by Lex H Jones
The numbers on the right-hand wall next to the doors lit up one by one, circled by a red ring of electric light. Eight, nine, ten. As the number “fourteen” lit up, Carl raised his gun once more, so that it was ready to immediately discharge into the chest of anyone stupid enough to be waiting for him on the next and final floor. The doors opened onto an empty hallway, but Carl still moved quickly and quietly through it. Only three doors were present; the two apartments that could be found on this floor and the fire exit. The latter door was closed, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been used recently. Those things were heavy, they’d close themselves even if the escapee didn’t take the time to cover his tracks. Carl looked at the fire escape and then back towards Mrs. White’s apartment. He was about to move towards the fire door when he heard the sound of something breaking into Mrs. White’s room. A vase, a lamp, it didn’t matter. Someone was in there, and the woman hadn’t seemed like the clumsy type.
Keeping close to the wall, Carl approached the door to apartment 202, slowly turning the handle as quietly as he could. With a silent count of three, he then swung the door open wide and entered, gun first. The sound of the door banging back against the wall was immediately followed by the noise of someone scuffling and tripping across the floor in a desperate effort to get away. Carl turned sharply and saw a small figure to his right, at which he instantly aimed his weapon.
“Not another step,” he warned.
The figure froze and raised its hands, standing upright now keeping perfectly still. Carl could now see that it was a girl, young and skinny with hair died a cheap purple. The girl was dressed in a pirate costume; white shirt, black shorts and striped knee-socks, with a black waistcoat and a black bandanna. Her face was painted like a skull in luminous pink makeup, but Carl still recognised her; it was the girl he’d rescued from Big Dog at the bus station.
“Please... I... I didn’t know what they... what they were going to do... I just...”
“What are you on?” Carl demanded.
“I’m not, I...”
“Heroin?” Carl asked, noticing the way the girl shook despite the pleasant temperature of the room.
“They said... they said they’d give me another hit... all I had to do was come along, and...”
“Who said?”
“Zack... he’s... he’s my friend, he took me in and...”
“Captain Zack,” Carl said through gritted teeth. “Where is he?”
“He’s left... they all left, I was supposed to... supposed to clean up, before...”
“Clean up what?” Carl said, suddenly reminding himself whose apartment he was stood inside. “Where’s Fei Ling White?”
“I didn’t... it wasn’t me, I swear. I didn’t know what they were...”
“Where is she?” Carl demanded, grabbing the girl by the shoulders and shaking her furiously.
“The bedroom! She’s in the bedroom!” The girl sobbed, dropping to her knees and crying as Carl let go of her.
He left the girl where she was and kicked open the door to the bedroom. Carl knew what he would find inside, of course, but he wasn’t sure exactly how it would present itself. Sure enough, Fei Ling White lay dead on her luxury bed, the blood drained from the open wound on her throat. She was sat up in her bed with the gaping smile across her neck, her arms tied to the bedposts at either side of her. Hung on the wall above her was a black flag on which was adorned a white skull and crossbones.
“Shit,” Carl muttered to himself.
‘Captain’ Zack Taylor and his Jolly Rogers were the most prominent gang on the West Side. Their activities consisted of dressing like pirates, decorating their faces and clothes with neon paint, and driving around the city doing whatever they pleased. Robberies, murders, whatever took the mood of their leader that particular evening. At last count there were about fifty of them, but it was hard to be sure. More joined all the time, for the ride, for the high. Zack himself was the kind of criminal Carl hated more than any other. When not “in costume”, Zack was an investment banker. The kind who made enough money in a week to buy himself out of trouble for a whole year. He was untouchable and a hedonist. Dangerous combination, and the kind that attracts others of like-mind.
Entering a residence like Diamond Heights would have been hard work even for Captain Zack, Carl thought to himself. Especially considering the fact that his chosen victim for the evening was on the very top floor. Lot of effort to go through for a random killing. So that left the likelihood that it wasn’t random. With that thought settled, Carl returned to the living room and found the purple-haired girl still sobbing to herself. He reached down and pulled her up by her arm, then held her tightly to stare directly into her dark-rimmed eyes.
“Why did they kill her? What was she to Zack?”
“I don’t know, I swear,” she sobbed. “This was the first time I’ve come along with them... I only signed up a day ago, I...”
“Wanted free drugs, yeah I got that part,” Carl said impatiently. “They must have said something, I know Captain Zack. He likes to brag. What did he say about Mrs. White?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t listening to that... I kept asking him for a hit, I...”
“You didn’t get it, did you?” asked Carl.
“He said he’d give it to me after I cleaned up... wiped away their boot prints, cleaned up the stuff they’d broken...”
“Goddamn, you’re even more of an idiot than you look,” Carl sighed. “There’s a dead body tied to the bed with a pirate flag hung above it in that bedroom! How were you gonna clean that up?”
“I... he didn’t say, he...”
“He’s playing you, you moron! Set the new girl some stupid task, promise her drugs, let her take the rap as she’s the only one still present when the cops arrive!”
