Chapter Seven:
Takeout Order
"Bad boys, whatcha want
Whatcha want, whatcha gonna do?
When Sheriff Brown come for you
Tell me whatcha wanna do, whatcha gonna do?"
Bad Boys, Inner Circle
7:61, GST
"I don't mean to be rude," I said, adjusting myself in the passenger seat, "but Jaran doesn't seem like the kind of guy you'd associate with."
He considered that with a mandible flutter. "Who do you think I associate with?"
"I . . . don't really know, honestly."
"And based on this lack of knowledge, you decided Jaran wasn't one of them?"
"I was just trying to make conversation."
"By assuming something about me and my friends?"
I threw my hands up. "Christ, Garrus, it was an observation, not some sage wisdom passed down from the land of yore, you fucking asshole."
He laughed and grinned at me with shark teeth. "Relax, Quinn, I'm just having fun."
"Yeah, I just love having fun after going to homicides. The splattered brains make me all giggly inside."
He laughed again, kinda breathless. Garrus didn't laugh so much as hitch his mandibles up and down in a sawing motion. "Jaran and I grew up together back on Palaven. He was the kid whose parents never really bothered caring about so they'd let him wonder around unsupervised. We met when I almost shot him during rifle practice. Best friends ever since."
"I guess opposites do attract."
He flared out the right mandible. "We have a few things in common. And I was a bad kid too, you know. One time I swore. In front of my parents."
"Truly the Jesse James of our time."
"Some good times," he said almost absently, nodding to himself. By the way, this whole time we were shooting through the top of Bachjret, which was a floating maze of purple, pink and orange. Garrus was taking shortcuts here and there, and talking calmly as he corkscrewed around spacescraper and twisting lines of traffic. "He used to be an Investigator, believe it or not. Then something happened and he got demoted."
"Being an Enforcer is a demotion? I thought C-Sec had branches, not tiers."
"They do less important work—patrolling, cleaning up trash, redirecting tourists, things like that. Realistically, Investigation and Network are the only branches that matter on a day to day basis so Pallin makes sure they're filled with the best." He glanced over at me. "Or whatever the Council forces him to hire."
"Hey, thanks for making me feel inadequate, Garrus."
"Anytime."
"So what exactly did he do?"
"I don't know. Jaran is damn good at keeping secrets when he wants to. He could kill me, and I wouldn't know till the morning after. I never asked and he never mentioned it."
This conversation is important because it was my first time noticing that canon had taken somewhat of a left turn. As far as I could remember, Garrus—in the games, at least—didn't have a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed best friend. This was new. I'm not saying that Jaran wasn't a wonderful addition to our cast of colorful characters, but he brought up a lot of questions. Was this a sign that canon had gone AWOL, or was it isolated? Were there more deviations? Would Jaran's presence have any impact on the order of events? And, more importantly, why? Why was he here? I had no answers, and no real desire to ask these questions to Gatsby. So I shrugged it off. Wait and see, that sort of thing.
The second time I noticed canon wasn't entirely there was later in that same conversation.
My stomach was starting to feel like a Yosemite geyser again so I swallowed something thick and said, "So what do you think? We didn't really get much."
He looked at me like he wasn't sure if he should say something. "Honestly? I think we're wasting our time."
"A little early to be admitting defeat, don't you think?"
"I just think. . . ." He paused, made a noise, and looked out his window. "There's a lot more going on out there. Real organized stuff, some really bad people, and we're stuck with some vagrant who walked down the wrong alley."
"It's got to be done," I said. "I mean, shit, that girl back there, she was a person once. She deserves a good try on our part, at least."
"Maybe," he said. "But this is Bachjret. It's filled with batarians."
"So?"
"So have you ever met one before? They're not the nicest sort of people."
I did a double-take. "Jesus, man, you can't just generalize like that. Every species has shitty people, it's pretty much a law."
