Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

Playing Nice With God's Bowling Ball

Written by N. K. Jemison

Illustrated by: Russ Hicks

"I didn't mean for anything to happen to Timmy." Jeffy Hanson sat before Grace in a chair big enough to swallow him, his head bowed and hands limp in his lap. "I told him not to feed it like that. I told him what would happen."

"Let's just start at the beginning." Detective Grace Anneton gave Jeffy a reassuring smile, though he didn't lift his eyes to see it. In spite of herself, Grace felt sorry for the kid. She knew better; he could be some sweet-talking little punk, trying to snow job her with his big, brown, puppy eyes. Or a sociopath, already skilled enough at only seven years old to emulate emotions he didn't feel. She shouldn't feel sorry for any confessed murderer, no matter how improbable the murder sounded. But she did.

He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "It was for my mom. The card. I wanted to get it back from Timmy. You know Monster Fusion King?"

Grace sifted through her memory and came up with an image: a sign in the window of the local convenience store. MONSTER FUSION KING SOLD HERE! "Some sort of card game?"

He nodded. "Me and Timmy, we get new packs on Fridays. Timmy always gets four or five. I only buy one. My mom used to give me an allowance, but when Dad went away and we moved here to the city she had to stop. We don't have a lot of money anymore."

"So how do you get a new pack every week if you don't have an allowance, Jeffy?"

"Mom gives me lunch money. But at lunchtime I get water instead of juice and I save up what's left and I use that to buy my pack for the week." He looked up at Grace, a different sort of guilt flickering in his eyes. "Do you have to tell my mom that? I think she'd be mad if she knew I wasn't using all my lunch money for, well, lunch."

Grace smiled and made a mental note to check for a financial motive if the kid's confession turned out to be more than a load of hooey. "I don't think we'll have to tell her that, Jeffy. So. This all started when Timmy got a card you liked?"

"No." He looked down at his hands again. "I mean, yeah, he always had cards I liked, but that wasn't what started it. Timmy was a real collector. He even got MONSTER KING magazine. He had almost all the cards ever made."

"I see. And how many cards did you have?"

He shrugged a little. "Not so many."

Of course. "So this started last Friday when you got your new pack?"

He nodded. "I got a really good card, the Cuckoo Chimera. It's a special contest card, only a few ever made. Only I didn't know that, not then. Timmy said he'd trade me for three of his repeats—ones he already had, I mean. I said yes." He frowned and squirmed in his seat.

Grace read his restlessness. "I'm guessing it was worth more than three cards."

"Yeah. My friend, Eduardo, said he saw one for three hundred dollars on eBay."

Holy shit, Grace thought. I gotta start collecting cards. "When did you find this out, Jeffy?"

"At school on Monday. That's when I talked to Eduardo. A lot of the kids in my class are into Monster King."

"I see. And you got mad."

"No." He looked up at her, frowning again. "I didn't care about stuff like that. Timmy was my friend. But that night when I got home, my mom was crying."

"Why?"

"Her car—it's really old—broke down at work. She said she couldn't afford to get it fixed. My dad, he . . ." Another of those little shifts of discomfort. "He doesn't send money to take care of me like he's supposed to. He doesn't think I'm his."

Grace's eyebrows shot up. What kind of parents would tell their child something like that?

"They argued a lot, before he left. Sometimes I listened."

"I see. So your mom was upset."

"Yeah. She couldn't afford to get the car fixed unless she took money out of the rent and if she did that we'd lose the apartment."

"That must have made you feel really bad."

An unhappy nod. "I asked her what she needed to fix the car and she said, 'Three hundred dollars.'"

Definitely a financial motive. And definitely more than manslaughter. Grace kept her voice even. "So then you wanted your card back."

"Yeah. I called Timmy that night and told him I knew he'd made a bad trade and it wasn't fair and we should reverse it. And he said it wasn't his fault I didn't know about the contest cards." Jeffy's brow tightened. "And then I told him about my mom and he said yeah, right it was a good story but he wasn't falling for it and too bad, so sad." Jeffy looked up at her. "I got mad then."

"I can imagine." Revenge motive too, maybe. Damn, the poor little brat might be looking at murder one. "So what did you do, Jeffy?"

"I told him I'd do anything to get the card back. I offered him everything I had—all my cards and my roller blades and even my Click-n-Go robot set. But he said he was going to keep the card because in a year it might be worth twice as much. He said he would only give it to me if I gave him something really, really cool for it. And then he laughed and said I'd never be able to give him anything that cool because I was poor, so that was like asking me to give him the moon or a black hole or something."