“Why would he do that?” The girl sobbed hysterically, the realisation of her situation dawning on her at last.
“Because he’s a fucking tool, that’s why! Jesus, you honestly thought a guy who dresses like a pirate and shoots people was someone you could trust?”
“I just... I needed a hit... he said he would... he said...”
“Tell me what they said about Mrs. White, kid,” Carl said with a sigh, unable to stay angry at the girl who seemed more pathetic with each passing moment.
“Before they left...just before he told me to clean up... he said ‘that’s as close as the bastard’s going to get’. That’s all I remember, I swear.”
“Alright, I believe you,” Carl nodded. “I need to get some blue boys down here, preferably from my side of the river. You might wanna get out of here before they arrive.”
Carl walked towards the door and opened it, then stopped as he heard the girl call after him, “Please help me... I don’t know anyone here... I... I don’t know where to go...”
Carl had better things to do than help a heroin addict. This case just took a nose dive into the insane, and his attention couldn’t be distracted. But the girl looked barely seventeen, if that. The only thing she had to go back to was Zack. If she turned up alive, he’d probably kill her for the fun of it. Probably rape her first, knowing his M.O. Carl asked himself if he could live with that, and immediately turned back towards the girl when the answer bludgeoned the inside of his chest like a sledgehammer of guilt.
“Come on,” Carl said softly, taking his leather jacket and wrapping it around the girl’s shoulders. “Let’s get you somewhere safe.”
Chapter Twenty;
Skye
T he Seven Saints was the only hospital on the West side of the Styx and was undoubtedly the last place that many of the City’s unfortunates would see the inside of. It was a good hospital with good doctors, but doctors who had to manage with far less than a hospital should. What kept the hospital good and pure was the same thing that kept it poor and ill-equipped—lack of funding. The two hospitals on the other side of the river were owned by private investors, which kept them clean, well-staffed and very, very corrupt. Poorer patients m
ight suddenly die in their beds if a rich guy needed an organ transplant, for instance. Write it up as ‘medical complications’ and nobody sues. Medicine’s complicated, you can’t be suspicious when you don’t understand the science to begin with. Lots of loopholes through which more money could be made by those that already had more than enough.
Carl had left the young, purple-haired girl in the care of the doctors at Seven Saints on the previous night. By the time they’d walked from Diamond Heights to the Steel Gate Bridge, the girl had collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Carl had lifted her into his arms, still wrapped in his coat, and carried her the rest of the way. His arms ached and the cold bit into his flesh through his grey shirt, but he ignored both. Neither was relevant enough to put the girl down, to let her succumb to whatever crap Taylor had given her. Carl wasn’t an idiot, he knew that the girl was probably an addict long before she arrived at the City, but Taylor and his band of Pirate dickwads hadn’t helped her. New to the City, alone and afraid, and they immediately set upon her, feeding off her addiction. That’s how the City works; if it sees a weakness in you, then you’d better expect to have a knife stuck in it and twisted.
As he walked in the direction of the hospital, Carl glanced at his watch and noticed that it was a few minutes before five. He looked at the shops on the sides of the street, the few that weren’t either boarded up or long-since boarded up and knew that they would be closing soon. This quickened his pace somewhat as he crossed the street, almost tripping on a loose piece of pavement as he made his way to “Street Vibes” clothing store.
“You need to get her some clothes,” Jimmy had told him when they had spoken the previous night.
“Why?” Carl had asked.
“Because she’s scared and homeless and dressed like a pirate! Jesus, Carl, even you’re not that dense! She’s gonna need some stuff—help her out.”
“I wouldn’t know what to get.”
“How old is she?” Jimmy asked.
“I dunno, about seventeen maybe?”
“And what is she? What’s her style?”
“How the fuck should I know? You’re the fashion guru.”
“You assume that because I’m gay?” Jimmy asked with an outraged folding of his arms.
“I assume that because you have more shoes than I have socks. I’m running out of room in my damn closet.”
“We’re not discussing my shoe collection,” Jimmy had reminded him. “What did the girl look like?”
“Purple hair, a piercing in her nose, I think... maybe a tattoo on her right arm, thought I saw it though the shirt but that could have been a bruise.”
“Relax, I figured it out at ‘purple hair’. You want to get some rock-chick type stuff. Nothing that looks too fancy or expensive, just some jeans, loose T-shirts, stuff with bands on them. Any bands; if you haven’t heard of ‘em that’s probably good. If no one’s heard of them then that’s even better. Now if she hasn’t heard of them you’re golden.”
“Why would someone want to wear a shirt with a band on they haven’t heard of?”
“It’s kids, they think it’s all cool and nonconformist, or whatever.”
“Sounds fucking retarded,” Carl remarked.
The store owner was just about to close the steel shutters over his window when Carl ran over to him.
“Hey, wait a second,” he called.
“Sorry pal, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
“I need some clothes, it’s kind of an emergency,” Carl explained. “I’ll pay you double whatever it costs.”