"Quinn, the galaxy has been dealing with batarians a long time before your kind showed up. They've bombed colonies, funded pirates and terrorists, committed political sabotage." He looked down at the sprawling orange and purple lights below us. "Most of them down there, they don't have their biometrics on file. They're refugees. They can get away with this sort of thing, and they know it." He shook his head. "It's a mess."
"I still don't like it."
"Neither do I. But it's the way things are." There was an awkward pause, then he looked over at me. "Look, I don't mean to sour any high hopes you had for this job, but this is how it is. It's not pretty." There was another pause, even more awkward than before. "People disappear down there all the time. At worst, we'll look around for a few hours, come back, and move on to the next one."
I didn't say anything. Garrus must've realized he'd been a bit too bleak there because he cleared his throat and immediately added, "But, hey, if this falls through, if it's actually worth our time, we might just get medals. Shiny ones."
"Really?"
"If there's one thing the media loves, it's good police-work and young dead asari. We'll be immortal." He sort of purred deep in his throat and let his mandibles roll. "Almost got one once. My first year, I got assigned to find a serial killer who'd been chopping people up on the streets. Had the whole station in a bit of a panic. Turned out to be an elcor diplomat, selling their organs on the black market."
I knew where this was going, but I humored him. "How'd that turn out?"
"I tracked him down, cornered him, but then I learned he was a pretty nasty biotic. We fought and, uh," he cleared his throat, "I ended up blowing up a spaceport. A small one." I looked over at him and he shrugged. "It seemed dramatically appropriate."
"So no medal?"
"No. Pallin tends to look down on wanton destruction of public property, for some reason." He seemed to think about it. "Too bad, I think I'd look good with one."
I smirked. "Yeah, it might distract people from your plated face."
He snorted with a heavy trill. "Maybe. And if you ever get one, maybe people won't notice your pink, hairy face."
I rubbed my jaw. "Hey, I'm tan, not pink."
"Whatever you say, pyjak."
"Forkhead."
"Softskin."
"Skullface."
"Primate."
"Birdman."
"Hairless ape."
"Imperialist alien."
"Pyjakfucker."
I blinked. "Huh . . . that's a new one."
"Heard it back on Palaven, a few years after Relay three fourteen," Garrus said. "A little vulgar, maybe, but it just rolls off the tongue so perfectly. . . ."
"Alright, alright Garrus touché, touché. You win this round."
Sorry, that one kind of drifted away from me. But the important thing was the batarians. Had they had ghettos on the Citadel before I was here? I knew they'd been there during the third game, but that was because the Reapers had cornholed them right out of the gate. I mean, the thought of batarians fleeing their oppressive government for Council space was plausible and heartwarming and all, but was it canon? I had no idea. It'd already been a few months since I'd gotten dropped here and it'd been even longer since I'd played the games, so my knowledge of the proper order of things was a little iffy. At the moment, though, it wasn't worth worrying about, so I didn't. Maybe not a good idea, but whatever.
Eventually, Garrus pulled up to that restaurant we were checking out. He dropped the car out of the sky and landed in a crowded parking lot. The entire area was flat and drabby like some backwater strip mall. I've noticed that, if you want to gauge the well-to-do status of the neighborhood you're in on the Citadel, you look for the ratio of neon to chrome on the walls. The less glowing signs and spinning holograms, the more you should probably get out there. The streets here were naked and dull. An omen, if there ever was one.
The store we were looking for was square in front of us, and looked like someone had carved it out of a giant shoebox. A flat rectangular thing with no distinguishing marks or personality whatsoever. All the other buildings next to it looked dead and the purple atmospheric layer stopped right above its roof. There was a limp sign hanging over a scratched doorway, barely held up by the wiring, that spelled JYYL'S SANDWHICHES in burnt-out pink neon. Two dirty windows, some bullet scars here and there, and a drunken looking turian pissing on the side of it really completed the mood. It was very modern art.
There was a sign leaning on the inside of the window right by the door. Written in scribbled black lettering, it read, and I quote, "Kno humenz alowd." I looked at it once and laughed.
"What does it say?" Garrus asked.
"Says I'm not allowed in there," I said, and walked right in.
