fine, Peaches. Sure, he does this sort of thing all the time.”

  Ollie nodded and tried, once again, to get comfortable. The car refused to allow it, though, and she searched for something to keep her mind off the growing stiffness in her legs, neck, and lower back. And, slightly less so, her upper back, forearms, and feet.

  Nothing much was happening in the bar itself from what she could see through the grime-encrusted window. Dan had gone inside to look for someone a few minutes ago. Reassuringly, there had been no shouts, screams or gunshots since then. This was in quite stark contrast to the three other bars they’d visited that night, and she was taking it to be a positive sign.

  “How did you two meet?” she asked.

  “Me and Deadman?” said Artur, shimmying around in his indent. He laughed behind his beard. “Ha! Now there’s a tale for the tellin’!”

  Ollie’s eyebrows raised as she leaned in, intrigued.

  “We met in a pub,” Artur said.

  Ollie nodded and bit her lip, waiting to hear the rest. She giggled in anticipation. “Right…”

  “Actually, that’s pretty much the whole of it,” Artur said. “In hindsight, I may have oversold it to ye a little bit.”

  Ollie leaned back. The Exodus’s seat punished her accordingly.

  “Oh.”

  “Aye, not all that exciting a story, really,” Artur admitted. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Mind you, he was on fire at the time…”

  The window of the bar exploded outwards and a corpse in a brown overcoat crunched onto the sidewalk.

  “Oh-ho. Would ye look at that? Speak of the devil an’ he’s sure to appear,” Artur announced. He leaned forward, rapped his knuckles on the windshield, and raised his voice. “Ye alright there, Deadman?”

  Dan clambered to his feet, accompanied by a tinkling of falling glass. His left arm was facing backward from the elbow down. He twisted it into place with a grunt. “Fine,” he said.

  “It’s just that ye appear to have been thrown arse-first through a window.”

  Ollie opened the Exodus’s passenger door, but Dan jabbed a finger at her. “Don’t. Stay in the car,” he barked.

  Nodding, Ollie jumped out and stood to a perky sort of attention in front of him. Dan glowered at her. “What are you doing?”

  “You said ‘don’t stay in the car,’” she reminded him.

  “No, I said, ‘Don’t,’ end of sentence, then, ‘Stay in the car,’ new sentence.”

  Ollie gazed back at him blankly, her face fixed in a vacant sort of half-smile. Dan sighed.

  “Forget it. Just get back in the car. I’ve got this under control.”

  “OK,” said Ollie. “It’s just… You were thrown through a window.”

  “And?”

  “And so, it doesn’t look like you’ve got it under control.”

  Dan ran his gloved fingers through the few remaining wisps of his hair, which made him realize he’d lost his hat. He grunted out a reply. “Did you ever consider that maybe I wanted to get thrown through a window?”

  “No,” Ollie admitted. She considered it now. “Did you?”

  Dan briefly considered lying and confirming that yes, it had been deliberate, but then changed his mind. He sighed. “Doesn’t matter. Just wait here, while I…”

  He turned back to the bar door just as an enormous armor-plated figure ducked through it.

  Living thousands of light years from the planet Earth, Dan had never seen an armadillo before. If he had, he might have spotted some similarities between that creature and this one, although any likenesses were passing ones at best.

  Even partially ducked, the figure stood almost eight feet tall. Interlocking armored plates covered its torso and its upper arms. Each of its spiked fists were larger than Dan’s head, while its own head was a neckless bump between its shoulders, heavily protected by yet more of its organic armor plating.

  “Holy shoite, he’s a big lad,” called Artur from the relative safety of the car. “I don’t fancy yer chances against that thing.”

  The giant armadillo lumbered towards Dan, cracking his knuckles. “Get going,” he spat through his scrunched up little mouth. “We don’t want you bugging our clients.”

  Dan shrugged. “OK. OK. Fine. You made your point. But I left my hat in there. I’ll just go get it.”

  The armored chest blocked his path, giving Dan a close-up view. Each interlocking plate had to be thick enough to stop a blaster pistol, never mind a fist.

  “I told you to get going.”

  “And I told you,” Dan began. He kicked out sharply, snapping the armadillo-thing’s knee outwards. Those big hands grasped at Dan as the guy fell, but he stepped smoothly back out of reach.

  The sidewalk shuddered as the armadillo-thing hit it, his leg buckled unnaturally outward, a hiss of pain whispering from
his lips.

  Dan stepped around him. “I’m getting my hat back.”

  “Should we come?” Ollie asked.

