We ran through the intersection and shot through downtown, past the old Colonial church and town commons, and blew a stop sign at the far side.
“Junior, I do believe you’re enjoying this.”
He let out a laugh. “Better than driving a desk in Langley.”
A siren wailed behind us. Red and blue lights flashed in our rearview mirror.
“What a time for the Cheerville police to be doing their job!” I cried.
“Has the car appeared on the trace?”
“No. We have to catch up to them.”
“How good are the local police?”
A loud cackle was the only answer I could manage.
It told Gary all he needed to know. He hit the gas again and took off down a narrow road past tidy little homes. The police car picked up speed too.
“Watch this,” Gary said. A side street was coming up, way too fast. He’d never be able to make that turn.
He knew it, too, so he cut across the lawn of the house on the corner, tearing up the grass and obliterating a garden gnome.
“Always hated those things,” he muttered, the car jolting as it got back on the pavement and he shot off down the new street.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. The policeman had decided not to risk the wrath of all gnomekind and had slammed on his brakes, screeching to a halt just past the intersection.
“He’ll back up and be on us in a moment,” I said.
“No problem.”
He zigzagged through a residential neighborhood, swerving to avoid cars, taking out a couple of mailboxes, and generally causing havoc. The police siren faded behind us.
“I must say, Junior, your driving is quite good. Have you been practicing?”
“I was a crack driver back in the day too. Don’t you remember how I used to drive a Jeep?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, I was good.”
“If you say so. I don’t recall you killing any gnomes in Panama or Syria.”
“I don’t think they have them over there.”
“Maybe if they did, they’d have more stable governments.”
We got on the highway. Still no sign of the car on my GPS locator.
“Where could they be?” I grumbled.
“There’s an off-ramp coming up. The sign says it leads to a county road. Should we try that?”
I looked over the countryside, a patchwork of woods and fields and the occasional large home.
“I think they went further out. Keep driving.”
My phone rang. Albert.
“This isn’t exactly the best time,” I said, glancing at my GPS locator and still seeing nothing.
“I figured out how the murderer managed to dump the body on you and get away without you spotting him.”
“Have you now?”
The doubt in my voice must have been obvious because he said defensively, “I’m not lit. I’m, like, totally sober. Okay, maybe still a bit buzzed from last night, but—”
Big sigh. “Albert, could you please get to the point?”
“Look, you know how Ms. Nightingale found a bar-code sticker on the catwalk and the pigs found one for the same product in the shopping cart?”
“Don’t call them pigs. They’re police officers.”
Gary gave me a questioning look. I waved him off.
“Whatever. The stickers prove the drones did it.”
“You’re high. I’m hanging up now.”
“No, listen! The bar-code stickers are always on the top of the packaging. The drones sense them and then stack the boxes on top of each other. The drone saw the label on the dead dude, saw the label on the shopping cart, and tried to stack the dead dude in the shopping cart.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It totally explains everything!”
“No, it doesn’t. Let me walk you through this. I’ll speak slowly so my words get through the fog. The drones aren’t intelligent. They’re not going to wait for me to pass by before stacking Sir Edmund onto my shopping cart. They can’t lift him anyway. The drones can only carry up to 30 pounds.”
“That’s just the safety limit. They can actually carry, like, 50, but it’s hard on their engines.”
“So a drone still couldn’t lift him.”
“Two drones could. They’re programmed to work together.”
“But how would they know to wait for me to show up? Why not just fly over to the row of shopping carts and drop him there?” The image of Sir Edmund Montalbion flying across the upper reaches of SerMart with a knife through his head flashed through my mind’s eye. That would have been interesting to see in real life.
“They must have got hacked, same as the camera system.”
“Oh.” Well, that made sense, didn’t it? I was impressed. We had explained the whole situation to Albert and everything we knew about the case, but I hadn’t thought that he would actually remember a tenth of it. “So those men from the security company who came last night must have been searching for the tag. They realized it could be a vital clue, and when one of their drones spotted it on the catwalk, they decided to come and retrieve it.”
“Yeah. They were dumb to do that in the first place, but when they saw the tag had come off the body and stuck to the catwalk, they decided to get it. They couldn’t get the drones to grab it because they only have grabbers on the bottom. The drones couldn’t have pulled it off the edge of the catwalk.”
“I must say, Albert, you can be quite intelligent when you want to be. If you stopped smoking, you could go places.”
“That’s what Octavian says. He’s, like, a motivational speaker or something.”
“Perhaps you should listen to him more, and perhaps you should stop lying to him about having quit smoking.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, he’s a good dude.”
I said goodbye and hung up.
“Who was that?” Gary asked.
“A young stoner who’s been helping out with the case. My boyfriend seems to have inherited him.”
He gave me a curious glance. “Inherited from who?”
“Parents who didn’t do their job.”
“Sounds like you’re having an interesting retirement.”
“You might say that. Hey! There they are!”
A red dot had appeared just on the
