Amateur - Chapter 8

– deepestdarkestblue -

Dec 08, 2025

Catch up by reading Chapter 7 - begrudger -
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The story so far: Homicide detective Ronnie Hurtler and his boss, Captain Justine Jason, investigate the serial murders of billionaire CEOs which have triggered a wave of unrest in the city.
Meanwhile college student Veronika, who supports herself through a sexcam business, has made contact with Ronnie and is offering him ‘special services’, including help locating the huge bitcoin stash belonging to the first victim.
But everyone seems to be looking for this vast crypto-haul, including the feared commander of the elite police intervention unit, “Beyond” Bill Simons…

The swirl of a riot cop’s billyclub inscribes a swift figure eight in the air, but it doesn’t signify infinity. Instead it arcs down in a perfect parabola to bludgeon a darkskinned woman across the skull, achieving a sharp finality.

Through the pane of glass, from inside the coffeeshop, Veronika experiences this violence as a dumbshow, a spectacular meaningless dance which makes her feel nothing at all, so much nothing that it takes up all the space in her head. The free flow of blood from the woman’s scalp stirs no reaction either. It registers like a video, like the news playing on the building by Alicia’s old camp, like it’s already happened and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it though it’s happening a few short feet away from where she sits in the booth tapping her plastic cup with a ruby red fingernail.

Ongoing protests outside the campus coffeeshop have spiralled into a tiny war, one of so many erupting on streetcorner battlefields across the city. Neither the cops nor the protestors show any sign of vigor or freshness. It’s just a dull everyday attritional grind. Not even any local news crews show up anymore for these conflicts – a couple of protestors, a couple of cops, they film the event on their mobiles for their respective archives and streaming sites. But nobody’s gonna watch this stuff; there’s surely bigger and better spectacle to be had somewhere else; when is another rich guy gonna die?

Veronika and Ronnie sit across from each other at a table by the window, the ruckus caterpillaring towards them as a blob of campus police push the protesting mass away from the university buildings. They settled for this place as a first in-person meeting, a get-to-know-you encounter before any flesh is encountered, before the blood flows. If it ever will. Like the warring parties outside in the streets, Ronnie seems somewhat spent, unwilling to engage further in person. He seems wearied by everything, even Veronika’s imminent flesh, even the storming tumult just outside.

A young woman is slammed into the freshly repaired coffeeshop window, her teeth scratching the glass, right cheek flattened against the pane. A police arm encased in bodyarmor wrenches at her left shoulder. She mouths out “End the violence!” but her words are hard to distinguish across the windowpane and its pressure.

Ronnie takes a sip of his espresso, Veronika her bubble tea. They eye each other as the protestor just inches from their table is shoved against the window one more time and then hauled off. Ronnie’s steelgray laptop lies on the table between them.

“But it won’t, will it?” says Veronika. “The violence? Won’t ever end, I mean.”
“Above my paygrade,” says Ronnie. “For the most part, I’m not even the one perpetrating the violence.”
“Come off it, Ron! You literally pay me to harm myself, man. Your violent desire is my whole livelihood.”
“Your lifeblood, so to speak.”
“Cute. Gruesome, but cute. So get off your high horse, won’t you? You perpetrate your fair share of what goes on.”

Ronnie drains his cup. He looks like shit. In person much more so than on screen. Though he has that thickset toughguy look, his forearms are scrawny while his belly is rounded, neck both bulging and lined. His eyes are heavily hooded, pupils peering narrowly through a cautious squint. He’s unshaven and his cheeks are gaunt and gray. He has a handlebar moustache-and-muttonchop arrangement that was out of style before he was even born. Which means it might be hip again, who knows?

A green polo shirt shows tits arguably more impressive than Veronika’s, which he’s never even had to work on. He’s all-round out-of-shape, flabby and skinny at once. About the only thing he has going for him is his thick dark hair with flecks of silver, splayed in a magnificent mullet around a thinning crown. On someone less slovenly it would be distinguished. On him it looks incongruous.

“Here’s the deal, V. I been thinking about the thing. The cutting thing. I don’t wanna do that stuff any more. It’s sick, and I’m sick for wanting it. It’s, like, issues that I have. I need to get my shit together and the first step in doing that is to lay off the pervo stuff. Just quit clean, like I did with the booze and coke.”
She scoffs. “And where does that leave me? That pervo stuff is what’s been paying my rent. Your cold-turkey medicine to cure your ills? I have no faith in it.”

Ronnie looks round, holding his empty cup, looking like he wants to order another espresso. Veronika slides over her drink, leaving a wet trail across the table.

“Here, have some of mine.”

He has a sip, clears his throat and says: “Look, Veronika, here’s the deal. There are other ways to get paid than what you’re doing. I want us to get more normal, you know, have a normal thing. You and me. A thing.”

