Sneak Peek: Dead Weight by G.P. Robbins!

This paranormal investigations novel releases on July 25, 2023!

You can preorder Dead Weight at the following retailers: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Apple Books.

Print and Audiobook editions will be coming at a slightly later date.

Note: please do not edit or criticize; this is an unproofed sneak peek meant for your enjoyment.

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Chapter One

Thursday, April 5, 2057
Warehouse Row, Precinct 153
Cauldron City, Nebraska.

The next time Captain Farthan asked if I wanted to accompany him on a call, I would concoct at least a hundred and two reasons why I needed to bust my ass at my desk. Had I been thinking, I would have remembered the captain liked to test his officers a minimum of once a year. With quarterly reviews around the corner, he’d taken to the streets to better monitor Precinct 153 and its eclectic collection of residents, transients, and others.

The call, which had come from a rather notorious warehouse with a tendency of attracting trouble, should have warranted two pairs, but no.

Captain Farthan viewed himself as a one-man army. And if the man part of the equation didn’t work out, he became a one-dragon army, and only an idiot pissed off a grouchy bachelor of a dragon looking in all the wrong places for his one and only.

The rust-pocked building came into view, and I began my weapon check, hoping I wouldn’t need it but expecting to have a close encounter with the strange, the stranger, and the dangerous.

I couldn’t remember the last time a call to the damned warehouse had gone well.

“Nervous?” Captain Farthan asked.

Raising a brow at his question, I replied, “Not at all. I have a gun and a dragon. I’m probably the best armed sentient in the entire precinct right now.”

The captain snickered. “That’s a good one. Been sitting on it long?”

“For about as long as the last time you sat on someone’s car after they tried to race with an interceptor.” When a multi-ton dragon treated a car like a skateboard, the vehicle tended to grind to a halt. As the captain preferred when his prey emerged alive, he’d turned skating using cars into an art. At least his efforts tended to keep additional property damage to a minimum. “If you do decide you’re an interceptor today, sir, I do ask you come to a complete halt before leaving the vehicle, transforming, and pursuing your target.”

“If you’re looking for a promotion, that’s the right way to go about it.” The captain parked in front of the warehouse, and to my relief, two other patrol vehicles joined us, their lights on while their sirens remained silent.

That told me one thing: whomever had been using the building had already cleared out, and we didn’t want to disrupt the neighborhood more than we already would showing up to do yet another cleanup.

How marvelously delightful.

I stowed my firearm, unbuckled my seatbelt, and got out of the cruiser. “Your orders, sir?”

“Let’s see how much you’ve learned in the three and a half years you’ve been with us, Officer Smithson. While you were gathering your kit, I informed the other officers that this is your rodeo.”

The last thing I wanted was to be part of a rodeo while at work, figuratively or literally. As my momma had raised me stubborn and my pappa had demanded I behave like a proper police officer, I saluted my captain, straightened my shoulders, and pretended I knew what the hell I was doing while heading for the main entrance of the warehouse, which someone had left cracked open.

How very helpful.

My fellow cops, two pairs of our precincts higher level detectives, joined me.

“Welcome to the jungle, Jace,” Paul said, and he held out his elbow for a bump. I’d learned early on to go with Paul’s elbow bumps. Cop by day, touchy-feely elephant by night, the elbow bump was one of the ways he got his daily dose of affection from his co-workers, thus sparing us from him trumpeting his loneliness for the entire precinct to hear. He’d revealed his second nature early on in his career, as lonely elephants became grouchy elephants.

Much like our dragon of a boss, a crabby elephant could do serious amounts of property damage in a short period of time.

So far, I held the top prize of being the most normal cop in the precinct. Everyone had some form of secret everyone knew about—except me.

I had my secrets, but I held them close to my chest.

“Am I getting the nice jungle or the mosquito-filled hell Brandon keeps telling us about that time his parents took him to Mexico?”

