The Magpye: Circus (3 page)

Parked up in the docks, Owen
and Rosa didn't normally practice the art of being inconspicuous or
hiding in plain sight. They liked to be seen. Since they'd come to
this hell hole of a town, they'd made it their business to be seen.
On the streets, in the precincts and, most importantly, right up in
the face of every son of a bitch who thought he was above the
law.

But tonight was different.

The back door of the car opened
almost silently and the Magpye slid soundlessly onto the back
seat.

"Detective White," he said. His
voice muffled through his mask, but gave Rosa a chill down her
spine nonetheless. She had spent six years profiling serial killers
and rapists before being hand-picked for the "Clean Squad", as they
jokingly called it. Nothing, but nothing, in those six years had
made her feel the way she did when in the same car with Magpye. She
had always considered herself grounded, rooted in the real world,
and in the now. It was what made her a great profiler; her almost
mechanical brain was the perfect tool for analysing the chaos that
drove others. Now, confronted with something so unreal, she could
feel the cogs and gears of her mind grinding together, threatening
to seize up at any moment.

Was this really what they were
doing? Had they really put their trust in this man, this...
creature? Rosa had been trained to hunt people like Magpye, not put
a leash on them and take them out for a walk.

Owen adjusted the rear view
mirror. "This is a bad one, I just need you to know that."

"They're all bad ones," replied
Magpye.

"We've been monitoring the
warehouse for three weeks now," said Rosa. She found talking made
it better, especially talking over case notes. If she could drag
them all, Magpye included, back to the world of facts and figures
and logic, then maybe she could cope with this. "Surveillance has
been difficult, for obvious reasons, but we estimate Victor Chase
is moving two to three shipments a week through here."

"More drugs?" asked Magpye.
"We're tired of hitting drug dens. They just build more and there's
always more junkies who want to work in them for a cheap hit."

Owen watched Rosa take a mental
note. They'd heard Magpye talk about himself in the plural before,
and Owen knew that some part of his partner's machine-mind was
filing this incident away as well.

"Not drugs, no," he said.
"Kids. He's shipping kids."

Magpye's head dropped and Owen
and Rosa heard him muttering something behind his mask.

"We've put in for all the
paperwork, just like always. A bust like this could open up this
city, take things to the next level... we could take Vic
Chase."

"But the paperwork got lost,"
said Magpye, "Just like it always does. Because behind Vic Chase is
Cane King, and Cane King runs everything."

Rosa sighed. "You can't take an
internet conspiracy theory and make it the basis for an
investigation," she said curtly. "Cane King has been investigated
every way there is and he's come up clean every time."

"Of course he has, that's the
conspiracy," replied Magpye. Rosa's well trained ear could hear the
tension in his voice, the frustration. Vic Chase was a scum-bag,
through and through, and after everything Rosa had seen in almost a
year in this damned city, she had no qualms about unleashing Magpye
on him. But this obsession with Cane King was becoming
dangerous.

"Look," said Owen, "We know you
think King is behind all this. And maybe he is. Maybe the puzzle
piece you need to prove it all to us is in that building right now,
or maybe it isn't."

Owen turned in his seat to face
Magpye.

"But even if it isn't, we do
know what is... a whole bunch of kids who are about to get sold on
to the highest bidder. You know the knife edge we're on here, I
know you know. You think it sat right with me, staking this place
out for week and week, watching the vans come and go, knowing what
was inside? I've been in and out of dirty departments my whole
career and I never knew a cop turn a blind eye to something like
this. Whatever's going on in this town it's rotten to the core,
I'll give you that. I'd love to make a case, make it stick, and put
Vic Chase away... but we can't."

The car was silent for a
moment, except for the soft murmuring of the Magpye.

