Sally's Story (1.5-8): Sin In My Heart

youtu.be/vzZ_-MUH_3c

	Back in their car the two detectives set to debrief after their latest interview. Vincent yawned again, arms stretching towards the dashboard before gripping the wheel. Key in place the car rumbled to life again, the choppy lurch of its suspension humming with energy. Twisting the radio knob a touch he returned to a familiar, antiquated disco station before hushing it. Mirrors adjusted, he turned to his partner, the nervous little robot flipping through her notes and charts.
	“All good?”
	“Ah! Yep,” she nodded, “right to the precinct again.”
	“Hopefully Brian can put us in the right direction but- oh, *shit*, right.” Vincent palmed his forehead, foot squeezing the brake down an inch. “God… dammit.”
	“Sir?” Sally turned an inquisitive little head, worried formality taking over.
	“Why bother interviewing him when we can just get a warrant for his place, I mean, come on!” Anxious thumbs drummed on the leather steering wheel, piecing together a secondary route in his head.
	“Well, sir, I still think another visit is in order… but maybe you need some rest, some time away from the wheel? I can handle drafting the affidavit if you’d like.” Vince rubbed his eyes, pointed fingers wiping away a pair of yawning tears as he nodded quietly. “I’ll get right on it after the second interview.” Pressing the accelerator the blocky car zipped away from the idle restaurant, the morning’s first shuffling patrons sliding in. Pulling away from the dense Polish neighborhood the duo made way for their home precinct, running along the riverfront for the last stretch southbound. Worming through the thickening commuter traffic, they slipped back alongside the cramped curb, just stopping by for another look.
	Through processing and back in the stuffy, carpeted floors of the precinct offices the pair of detectives set their little interview room back up. Vince thumbed the matchbook in his jacket pocket, the coated cardboard slick underneath his cold fingers. Scurrying around the back rooms around the interview room, yellowed, tarry wallpaper staring back at her, Sally rounded up her materials for the interview as well- concise notes, practiced lines of questioning, and a secondary, mental list of everything pertinent to drafting their affidavit. Once they picked over Brian’s brain for the second time she figured they’d be fully ready to start pursuing *real* leads, not family businesses and their begrudging owners.

	“Everything set,” Vince asked, head swiveling to the nandroid as she snipped the door shut behind her.
	“Yeah, all good.” She slipped the denser wads of paper back inside her corduroy jacket, a small stack of cards following them once their contents were burnt into her synthetic retinas. “I’ll… I’ll go grab them.”
	“I got it.” Vince paused to nurse his third cup of vending machine coffee before sauntering up to the door. “He’d probably prefer to see *you* sitting there staring at him when he comes in, yeah?”
	“Right, right.” With a nod Vincent slipped back out into the musty hallway, an attending officer helping to escort the re-cuffed suspect into his interview room. Having waived any right to a lawyer he was alone, stuck between the dusty whir of the room’s ventilation and, as he took his seat, the tape recorder sitting between him and the detectives. A fresh tape sat spinning as they opened, Brian aimlessly looking for the sharpie they were going to label it with. He wondered how they titled these things, eyes tearing up in the room’s arid air as he glanced between the two detectives. The moustached man on his left, nose snooping into his styrofoam cup, probably took a little joy in naming them like shitty seasonal flicks. The robot on the other hand, her hands neatly folded on the table instead of scribbling in some notebook, wouldn’t care for that. Just date, name, time and so on. Minutia, how robots like things.
	“Alright Brian,” Vince opened, “let’s get to it. We stopped by that bar, spoke with Mister Banaszewski and so on.” He blinked.
	“We spoke with your boss as well as some other workers at the rest-”
	“Calling your shit,” he snorted, not impressed. “Too damn early for that.”
	“It’s not just employees that work there though, right Brian? If you wanna be a cocky little shit-”
	“Vince,” Sally nudged. “What we’re saying is that we interviewed more than just Mister Banaszewski. We got a pretty solid picture of how long, and how *hard*, you’d been working there. I mean, from bussing tables to bottling and deliveries is quite the jump. He was quite fond of you, Brian.”
