Marshall Law

by Paul Kilmartin

  ‘Here,’ she whispered and leaned out. Amber placed a torn piece of paper from her desk and popped it in the front pocket of the detective’s jacket.

  ‘I get off in an hour.’

  Lance smiled and continued to walk away, embarrassed with flattery. He wondered would he be able to resist looking at that piece of torn paper for five minutes, let alone for the entire night ahead.

  Unbeknownst to him, the twenty-six-year-old Amber was checking out his butt and ambitiously planning what she thought would be her morning get-away from the Detective’s apartment.

  DRINKIN N’ FIGHTIN

  ‘Oh sweet, sweet scotch,' Lance Marshall nurtured the poison in the glass to his upper chest and thought about shooting the whole thing down in one go. It would taste good, and carry an after-burn with it that might stop him from reaching into his pocket and taking out Amber's number. Then again, taking that number out could still happen, regardless of the scotch he was about to consume.

  ‘Fuck it.' He said to himself and downed the bronzed liquid in one.

  Out came the crumpled piece of office stationery and he looked upon it forlornly. It carried with it a little hope, which began with some fantasy and wild ecstasy but concealed in among the lights and sights and sounds was a fog of doubt, hurried guilt and that general feeling of a wrong thing that every good detective got.

  Lance looked around the bar and straightened his shoulders from the hunch they had been in.

  ‘Rooney’s’ was a Cop bar, and was usually just frequented by other cops and their families. He noticed that the bar was quiet, even for a Saturday night. Lance looked down the bar again and saw the other two occupants, two off duty beat cops, slowly enjoying two pints of Budweiser. They were middle-aged men, and the detective surmised that they were wise in the goings on in the force as they looked upon him with more than a little disdain.

  Lance felt it best to call them out. It was what he usually did when being hassled with evil looks by know it all blue bloods.

  ‘Things alright there pal?’ asked Lance of the two men. They looked at each other and smiled a devious grin. They nodded a no but still smiled his way.

  ‘Yeah, pal. We are all right. How about you?' The larger of the two spoke up.

  It had not been the pair's first drink of the night, and the same large man slurred his words now.

  ‘You think you can maybe, not come in here, man?’ The smaller of the two spoke up. ‘I mean, this is a bar for cops and all you are is a rat bastard cop.’

  God Damn, know it all blue bloods, thought Lance. They were always coming up with this shit, and he would not usually mind, but all they did was guess and make assertions about the detective. Yeah, it had some air of truth about it, but why would he even tell patrol-men anything about it. Lance knew that he was not about to start now.

  ‘How about you two morons just mind your own business?’ Lance turned his head again and looked for the barman to order another scotch.

  He had dismissed the pair as quickly as he had started this entire raucous by confronting them in the first place.

  ‘Hey Richie.’ Lance shouted down to the other end of the bar, where Richard Rooney, the owner was standing and washing glasses. He did not have to tell the seventy-two-year-old what he wanted, Richie knew him far too well. For Lance Marshall, it would always be a scotch on the rocks or vermouth and coke, if he was feeling adventurous.

  The detective turned himself once more back towards the two men, to check if they were still shooting him that dirty look. What usually happened next was that the unknowing cop would give Lance some verbal abuse for a couple of minutes until he had told him to shut the hell up, usually just finishing with Lance getting his jacket from under him and heading out of the door.

  Lance noticed the shadow over his shoulder and figured it was going to be one of those other nights.

  The first punch rained in across the detective’s neck and head, a miss timed volley from someone who had more than one drink consumed. If it had just been the one guy, then the fight could have been something resembling a fair contest but the second man reached and pulled Lance to the ground, reducing the bout to a beating.

  Lance shielded his face from a couple of ferocious boots to the chest and arms. He could hear the muffled sounds of Richie Rooney yelling about calling the cops and would have smiled that they were already here, had he not been too busy defending himself. The two cops called out to the defensive ball, a blast of obscenities as they kicked and punched him.

  ‘Dirty cop, dirty fuckin cop, rat bastard dirty fuckin cop.’ The tastiest choice of words.

  The smaller of the two felt this was going nowhere.

  ‘Pick him up.’ He ordered the larger and more muscular guy.

  They picked Lance up who seemed to be motionless in their arms and who had sustained a small cut below his left eye in the flurry. They walked him out to the back of the bar and through the emergency exit door and into the side alley beside the bar. A light rain transcended upon the three and as they lay the still Lance on the ground, they wondered if they had maybe knocked him unconscious.

  Lance's reflex kicked in as he reached out and grabbed the smaller man's trousers, just above his leather boot. The smaller man instantly and unexpectedly leaned down and punched Marshall hard in the face, leaving rouge coming from his nose.

  The detective now regretted his surprise attack upon his assailant's ankles. The idea of playing possum and then grabbing the guy's ankles and flipping him over, worked much better in his head than it had turned out in the real world. Lance steadied himself and felt he would have to go old school on these two jokers.

  Suddenly Marshall leaned over again and grabbed an ankle of the smaller man. The guy looked down once more and wondered why this guy wanted to be hit so severely, but this was coupled with the intense searing pain of biting through his right ankle. Lance was chewing on his ankle. He roared a guttural cry of pain and shock as the detective found the bone.

