Karma Police

Baradit

Jonathan Rivarola took the safety off his gun and held it near his face. He leaned back against the outside wall of the house like he’d seen the cops on TV do so many times before. He was sweating, smiling, scared, but he also had an incontrollable urge to spearhead the attack, wrapped in a heroic shout. He dreamed of killing a whole gang of drug dealers himself, of saving some fellow officer’s life and emerging wounded – slightly – to the sound of his companions’ cheers. None of that would happen today. The team was small, the operation minor and the information to the press, restricted. The criminal hidden inside the house was considered highly dangerous and the intelligence work required to bring off his capture demanded caution and silence.

 Jonathan sweat his rookie fear, gripping a tiny standard revolver, his shrunken balls and legs half numb from crouching made him look like a monkey clinging to a branch.  The sweat ran into his eyes and made them burn like hell but he didn’t dare close them; he was staring fixedly at the dark, chiseled face of his unit's commander. Telecommunications and the telepathic coordination systems had also been disconnected because of the risk of interception. Intelligence suspected that the criminal had psychic abilities that could block his capture and recommended the traditional sign code for organizing the operation.

“I just hope that motherfucker comes my way,” muttered Jonathan, picturing himself standing in front of the criminal, dodging a machine gun burst in slow motion, rolling on the floor and nailing a single bullet between the guy’s eyes with clinical perfection.

There was hate inside of him. This was his first police operation and he’d had to get deep inside the twisted psychological profile of the criminal. Mentally, he went through the huge file that each cop had received as part of the pre-op briefing.

Renato Carranza had been the perpetrator of the most horrifying series of murders in known history. He’d been found at his home in the outskirts of Temuco, in the middle of a pile of half-rotten corpses of naked girls, all younger than twelve and on the verge of puberty. The country had lived through months of terror before his arrest. Girls who disappeared as though into thin air were later found with their wombs torn to pieces,  discarded in the most unusual places: inside the engine of a truck painted with blue spots; hanging by one foot in a library bathroom, covered with needles; nailed to the door of some church or inside a giant bottle of formol hanging from a light post. Jonathan felt sick remembering the photographs attached to the file.

The file didn't mention that written on the inside wall of each of their skulls was a word from the book Renato was writing, using his victims as the blank pages of a cryptic text on the beauty of Korean calligraphy.

No one understood his profound artistic sensibility.

The media had a field day with the details (the juicy details) and when he [Renato] finally appeared before the courts the whole country was stunned by plain, ordinary face. No fangs, no threatening eyes, just a common, almost bored-looking man narrating his odd routine, his cutting-edge art: Renato Carranza, plastic artist of no particular note, had decided to feed, for a period of nine months, on immature ovaries taken from pre-adolescent girls who were born at magic points within the territory.  The magical-artistic ritual demanded the bare-handed extraction of the organs through the young girls’ vaginas, which were kept artificially distended by mechanical devices. Later he would kiss the girls and hug them tenderly, accompanying them with chants until they bled to death in his arms.

Jonathan had a little niece he adored. The very idea of someone hurting her made his chest burn.  He would love to go in there and fire all his ammo into that son of a bitch’s head, but his commander hadn’t moved a finger yet, there he was with one knee on the ground and his hand on hip in a perfect pose, ‘beautiful as a Greek sculpture,’ Jonathan thought, watching his teammates out of the corner of his eye.