| From: | Paul J. Adam ShadowTK@********.demon.co.uk |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Lullaby |
| Date: | Mon, 3 Jul 2000 22:53:28 +0100 |
>>>>>[I... don't know.
It feels wrong. But it fits part of the pattern. Blows other parts to
hell.
I just don't know...
+++++begin video
The Chevrolet Cobra stops, by the Lone Star-coloured Patrol-1 whose
lights are flaring. The nervous patrolman, in full armour with a HK227
clenched in nervous hands, is definitely relieved when Hart's hand
emerges holding nothing more lethal than her detective's ID.
"Julianne Hart, Tacoma homicide. We got called in by Captain Burke. You
expecting us?"
"Yessir! Thank you. Pull over there, inside the tape?" The patrolman is
nervous, not stupid, and has a good enough look at the badge to call it
in (and also carefully checks Hart's photo against her face).
"Not bad." Nash admits.
"Barrens cops are outnumbered and careful. Not, by and large, careless."
Hart says as she applies the handbrake. "Some are crusaders, some are
corrupt, but the stupid ones die fast out here."
The dark street is lit by blue and red strobes from the police cars and
the coroner's meatwagon, by the garish neon sign outside
"O'Hallorann's", and by the big klieg lights that illuminate the dead
man with a harsh white glare as a photographer circles with a trideo
camera.
"Weird." Hart pauses, to light a cigarette: offering the pack to Nash,
who waves it away with horror.
"Why?"
"SOP for a homicide, here? This is deep Puyallup. The DB must be a
person of importance."
Nash doesn't look dumb, he just thinks for a second. "You told me
before. Most homicides here are SINless until proven otherwise, this
guy's known, else there'd be no fuss. If it was a nobody, they'd have
tossed him in the morgue and never noticed he was killed with APEX
ammo."
"Give that man a cigar! Except you doesn't smoke. Those splatters on the
sidewalk, are the brains of a Mr Big."
"Oh, _gross_." Nash murmurs. He doesn't sound too serious: SWAT troopers
are used to the sight of bodies disassembled by high-velocity bullets.
"Lieutenant Hart?" The officer greeting them is an Ork, dark-skinned,
with his fangs handsomely capped with enamel to give them a glittering
ebony effect.
"Sergeant Menze, isn't it? You tried out for my taskforce when I was
down here, but just missed out? Ankle sprain during evaluation?" Hart
asks.
"That's right, sir." Menzes nods. "Captain Burke called, said to expect
you. We don't have much, but apparently you're working a serial murder
case using APEX ammunition?" The Ork gestures at the dead man, whose
cranium has split apart like a blossoming flower. "Looks like APEX to
me."
"Yeah." Hart nods, studying the corpse carefully. (She must have a
strong stomach: the sight is quite awful). "One round connected. Pretty
heavy calibre."
"My impression, Lieutenant, is a sniper with a suppressed rifle." Menzes
explains. "Nobody heard a shot. There were two guys on the door, they
both saw it, neither heard a thing over the music. You're talking a
suppressed .655 to blow a head apart that much with no report
noticeable, even with a lot of background noise. Had to be a big
subsonic bullet to do that."
Hart nods, not arguing with a Barrens patrolman who sees a _lot_ of
gunshot wounds and who is speaking good fact. "Fits what I know, too.
Not my case, then. My guys are a two-man team, using HK227s and firing
APEX by the burst."
"No way, sir. One shot, well-aimed, right on target. Pro sniperjob.
Neat, precise, clean. Might _maybe_ be a golden bullet with a -227, but
it just looks wrong, my money's on a subsonic .458 or 11mm Beijing, or
maybe a .655. Late detonation, that's an APEX hallmark." Menzes pauses.
"You want an unofficial conclusion?"
"Sure. You're the local guy, you oughta know."
"This dead guy, we've got an ID. Tom Morant, security manager at the
Chardy Manufacturing plant. He's pissed off a _lot_ of people. Maybe,
finally, someone kicked back." Menzes shrugs. "Barrens SINless labour,
at Chardy. But maybe he pushed the wrong person and they had a friend in
the shadows, or some family, or just found a crusader, and got dead."
Hart shrugs. "That's life in an extraterritorial site for you. Any noise
from Chardy or their owners?"
Menzes shakes his head. "Nope. Not yet. Means, this wasn't sanctioned."
Nash nods. Hart looks at him. "Explain 'sanctioned', SWATboy."
