Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets (21 page)

“Are you out of your mind? Gannon from narcotics had his retirement party last night, they’ll all be as drunk as—“

“Last night I worked my arse off. If I can work today, then so can they.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“That’s right, I never sleep. Cut the crap and get busy.”

“Yessir.” Pharrol raises his hands, meekly. From a God’s point of view, none of my men (and that includes myself) would win the award for best cop of the year, but that doesn’t mean they are all useless layabouts. With the exception of Reinart and Lisande, I personally selected all the members of my team, and the success accumulated over the years, enough to silence the rumours of corruption and the threats of disciplinary action, only go to prove that my casting session was perfect. I clearly remember when I first met Ezy, still Inspector at the MetroPo with a full head of hair. I got myself a partner for life that evening.

I chew a piece of gum frenetically and produce that irritating noise people make when they eat with their mouth open. All smokers, sooner or later, go through a period in life when they convince themselves they have to give up cigarettes. Some say it costs too much money, some, after having coughed up their soul for the umpteenth time, suddenly realise that they have become health nuts, and finally, some are simply tired of smelling cigarette smoke wherever they stop for more than ten minutes. Obviously I wasn’t making any visible signs of progress in my venture, and the only effect of my New Year’s resolution was to replace one annoying bad habit with another.

Reinart is waiting for me, hands in pockets, badge hanging of the trousers and is wearing the usual sunglasses with the blue lenses. The black tank top shows off the sculpted biceps and olive skin, the result of southern coastal origins, this gives her the look of a virago which is enough to squash any unwanted male attention. In addition as a way to reassure the casual observer of her already somewhat explicit sexual tastes, the sergeant is smoking a decidedly unfeminine cigar, the same brand as the ones Beron smokes. Sniffing the air, I succumb to my instinct and light up a cigarette.

“You told me to call, and I called you.”

The lesbian is somewhat resentful towards me. I haven’t done anything wrong, let that be clear, but she probably thought that when her old division was removed, she would have been promoted to Lieutenant. Instead a commissioner recently transferred from the MP stole the position from her without any warning, this newcomer was even approved by the higher echelons and was given reign to choose the elements of a new team.

“Do you know him?”

She shakes her head.

“I know his cousin. He saved my arse on duty once and in return he has asked me to save this one’s arse. So you’ve got to find a solution.”

“What happened exactly?” I ask, peeping behind her shoulders at a man staring at the ground with his head in his hands in despair. The car the woman is resting her toned buttocks on is blocking my view of the cause of all this emotion.

“See for yourself” She waves her hand towards the scene.

On the ground, in a pool of cerebral slop, lies a middle-aged man with the top of his head missing. Pharrol’s eyes are locked with those belonging to the corpse, glued together by fear. In any case, for one of the two, there’s history here.

“Hey,” I introduce myself. The agent jumps slightly, like a child who’s been caught by his mother with his dick in his hand.

“Easy,” Reinart reassures him. “He’s the friend I was telling you about. He’s here to help you…”

“That’s right.” I lay it on thick, too, before asking, “What exactly happened?”

“I… I… shot… him,” stammers the police officer in shock.

“Yeah, I can see that. I mean, how did it happen?”

“I just wanted to… to frighten him a bit, that’s all. I thought the safety was on… the safety should’ve been on, you see? I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to!”

“Shh, shh. Relax, we’ll sort it out now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

I delicately rest my hand on his shoulder and notice that he’s still holding his weapon. Unfortunately it looks lke it’s a nine-millimetre Seban C, a regulation police gun. The idiot has killed a poor random fuck with his
own
gun, which happens to be registered and on record. Off the top of my head I’d say we’re talking dishonourable discharge, no pension and at least fifteen years of assorted brutality in some cheery federal prison filled with horny lifers with nothing to lose and a burning desire to wreak revenge on the world. For a minute I’m not sure if I’m dealing with the world’s biggest fuckwit, but Reinart knows I’m looking for people for the team, and I don’t think she would be so stupid as to compromise her career with an out-of-control moron just to make me look bad. I come to the conclusion that he’s a decent policeman who just ran into some bad luck. At least that’s what I hope.

“Is that your gun? Registered in your name I mean?”

