The Nose

A gritty cyberpunk tale in less than 5,000 words

I entered this story in Lunar Awards S11 Round 3 contest. Wish me luck!

“Let me get this straight, your ex went to Vegas with the kid?” I asked; the app I used translated it into Spanish as I spoke. It felt weird to think in one language and then talk in another, but these are the times we live in.

She quirked her lips and nodded slowly. Mrs. Delgado was early forties, late thirties. Mexican descent, blond hair, and wearing sun-faded beach clothes. Pink flip flops.

“And your neighbor, Mrs. Wilke, reported it?” She nodded again. She didn’t seem to like my Spanish; I guess my accent needed work.The neighbor wasn’t home, so I’d dropped my details on their doorstep.

Mrs. Delgado kept eyeing me as if I were a rat on the countertop. That’s Okay, I’m white like Casper and turn red like a lobster in the sun, the bane of all gingers. At least I had blue eyes and topped six feet, in boots. I realized I’d forgotten to introduce myself.

“Oh yeah, I’m Nate Cheedy, your contract law enforcement agent in what looks like a case of the ex taking off with his kid, that about right?” I asked. This was my first case involving a child. It’s so much easier just doing traffic stops.

She nodded again.

“Alright, got a shirt, toothbrush, of theirs?” I pulled at my shirt to show what I meant. The neuro app I was running was cheap translation software, and giving me a headache. That Port Aransas heat wasn’t helping, either.

Mrs. Delgado beckoned me into the rental house, and I stepped into the air conditioning with alacrity. My neurodevelopment app decided that was my word for the day, alacrity. It meant ‘a brisk and cheerful readiness.’

I was brisk, at least.

The rented house was typical South Texas, laundry piled on a couch sitting in front of a screen. A Mexican game show on mute was doing its damndest to be as visually loud as possible on that old screen; it looked old, vintage 2020s even. It smelled like vapes and old cigarettes. The living room was neat, though.

That translation app went berserk translating the text on the screen, doubled my headache, and that’s probably why I missed it. At least that’s what I tell myself when I wake up late at night and can’t sleep, and all I do is think about this case.

She tried to hand me a tan work shirt with sweat stains at the pits, grease stains on the belly, and the name Fernando embroidered above the left pocket. She pinched it with two fingers at the collar. Like handing off a skunk.

I leaned forward and sniffed it. That was all I needed to do. The nose knows, you know? I’d upgraded the firmware just a month before, and they’d dialed the size down to normal. No more big-nosed jokes.

The ex-husband’s DNA profile popped up from that whiff. A subvocal command and I sent it off to CODIS; might be a warrant out on him, or a bounty. I could use the money.

Mrs. Delgado’s DNA profile also popped up; I thought little of it. I was just glad the nose upgrade was an actual upgrade; you know? How many times have you gotten an upgrade and realized it’s the same thing, just a fresh box and a higher price?

Thought so.

Anyway, after that I went through the usual spiel. “Texas Department of Public Safety had empowered me-“ yadda yadda yadda.

Nobody who ever needed Freelance Law Enforcement ever listened to anything in the disclaimer. I finished my spiel up with her giving consent for me to investigate, retrieve, arrest, etc and got onto the road. This freelance law enforcement work had been boring up to this point.

That app headache wasn’t going away, so I uninstalled it and downed three melatonin. Then I let the car drive me to Nevada. I couldn’t sleep longer than six hours; the job software monitors that, so I sorted the warrants and checked the credit history of one Fernando Delgado, lately of Port Aransas, TX.

Fernando had booked a hotel in Henderson, Nevada.

The Joker’s Wild.

I told the car to go in that direction, fired an email to the local police, and ran a system check. The nose was working well, the nerve splice was tiptop, and I had the microdrones slaved to my shades. I was ready, so I thought.

After that, it was a long, boring car ride, on the clock. Like I said, law enforcement is pretty boring most of the time. As a matter of fact, you don’t really want it to ever get exciting. That’s usually a bad sign. Either way, I got there around nine pm.

Joker’s Wild was a casino and hotel. The place smelled of old nicotine, new vapes, and desperation. Almost exactly like Mrs. Delgado’s rental house. The clerk sent me to a first-floor room along the back wall after he had the most annoying series of tech malfunctions I’ve ever seen.

I eased off towards the indicated room.

My gut flip-flopped when three guys with a beer cooler walked past me going the other way. They weren’t the sort that would drink together. One wore red scrubs and a surgical mask; the other two sported fake gucci tracksuits. The tracksuit guys probably drank together, but it wasn’t beer; they looked like vodka men. Blond hair, mirrored shades, and Slavic cheekbones, just like my grandad; he’d been from somewhere in Europe.

