Never Go Home Again
Ξ September 17th, 2007 | → | ∇ Black Hole Sun, gen, original fic, r |
Title: Never Go Home Again
Author: Astrothsknot
Fandom: Dark City
Rating: R
Characters: Brian LaSalle, Inez Urirte DaCosta
Disclaimer: This is mine, all mine!
A/N Reflections on life changing events for the characters.
You get up that morning, have a shower, breakfast. If you’re a woman, you piss about with your hair. If you’re a man, you piss about with a shaver.
You leave at the normal time, and you drive to work. So far it’s business as usual. The Guv briefs you on what you’ll be doing and who with, and you see what’s come in overnight, and what notes you’ve left for yourself.
The day will be spent checking up on leads, and analysing the evidence that’s there. You never think that you won’t be going home tonight.
***
I got to work that morning, too fucking early, all ready for Operation Tigre. It was good to know that French commanders picked as stupid names for their ops as the English did. I joked about it with Reebourg. Then everyone else joked about me and Reebourg finally coming in together. Hey, DaCosta, you guys official now?
“Looks that way,” he’d said and everyone had pretended to throw up. Just then our boss came in , and gave us a lecture on PDAs in the office. Then we made sure we had our warrants, and our kit, and we went to arrest some drug dealers. It was especially important, given that the unit was under suspicion. There wasn’t enough evidence - yet - to suspend or charge any of us, so it was business as usual.
***
The place where the kid had been found had been local, some carpark on the outskirts of Stirling. I’d wanted to see it myself. The kid hadn’t been local. We didn’t have a name or a missing persons. But for all we knew, he could have been taken from Ireland and traded in here
***
Everything was going to plan. There had been resistance, bull terriers and that shit. A lot of them had dogs that were trained to go for the balls of the male officers. Even though they were wearing boxes, it’s still unnerving for the men to have a small, ferocious dog dangling between their legs. Mind you, it’s an improvement in most cases.
The women didn’t have this problem. We just shot the little fuckers. One went for Reebourg, and I shot it in mid-jump. Gotta protect my investment.
But none of it wasn’t anything we could handle. Until one guy, who must have been sampling his inventory, jumped - armed - out of the window into the flat below. A prostitute, and her kids lived there.
***
I’d almost finished looking round, and was about to go. It wasn’t anything special. It was sad, lonely and terribly normal, a car park with huge - those giant buckets that Americans call dumpsters - and puddles from where the rain ran in. He’d been killed in that puddle. Someone had raped him one last time, then drowned him in the puddle. Then they’d left him there. Like rubbish they couldn’t be bothered to put in the dumpster. He must have been about 14 but he only weighed 35 kilos. Solescu had summed it up. “He weighed buttons,” she’d said, and even those of us not familiar with the saying understood what it meant.
The puddle had been deep, formed over a blocked drain, and was a fair size. It was larger than my living room, easily 20, 25 cm deep. I do remember that it came over the top of my boots. The water had soaked my trousers, and I swore. They were new.
I leaned down to curse at my stupidity, and to see the damage. And that was when I saw the wallet. At first I thought it was the wallet of someone who’d been mugged in the multi-storey. When thieves have everything useful out the wallet, they dump it in the nearest bin. Tip for you. Look in the nearby bins to get back the pics of the wife and kids if you get mugged. Cards can get cancelled, phones replaced. That tacky donkey keyring you got in Majorca because your daughter bought it with her pocket money is a one-off.
So, I picked it up, out of the water. Wincing as I did. Can you get rabies from puddles?
***
We negotiated for hours, until the order was given for us to go in. Reebourg and I were in front, remember that much. We went through the drill, check each room, the corners, behind the doors, yelling info and orders to each other all the while, and the woman is screaming and the kids are screaming, and Reebourg suddenly has them, and he checks a room as we go by, pauses a little bit too long but then it’s too late for me to do anything, because there’s a bang and a thud, and I can’t breathe, and its all warm and I’m wet and I can’t stand up because the world has gone red, and it’s fading.
No one will believe it doesn’t hurt.
***
I didn’t even hear them behind me at first. I didn’t hear them at all. One minute I’m looking at a wallet, wondering why the locals never found it, next I’m face down in that puddle, and it’s filling my mouth and my nose and the water tastes dirty. There’s a hand pressing my face into the water, and I can’t get up, there’s just too many. there must be at least three. They begin tearing off my clothes, and I know that rabies is going to be the least of my worries. There’s a pause as one of them finds my ID, and for a brief moment I think it might not get any worse.
Then they put my gun to my head.
And the people that we were when we got up that morning, will not go home that night. The people that we were, will never go home again.
on March 5th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Damn.
That was good.