“Fuck, yeah,” he answers, on the verge of tears. “I’m screwed, screwed. I’ll end up in the Well forever, do you understand?! Do you know what they do to police officers down there? Do you?!”

The Well, Nectropis’s prisons. Reinforced concrete coffins measuring six by three metres in theory designed for four inmates each, but in actual fact they’re inhumanely packed up to double their capacity, and dug out of the ground over twenty metres underneath the last sub-level. Sunlight, even that faint glimmer of light in the City at midday is a mere faded memory for these guests of the state.

“Nothing like that is going to happen my friend. Ezy Pharrol, is that right?”

I stick my hand out, he looks at it in confusion.

“Lieutenant Arkham, from the Guard.”

He shakes it uncertainly.

“Contrary to how things may seem at the moment, you’ll look back at this day as a turning point in your life. And I mean for the better.”

“I don’t see how…”

“I don’t know who this dead guy on the ground is, and I couldn’t care less. Because neither I nor the Sergeant here, and you especially, weren’t here this evening.”

“Er, no?” he asks hesitantly, looking backwards and forwards at me and her, uncertainly.

“Of course not!” I clap him on the back and summon up one of my best salesman smiles. “That would be impossible, seeing as all three of us were at the bar talking about your transfer to my team, isn’t that right, partner?” I pass the ball to the carpet-muncher, who nods from within a cloud of burnt cigar.

“Er, what… but it’s my bullet… he’s the suspect from a case I’m investigating…”

“I’ll take care of the corpse. Your suspect vanished into thin air? Well, that means that your hunch was spot on, am I right? He split because you were onto him. God knows where he’s got to now.”

“But, what do you mean…?”

“Leave it with me, okay? You and the Sergeant go and get yourselves a stiff drink now, and I’ll meet you later.”

“Hmmm… all right then,” he comments disbelievingly, relaxing ever so slightly.

“Go on then, off you go.”

I take out my mobile while they start up the car and drive off. A woman carrying bags of shopping peers over at the scene from the end of a side street, she winces when she catches sight of the mangled corpse.

“Move along, madam. Federal Guard, everything’s under control.”

She doesn’t react fast enough for my liking. The plebs must jump to it when I order them to get lost. I move closer and behave more menacingly.

“Go home, before your frozen peas thaw. Go and put your vegetables in the fridge. Now. Your stuff will go off if you end up in jail for obstructing the course of justice. You have no idea how many times that happens to nosy parkers. It happens
all the time.”
I enunciate my words clearly and deliberately, finally persuading her to leg it.

I press my phone against me ear a couple of rings before they answer at the other end.

“Ugube? It’s me. I need a blast furnace, and quick… all right, fuck, put it on my tab… yeah… listen, shut it now. Send someone with some saws and some plastic bags.”

Fuck’s sake. Fat old pain in the arse. I couldn’t care less about eight thousand crowns more or less, it’s not like I have the slightest intention of paying. Sooner or later I’ll pin something on him and get him out of the way for good. At least that’s what I thought six years ago.

While I was waiting for Khan’s henchmen to arrive, Reinart took Pharrol to a typical bar for cops, the owner of which owed his survival to both the discretion and politeness of the clientele in uniform. They are sitting at a table in the corner in the shadows, and are drinking a gutwringer of a drink that hovers somewhere between fear and hope. To be perfectly frank, it’s guesswork with the Sergeant, she spies on the world through cerulean glasses with her usual suspicious, scornful demeanour.

I order a whiskey and sit down on the empty stool, calm personified.

“Everything… okay?”

“Of course,” I answer simply, in the tone of voice of someone who is reciting a geometric axiom, they are dumbstruck.

“I don’t know how to thank you, sir, I owe you—“

“Stop right there, don’t even start, Pharrol. Welcome aboard.”

“I don’t get it, why me? I mean, I don’t even know you…”

“You see,” I’m ready with my script, “the team is like a family to me. There has to be absolute trust, you know? Each one of us has to be prepared to put their trust in their colleagues. And I can’t rely on someone who has never made a mistake. I’ve read your file and I know you’re an excellent agent. But it’s only when you come up against life’s pitfalls that you get the true measure of a man…” Then I add, remembering Reinart’s there too, “… or a woman. I want us all to be bound to each other by a permanent pact. I know that you wanted my position, Sergeant, and I think you deserved it. But it’s out of my hands. They sent me here. What would you have done, if you had been in my shoes, refused it?

