Tusmon shifted his feed over to Above. They'd been getting quite problematic lately. More times than he’d like to admit, but the detective had been left to clean up a mess they’d left behind. Their leader, Creti, in particular had become a massive headache. So many of her ‘clients’ had been left brainwashed, or there were other lingering consequences that she probably hadn’t considered, just to appease her vain selfishness and desire to be noticed.
It wouldn’t be the same as taking down the Fiends For Hire with his own hands, but if he could bring Above to heel, then he could consider his career a successful one. If only he could figure out where their hideout was, then he could really take action. The man knew of one surefire way to find them, but his pride hadn’t dwindled enough yet to explore that avenue.
Next on his list was the Red Eyes gang. Arguably, they were far more villainous than either Fiend group, basically having their hands in every type of heinous act in the criminal underworld. While blows to that group would certainly help the average citizen more, it wouldn’t bring him as much valor and compensation since the Central Peace didn’t rate them as highly.
Unfortunately, the entire pay structure for his department was based on results. Chiulu received a salary just being a CP employee, so he didn’t need to worry about her. And Tusmon was in a good place financially, not needing to worry about bills if he didn’t make any big arrests for a while. But if they wanted anything else, they had to earn it.
Originally, they didn’t even have an office. Tusmon would come and pick Chiulu up everyday and they’d work out of the closest coffee shop. It was inconvenient, especially since Chiulu couldn’t drive—the catastrophes would likely be unspeakable. But after he took down some Lesser drug-runners, they’d been granted their office space in lieu of actual payment.
Everything since, Tusmon had spent on equipment, mostly scanners and the fancy database screen he was currently operating. His most recent purchase was special gear for Chiulu to hopefully make her more useful in the field. As it stood, she was more of a liability to himself, so he usually had her wait in the car.
But even that wasn’t always the safest of places. Tusmon had also driven their CP gifted car when first starting out. That had actually been included with their arrangement initially just as a security measure. But Chiulu had crashed the car into a fleeing criminal—somehow. The detective still hadn’t been able to solve that case, since she’d been in the passenger seat with the car parked and turned off, and Tusmon had the keys at the time.
He’d been given another car, but now swapped to his personal vehicle before following any leads or patrolling. In a way it had been a blessing, since he preferred his own vehicle anyways. Maybe her Curse pitied the old piece of junk as well, since there’d been no further crashing incidents, not even a scratch.
Unfortunately, there hadn’t been any big busts in a while, so Tusmon was getting antsy. They mostly worked locally, and Horage had a lot of crime because of its high population. Prosper might be considered a pretty safe place, but the rest of it was deemed one of the more dangerous places to live. When things were slower, or if they got a big lead, then they’d travel countries, but it hadn’t been too common of an occurrence thus far.
The detective scrolled through the feed for a while, finding nothing either worth their time or in close enough proximity that they could get there before local law enforcement had barricaded everything behind bureaucracy and jurisdiction disputes. He had the authority to override all that, but by the time he cut through the red tape, he could have solved a dozen other cases. It just wasn’t worth his effort most of the time, and as a former cop himself, he didn’t like butting heads with them.
“Chiulu, have you found anything?” Tusmon whirled around suddenly, clearly a poor choice since he startled his assistant. She was in the middle of squirting additional sauce onto her sandwich, but his question caused her to squeeze too hard, blowing the cap off the bottle and spraying sauce everywhere.
That wasn’t due to her Curse, just the clumsiness that was ingrained in every fiber of her being, not to mention that she’d never properly learned how to control her strength after becoming a Fiend. There’d been a few crushed hands already during introductory handshakes. Tusmon himself rubbed the back of his own after seeing the bottle, a sore memory drifting to the front of his mind from when the two first met.
“Oh, yes, that was actually the file I was looking for earlier,” the woman answered as she rushed to clean up the mess. “I was trying to find the records of a certain symbol we’ve seen pop up recently. Umm, you see, Captain Luciri visited earlier and she brought a gun with her to submit as evidence. It’s in the box over there.”
“I didn’t touch it because… well, me, but there was a symbol carved into the side that I recognized. She said she was squaring off against a Lesser who threw the gun at her after a few failed shots and ran away. The captain didn’t have many more details beyond that, besides that the Lesser didn’t have anything to do with her mission. It seemed he was aggressive after she’d entered whatever territory he was guarding.”
“Hmm, definitely could be a new Lesser gang,” Tusmon picked up the file Chiulu had set aside and scanned through all the incidents that had the same symbol. It had only just started appearing rather recently, about a month or so ago, so they were still upstarts. If he could stop another group from gaining notoriety and reaching a level of power and influence the big three Fiend groups had, that would certainly be a win for justice and for the detective himself.
He walked over to the box and looked inside. The gun had been sealed in a clear plastic case with a lock on it, one that his pendant should open if Jaid had completed the transfer procedure properly. Which he had no doubt that she did. Tusmon had come to know the captain rather well since she returned from her escapade as a spy.
The detective had just signed on with the Central Peace right before that incident, so he’d been allowed to sit in on some, but not all of her debriefings. He’d assumed that was the end of their relationship, but the Fiend had sought him out on her own not long after.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
It seemed she’d considered him a kindred spirit given his history with the Fiends For Hire, wanting to vent and requested his help to work through some of her missing memories. And while he still wouldn’t call the two of them close friends—more business acquaintances—they’d still help each other out whenever they could. Jaid would bring Tusmon leads from her missions, and Tusmon would solve the aspects that she’d overlooked or simply didn’t have the time for, ultimately covering her ass from retribution down the line.
