Persistence of Evil

[Jayce]

"Ho-ly shit, Paige." Roscoe stared at a display aboard the bridge of the Braxton, practically salivating. Zero after zero, flushed beyond flushed with cash. Eventually, the hawkish man tore his eyes from the screen to glare down at the pink-haired woman seated below. "How the fuck did you manage this? Hack the First Bank of Manhattan or something?"

A devious glint shone through her thin-rimmed, thin-lensed glasses. "Nope, nothing like that. Remember that squinty prick, what was his name? Your ex-chum from Kusari."

"What, Chip? Yeah, but we about cleared him out before we snuffed him. What's he got to do with this?"

"Oh, you cleared him out, for sure, for sure." An almost bestial grin began to mar the typically-fastidious woman's visage. Roscoe was a hard man, but when Paige smiled, his fillings hurt. There was something disarming about that smirk, but a little voice in the back of the crooked cop's mind screamed at him not to relax. "But we weren't the only crew he worked with. He had other friends. Had, being the operative word."

A pregnant pause. Maybe Roscoe was getting too old and senile for this. "...I'm not tracking."

"For someone stuck dick-deep in the mud of crime, you've got an issue with not seeing the big picture. Here, let me lay it out." The smile disappeared, replaced with the eye-roll of a young woman who hadn't really grown out of that particular phase. "He's an info-broker, yeah? That means he's got contacts that he's all buddy-buddy with. People like us." A few keystrokes, a manual input on the touchscreen display, and an image of the deceased Kusarian appeared. Linked to it was a photo of the Braxton, taken straight from the datafile. Then, like spokes on a wheel, dozens of other tendrils extended from Hachiko's face, towards further circles, each representing one of his contacts. Some contained faces, some names, and others pseudonyms.

"While you and Adrian were out doing the dirty work, I was taking a tour of Hachiko's little office. He had shit taste, and even worse security, by the way." Turning her chair to face the Sergeant, Paige leaned back, resting well-manicured hands against the armrests. "Why were we working with him, again?"

"No family in Liberty, and the family he had in Kusari wouldn't give much of a shit if he bought the farm. Slotting him was always on the table." Roscoe leaned against a bulkhead, crossing his arms. His everpresent windbreaker scratched slightly. "Purely a matter of convenience." It was the truth, too: the man's death didn't even break local news. The chemical spill from his fall caught most of the exposure, and even that was limited to a ticker at the bottom of the screen. Dead, gone, buried, and nobody batted an eye. Someone with a moral compass might find the situation saddening. Sergeant Boone simply figured it was good for business.

"Uh huh. Well, seems like half the people he worked with were just as brainless as he was." Turning back to the display, Paige input another command, and a solid half of the images and names disappeared. Those that remained increased in size to occupy the newly-available space. "These ones, specifically. I knew your boy wasn't long for this world, so I took some initiative. Shot out some job postings, some info on cargo shipments, whatever he had laying around when he 'bought the farm', at a damn-fine price. His boys and girls ate it up, and Kieran worked his magic. Kid's good, seriously."

Kieran Marshall, an Ageira contractor on loan from a subsidiary firm, ostensibly served as part of the maintenance force of the Braxton. In actuality, the man was a veritable god of computing, sourced from Arecibo after being given the boot for snooping around where he shouldn't. It took a bit of shuffling, and more than a little palm-greasing, to keep the boy from being shitcanned outright, but the cash had been made back dozens of times already. "Uh huh, so you bombed their mail with... Something. Go on."

"Yeah, 'something'. A pretty little bit of code he cooked up, dicks with the routing of credit transfers after they're away. You'd have to ask him about it. That number right there? That's the result of every single transaction every one of these retards made being routed to an offshore account before they noticed what was up." The pink-haired deviant giggled quietly, pointing at a specific face on the screen. "Shit, this one? I strung him along for so long. 'Are you sure you got the account right? I haven't gotten my payment yet.' Mongrel."

Now it was Roscoe's turn to smile. She'd fucked them, but she did one better: Paige only fucked the stupid ones, the ones Roscoe would likely never do business with in the first place. We're talking 'bite the pillow, I'm going in dry', 'leave-her-a-single-mother', shoot-and-scoot fucked. She didn't even leave a paper trail. Those were the idiots that ended up on Sugarland anyway, helping the Braxton make her quota. Straight cops or not, the crew had to keep up some of the appearance of being a policing unit.

"There's just one small problem. Two, come to think of it." Paige continued, snapping the Sergeant from his reverie. "One, before you ask: no, we can't do this again. Neuralnet Division's patched the backdoor Kieran used a few weeks ago. Only people vulnerable are people we want to 'work' with. Don't shit where you eat." Fuck, well, there went that idea. Too good to be true. "Two: this isn't chump change like we've been screwing with before. We're talking more cash than you've ever dreamed of, Boone. You move even a quarter of this, shake it the wrong way, and the Revenue Service is going to crawl up your ass so far you'll taste them."

She was right, of course. Paige had an unnerving tendency to do that, and Roscoe was pretty sure he didn't like it. He'd have to keep an eye on her. Airlock, definitely, if she gets too uppity. The Braxton's portside boarding collar had been on the fritz recently, after eating one too many stray rounds from Stanton's subgun. Wouldn't take too much for her to have an accident. He had to admit, though, Detroit had done a bang-up job designing that thing: could blow a hole in someone's ass as big around as a cantaloupe, but it was a pup under recoil. Nice and easy to control, not that you'd know it from the OIT's recent performances. Sure, it was black market, but that meant nobody was going to notice it was missi-...

"Roscoe? Roscoe. Hey, old guy!"

Discarding the comment regarding his age, Roscoe shot back a grin. "I think I know who can help solve our little tax problem. It's about time we restocked the armory."

"Detroit?"

"Detroit."

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