By the time I made it back to my apartment all the adrenaline i’d kicked up from the action was leaving my system like the last passengers to make it off the Titanic. I was jittery and had to keep my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t see them shake. I wouldn’t be firing a gun again tonight. Killing a person like that takes a toll. It’s different than in the heat of battle when they draw down on you and you don’t have a choice. This action was all choice. Didn’t matter that I wanted to believe it was the right one.
The car full of goons were packing up and piling into their car laughing and high fiving each other like they’d just won a game. The loss would hit them soon enough. Maybe it turned to anger and they came back. Maybe not. I watched them go and rode the elevator up to the 14th floor where it spat me out in a long corridor filled with identical metal doors. Mine was the one bashed in. A few neighbors were already sticking their heads out their doors and tsk tsking me for being the guy to bring this kind of bad to their doorstep. Mrs. Mitler, a dwarf woman who looked closer to 100 than the 50 she was, told me she’d called the cops and they’d be along soon. The cops wouldn’t be along too soon. This was Greenpoint after all.I ignored them best I could as I walked into the mess of my apartment.
Good News: The locks held. Bad News: The frame didn’t. That one costs more. I was already eating into the profits of my next job. Why couldn’t I have an office like every real detective and that way the baddies show up there and cause damage I just write it off as a business loss.
Bad News: They killed my cat. Good News: I don’t have a cat. They must’ve brought the carcass along as some weird message. What did it say? We will kill pets you don’t have? We hurt things that everyone loves? I’ll admit that did get me. I do love cats. There’s a matrix rule about not hurting cats, so I suppose they were making a statement after all. Or, they never got that memo.
They wrecked a few pieces of furniture, drank the last of my beer, and my bed was suspiciously wet. Somehow all of these things felt like less than the penance I should be paying for my own actions. Somehow all of these things felt like the should be avenged; especially the cat. However there would be a time and place for that. It wasn’t now. Now I needed a hotel to crash at. I dug through my closet, found the right clothes and gear for the upcoming job, and left long before the police considered arriving.