Murder for hire -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
"Let's," she smiled.
"Here's to a fine old professor, who invented a time machine and
kindly let me kill him and take it away. Here's to a policeman's
nightmare--the perfect murder."
They drank.
Smith got to his feet then and put the glass down. "Well, I've got to
go now, I--"
He saw the blank look of astonishment on her face. Her mouth had
dropped open and her eyes were wide, staring. But they weren't looking
at him--they were looking _behind_ him.
And then he heard the polite cough.
Smith spun around. He stared in amazement at the figure of a man
standing there. A man clad in a strange shimmering metallic uniform.
The man held an odd-looking weapon in his hand. He was smiling.
"Mr. Smith, I believe?"
Smith nodded automatically. "Yes, but who--"
"--am I?" the stranger completed the sentence for him. "It's quite
simple. I'm Inspector Graevod, homicide. I'm arresting you for murder."
Smith shook his head dully. "But that's impossible. There's no
murder--no body.... Where did you come from?"
The shimmering man smiled pleasantly. "Oh but there is a body. Matter
of fact there are quite a few. We've had quite a bit of difficulty in
tracing you down. I've come all the way from 2035 to find you." He
turned his eyes to the woman. "As an accessory to the fact you are also
under arrest. Come along, both of you."
He pointed the strange weapon at them and a silver radiance swept from
it to envelope their bodies.
But only for a moment. Then they were gone....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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