The story so far: An unknown killer has struck down billionaire CEO Ollie Caroon. It seems the killer has struck again with another shooting the same day. Meanwhile we meet college student Veronika and her homeless friend Alicia…
CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER:
Self harm, sexual exploitation, anti-trans slurs employed by some characters
Veronika’s walk back to her place clears her headfug some, and she’s actually not as reluctant to start work as she imagined. Kind of loosened up by the dope and feeling ready to party like a pro. Amazingly, looking forward to this evening’s session.
A quick shower – one before and one after each session, ritual cleansings to mark out the ritual space of the job – and she’s ready for action. Lingerie, diaphanous gown, tight ribbon bowed around her neck. Tonight she’s not a slutty schoolgirl or a stern dom. She’s the naive ingénue. Sweet girl, all innocent and free of corruption, for now.
The setup has evolved over time from a cellphone stacked on some books pointed vaguely towards the sofa to a complete corner of Veronika’s tiny apartment, a studio of sorts. It’s set up with soft lighting, candles, and a raised divan strewn with white and pink satin. Alicia called it Veronika’s ‘dynamic workspace.’ The name stuck.
Facing the action are a tripod with an iphone and below that a laptop propped up on a table with the chat text set to show BIG, so she has no need to squint like a rube as the messages come streaming through. The iphone is both camera and music center, bluetoothed-up to a soundbar on the floor.
All the gadgetry is set up at her eyeline, so she winds up on the divan facing the complete array. Cellphone-camera with music playlist; laptop displaying large streaming text and also showing the camera’s-eye-view, set to show as picture-in-picture on the main screen; boom mic on an angle-stand; speaker bar low down; soft lighting rigs to left and right. Altogether it makes up the look and feel of a teeny-tiny sound stage.
Meanwhile from the camera’s point of view, everything is soft and sensual: scented candles, in rose and strawberry (for Veronika’s nose alone, a private salon of sensorial delight), muslin hangings in rose and salmon and soft green, a reproduction print of a seraglio with buxom odalisques, and a statuette of Ishtar. She hits play on the playlist, and Little Simz comes throbbing out of the soundbar, a grinding grime mix from old London town…
ibeenhavingmoodswingsmoodswingsmoodswings
She starts her grind bang on time, live at 7pm, and her lostgirl naïve girlchild sexkitten bump-and-grindset is in da house.
A true professional is always punctual. A true pro never disappoints.
At 7pm on the dot, Ronnie starts his briefing for the city homicide crew. The media are already tentatively going with ‘The Gravedigger’ as nom-de-mayhem of their suspect. But it’s a soft and pliable name still, conditional on circumstance. If anyone on the homicide squad were to come up with a better name, no doubt the media‘d be willing to take it up. Inspiration is lacking, though.
Captain Jason, who’s already expertly delivered a near-zero-info press briefing this afternoon, has given Ronnie her blessing to cut the shit and get straight to the nitty-gritty for tonight’s team briefing. The homicide boys and girls are hungry, late for their dinner and low on attention. More than one tummy will growl in the course of his short presentation.
Ronnie steps up to the dais and kicks it out sharp: “Suspect name, yada yada, you already know all that shit. Shot once through the chest, nine-mil automatic dum-dum, heart all exploded to fuck. List of grudges from his work activities a mile long. Practically infinite number of suspects with a motive. It’d be a lot less work to make a list of who didn’t want this asshole dead.”
“Which wouldn’t include anyone here, either,” cracks Sanchez. “I hated the schmuck myself.” She brays with laughter and a few of the guys join in.
Needless to say, the tone would be somewhat different in public, but in the cosy surroundings of the cabbage-smelling precinct house, with no feds or anyone official around to spoil the fun, Ronnie knows his informal approach is welcomed.
“Suspect’s wifey’s Polly — Polly and Ollie, kinda cute, no? — has an alibi that checks out, along with Thraller Chief Financial Officer Maurice Staytrue. That’s a real name, not made up. He accompanied the pair to the investor meeting set for this morning and his alibi’s the same as hers.”
“What’s the nature of their alibi, exactly, Ron?” shouts out Betty Oliviera.
