The Neo-Metropol Heist

20: Jaeger

Jaeger sat in the hospital room waiting room with what felt like cement in her stomach.
She was wearing her casual winter uniform, a thick jacket with a neck covering and the NMPF logo emblazoned on the breast. She was officially back on patrol, not that she was doing anything particularly useful.
Right now, she was fine china to Aquilar and anybody in charge of doling out field work, so she'd been sat on her desk for the last two days, staring into her computer screen.
Of course, she didn't have much choice in coming back to work, now that the department was a detective short.
A neighbour in Oscuro's building had heard the gunshots and called the emergency services before he'd bled out all over his own carpet, and they'd taken out the bullet, sealed him up and pumped him full of new blood from somebody else.
That had kept him alive, but he wasn't 'healthy', by any stretch of the imagination.
The news had come as a shock to the whole department. Beacher vengeance, they called it. Oscuro hadn't deserved it, had he?
Of course he had, Jaeger swallowed venom.
She'd eventually summoned the will to see him, to keep up appearances. As far as she knew, nobody knew she'd even been there the night Oscuro was shot, and she needed it stay that way.
She hadn't pulled the trigger herself, but she'd been there.
Jaeger was disgusted with herself for worrying about how she'd come out of the situation, but it was the easiest thing for her mind to focus on now.
The doctors weren't sure about Oscuro's prognosis, a lot of his body was being kept alive by machines, robots and powerful medication. Maybe they should just let him die, Jaeger thought. She swallowed again.
"Detective Jaeger?" A voice called out through the dull hum of the waiting room.
Jaeger looked up and spotted a tall, slender figure. At first, she thought it was a very thin nurse, but quickly recognised the frame of a medical droid.
The machine's carefully sculpted features were sympathetic and soft, a blank white faceplate bearing a blinking red cross. On its chestplate, the CastellsTech logo was embossed, neat and clean against the white ceramic.
"Detective Oscuro is ready for visitors," the droid said. Its voice was artificially feminine, meant to be reassuring but actually quite creepy, "are you ready?"
Jaeger nodded, standing up from the utilitarian and uncomfortable plastic chair and walking across the clinically lit room. She could smell disinfectant and everybody spoke in hushed, muted tones.
She'd never liked hospitals, even more so since her father had died in one. The very same hospital, actually. Two floors up.
She followed the robot past vending machines and trolleys, some with patients on them. The hospital was busy with fallout from the riots, both officers and Beachers.
The hospital only had so many rooms, but a lot of the people left outside in the corridors looked like Beachers to Jaeger.
They stopped at a room with a sliding glass door, words projected onto it from a source she couldn't see.
A lot of it was confusing doctor-speak, but at the bottom it said: '(Det.) Guillermo D. Oscuro. Gunshot, cat. 4, patient no. 004657'.
The robot gestured at the door and the words disappeared as it slid up to the roof, allowing them into the room.
It was quiet, and smelled like the rest of the hospital. There was machinery in the far corner, pumping and hissing, surrounded by beeping monitors.
In the middle of the room, there was a bed, and in it, Oscuro lay.
His eyes were closed, not that Jaeger had expected him to be conscious. She wondered for a moment what 'category 4' meant, and which way the scale tipped in terms of severity.
"Detective Oscuro is being kept in a medically induced coma, Detective," the robot explained, standing over the bed and apparently checking the monitors for something Jaeger couldn't see, "we're monitoring him closely, but he remains in a critical but stable condition."
Jaeger nodded.
"Well, at least there's no bullshit with robot doctors," she said, without thinking. The robot simply nodded at her courteously and left the room.
Jaeger stood there for a moment as the door hissed closed behind her, unsure of where to go.
Her last memory of a conscious Oscuro was him standing over her, his eyes flaming like a devil and his voice empty and without emotion. He'd terrified her, and even now, as he lay half-dead, he still held power.
She swallowed her fear, told herself she was being ridiculous, and moved to the bed.
He was pale, and his eyes were dark, his lips blue.
The monitor next to his head beep slowly and regularly, an IV drip carefully feeding various medications into his arm, all to keep a murderer alive.
She wiped her eye and realised she'd been crying. Even she was confused.
She was angry, and Oscuro was a murderer. But now he lay there, half-dead, and she didn't know whether that was punishment enough.
Jaeger didn't want him to die, and yet she didn't want it to be because she knew that if he did, it would be her fault.
"So," she said, her voice croaking, "I bet you didn't see this coming. I definitely didn't."
She felt ridiculous the moment she'd said it. Oscuro couldn't hear hear, and even if he could, the words would be equally stupid.
There was a comfortable looking chair at the side of the bed, but Jaeger didn't take it. She wasn't supposed to be there, and she didn't want to be there, so she stayed stood up.
She wondered where Oscuro's family were. He didn't speak about them much, she knew that he had a dad that lived a couple of states over, but they didn't speak much.
He had a sister, too, but she didn't live close. Jaeger and Oscuro had more in common than she liked to admit.
But it hadn't turned her into a murderer.
Without warning, Oscuro's body jolted and the heart rate monitor began to beep faster. He grunted, moaned and coughed, and his eyes fluttered open.