Paul grinned at me. “I’m going with the mosquito-filled hell. Orders are orders, so we’re supposed to do what you tell us and only what you tell us, as he wants to see how badly you pooch our investigation. He took Yvon out yesterday. It was special. Yvon is going back to preschool next week until he understands he is not allowed to lick the evidence.”

In Precinct 153, preschool was another word for the academy, and the captain liked sending cops back for remedial lessons if he wanted to promote them but they had more to learn than he liked. A few weeks bringing cadets up to speed and getting lectured by experienced cops tended to work wonders for the slow learners.

I’d yet to earn a trip back to preschool, and I hoped to avoid it.

“All right. I’m going to start with wear your damned gloves, put your booties on, and don’t contaminate any of my damned evidence. Do we have scrubs to put over our uniforms?”

The detective grinned at me. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Enough for even the hothead who made me come out here?”

“Cute, Smithson,” the captain muttered, strolling up to join us.

“We were instructed to bring extras, as you had no idea you’d be playing detective today,” Paul informed me.

“Get everyone dressed. Pretend I’m the captain and you’re dodging preschool when you show me what I need to wear and how I need to wear it, allowing for us to access our firearms because we don’t know what’s in that building,” I ordered, glaring at the open door.

“Damn, Captain. He’s already ahead of the curve. Hardy, we’ve got ourselves a smart one.”

Detective Hardy Grimstone, the grandson of a rather notorious black dragon who’d made his nest in New York City, chuckled and went to the trunk of his cruiser to start implementing my orders. “He probably doesn’t want to get sent to New York. He caught my grandpappy’s eye last go around, and you know how that old goat gets.”

“I saw him first,” our captain growled.

As the last thing we needed was two dragons duking it out when we were supposed to be solving a crime, I cleared my throat and said, “Focus. If you two want to argue about who has property rights, do so at the station where everyone can participate, make bets, and enjoy the show. What type of case do we have here?”

At the very least, I would be highly amused should they duke it out at the station, where the men and women alike would get in on the argument. Only one winner existed in such a scenario: me. Nobody would bother me while I got my work done, and I’d have a great day laughing at my fellow cops.

Captain Farthan regarded me with a raised brow before glancing in the direction of the warehouse. “We have a serious case of dead weight and a cranky unicorn we need to get down from her current position. We only know she’s a her because the caller got a good look up her skirt, as the dead weight is keeping her a solid twenty feet off the ground. We think it’s a standard unicorn heist.”

And just like that, my day went from bad to worse. Unicorns came in two varieties: shapeshifters and natural-born. Natural-born unicorns were shapeshifters, and shapeshifter unicorns could produce natural-born ones. They shared most of their abilities, and both counted as endangered.

Natural-born unicorns tended to play human more often than not, leaving the shapeshifters to take the brunt of society’s determination to tame, catch, or benefit from the species.

Depending on breed of unicorn, they were wanted for a myriad of different things. They came in every color of the rainbow with a few extras mixed in, and each one had a different trick. The blacks were prized for their healing abilities and were responsible for the majority of legends surrounding unicorns. Fortunately for the entire unicorn race, the instant the unicorn died, their magic died with them, so everyone wanted living, breathing unicorns.

The blues and indigos purified water along with sporting some healing arts, although they couldn’t hold a candle to the blacks. The greens restored vegetation and improved crop viability. The oranges, yellows, and reds liked confusing everyone with their various abilities, although their powers boiled down to life-giving flame, prosperity, and fertility. The violets could do a little of everything, which made them among the most desired of the species.

White unicorns had the potential to do a little of everything with a twist.

Whites produced gemstones in their droppings along with the dreaded crafting herpes, glitter. In addition to that, the whites could purify just about anything, heal well enough the blacks liked keeping them around in case of emergency, and were the true masters of short-distance teleportation, an art known as blinking.

Precinct 153 had a ridiculous number of unicorns, and there was one universal truth: unicorns were trouble.

