Five Minutes: A Desk Job in East Chattanooga

I sat down hard in the chair and reached up to pull the radio mic off my shoulder, dropping it on the desk in front of me. I logged into the network and while Windows loaded I reached below the buttons of my shirt and pulled the hidden zipper down and slipped the uniform shirt off, draping it around the back of my chair. I was finally able to pull the Velcro straps off my armor off with a sharp rip, and the instant relief was countered by the corpse-like smell it had concealed. There has never been any comparable sensation in going from the hot tightly-wrapped confines of Kevlar to the release of pressure and sensation of cool air on once hidden skin…better than the shock of cold beer on a sweltering day, or getting in a warm car on a cold day.

I punched in my login information from muscle memory and pulled police reports off the server waiting for approval and then stared at a screen full of information, yet reading nothing.

Jesus, was that smell me? I rolled back and glanced to see blood still on my boots, but it didn’t have time to have gone over, and there certainly weren’t any brains on them; I had been careful.

I rolled forward again and took a moment to cup my face in my hands, elbows firmly spread on the desk. The pressure it relived was almost as nice as peeling off the vest, and my back involuntarily relaxed as I gave in to the relief. Minutes passed before I looked at the screen through split fingers.

An anonymous person had reported the presence of a suspicious person with no description on Stanfiel Street, and documentation showed that no one had located the unknown person in question as reported by the non-existent caller. On Derby Street, ‘Malcolm’ had been approached by a man who offered to rent him a car for $10 dollars. Malcolm thought this quite the bargain and took him up on his offer, stretching his value for three and a half hours before leaving it as ordered on a nearby street corner; Malcolm was shocked to find the vehicle had actually been stolen from its owner, who apparently not been the same man who had rented it to him for what was now, in retrospect, an offer too good to be true. He lamented his luck and was transported to jail, a victim of circumstance. Approved, approved...

My hand found my face again while reading, covering my eyes… I thought back to the red shag carpet earlier that framed a deformed but shiny copper slug like a diamond laying in a field of smoothed scarlet soil. For the first time I could completely understand a crows fascination with shiny objects because I had locked on to it, transfixed during my search of the house, pistol barrel dipping in absentia. The metal was distinguished by a thin thread of blood dried along its one smooth side; it was so beautiful, so…elemental, the copper and blood, pure and uncomplicated. Blood coagulated in thick pools nearby looking like a light and dark crimson swirled marble on the surface, a trick of oxygen leaving some parts more quickly others, still trying to seal off a wound in veins and arteries in which it no longer flowed. Such engineering.

Gangsta Rap came over the PC speakers from a random play selection and snapped me out of my brief trance, and I got back to work. I was out of coffee and I was tired, and my only company being a row of mismatched file cabinets was not helping. Long drive ahead and I just wanted to be asleep…and maybe to see that bullet one more time. Would they throw it away after the trial?

Maybe I’d swing by Stanfiel Street on the way home, in case the undescribed person was still in the area near the anonymous callers house… I’d talk to them, and be firm yet polite. Then I would sleep. It was still dark outside, after all.

The Cults, the Brain, the Meat Pt. II

I haven't typed for a while because while my stories are even more disturbing...they are also true, and as a supervisor I have a different responsibility to typing about them. Until I figure the balance out, the Weirdness will have to wait. But I'll start keeping up with this again, I promise. 'Sorry'.

_______________________________


Even now the building became colder, the shadows darker, and my co-workers further from me. I didn’t show a visible shudder…but it was there all the same.

The investigator looked at me and asked what I thought, and I returned the stupid look that he deserved. There was no thinking here just yet—there was only the realization that I was in a building used for the processing of human flesh and who or what would do such a thing, not to mention the reasons why, were somewhat out of grasp at the moment. Which is why I asked for the now scarcely found cigarette. Cigars were my choice for crime scenes, but I wasn’t one for structure and keeping well-stocked. God…I just wanted to be normal, not have to remember to buy cigars in the event of corpses appearing now and then. Well, not always anyway.

Others had already begun the mundane tasks of locating property owners, lease documents, and tax records. It wasn’t long before they were located and just as long before they couldn’t be found…but eventually a name came up as well as a body to match it. I talked to him; I was cool.

“When was the last time you were here, Mr. Ramsey?” I asked. The gentleman was in his early 40’s, white, well kept, and scared. He hid it as best he could, but there was no mistaking the shifting of his eyes, hands, and feet. “I rented it in August, that’s all. That’s what I do, I rent property for people, I don’t keep it up I don’t even see it much beforehand. Look at it, Christ.”

