Nothing Happens All the Time - Homicides Truly Know How to Interrupt a Good Meal!

Chapter One

The Big Bang

Oh my God…I have a splitting headache… Eli Mitchell thought to himself.

He had no idea why it manifested now.

It was his week to play passenger while his partner, Wayne Thatcher, drove. They had just sat down to grab some lunch when dispatch contacted them about the robbery call. Their brown sedan rolled down the avenues of Boston. The driver had his choice of music to play over the sound system. The ride was soothing enough so he simply chalked it up to the twangy music being played through the speakers, but it was being wrongfully accused. Both of the men inside the vehicle scanned the scenes around them. The police Comm in the unmarked detective car constantly chimed in about problems that were taking place throughout the metropolis.

Autumn colored leaves were sporadically gathering on the sidewalks and streets below. People moved along the sidewalks ignoring the leaves’ last acts of defiant claims to life. The leaves danced and swirled about from the multitude of vehicles that passed over the asphalt. The tall, ultramodern buildings hid the foot traffic’s view of the water fowl flying overhead. They were starting their migration to warmer climates, unaware of the strenuous ordeal the leaves were going through. The sleek, curved, modernistic buildings were intermingled with the older, more conventional, straight angled structures and their strange shadows only added to the chill already in the air. The pedestrians didn’t seem to think about any of it, not even for one moment.

Eli was wearing his black suit today and had hung his jacket off the back of his seat. His simple blue tie was sprawled slightly to the left against his white dress shirt. The dark sunglasses he wore hid his blue eyes. He ran his hand over his flattop blond hair and contemplated a good day to get it cut again, but nothing solidified as a decent time for that right now. Eli stood slightly over six feet tall, which made him a good three inches taller than his partner. This fact occasionally annoyed his friend and sometimes it had nothing to do with Eli’s intermittent comments about the matter.

Wayne’s brown hair was what Eli referred to as a Russian Haircut, due to his receding hairline rushing further back with each passing year. He refused to do the standard comb over because he felt it looked stupid on guys who tried to rebel against their hair loss. Wayne did manage to keep his hair looking respectable by keeping it just above the collar and short around his ears. One of the first things people noticed about the man was his brown eyes, which could bore a hole through steel when he chose to stare at them. His gravelly voice was the other thing which could easily be confused with a box of steel ball bearings rolling around in a rock tumbler. He was wearing a dark gray suit that matched the other suits he had in his closet. Using this approach, he didn’t have to worry about deciding what to wear each day. The only thing he did change about his apparel was the tie, which was dark red today.

Both of them sported a mustache. Eli had his for the past three years because of the department contest that was held each year to see which officer could grow the best one. Wayne pretty much had one since he first started working as a cop. Neither of them had yet to win the contest, despite Wayne’s best efforts to bribe the judges last year by giving them an all day spa treatment. That award went to Louie Haskell instead, who sent the judges to a nightclub with an open bar policy for the win.

It was Wayne’s turn to drive and he was enjoying every moment of it. They both came up with the idea on who drove the car for the week by flipping one of his old collectible coins. This little game started when they were paired together more than six years ago, shortly after Eli had been promoted to his detective grade. Wayne felt slightly victorious this time; not because he didn’t have to use his double headed coin to win, but because Eli had yet to catch onto his little trick.

Eli picked up his coffee from the center console to take a sip and put it back without looking at it. He knew that Wayne would deliberately hit the pot hole ahead in an attempt to make him spill his drink. He was ready for it, unlike when he got his partner three weeks ago with the same practical joke.

“Did you catch Sunday’s game against the Jets?” Eli asked his partner as Wayne slowed the vehicle down for the pending red light.

“Yeah, I did,” Wayne lit up his cigarette and flipped on the left turn signal.

Eli mused to himself because he already knew how this conversation was going to go, “Those Patriots barely got out of that game with a win…”

“Screw that, they didn’t even cover the point spread! Nine points! Nine Points!! And against New York!! Sons-a-bitches!! The way New England’s defense played, it would’ve been better to use my sister’s kid’s Pee-Wee team!”

“What did I tell you about betting on teams you have an emotional investment in, Wayne?” He goaded his partner for another colorful comment.

Wayne shook his head as he took the next right, “Nine damn points!! Against the Jets, no less!! I bet on the Red Sox games all the time and make out like a bandit!”

“And look what that did for Pete Rose betting on his own team,” Eli added, knowing that Rose was one of his baseball heroes.

“Fuck you, you asshole…” Wayne mumbled to himself.

“What was that?” Eli deliberately asked.

“You heard me!”

The sedan entered into the east parking lot of the Tedeschi Foods Shop, at the corner of Cambridge and Beacon Street and stopped just short of the holographic police line. Eli signed them out at the scene of the robbery and exited the vehicle. While waiting for Wayne, he put on his jacket and threw a couple pieces of gum into his mouth. He was still struggling to get used to the mustache even with having it for as long as he did. Despite the occasional threats to shave it off, he was subconsciously playing with the longer strands with his bottom lip since his partner was taking too long.

They walked up to the officer in charge and obtained the details of the incident. A lone white male assailant had entered the store and attempted to rob the clerk at gunpoint. One of the customers in the store attempted to stop the suspect and ended up being shot in the process. The victim’s body could be seen on the other side of the checkout counter. While they were getting updated by the officer, a woman’s shriek could be heard which caused Wayne to look around the white walled partition. It’d been set up to prevent the crowd that had gathered from looking into the scene. He quickly scanned the multitude of people, but he didn’t see anything out of place so he turned his attention back to the end of the officer’s narrative.

The medical examiner, Danny Finn, was in the process of digitally imaging the corpse when Eli and Wayne entered the building. Danny was hard to miss when he was on a scene. His roughly six foot six inch sturdy frame didn’t leave anything to the imagination indicating that he used to play football professionally. A knee injury ended his career and left him with a slight limp. His shaggy red hair matched his unkempt beard. He definitely knew his stuff when it came to forensic pathology, archeology, and trace element analysis. He was wearing the usual black semi-professional shirt and blue jeans, with his brown leather jacket currently draped over his forensics kit by the doorway.

“Hey Eli…Wayne…Dropping in for the special Dunkin Donuts is having?” Danny quipped.

Eli gave a casual wave.

Wayne smiled, “I heard your wife was working here and I figured I could dunk my donuts while I’m getting some coffee.”

Danny frowned and adjusted his technician glasses, “You’re in a mood today, Wayne…”

Eli quickly stated before Wayne could remark, “Don’t mind him, Danny, he lost his shirt over the weekend. Who do we have here?”

“Football again, eh?” Danny inquired. He looked at Wayne, who was ignoring him while he used his fScanner to scan the victim’s uChip located at the base of the neck.

The fScanner, which was short for field scanner, was exactly what it implied and was provided through the Thetatronics Company. It was one of the more recent additions to police investigations allowing anyone who used it to scan a crime scene. The device was meticulous and very rarely missed minute details that could potentially be overlooked given the older standard methods. All of the gathered information could immediately be crosschecked within any criminal or information database and provide an accurate response, so long as the operator was familiar with its functions and used it correctly.

Thirty-three years ago, back in the year 2043, Ion-U Technologies introduced two inventions into society which helped revolutionize the world and everything conducted in it. The first was the uChip, a microchip device which was systematically provided to everyone throughout the world. Embedded under a person’s skin, usually at the base of the neck, it was bio-engineered to interface with a consumer’s brain and nervous system to correspond with Ion-U’s second inception.

The Grid,...