  “No,” Dan said, in a tone that suggested this wasn’t open to discussion. “Stay here. Watch that thing. If he tries anything, take care of him.”

  Ollie looked down at the fallen brute, then back to Dan. “OK,” she said, resolutely. She gave Dan a double thumbs-up. “We will!”

  Dan hesitated. “Uh… OK, then,” he said, then he cricked his neck a couple of times, adjusted the collar of his coat, and stepped back into the bar.

  The inside of the place was relatively quiet, which was a change from the other places he’d been that night. It was also a complete shizzhole, which wasn’t.

  For the most part, the clientele here hadn’t come to celebrate or socialize. They were here because they wanted somewhere dim and dank where they could sit alone and drink their memories away. Of all the places Dan had visited that night, this was by far his favorite, and there was a shadowy booth in the back corner that practically had his name on it.

  That wasn’t why he was here, though. Ignoring the dirty look and muttering from the barman, Dan retrieved his hat from the spot on the floor where it had been knocked off, dusted it down, then deposited it back on his head. It was a little battered and out of shape, but no more than the rest of him.

  “Let’s try that again.”

  He pointed to a ratty-faced little bald guy sitting hunched on a stool at the far end of the bar. “Bonbo, you and I need to talk.”

  Bonbo nodded. “S-sure thing,” he said, his hand trembling as he raised his glass to his lips and tipped the contents down his throat. His already scrunched-up features became momentarily more so, and he coughed as the fiery liquor scorched the back of his throat.

  And then he was off and running, the stool clattering to the floor as he raced in the direction of the only door not currently blocked by a corpse in an overcoat.

  “Mindy, stun shot,” Dan said, drawing a blaster the size of a miniature cannon from inside the coat. The weapon’s lights illuminated and its chamber spun, but before Dan could pull the trigger, Bonbo was through the door and safely in cover.

  “Why do they always fonking run?” Dan grunted, giving chase. Something big and ugly attempted to block his path, but the butt of Dan’s gun cracking across the bridge of its nose promptly gave the thing pause to reconsider.

  Dan didn’t bother to take it slowly at the door. Being dead brought with it a number of advantages, the main one being that it was difficult to become deader. If Bonbo was waiting through there with a gun, as long as the shot didn’t take Dan’s head off, it wouldn’t really slow him down.

  Beyond the door was a room that was balancing on the cusp between ‘bathroom’ and ‘biological weapons testing site’. As far as Dan had been aware, he no longer had any sense of smell, but the stench wafting through the open doors of the bathroom’s six stalls forced him to reassess this.

  There was a single small window in the place, but it was too high for Bonbo to be able to reach. Dan was pretty sure of this, as Bonbo was currently jumping to try to catch the ledge but falling short by several inches.

  “I just want to talk,” Dan said.

  Bonbo, suddenly alerted to the detective’s presence, screamed briefly, then shot into the closest stall and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Evidently, there was no lock on the door, as he immediately jumped back out again, before darting into the next one. This time, once the door had slammed, there was a definite clack of a locking mechanism being activated.

  Muttering below his lack-of-breath, Dan holstered his gun and crossed to the cubicle door. The paintwork had been etched and sketched with graffiti in various symbols and languages, all of which were quickly translated by the chip implanted in one of Dan’s eyeballs. None of it was of particular literary merit, though, and he kind of wished the chip hadn’t bothered.

  “You’re not in trouble,” Dan said. “I’m not after you. I just want to talk.”

  “Then why did you chase me?” Bonbo whimpered through the door.

  “Because you ran away. I can’t talk to you if we aren’t in the same room.”

  Bonbo didn’t have an answer for that.

  “Open the door.”

  “N-no. We can talk like this. You out there, me in here.”

  Dan pinched the bridge of his nose and inhaled slowly. The urge to kick the door in and waterboard the son-of-a-bedge with toilet water was almost overwhelming, but he’d been trying to resist such temptations of late. He blamed Ollie.

  Mind you, he blamed her for pretty much everything.

  “Fine. We’ll talk like this,” Dan said.

  “You’re going to shoot me through the door,” Bonbo replied, his voice cracking.

  Dan raised his hands so Bonbo could see them above the stall. “The gun’s away. Like I said, I’m not after you.” He brought his mouth closer to the door. “I’m after Krato.”

  There was no reply from the stall, but the way Bonbo’s breath changed told Dan he had the man’s attention.

  “Word on the street is he’s behind what happened at the mall on Eighteenth,” Dan continued.

  “I… I don’t know anything about that,” Bonbo said.