Despite all logic, the place looked somewhat better on the inside. A long counter was at the back with a register and an assortment of meat, vegetables, and other substances I couldn't identify. There were rows of round tables, a soda dispensary with something yellow boiling in a pot beside it, and glowing pictures of "attractive" aliens eating food and laughing on the walls. It would've been alright if anyone had actually, you know, been in there. It was empty. And I got the feeling Garrus and I were interrupting some long streak of customerlessness it had had going for it.
"Anyone here?" Garrus yelled. No one replied.
We walked towards the counter. I thought I could hear a vidscreen playing in the back of the place, and whatever was on sounded both angry and porn-like. Seemed in character for this place. The food and condiments on the counter had been cracked dry by heat lamps and microwaves, and were on the last legs of their edibility. The cups of soup on the left had pretty much fermented into alcohol. I looked around a bit and saw what we had come for. "There's the prumac," I said, pointing.
Garrus glanced over. "Looks fresh."
"They might've changed it." I leaned on the counter. "Hello?" I shouted. "Anybody back there? I'd like to purchase some of your somewhat suspicious looking merchandise."
There was a startled noise at the back, a crash, and some swearing. The angry porn got the volume lowered but wasn't turned off. A few seconds later, the door to the back opened and a batarian with a sheepish grin jogged out. "Good morning!" he said with a voice so low it might've belonged to a whale. "How can I help—" He looked at me and his expression of fake joy turned into real hatred in two seconds flat. "Hey, human, read the sign! You'll track filth in here."
"That's no way to talk to a customer," Garrus said.
The guy gave Garrus a slightly less hateful look. "You, I'll help, but you," he jabbed a finger at me, "need to get out. Now."
"But I want some of your 'food'," I said. "It looks 'appetizing' and 'nutritious'." Despite it having a questionable description as food, I did sort of want some. Not eating for a few days will do that to you.
"I don't care." His face scrunched up for a moment, then he let out a loud sneeze that sounded like a tuba backfiring and sprayed all the food with yellow mist.
"Jesus, buddy, that's like seven health code violations right there."
"Get out!" he yelled, his voice warped. "You humans think you're entitled to everything!"
"Could I get your name?" Garrus asked.
"Fuck you!"
"Can you spell that for me?"
"Get out!" he yelled again. "You, pyjak, and your human-loving friend can kiss my ass! I don't have time for this!"
"Do you have time for C-Sec, pal?" I flashed my badge at him. Garrus did the same. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about a dead asari a few blocks back from here, would you?"
He lost his composure for a split second, and I saw right away that he knew something. It was written all over his face. "Trying to blame the nearest batarian you can find?" he said, clearing his throat. "Typical human."
"The victim had prumac on her fingers," Garrus said, "and you're the only who sells it. Care to explain?"
"I—"
"She also had some cum in her that looked pretty batarian to me," I said, trying not to smirk. "Where were you last night, exactly?"
"Back off!" he screamed, pulling out the tiniest knife I'd ever seen and waving it at us. The worst part was, he looked completely serious. "I don't know anything!"
Garrus and I pulled out our pistols simultaneously and leveled them at the guy. The look on his face, man—priceless. "We have guns and you have a butter knife," I said. "How do you think this going to work out for you?"
He looked down at his knife, back up at us, down at his knife, and then he threw it at me like a Frisbee. The blade twirled and hit me right on the nose, causing me to flail backwards on to a table. I heard Garrus yell, someone open and run through the backdoor, and someone else sliding over the counter. I grabbed my nose and scrambled to my feet, my eyes welling with tears. Garrus and the batarian were gone. I ran to the counter and tried sliding over it, but I ended up kicking the very solid register and falling in a heap on the other side. A bunch of equally dull knives crashed down on top of me. I stumbled upwards and fell through the door.
The back was a small corridor with a bunch of packaged food boxes and a vidscreen hanging crooked over a chair, playing something with a batarian and an asari making Jesus cry. The door with the red exit sign closed right as I came in. I sprinted through it.
