The Prospects (Short Story): Above the Stars by Daniel Halayko Page A

the man’s chest.
    “The bones ain’t lined up,” said Chak in a gravelly voice. “They moved around. Tore up his insides worse than his outsides. We got a drug that causes instant mutation, but I don’t know its scent.”
    Alex said, “I think a crime lab would reveal more than your nose.”
    Chak tossed the cube to Alex. “All those geeks in white coats will give you is a report with ‘unknown’ over and over again. I smell something that once flowed, ancient like the mists over mountains. There’s an undertone of fire, not the natural scent of burnt wood or molten stone, but something made of elements you won’t find on a periodic chart.”
    “You must be fun at wine tastings.” Alex sniffed the cube. “Smells like rust and rotten eggs. I don’t know where you’re getting all that other stuff.”
    Long black braids rolled along the sides of Chak’s sharp Native American face. “I’m here to track. You’re here to watch.”
    “I don’t even know why you got involved with this case.”
    “Personal reasons.”
    “And those reasons are?”
    “Personal. Let’s talk about the past victims, eh?”
    Max flipped through his smartphone’s screen. “The first was a rich kid with a long history of doing stupid things and having his daddy bail him out. We found little shards of this drug in a spoon.”
    “The Takeda boy,” said Chak. “Japanese-American.”
    “The second was a call girl.”
    “Right, thirty-two-years old, Korean-American,” said Alex.
    “She had half of a cube left on her nightstand,” said Max. “This guy was an entrepreneur who retired a multi-millionaire at thirty, which isn’t bad for a Taiwanese immigrant.”
    “All rich junkies, wherever they came from,” said Alex.
    “The call girl had a history of drug possession arrests. This guy has nothing but speeding tickets on his record.”
    “Then someone bought drugs for him.” Chak rolled up the man’s sleeve to reveal a line of circular scars along his vein. “He was speeding down the road to ruin.”
    “I’m sure we’ll learn more from his autopsy,” said Max. “The result from the Takeda boy’s was weird. Apparently her blood changed into something distinctly non-human.”
    “How’s that?” asked Alex.
    “You know how normal blood cells look like donuts under a microscope? His looked like buzz saws.”
    “That ain’t right,” said Chak.
    “That’s why I’m glad you volunteered to help our investigation,” said Max. “Stuff like this is beyond normal police training.”
    “I deal with stuff that ain’t normal all the time. But we don’t have much to go on.”
    Alex flipped through his smartphone’s screen. “I did some research on the flight over. On the call girl’s last arrest, she named a David Tang as her dealer.”
    “I arrested him back when I was in uniform,” said Max. “Chubby dude with a scar on his chin. It looks like an old knife wound, but he swears he cut himself shaving.”
    Alex pointed to the dead body. “Does this guy have a connection to David?”
    “Not that we found yet.”
    Chak looked around. “Does the dealer sell things other than drugs? Like, say, folk medicines?”
    “He has contacts with all kinds of smugglers. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
    Chak’s bare feet patted softly on the linoleum when he walked into the kitchen. He picked up an unmarked ceramic vial from the top of the stove, unscrewed it, sniffed, and nodded.
    “What is it?” asked Alex.
    “Your lab geeks can analyze this, but all they’ll see is keratin, the stuff fingernails are made from. But I smell the sunrise over an open grassland and hear elephants in the distance above a faint hint of seawater and hay from being shoved into a crate. This is ground rhino horn.”
    “What, an aphrodisiac?”
    “That’s a myth,” said Max. “Rhino horn is more of a painkiller than a sex drug. It’s mixed in boiling water, which explains why it’s by the stove.”
    “All the same,” said Chak,