“I’m sworn to confidentiality as to the exact nature of the activity the pair was engaged in at time of death, but let’s just say it precluded any gunplay down in the lobby.” Eyebrows raised, the crew hooting with the joy of it. “You might call it an illicit fuck-sesh caught on verified sextape, but you never heard that from me.” Through all the merriment, the whistles and catcalls, Sanchez’s “Can I get the tape, just for court validation?”, Ronnie blinks in an unwanted flashback to Straytrue’s moistened lips close-up, his expression of obscure invitation. He clears his throat and goes on.
“Here’s the only solid lead we have so far, and it’s a doozy. Crime scene techs recovered a spent casing at the scene. 9mm round, consistent with a Glock 19 automatic pistol. Ballistics have no previous record of this weapon… but!”
His raised voice and the pause are for effect, and this effect is fully effective. Every single one of the homiciders is craning round to listen to him now, all previous grab-assing and ribald banter forgotten.
“A 9mm parabellum slug consistent with this weapon was dug out of the knee of a liquor store owner shot just this afternoon, at a location just five blocks from the hotel where Caroon was killed. A cartridge identical to that found at the Caroon scene was also recovered at the scene of this incident. Instore videos show a shooter that could be the same as the one who shot our boy in the Marina Hotel. Hoodie, mask, dark glasses, similar build and height. Maybe the same guy.”
He flashes up stills from the security video. Hoodied figure, impossible to see clearly. Behind the counter there’s a thickset white guy, soon to become a gunshot victim, open-mouthed, mad at the hoodied guy. The shooter leans over the counter and pops him once in the knee. The open mouth just gets more open.
Josh Gorman, station skeptic and resident naysayer, speaks up: “Shooter kills a rich-guy CEO and don’t take shit from the scene? Then jacks a liquor store same day? MO seems hinky, you ask me.” Gnawing on a chicken drumstick, the greasy fried smell arousing envy and gurgling bellies all around him.
“It’s all we got to go on, Josh, so it’s our priority lead,” says Skipper Jason.”Though of course we have many others,” she adds, unconvincingly. There’s a pause while whichever leads she might be expected to outline go unmentioned. Her attempts at team uplift are lame in the extreme, thinks Ronnie, so counterproductive that she really shouldn’t have bothered. There was a time when she inspired the crew, but it seems the sun may have set on her heyday.
Ronnie goes on: “Unfortunately the liquor store victim, one Mr. Vincent Lowestoft, is presently in a post-op doze after reconstructive surgery and is not expected to be available for questioning until tomorrow AM at the soonest. I’ll be going round there to check him out in the morning.”
The detectives file out for their burgers and fried chicken. Ronnie battens down the hunger and dips out of the stationhouse. He has something else in mind for his free time this evening, and he’s running late.
While Veronika is busy grinding out her camsex living, a snippet of anthropology lore pops back into her head. It’s why she put the Ishtar statuette on the bookshelf, in pride of place and full view of the punters, just over her left shoulder. Turns out the earliest Mesotoptamian temples were also key nodes of the ancient sex trade. World’s oldest profession? Priestess and whore, baby.
bormyhorny yeah baby justlike that. when you gonna show ur pussy
grk0657a1 100 bux if u fist urself just privat 4 meHow’s that for the sacred and the profane? Ishtar’s priestesses would turn a trick for their love-it-up goddess. Toss a handful of coins into that lap and your girl’s gonna serve up some deification for you, hot and wet. Now that’s what I call catechism.
tgirlfucker333 show us your cockThe other oldest profession: transsexual genderfucker. Though none quite grasps just how fucked Veronika’s gender is. She was born intersex with genitals that confounded the doctors, resulting in an hour long debate over how best to mutilate the newborn baby to make something they could understand.
There was nothing truly wrong with Veronika. She’d have been just fine left untouched. But her mother had been expecting a boy and so a boy she would have. So Veronika’s first moments on earth were spent under harsh lights having her body distorted to satisfy the most basic ideas of sex and gender. So she could get a boy name to go with boy parts. Even a baby knows they are more than their genitals. Even baby Veronika thought the whole thing stupid.