I came out right smack dab in the middle of a very crowded market. Asari, salarians, turians, and a sea of others all circled around me. Imagine a poor African or Middle-Eastern bazaar with tight alleys and too much people, and put a layer of chrome and neon over it. It was thick and crowded and filled with all sorts of noises and smells.
Garrus was gone. I whirled around in a circle and saw nothing. It was only a crowd, faceless, alien, and impersonal. I'd only lagged behind a few seconds, but it'd been enough for me to lose both my partner and our only lead on my first case.
Fuck.
Then, a miracle—someone shouted in the aisle over from me and I caught a glimpse of two people running. One was a batarian and that's all I needed. I ran straight at the kiosk in front of me, which was an asari open-grill barbecue with slabs of raw, bloody meat. I pushed a human out of the way and jumped right on the grill, landing on a piece of meat that hissed and sizzled and squeezed out gray juice like a water balloon. I jumped over the cook, landed on top of another grill and another piece of meat, shouted, "You should cook that more!" at the bewildered turian cook, bunny hopped over another turian customer, and sprinted after the batarian.
I ended up being not that far behind from the two, and after a few good shoves, I was closing in. Garrus was sprinting full on, head down, weaving very smoothly through the crowd for someone wearing full body armor. The batarian, on the other hand, was being a lot less graceful and just shoved and tackled his way through. Me, well, I was acting a lot like the latter, and may have accidentally hit a few people in the face with my gun while trying to push my way through. Not my fault at all, of course. All in all, we weren't moving that fast—the crowd was so thick, arm strength was a lot more important than leg power.
The most memorable thing about this whole escapade was the smell—it was pungent, thick, this all-encompassing mish-mash of meat, sweat, bodily fluid, and everything else not under the sun. The alleys twisted and snaked in every direction, and every new curve was an adventure. I saw a volus merchant selling out of date omnitools, an asari tattoo artist, a human hairstylist with pink porcupine hair, a turian selling clothes that looked someone vomited paint onto cloth, all types of music blasting through speakers that vibrated through your chest. All set to a backdrop of neon and chrome with a purple, starry sky.
Then we hit the center of the market. This place had the population density of Hong Kong, relatively, and absolutely no one seemed to have any idea about elbow room. The batarian dove right in to the thick of it, but Garrus stopped right outside the threshold, keeping his gun steady. The batarian got swallowed whole, molded seamlessly. I would've just barreled past him, but Garrus looked back and held out an arm. I very nearly crashed into him.
"Go around," he said. He was wearing nearly thirty pounds of armor and he didn't even sound tired.
"Why?" I half-yelled.
"He could double back." He raised his gun so the barrel looked at the sky. "Go around, try to cut him off."
I gasped, nodded, and dashed to the right. I got my gun up and ready, scanning the crowd. It was thicker than bamboo, man. Forget a needle in a haystack, this was like looking for a pebble in the ocean with a flashlight. And the crowd was blissfully unaware they had an active runaway inside them. I thought about firing into the air and scattering them, but that would've just created chaos. And it was, you know, illegal.
Then I saw him. It was just a flicker of brown and red for a second, then his sweet four-eyed face came into center view, looking scared and glancing backwards. Heading exactly in my direction. He had just reached the edge of the jungle when he saw me, spasmed a bit, and ducked back in. Needless to say, I dove after him.
Oh boy. Talk about a herd of people. Hot breath from every angle, people's arms jamming and shoving into me, a complete clusterfuck of noise and half-heard conversations. A careless blue hand backhanded me in the face, to which I heard absolutely no apology. People pushed, shoved, glared. For a second, no one looked like actual people and it was just an ocean of turian brown, asari blue, and salarian green swirling around me. I panicked, started yelling.
Then I got punched in the face.
It was a right hook out of nowhere, man, and my jaw took the full brunt of it. I fell hard, but not before accidentally discharging my weapon in the middle of a crowd. My bad, honestly. The shot went up and needled a short-lived hole in the purple atmo layer, but it made everyone else panic and there was suddenly a circle around me like this was a high school brawl. I tried to get my bearings, already tasting blood in my mouth, but I had only just looked up when a boot came stomping down on my head. I went prone, my head spinning. My gun got tugged out of my hand.
