CHAPTER 1 : Long Beach, California :

It was 9:26am. Carl Bates pushed through the heavy glass doors of Long Beach local police department, deep in thought. His mind was swimming with information, cross hatched with pictures - both the dry photographic evidence he had just seen, and the more colourful images it brought to mind from his own brand of research. He squinted in the seemingly perpetual sun of northern California, and tried not to look up at the face of the police department building behind him. The looming column of blue glass was giving him a headache.

In the parking lot, his business partner - in more ways than one - was predictably waiting for him, leaning up against the side of his beat up old Lincoln. He was staring at the shops that bordered the opposite side of the street, but obviously unseeingly. Carl slowed his steps, head tilted in consideration at his companion. It was times like this, when he wasn't aware he was being watched (an unguarded moment, sang The Church in his head) that the younger man was at his most deceptively complex. His face was clear and empty and he looked somehow fresh, his body open, hands idly resting against the surface of the sun-warmed metal at his back, his chin tilted up to the sun, eyes distant. For that split second, he looked achingly young and almost beautiful. Gone were the constant affectations of manner and whatever he used to justify them. The staples were still glaringly in place like neon signs - he was thirty-six, lean and rangy, dressed in faded jeans with holes in the knees, those ridiculous cowboy boots he always wore poking out from beneath jagged hems, the red splash of his large Jack Daniels belt buckle, the black t-shirt proclaiming Black Sabbath under a red and black checkered flannel. His shaggy blond hair was perpetually untidy, left to tousle like soft straw at will around his head. The only sensible thing about his attire was the leather throngs threaded with small (but useful) amulets that hung around his neck. Despite it all, however, the rare times Carl caught him unawares like this, he wondered intensely just who R.C Adams really was, underneath all the bullshit. It was like watching the man sleep wide awake. Despite the eight years the pair had worked together, at times like this, he wondered. Wondered even more why he never knew this guy. The man behind the mask.

His boot scuffed the loose road base of a forming pot hole, and R.C's attention snapped around to focus on him. R.C snapped back in to animate his regard, bullshit and all, that something shifting back into the pale blue eyes and his body wired to alert, the mocking half-smile twisting one side of his mouth, the cocky, smart-ass provocation with which he held his body all slipping back into place. Carl sighed. After eight years, he didn't even know if the man's mother had named him R.C, or if the initials originally stood for something, and he had just decided it sounded more badass that way and it stuck. Mainly because he didn't go looking - his friend would certainly not have appreciated the enquiry. No, there was a reason for R.C's bullshit, whatever it was, and Carl granted him that. Maybe it was because he was too faded nowadays to do anything else. Los Angeles was spreading him thin in ways it hadn't when he was younger, and he wondered aimlessly if R.C ever hungered for the smooth oiled synchronicity of his childhood home in Baton Rouge, where warm rain dripped from hanging mosses on the trees of the bayou. He had been tired of the city for a long time. Time enough to move on, he thought to himself when he customarily thought too much - over somewhere where they had animals that actually tore people up instead of monsters. Montana, maybe.

R.C spread his hands in enquiry as Carl approached the Lincoln.

"So?"

"Well it's something," Carl hedged.

"Somethin' like our kind of somethin'?"

That was another thing about R.C that seemed to coalesce with his current tangent of contemplation, Carl thought as he slid the younger man a glance. That ridiculous southern accent stuck like tar, no matter how long R.C lived on the west coast. Cynically, Carl suspected it was just another element of R.C Live, the deliberately scripted and costumed show that aired on constant repeat every hour the man was awake. He shifted his shoulders - something about this was making him annoyed and edgy.

"Yeah maybe," he replied, wrestling his unease into the back of his head and handing R.C a Xerox, lifting the handle of the Lincoln behind him. The younger man's pale blue eyes scanned the photocopy of a young woman, mid twenties probably, virtually eviscerated by what looked very much like claws.

"Any weird shit at the scene?" he asked, spinning to pursue Carl into the tinted interior of the Lincoln. "What'd Hughes give you?"

"Not much, he's clamming up. Probably worried about a shitstorm of litigation if he goes on anyone's record saying anything about anything. Get in the car, will you?"

"What's up your ass?" enquired R.C predictably, and Carl sighed, having anticipated something similar.

"I don't know, there's something nagging at me about it, like maybe I seen this before and it never turned out well."

R.C arched an eyebrow, draping one arm languidly over the open door of the Lincoln and grating further on Carl's nerves. He waved the gruesome photocopy to expound his words.

"Hey, we'll look into it, right? Dot and tick, and rack the shotguns if we have to. End of story. Or - " he slid Carl a sharp, mostly deliberately affectatious look. "Are you calling in others on this one?"

Carl wouldn't bite. He was too tired. "We'll see. Who knows."

He slammed the door of the Lincoln before R.C could do anything but arch both brows to disappear under the mop of tousled blond and slide in a loose and suspiciously self-satisfied way toward the driver's seat.

The office did nothing to ease Carl's sense of despondency. The little premise was cluttered and untidy, much like his business partner, and paperwork was currently everywhere. R.C had taken the truck, and had emptied out the chemical cache in the bed - to drop it on the floor in the office. Carl stopped and looked down at it at his feet, while R.C loped into the room and flung himself into the chair behind the single desk, stabbing a finger at the answering machine. A congested detective running customarily on empty, his voice a monotone, requested their services for a clean up, at this address, anytime after four. Carl pinched his eyes shut - the headache was beginning to saw away at the back of his optic nerves. R.C picked up a rubber band and flicked it triumphantly at the opposite wall, bottom lip caught between his teeth.

"See? Now we'll get in on the all the details man, it's the same job as the copy. Fuck Hughes, if it's our kind of gig, then we'll see everything we need to see cleaning up the crap."

Carl nodded, nudging the chemical cache with his foot. R.C narrowed his eyes.

"Don't start in on me, I ain't your boy."

Carl suddenly felt too hollow to argue with him. What was up his ass about this job? Maybe it was unrelated. His head hurt. He looked at his watch - 10:03.

"I'll meet you back here around half three then," he said tonelessly. "We'll swing around, see what there is to see. And R.C," he paused and turned back to level the younger man with his eyes, hand on the knob of the office door, to watch him flick another rubber band at the complimentary calender of Tyson and Sons auto repair, Venice Beach, his feet crossed on the cluttered desk, "don't be getting anyone else in on this. I don't want to be tripping over yahoo hunters trying to clean up a crime scene, okay?"

R.C held up his hands in mock surrender, a decidedly sardonic smile twisting the corner of his mouth into a mean hairpin. "You got it, boss."

Carl let it slide.