This fic is what happens when I listen to 3 hours of TKKG in one sitting and then also read All for the Game in the same week: the Foxes wind up taking on wacky mystery cases in less-than-legal ways.

Inspired by TKKG 184: Die ewige Finsternis (The Eternal Darkness for those of us who don't speak German)

Seth Gordan had been spending the first half-hour of his night shift in the usual fashion: downloading porn onto the government-issue desktop and having a well-deserved wank on the Oakland PD's dime.

The porn star on screen ran a hand through platinum blond ringlets and gave one generous breast a squeeze. She looked remarkably like Allison Reynolds from the detective bureau, which was entirely the point. Seth wouldn't have picked the video otherwise.

He wondered, idly, if Reynolds had an OnlyFans.

Then, just when the keens of the bubble-butted actress reached peak volume, the power went out. The lights abruptly died. The porn star's wails went silent. And Seth was left alone in the darkness with his dick in his hand and his orgasm irreparably ruined.

After spending a solid minute stewing in irritation at his desk, Seth wiped his hands off on his pants and put his dick away. Luckily so too, because it was at that moment that the door flew open to admit Matt Boyd.

Seth took a moment to be grateful for the power outage.

If there was one person he didn't want to see the Reynolds lookalike porn actress, it was probably Boyd.

"Can't you fucking knock?", Seth snapped, trying to inconspicuously wipe the last of the lotion from between his fingers.

"Hello to you too, asswipe," Boyd griped. "You clearly haven't bothered to look out the window."

Well, that was a weird way to start the conversation.

Seth had just opened his mouth to say something rude in retaliation when Boyd went for the office's dirty plastic blinds and unceremoniously tore them up.

Oakland had gone completely black.

Every single building, every skyscraper and street lamp alike had been snuffed out. Only car headlights and flashlights glowed like tiny pinpricks in the darkness.

"That is so fucking cool," Seth said in awe, 10% because it was actually kind of cool and 90% because it would annoy Boyd.

Sure enough, Boyd was already in the process of working up an indignant bluster when Dan Wilds stuck her head through the door. "Calls coming in," she said tensely. "We are so lucky the cell towers are still up! There's been at least eight car crashes in the last five minu-"

She paused, clearly aware that nobody was listening.

Boyd had been at least pretending to be paying attention, although it probably would've been a lot more convincing had he actually stopped kicking Seth's shin. Seth, on the other hand, was happy for any opportunity to yank on Wilds' oh-so-tempting chain and cheerfully ignored her.

"Get out here, you two," she said briskly, gesturing to the office floor where everyone else was in a frenzy over the backup generator. Boyd, looking fascinatingly similar to a chagrined puppy, quickly joined his girlfriend on the poorly lit office floor. Seth stayed seated.

"You too, Seth. It's about time you did something more productive than sampling each and every porn website."

Seth, sneering, leaned back in his chair and sternly waggled a toe at her. "You know what your problem is, Wilds?"

"What, pray tell, is my problem, Seth," she said in a tone that indicated she wasn't particularly interested in any answer he had to offer.

"You've been hanging out way too much with our beloved chief and he's clearly been rubbing of on you. Newsflash. You're not in charge, bossypants."

"I have not been hanging out with Kevin," Wilds said indignantly, as though this were the greatest of personal insults. "Nobody hangs out with Kevin. He's too busy playing God in his office for that. Now get out here. You're actually needed for a change."

Then Boyd and Wilds went off together, hand in hand, presumably to make out in a lightless corner like hypocrites.

Outside, the noise had become deafening. Every phone seemed to be ringing off the hook, the feeble light of the backup generators flickering through the crack of his office door. The power outage was wreaking havoc across Oakland, and Seth had a metaphorical front-row seat.

It was to Seth's great disappointment that Boyd and Wilds were dutifully at work when he finally dragged himself out of his office.

Surprisingly, even Kevin Day had emerged from his cave of an office to grace his long-suffering team with his presence. He was leaning bad-temperedly against a door frame, his arms crossed, glaring at the door of Seth's office as though he'd been waiting for him to come out.

"Nice to see you finally made it," Kevin said nastily. "Been busy, have you?"

"Oh yeah, boss. Very," Seth drawled lazily, spitting out the word "boss" in such a manner that clearly made it into an insult. He loped around Kevin and popped open the mini-fridge. Predictably, the power outage meant that the inside was dark and the soda had been steadily warming up to room temperature. Seth reached for a bottle anyway.

Kevin hissed like an affronted cat.

"First of all," he snarled, snatching at the bottle in Seth's hand, "those are mine."

