Somewhere - The Same Night Unit D Found The Gumshoe Office
⠀
The apartment had no name and no address, at least not one anybody would bother to remember. Just four walls, a busted radiator that hadn't worked in years, and a window painted shut with grime.
⠀
Haesche paced the length of the room like a man who couldn't stand being still, his scythe resting against the wall by the door, his purple sunglasses catching the one bare bulb overhead every time he turned. A thin purple chain, no thicker than a wire, drifted loose around his ankle and curled itself back into nothing every time it brushed the floor, like a leash with nothing on the other end of it. He didn't seem to notice. He never did.
⠀
"We hit 'em where it counts," Haesche said. "All of it. Every single caller we've got, every fan, every idiot who's ever typed a name into that site, we point 'em all at the Bashnya at once. Overwhelm 'em. Make it impossible to ignore."
⠀
"And how many of our 'fans' do you figure actually show up when you ask them to march on a Coalition?" Garamond said, not looking up from the rifle across his lap. He ran a cloth down the barrel, slow, methodical, the same way he did every night whether it needed cleaning or not. "Half of them can't be bothered to leave their apartment for anything that isn't their wireless devices."
⠀
"Then we make it easy for 'em."
⠀
"Easy doesn't mean smart." Garamond set the rifle down across his knees. The gold chain on his arm shifted with the motion, links clicking softly. "You throw a mob at Maxim Borai's front door, you know what that looks like on the morning news? Not vigilantes. An army. The second people start calling us an army instead of heroes, every Fixer in the Ring gets an even better reason to try us."
⠀
"Good. Let 'em try."
⠀
"They will try. And they'll win, because the fight isn't what I'm worried about. It's the headline..." Garamond leaned back against the wall. "You want Borai out in the open? Fine. I don't disagree with the goal. I disagree with dragging innocent kids into this."
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Haesche's jaw worked for a second. He didn't like being told no, and everybody in the room knew it, including the chain around his ankle, which went rigid and taut without him seeming to notice.
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"So what, we just sit here?"
⠀
"We think," Garamond said. "For once."
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"You know what Hermes woulda done in this spot?" Haesche said. "He wouldn'ta sat around thinkin'. He woulda just walked into the Bashnya Coalition, shot the secretary, took the elevator up to Maxim's office, and shot him in his face!"
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"Hermes isn't here," Garamond said. "And last I checked, we aren't him."
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Haesche didn't have an answer for that one either.
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In the corner, in the room's only chair that faced away from the window, Script hadn't moved in over an hour.
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His coat hung heavy off his shoulders even sitting down, hood up, hands folded in his lap like he was praying, or sleeping, or simply somewhere else entirely. A can of Fun Cider sat on the windowsill beside him, untouched since Garamond had set it there for him hours ago. Nobody had heard Script say a word since the meeting started. Nobody expected to.
⠀
"Hey. Script." Haesche snapped his fingers twice in the hooded man's direction. "You got an opinion, or you just here to take up a chair?"
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Nothing. Not a twitch, not a breath out of place.
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"...Right. Forgot who I was talkin' to." Haesche turned back to Garamond, warming up again. "We planted the flyers. Schools, storefronts, right where the angry little nobodies with nothin' better to do would find 'em. Ninety-five percent of what comes through that site is exactly the crowd I wanted. Weak and petty... You think we can't get a few thousand of 'em to show up if we tell 'em to?"
⠀
"I think we can," Garamond said. "But it just won't work out. First, I don't think it still gets us what we actually want. Second, you're still taking advantage of our mostly middle- to high-school-aged clients to get what we want. Of course, power to you, but I'm not standing behind this just for Gunsmith's sake."
⠀
"Then tell me a plan you can side with, genius!"
⠀
Garamond opened his mouth, and closed it again. For once, he didn't have the answer already loaded.
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A marker cap clicked.
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Both of them turned.
⠀
Script was on his feet, standing at the bare wall by the window with a black marker already moving, quick, sure strokes that didn't hesitate once. He didn't look at either of them. He just drew: a box labeled SITE, an arrow to a stick figure labeled USER, another arrow to a second stick figure with an X through it, labeled TARGET. A third arrow, branching off, pointed at a rectangle labeled BASHNYA, with a question mark hanging over it.
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"Your plan puts us in front of the cameras," Script said.
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His voice was quiet and even.
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"A mob has a face. Ours. That's a mistake you'd only make if you wanted to get caught."
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He drew a line through the USER to BASHNYA arrow.
