"Guilty Conscience"
Dated: Yesterday
Title: Guilty Conscience
Rating: Meh, T. Minor language, reference to violence
Summary: Jesse is guilty of a lot of things... but he could have gotten away with it if he'd wanted to. OC POV
[[ Very future-ficcy. I'm not decided on the current situation here except that it's a while after the S3 finale (which means spoilerz) so Jesse is spiritually destroyed and wants to punish himself. I had it in my head that Walt has already died somehow in this one, but not for sure, he could still be alive I guess ]]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Glass of water?"
"No. I'll take a cigarette if you got one."
"Give the kid a cigarette, David."
David Mosier, my partner of only the past seven months and a mousy guy of just thirty-one, pulled out his cigarette tin and handed it to the kid, who took one out, then remembered he didn't have a light. I lit it for him and he took a long, righteous drag.
"So," I began again. "You're telling us you were involved in the disappearance of Gale Boetticher."
"I told you I killed him."
Yes he had told us that, but nothing else. I know when criminals are withholding information and when a fall-guy just doesn't know the answers to the important questions. It didn't take a genius to figure out which this was.
"Where's the body then?"
Nothing.
"Why did you kill him?"
Silence again.
I sighed and rubbed my temples. The kid - Pinkman, his name was - had come in with what at first seemed like a flimsy confession at best... and now it was going nowhere slow. I thought that if he was going to come in and lie, he should have at least plotted his points first.
"Kid, what are you doing?" I asked bluntly.
"I'm telling you I killed a guy. What else do you want?"
"I want you to stop bullshitting me," I answered, sipping off the glass of water I had poured for myself. Interrogation rooms are mercilessly stuffy.
He looked incredulous at my disbelief. "You don't think I did it?"
"You also told us you're 'Heisenberg'. That I really don't believe," David said.
Pinkman squinted at Dave through the smoke of the cigarette. "That's part of the reason I got away with it for so long, don't you think?"
"We already got a guy claiming to be Heisenberg," Dave reminded him. "Locked away in New Mexican State prison."
"I paid him," Pinkman disputed. "Thirty grand. I'm sure you know about that guy- he gets paid to go to jail."
Jimmy In N' Out. I did know about him. "Why did you bother if you were just going to come confess to everything later?"
"I didn't feel like going to jail at the time," Pinkman responded easily. "That was for one of my employees."
"Brandon Mayhew."
"Yeah, now stop talking like I'm an idiot," The kid snapped. "You can pull the tapes from those flower vans . Not the one with the DEA guys in it, the one with the cops. You can see me pass by Jimmy and Brandon. I'm telling Brandon he's on the wrong bench."
"The APD probably lost those tapes months ago," I said, although some really dedicated storage-hunting might seem them resurface yet.
"Hank whats-his-name was there. Schrader. The one who found out about my RV."
"You denied ever being in possession of the RV, am I correct?" I had heard about the case a few months ago back when it was fresh. Pinkman turning up at the station made me dig the file out again.
"I'm not denying it now. Go ask that Hank guy, he could tell you all sorts of shit that would link me to your Heisenberg investigation."
"I'm sure he could," I agreed. "But agent Schrader is no longer with the DEA and his testimony wouldn't be looked at as irrefutable after the assault charges."
Pinkman leaned back in his chair and sighed in exasperation. It wasn't going the way he had planned, but what did he expect? He had no evidence connecting himself to anything he was trying to confess to. "Okay, let's start over. I killed Gale. I shot him. I can give you the gun I did it with."
"What good will the gun do us without the body?" Dave asked.
Pinkman continued on as if he hadn't heard. "And I told you that I'm the Heisenberg guy the DEA has been chasing around. I can tell you about it right now."
"Let's hear it then," I said.
"I bought an RV and stole lab equipment from a high school," Pinkman explained. "I used the RV to cook in. I sold on my own for awhile and then I went into business with Tuco Salamanca."