“It’s October, man. Look around. Know what that is over there?” I pointed to a scrap of pink remains pushed up against the corner of the back steps of the home and where they met the sidewalk. “Brains, man. Brains. And not cow or pig. Do you get what I’m saying?” The guy was a statue. He got what I was saying.

“What’s happened here is something no one has been able to wrap their heads around—so to speak. To be honest, I’m pretty fucked up about it myself. Can’t think. Still hard to breath. And all I have to show for my work so far is you, which puts you right…about…here”, I said as I held up my flattened palm just below my nose. Who’d you lease this to? What’s their name? And is this the only place?”

The comment broke the statuesque pose of Mr. Ramsey who had been holding his mouth agape for the last two minutes while I rambled, and he snapped-to like a man coming out of a trance on a hypnotist’s stage. “Yes! “ he exclaimed, shaking unseen cobwebs from his face as he did so. “Cowart Street, near the stockyards! A whole house! I have the address here..in the car…”

I took it and handed him over to a co-worker. He wasn’t done. None of us were, including the flies who had just started a shift of their own. God, I hope it wasn’t going to be too hot out here today.

I left, and called for a Uniform in another district to meet me near the new house on Cowart, but none were available at the moment. Fucking city…too many barking dogs, not enough tax base.
I waited a few minutes, and opted for a ‘preliminary’ drive by like we were taught on all raids; that’s when I saw him, and stopped to get out. ‘What the fuck’, I thought. It was already weird as it was. How much worse could it get?

The Cults, the Brain, the Meat Pt. I

It was dark outside, but cool as I walked up the sidewalk to the rear of the apartments to find the investigator hunched down, poking a pen into a pile of something. They had just erected the spotlights on small tripods and everything seemed well defined, albeit off by a few degrees of light here and there.

The pile he was investigating was pink. It was the bright color of freshly ground pork, but not steaming; it was just there, pink tubular butcher-ground flesh in an oblong mound, marbled with fat. It was scattered on the sidewalk, but piled largely in a grass-covered void just below the sidewalk that ended abruptly at a concrete wall that led about three feet down to parking spaces below. This was of note because while the pile was substantial in the void, there was little waste on the sidewalk itself or the space below the wall. There were obvious places where feet had tread through here, but little was scattered around as would be expected in such a sloppy mess. It was so compact, it was hard to tell where the original mass had come from even though it was largely near one particular back door.

The investigator stood up, a white male in his late 20’s. The corners of his mouth were curled downward in disgust and puzzlement while he tried to figure out what this was, where it came from, and how to disguise it from himself from what it may just be. The latter was a reflex by the human mind, but found only amongst those that either still have a bit of humanity left to them or have only had a few years on the job. He looked over at me as I approached and without a word expressed gratitude from the break in having to share this all to himself.

We consulted, and I found that this thing was barely in the infancy of its investigations; a caller reported a flurry of activity, the presence of meat en masse, and what we had left before us. This wasn’t the most common of scenes upon arrival, but for those that tend to death as a profession, the presence of large quantities of meat usually meant two things: Someone was dead, and Someone had to be told about it. This scene was by no means the norm, but the destination seemed inevitable. God, what a shitty job.

I turned back to the sidewalk, and began wondering where this had come from. All the doors aligning the complex seemed the same, but that was almost always the case. I walked along with some uniforms in advance and in tow, and found a door a few feet north that was slightly ajar. It was always the goddamn obvious, and here I was.

There is a dynamic to walking into a place where you know something awful has occurred, and that whatever it was that caused it may not be done yet, and you were likely the next candidate because ‘it’ knew that you were likely to be the last to be through such an opening without advance notice. It’s a lot to think about, but so little to do…when you just go through. I did.

The back door led into a kitchen as they so often do in homes. White vinyl floors broken apart in small squares separated by grey; wood toned cabinets…there was lighting from a small fluorescent above the sink, but the light was sickly. It showed enough, however, to reveal a stainless steel chute near the rear dining room table to a room below.

The chute was littered with the same pink marbled ground meat, but as with outside, there was little clutter of the same around. Baffling.

