Acts of Violence

by Ross Harrison

  There was probably some kind of gravity device under the table that would pull me hard to the floor if I tried anything. Or maybe blast me against the wall or the ceiling. I put my palms on the table, each on top of the outline of a hand. Restraints folded out of the table and over my wrists. They were meant to be rubber coated, but the rubber had worn partly on one and completely on the other.

  Lawrence leaned back. The chair creaked. He stared at me. Probably wanted me to get nervous. I was, but he wasn’t going to make it worse. I looked at the upside down timer on his side of the table. Thirty-two seconds had already passed.

  He leaned forward again. Reached for the evidence box. I followed his hand as he slid the lid off and rifled through the contents. The hand came back out with my badge between his index and middle fingers. He regarded it for a moment as though it were the morning paper comic strip. Then he set it down beside the box.

  ‘Harem Police Department,’ he said. He was staring into my eyes again. ‘Funny, I thought you hadn’t made it through the academy. Did you go back, Jack?’

  The scanner in the table would have picked up the increased heart rate, tensed muscles and clenched jaw.

  ‘You didn’t invite me to the graduation,’ he continued. ‘I could have bought you a beer after. For old times’ sake.’ Clenched jaw and narrowed eyes. ‘Which precinct are you in? There’s only two in Harem and it can’t be this one. I think I’d have seen you around. What precinct would let in a killer?’

  The timer said two minutes thirty. Didn’t feel so long. The time was flying by. Soon I’d be strapped to a chair with a needle in my arm. Time wouldn’t matter much then. But it wasn’t the timer that drew my eye. It was the little red flash. That flash told Lawrence he was too close to crossing into a closed case. The scans during that question would still be counted for or against me, but a good lawyer could get that thrown out. Harem didn’t have any good lawyers.

  But the question wasn’t for the sake of the scanner. Or any court. It was just for me.

  ‘You’re not a cop, Jack. Why did we find a police badge in your jacket?’

  ‘Nostalgia.’ I wasn’t helping myself.

  ‘Are you “Officer Mason” or “Detective Mason” when you illegally impersonate a police officer? Maybe you’re “Chief of Detectives Mason”.’

  ‘That’s a hurtful allegation. Who says I’ve impersonated a police officer?’ I had. Often. But the kind of hoods I usually flashed the badge at weren’t the kind of people to report me to the real cops. And Lawrence had no cause to check in Webster’s club yet. The identification would have told him he’d need to look there next though.

  Lawrence smiled. He wasn’t amused. ‘Well I’m sure we can come back to that later.’

  ‘And I’m sure we will.’

  ‘The reason I’ve asked you here today is to tell me a story.’ He leaned back. The chair creaked.

  ‘Is it your bedtime already? I think I remember one about an elephant who lost his balloon…’

  ‘The one I’m thinking of is more like a murder mystery. Except without much mystery. See, I know bits of the story. I just want you to fill in the blanks for me. I know the setting. I know the characters. I know the how. I know the when. I even know the ending. Spoiler alert,’ he held the back of his hand to his mouth and lowered his voice. ‘It ends with a lethal injection for the villain. What I’d like you to tell me is the why.’

  Six minutes and thirteen seconds.

  It was a good question. Why?

  ‘So tell me, Jack. Why did you kill her? Tell me what happened.’

  THREE | RATHER A HORSE’S HEAD

  The heat was sore on my lip. She’d bitten it. Hard. I reached over and ground the butt beside the others.

  She was watching me. I looked down at her. Her hips were pretty much on top of mine, but her head was at the other end of the bed. She’d just collapsed backwards. Not bothered to move. I was still inside her.

  I liked the shine on her smooth thighs. The glinting fake jewel in her navel. She looked odd. One breast had flattened out a bit now she was lying down. Elongated. Gravity. The other sat right up in a pink-crowned dome. That one had a scar on the underside.

  She took one last drag on her cigarette. Pulled herself up through a cloud of smoke. She leaned down and held the bright red tip over the pool of sweat in the little dip in my chest.

