The Martha Vance Case

Martha Vance walked into my office at three in the morning, which is when I was usually still drinking whiskey and wondering why I had become a private detective instead of staying in the Marine Corps. She threw an envelope on my desk that contained five hundred dollars in cash and a single sentence: "My husband is not who he says he is."

I told her I didn't do marital investigations. I was sobering up, barely, and I didn't need more problems in my life. But she threw another five hundred on the desk and said, "My husband is a federal agent, and he's hunting something that isn't human." That got my attention. Not because I believed her, but because people don't usually say things like that unless they have a reason.

Her name was Martha Vance. She was twenty-nine, with dark hair and dark eyes and a face that was beautiful in a way that made you uncomfortable, like a knife. She told me her husband's name was Robert Kane, and that he worked for the FBI. She told me he came home every night with dirt on his boots and chemicals on his hands, and that he never slept in the same room as her anymore. She told me she was afraid.

I started watching Robert Kane's house on East 45th Street. It was a decent house in a decent neighborhood, the kind of house that belonged to a man who wanted to be invisible. Robert was a tall man, late thirties, with the kind of face you forget immediately after looking at it. He left the house at midnight every night and drove to a warehouse near the old airport in Van Nuys.

I followed him on the third night. The warehouse was dark, but there was activity inside—flashlights moving, voices speaking in low tones, the sound of metal on metal. I parked two blocks away and waited. At two in the morning, Robert came out alone, got in his car, and drove home.

I was about to leave when I saw Martha arrive.

She didn't go to the house. She went to the warehouse. And that's when I saw something I couldn't explain. She stood in front of the warehouse door, and the moonlight hit her skin, and her skin—her actual skin—shimmered with a metallic sheen, like silver paint. Her eyes, when she looked up at the moon, glowed in the darkness.

I dropped my cigarette. I had seen things in the war. I had seen things that made me drink. But this was different. This was not human.

Martha turned and looked directly at my hiding place. She knew I was there. She walked over, put a finger to her lips, and said, "I'm not what you think I am. But neither is he."

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Refugee," she said. "Twenty years ago, my people crashed in New Mexico. The government caught them. They took them apart—literally—to study their biology. I escaped. Robert is hunting me because my tissue samples can be used to create weapons. He doesn't care that I'm a person. He cares that I'm useful."

"Why tell me?"

"Because you're the only person who followed me here without trying to arrest me. Because you look at me like I'm a person, not a specimen. Because I need someone who isn't on their side."

She asked me to help her escape. She had a contact—another refugee, hiding in the hills outside Burbank. A transport ship was coming in three days. She just needed to get there.

I should have said no. I was broke, sober, and trying to rebuild a life that had been destroyed by war and divorce. I didn't need to help an alien woman escape the FBI.

I said yes.

Two days later, as I was driving Martha toward the pickup point in the San Gabriel Mountains, Lillian was waiting for us. Lillian Cross—my ex-girlfriend, a singer at the Blue Note club, the woman who had left me six months ago because I drank too much and talked about the war too much. She was standing in the middle of the road with Robert Kane's gun in her hand.

"He said if I brought you and Martha here, he'd give me fifty thousand dollars," she said. Her hands were shaking. She was crying. "I need the money, Jack. My brother is sick."

I smiled. I had been expecting this. I pulled out my .45—a military surplus piece I had kept since the Corps—and pointed it at Robert's car, which was parked behind us with Robert inside.

"Lillian," I said. "You can take the money, or you can help me do something that matters. But you have to choose now."

She looked at the gun, at Martha, at the road, at the mountains. Then she lowered the gun and said, "Get in the car."

We drove past her. We drove past Robert. We drove until the sun came up over the Pacific, and Martha sat in the passenger seat with her eyes closed, finally sleeping peacefully for the first time in twenty years.

I didn't know if her people would come. I didn't know if they would save her. But I knew one thing: it was the first time in twenty years that I had done something I wasn't ashamed of.

OTMES v2 Codes:
M1=5.0 M2=4.0 M3=3.0 M4=6.0 M5=7.0 M6=4.0 M7=7.0 M8=5.0 M9=4.0 M10=3.0
N1=0.8 N2=0.2 N3=0.7 N4=0.4 N5=0.6
I1=0.4 I2=0.7 I3=1.0 I4=0.3
Theta=135.0 R=0.3 TI=58.0

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