"Don't tell me," I said, but I already knew. Looking over the assault case on this kid had led me to Schrader's other run-in with Pinkman. He had been brought in for questioning after his car was found at the scene where Tuco had been hiding out after murdering one of his own henchmen. Schrader had tracked the car there on an unrelated matter that I hadn't yet looked into, but either way Pinkman had gotten off the hook that time.
"Yeah, I shot him. In the stomach. Then I saw someone coming and decided not to take my car."
"Why did you shoot him?" I asked, now with some intrigue.
"He kidnapped me. I was trying to get away."
Dave raised his eyebrows. "Why did he kidnap you?"
"He wanted me to work for him."
"I thought you had already gone into business together."
"Yeah but I was still cooking by myself. He wanted to force me to go to Mexico with him and work in his lab. I didn't wanna go."
Dave was still doubtful of the entire thing- I could tell by his face. He gave me an are you hearing this shit? look and then asked gently: "Why didn't you want to go?"
"Would you wanna go?" Pinkman countered. "That guy was psychotic."
"But you did business together," I pointed out dryly.
"Are you sure you're a cop?" Pinkman asked sarcastically.
Dave and I exchanged a glance, but it wasn't anything really communicative. His said why are we wasting our time? Mine said... something different.
"Go on," I prompted.
"I went back to selling by myself," Pinkman muttered, speaking in the voice of one who knows his words aren't being received. The cigarette was just a stub hanging out of the corner of his mouth, neglected after the first puff. "I hired some guys. We started doing business out of town. Then Hank found out about my RV and shit so I had to get rid of it. I took a break, and..." He trailed off, rubbed his eyes. Clearly the fabrication had gotten muddled in his head. He was trying to lie carefully, without implicating his associates, but it was making his already ridiculous stories come out sounding like total nonsense.
"Keep going," I pressed.
He looked away then, and I thought he was coming close to giving up, even more so when he said: "Why should I? You don't even believe me."
"I don't believe you now the same way I wouldn't believe you if you confessed to being Charlie Manson," I told him. He said nothing. "Kid, I know what you're doing here. I've seen it before. The guy you work for-"
"I don't work for anyone."
"-you think he cares about you, right? Believe me, you've probably already been replaced. You think you'll just take the dive for him now and he'll come break you out of prison later? It's not going to happen that way."
Pinkman plucked the butt out of his mouth and flicked it across the room. "Great. That would make me sad if I was working for someone, I guess. I already told you, I'm the guy. There's no one else."
I shook my head, observing the delicate movements of Pinkman's hands. He was a small kid, kind of pale and painfully thin. He had a good-looking face, but that wasn't even what would work against him most in prison. More than anything it would just be the youth of him. I cringed a little inside and wondered if he fully realized what he was doing to himself, but there was no way of telling realization from ignorance on certain people's faces. I didn't believe him totally innocent - the haunted look in his eyes made the thought impossible - but I still didn't take him for a kingpin by any definition. And I couldn't help feeling sorry for him when it was so apparent he had been manipulated by his boss. Although from the way he was resisting every attempt to get him to spill the top banana's name, I thought he must have had some idea about the seriousness of the confessions he was badly trying to make. It's not that I didn't want the crimes solved- I wanted the real perpetrator behind bars for them, that's all.
"Jesse," I started, intentionally using his first name. "You won't last a day in the penitentiary. I don't know what you've done and what you haven't, and I don't know what you think you're doing now-"
"I'm doing the right thing," He interrupted, the tone in his voice surprising me. He wasn't trying to bullshit that time. He believed what he was saying, one hundred percent.
"If you want to do the right thing, tell us who you work for," I reasoned. "You're obviously guilty about the crimes, but if you really want to atone for it, you have to tell us who was actually behind them."
He stared at me levelly. I waited to see something on his face, some urge or some little crack in his determination, some desire to tell on his boss. But there was nothing. I had been quite wrong in thinking he would give up on this.
"Think about your parents," I told him, appealing as a last resort to his connection with his family. As it turned out, that was the worst thing I could possibly have done, because something did light up in his eyes then, some idea, some deal finisher.