It was only for a second, and it wouldn't even have been long enough for his eyes to refocus, but for that second, Jaeger could swear he looked at her.
Into her, the dark eyes judging and blaming.
Then: "... hermana."
She felt sick, the cement in her stomach back without warning. She wanted to run, to get out of the suffocating room.
Then, his eyes were closed again, and it was like he hadn't even woken up.
Maybe he hadn't, even she was starting to doubt her own sanity, god knows what the patrol psychs would think if they got hold of her.
She wanted to leave, suddenly feeling suffocated by the clean plastic of the room. The door behind her hissed, and she expected to see the robot doctor reappear, but instead, Aguilar appeared, frown lines across her pale face.
"Detective Jaeger," Aguilar said, "I thought I might find you here."
"Lieutenant," Jaeger choked, unsure of why she suddenly felt so guilty, "were you looking for me?"
Aguilar shook her head, her eyes still focused and piercing.
"Not exactly," she said, "I came to see Detective Oscuro, I just expected you'd be here."
Jaeger didn't have a response, so she just stayed silent, waiting for Aquilar to mirror her position on the opposite side of the horizontally unconscious Oscuro.
"It's a tragedy, don't you think?" Aguilar said, a statement and not a question, "for an officer, any officer, to be cut down in such an unjust and unfair way."
Unfair. Unjust. Jaeger couldn't process the words without noting how ridiculous they were when used in that context.
"It's... awful," Jaeger managed.
Aguilar nodded, her brow furrowed and her raptor-like eyes piercing.
"It is," she said, "so, why are you here, detective?"
Jaeger felt trapped, the walls were closing in again and she had to get out. Each beep of Oscuro's monitors screeching into her ears and striking her brain like missiles.
"Actually, lieutenant, I was just leaving," she barely managed to choke the words out as she began to head towards the door.
She barely made it four steps before Aguilar handed her a tablet and said, "could it be you have a guilty conscience?"
Jaeger felt sick, whatever was on the screen she didn't want to see. If she didn't take it then she didn't have to think about it. The panic attack, because that's what it was, subsided and she froze, moving only to take the terminal from Aguilar's sharp, pointed fingers.
It was looping video footage, blurry video from a security camera.
She watched it for a few moments as a miniature version of herself, monotone and ghostly, strode into the frame.
At her side, she held her gun in a shaking hand. Her face was pale and her eyes dark from the shadow of the video.
She looked angry.
As the miniature screen version of herself turned away, Aguilar stared her up and down.
"This footage was captured by the security cameras outside Detective Oscuro's apartment around the time he was shot," the woman said, Jaeger's heart beginning to race like it was going to tear from her chest and fall to the floor, "that appears to be you, Detective Jaeger."
Jaeger had no reply for a moment.
"You think... I did this?" She asked, quietly.
Aguilar laughed, a throaty cackle.
"Of course not," she said, gesturing at the screen as it showed the young Beachers that had shot Oscuro stream past her as she stood frozen in the courtyard, "but you were there."
Jaeger didn't understand for a moment, then it clicked.
"What are you going to do with this?" Jaeger asked.
Aguilar smiled and put the tablet away.
"I like you, Jaeger," Aguilar said, no real truth to the words, "you're skilled. Determined, and you have a good sense of right and wrong. A couple of years ago, that would have made you a damn good officer.
"Right now, though? It makes you a massive fucking pain in the ass."
Jaeger didn't let her features soften, now was a time to be strong.
"Things don't work the way you want them to work, your daddy's do-gooder ideals don't fit in today's world. Things aren't right. You do what you're told and what you have to do to survive."
For a moment, Jaeger had a flashback to her conversation with Lutalo, except that there she found a sense of reassurance, and here all she found was hatred and contempt.
"People like you think you can change the system, fix it," Aguilar spat the words, "and maybe some of you do. But what people like you do especially well is ruin people - we all do what we need to get by, Jaeger. We all answer to somebody."
So, it was self-defence. A shield to protect all the meager comforts Aguilar held dear.
"So with this, I'm going to make sure you do what you're told. I'm going to make sure you fit into the system like a good little cog, and I'm going to make sure you don't do a thing to fuck up everything I have worked my fingers to the bone for.
"Oscuro should be sergeant because he understands. He knows how things work, how not to rock the boat. You don't."
Jaeger wouldn't have been surprised if Oscuro had risen from the bed to join in.
"It's obvious you didn't kill him, anybody who's taken one look at your fucking psych profile knows you don't have it in you. But this is all I need to tie you down with enough fucking red tape to leave you sat rotting in a desk for the next fifty fucking years. Do I make myself clear?"
Jaeger felt like she could be snarling, because she knew that Aguilar had her pinned to the wall. She could lash out all she liked, but she knew the woman with the severe face had her right where she wanted her. So she just nodded.
"That's good," Aguilar said, her features suddenly relaxing like nothing had ever happened, "now, get back to the office. Paperwork doesn't just disappear when you leave it to pile up."
Jaeger wanted to say something, anything to defend herself. But she couldn't find the words, so she just turned and left the room, leaving Aguilar stood over Oscuro, smiling at her own thoughts.