Chapter 104: The Trial (Part 3)
The City of Townsville. Old Town. Pioneer Avenue. Precinct 13.
07 MAR (Tuesday) 1989. 1655.
It was a close call. Bunny considered herself lucky that she hadn't been discovered yet, but then again, the women's washroom wasn't frequented much, owing to the few female cops in the building; women from the public weren't allowed on the second floor. After that close call in the washroom, Bunny began going through each and every room once more.
Thankfully, she didn't have to go to the ground floor. She could tell with her enhanced hearing that the first floor was the busiest of them all. While hugging the wall, Bunny leaned out of a corner by the door, spying on the subject of her mission: Detective Marion. The man was thirty-something. True to his profile picture, he was Caucasian, with dark brown hair and blue-green eyes. And he was busy writing… something on a stack of papers.
Those stack of papers looked like evidence. She was so close and yet so far. With Marion on top of his papers, there was no way she could sneak them away without being detected. So Bunny waited, and waited…
The City of Townsville. New Harlem. Crowe Apartments.
07 MAR (Tuesday) 1989. 1701.
It was absolute chaos in the cramped apartment.
"Buttercup, right, Bubbles, left!" Blossom had ordered quickly as bullets began to fly.
"No killing!" she added on the fly as she shot for the Big Brother, Lydel Lucas himself, but his Mid Bros and guards surrounded him, shielding him and firing uzis and other machine pistols at her. Bullets peppered Blossom, putting holes in her armor and uniform as she gave one guard an upper-cut, then another a punch across the cheek. She wrestled another to the ground, kneeing him in the face so hard, he couldn't even shout in pain as he'd fainted immediately.
Bubbles was aiming her ion beams at the feet of her targets, flooring them with the sheer pain of what could only be described as electrocution and burning rolled into one, though she did try to keep the intensity of her beams down to the minimum.
Buttercup, in the meantime, was doling out wallops that she wasn't sure could spare lives - not that she cared. All that mattered was that she was having fun. The sound of bone-crunching, however, was worrying to everyone around her.
In this pandemonium, doors were kicked open, and more men were streaming in. All three Girls looked and saw shining metal with their Duranium vision. Duranium! In the form of guns!
"Watch out!" Blossom screamed before flying into another gangster, knocking him out of the way - she flew into a group of Duranium gunners who were coming in from another room in the apartment. Knocking them all over the place before they could shoot.
But there was another group of them who were able to fire their weapons, and Buttercup was caught out in the open before Blossom and Bubbles were able to knock them out with their respective non-lethal ocular beams.
The vast majority of the Duranium guns hadn't hit home, of course, with some suffering chamber explosions and falling their own users while others simply too poorly machined to be accurate. Buttercup had brought up her energy shield, blocking the remainder, but she did feel one bullet in her stomach before falling over, her ocular laser beam slicing the ceiling and when she did.
"Buttercup!" Blossom screamed. Her sister! Wounded! Rounding about almost instantly, Blossom flew into Lydel Lucas, who had pulled an ornate pistol out of his jacket and fired a few rounds, only to miss when she flew in a wavy pattern. She collided with him fists-first, causing him to get blown off his feet, landing on his coffee table - all four legs of the furniture broke, as did the wooden surface such that the mob boss ended up lying in it as one would in a bathtub.
It was calm after that. The Black Brothers' leadership had been defeated. How many were killed from the misapplied force, Blossom had yet to count, but most of the Black Brothers were either moaning or writhing on the ground, which was a good sign.
Then there was laughter. Blossom recognized the voice to be Lydel Lucas'. She flew up higher than the sofa and found him on the floor, clutching his stomach. Lydel had migrated from his coffee table, for what purpose, Blossom did not know and didn't care to - what could the Big Brother accomplish with just a few feet of crawling?
"What's so funny?" Blossom asked, mad that the mob boss did not make the right choice for the sake of everyone. "Are you happy now? I didn't want this but you made me do it."
"Oh, nothing, just everything," the Big Brother said, wincing every so often. He stopped for some time as he nursed his stomach. "Getting beaten by a trio of girls - I ain't ever going to get over that - all that irony in your claims. And even after all that, you were right in the end-"
"It's over now, anyway. I'm bringing you in-" Blossom interrupted, pulling out a set of handcuffs. Lydel, however, went on as if he didn't hear her.
"-But I gotta do what I do and you gotta do what you do-"
"and I'm telling everyone you hurt my sister-"
"-you ain't ever gonna stop, and neither will I!" Lydel yelled and leaped for a Duranium pistol that Blossom had only noticed until now - she had been so absorbed in talking to the man that she had forgotten her surroundings.
He pointed the gun at Blossom and fired. Bubbles gave a surprised shout. Blossom saw where the gun was pointed and faded left. The bullet ripped through her earlobe. Blossom returned fire with a stunning infrared beam, knocking the mob boss out.
"Blossom, you're hurt!" Bubbles flew over to her, freaking out over Blossom's torn earlobe. The lower half had been pierced by the Duranium bullet with such force that it had torn the lower half in two. Blossom winced when Bubbles notified her of her injury, which had only begun to hurt after the fact.
"Buttercup's hurt worse," Blossom simply said.
With the Big Brother out of the way, Blossom turned to check on her wounded sister, Buttercup and saw that she was still on the ground, clutching her stomach. Her eyes were closed. Blossom flew to her side, cradling her in her arms. When Buttercup's eyes fluttered open, however, she pushed Blossom away, falling back to the floor and yelling in pain.
"Buttercup, what's wrong with you?" Blossom questioned her sister. She had been behaving oddly, giving the entire family the cold shoulder.
"Why do you even care!?" Buttercup said. Bubbles flew between them.