“You serious? I only sell clothes, you know. No drugs or anything.”
“Just open the damn shutter, will you?” Carl asked, catching his breath after the mad dash across the street.
The inside of the store was like a nightmare for Carl. He remembered clothes stores being organised in garment type and size. Not in here, where you’d find shirts and pants and belts on the same damn wrack. Who the hell had organised this place? How was anyone supposed to find what they needed? Carl decided to forgive the organisation of the place, however, when he noticed the prices on the plastic tags. For a shop like this to stay in business on the East side, the prices would have to be competitive, and they certainly were. Carl was self-admittedly ignorant about the cost of modern clothing, but he’d heard horror stories about jeans going for over a hundred bucks, so was glad to find some for less than thirty.
“Not sure those would fit you, big guy,” the shop tender remarked as he stood impatiently at the cash register, tapping a chewed ball-point pen against the counter.
“Funny,” Carl smirked.
“Your daughter?” The shop tender asked.
“Not exactly.”
“You old dog, good on you!”
“I’m a cop and I’m carrying a gun right now, smartass. You might wanna consider that before you say anything else,” Carl informed him.
“Hey, we all got urges, buddy,” said the tender, raising his arms in a defensive gesture. “You know her size, I take it?”
“I got a rough idea,” Carl replied, his Detective skills having come in use at estimating the girl’s height and measurements. “You got any shirts with bands on them or anything?”
“Over there,” the tender remarked, pointing at a small rack in the corner of the shop.
“Who the hell are F.T.O?” Carl muttered, lifting a black T-shirt which bore a design featuring the band name and a sketch of an octopus-like creature.
“How should I know?” The tender shrugged.
“Nothing like knowing your own business,” Carl muttered as he took the shirt and three others, then walked over to the counter.
The clothes were folded and placed in a large brown paper bag, and after Carl had made his feelings known regarding the fact that the shirts had each cost more than the jeans, he left the store and continued his walk to the hospital. There was a dirty white covering of snow lingering on the ground from the previous evening’s fall, causing Carl’s footfalls to make an audible crunch with every step. The sky was filled with thick cloud promising more to come, but for the moment it was holding itself at bay. Carl was glad of this, as he didn’t relish the though of another night walking through freezing snow.
The doors to the hospital were automated but didn’t open when Carl approached. A small paper note in the corner of the glass revealed that they were out of order, so Carl stepped to one side and opened the left door by hand. Upon entering he walked over to the desk attendant who was dressed in a thick sweater and gloves, owing to the cold temperature of the hallways. Any funds to heat the hospital were used to keep the occupied rooms at a comfortable temperature; there wasn’t enough to keep the staff areas warm as well. Not that any of them complained, that wasn’t the type of person you would find in these old, crumbling walls. Each and every one of them, from the administration staff to the doctors knew that they could do the same job for ten times the pay across the Styx, but at the expense of their soul. Not a price any of them were willing to pay, regardless of how shiny and tempting the gold might look. Carl hated how the few good people of the City were so neglected and downtrodden but could not remember a time when it had been any different. Sin brought comforts, decency brought pain.
“Hello there,” The wrapped-up receptionist smiled with a shiver.
“Hi. I’m looking for a young girl, I brought her in yesterday?” Carl enquired.
“Oh, of course, I remember. She’s in room twelve, just down the hall and to your left,”
Carl thanked the woman and walked quickly down the hall, the brown paper bag tucked under his arm. The number twelve was written on the door in thick black ink, the metal numbers that were formerly stuck there having long since fallen away and been lost. Carl knocked twice and then opened the door gently. The room was lit by a single lamp at the bedside, and the purple-haired girl was laying facing away from him as he entered.
“Hey,” Carl said quietly.
“Hm?” The girl muttered, ha
ving been almost asleep when Carl entered. She turned and saw him, then smiled. “Hey! It’s you!”
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure if you’d...”
“Remember you? Of course I do, you saved me! Twice!”
“Twice?”
“The bus station. That was you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then thank you twice,” the girl smiled, sitting up in her white bed and brushing her long hair from her face. Carl looked at her in the light of the old lamp, the style of which didn’t really match the room decor and noticed for the first time how pretty she was. That was partly due to the fact that she looked much better than she had the night before, her pale skin no longer covered in bright pink makeup and her eyes no longer glassed-over.
“They put you on some meds?” Carl asked.
“Yeah, something to clean the crap out of my blood.” The girl smiled, lifting her arm and revealing the drip line attached there.
“You feeling any better?”
“Yeah, actually. I think a lot of that is having a good night’s sleep for the first time in months, you know?”
“Where have you been sleeping?” Carl asked.
“Bus stations, parks, anywhere I can get really. But I never sleep properly, I can’t. Last night was different, I guess. For the first time in years I felt, well, safe.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Carl smiled, feeling somewhat awkward, given that the situation was far removed from his area of expertise. Unable to think of anything to immediately say to the young girl, he took the paper bag from under his arm and passed it to her. “This is for you.”