  The second larger man went to stop Lance, but the detective was too quick. He stopped biting and aimed a very high kick straight through the larger man's groin. It was as straight, and as force-full, a kick as any man could deliver from the floor and it struck a direct hit against the frank and beans. The sound, which was akin to two pool balls smashed together, made the three men recoil.

  The larger man hit the ground hard and caused a dulled splash from the puddle behind him to rise up. He roared in silence, too sore to scream but not enough to stop the little tear, which now fell from his eye.

  The smaller man was hobbling around as Lance got to his feet and patted his clothes down of excess water. He looked upon his wounded attacker who was now unwilling to fight anymore, hobbling backward just a touch. Lance contemplated if he should hit the man, only to send a message to others that he had not gone soft. The detective suddenly remembered he was the lead investigator on a murder case. He felt a responsibility upon him even though these fellow law-men had not shown him any such courtesy.

  ‘You know what? I’m no dirty cop.’ Lance spoke directly to the smaller man.

  ‘But if I were, I would shoot you in the head right now, coz I’d have nothing to lose.’ Lance unclipped the small Beretta handgun from his belt clip and held it up showing the by now terrified cop its side profile. It had enough stopping power to make a herd of elephants think twice.

  ‘Yeah sure, Hey look, we didn't mean it okay.' The injured cop said. He had already been bitten and felt sure that he could make the leap to a point-blank range execution, at any moment now.

  ‘Whatever.’ Lance re-holstered his sidearm and clipped it into place. He looked to the larger man who was rolling in agony beneath his feet. It was an uncalled for shot amongst guys, and Lance regretted giving it. The guy would be in complete agony for a couple of days, and as Marshall saw it, he would think twice about jumping him again.

  What was clear, was that there were enemies in the department, seen and unseen.

  EVE
RYONE’S A SUSPECT

  This was never going to be easy, investigating cops never was. The day after a bust-up with some over defensive officers was almost certainly the worst day to do this, and then there was the hangover and the bruised right cheek, and then the ego.

  Lance Marshall hated Mondays.

  He had checked in at the desk sergeant to ask for the call sheets to see who was on duty the night of the murder. They had been eventually given to him after a tense stand-off, and it was apparent to Lance, that everyone in the department had been made fully aware of the scope of his investigation. He was not inherently accusing cops, but by saying a murder had taken place near the station house and then asking questions in that same station house. Well, you did not have to be any kind of law-man to deduce that Lance was conducting some sort of investigation into cops.

  Marshall looked over the sheets in a small room beside the booking desk while in the presence of the desk sergeant, an old school beat cop named Mike McCluskey. Mike was half Scot and inherited his Mother’s Glaswegian short fuse for such occasions.

  ‘So it’s a cop you are investigating?’ Lance remained fixated upon the sheets. ‘If you are fucking investigating cops, I would like to know, as there is a name on the top of that sheet that ya may recognize.’

  Mike’s tight lips beneath a large bushy white moustache flared up as he presumed that Lance was here for him. Indeed at the top of the call sheets was the name of the desk sergeant on duty for that particular shift. And as per regulations, this sheet was no different.

  Desk Sargeant: Mike McCluskey

  ‘No Mike, I’m not investigating cops, I just need to check who was on and who was not, to see if anyone saw anything.’ Lance lied.

  ‘If it didn't pass by your attention, you wouldn't have happened to notice that this is a police station that you are in,’ McCluskey had a great point. ‘And if there were anything they did notice, they would probably tell the officer who was investigating the case, which in this circumstance, is you,’

  Lance continued to read the names on the sheet.

  ‘So, until someone does pop their head upstairs and tell you that they have seen or heard something, maybe you should fucking leave it to them to do so.’ McCluskey swiped the sheets from the hands of the detective.

  ‘And if it is not too much trouble, you might start to allow me to do my job and ask me what you want from this sheet. I am the only one who knows who was, or who was not in the station house, who is on this list.’

  Lance was in no mood to start divulging his hunches or his distinct lack of, to a desk sergeant who was in the favor of the Chief of Police.

  He had perused the list a couple of times and picked out whom he thought could be involved. The rest, he knew personally or knew that they were gutless, bent or incompetent.

  ‘I am not in the business of involving anyone in my investigations. I had just wanted to make sure that my name was not on that list and that yours was.’

  Lance smiled, though he had lied.

  Marshall walked out the door and towards the stairs, which would lead to the third floor. He left McCluskey scanning the list and raging to himself that the detective may finger him as a suspect. He was in no way a suspect, but it pleased the detective to have him chase his tail for some time and to go maybe whining to the Chief about it all.

  All in all, it just provided another suspect if Lance Marshall were to fall ill or meet an untimely end. He added to that list every day in this department and antagonizing Mike McCluskey was a sure fire way to another kick in the gut some night outside Rooney's bar.

  The detective sat at his bullpen and looked around at the offices of the third floor. It sounded of voices and phones ringing, copiers copying and the chatting of officers and receptionists. He looked at each of the detectives and ruled them out one by one.