"Stay down!" a deep voice yelled, and I just had the clarity of mind to look up when I saw our batarian suspect point my own gun at my head.
This might not look too good on the report.
"I mean it!" he shouted, waving and jabbing the gun towards me. "I'll blow your fucking head off!"
Slowly, I slid my hands under my chest and pushed myself to my knees. Everyone was gawking around at us and not helping at all. The batarian was a fucking live wire—all four eyes bulging, his razor teeth barred and my own pistol shaking wildly. Despite all the oxygen debt, I took a slow, deep breath and held my arms up.
"Easy," I said, almost completely calm. "Go easy, man."
"Fuck you!" he screamed, and jabbed the gun at me like it was a sword. "Just—just don't move! Stay down!"
"Listen," I said, "this isn't going to—"
A gun went off. While everyone screamed and scattered, I dodged backwards in a desperate and admittedly useless attempt at dodging a bullet. I hit the floor and saw the panicked stampede of feet turn upside down. There wasn't any hot pain, no white tunnel. The batarian staggered from the rushing crowd, fired blindly to his left a few times, and then ran off again, disappearing in a stream of fresh panic. I stayed down and my heart clenched painfully in my chest like it was telling me: hey, asshole, don't do that again.
Then Garrus was suddenly kneeling over me, yelling, "Are you alright?" right in my face. I nodded once, feeling strangely numb, grabbed a hand that he offered, and got pulled to my feet. Then we took off into the thick of the crowd.
The chase was back on.
I was gunless, bruised, bleeding and more than a little disoriented. But all the gunfire did have a benefit—instead of standing around to get in our way, people were running here and there, diving away. It was much easier to push through and meant we spotted our batarian friend almost right away. He was getting even less graceful now, foregoing shoving people out of the way and instead bulldozing them down like a personified bowling ball. Another somewhat good thing about this was, well, he wasn't firing my gun back at us. Every bullet fired from that thing was recorded and catalogued in some C-Sec database, and I had to write a report about every single one. It really wouldn't look good if a couple bystanders got killed with my weapon and I doubted Pallin would prefer my version of events.
Despite all the heavy armor, Garrus started pulling ahead of me. While it pains me to admit it, turians are a lot better than humans at short distance running. We've got them beat pretty solid on cross-country stuff, but they can sprint, man. As we went through cramped alley after alley, up and down the seedy and smelly boulevard, Garrus closed the gap between our batarian. I saw him pump harder, legs a blur, his head dead center concentrated on our guy. He got closer, and closer, ten feet, seven feet, four, three, and then he reached out a hand that caught the batarian's back. . . .
And then, like the god of Hollywood clichés was smiling down upon us, a fruit cart, an upside down trapezoid filled with all kinds of colors, wheeled itself out by a salarian who seemed very oblivious to everything that was happening. The batarian saw it coming and did a particularly uncoordinated leap over it, but Garrus was concentrated entirely on nabbing the guy and smashed flat into the cart, spilling its guts in a spectacular way. I might've stopped to help, but no—I leaped over the capsized cart, slipped and slid on the broken fruit, and kept running.
Now it was just me and the batarian, and I really did not like those odds.
Fortunately, or not, we had reached the end of the market at this point, which was punctuated by a fifteen foot tall artificial bluff with a railing over a lower, practically identical bazaar. More kiosks, more people, and no stairs in sight. The batarian didn't slow down. Neither did I.
Without any hesitation or glance downward, the batarian launched himself clumsily over the railing. His intentions, I can only guess, were to land on the roof of the closest kiosk, but he'd misjudged the angles. He flailed, went horizontal, and smacked hard into the lip of the roof. Even from far away, I heard all the air whoosh right out of him. My gun went flying out of his hands and he tumbled down into the crowd like a drunken angel.