Veronika’s eyes are saucers. She gapes. He goes on:

“We can work something out with your rent… Maybe you move in with me, I dunno.”

She laughs loud and long. He slumps shoulders and scrunches up his forehead, frowning. She brings it under control. He’s owed some respect, so she lays it out:

“Oh, Ron, normal? Really? You and me? Are you normal, detective? Do you even know who I am, Ronnie? What I am? We’ve never even gotten to that in our sessions.”

Sheepish, Ronnie looks down and starts shredding a napkin. Veronika continues: “It’s been all about the cutting, peek-a-boo, explain bitcoin to me, mommy. You never even asked me to take it all off. You’ve never once asked me what I want. What gets me hard — because I have a fucking cock, Ron. And you know me, you think? If you think I’m capable of normal you don’t know me at all, man. Not one bit.”

He looks shattered; he looks sincere. He’s sincerely shattered. He takes her hands. She lets him. “I know who you are, Veronika. I’ve been skirting round it, but I know. Maybe the cutting helped me avoid all that complication. But I know who you are, I think. I think I know what you are. I’m ready to accept that, to work around it, work with it, whatever…”
“Ron, are you serious?” She’s stopped laughing, her hands clasped in his. “Go ahead, tell me what I am, tell me–”

Rat-a-tat-tat. Tap-tap. A knuckle on the window.

Veronika snarls. “Who the fuck’s that? Your dad?”

Ronnie flashes a memory-image of a harsh-faced man with snot streaming, slapping his mother again and again. Beyond him, in the night outside, the sky is the deepest darkest blue imaginable. Now he looks out of the window of the coffeeshop into the bright morning, the sky a paler vivid blue, but deep and unknowable nonetheless.

The cops and protestors have vanished. There’s Beyond Bill Simons in a cheap plastic mackintosh and a worn homburg, smiling at him through the window like an invitation to an inquisition. At his left shoulder, a tall cadaverous agent in mirror aviator shades with an audio earpiece shadows his boss. If someone is to be executed, this man will be the executioner. Ronnie waves to beckon in Beyond Bill, then remembers Veronika is with him and cancels the gesture. Instead, Bill beckons him outside.

Ronnie and Veronika share a terse parting exchange and then Ron rises and strides out of the coffeeshop into the bright blue of the world.

Bill Simon’s new undertaker-executioner-escort, who goes by the name of Agent Unwin, conveys them by car to the waterfront, to a nice open space, a wharf-turned-park where the seagulls wheel and the boats parp their horns and few people are there to bother them on this ordinary workday morning. The day is fine and sunny. Despite this, Bill Simons is wearing a mackintosh and hat, and leans as he walks on an old-fashioned umbrella,with a metal ferrule.

On the drive out to the waterfront, the other agent, the first one who came for him at the diner – Agent Howard, if Ronnie remembers his name correctly – sat next to him in the backseat and made him open his shirt, then checked Ronnie for wires. Ronnie was politely asked to hand over his service weapon for safekeeping, and complied without protest.

Before that, before he’d left the coffeeshop, Veronika had whispered to him that she’d think it over, think over what he’d said. It was hard to tell if she was serious–he’s still only half-sure about his own seriousness in making the offer he did. Then in the car it came back as a memory more real to him than the menace of the men with earpieces and dead eyes.

Ronnie hasn’t had a steady thing, hasn’t dipped a toe into the waters of love since his divorce, since long before that even. Can’t remember what it was like to love his wife though he knows he once did. And so is this love that he feels for Veronika? Or is she just another drug, another substitute for life while he avoids truly living? It has to be worth trying anyway.

He remembers that she wrote her cellphone number on a napkin and slid it across the table. He left his laptop with her, saying she could look over his notes on the crypto shit, and then she’d said something strange as he was leaving.

He remembered that she’d said: “Everyone everywhere is so involved, so involved in this fruitless search for what?” He hadn’t known how to respond, it seemed so obvious that the search is for money and money alone, so he walked out of the coffeeshop to where Bill Simons was waiting for him with his cadaverous entourage. He wonders now if she’d been talking about money at all, or something more. Begging the question: what is it that Ronnie’s looking for?

It was the same question that had brought about both his marriage and his divorce. He’d always thought Francine had been the thing he was looking for–a body, amongst all the other bodies, that felt different, that had a quality about it worth clinging onto. He thought he’d found it and so he’d married the feeling and they were happy for a time, or something like happy. She didn’t mind the drugs, she fucked like a rabbit, she had her own proclivities in bed that kept the spike of excitement wedged beneath him. But then, just as quickly, it grew dull again. The edges all worn down. And she’d known it was no longer her that he wanted, if it ever had been. Maybe all he’s ever wanted is the edge, and maybe that’s something a man must keep approaching but never truly reach, maybe he must never settle.

