by Finn, Emilia
“What?” My pulse skitters like crazy. “No.”
“You’re so tightly wound, Lib. You’re so insanely on edge all the time. It’s like you’re waiting for me to slap you down and take your badge.”
“I don’t—I’m not…”
“You’re not your daddy,” he murmurs. Sitting forward, he presses his hands together and laces his fingers. “It would suck to have the last name of a man you don’t respect. Especially in the same field of work. It would suck being in an industry run mostly by men. But you worked for your position in my squad, Lib. You earned that badge, and you earn it every single day that you come to work. I’ve never once compared you to your father. I don’t consider all kids to be products of their parents. I don’t consider all kids to be the same in behavior. Your father was crooked, but you’re so straight you’re gonna snap. Your father brought shame to the badge. But you add shine. Every single day you wear it, you clean off some of the filth and make it shinier. So I’ll ask again; anything you wanna talk about?”
“It’s just…” I lift a hand, then let it drop. “I just…” I grunt from the frustration of knowing what I want to say, but being too scared to voice it.
But then our eyes meet, and he reminds me he’s the leader worthy of respect.
“I don’t want anyone to think I could be dirty,” I whisper. “I don’t even want it to be a thought running through their mind. It would break my damn heart to work so hard, only for residual suspicion to leak onto me.”
“But, Lib, no one has ever thought that about you… except you.” Alex shifts on the edge of my desk and makes himself comfortable. “Hayes was in this very fucking station, but no one thought it had anything to do with you. We had his case boards filling the war room, but did you hide what you knew of that man?” He sits back and shakes his head. “Nope. You dug in deep and gave us everything–even your memories as a child. Cruz was in here, and he wasn’t exactly on the up and up. He wasn’t a bad cop, but he was sneaking. Who suspected it first?” Blue eyes bore into mine. “Wasn’t me. It was you. You’re so attuned to the station and everyone’s behavior, you called Cruz long before I did. You near ripped his head off when he said you’d taken his lunch. You thought he was dirty, and you were ready to take him out. But the second he was proven innocent, you admitted you were wrong and apologized. You treated him fairly, when I guess I was still caught up in my anger. He wasn’t dirty, but he still lied, and that messed with me. You’ve proven yourself, Lib. Not all children are their fathers, not everyone grows up to carry on the family business. You’ve done your job, you continue to do your job. You demand our respect and belief, but you don’t believe in yourself.” Standing, Alex gives a sad little shake of his head. “You’re a good cop, Libby. You’re one of the best. Don’t get so caught up in someone else’s behavior that you forget your own.”
I walk away from my station with a little less weight on my heart, if not a smile. My chief believes me. He believes in me. And really, as the daughter of a crooked cop serving life in prison for multiple counts of murder, corruption, embezzlement, theft, assault, drugs and gun-related crimes, that’s all I can hope for.
I slide into my car and sit for a moment.
I’m so straight I’m going to break.
Well, if that ain’t the truth.
A yawn overtakes my body and forces my mouth so wide that my face aches. My eyes water, and when I look at my hand, I huff at the spots of dried blood that flew from Donohue’s face.
“Shit.”
I switch on the ignition and pull away from the curb. I need to go home and reset. I need to stop freaking out about every little thing at work. I’m thirty-one years old, not nine, and I don’t have to apologize anymore for my father’s actions.
He’s in prison, he was proven guilty.
I’m free, I don’t have dimples in my knees anymore, and I have the respect of my CO and colleagues.
I’m a good fucking cop, and there’s not a soul on this planet that can take that away from me.
2
Theo Griffin
Silence is Power
The news hit hard — on every channel, on every screen, every department store window I passed, and every tweet that bleeped and annoyed the ever-living shit out of me until I tossed my phone to my assistant and told her to take it away. Half a year has passed since the day that rocked my world, again, but I remember it as clearly now as if it happened only this morning.
Colum Bishop — that mother-murdering bastard — is dead.
The news was both freeing and annoying. Satisfying and oppressive. It made me giddy with relief, but then it sent me into the kind of funk I hadn’t experienced in decades; I wanted to be the reason he was eliminated from this world. I wanted to own the bullet that passed through his brain, and I wanted to control the finger that gently massaged the trigger of a gun.
I’d planned for it to be me; for two long decades, it was a promise and a goal. But not everyone gets what they want, and life has never hinted that I would be one of the lucky ones.
At least he’s dead, at least he’s gone. It shouldn’t matter to me who did it.
I remember the Breaking News banner that relentlessly slid across my screen. It played all day and night, an unending reminder that interrupted every commercial, every show, every news piece. His name was every-fucking-where as I tried to go about my day.
It’s not like I wasn’t busy with my work, and it’s not like I didn’t already know everything the journalists were crying about. I knew more than they did, I knew it earlier, I knew the facts, but like vultures on a carcass, they took whatever scrap was offered, even knowing it was shitty intel and lacked the very thing they as journalists promise — facts.
Colum Bishop was taken out in a police standoff, and the bullet that passed through his brain belonged to a small-town cop from a town in the back of nowhere.
