Fearless Leader (Juxtapose City)

by Tricia Owens

  ~~~~~~

  "Black, let me drive the bike."

  Black didn't hear him. Or chose not to. Either way the result was the same. Black hastily yanked up his jeans and threw one leg over the electro-bike.

  Calyx tried to catch the other man's arm. "Wait! You're in no condition to drive that thing, sweetheart. Let me do it."

  He received a backhand to the face for his concern. Calyx cupped his mouth in shock, tasting fresh blood. He stood by dumbly as Black slammed his helmet over his head and started the bike. The smooth whine that filled the garage sounded like that of a terrified animal.

  Calyx jumped back as Black spun the back wheel in a screech of rubber before tearing off down the aisle. At the top of the ramp Black turned his bike west. He didn't spare a backwards glance for the man he'd left behind.

  It was silent in Calyx's head. It was almost eerily quiet when compared to the tumult that had bombarded his senses just minutes ago. Now that Black had left Calyx was able to appreciate how much emotion his leader had been sending his way the entire time. He was left slightly flabbergasted.

  Where had that shame come from? And that uncontrolled fear? Calyx had learned more about Black in the last few minutes than he had in the days since joining JC2. What he'd learned made him think twice about his impressions of the lieutenant. Calyx prayed he was wrong.

  He dropped his head, all at once tired and feeling every pained inch of his abused body. His eyes fell to Black's PRU lying discarded on the concrete. It must have fallen out during the scuffle. With a wince, he bent and picked it up. An amber light flashed at the top of it.

  Calyx jumped when the PRU buzzed. Startled, the squeezed too tight and the unit flew out of his hand. He fumbled with it like it was a slippery bar of soap.

  He expected Black to have a lock on the system to prevent anyone else from using the unit but to Calyx's surprise the video flashed with a picture of Jake's concerned face.

  "Starr! What the hell's going on? Where's Black? Put him on right now!"

  "I don't know where he is," Calyx replied, trying not to sound like the criminal he knew he was. A cop like Jake would sniff him out in a second if he wasn't careful.

  "Don't give me that. Black's personal alarm went off. Something's happened."

  Ah, so that explained why the PRU was working. Black must have activated the alarm system during his struggle with Calyx. It was more than a little sickening to realize that Black had felt threatened enough by him to feel the need to call for help. Calyx suspected that Black rarely called for assistance in anything.

  Jake's bark jerked him out of his musings. "Starr, where the hell is he?"

  Calyx's eyes drifted to the street. Black had turned right when he'd torn out of the garage. Not left which would have taken him back to the house but right into a very specific and notorious part of the city. Yeah, Black could have been heading for a convenience store or off to run some errands. But after what had just happened Calyx highly doubted that Black had gone on a doughnut run.

  Calyx studied the face looking back at him from the screen. He didn't like Jake. He couldn't stand him, actually. But his dislike for the light-eyed sergeant wasn't nearly as strong as his feelings for Black.

  Dreading the confrontation he was deliberately setting himself up for, he said, "I need you to come pick me up, Jake."

  The other man's face registered surprise at the sudden familiarity. But like a seasoned cop his surprise swiftly gave way to a grim suspicion. "What's happened to Black?"

  Calyx's hand tightened around the PRU. He envisioned again the moment when Black had placed the Bliss tab against his neck. "I don't know," he admitted. "Just -- just come get me." He took a deep breath. "I'll explain what I can as we go."

  ~~~~~

  The past was called the past because it was something that had happened before; it wasn't something that continued to happen. But for some reason in Black's life the past refused to stay buried. It insisted on intruding on his present life every chance it got.

  Don't think about that. Don't think at all.

  Good advice. Black decided to take it. Being willfully blind to what had just happened was preferable to dwelling on the fact that he had a Bliss tab stuck to his neck and a lifetime's worth of terrible images roaming through his head.

