Birth of a Monster (2 page)

“Frisk him!” yelled the cop.

Moments later, the cop extracted what
he believed to be a dagger, but was really a compressed sword a la
Pitkins.

The cops then dragged Tats, hands
firmly cuffed behind his back, to the wagon.

“What kind of flowers you deliverin’,
hmmm?!” said one of the cops.

Tats noticed the other cops look a bit
startled when one of their number pulled out a large dagger and
hacked open the contents of one of the bags.

He withdrew his blade and smelled—but
did not snort—the contents. An evil grin swept across his
face.

“Boys, this is the bust we’ve all been
waiting for!”

“Take these rats to the station.
They’re all under arrest for multiple violations of
SISA!!”

Chapter 4

As Tats and his fellow malefactors sat
in the back of the police wagon, their still tightly bound gags
removing all conversation but that of exchanges of trepidatious and
quizzical stares, he felt his life was truly over. He had been
nabbed from time to time as a youngster for petty offenses and had
a few close brushes as an adult. But this was different. This was
the big time. This was twenty to forty years in the slammer
minimum, and who knew whether the large stashes he had tucked away
at his various mansions would result in separate charges and
convictions and perhaps make him eligible for the death
penalty?

He was no lawyer, but he suspected the
death penalty was only on the table for a SISA offense committed
after a conviction. As he pondered the prospect of decades behind
bars in Kasani knows what kind of squalid conditions, he found
himself thinking perhaps the scaffold would be a merciful fate
after all.

He reflected briefly on how the trap
had been laid—and whether Crabs or others were complicit—but this
took a back seat to his meditation on his dreary future.

“Get these punks outta
here!”

So deep in his thoughts he had been,
that he hadn’t even noticed the whiff of fresh air purifying the
dreary wagon until he heard this authoritarian bark from a
policeman standing outside of it with the door cracked slightly
open.

The cops inside the wagon began hauling
their catch out towards the fresh air that they would only briefly
enjoy before being marched into the police station.

As Tats watched Crabs and his
underlings step out of the wagon with doom written on their faces,
he felt he was perhaps experiencing what a captive of war might
who, taken from his homeland, exits the vehicle of his
sequestration into a foreign environment at the mercy of his
captors.

“Hurry it up, ya young hoodlum!!”
barked the cop behind him, giving him a stiff poke with a club to
accentuate the point, thus ending Tats’ reverie.

Once inside the police station, there
appeared to be little difficulty recognizing the underlings. A
stern-faced officer rattled off each of their aliases and real
names with a promptitude that demonstrated the frequency of their
visits.

Crabs proved to be a more elusive fish,
and while the officer was sure he had seen him before, he had to
ask for his name. Once he had it, his secretary went looking
through a pile of boxes and brought forward a file.

“Here you are sir,” she
said.

“This had better be yours!” the officer
told Crabs, with menace in his eyes.

He opened it up and looked at the
sketch.

“Yep, that’s you. You’ve had a bit of a
vacation, haven’t you, Mr. Crabs? But you weren’t on the straight
and narrow, just covering your tracks a little better than you used
to. But not better enough. Not by a long shot! Get him outta
here!”

Crabs was led off out of the
room.

Tats alone stood before the
cops.

“And you? I don’t think I recognize
you!” the processing officer barked.

“They call me Tats, sir,” he
said.

“Do they now?” the officer said with a
sneer. “How original!” he added, his eyes venturing towards the
mostly concealed tattoo on the side of his neck.

“And what did your mother name you—that
is, if you have a mother?!” he asked, with a bit of a
snicker.

“David Havensford, sir,” he responded
calmly, though seething with rage inwardly.

“Well, well, well,” the officer
responded with a look of triumph on his face. “You’re related to
Rebecca Havensford, now, aren’t you?”

Tats nodded.

“Is she the beast that bore
you?”

“She’s my sister, sir.”

“Well, she’s been on quite a vacation
ever since she strangled the life out of a former police chief’s
son!” he exclaimed.

Tats didn’t feel now would be the best
time to point out that the son of that police chief had tried to
screw for free at a whore house or that his police chief dad had
later been sent to prison upon conviction for multiple corruption
charges.

“Take him away!” the officer
ordered.

Tats was led down a dimly lit hallway
and placed into a single cell with solid walls going all the way up
to the ceiling that offered no view of the hallway or any
surrounding cells.

The door slammed shut, and he heard a
lock click with a loud thud that suggested it could imprison the
hounds of hell. A small sliver of light made its way in from a
small aperture at the back of the cell that he assumed must be
coming from outside.

Silent, bitter tears of impotent rage
marched down Tats’ face that night as he lay in nearly pitch black
darkness.

Chapter 5

“Get up!”

Tats awoke from a melancholy
sleep.

The processing officer stood before
him.

“On your feet, you!” he said, grabbing
Tats by the wrist and then prodding him out of the cell with his
club. Once out, another officer put a pair of shackles on Tats’
wrist.

“This way,” one of the officers
barked.

