walking the beat
DOGS fic!
This is about Doug the cop and the Nails brothers. Policing must often be thankless, but I bet nothing beats being The Police in a place like the Underground. Seriously, how much do you have to piss off your chief before he sends you down there? D:
Spoilers through Ch. 32. I don't own DOGS.
Walking the Beat
“Assuming this goes well,” Alexei says in a tone that makes it clear how unlikely he finds that, “we’ll still have to deal with the riot and whatever is going on on the East side. And then we have to report to the Chief, assuming nothing else goes wrong.”
“That’s a lot of assumptions,” I tell him. “And you’d better stop making them, because you’re only letting yourself in for a world of hurt.”
Alexei is a good kid, but he does keep wanting to impose order on things. That’s a bad idea even on the Surface, but it’s fatal in the Underground.
“I’m just trying to make sense of this,” he says stiffly. And that would be the problem.
He goes on at length, as he’s given to do. The state of the Underground. The difficulty of Doing Good. The probable end of life as we know it any day now. Blah blah blah.
A good kid, but I generally tune him out about ten seconds after he opens his mouth. There’s plenty to distract my mind in the Underground, anyway. Just the people on the sidewalk are enough to base a whole life philosophy off of: predators and prey and their strange dances. I drive us down the road and take guesses at what each person on the sidewalk is up to.
Everybody in the Underground is up to something, guaranteed.
There’s a pimp, easy to spot, not worth arresting. There’s a prostitute, same story. Oh, now there’s a shady character. Somebody’s hitman? Independent assassin? Just your average dangerous lunatic? Hard to say. A few factory workers, poor bastards. A lone, sad, crazy guy. An unremarkable group of thugs.
Badou Nails, standing in a little knot of predators.
Last I heard, Badou Nails was an inept information broker up above, and they’re a different breed from information brokers down below. What the hell is he doing here?
…Here, just here. Here, a block from this “disruption” we’re supposed to be looking into. Standing with a pretty, pretty girl who doesn’t look scared, and if a pretty girl in the Underground doesn’t look scared, it’s because she’s as deadly as a cobra. And a pretty boy, too. A pretty boy with white hair, empty eyes, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth, and a coat the worse for gunshots.
I pull over, and they all three look at me with that Underground predator look, the one that says if I make one false move, they’ll eat my liver. Things are staring to click together and make sense, and I wish they wouldn’t.
Badou snaps a smile on, and hell, it’s trying to be his brother’s smile. It’s depressing.
“If it isn’t Nails’s little brother,” I say.
“Hey, it’s Doug.” So friendly. It isn’t like him. “You working down here now?”
We proceed to have a stupid conversation. I ask him questions I already know the answers to, and he smiles and tells me lies and doesn’t care whether I believe him or not.
“We’d better hurry, sir.”
Yes, yes. Hurry, as if it’ll make a damn now. Nails is out here, and if he’s out here, then anything interesting is over and done. I know how the Nails family works.
“See you around, Badou. Don’t do anything crazy.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
Lord love us.
“Who was that?” Alexei asks impatiently once we’ve driven away. Seriously, this kid. He’s gonna give himself an ulcer before he’s forty.
“The little brother of a dead friend of mine.” Well, a sort of a friend.
Alexei gives me a sidelong look. “He didn’t seem too fond of your friend.”
“Nah. He’s never forgiven his brother for getting himself killed.”
Alexei considers that. “I guess that is pretty annoying,” he says in a low mutter. At least he has a sense of humor. It’s a stealth sense of humor, but it’s definitely there. In another decade or so, I may even grow to like the kid.
Badou Nails, huh. Haven’t seen him for, what, three years? And even then…
He was always the rougher article, Nails’s little brother. Probably harder on the outside and softer on the inside; that’s usually the way with that kind. From the look of him now, he lost a whole lot of sanity along with his brother and his eye. Broken for life, just like the rest of the Underground.
I tell myself there’s nothing I could have done. Maybe it’s even true.
There are cigarette butts all over the scene of the crime, but that doesn’t prove anything. There are a lot of smokers around. Hell, I’m a smoker. I don’t bother to mention it.
* * *
I liked Dave Nails, that’s the hell of it all. He was well-meaning and stupid with it, a crazy, perpetually broke adrenaline junkie. He was terrifying on the rare occasions something really upset him. He was a good man. Didn’t surprise anybody but his brother when he got himself killed, though.
