Rafe from Murder on Ceres

Today is a day for dental and eye appointments in my family. Luckily it’s Day R. Please meet Rafe, the protagonist in my novel, Murder on Ceres. These three snippets from Chapter 1 introduce Detective Rafael Sirocco of the Ceres Colony Police Department and his Solar System. It’s a time when human civilization is centered in the Mars Colonies and Earth is a backwater, truly the Old World. But humans are still human and murder happens.

    TS-17 Raiders screamed overhead. A flaming groundcraft hurtled toward him.

    “Off,” he said and exited the comfort bubble into the silent hotel room. Time for the next security check.

    He touched the control pad opening the bedroom door enough to see Shuller. The inoffensive business man had a wife and child tucked away somewhere safe on one of the Mars colonies. The man’s chest rose and fell. Inhale. Exhale. Quiet and even.

    “Still alive,” Rafe said heading toward the entry door.

    His partner Joe nodded and continued playing cards on the dining table.

    A red pinpoint of light in the upper right corner of the door’s security screen held steady. Locked. The screen showed an empty hallway. All quiet. He keyed his mobile and checked the closed circuit block cams. No unusual activity at the hotel’s front or rear entrances. No change in the last thirty minutes. Or the thirty minutes before that or thirty minutes before that. Nothing unusual for the whole shift.

He dialed the room’s window external view only and made a visual sweep of the street four stories below.  In the twilight which passed for night on Ceres Colony, he saw nothing of interest.

    A short siren blast broke the quiet. He froze. Joe came out of his chair tapping his mobile. The cards on the table blinked out.

    Another short blast. Inside the suite. Not from the bubble. A ringtone. Not his.

Joe crossed the room in three strides and keyed the offending mobile offline. “It’s Shuller’s. Don’t recognize the number, but it’s local.”

    They stood, listening. Nothing from the bedroom. That guy could sleep through anything.

    A second check of the entry door. The lock light still red and the hallway still empty.

    He relaxed. “All clear.” He spoke into his mobile reporting to the precinct. “They say to hold in place.”

    Joe returned to the table. The playing cards reappeared.

    Back in the bubble Rafe was again surrounded by flying objects and high decibel sounds. He liked Earth holographic videos, the effect of projectile weaponry on fast vehicles in deadly gravity added up to a near death experience. As close as he wanted to come. But this one had no plot. Besides cops don’t talk like that, probably never did. You’d think they’d at least get the dialogue right.

    With standard Earth-mix atmosphere and a full g, he knew projectile weapons would function on Ceres Colony exactly as they did on Earth. Like everyone on every colony in the solar system, he knew not to risk it. Being expelled into space through a hole in the super structure couldn’t end well.

***

    Joe flipped him a thumbs-up and nodded for him to take a seat at the table, then touched his mobile, and the cards reappeared.

    “TePaki was your first case,” Joe said. The faux wood grain of the table showed through the gaming surface and cards. Standard police-issue Ion-D’s graphics left a lot to be desired. Joe touched the next card. A ceramic bowl of fresh fruit distorted the king of diamonds.

    “TePaki was never my case.” He picked up an orange and peeled it. “They took it away from us before we could interview anyone.”

    “Anyway, we broke it.” Joe touched two fingers to the table and was dealt two cards.

    “Just which ‘we’ is that?” The thin, sharp scented skin came away from the orange easily.

    Sure, an early example of Detective Sergeant Joe Hudson exercising seniority. Nearly a year ago Joe had info-dumped all the TePaki files into Rafe’s inbox.

    Hudson reached across the table and helped himself to an orange segment. “It was a natural for you, you being a son of Sirocco Shipping. You got the red hair and all. And TePaki being a pirate, your family’s number one competitor.”

    At first he’d thought Joe was jealous of his family. The Siroccos were a wealthy, old colony family. But his uncle was wealthy not him. Dear old dad, ever the bleeding heart, had folded on the family fortune in favor of some misbegotten dedication to lawyering for the downtrodden. The one thing he liked about his dad was that he didn’t use the family name for status. Neither would he. He promoted early to detective because he was a good cop, a smart cop. But Hudson wasn’t jealous. He wasn’t even impressed.

 ***

    He and Joe were done for the night. All they had to do was file their reports and go home.

    “Beats uniform work anytime,” Joe said, as they stepped into the hall.

    “Seems like all we do is mop up. Like this case, we’re baby-sitting Shuller.” He looked both ways down the hall. “Training on Earth’ll give us a break.”

    “Yeah, sure. A break from the tedium, right?” Joe laughed.

    “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day-to-day living that wears you out,” he quoted. “Manny Turrentine”

    “The philosopher?” Hudson rolled his eyes. “One guy in the Department who quotes philosophers, and I got him for a partner.”

    “Joe, the goad.”

    “You calling me a goat?”

    Rafe ignored him. “They have a chase course for high speed ground craft. And rail guns. We can do things on Earth we’d never get to do here.”

    He was only about seven and a half centimeters taller than Joe, but Joe was at least fifteen centimeters broader, the difference between a runner and a weight man.

    A door to their left jerked open and a bald-headed man collided with Joe. The man bounced off and staggered a couple of steps. He bared his teeth and growled. He charged Joe swinging. Hudson ducked and grabbed the oncoming fist. He twisted it behind the man’s back and turned him to the wall.

    A wild-eyed woman wearing next to nothing charged past Rafe. She jumped on Joe’s back, punching and clawing. Joe and the man went to the floor with the woman on top of the pile. Rafe moved in to help.

    The commotion brought Harper and Gomez out of the witness’s suite. After checking both ways for potential threats, Gomez returned to the suite, and Harper called for uniforms.

    Rafe got an arm around the woman’s head and neck, pulling her away from Hudson. She squirmed out of his grasp and bit his right arm. She bit him hard. He shoved her away. She came at him screaming obscenities. He side-stepped her, grabbed an arm, and spun her to the floor.

    Joe cuffed the man and sat him against the wall. Harper, Joe, and the male combatant watched Rafe cuff the woman. She continued to struggle, screaming and spitting. He forced her to sit against the opposite wall.

“You mother-slagger. You failed abortion,” she shrieked at him, the auto-cuffs biting into her wrists. “I’ll tear your face off.”

    Rafe’s eyes narrowed. “Shut up.” His jaw clenched.

    She blinked at him. “What? What did you say?”

    His face was as red as his hair and mustache. His lips a thin, angry line. His face glistened with a sheen of sweat. He glared at her.

    She glared back, but she was quiet.