"I want you to know how much I really,
really hate you."
---
"Where is he?"
"Downstairs, last cell on the right. He's unconscious, but we didn't sedate him."
The cigarette was a flush of smoky warmth flooding his airways, blueblack sour, spreading cancerous delicious. It drifted out his nostrils as from a deadfaced stone totem.
"Wait. We're going to back this up."
"Excuse me, sir?" A sound like swallowing their own adam's apple. Sweat began bulletin-board notices to assemble at the intersection between brow and hairline, on the field of forehead.
"Let's run through the list. I ordered what first?"
"A footlong tuna, dry, wheat bread, everything on it,--"
"No, kid, after lunch."
"Uh, I'm sorry?"
"What did I order you do with the fugitive?"
"Bring him into custody."
"And you were doing that."
"Yes, sir." Sweat should immediately deploy across all fronts, including but not limited to the armpits, palms, feet, face, scalp, and sundry crevices. All active associates are to begin deployment.
He adjusts his hat, sitting on the counter, trying not to inhale too deeply so as to swallow the cigarette, or the crush the felt hat sitting on the divider's counter between them. The lockup smells like old urine, cement, sawdust, and gum the scent of boredom. "And then what? I want to hear this back from you, if we could do that."
The officer wrings his hands, slick and clammy now with salty perspiration. "To remove all his items."
"And?"
"To double check his person after we believed we had all his items?"
"And?"
"To give him a cavity check, and feel each of his teeth individually, and to ignore any crude comments he made."
A heavy sigh, a nod, the cigarette's ember flaring then dimming with a deep inhalation. As the man speaks, heavy jaw like earthworks moving, eyes tired and annoyed, one eyebrow raised, his voice is like an engine strong and healthy and also brow-beaten from a million miles. It is sturdy and great and awesome, which is to say full of awe, in its strength of character. Even simple words, deep of timbre, are powerful. "Keep going."
"We were also to never let his hands stray from the counter during the body check, and to examine our persons for missing belongings no matter what size if they should wander. One guard was to stand aside in case he should attempt an escape--"
"If he wanted to be gone, he'd be gone."
"Excuse me, sir."
"Screw it, nevermind. Go on."
"...uh, another officer was to watch solely his hands for movement, and the third to pat him down. After that we were ordered to place him under lockup and have no contact until your arrival, sir."
"Okay. So far, so good. Now, question, if I may?"
"Yes, sir?"
Inspector Koichi Zenigata of the International Criminal Police Organization removed his handcuffs and began walking towards the end of the hall to the hall. With his free hand, he began rolling up either cream-coloured shirtsleeve to the elbow. He continued talking even as the officer stayed behind the desk. "At what point during any of these orders did I tell you to beat the Christ out of him and let him steal one officer's personal posessions for thirty seconds before leaving him for a vegetable on the cold floor for an hour and a half without medical attention when he had a known abrasion on his right flank recently stiched?"
Sheepishly: "...You can't smoke in here, sir."
"Ask me if I give a shit."
---
"I mean it. You are a waste of a lot of time. You know what I could be doing? I could be Van Gogh. I could be playing catch with some foster kid, or something. I could be writing an opus. I could be learning how to kayak." Turning his head for a moment, he yelled. "Could I get a fucking cup of coffee?! And a chair?"
Down the hall, yelled over the sound of a space heater: "We only have the metal ones!"
"I don't care!" Zenigata looked to the floor, to the heap laying sprawled on it. He was considerably less loud-mouthed. "You want a coffee?"
"Nnnnnn." An elbow twitch.
"Make that two of those damn things! And get me a mug for god's sake, not one of those little styrofoam things!" He threw the cigarette into the toilet and leaned against a wall. "You look like crap." Down the hall, there was the sound of scuffling feet on grey pavement, and the rattle of ceramic.
"Nnnnn."
"Yeah, we're all a ray of sunshine today. It's going to rain until we flood. You know France is all hills? Watch, we'll be paddling down the streets before the weekend. Just pick one place I can get a tan or something. Just once. That's it. It's not hard."
"Nnnnn."
"Real one track mind with you." The booking officer dragged, loudly, a metal chair from down the hall, scraping it along the floor. "Knock that off and pick it up!" In a moment, the chair was there, and placed in the open door of the cell. A tray with two mugs of coffee, creamer, and sugar sat on it. "Thanks." Zenigata looked down at Lupin again. "How do you take yours?"
A groan. Lupin rolled on his side, let out a shout, and then onto his back. The appearance of a hungover young college kid was not a picture unpainted. "Black. Cold."
