~Prologue~
The fire had taken a long time to die down, flames reflected on the water and adding a kind of rosy edge to the light of the half-moon that played on the waves and windows of the buildings on the waterfront. It was interesting, watching crisis from a nice, detached distance as the flames fought with the sprays that he couldn't see, but didn't need to. He'd been there enough times to be content to be here, instead, at the end of the city - or one of them, anyway, Mumbai being what it was - with the breeze and a bottle of whiskey and eyes unblinded, hair unsinged and lungs filled only with the smoke of his choice.
The jubilant light of Marine Drive stretched out behind him, every bit as spectacular as the postcards suggested, but Gaish had long ago decided that he preferred the ugly little lights of Macchimaar Nagar to the pretty lie at his back. Real life happened to the people on the hills the same as the fishermen and their families, he knew that. It just didn't happen everyday.
He'd been here for a few hours now, watching from the first few tongues of flame to the insistent billowing smoke that still rose, seemingly from the sea itself, into the sky. He didn't envy the early commuters at Churchgate, that was for fucking sure. The air was going to be even thicker than usual with that smoke, even after the three or four hours between now and then. He'd better take the west coastal roads home, but the smoke should be thinned out to nothing special by the time it hit Nagpada itself. Still, Gaish figured to give it a little while before he got moving on that. He still had half a bottle left.
Slowly but surely the flashing lights changed as the firemen made way for the cops and the ambulances, some trailing out, more trailing in, and flashes of colour skipped almost merrily along the waves. Still, the fire was out, and even his neck had only so much rubber. It wasn't anything to do with him or his department, he wasn't ever going to know more than the papers could tell, so the poor fuckers who had jurisdiction over that could keep it. The moon on the water was much less exciting, but it was what he'd come out here for, and he wasn't about to go home without it.
He wasn't sure, later, how much time passed between when things mostly stopped moving across the water and something started moving down on the rocks. Well, started and then stopped again pretty quick, but it was enough. It took him a bit to get the image of the moon out of his vision, even though it wasn't full or even that bright. Squinting into the darkness, Gaish finally managed to make out a darker shape among the rocks, weirdly rounded, and it was a good thing he spent so many nights here, or he might not ever have recognised the body slumped over and being licked at by the water. He watched for a little bit, because the body had moved before and it might move again, and he had no intention of babysitting a drunk. He was drunk, after all, and no one ever babysat him. Well, okay, Gonsalves had busted him driving his bike on Marine that one time. And yeah, maybe he'd picked Gaish up a time or two after that, but the abuse that came with it didn't feel like any kind of care, so he figured that counted for maybe half a time at a shot.
So he waited and watched and drank a little more, but not much because the fact that the drunk wasn't going to move again was getting to be a fucking certainty. Fuck. Fine.
Gaish stowed the bottle away in the inside pocket of his jacket and started picking out the most likely way to get the dumb bastard back up over the sea wall before he fucking drowned. There was a place fairly close, where the rocks came up high enough that he could probably maneuver even a dead-weight up without too much difficulty, but he wasn't about to go wasting time and energy getting down in the first place, so he jumped. It was a fair little distance, but Gaish had done it before, and he'd been drinking slowly enough that it wasn't all that dangerous. A moment to clear his head, and he was scrambling his way over sharp, slippery rocks and grumbling aspersions on the life and character of the dumb bastard and his entire ancestry.
It took him a little while to reach the fucker in question, during which time the tide rose by several inches, and the grumbling got louder and ever more profanity-ridden. Drink-addled fuckwits drowned out here pretty regular, apparently unable to pair up alcohol with the concept of twelve-hour cycles or the knowledge that tides come in fast, and this wasn't the first time Gaish had dragged someone out of the hungry mouth of the ocean. When he was within reach, he nudged the body.
"Hey. You dead, or what?" No response. He nudged again. "You want to be dead? Hey." Nothing. Right.
Heaving a sigh, Gaish climbed up a little higher, testing his footing before he reached up to turn the dumb bastard over. Well fuck. It was just a kid, oddly pale, even waxy in the moonlight, and the strong, familiar smell of blood rose above the scent of the water. Shit, the kid wasn't drunk, after all. Or at least not just drunk. He managed to get a bit closer and reached over to feel what he couldn't see, not with the dark clothing and the half-light of the moon. It didn't help much, since the kid was soaked from the spray of the water and winding up face down on a big, wet rock, but when he reached the kid's side, it got him a soft kind of whimper. Nothing else, the face just as unconscious as it had been, the body just as limp as before, but that sound and that smell meant something bad, and Gaish had no choice but to take a chance on making bad worse. Or even worst.
If he'd been asked later exactly how he managed to get the kid off the rocks without killing him, Gaish wouldn't have been able to answer, his thoughts narrowed only to tug and push and lift, the memory of his feet sliding on treacherous ground and half-formed prayers that he wouldn't fuck this up and send them both skidding into the maw of the water. It was a bad idea, but he had no option but to sling the kid over his shoulder so he could use one arm for balance and to climb, and he somehow managed to get them to the place on the wall that he'd picked out earlier. It might kill the kid, Gaish reasoned, but might was a far cry from the certain death the rocks and the tide had offered.
Eventually, Gaish scrambled over the sea wall with the boy still miraculously on his shoulder and, danger momentarily averted, the grumbling started up again as he slogged squishily toward his bike, which was parked - nowhere near conveniently at this point - at the end of Marine Drive. His brain had started ticking over again pretty much the moment he'd got them to dry land, and had made a nice, bullet-pointed list, like he'd been trained to do at the academy:
One: The kid needed a doctor.
Two: While doctors were nearby, it wasn't like a cop's salary provided Gaish with enough money to pay for some random kid's room and treatment out of what was in his pockets at the moment.
Three: Gaish would, then, have to take the kid to a "doctor", several of which he knew quite well, actually, but all of which were far from the graceful lines of Marine Drive.
Four: Gaish had a bike, and unconscious and possibly mortally wounded people were notoriously bad motorcycle passengers.
Five: Gaish also had handcuffs, because there were some things he never left home without.
Six: Even the unconscious and possibly mortally wounded had to give it up to handcuffs, and a guy slumped over with his arms around the driver of a motorcycle would look drunk, not half-dead, so if Gaish drove slowly enough, they just might make it back to Nagpada without becoming either a smear on the pavement or a salacious headline.
It still might kill the kid, but between slim and none, Gaish would take slim every time.