  This fall was inevitable, Black realized as he drove without conscious awareness through the darkest streets of Juxtapose City. Captain Dickerson might have thought Black stronger than this but all along Black knew he was just one step away from corruption. It was in his blood. It had been ingrained in his senses. It was what he was used to so why fight it?

  Because you're better than this. You want better than this.

  But who said that he deserved it?

  The proof of his worthlessness was the illegal substance currently pumping through his bloodstream. There was no clearer evidence than that. He was worthless. He was no lieutenant. He was better off accepting what he was and moving on.

  Black pulled the bike to a stop at a red light. He looked around himself for the first time. He was on 32nd and 'D' Street. How fitting. He was in the heart of Juxtapose City's drug district.

  A shuffle to his left turned his head. A kid in a black trench coat and ragged blue jeans paused beside a garbage can. The kid was smoking a cigarette but Black caught the scent of an illegal weed in the blue-tinged smoke.

  "Ever wonder how high the sky is?" the kid asked, casually looking Black over.

  In street-speak, the kid was asking if Black was interested in buying G-28. It was the latest drug to replace cocaine as the party drug of choice. It was dangerously addictive, designed that way by its makers to ensure an instant, desperate market for the drug. It was the city's second most popular drug behind Bliss.

  G-28. Black was familiar with it in many ways. He'd seen its evil in every intimate form. It didn't weaken a person it destroyed him.

  "What've you got?" he asked.

  As the kid sauntered closer Black reached into his pocket. His fingers bypassed the silver badge he carried and curled around the shape of his wallet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sola sat back in his chair and dared the beginnings of a grin. "Gotcha," he said into the silence of the computer room.

  He stretched sore muscles and checked his watch. He noticed with surprise that he'd been here for most of the afternoon. It had been worth it.

  Earlier in the day the other men had invited him to tag along to Jubilee's. It would have been a smart move to go with them and build his relationship with the rest of the team but Sola had been feeling a bit obsessed lately. Strange things had been going on in the team since he'd moved in. He wanted some answers.

  First he'd noticed that Bee and Haney were close friends which wasn't unusual within a tight knit team like JC2. But he hoped it wasn't more than friendship because oh, how he hated fags with a passion.

  Then he'd noticed the other relationships within the team that had the potential to disturb him. Jake and Black seemed to both pull and push at each other like a married couple. If he wasn't demanding Black's attention like a neglected wife Jake stared at his leader as though Black were his personal god. Grow a fucking dick! Sola had almost yelled at the man a couple of times. You're making a fool out of yourself.

  Still, despite the theatrics with Black Sola enjoyed Jake’s company when he acted like a man. Like himself, Jake clearly hated Calyx Starr. Jake obviously recognized the threat the empath held for the team and wanted him gone. Sola liked that. He'd already put Jake down as a potential ally in the future. It was always wise to keep track of such things.

  But most disturbing of all to Sola was what was happening between their leader and the empath. Late at night Sola had heard the two men's doors closing at odd hours. Sometimes the men retired at the same time as though they'd been together. He didn't completely believe that -- Black seemed to firmly believe in keeping boundaries between himself and his subordinates -- but Starr was a freak. Who knew what he was doing to
mess with the team leader's mind? If Starr was influencing Black in any way Sola needed to stop it.

  Sola didn't know what everything meant -- on some level he was afraid to look too closely -- but until he understood his teammates better he couldn't get comfortable in JC2. He needed some leverage first. So he'd planted himself in front of a computer once everyone had left the houses and returned to digging for clues about his new leader.

  After just under an hour of hiding his trail by going through a handful of hacker 'washers' -- scrambling websites used by hackers to prevent their computer's numerical identity from being recorded and thus rendering them traceable -- Sola had managed to break into the Juxtapose City Main Municipal Jail, a.k.a. Hangway.

  He'd followed a hunch, driven down that route when every other attempt to learn more about Lieutenant Black had met with a dead-end. Black's trail was as cold as a corpse and no amount of nudging would bring it to life again. He needed to find a thread that took him deeper and what could be deeper than the captain himself?