  “I do,” Dan said. His voice dropped into a growl. “You want details? I can give you details. Ninety-six adults. Thirty-eight children. Least, that’s what they think. I’m told that piecing them together has been challenging.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Bonbo repeated, the words choking him. “I swear.”

  “I know you don’t, Bonbo. I know you aren’t mixed up in this. If I thought you were, this door would not still be standing,” Dan said. “But I need to know for sure it was him. I need to know he sold the weapons. That’s all. Just a yes or a no.”

  There was a clank from beyond the door as Bonbo’s legs gave way and he landed heavily on the toilet seat.

  “He’ll kill me.”

  “He won’t have a chance,” Dan said. “One-hundred-and-thirty-four people, Bonbo. One-hundred-and-thirty-four.”

  The bathroom door squeaked open. Something with tusks and facial piercings shuffled in, fiddling with his belt.

  “Occupied,” Dan barked, snapping his head in the newcomer’s direction. “Fonk off.”

  “But…”

  Dan pushed back his hat, revealing the full horror of his decaying face. “Hold it in,” he said, then the door squeaked again as Tusks beat a hasty retreat.

  “Still with me, Bonbo?” Dan asked.

  A cheep from inside the stall confirmed he was.

  “Yes or no. That’s all I need.”

  “N-no,” Bonbo whimpered.

  Dan clenched his jaw, both fists and, to a lesser extent, his buttocks. “Don’t jerk me around, Bonbo,” he warned, but he was barely halfway into the sentence when the voice from the stall became a shrill squeal of panic.

  “No, no, no, no, n—”

  Bonbo exploded. At least, that’s how it seemed from the other side of the door. There was a visceral meaty sort of sound, then the filthy ceiling above the cubicle was pebble-dashed with blood, flesh, and fragments of bone.

  Something black and pointy, like a blade fashioned from darkness itself, stabbed upwards, appearing briefly above the top of the stall door. Bonbo’s head – or possibly just the top sixty percent or so of it – was impaled on the spiked tip. His eyes rolled forward then flopped out onto his cheeks. The top of his skull flapped open and closed as if on a hinge, then the head and the blade jerked sharply downwards out of sight.

  Dan kicked open the door, his hand already reaching into his coat for Mindy. He caught a glimpse of an empty Bonbo-sized sack of skin just as it was yanked down into the toilet bowl. Blackish-brown water burbled up from the plumbing, then poured out over the seat. The liquid sloshed over the floor and into the one remaining shoe that sat upright on it, and which was now the only evidence that Bonbo had ever even been
there. Unless you counted the blood, guts and brain matter on the ceiling, of course, in which case there was probably a good pint and a half of proof to confirm his presence at the scene.

  Dan stepped back from the slowly expanding puddle. “Shizz,” he muttered.

  And he was right. It was.

  DAN STEPPED out onto the street and found Ollie kneeling beside the fallen armadillo-thing. She had torn a strip off the bottom of her t-shirt, and was wrapping it around the armadillo’s knee. The t-shirt itself had the slogan, I’m Smiling Because I Have No Idea What’s Going On printed across the front. Artur had spotted it in a shop window and insisted on buying it for her. Or, more accurately, had insisted Dan buy it for her.

  Ollie, for her part, didn’t really get the joke, but she did like the color, so that was fine.

  “What are you doing?” Dan asked.

  Ollie and the armadillo both looked up. “You said to take care of him,” Ollie replied.

  Dan tutted. “No, that’s not…”

  “I tried to tell her, Deadman,” said Artur. He was standing on the grille of the exodus, looking for all the world like a hood ornament. “I said that’s not what ye meant, but she wouldn’t listen. He means ‘shoot him in the face’ I said, not mollycoddle the big bastard. Am I right?”

  Dan caught Ollie by the arm and hoisted her to her feet. “Come on, get in the car,” he said.

  “Oh. OK,” Ollie said. She flashed a smile and a wave to the injured armadillo. “Get well soon.”

  “Uh… Thanks,” he replied.

  Dan bundled Ollie into the passenger seat, then walked around to the driver’s side. Artur hopped into his coat pocket as Dan passed, and gave a little cheer of triumph when he landed safely inside.

  Pulling open the door, Dan hesitated. He looked down at the armadillo-thing, then pointed to the bar. “The mess in the bathroom? Just so you know, that wasn’t me.”

  The armadillo grunted with distaste. “Yeah, sure,” he muttered. “That’s what they all say.”

  TWO

  “EXPLODED? What d’ye mean, he exploded? In what way did he fecking explode?”