AurorusVox Presents
Little Italy Police Department Mafia
It seemed that something just wasn't right for the Little Italy Police Department. They'd had trouble with those scumbag mafiasos before, but recently it seemed that their job was getting that little bit harder. Evidence disappearing. Witnesses changing their story. Criminals walking free on school-boy technicalities. Well, something had to be done. And soon. When the enemy fights dirty, you gotta get down there in the mud with them. No more arrests. Just cold, rough, irreversible justice...
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MR C. VILLIAN, MURDERED N -29
Detective I. M. Acopp lit the cigarette with a Zippo lighter he pulled from his inside suit pocket. He put it on the table and inhaled slowly. The tip burned bright orange as he eyed the kid sitting opposite him. The Detective leaned in and blew the smoke out into his face. His eyes were cold. The kid coughed and instinctively went to waft the smoke out of his face. He couldn’t; his hands were cuffed to the table, and all he accomplished was to hurt his wrist.
The Detective stood back up and walked over to the other side of the table, where he took off his suit jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. His partner, G. Nerikop, a hard hitting Polish police officer, nodded and dropped a folder on the table. He spoke, his voice as gritty as this description.
“So, Mr...E. Herring. Where were you last night?”
“Where was I? I was, uh, with, my buddy. Yeah.”
“Your buddy, eh? Hear this Ian? With a buddy. Well. This buddy have a name?”
“Course. His name’s Andy. Andy Crumbalot.”
“Crumbalot? The baker?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Oh. He was with the baker, Ian. Guess we can let him go.”
The kid’s face lit up – he was going to go free. Detective Acopp walked over to the table and extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray lying next to the folder. He flipped the cover open.
“Funny, Gene. Because county records show Mr. Crumbalot was in hospital last night. With a broken finger.”
Herring’s face drained of colour. “What?!”
“You’re lying to us, Mr. Herring.”
“No! I swear it!”
“The records don’t lie, but people do.”
“There’s been a mistake, I mean, I was with him, last night!”
Detective Acopp turned and looked at his reflection in the mirror that ran the width of the room. He jerked his head backwards, gesturing towards the pale kid trembling in the chair behind him.
“Lock this piece of shit up.”
MR. EDWARD HERRING, WRONGFULLY DETAINED N -25
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Just over three weeks later, Acopp stormed into the police station, heading straight to his partners desk. He flung a newspaper at him, opened to an inside page showing a full colour picture of young Edward Herring on the steps of the courthouse building.
“Hey. You remember that kid we collared a few weeks ago for murder? He was in court yesterday. Would you believe it? His alibi checked out. That baker, the one we couldn’t find, the one he said he was with – he never broke his finger. The county hospital have no records of a Mr. Crumbalot visiting them the night of the murder. We were duped.”
“What? But the records-”
“The records were falsified, gentlemen.”
The voice was gravel; its owner had clearly spent years drinking whiskey out of empty cigarette boxes after smoking the whole lot in one sitting. It was so gritty that even his tongue must have had its own stubble.
“Excuse me, but who are you?”
“They call me A. V. I’m just a man with a maverick disregard for the rulebook and a tragic backstory that would be revealed in a flashback episode if this were a TV show. And I’ve been following these scumbags for a long, long time. Forget everythin’ you thought you knew. There’s no longer time to go through the courts. Are you listenin’? We’re throwin’ procedure out the window here. No more handcuffs. If we don’t do somethin’ soon, Little Italy is going to the wolves – and they ain’t friendly critters either. You ever killed a man with rabies, boy? You ain’t never looked death in the eye ‘til it’s drippin’ from the teeth of an enraged rabies victim, I’ll tell you that much. And that’s where we’re headed. Unless you listen to me and listen real good. Over the years I’ve narrowed the scumbags down to somewhere amongst this list of people. But our badge ain’t no good any more, you hear? We gotta let natural justice take its course. Announce to the people of Little Italy that we’re looking for the killers, and then “accidentally” leak the document. I can guarantee you that the people on that list will take matters into their own hands to prove they’re innocent – I mean, living here, what more do you expect? We’ve done our part, gentleman. Now alls we can do is wait and watch as this town finds and kills the scumbags for us – or destroys itself trying.”
POLICE DOCUMENT, LEAKED N0
