Creed wasn't there when the body was brought in in the coffin for everyone to see and take a moment, and he didn't care about that. He had only ever seen Walter Mayberry once, and the man didn't speak a single word to him. Instead, he was in Doctor Faye Willoughby's office again. After the news that Creed had had his second encounter with Henry Marsden, Doctor Willoughby wanted to see him again to find out how he was doing.
"I'm...good."
"Good."
"Yep...good."
"How do you feel about Henry Marsden now?" Doctor Willoughby pushed her glasses back into proper position on her face. With the other hand, she scribbled some things down on her notepad.
"I feel fine..."
"Your choice to spare him...to hold a gun to his head and then decide to spare him and take him into custody, that's not what was expected."
"Was I supposed to kill him?" Creed repositioned himself on the couch in front of Willoughby, watching her eyes go from him to the paper and back to him.
"No...only if you wanted to."
"Well, everyone else around here is pissed at me because I didn't kill him."
"He killed a number of good men. They're in pain, but they'll get over it."
"Like Mayberry?"
Doctor Willoughby paused and glanced at a potted plant on the right corner of her desk, then resumed, "Yes. Mayberry will be replaced, and business will resume as usual."
Creed quietly watched her write until he couldn't take the silence anymore, "I wanted to kill him..."
She looked up at him, ready to listen some more, "Go on."
"I wanted to kill him really bad. I wanted to make him suffer for killing my team...but in that moment when I had the gun trained on him, Cordell telling me to do it..."
"And?"
"...I started to think of something I told someone once. That...you can't let vengeance get in the way of justice. It might feel good in the moment to put a bullet in his brain, but I would regret it afterwards."
Doctor Willoughby wrote some more observations down. Creed watched the pen jitter back and forth as if trying to escape from her hand, "So...am I good to go? Am I clear to leave?"
Doctor Willoughby put the pen down and watched Creed across the room, "You know, Mr. Creed, I never requested that I see you again after you dealt with Henry Marsden. Clearly, you wanted be here."
Creed sat dumbly for a moment, trying to recall. She told me she wanted to talk with me again, didn't she? I remember it so clearly. "Well, I guess I'll be going. Thank you, Doctor Willoughby."
Creed stood and left the office, returning to the ground floor of the other building just in time to catch Commander Kerzing as he was leaving. They had taken away Mayberry's body and the members of the crowd were dispersing.
"Sir."
"What is it, Creed?"
"Now that this business with Henry Marsden is over, I'd like another assignment."
"I seem to recall you have an assignment, Russell Newlin is still on the loose, along with the other escapees."
"Yes, but they're all vanished for now. I'd be happy to drop everything and go after them should they surface, but I don't believe I should waste my time waiting around here or chasing down cold leads."
"Can I trust you'll get the job done?"
Creed stopped in his tracks, "Sir, I know you disapprove of my decision regarding Henry Marsden, but you have to understand where I was coming from."
Kerzing turned to Creed and shook his head, "I don't have to pretend to understand why you chose to spare a dangerous man who killed almost a dozen of our men."
"Sir, regardless of how it ended up, I neutralized Henry Marsden as a threat. Locking him up or killing him, he won't be a problem anymore either way. Now I'd like another assignment."
"You want another assignment? Fine. Specialist Glover is going to run surveillance on a bar."
"Yes, Sir."
Creed watched Kerzing leave and went and found Specialist Theodore Glover carrying several black equipment bags. Glover was an older man, one of the 'old timers' alongside Kehoe, and Recker. Ted Glover was in his late forties, black, with light brown eyes and a broad nose. He had a graying mustache and thick black hair. He was also grumpy as all hell from what little Creed had seen of him so far.
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm here to help you out."
"Oh, good. You can carry the bags, then." Glover handed the two heaviest bags off to Creed, "Enjoy, let's go."
Glover led the way out into the vehicle bay. On the way out, they were cut off by a guard who quickly got out of their way. She had her hat tucked way down and was staring towards the floor, but Creed didn't think anything of it.
Creed followed Glover to a large gray van, Glover opened the back and put his bag inside. Creed put the two bags inside and shut the doors, joining Glover in the cab as he started it up. Glover backed out and they drove up to the front gate, where they were let through by the guards.
Out on the road they were silent. Creed didn't like the awkwardness of the silence.
"Were you there when they brought Mayberry in?"
"No. I was busy." Glover pushed up his sunglasses. Like Specialist Recker, Specialist Glover wore the high-tech SHADES, the only other pair, as far as Creed knew.
"How are you feeling about things?"
"Look, kid. If you're going to come along and help, that's fine...less work for me, but I'm now missing out on some much-needed quiet time. So, if you could keep the chatter down to when it's necessary, I'd appreciate it."
Creed silently acknowledged Glover's request and refrained from speaking until they arrived at their destination on South Harper Avenue, all the way down in Hyde Park. Glover parked the van between two other cars and pointed to the bar across the street. It looked like a normal bar, a few people came in and out occasionally. The bar was called Scalleri's, and it wasn't what Creed pictured.
"Do you know what we're doing here?" Glover asked.
"Kerzing mentioned we were doing surveillance on a bar, that's it."
"Yeah, right over there, Scalleri's. You see, rumor is this bar is involved in some illicit activities. More than that...we suspect that the owner, and possibly some of the staff, are bio-criminals. We're going to do some surveillance to determine if that is true."
"So, we're just going to watch from the outside?"
"Nope. Since you wanted a new assignment, you're going to do all the heavy lifting on this one. That means you get to go in there and set up cameras and microphones without being caught. Just don't let anyone pay too much attention to you and you should be good."
