Red Shift: The Odds (Censored version) Read online

  Chapter 7

  The car pulled up outside an empty retail store.

  “Time to get out, Blake. We’ll be in touch soon to get an update on what you know.”

  As Blake rounded the corner, he could see the accident scene three blocks up. He got nearer and saw the police sonic barrier cones with the usual warning signs that anyone crossing would receive high-energy high-frequency sound pulses. His ID chip neutralised the signal in his immediate vicinity as he passed through.

  His first instinct was that it was a multiple car smash, a ram-run gone wrong. But as he got closer, he could see one set of short skid marks that were from a bike. He couldn’t see a bike anywhere. The other problem was that the two other vehicles were at odd angles. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the road marks and impact points didn’t seem to match the angle the bike would have been coming from.

  “Detective, good of you to join us.”

  “Don’t start with me Drake, messed up morning. What have we got?”

  “Well, what you would have seen when you came in, and on the 6 am news. Looks like a gang hit, two cars, a truck load of bullets, and all-round carnage.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “A handful. Mainly other people driving on the freeway at the time.”

  “And what about the bike?”

  “What bike?”

  “Back over here, short skid mark, looks like a high-speed brake, then the bike left the ground, somehow.”

  “Damn, I didn’t even see that. It’s covered by the car marks. How on earth did you see that?”

  “Must have had a good night’s sleep. Lucky I’m here to keep you turkeys in line huh?” Blake looked at Drake with a raised eyebrow as they walked over towards some techs taking laser-grid overlays of the scene.

  “We’re almost ready here, Sarge,” one of the techs said to Drake. They all moved to the side of the road near another tech that had a screen display up on a tripod.

  As the tech adjusted a set of inputs, busy tapping his fingers in various sequences, a green grid swept down over the area, stopping just off the ground. “Based on the current inputs from vehicle locations, damage, road marks and eye-witness accounts, this is what we have.”

  Looking to the cordon two hundred metres up the road, Blake watched four hover-pods line up in a square. As they charged up, a faint but visible hologram Sat static with two cars about ten metres apart.

  “It’s daytime so the graphic won’t be as vivid as it should, but you’ll get an idea of what went on. I’ll run it through in real-time first, then we’ll take it back and cut it up.”

  He flicked his fingers again, and the four pods accelerated down the road. The two cars were swerving left and right, there were red flashes, then one of the cars blew a tire and spun into the path of the other car, both of them flipped multiple times before hitting the retaining wall of the off-ramp, landing exactly where the mangled cars were currently sitting.

  “Right, we’ll run it through slower this time. The red flashes are gunshots. They’re not exact, it’s based on the eyewitnesses mainly, but a few cases were found, and we worked backwards to an approximate point of origin.”

  As they watched the scene over and over again, Blake had a niggle in the back of his mind that he couldn’t shake. Then it came to him. “Sarge, this whole thing is staged.”

  “How do you figure that, Blake?”

  “How many bodies have you found?”

  “Only two, but one of the cars was incinerated after the impact, we think on purpose.”

  “I think that one of the cars was programmed to hit the exact marks from the bike to disguise an earlier accident.”

  “Why do that? Why not just clean off the marks, and remove the vehicle afterwards?”

  “Because they wouldn’t be able to remove gouge marks from a vehicle being hit, the bike I mentioned, or chemical residues from weapons fired, or fuel spilled from frame ruptures, the list goes on. It’s a lot easier just to mask it all with another accident.”

  “Who the heck goes to that kind of effort?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” He wasn’t about to mention Wing’Tan, or the directive given through the Secretary.

  Blake walked over to the vehicle impact site. There was nothing but a big mess of metal and burnt vegetation. He started trying to piece together what was going on, but cut himself short. There wasn’t enough data yet to get a good idea, and all he would be doing now is making the evidence fit his preconceived idea of the events.

  The team spent the next four hours marking, bagging and taking digital imprints of everything in the area. Nothing out of order turned up. Whatever the UTF wanted wasn’t there. Blake left the scene to head back to the office. As he left the scene his comm clicked an incoming signal. It was the UTF, Blake told them there was nothing, and the comm ended. Just like that, Blake was of no further use, apparently.