"And second of all?" Seth jeered around a mouthful of soda while Kevin seethed.

"Second of all, get your useless ass into a seat and start tracking the power outage. We're paying you to be a research assistant, not a soda-guzzling waste of space."

"Waste of space?" Seth asked cruelly, tilting his head meaningfully to Kevin's mangled left hand. "How's the career, Kevin?"

Neil Josten had only ever ridden in Patrolman Minyard's cruiser twice, and one of those times he'd been in the back. But from what he'd heard about Andrew, it was very very unlike him get into any roadside crash he hadn't done on purpose.

That was until that night, even though he'd been navigating the pitch-black streets with such perfection that Neil thought he must have them memorized. Then Andrew almost drove headlong into Allison's obscenely shiny Mustang, painted violently pink with rhinestones on the tire rims.

"How the hell did you miss it?" Neil sputtered, gesturing at the Mustang. "It was right there." It had been parked diagonally in front of the entrance of the Oakland PD parking garage like the world's flashiest roadblock. Even in the total darkness, the thing glowed in the moonlight, a hot-pink beacon of too much money and not enough taste. Neil was 99% sure Allison bought it just to be irritating.

"Zip it, rabbit," Andrew said unconcernedly, parking his cruiser equally obnoxiously in the middle of the road. "Maybe I did it on purpose." With that, Andrew got out of his cruiser, strolled over to Allison's hideous pink Mustang, and gave one rhinestone-studded wheel a disdainful kick. "Disgusting. This is the kind of thing we should be arresting people for."

The inside of the parking garage was completely devoid of light. Where the rest of the city was at least bathed in the faint glow of moonlight, the inside of the garage yawned completely and unforgivingly black. Andrew set off into it, completely unbothered, navigating his way around the concrete columns with unnerving ease. It was as though he had the floorplan plastered onto his eyelids.

Neil was smart enough to jog after him. He had no desire to be left alone in the dark.

Five minutes of terrifyingly purposeful walking later, Andrew reached into the dark and yanked open a door Neil hadn't even known was there. The feeble, flickering light of backup generators illuminated the Oakland PD offices and spilled out into the dark of the parking garage. Somewhere inside, Kevin was shrieking like a high-strung housewife.

"You need a written invitation?" Andrew sneered, pushing his way in. "Please, Detective Josten, won't you join me and the rest of us humble plebians in our pitiful attempts to deal with the power outage?"

"Shut up," Neil said stiffly and pushed past him.

Quite suddenly, the inside of the Oakland PD offices exploded in a blast of noise. Neil felt his hackles go up as he prepared himself for the incoming threat. Was it his father? Lola? Another one of the Butcher's henchmen?

"You will not fucking believe this!"

It was Allison. She was storming through the office from the opposite direction, having evidently come in through the front door rather than the garage.

"This is the very last-" she paused for a loud, angry inhale. "Oh, I can't believe this. I'm going to kill someone. Actually commit a murder. Somebody get me a drink."

And it was with that that she furiously dropped down on the couch and kicked her high heels onto the coffee table, taking down about four Starbucks cups in the process.

Renee sat down lightly next to her, perching herself on the couch cushions like some kind of therapy fae. "Allison," she said gently. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Yes I want to fucking talk about it," Allison bristled. She'd gotten her hands on one of Kevin's vodka bottles and had expertly flicked off the cap. She took a long gulp. "Somebody- somebody broke into my apartment!"

All around the room, jaws dropped.

Allison's beautiful penthouse suite had gained notoriety among the team. Neil had never been, but had heard the stories and had seen enough Instagram posts featuring the luxurious pool and mile-high ceilings to know that this was a very, very big deal.

"Somewhere out there, there is a man with balls of steel," Nicky said, his voice hushed reverently. "Massive balls. Giant balls. Absolutely humon-"

"Shut up, Nicky," Dan and Allison snapped in unison.

"Keep going, Allison, please," Renee said kindly.

Allison resurfaced from the liquor bottle, slammed it down, and fussily fixed a loose strand of her perfect platinum hair. "It was the power outage, obviously. The alarms on my apartment were shut down, somebody literally just-," here she took another angry gulp, "-kicked down my front door. Everything's gone. My TV, all my jewelry, half my closet. They took my fucking dishwasher- who steals a dishwasher?!"

Dan bolted upright from her seat. "You stay put Allison. We need to take this to protocol, I totally forgot-"

"To protocol?" Allison sputtered around the mouth of the vodka bottle. Then she flopped back on the couch, dangling the bottle listlessly over the edge. "I can't believe this is happening to me," she moaned.

