by Brian Parker
“What? Put your goddamned hands behind your back or I’ll fucking shoot you,” I hissed. “Do you hear me?”
“No need to be rude,” he replied. “I want the same thing that you do. I want every tweaker, ganger and murderer to pay for the things they’ve done.”
“You don’t know shit,” I countered. “Put your hands behind your back!”
He slowly lowered his hands, but they didn’t go behind him. “I’m cleaning up the streets. Something you don’t appear capable of doing.”
“And we allow everyone to have their day in court. The same right you’ll be granted once I take you in.”
“So you’re the guy, huh?” he asked.
“What?”
“You’re the detective assigned to the case against me. Good to know.”
I advanced two steps. “Is that a threat?”
He shrugged and I twitched the end of my laser pistol in response. “Ah, ah. Keep your hands up where I can see ’em.”
“I like to know who’s keeping an eye on me,” the Paladin replied. “So I can keep an eye on them.”
“You son of a bitch,” I spat. “If you go near anyone I know, I’ll kick your teeth so far down your throat that you’ll be shitting enamel. You understand me, nutcase?”
“You’re fighting the wrong war, Detective. There’s something much bigger happening in this city.”
“The only war is the one you started against everyone else down here. Before that, it was only mildly dangerous.”
His chin jutted upward, indicating a point behind me. “Your partner made it.”
I didn’t need to turn. I’d heard Drake’s grunts of exertion from a block away. He may have been massive and an intimidating physical specimen, but his cardiovascular system was definitely lacking. “On your knees, Paladin.”
“I didn’t pick that name, you know,” the perp stated as he began sinking to his knees. “It’s a stupid nickname.”
“I’ll be sure to put it in my report,” I retorted. The Paladin was in a position of weakness, so I risked a glance over my shoulder to see where Drake was—which was all the perp needed.
The world around me exploded in green smoke and a fist came out of the cloud to my right, sending me flying backward.
“Oh, damn!” Sergeant Deshutes laughed. “Rewind that, play it again.”
The street light’s video feed rewound and I relived the humiliation of letting a perp get the drop on me before escaping into the darkness.
“Bam!” she shouted at the monitor.
“Shut up, Sandra,” I muttered, staring at her darkly through my swollen eye. “Don’t you have a desk you need to ride or something?”
“That paperwork can wait,” she said. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s not every day that I see a Kung Fu master get his ass dropped with one damn punch.”
“You’ve got a short memory, then,” I replied, referring to the incident at The Puss ’n Boots a few months ago.
“Oh no, I remember your pummeling by penises at The P&B.”
I blinked slowly, unimpressed. “Have you been waiting all this time to use that one-liner?”
“You don’t like it?”
“It was pretty dumb,” Drake said.
She thrust her chin out. “Nobody asked you, Muscles. Alliteration is clever and shows a high level of intelligence—something you two obviously don’t have.”
“Alright, Deshutes,” Chief Brubaker interrupted, walking in from the hallway. “Get back to the desk. The lobby’s starting to fill up. I want it cleared before lunch.”
“On it, Chief,” she replied, stepping away from the monitor. “These low class cops are boring me anyways.”
I watched her leave in annoyance. Sandra and I were good friends, but I hated being the butt of any joke.
“Okay. Tell me what we’ve got,” the chief ordered.
“We had intel that the Paladin would be on Jubilee Lane on Thursday evening. Drake and I went over there to investigate evidence of another attack by the vigilante—”
“What kind of evidence?”
“A dead drug dealer in an alley, two massive knife wounds originating in the upper abdomen and terminating just below the scapula on his back,” Drake cut in. “Stabbed completely through. His product was dumped around his body and ruined by the rain.”
“Same M.O. as usual,” Brubaker stated. “You’re sure it was the same guy and not a copycat? I don’t want the media giving this guy credit for murders he didn’t commit.”
“The dealer’s head was separated from his body,” I clarified.
“Well, damn.”