Apt, I suppose. I possess a deep loathing for the police, but that one dude might have received a Christmas card and gift from my company last year.
I used to be a boy who slept behind dumpsters and raided the trash from fancy restaurants. They knew a child lived in their alleyways, so where they once callously tossed their leftovers, they began leaving them in foam containers. Those containers still had to go in the trash – something about workplace policy – but when you’re hungry, you don’t give a single shit about where the food came from. When it’s still lukewarm and smells of garlic and spices, you’re willing to eat the damn foam to get to it.
That was my life from eleven to seventeen.
I ran away from a dark club after watching my father and his friends murder my mother, I ran into an alley, and I didn’t leave again for a long time. I had nowhere to go. I had no one to run to. I didn’t have keys to access my apartment, and even if I did, I didn’t have transport to get there. Hitchhiking the three hours’ drive didn’t enter my mind until I was older, and by that point, my mom had already been buried and the ‘army guy’ — Colum Bishop — had moved on.
My apartment would have been packed up by the first of the month when the rent wasn’t paid, and that sweater, that stupid fucking red sweater with little white dinosaurs, was a symbol for everything I wanted in life but could never have again. It was just a sweater, but to me, it was symbolic. It was the theft of my childhood. The murder of my family. The scars a boy had been given, and the nightmares that same boy had to endure.
Night after night, a child’s brain played on repeat the last seconds of his mother’s life. It was a steady stream through my conscience, just like the ribbons of Breaking News on my television screen.
My mother was nothing more than trash in Colum Bishop’s eyes. She was worth less to him than the foam dishes were to the restaurant staff who periodically fed me.
My growth spurts, those spurts I was kind of proud of and showed off to a short, chubby girl with cute hair, slowed. You can’t grow the way I had been when you have no food or a safe space to sleep. You can’t mai
ntain that kind of growth, and though my body wanted it for me — my body ached, and my eyes drooped — food and sleep are instrumental in that process.
I had easy access to neither.
That was more than twenty years ago, but that boy is not the same as the man I am now. That boy died long ago, eliminated in the dark and reborn again as someone else. Gunner Bishop was murdered the same day his mother was, deleted from this world. His medical records just… stopped.
Schooling, stopped.
Dental, stopped.
Even the after-school program where he could play ball with counsellors, or draw in the quiet rather than be home alone seven days a week, it was all gone.
The news spoke of the missing child. They considered it foul play, and really… wasn’t it? It seemed pretty fucking foul to me. Watching your mother’s rape and then her murder, sleeping in the freezing cold and wishing for your sweater more than you wished for your mother or a meal, it was all symbolic of a pretty fucking foul life.
Gunner Bishop died when he was eleven years old.
That child was nameless for years. He was voiceless, because he had no one to talk to, no one who would listen if he spoke. Selective mutism? I think that’s what those with the important degrees call it.
For six years, he literally didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. And when you do something for such a prolonged period of time, or in my case, don’t do something, it becomes a way of life.
When you lose one sense — for me, that was speech — the others become stronger. I was able to hear the footsteps of a rat in my alleyway. I was able to smell salmonella when science says it’s impossible. I was able to ignore the heat and cold, effectively turning my body into one giant callus. Weightlifters and laborers have callused hands. At first, they get blisters, it hurts and makes a man miserable. But eventually, those hands toughen up, they become hard, and nothing can hurt them again.
Spending the tail end of a winter living in an alleyway; that’s all it took for me to harden the fuck up.
Fuck that sweater, I didn’t need it. Fuck my mom, I didn’t need her either. Fuck Colum Bishop; he would eventually die at my callused fucking hands. I just needed time. I needed patience. I needed to use what I had; my brains.
My creative side wanted to draw, but the logical side knew drawing would get me nowhere. So I channeled my creativity elsewhere. I drew pictures at first, because a smart man uses the tools he already has. I drew, I posted a For Sale sign at the end of the alleyway, I hawked those images to sympathetic passersby, and with the money I made, I rebuilt broken down computers, because that was another skill I possessed.
I sold my drawings for between two and ten dollars apiece. I sold refurbished computers for a hundred.
It took my eleven-year-old brain only minutes to figure out where to focus my attention.
I made my way to the old computer store, three blocks up, as often as I could, stole what they considered trash from their dumpsters, purchased the parts I needed, or made them myself, if they were too expensive or simply didn’t exist yet. I rebuilt, rebranded, and sold those old machines to people who wanted a good computer for a tenth of the price.
And that’s how Griffin Industries was born.
I didn’t call it that back then. I didn’t call myself anything. I just sat in my silence and let my brain keep my body afloat. I needed food, so I earned and purchased it — or more often, I stole it. I needed a blanket and a mattress, so I earned enough to purchase. In reality, I stole that stuff too.
I enjoy stealing.
To buy something I earned feels sweet. But to take it feels a thousand times better.
To take it from a big corporation making billions, who could afford to float a kid’s basic needs, was the sweetest flavor of them all.
Now I’m forced to talk to people on a daily basis, though I keep it to the barest minimum. I eat and sleep in comfort, though I still steal as often as the opportunity presents itself. Why? Because it feels good.