Ronnie believes this. He’s seen it from his child’s vantage point how if a man can’t find the edge, he’ll create it. He’s seen the evil a man can do with his restless hands. The man struck the woman like a PSA on a billboard, like a video he’d watched somewhere. The woman wept and the man said things that were bad and the woman had blood running down her leg. Mama, gone now. The man said he wished the first one had ended the same way as this one, a simple punch in the gut, and he looked at Ronnie and Ronnie knew his life was void.

All these snatches of the recent past and the faraway past are surging through his memory, erupting like demons into the present and running interference on Ronnie’s faltering sense of here-and-now. The then is strong with childhood slaps and tears, it’s colored deep and blue, and he wants to end all that and just be wealthy and happy and live in simple love with Veronika forever. But the now is strangely more obscure than the past, airy and lighter, yet somehow insubstantial. And the now has him striding side-by-side with an old man along the esplanade at the waterfront, the seagulls and the boat klaxons almost drowning out the softly-spoken words of Beyond Bill Simons.

Bill’s just saying: “So we spoke to Caroon’s widow, Polly — ‘Polly and Ollie Caroon’ is so adorable don’t you think? — and she told us that she was fairly certain that the late Olly always carried his private crypto key written on a slip of paper in his wallet, his black leather wallet.”
“She didn’t tell me that,” says Ronnie.
“Well, she told me,” says Bill. “The why of that must’ve been how I actually asked about it while you, from what she’s told me, ran from the room when she tried to tell you–” Ronnie hasn’t even made a move to interrupt, but Bill puts a hand up to stop him anyway. “We checked with the manifest of victim’s personal effects logged with the crime scene investigation team. Black leather wallet – check. Slip of paper with crypto key – nada, nichts, zip and zilch.”

“First I’m hearing of it, Bill” says Ronnie. The ambient noise, seabirds and port traffic, make him strain his voice somewhat in order to be heard. The old man keeps leaning closer to catch his words and he’s come to fear the smell of naphtha, those mothballs old folk use to keep their overcoats intact. Deep dark blue thoughts and the ghosts of long-ago slaps intrude on his now when Bill is near him.

Beyond Bill continues to stroll, his tone still conversational and pleasant, but his gaze sheeny gray, a penetrating cold steel into Ronnie’s eyes. His shuffling dark black crocs keep pace alongside Ronnie’s detective suedes as they move along the promenade.

Bill’s spiel goes on: “So we checked Caroon’s personal effects in the evidence room. I checked them in person, in fact. Looked in all his pockets, pants and jacket and shirt, all those little slots and folds in the wallet. I mean his physical wallet now, what they call a billfold, not the kind of wallet we’re really interested in. Following me so far, Ron?”

Ronnie has found himself craning his neck down towards Simons so as to hear his soft warm voice. Now he’s faced up close by those steel gray eyes, the whiff of old-man malice. He lurches his head back involuntarily.

“I gotta confess that to let this detail slip by is some pretty sloppy police work on my part,” Ronnie admits without gritting his teeth. “I can only offer as an excuse that we were fixated on the Caroon shooter pretty much exclusively, and maybe we let the whole cryptocoin angle slide by the wayside. The thing is, we know the killer never stopped to take it — so who did?”

Bill lays a friendly hand on Ronnie’s shoulder. “Isn’t that quite the question, Ron? I’ve been wondering myself how we ended up here. Things got a bit hectic there, what with you getting wounded in the line of duty the day after the murder. These things slip by us. I understand.”

He straightens up and begins to shuffle on. The black crocs slide softly along the planking of the dock. Ronnie steps along beside him.

“Here’s the thing, though, Ron. I head up the supposedly elite Special Crime and Corruption Unit. If it were to come to light that someone…non-civilian had swiped a hoard of illicit cryptocurrency before the evidence was logged, that would come under the general heading of special crime, and very much particularly land in the area of corruption. We would have to come down hard, no choice. No choice at all in the matter.”

Bill shrugs, then taps Ronnie gently on the shoulder with his folded umbrella. A smiling Mary Poppins with the cold eyes of a killer and the faint scent of lost terrors. “But if you, Ron, were somehow to find the cryptowallet — missing things do reappear sometimes — suddenly all that putative grief would go away.” He makes the magic gesture with his free right hand. “Poof! All that tsuris, gone just like that. How easily things can be made to disappear.”

The sun glints hard into his steel gray eyes, and so he raises his right hand to visor them. A deep blue shadow folds across his face.