The door was ajar when I got there, so I turned on my personal recorder and pushed it open with a toe. The room looked empty, but I knew better. The nose knows, ya know?

I flipped my shades into IR and saw the motion detector flickering an infrared tripwire in front of the door. I carefully stepped over it. It was rigged to a dust bomb; the dust comes from the interior air filter on a city bus. That dust would be skin cells from thousands of people, just a way to contaminate DNA evidence.

The smell of blood overpowered the small room. They’d left the air conditioner on full blast, too, so I knew it was gonna be bad. I walked up to the bed to see who was under the covers.

Fernando looked just like his driver’s license picture, except he was dead. He had on a wifebeater, underwear, and a neat little hole in his forehead.

He still had the screen remote in one hand.

I pushed open the bathroom door and heard plastic crackle. Someone had laid drop cloths down on the floor in there. My heart sank; I didn’t want to see this. I eased the door open just enough to look, and I wished I hadn’t.

You can look at the pictures in the case file if you want to; I’ll sum it up in two words.

Surgical wreckage.

That’s all that was left of the boy.

He was stuck to the hotel ironing board with thick, gray zip ties, and every organ with a dollar value was gone. Heart, lungs, eyes, liver, kidneys, you name it, and long swathes of skin were missing from his legs as well.

The nose immediately logged his DNA. Couldn’t help it; it was everywhere in there, and wouldn’t you know it, I still hadn’t figured it out.

That was when I took the safety off my cyberware.

In the war, I’d gotten a nerve splice to speed up reaction times, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of removal, so freelance law enforcement was the career route for me. I’d gotten the nose job done after a barroom altercation; besides, I was used to being called Law Dog and figured having the DNA sequencer wouldn’t hurt. I rely on the damn thing now.

I wanted to believe that the people who did things like this were deviant, mutant weirdos, but I knew the truth. There were those people in the mix, but the majority were just people who turned the other way.

The more I thought about it, the more it fit.

The timeline of them walking out and me walking in meant the clerk was in on it. He must have texted them as I stood there, like a rube, waiting for him to finish his ‘technical difficulties’ act and read off a room number.

Local PD came and cordoned off the hotel room. The hotel manager, general manager, head of housekeeping, and some old man with a Pomeranian came around to stare until the bodies came out. I uploaded my sensorium files to the magistrate’s office and gave my statement.

The cop who took my statement looked tired. I gave him the description of the three guys and he nodded like he was taking a lunch order. He tagged the statement and my files into evidence and then played a game on his phone as we waited for the Crime Scene guys and the coroner to get there.

I called the mother, and she didn’t pick up, so I called the Port Aransas Sheriff’s Office. The deputy who answered said he’d go tell her. I felt bad about that, even though I couldn’t have delivered the news any better.

What do you even say? I mean, there’s a template we learn, and everyone knows it from cop shows. You say you have some bad news, and for them to sit down. Then you tell them their child, father, husband, brother, sister, mother is dead. You don’t sugarcoat it, or drag it out. You give them the knowledge that their life has changed forever.

The Crime Scene guys and coroner got there after an hour or so. I stood around and waited as the CSI techs disarmed the dust bomb and bagged it. The coroner techs pulled on disposable coveralls in the hall before going in. One threw away a bag from a burger joint in a nearby trash can.

“See a lot of these?” I asked the tired cop, I’m sure I was frowning. Wasn’t much to smile about right then. I heard one of the coroner techs whistle and say something in Spanish from the bathroom.

“Once a month we find something like this.” The cop trailed off, shaking his head. He tapped his tablet a few more times, changed tapping finger, then the coroners came out of the hotel room. They had conserved space by putting both bodies on one gurney.

That pissed me off.

Why couldn’t they give the boy his own gurney?

‘Goddamn did it stuck in my craw,’ as Grandad used to say. He’d been born overseas, but by God, his soul was as Texan as rattlesnakes and six-guns.

I decided there and then, I was going to find who did this. I’d do whatever I had to do in order to sleep at night.

I hadn’t mentioned anything about the clerk to local PD. My gut feeling wasn’t ‘evidence based’ as they say in important places like courtrooms. All I had was suspicion and little way to prove it.

So, I thought about a way to prove it.

“Hey, you got a second?” I asked the CSI tech who had bagged up the infrared tripwire.