Unicorns showing up during my shift were double the trouble and would haunt me for weeks to come.

“What sort of dead weight are we talking about?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

The opal dragon huffed, and he wrinkled his nose. “The corpse kind. Someone got the bright idea to use corpses to keep the unicorn lifted up off the ground.”

I sighed. Sometimes, a criminal did something clever. Hauling a unicorn up into the air counted as clever. A unicorn who couldn’t touch a hoof to the ground couldn’t do interesting things like blink short distances away or bring their most potent weapons into play. Shifting also became questionable; some could shift without touching hoof to ground, but most were stuck until rescued. “All right. Let’s get kitted up, see if we can get anything useful off the door, and prepare to deal with someone even crabbier than a dragon fresh up from a nap with no gold to play with.”

“Hey,” both the captain and Hardy protested.

I raised a brow and engaged both in a stare down. “Where’s the lie, gentlemen?”

“I told you this was going to blow up in our faces, Captain,” Hardy muttered. “You’ve gone and done it now. You’ve put Jace in charge, and do you know what Jace’s problem is?”

“What is my problem?” I asked, tilting my head to the side and crossing my arms over my chest, waiting for my co-worker to illuminate me. “Beyond having to pretend I’m qualified to do this job, which I’m not.”

“You’re too damned pretty to be that damned bossy when you’re in charge of something!”

Damned dragons. Man, woman—it didn’t matter to a dragon. When they encountered someone they felt was pretty, that was that. They lamented over what they couldn’t have. I needed to have a long talk with my parents about their contribution to my various assets. “Just shut up and get the kits, Hardy.”

“Will you marry me if I do?”

“Neither of us swing that way, and even if we did, the captain has rules. His rules say the precinct’s dragons do not kidnap or marry co-workers on grounds of appearance or competence.” I would not remind Hardy about the exceptions, as determined dragons usually got what they wanted. “The gear, Hardy. You can go cry to your grandpappy later, after we investigate the unicorn, check out the dead weight, and get everything and everyone down. And no messing up my evidence. If one of you gets me sent down to preschool being reckless, I’ll find some way to make you pay.”

“I should be reprimanding you over the use of coercion and threats, but you’re doing it with such skill,” my captain complained. “How can I reprimand that?”

I uncrossed my arms, rolled my shoulders, and finally shrugged. “Personally, I have no idea, sir. Let’s get this job done as though we’re actually skilled law enforcement officers rather than members of the circus who were given cuffs and guns and told to play cops with the local riffraff.”

“Wait, we’re not members of the circus?” the elephant asked.

“We forgot the lion, and we left the ringmaster at the precinct,” I retorted. The last thing any of us needed was Deputy Inspector Hagfield, another opal dragon with an attitude and a love of all things pretty, coming out to play with us. As for the lion, he’d stayed behind waiting for the drug calls, where he did his best work.

The bloodhounds would help in extreme circumstances, but they claimed dealing with the base-level drugs counted as cruel and unusual punishment, where the lion could handle sniffing out the narcotics without going half-mad from the stench.

“It seems Officer Smithson is on a roll. Let’s see if that roll translates to decent investigative work,” our boss said, helping Hardy pull out the scrubs and various other equipment we would need to gather evidence. “Listen up, Smithson. I only want to have to explain this once. Under no circumstances do we harm the unicorn. Beyond that, show us what you’ve got, ask questions, and assuming you’re not an idiot, you’ll dodge preschool. This time.”

“Wait. This time?”

My captain chuckled, ignored my question, and proceeded to guide me through the detective’s basic arsenal of equipment required to gather evidence and bring criminals to justice.

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Thursday, April 5, 2057
Warehouse Row, Precinct 153
Cauldron City, Nebraska.

Twenty minutes after getting kitted up and enduring a thorough lecture on why the exterior of the warehouse door would be shit for admissible evidence, we entered the building.

