by Lee
“Good luck with that, chief. Let me know how that works out for you.” I divested myself of the unwanted one-page manifestoes and ran for the door when Fred went to pick up the mess. Poor old Fred Garvin was en route to the next stage of Outraged Citizenry: Unlawful Conspiracy Theorist.
It’s a classic progression; going from Outraged Citizen, legally sponsored and receiving small subsidence checks in the mail along with free print vouchers for their pamphlets, to Unlawful Conspiracy Theorist could sometimes take years. Or minutes. Or never at all. It’s a funny old world.
The two Rules-sponsored crazinesses (crazies? Craziness? Whatever. You know what I’m saying) are very similar in job duties, with the exception that OC’s usually aren’t permitted to point to specific organizations, imaginary or not; their remit is to have a list of complaints as long as their arms and shout loudly about who was going to fix them. UCT’s are only allowed to work in bus depots, libraries, in front of high-profile banks and alleged Federal Reconditioning outposts. They do get a bigger chunk of free print coupons and slightly more money, but there’s always the risk of being nabbed by one of the on-tap shadowy organizations for a bit of cranial cut-and-paste.
I made it to the safety zone (ten feet) and watched as Fred Garvin slammed to a halt. He didn’t look very happy that I’d dropped his pamphlets after appearing to be such a nice guy. It was a safe bet that I’d figure prominently in his protean conspiracy dreams for a while. If I was lucky, I’d wind up being the head of Darkstar.
I walked through the electric doors and sighed.
Damn. Standing by the elevator was the police chief’s aide de camp, Reginald Worthingtonne. By the look on his pointy little face, the gleam in his evil little black bird’s eyes and the absolutely bastard way he pointed at me, I deciphered that the police chief wanted to have a little chat with me before I hung out with my sister.
Nodding to the duty chief who looked positively thrilled to be doing nothing at all, I headed over to the elevators and, pretending that Reginald wasn’t there, I thumbed the button. Daggers launched from the aide’s eyes, but, having been caught in murderous crossfire between an Israeli Writman and an angry Russian Mafioso, having a diminutive twerp try to boil me in my skin wasn’t much of a problem.
It might not be immediately obvious, but I don’t much care for Reginald. It might have something to do with the fact that he’s not really a cop (think glorified male secretary and you’d be about a third of the way there) and he preens way too much on his appearance. I know for a fact that he shops at the stores that sell name brand clothes for bargain prices, spends most of his nights working to rid those ‘fancy’ clothes of the flaws that made them so cheap, and then tells everyone he got them in a trip ‘up to New York with some friends last weekend’. Beyond his narcissism and general seediness, Reggie has somehow managed to convince himself that police HQ could not run without him. I’ve heard from Amily, who thankfully shares my nearly religious loathing of the geek, that he’s been trying to ingratiate himself into nearly every department in the precinct ‘for educational purposes’. After Googling him, I managed to find his resume, and had warned Amily immediately that the dork had spent ten years in ‘operational streamlining’, suggesting that everyone watch their asses when he was around.
Not that Police Chief Rigible would ever actually act on any scuttlebutt the little toad delivered up on a silver platter, because Rigible’s old school in all the good ways. It’s just better to be safe, especially since a guy like Reginald Worthingtonne was the sort of person who wouldn’t hesitate to drop by Internal Concerns and ‘accidentally’ let something mildly illegal slip off his slimy tongue and then be very contrite and apologetic when all the firing was finished.
Reginald didn’t like me because I had the ear of the Chief. It was as simple and unadorned as that. When Rigible and I spoke, it was alone, without the benefit of prying eyes or ears, which I also knew through Amily drove him absolutely insane. Amily herself didn’t know what the Chief and I spoke about when we met, but it didn’t really bother her because it meant that I would have less time trying to con her out of money or prizes when I eventually got to her floor. Being an uncontrollable factor in Reginald’s life made the skinny, beady eyed creep positively florid with anger every time we met. Me? I was filled with joy and love for my fellow human beings.
