“Huh? Didn’t he bite it in the bombardment?”
“Nah. He went AWOL a couple days before, and nobody knows where he went, or what happened.” Bradly scowled. “Some people are saying he cleared out to avoid the heat before the Empress could get popped. He may not even be on Sintar any more, the bastard.”
“Oh. Huh. That’s a pretty shitty thing to do. I didn’t think he was the sort to do that. Shows how surprising some people can be, I guess. Okay, I’ll see what I can scrounge up on him.”
In the end, Carr and Bradly were never able to find out what happened to Gorecki; the fact that Ashton’s team had had to gun him down in the street when he resisted arrest was a matter that Empress Ilithyia II had wanted kept under wraps – the fact that they had attempted to arrest him at all was to be kept under wraps, and Emperor Trajan had agreed with his sister on the matter – and thanks to the way it had been handled during the city’s off-hours, the IPD ‘elite’ had never managed to find out what happened to their chief enforcer. He simply disappeared one day; most – like Bradly – thought he’d skipped out to avoid trouble. The practice of cremating the remains of those executed – and, if unclaimed, placing them in a decidedly unhallowed location – meant there wasn’t even a body to find.
But Carr had managed to round up around half a dozen other ‘oldies,’ not including himself, Bradly, and Peabody.
So two nights later, they met in a relatively high-end bar several blocks away from the rented ‘New Headquarters’ building. They would have preferred their old hangout, the Fire Water Bar, not far off Imperial Park Boulevard South, but it was no longer in business – it had been raided by the ICPD not long after the attack on the Palace, and with the aid of the Imperial Marines, no less… though none of them understood why.
So instead they met in another bar, farther west – the Cool Breeze Pub. Both it and the Fire Water Bar had been places where they were used to meeting their enforcers and mercenaries – thieves, assassins, and the like. Bradly hoped, by going to the Cool Breeze, they might see some of those same familiar faces, and bring them in to do most of the dirty work.
Winston Peabody joined them.
They didn’t encounter any of the desired familiar faces; almost all of those had, indeed, been eliminated in the Emperor’s attack on IPD Headquarters, one way and another.
In the end, however, one of the ‘oldies’ had managed to find a couple of ‘enforcers’ who had been away on a camping and fishing trip together during the destruction of the original Headquarters building, and brought them along to the meeting, which occurred in a back room at the Cool Breeze Pub. As soon as they found out what the crooked cops wanted, they grinned.
“That sure sounds good to me,” Pete Brandt remarked, smirking unpleasantly. “Me ‘an Joe here can handle it, can’t we, Joe?”
“You bet, Pete,” Joe Hennig agreed, matching his smirk. “You got an address for ‘im? This Carter fella?”
“Yeah; look in channel 1248,” Bradly said, pushing a small file through VR to the enforcers. “That’s where Carter lives now, with Colonel Peterson from the ICPD. It’s on the extreme west-southwestern outskirts of Imperial City.”
“Right,” Brandt said. “We’ll scope it out and get a feel for their habits.”
“How does he get inta work these days, do ya know?” Hennig wondered.
“Drives, as far as I know,” Bradly said with a shrug. “Got ‘em one of those little box electrics that Imperial Transports makes. I’ve seen him pulling up in it a couple times.”
“That sounds promising,” Hennig decided. “Ever been to the house?”
“No. I, ah, don’t move in the same circles.”
“Mm. Well, most o’ the suburban houses around this part o’ Sintar tend to use gas to run incidentals, like hot water heatin’ an’ such,” Hennig noted. “Me an’ Pete oughta be able to scope that out pretty quick, once we get out there. It ain’t a gated community, is it? If it is, it could give us troubles.”
“That, I couldn’t tell you,” Bradly said. “It could be, I suppose, but from what I can see of Carter, I kinda doubt it. He isn’t the type. Too egalitarian.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Brandt said, holding up his hands. “Two-bit words, please. Them damn ten-credit words just make things complicated.”
“He doesn’t believe in elitism,” Carr tried.
“That’s...a little better,” Brandt decided. “What you’re tryin’ to say is, he don’t hold with fancy shit an’ lordin’ it over other people, right?”
“Right,” Bradly confirmed. “Carter’s trying to flatten out the hierarchy, and he’s doing away with rank, and everything. It’ll ruin the department.”
“Damn,” Brandt said, rocking back in shock. “That ain’t good for any of us. Here we manage to survive what that bastard emperor did, and now this guy’s cuttin’ down what’s left?”
“That’s about the size of it,” George Holland, one of the other dirty cops, remarked. “We figure, if we can off him and his pet investigator, Ashton, along with their interfering ICPD wives, one of us – prob’ly Peabody, here – can step into the role and make the department what it used to be. Whether the damn emperor likes it or not.”
“Then, if we’re smart,” Dave Seeger added, “we’ll see about taking out the ICPD. They’re nothing but trouble anyway, sucking up to the Palace an’ shit.”
“I figure a bomb in the right place, over at their main precinct, oughta take care of them,” Matt Lowe pointed out. “That can wait until after Carter is outta the picture, though, I guess.”
“But we have