Tats was led back down the same hallway
he had traversed the prior day, reentered the same processing area,
and from there was taken upstairs. They went up several flights of
stairs, passing many uniformed officers in the process but no
prisoners.

On what seemed like the sixth
floor—Tats was still a bit too much in a state of shock to be
certain—the stairs ended, and so did their climb. They then began
marching down a hallway whose office doors bore important titles
such as “Captain Willis” and “Lieutenant Redsen.”

But down the hallway they continued
without so much as a pause at any of these offices. Then, Tats
noticed a placard at the very end of the hallway becoming just
barely legible: “Chief Lloyd Benson.”

Tats gulped, as he braced himself for
what was surely to be a torrent of threats as to what would become
of him if he did not admit to everything once and for
all.

The door opened, giving way to an
opulent office.

A studious-looking man glanced up from
a pile of papers and said casually, “Un-cuff him and leave
us.”

“Chief?”

“Do it.”

Tats felt more confused than the
accompanying officers as they dutifully unfastened his cuffs and
left the room.

A brief silence reigned, as the chief
looked Tats up and down the way a fighter might to an unfamiliar
opponent.

“Sit down, Tats.”

Tats did as told.

Another awkward silence.

“Do you know why you’re
here?”

Tats felt the desired answer
was,
Because I got caught with a hundred
pounds of Smokeless Green
, but he opted to
just shake his head.

“Oh, come now, Tats. You didn’t become
the number two man in the number one crime outfit in this city by
being dimwitted.”

Tats began to wonder what the right
answer might be to this seemingly trick question.

“I’ll help you. It’s not because you’re
selling Smokeless Green . . . at least, that’s not the whole
reason.”

Tats knew he was at a complete loss as
to what the chief was getting at, so he decided to grant him a bit
of transparency.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,
sir.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” the chief said
as he stood and sauntered lazily towards the window like a man
without a care in the world. He looked out for a long moment,
before turning back to Tats.

“That’s the problem . . .
you
don’t
know. You
don’t know how things work around here.”

Feeling like he had little to lose,
given the amount of time he was already looking at, Tats took a
verbal plunge into an abyss, mentally ready for a sharp
rebuke.

“Is it about money, sir?”

The chief looked at him long and
hard.

“You know something, Tats. This
situation may not be quite as hopeless as I feared when I asked my
men to bring you up here.”

Tats felt a huge weight slip off his
back.

“But you’re wrong if you think a bit of
money from you is going to make this whole thing go
away.”

The chief moved closer and sat on top
of his desk, looking down on Tats, resembling a viper ready to
strike.

“I don’t normally waste my time
discussing business matters with anyone in subordinate status.
Sovereigns ought to talk to sovereigns, should they not?” the chief
inquired with a steely gaze.

Tats felt his world collapse around
him. He wasn’t going to roll on Mr. Brass. Not a chance.

“I can’t tell you who he is, sir. I’ll
do the time. We’re done talking.”

“HAA!!!!” the chief exclaimed with
genuine amusement.

“How old are you, son?”

“Twenty-two, sir,” Tats replied, not
liking the reference to a paternal relationship one bit.

“I’ll forgive you some of your
stupidity on account of your youth,” the chief said with what
seemed like genuine pleasure.

Then he drew near, placing himself
almost eyeball to eyeball with Tats.

“Do you really think I need YOU to tell
me who your boss is?” the chief asked, with a look of sincere
offense on his face.

“This is my town,” he said, in a low
growl. “Your boss is Mr. Brass.”

Tats gulped.

“But, on the other hand,” the chief
began, his tone immediately turning cordial, “you’re not entirely
stupid for thinking I have less information about him than I would
like. Your boss is one elusive fellow. Something tells me I might
know as much about him as you do, maybe more,” he said, but with
his eyes scanning every square inch of Tats’ face for the answers
criminals so often give even when they refuse to do so with their
tongues.

“I think Mr. Brass is either a
professional boxer or used to be,” he added, still scanning Tats’
face. “He’s turned to crime a bit late in life, and thus, he
doesn’t know all the house rules.”

Once again, he moved near
Tats’ face. “Most of all, he doesn’t know this is
my
house. And he doesn’t
know that in my house you have to pay to play.”

He then backed away and seated himself
calmly at his desk chair and looked directly at Tats.

“I don’t have to keep you here, you
know. It’s only a matter of time before the federal boys get a
whiff of this, and believe me, the National Drug Police isn’t going
to let a bust of this magnitude get handled at the city level
without a fight. They would love a fish like you in their
net.”

“Suppose you were to give me the chance
to ask my boss if he is willing to meet with you . . . would that
be satisfactory?”

The chief leaned forward in his
desk.

“Something tells me I’d
never see you again . . . unless I went looking for you, which I
have neither the time nor inclination to do when I already have you
right here. Here’s how this works. You tell me where Mr. Brass
lives, and
I’ll
arrange a meet and greet. And if he proves to be a reasonable
man, then all this might just turn out to be one giant
misunderstanding. After all, with everyone trying to get the
largest bust, my agents might have mistaken some loose flower
petals in your wagon for a very pernicious, very
illegal
substance.