The Neo-Metropol Heist

18: Jaeger

When Jaeger slept, she dreamt that she was falling.
She could almost feel her hair trailing behind her and whipping her in the face, her stomach lurching into her throat.
As she fell, she heard echoes around her. Oscuro barking, repeating gunshots and Tommy Muchanza's screams even though her conscious mind knew he'd never made a sound, Lutalo exhaling quietly and tiredly.
The dream was cliché and she knew it when she finally opened her eyes and landed with a thud back into reality, into a pool of her own sweat.
She lay there in the darkness for longer than she intended to, staring at the smooth silver-grey roof of her cube.
She gestured with her palm and strip-lighting set into the floor illuminated the room with a muted blue, not so dark that she couldn't see her hands in front of her face but not too bright to burn her sore eyes.
Exhaling loudly, she forced herself to momentarily reconnect with real life, reaching for her terminal which sat on the small bedside table fixed to the side of her bed.
A couple of work messages from people who didn't know she was in no kind of state to give a shit, various spam messages, and one from Oscuro.
She felt a wave of sickness wash over her but forced it back down into her stomach. She didn't care what was in it, she didn't care what sick, twisted justification he had for cold blooded murder.
She swiped the screen and cast the unopened message into the abyss of deletion.
As the list of messages reorganised themselves, one appeared that made her feel a warmth she hadn't felt in a while.
'Call me sometime - V'.
Her sister's ID flashed at the end of the message.
It had been a couple of months since she had spoken to Victoria - they hadn't fallen out, but Victoria lived in what was only the next state over but what felt like the other side of the world, and Jaeger was busy most of the time.
Before the city had totally gone to shit, the Jaegers were a big deal within the NMPF. Four generations of officers had made their name a pedigree in the force.
All Jaeger had ever wanted was to be like her father, so when her parents split up, Jaeger stayed behind while Viki went with their mother.
Then her father had died and Jaeger had been left in a city that was quickly going to hell, trapped in a police force that was little more than trigger-happy morons too stupid to pass the RNS entrance exams.
Viki had cultivated a family and lived in a house with hanging-baskets with a husband that wore a suit to work. Her kids were pretty cute, too, Jaeger didn't know much about them except their names and that one of them had a thing about horses and the other liked pickles.
Jaeger opened the message and let out a sigh riddled with emotion as Viki's face appeared, green eyes like hers but with blonde hair instead of Jaeger's dark brunette.
"Hey sis," her sing-song voice sounded tinny through the speakers. In the background, there was a TV playing a noisy kid's show, "it's been too long since we spoke so I thought I'd send you a message since you're never going to."
Jaeger smiled at her sister's smile.
"Mom's fine, you know how she is, she keeps busy," Viki said, "and RJ and Mariana miss their Aunt Yasmin. If you ever want to get out of that box and that city and away from that job of yours, we've always got room for you here, you know that."
Jaeger's eyes welled up inadvertently, but there were no tears left to fall. Then, Viki's smile faded and her eyebrows furrowed.
"You know, you..." Viki seemed like she couldn't form the words she wanted to say, "you don't have to stay there. You don't have to prove anything to anyone, you don't have to prove anything to dad."
Then Viki stopped talking, her face sad like she had suddenly re-discovered a cache of emotion that was probably in the same place Jaeger kept hers.
"Sorry, ignore me, you know what I'm like. I love you, sis. Don't be a stranger."
Then, Viki gave another warm smile, although more forced this time, and the video stopped on the last frame.
Jaeger could have cried, but instead she forced herself to sit up and shook her head, scraping her unwashed hair back and then letting it fall again.
All she wanted to do was to grab the terminal and call her sister, to talk to somebody who she didn't have to keep up a front around and smile for the first time in a long time.
Only she couldn't, even with her own flesh and blood she had to pretend. She had to pretend that living in the city, trying to maintain the thing she'd worked so hard for and that was now slowly suffocating her wasn't killing her.
She put the terminal back onto the side-table and pulled herself out of the mass of covers, placing her bare feet onto the cold floor.
Standing up, she moved to the back of the cube and a door that was completely invisible slid open, revealing the separate washroom area at the back of the structure.
Inside, LED lighting around the mirror set into the wall above the compact sink automatically lit up and illuminated her ghostly pale face.
Her eyes were red and sore, and her hair limp and greasy. Her lips, though she'd felt how sore they were, were cracked and dry. So, she actually looked as terrible as she felt.
She splashed water on her face and rubbed her eyes, like it was going to do anything to kick-start her. She looked and felt like death incarnate.
