Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy by Dana Stabenow

Author:Dana Stabenow [Stabenow, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780441016372
Goodreads: 3395318
Publisher: Ace Trade
Published: 2008-12-01T23:00:00+00:00

The Duh Vice

Michael Armstrong

“If you’re smart, you’ll just ignore me and walk away,” Novak said right before I arrested him on six counts of resource-allocation waste in the first degree.

Months later, when I was warming my ass over a little nub of what he called the Duh Vice up there in my suck-ass little shack near Boundary, I realized he had been right. What the heck did I know last winter, when I got a call out to Novak’s place to check out a citizen tip of resource waste?

I’m a cop, a Rawhide, the petty little bureaucrats who hassle good citizens about keeping their thermostat set too high. Yeah, I get grief for doing my job. OK, here’s the deal: when the United States government figures out how not to piss off the world so we can get some of its spare energy, I’ll retire. Until then, I’m the guy who knocks on your door at 2 a.m. because you’re using more than your fair share of energy. You don’t like it? Move to Canada.

Which was how I got called out to Novak’s place that crisp winter day. Not that I told Novak that, but his neighbor, a real dickhead named Stark, had ratted him out. Stark was one of those reserve-police-officer wannabe cops who had taken fifteen hours of training and become dangerous enough with a remote thermal sensor to fink on his neighbors. If Stark hadn’t said Novak was leaking over 1,000 BTUs an hour, I wouldn’t have bothered. We Rawhides don’t get out of bed for anything less than 500.

Stark had come by the Resource Allocation Department station with his little readouts, an infrared video, and even a cheap-ass blurry digital photo of Novak sitting in his living room in T-shirt and shorts. I could tell by his smarmy little smile he thought he’d nailed the guy, and if his tip resulted in a conviction, he’d get the reward of one hundred resource-allocation points.

Good citizen, my ass. Stark was looking to be able to jack up his thermostat another two degrees.

“So, you gonna check it out, huh?” Stark asked me.

I was investigating a major violation of the 2017 Resource Allocation Act, some guy who’d found a stash of honest-to-goodness gasoline and had been seen running a snow machine out in the Caribou Hills—I mean, a two-stroke, internal-combustion sled, not one of those electric snow coaches. I didn’t really have time for penny-ante crap. But Stark knew someone in the department, I never could figure out who, and his tip had landed in my in-box with a note from the chief, “Check this out.”

I didn’t know Novak. He’d moved to Della on the ass end of Alaska a year ago, got himself an approved one-bedroom, nine-hundred-square-foot cabin for him and his son. “His retard son,” Stark told me, but I’d pulled the APSIN records on the Novaks, and his son checked out as having Williams Syndrome, kind of a rare developmental disability—only we were supposed to say “differentability”—that meant the kid was high end in some abilities, low in others.

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