I approached the chute more closely, and the closer I came the more meat I saw in the chute. I looked around the room to gather signs of life…kids pictures, family photos, generic prints…but saw nothing that made the hairs on my neck curl. It was creepy; there was obviously a murder scene, but without a body or evidence outside of what appeared to be a butchers block. And so while I realized I had already realized it...my rational mind allowed ‘it’ to strike me.

I was in a slaughterhouse, however its architects intended it to be.

It's a 4th Avenue Thang

Recovered: 03.05.2006



The dog was a Weimaraner, a young female, or as I dubbed her--a Grey Dog. She was penned into what was once the playground of a McDonald’s restaurant that was now, of course, a Hispanic Discothèque. I reached through the bars and coaxed her to me, and she eventually came over with her tail between her legs, or what was left of a tail anyway. It appeared to be crudely cut off about halfway up, but had healed well. She had a beautiful silvery sheen and good lines; her resemblance to a Lab is what got my attention at first, but the True Owners notice the difference in the clavicles and hips, and of course that missing spark of Personality that the Lab’s seem to alone possess.

It was cool outside, and there was a breeze blowing off the Interstate nearby under a cloudless sunny sky, and I checked to see what she had in the way of food and water available. The dishes were steel and in an expensive rack setup, but instead of water she had been given beer; there was still foam in it. I emptied it out and went to my trunk where I keep my bottled water—you never know when you need it or why, and if you need it enough you won’t mind if it’s hot, I’ve found—and filled her dish with two of them. She’d shied away again and I went back to the gate where I had showed her why Brown Dog so enjoyed her own ears being rubbed at thumb point, when I heard the squeal of tires behind me from the direction of the Projects. That was not uncommon, but the dog was, so I ignored it in her favor. It was the shrieking sounds of women and screams for ‘POLICE’ that got my attention.


I walked away from the gate where once landscaped shrubbery had turned into tangled jungle growth, and saw a crowd forming on 4th Avenue in front of the East Lake Courts. A vagrant known for repairing vacuum cleaners from parts gleaned in alleyways was shambling across a dusty parking lot towards me and was yelling something unintelligible about someone hitting a baby and ‘getting on the highway’. My pace quickened to a trot, and I got into my Lawmaster to close the distance of a few hundred feet. I pulled up and saw a crumpled yellow coat on the ground near the curb, and as I got out, my pace now quickened to a run, and I called for a ’20 and Fire. There was a kid under that coat.

He wasn’t moving. He was six years old and he was bleeding from the mouth and nose face down on the asphalt, and I could see the side of his head expanding from the fantastic pressure the heart puts on the brain when its protective shell is cracked. I was down on all fours, and the crowd was moving in; it’s a 4th Avenue Thang, but for the first time in a while I wasn’t worried about the crowd forming an umbrella over me in order to better pluck my gun from its holster to murder me with; instead, it was just out of curiosity. The only one not peeking in was a woman sitting next to him on the curb holding her jaw in her hands, neither breathing nor moving, so I surmised her to most likely be the mother. I asked her for his name and she could only slightly shake her head. She was gone, and I ignored her from there on out but without malice. The Clamps had simply come down.

I reached around his neck and with the assistance of the blood, slipped a finger to his carotid pulse and found it present, but labored from the fluid he was unable to cough out. He wasn’t moving or responding to the obvious injuries to his head, much less my voice, so I ordered the crowd back as best I could and sought his name; you don’t perform CPR on those breathing with a pulse. An Aunt came forward, and I relayed what she knew over my radio to the ambulance I’d called for and stayed with him, my leather grinding against the pavement as I sought comfort while comforting. I was curled around him because all children, when injured, become our own.

I heard the skidding of tires and thought briefly about possibly being struck myself—again, it’s a 4th Avenue Thang—and was relieved to see that it was the oncoming shift, fresh from line-up. Their mouths were open as they approached because besides seeing what I was protecting, they saw me lying on the street about as frequently as they heard me talk/yell while running on the air. Chaos was now coalescing into order as muscle memory set in, and the cops surrounded the scene, preserving it while making room for the ’20 that was due any minute/hour/day. Detectives were showing up also, because it was his kid as much as mine, as much as the Paramedics coming in, which they did after the usual eternity of waiting and began taking over, all calm but the apparent student that stopped in her tracks.

