Once, there were upstanding men like JD Masket, officers and inspectors like Moe Knox, too-vicious combatants like Una Kidman. Sure, Nazumaki and Ishikawa still reared their heads now and then, but only to do their jobs, to the best of their abilities. Honest, hard-working Officers of the Liberty Police, through and through. Respected, even, if only by their comrades-in-arms.
And then there were "men" like Roscoe Boone. Oh, sure, on the outside, to the casual observer, there wasn't anything off about him, or the crew of the Braxton in general. Levan Harlow could attest to that. Just your average, friendly beat-cop. Maybe a bit of a loose tongue, a little too eager to key the mic, but not a bad guy. He did his job, and he did it well enough to teach others how to do theirs. A "Field Training Officer", the Company called it. Ride around with the new hires, show them the ropes, help keep them safe. To Roscoe's credit, the chiefs and deputy chiefs and middle-managers and paper-jockies all the way through his chain of command thought he was perfectly fit for the role.
The man roughly-bound to a rickety chair, hidden from view in a shipping container on some abandoned Manhattan landing pad, thought differently.
"W-when I get out of here-" He spat through a mouthful of blood and ruined teeth, words slurred by the searing pain of a cracked jaw. "I'll have your ass, Boone! You said it yourself, I'm untouchable! I've got enough dirt to bury you."
The squeak of a pleather jacket was the first response. The second, the crack of a riot baton across the back of the man's head, was significantly more painful. The third, though, was what truly set the underworld information broker on edge:
"If."
"'If?' What the fuck do you mean 'if'?" Hachiko Mori had a sneaking suspicion he already knew what the Sergeant meant. He was good for that sort of thing, knowing what people were getting at without them actually saying it. Came with the territory, of being raised by a Hogosha boss. Sure, he couldn't quite hack it in Kusari, too cutthroat, but Liberty was fertile ground for even a half-assed criminal. Still, it didn't hurt to make sure.
The sharp, angular features of his once-friendly Police contact hove into view, a devious grin tugging at thin lips and revealing teeth that could do with a check-up. "You said 'when I get out of here.' I said 'if'. You're a smart man, Chip, two and two." That's what Roscoe called the Kusarian, 'Chip'. Chip off the block, like his old man. It was supposed to be a friendly affectation, but in this moment, the word felt anything but.
A gulp, then a gag. Blood really did taste like pennies going down, and it wasn't pleasant. The once-Hogosha soon found himself considering just how many other men and women had savored that flavor after meetings with men like Roscoe. "C-come on, Boone, it was just business! You know it wasn't personal. Said yourself, 'money talks, merit walks', right?"
"Hmph. I did, didn't I? Alright, Chip. Let's cut a deal, between friends. Corporal?" Without breaking his gaze, Roscoe beckoned over a heavily-armed, heavily-armored member of his crew. 'Crew' was a good term, too. Really fit, considering the circumstances: the gentlemen (and lady!) Aboard the Braxton were barely a cut above your average bunch of Rogues, elevated by virtue of clean uniforms, and twice as vicious. The Corporal responded with a noncommittal grunt, and thrust a datapad into the abused Kusarian's lap. Displayed on the screen was a secure credit transaction menu, a pending transaction in the amount of thirty-three million Sirius Credits awaiting the source account. Helpfully, the destination was already input.
"Thir-..." Hachiko stuttered, his voice catching on a dislodged tooth. Cocking his head to one side, the offending dentition was ejected in a fountain of spit and blood. "Roscoe, we had a deal, and thirty million credits wasn't part of it, not even close!" The hair-raising sound of an energized electric baton somewhere out of view encouraged the broker to reconsider his position. "Okay, okay, fine! Fine, you win, Roscoe." Fuck. The Officer had added interest, of course he did. Well, nothing for it. Straining with effort, the expat managed to extend a finger towards a small pad embedded in the corner of the datapad, and the remainder of the transaction details fizzled to life on the screen. A confirmation, and the Credits were away.
"Excellent! Corporal, come on, let's get our good friend out of this stuffy container and into the fresh air."
Hachiko soon found himself rotating, as the pair of officers grabbed hold of the backrest, dragging the whole assembly along the rusted deck of the landing pad. He breathed a sigh of relief. Sure, the man was out nearly his entire bank account, but money came quick and easy in Liberty. A few days in the general hospital, a few weeks back in the office, and he'd be squared away, for sure. Eventually, the chair leveled off, and the man found himself staring up at his two captors. "So... We're done. Right, Roscoe? We're finished up here?"
"Yep. You're finished." Still wearing that lopsided smile, Roscoe gave his corporal a nod, and Hachiko felt a rough-treaded boot impact his chest, tipping the chair and its occupant over the edge of the platform...
...And into one of the vast storage yards of toxic waste canisters, dozens of meters below. Plastic shattered, wood splintered, flesh sizzled, and bone dissolved to nothingness in half a minute, punctuated by agonized, gurgling screams.
Someone needed to clean up this shithole of a planet. It was getting as bad as Houston.
"All in a day's work, huh, Sarge?"
"Heh, yeah. Come on, I think there's a strip joint around here."
"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."
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