"Hey, get me some ice cubes in here!"
Again, down the hall: "We don't have any!"
"Then make some!" Under his breath, and spoken into his chest as he prepared his own: "Goddamn it, who doesn't have ice cubes." Half sugar, half cream, there was hardly any room for the coffee in his cup. The milk had cooled it preemptively, and it was half gone in a swill. "Tastes like mud. You ever had cop coffee?"
"Once." Eyes closed, mouthed staying where it fell, Lupin was an unmoving snow-angel imbedded in cool granite. He had been given his pants back at an indeterminate time before Zenigata's arrival.
"It all tastes the same. You'd think one of us would spring for French Vanilla or something. I'm living on energy drinks all day anyway."
The ice tray arrived. The officer was out of breath, mentioning it had been retrieved from the break room two floors up. He then retreated, and Zenigata nodded his approval.
"So, lay this out for me. Because I could just let you rot here. There's no reason not to, I punch you in the kidneys and you're not going to move for hours with those stitches there and there's enough in your file to justify building a prison for you alone." He glanced over Lupin once more. "You come in with that shiner?"
Lupin gave him a look, one eyebrow raised and his mouth pursed like someone sucking on copper, and it was well removed from his usual good-humored teasing expressions. "Take a wild guess."
"Officer Asshole will be working at the DMV in a couple hours. You're welcome. So, I'm doing you a favor. Let's hear it." He placed the coffee next to Lupin's hand. It remained unmoved for a moment. Zenigata, hair slicked back from a fresh combing and wet with rain, yelled out to the officers down the hell. "HEY! Take a hike!"
Three pairs of footsteps shuffled further down the hall, and a metal door clanged.
"Where do I start?"
"Usually you pick up the cup and you drink. I know, tough concept."
Lupin moved his head forward, chin on his chest, and sipped, before returning to the previous position. "Aw, crap, you're right. It's bad." A sigh. "You remember what I told you?"
"I remember you bullshitting me, yes."
Lupin gave him another look.
Really?"Alright, I'll take it at face value."
"Well, there's maybe... Fifty? A hundred? Teens and twenty-somethings out in the city trying to knock off my group. And you two."
"Melon, too? Low standards these days."
Lupin gave a tight smile. "You're familiar with charm schools, yeah?"
"Sure. Spook stories, most of them, but there's been a couple organized crime links. Nothing ever pans out. There was a case I was working when I was still a pissant with Tokyo Metro working for my sergant badge that might've had something there like it, but all we ever hit was brickwall or dead suspects."
"Well, they operate like Ivy-League boot camps. Half this crap would put West Point to shame. They're getting educations in botany, mathematics, seduction, philosophy, extended unarmed and armed combat, small arms only, with heavy emphasis on stealth and espionage."
"Sounds like you've got some experience." Zenigata sipped his coffee.
Lupin tried to give him a glare, but when the look was matched, Lupin folded. Perhaps one was recruited for Inspector based on poker face. "Fair enough. Look, point being, they dispatch teens for hits and rake in the rewards until the kid gets killed or breaks out, sometimes trying the latter and getting the former. There's professional hitmen who started from charm school education."
"Any thieves?" Sip.
"Hah. They wanted me as an instructor and I said no. So the heads said "teach him a lesson," and now they're trying to get to me through you, with the reward of instructor rank and a boatload of benefits, monetary or otherwise. One instructor's after me, and I get the feeling she's going to try and take over. Everyone else is gunning for you, Melon, Fujiko, Jigen, and Goemon."
Zenigata let out a bark of a laugh. "Good luck to them. What's his angle?"
Lupin took this as a compliment. Which it was. "Her. She doesn't like it as an advert for the school, or that her students are going to get screwed, or that it raises their profile. I don't know, maybe she just doesn't like my haircut."
"I don't."
"We can't all look like the Asian Ted Koppel. Look, it's irrelevent. But she's not going to stop until one of us is finished. And the hitmen aren't going to quit until they've got their prize." Lupin moved to sit up, carefully and slowly, taking with him the coffee mug. He planted himself gingerly on the wall-mounted cot, facing Zenigata at an angle.
"There's a morgue full of people proving that much. I've got an APB on the bomber, and we've got artist sketches working with witnesses. I got off the phone with INTERPOL just before I walked in, they're speaking with the French police about flying in some forensic analysts from Paris to see if they can't find some trace. The rubble got cleaned out as of an hour ago, which is probably the only break we're going to catch because we don't think the building's going to keep. I heard city hall's going to work on a scheduled demolition ASAP for safety reasons, but frankly it's not my field or problem. We've also got some people talking to nurses down at the hospital, someone went up to the ICU and started poking around for information on you, attacked a few patients and no one noticed for an hour and a half. "
Looking at his mug, Lupin's voice was soft and young and old and heartbroken. "How many?"