Back in the main room, she opened up the cupboard doors and began rooting for something to make a meal out of, now that she finally felt as though she wasn't going to hurl it back up again.
As she found some high-protein meal 'bars', that both looked and tasted like pavement slabs, she swiped her palms and the TV on the far wall came alive.
A news feed showed Playa Perdido from afar, smoke rising into the sky still but now illuminated by a muted orange sun.
The riots had almost stopped now, two days of violence and repressed anger exploding outwards as a wave of unrest settling back into the uneasy truce that was ever-present.
Images of the rioters being slowly herded into patrol cars played in carefully cut and pasted segments, all designed to give the city a sense of relief that things would finally go back to normal.
Even Jaeger knew, things were never going to be the same. The Beachers had shown that they weren't willing to be treated like animals, that the city were no longer allowed to sit superior. Good on them, Jaeger thought.
Immediately, the thought was replaced by her work-brain which could only think of all the paperwork that would be involved in processing all the rioters.
She took a bite out of the protein bar and found a hairband, tying the unruly mess atop her head back as she sat down onto the bed.
The bars were designed to replenish energy quickly and efficiently for officers on stakeouts that didn't have time for meals, but Jaeger found that they were equally good meal replacements for when she just couldn't be bothered.
The news feeds switched from the images of Playa Perdido to footage of a CastellsTech event somewhere in the city. There was a brief mention of the upcoming investor conference at the Neo-Metropol, Castells' towering spire, and general discussion about security concerns, but Jaeger had lost interest by that point.
It had been three days since she'd fallen into her bed, letting darkness envelop her and leaving the problems of real life outside.
Only, that hadn't happened, they'd followed her and lingered even though she refused to acknowledge them.
Oscuro, Lutalo, Aguilar, Muchanza. Her worries about the Astoria case seemed small and insignificant now.
Something had shifted in her mind, Oscuro had released frustrations and pent-up anger in what he had done to Tommy Muchanza, and they'd come flooding out in a tidal wave that couldn't be ignored, just as the entire Beach had done.
Everything had changed, and she couldn't ignore it any more. Then, she realised, she was angry.
She hated Oscuro. She hated the NMPF.
Her fists balled and tensed, her teeth clenched. She climbed to her feet and grabbed at her head, yelling out but the frustration stayed, it had burrowed into her head and refused to move.
She began to suffocate, the walls around her no longer a warm, protective womb but those of a metal coffin that was slowly closing in on her. She gasped at the thought and desperately scrambled around for clothes on the floor around her.
Grabbing a black hooded jacket from the floor and a pair of jeans, she pulled them on and left the cube, grabbing her gun on the way out.
She fell out into the cold air, gasping for breath, exhaling and seeing the vapour evaporate in front of her as she did.
Leaning on her own knees, she thought she was going to throw up again, but she hadn't eaten enough, so she forced herself to straighten up and took ten deep breath, feeling her heart rate slow.
She knew that what she'd just experienced was probably a panic attack, and that she most likely wasn't dealing with the emotional ramifications of what she had seen all too well, but she couldn't face that now.
When she finally relaxed, or at least calmed to a point she could function, she strapped her holster under her jacket and turned to walk, aimlessly.
Although it wasn't aimlessly, it took her a while but after what must've been half an hour of wandering she realised where she was heading.
She'd only ever been there twice, and both of those times had been uncomfortable experiences.
Oscuro's midtown apartment, part of a complex of old-style three-storey tenements that hadn't caught up yet, dated and grime-covered. The first time had been an ill-fated meeting for drinks when they had first met, when she thought she found his odd charm and striking looks attractive.
She'd only stayed for an hour or two and a couple of beers before she realised that she didn't want to be there, and that had coloured the rest of the time she'd known the man.
The second time had been for a party Oscuro had held for the office. He'd drank too much and everybody had left early.
She couldn't tell for sure whether every memory Jaeger had of Oscuro had been sullied by what he'd done.
It wasn't all terrible. There had been some times that Jaeger almost considered to be 'good'.
He'd saved her life once or twice, and she'd saved his more. They were bonded by something that normal civilians didn't understand, and she had to remember that. She pinched her hand when she realised she was stroking her gun.
Once, they'd been staking out a deal between two gangs, way before Castells had replaced gang-warfare with his own brand of special corruption.
They'd watched the place in a patrol car for almost three days, eating nothing but protein bars and pissing in the freezing cold.