	“*Was*, Brian,” Vince added. “He wasn’t exactly impressed when we started discussing your conduct. Drug dealing ain’t exactly a good look for a family restaurant, let alone some kid pressing pills in the basement.” The young man blinked and blinked again, the blatant dig pulling his eyes back open. His diaphragm jittered in place, forcing a sputtering little cough out of his lungs. Doubling over the hiccup turned into a nervous fit of coughing as he tried desperately to collect himself before he hacked his lungs out. Struggling for breath the world caved around him for a second, face reddening in exhaustion as little pops across his skin cried for oxygen in a world starved of it. The dry air chafed the back of his heaving throat, precious water trickling down from the insides of his eyes, pooling on the tip of his squashed nose and sun-kissed skin before dripping to the cheap carpet below. Rasping breaths calmed the flexing bow of abdominal muscle, spongy lung tissue filling with precious air as one of the detectives patted his back. Narrow, hard fingers gently eased him up to breath again, opening him back up as the robot comforted him.
	“You need a water Brian?” Still wheezing he nodded silently, clearing his scorched throat with wispy little grunts. “Alright, one second.” Sally nodded to Vince, slipping out to the innocuous machine down the hall. Fetching a little conical cup of water she rejoined them, the drink greedily downed by their interviewee as he tried to collect himself. Breathing heavily he slacked his head backwards, squinting against the stabbing, buzzing fluorescent tubes above him.
	“All good?” He managed a meager nod, head still roped backwards with his eyes shut. “Good,” Vince nodded. “Back to business. Business like your delivery schedule and routes, yeah?”
	“Hm?” The boy hummed, avoiding eye contact as best he could. He ached over how they’d pried at his boss, or former boss he guessed given the nickel-plated cuffs strangling his wrists. They’d hopped over for an hour or so just to see him and came back, and Brian couldn’t fathom the back and forth game he’d initiate if he didn’t let slip. He wanted to snitch, he thought, finally bringing his eyes back level with the detectives. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, meeting the gentle blue glow in front of him again he saw what could be construed as compassion, or worry, or, worst, pity in the subtle tilt of her composite-sheathed eyelids and sliding brows. “Yeah. There’s a ledger, I dunno-”
	“We already looked through the ledger, Brian,” Sally interrupted. “We took a very close look at everything across the past couple years and especially the closest months to today. Fall’s just starting up but the patterns we’ve picked apart are pretty damning, Brian.”
	“Oh yeah?”
	“Yes, Brian,” Sally said, producing the first of her concealed notes. Her little cross-hatched diagram was slapped in front of him, familiar business and street names plastered across the ink stained paper before him. A number stood out to him, and a number more were conspicuously underline, bright red circles and arrows strung across the sheet like some conspiratorial penstroke quilt. Brian’s furrowed his brow at the implications behind it, the obvious suggestion enough to tell them they were on the right track- what he said didn’t matter to them, did it? “As you can see we’ve already been doing a lot of work tracing your former delivery places back towards the docks, cross referencing them by how often, or *not* often you went, see?” Tapping her off-white fingers blindly atop one of the labeled columns she guided his eyes to the far neater list of dates and occurrences, the robot having taken care to note the frequency for each of their suspect locations.
	“So what we’re asking Brian is if you think *any* of these places are the smart choice, yeah?” The young man cleared his wetted throat, rolling between stiff-arming them further or coming clean. “We could always search your legal residence on top of what you tell us, so there’s no reason to give us the runaround, man.” ‘Legal residence’ rang in his reddening face, nervous scratches at his arm telling him his jig was well and truly up. They’d come for his place of work and soon would be his home, some thick headed lawmen pounding on the door regardless of what, or who, was inside.
	“Fu-huck me man, fine,” he coughed again. “This bullshit’s been going since those weatherman motherfuckers got thrown around by you guys, right? Some other shitters moved in to suck up their business, small timers trying to grab a hold of that, uh, what’s the word-”
	“Infrastructure?”
	“Yeah, that. Four fuhckin’ years is enough to fill that hole, yeah? But not enough to, like, *enforce* it, if you know what I mean. They’re new so they can’t exactly go around killing people and bribing cops to lay off, otherwise I wouldn’t be in here and you wouldn’t be going after me, make sense?”
	“Well then who are these out-of-towners? They Americans, foreigners,” Sally asked.
	“Uh, shit. I only talked with the Americans they hired out of here, keep things close. Wait, shit, right! I guess it would help if I cleared up the timeline here, yeah?” The detectives nodded lightly. “Basically young me goes out to deliver some liquor, winds up in a bar where some shit’s happening. I ended up getting roped into it and started running things for them, and-”
	“And pressing pills and things for them as well?”
	“Yeah, yeah…” He drooped his head a touch, stealing a sip from the lukewarm water in his hand. “Oversimplification of the decade but I’d show up to this teamster’s bar that was attached to a major warehouse and get shit figured out there. And, well, you’ve got these *big* motherfuckers, like six-four, speaking some German or shit. *They’re* from back home, saying things like ‘war can icky duh’ or ‘skeet ope’ when I wasn’t moving fast enough. Christ, and they were packing- rifles and bulletproof vests and shit.”