"As of right now, a hundred and fifty dead, another two hundred and fifty-something wounded, three dead after hospitalization and thirty three in critical condition." Zenigata's gaze was level, tired, and ageless in its ancience. He met Lupin's face but Lupin did not return the stare.
A beat, bloated.
"You were really fucking serious, weren't you? You were turning yourself in. So this... whatever the hell this is, didn't happen." Astonished, Zenigata just stared, that realization blooming on his face like moving rock.
Lupin looked up, surprised. "Yeah. Yeah, I was."
"Do you have any plan for this? Or any information I can use here, put these bastards down?"
"I don't have the file, Jigen does, and I only glanced at it. But something about one of the heads named Guy Montag?"
"What? You're kidding."
"You've heard of him?"
"Yeah, college lit."
A burst of tittery laughter, full and boyish. Lupin's smile was radiant in that grey light. "You took literature?"
"Go to hell, it was an easy credit. Guy Montag's a guy from an American book, Farenheit 451. Burns books, stops, becomes a rebel. You know where he's living?"
"The file had an address, yeah, but I don't know and Jigen's got it and I couldn't get ahold of him. But the school's probably located here in the country, if I had to guess." He rubbed his back idly, wincing. Lupin slugged a swallow of the coffee, its chilled temp only adding to the bitter flavor. "Anything you can do with the name and place, aside from an internet search for lit theses?"
"Probably goes by another alias, but I can cross reference with organized crime commited in the area in the past fifty years, see what shakes loose. Detective work gets a lot easier when you've got a big databse to run everything through instead of news paper clippings." Zenigata began digging around for his cigarettes. "Want one?"
Lupin nodded, and took from the beaten and bruised pack that was offered. The lighting was shortly thereafter, and for a moment a shared bond.
"You think you can get me that address and that file?"
"It'll take a while, but sure. You got any aspirin?" Zenigata shook loose a fistful of self-enclosed tablets that looked like they had been filched from a first-aid kit. "Why are you carrying a pocketful of ibuprofen?"
Zenigata gave him a look, one eyebrow raised and his mouth pursed like someone sucking on copper, and it was a neighbor to the usual weary expression he gave people with stupid questions. Which was often. "Take a wild guess."
"I'm not that bad." Another gulp of the mud, and Lupin set his mug on the cot slab.
"...I just spent an hour waiting for you in a park staring at drop boxes before I get word you've been arrested on charges a fifteen year old wouldn't get caught on. Tell me another one." Zenigata stood, took another slam of the coffee, and let it hang in his hand. "Again. You swear to me you can get me that file and any other info?"
"There's some crap I'm leaving out, only because my head still feels like I fell up a flight of stairs, but sure."
"You got a plan?"
Lupin raised an eyebrow, and a small smile. "Do you really want to know?"
Another heavy, brilliant pause, time stretched sullen and soundless. Zenigata reached one massive fist up to his head, rubbing the ridge of his nose.
"Can I ask you something, Pops?"
"Shoot."
"You're Japanese, right? But you've got these hairy fists like a boxer and these shoulders like a wrestler and a jaw like--"
"German grandfather."
"Huh."
The Inspector shook the cuffs in his hands, rattling them some. Leaning out of the doorway, he tossed them lightly down the hall, towards some of the other cells. He kicked the chair out from the cell's doorway, lazily and with a minimum of interest. It clattered down, spilling sugar and cream on the floor in a grainy puddle. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to escape from custody after it turns out the cell door wasn't locked correctly because--" Zenigata produced a stick of gum, and then jammed it in the lock. "--the guards failed to search you properly, as you still had a lockpick rake still on your person as well as a pack of chewing confection. Which, according to them and my report later will reflect, would not have happened had an officer been so hot-headed to assault you and do his damn job. In addition, I attempt to open fire but you are oh-so-wily--"
"True, true."
"Shut up, this isn't for your benefit. Oh-so-wily that you manage to knock the firearm out of my hand." He unbuckled his sidearm, and, flicking the safety off, dropped it. It thankfully did not fire. "You then escaped the building but not before making off with the keys to a squad car."
"How far do you think I'll get?"
"I'm giving you thirty seconds before I sound the alarm. Take your clothes, would you? I don't want to see you back here unless you've got that goddamned folder in your hand."