"Chardy might have decided he was a nuisance and had him whacked." Nash
spreads his hands. "If that was true, they'd probably have filed the
complaint about him being murdered in our jurisdiction before he hit the
ground. They haven't said jack, so they weren't expecting this, or it's
a _very_ good bluff."
"Bingo, SWATboy, you get the picture." Hart stretches, looking around.
"SWATboy?" Menzes asks.
"Sergeant Nash was a very talented SWAT trooper before he transferred to
Homicide." Hart explains. "He's now an inexperienced Homicide detective
who shows some promise. And is very nice to have backing you up in a
firefight."
"Right." Menzes nods. "Anyway, we got four witnesses. A couple more in a
car we're trying to trace, probably a couple of Chardy guards who're
cowering inside Chardy's fence now. You want to talk to them?"
"Nash, you're the gunbunny, you see what the witnesses learned." Hart
nods. "I'm going for a walk."
"Seen something?" Menzes asks, a half-heartbeat before Nash.
"Maybe. I'll check it, if it pans out Puyallup get credit. You'll be
doing the damn followup legwork anyway." Hart moves off, crossing the
street towards a half-derelict tenement.
The building is like most Barrens slums: a hellhole that only really
offers protection from the worst of the elements. Roof and walls, and
windows screened with whatever scrap plastic can be hooked over the
nails around the windowframes.
Warmth, is a garbage fire lit on a concrete floor. Light, at night, is
that same fire, and to hell with the choking smoke from the plastics
that are much of the available combustibles.
Sanitation? The plumbing is a distant memory. Some drek in a bucket and
fling their excreta into the street, others relieve themselves out of
the windows or in the hallways, and some simply live amidst their own
reeking wastes.
Hart keeps enough of her attention on the ground that she at least
avoids the larger lumps of faeces, but she can't help gagging slightly
at the stench of the stairwell. Thankfully, the recording is merely
trideo with a soundtrack, and olfactory data is absent.
The lower floors are occupied on a fairly long-term basis, with signs of
prolonged residence. By the fourth floor, it seems to be home only to
transients: the fifth, penultimate floor has only one of the four
apartments occupied (at least, if closing a door matters: and here,
anything remotely valuable not behind a door, is _gone_). The sixth and
highest floor is empty and abandoned.
Hart scouts it carefully, a small infrared-filtered flashlight in her
left hand and her non-regulation Richard Wilson Custom automatic ready
in her right, the safety off but the weapon aimed at the floor. Two of
the top floor's apartments are ruined, the roof collapsed onto them. Who
knows why? Earthquake, warfare, structural failure?
The policewoman checks the other two carefully. The first, has no view
of O'Halloran's, and so she ignores it: in the second, she begins a
meticulous check of each window that looks down on the homicide scene.
A whisper of movement behind her, and suddenly Hart is staring at a
small child, whose pronounced lower canines and skull ridges mark her as
a young-goblinised, over the tritium sights of the Wilson automatic.
Hart's focus shifts in an instant to the darkness behind the girl,
seeing nothing there, before she raises the weapon and her torch hand.
"Oh, I'm sorry, you surprised me."
"I'm sorry!" the girl says, cowering. "I didn't mean nothing! Please
don't-"
"It's all right!" Hart says, trying to be reassuring. "You didn't do
anything wrong. I'm not angry, and I won't hurt you. You're just very
good at being quiet. That's all. You surprised me, and I sort of reacted
too fast. I didn't meant to scare you."
"Will you be long?" the child asks.
"No. Not long. Some other people might have to come here and look
around, though. Why are you here? Isn't this a bit wet and cold?"
"Maybe." The girl wraps her arms around her. "But _he_ doesn't come
here."
"Who's 'he'?"
"Bobby." There's a freight of hate in the name. "He doesn't know about
here. If I don't want him to find me I come here."
Hart pauses. Skips over the routine horror of being young and female and
vulnerable in the Barrens. "What's your name?"
"Molly. Who are you?"
"Julianne Hart-Kryzdanovich. But _you_ can call me Juli."
"Thank you, Juli. I don't think I could say Hart-Kryzdanuv... Hart-
Kristan... whatever it was. That's a funny name."
"It was my husband's name. He was a good person."
"Did he die?" Molly asks. Innocently, but too well-informed. Random
death, after all, is a fact of life here.
"Yes, he died." Hart nods. "That was bad, because he was a good man."
