INITIUM NOVUM: Part 1 (5 page)

“Focus on who instead of what you are?” She
answers.

“Where did I come from?” He continues tossing
questions at her.

“
From what I know, you began at
your bathroom mirror. And before that, well, I can’t
say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Does it matter?” She says with a sad smile,
as if the thoughts behind it were infused with both joy and
pain.

For him, the response satisfies the question
asked but it provides no answers for him. Inside his head, he
thinks to himself, “What the fuck does ‘began’ mean?”

He tries, and quite sternly, to understand
everything he’s been told as the truth. He believes that she
believes it is true. But then again, that would make the girl a bit
of a loony, it does. Especially when you factor that he’s
apparently never done a drug in his entire life. And actually, he’s
only hours old.

He squints his eyes and nods his head,
exaggerating his body language to express that he attentively
listening to her accounts. The accounts of someone who he begins to
suspect is indeed a crazy person.

“I’m not crazy,” she says, responding to his
thoughts.

“Then it must be me. That would explain the
voice.”

The gypsy begins laughing hysterically. This
continues for quite a while until the unnamed man interrupts
her.

“You mind telling me why that’s funny?” He
asks her sternly.

“Don’t get too carried away by the voices in
your head,” she replies. Her response approaching nothing close to
an actual answer. It does, however, provide him proof that there is
an actual voice in his head. Not only that, but the psychic and the
voice seem to be of opposing opinions, to say the least.

The unnamed man offers her a smile, out of
sheer courtesy, before he begins to walk away. If he is to believe
everything this woman has just said, then his life has just started
and he will be heading to jail unless he reboots it by speaking a
phrase from a dead language.

Ride it out.

The voice instructs the young man to disregard
the gypsy’s advice about restarting his life. Instead, it implores
him to accept the impending future which, according to the gypsy,
involves going to prison. It does, however, also involve a
beautiful, successful, and ambitious woman who has taken notice to
the young man. Whatever the outcome, the choice is his and his
alone. What can be said for him can be said for all people, there
is always a choice. So far, he’s leaning towards a certain path, a
path which the gypsy had tried to sway him from.

As he walks away, it dawns on him as if were
an epiphany. He knows his name. Turning to the gypsy, he begins to
introduce himself.

“My name is –

“William Freeman,” she answers for him. “I
already knew your name. My name is –

“I didn’t say I wanted to know your name.”
This time it is Will who does the interrupting.

Bitch.

“Bitch,” he adds comically, following the
voice’s example.

“Heather,” she says anyway. “My name is
Heather. And you’re the bitch. Bitch.” She smiles, not because she
has taken a liking to the insult, but because this time around the
insult was unexpected. This gives her hope that he’s finally up to
something new.

Will walks off, thinking about the gypsy’s
smile and how he’s sure that she had gradually warmed up to the
idea of being called a bitch. He feels accomplished for some reason
or another. It is just too bad that as he thinks of interactions
that are still frivolous and without meaning, a life altering event
looms on the horizon. Because little does William know, he is in
the forefront of Laura Cohen’s thoughts. If the old lady dies,
someone must pay. In this regard, Laura is no villain. It is just a
circumstance of no consequence that Laura gives absolutely no shits
about the old lady dying. She only cares for the prestige behind
punishing somebody for their crimes, whether intentional or not.
Besides, the old lady is someone’s grandma and they might have a
say in this too.

A phone rings somewhere behind Will. He
doesn’t look towards the sound. Will knows that it’s Heather’s
phone that’s going off, and it doesn’t take a rocket science to
figure that it’s the same person who had just called a few minutes
ago, whoever that person is.

“And pick that phone up,” he says jokingly,
finally looking back so that he can see her reaction, an aptly
raised middle finger directed at him. “Your singing
sucks.”

CHAPTER 4:

When she arrives at the scene, Laura Cohen
kneels by the old lady and grabs her hand, cupping it between her
palms, so sweet and gently. She lets go softly, with great care,
and flashes her badge at the crowd and the arriving EMTs. She
assures the lady that justice will be served. She assures the crowd
that that someone will pay, improvising a lecture on how the
incident was no accident, but a crime deserving of a full and
thorough investigation.

Laura Cohen does not give a shit about whether
this lady dies or not. Truthfully, she does not even care about
whether or not justice is served. What she is vehemently invested
in is her score card. She only cares about how powerful and
intimidating her resume is. A case such as the one which lies
before her isn’t compelling to her in any form or fashion, but it
appeals to her hunger, her unquenchable ambition. And since Will
has her special card, she might as well bag and tag him.

A plain-clothed officer approaches Ms. Cohen
and informs her that a possible witness to the incident would like
to have a word with her. She reads his name tag, H. Kelly, not that
it matters as she’ll never use his name to address him anyway. She
agrees to see the alleged witness, following the cop to the man as
the EMTs wheel the old lady away.

“Such a shame,” the cop says.

“What is?” She responds blandly, already bored
with what the cop is planning to tell her.

“It’s just a tragedy, you know,” he begins
with the carefully plotted out objective of expressing his feelings
to the beautiful Ms. Cohen. As if they were something she might be
remotely interested in listening to. She could not care less about
his feelings, but alas he continues to share them, and her eyebrow
continues to rise. She knows his type. She knows them well.
Over-sensitiveness is generally a result having been raised by too
many women and not enough of a strong-male presence during
formative years. This little mama’s boy is wasting both his and
Laura’s time mushy mumbo jumbo. “Nice, old lady has to suffer like
this. It’s because of scum like that, you know, scum like that is
why I became a cop.”

“Is that right?” She asks blandly,
uninterested in the answer.