“I’ve already called the elevator.” Reginald looked at me, his spooky black eyes trying to drill holes through my forehead.
“Oh?” I asked nonchalantly, nodding a greeting to one of the bluecoats that Amily’d dated for a short while. I snapped my fingers. “Oh, hey, Tommy!”
Tommy motioned for his partner to continue on and turned back to me. “’sup, Jimmy.”
“Your OC out there is on his way to being a UCT. Maybe two more days, less if no one talks to him.”
Tommy frowned. “You mean Curtis? No way.”
The elevator binged. Reginald gave a glance that suggested I’d better be on board when the doors closed or he was going to tell Rigible that I was down in the lobby eating children. “’fraid so, Tommy. Mentioned a shadowy organization name of Darkstar responsible for his descent in madness and despair.”
“Crap.” Tommy rolled his eyes. “Last thing we need is for Curtis to go UCT on our doorstep. All right, I’ll tell one of the meter maids to kick him across the street to the deli. They can deal with him blowing his stack.”
“James.”
I rolled my eyes at Tommy, who burst out laughing. I did an about face and hopped lithely into the elevator. “So, Reggie, that a new shirt?”
Reginald clenched his teeth at being nicknamed, but nodded brusquely. “It is. It’s a Lorenson original from his galleryshop in New York. I went there last month with some friends and had a great time. Picked it up for a song.”
“Really?” I asked with sickeningly sweet interest. My eyes, which are augmented by the compact lenses I wear (one of few holdovers from my days as a really good assassin) easily picked out the flaws he’d fixed with a thread and needle. “That’s interesting, because to me it looks like … Lorenson? Lorenson used two different types of black thread, here, on the lapel, and here, on the cuff.”
“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Reginald said coldly. He smoothed the sleeves of his cheap knock-off with a hauteur learned in front of a mirror. “This shirt was brand new when I bought it and this is the first time I’ve worn it.”
“Well, Reggie, I don’t know what to tell you, but all I can say is I think this Lorenson guy is running a sweatshop in his basement and ran out of the proper color thread and pulled a substitution mid-game. Probably why you got it so cheap. Of course,” I clapped a hand on his shoulder and nearly burst out laughing as Reginald almost jumped out of his skin, “no one’s going to notice unless they look at your neck or cuffs, and who really does that?”
“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, James?”
“Most of the time, yes, Reginald, I find that I am quite amused by myself.” I tapped the side of my head. “Makes for some fun times up here, I can assure you.”
Reginald made to say something that he probably imagined would be quite nasty, but the elevator door popped open and I stepped past without giving him the chance; bickering with someone like Reginald could take up an entire day and the only thing I’d have to show for it was a headache and a slight advancement in my off-the-cuff insults.
We rode up in chilly silence, listening to a Muzak version of the Mellonballers hit ‘You Suck So Hard You Make Me Wanna Blow’. The doors thankfully popped open before the song got to the part where Miggy lyrically emasculates her horrible ex-boyfriend. I hopped out quickly. Reggie was about to step off the elevator after me when His Honor Police Chief Derek Rigible the XII hove into view, all seven foot, four hundred three pounds of him, palming a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate of donuts in the other.
“No need, Reginald, I can see to James from here. Lead on, Herr James, and I wi
ll follow forth as ever.”
Unlike Reginald, whom I wouldn’t piss on if he was burning to death on my front lawn (in fact, I’d try to sue his estate for destruction of private property), I love Chief Rigible; before making the leap into law and order, the giant had spent more than half of his life being ‘World’s Strongest Man’, and you just had to take a look at him and all doubts would be instantly dispelled. The man was massive, built like a goddamn armor plated oak tree. His hands were big enough to palm my head and I didn’t doubt for a second he could pull it right off my neck were he so inclined; there were pictures on the walls in his office of him lifting such ridiculous things as refrigerators full of car batteries, oxen, gigantic slabs of rock, mining carts full of ore. There were others of him bending tire irons, cable ties, fenders and other unbendable objects into pretzels. In his time as World’s Strongest Man he’d pulled cars, horses, boats, submarines, monster trucks, trains and airplanes with his teeth, ears, and if whispers were true, with his penis once while in Amsterdam.