“Sup?” the tech said, his dreadlocks were woven with reactive fiberoptics and twitch myomers. It was supposed to be cool, but to me it looked like he had an epileptic rainbow squid on his shoulders instead of a head. He had a smoothskin body mod that reinforced the whole ‘sea creature’ look, too.

“Where’d you put the smocks? I got a sequencer right here,” I said, tapping the side of my nose. He nodded and pointed at a plastic toolbox on wheels.

“They’re in there, ain’t gonna get anything, though. Acetone.” He said with a quirk of the lips.

“Acetone? Really?” I said as I opened the toolbox. I pulled on a pair of his vinyl gloves and opened the bag with the first blood-soaked smock. It was still wet from the shower, and I flipped it inside out. I ran my finger around the back and under the armpits. I know it’s gross, but sweat really does give a lot of DNA. I did the same thing to the two other smocks.

I used different fingers for each, though.

Funny thing about acetone, though, is it doesn’t actually dissolve DNA. It’s used as a DNA fixative, and the human body produces it by decarboxylation of ketone bodies. We exhale tiny amounts of it, unless you’re severely diabetic or on a diet that causes you to remain in ketosis. That neurodevelopment app is so good, really. It makes me feel super smart when I say things like that.

Then I did a much more gross thing and smelled those fingers. A big, deep sniff, too.

Proximity helps the sensor’s accuracy, so I got really close. Three profiles that weren’t the boys popped up. I sent them to CODIS and ignored the CSI techs grossed out face. The guy trying to look like a sea creature was disgusted by what I was doing? Only in Vegas, I guess.

Then I stepped back into the room and looked around for the one thing that was going to link me back to the clerk. This thing had to revolve around him in some way. They had a room next to the exit on the ground floor. He was the key.

That was when it hit me.

The room key was sitting on the nightstand. I leaned over and sniffed it. Bingo! I had a hit that wasn’t Fernando, the boy, or off the smocks. Under the room keycard was another card, with the Joker’s Wild logo on it and a picture of Fernando; he looked happier in this one than in his driver’s license photo. I bagged it and dropped it into the evidence toolbox for the tech.

I didn’t run the clerk’s sample off the room key through CODIS, figured it wouldn’t get any hits, after all, he worked in a casino. So, I ran it through the Nevada State Unemployment Database. If he worked at a casino, odds were good he’d been laid off at some point, and bingo, bango, there was his name-o.

Alex Pikeev.

Address, too.

3728 Huckleberry Lane, Henderson, NV

I went outside and caught the cop I’d given my statement.

“Hey, when you think you guys are gonna put that big Department A.I. I seen on the news on this thing and make some arrests?” I asked. A wry look somewhere between grief and laughter crossed the cops features. He looked at the ground then into my eyes.

“As soon as the casino heads let it, I guess.” He answered as if he were biting off the words.

“What?” It just came out like that. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Yeah, you need to quit watching cop shows. That A.I. doesn’t do meatwork, especially not small-time organ grinders making pick and mix out of illegals. It’s too busy catching card counters and table cheats, you know, the kind of criminals that pay fines.” The bitterness in that cop’s voice could have melted concrete if it was an organic compound.

I left without another word.

His self-loathing was his problem. Didn’t mean I wasn’t mad as hell to hear that, but it let me know I was on my own on this.

Fine. Hide and watch, you motherfuckers.

I went to the address on file for that clerk. It was a trailer park on the poor side of Henderson. Which, honestly, kind of felt like home. I rolled through and got an eye on his trailer and got out of the car. I told the car to drive around but to be within a minute of my location.

He wasn’t home, but it was definitely his trailer. I peeped at the windows with a microdrone slaved to my shades and saw plenty of used casino merch on the couch and walls. It was all gaudy advertisements for second-rate nostalgia vacations that fleeced retirees. I found an abandoned trailer next door and waited in the darkness of its porch.

I figured I’d be a while.

I checked my email, nothing from Mrs. Delgado. I felt like a coward for being grateful that she hadn’t messaged me. Truth be told, I had thought it was just an angry ex-husband who needed a little time with his kid, I hadn’t figured on whatever the hell this was. I had no idea what I was going to do, and yet I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Busy work kept me from spinning out over it. I reviewed the things I knew while I waited. The clerk’s name was Alex Pikeev. He had worked at Joker’s Wild for eighteen months, and in that time there had been fourteen murders there. Three in the parking lot (drive-bys), two in the newlywed suite (crazy ex story), and eight on the casino floor during a mass shooting.

The last one made my hair stand on end.

