Out of a Christmas Sky

Name: Out of a Christmas Sky
Author: Robert J. McCarter

Prologue

6:52 AM Christmas Morning. Carter Hill.

I won't tell you that I hate Christmas, nor will I tell you that I love Christmas. My relationship with the holiday is much more complicated than that.

And getting more complicated all the time.

A dead body laying under a pine tree will do that. Especially when you’re the chief of police and the victim is a friend of yours.

But we'll get to that. Let me set the scene first.

I can say that there is no better place to be than Carterville, Arizona for the holiday. Especially in the desert southwest. We are up between 6,400 and 7,100 feet in elevation with the 12,600 foot San Francisco Peaks towering behind us and covered in snow.

The little town with a population 293 is built on Carter Hill and is one of those historic western towns that started as a mining boomtown in the late 1800s and has a quaint feel with old red brick buildings lining the main street. Those buildings are now occupied by tourist friendly shops.

And Christmas time in Carterville is Winterfest, the whole town decorated for the holiday with days of celebration, the population of Carterville briefly swelling from hundreds to thousands, the whole town taken over and transformed. All of it topped off by the Silver Ball, the big Christmas Eve bash.

The decorations go all the way to the top of Carter hill which sits at 7,100 feet in elevation and is crowned by ponderosa pine trees strung with green, red, and white Christmas lights that can be seen for miles.

The ponderosas turn to smaller piñon pines as you go down the hill with fir and maple trees over a hundred years old lining Main Street.

It's a steep climb up Carter Hill but worth the effort. Picture yourself there with every tree along the street strung with glittering Christmas lights, the old-fashioned streetlights wrapped in tinsel, the remnants of the last snowstorm still decorating the ground, and the towering peaks framed behind it.

It's like a perfect Christmas snow globe come to life and hard to imagine a better place to spend Christmas.

Except Carterville isn't just an old mining town turned quaint little tourist trap. Of the 293 permanent residents, 201 have some kind of power since the meteorite hit five years ago. But only while they are near Carterville. The zone of influence extends out about five miles and beyond that everyone is normal.

With all those powers, Carterville is a much better place for the strange and mysterious. And I should know. My name is Henry Carter. This town was named after my ancestor, Samuel Carter, and I am the dutifully elected chief of police of this no longer quiet little town.

With the name and the badge, I feel kind of responsible for what goes on around here.

Christmas day that year, the sky was clear and cold. The sun, being a lot luckier than I, wasn't up yet but the fire on the horizon looked like a match being lit, yellow and orange and deep blue pushing the darkness back.

It was so beautiful it could bring a tear to your eye. Or that could be the cold, it was in the mid-twenties, my breath hanging in brief clouds of condensate with each exhale. Or maybe it was my hangover, the Silver Ball was last night and I had good reason to drink afterwards. Or the hour, it was early and I had no coffee in me. Or the fact that the victim had been alive and happy and flirting with me less than eight hours ago.

I took off my sunglasses, cheap aviators, so I could really see, and immediately regretted it. There was some snow on the ground, but not much. Just enough so the scarlet splatter of blood was shockingly stark. Lila Chang was lying there on the top of Carter hill under a couple of ponderosa pines dressed like an elf with a dark green smock, red and white striped stockings, a long-sleeved red shirt, and those silly shoes and hat with their tiny bells. Her skin was pale, her limbs akimbo, her eyes open to that deep blue sky but the lights clearly off.

Oh, and her throat had a puncture wound of some sort, thus all the blood.

I know red is one of the colors of Christmas but when it's soaked into crusty old snow it doesn't seem that festive. And when the scent of blood, that sharp iron tinged smell, is in the air, well it's enough to make you want to never see red again.

"This ain't good, Chief," officer Martin Lester said from behind me.

"No shit," I replied. There was no need to hide my annoyance from Lester and no one else was here. The only building at the top the of the hill is the old Carterville Church set just back from the lookout. Sitting in the parking lot that served the church and the overlook was the tent that was used for last night's Silver Ball. But it was early yet and no one else was here.

The view up here is spectacular, particularly in the winter with the inner basin of the San Francisco Peaks in one direction and the vast desert all the way to the Grand Canyon and beyond in the other. The snow disappearing as the desert took over from the mountains, the white melting into the tan, taupe, and salmon layers of the desert. The cut in the desert that marked the Grand Canyon clearly visible on a morning this cold and clear.