Even more stupid now showing her cock on camera for a stranger’s money which she’s saving up to someday get the cock removed again. There’s something delicious in the circular irony of it. There has to be. Veronika makes it so.
No remedy, no cure for me, call me poison, Shygirl deadpans through the speakers. Veronika moves her hips to the dripping beat, robe shifting only enough to reveal smooth bits of skin and shadows of bone. Viewership is growing by the minute but the tips so far are chump change.
She won’t even acknowledge the audience until they start valuing her. This always takes some time, but she doesn’t mind. There’s a sensuality in the buildup, the game of viewer and viewed, the exchange of money for the show of invoking sex without ever having to be touched.
killmenow tipped $50
killmenow hey beautiful
killmenow wanna see you bleedThis guy again. He’s never punctual, sometimes even misses her streams entirely, but once he enters the chat he’s locked in, and though she often ignores him, he persists with his requests, tossing larger and larger sums of money with requests of a growingly disturbing nature the harder she ignores him. He’s fascinating though–she’s fascinated by the way he seems to get off on offering his money to the temple of her stream and getting nothing in return. The silence must make his little prick throb. He speaks into the chat as if it’s the two of them and no one else, and he seems to notice she’s observing him, gathering bits of him to Frankenstein into a real man, and she wonders, though she never reveals personal information on these streams, could he be gathering bits about her, too.
Tonight feels different. Veronika is scattered, unmoored by the events of the day. She’d been drifting along somewhere just outside her own body to avoid all the pestering demands of a life. But now she recalls with true clarity the sense of violence that had overcome her listening to Alicia go on and on about her endless string of misfortunes and how complacent she’d been in all of it.
Hadn’t fought for her job. Hadn’t gone looking for another. She hadn’t just fucked her landlord for housing, like any sane person would. She couldn’t do anything for herself. Veronika felt herself boiling slow as a frog in some gently bubbling rage.
She can’t be sure why but the urge comes over her and she follows it. She shows her manicured nails to the camera, petite pink and subtly sharp. A woman’s carefully cared-for fingernails. Pulling aside her robe, just enough to bare the soft flesh of her thigh, she digs the nails into the meat of her leg and presses until blood is drawn. Delicate scarlet trickle tracing interstate lines down her thigh.
Closer you come to flatline, I’ll bring you back, I’ll bring you back.
Veronika brings a blood-tipped nail to her mouth and pretends to tongue the red drop from it. The chat explodes.
scrmguy holy shit
tgirlfucker333 wow
killmenow tipped $100
killmenow fuck, baby
tinydick_bob yeah mm yeah lick all over good
killmenow $500 for a private chatVeronika blinks. It was only a moment’s falter but enough that this guy saw the performance drop and he knows his chance is here.
killmenow $500 just an hour
killmenow 30 minutes even
scrmguy fuck off dude
scrmguy tipped $1
killmenow just a chat. talking only. Promise.She sucks at her teeth. Normally she wouldn’t do a private chat with anyone putting out the kind of stalkery vibes this guy spews like a fountain. But for all her anger with Alicia, she’s still her best friend. If she had a bit more money, if she could spare even a cent for Alicia…
Veronika ends the stream in a hurry. Deeply unprofessional, but hell, they’ll be back. Some of them will even jerk off to the suddenness of her departure. These men can make anything sexy if their dick is hard enough.
She pulls up a chair, wraps her robe tight around her body and opens a private chat with user killmenow. Hovers the cursor over the chat box and hesitates. Then she starts typing.
RedVixen money first. then chat. you have thirty seconds
killmenow sent you $500killmenow hi
RedVixen one hour. clock starts now.
killmenow i don’t need an hour. i just wanted to set the bar high so i could work down to 30 minutes and make it sound appealing
RedVixen funny. 20 minutes then. start talking
killmenow okay
killmenow this is going to sound a little insane
killmenow coming from a random guy on the internet
killmenow but i think we have a soul connection. do you feel it too?