The dead weight, in the form of ten bodies, held up a rather sparkly white unicorn. A sizable pile of droppings exposed the motive of the crime. When my father heard about the situation, we wouldn’t need to investigate anything.

He would take care of the problem himself, and he’d leave bits of the culprits spread across the entirety of Cauldron City, the capitol of the strange and stranger in the United States.

Once I got her down and home, I had a few questions for my mother, who spotted me and turned her head so she wouldn’t have to look me in the eyes.

All right. As my mother had weighed in at 1,342 pounds as of a week ago while a unicorn, we had 1,342 pounds of deadweight in the form of ten bodies to contend with. The system holding her up, which involved two heavy-duty pulleys and a single length of thick, steel cable, would raise or lower with the addition of any weight to a single side. Even a pound would do, albeit it would be the world’s slowest descent.

Considering the rate of putrefaction in humans, I gave it no more than twelve hours before the corpses released enough fluids to ease my mother to the ground without any harm done to her. The culprit would come back to retrieve the droppings, which would be loaded with glitter and gemstones. She’d escape with little difficulty once her hooves touched the ground.

She was one of the unicorns who had no hope in hell of blinking or shifting without a hoof touching solid ground.

After that long of hanging around, she’d do what any sensible sentient would in her situation: she’d bolt for home without stopping to collect the wealth she’d left behind.

Well, maybe. She was my mother, and I’d learned most of my tricks from her, with a few lessons tossed in from my father.

Great. Just great. What had my mother been eating, when had she eaten it, and had her kidnapper monitored her for her diet? If fed the right balance of food prior to having to use the facilities, we could produce even diamonds. What we ate determined what sort of gems we left behind. A steak-rich diet tended to result in garnets. Lettuce created peridots. Vodka created magic and mayhem but little in the way of gemstones.

Chicken and cheese were the harbingers of great wealth, and the greater the volume of cheese, the higher the probability we’d leave diamonds in our wake.

Well, as I couldn’t start catcalling my mother and informing everyone I knew every damned unicorn in our precinct, I went to work collecting the accessible evidence. Someone had caught her on the hoof, and she must have been taking my father somewhere, as her favorite bridle and saddle were abandoned off to the side. I pointed at it and said, “That probably belongs to the unicorn, so you’ll want to wipe it for prints if possible. You won’t get the unicorn’s prints, but you might lift the culprit’s prints. She’ll want it back later. Expect it to disappear from evidence if it isn’t returned to her in a timely fashion.”

Every white with a single grain of sense wiped their prints off their gear just in case somebody got overly interested in acquiring easy gemstones. Most of the time, unicorns didn’t require hands to work with their tack, willing it into place as needed. Some species couldn’t, but my family?

We’d mastered the art of manifesting bridles, saddles, halters, shoes, and anything else we needed. If a saddle no longer fit well, we dumped it off somewhere and manifested a new one. If we were feeling fancy, we’d go buy one properly, hiring someone to create a work of art for us.

I’d rewarded myself with such a saddle and bridle the day I’d gone to work as a cop in Precinct 153.

My mother snorted and turned her ears back.

“I see you’ve been studying species abilities,” my captain stated, and he headed over to photograph my mother’s tack. “What would you have done if this were a dragon’s hoard?”

“I would have called you and stayed away. Only an idiot touches a dragon’s hoard.”

That got the rest of my co-workers laughing, especially Hardy, who had a reputation of getting extra crabby if someone messed with his hoard.

He kept a pile of gold in his drawer, and once a week, I made a point of shuffling the coins around before erasing my fingerprints with my special brand of magic—the same brand of magic that would make certain my mother departed without leaving any evidence of who she was when human.

“Good answer,” Paul praised. “And the dead weight?”

“Let’s gather the evidence on the ground before we worry about that, but getting the mare down will be easy.”

“It will? How?” my captain demanded, his tone sharpening.