  Sola, like every other man at the department, had heard the rumors about the two men's relationship. Such things were inevitable when the leadership of JC2 had been given to someone like Black who had no proof of experience in the field or in leading a team of men but who was young, attractive and clearly very dedicated to what he did. Maybe too dedicated. Sola had learned in his career that men like Black would do anything to accomplish their goals and there was often a very fine line between using legitimate methods to get the job done and crossing over into those hushed up, unspoken means that everyone suspected of Black. It didn't take a rocket scientist: Black was a good-looking kid. Captain Dickerson had a history of taking advantage of hookers and snitches. It wasn't a hard leap to make.

  So Sola had latched onto the Black-Dickerson connection and searched the captain's records for references to JC2's leader. After two hours of eye-straining Sola had found his break: Black's records had been sealed by Dickerson's order, #CD445-62. That order had only ever been applied to files pertaining to Black. But Sola found that particular red flag not only in the department's files but also in Hangway's.

  It had caught Sola by surprise. He'd spent another forty-five minutes trying to determine if it was linked to Black's possible employment as a corrections officer within the jail. But the file wasn't tied to Human Resources. It was located in a deeply buried subdirectory within the prisoner directory.

  No amount of hacking from this computer would break into this file and Sola quickly gave up trying. But though he couldn't read what was in the file it got the sergeant to thinking.

  What could Black's connection to the prison population of Hangway be that was so bad it needed to be sealed by the captain? Sola had already tried searching for a criminal record on Black and came up empty. He'd found no evidence that Black had ever stepped foot in jail.

  That's when Sola had expanded his thinking beyond the box. What if Black hadn't been a prisoner but had been an arresting officer? What if there was a scandal there? Maybe a prisoner had tried to blackmail him? Or maybe he'd pulled together a sloppy case that brought his ethics into question?

  Or... what if Black had put an innocent man behind bars? A man that had been killed while in Hangway.

  It was a possibility. Captain Dickerson, thinking with what was between his legs, would need to cover that fatal mistake in order to promote Black to lieutenant and appoint him as the leader of JC2. Sola wouldn't put it past the man. The captain, while someone he respected for his position, nonetheless struck Sola as the type of man who would risk his career for that. It always amazed him what some men were willing to do for a piece of ass.

  "Gotcha," he said again and this time his grin was sharp, edged with anger. He might be shooting in the dark with this theory but his gut told him he was getting close. Whatever Black's secret was it was looking more and more like something very dark and dirty that would crush Black completely. It might even be something Sola would enjoy revealing if it meant removing a corrupt officer from the force.

  He sat up as he heard the garage door slam. Belatedly he realized that the low purr he'd heard in the background must have been Black's electro-bike. Sola cleared the cache on the computer and accessed his favorite hunting website. He noted with pride that the photo of his double take down of two deer was still on the community post board. Too bad he couldn't stand the taste of venison. He'd probably enjoy hunting a lot more if he could actually eat his kills instead of dumping them out in the fields.

  Black's bedroom door slammed upstairs. Sola glanced at the ceiling. Black rarely showed a lack of restraint in anything he did. It was something Sola could grudgingly admire in the younger man. Control was the key to life, Sola believed. If you didn't take control, if you didn't go on the offensive in every aspect of your life you left yourself open to get screwed. Sola had learned that lesson well. He'd taken it to heart.

  He spent another few minutes on the hunting site then clicked to an online weapons magazine and checked out the new rapid-fire guns being introduced this month. God, he loved guns. There was something about the solid feel of the weapon kicking back in your hand when you pulled the trigger that made Sola half hard just thinking about it.

  He jerked his hand from his pants when his PRU buzzed. Captain Dickerson's face filled the screen and for a painful second Sola's heart stopped. But then he reminded himself that he'd been careful to cover his tracks. The captain couldn't know anything about his hacking.

  "Captain Dickerson, sir. What may I help you with, sir?"