You breathe slowly your own recycled air in the compact space. You must be still. Any noise reverberates. But you’re getting good at this. What it takes to make the body, your body, capable of these things. Nothing more than endurance, and with all you have endured in this lifetime? More than most. This is an extension of all that. The hole inside the self which you must bunker down in to do whatever has to be done, what they required you to do.

And in that hole is the thing which has sustained you. The feeling of a deep, drifting ocean. The drone of silence in the subaquatic void. That darkest blue silence. That velvet midnight of the soul which calms and sedates, slows the body down to nothing more than its most primal maintenance. Yet your focus never wavers. 

Down in the deepest darkest blue you rest the heavy weapon on your knee, and you wait like a thing huddled in a reef with a poison sting. Waiting for a killer shark to swim by...

Through the heavy silence comes the music in your ears. RZA growls:

Bring da motherfuckin’ ruckus!

Lyle Jackson has been on the job exactly one week and two days, and for nearly all that time he’s managed not to let his face betray the edge he straddles. He feels he’s an imposter. He’s not qualified for this – can’t be sure why anyone thinks he is. He guesses it’s because he’s tall and serious and Western-looking. Swole arms, square jaw, buzzcut heavy. True SOCOM looks, a chad for the ages. A gun at his hip appears as natural as his biceps. He should be modelling as a bodyguard, playing bodydouble for The Rock, not actually working this job. He’s swimming in his costume, LARPing a thickset menace that he cannot feel. He’s the insecurity guard.

Distracted so by his own inadequacies that when Marcus Jansen, his principal, his precious treasure, storms out from the meeting room, he’s already halfway down the hallway before Lyle has even noticed. He has to run to catch up. He conceals his huffing with tight lips as he makes up the distance, and follows Jansen two steps behind as the bossman rants to some disembodied receptacle. Maybe yelling at an underling on his phone. Maybe raving to the empty air merely to hear his own voice. Lyle’s professional duty is to feel protective toward this man, but he just can’t. The guy’s a certified asshat.

They hurry down the pale corridor – another angry shoutdown to attend in another meeting room stocked with drinks and pastries – and Lyle is wondering whether his first paycheck will be enough to chase off the loan sharks for another month. It’s the most money he’s ever made. But nothing ever seems to be enough. Lyle cannot feed his family. Poverty is so exhausting.

The man careening corners in front of him earns fifty times any loan Lyle’s ever taken out each month, and still his suits don’t fit quite right. The seams are expensive and incorrect. The man’s anger twists everything he comes into contact with, bespoke tailoring included.

Lyle’s watching the poor movement of this luxury suit, can’t stop seeing the way it reveals itself as fraudulent, as Jansen leads them down these endless halls. So focused on the indecency of it all that he hardly feels the swish of air slip by his ear, hardly notices as the boss man stops in his tracks with a strange little hiccup, doesn’t realize he’s walking on his own ‘till the next turn. Only then does he turn back down the windowless corridor to watch his principal fall face first onto the hard tile floor, revealing the feathered crossbow bolt protruding from the ill fit of his suit back. Dead center of the back, like a target on a range.

“Uh,” Lyle says. Whizz thunk. Blood spurts from a new wound just above Jansen’s buttcheek and taints the white hallway. Lyle stands and stares, looks hard at the scene before him, but cannot see clear to committing any of this to memory.

He’s not qualified. He’s drowning in his costume.

I rip it hardcore, like porno-flick bitches 

You remain still. You wonder if you will need to kill this other man, this hulking hesitant one who merely stands stunned and dazed before the skewered body. You don’t want to kill him, but you will. How easily the simple crossbow bolt took to the air and made sharp death with only the pull of a trigger... 

This doubtful man gives you plenty of time to reload and lay him in your sights. He hasn’t even drawn the weapon at his hip. He blinks like a hare in the headlights.

Through the vent in which you have smalled yourself to be the deepest, darkest blue, this is easy, this task. Death is effortless to a true pro, and finally that’s what you’ve revealed yourself to be. You raise the crossbow and aim.

But then, the large man merely turns and runs. This is what happens when one doesn’t have a place to go within oneself, when there’s no hole in which to find the perfect calm. The panic wells up and the one who fears must attempt to outrun himself, an impossible feat. That is him: this big thick man full of fear with his untouched gun. But it isn’t you. You need not run. You have your steadiness.

The hallway stays empty, save for the emptied body. You rest the crossbow on the airvent ledge and peekaboo out into the corridor. From your breast pocket, you remove the USB drive: your tease and your conclusion. You frisbee the USB, which twirls round and round, and lands neatly, perfectly, on the dead man’s back, just below the bolt lodged in his long-dead heart.

You shimmy back down the vent and make your exit. The rest will all unfold just as it’s supposed to. You’ll watch it all from the refuge of your deepest, darkest blue.