I pointed at the pulley system. “Give me a rope and five minutes, and I’ll have her down without any issues. We’ll want to photograph the bodies and get as much evidence off them as we can before we set her free, unless you happen to have, say, fifteen hundred pounds of material we can use to hold them up.”

“Hardy, once we’re ready to bring the unicorn down, I expect you to shift.”

“Are you calling me fat, sir?” Hardy complained.

“Yes.”

I snickered, as Hardy barely topped the weight I’d set as the requirement to hold the bodies up. For a dragon, he had a great deal of growing to do before he matched our captain, who had at least a few hundred years on him.

My mother might kill me when I came over to visit and ask how she’d gotten herself in trouble, but I’d go out with a bang.

I took my time walking around the site, discovering someone had done a rather admirable job of cleaning the area. “Well, the motive is easy on this one.”

“It is?” my co-workers blurted.

I retrieved my phone and held it up, giving it a wave. “Search the internet for unicorns, their abilities, and look for white in the color listing.”

Rather than investigate my mother’s saddle and bridle for evidence, everyone dug out their phones and checked the public databases on unicorns. A few moments later, everyone stared at the rather large pile of droppings my mother had left on the floor.

“That’s right, gentleman. It could be glitter, it could be gemstones. Are you brave enough to find out?” I chuckled. “It’s evidence, anyway, and technically, it’s her property, so even if you did want to check it out and find out for yourself, you’d have to get her permission. At most, you can investigate the evidence to establish the value of glitter or gemstones as part of the charges pressed against her kidnappers. Then you would have to return the glitter and gemstones.”

I’d lost count of how many times one of my parents had vanished off for a few days to return home grumpy, hungry, and out a few gemstones after having gone through the effort of eating the perfect diet for a few weeks to maximize the odds of getting something worth decent change.

“I think he’s been reading up on the law, sir,” Paul said.

Paul’s partner, a magicker with a wicked sense of humor and a drive to pursue justice, came up and stared at the pile. “Toxicity rating?”

I snorted. While dragons had some fairly toxic excrements when in their scaled form, unicorns came dead last in the dangerous department. “It’s shit, Lovell. Don’t lick it and wear gloves. You’ll be fine.”

That won me a chorus of snickers, and Lovell laughed the hardest. “I’ll keep that in mind. Can we just bag it?”

“If the bag breaks, you’ll regret it. That is glitter-trapped shit, and there is a lot of it.”

As a general rule, glitter made up the vast majority of the droppings, with a light but rather hard casing protecting the treasure within. We used either hoof or horn to break open the payloads in search of gemstones to fund our various lifestyles.

I behaved more like a dragon than a self-respecting unicorn, opting to keep most of my gems unless I wanted something I couldn’t realistically afford with my job. Thus far, I’d only released three of my gemstones into the world, all so I could purchase new gaming computers and go on book buying binges. My parents played at being middle-of-the-road Americans, working because they wanted to and living the high life in some other city when they weren’t in Cauldron City keeping an eye on me.

They spent most of the year making sure I didn’t cause them trouble. According to my father, he would continue to do so until I was safely married. According to my mother, it was a crime a man as handsome as me had zero luck convincing a woman of any species to give me the time of day.

I hadn’t had the heart to tell my mother I had no problems convincing women to give me the time of day, but finding a woman who wanted me for more than my looks took a lot of work. From the day I’d turned twelve, I’d decided I would aim for what my parents had, which involved a relationship founded mostly on love with an uncomfortable amount of lust tossed in for good measure.

Whenever the lust issue came up, I made a point of leaving their house and staying gone until certain they’d finished their various acts of debauchery.

I’d been overjoyed when I had turned eighteen and had made my way into the world. My parents had flung a year’s worth of rent at me to make sure I’d stayed gone, too. I’d put the money to good use, sending in applications for prestigious colleges and universities. Once they realized I’d meant to expand my education rather than work right out of the gate, they’d both sold gemstones to pay for my efforts.

I’d earned a degree at Yale only to enroll in the police academy and take the opportunity to pursue my dream job.

