Chapter Text

The world is full of scum bags, you know? It’s teeming with guys who think because they’re big bad men with loads of money and cash that they can just walk all over the little guy and take whatever they goddamn want. Not on my watch. No sir, never on my watch.

I put away a lot of assholes in my time working with the force. Jerks taking advantage of the fear that teemed through the streets like a plague of rats. It was a time of change and for the majority of people out there (the minorities, you know?) it was a time of god damn horror. Corrupt cops beating and even goddamn shooting anyone who wasn’t white and getting away with it to! A molesting president who was leading the country right down the path to war. Increased costs of living while work wages plummeted nearly every day. If you weren’t rich, well, you certainly weren’t going to get rich any time soon. Not with the corporate goons robbing you in broad daylight while the gangs mugged you at night.

Fucking horrible.

Being a detective I met a bunch of people from all walks of life. Everyone was being robbed every which way. Lucky me, I only dealt with high profile cases. Serial stuff, you know? None of this gun point crap that ended with the perp dead on the floor after a firing match between his buddies and the cops. I kept far away from the murders and the kidnappings. I wasn’t so… delicate with the departed or the grieving so mainly the chief stuck me on busting up drug rings and tracking down stolen “items of value”. It was a bad gig but I still made my enemies. What detective didn’t?

You know, I wasn’t bad at my job. It wasn’t easy but at least I was never even tempted to go bad. I had my code and I stuck to it. Sure, I wasn’t bringing about the hard type of justice that the public want to read about in the news – I never caught no mass murderer or sent a kiddie stealer to the chair – but I helped make the world a better place in my time. That’s what fucking counts.

No, I was never tempted to go bad. Didn’t take any money to turn my back, even if it meant I woke up in the hospital or had a gun pointed right between my eyes. There was this one case though, this one time where I considered letting the jack ass go. I didn’t in the end – what’s the point in having a code or the law if you don’t fucking follow it? – but I didn’t exactly catch the guy either. Slimy bastard slipped through my fingers. What can I say? He was smarter than me, faster. Charming as anything but not my cup of tea. I’m not saying he was right to do what he did or that he got what he deserved but I don’t exactly regret not catching him. One way or another it makes a good story.

Chase Stone.

What can I tell you about Chase Stone? Damn.

I never built much of a profile up on that guy. Didn’t need to. Everyone was after him. CIA. FBI. Interpol. But that shit all came later. I met him before all that, when he was just a single thief in a big city. Kept up on his file throughout the years, he got himself in to some deep shit. Stole a lot of precious things that made a lot of people mad. Me? I just chuckled. After all, the kid started off as a Pie Baker. How does a Pie Baker become an international thief? It don’t make sense.

He worked for his pa in the family bakery as a kid. Got a knack for making the sweetest pies you’d ever tasted and took that skill to the competitions. He did good, won a lot of money that, in the end, helped save his pa’s little bakery from closing down. It was only a family run place, you know? A lot of the big chains were springing up all over the place. The people began to prefer donuts to pies. They were easier to eat out on the street, you know? Didn’t have to sit down to eat and people were busy, busy, busy. Didn’t want to stop for nothing or no one. Chase, he wasn’t so good at donuts. He was a pie boy at heart and for a long time that’s all he thought he’d ever be.

But still, the kid did great on the competitive pie baking circuit. At least, he did for a while but the way I heard it, the family business sinking put him in a downer state. He started losing his flare a bit. To try and bounce back he made what the pike baking community call “the forbidden pies”. Utter bullshit really. I mean, okay. Chicken pie is weird. Meat in a pie? What were the Brits thinking? Disgusting stuff. But should it be “forbidden”? I’d say probably not. Poison-berry pie though… well it wasn’t exactly poison. Nobody died or even got sick so I don’t see what the problem was. My opinion don’t matter though. Chase got kicked out of the circuit and shunned by his peers. That was it. He was done. Finito. Out of there.

I guess that’s why he started stealing. It had to be because up until this point he was nothing but a good boy. But failing family business, no way to help keep them afloat. A good person would have gone out and got another job but then, Chase had a bad streak in him. I don’t know what he stole first. It took us ages to connect the robberies to him at all, he was that good. He didn’t start leaving his signature pie-calling-card-things until after I met him anyway. Not the point. The point was I don’t know how he got into the game of robbing stuff but he got there. He did it. He broke the law and he had to be brought in. Those are the rules, right?