Owen watched him. It was true,
he'd worked in and out of dirty departments his whole life. He'd
come to believe that a lot of people couldn't be that close to so
much pain and misery and wrongness without it rubbing off on them.
The only sensible response was to become worse than the thing you
had to face every day. Some cops did it in a bottle, some in a line
of white powder. Some put a gun to their heads. Some just put out
their hand, took the money, and sold their morality on to someone
else. If it was a bad world, why be a good person? And he knew he
was on that same slope now. He'd been recruited because of his work
uncovering corruption, and now he was running a disturbed vigilante
in his own turf war against the mob. Maybe he'd already slipped too
far. Or maybe not.

The Magpye looked up from the
floor of the car. "We'll make it stick."

Owen watched as Magpye slipped
out the car and dashed across the street, disappearing into an
alleyway between two warehouses.

Rosa sighed. "This is
wrong."

"What's going on in that
warehouse is wrong."

"He'll cross the line, you have
to see that."

"When he does, if he ever does,
I'll be there."

"It'll be King. He'll take a
run at him no matter how insane we tell him it is."

"You think it's that crazy?
I've been around corruption a long time Rosa and I'll tell you
thing... the deeper it goes, the higher it goes. You might want to
dismiss it, but I think he might be right."

"I'll remember you said that
when Cane King's on a slab and our friend out there is suspect
number one."

Owen started up the car. "If
the time comes, I'll bring him in myself."

Cane King was six foot six,
blond, and handsome in the way that magazine covers like people to
be handsome. His suit was worth more, Vic suspected, than his
apartment. Cane was flanked by his two chief lieutenants: Mick
Garrity, the dirtiest of dirty cops, and Jack Taylor. Vic had heard
things about Taylor, things that made even his flesh crawl. Vic was
a shark, sure, and he'd done his share of bad things, but always
with a purpose. He was a businessman, first and last. Taylor, on
the other hand, was the kind of guy who does bad things just
because he wants to. An ice cold sociopath who would kill you as
soon as look at you.

Right now, he was looking at
Vic Chase.

"Mr. King," said Blake,
breaking the silence. "I had no idea that you..."

"What?" asked King. His voice
was strong, flowing. A voice that commanded. A voice that
convinced. "Didn't know that the heads of the four families that I
let run this city were coming together? Now, I wouldn't be half as
smart as people say I am if I didn't know that, would I?"

Garrity and Taylor stepped in
behind him, Cane sauntered across the gantry and down the flight of
metal steps. Each step clanged like a bell. One, two, three, four.
Vic held his ground, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

"Although I must say," King
continued. "You could have picked more comfortable
surroundings."

"It's a safe place," Vic
replied, his eyes never leaving Jack Taylor. "Not so many of those
about right now."

Garrity pushed past Vic and
dumped a heavy duffel bag on the table. There was something big
inside, big and wet.

"What the fuck?" blurted Keane,
"The fuck's in that bag, Garrity?"

"The answer to your problems,"
answered Cane, patiently waiting for Garrity to return to his side.
The dirtiest of dirty cops was also one of the most out of shape,
not that it mattered. Mick Garrity had a mean streak as wide as any
there was, and could fight with the best of them. Out of shape or
no, Vic wouldn't have bet against Garrity in a fight with
Keane.

Cane pulled Vic's chair across
to himself and sat down, Taylor and Garrity standing either side of
him.

"So, Garrity tells me you've
got a problem with the new cops in town?"

"Them and their freakshow
helper, yeah," said Vic. "It's been six months and there's no let
up. People are starting to ask questions Mr. King."

Cane smiled. "Ah yes, the
mysterious vigilante. The masked man. We're going to deal with him
too."

"Thank you, Mr. King," wheezed
Blake. "We appreciate it."

"That's it?" said Keane,
"You're not even going to ask him how?"

"Mr. Blake has been alive a lot
longer than you," said Taylor suddenly. His voice was the
antithesis of Cane King's. Emotionless, monotone. "Perhaps his
gratitude and respect for Mr. King are why."

Cane laughed. "It's alright,
Jack. It's a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer. So, open
the bag..."

"What?" asked Keane.

"You heard him, Irish," said
Crow, suddenly finding his voice. "Open the bag."