A Canadian investigator, a real social media type, tons of posts, lots of followers. He had followed the trail of an abducted child to the Joker’s Wild, then he ended up in the trunk of an abandoned car minus his cyberware with a neat, little round hole in his forehead. Some kids found him and called it in, said they found the car in the dunes and wanted to see if it had anything they could sell in the trunk.

I looked over the scene footage of the kids and noticed two things off the bat. The first was that the kid doing the talking keeps flipping a poker chip up into the air. The second was that he wore a brand-new pair of tennis shoes. They didn’t match especially well with his raggedy old hoody, but like I said, people turn away for all sorts of reasons.

I stopped the footage and checked the poker chip.

Joker’s Wild.

Facial recognition is old hat and I ran the routine on that footage and wouldn’t you know it, there was Alex, and two other guys, all of them in tracksuits in the background. My busy work was busted up by a car pulling into Alex’s driveway. Alex got out of the back and kept trying to convince someone in the backseat to get out with him, but she wasn’t having it.

After an uncomfortably long time of him standing there begging and tugging her arm, he let go and went inside. Smart girl. I popped the microdrone up to go see what he was up to.

Solo drinking on the couch, and he was hitting a vape, looked like one of those crack whiff units you get at midnight on a shady corner, but what did I know?

I figured now was as good a time as any to have a conversation so I went and knocked on his door. He opened that door so fast only for his face to fall just as quick.

No girl, just me.

“Alex, let’s talk buddy,” I said as I pushed my way into his trailer. The place smelled like body odor and fast food. No wonder the ladies avoid it.

“Fuckoff, get the fuck out my house!” Alex demanded. He raised his arms into a fighting position and I smiled. He’d just shown intent to harm an officer of the law.

I triggered the nerve splice and elbowed him in the solar plexus. Not hard. I didn’t want to kill him. From his perspective, all he saw was a blur, and then he was on his ass trying to breathe. I could have been a wizard for all he knew cause I’d just conjured some whoop ass on him.

“Let’s start over.” I said as I kicked the door shut behind me. The trailers on either side of his were empty, we could get loud if we needed to. My smile at that thought was very genuine.

“Who told you which room to put Fernando and the boy in?” I asked. He’d staggered to his feet and he lunged toward his couch. I beat him to it from the kitchen.

“Nice! What is this?” I said as I pulled out a ghost gun from under the couch cushions. It was a shitty 3-d printed gun that would probably explode the first time it fired, but very popular with the low rent criminal crowd. Alex probably wasn’t an informed consumer on guns, much less his many other purchases, judging by his décor.

Since he’d gone for the gun, I was now authorized to use lethal force if I wanted to. So I put him in a sleeper hold and sent him down to dreamland for a few. I wanted answers, not another body, but I’d take what I could get.

I found thick, gray zip ties in the nightstand next to his bed, oh girl, you dodged such a huge bullet, and tied him to a kitchen chair with them. The receipt for them was in a plastic shopping bag on his bedroom floor. I pocketed that.

That little tidbit made me go icy cold inside. How deep in this shit are you Alex? Let’s find out!

The trailer was easy to turn out. It was practically a wreck to begin with, either way, I found a duffel filled with a few questionable items, so I slapped Alex awake to tell me about them.

“Wha? Why? Who?” Alex said, I’m sure he said more, but I slapped him into silence.

“I have questions, Alex,” I said as I kicked the duffel over and spilled its contents on his kitchen floor. Zip ties, organ donation bags, gloves, and surgical smocks scattered everywhere.

All the same brands that I’d seen in that hotel room.

“I’ve logged fourteen different blood samples on that bag; and each one goes back to a missing child case in the last two years. You’ve been sloppy, Alex. So tell me everything, and I promise I’ll kill you with a twist to your head so fast it’ll make your head, uhh, spin.” I know, I didn’t really stick the landing with that, but he got the point.

“Fuck you.” Alex said, and he spat at me.

Good.

I went to work.

Alright, one moment here. I want to point out that nothing I did to him was worse than the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA.

What I did was put his trodenet on his head and put a blank chip in it. He didn’t know it was blank, he thought it was a prerecorded sensorium of a victim of the Mexican cartel. Nasty stuff those guys do, skinning people alive, bulldozer stuff, just horrible.

Now, why did he think that? Because I’d removed the internals from a chip case that came from a cartel job I worked a while back. I just hovered my finger over the play button. For all he knew, he would have been dropped into a private hell until he died of cardiac arrest.

“Alright, okay, you want what? Names? I don’t know any real names, but I have an account number!” Alex exclaimed. I smiled and gave him a ‘go on’ gesture.