RedVixen I *could* feel it for a couple more hundred dollars
killmenow i know it sounds ridiculous
killmenow its why i want to see you bleed. its not just erotic. you can see a persons essence in their blood. if we bled together, you’d see we were forged in a similar pain. youd see we are the same.And he goes on like this for quite a while. Taking up most of their allotted time. For some reason she can’t quite place, Veronika finds it not as unsettling as she probably should.
It’s gross, but maybe beautiful as well. There’s a poetry to the man’s very specific horniness. If nothing else, she’s fascinated from an anthropological perspective and when their time comes to an end she even finds herself wishing it might go on a little bit longer. Close, but not quite.
RedVixen well if I ever see you in my blood I’ll let you know
killmenow ms. Vixen, i hope we can do this again sometime. i’ll pay well. you know i’m good for itShe types out a response. maybe. we’ll see. Then she deletes the words and closes the chat. Starts up the public chat. Sits in the harsh glow of the screen watching messages roll in from other random men, boring men.
The punctures in her thigh throb. She traces the wound and fingers the rim where the skin is already turning yellow. What possessed her to do that? Violence, she thinks, can come from anywhere, at any time, and all the recipient of it can do is decide how they’d like to perpetrate it.
Dawn is dawning, the rain is clearing, and the fragments of sky through the clouds between the highrise blocks glow violet and salmon in the glistening air. Traffic is bumper to bumper. Ronnie is nursing a sleep-deprivation headache, and every little start and stop of the car sends squeaks of pain all along his cranium. Even watching the raindrops race down the windowpane isn’t enough to soothe him. How it ever calmed him as a kid – well, he’s not a kid, is he, hasn’t been for a long time. Quite some time since he’s been calm either.
He slides the car over to the curb and places the POLICE ON CALL card in the window, where the patrolmen will see it. Takes a deep breath and opens up the door. Time to walk those last few blocks and see if he can’t lose the malaise, the jackhammer throb between his temples and the soft heaviness dwelling in his heart and innards.
Walking the city streets is a finely tuned talent, these days, not for the light-hearted. A person must be hard as stone to keep out the tumult, the aggro, the buzz of smothered resentment and the simmering fury edging ready to burst into righteous rage. With every step, it arrives in the gaze of seedy passers-by, it insists that you fall into it and join the chaos. Your head must be kept down, head down, eyes must never meet eyes, sidewalks must be utilized with utmost care — even the pavement wishes you its share of harm. To survive, you must avoid these taunting confrontations at all costs, but you must also be prepared to rise should the confrontation prove unavoidable. And it is so very often impossible to avoid.
After three blocks, Ronnie has skirted round five separate incidents ranging from purse-snatching to street-level fraud to aggravated assault, and resists at least once the temptation to flash his shield and roust a small-time perp. On top of the sustained sleep deprivation, the constant friction of city life has him worn to a gordian knot of frayed nerve tissue.
He gets to the hospital feeling like serious shit, toying with the notion of asking a doctor or nurse for some prescription-strength painkillers, maybe slipping them a few bills to expedite the process. Then he decides that it would be counterproductive, make him even more dissociated for this interview with the key witness. Stay sharp, hah. Just get on top of your demons, Ronnie-boy. Stay professional. Witness questioning first, drug deals later.
Liquorstore victim Vincent Lowestoft has been most displeased to wake up in a crowded, scuffed hospital room with all manner of extraneous shit going on around his bed: the death dramas and tearful accusatory dialogues of complete strangers like some telenovela turned up real loud.
Vincent’s a meaty chunk of resentment, thick medicineball head garlanded with a fringe of greasegray mullet, crown bald and blotchy on top. Hands like steamhammers, fingers like gristly sausages. Thick forearms with anchors and badly-sketched tits scrawled out with a blunt sewing needle in some long-ago prisonblock or steam freighter. That someone ever had the nerve just to fuck with this guy, even armed with a Glock 9mm, seems to Ronnie like a minor miracle of recklessness.
Vince is also not happy to be visited by the police a full day after being maimed. He’s been kneecapped by some lowlife punk, and now he has to answer questions from this lousy johnny-come-lately detective? Though he’s drugged heavily, he still seethes. True dedication to the bit. His eyes bore into Ronnie’s, and the hot rage of them just might set fire to his retinas.
