Chapter 107: Tale 11, Ch 2: The Man Who Met the Shadow

I grunted, and walked back to the police station’s door and knocked on its rusted bars.

“Name and number,” a woman’s voice said over an intercom. The round, black lens of a camera looked at me through the bars, set in a little divot in the wall behind the metal door.

“Mec,” I said.

“And your last name — whoa!”

It was a common, often delayed reaction people had when they first saw me. The image of a man wearing clothes made on Sevens, sturdy breathable fabrics, weren’t too off-worldly. What would usually surprise people was my gold-lined Verland helmet.

A round, not-quite conical shaped helmet, it had thin bands of metal riveted onto the top-middle going down every few centimeters along the cheek and neck guards. These bands, and the rectangular noseguard, were the parts that had turned gold when the polished steel helmet was blessed. Not only did it shock those not from the planet Triumph, it immediately told anyone who saw it that I was a Gold Prophet.

“Um, what do you need?” the woman controlling the door, looking at me through the camera, said through a quick stutter.

“I need to speak with Clark Donnegan,” I replied.

“Is he, um, is he expecting you?”

“Yes.”

A sharp buzz rang out from the intercom, signaling that the many electronic locks had been opened on the iron door. I swung it open and stepped through, walking up to the counter where a plain-faced police officer sat scratching reports on an electronic notepad.

“I need to speak with Clark Donnegan,” I said before the woman could say anything.

She looked up, took a double take at the sight of my helmet, then looked down to a schedule resting next to her notepad. “Yes, well,” the woman said and noisily cleared her throat, trying to divert her eyes from my helmet, “Minus two floor, office minus 246. Stairs to your right.”

I checked the Velcro patch on the woman’s left shoulder that showed her rank. “Thank you, Sergeant.” I was glad I’d researched the police officer command structure for this city. They varied so much between cultures. Even the Grundar barbarians had a different system than Verland, and the two kingdoms bordered each other.

As I walked away, the sergeant reached out and noisily cleared her throat again. “You wouldn’t happen to be looking for Shane, would you?”

I stopped and turned back toward her. “Do you know where he is?”

I must have sounded too stern, because the sergeant nearly fell out of her chair. “No, no, I don’t know, no.” She cleared her throat again, even louder than before, and sat back in her chair.

I took one step back toward the sergeant, enough to make her straighten, and said, “Look, I’m not here to interfere with anything. I’m just here to find Shane. After what he’s done, I’m sure you’ve wanted him gone a long time ago.”

“Well, it’s just, you know,” the sergeant mumbled, shrugging, “I thought you’d be working with the other two is all.”

“Other two?” I crossed my arms.

“The White and Gold, the Prophets who were here earlier at the Cells district. They were looking for Shane too.”

Cells was the most populous, over-crowded, violent district in Prosperity. Its biggest tragedy was not being completely overrun by gangs and organized crime, but the fact that no one of these elements was in control. Power shifted daily, with every change fought for in blood and illegal chemical enhancers.

I didn’t hesitate, despite my slight shock these two hadn’t contacted me, but asked, “What did they find?”

“Him, apparently. But they left at daybreak.”

I blinked. “Did they deal with Shane?”

The sergeant shrugged.

“They just left?”

The sergeant threw up her arms in a bigger shrug and said, “Beats me. I just organize tickets and point people to the stairs.” She indicated the stairs with her eyes, eager for me to leave.

“Listen, sergeant,” I said as I approached the woman’s desk and rested my loosely clenched fists near her notepad. She cleared her throat much softer this time. “The man we are talking about is not just a renegade. He’s a murderer.” I grabbed the digital pencil out of the sergeant’s shaky fingers and started writing on the pad’s orange-stained glass surface. “Here is my portable phone’s number. You will call me if you have or receive any information about Shane. You understand?”

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I spoke slow and direct and got the appropriately repeated nod I wanted. “Good,” I said and walked toward the stairs. As I did, I knocked twice on my helmet, the golden clang resonating off the cracked concrete walls of the police station. “The Prophets are here to help, sergeant. Don’t forget that.”

Police officers like that sergeant always irritated me. Sit behind the desk and point at the stairs, her own words. How many people had just as much apathy for what was going on in Prosperity? Just smelling the streets easily answered that question.

As I made my way down the stairs, I paused at the first minus level, the first underground level, tertiary containment. It held the everyday criminals, the delinquents, the brawlers, the ordinary filth the system had no way of containing or controlling.

Urine and vomit-stinking cages lined every nook and cranny of the first-floor hallway. I saw about six little pens, thin and cracked black iron blocking off the contained, along with the windowless, crumbling concrete. Further down, I saw that the bars blocking the cells from each other had been taken out, allowing for more people to be stuffed into one giant cell.

I sniffed and shook my head. Horrible filth. No wonder Prosperity allowed a man like Shane to go without capture for so long if this was the condition of the police station.