Their expressions upon realizing what I had done remained a favorite memory.

I regarded my mother, wondered how my dream job had mystically transformed into a nightmare, and sighed.

My captain regarded his phone, echoed my sigh, and joined me in staring up at my mother. “The motive seems easy, then. They wanted the unicorn’s shit, so they put her in a sling and hauled her up there. But why use bodies instead of sandbags?”

“Putrefaction,” I replied.

“Pardon?”

“Putrefaction. The process in which a body decays. They would have matched the bodies’ weight to the unicorn’s weight so they balanced out, allowing them to haul her up while they set up the corpses. If they got the weight right, that’s what you get—a perfect balance, where their unicorn can’t escape and the corpses hold her up. During the process of putrefaction, they’d start to drip. As they’d start to drip and otherwise shed weight through the process of decaying, she would gradually lower to the floor, allowing her to make her escape. At that point, she’d be fairly spooked and run for it. The perps would then come back to a bunch of bodies on the floor and a pile of potentially valuable unicorn droppings.” I waved my phone at the captain to reinforce the whole idea I’d been doing my research on the various denizens of Precinct 153.

All four detectives and my captain stared at me as though I were the unicorn rather than my mother.

Boy, did I have news for them.

“You’re serious,” Captain Farthan spluttered.

“Give me a rope and a grapple, and I’ll show you, but I’ll need a dragon who can keep the corpses from splattering on the floor once she makes a break for it. I can almost guarantee that the instant her hooves touch the floor, she will be gone. She’ll show up at the station to collect her droppings later, I’m sure. And her saddle and bridle. I’m sure those are expensive, and she’ll want them back. She’ll bring a note with descriptions of the saddle and bridle, but just expect to read between the lines on the glitter and gemstones.”

The directions were more for my mother’s benefit than to convince my captain I had an idea of what I was doing, but with a little luck, she’d show up, get her property, and go home. Once home, I’d be there ready to scold her for adding another tally to her disappearance count.

My parents needed to stop romping around as unicorns, inviting themselves to questionable situations.

Hardy regarded my mother, heaved a sigh, and bowed his head. “I’ll go get shifted. I doubt I can fly up there, but at least I can keep the bodies from hitting the floor.”

“Try not to give the entire neighborhood a show,” Captain Farthan ordered.

Anyone on the street would get a show, as Hardy wasn’t an old enough dragon to shift without having to strip first. As he got older, he’d learn the trick of it. Most shapeshifters learned how to deal with clothes in some fashion or another as they aged.

I’d mastered the art of shedding my clothes after adding my thick coat over my human skin but before popping to my unicorn form in the blink of an eye. My mother and father transformed and sent their clothes home to the dirty laundry bin, and when they shifted back, they summoned something from their supply of clean clothes. I gave it a few years before I reached their level.

I could shift without tearing my clothes to shreds, and I’d learned how to fold them with magic.

Unlike my parents, I rarely went out and about as a unicorn. The idea of being left hanging lacked appeal. One day, I hoped it lacked appeal for them, too.

Within ten minutes, a grumpy Hardy, who took after his grandfather with black scales tinged with red, sauntered into the warehouse, barely squeezing through the door. Like most in his line, he breathed fire when annoyed, although he had other breath weapons at his disposal. To keep from adding yet another incident to his permanent record, he contained himself to a few trails of smoke from his nostrils.

Lovell handled acquiring the rope and grapple for my plan, and I rigged the hooked metal to the rope, giving it a practice spin while eyeing the chain above my mother.

“If you get that first try, lunch is on me,” Captain Farthan stated, staring at the sling and chain holding my mother up. “And I’ll give you a pass from going to preschool for two weeks. That’s going to be quite the shot. Whatever you do, don’t hurt that unicorn.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“Those are famous last words. Mess this up, and you’ll be going to preschool for at least a month.”

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Preorder Dead Weight at the following retailers: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Apple Books.