“No, yeah, definitely. I hate people who do
bad things,” he says as they reach the witness, who is sitting on a
platform bench.

“Thank you, Deputy Do-Right, I’ll take it from
here,” she says, dismissing the cop and shooing him away quite
rudely. Not that he minds. Most men will stand around and swallow
her abuse just for a chance to be near her. It also doesn’t help
the cop’s chances that he embodies more of a sensitive nature than
anything else. She hates the sensitive type.

The first thing Laura notices is that the man
is morbidly obese. The second thing she notices is that his t-shirt
is wet and clinging to the rolls of fat on his torso. She wants, so
badly, more than anything, to ask him why he is such a big, fat,
sack of sweaty shit. She, of course, doesn’t ask him why he is as
he is. Her professionalism, as always, keeps her in check,
reserved, and proper. But, oh, how she longs for a release from the
shackles of conformity. One might even go so far as to say she
envies the quall of those she’s been responsible for locking
away.

“Sir,” she begins, already addressing him with
a cold tone before he has had a chance to utter a word of his own.
Since she is well aware of what happened during the incident, the
very act of her talking to the man is a formality, a courtesy to
her own reputation as it stands before the eyes of the people
around her; because no self-respecting, crime-fighting,
justice-delivering assistant to the District Attorney wants the
people to known exactly what kind of shitty person they are. “I’ve
been led to believe that you might have witnessed something and are
holding information which might be of particular use to the
investigation at hand.”

At her prompt, the fat man begins to recant
the entire incident to Laura. During his testimony, he pauses
frequently in order to catch his breath in between strings of
words. A look of disgust creeps across Laura’s face as she
struggles to withhold her disdain for the man and his false
testament. Her eyes dart back and forth across his forehead as she
traces multiple beads of sweat threatening to springboard from his
brows and onto her skin. The thought repulses her. Luckily the man
finishes his accounts. Her breaking point was not too far
away.

“Let me get this straight, you chased the
young man, but he got away?” she asks.

“Right,” he confirms.

“And you gave chase,” she begins, air-quoting
the word ‘chase,’ “because the lady fell?”

“Right,” he confirms again.

According to Laura’s reasoning, the very fact
that the fat man used the word “run” casts a shadow of doubt over
his entire story. One look at the man and it becomes crystal clear,
running his not his forte. Secondly, the lady fell after the young
man had made it into the train. Laura had seen this with her own
two eyes.

“Where were you standing, in regards to the
lady’s position, at the time of the incident?” Her questions begin
to make the transition over to interrogation both in tone and
intensity.

“I was near her,” he replies.

“And when she hit the ground?”

“I was near the train.”

“So then,” she begins, “please explain how is
it that you chase the man for a deed not yet done? If you were
already near the train by the time the lady fell.”

“Uh, ugh,” says the fat man, stumbling over
his words.

“I’ll tell you how that was possible. You
chased the man before the fact. Now you stand before me like some
super-obese Good Samaritan. Come to think of it, from what I
understand, you’re partly to blame for the incident.”

“What, no. Wait lady, you got it all wrong,”
he pleads. “I’m also a victim here.”

“A victim of cholesterol and diabetes, maybe,”
she snaps at him. I’ll tell you what, get your fat, cheesy ass away
from me and I’ll think about not having cuffs slapped on you for
obstruction of justice, you fat, fucking piece of lying
shit.”

She can almost feel her temperature rising,
steaming her from the insides. Laura cannot believe the audacity of
the man, to claim himself a victim as well. Not that she cares for
the well-being of the old lady as it is in her nature to only give
consideration to the victims which she can claim as her own. Her
sudden anger stems from many thoughts racing through her head, but
the one fact that, without a shadow of a doubt, exacerbates her
fury is the aesthetics, or lack thereof, of the fat man. His
fatness pisses her off to the point where she can literally
visualize ripping his head off and using it as a bowling ball to
knock over the uniformed pin-heads around her, specifically the
sensitive Deputy Do-Right. But as quickly as she had lost it, Laura
recollects her calm, collected demeanor and scurries off in pursuit
of the EMTs who are carting the old lady off to the nearest
hospital.

After a brief chat with the emergency medical
technicians just outside of the subway, she acquires all the
information she requires, the old lady’s name and the hospital she
is being taken to.

On her cell phone, she opens up an application
marked “Beta Test GPS,” based on a similar technology already in
use in fitness apps. However, this particular app does not trace
the global positioning of an individual’s cell number, but uses a
radio-frequency emitting chip small enough to be concealed on a
piece of paper, more specifically, a business card. Once the app is
running, a small cursor on the map begins to blink, displaying a
location near the Brooklyn-Bridge. Although the very practice of
tracing an individual through such means happens to be extremely
illegal (specifically, in regards to violating a person’s basic
constitutional rights), no one, especially her superiors, need to
know it about it.

Without further ado, she calls an associate of
hers that she met in college. This associate is a high-ranking
officer in the New York Police Department. Since the two have been
friends for quite some time, there is little need to explain that
this high-ranked officer is no Deputy Do-Right. This guy, he’s
old-school; beatings, interrogations without attorneys, and forced
confessions. That’s the type of old-school this cop is.

It’s only a matter of minutes, if not seconds,
until she gets the confirmation call back. Within another few
minutes, a small team of three undercover officers are heading her
way. Just a few minutes after that, she is being picked up by an
old friend named Hector Santiago. He pulls up to her in a Dodge
Charger, the usual and obvious choice for undercover cops. There’s
an open seat in the back but she stands by the passenger side door
with one hand on her hip, tapping her foot on the pavement and
staring at the occupant, a detective named John Corey.