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Chapter 10; Trouble Spelled 'Y-O-U'
Shaun didn't like being told to wait. Wait was a four letter word where he was concerned and it caused him physical pain to be forced into it. He played his MMORPGs and went to watch Alice in a competition. Got drunk and smoked a few packs.
He teased Desmond mercilessly and had the idiot over every evening to go over what they had on the case and try, without Chris' help, to connect the dots.
There wasn't much. Even with Chris confirming their suspicions concerning Walker and Abbas, there was no closure. No physical evidence. They knew who, they knew vaguely why… but they had no proof.
The men who had already been arrested still presented no Alpha personality, even including Walker and Abbas. Desmond occasionally spoke discretely with Ezio on the phone, went over the other young man's statement multiple times yet it did nothing but make the young PI wish he were very very drunk on a beach somewhere with a bunch of bleach blonde Playboy Bunnies.
It came to a head quite suddenly one evening, late hiding away in the office. Altair, Ezio, Malik and Hadiya had gone out somewhere and it hadn't taken much to sneak in. Desmond had got very good at climbing the side of the building and slipping in through Altair's office window and Altair wouldn't think anything of the two of them being in the office if they came back soon.
It was nearly midnight and Desmond had refused, yet again, to let it go for the night. He was sitting in Altair's chair, slouched down and staring at that ugly painting Rebecca had sold Altair and thinking that it reminded him of the playground at his old school. The girls in their uniforms sliding down the fireman's pole, how sometimes, if he got close enough their skirts would fly up just enough that he'd be able to see their underpants. The one time he'd tried to slide down the thing, on a dare and busted his nose falling off, there had been a smear of blood on the ground beneath it and red spots on his uniform shirt.
Red spots on his shirt as that fat Borgia fuck had sliced and sliced through his face while the bald one held him still. The ugly bastard's erection rubbing at the back of Desmond's neck… How the sick creeps had touched him, the electric high buzz of that haphazard tattoo gun and all the blood on his khakis.
Desmond felt himself shaking and couldn't stop it. Even when he launched himself to his feet and started pacing, hands tangled in his hair, bouncing as he made his way the length of the room, past where Shaun was hunched over half of the file, rubbing at his bloodshot eyes.
"This is pointless, Des."
"Shut up."
"We're not getting anywhere! There is nothing!"
"There is never nothing. There's always something, we just have to find it!"
"Oh, give it a rest!"
"We just have to look at it from a different angle…" He pulled at his hair a little harder.
Shaun squinted up at him in annoyance and exasperation; "If we look at it from any more angles we'll be defying physics!" He ground his teeth and took a steadying breath; "We are out of options. We can't do anything else! Unless Chris finds some little sliver of evidence we are dead in the water!"
"No we're not! We're close—We're on the verge of something here and—"
"Yes, we're on the verge of tearing one another's throats out!"
"It's there, Shaun. It's all right there and we just can't see it!"
"Oh, I can see it perfectly! There is a bad cop out there and if we keep poking and prodding at this—this bloody wound in the judicial system we're going to wind up dead! We can't do anything else without alerting him of our presence!"
"Meanwhile he's out there doing fuck knows, planning to take more kids!"
"Desmond, there is nothing we can DO. We have to wait for Chris to tell us what he's found! I don't like it any more than you do, but we can't just—just jump into this, can't just hand over what we've found knowing that he has control of the evidence and is tampering with it!"
"Then we take it to the feds!"
"Oh, yes, and who are the feds going to believe, a policeman with a clean record or two men playing Detective!" He rubbed his face tiredly; "Give it up, Desmond… You're not Sherlock Fucking Holmes, there is no magical way to deduce yourself out of this! We're stuck! We can't do anything unless we have hard SUBSTANTIAL evidence to expose him as a fraud, and even then we're likely to come under close scrutiny—You're likely to lose your license, my visa will be revoked—Altair could lose HIS license! Admit it! We are completely and royally fucked!"
Desmond wheeled around and kicked the waste basket beside Altair's desk, sending papers flying in every direction, then dropped into a crouch with his arms folded over his head, curled in on himself like a toad.
"We have to wait, Desmond… Chris will call. He'll tell us what he's found and we can go from there."
"We're running out of time, Shaun, what if these bastards come after Ezio?"
"We'll be careful. We… we'll watch out for him."
Desmond bit his lips and didn't voice the question that burned into existence behind his eyes; Yeah, but who's gonna watch out for us?
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