Most of them wouldn’t even be prosecuted, only kept in these massive cells to frighten them. Those men who weren’t forgotten or didn’t have their papers lost in processing were released back into the wild of the Trains District, or were killed in the cells by those who should have been locked in the secondary containment level further below.

Disgusted, I walked down the dirty steps. They were so stained with a variety of liquids and dust that I kept my head on the walls. The smell down on the minus two level wasn’t much better.

“Come in — I know who you are,” I heard Clark Donnegan say when I knocked at his door. Knocking was unnecessary as the windowpane was missing from his imitation-wood door.

I stepped over the dusty, broken glass in his doorway and approached the detective’s desk. “Detective Donnegan,” I said, and extended my hand.

He was a large man, short and round but with a scarred and narrow face. He wore a gray hat covered in burns, and sucked on an unlit gumbush stick. He didn’t get up, only pointed at a chair with a thick, short finger. “Sit down.”

Shrugging off the lack of respect, I sat. “Have you any developments to report?”

“You know it’s not too often that the Prophets communicate with us direct.” The man finally looked up from what was apparently his lunch, laid out on his paper-messed desk next to his blackened computer. “Big-ups like that usually like to talk to our big-ups.” He leaned back in his chair, causing a massive creak in the plastic thing, and tilted his hat so he could see me in his reclined position.

“I spent many hours tracing Shane’s known movements. I wanted to save time by having a White speak with your department.”

“Mmhmm. And they gave you my name.” Donnegan’s hand rested easily on the black plastic handle of a dirty revolver. The thing was quite large for a police officer, old and rusted from either too much or too little use.

“No.”

“No?” The fat man rested his pudgy fingers on his belly, squinting his eyes at me.

“No. The White who communicated with your chief got a list of those in your department. I ran the information and found you.”

There has always been an unstated honor code among the Prophets. Among the highest of these was honesty. But sometimes Prophets would abuse the truth, twist it, manipulate it to something wholly factual but completely misleading. For me, this was just as bad a violation as telling an outright lie.

“You are the individual who knows the most about Shane,” I continued, not withholding any facts. “You’ve worked with him before.”

“Seen him, is all,” the detective noted as he reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a mini torch. Grease and sweat stained the torch’s steel exterior with an oily film that I was surprised didn’t catch fire when Donnegan snapped the flint and ignited the little flame. As he spoke, he lit his gumbush stick and inhaled the yellowish smoke. “When he first got here. On assignment then, both of us. We were trying to take down a chemical-enhancer shop that had set up in one of the leftover train assemblers. Didn’t do much more than point him in the right direction.”

My opinions about police in Prosperity had yet to be disproved.

“And you saw his face before he became what he is now,” I said.

The plastic chair creaked like the noise of a sick animal as Donnegan unclenched his hands and leaned forward on his desk. “And what would that be, Mr. Gold Prophet?”

“A shadow.”

“A shadow.” Donnegan took a long puff of the yellow and brown fumes burning off the tip of his gumbush stick. The brown tint to the yellow smoke meant the gumbush was mixed with artificial substitutes, nasty stuff that made an already filthy smell worse.

“It’s not what the papers call him,” Donnegan said, and rifled through the remnants of his lunch and what might have been the pieces of a month’s worth of newspapers scattered on his desk and floor. He picked up a front page, wiping off the blackened dust. “Says here, ‘Shane kills twelve.’ Six of them chemical-enhancer pushers, three pimps, and a thief caught stealing from a midnight shop. Last two were programmers working late in an office.” He tossed the papers and they scattered over the desk. “Nothing about a shadow.”

“That’s exactly why he is one,” I said. “No contact, no reasoning, no arrests, just headline after headline of his actions.”

“And what can I call you?”

“Mec.”

Donnegan took a long drag from his artificial gumbush stick. “What did your high ups back at Prophets headquarters tell you about Shane, Mec?”

“That he was a killer, a thief, and a blight on this city.”

“Hmm.” Creak, creak, his chair squeaked as he rocked back and forth. “That it?”

“There’s nothing more to know. He’s a rogue killing people. I expected a little more cooperation on the city’s part to help me with this, detective, and I’m not enjoying the reception I’m getting. Will you help me or do I have to do your work for you?”

A necessary insult. The man was a pig, unlike the Verland or Sevens police. Dutiful and strong, they were. These Prosperites seemed so daunted by the task of handling the millions messing up their city that they didn’t even try to contain the violence it caused.

With a forceful stamp, Donnegan pressed out his gumbush stick and said, “How do you catch a shadow?”

“Detective Donnegan?” the little speaker covered in wrappers and papers on Donnegan’s desk crackled with the voice of the sergeant at the front desk. “Triple homicide and a fourth in progress at the Fertile River Coal Plant, the new one.”

“In progress?” I asked.

Donnegan pressed the button on top of the covered speaker and said into it, “On my way.”