All this had happened on the other side of the Iron Curtain way back in the thirties, but after Communism collapsed in the mid-forties when everyone had basically gotten fed up with their whole way of existence, the life of a circus strongman held no meaning and so young Derek Rigible hopped the first plane to America and worked as diligently at applying himself to his new country’s way of life as he had once in bending the unbendable and pulling the unpullable. Maybe living in such a ruthless, lawless country was the primary reason for Rigible’s unswerving predilection for justice or perhaps he’d just re-worked the old carnie codes into something applicable for the greater good of the city. Whatever the case, Derek Rigible was the only Police Chief to have also been knighted, was the only man to be told he could basically do whatever he wanted without any repercussions whatsoever by the President of the United States and was also, and this is the main reason why I liked him above all others, the only man outside my organization who knew I was a Writman and he hadn’t told my parents or my sisters, and didn’t use the knowledge for his own personal gain, which is more than could be said for other folks and other Writmen.
We meandered our way down the halls, chit-chatting about the upcoming Mellonballers album, whether or not Morty Ziegler was going to be allowed to sell some more of his inventions to the general public (we had him to thank for skullphones, eye computers, cyborg implants, stronger-than-hell metals and fourteen new and wholly radical flavors of ice cream) and who was going to win the next series of Kung Fu Wrestling matches. My personal favorite to take the vaunted Kung Fu Grip Trophy was Mikhail Brovloski from Newark; Rigible claimed he knew the odds-on favorite was Tony Denardo from Singapore.
Once in the office, seated and relaxed, Rigible quirked an eyebrow at me thoughtfully. “So,” he said after a long moment of silence, “that was quite the … foul-up yesterday, yes?”
I sighed. I don’t know why I felt like I was letting Rigible down every time I pooched a mission, but I did; possibly it was because he’d once confided in a rare moment of truth that he felt that us Writmen were one of the main reasons a lot of ‘illegal’ crime just didn’t happen anymore. When all it took was evidence (of which there was always going to be ample) and enough money to get a Writ issued, vanishingly few criminals thought about doing anything ridiculously dangerous. Police officers spent almost all their time out there catching real criminals like jaywalkers and tax evaders. People like me took care of the rest and everyone was quite happy with the arrangement. Well … almost everyone. Not counting the DemReps. They don’t like anything. Even themselves. “It didn’t go exactly as planned, no.”
Around a mouthful of cruller, Dirigible snorted. “Seems to me the Writ suggested quite strongly that it would be best if no attention was drawn to the deliverance, yes?”
I’d never been able to figure out how Dirigible knew so much about Writs. As police chief, he was legally required to be familiar with the identities of all Writmen who were based in the city, and with the Writs issued each day. But the specifics were supposed to be buried under the Anonymity Act. Why else was I paying premiums?
“I don’t know what to tell you, Chief,” I said, looking at my hands, “it just went south on me. By all accounts, Daddy Tooms was not a smart man. Crafty in the ways of lawless importation of tobacco goods, okay, given, but building a life-size paper Mache doll of himself? Didn’t see that one coming.”
“I have seen the forensic reports, yes.” Dirigible drank some coffee. “You blew the head off that doll very nicely. Then, of course, you did the same for the real thing.”
“Can’t afford a real gun any more, Chief. Had to use my cell gun. Daddy Tooms got the drop on me and I did what I had to do.”
“I have here a report,” Rigible indicated a random piece of paper on the small mountain of carbon copies on his desk, “well, you get the point. On this desk somewhere is a report from a man who says you sicced his own attack dog on him. His wife is also claiming you raped her before stealing all her Whacky Tongue cigarillos.”