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"We don't need to point anyone at Bashnya," Script said. "We already have several thousand people pointing themselves at whoever they hate most. Some of those people are under Bashnya's protection right now. Every time one of them dies anyway, in spite of a Protection Order they paid for, that's not our headline."
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He tapped the BASHNYA box, hard enough that the marker squeaked.
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"That's theirs."
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Haesche stared at the wall for a long moment, sunglasses catching the bulb light again as he tilted his head.
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"...So we just," Haesche said slowly, working it out loud, "let it happen on its own. Don't send anybody anywhere. Just let the site keep runnin', and every time some protected nobody eats a bullet anyway, Bashnya looks weaker?"
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Script said nothing. He never repeated himself once he'd said a thing correctly the first time.
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"And once enough of 'em die..." Haesche went on, faster now, grinning wide enough to show teeth, "Borai's gotta come out and say somethin', 'cause if he don't, everybody in the Ring's gonna know his protection ain't worth shit! He comes out, we've got our audience, and the Gunsmith Office gets to make its move right to his face, and it ain't even our fault. It's just..."
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"The way things go." Script finished.
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"That's what I said," Garamond said, deadpan.
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"No it ain't! All you did was tell me to think of somethin' smarter, which ain't the same as havin' the idea." Haesche turned back to the wall, practically vibrating, the loose chain around his ankle finally going slack again now that he'd gotten what he wanted. "This is good. This is real good. See, this is what's up! The Three Musketeers are actually makin' shit happen!!"
⠀
Script capped the marker, set it down on the windowsill next to the untouched cider, and walked back to his chair without a word. He sat exactly the way he'd been sitting before, hood up, hands folded, and by the time Haesche turned around to thank him properly, his brain had already gone somewhere else, somewhere nobody had ever been invited.
⠀
Garamond looked at the diagram on the wall a moment longer than he needed to, committing the plan to his memory.
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"...Get some sleep, Haesche," Garamond said finally. "We will continue tomorrow."
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"I don't sleep."
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"Then... go take a shower, or something. You smell of dirty laundry."
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"I DO NOT!"
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⠀
7th District, The Following Morning
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"I don't understand," Oliver said, "...how that hat happens to be exactly your size."
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"I don't ask questions," Mori said, adjusting his deerstalker hat in the cracked mirror by the coat rack. "I just wear the hat!"
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The hat was yellow and brown, with two flaps that stuck straight out over his head, making him look like he'd wandered in from a detective novel. He'd found a magnifying glass in the same box, the kind with a chipped wooden handle, and he'd already decided he'd never put it down again. His scarf, for once, seemed to be behaving itself, coiled loosely around his neck under the hat's brim.
⠀
"OKAY, EVERYBODY! GATHER 'ROUND!" Saoirse announced, striking a pose in the middle of the office with both hands on her hips.
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She had a mustache.
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It was enormous, dark brown, curled at both ends like it was ripped out of a cartoon, and it took up most of the bottom half of her face. She'd also, without asking anyone, glued two considerably smaller versions of the same mustache onto Stuffy and Arnold.
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"Behold," Saoirse said, stroking the mustache with Stuffy, very pleased with herself. "The great detective, Saoirse, and her esteemed associates!"
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"...I hate this..." Stuffy muttered, his own little mustache bobbing as he spoke.
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"ARNY LOVES IT!~ ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و"
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"All right, all right," Oliver said, clapping his hands together, "gather up, gather up. We've got three cases sittin' on my desk that haven't solved themselves overnight, so let's split the work. Mori, you're with me."
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"Got it," Mori said, tipping his hat like he'd read someone do in a book once. It nearly slid off entirely. He caught it just in time.
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"Angelika, take Yuhuan and Roby," Oliver said. "You three can handle the missing-persons file, the Otsuka boy who never came home from his shift."
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"Fine by me," Angelika said, already pulling on a coat and shoving a notebook into the pocket without looking at it.
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"Kraus, you're with Saoirse."
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Kraus's whole face fell.
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"...Why me?" Kraus said. It wasn't a question so much as a plea into the void.
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"'Cause you drew the short straw last week!" Oliver said cheerfully. "Go on, the both of you've got the watch guy. Third floor tenant. He keeps coming down saying the same watch got stolen off him again..."
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"AGAIN?!" Saoirse gasped, scandalized. "Same watch?! What kinda thief keeps givin' it back just so they can steal it again?! A COWARD, that's what! A cowardly thief with no follow-through!"
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"...I don't think that's how theft works..." Stuffy said.
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"—IT'S HOW IT WORKS TODAY!"
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Kraus put his face in his hands and left it there for a solid three seconds before pulling on his coat.