So my first case that we knew it was Chase (not at the start but I found out pretty soon it was him) was this diamond heist downtown. Someone had robbed a pawn shop, horrid place with this huge yellow sign that just pulsed and glowed above the door non-stop day and night, even when the damned place was closed. The owner, some money-grabbing tubby scum bag, always wanted everyone to know that if they had something of even remote value, he would pay them a pittance for it so they could make rent. Boohoo if you wanted it back though. The interest rates on loaning were like a freaking rocket ship, soaring way up higher than anyone in that neighbourhood could afford. Still, people went to him. They needed to or they’d be homeless and the streets were running out of room fast.

Anyway, this pawn shop dealt in heirlooms too. People round there may have been piss poor but not all of them had always been that way. Like, a generational thing, you know? Some of them still had Grandma’s ruby slippers or Great-Great-Aunt Tilly’s pearl earrings or something. By law, the owner (was his name Randall? I’m gonna call him Randall because I’ll be damned if I actually cared about his real name), Randall, had to keep any precious items he was “holding on to” on site until the original owner gave him whatever amount of money he had extorted out of them.

There was this safe in the floor under these old Persian rugs that nobody even wanted to go near. I mean, they may as well have been infested with giant mutant moths or something. The sheer amount of dust trapped in them could suffocate anyone, believe you and me. It was the perfect place to put a safe because there was a decoy in the wall behind the till and no one would check over by them god damn mouldy rugs. But apparently someone did. Chase did, but when I arrived on the scene in the early hours of the morning, well I didn’t know a god damn thing. The night shift was brutal and the need to sleep often made me bleary eyed and delirious if the coffee didn’t send me jittering off to crazy town.

So I get to the scene. The shutters around the glass windows which ought to have been pulled down were all battered and half way up. They couldn’t go any further because they were so out of shape which was unusual for a crime scene. Most thieves found it easier to break in through a skylight or round the back, where they wouldn’t be seen on the street. Thievery required stealth, you know? I mean, Chase had stealth. He had a lot of things but I’m getting ahead of myself. So shutters all bent and broken and whatever. Police tape around the outside of the building to cordon off the civilians, not that anyone really dared go out at night in that part of the city. Not unless they had to anyway. So no witnesses. You know, I’m still not sure if there were no witnesses because nobody was around that night, or because in our city nobody wanted to witness nothing. Life was easier if you kept your nose to the ground and remained blind to the world around you.

Inside there were the usual suspects milling around, taking photos, marking things, doing their police work like it was no biggie because it wasn’t. The lackeys just got on with it, noisily perhaps but I didn’t care. Let them have their jokes and get confused with the evidence. It was all part of becoming a real cop, you know? Who hadn’t made a few mistakes? No one I knew on the force was perfect. They all fucked up. It was part of being human.

So the lackeys were doing their thing. Randall was hovering by the till, watching the ants scurry about marking up the place with these greedy little beady eyes of his that sunk way back into his squishy face flesh. Even in the dull flickering shop lights (ridiculous in comparison to the tacky sun beam that he surrounded the exterior with) you could see the sweat just pouring down his bald potato shaped head, gluing his comb over to his scalp. I could smell the pit stains on his white tank top before I could see them. The whole store reeked of laziness to be honest but Randall just burst with it like an exploded rotten cabbage.

“So how much money’d they take from the till?” I asked, forcing myself into the spotlight of his distrusting gaze.

“No money. The till’s untouched.” Randall grunted, looking past me to watch the ants scurry about some more.

“Hey, eyes here pal,” I was tired and maybe a bit hungover. I wasn’t going to let this asshole look past me like I was invisible, you know? It just wasn’t my style. I was there to work and he was gonna damn well pay me some respect and answer my questions. “So what did they take?”

“Jewels from the safe.” Randall shrugged like it was no biggy but the look in his tiny little eyes was one that I’d seen on all of my cases. It was the desire for justice or revenge, whichever came first.

“The safe on the wall is untouched.” I said like a dunce. I had eyed up the big safe as I walked in, wondering why it was being ignored but I figured, hey, these guys would get it eventually. No need to rush them, you know?