Vic watched as Keane moved cautiously towards the bag. He
had to admire the way that King had divided the room so quickly.
Blake and Crow on one side, the loyal and dutiful, Keane on the
other. It didn't give Vic many places to go; Keane wasn't the sort
of ally that he wanted,
even
if he
only lived through the
next ten minutes.

Keane got a hold of the zipper
and slowly opened up the bag. "Holy shit."

"Empty it," said King, even as
Keane was backing slowly away from the bag. "Onto the table."

With one hand over his mouth,
Keane took hold of the end of the bag and slowly lifted it up. The
contents shifted awkwardly, then began to spill out. The first few
pieces were unrecognisable, just hunks of bloodied flesh, fragments
of broken bone. Blood and bile had begun to leak from the bottom of
the bag and pool on the table when a partly skinned hand toppled
out. Blake's oxygen bottles hissed as he drew breath, watching a
misshapen head roll free.

Crow vomited, unable to control
his revulsion, as the head stopped, face up, in front of him. The
eyes were gone, the mouth was nothing more than a smashed and
gaping hole.

"The first of your so called
untouchable super cops," said King. "Tomorrow my news network will
break the story that this hero-cop was killed by your vigilante.
He'll be public enemy number one. Garrity here will set up a task
force to track him down and when we find him... well, I'll leave
that up to you."

Magpye finished scaling the
roof of the building next to the warehouse and carefully wound in
his trapeze wire. The adjacent building was slightly larger than
the warehouse, and this perch offered Magpye a view down on to the
roof of the warehouse that was his target. Six months ago, he could
practically have walked up to the front door. The gangs had gotten
smarter since then, more cautious. A lot of the operations were
mobile now, moving from place to place to stay ahead of him and the
few clean cops who fed him his information. Those that were too big
to moved, like this one, had been fortified. Good, Magpye thought
to himself. They're scared. They're under siege.

The windows were all covered
with paper and boarded from the inside. The doors at either end of
the building had new steel braces, new locks. No way in. Except the
skylights. Dotted across the metal roof, they were too high up
maybe for anyone to get to. Too high up to worry about. It had to
be a forty foot drop, at least, from the lowest of them. A scary
height, if you hadn't been raised in a big top.

"Need to get a closer look,"
muttered Magpye to himself, groping inside his coat. He pulled out
a telescope and carefully unzipped and lifted his mask before
putting it to his eye. The scope was old, another relic from the
circus, but it did the job. The skylights were clear and through
them he could make out a little of the layout inside the warehouse.
Armed thugs roamed back and forth, nervous. Did they know he was
coming? It didn't matter.

Slipping the telescope away,
Magpye carefully zipped his mask back up. He checked the rest of
his outfit as well. The coat, packed with all the little tools he'd
amassed from the circus, sat over the tight mesh of Lycra and
leather he'd stitched together himself. He checked it from head to
toe, making sure every seam was closed, that no inch of his flesh
was exposed. He had to be careful - it only took a droplet of
blood, a gram of flesh to get inside him, in his bloodstream, and
the unquiet ghost of whoever the blood and flesh belonged to would
be his.

Their memories, their
knowledge, their skills, all patch-worked onto his mind. The
problem was, ghosts had a way of making you theirs too, and
Magpye's head was full enough already.

The circus was one thing. At
first, he'd only sought out the ones who had skills he could use.
Acrobats, sharpshooters, knife throwers. It had been bad enough
picking through what was left of their belongings, but searching
for their blood, or their charred flesh, was something else
entirely. He'd needed it, that had been the justification. He'd
needed it. And he only needed a little - a dry blood stain,
moistened by his pale tongue, was all it took. He'd needed it. But,
after a while, he'd started to need them, too. His own memories
were little more than fragments, and so he'd collected the minds
and memories of others, hoping to piece together a little of who he
was through them. Another justification, perhaps, but in the long
days and nights as he'd scoured the ruins of the circus, hunting
for each elusive splash of crimson that held the key to another
soul, he'd convinced himself of it.