I vaulted over the railing just as he had, but I had done a better job positioning myself. I dropped for a moment, stomach shooting up to get cozy with my lungs, and hit the roof and tried to roll. I only ended up smashing my shoulder and bleeding head into the roof. I guess it's the thought that counts. My gun was lying crooked over the edge and I scrambled for it. I grabbed it, somehow jumped to my feet, and felt a moment of elation. The tables had turned back around.
The batarian staggered to his feet below, clutching his bleeding mouth. I saw a small blob of something wet and brown next to my foot, and realized he'd bitten off part of his tongue. He looked up at me and took off immediately. I raised my gun, then panicked and put it down. There was no way I wouldn't hit someone innocent, and limb shots are something that only exist in movies. It was out of the question.
So, instead of jumping down after him, I started running forward. The stalls were all aligned in a pretty straight row, only a feet or two apart from each other. I braced, jumped, landed smoothly on the next stall and kept going. I could only imagine train robbers jumping from cart to cart in the blazing heat of the Wyoming plains, black smoke billowing out the front as wind whipped at their coats. Yeah, I know, too many movies—it was still pretty cool.
Now I was making a lot better time than the batarian. He still had to fight and pummel his way through the crowd, but I was unburdened minus the gaps. Even still, I hung back just in case he decided to do something smart and cut across the aisles. Fortunately, people who run from the law aren't the brightest of fold and he kept on in a straight line. People were shouting up at me to get off. I barely heard them.
Then a new problem presented itself, as they tend to do—the aisle we were sprinting down ended abruptly about a hundred feet downwards with a flat chrome wall and the cylindrical doors of an elevator. I could just make out the red neon words LOWER WARDS ACCESS floating right beside it. Our batarian friend was making a beeline at it.
Yeah, no. I pumped harder, pushed my legs, scraped up all the residue willpower inside and fucking ran. I wasn't even jumping the gaps anymore, I was going so fast. I tried to widen the gap between me and him as far as possible as my supply of rooftops quickly ran out. A dull, ketchup-y mixture of blood and sweat ran down into my eyes. I was out of air and out of time. I reached the last stall.
In a split second, I hit the corner of the roof and launched myself into the air. I flailed around in a spastic attempt to turn my body the other way, but as anyone who's ever tried that knows, it's pretty goddamn hard to do. Somehow, it worked and I landed backwards, falling and sliding not very far on my ass. And just as I came to a stop, I brought my gun up between my legs and pointed it right at the charging batarian.
"Freeze!" I yelled—or, I would have, if I hadn't just hit the ground rib cage first at full sprinting speed. It came out as a puffy squeak. The batarian stopped for just a second, all four eyes wide, before pushing off an asari and changing direction to the right.
Shit, man—I had really thought that would've worked. I fell upwards and chased after him.
I was running out, dude. My chest was burning with the fury of a flamethrower. Blood was still leaking down into my eyes, and I was sweating buckets. But the batarian was faltering too. He was pushing people with less strength, slowing down, leaving a dripping trail of brownish red blood. Neither of us could keep this up much longer. It was just a question now of who would give out first.
We reached another dead end of the market, but this time it widened out into a long and wide open area. At the end of the line was a skycar and a fast travel console. An easy getaway. I knew the batarian came to the same conclusion I did because we both sped up at the same time. But, I'm sad to say, he was pulling ahead. I pushed, I gasped, I willed myself onwards, but it didn't matter—he was beating me. He'd get there first.
He got to the open area and was about halfway through it when another skycar came zooming out of the sky and parked horizontally in front of him. Garrus stepped out smoothly, leveling his pistol over the low roof of the car. The batarian skidded to a halt and looked torn on what to do. And that's when I, with all my momentum, came up from behind and flying tackled him to the ground.
I had wrapped my arms in a death grip around his so he had nothing to protect him from the fall—he hit the ground chin-first and ate shit. Almost immediately he started trying to wiggle his way out but I'd gotten my full weight on him. He kept struggling, but that stopped pretty quickly when I jammed the business end of my pistol into the back of his fleshy head. He went dead fish, full limp. I could hear him gasping in wet breaths through his bloody mouth.