Just then, Aaron emerged from the parking garage and stomped into the office. Seemingly unable to read the room, he said rudely, "Did the two of you win your driver's licenses in the lottery? Neither of you know how to fucking park. Andrew. Allison."

Allison heaved herself back upright and tipsily pointed the bottle at him. "I'm in shock, you illiterate twat truck. Somebody stole my fucking dishwasher and nobody likes you."

Aaron's blond eyebrows rose alarmingly toward his hairline. " What are you talking about ."

Then he gestured to Dan and Kevin. "She's drunk off her ass. Why is she drunk? The shift started literally twenty minutes ago."

"...not drunk...," Allison's voice drifted distantly over, her hand wavering over the top of the couch to point in Aaron's direction.

Kevin took that as his cue to stalk past and take the remainder of the vodka off of Allison's hands.

"Firstly," Kevin said sternly, examining the now half-empty bottle with begrudging respect. "This is not how you deal with your problems. Secondly-"

Seth laughed unkindly, interrupting Kevin mid-sentence. "Nobody needs an AA lecture from you of all people, you hypocrite."

Kevin puffed himself up like an angry pomeranian and was halfway through a retort when Chief David Wymack burst through the door. Kevin swallowed his insult with hilarious abruptness.

"Quiet, you lot!" Wymack barked. "This an actual emergency, you morons need to stop dicking around. We've got calls coming in at top speed, houses are being plundered left and right, there's a car crash every thirty seconds. I don't think I'd be surprised by anything less than purge sirens, that's the level of chaos we're talking." Wymack took a moment to cast a long, critical look around. He looked at Allison tittering away drunkenly on the couch, and then at Seth and Kevin, who looked about two seconds away from killing each other. He sighed.

"Kevin- count to ten and breathe, you look like a python swallowing an egg. Seth, you look way too damn smug for someone who hasn't done an iota of work in the past three months. And Allison-"

Allison, as if on cue, fell off the couch in a fit of tipsy giggles.

"-somebody just get her a water or some shit."

The dawn broke on Oakland in chaos. Predictably, a small crowd had gathered by the entrance of the Oakland PD parking garage to gawk at not only Allison's offensively blinged-out pink Mustang, but also at Andrew's patrol car, both which still assumed their positions in the middle of the intersection.

No less than twenty-four indignant phone calls had hit Chief Wymack's phone before the end of the night shift to complain, and not even the threat of three months of desk duty had gotten Andrew to get off of his phone and repark the car.

Neil craned his neck and looked up. Upstairs in his office, he could still hear Wymack bellowing something about the Oakland PD looking like a bunch of rule-breaking hypocrites into his phone. Neil stayed only for a moment to listen, then maneuvered around the two parked cars. He tugged his dollar store tie off of his neck and broke into a steady jog home.

He'd only made it two blocks when there was a sudden screech of tires behind him. He dove aside, swearing, only for Andrew's police cruiser to rocket past him like hell on wheels.

"You're not gonna know shit about me if you run me over, you maniac!" Neil hollered after the receding car, watching as the cruiser took a corner at warp speed and almost took out a mailbox in the process.

"Wymack's lecture can't have been that bad," he grumbled, bad-temperedly kicking at a discarded soda can as he resumed the jog.

It was some ten minutes later that Neil turned into his street and found Andrew's cruiser parked directly on his two-by-two square of dried-out lawn. The door of his ramshackle apartment was wide open. And in the doorway was Officer Andrew Minyard, picking boredly at his nails.

What in the flying fuck had happened here?

"So was there a reason for you kicking in my door or did the drugs finally fry your brain?," Neil snapped, stomping over to Andrew and reaching for the door. The wide-open apartment was making him supremely uncomfortable.

"Manners, bunny rabbit," Andrew said gleefully, baring his teeth in his usual Cheshire cat smile. He stepped out of the doorframe, crossed his arms, and cocked his head with a grin.

"You've been robbed," Andrew sing-songed. Then he gestured to the still-open apartment. "Come on in, detective! Let's take a look!"

"You're insane," Neil groused but followed Andrew in. He had next to no valuables to rob anyway, and what kind of burglar would steal seemingly random paperwork?

"And get your cruiser off the lawn- who the hell gave you a license? The HOA is gonna throw a fit."

"Oh Neil," Andrew said pityingly, in a tone that would've been much more convincing had he not still been grinning like a drugged-up circus clown. "You're about to have much bigger problems than-" he paused to giggle, "-the HOA."

It was with that that he kicked open the bottom drawer of Neil's nightstand, and Neil felt his stomach bottom out.

The binder was gone.

To be updated as inspiration strikes!