"Mommy says Bobby is a good man. We've got trideo now. And power. And we
can buy water when he gives Mommy money. But he makes Mommy cry, and he
shouts at her, and he hits her. And sometimes he comes and hurts me,
when Mommy's chipping or when she's out. That's why I hide here when I
can. But now _everyone_ seems to come here. You won't tell Bobby about
it? Will you?"
"Absolutely not!" Hart replies, vehemently. "I'll help you hide if I
can."
"Promise? You won't tell?"
"Promise."
"How did you find it?" Molly asks, still suspicious.
"I followed the stairs all the way up."
"Oh. Nobody told you?"
"No. I didn't know about you, and I didn't expect you to be here. And I
won't be coming back, so it's all right. But it's nice to meet you."
"Have you got any food?" Molly asks hopefully.
"Well... let me see." Hart tries a couple of pockets, before she finds a
glassine-sheathed white bar claiming to be "Kendall Mint Cake". Molly
devours it in about three bites, before licking the plastic wrapper
clean.
"Thank You Mrs Hart that was very kind." Molly recites, looking up with
slight embarrassment. "You're nice. Are you real?"
"I think I'm real. Why?"
"Because I saw a ghost in the next room and it was nice to me, but
ghosts aren't real. And hardly anyone I know for real is nice. So I was
wondering if you were a ghost or a dream or something." Molly finds a
few last crumbs of sugary whiteness in the energy bar's wrapper, and
busies herself with consuming them.
"Which room, Molly? Can you show me?"
"I won't get in trouble?"
"No. Not at all."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"All right. It was next door." Molly leads Hart to the room, points to
the decaying mattress by the window. "I come up here sometimes when
Bobby gets... you know. But there was a ghost here last time. And you
were here this time."
"A ghost? What sort of ghost?" Hart asks.
"A pretty ghost. She was nice. She gave me candy and juice and sang me
to sleep." Molly smiles happily. "I _think_ it was a she. It was nice
like Mommy, when Mommy's home and not chipping and Bobby's not angry."
"Did the ghost have a name?"
"I think so. But I don't remember. I'm sorry." Molly's face suddenly
wrinkles up and she cowers back, afraid. "I wish I could remember! I
tried! But I can't-"
"It's all right! It's all right. It's not that important, Molly." Hart
replies soothingly. "What did the ghost look like?"
"Like a big pretty white cat. She had a mask on, all shiny and metal,
but I asked her and she showed me what she looked like under it." Molly
says proudly. "She said she was ugly like me, but I thought she was
_beautiful_. Like a pretty white cat, except with pink eyes. I wish _I_
looked like her. Bobby says I'm an ugly little trog fuckslut and that's
why he has to hurt me. If I looked like the ghost maybe he wouldn't hurt
me."
"You're not ugly, Molly. You're prettier than me." Hart says. Pauses.
Then, you hear the policewoman bring the axe down, on the thread of
compassion: this is just one Barrens child, with a hundred thousand more
like her, living in filth and misery with no hope and no future, and
Hart for her own sanity cuts off thoughts of solving little Molly's
problems. "She was here?"
"Sitting right there on the mattress." Molly nods. "I come here to sleep
when Bobby seems like he might want to come find me. I came here and
that's where the ghost was. I was scared, but it was pretty and _it_ was
scared of _me_, but I told it I wouldn't hurt it. It gave me candy and
sang to me and I went to sleep. And when I woke up it was gone."
"Did it leave you anything?"
Molly thinks. "No. It gave me candy and juice and it sang me to sleep.
It didn't leave me anything. But it was nice."
Hart nods. "Just a minute, Molly. I want to look around a little." Hart
turns on the flashlight, sweeps it around.
"That's pretty. But it's all dark and red. What is it?"
"It's a flashlight. A special flashlight. You can't see its light, can
you?"
"No. Can you?"
"Yes, I can. My eyes got changed so I could see the special light from
it. It means I can search around without people noticing." Hart
explains.
"So Bobby won't know you were here?"
"No. Not here." Hart replies, cool and calm and level. "You can still
hide here."
"Good." Molly falls silent as Hart conducts a quick but efficient visual
search. A few short, fine, startlingly white hairs from the windowsill
go into a ziploc bag, but that's the sum total of the evidence to be
had.
"What's that?"
"Just something I saw. Where do you live, Molly?"
"Downstairs. The place with the door?"
