Mi Hermano

By Tyson Blue

In this story of mystery and suspense from Tyson Blue, a private investigator and his partner are hired to investigate a company suspected of illegal activities. As they uncover a toxic conspiracy, tragedy strikes, leaving one to navigate a perilous situation alone—or so he thinks.

“Cheer up, mi hermano,”  Fernandez said, cracking the passenger-side window and blowing a column of smoke outside. “You walk around like you’re under a cloud.”

I looked back at him and turned slightly to face him in the seat.

“What are you talking about? What’s to be happy about?”

“What’s to be unhappy about?” he fired back. “You’re a successful PI, we’re workin’, we’re healthy—”

“Not for long if you keep smokin’ those damn cigars,” I interrupted. He chuckled, sending little puffs of smoke out into the car as he did.

“I have to watch what I eat, what I drink, I can’t smoke cigarettes, I have to spend an hour a day at the gym to make up for sitting around on these stakeouts all the time,” he said. “A man has to have a little vice to make life interesting.”

He had a point. Unlike the world of television and the movies, the life of Steve Edwards, Private Eye, consisted mostly of sitting around slumped in the front seat of a beat-up old car keeping an eye out for philandering husbands or wives, insurance claimants who were doing things they shouldn’t with the injuries they supposedly had, or, in the present case, for industries violating health and safety regulations.

We’d been hired to investigate Global Chemical, a Philly-based concern, who were suspected of transporting toxic waste in substandard containers and dumping it into the marshes outside the city. This was dangerous to the people doing the transporting, and also was dangerous to the wildlife in the wetlands where the stuff was being dumped. A couple of the drivers had gotten concerned when they began feeling sick, and had hired us to spy on the company to get enough evidence to turn the matter over to OSHA for legal action.

Sounds pretty important and exciting, right? What it actually boiled down to was parking close by the side gate to Global’s plant and waiting there all night for someone to move a cargo out and following them to see where they went, and, if it proved to be something illegal, to photograph them while they were doing it. The problem was that they never moved the stuff at the same time or on the same day, so we just had to sit there and hope we got lucky before the client ran out of money. At $100.00 a day plus expenses for two operatives, that might not take long.

We’d already been at it for three days, and so far, all we’d gotten was stiff joints and a lot of bad food and coffee. In the five years since Frankie Fernandez and I had opened Hermano Investigations—named for Frankie’s habit of referring to me as his brother—we had spent a lot of time doing what we were doing right now, and in the process had consumed a lot of bad food and washed it down with a lot of bad coffee. I was beginning to wonder if there was any other kind.

Then, Fernandez sat up. He tossed his cigar out the window, and rolled it farther down, sticking his head out, listening.

“Hear that?” he whispered. I listened and heard the sound of a heavily-laden truck nearby. Lights shone out of the gate of the Global plant, and then a stake-bed truck rolled out the gate and stopped by the gatehouse. A man came out of the building and leaned in the passenger door of the truck.

“This might be it, mi hermano,” Fernandez whispered, opening his door and sliding out. The dome light in our car was turned off, so there was no light to reveal us to the driver and the guard. We could see that the back of the truck was loaded with steel drums and what looked like truck batteries behind them.

“Where are you going?” I asked Fernandez.

“I’m going to see if I can sneak into the back of the truck while they’re talking.”

“What are you gonna do that for?” I asked. “We can just follow them!”

“You follow them,” he answered. “If they spot you, just fall back and I can still see what they do.”

With that, he moved out in front of the car and crept swiftly and silently up to the back of the truck, using the bulk of the vehicle itself as cover from the two men near the front. He reached the back of the truck without incident, and crawled slowly up onto the back, so as not to cause any movement of the truck body and alert the driver that someone was getting on.

That did nothing to keep him from being noticed by the man who emerged from the shadows behind the truck and stopped, pointing a very large gun at my partner. I began to slide out my side of the car, reaching for my own gun.

“Hey, you!” the man shouted at Fernandez. “Hey you guys! We got somebody snoopin’ around back here!” The driver and the man from the gatehouse looked back.

