A murder cop working in an area where there's not a lot of murders has to have a skill set beyond the ability to track and arrest killers. In places like East Greenwich, RI where there was hardly any crime at all, the officer who heads a murder investigation is oftentimes also the officer who finds stolen bicycles, and busts weed dealers. That’s just what Lawson Danes was doing when he got the call about the afternoon’s excitement at 193 Dollar. This was a fortunate coincidence for both the weed dealer and Danes, as the former avoided the wrath of the law (mostly - Lawson called him a “shithead” ), and the latter scored two ounces of monumentally stoney weed. Danes smoked some on the way to Dollar St.
Uniformed police are trained in certain procedures where murder is concerned. They are often the first of all the first-responders to show up on scene. As such, these police are responsible for the preservation of the crime scene until the Investigating officer arrives to take charge. Murder is an act that people go to great lengths to conceal, and so the place where a body falls gets taken apart detail by poison detail, everything dusted for prints and bagged for later consideration by forensics teams, police personnel, and legal counsel. It’s an exacting dance, and best performed under low-stress conditions. Critical pieces can be overlooked because of pollution in and around the crime scene, so the cop in charge has a great many things to account for. The better ones start learning names and enlisting support right away upon arrival, delegating tasks, taking information from some, and transiting it to others the minute they arrive on scene. The best call ahead, starting their choreography while ducking speeding towards to the call. Lawson Danes wasn’t one of the best, but he had the speeding part nailed.
Arriving at 193 Dollar, Danes wished he’d gone slower.
***
Martin Burke woke up in a different place. He wasn’t exactly sure where he’d come from, but he knew for a certainty that it was not here. His theory was confirmed by the flying car that almost ran him down. The place in which he’d woken appeared to be a vast, empty plane of grass, not a road in sight, and so he thought himself safe enough. At least from cars. The one that almost hit Burke had to be going over a hundred miles per hour. It missed his head by what seemed like inches, and in the instant Martin hit the dirt, he thought he heard laughter in the blast of hot air swirling and pushing in flying thing's wake. By the time he looked up, the car was gone out of sight, melted into a horizon where green grass met with blue sky.
Las Vegas looked the same, even if the desert that Martin knew surrounded it had changed into a grassland. He’d walked for what seemed like weeks before seeing it. Now he was walking around it about a mile out, nervous to enter, and nervous to keep his orbit around the city. When at last he did enter, he was relieved to find the Vegas he’d known all his life. The Luxor still looked the same, and the bellmen and desk staff still remembered his name. Within two hours of hitting the city that day, Burke had been given three thousand dollars in courtesy chips from the Luxor concierge. He augmented that with another thousand- worth from his account, and set to work at the tables. Within two weeks of playing and winning and whoring, Burke started to forget about his weird circumstance. After a month he’d no recollection at all of his previous life, and no yearning for the people and things that had meant so much to him. He was in Vegas now, winning. Martin Burke was alright with that.
That was the other thing: winning here in this Vegas was a lot easier than back in the world. Burke didn’t know why, but he suspected it had something to do with the odds in this place being different. Burke spent five years raking in Las Vegas. Whatever weird statistic was at work in this world, it made Martin Burke a very rich man. He stashed his new fortune in four different numbered accounts and began a high speed, improvised jaunt all around his new reality. He planned on hitting up every place he’d never gone on earth, and he planned to do so in a flying car. He secured a used one, and spent a few weeks on the grassy plains outside Vegas. Eventually he felt ready to test his skills in the great big world, and took off at 150 mph in a rush of noise and hot air.
Alaska, he found, was too hot for an extended visit, and too noisy. Aside from that, though, it prooved culturally superior than any place Martin had ever been. Chicago was just plain boring. They rolled up the sidewalks there at unreasonably early hours. London was barbaric and dangerous, but home to some of the most dramatic landscapes and countryside of anyplace in any world. The journey lasted more than a year, and cost him only a tiny fraction of the money he’d won. On his return, Martin planned to buy himself a house. Nothing fancy, just a nice little place to call his own. He’d been out seeing open houses when he got sick.
He was bed bound for three weeks, and by the time he’d gone to the doctor, the cancer had spread from his colon and laid waste to his anatomy from his balls to his throat. The doctor wasn’t worried though. Instead of telling Martin to get his affairs in order and prepare for the worst, he prescribed a drug called “Vidas”, and told his patient to take three a day with a full glass of water. He’d told Martin:
You should be ok after that, but if not we’ll give you another week’s supply and mop up the last of it.
After a few moments of uncomfortable staring, Martin and the doctor had the most amazing conversation. Cancer, the doctor told him, had been solved in this world. Even the worst, most malignant types could be beaten, usually with nothing more invasive than a pill-regimen. It wasn’t just cancer either. Most diseases and ailments - from the common cold all the way to Muscular Dystrophy - had been eradicated.
Martin went back to his new house in Vegas, and lived out the rest of his days as a successful gambler. He died at the age of 110, which - he'd learned - was about right for this world. One night he’d climbed into bed to watch Letterman (still funny here), but he dozed off instead, dreaming of a gigantic school of fish moving fast over a huge coral reef. They swam as a group but constantly feinted and slid as one unit like high-speed underwater swallows. After a long time following them, Martin saw them break for the surface. He followed, sounding moments after the fish, who were now doing their weird drill in the air. Martin sat there watching them for a few minutes, still hypnotized by their lunatic route. After a while he got tired of treading water and stopped. He felt himself sinking, and didn’t care.
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