	“Interesting, could you place the accent if you could?”
	“Like I said, some Euro shit, prolly Germans.”
	“Hm. Germans,” Sally hummed, eyes narrowing. The boy’s cooling demeanor didn’t lie, just slacked and rolled underneath their questioning. Vince hopped up to fetch him another cup of water, an added cigarette taking up his opposite hand. Reconvening Sally continued. “So what was the name of this bar?”
	“The Lion Inn,” Brian said. “Weird name since you can’t sleep there. Big orange lion on the outside though, and it’s a newer place. Very obvious.”
	“Absolutely,” Sally said, running her finger over the name in the ledger where she’d failed to circle it. “And you said this was a very *new* establishment?”
	“Yep, popped up maybe a year ago. Shitty spot for a bar honestly, so that just tells me they were more focused on putting roots down than anything else.”
	“Well Vince, you think that’s our place?”
	“Damn well better be,” he eyed, a curl of smoke drifting across the table and over his head. “We’ll switch up the paper and go sniff it out. They open?”
	“Should be? They don’t really keep to the nighttime. Or daytime, I guess.”
	“Well, uh, anything else Sal?”
	“I don’t believe so, Vince.”
	“Well then we’re done here, again.” Vincent stretched an offering hand to Brian, his cuffed wrists wiggling together as he stared back at the man. Downing his second cup and deftly swapping his cigarette to his left he took the hand. “Thanks for the help, Brian. Sorry things panned out how they did.”
	“Yeah, man. Yeah.” With a sniff he stubbed out his cigarette and rose up, escorted away by a waiting officer as the detectives reconvened out in the hallway.

	Shuffling their newest materials back together, a sharpie striking out the date and time and details on the fresh tape, Vincent and Sally ascended back to the fresh air and cold currents on the main floor, slinking through to their desks in the Vice department. The other smattering of detectives had slipped away on business of their own, the small wing silent save for the clacking steps of someone in the adjacent hall or the sharp whine of the copier further down the hallway. Plopping into their seats Vince wheeled himself around from his desk, legs dragging him out into the narrow aisle between the twin rows of desks.
	“So,” he started, “anything you wanna say about this European story?”
	“He’s telling the truth Vince, Brian doesn’t seem like… he doesn’t fit the description of someone who could just make up a language on the spot. Odds are he figured it was German from movies or something.”
	“Well what is it?”
	“Dutch. They were asking where things were and for him to hurry up.” Vince nodded, Sally’s Sterling-built linguistics knowledge coming in hand more than once.
	“So what do you think the deal is, shot in the dark?”
	“Well, I think the Dutchmen are some stripe of hired muscle-”
	“Sounded like mercenaries to me, given the arms and armor.”
	“Christ, *mercenaries*. Sounds like a shitstorm-”
	“One we can hopefully nip in the bud, Vincent. It doesn’t sound like they’re established yet. And we have pretty solid cause to get a warrant for the whole property, warehouse included.”
	“Yeah, right. I guess we should get on that, then.”
	“I can handle it,” she smiled. “I’d recommend we get some more hands together though, given Brian’s description of things…”
	“Gotcha, I’ll talk to Captain Locke and get back to you, cool?”
	“Yep! I’ll get to work on the affidavit right now,” she swiveled, turning to the chunky personal computer on her side of the broad desk. With a click and a humm it whirred to life, word processing software drummed up as she set to work on composing the document. Vincent walked out of their little wing to find the Vice department head and bring up their pressing issue with him, the prospect of a break so instant enough to grab his attention. As Sally clacked away at her keyboard, the drum of plastic on plastic counting out the minutes, she prayed that their leads were good. They’d be wrapping it up late into the day, night time most likely. Digging into the back of her head she fetched the day’s-worth of pertinent evidence as she filed it onto the screen and out of her mind. With Vince still gone she watched their shared printer scream to life, line by line producing the blank form for him to sign, the subtle dig at her own reliability washing off as she ripped the sheet free. Drumming in her lap she waited another two, then five, then ten minutes as she read and reread the bundle of papers in her hands, slipping the paperclip off every time she checked for errors.
	“Well… I suppose it wouldn’t be any harm to interrupt,” she said aloud, rising from her seat. “Time is of the essence.” Marching out of the department, all the devices behind her shut down and neatly restored to their places, she marched up to the upper floors of the precinct with her pen to get that signature.