Grace shook her head. Kids could be real little monsters sometimes. Then she shoved that thought aside; she was feeling sorry for the kid again.

She leaned across the table and folded her hands. "Jeffy, when you came into the precinct, you told the officer at the front desk that you might've killed Timmy Johnson. Is this why you killed him? Because he wouldn't give your card back?"

Jeffy frowned again. "No. I told you, I didn't mean to. It was an accident."

"But if you were angry with him—"

"I wasn't, not once he said what he wanted. I gave it to him and I told him how to take care of it. But he didn't pay attention."

Neither had Grace, apparently. She frowned in confusion, trying to figure out what she'd missed. "Gave what to him, Jeffy?"

"I already told you," Jeffy said, with an exasperated air. "Timmy said he would give me the card back if I gave him something like the moon or a black hole. I couldn't think of anything else, and the moon was too big, so I made a black hole and gave it to him. It was just a little one. But he started feeding it this giant stuffed panda he got from Coney Island last year. The panda was even bigger than he was. I tried to stop him. I told him it was too big. But he dented the special container it was in, and the black hole got loose and ate him."

Then, apparently oblivious to Grace's stare, the boy burst into tears. "I told him to be careful."

****

In the observation room, Grace rubbed her face with her hands. Beyond the one-way glass, little Jeffy sat with his head down on his folded arms.

"So the kid is crazy," said Captain Dewitt.

"Not necessarily." Taliafero, Grace's partner, regarded the boy through the glass. "Could be a cry for attention or some bullshit like that. He killed somebody but can't say where the body is; no, wait, he only thinks he killed him; no, wait . . ." He shook his head. "Prank, maybe. Or just a flat-out lie."

Grace shook her head. "Put a kid that age in front of a cop and they might tell little white lies, but not the kinds of whoppers this kid is spinning. He actually believes what he's saying."

"Could he be . . ." Taliafero waved a hand. "I don't know, confused? Maybe the Johnson kid fell into a sinkhole. This kid sees what happens, doesn't know the word for it and calls it a black hole. And he feels guilty because maybe he wished something bad would happen to little Timmy 'cause little Timmy's an asshole, and he comes up with this story."

Dewitt shook his head. "We can get Dr. Howard to examine the kid if it comes to that. In the meantime, get his mother in here and take an official statement. If the kid did kill somebody, I don't want him getting off on a technicality."

****

They took another statement from Jeffy once his mother arrived. Grace watched closely while Taliafero conducted the interview. Taliafero asked Jeffy the same questions in different ways, urged him to repeat certain details, made him describe the three hundred-dollar card and retrace his steps from school to home every afternoon. But despite all that, Grace detected no inconsistencies in the boy's story.

She watched the mother, too. Mrs. Hanson, a thin woman in a faded dress, who had perpetually-tired eyes, listened to the story with a little frown on her face, showing surprise only once. Not when Taliafero mentioned "possible harm to Timmy Johnson"—that had only made her frown deepen. But when Jeffy gave his black hole explanation, her eyes widened, her breath caught and her body language screamed anxiety in a way that no detective could have missed.

Dewitt noticed it too, and rapped on the door to bring Taliafero out. Closing the door, he turned to them and folded his arms. "So?"

Taliafero shook his head. "I can't crack the kid, but the mom sure is interesting."

Dewitt sighed and nodded. "And here I was ready to call this a case of too much high fructose corn syrup."

"Shouldn't we send a forensics team over to the Johnson’s?" Grace asked. "Hard to indict anybody for murder if there's no evidence that a murder actually occurred."

"I don't want to send a team yet. I'm with Tally on this maybe turning out to be a prank. But you two go check it out. Holler if you see any black holes."

****

Mr. Johnson wasn't home. Mrs. Johnson let them in. She was a pretty woman, but there was a dull sort of glaze to her eyes that Grace had seen before. Denial, probably, or shock. That desperate creeping fear that only the parents of a missing child could ever know.

"It's about time," she said when Grace and Taliafero entered the house. Despite the words, her voice was without heat. Without any emotion, in fact, spilling out of her in a soft, droning babble. "I called in the missing persons' report this morning. You want a description of what he was wearing? I've been trying to find a good photograph—"

Grace cleared her throat uneasily. "We're not exactly here about the missing persons' report, Mrs. Johnson." She glanced around the foyer of the place—a four-bedroom duplex in a nice brownstone, worth a lot these days but probably not when they'd bought it. There was something strange about the place, she noticed at once. Something off-kilter. But she couldn't put her finger on the source of that feeling.