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Group A took the shop at the corner of Verger Street, a cramped little grocer's whose owner swore up and down that inventory kept vanishing off his back shelf overnight, no broken locks, no witnesses, nothing.
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Mori got down on his knees behind the counter with his magnifying glass, squinting at the floorboards.
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"Find anything?" Oliver asked, arms crossed, clearly enjoying watching him work more than actually expecting results.
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"...There's a gap under the shelf," Mori said. "Real small. Wouldn't fit a person."
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"Wouldn't fit a person," Oliver agreed. "What would it fit?"
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Mori leaned closer, and something small and gray shot past the lens and vanished into the dark.
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"...A rat," Mori said, deflating. "It's rats."
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The shop owner, standing behind them, went very pale.
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"...I've been chargin' the Coalition insurance for a robbery," the man said slowly.
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"You have," Oliver said, patting him on the shoulder. "You want us to write that down, or you want us to forget we heard it?"
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The man decided quickly that forgetting sounded better.
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Out on the street afterward, Mori tucked the magnifying glass into his coat and glanced sideways at Oliver.
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"Is it always like this?" Mori asked. "The cases, I mean. Small stuff?"
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"Mostly." Oliver shrugged, hands in his pockets. "Every once in a while somethin' bigger walks through the door. Somethin' that actually matters. Most days, though? It's rats and stolen watches and kids too scared to knock on a girl's door..." He glanced over. "That bother you? After everything you four have been through?"
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Mori thought about it. Thought about a hundred floors of dust and dark and the other Mori. The one who wouldn't hesitate to take the contract with Gun... The one who wouldn't hesitate to fire, even if the gun was facing a friend.
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"No," Mori said finally. "I think I like it. Nobody almost dies in this line of work."
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"...Give it time," Oliver said, not unkindly, and clapped him on the shoulder the same way he had the grocer. "I've seen some ugly things working here."
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He noticed Mori's expression tense a bit.
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"B-But that doesn't mean you will, Mori! Hahaha... ha..."
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"Oh, then that's good!"
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Phew...
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⠀
Group B found the Otsuka boy three streets from his own apartment, sitting on the front step of a building with a bouquet of wilted flowers in his lap and the expression of a man bracing for execution.
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"You've been gone two days," Angelika said, arms folded. "Your mother filed a missing-persons report."
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"I was gonna go home! I just—" The boy looked at the flowers, then at the door behind him, then back at his own shoes. "I didn't know how to ask her, and then I chickened out, and then it'd already been a day, and then it felt too late to just show up—"
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Roby dropped into a crouch in front of him, grinning.
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"Buddy," Roby said, "lemme tell you somethin' about waitin' too long to say a thing. It don't get easier. It just gets dumber."
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Roby pointed his finger at the boy with a grimace on his face.
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"He's not wrong," Yuhuan said.
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"See, even he agrees, and he's got a stick up his—!"
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"I can hear you," Yuhuan said.
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"Good! Means it's landin'!" Roby stood back up and jerked a thumb at Yuhuan. "This guy once spent a whole month workin' up the nerve to ask if he could room with me and Mori instead of bunkin' with Qiang, and by the time he finally asked, Qiang had already switched rooms on his own! Can you believe it? He wasted a whole month bein' scared of a question that answered itself!"
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"That is a wildly exaggerated version of events," Yuhuan said.
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"Is it, though?"
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"Extremely! I always shared a room with Mori! You were the one who wanted to ask to room with him and me!"
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"Uhm... Sorry if I'm interrupting, but... Who's Mori? And... who's Qiang?" the boy asked.
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Angelika watched the two of them with flat, unimpressed patience. She had clearly worked with worse partners than this in the past. "Are we solving a case or am I just gonna be babysitting you two?"
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"Multitasking," Roby said.
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He clapped the boy on the back hard enough to nearly knock the flowers out of his lap. "Go knock on the door. Worst she says is no. Best case, you ain't slept on a stoop for nothin'."
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The boy knocked.
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The girl answered the door slowly, then realized it was him. They talked for a while and, eventually, she said yes.
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Roby whooped loud enough that a window three buildings down slammed shut in annoyance, and Yuhuan, despite himself, found he was smiling the whole walk back to the office.
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"You're grinnin'," Roby said, elbowing him.
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"I am not."
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"You are so grinnin'. Look at you. Big rich-boy grin."
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"I don't grin."
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"You're doin' it right now."
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Angelika, walking a step ahead, didn't turn around, but the corner of her own mouth had gone up just slightly, and neither of them noticed it happen.
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Group C did not go nearly as well.