Griffin Industries is a technological empire on the cutting edge of innovation. It started as a hungry boy in an alleyway, and now boasts innovative divisions that beat out almost every other bidder in the mechanical division. We bid lower than everyone else. We under promise and over deliver. We take perverse pleasure in undercutting the competition, sending their businesses into the ground, then reaping the rewards of a market that is almost exclusively ours.
We continue to quote low, despite the lack of competition and the option to gouge money from clients. We could fix prices and completely fuck the industry, but that would screw all the little guys.
I only take pleasure in ruining those bigger than me. There’s no point picking on those smaller. That’s not a victory at all.
Those that are smaller come to me when they can’t keep up, they beg to be swallowed up by Griffin, I pay them well and above their asking price, and bring their owners and executives in as part of my executive team. If they were smart enough to establish themselves in the first place, then they’re smart enough to be part of my team. I pay my executives high six-figure salaries to ease the pain of losing control, plus bonuses every time we win a contract and sweep it out from the bigger tech companies.
It’s stealing, and I fucking bask in it.
Griffin Industries has more than a hundred thousand ground-level employees who all earn an above average wage. We have an incentive program where we pay for education if it’ll benefit my company. A kid wants to become an electrical or mechanical engineer? Go for it. When he or she graduates, they have a guaranteed job, a monetary bonus as reward for graduating, and if they graduated with honors and their final thesis intrigues me, they’re sent to my office for an interview to enter my executive team.
If you’re smart enough to graduate a program like that with honors, then I’m smart enough to know I’d like to sit down over a meal and chat about where Griffin Industries can go next.
My company believes in the voiceless little guy. It might not seem that way, with how I buy up the little guys, but this is how we build a bigger army. Splitting our efforts and having a hundred tiny tech companies spread out through the country is dumb. It’s weak. So I bring them all under one roof. We combine our forces, we combine those brains and their collective knowledge, then we take down the bullies that sit above us.
What will I do once I reach the top?
I’m truly not sure. But once I’m there, I hope to still be that same boy in my heart. I steal, but only from those who can afford it. I lie, but only to those who don’t deserve truth. I want to be able to stand at the top of my mountain and look down at the path I walked. I don’t want to see burning valleys and broken people. I’d rather see kids like me being helped up. I’d rather see hope, and education, perhaps a little law-breaking, but only when the law is wrong.
I hire thieves. Because I know how their minds work.
I hire liars. Because I know why they’re lying, and I know they’re not lying to me.
I hire the smartest brains, and put them to work continuing what I started.
I guess in a way, we’re the Robin Hood of the tech world. The sheriff of Nottingham considered Robin a criminal. And yet, the story is of Robin’s happiness and good deeds, no?
Fuck the haters and fuck the jealous. I found a hole in the market, I filled it, I continue to fill it. And in between conference calls, I dig into the data of those who’ve stepped on me.
Colum Bishop.
Officer Raymond Tate
Abel Hayes
The unnamed suit from that day… it took until I was twenty-one and had access to data I hadn’t earlier, to find out his name was Sean Frankston. Another drug dealer. Another woman-beater. Colleague to Colum or competition, I could never tell. He went to prison a few years back for crimes similar to those Bishop and Hayes committed, but it wasn’t connected. Not officially, anyway. Never in the government files. Frankston’s arrest remains to this day unconnected to Bishop’s empire, but when he was sent a
way, he became a non-issue for me.
I’m not here to help the cops or feds. I’m not here to straighten out files or add prison sentences to an already lifetime sentence. If Frankston had a chance at parole, I would take care of it, for his part in my mother’s death. But since he’s not, he doesn’t rate my attention.
Tate has been locked away, Hayes was taken out in a club similar to the kind I was walked through when I was eleven, and a year after Hayes’ death, Colum met his end.
My enemies are being taken out without my interference, which is both relieving and irritating. I’d made plans like a domino effect, where I’d pop them one by one, but each time I get close to making a move, someone else steps in and takes care of it. It keeps my hands clean, I suppose. But it’s annoying that I continue to sit at the starting line, waiting for the buzzer.
But now we have a whole new wave of Bishops I had no clue existed.
Kane Bishop is Colum’s oldest son, and Jay, his second. I didn’t know Colum had sons other than me; I didn’t know it when I was eleven, and I didn’t know it in all the years I sat in an alleyway, surviving on scraps and bitterness.
I didn’t know it until I was in my early twenties, because what d’ya know, Kane Bishop was a decorated ATF agent, supposedly instrumental in the takedown of a business similar to his daddy’s. And Jay was rising up the ranks, following his big brother and smiling for all of the pictures.
They looked like such a happy fucking family; a father and his two sons. They all held official titles. All with awards and ceremonies. All with the same fucking eyes and square jaws.
The same as my square jaw.
Colum Bishop posed with his sons in uniform, all smiles, published quotes, ‘I’m proud of my boys.’ That snake fucking prick had created two more of him, he helped them into positions of power, ATF and DEA, guns and drugs, and he never again had to worry about getting his product in and around the country.