"Really, though," I said, shifting up so my knee was in the small of his back, "I would just love a sandwich. Do you have pastrami?"
"Fu—" He choked and spat out some blood. "Fuck you, human!"
"I have a complaint about your customer service," Garrus said as he strolled up towards us. "Can I speak to your manager?"
If there's one thing Garrus and I have in common, it's the love of a witty quip in a very inappropriate situation.
I unhooked the pair of handcuffs I'd had dangling at my waist and clicked them on his wrists. They turned on with a steady thrum, pulsing blue. I dragged him up to his feet. He spat out more blood and glanced over his shoulder at me, and I'll never forget that look of blistering hatred on his face. Teeth barred and bloody, his face was cut with anger in much the same way as the ground is shattered by an earthquake. Big valleys of loathing, vicious animal anger. I couldn't decide which set of eyes to look at, which seemed to make him a lot more angry, but then he looked away and growled.
"You alright?" Garrus said.
"Fine," I said, wiping the blood from my face. "A little head trauma never hurt anybody."
He looked at me over his shoulder again and said, in a perfectly calm voice, "I hope it hurts."
"It won't hurt as much as what I'll do to you if you don't tell me where you were last night," Garrus said, without missing a beat.
"W-what?"
"I agree," I said. "What did you say?"
Garrus' mandibles moved in such a way that I thought he was giving the batarian a creepy smile. It was creepy to me, anyway. "You threatened and attacked a C-Sec officer with a lethal weapon. That authorizes us to use deadly force—at our discretion." He brought his gun up and looked it over, peering down the sights. "So start talking."
"Hey, hey, whoa, Garrus," I said, "we're not gonna—"
"I'll talk!" the batarian said. "I-I'll fucking talk!"
Garrus stared him down, face hard and burning. "Name."
"Karth Ulnores."
"You were working at Jyyl's Sandwiches last night?"
"Yeah, it's—it's the end of my shift." He was having trouble looking at Garrus so he looked away and right at me, scowled like I'd just pissed on his rug, and faced Garrus again. "Was just about to go home."
"Well, why don't you run us through what happened last night," I said. "If you don't mind."
He glowered at me. "Some choice I have, human."
"Talk," Garrus said.
Karth brought his chin to his chest and cleared his throat. "Well, uh, it was about . . . one last night when I started. No one was there—no one is ever fucking there—so I was in the back getting ready to watch some vids when I hear screaming out front. I come out and there's this asari bitch screaming and knocking over tables and saying there was someone chasing her. I could tell she was out of her fucking mind on dust—these kinds of people come in every now and then, you know. I try to get her to leave but now she's throwing food everywhere and yelling that 'he' was going to kill her, and I could just not fucking care at this point so I tossed her out. I heard her cry and run and . . . that was it. That was all I saw."
"You didn't help her?" Garrus growled. He was getting pissed, man. Tensed fists, clamped mandibles, the whole deal.
"Why would I do that?" Karth said, like the thought had honestly never occurred to him. "I get dusters in there all the time and they always leave a mess. So fuck her—why should I care?"
"Because she's dead now," I said.
It took him a few seconds to put two and two together, but when he did, he flinched hard. "Hey, hey, I didn't kill her! Th-there are cameras in there, I never left, human, there are cameras—"
"We'll deal with that later." I wrote down some notes on my tool. "Is that all that happened?"
He looked desperately at me, opened and closed his mouth a few times, looked at Garrus, flinched again, and then said, "Uh, no, no. A little later—about five minutes—a batarian comes in with a gun and asks if I've seen an asari. I tell him, yeah, and said she left. Then he waves the gun at me and said he'll blow my eyes out if I tell anyone. He fucking would have, too, if I hadn't told him there were cameras. So he left and I was perfectly happy with not worrying about this at all until you two showed up. Thanks for that."
"Can you give me a description?"