Alex gave up everything he had, which wasn’t much, and that was by design. The people who’d set up this thing were smarter than him and me combined. I took the number and fed it into the case file.

He’d confessed to some pretty horrible things, and I got all that on the recording. I’m running the full suite of voice stress analysis and I’d say he was pretty truthful. At the end, when he saw I was going to put him in an unmanned patrol car to extradite him to texas, he flipped out.

I didn’t care.

He kept talking about how a death sentence would be better than what was going to happen to him in general population, and I had to agree. Death would have been better. After what he’d been a part of, I couldn’t give that to him.

I ran through the databases to get the faces, credit cards, and names of everyone associated with good old Alex. The two tracksuit guys didn’t know any more than Alex did, and the surgeon in the red scrubs disappeared like a black cat in a chimney.

So, that led me back to the start, Mrs Delgado.

I finally asked the one question I really should have asked at the start: why didn’t she call it in? It was her kid who was missing, wasn’t it?

My software was flagging me with notifications from CODIS and a few other things. On a hunch, I decided to check the kids’ DNA. Usually that’s a big no-no, you can’t so much as look at a kids social media profile without a warrant, a legal guardian’s consent, and a state prosecutor hungry for the case.

This was a murder case, now though.

The Joker’s Wild club card triggered something in my head so I scanned the account. Turns out Fernando was a regular here. He showed up every two months like clockwork, and he would gamble from saturday morning until sunday afternoon.

I ran the DNA of the boy into CODIS, no hits, as I suspected. None for Fernando, but Mrs. Delgado had a shitload of traffic tickets in Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and Guadalajara.

I went and got a coffee at the Starbucks on the strip and watched the freaks go by for a while. The creamer in my coffee rolled and rolled as I stirred it with my wooden spoon. Something in that swirl made me ask, what if it wasn’t Fernando’s kid?

Fernando was a hard-working man. Suppose he finds out the kid isn’t his, and he’s going to show her, really show her, and make this kid he’s paid for and slaved for disappear. There’s a lot of passions at play when a man finds out his son isn’t his. That rarely goes this wrong, though. Still, it was worth a shot.

I ran the kid’s DNA against Fernando’s. Should have been twenty-three alleles in common. Instead, there were none. Okay, so Fernando ended up raising someone else’s kid, got mad, and brought him to Vegas to sell his organs?

That made no sense either. If he was gonna kill the kid, he’d have done it at home in an act of passion right in front of the mother. Condemning a boy to the kind of terror he must have felt being zip-tied to an ironing board by strangers doesn’t track either.

I had an email notification. Mrs. Wilke had written me back, said she had a ton of old stuff that belonged to the boys that had stayed with Mrs. Delgado over the last year. I blinked a few times. The plural in that sentence made my train of thought back up and take a dirt road.

I ran another test.

The kid turned out to have no alleles in common with Mrs Delgado either.

It stopped making sense until it did.

He wasn’t their kid.

He was their payday.

That was what I missed.

It wasn’t what was there, but what wasn’t there.

No toys, no toothbrush, no tears, and no missing person’s report if the neighbor hadn’t done it.

I got in the car and told it to ignore speed limits. If I were right, Mrs. Delgado was my last link to finding the principals in this thing. It was a long way to Texas, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep.

Halfway there, the Sheriff’s Department called me to close the case. Mrs. Delgado had died in a single-car accident just south of Port Aransas. With the whole family dead, they were transferring this to the homicide detachment at Austin. The deputy congratulated me on my dedication to duty, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I hung up after he stopped talking.

I pulled into the next bar I could find and got deadass drunk.

Halfway to a hangover, I got woken up by an email notification. The Texas State Bureau of Investigation wanted my final report and for me to turn over my sense recordings relating to this case. While I was blinking myself awake, I got another email, this time from the LAPD telling me I needed to return immediately to leave any and all sense recordings related to this case in their possession.

I blinked.

Then I smiled.

After visiting Mrs. Wilke, I added twelve more DNA profiles of boys who had been trafficked by the Delgados. She was a rare specimen of a genuinely good person, and for her sake, I hope none of this blows back on her. I explained the danger, and she told me that she was eighty-seven and completely out of fucks to give.

Me too, Mrs. Wilke, Me too. I’m not eighty-seven, but you get the point.

To make this long story slightly longer, the multiples in the case led to a rare collusion between state and federal prosecutors that ended in me getting handed an open-ended warrant and a budget.

So, I’m going back to Vegas with a federal warrant, a budget, and a bad attitude.

Hide and watch motherfuckers.

‘Cause I’m coming for you.