“Uh, Mr Lowestoft. Hope you’re feeling better?” Hot raging silence. “I need to ask you a few questions about yesterday’s incident.”
“It weren’t no incident, man, it was a robbery carried out by a loser punk asshole you cops allow to run around in the streets. Three times this month! Three times I been held up in my store!”
“Uh, we have reason to believe the shooter may have been involved in a homicide earlier in the day.”
“Like they were sayin’ on the teevee? That rich asshole? The big boss man? Now I get it.”
“Get what?”
“Why you come in here, asking me all about it. If that punk-ass motherfucker hadn’t popped the rich dude, you wouldn’t have bothered your worthless cop asses to ask me about anythin’. I’d be sittin’ here in this fuckin’ hospital with no kneecap an’ I’d be lucky if I ever got a postcard from you pigs.”
“Now, there’s no call for disrespectful language, Mr Lowestoft, we’re doing our best…”
“Yeah, your best for the rich assholes. Won’t do shit for the likes o’ me, though. Like they used to say in the olden times, 9-1-1 is a joke!”
By now Lowestoft has turned a livid beetroot, flecks of spittle speckling his lips. The teeth are yellowed, sharp. His hands bunch up the sheets and his breath’s getting raspy and sharp. Ronnie’s struggling to get a grip on this interview, struggling more against his own sluggishness than against the broad blast of hostility from Lowestoft.
“Mr, uh, Lowestoft, I’d like to take us back to the inci- uh, to the robbery. Could you tell me about it?”
“Tell you about it? Punk comes in, waves a gun around, demands my money. I tell him to stuff the pistol up his ass. Boom! He loses his head, I lose my kneecap. That seem about right to you, officer?”
“Detective.” As soon as he’s blurted it out, Ronnie knows the instinctive correction was a mistake. Puts it down to the sluggish morning, the lack of caffeine.
“Detective!?” Lowestoft has lost his shit. “Not an officer, noooo… a fuckin’ homicide detective! What fuckin’ good are you detectives to me? I pay my taxes, then I pay extra to your cop pig motherfuck asshole stationhouse on the side! And what does that get me? Protection? Shot in the fuckin’ patella, that’s what!”
Ronnie thinks it wise to stand up and approach the bed to reassure him, to settle him down. Second mistake.
“Stay the fuck away from me, cop fuck!” The monitors hooked to his body are starting to register volcanic levels of activity. Bleeps and cheeps start to trill out all round the room.
Ronnie turns his back to look for a nurse. That’s his third and final mistake.
Lowestoft grabs a ballpoint pen on the nightstand next to his bed and thrusts it hard into Ronnie’s neck. An impact both silent and loud at once. Ronnie’s ears burn and buzz, and his ankles jelly up on him. He’s falling to the floor with warm blood fountaining over his shoulder. Only now does he notice that Lowestoft has BADD APPL tattooed on the knuckles of both hands. He sees those letters but cannot quite figure out what it means.
“Crime wave! How’d you like that for a fuckin’ crime wave?” chokes out Lowestoft over the noise of the heart monitor’s shrieks and whoops. He’s crimson now, with froth on his lips, in serious cardiac distress, but somehow strangely happy, his bizarre enraged grin stretched out wide. As Ronnie’s blood showers up on his face, he starts eyeballrolling, zombified blank eyes aflutter, and the monitors scream out all their alarms at once. He flops onto the bed. Ronnie drops to the floor, hosing an arterial spray.
A nurse comes in and stops dead in the doorway, mouth open, looking left and right, up and down, at the terminal heart-attack victim on the bed and the bleeding-out cop on the floor. She’s caught open mouthed between twin life-or-death crises like a thirsty mule paralysed between two equally appetizing water troughs.
Good thing this all happened in a hospital, thinks Ronnie just before he blacks out.
END OF CHAPTER 3 - penmanship -
AMATEUR continues here…
Credits
Graphic - “Priestess” collage by James Worth
Lyrics from “Mood Swings” by Little Simz
Lyrics from “Poison” by Shygirl
Damn! What a way to end the chapter. Really enjoying this!
"Penmanship"
that is all.