“The one over there,” he paused, probably refraining himself from adding an insult because he was just that type of jackass. “Took a case of about twenty diamond rings, some pearl earrings, and an emerald necklace. The whole lot is probably worth a thousand bucks.”

“About? Probably? I don’t deal in approximates. We need to know exactly what was taken and the value of it.” I raised an eyebrow. Took me years to learn to do it. My pops could and as a kid I would spend ages in the bathroom mirror practicing so that I could impress my old man. He wasn’t impressed but by god, I was.

“I need to check my books to be sure.” Randall shifted his gargantuan weight from one foot to another. I knew what that meant, I wasn’t stupid. It meant that he needed time to cover up that he had ripped people off. It wasn’t a crime and I was tired so I didn’t care what he did. The idiots shouldn’t flock to him in the first place. They knew what they were getting.

“You go do that then. Be sharp about it. I don’t got all day.” I turned my back on Randall. I could hear the floorboards creak as he waddled off to do his shady business in the back room. Really I shouldn’t have let him get away with it but what did I care at 3am?

Scouring the room, I spotted the most senior officer under me and beckoned him over with a finger. There was nothing special about this guy. Just another forgettable face with another forgettable name. They all had the same personality too, the guys who ordered the lackeys. They felt like big fish and puffed their chests out to prove it. The truth was they didn’t have any power and they simpered to their higher ups like that would get them promoted. Fools, the lot of them, but I s’pose everyone dreams.

“We got any witnesses? Suspects?” In my pocket I keep this notebook, a little reporter’s pad. I still carry one around, you know. Should have got it out when I did my first talk with Randall but I knew that slimeball wouldn’t have anything useful to me straight away. Men like him are all the same so I kept it in my pocket. Talking to the head of the crime scene though, well, they always want to impress and it’s worth taking notes because idiots tend to forget half of what they’ve said, so eager to spill the beans on the situation.

“No witnesses, suspects, surveillance, nothing. My boys can’t even find a scrap of DNA on the place. We’re beginning to reckon it was an inside job. God knows this guy would raid his own place just for the insurance money.” The head lackey shrugged. We liked them simple, open and shut. They never were though and I could feel it in my gut: this time was no different.

“Nothing at all? Not anything weird or interesting or-?” I stopped as a look came across his face. Clearly I had reminded him of something worth noting at least.

“Crumbs. There were these crumbs by the safe and more outside where the shutters’ been beat.” The look on his face was so sincere, so serious. I wanted to smack it right off.

“Crumbs? You think crumbs are worth noting? Have you seen how filthy this place is?” I asked. Maybe I raised my voice a bit. I thought he was being stupid.

“There were no crumbs anywhere else. Just thought it might be important.” He retreated into himself a bit, going red with the feeling of foolishness. At the time I thought it was damn right of him too but actually that moron had stumbled on to a genuine clue. I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.

“Well you sweep up those crumbs. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find some DNA or shit on them.” I ordered, swatting at him to get away. Fucking idiot. Crumbs. He deserved a rude dismissal for wasting my time with that crap.

“I’ll have them sent to the lab right away.” He probably said something like that. They always say something like that. I wasn’t listening though. I was too busy making my way over to the obscure, cracked safe.

Squatting down, I saw the lackey was right. There were crumbs, a sizeable bunch of them, scattered around the bottom of the safe. A lot had been left untouched. Rare china, golden candlesticks, vintage garbage, that kind of thing. There was no jewellery left though. That was gone.

Standing back up, I stretched and clicked my back. It had been a long night, mainly writing reports that nobody would bother to read for the sake of procedure. Glancing at my wristwatch, it was more or less my time to clock off. I was done for the night. Good because I didn’t want to deal with Randall’s bullshit. Let that be someone else’s problem. I could read the interview transcript on my next shift.

“Hey,” I called the head lackey over once more. “Have someone take whathisname down to the station and get him properly interviewed, okay? I want the initial report on my desk in less than twenty-four hours or heads are going to roll. I’m going to get a drink.”

It was a hollow threat and they all knew it. Still, I said jump so they were going to do it because that boot licker knew it would get him promoted. There were nods and words of understanding but I was already out the door, undoing my top button to get a little bit of that cool air. There was still no one about but that was fine. Reporters were vultures and a small job like this wasn’t exactly big news anyway. At least there was no one to avoid hitting with my car, meaning I got to make a speedy getaway to my favourite dive: The Torso Bar.