Fernandez turned, bracing himself on one of the drums in the truck, reaching into his jacket for his ID.

“He’s got a gun!” the guy shouted, and simultaneously fired. The sound of the shot was loud in the canyon of the street. I yelled something, I don’t remember what. I got about two more steps, then froze as the cold barrel of a gun pressed against my temple.

“Not another move,” a harsh voice grated in my ear.

I didn’t even blink. I just stared at Frank, who stood frozen for another moment, a moment during which I hoped the shot had just been a warning. Then, he slowly leaned back over the back of the truck, pulling the drum with him.

“Mi hermano,” he gasped, then fell off the truck. the drum fell down on top of the batteries behind it, the steel making contact with the posts. Arcs of electricity began flowing across the surface of the drum, whose top fell off. A viscous green liquid, its surface also coruscating with bright blue electric snakes, flowed over the back of the truck and washed onto Frank’s body in the street below.

“Frankie!” I screamed, starting toward him. I was brought up short as the gun barrel pressed harder into my temple.

“I said not another move, Pal,” the voice grated.

I never found out what was in the drums Global was moving that night, but it was corrosive. As it flowed over Frank’s body, clouds of acrid steam rose off him, arcs of electricity flashing through them. Frankie’s body began to change its shape, folding in on itself as it dissolved in the bath of chemicals which drenched it. In a matter of two or three minutes, body, bones and clothing all dissolved into the thick puddle beneath a small flashing cloud which slowly dissipated. All that was left was a strong acidic smell. For a moment, no one made a sound.

Then the driver looked at the guard and said, “What the fuck was that stuff? What’re you people doing?”

“You’re paid to take it out and dump it, and you don’t need to know what it is to do that,” the guard replied. “And those drums are going to start to leak in about an hour, and you don’t want to see what that stuff’ll do to your truck. So get going and do what you’re paid for. And you,” he said, turning to whoever had the gun on me. “Get that mook over here.”

The gun left my temple and prodded me in the small of my back. I stumbled forward a few steps, not at all anxious to get anywhere near the toxic puddle at the back of the truck. As I came up to the guard, the driver climbed back in the truck and put it in gear. As he rumbled quickly away, the man with the gun came around in front of me. He was a foot or so taller than me, and outweighed me by fifty pounds. He had a Colt pistol in his right hand, still pointed at me.

“So who are you and what’re you doing here?” the guard asked.

“I’m a detective,” I told him. “I was hired to find out if you were moving toxic waste out of here illegally. Looks like you were.”

“Yeah, I guess we were,” the guard said, smirking. “Just you two?”

It was, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“No, there’s three of us in the agency. Our partner knows where we are, so you’re screwed one way or the other.”

“Not if they don’t find you,” the guard shot back. “And judging by what happened to your friend there, that should be pretty easy to arrange.” He pointed at the steaming puddle that had been my partner and grinned. I looked at it for a moment, then looked back at him.

“You better think more about cleaning that up before you have a lot of explaining to do,” I said. The guard looked closer, and his face went pale.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

Where the body had been, a large hole was forming in the pavement as the chemical spill dissolved the surface. The gravel beneath it was foaming and steaming as well. The guard looked at his pal with the gun.

“We need to water this down quick before it eats through to power lines or something,” he said. “Take him in the back room of the gatehouse and tie him up, then come back out here and help me. We’ll take care of him after.” The gunman poked me forward with the barrel of the gun and prodded me in the direction of the gatehouse door. When we reached it, the man who had shot Frankie opened the door and walked in, crossing the room and passing around the guard’s desk and through a door behind it.

Through the door was a small room with no windows. it was furnished with a wooden chair, in which my captor prodded me to sit. Keeping me loosely covered, he went back out to the guard’s desk, rummaged in a drawer and came back with a roll of duct tape. The guard came in the door behind him.

“Here,” he said, handing the tape roll to the guard. “Tape his hands together and then tape him to the chair.” The other gunman stood in the door and covered me.

I held my hands out to the guard. He passed the tape around them several times, then ripped the end off. next, he taped one ankle to each leg of the chair, then took a few turns around the chair back, securing my body to the chair back. He stood back and admired his handiwork.