I held his cervical spine in all of one hand; he had begun to move, but it was an involuntary curling-in and jerking associated with serious trauma, and not that of an injured boy. His eyes were rolled back. I straddled him as they put a spinal board on the ground beside him, and we moved him onto it in one motion, and I coo’d his name in his ears as I’d done from the start. His eyes were slightly open now and looking into the sky, but the sunlight did not affect the iris’s and my heart sank while my voice held. I stepped back and got into the Lawmaster again, and made efforts to start having other cars start blocking intersections. When under stress and in large numbers, you find work for others to do—including yourself. It worked like a charm, and the boy was in the emergency room before I registered what I’d pumped into the radio from street to street, our City at a halt for the boy inside the box behind me, and I was there in the E.R. listening to his life being dictated in terms of minutes instead of years. They were bagging him now, and double doors throughout the E.R. were being thrust aside straight out of a television show. The firemen gathered in one corner, the cops in another, myself closest to the ICU to hear the status. A hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear indicated the parents had arrived, and I was off. I would want to hear from me, were I them.

We spoke. It was not quickly. It was personal.

I left their sterile room, and wandered a hall…and found sunlight. A cop was outside waiting by his own Lawmaster, his fledgling in tow, and he asked me if I was alright; he said he’d never seen me ‘that bad’ on the scene, and I remembered him being the first one there when I looked up from my prone position above the kid on the street, and I reassured him I was in fact ‘cool’, and that I appreciated him coming here also. We were quiet, leaning against the fenders of the Prowlers for a moment and said all we needed to in silence, until we parted ways off to home and side jobs. On the way I tried to call my ex-wife to find my own son and found that there was blood on my sleeve still, and as the answering machine picked up I began to wipe that sleeve on my right midriff absently with phone in hand, admiring the setting sun. It was time to go home, and the Boy finally answered. We spoke of Star Wars Episode II and Age of Empires games until he no longer could stand it, and parted ways, but with myself no longer shaking.

I grabbed my log sheet and noted the time and addresses, and an arrow was placed beneath the code for ‘Pedestrian Struck’ after my last entry; it was, after all, a 4th Avenue Thang.

Time for the next shift.


Selah.

Bicycle Blues

Recovered: 05/23/2006



He looked at the victim straight in the eye, and crossed his white, scarred arms. “Yo bike was like five feet from the driveway, how was I supposed t’know it was yo’s?”

“It wasn’t yours son, that much all three of us know.”

He looked at me, clenched his teeth, and spit at my feet.

“Never do that again. Never, ever show disrespect like that, or I’ll spank you son, right here in the middle of 6th Avenue.” A smile faded, and pursed lips replaced objective listening.

“Sheeit. You ain’t gonna do a fuckin’ thing. I’m seventeen. Get the fuck on out of here.”

He was right. About his age…but little else. He couldn’t help that…but that was a failing I had to help him with, and I readily admit—he had already gotten under my skin. My headache was worsening by the second. Millisecond. It was awful.

“You’re wrong. She saw you stealing her sons bike. What I will now do is Arrest you.”

I reached out and touched him with my left hand, cuffs in the right. He had lifted the bike over an eight foot fence, and the owner hadn’t just watched him, she got in her car and followed him around on it. For half an hour, trying to get police there.

When we were called and caught up, the kid was standing in the street, flipping her off. His oversized trucker cap was sitting crooked on his head, his eyes the slits of classic Southern inbreeding, narrow and stupid, but the kid was firm in his resolution. I’ll give him that.

His arms were now locked in their folded stance, and he was making choices. “You’re not putting fucking cuffs on me” he said, and my partner heard this and grabbed him from behind, poorly and with no tactical direction in mind. There was never a time for debate over this as is expected by the Uninitiated liberal crowd, but then…they wouldn’t debate it if they’d ever had to deal with Real People before. At any rate, the ‘kid’ now came unglued, a fight had begun roughly one second before he lost his feet and found the trunk of a Crown Victoria, and reasoning came to him as rusty steel clasps secured his hands. Jesus, I was already breathing heavy; the kid shouldn’t have gotten to me so quickly.

I helped him upright again, as the victim warned against retaliation as it came naturally to her—“When you think of getting back at me, think twice—my brother’s a cop, and I’ll fucking do you, kid.” He wrinkled his mouth and began to spit, and I distracted him by knocking his ball cap over his head and holding his nape firmly while I whispered something personal in his ear, something not for you, avid reader, but me and the kid. He became strangely calm, and I took him to jail.


I thought about how I would have reacted to seeing that all transpire from the side of the road, and used it to do what I always do—remind me why people hate cops, hate their tactics, and love their results without ever knowing it. God, my head was still pounding.

