The Gaming Outpost

The room was still, and light streamed through the many-paned bay window to illuminate the hypnotic whorls on the rug between the two. The man was balding, vested in gold-green, with his dried moss color trousers neatly creased, his right leg crossed over his left. She was also sitting facing him, on the other side of the infalling light, and her face while naturally pale, and cherubic was more so today. Eyes of deep blue, and curly, gleaming black hair made her an attractive woman, even if she had a natural tendency to a few more pounds than fashion photographers appreciated.

Still leaning back, with his right hand supported by the thin wooden armrest of his polished chair, and that hand supporting his head, with his index finger touching the edge of his straight hair, the man spoke to the woman crumpled in on herself enough that her chin was in a straight line above her knees, and her hands would not stay still.

“So, tell me, about that day, or anything at all, Ginnie…you don’t mind if I call you Ginnie, do you Specialist Kirkpatrick?” His voice was the boiled down and condensed expression of pure disinterested kindness. It waited in the air for a response, and he seemed in no hurry to chase his words.

“Dragon.” She murmured, and then hiccupped, and a tear came to the farthest right corner of her right eye. He instantly leaned forward and offered her a square of hankerchief from his left hand. It was a smooth, practised gesture, and his face held just the slightest element of concern, not enough to burden anyone by needing a reply, but offering help all the same.

“Dragon? Hmm?” He asked.

She looked up, and her shoulders trembled, and she said the word again with her blue eyes fixed on his brown.

“Dragon, doctor. You know how they say you should leave a bear in its den alone…”

She broke down crying, and this time, he stayed still, letting her master herself. It was in his mind that she had to speak, or she would fall ever inward on herself.

“Well, they never say you should leave a dragon alone in its den, y’know.” And there was a rage in her that her culture had not prepared her for what she had faced, that her police instructors had not warned her, and a ruefulness for no one could have.

“No, they don’t.” He agreed so very softly that she might not have heard the words. His eyes were wide with alarm, but his glasses, the ones with simple glass in them, helped hide his worry.

She bowed her head above her hands clenched tightly on her skirt in her lap, so closed that half-moons or even blood might be found in her palms later. Her breath came in shuddering, and juddering, in great singular inhalations, and slow long sighs out near imperceptible to the ear. But the doctor’s ear could make out a prayer that went over and over again.

“please god let them have another chance.”

The man shuddered. In his cases, he had found that approaching the initial interview cold, with no foreknowledge helped him form a more accurate view of the patient. That way, he was not encumbered with the analysis and judgements of others revealed in written reports. But, he was beginning to think that might have been a mistake here.

“Tell me about the dragon, Ginnie.” He commanded. His voice was still quiet, but now there was an energy in it.

“Ok. We, on Major Crimes, well..” She paused and gulped. “My fifty-fourth day on the job. Six more days, and I’d be off probation.”

“That attention to detail is what makes you a good cop, I suspect.”

“That’s what my instructors said.” She jerked her head in what was meant to be a decisive sign, but her head was tilted off at an odd angle.

Bolstered by his praise, she went on.

“Camendyll came in, and he told us we had a suspect for the Carson vandalisms….the brand new cars being sprayed with acid in the Carson car lots.”

“I’d heard of it. From what I hear, the Mayor is livid.”

“Oh yeah.” She said, the first hint of a smile coming to her face. “We heard about that every day. Its nice being friends with the Mayor.”

She shook her head, and rolled her eyes in disgust.

“Politics is a dirty business.” He said venturing out just a tiny bit. Almost anyone would agree with that statement. She looked back at him, assessingly, even though her capacity for assessment was basically shot right now.

“Oh, no kidding. I did not realize how much of police work is harrassing folk with different opinions than the Mayor and the Council.”

He waved her on. At this point, he’d be happy to have her discuss baseball cards, as long as she would talk. So she spent a good half-hour talking about the various cheap tricks they used to make life miserable for the unconnected and loudmouthed. It ran the gamut from shooting a bb pistol into the back light of a parked car, and then waiting for the driver to venture out to give him a ticket for a busted light to dropping a knife on a neck loop down the back of a handcuffed suspect, and then later finding it.

He raised an eyebrow.

“That’s what I heard anyways.” She finished lamely.

“So…”

“No, no way. I was not involved!” She shouted, her fists clenched, and he held up open, placating hands. She sighed and folded way too easily, losing her drive like a car out of gasoline.

“I heard about it as jokes, and said that was not cool. Later I figured out that was when they were checking me out. See if I was a playa.” She seemed disgusted at her own naivete.

The doctor nodded.

“We can have an investigation of Camendyll. Very quiet…it won’t…” He paused and then stopped as she kept shaking her head. Her eyes were full of tears again, and he pursed his lips.

“Why not, Ginnie?”

“Be…because…” She blubbered. Tears mixed with snot and saliva as she broke down, but this time she did not hide her face from him. “Because the dragon ate him.”

At this time, he came over to her with his second hankerchief (he carried four) and put an arm around her shoulder, and patted her face, and waited on one knee beside her. After a few seconds, she gave in, and buried her face in his shoulder, and just bawled.

Surprised, but not totally, he just stood there, and served as a human comfort post, a personal wailing wall until she regained enough control to care about her dignity, and sat back up a bit. She kept the second hankerchief, and patted at her eyes, carefully not looking at him as he quietly resumed his seat.

It was clear that he was not as calm as he had been. He swallowed twice, and his mouth hung a bit open as he rubbed his forehead with his index finger of his left hand. Then he shook himself, and put on the more professional mien before she could see him acting fearful and dazed.

Several minutes passed, and finally he asked a question.

