The Subtle Art of Brutality

Flemming didn’t slap wrists; she slit throats. Or she lodged knives in peoples’ backs. That’s not IA. That’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And she didn’t like me. The situation with Stoke opened the door and she shouldered her way in.

Any transfers in the department that do not occur on a payday Sunday are disciplinary. I was transferred on a Wednesday afternoon.

That told me something.

I was sent to the stolen vehicles unit, where rookies who barely passed the detectives’ exam went to cut their teeth. There is an ancient legend that has been passed down in whispers from investigator to investigator about the stolen cars unit: it was created as a reservoir of those the PD wishes to forget, or push out.

The PD wasn’t going to forget me. Not after Stoke. Not after a lot of things, really.

They wanted me out. Cassandra Flemming wanted me out. She got stolen vehicles instead. Same thing, longer period of suffering.

Good detectives will have good cases wherever they work. I tried. My time there was unremarkable save one thing. One thing that, in the end, cost me everything. Jared Garrett came knocking.

Narcotics will pull in fresh faces now and then to do controlled buys. Cops are easier to trust than CI’s. Garrett asked me to do some controlled buys against a Big Fry dealer. Seems his case was hinged on some crackhead CI who was so-so to begin with and had turned up dead. OD. I wanted anything I could get to pull me away from my punishment desk in stolen vehicles. So I said yes. I should not have.

Doing the buys weren’t hard. It was the hit afterwards that cooked my goose.

Roscoe’s.

Somewhere around 9 a.m. a fat bald guy unlocks the door to the bar. Two guys have been waiting outside the place longer than me. Both go right to the counter. The fat guy walks around the place and grabs two mugs. Fills them up. Serves. No orders, no talk. All habit.

My kind of bartender.

I watch the door for a moment, see if the off-coming police shift walks in. Sometimes that happens. Midnights get off work as the sun rises but to them, it’s their evening. And who doesn’t want a beer or two before bed? Lord knows I do. But no cops show up.

I sit down away from the customers and I light up a smoke. The fat guy comes over.

“City says you can’t do that.”

“I say I can. What do you say?”

He reaches under the bar a little ways down and produces an ashtray. “I don’t tell customers what they can’t do.” He holds the ashtray in his hand. “You a customer?”

“I am today.”

“What’ll it be then?”

“So eager to get booze in a man at this hour?”

“The way I see it, you’re sitting at bar, maybe I ain’t the one so eager to get booze in you. If you ash on the floor instead of in this here tray you’ll be fucking up my mop job. I don’t take kindly to that. So you want to smoke, you need an ashtray. You need an ashtray; so you need to be a customer. What’ll it be?”

I smile. My kind of bartender. “Stout on tap?”

“Yup. Local brew.”

“Like it?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll take one.”

He sets down the ashtray. Mozies off. Returns with the beer.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Blimpie.” I sit my smoke down in the ashtray and eyeball him. The bartender gives me a distrusting look.

“Blimpie don’t work today,” he says.