"Too late for Smitty to help," he said, stating the glaringly obvious and with everything else it just made me grind my teeth.

A lot of the powers that residents of Carterville acquired the night the meteor hit are odd or small. But not Winston "Smitty" Smith, he had what could be called a real live superpower. He could heal people, although there was a price he had to pay which was why his blond hair was going grey in his early thirties.

But Smitty couldn't bring back the dead, thus Lester's statement of the stupidly obvious rubbed me the wrong way.

I inherited Lester from the old chief of police. He's been on the job for twenty-five years and knows Carterville as well as anyone, but he never worked in a bigger city and I think that the way things changed five years ago when the meteor hit and folks got powers made the job a little too much for him.

He was great when Carterville was kind of like Mayberry but now that it was more like Stephen King's Castle Rock, he was out of his depth.

I glanced up at the older man. He was tall, and except for a slight bulging around the middle, still lean well into his fifties, his eyes sunk into his long face, a frown hanging below his prodigious steel grey mustache. That mustache, just like Lester, belonged to another era.

It was early and he had been on call and was woken up for this so he wasn't in uniform, dressed in jeans, a faded brown Carhartt jacket that was too big for him and kind of made him look like he was wearing a big paper bag. Wisps of his thick grey hair peaked out from underneath his black cowboy hat.

"Tell me again," I said looking back to the dead elf in the snow, my stomach twisting, my teeth clenching more against my anger and guilt than against the cold.

"Dispatch in Flag woke me up," he said. "They got a 911, some woman sayin' there was a dead elf on top of Carter hill. They traced the number, but it belonged to a burner phone. Walked up here and found her. Called you." He shrugged as if the gesture could somehow make up for the lack of detail and emotion in his report. But that was Lester, he was a man of few words. A quiet sort.

Lila's body--I'm not going to use the word "corpse" since this was someone I knew and cared about--was a few yards away under the trees. She was slumped against the dark brown bark her head pointed towards us, her lifeless eyes accusing.

The Christmas lights were still on, a cheery green starting a few feet above her body, the cord snaking around the tree right behind her head. The incongruity was almost too much to bear.

Lester and I stood on the road and only one set of tracks led to Lila. The blood had dripped down over the green of her elf costume and onto the snow, but there were no drips of blood along the path she walked and no murder weapon visible.

"Powers," I said with a sigh.

"Yup, Chief," he said, his voice low like he was saying something profound. "It don't make much sense unless powers were involved."

I stood there staring, my hands shoved into the pockets of my jeans. I had left so quick I had forgotten gloves. I felt this rumble happening deep inside me. Part of it was the cold, my body wanting to shiver against it, but a lot of it was anger.

Lila was my friend and someone had killed her. This was my town and someone had been killed here.

And along with that quaking anger was a heavy load of guilt. Lila, while she was flirting with me last night, trying to pull me out of my funk, wasn't quite normal. She was fidgety and distracted.

I had missed something. I could have stopped this if I hadn't been caught up in the funk of yet another breakup with Annie Smith.

Lester stood there staring at the body like that was all there was to do. And then I realized I was doing it too. The fire of my anger woke me up and I started barking orders.

"I'll stay with Lila. You go wake up Annabelle, tell her to load up the SUV and haul the CSI gear up here. Then go and get Doctor Lion, we'll need her to tell us what happened. And bring Mary Reilly too. The town is stuffed with tourists and word of this will spread and we'll need her help keeping the crowd away. I'll call the Sheriff's office and let them know what we're dealing with. We might need extra bodies for this one."

After my little speech, a cloud of condensate hung in the air between the older man and me slowly dissipating while he just stood there his dull blue eyes vacant looking at Lila's body.

I was about to yell at him when the slight quiver of his chin stopped me. I had done my time in the Tucson Police Department. I had seen some things. But not Lester. And everyone loved Lila. With her bright smile, petite form, and happy disposition, she was the perfect person to play an elf.

"We'll get whoever did this," I said quietly. "I promise you that."

He nodded slowly, his haunted eyes fixed on Lila's body.

"Now go, Martin," I said. "I need you today. I need you to be at your best."

He bit his lower lip, sniffed, and nodded.

This is the end of the excerpt.

Part of Out of a Christmas Sky: A Carterville Mystery

Carterville, AZ. Population: 293. People with powers: 201