Freelance journalists are a noble breed, but they are, to a man, nuts. Anybody who’s trying to serve freedom, truth, and beauty in this day and age has slipped a critical cog. This is what’s wrong with young Alexei, too, except in his case, it’s freedom, truth, and justice. Christ.
Interesting that Badou turned information broker. People tend to confuse the two, but information brokers aren’t quite on the same page as freelancers: they’re not serving truth and beauty, they’re serving money. They slot neatly in between process servers and bounty hunters.
What all four groups have in common is, they’ve never settled into life the way other people live it. They don’t live with the common folk, they live off of them. Depending on their personalities, they might feel bad for you, the normal guy, or they might think you’re dirt, but they never will think that you’re like them.
* * *
“Doug, my man,” Dave Nails said. “I’ve been looking for you for ages. I’ve been missing you like I miss my own mom. I’ve been-”
“What do you want, Nails?” If you allowed him to go on, he would. All day.
He grinned at me. “My wants are few, Doug, and they’re simple. Food. Money. Delicious information. Got anything for me?”
“If you’re asking me for money, then you really are screwed, Nails.”
He threw back his head and laughed. Idiot always was finding his own misery hilarious. Since he’d probably go on like that for a while, I let my eyes drift to the kid brother. I admit I was curious: Nails generally kept the kid brother hidden away. I’d seen him around once or twice, but never up close.
The idea of Nails raising a kid was enough to give you nightmares, and looking at the kid didn’t do anything to reassure. He was sullen, but he was thirteen at the outside, so there was nothing unusual about that. It was more than just sullenness, was the thing. He looked jaded and tired, more wary than his crazy brother, more wary than a few of the guys I’d put in prison. I’d heard people who knew them both say it was hard to tell who was taking care of who, with the Nails brothers.
Nails was still laughing, and Badou gave him that classic you are embarrassing me in public look. He pulled a lollipop out of his shirt and stuck it in his mouth, settling in for the long haul. He always seemed to have a lollipop on hand, just like his brother always had a cigarette. Apparently oral fixations ran in the family.
“Doug, Doug,” Nails said finally, waving a hand and wiping tears from his eyes, “you are not my money guy. No. Oh, hell no.”
At the time, I was famously hard up. There was no need for Nails to be such a dick about it, though.
“Information, Doug! You police types know all the best people, I’m so jealous. Do you have information for me?”
“Why do I have to pay an arm and a leg to get a scrap of information from you, and yet you expect me to spill for nothing? Why is that, Nails?”
He grinned, scratching his head and looking sheepish. “I guess I could buy you a sandwich?”
Because he was a born con artist, that was why. “I don’t know why I try. But fine, I guess I do respect your crazy cause. Introduce me to the little brother, and I’ll tell you what I know. Can’t say fairer than that.”
“My little brother?” Nails looked between me and his brother and waggled his eyebrows like a clown. “Didn’t know you swung that way. But I gotta put my foot down, Doug, I really do. I like ya, guy, but I have my principles. He is my kid brother, you know.”
“Nails! For Christ’s-”
He was laughing. Just thought everything was funny, did Dave Nails.
“I’m Badou,” the kid brother cut in, bored and annoyed. “You feel like a more complete person for knowing that, old man?” Then, “Ow,” as his big brother thumped a fist down on his head.
“Play nice, bad boy,” Nails said, something like serious. “Doug’s a friend. You can trust him.”
“Don’t call me that,” Badou muttered, looking discontentedly at the lollipop stick that had bent in his teeth when he was hit on the head, and then suspiciously at me. Apparently he wasn’t overly impressed with his brother’s ability to judge character.
That’s how Badou Nails and I first met. I’m sure it made a bigger impression on me than it did on him.
* * *
“You’re asking me about Badou?” Mimi says incredulously, staring over the overpriced pasta plate I just bought her at a restaurant too white, echoing, and sterile to be a place she goes regularly. The fact that she took me here means she doesn’t trust me. Information brokers are a bunch of paranoids. “Why do you want to know about Badou?” she asks, then, without waiting for an answer, “I’m not telling you anything. He’s a friend. I don’t sell information on friends.”
“I saved you from an addict with a knife when you were ten,” I remind her.
“Good for you, but I didn’t ask you to do it, and I don’t owe you anything. You’re a policeman; that kind of thing is actually your job. I thanked you with my tax money already.”
“Do you expect me to believe you pay your taxes, Mimi?”