“No. No, I think I’d’ve accepted it,” she admits after thinking about it for a second.

“Listen, we did this thing
together
. From now on, if one of us goes down, we all go down. But I
swear,”
I lay on all the emphasis I can muster, “I
swear
that together, we’ll go far. We wouldn’t be here now if we didn’t know that you can’t do this job by following the absurd rules created by those thieving politicians. Everyone knows they’re the most corrupt of anyone else, and they make the laws so that they can carry on with their own rackets and get away with it. And us, my friends, we do good things for society, as far as it is humanly possible, and at the first hitch or slip up, how are we treated? No pity whatsoever. They unload all the responsibility onto our shoulders as though we were the dregs of society!”

“You’re abso-fucking-lutely right!” exclaims Pharrol, galvanised by my closing speech that I carefully rehearsed in front of the mirror. Reinart is more restrained, but I think that deep down she readily accepts the alibi I’m offering her. After all, what other options does she have? She was the one who asked me to bury the incident, which she’s up to her neck in. This is exactly the type of person I need, people who understand that there are
shades of grey
in life.

“I’m not having it. And neither are you two, I’m sure of it. We’re good agents. I swear to you both, when we’ve finished we’ll get everything we
fucking
deserve, no one will get left behind.”

I wait a moment to let my proposal take root inside their heads, especially the woman, because Ezy keeps on nodding his head like a donkey at every word I say. At the end I lay my hand, palm up, on the table.

“So, are you with me?”

“Fuck, yes!”

Pharrol gives me some skin, and leaves his right hand against mine. We both stare at the Sergeant with big smiles on our faces. It’s a tense moment when she hesitates. Evidently she’s sharper than Ezy, and she obviously has a clearer idea about what this pact will lead to. When she gives in with a sigh and a conspiratorial smile (the first one I’ve seen from her), she puts her hand on top of ours and says scornfully, “Fuck it. The pay is crap anyway, and the pension is laughable.”

We raise our glasses make a toast, then we drink a mouthful together. Reinart elbows me.

“You know, Chief, I’ve heard that you can get cancer from smoking with chewing gum in your mouth.”

We have a good laugh and I promise to give up my chewing gum habit. I probably don’t need to underline the fact that that didn’t happen.

That day I laid the foundations for my subsequent triumphs. Over the years not only did we make a living, going from one success to another, regularly using the complete range of legitimate as well as unlawful investigative methods, but we all got our slice of
bonus
profits and extra
benefits
. A favour here and a reward there, and everything went smoothly. I’ve created a close-knit, friendly group: basically, I say this without a trace of false modesty, I’m the best boss in the world, and if anyone disagrees with this blinding truth I will take action, occasionally I will also employ even more persuasive methods.

I had almost reached the relative safety of my desk, separated from the rest of the room by reassuring green metal Venetian blinds, when Mequire bursts into the room. When it comes to sniffing me out to get on my back, the Captain is like a fucking bloodhound, so much, in fact, that I suspect he has planted bugs all over the station just to catch me out.

“Arkham! My office,
immediately,”
he barks from the doorway, disappearing before I can even turn round.

“Mother fuck, I’ll shoot him one of these days,” I mutter as I go past Pharrol’s desk.

The tiny kingdom belonging to Fingeruphisarse always reminds me of a dusty cupboard, despite the obsessive cleaning carried out by his room mate each day. Over the years I have come to realise that this feeling is mainly caused by the collection of black and white photographs on the walls, dominated by an ancient photo of his father, an army Major who died a glorious imbecille at the head of his armour-clad unit during the Great War. Mequire, an insignificant biped obsessed by the desire to imitate the deeds of his illustrious parent but unfortunately without any heroic battles to lose, had to settle for a mediocre career as a superior officer in the Federal Guard. In a bid to assure himself as well as the entire world of being a faded copy of a great soldier from the past, the Captain sports two long greying sideburns and a thick moustache which have supposedly escaped from the last century.