Welcome to Gaia! ::

The flash of camera lights and the shouts and the sirens and the chaos of the crowds outside all intruded through my eyes and ears into my currently delicate brain-case. My head throbbed and I stumbled to my feet. I remember the night; the jazz and the booze and the beautiful women.

Now my brand new white shirt was soaked in blood. So was everything else in my sight and those pretty girls were all dead and artfully arranged around the saloon in a hideous caricature of the nightly operations, with the less than legal endeavors front and center where they usually hid behind the closed doors of the upper level and the back rooms.

Happy ******** birthday, Fletcher. You go out to celebrate your thirty-third year on this miserable rock with liquor and women who don't know you and you wake up with a hangover, covered in their blood. I know I'm in a hard damned place and the rocks are about to start rolling my way.

I came alone, which meant there wasn't a damn soul to vouch for my innocence. Worse, the incoming police might know me and bent or honest, no cop loves a spook. I knew my luck wasn't improving when the detective walked into the joint.

“I didn't do this, Mick,” I said.

“Damned if I don't know that. Don't know why you're so ********' jumpy, Howard,” Leon McKay returned and then sighed. “Still, you're here which means you probably did something. This is no place to find an honest cop, Howard. Especially a hatchet man.”

“It's just a bar, Mick. Better music. Prettier girls than most.”

“You know it ain't and the ladies here don't come for free.”

Mick was right, of course, and it was true that I should've been more worried about the ordinary sort of crime than going down for a bunch of murders I didn't commit. There were a lot of boys who would love to see an Affairs man go down for minor corruptions just on principal.

For the first time, then, I noticed I wasn't the only survivor from the bloody night I couldn't seem to recall and every man there looked as s**t as I felt.

“What've you got on this, Mick? I wanna know what sling my a** is caught in.”

“Divine vengeance if you believe the rags. Sodom and Gomorrah for modern times. Sinners are being punished and their crimes are put on on display for the remainders to see plain.”

I stopped and rubbed my aching skull. The line just doesn't add up right away.

“What the hell do the rags have on this already? It's too damn early for the presses to be cooling off,” I said.

“You've got to start reading more. This ain't the first hit. How is any cop not hip on the biggest crime spree in town?”

“The town ain't my beat, Mick.”

The silence made me regret my words immediately. The last thing I needed was to remind Mick that we weren't friends anymore. I didn't have friends. I was the phantom in the cop shop who made friends go away forever.

That was the reason I was drinking alone at this hive of villainy on my birthday, after all, and it seems that I'd been drinking pretty damn hard.

“What about the other witnesses?” I said to break the ice that was forming on the scene.

“There are no witnesses. Every last one of you was knocked the hell out when we got here and, all things considered, I don't think that was all from the juice.”

I braced myself against the bar rail and stagger over to one of the dead girls; this one posed in an unseemly way over the bar. She was still technically clothed, but not in any meaningful way. All the other bodies were in similarly vulgar states and some had male staff and customers additionally posed as accessories.

“This is disgusting, Mick.”

“It for sure ain't dignified. I'll take it over the last scene I scoured though. I'll never set foot in a diner again.”

I leaned in for a closer look. Nothing about the tableau was rough-shod or impromptu in the least. There was art and craftsmanship. Fine stitching and subtle bracing was used to hold every detail as the killer wanted it to be seen but there was enough left to nature to keep the scene from losing – for lack of a more appropriate word – its life.

It was a kind of bizarre taxidermy done with no stuffing or preservatives and I couldn't believe that it was all done in the space of a night but the state of the bodies – still fresh, almost even warm – meant that it had to be so.

“Howard, you said yourself this ain't your beat.”

“Think of me as an observer, Mick. An expert witness just getting my bearings here. A cop on scene plays well with a jury.”

That was the truth, but more I was just fascinated. This was unlike anything I'd seen in thirteen years of service. This was homicide as an art form.

“I can already tell you one thing,” I said to Mick. “The perp knew this place damn well and he knew these people would be here. You don't design a portrait like this on a whim and everybody who ain't dead, myself included, are just extra parts who didn't belong.”

“There's something to that, I'd bet. I don't see how that helps any, though. Just means that anyone who might've known the whackjob is tied up in the scenery.”

I shook my head.

“Use your brain, Mick. Just because all the vics are regular doesn't mean all the regulars were here. Same goes for the other scene.”

“Four.”

“What?”

“Other four scenes. I told you this is big, Howard. We've seen four of these massacres already. A diner, an art show, a theater, and a church.”

“That's good news, Mick.”

“I don't see how you can say that. There's so many victims.”

“Our lot is not to feel sorry for the dead. All that tragedy is an opportunity for us. Cast a net. Somewhere, somebody was fortuitously not at their normal haunt. Lucky for them and us. We find them and they'll tell us who the new kid in town was.”



The uniforms started pulling the survivors out of the bar to take down to the station, but I stuck around with Mick as the coroners came in to deal with the bodies, seventeen in all. Moving them would've been a real b***h, so they tarped them over and got shuttering the joint. Autopsies would likely be on-site, which never made the corpse doctors happy. There would be arguments; territorial disputes over the state of the scene. Detectives would want the positions of the bodies preserved, coroners would want to cut 'em open, and loved ones would want them buried or burned. Rules would be bent or broken. That was my beat and maybe for once I could head bad behavior off at the pass.

At my recommendation, Mick already had patrols off to gather potential witnesses and there was time enough for my deposition later. For now, I needed the hair of the dog and Mick looked like he could use an early start. The bar might be out of business but my bet was the hooch still worked fine and nobody who mattered was around to claim it. I grabbed from the top shelf and poured for the two of us.

“It's my birthday, you know.”

“No s**t, Howard? You throw quite a party, don't you?”

We drank in silence.

Neither of us were ready for the next person who walked through the door.

Captain Benjamin Brooks came in and sat next to us and poured one for himself. The men had always taken the Captain for a teetotaler but he put the liquor down like a regular barstool jockey.

“This is a right mess, boys, and I can't say I'm pleased you're here, Fletcher. You have an obligation to be above reproach. I rely on you and here I find you're in the sleaziest establishment in town on the very night the most wanted murderer we've ever set our teeth against tears up the place and more over you allow it to happen and see nothing.”

Captain Brooks shook his head and poured another.

“There are any number of respectable cop bars in this town. Why did you have to be here?”

The question was rhetorical and it didn't bear saying that I wouldn't be welcome at any cop bar.

Mick and I held our tongues like good soldiers and let the Captain continue.
“This is the fifth such attack in our fair city in the last two months, but it's the twelfth in all. I've kept this close to my chest and out of the press but I fear this isn't purely a local problem and as much as I loathe the idea, much of this is about to be taken out of our hands.”

Captain Brooks looked me dead in the eye and I felt cold.

“I'm telling you this, Fletcher, because I want this cleared up and I want you back as soon as possible.”

Mick jumped off his stool, but my foggy mind failed to register what he was easily grasping.

“You can't be ******** serious, Captain!”

“It's out of my hands, McKay.”

I felt the shadows over me before I bothered to look behind. I knew what I would find if I glanced and I didn't want to know. If the regular cops feared the likes of me and the Captain, we too feared a greater power.

A power that came in pairs of black suits and don't give much care for working stiffs like us because they had the Law behind them in a way that we only played at.

“Detective Sergeant Fletcher?” asked one of the matching Feds behind me.

“That's me,” I said in a raspy, mouse-like voice.

“You're under arrest.”