We’d managed to keep the decapitation details out of the vidfeeds, so the likelihood of a copycat was slim. The Paladin had garnered the media’s attention by using a sword or long knife to murder his victims. The blade was either super-heated or used lasers because the severed veins and arteries cauterized instantly; there was almost no blood at all.
The media focused on the idea that the vigilante was cleaning up the streets, rescuing the citizens of New Orleans from the filth that seemed to be everywhere, not the illegal aspect of his actions. They made him seem like a goddamned hero.
He may have been murdering bad guys, but that didn’t make it right.
“So, yeah. We went over to conduct the investigation on the dead drug dealer,” Drake continued, “and we hear a scream down the alley. There weren’t any drone units or uniformed cops available to assist, so we went to check it out.”
“That’s when we saw the Paladin and gave chase,” I finished.
The chief eyed my purple eye dubiously. “I guess you didn’t learn your lesson about waiting for backup, did you, Forrest?”
“I had him, Chief. It was only one guy, there wasn’t a need for backup.”
“The evidence would say otherwise,” he retorted, pointing at my face.
I couldn’t argue with him. I’d let the Paladin get the drop on me. It wouldn’t happen again.
Chief Brubaker straightened up and yelled down the hallway. “From now on, no officer from my precinct will attempt to apprehend the Paladin until drone support has arrived. Is that clear?”
Mumbled responses answered him and he nodded to himself. “Deshutes!”
“Yes, Chief?” Sandra’s voice echoed off the cinder block walls.
“Put that in a memo and send it to every officer in Easytown.”
“Got it!” she replied happily. She loved doing paperwork, which was one of the many areas where my opinion of police work differed from hers. She was happy as a clam being the desk sergeant and never leaving the precinct. I wanted to get out amongst the population every opportunity I got. That’s where the real police work was—not filing damn reports.
I loathed the paperwork aspect of my job.
Brubaker stepped back into the homicide office. “Forrest, I want to hear you say it.”
“Oh, come on, Chief. I’m not some rookie who’s gonna—”
“Say it.”
I bobbled my head side to side sarcastically as I said, “I won’t attempt to apprehend the Paladin without the proper drone support.”
“Good. Now, find me that vigilante and put him behind bars.”
Chief Brubaker stepped backward into the hallway and disappeared. “Does he think I’m some sort of goddamned rebel or something?”
“You did get yourself into a lot of trouble a few months ago by refusing to wait for backup.”
“But, I took you with me for the bust,” I reminded him.
“And I ended up buried under the statue of a horse.”
I waved dismissively. “Details.”
“Okay,” Drake said in the serious tone that I’d learned meant he was ready to work. “Unlike you, Detective, I have a family to go home to. So let’s work on some of those ‘details’ today so I can get out of here.”
“Hey, that hurts me right here,” I replied, pointing to my chest. “I have things to look forward to in my personal life. I ju
st upgraded Andi’s AI to a faster processor.”
The big man stared at me through lowered eyelids. “Damn, we need to get you a dog or something, sir.”
Drake was right. I didn’t have anything to go home to. My days consisted of hanging out at my friend’s restaurant for lunch, and working. My nights were usually filled with more work and fiddling with Andi’s components to improve her interface as much as I could afford to do, although recently, I’d been seeing a state cop named Avery when our schedules synched up.
“Fine,” I relented. “The Paladin’s latest kill was here,” I tapped a map of his previous kills on the vid screen and a dot appeared. I typed a few notes in the details box and closed it down.
Looking at the map, the guy had no discernable pattern except staying off The Lane itself. Everything else was fair game. “I wonder why he’s avoiding Jubilee. That’s where a lot of his targets hang out.”
“Cameras,” Drake replied. “The Lane is saturated with cameras and drones watching over the customers. He’s avoiding the cameras…even the hidden ones.”
I wiped angrily at the brown spots of coffee the machine had applied liberally to the front of my white shirt out in the hallway. One minute I was thinking about what to say to Dr. Jones to get me out of our session and the next, my shirt was ruined by the goddamned coffee maker.