"My parents," He repeated. "You want evidence right? Call them. Call them right now and ask for pictures of the meth lab I had at my house."
Dave, who had been treating the whole thing like a big joke the entire time, now looked utterly flabbergasted. "What?"
Pinkman seemed impatient. "They found the lab in my house when I was at Tuco's place. They took pictures of it to use against me if I didn't move out in three days. I bet you anything they still have them."
"So, if we call your parents right now, they'll give us incriminating photos to use to convict you?" Dave asked, kind of buying it and not wanting to.
"Probably," Pinkman confirmed. "If they've still got them around somewhere... Actually, it's not just the lab that was in the house. I killed Emilio Koyama and Domingo Molina there too."
That smashed the little bit of credibility Dave had almost surrendered. I could have been mistaken but he looked ready to laugh. "We have them in our records, right, John?" He asked, turning to me.
I nodded, somewhat vaguely. "They went missing over a year ago. You're confessing to their murders?"
"Yeah. And about the bodies, I melted them in acid."
That look of dull amusement on David's face increased. I felt slightly sick.
"In the bathtub of my house on Margo. I didn't know you couldn't use hydrofluoric acid in a bathtub, so it went right through the floor and blood got everywhere. I think the floors in the bathroom got replaced but if you take some of those forensic guys in there, you'll find some blood on something. The toilet or the ground under the bathroom. That blood'll be Emilio's and Kr-Domingo's."
There was a long pause. I watched Pinkman the entire time. I'll always remember the way he looked then, like someone who's been on deathrow for years and has already accepted their predetermined mortality, a look that seemed totally out of place on that skinny, blue eyed kid bundled in too-big clothes sitting with his arms folded across the interrogation table. He seemed confidant that we would charge and convict him of at least one felony then. The more years that got tacked onto his sentence the better, it seemed to him. I have no idea what motivated him to come in and confess to so many skewed crimes, unless he was under direct orders or duress from his employer... but he denied that employer's very existence so there was no choice but to take the kid down for it, which is exactly what he wanted.
"Call the kid's parents, Dave," I said at last. "And the investigators, if you can get ahold of them." David gave me one more strange look, then left me alone with Pinkman, who watched me just as intently. "If they find anything..."
"They will."
I swallowed through a throat that had gone dry. I sipped my water again and tasted dust that had settled on its surface. "You acted alone?"
"Completely."
I shut my eyes and rubbed my temples again. I felt absurdly old. "You still have a chance to tell us who Heisenberg is."
"It's me. I know you don't buy it but all you have to do is put me in a lab. I can show you how to make the blue meth with the phenol acetone."
I knew the kid wasn't Heisenberg but there wasn't any doubt in my mind that he could show us, that if we asked him to he could make the meth perfectly, down to every detail in replication of his employer's product. If it came down to it and they did make him put on a demonstration, it would be the final nail in his coffin. He honestly believed he was doing the right thing, and maybe in some way he was; crimes should be met with justice, criminals should be punished. The only thing wrong with the picture was that I knew that the mastermind, the manipulator, was still roaming freely out there somewhere while this kid would be getting shipped off to the pen for twenty years or more and eaten alive within the first hour. It's this type of thing that makes me want to retire. It's not criminal loyalty, it's seeing the young malleable Pinkmans of the world get so twisted around in the hands of some exploitive drug kingpin that they lose all sense of self. It was obvious that Pinkman was alienated at home, and it would have been so easy for Heisenberg to take him in, make him feel secure, looked after, even loved. Just so that when the time came, Pinkman would walk right into the jail sentence for him.
My stomach gave a slow, uneasy roll. I opened my eyes and looked at the kid again. His expression was unreadable as he looked back at me, knowing what I thought, knowing what I knew, and knowing that I couldn't do a damned thing about it.
"Yo, I think I'll take some of that water now."
I obliged him. I thought for a second that he had finally started to look scared.