  ‘You didn’t ask my name,’ she said. A hiss as the cigarette touched the pool. There wasn’t enough sweat. It burnt.

  ‘You didn’t ask mine first.’ I took the butt and put it with mine. Before she decided to put it out on me. She was like that. She’d bitten and scratched. Not wild and passionate. More like vicious.

  ‘All right, so what’s your name, Detective?’

  ‘Jack Mason.’ I reached for the third cigarette. ‘And I’m not a detective. Badge is fake.’

  ‘You said you were investigating Webster.’ She suddenly sounded serious. Maybe I’d been wrong about how much she knew.

  ‘Did I? Strange thing to say. You hungry?’

  She frowned at me for a moment. Curiosity spliced with frustration. Then she climbed off. ‘Yeah. You still haven’t asked my name.’

  ‘The cupboards are bare. You make the coffee and I’ll go to the store.

  *

  ‘That’s it? That’s your story?’ Lawrence looked surprised. Must have expected me to make up something better.

  ‘Well if you want to hear about the murder itself, I suggest – humbly – that you go and find the killer. I think some cops call it their “job”. Maybe not the cops in this city. But somewhere.’

  ‘Oh. There it is.’ He said it like everything had fallen together. ‘I wondered how long it would take. So you’re innocent? Again?’

  I didn’t respond. Best not to.

  Lawrence leaned forward again. Reached into the box. He moved his hand carefully. What was he being so cautious about? I found out two seconds later when he pulled out a blade. It was in a bag, but it was sharp. Could easily cut through the plastic. It looked like a scalpel, but about six inches long. There were brown tints all over it. Blood.

  He put it on the table. In the middle, but closer to me. He probably wanted to tempt me. Thought maybe I’d try something and get hurt.

  The next thing out of the box was my gun. He put it beside the knife.

  ‘Why didn’t you use your piece? Too loud? Every bullet accounted for. Hasn’t been fired any time recently. It’s even registered to you, nice and legal. I’m surprised.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the knife. Her blood covered it. But that’s not what I was thinking about. Were my prints on it?

  ‘Let’s try again. Tell me what happened. To be more precise, tell me what happened between the girl being alive and her being dead.’

  *

  The store had been robbed. Some hood had burst in with a pistol. The cops hadn’t arrived yet. I must have missed the party by about a minute. No one was hurt. He only got away with fifty credits and some alcohol. That’s what the storekeeper was telling his wife on the comm. But it meant the guy was too shaken up to serve me. Damn shame. I was hungry.

  The next place was about six blocks away. It was closed. I’d forgotten it was Sunday. There was a diner closer than that, but it wouldn’t be open for another few hours. I gave up. Coffee would have to fill the hole.

  Thunder rolled in the distance as I made my way home. There was so much rainwater gushing across it, the sidewalk looked like it was sliding into the road. It made me dizzy. The torrent was about an inch thick. It flowed so fast that it washed up over the side of my shoes and soaked my socks. Each time I put my foot down, it ended up a few inches further towards the road than I’d planned. I must have looked drunk.

  I considered crossing to the other side of the street, but the rain flowed just as quick over there. This was supposed to be the end of summer. There was supposed to be sun. Sure, there was heat, but it just made the rain worse.

  I wouldn’t have be
en surprised if I rounded the next corner to find some guy in a boat. In my head, I got into the boat with him and let the current take me away. Problem was, if you went with the flow in this town, you’d end up taking a dive over a waterfall.

  The streets were pretty empty. They usually were. It wasn’t particularly early, but at this time of the morning half the city’s inhabitants were in bed with hangovers and the other half were hard at work trying keep money coming in. I didn’t know how well we were faring compared to other colonies, but we certainly weren’t thriving. The planet was on the edge of human territory. Our own people had all but forgotten us. On our own, pretty much all we could hope for was to stay alive. Harem would never be prosperous. Even if it were, the prosperity would go to the dealers and thugs. And Cole Webster.

  When I rounded the corner, I was surprised. There was no guy in a boat. But there was an ambulance. And cop cars. And cops. And the cops were going into my apartment building.