“You just sit tight until we get back,” the man with the gun said. “We’ll take care of you after we clean up the mess your friend made.” Chuckling to each other, the three left the room, closing the door behind them.

Alone for the first time since Frank had been shot, I felt a wave of grief wash over me. Hot tears streamed down my face as I remembered how we had met at community college taking criminal justice courses. Between classes, we had grabbed a cup of coffee and began talking about our lives to that point, our hopes and dreams, and over the course of a semester became fast friends.

I don’t remember when he first started calling me “Mi Hermano,” but it was sometime during that first year. And it was true—we did everything together—studying , going to movies, reading, double dating from time to time.

So it seemed inevitable that upon graduation we would get our licenses and open a detective agency together. And that was how it had been ever since—until tonight. Now, it seemed, Frank had done something without me, although I had a sneaking suspicion that I was going to be close behind him if my captors had anything to say about it. I had to get myself back under control again, try to think of some way out of this.

“Why so sad, mi hermano?”

It wasn’t a voice out loud, but I heard it in my head as plainly as if someone had spoken. It was Frank’s voice. I figured I was losing it. Maybe I’d inhaled too many chemical fumes and was hallucinating.

“Frankie?” I whispered. “Where are you? I thought you were dead!”

“Not exactly,” the voice replied.

“What you mean, not exactly? Where are you?”

“Up here,” the voice replied. I looked up, and that’s when I thought I’d really lost it.

Above my head, near the ceiling of the room, there hovered a small cloud. It looked a lot like the chemical mist I’d seen above Frankie’s body as it dissolved in its chemical bath, only without the electricity playing around the outside.

“Frankie?” I whispered. “You’re a—a cloud?”

“Looks like it,” he answered.

“But how?”

“How do I know? I’m a private eye, not a scientist,” Frankie shot back. “But don’t you think we better work on getting you out of that chair?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

So I got to work.

The three guys had made one mistake. They had taped my hands together in front of me. As I held my arms out, palms together, I had created a small space between my hands, which gave me some slack in the tape when I held them straight out in front of me. It was pretty short work to slide one hand free, and then quickly unwrap the other.

From there, I turned to the tape around my chest. I had breathed in and held my breath when the tape had been wound around me, and when I let it out, the tape had loosened a little. I began rocking my body back and forth, trying to stretch the tape. I felt around, trying to find the end of the strip, but it was somewhere behind me.

I was still working on this when I heard the outer door open. I heard footsteps crossing the outer office, then the door opened and the guard and one of the gunmen came in. The man with the gun snickered when he saw what I was doing.

“So, you managed to get your hands loose,” he said. “Good! Saved us one chore in getting you loose.”

“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said, although I didn’t know how they weren’t. “People will come looking for us.”

“And they won’t find you,” the guard answered. “That drum your friend spilled took care of him, and we got a whole lot more of it inside. We’ll just dump you in a barrel and fill it up with the same goo, and poof!—No more evidence. They might suspect something, but without a body, where’s the proof?”

“But if they come looking for us, they’re gonna find out what you’ve been doing.”

“They’ll be looking for a stiff, and they’ll be cops or private dicks like you, not scientists,’ the guard explained. “And without someone who knows what they’re looking for, they won’t find out anything. And even if they did, the owners’ve spread enough money around in the right places to get away with a slap on the wrist. “

“Besides,” his partner chimed in, “this is America. Nobody but a few tree-huggers care about this shit. Unless it affects them right now, they don’t care. Now enough talk, let’s get you a nice chemical bath.”

“And maybe,” the guard said, “if you don’t give us a hard time, we’ll kill you before we dump in the chemicals.” He snickered.

“Watch out, mi hermano,” Frankie said in my head.

While the gunman covered me, the guard leaned forward to begin cutting me loose. As his boxcutter sliced through the last of the tape around my chest, there was a flickering from overhead. I thought at first that the light was starting to go, but then I looked up. The cloud was pulsing with light, and as I looked, a small bolt of lightning flashed between the cloud and the barrel of the gun. Another fork shot out and struck the gunman in the center of his chest. He dropped the gun, then fell to the floor, where he twitched for a moment and then lay still.

