Sally's Story (1.5-7): All Over The World

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhmcqe2L1YE

	Vincent flapped open the squat ledger onto the bar, the paff of worn leather on wood clapping gently in the still-quiet establishment. Shaking her head Sally turned back to the open book, narrow rows and columns filled with a scrawled, cursive script. Her partner’s eyes narrowed at the nearly illegible script, a word here or there *just* enough to push him in the right direction. With a few tentative flips of the page Sally caught on, eyes glancing across the spotty paper with each turn, notebook set alert on the counter for any pertinent information.
	“Hey Sal,” he started, blinking at the unyielding words string back at him. “Could you give this a quick once over? Handwriting’s a bit-”
	“Dodgy?”
	“Yeah.” Passing it over Vince rested his chin in his hand, aimlessly watching her pore over the book, deep threads in her mind latching onto the structure and form of the meager handwriting, reconstructing it into useful bits of information. The ledger started decades ago, well before their suspect was of working age and predating any of her, or Vince’s for that matter, detective work. “Dates start around 1973, this must be a newer ledger.”
	“Yeah, restaurant’s easily older than that. Couple decades more at the least.”
	“Not important, though,” she snipped, flipping a chunk of the dates away until the very rear-end of 1979. “We should be looking *here*, when Brian *reliably* started working.” A turbulent time in the city, the chill of winter accompanying some of the worst unrest it had seen in a generation, perhaps two. *Organized* unrest at that, Sally winced at the memory, and one that had most certainly rocked the city’s underground beyond just the unceremonious death of the Weathermen. More than just that chaotic dethroning it had opened *avenues*, little inlets for the ‘little guy’ criminals to pick their heads up and get some work done. Perhaps even to make it big on their own.
	“Smart, yeah. Might as well scoot up to a few months ago, work back from there.”
	“Already on it,” she smiled, deep blue ink spilling from her right hand as she cross-referenced addresses well within the limits of the harbor. “Most of these are restaurants as well, nothing too out of the ordinary. It would be imprudent to look through all of them.”
	“Any stand out?” She frowned.
	“I couldn’t say, sadly.”
	“Well, if Brian was working at the docks as well, and delivering there, there might be some point of contact we’re missing.”
	“Oh?”
	“Yeah,” Vince opened, cutting the air with his hands again. “We already figured he’s a part in something bigger, right? Well, we just gotta find a *not* restaurant and pin it from there. That’d be the place wherever he’s making the handoff with people, a front.”
	“Vince…,” Sally sighed, eyeing the ledger warily. “I’m not sure if there’s anything like that in here. We’d have to go piecemeal over places, and-”
	“And?”
	“Well, he might have *met* these people while working at the docks, and then they established some other spot in the city for their work, but a lot of it doesn’t… add up, I suppose? This ledger can’t tell us much.”
	“Oh, well, we could always go back and interview him again?”
	“Vince, he’s most likely not going to talk to us again,” she sighed. “We could certainly *try*, but it wouldn’t do us much good. Best bet is to start snooping around for employment records.”
	“Mm, nah- whatever he was doing was probably an odd job kind of deal, safer that way.”
	“Ah.”
	“That won’t pull anything meaningful up either, besides this place and, well,” Vince trailed off. The nandroid, her blue eyes averted from the yellowed pages, nodded. “Best bet is to chunk our suspects apart and move piece by piece. We have time enough to try *that*.”
	“Seems a bit… inefficient.” She creased a page in her fingers before flipping it over.
	“I doubt there’s much better to do, Sal.” Her narrow shoulders slackened imperceptibly beneath the stiff, blue suit fabric, a robotic tic in her head telling her there was a better way- one that was painfully inaccessible to them. “We can’t exactly take that with us, either.”
	Sally closed her eyes, collecting her thoughts in the hidden cache of case-memory in her head. Tiny, gossamer shutters zipped their way across the glassy blue lights beneath them, a swallowing layer of polymer shielding the gentle glow beneath. Reaching back into her mind she constructed a number of ideal situations, listing off the candidacies for the most fitting restaurants. Analytically she could put together a list of the most ideal, the most realistic and the most *true* guesses at whichever restaurant was the boy’s contact point. It would take a bit of thinking, deliberate and focused, to piece together, and it would help to put it to paper as well. Sally opened her eyes.