Technology and I didn’t get along.
“What the hell happened to you?” Dr. Jasmin Jones, the NOPD staff psychologist, asked when she opened the door.
“I read an article that said coffee was good for your skin. Trying it out.”
She grunted. “Everyone knows that you don’t read, Zach. Come in, you’re late.”
I followed behind the doctor and she gently closed the door behind us. I’d been in her office easily a hundred times over the years. I had an aggressive personality and a rough demeanor with suspects. It had gotten me forced into the department’s anger management courses and eventually landed me in the shrink’s office. Now they didn’t even bother sending me to anger management, they just shipped me off to her.
Old-school print books lined the shelves in her office, making her an oddity among the staffers at the NOPD headquarters. I’d only seen her open one of those books in all the years I’d been coming here. It was a giant tome called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — 39th Edition and she’d plopped it on the desk when I came to get her opinion about a possible profile on a serial killer who’d been stalking Easytown’s robotic pleasure clubs.
I’d followed the false trail that the killer laid for me and her unofficial opinion had helped put me on the right track. She’d also been there for me when Paxton Himura committed suicide across the table from me.
“Have a seat,” Dr. Jones said, indicating the couch.
I lay back and closed my eyes. “Man, this is the life, right? Getting paid by the city to take a nap.”
She sighed. “You’re in one of those kinds of moods today, huh?”
One eye popped open so I could see her. “One of what kind of moods, Doc?”
“The one where you feel compelled to be a dick for no reason.”
“I— Sorry,” I amended and sat up. “I don’t want to be here. What do I need to do to leave as soon as possible?”
Dr. Jones crossed a leg over her knee, exposing a shapely brown calf. “You know the drill, Zach. Talk me through what happened this time.”
“I, uh… Heh,” I chuckled, remembering the way the suspect had cried like a baby when I snapped his wrist. “I defended myself against a knife attack.”
She shuffled through some papers. “Says here, you broke his wrist and stabbed him with his own knife.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, that…ah, did happen, but it was unintentional. I didn’t stab him. When I broke the wrist, his hand flopped over onto the back of his forearm and the blade went with it. His own momentum carried him into the knife and it went into his ribs.”
The folder closed. “How long are we going to do this, Zach?”
“What? Have meetings where you determine that I’m totally sane and an asset to the police force? Probably for the next ten years or so.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to work for me. You’ve always got an excuse for why something isn’t your fault. You have serious accusations of police brutality against you this time.”
I shrugged. “It’s Easytown. Either I’m brutal or I’m dead. The judge always sees it my way.”
“Judge Carlson is getting ready to retire, Zach. You know who’s next in line until the governor makes an official appointment? Hennessey. You know who Judge Hennessey’s golf partner and bass fishing companion is? Todd Jefferson. Is this starting to make sense to you now? It’s not a game.”
Fuck. I’d stiffed Councilman Jefferson during a murder investigation at a sex club a few months ago and wouldn’t let him leave until everyone else was released. Rumor had it—Teagan’s rumor mill—that when his wife found out that he’d been visiting hookers in Easytown, they split up. She took the kids and left him with nothing. I’d thought it strange that he showed up at my award ceremony for the fight at the cathedral, but maybe it was his way of keeping an eye on me.
I couldn’t afford to have the city’s highest-ranking judge against me—or against the precinct for that matter. Carlson always overruled anyone who tried to censor the iron fist we used in Easytown. What worked in the French Quarter or Village de L’Est, where I lived, wouldn’t work in Easytown. Those thugs would eat up the cops from other parts of the city. The district was simply too wild.
“If Hennessey overturns Carlson’s rulings, then the city will lose revenue,” I countered. “The only thing keeping that district afloat are police drones, uniformed patrols and plainclothes officers working the crowds without fear of reprisal for doing whatever needs to be done to keep the tourists and customers safe.”