When it finally happened, it quickly went to shit. Two bosses disagree, give an order and a whole lot of people die. In the chaos, they'd been discovered and dragged into the violence. A bullet had been fired at her and long story short, Oscuro had made sure it hit him.
It had been close, but they managed to shut down the bosses and Oscuro didn't bleed out enough to die. They looked back on it as an 'adventure' now, but then it had been hell.
Jaeger didn't believe that people were born bad. Well, maybe some people just had something in their brains that made them bad, but in the main, people went bad because something made them go bad. Like ripe fruit in the sun.
Whatever had happened to Os, it hadn't always been there. Sure, he'd always been an asshole - but he hadn't always been a cold-blooded killer.
Jaeger stopped, looking up at the window she was sure was Oscuro's.
She stood there for a long time, in the encroaching night air, swaying from restlessness and distraction.
What was she going to do?
Did she want revenge? What for? She hadn't known Tommy Muchanza.
Was it that she'd projected every frustration with her life onto Oscuro because he was an easy scapegoat? If so, even she knew in her angry stupor that that was ridiculous and wrong.
If she had an issue with the NMPF or the way she was living, that was for her to solve. Oscuro had done something despicable but that didn't give her any right to deal out her own justice, wasn't that what the problem was in the first place?
She sighed a sigh laced with tired emotion and was turning to leave when her terminal buzzed with a notification that told her she had a new message.
She shivered and pulled the slate from her pocket, flicking the screen on. A message from Oscuro stared back at her.
'I've left the door unlocked. 336 - Os.'
She blinked twice and glanced back up the window, Oscuro stood there for a moment, blacked out by the warm light of the room behind him, then disappeared.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was walking towards it.
Inside, the building was warm and the corridors inside old and tired. She climbed a staircase to the third floor and found Oscuro's apartment. Further down the hall she could hear loud music booming out of a door, barely muffled by the thin old walls.
The door was off the latch, so she just pushed it open and stepped inside.
Oscuro's apartment was a mess, though not as bad as her cube. A TV on the far corner blurted out lines quietly from some crappy sitcom.
At first, she couldn't see Oscuro, but then he appeared from the kitchen carrying two glasses of liquid.
"You came," he said, "I didn't think you'd even look at my message."
"I didn't," Jaeger told him straight, her spine rigid and her palms sweaty, "I deleted it without reading it."
Oscuro looked bemused.
"Then why are you here, hermana?" He asked.
Jaeger didn't really have an answer to give him, as he stood there holding the glasses, his eyes black and his skin pale, he looked almost pathetic.
Oscuro could never look pathetic, he was too big and too everything else to come close, but he looked different in some way. Jaeger couldn't put her finger on what it was.
Smaller, maybe.
"I don't know," was all she said.
Oscuro stepped forward and Jaeger inadvertently stepped backwards.
Oscuro sighed and handed her the glass, which she took but didn't drink. Oscuro gestured for her to sit down on a scruffy old sofa set in front of the TV, but she stayed stood up in the doorway.
"Look, Jaeger, I just..."
"Why?" Jaeger heard herself ask, as she put her glass down on the nearest counter.
Oscuro raised his eyebrow and leaned back into the chair.
"You might have to be more specific," he said, taking a sip from his drink. Jaeger found herself wondering whether the rings of black around his eye were because of what he'd done or because of what he'd done had caused.
"You know what I mean," she almost spat, "why did you kill the kid?"
Oscuro stared away for a moment, then turned back to her.
"Look, will you sit down, please?"
"I'm not sitting down, Os, answer the question," Jaeger said firmly, finding herself.
Oscuro rubbed his three-day old stubble and sighed.
"And don't give me that shit about him charging us," Jaeger said to him, cutting him off before he could lie, "I saw what you saw and that kid was running to get away from you."
Oscuro nodded, almost solemn.
"I know," he said. Jaeger felt a wave of surprise at his admission and had to recoup her thoughts so she wasn't found speechless.
"Then why?" Jaeger asked.
It looked like Oscuro was thinking for a moment, deeply, looking at the floor. Maybe he was thinking of a justification or maybe it was a just a way to get himself out of it.
"Do you want me to apologise, hermana? Repent?" Oscuro finally said, his eyes narrowing, "confess?"
Jaeger blinked, Oscuro's tone had changed and he didn't look as small any more. He put the drink down and stood up.
"Look, partner," he trilled, "if you want me to apologise, that ain't going to happen."
He strode across the room and stopped a few feet away from her. She made sure she didn't back away, made sure to let him know she wasn't afraid of him even though she probably was.