  Dickerson ignored his deference. "Sergeant Sola, where is your lieutenant?"

  "He just returned home, sir."

  "Alone?"

  Sola wondered briefly if the captain was testing him. "I only heard one set of footsteps on the stairs, sir. Someone else may be on the bottom floor; I don't know. I'm in the computer room. Studying the Glock A8," he added, because it never hurt to show your dedication.

  To his disappointment Dickerson didn't appear to have heard him. The older man was frowning, his eyes distant. "Find Lieutenant Black," he ordered. "Give him your PRU."

  Sola almost asked why the captain didn't just call Black on his PRU, but wisely kept his mouth shut. "Yes, sir," he said and left the room.

  ~~~~~

  Black sat cross-legged on the carpet and stared at the bounty he had spread before him. It was like a buffet for the underground. Glass vials of G-28 lay on the carpet, their bright green liquid shining like slivers of emeralds within. The tubes lay amidst every tablet of Bliss that he'd found in the silver case the captain had given him.

  What should he start with? Black tapped his finger against his teeth, considering. He could start with the Bliss and get a nice, mellow high started. Then when he took the '28 it would extend that high until it broke into brilliant, crystal euphoria.

  Or, he could take the '28 to clear his head and get his adrenaline up, then chase it with a handful of Bliss tabs to smooth out the edges.

  It had been a long time since he'd done drugs. He wasn't sure if he missed it exactly, but he missed the escape it provided. You didn't care if you were about to be hit by an electro-craft when you were on drugs. Nothing mattered and no one mattered least of all yourself and all of your problems.

  That's what he craved right now. Blankness. Happiness. Anything but what he currently felt which was tearing him up inside. He'd thought he could fool them all with his act. For almost a year he'd done a pretty good job of it. But in the end you can't hide a tiger's stripes no matter how much paint you use.

  Even Starr had seen through to who Black really was, had seen that Black was not a police lieutenant worth respecting but common street garbage who didn't deserve better than what the empath had tried to do to him. Black fingered a sheet of Bliss tabs that looked like so many innocent candy buttons. If everyone knew why fight it? Temptation called.

  What the hell are you doing?

  He frowned, that wasn't Temptation. He shoved the voice to
the back of his head. An attack of conscience was not what he needed right now. He needed to fly away for a while until he could sort things out and figure out where he would go, what he would do. Until he figured out how far he needed to go to get away from Dickerson's influence.

  And throw away everything that you've given up? Everything that you've done for him?

  "I didn't want to do those things," he muttered. The sound of his voice startled him in its misery. Anxiously, he put down the Bliss and picked up a vial of '28 and shook it, watching it fizz.

  But you did do those things and you did them for a reason. To get away from this. Do you want to go back? You know that he'll drag you back if you cross him.

  Black knew. Of course he fucking knew. It was why he never said no, why he never fought. He owed Dickerson big time. He owed...

  That's right. You owe him for the pathetic life you're trying to ruin right now. You don't have the right to throw yourself away like this. This isn't your life. This isn't your body. They're his. At least for now.

  For now. Black stared at the liquid within the vial he held. Someday this would all change. Someday he would be a free man and if by then he still wanted to kill himself with drugs he would have the right to. And someday if he wanted to be something better – well, he could be that too.

  But you've got to get there, first. Don't break now. You've come so far. Don't break. Not for them.

  He raised his free hand and studied the long burn mark across his palm from when he'd grabbed the tail pipe to get away from Starr. The captain had raped Starr. Black had known it the minute he'd pulled off his helmet back in the garage. And yet even though he'd known, even though his insides had seethed with rage, he'd done nothing. Said nothing.

  His own reaction didn't surprise him. He knew he wasn't good at facing things. He wasn't good at reacting. To feel emotion meant placing yourself on a tightrope over a huge hole full of despair, agony -- you name it -- and trying not to fall into it. That hole scared Black. He'd been trapped in it before. Only recently had he managed to climb out of it and he wasn't about to go anywhere near that edge again.