“That isn’t the point,” she insists primly, and takes a bite of pasta.
Doug zero, Mimi one.
“I’d settle for the boy with the white hair, can you tell me about him? Or the girl with the sword?”
“The girl with the sword is Fuyumine Naoto,” she says, neatly sidestepping Question #2. “You’re not the first one to ask me about that sword, either, but I haven’t got much to tell you yet. Just that Mihai says these guys in masks who wouldn’t die-the guys on the freaky train-had them. Swords like hers.”
“Mihai?” Mimi knows Mihai? Isn’t he supposed to be dead? “Mihai Mihaeroff?”
“I’m not telling you anything about Mihai, Doug.”
So she’s friends with Mihai Mihaeroff, the infamous hitman. That’s just swell. “What do you mean the men on the train wouldn’t die?”
“What does it sound like I mean? They wouldn’t die. Mihai knows his business-” Very funny, Mimi. “-and if he says they should have been dead, I believe him. Something’s up.”
“Something’s up all right, and the Nails kid is right in the middle of it,” I mutter bitterly. I’m supposed to be protecting these ungrateful brats, so why is it their obvious goal to make that impossible? “What would his brother say?”
Mimi snorts and drops her fork with a loud clank. “If Dave wanted to say something about it, he shouldn’t have gotten himself killed.”
The generation gap between me and these kids…it’s not a gap, it’s a chasm. Their formative years were the toughest ones I’ve seen, and they grew up through them and came out the other side hard, burned, twisted. Mimi’s one of the best at faking sane, but she is faking it. I shouldn’t let myself forget.
“I guess there’s a tiny, tiny chance he’s still alive,” she goes on. “And if he is, and if Badou really finds him, then I hope Badou stabs him in the eye.” And with that, she sits back up, picks up her fork, and viciously attacks her pasta, scowling.
That expression means that Mimi won’t be answering any more of my questions today.
* * *
On the Surface, it’s never very hard to figure out whodunit. Pay the right friendly neighborhood information broker the right amount of money, and you’ll know. Maybe you won’t have any evidence, maybe you’ll never be able to arrest the bastard, but you’ll know.
The Underground doesn’t work that way. Information brokers get paid in trade more often than they do in cash, and there’s nothing on the planet a cop could give them that they’d be willing to take. So straight information gathering is out. Interviewing witnesses is a waste of time, because the people of the Underground hate cops more than they hate murder and rape. It’s ridiculous, but the best source of information for police in the Underground is the rumor mill.
So we dress in plainclothes, we try not to get killed, and we listen to the rumors. And what rumors, lately. It’s enough to give you a headache just thinking about it, because the hell of the Underground is, it’s never safe to dismiss a rumor out of hand. Doesn’t matter how crazy it sounds.
Mimi’s people who can’t be killed are big news, lately. Also big: stories of White Hair and Eyepatch, two crazy bastards who, depending on who you’re asking, are either fighting for great justice or else just fucking up everybody who crosses their path. In other news: a girl with a sword. A man with a sword. Mihai the assassin here, there, and everywhere.
Clearly we’re never going to be shut of Mihai the assassin. I’d stupidly thought he was bad news only on the Surface, and furthermore that we were done with him ten years ago. Hah.
Rumors, rumors, rumors. And the facts aren’t any better. The train and the explosion, the kids without homes, the stack of dead pimps and slave traders (not that I’m planning on crying about that last one). And it seems like everywhere we go, we’re following a trail of cigarette butts.
I’m trying hard not to notice things, here. I figure I owe Dave Nails that much, because he was a good guy and a decent friend, but his kid brother is not making it easy on me. White Hair and Eyepatch, for God’s sake. It’s criminal that Alexei hasn’t picked up on this. After all, he met them, and that’s all it should have taken for anybody with eyes to see. Like I say, he’s a good kid, but sometimes I wonder how bright he is.
I, meanwhile, should have known better than to think that any member of the Nails family might possess a shred of subtlety. In fact, Badou’s taken it one step further than his brother. Nails saw evil and wanted to write an exposé. Badou sees evil and shoots it in the face, leaving a massive, headache-inducing pile of paperwork behind him for yours truly.
If there’s one bright spot in all of this, it’s that Mimi’s right. Something is up. If it turns out to be as disastrous as it looks like it’s going to be, then keeping Badou Nails out of jail is going to be the last and least of my problems.
So that’s all settled, then. The apocalypse will save us. Time for a beer.