Mrs. Johnson walked past them toward the living room. A half-burnt cigarette smoldered in an ashtray on the table; she picked it up and waved them toward the couch. "Talk to me about what?" Her eyes lit in sudden hungry anxiety. "You found Timmy?"

"No, Mrs. Johnson. I'm sorry." Taliafero looked uncomfortable. "Do you know a friend of Timmy's named Jeffrey Hanson?"

The Johnson woman seemed to wilt; her dull glaze returned. "Jeffy? Sure I know him. Weird kid, but nice enough. What's this about?"

"Why do you say he's weird, Mrs. Johnson?"

"He just . . . is." She made a vague gesture with the cigarette; smoke swirled in loops around her. "Quiet. Polite." Her lips quirked in a faint, fleeting smile. "Well, maybe I'm just used to Timmy. But I've heard weird things about his mom." She shook her head. "Anyway, what does he have to do with my son?"

Taliafero cleared his throat. "This afternoon, ma'am, Jeffy came into the precinct and asked to be arrested. He said, and I quote—" He flipped through his notepad. "'I think I killed Timmy Johnson. It was an accident, but I think maybe I should go to jail.'"

The Johnson woman's face went slack for an instant. "Timmy's dead?"

Quickly, Grace spoke up. "We're not certain, Mrs. Johnson. Jeffy says it happened here, in Timmy's bedroom, but obviously you would have been the first to know if that was true. And Jeffy appears to be . . . confused . . . about the details of the crime. So we can't jump to any conclusions about Timmy yet."

The shock began to clear from Mrs. Johnson's face. She swallowed, took a breath, noticed that her cigarette was about to drop some ashes, and absently stubbed it out. "When . . . when will you know more?"

"Well, first we'd like to examine the crime sc—the place where it supposedly happened," Grace said. "May we?"

The woman nodded and waved them toward the stairwell. "Up on the left." She fell silent then, lost in the daze of her own terrible thoughts. Grace and Taliafero glanced at each other, then made an awkward exit to go check out the scene.

But when they opened the door to the Johnson boy's room, they both stopped in shock.

Parts of the room were still normal. A bookcase set into one wall held all of the usual accoutrements of the small-boy lifestyle: large binders labeled "MONSTER KING" in a blocky hand, an open box of Legos, a row of books arranged with a mother's neatness. On a nearby wall were posters, one of the Yankees' Derek Jeter and another of some spiky-haired anime character. Below the posters was a bed, more or less in order. They could see that at one point it had been neatly-made, but now the sheets hung half on the floor and the bed itself had been partially pulled away from the wall. It dipped at a precarious angle toward the yawning, splintered pit in the middle of the hardwood floor.

"What the . . .?" Taliafero murmured aloud. Grace stepped into the bedroom, moving gingerly even though the outermost edges of the floor seemed stable. The pit started a foot or two into the room. From there the floor had been demolished in a rough circle, bits of plaster and wood sloping dangerously toward a hole maybe five inches across at the center. They could glimpse the room below—the kitchen—through the opening.

Grace had a sudden vision of a whirlpool made of wood and lathing rather than water, twisting with hellish speed as it descended into . . . what?

A black hole, like the kid said.

She pushed that thought aside.

"Looks like somebody dropped God's bowling ball in here," Taliafero muttered.

"We thought he'd run away," said Mrs. Johnson. Grace spun around. She'd been too stunned by the hole to hear the woman coming up the steps behind them.

"That's why we waited 'til today to file the report," Mrs. Johnson said in her heatless, spiritless voice. "We thought he'd gotten into something—fireworks maybe—and run away because he thought we'd be angry. But I don't care about the floor." She rubbed her eyes; Grace's heart ached for her. "If you find him, tell him that. The floor doesn't matter, I just want him home."

Grace pointed at the floor. "Mrs. Johnson . . . do you have any idea what could have caused that?"

The woman looked up, her eyes haunted and very, very lost.

"No," said Mrs. Johnson, "but there's one in the kitchen, too."

****

They searched the basement as carefully as they could in the area under the kitchen. But there was nothing—no blood, no fireworks residue that they could see, no signs of a struggle. The basement had been set up as Mr. Johnson's den, with an old couch and TV and ugly carpeting. The