Read The Prospects (Short Story): Above the Stars for Free Online Page A

something glittered in the darkness behind it.
    Slowly, Alex let the light’s beam go along the jawline to the neck, which was draped with a pelt of glistening scales identical to what he saw at the Vietnamese smugglers’ hideout. Further down he saw a bony arm sticking out with the last joints of the fingers clearly broken.
    Alex took his curved knife and put it against the missing joint. The handle kept it from being a perfect fit, but the size was so proportionately correct he had no doubt the blade was once this thing’s claw.
    Alex shone the light around. Tied to a shelf against the wall was a jar with a large reptilian eye in it. A table under it had various entrails and glands pinned down under a nonfunctioning sunlamp. At the corner was a sectioned tray. Each little box on the tray held a dark glistening cube.
    “Over here,” said Chak.
    Too engrossed to listen, Alex followed the process of making Macguffin backwards. He saw the open over at the end of a row of vials and beakers, all attached to the metal table with magnets. On the other end, he saw a barrel placed beneath a desiccated reptilian tail as long as he was tall. Inside the barrel was a thick dark syrupy liquid that reeked of sulfur and iron.
    Under the direct light Alex saw how deep red it was. “Blood,” he said under his breath. “They made a drug from dragon blood.”
    Over the barrel were several deep gashes in the metal hull. It took Alex a second to remember he made those himself. He remembered how Chak said Qing Long tracked by scent, but the long-haired man boasted Qing Long couldn’t find them. When Alex made those holes, he unwittingly summoned Qing Long.
    “Ain’t getting younger,” said Chak.
    Alex ran to his side and ran the knife through the ropes and cables that bound him. They came apart with no effort. He helped Chak to his feet.
    Chak looked at the skeleton in the faded light that came from the gashes in the deck. “Must be hard to see your own flesh-and-blood slaughtered, eh?”
    “Poachers hunt so many animals,” said Alex, “it’s good to see one of them hunt back.”
    “I don’t hear the engines running.” Chak looked up through the gash. “You got a plan for getting home?”
    Alex took his cell phone out of his pocket and tapped the signal icon. “Full bars.”
     
     
    Alex and Chak stood on the tugboat that led the damaged fishing boat back to the harbor. They watched the night skyline of Seattle slowly come towards them.
    Chak said, “This city changed a lot since the first time I saw it.”
    “How long ago was that?”
    “Back when what’s now Pioneer Square was the muddy village of Duwaps. I’ve come and gone a lot of times, but I spent most of the sixties here. That’s when I met Midori, a real pretty nisei .”
    “A what?”
    “American-born Japanese. Poor girl spent her childhood in an internment camp out in the desert. When World War Two ended, she wanted to get far from that. She ended up here in Seattle. I remember the first time I saw her. Bright sunny day, her in a gauzy dress that showed her shape with the wind blowing her long hair back with the waves behind her. Let me tell ya, girls these days show more skin, but back then ladies had sensuality.”
    “I get it.”
    “Midori and I got married. Even had a daughter. But, me being me, I had to screw it up.”
    “Why?”
    “She got older while I stayed the same. We had less in common every year. One rub the wrong way and I moved on to someone younger.”
    “Sure Midori didn’t like that.”
    “I took the best woman I met in the nineteen-hundreds for granted. Hurt her worse than anything anyone else had done to her. Still beat myself up over that.”
    “You deserve to.”
    “People do bad things, but that doesn’t make ‘em bad. It makes ‘em people. Heck, I wasn’t thinking right when I tried to goad you into a brawl earlier today.”
    “Be that as it may, you hurt people when you don’t control yourself.”
    “True. I left our