  They couldn’t be there for me. If they hadn’t been called to my place last night with the noise the barmaid was making, they wouldn’t have been called this morning. The old lady down the hall had probably twitched her last curtain. Shame. Meant she probably left me her cat.

  I stuck casually to the wall as I neared. Didn’t want to be seen by the cops. If they saw me, they’d stop me. Question me. I wanted my coffee. They’d be knocking on doors later anyway if there was any call for questions.

  When I reached the door, I heard a voice. It was the old man who lived on the bottom floor. I was about the only one in the building who wasn’t old. He was calling to a cop standing at the foot of the stairs. The cop walked over to him and I took the opportunity to slip past and up to my floor. The guy asked what was going on, but I just kept going. I didn’t hear the reply. I’d have turned back around and left if I had. I shouldn’t have been so sure of myself.

  At the top of the stairs, I looked left, towards the old lady’s door. There was only one person in the hall that side. And she was holding an angry looking ginger cat.

  My brain didn’t have time to find disharmony between the old woman staring at me with wide eyes and the assumption I’d made a minute ago. I heard sounds coming from the other direction. My door was open. The sounds weren’t the kind I liked to hear from my apartment. Voices, footsteps, clicks, a short laugh.

  I decided pulling my gun on the cops wasn’t a good idea, even if they had let themselves into my home. I considered leaving, but I’d already been seen. So I stepped through the door.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ The first cop to see me wrenched his pistol out so wildly I thought he’d shoot his own foot. Two other uniforms trained their pistols on me.

  Two detectives stood just inside. They’d turned to face me, but didn’t bother with their own weapons. One of them was familiar.

  ‘Jack Mason.’ He spoke as though seeing an old acquaintance again after a long time. One he didn’t like.

  ‘Detective… No, sorry, it’s slipped my mind.’ It hadn’t. It never would.

  ‘Detective Lawrence.’ He introduced his partner, but I forgot his name right away.

  ‘Right. The guy with the first name for a last name. Do you have a last name for a first name? What was it again?’

  ‘Detective. And what I have is you. For real this time.’

  ‘The hell are you talking about?’ That was a long time ago. And yesterday. Both at once.

  Lawrence stepped aside. I nearly threw up.

  The girl wasn’t making coffee. She’d been about to. The cupboard over the sink was open. Two mugs were sitting on the side. But then something had happened. Something that ended with…this.

  I took a couple of steps further in. The partner motioned to stop me, but Lawrence backed him off. I guessed later that he wanted to see how my acting had improved.

  Police technicians swarmed the place. I ignored them. Something drew my eye to the ceiling. There was blood even there. It was everywhere. On the floor, on the bed, in the kitchen. And all over the girl.

  The whole room was turned over. Someone had searched hard for something. It wasn’t the girl getting thrown around. The blood wasn’t spread about enough, although there was a lot of it. There was a hole in the wall, smeared with blood. Her face did that. A smashed lamp on the floor, also bloody. Everything was bloody. Two smashed plates on the kitchen floor. Bloody footprints, deliberately smeared.

  The girl wasn’t on the bed where I’d left her. Well, most of her wasn’t. She was lying on the back of my overturned armchair. She’d put her underwear back on, but nothing else. The bra had been ripped mostly off. It stayed on only by one strap around her elbow. An elbow that was bent the wrong way. Most of her skin was red, orange or black. The same dark brown eyes that had stared into mine while she groaned and writhed on top of me stared at me again now. Accusing. But unseeing. There was no shine to them now. The whites were red.

  And then I couldn’t put it off any longer. My eyes moved to her breasts. Or rather, breast. One of them only raised about two inches into the air, elongated. Gravity. The fawn was mostly disguised by dark red now. The other breast was gone. Where it should have been was a rough, lumpy, dark red circle.

  My eyes moved to the bed. On the pillow sat the missing breast. A browning stain spread around it.

  *

  Lawrence sat back in his chair. It creaked.

  The timer read twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds. Just over twenty-seven minutes closer to my death. The lawful murder of an innocent man. I hadn’t done it. That’s what I’d told Lawrence. He’d never believe it.

