There are things I can justify in this life. Mostly out of dire necessity thanks to this crapsack world I was born into. Even though all the churches and preachers are gone, civilized society still holds "thou shalt not steal" in very high regard. But what do you do when the rent is past due and the fridge is empty? Or when you're burning up with fever, the clinic's only nurse is in the bathroom and the medicine cabinet is three feet away while you were dredging your pockets for every last crow?
Some things are just on account of being human. I've overspent, overslept and overthought on more occasions than I care to remember. Or could remember. Sometimes a fellow just cant help himself.
But at several definite points in my existence I can only point a finger at the guy in the mirror. The guy who slacked off until his bank account was so knee-deep in the red that his roommate moved out to avoid the inevitable disaster. Funny enough that the repossession finally happened when I dragged my fanny out of bed to conduct the first actual criminal investigation since I last attended an FPOWA meeting.
It was a fairly simple case, too. A wannabe hitman who didn't police the spent brass and left the murder weapon right there on the kitchen counter. In the same evening he was arrested, hauled off to City Hall by the Enforcers, convicted and sentenced to hang at midnight. The rich dame whose apartment he was in is too well connected to see the inside of a jail cell, but the morning news say she's been fired from her cozy executive position. Payoffs and kickbacks are one thing but just you try backstabbing someone the literal way. Thankfully we have no tolerance for murdering someone outside of a scathing take in the gossip columns.
While I dusted off my detective skills I was forced to come to grips with some aspects of myself. How badly I'd gotten out of shape, how weak I was getting from not bothering to eat regularly. When a waiter takes one look at you after you ask him if he's seen someone from a photo and instead offers you a hot bowl on the house, you know it's time to make some changes. So I went home and fried an entire pound of synth-beef in slabs. Tasted damn good. Felt even better to relax in front of the TV...and then it took every smidgen of self-will I had to drag my butt off again. A body at rest want to STAY at rest. Especially a body that's possessed by too much melancholy after being left all alone in the world.
I'll never know how close I came to letting the victim's friend be next on the killer's list, but it can't have been long. He made the mistake of calling to try and warn Desmond from his home phone instead of going to a payphone. Made himself a loose end to be tied up. The poor sap was so scared he didn't even want the SyncDisk that Desmond had just mailed him. Now THAT is what real fear looks like! When a man is giving away a thousand crows or more all to a complete stranger he just met for fear of it attracting a knife in his back.
I pondered the things that could make me do the same things as I had a cup of coffee at the diner. Physique is a damn fine Sync to have; I could've resold that thing for thousands. But carrying around more stuff is a skill that comes in handy all the time. Grocery runs, field work, you name it. Certainly came in handy when I was stripping George Washburn's apartment before calling in the murder.
That's one thing I still don't regret doing. Won't regret doing it in the future either. "Finding" is a part of life in this city what with all the shortages. If you go to visit your elderly neighbor and find her peacefully passed away in her recliner, the first thing you do is grab the home-made cake off the counter and the spices out of the cabinet that you've had on back order for three months. Enforcers won't even blink. In fact they'll have first dibs on everything BEFORE it gets hauled off to Public Property once the place gets taped off. Likewise if your coworker takes a dirt nap for an early retirement you yank the Sync Upgrade hypodermic from his desk drawer on the double and act all innocent little lamb if anyone asks about it.
It sure saved my hide that I ran everything I "found" to an empty basement room instead of straight to my own apartment. Taking a dozen trips on the elevator in the middle of the day tends to raise eyebrows, after all.
Of course that didn't help with my book collection or videos. They were part of the problem, though. I'd reached a stage in life where I would rather see the same thing for the hundredth time rather than something new. I've always been someone who could far more easily take comfort in the familiar as if I were huddling from the cold world around a mental campfire. That was a lot of what held me back. And only when I was staring at the confiscation notice by what used to be my front door did it that burden finally get lifted.
Being so forcibly separated from all of my old life...it changes a man. Puts things in perspective. Now I was far from a penniless drifter; thanks to doing careful work on the arrest I was walking around with an extra 2000 crows jingling in my pocket. But everything from my favorite lounge-around-the-house outfit to the five-crow novels from Clyde Cossler that I loved so much (all 50 of them) was strangely freeing in a way. All I had to care about was what I was carrying with me. A perfect time to rethink life goals, one's own purpose in the world. My roommate had left me by choice a month ago, my parents had left me in the wave of Influenza-D that swept the city a couple years back. Nobody but me now. Nothing but whatever I had.
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I didn't immediately run to my contact at the FPOWA, hat in hand and tears in my eyes like some desperate slob. Not all my old skills had laid unused. Almost a year ago I'd acquired a key to the room of Mr. Jensen down in 103. He was a giant of a man who worked 16 hour days trying to teach the snot nosed new hires at the factory how to run a lathe or drill press without ripping their arms off. With his missus been gone for half a decade his work was all he had left. And if for some reason he'd have been home early I could have just as easily crashed in the bedroom of Mr. Sanders in 401 who always came home drunk as a skunk precisely at 12:15. The instant he fell across his couch I could - and had, after fights with my old roommate in the past - slept undisturbed in the actual bed he never used until 8 AM when the grandfather clock jarred the slob awake for a hasty dress-and-dash to his job at the office.
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Difficulties of a travelling lifestyle aside, the biggest problem I had was having nothing to do at all instead of the ability to do anything productive. Funny how either end of that equation ends up meaning the same thing. It leads to oddities such as playing poker for hours with three other strangers at a diner table over endless orders of coffee even after you've lost the last ten hands.