The processing was quick because the attendants at Juvenile believed in what they were doing, unlike the rest of us, but they were nice to be around.

I went back, and looked for a cave to crawl into thinking cool darkness would help, but it didn’t. Instead, I found a house being burglarized by a half dozen kids smoking weed and handing around a pistol.

A pistol.

I am funny, I am getting fat, and I am getting slow…but those that underestimate me rethought things later after I caught two out of three as they fled from the porch of this technically vacant house, and put them both in custody—one 19, one 17, and me out of cuffs. Backup was nowhere in sight, but that didn’t matter. It never was right away in the real world. And I was Alive. And the people that underestimated me always looked surprised when they went from thinking about the price of lettuce one second, then find me me clamped around their throats the next with a grin that would make large men consider a new trade school, or living in there car for now on. Helluva trick, that, but it came naturally. How goddamn aweful. It's also why I pack such thoughtful restraint. Mostly. But I digress.

Someone showed up long enough for me to point at them and be relieved from stepping on their necks so I could go inside, and inside I went, around corners, checking closets, and finding a gun beading with sweat lying on top of a Sony Playstation in a rear closet. The sweat was confusing, until I thought of the refrigerator door I’d closed in the kitchen before checking upstairs. Little bastards had been hiding it there, and while I had found it…I treat pistols like cousins or cats. There’s never just one around.


Weed…blunts…candy, by the pound…I found it all, and a tiny Hobbit-sized door to boot, which I quite naturally entered into an attic area that was reminiscent of the World War Two-era movies I watched as a kid. Slats separated by mortar, yellow newspapers in stacks…and a man hiding on his stomach holding both hands beneath his stomach, face still down, chest moving with labored respirations…and as a back-drop, I could see three copsthrough a window on the sidewalk outside and below, talking and laughing. I wished I was there. Then I keyed up on my shoulder mic, and said “I have one in the attic. Gunpoint.”

I wasn’t so interested in help, as I was their faces. The ones on the sidewalk dicking around stopped in inevitable mid-sophomoric joke, and looked up at the window that had to lead to me. Then, to their credit, they ran. (Ok…a brisk shuffle).

Dude Between the Beams still lay there, until I finally challenged him. He looked up, and he had no expression; this was bad. He stood up, and that, too, was bad; he was between the beams...but not for long. Ah…Physics.

The cops coming in from the street met him as he stopped being between the beams, and fell through them and thusly into their path, but from above, and not the Side, as is so commonly expected from the Average Person.



After the screaming, there was only laughter. My own.

…From the largish hole in the ceiling above them


It was grand, and the day was half-over. But my headache wasn’t.


Oh…this goddamn headache.


Why won’t it go?

In The Fields, We Dance

Recovered: 05.05.2006



I backed my car up to the fence, so that I could jump over it from the top of the trunk.

I was standing there silently when I saw a white hat and a flash of blue shirt; he hadn’t seen me, because he was still piling up equipment that he would soon attempt to get over the same fence I stood on the opposite side from. He passed out of view; I gave him a moment, and scaled my car. I was no slender reed, but I also had no impulse control outside of a hunters basic instincts. I leapt.

…And hit the ground with one hand down on the ground. My heels stung along with the palm of my hand, but I smiled; this was exciting. He had to have heard me, so I assumed this, and began stalking forward. It was an open field, probably the dimension of three football fields side by side, and surrounded by an eight foot fence. The grass is what made it so fun because it was between four and five feet high. The burglar was in here with me for the same reason the grass grew so much—the 86 year old woman running the place had died, and everything but her and her business flourished in her wake.

As I moved forward, I drew my Taser…but I thought better of it, and exchanged it for my pistol. I didn’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight, but then…the sway of the Grass had its way with me, and in the romance of the waving field of fresh green stalks I re-holstered my Lawgiver, and after engaging the safety snaps…I simply raised my hands. I was alive.

I pictured the flaxen grasses of North Africa, and immediately understood why lions never migrated elsewhere: It was exhilarating. I couldn’t tell if I was hunter or hunted, and the sweat began to bead on my forehead. It was hot outside, yes…but I was hot inside, too. I moved forward, examined the pile of booty, and moved on, guessing where he would go based on where I would go were we in one another’s shoes. It went on for an eternity that lasted perhaps nine minutes.

