Work in progress.05:31 Mar 04 2007
Times Read: 914
West nodded to the security by the door. He had just handed in a dossier to some rich media mogul, complete with photographs which proved that his twenty-seven year old wife was not only screwing around on him, but she was doing it with three other men and doing it on film. That job had earned him $10,000, $1000 a day and $9000 to buy his silence. The photographs were evidence enough to guarantee a cheap divorce, but that would never happen. It would be cheaper to pay the bitch a settlement, even if it ran into the millions. The bad publicity alone would cost the empire tens of millions. Easier and cheaper just to pay the bitch off and have her killed. West had turned down that part of the job, but he didn’t doubt she would be dead before the end of the week. Odds-on the rent-a-cop by the main entrance would do it for a few hundred pegged onto his paycheck. He’d do it, she’d be dead and then someone else would get tapped for the murder, didn’t matter who, just so long as someone took the fall. West fingered the envelope hidden in the lining of his coat, he had copies of some of the more graphic photographs just incase they got the bright idea to trip him for the murder. The fact that he had all but sentenced that woman to death didn’t bother him, she wasn’t worth the guilt. What bothered him was after her death, the money she would have gotten from the divorce will be donated to some children’s charity. Donated by the man that paid a few hundred to have her killed and they would both appear as saints, everyone would overlook who owned the charity. West didn’t doubt that the charity would be under the belt of the 33 building, almost everything was on this side of the city. The sooner he got back to scrub town the better, the money there was just as bloody, if not more so, but at least the money didn’t pretend to be clean. You knew where you stood in the scrub and more often then not you knew when someone was coming for you. If someone wanted you dead they walked up to you with a blade, not a smile. Sometimes there were shootings, non-locals usually, most of the scrub handled their business up close and personal, blades were personal. That’s why he carried a .45 , blades were scary but they weren’t very practical. West understood the mentality of the scrub, they wanted to look you’re your eyes as you died. It was all tied in to the local juju, a mix of early Vudun and a form of western Demonology. Most of the big players in the scrub claimed to be some form of cleric, or farseer. It was all crowd control of course, keep the population scared of you and they did what you wanted, if they didn’t then the farseer sent some voodoo after you. West had no interest in stealing an enemies soul, dead was dead as far as he was concerned. He didn’t openly fight the clerics, he still had to work and live out of the scrub, but he didn’t buy into it and they left him alone, for the most part. Occasionally they would approach him to track someone down for them. Once he’d asked why they didn’t just use magic to find them and he’d been told that not everything in magic, could be fought with magic. West had taken the job, found the guy, an end of the pier bookie that had skipped town with a weeks takings. The fact that he had been dead when West found him was of no interest to the cleric that had employed him. He’d been told to just report the location and leave, don’t stay to watch, just leave. The rumor around scrub was that it had been a zombie that had taken the money and left, and he was only playing dead when West had found him. The cleric had supposedly eaten his soul for the insult, West had seen the corpse, he’d been shot, not a very magical way to kill a zombie.
West did most of his business in the scrub, but every now and then the money of the 33 came in handy. It wasn’t cheap to operate out of the scrub. You had to pay rent and you had to pay to the right people. Every lead you got didn’t come free and if it did you’d have to pay for it later, sometimes with more then money.
There was the sound of grinding glass, West’s eyes opened. Trembling slightly with each breath. He sat hunched at the bar, his fists clenched, his forehead pressed hard against the stained wood, the dreams had hit hard. He reached up to wipe the sweat from his eyes. His face was sticky with blood and whiskey. He looked at the broken glass spread across the bar, then to the remaining splinters embedded in his palm. Under the neon red glow blurred figures moved with unsettling slowness. How long had he been out? The clock behind the bar said nine but was that am or pm? In a bar like Jays it didn’t matter, you couldn’t turn your back on anyone day or night. West checked his coat, he still had his badge, and his .45. He couldn’t have been gone for more than five minutes, still five minutes was five minutes too long. It doesn’t seem that long a time but, without rest, without sleep, thirty seven hours might as well be a lifetime. Thirty seven hours of smoky bars and dimly lit peep shows. It really doesn’t matter how long you go without sleep the real problems start when the sleep catches up with you. You start to drift off, your mind slows to a lead lined crawl and then the memories hit. Every unpleasant thought your mind can dredge up, one after another, each more sickening than the last. Then your mind collapses in on itself and you just can’t fight it anymore, you sleep. He got to his feet slowly dodging a ray of sunlight drifting through the splintered two by fours covering a broken window, which hadn’t been there the night before. Definitely am. Ducking through a haze of neon red smoke West made his way across the bar. As he got to the door he gave the place one last look, just one more place where he couldn’t get away, there weren’t many places left that could keep a person awake in the city. Stepping outside he sucked in a last lungful of Jays and was gone.
The streets were different each time he'd woken up, every few days when he couldn’t stay awake any longer the streets would rearrange themselves. Nothing stayed the same after he’d slept, not even himself. Every dream he had changed him, in subtle ways at first, but recently the changes had been more noticeable. The scar across his knuckles, the pock-marked knife wound in his shoulder. Recently, he’d wake up and find that half the block he’d walked to get to a bar had decayed overnight, entire buildings were deserted and torn down while he slept. How long would it be before everything was different? How long would it be before he didn’t wake up?
Every murder meant that the change was more extreme, so far six murders in eight days. Six murders, six scars, six dreams, six victims. He had been on the case a solid week, at the time he had thought it was odd that he was hired for this one. Considering that he had been convinced that it was him who had committed the first murder, but now, he wasn’t sure if it was coincidence. West rubbed the scar on his hand as he walked through a desolate neighbourhood that had just last night, been full of people. That first scar that had him believe that it was he that had killed Jason M. Briggs. A stockbroker who worked at the 33 building, had a wife, four children and had had his rib cage split open and his spine removed. Jason M. Briggs, who had been forced to slash his attacker 6 times across the back of his hand with a shard of broken glass in a vain attempt to stop his chest being cracked open. Whose eyes West had looked into as they misted over and his screams gurgled into silence.
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