Creed squeezed into the back of the van and looked at the bags on the floor. Inside were the tiny cameras and microphones.
"How do these work?"
"All you have to do is plant them in good spots. We activate them from here and they upload remotely to the setup on the wall."
The right side of the back of the van had a small table as well as a swivel chair that took up most of the free space. "How many we got in here?"
"I requisitioned six cameras and eight mics, so we should have pretty good coverage no matter where you put them, but try to be strategic about it. Spread them around as much as you can so we can get a view of the whole establishment."
Creed took out one of the cameras, no bigger than a thimble. He looked into the inky blackness of the lens staring back at him. He grabbed the rest of them, stuffing them into one of his pockets, taking the mics and putting them into his other pocket.
He exited the van, keeping his eye down when he walked across the street and entered the bar. There were many people inside, not many of which looked like a friendly crowd. Creed's police senses were heightened and he could tell a number of the patrons were Italian mob. The others, he guessed, were random unaffiliated criminals. None of them paid him any mind.
Creed decided the bar would be a good place to start. He squeezed between a few busy pool tables and reached an empty stool. A blonde in her early thirties was working the bar. She had bright red lipstick on and yellowish eyes. A white bandana was tied around the top of her head, holding her long hair in place. Creed was attempting to casually look about the bar for good placements when she approached him.
"Haven't seen you around here before." Her East Coast accent stood out here in Chicago, Creed would've guessed New Jersey.
"No...my old haunt closed down because of the shit going on down here, so I thought I'd try this place."
"Have you seen the rest of the clientele? You don't exactly look like you belong here."
"Actually, I think this is the perfect place for me."
She stared at him closely, but the look he returned was cold enough for her to back down, "What can I get you?"
"I'll have the best I can get for this," Creed slapped a twenty on the table, which she snatched up and put into her apron. She returned with a drink and handed it to him, he thanked her and took a sip.
The place was crawling with people. He wouldn't be able to scratch his nose without someone taking notice, let alone plant surveillance equipment. He checked for the bartender, finding her at the opposite end refilling a muscular biker-looking fella.
Creed pulled a microphone out of his pocket and reached forward, slipping it on the underside of the bar behind one of the taps, quickly pulling back when the bartender came back around.
He got up and headed toward the bathroom, discreetly depositing a camera in the leaves of a plant and another microphone behind the edge of a framed photo of Prohibition Era Chicago on the wall. In the bathroom, he waited for two men to finish up before he stuck a microphone under the sink.
He spent almost another half hour placing the rest of the surveillance equipment before he exited the bar and hurried back across the street, getting into the van. Glover had already finished setting up the monitors and the speakers, and the feeds were already displayed on the screens.
"That's pretty good placement, kid." Glover remarked as Creed shut the door, "Although you stand out like a sore thumb in that crowd."
"Not as much as you would," Creed retorted. "You look like the vice president of a bank."
"Alright, that's enough. Now we play the waiting game and hope that some of these assholes decide to do something illegal."
"I was a cop for a while. I can tell you, it can take a long time for stake outs to bear fruit."
"Kid, I've been doing shit like this for almost thirty years...I think I've got you beat in terms of experience in every way."
"The HDF has only been around since 2016."
"But remember, it wasn't always about hunting bios either...the organizations come and go, the reasonings change with them...but the job has existed all the same. Guys like me, we've been solo, we've done it in small groups, and big organizations like this."
The two of them spent almost two hours watching the screens and listening to everything the microphones picked up, most of which was pointless. When Creed was finishing his cold coffee, he saw something on the camera. The bartender was handing out drinks to the patrons, but that wasn't what got their attention. She was producing a small dropper from her apron and putting drops of something into the drinks of certain customers.
"There, what is that?"
Glover leaned in to try and see what he was pointing at, "I didn't see it."
"Looked like an eye dropper or something. She was squirting something into the drinks."
"I can't imagine why this bar would want to poison its customers."
"I don't think it's poison...what if it's some kind of drug?"
"Administered via an eye dropper in booze?"
"Could be something new...they come in pretending they just want a drink, when they're actually getting something else."
"It's not enough for us to go in there. We need more than a hunch that that's a drug being put in the drinks."
Creed took the controls from Glover rewound the footage to an angle of the bartender's face and zoomed in. When he got in close enough, they could see a shine in her eyes.
"What about that?"
"Could just be the reflection of the lights."
"No...come on...that is definitely not normal. What kind of abilities might cause one's eyes to shine like that through a camera?"
"More than I can think of right now...but I still don't think that's good enough."
"What is good enough? Because we could be here a long time and we might not get another chance at this."
"Look, kid...I'm really not in the mood to get into a fight. There are twenty of them in there, plus the bartender. You very well could be right about her, and we have no idea how many of them are armed or might even be bios themselves.
"I was like you once...young and thinking that I could take on the whole world. The first hard lesson I had to learn in this line of work is that you can't. Maybe in your days with Chicago PD you got to do that, but these guys won't throw up their hands and surrender, they'll just kill you."
"Then why don't we bring a couple squads down here to even the odds? No more than two, plus us, I've done the SWAT thing, I know how it will go."
"I can request backup, but unless I can prove we have a situation that needs it, the bosses will never approve more than maybe a couple of lightly armed officers."
"How do we get more?" Creed asked, starting to feel frustrated now.
"We sit here, and watch, and find definitive proof."
Creed sighed and sat back, settling in for a long day of watching people drink and play pool.