"I saw it." Hart looks out of the window, at Morant's corpse and the
street layout. A sniper might complain about aspects of the shot, but
it's a good, clean, oversight position and even an amateurish long-
rifleman could pick off anyone walking into O'Halloran's from here. A
_good_ sniper could make completely sure of a headshot, from a vantage
like this.
Hart looks to her right, seeking the telltale glitter of a brass case,
but there's just mildew and silverfish and a couple of roaches. On a
whim, she checks her left too, but she finds no more surprises. "The
ghost sang you to sleep?"
"She was pretty." affirms Molly. "And nice. It was a good ghost. There
_are_ good ghosts, aren't there?"
"I think so."
"I'm sorry I can't remember the ghost's name. It did say but I was too
scared at seeing a real ghost to remember it properly, and then I liked
its song and I forgot to say that I didn't know the ghost's name." The
small Ork girl shrugs. "Then I went to sleep. I woke up and the ghost
was gone."
"You want to stay here, Molly? I'm going, but I'll be quiet and careful
and make sure nobody knows you're here if you like."
"Please? Bobby's coming home and Mommy's still chipping-" The small
Ork's eyes plead with Hart.
"It's okay. I won't tell anyone."
"Thank you. Are you a ghost too?"
"Sort of." Hart says.
"I thought so." Molly sighs. "All the nice people are ghosts. Nobody
_real_ ever does anything good."
Hart might have been about to say something. Instead, she reaches out
and strokes the child's face. "Stay here and sleep, Molly. I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?"
"For everything." Hart gets to her feet, leaves quickly.
Walking out of the apartment, Hart keys her radio. "SWATboy?"
"Yep?"
"I'm coming out. Anything there for me?"
"Best guess, sniper was in your building. Just an informed guess. Not
much more. Morant got out of his car, pow! his head's half off. That's
all anyone here saw." Nash replies, as Hart tries not to inhale in the
reeking stairwell. "You find anything?"
"Not much. A crusade I couldn't carry through, and maybe a lead." Hart
gets into the fresher air outside with a gasp of relief. "Some evidence.
Might or might not matter."
"What do you mean, a crusade?"
"I got my nose rubbed in what it is to be a twelve-year-old girl in the
Barrens, Chris. And I either walk away, or I commit murder. Probably not
much middle ground." Hart lets go the radio link, as she reaches Nash.
"...That bad?"
"Let's just get the hell out of here. I found... something, probably
nothing, but something. We'll get it checked, give it to Puyallup, and
get out of here." Hart sounds quite badly distressed.
"What's wrong?"
"There's a scumbag back there who needs killing and I'm trying to remind
myself why I don't just do summary execution."
Nash pauses. "What can you - we - do, here?"
Hart draws a deep breath, lets it out as a long shuddering sigh. "Sweet
frag all, Chris. We're Tacoma homicide. We investigate this killing. The
rest, is outside our remit. Just leave it."
"If-"
"Nash. Believe me. Just leave it. You either violate your oath as a law
enforcer, or you go mad, or you learn to walk away, or you get dirty and
learn to make money out of the shit floating past you. If there's a
fifth option, nobody's told me what it is. Come on. We're going for #3
and we're leaving."
+++++end video
That was a couple of days ago. I've been checking it out, looking it
over, but there's nothing to connect Morant with the run of killings in
Tacoma.
Chris wanted to know why I was so upset. If I tell him... he'll kill
'Bobby'. Quick and simple and easy. And... wrong. It won't solve
anything. Molly's mom will find some new boyfriend, and instead of just
playing hide-the-wiener with little Molly while Mommy chips out, this
one might decide that a young Ork cutie like her could be profitably
pimped out. 'Course, maybe Bobby'll get that idea all by his lonesome
anyway. Heads they win, tails she loses.
Sometimes, no matter how deep you dig, the cloud just doesn't have a
silver lining: sometimes, there's just nothing you can do except harden
your heart and walk away.
But it still bothers me.
Sometimes I hate this job.
Oh, yeah... the hair sample. That got me a big, fat, zero. "Male elf...
maybe... except the insert-incomprehensible-biogenetic-babble is all
wrong, so we got no idea what it is, how old was it, how pure's the
sample, how might it have been contaminated, did you wear gloves..."
Umpty-squillion's worth of lab equipment just so they can tell me
"Fuctifino" with confidence.
I don't think Morant's killer has much to worry about. And I don't think
it's relevant to my case. And I don't want to go back to Puyallup for a
while.]<<<<<
-- Lt. Julianne Hart <22:46:36/07-03-61>
Lone Star (Tacoma)