  ‘Too lazy, too eager, too stupid, too sloppy.’ One by one, he ruled them out.

  ‘He sleeps with that guy's wife, that guy is on the take, he couldn't catch a cold.’

  He methodically ruled the men on the sheet out as even being close to suspects. The only officers with access to the station houses gate to the park were the men and women on this floor. It was a privileged area for the detectives who needed some time out. In the past and the bad old days, it was an area where dirty cops would leave stuff for other dirty cops.

  Marshall re-scanned the room and could not find a suspect among them all. God knows that he was okay with it if he did, but there was nobody.

  He saw Brandt, Johnson and Dawn, all hunched over Lindsay Dawn’s desk and one by one, they gave him the nod.

  He looked out and saw the lifers who had become Cops because that is what their Momma's and Daddy's were and Lance knew from them that their sons and daughters would do the very same thing if even it meant that they occupied the same dusty desk their parents had before them. He saw the new breed, the committed, eager but as yet to be proven fresh meat. Lance could tell which of these had seen a dead body or had pulled a trigger to make a new one. Over time, he watched their soul-searching of the rights and wrongs of it all, dissolving into apathy and then nothingness.

  Lance looked at them all and figured that after a lifetime of chasing killers, that he knew what a killer looked like. He thought about their calm exterior, and their ability to disconnect themselves from reality. He checked all of these characteristics against the murderers he had caught throughout the years and felt a small hole in his stomach opening just a little wider.

  He remembered the ones he had yet to catch, the ones who seemed to kill for fun. Then he recognized some of the killers that the old Detectives used to talk about. They didn't leave clues like the regular ones, and they seemed to enjoy the chaos. When they were caught, and it was usually by pure dumb luck, that they looked like every regular guy or girl that you had ever met.

  Lance looked around and saw a new room full of suspects.

  AS STILL AS NIGHT

  He lay on the grass, his body smooth as ducks on the surface of the water. While inside his mind was a hive of activity, listening, and sensing the very air around him. The only thing that could have snuck up on him was his own shadow, but tonight he knew that even it, was laying at a 45-degree angle by the light of the streetlamp.

  It was either him or her, but the real art of the moment was that the choice would be his to make. He would decide tonight who was to live and who was to die. For the moment, he enjoyed watching, and anticipating the movements of the people and in particular, his carefully chosen victim. But they had all looked so helpless, and naieve, and right then, the killer wanted to knife them all.

  The park beyond his prone body seemed so still and quiet. He had thoroughly checked that the Police had placed no perimeter checks and had not cordoned off any areas for further investigation and when all had seemed still, positioned himself by a small wall outside the small park.

  He looked at the people that stood and moved around nearby and thought about their muscles, contracting and relaxing as they walked, and the contraction in the upper thigh as they turned, to go back and get something that they had forgotten. He thought about these things to such a degree of mechanical obsessiveness, that at times he felt as if he could help them to stop and move on his command.

  Come towards me, show me your gut, inhale my knife.

  The man he wanted, walked towards him, and looked his way, but, yet could not see his fate.

  It had taken the Cops a full day to clear away from Park Lane, and now, in the silence, beside a small gate that had been newly locked, the latest victim was just a few steps away from a similarly gruesome fate.

  The man walked, right up to the wall and the gate beside it and leaned across it, taking a sharp, deep breath in, and exhaling it and a lungful of nicotine into the night air. He stood, looking into the darkness of the park, but could not see the beast that lay, at the other side of the gate, an arm’s length from his feet.

  The gruesome shadow that lay beneath his
prey, suppressed a cough at the pure disgust of the moment, as smoke drifted towards him. He took a final drag of the cigarette that covered his airway and prevented him from screaming for just a moment.

  The second moment would come too late.

  A knife flashed from the ground and lashed at the Achilles tendon of the smoking man, causing him to collapse to the ground immediately. Caught with a lungful of bland nicotine, the smoke suppressed a cough that tried to scream, as a hand reached out and muted the victim, before pulling him over the low wooden gate.

  The killer held a palm against the man’s mouth, as he sliced, and created a precise swoosh in the air, that caught the moonlight and sliced open his neck. The gurgling screams fell silent against the stone pavement.

  Without missing a beat, the attacker drove his hands into the chest of the almost dead man, and hauled him to the side, and away from more curious minds. It was a move of ferocious speed and agility and knocked what remained of the last breath from the dying man.

  Remaining so very still now, and for the briefest of moments, he listened for any outside parties.

  Feeling confident that he would not be disturbed, there now lay a task of preparing the scene of macabre oddities. His movements were as he had imagined them to be, and he felt confident that he had not been, seen by anyone.

  He reached inside of his jacket, and took the new gruesome mask out and carefully fitted it around his head.

  The dying man had died, a most horrible and brutal death, but the wide-eyed look upon his person, as a morning police patrol found him, was one of pure horror.

  The, almost dead man had looked up, as he lay bleeding on the path inside the park, and saw the face of an Ant pretending to smoke an unlit cigarette and then placing it inside of his open throat.

  THE GORY DETAILS