“Who is the dragon?” In an utterly calm voice that denied this was an impossible question.

“Mister Simon Rochester of 1849 Lavarre Street. He was at home when we came to arrest his wife for vandalizing the cars.”

“Was she guilty?” He asked, mindful of her earlier orations on frame-ups.

“At the time I thought so, although I had some…I don’t know…fears.”

“Nothing enough to verbalize, but still troubling?” The man asked, and she nodded.

“It got worse when we got there, and he shoved the warrant paper in the guy’s face. And then when the guy’s kid started hollering, he wanted to go to him, but Camendyll was in the way, and would not let him by. Told him he had to stay there.”

“I don’t think that’s true, is it Specialist” The doctor said invoking her professional skills as a police officer.

“No. Its not. They have to be accompanied by a police person, but we cannot restrain their movements in their own house. Especially not to comfort a child. That might have been enough to have the case thrown out with a really slick lawyer.” Her voice was calmer, condemnatory. It was clear she had not liked Camendyll or her fellow officers.

The doctor raised an eyebrow.

“He, that is Mister Rochester simply quick stepped sideways, and was already moving so Camendyll would really look like a dork if he tried to box him in. But Camendyll got his revenge by dragging the woman out by her arms behind her back,a nd her feet above the ground.”

The doctor paused and visualized a small woman, with her hands handcuffed behind her, and two big guys lifting her by her forearms so that her elbows felt like they were going to break.

“How did Mister Rochester take this?”

“He shielded his kid from seeing it, and his face was very guarded, but he saw every bit. You got the feeling he was memorizing faces.”

“What was he like, this man?” The doctor asked.

“Tall, broad shouldered. He lived in a white house on a quiet street. His yard was neat, and his house was mostly clean. It looked lived in, but nice.”

The doctor smiled faintly. It was clear to him that Ginnie would have liked to have been with this man. Attraction complicated things.

“We took his wife, Susan, down to the station, and the boys were pretty crude about it. Cracking jokes, and thumping her down in the chair hard. She said ‘This is because we voted for Stieglitz, isn’t it?’”

Camendyll made to slap her, and it was then I realized this was a put up job. It turns out Rochester was a precinct chairman for Stieglitz, you know…’A small and honest government is our birthright.’”

“‘Don’t sell your birthright for a mess of graft.’” The man quoted, and then he nodded. “Too bad Stieglitz lost the election.” The doctor would have said that anyways, to gain rapport, but in this case it was the truth. Two years ago he had come up short one month on his bills, so he had decided to forego the monthly donation to the police veterans fund. Four days later, his office had been broken into and trashed. He got the message real clear.

“The man came down, alone. He refused to tell us where his child was, and told us that his wife was innocent, and should be released.”

She drew in another breath.

“We were sitting at an interrogation table when he refused, and he made his chair seem a throne. One of the officers, I don’t know who said that his refusing to tell us made it seem he was saying we, the police were untrustworthy. It was a threat, of course, and I’ve seen other men fold under threat, but he merely smiled.”

“I’m asking nicely.”

“Is that a threat?” Camendyll leaned forward.

“It is a statement of fact, Detective Camendyll.”

“Is that another threat, you know who I am, you little punk?”

Camendyll’s words were slightly comic seeing as he was smaller than Rochester, and Rochester merely wiped the spittle off his face. We left him there to stew. He fell asleep.

At that moment, doctor, I found myself admiring him.

We bust in, and handcuffed him again, shouting at him, and dragging him out into the main office area where a bunch of cops were, standing around their desks, some eating microwaved food.

And Camendyll yelled something.

“Your wife is never getting out. She’s going to go to jail and get shivved there if you don’t cooperate.”

There had been six men shoving him, even as he went, twisting his arms, and bowing his back so that his stomach pushed forward and then suddenly he stopped moving.

“Is that the feeling of this assembly?” He asked, and I whimpered ‘no’. He spun his head to look right into my eyes, and I swear, he smiled. But everyone else in that room yelled and cheered for Susan Rochester to get shanked in prison.

And then I heard the clank of handcuffs hitting the floor. And all the officers around him fell back. Two reached for their guns, and he turned like he was a ballerina, and they fell back against the wall.

He stepped toward me, and I shrank down. Camendyll was in his way, and then suddenly Camendyll’s body was slumping to the ground, and his head was flying across two desks to land with a bloody thump on a desktop.

I heard a sound like blinds being pulled, very rapidly. And then he touched my left shoulder, and slung me under a desk. From there, I…

“What did you see, Ginnie?” The doctor asked.

I saw thin sheets of plastic, finger width, stiff, snap out from under his fingernails to about four inches, and just looking at them, you knew they were impossibly sharp.

He passed back into the room’s middle, and I heard bodies falling, and the thunk of something hitting something. I did not know what it was until the severed arm of a police officer fell right next to my desk, and four inches from my nose as I hid under the desk in shadow, it fell in the light.

With a screech, I was up. He moved, like he was dancing, doctor, a gentle waltz. His arm would go out, and a head or leg would fall off. He would spin about, and two more were dead with their chests spouting as they fell back.

And then I saw someone shoot, and I looked back at him to see his dead body, but the bullets hung in the air inches from his face. And he smiled at me. and then went back to killing.

In less time than it takes to tell it doc, they were all dead.

As he left, I asked him who, or what he was.

“I’m a verser.” He said, and then went to release his wife from jail.

But he lied, you know. He’s not a verser. He’s a dragon. And we were fools to go into his cave to steal his treasures.

Her sobbing insistence was met by the doctor sprinting to the trash can to throw up. And thus it was that she offered him the first hankerchief back to wipe his mouth.