The guard scarcely had time to react before another bolt danced crazily over his head. His mouth opened in a soundless scream, and tiny arcs of electricity raced over the fillings in his teeth. He dropped to his knees, then slumped to the ground.

The flickering in the cloud gradually receded, until it was once again just a hovering mass over my head.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a few more of those bolts to take out the rest of this tape?” I asked.

“I’m pretty new at this cloud business,” Frankie’s voice said. “I don’t know if I can aim lightning that precisely. I didn’t care if I hurt them, but I don’t want to fry you by mistake.”

I nodded.

“Well, thanks for the save, brother,” I said.

“De nada,” Frankie replied.

“I better get out of this and call the police,” I said. “How are we gonna explain two electrocuted bad guys in here?”

The cloud drifted around the ceiling for a moment, then I heard the voice in my head.

“Look on the guard’s belt.”

I looked. Along with the holster for his gun, there was a second, smaller holster which housed his taser. I hopped the chair over to the guard and plucked it from its holster. Arming it, I bumped the chair back a way and took aim. The barbs shot out and one lodged in each man’s flesh, giving each of them another 50.000-volt jolt that made them twitch for a few seconds.

“There,” I said.

“Don’t both barbs have to be in the same body to give the person a shock?” Frankie asked.

“How do I know?” I said. “I’m a private dick, not an electrician!”

Frankie chuckled. I reached down and got the tape off my feet, then walked over to the desk in the front room and called 911 from the landline on the desk.

“911 Center. What is the nature of your emergency?”

I gave the operator my name and license number, then told her I was reporting a murder. I gave her the details, and she told me to wait there for the officers to arrive. As she spoke, I began to feel dizzy. Some sort of delayed reaction to the night’s events, I don’t know. All I know is that I fainted for the first time in my life.

I came around to someone gently slapping my cheek. A voice said, “Sir? Sir? Can you tell me your name?”

I opened my eyes, and saw a police officer leaning over me. I looked past him to the ceiling, but didn’t see the cloud anywhere.

“Her — herman — o?” I said faintly. The cop’s brows furrowed.

“Herman Hoe?” he asked. “Your name is Herman Hoe?”

The cobwebs dissipated a little. I shook my head.

“No, no, it’s Edwards. My PI card’s around here somewhere. I fumbled around for it as the officer sat me up.

“Don’t worry about that now,” the officer said. “You wanna tell me what happened around here?”

For the next hour or two, I walked him through the events of that night, leaving out any mention of the cloud that was now my partner. I showed them the hole that had been eaten in the street, and explained how the two men had gotten the drop on me, and how they killed my partner and meant to kill me, and how as they were cutting me loose to take me and dump me into the same chemical bath that had done for Frankie, I had gotten my hands free and fought them, getting the guard’s taser in the struggle and taking care of them.

The officers seemed to buy the story, and asked me to follow them to the  precinct and give a formal statement. As I got into my car, Frankie’s voice sounded in my head. It made me jump.

“Jesus!” I said. “I was beginning to think I made you up!”

“Nope, I’m here. I just thinned myself out a little. Didn’t think the cops needed to see a little cloud drifting around indoors while you were telling them what happened.”

“You might have a point,” I said. “So, what do we do from here? I mean, are you gonna be a cloud forever, or will you just drift away somewhere, or what?”

“I don’t know, mi hermano,” he said. “But for the time being, here I am.”

“You know,” I said as I put the car in gear and pulled in behind the police car, “We could use this in our job. You could spy on people without spy gadgets, just drift around in their rooms, get into locked rooms by slithering through keyholes and under doors, and —“

“And save your ass with a well-placed lightning bolt or two,” Frankie added smugly.

“That too,” I admitted. “But I am gonna miss having you around to talk to.”

“I’ll be right here, mi hermano,” he said. “The little cloud you walk around under all the time? That’s me.” “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” I said, then smiled. “Mi hermano.”