“First of all, the dog tried to eat my shoes and the owner probably wanted to kill me for home invasion, so I kicked him in the knees. The dog, I’m assuming, was not a big fan of his food provider.” I ticked off a finger. “Second of all, the wife was higher than a kite and I’m willing to bet my left nut that she was drinking paint. Not very good witnesses.”
“Indeed,” Rigible said, nodding with his mouth full, “this is very true, yes. The only definitive thing they could remember about you were your bright red shoes. They are very nice. Where did you get them?”
“MaxCo Shoes on North Azels Street between the sandwich shop and the all-night porn store.” I answered the question automatically. It’d taken me four hours of practice to get that out without shouting ‘illegal shoes from Prague!’ in the middle. “Special order from Vinnie Mcmanus. You want a pair I can get you one.”
“Not necessary, my friend. I get mine specially made for me in Prague. They are the only people who understand what it is to make a good pair of shoes, especially for someone as large as myself.”
“Uh.” All ability at coherent thought drained out of my skull in one rapid movement, and for what felt like an eternity I sat there, staring at Rigible, who continued eat donuts and drink coffee with all the innocence of a choirboy. Now, there is a very good chance that the Chief truly did have his shoes made in Prague, because for all that country’s particular faults (we won’t mention the short-lived Thistle War of seven years ago, or their attempts to hi-jack a space station last summer), they have a way about them when it comes to foot apparel. Even if my bright red shoes, which I sadly realized had a heat score factor of one billion plus, were not packed full of performance equipment, it’s probable I would’ve had my guy make me a pair anyway. “I was in Prague once. Lots of prostitutes.”
Rigible grinned knowingly and changed subjects, leaving me feeling deflated and slightly hollow. “This Zongo situation. What do you make of it?”
On the ride over I’d listened very carefully to the news in anticipation of a breaking story covering what, if any, developments were being made into the entire affair. Thus far, every channel was repeating what I’d read this morning; Daddy Tooms was possibly not an illegal importer of tobacco products. This made the legal department for Zongo look very stupid at best or intentionally negligent at worst, a potential disaster for which ever VIP signed his or her name on the bottom of the Official Writ logged with the GOC. It happened every now and then, and had been known to destroy lesser companies, but a giant as big as Zongo? I imagined they’d pay their fines and that’d be the end of it. I told Rigible as much, adding that I wasn’t overly worried about myself. In these cases, the Writman isn’t culpable; we aren’t required to determine the legality of the Writ one way or the other. Once it hits the street, everything is (or should be) above board and one hundred percent legal.
“Hmm.” Rigible said. He toyed with the last donut for a brief moment before po
pping it in and smiling. “I cannot be sure, young James, but I sense a change in the wind. This organization, Champions of Proper Law, they have very many powerful friends in the Senate. Their anti-Writ movement is slowly gaining favor with politicians. While I think that it will be many years before they are officially passed in the House, I do believe that they will try to take advantage of as many of these kind of legal errors as they can in the meantime, to make you and yours look like bloodthirsty maniacs.”
Champions of Proper Law. Horrible, horrible bastards, is what I thought. Originally founded and funded by a few wealthy families ten years ago (who, I might add, had each of them had evil sons and daughters who all got Written Off for various crimes against Man, God, Nature and Commerce), CoPL spent all their time haranguing any organization that would listen as to the illegal, immoral and improper aspects of the companies that delivered Writs. The primary thrust of their argument was always the same; ‘crime’( and therefore the ‘criminals’ who engaged in such activities) should be dealt with by duly authorized law enforcement officials who are trained to deal with the subtle nuances of the human psyche and not summarily executed by anyone who had enough money to buy a Writ.
It didn’t matter that all aspects of crime was down anywhere from twenty-five to fifty percent and that everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves a bit more, or that none of the cottage industries that had sprung up as a result (legitimate industrial espionage, for one) were a boon to the economy. But as Rigible had pointed out, any headway they were making in the Senate and House was almost always instantly ameliorated when a high-profile Writ broke in the news and public approval skyrocketed. It would be many, many years before any of their ‘laws’ even made it to the floor, let alone got passed.
