Page 11 - Unlikely Stories 2

El Asesino

The man heard his name called by a familiar English-speaking
voice. He looked at Dr. Rabette for an instant, eyes widening in fear.
Then he grabbed his rooster and ran.
The professor turned to Jack Flacket, who had grabbed his arm in
an attempt to restrain him. “Aren’t you going to stop him? We have
to get that creature back to the lab! This is totally unauthorized!”
They left quickly amid a rumble of discontent building up around
them. Flacket quickly maneuvered the car out of the barrio onto a
main boulevard leading back toward the university.
“Thank you, Professor. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting
a confession now. Theft of government property, at minimum.”
Warren Rabette was stunned, slow to recover. “So you brought me
there just to scare him. You knew all along that he had stolen
transgenic eggs and was replacing them with store-bought chicken
eggs he smuggled in and intentionally dropped, didn’t you? That he
quit as soon as he had a proto-saurian bird that was a ringer for a
rooster and would make him rich.”
“It seemed a logical conclusion, but we could not arrest him or get
a search warrant. No judge would have believed us.”
“Was that the only survivor among the stolen eggs?”
“We think so. The odds of any hatching after his rough transport
and improvised incubation were not great. If any hens were hatched,
I’d guess he ate them.”
The professor sighed. “Then if we confiscate El Asesino, the harm
can be mitigated immediately. Perhaps this can be kept out of the
press?” he ended hopefully.
“That’s out of my hands,” said the inspector. “But your project is
out of yours.”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“Guerrero wasn’t just making money in the cockpit. Until we
discovered the anomaly in your dropped-egg statistics, he had been
raking in exorbitant stud fees for months. That genie is not going
back in the bottle.”

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