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"For the FOURTH TIME," the tenant said, wringing a frayed cap between his hands, "somebody's stealin' my watch! Same watch! Right off my nightstand, every few nights, then it just... shows back up a week later like nothin' happened!"
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"Have you considered," Kraus said, in the flat voice of a man who had asked this question three times already, "that you're just misplacing it?"
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"I AIN'T MISPLACIN' NOTHIN'!"
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Saoirse, meanwhile, had crawled entirely under the man's bed and was narrating everything she found to Stuffy and Arnold in a hushed, reverent whisper.
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"A sock," she reported. "One sock. Where's the other one, Arny?"
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"MISSIN', JUST LIKE THE WATCH!! IT'S A CONSPIRACY!!"
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"...It is not a conspiracy..." Stuffy said. "...It is a sock..."
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"A dust bunny the size of a small dog!" Saoirse continued, undeterred. "This one's got a NAME now! I'm callin' him Gerald!"
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"Please get out from under my bed," the tenant said.
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"GERALD SAYS NO!"
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Kraus rubbed both temples like he was trying to physically push a headache out of his skull. "Both of you. Please. I am begging both of you, in the name of my own sanity, to let this be a simple watch case."
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By the time they left, no thief had been found, no watch had been recovered, and the tenant seemed weirdly satisfied anyway, like the visit itself had been the point. Kraus walked back to the office three steps ahead of Saoirse the entire way, muttering to himself, while Saoirse trailed behind cradling an actual dust bunny in both hands like a rescued kitten.
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⠀
"I solved something today!~" Saoirse announced proudly, once they were all back at the office comparing notes. She set Gerald down gently in an empty mug. "I found a sock, and I made a friend!"
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"Neither of those is a case," Kraus said. "Neither of those was ever a case..."
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"THEY'RE BOTH CASES NOW! I DECLARE IT SO!"
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Oliver, tallying up the day's results on the whiteboard, looked entirely too pleased with himself.
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"Rats caught, boy delivered home safe, sock found, dust bunny adopted," Oliver said, writing the last one down without a hint of irony. "Not bad for a first day, Junior Detectives."
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"The watch is still missing," Kraus muttered.
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"The watch'll turn up. It always does." Oliver capped his marker and clapped his hands together. "Which means we celebrate. Bar's on me tonight. You'd better grab your coats before I change my mind."
⠀
Saoirse was already at the door, mustache askew, Stuffy and Arnold's tiny ones somehow even more crooked than before, Gerald the dust bunny tucked safely into her coat pocket.
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"TO THE BAR!!" she shouted, pointing straight at the door. Nobody argued.
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They filed out into the evening one by one, Kraus still grumbling, Roby already trying to talk Yuhuan into a drinking contest he had no intention of winning fairly, Mori bringing up the rear with his detective's hat tipped back on his head and something almost like a normal day's amount of tiredness settling comfortably into his shoulders for the first time in what felt like months.
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Behind them, the little office sat dark and quiet, the sign out front creaking once on its hinge, satisfaction, per the fine print, still not guaranteed, but for today at least, nobody seemed to mind.
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⠀
4th District, That Same Night
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"Shin, honey, dinner's ready whenever you want it!"
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Shin Hoshikawa didn't answer right away. He sat at his desk with a textbook open in front of him that he hadn't actually read a word of in the last twenty minutes, his chin propped on one hand.
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Not hungry, he thought.
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He leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Seventeen years old, and every day looked exactly like the one before it. Wake up. School. Home. Study. Sleep. Repeat, forever, until he was old enough to leave and do it all again somewhere else.
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Somewhere down the hall, he heard his mother's footsteps recede back toward the kitchen. She wouldn't push. She never did. That was almost worse, some days, than if she had.
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His mind wandered back to class that afternoon, to the window he'd been staring out of instead of listening to a lecture on the Season of Folly he'd already heard four times in four different grades, from four teachers who all somehow made it sound equally boring. A community board sat bolted to the fence across the street, plastered with flyers for lost cats and tutoring services and one gigantic one, right in the center, that he hadn't been able to stop looking at.
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THREE MUSKETEERS FREE KILLING SERVICE.
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DO YOU HAVE HATRED IN YOUR HEART?
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He'd told himself, at the time, that it was a joke. A prank flyer, maybe, put up by some upperclassmen with too much time and too little supervision. He'd gone the rest of the day without thinking about it. Mostly.
⠀
He sat up straight.
⠀
His computer was already on, the way it always was. He typed the name into the search bar half-expecting nothing, some dead link, some joke that had already been taken down.
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It wasn't.