I checked a concrete building with no windows and unlocked doors, but the path to it and inside it was a maze of hubcaps, radiators, grass, and the detritus of 40 years of car parts coming and going. There was no stealthy approach to it, but my holster was in the same place it had been for the last decade of use, and my hand knew this. The building was devoid of thieving life.

Around the corner to the northwest were the hulks of several cars though, and the search began anew. I hadn’t found him, and I was beginning to become annoyed; little infuriated me like one Getting Away. From It. From Me. I passed the cars slowly, checking undercarriages, and peering in windows covered in mildew that began forming when Bush Sr. was in Office. As before, there was no safe way to do this, but those are the cards you are dealt and win or lose, you had to Pay to Play. It was not a relief, however, when I found him hunkering beside a 1966 Ford step van.

He looked left and right, and his adrenaline had been running hot long enough that he probably had time to take a quick nap between its rushes through his system. Out of habit, I let him make the first move (being empty handed) and alas, the move, like many, was the wrong one. His exit was blocked by another Strange Cop, so he charged me—and my smile turned to a grimace. I remember, because my face cracked with the change, so slick with sweat and seeds and leaves was I.

He ran, and I began to decide what to do while evaluating him for weapons. Hands were always the first clue, and his were away from his body, so I took a step forward and let him take care of the rest, one leg bent, one leg braced to keep my ground. I only helped with the two points of contact, which first was the collar of the blue shirt, and the second being what I like to call “His Freaking Balls”. His momentum took care of the rest nicely because I was able to simply lift him up and over my head into an unexpected yet spectacular crash into a pile of stacked hubcaps, my man landing upside down and backwards. He lay sprawled in a state of confusion only known to those landing upside down and backwards into a pile of stacked metal, but it was appreciated all the same since it distracted him while I then threw myself airborne and landed, nearly ‘69’, on top of him. His reaction absolved all thoughts of dieting from my heart, as evidenced to this day and its meals. He made funny ‘sounds’.

I like to distract people first, so I started with guttural bellowing into his face and ears. He was bug-eyed with fear, but also horribly restrained by several hundred pounds of ‘What the Fuck?!?’ on top of him and I used it to my advantage. I keyed up on my mike to call off the Hounds coming in, but felt I should acquaint myself with my new pet while we traipsed across the fields to our point of egress.

I held him closely, and struck up a conversation on how good a new installment of ‘Smokey and the Bear’ franchise would go over this year (in my opinion), but he ignored me, distant, scatter-minded. I had him by the shoulder and the cuffs, but he may have well been on another planet. I just wanted him to listen, but he wouldn’t; it was as if I didn’t even exist, and I began to wonder what I did wrong.

Being nice, I put him through a hole in the fence rather than over it, but as before he showed no response, much less appreciation.

Calls were coming in again, and I looked back over my shoulder at the fields of green waving gently as if there had never been a hunt or a hit there in a hundred years. I was Happy. And the day had only begun, in Eden.


...After it was over, I went back inside there…but it was not the same. But then…what ever is?

Hand Made Divorce

Recovered: Sometime, 2003
[Miscellaneous Internet(s) reply on the topic of Divorce.]


Fuck it.

I didn't just file for my divorce--I typed the goddamn thing, liquor-ey letter by liquor-ey letter from decree to child care agreement. Submitted it. Before the final filing, my not-yet-ex drove away towing the car I bought us behind a large yellow truck that said 'Ryder' on the outside, and bore my five year old son inside, waving 'goodbye' to me shortly before I went to my knees in uncut creeper vines on slope that was not steep enough to hold back a wave of angst that three years worth of calendars couldn’t measure before it hit the high water mark.

I stood at my hearing alone, just as uncontested, just as hurtful, and just as productive--none at all, until I LET it be, where my only comfort at the time were the eyes of attorneys who despised me for undercutting their trade when the judge made the comment "Did you do this? It’s good work--I just see the Font changed here about midway through." They looked when I subconsciously fingered my pistol as I left, eyeing them as well. I had 'held myself out at court' while on the job to do this, and instead of KFC and Xbox, I sat on an old oak bench outside and Lost Time, until I found my car and answered calls that I could not remember handling immediately thereafter.

It sucks.

But it is what we wanted.


Live Now; Die Later. And enjoy the in-between. And don't shoot at buildings, tanker trucks, and petroleum reserves in the mean time. It fucks up your karma, and makes your ears ring.


...Mind these words. For I am The Sign...that serves as a Warning to Others.


Pay Heed.