The first day of freedom made me feel like a schoolboy again right after graduation. Free as a bird to wander all around with a newspaper in hand, eavesdropping from behind it on any bench or booth seat I pleased. Asked enough people until I got the address of a 'private room' accessed through a backalley door to play poker in a smoky room where the owner certainly didn't pay gaming taxes. I found lost shoes, did a side job and rifled unguarded drawers without a single care as to where I'd be or what I'd do an hour later. Drifting about like a Starch candy wrapper in the breeze.
By contrast to my initial acceptance, on the third day I ended up helping some poor kid at the cash register unjam the stuck drawer just to have something productive to do. While I left that tiny drugstore with a permanent discount and all the handshakes his manager could give me, I knew I couldn't keep this semi-nomadic lifestyle going, even aside from the eventuality of regular expenses draining my wallet. I never was the type of person that could tolerate sleeping in some shed when I wasn't warming up around a trash barrel fire.
With great reluctance I finally resigned myself to the road back to 'proper' life, found my old FPOWA buddy drinking coffee on his lunch break. He said I was lucky they had an apartment available...but somehow it felt more like being dragged back to class by an angry schoolteacher after getting to run free for a short time. And the place they had - man alive - you couldn't have gotten any more barren. It had a bed and a light in the ceiling. That was it.
At first i nearly left the key in the lock to go find the nearest hotel! In fact I made it halfway down the hallway before I realized that the problem wasn't the new digs but rather with my mindset. Instead of a gigantic 6-room place to sweep and dust where things went unenjoyed for months, I had two small rooms that took fifteen minutes to clean up at most. Since there was so little floor space I'd need to get creative and bring in only the things I actually used on the daily. Instead of giving in to my first impressions I needed to seize the day; begin anew.
So that's just what I started doing. Getting a shower stall and shitbox put in was the hardest part, but I've always insisted on doing certain activities in private. Shelves became a solution for saving on floor space. A kitchenette with overhead minifridge just big enough for a couple days at a time instead of the monstrosity at my old apartment where no more than 20% of the available space was ever used.
I managed to use the old brain-box well enough that even in my miniscule space there was room for a few nice things. A quartet of print paintings soon livened up empty space on a wall, with a nice pin-up calendar at the north wall by the door. Instead of a cheap digital model I bought a secondhand grandfather clock from the pawn shop. Much to the amazement of the proprietor who thought he'd never get rid of the thing. So what if it was a few more crows? I was raised by classy people, dammit, and I was going to keep at least a touch of class.
When the last deliveryman was gone I took a moment to admire the results. The filthy old wallpaper and grungy red tile floor were replaced by new color-coordinated ones, though doing so had cost me dearly. Everything around me had a definite purpose. There would be no more lounging in front of a television to put off cleaning the kitchen counters which barely saw any food go across them in the first place or playing a sad game of solitaire on a table that could have sat six people with ease. A new bottle of Gemsteader served to toast the humble dwelling.
Here's to new beginnings. All my detective tools are back in my belt, I'm fed and hydrated and feeling sharp as a razor's edge. Whenever the police scanner hits on something big I'll be out the door in three steps chasing a new case instead of sitting here shambling around looking for a purpose. I'm going to be on the first-name basis with the Enforcers again as 'that guy' whose name they keep stuck to their cruncher's monitor. Before I know it I bet I'll be rummaging through a trash can looking for the one slip of paper that ties the suspect to the scene or scouring somewhere top to bottom for the lone fingerprint that doesn't belong.
Because I am an investigator, dammit. From the time I was a snot-nosed kid I wanted to find things that others couldn't. Now I've found a way to shake the load off my shoulders and start doing what I did best again.
Starting with this murder that just got squawked over the Enforcer's alert band. It all begins anew - a victim to examine, a lead to find, an arrest to make and another folder to file away.
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The motive is obvious enough, as they usually are. Murder weapon is something of a curiosity; victim's been blasted square in the upper torso and neck with a factory's worth of small metal screws. Nasty way to go out. Witnesses from nearby apartments said they heard a sound like someone shot off a cannon left over from the Mustard Wars. I'd almost say a jerry-loaded shotgun but the dispersal pattern is insanely wide even for a twin barrel sawed-off job. One of the living room windows is broken but at ten floors up even the right Sync Disk wouldn't save you from splattering on the pavement. When I pay a little visit to the building's security camera room I can't find anyone carrying any suspiciously bulging coats or gun-shaped packages.
As expected there's no body or parts of one on the ground. But there is a half-moon shaped strike mark on the pavement from something big. My unfriendly local arms dealer will be a good place to start even if the bitch does charge me a hundred crows a question. If she doesn't know who pulled this off or how, guaranteed she'll know someone who does.
I've got the vic's address list copied down into my new notebook. Unfortunately as my new home didn't come with a telephone line I'll have to make all calls collect from the local diner payphone. A carefully budgeted business expense along with the black coffee and a thin sandwich for lunch.
Or - hang on a minute - maybe a nice thick sandwich. Vic had a couple fresh slabs of synthbeef in the fridge. For a couple crows most any eatery in the city will cook anything extra you bring if its in the package and you're ordering dine-in. A whole pound freshly grilled and sliced ought to give me a nice start to piecing together the facts. And to hell with it all - I'm taking the ketchup too. It's the good brand. I'm gonna feel awful silly carrying a bottle of ketchup around for a while, but what good's a sandwich without any ketchup? Maybe I'll just leave the bottle at the table for the next guy when I leave.
That leaves me with only one pocket free for the moment but there's nothing at the scene that I couldn't write down or take a picture of. No point carrying around the handcuffs this early in the case, either. Over a good solid lunch I'll start jingling phones for a while until I've got some idea of who to go grill in-person. There's something in me that can hardly wait to get started.
I'm on the case again...and it's a damn good feeling!