"Nobody but you gives a shit about this, Jaeger," Oscuro said flatly, his eyes empty, "nobody."
Jaeger gulped.
"You know as well as I do in a couple of weeks I'll be back in the office and back to work," Oscuro told her, "Aguilar might let the upstairs guys do their little internal investigation to keep the Dog off her back, but they won't come up with anything, because she won't let them.
"And then everything will go back to normal. Sure, it might set me back in the race for sergeant by a couple of months, but that'll be it. And you know why?"
Jaeger felt herself almost snarling, and shook her head inadvertently.
"Because nobody gives two shits about some little Beacher piece of shit."
Before she knew it, Jaeger had punched Oscuro square in the nose, his face belching a spray of blood outwards as he stumbled backwards. She could throw a pretty solid punch, but it wasn't nearly enough to drop him.
Then, adrenaline rushing through her and blinding any sort of logic, she'd pulled her gun and aimed it at his face.
Oscuro stared down the barrel, wiping the blood from his face with his wrist, serving only to turn it into a deep crimson streak.
Then, he laughed.
"That it, then?" He asked, chuckling gruffly, "you here to dish out a little vigilante justicia? For the Beach?"
Jaeger suddenly felt ridiculous. She didn't have another go-to-place for when she'd pulled her gun, in the field it was either shoot it or arrest whoever it was aimed at.
"What now?" Oscuro asked, standing up straight.
Jaeger stood there for a moment, the gun straight but her arm starting to tremble.
She could shoot Oscuro.
Physically, she could shoot him. She'd killed before, she'd always had a reason, and she'd always tried every other route beforehand, but she could do it now.
It wouldn't solve anything, and in fact, it would make things a hell of a lot more complicated - but it would make her feel better.
"Come on Jaeger," Oscuro said, "you ain't going to kill me."
He was right.
Oscuro stood there, high and mighty, invincible and untouchable, and Jaeger knew that if she could do anything to bring him down, it wasn't this.
Jaeger met his eyes and then lowered the gun, Oscuro nodding and smiling smugly.
She wanted to say something, something to make him feel bad or think about his actions or at least stop smiling, but she couldn't think of any words strong enough, so she just turned and left.
As she left the room, Oscuro called after her.
"See you soon, partner."
Jaeger half-ran out of the apartment building, back into the cold night air. In the building courtyard, a group of three young men dressed in scruffy, casual attire with grubby faces passed her.
She should have noticed several things about her, how they obviously didn't belong there, how their muted conversation and suspicious glances should have immediately put them on her radar, but she was too distracted.
They passed her and Jaeger realised she was still gripping her gun tightly. She stowed it and walked away from the building, her stomach churned and her heart beating.
Oscuro had terrified her with the coldness of his voice and the emptiness of his eyes.
Maybe she was wrong, maybe Oscuro had always been bad and it was only starting to show now. She couldn't imagine anything that could make a person so completely bad so quickly.
It was only when she was halfway across the courtyard when she suddenly remembered the youths, the delay finally catching up.
She stopped and turned back to the doorway.
The young men didn't fit in here; everything from their clothes to the way they walked placed them elsewhere in the city, somewhere very specific, in fact.
The Beach.
Jaeger stood there, frozen. They were here for Oscuro, that much was clear, she might have had more sense but they wouldn't have any qualms about vigilante justice.
She found herself stood at a crossroads, confronted with a moral decision. She couldn't kill Oscuro, but she didn't have to save him, did she?
She glanced up at Oscuro's window.
If she went now, she could stop them on the stairs, bottleneck them and talk them down.
But Jaeger didn't move a single step, fixed to the spot, her hand on her gun.
It was a few moments before muffled shouting began to emanate from Oscuro's window. It continued for a few seconds before it was ended by a single gunshot that penetrated the window and echoed around the courtyard, the room lighting up brightly for a single split second.
Jaeger gasped quietly, still frozen, her arms limp.
She stood there even as the young men reappeared from the door of the building, running and shouting amongst themselves and then splitting up running in several directions. They were still the same number as when they went in and one of them had a faint spray of blood up his white tshirt.
Jaeger's blood ran cold and she flinched as one of the Beachers burst past her at full speed, shooting her a glance of wild eyes. Young eyes, eyes that knew that a horrible mistake had just been made.
The men disappeared and Jaeger remained, in the cold, her breath billowing out of her mouth and lingering in front of her for a moment.
She knew then that even by doing nothing, she'd allowed something truly horrible to happen, but she wasn't ready to think about that yet, so she turned and walked slowly away into the night.