"Of course Blossom cares, she's your sister…" Bubbles said. To that, however, Buttercup had an odd reaction.
Buttercup snorted at the fact. "If only you know," she said vaguely.
"What do you mean?" Bubbles said, utterly confused.
"Forget it, I'm fine on my own," Buttercup averted the question. With gritted teeth, she forced herself to stand up, but after taking a few steps towards the window, she would have fallen down again had Blossom not held her up. This time, she didn't have the strength to fight her off.
"Let me go!" she'd still stubborn resist, however.
"Not this time, Buttercup. Like it or not, I'm helping you because I care about you," she said. Buttercup gave up after that and went limp in her arms. Her stomach wound was burning, and, though she would hate to admit it, it felt quite serious.
Taking one final look around, Blossom saw that very few of the gangsters were killed and some of them were coming round. One thing that Blossom noticed was that the few who were killed were on Buttercup's side of the battle. However, that would be a topic of discussion for another time as Blossom needed to tend to Buttercup's injury first. Just on time, police officers were streaming through the front door, backed by a SWAT team picking up the rear. All of them had their guns up.
"Powerpuff Girls! Good job busting these boys up!" the leading police officer, someone almost as shady as Police Chief Feig, said. After taking a look around and checking the pulse of one of the gangsters, however, he became less than kind. "They're all alive." He'd said it with some venom in his voice. It was clear what he wanted. "I think you Girls have done enough here. We'll do the rest."
"Please be nice to them," Blossom said. "We didn't-"
"I said we'll do the rest. Now get lost!" the lead police officer scolded.
With that, the Girls flew away through the window, with Blossom carrying Buttercup in her arms like a baby.
The City of Townsville. Old Town. Pioneer Avenue. Precinct 13.
07 MAR (Tuesday) 1989. 1704.
For nearly ten minutes, Bunny had waited for something to happen, anything that could give her a chance to grab some evidence and escape unnoticed. Yet, there was nothing so far. Detective Marion, the subject of her mission this time, had just been sitting there, writing, and writing. How adults could be so patient with scribbling paragraphs upon paragraphs of tiny little words was beyond her.
But just when she was about to try a more radical approach, a uniformed police officer walked into Marion's office and hand-delivered a letter.
"Here's 'it' for today," the officer said, in a rather deliberate and peculiar language. Bunny peeked at the two bent cops and saw Marion slip his partner-in-crime a wad of cash.
"Don't mention it," Marion said, putting multiple meanings into his words through a fake, deliberate tone. He waited for the uniformed officer to leave, then stood up, cracked his back, and made his way towards the door. Bunny knew what he was going to do - it was often what people with secrets do, after all - and stole her way into the office. The detective closed his door and locked it.
Returning to his chair, he lit a cigarette up and began taking a few puffs. Bunny hated the smell, so she tried to stay as far away from the detective as possible, and ended up sitting in a corner. This went on for a few minutes before the detective went over to his window and opened it up to let in some fresh air. A wintry wind blew in almost immediately, but it wasn't as cold as it used to be. In a week or two, it would be spring.
Pulling his half-smoked cigarette out of his mouth and leaving it on his ashtray, it was only then that the detective opened the envelope. Bunny let herself float up to see what he was doing.
He'd taken out a large stack of money as well as a letter. 'That had to be it!' Bunny thought - but she was powerless to do anything more. She had to be undetected, as it was part of the mission parameters. She'd thought about knocking the detective out and taking the letter, but she hadn't seen what it actually contained yet, suspicious though the detective was.
For a while, Bunny froze as the detective read his letter, unsure of what to do. She wanted to read the letter too, but she was afraid that she might lose control of her flight and collide with something, and neither was she confident that she could fly close to the detective without alerting him to her presence due to the wind. What if the detective decided to get up again? He could collide with her then! There was an endless list of things that could go wrong, and it was sweating Bunny out.
Instead, time had decided things for her. The detective stopped reading the letter before folding it up. Picking up his cigarette again, he started smoking it once more. After a few more puffs, he stuffed the letter into his ashtray and stuck his cigarette into it. Bunny was horrified! The evidence!
The fourth Powerpuff Girl had to actually physically stop herself from screaming when it happened. The detective, in the meantime, was rounding his desk in a hurry to walk out of his office. He'd done it so fast that he nearly ran into Bunny and would have, had Bunny not hovered sideways to dodge him.
Floating over to the ashtray, trying her best to ignore the horrible smell, Bunny had wanted to rescue the letter, but she had to look up at the door to see if the detective was looking. Every second became precious; the cigarette embers had given birth to a ring of fire on the paper, and it was spreading quickly. The detective couldn't leave as quickly as he'd wanted to either because he had to undo the lock on his door and open it.
After that, the detective went through the door, and as if to punish Bunny without knowing it, look around his room one last time before shutting the door and locking it from the outside. Bunny immediately fished the burning letter out of the ashtray and smothering the ring of fire after that with her palm. She opened the letter frantically to read it, and much to her dismay, much of the bottom half was ashes and unrecognizable even with her acute sense of sight.
'M,
I got 3000 greens here for the murder at the Tenements, Javier Street Apartment 3, unit 5. I know the coppers who will be guarding the crime scene at 11pm today. I need you to pin it on a troublesome gang local to the area known as the Snakes.
Also, your next hit of His Secret will be delivered to you this Friday. Use it while-'
And that was all. Even Bunny could tell that so much had been lost. But it was not the time for her to cry over spilled milk, as she could hear agitated shouting coming from the outside. She peaked her hearing and heard someone, a woman, screaming about an officer being down and the building being infiltrated by a hitman. Not wanting to be found, Bunny flew out the window.
