Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
When I get back and give him the stuff, he looks at it like he doesn’t know what it is for a moment or two, then sets about demolishing it. As he does, he tells me a story.
“It was a man. But not like a man, man. He was weird. He was like, twenty feet tall, with red eyes and wings. And his teeth were sharp, and his hands were clawed, and he was just ripping into that poor guy, shaking him, like the way antelopes shake on those nature shows when a pride of lions is eating their insides. You know, the guy was gone, but still moving and…”
This is the sort of eyewitness testimony I am supposed to conduct investigations with. If any of my witnesses were sober, I might get somewhere. But you don’t get sober witnesses in Brooklyn after three in the morning. You get the sort of people who see monsters everywhere. They should be looking in the mirror.
“Alright. Do I have all your contact details? You got a cell phone? Twitter account?”
“Uhhh… “
“Write them down,” I say, sliding paper over to him with a pencil. I might get some sense out of him tomorrow. I’m not keeping him overnight, and I’m not going to hammer him with questions while he’s addled on whatever he’s on.
It’s time to turn my attention to the victim, identify him, inform next of kin, ask them if there was anybody who wanted to gut him like a fish.
“Where’s your hat?”
My partner’s greeting is drowned out by high-pitched and yet hoarse barking from the emotional support animal who inhabits the top of her desk like a pointy-eared gremlin. Obigor the little Brussels griffon had ginger fur once, but now he is nearly entirely white around his little face. Obigor doesn’t see well, doesn’t hear basically at all, but he loves Tessie more fiercely than any creature on the planet.
Tessie has worked with me for six months. She holds down the office while I go out and look at things. She does the paperwork, I do the grunt work. She used to go out in the field but got benched after being shot after less than a year on the job by some asshole who didn’t want to pay a speeding ticket. She walks with a cane, which she uses to hit people if she catches them feeling sorry for her.
She’s very pretty, with caramel skin and the cutest freckles that dot the bridge of her nose, dark eyes, and curling dark hair. She might be the smartest person I’ve ever met. She can do more from behind a desk in one hour than some people can do in weeks in the field.
“No festive headgear allowed at crime scenes,” I tell her. “Why are you still here? You should have been at home in bed hours ago.”
“I don’t sleep,” she says. What she doesn’t say is she doesn’t sleep because she’s always in pain. She refuses to take painkillers besides weed, the scent of which I pretend does not perpetually permeate my office.
“We’ve got another one,” I tell her. “This one looks like a…”
Tessie glances toward our open office door. I share my office with her, which is fine because I’m barely ever here. So really, it’s her office.
I’ve been told to tone down my colorful similes. There’s nobody here to hear them, aside from the night shift, but the night shift rarely undergoes the formality of actually appearing at the 89th. They’re around somehow without ever being present.
“Another one of them mutilated?” She guesses correctly.
“Yes,” I say. Understatement is best.
She pulls out a red file. Everything is stored on computers, of course, but Tessie likes having special case files on paper. No matter how much they push us to digitize, a lot of us are still addicted to paper. Can’t hack a pen.
“Digital pictures are on the computer,” she tells me. “Print them out if you want. Wouldn’t recommend it. From what I saw, it’s a ‘cannot be unseen’ sort of situation. While you were interviewing the witness, we had some basic stats come through about the victim. Male, somewhere between thirty and fifty. Hard to tell when someone is, er, open that way. It’s starting to look like a serial killer. If this keeps up, the FBI will be all over it. They love serial killers.”
I stare at her and snap my fingers. “That’s right! They will be all over this pretty soon. Oh. Good. They can deal with the interviews. And the bodies.”
“The tabloids are going to be full of it again. People are getting scared,” Tessie sighs.
“People are always scared.”
It’s not that I’m indifferent, it’s that I’ve seen too much in my time on the force to expect anybody to feel anything other than fear, generally speaking. The world is a much more fucked up place than most people realize. The proper response to waking up each morning is probably five solid minutes of good solid screaming before attacking the day.