Regardless of their relationship, it was good to have someone he could confide in at the Central Peace. Since arriving at the organization, Tusmon had quickly discovered that it wasn’t the bastion of paragons that the government sold themselves as. There were just as many backroom deals, handoffs, bribery, corruption as could be found anywhere else. But that was ultimately none of his business.
If it didn’t involve Fiends, it wasn’t in Tusmon’s jurisdiction. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t stop a crime happening right in front of him, but he’d leave solving those cases to the people qualified to handle them. But no one was qualified to handle Fiends, not even himself. He’d basically been making up the regulation and procedures as he went, hoping to make a solid foundation for whatever form of official law enforcement came next. No other governing body wanted to handle it, so he’d pave the way with his own hands.
Tusmon picked up the box and carefully brought it over to his desk. Before removing the gun, he made sure that the safety was engaged and slipped on a pair of gloves. “When you’re done eating, bring me the fingerprint kit please,” he asked the woman who was now getting excess sauce all over her face.
In theory, the only prints left on the gun should be the previous owner’s. Jaid would have worn her armor, and the evidence handlers at the CP followed procedure to the letter, so Tusmon didn’t want to contaminate it and ruin their effort. But he was also impatient and wasn’t going to wait to start examining it.
Before he picked it up, however, the detective did notice the symbol Chiulu had mentioned earlier carved into the side of the gun. It looked like it had been done with a knife, so it wasn’t anything professional, possibly done on a whim. But according to their file, there were several other instances of it appearing, so it wasn’t just a one-off where the owner thought it looked cool.
The symbol itself looked like a rounded cross but with the bottom quarter missing. He’d done a search on it before, and turned up no religious connotations or any association with known gangs. But just based on the design, it was clearly meant as some sort of company or organization stamp—possibly some mercenary symbol, but it just didn’t have the same ferocity as most groups.
Comparing it to the past incidents, this was the first time finding it on a weapon. So far they’d seen it graffitied, on a few transfer documents for an unlicensed freight truck, and on a business card with no other writing or markings. Tusmon had even checked it for invisible ink and held it over a lighter but came up with nothing.
Really until now, there’d been no connection with Fiend activity, so all the information had just been tossed into a file and forgotten. But with Jaid’s testimony, and no reason to doubt its authenticity, Tusmon would work himself to the bone until he got to the bottom of it.
The location where Jaid had found the gun wasn’t too much to go off of, because the symbol’s sightings had been spread out around a few countries. They’d probably still go take a look at the site if they found nothing else, but it could very easily just be an empty lot and a coincidence that the Lesser was there. Hopefully, the gun itself would provide a few more clues.
But the detective didn’t find much worthwhile at all upon first inspection. There was still one bullet in the chamber, and the ammo magazine was about half full, matching the Captain’s recreation of events. It even had a very small dent in the muzzle from where it had likely clanged against Jaid’s sword or armor when it was thrown at her.
The serial number would have been his next source of information, but he expected it to be scratched off. Surprisingly it was still there, but he could tell from just a glance that it didn’t look quite right. No, the original number had been removed, and a new one had been imprinted to create a false trail.
Whoever had modified it knew their stuff, but Tusmon still ran the number anyways to be certain. That quickly led to a dead end, unless 86 year-old Berthatrice from Virabeld—a village that culturally didn’t use modern firearms—had been hiding her collection from everyone and was actually an avid gun-nut.
The ammo and model of the gun weren’t exactly the standard, but they also weren’t uncommon for personal use. So that just left the fingerprints as a last bastion of hope to find any sort of reliable lead. And Tusmon looked up expectantly as Chiulu brought the kit over to him.
But then she tripped at the last step, banging her head against his desk for the second time. The kit flung out of her hands, knocking the gun out of Tusmon’s. It slammed down against his desk and fired into the air—somehow with the safety still on, but such physically defying happenstances were nothing for the woman’s Curse.
The bullet ricocheted off the hanging light in the air, then into Tusmon’s old badge that he had mounted in a frame off the wall. Finally, it zoomed back to the detective’s desk and shot straight into the gun it came from, shattering the casing of the grip’s frame.
After coming back out from under his desk where he’d ducked under, and checking on Chiulu for yet another time that day, the detective’s eyes returned to the pistol, praying that it hadn’t been so damaged that he could no longer extract fingerprints. If that was the case, he’d be forced to suspect that his assistant was in league with them somehow if her Curse was protecting them.
But that wasn’t the situation. Rather, lo and behold, an astonishing clue. It was equally surprising that, first, there was a slip of paper somehow unnoticeably hidden into the grip of the gun, and second that it hadn’t been damaged in the slightest while the gun was in splinters. The Bumbling Bureaucrat's Curse could really be terrifying at times.
Replenished hope glinted in Tusmon’s eyes as he pulled out the slip of paper and unfolded it. “A map?” Chiulu asked, peering over his shoulder and ignoring the new trickle of blood dripping down her face.
“A dead drop map,” Tusmon quickly deciphered the markings. He then rushed back to his computer and pulled up a satellite image of where Jaid had confronted the Lesser. It had been in a rundown abandoned warehouse that even had a good chunk of the roof missing, not somewhere anyone should be.
If they were hiding something there, it would explain why they’d suddenly attacked Jaid who was trespassing in their eyes. She herself had just been searching the area for an entirely unrelated criminal that they’d ultimately caught. If the Lesser hadn’t engaged, she would have been gone within moments, unless their cache of whatever was blatantly in plain sight. Clearly the perpetrator was brash and careless and had acted without thinking.
Tusmon did another examination of the map. It was crude and hand drawn, not closely matching the overhead map. But there were just enough landmarks for him to figure it all out. “Get your things, Chiulu, we’re headed to Guzrinn.”