	Pulling her open blue notebook over she flipped to a new page, abandoning the dull list of addresses and names penned there, just-dry ink trying and failing to bleed through the paper. She sketched out a ledger of her own, machine-perfect lines and boxes meeting together. Sally cross-referencing from the last page she filled them in, Vince watching quizzically as she poured over the page in her neat, perfect script. The neat blue letters filled up the little mathematical table, elements of raw theoretical forensics compiled helpfully in front of the two detectives. It was helpful to offer Vince a peek into her head when she started thinking, the refined models and theories a bit too extreme for most.
	“Whatcha got?”
	“Well I have three… models for where we should be looking,” she began, bristling at that word- model. Too technical. “They’re just ideas, but I think either Brian’s contact point- are we calling it that?”
	“Uh, how’s about just ‘source’?”
	“Ah. Then Brian’s *source* was either somewhere he stumbled into-”
	“And he was recruited from there?”
	“Could be. That, or coerced perhaps, but that’s besides the point.” She took an unnecessary breath to center herself- already the theoretics were escaping her. “Well- okay. Every scenario deals with ‘contact’ being made on a delivery. What changes is whether they kept him coming back to one restaurant, or closed things from there entirely. So, two scenarios. Not three.”
	“Well then I guess we look for that in the record?”
	“That’s what I’ve been doing, yes. Narrowed it down some too, largely to one-time deliveries versus the ones that are most routine.”
	“How come?”
	“Well,” she started, head twisting to the ledger and notebook in turn, “simply put, it would make sense that he would keep going back on deliveries. Keep up a regular… sense of presence.”
	“Seems a bit far-fetched. Let’s focus on the one-timers first, okay?”
	“Okay,” she nodded. “In that case, there are very few of those in the past years. We could probably visit all of them in a day, two tops.”
	“Traffic depending.”
	“Yes,” she chuckled, “but that shouldn’t be any trouble. What *will* be is, well, what we do when we get *there*.” Vince scratched his head. With everything, or rather the severe *lack* of everything, that they knew they still didn’t have a plan. Going in blind and asking about possible employees would be enough to get them shot on a good day if they weren’t careful.
	“Well… what if we’re not investigating a huge drug operation, right?” He tapped the side of his head for effect. “...There’s still a victim in the hospital most likely, yeah? That’s an angle we can still play.”
	“Vince…”
	“It’s all we have, and I’d imagine whoever the hell we’re looking for up top would be a lot more forthcoming if they didn’t think we *knew*. If they thought we were going for a grunt they could just rat out, simple as that.”
	“Right, but-”
	“Sal there’s not really a ‘but’ here to make, we hardly have enough at this point. We could ask to look around like we did here but we’d be sliding into warrant territory once we *find* the damn place.”
	“So this is just for scouting then?”
	“Yeah exactly, scouting, reconnaissance. We wanna find out wherever Brian stuck his nose, officially or unofficially, and work from there.”
	“And get a warrant from there.”
	“Yeah, exactly.” He smiled, shutting the ledger with another soft clap. “I still think we should try and push Brian for some more about this docks job first, it could save us a lot of trouble.”
	“Well… if you think it’ll work.”
	“It’ll be worth the time at the very least, and saying we were here is enough to get some more.” Sally winced at the implication, the subtle pressure, the push and tear at his emotions rubbing her the wrong way.
	“Well… what first then?” Vince popped his wrist back up, eyeing the digits glancing back at him. Time enough for another interview, easily, but it couldn’t hurt to look ahead first.
	“You decide.”
	“What, I-,” she stopped, weighing the options in her head as she slipped her notebook away. “Hum.”
	“Hm?”
	“Thinking,” she mumbled. The silicone rubber over her face squished into a pout, harder lines of analytical reasoning trying to quantify the odds, the raw probability of either of their current choices. Both had some pretty glaring flaws, she reasoned, the pure chance of the one versus the emotional unpredictability of the other. However, the second option had the benefit of more information, and of someone clearly important to their suspect. “...Leverage. Yeah, we should talk to Brian.”
	“Alrighty,” Vince smiled, turning to the front door. “Coming?”
	“One sec.” Sally hefted the ledger into her hands, sliding back to the rear of the building. The broad man was sweeping idly, rearranging knick knacks and adjusting portraits as he passed them and waited on the moment to open up properly. “Here you are, sir. Sorry for the… for the trouble.” Sally worked a wan little smile for him as he took the dense book into his hands. He wanted to tell her off in some snide, quiet way but couldn’t muster the energy to do so, opting instead to send her off with a little nod. Slapping the book onto a table he leaned into his broom for support, the two detectives slipping out the front door with a jingle to attend to their business.