Karth described the asari in a way that completely matched our dead girl, right down to the tattoos. His speech was starting to slur—I think his tongue was swelling up—and my translator kept giving me weird words every time he lisped. But when I asked him to describe this other batarian, he suddenly clammed up and muttered, "I didn't really see him." When I gave him a skeptical look, he added, "He had a gun in my face, alright, it wasn't like I had time to make a fucking sculpture."
"Well," Garrus said, folding his arms, "then I guess you won't mind if we looked at your security footage. Since you're obviously telling the truth."
Karth's neck muscles went as thick as rebar, like he was pissing on an electric chair. "The cameras—they don't work, okay? They're for show. I just say they're there to make people leave."
"Oh, now they're fake?" Garrus said, his voice raising and flanging. "Is there anything else you're lying about, Karth? How about I break a limb, would that help jog your memory?"
I pulled Karth away from Garrus, like I was a parent pulling a child away from a stranger at the park. "What the fuck are you doing?"
"He's lying," Garrus said, spitting out the words, his teeth sharp. "He knows something and I'm not going to let C-Sec protect him."
"I want a lawyer!" Karth yelled behind me, spraying the back of my neck with blood spittle. "This is cruel and inhumane, and I'll have your fucking badges!"
Standing between those two, I felt like Poland circa nineteen thirty nine. Between a rock and a pissed off alien with a gun. I grabbed the Karth by the scruff of his collar, held him at arm's length, and said to Garrus, "There are rules, man. He's fucking unarmed."
"He tried to kill you," Garrus said, glaring at him over my shoulder. "He would have if I hadn't been there."
"You're fucking right, I would have!" Karth tugged and twisted at my grip on him, ripping his shirt. "Fucking humans, and you, turian, you think you're fucking better than everyone. Where are all the rights I was promised? When I fucking tell CNN about this, you can kiss your badge—"
Garrus raised his gun execution style at Karth, none of it slow-motion—in fact, everything happened so fast it got blurry. I let go of Karth and swatted the gun away, which went off right in my ear and there was a sharp explosion that slapped my brain and made me numb, and then Karth kicked me in the small of the back and I went sprawling to the ground. My inner-ear balance was shot to shit so it took me a few seconds of wobbling on my elbows, my ears ringing and my vision swimming up and down and sideways, until I got to my feet and saw Garrus chasing Karth, the former aiming at his gun at a full sprint and the latter pumping his shoulders wildly as he fought the cuffs.
"Hey!" I screamed, my voice sounding quiet and dull. Garrus looked back at me for all of a second and kept going, but he holstered his gun. He caught up to Karth easily enough. The batarian looked backwards just in time to watch Garrus tackle him, and he hit the ground sideways with the loud crack of his head bouncing on the chrome. Garrus was on him like a lion might eat a gazelle and punched him hard in the face. I was running in a staggering line, my ear throbbing. Garrus pulled Karth up by the collar and headbutted him back down, twice. I was out of breath, practically delirious, on the verge of collapse.
I got to them right as Garrus reeling was his arm back for a savage haymaker and I shouted, "Stop!" in a croaking, breathless voice. He hesitated and looked at me, actually looking surprised, like I'd caught him doing something naughty, and then Karth groaned with his mouth a bleeding hole and all four of his eyes blinking and his chest heaving. Garrus' fist was shiny with red blood. He looked at it, then me, Karth, and then he stood up with his head down. Without another word, he turned and strolled back towards the car, a casual walk. I had absolutely no idea what to do.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I yelled after him. He didn't stop or even acknowledge me. He just kept going towards the car which I only then realized must have been stolen. It definitely wasn't ours. He got in, turned it on and zoomed past over our heads, the wind blowing back my hair, leaving me alone. There was a heavy silence broken only by Karth's grunting and kicking on the floor.
He focused on me with the top pair of his eyes, like I was a figure in the dark he couldn't quite see, and, after a few seconds, said, "Fuck you, human," and let his head fall back down.
"Shut up," I said, and bent down to start giving him first aid.