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The page loaded black, no banner, no logo, nothing but a short block of text and five empty fields underneath it.
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Include enough detail so the target cannot be mistaken for anyone else. A name. An address. A photograph, if you have one. All submissions are handled professionally and promptly, most within minutes of receipt.
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NAME: — AGE: — ADDRESS: — PHOTO: — CAUSE: —
⠀
Shin stared at it for a long time.
⠀
This is stupid, he thought. The whole world already lets you get someone killed if you've got enough reason and enough money... Miracle Fixers don't even charge money for this. Why would anyone want it anonymous and free, unless—
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He stopped himself there.
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Unless it's dirty. Unless you're the kind of person who wants somebody dead but doesn't want a paper trail proving you wanted it! ...Or unless you're already halfway to being a Fixer yourself and this is just... practice.
⠀
He grimaced.
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Either way, nobody normal actually uses this!
⠀
He almost closed the tab. His cursor hovered over the little X in the corner for a good five seconds.
⠀
But instead, because he was bored, and because the house was quiet except for his mother humming to herself in the kitchen, he reached for the remote and turned on the little TV bolted to his bookshelf.
⠀
He flipped channels twice before he landed on a live shot from a helicopter, the camera feed shaking slightly, red and blue lights strobing across a highway far below. A banner scrolled along the bottom of the screen with a name, an age, a description, all pulled from some police bulletin.
⠀
Shin picked up his phone and took a photo of the screen.
⠀
He copied the name and the details into the fields, one at a time, his fingers moving faster than he expected them to. NAME, Arthur McCabe. AGE, after a quick search, 41. ADDRESS, he didn't know, so he wrote his current location: District 2 Highway H53. PHOTO, the blurry photo from his television. CAUSE, he typed, and paused, backspaced, and typed some more: car accident.
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NAME: Arthur McCabe
AGE: 41
ADDRESS: idk, he's on the D2 highway, H53
PHOTO:
CAUSE: car accident
⠀
He clicked submit before he could think about it any harder.
⠀
Then he sat back and turned his chair 90 degrees to watch the chase, heart thudding for no reason he wanted to name out loud.
⠀
The chase was still "normal," or whatever that really meant to Shin. He just sat there watching, sweat dripping down his face. He couldn't look away. It was like watching something he wasn't supposed to.
⠀
On the TV, one, then two, then three of the vehicle's tires had popped in sequence in less than a second.
⠀
"—and it looks like the suspect vehicle is beginning to lose control," the reporter's voice said, tight with the particular excitement reporters get when something is about to go very wrong on live television. "Repeat, the vehicle appears to be losing—"
⠀
The car swerved. Fishtailed once, twice, tires screaming even through the helicopter's distance and the television's tinny speaker.
⠀
It hit the light post on the driver's side, doing well over what any car should ever be doing on a highway, and the entire left half was destroyed, ripped apart in a spray of metal and glass.
⠀
The feed cut immediately, dropping to a stunned anchor behind a desk who clearly hadn't been briefed on what she was supposed to say.
⠀
"—we're, ah, we're going to step away from that feed for a moment, folks, it appears something serious has just—"
⠀
Shin turned the television off.
⠀
His hands were shaking. His shirt had gone damp under both arms, cold and sudden. Somewhere very far away, his mother was still humming in the kitchen, completely unaware that anything in the world had just changed.
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It's a coincidence, he told himself. It has to be a coincidence. There's no way that's connected to me. There's no way anybody could ever trace that back to me! I didn't do anything. I just typed some words into that website.
⠀
He stood there a long moment, staring at the blank television screen, his own reflection staring back at him, pale and wide-eyed, a kid who'd spent seventeen years being told what to do and when to do it and had just, for the first time, made a decision entirely his own.
⠀
He was going to run from that chase forever, Shin thought, slower now, steadier. He would've kept driving until he hurt somebody else, or gotten arrested and clogged up a courtroom and a cell for years on the Ring's dime. I didn't do anything wrong. If anything, I did him a favor... Quick. Clean. No trial. No years wasted.
⠀
That's not murder.
⠀
It's... Mercy.
⠀
The shaking in his hands slowed, then stopped.
⠀
A small sound came out of him, somewhere between a breath and a word. Then it came again, and this time it had a shape to it.
⠀
A chuckle.
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Then a laugh, quiet at first, one hand pressed over his own mouth like he could keep it contained if he just tried hard enough. It didn't work. It came louder and louder, until Shin Hoshikawa was standing alone in his bedroom, computer screen glowing behind him, laughing so hard his eyes watered.
⠀
He wasn't bored anymore, and he wouldn't be for a long time.