“I understand, Zach. Heck, your stories were enough to make me get two Dobermans, reinforced steel entry doors and shatter resistant glass on all my first floor windows. Judge Hennessey is an idealist. He’s spoken out publicly many times that he feels that law enforcement has been allowed to have a heavy hand in the city for too long.”
“And since the other precincts don’t actually use that same heavy hand—” I left it hanging in the air.
She nodded. “Exactly. So, back to my original question, Zach. How long are we going to do this?”
“I didn’t mean to let him stab himself,” I replied, holding my ground. “When faced with a life or death situation, I made the call to eliminate the threat. It’s not like I killed the guy.”
“This time. You were lucky, Zach. A few more inches toward the victim’s back and you could have gotten him in the kidney.”
I sat up off the couch and held my hands up. “Whoa. Don’t call that criminal a victim. He was wanted for murder and tried to kill me. He’s not a goddamned victim, he’s a murderer.”
“Bad choice of words on my part. Sorry.”
I forced the anger to simmer down and lay back against the pillow.
“I’m not questioning whether the murderer needed to be stopped,” Dr. Jones continued. “What I’m asking you to do is to think of the political climate that’s brewing downtown. Let that temper your responses, Zach. Councilman Jefferson would love to have Judge Hennessey make an example out of you.”
I set my jaw and thought about my problem for a moment. “I can try to be easier with them.”
“That’s a start. I’m not asking you to allow yourself, or anyone else, to get hurt. Could you have controlled James Cochran with a wristlock instead of breaking his wrist?”
“Probably.”
The room became quiet and I turned my head toward the shrink. She had a grin on her face that stretched from ear-to-ear. “What is it, Doc?”
“After all these sessions—all these years, I finally got you to admit that there may be an alternate solution to a problem than the one you chose.”
“D
o you want a mark on the scoreboard or something?”
“No,” she answered. “You wanted to know what you needed to do to get out of here early today…well that’s it. We talk about the difference between black and white, my way or the highway, and the futility of an office worker like me questioning the actions of someone out in the street. Well, today, you actually opened up to some advice and I’m very happy that you’re at least willing to see the other side of an argument.”
I sat up once again and pushed myself off the couch. “If I’d have known all it would take was a compromise, then I’d have done that years ago,” I said as I walked across the room to the coat rack where I’d placed my coat and hat.
“Maybe you should apply your newfound insight to the opposite sex more often, Zach. You’d be surprised how far meeting in the middle will take you.”
I grunted in acknowledgement. “See you next week, Doc.”
TWO: FRIDAY
“Hey, baby. You look cold and wet. I… I can make you hot and wet,” an inexperienced voice called from the mouth of a darkened alley
I glanced at the hooker who beckoned to me. She wore an expensive-looking white, water repellant jacket that hadn’t been dug out of the trash, a black mini skirt with cliché fishnet stockings, and earmuffs poking out over light pink, shoulder-length hair. Honestly, she couldn’t have stuck out more in Easytown than if she’d been wearing a sign that said, “Fresh Meat.”
If she survived her first week on the job, she’d know better than to ask me for sex.
“I’m a cop, sweetheart,” I warned her.
“Oh, I love cops,” she replied, stepping out of the alley and closing the distance quickly.
She wore a prosthetic on her right leg below the knee. It was high-end tech, not the junk amputees in Easytown usually wore. Up close, I could tell that her clothing didn’t just look expensive, it was expensive.
The diamond studs in her ears confirmed my initial thoughts. “What sorority?”
“Huh? I’m trying to make some money and have fun at the same time, you know?” Lie.
We saw it all the time. Sororities and fraternities had their pledges do all sorts of crazy things down in Easytown to show their dedication to the organization. We’d had males pick fights with district toughs and attempt to ride the police drones like a bull, girls stripping in front of uniformed cops and performing sex acts on each other in front of live news feeds. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen one of them force a girl into prostitution to prove her loyalty to the sorority.