  ‘So you conveniently wandered out for food at just the right time? Went off looking for breakfast just long enough for somebody to let themselves into your building. Let themselves into your apartment. And kill the girl.’

  ‘Just the right time?’ The scanner would note the increased heat and heart rate. The flared nostrils. ‘Hardly seems convenient to me that I was out while a girl was getting cut to pieces in my apartment! Yeah, real convenient, you ridiculous prick.’

  ‘Where’s the food, Jack?’

  ‘I told you, the store had just been robbed. I didn’t get any.’

  He pointed at the scalpel. Opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘My prints aren’t on it, are they?’ I said. More of a statement. I knew it wasn’t mine and I doubted anyone would have planted my prints on it. Easier to take my gun and shoot her with it. Except they’d have had to take it from me first.

  ‘Do you suppose that means something? Have you heard of gloves, Jack? Finger salves?’ You could rub that stuff onto your hands and it would solidify, covering your prints. It lasted a few hours. Cheap too.

  I stayed quiet. I wanted to shout at him. Call him as many names as I could think of. There were two problems with that. Firstly, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Of all the cops in Harem, he was probably the cleanest. From what I’d heard anyway. All he was doing was investigating. And he had damn good reason to suspect me. Second, the table would give me a shock to remind me of my place. That would just make me angrier. It would shock me again. It would continue until one of us gave up. I doubted it would be the little computer chip inside the table.

  There was a single rap on the door and it opened. Lawrence’s eyes flicked up. I saw the flash of excitement. I’d have bet good money it was his partner, back from investigating something. Probably the club. Things were about to look worse for me.

  He tapped something on the table display. The timer froze at twenty-nine minutes and forty seconds. It felt as though my death sentence had been put on hold for a little while.

  A very little while. Lawrence didn’t even leave the room. Whoever it was whispered into his ear for less than a minute. Then the door closed and Lawrence sat back down. Resumed the timer. He looked almost happy.

  ‘Where’d you meet the girl, Jack?’

  He definitely knew about the club.

  ‘The Web.’

  ‘She was a few years a
bove most of their patrons.’ I didn’t say anything. He knew damn well she worked there. ‘Witnesses say that you assaulted Webster junior and then practically abducted the girl while hiding behind a Harem PD badge.’

  I said nothing. It was surprising how fuzzy even recent memories can get the moment a little heat is on you. Like the car windshield on a cold morning. I was trying to remember everything about last night. Exactly how and when it happened.

  ‘Let’s start with the assault. I think that’s what set you off on the girl. Webster was out cold when you left. You didn’t get enough of a kick out of smashing up his face, so you moved on to the girl. Worked out the rest of the adrenaline.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Broken cheek bone. Fractured skull. Cracked teeth, some missing. Broken collarbone. Dislocated shoulders. Both of them. Broken elbow. Broken fingers. Half-crushed larynx. I won’t even start on the internal organs. And then of course, your crowning achievement. The thing that really wins you the sick fuck award. You sliced off her breast.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s evidence of sexual assault too, as if all that weren’t bad enough.’ She’d been wild. Rough. That made things better last night. Worse today.

  ‘No!’

  My feet pushed off the floor. The restraints kept me pinned down, pulling painfully at my wrists. I was back in the ice cold shower. My funny bone had been set upon by a hammer again. Felt like nearly a minute before my legs finally relaxed and I collapsed back into the chair.

  I closed my eyes. Tried to ignore the stinging pulses and calm down. I couldn’t argue my case through gritted teeth. Or through a million volts. Or whatever it was. Felt like ten million.

  ‘Calm down, Jack.’ The calm voice flared my anger again for a second. ‘There’s no need to bring pain into your last moments of relative freedom. Was it the rape? Were you hoping you got away with that? You did a lot of bad things last night.’

  ‘I fucked the girl four times and finished her smokes. That’s it. She consented to both. I’m not sure she was as happy about making the coffee.’ I straightened my thoughts out a little and took a risk. ‘I can prove it wasn’t me.’