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I struck a match and remembered fondly the atrocities I had recently committed. Recently helped commit. Recently witnessed. Before all this started I'd been a respectable guy. A senior detective of the Coronet police force, homicide, the one desk in the force that's..."wanted".
Would you want to see a poor, young, dumb lady's brains scattered against her kitchen as her just as young and dumb husband had gone a bit too far with his evening-scheduled wife-beatings? Or pursue "The Chef", a serial killer who slowly sliced off bits and pieces of his victims fingers and toes (and a guy's "little friend" if he really felt like torturing somebody), made a soup out of them, adds a particularly painful poison, and forces his victims to eat it until they die? Need I go on? Not a single person seemed to care about the people they were helping, instead only trying to garner personal fame and fortune and a title to slap in front of their name and brag about it to all the new, just as rich people they're introduced to by "friends".
And I had one of these such titles. And I had a family, rich friends, knew people, could have "favors done if I needed one". It was a disgusting life I led but I led it for my wife, Seema Lez, a Twi'lek dancer who I'd met when I was a drunk beat cop with nothing better to do than watch Twi'lek girls dance for money. And of course I couldn't do it without feeling bad for the first one I saw and fell in love with the poor girl.
She shoulda stayed a poor dancer. Don't get me wrong, she loved being rich and buying even sluttier outfits than what she wore as a dancer, only making me pay hundreds of credits each time. But it didn't bother me cause she was pretty and I was foolish and we were young.
Again, don't get me wrong, the love really was there. Possible because we'd never experienced anything like it before, but there was an interesting character beyond her curves. The marriage lasted fifteen years or so, until everything I had built up over those suddenly came crashing down. Eventually after that, the fancy apartment, the complex, and the three complexes around it, would come crashing down via flames. To the police, they were unrelated crimes. To my now criminal-suspect-on-the-run self, they were 100% related,
Two weeks before that fateful day, a serial killer aptly named "The Horror" by the media kidnapped a transport of twenty people. He killed seven promptly. He wanted to drag it out for a while, though nobody was sure how many people he'd kill in a day after that first one. The killer drew strange, detailed, disproportionate faces that made no sense but beyond that the kills themselves were not malicious or angry in any way like he'd seemed in a transmission sent to the police demanding "a hundred billion credits" and a "transport to get off this damned planet" even though he'd hijacked one. It was a disgustingly annoying ordeal to work anything out about anything in the damned case. After he killed the first seven people and blew up the transport, The Horror disappeared. And each day a person would die, with a new, stranger, disgustingly detailed and horrific faces on these victims, only these ones were stabbed and dismembered and about a hundred times each and a random fact ripped from HoloNet that he liked would be written on the remaining pieces of the victim, also in a large amount of detail.
Nothing but randomness and missteps and false tips and transmissions by people pretending to be him. For two weeks I did nothing but bumble around and look like an idiot in front of the press when I was removed from the case and assigned to a different, much smaller case. No longer senior detective, with that nice little bonus in salary. I was just a detective, removed from homicide and assigned to Narcotics. Humiliating from me and removing me from those "favors" and all my rich friends and everything but my wife and son, Adrian. Well, so they promised. Of course I went out to drink, I could afford to do so without it making the news that I had one too many Corellian Ales or some such crap. And the people who had seen me as a senior detective avoided me, believing I'd be in a pit of downfall and depression. And I was.
The Horror burst in with a blaster rifle in his hands, from the back door. A volley of fire and the patrons, the bartender too, were all dead. He'd deliberately missed me I could tell. And for the first time, somebody saw him up close. His face was unmasked unlike in the one message he'd made public......he seemed like the kind of guy who had tried to make a lot of those messages to see which one worked best and then kept the rest to himself.
"Hello detective!"
"What the hell do you want?"
"Ohhh, just wanted to say hello."
I fumed. The bar was stained with the blood of innocent people, five or six or so, jumping up his total to about twenty-five. My pistol was holstered in my shoulder, covered by my jacket, but of course I wasn't ready to see a bolt fired through my throat. Because he seemed like he wanted me to suffer.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked, just trying to get some sort of read on who he was, I just wanted a hint at to what sort of person could be doing all these things for seemingly no damned reason. He had to have a reason.
"You're not going to say hello?" He seemed disappointed, but I had run out of pity trying having listened to whiny, rich people for the past three years.
"Stop it, tell me why!"
"If you don't want to play, well, maybe I could find some new friends..." He walked toward me, rifle aimed at me the whole way, and reached into my jacket. Right past my gun and to a card, and I grabbed his arm. He started to squeeze the trigger but I bashed the gun out of his arm and tackled him. The card had my address on it, I knew it. I didn't carry much else besides my gun and my I.D. He was quicker than I thought and sent my jaw the hello he had been meaning to send. Crashing into the bar stools behind us, he was out the door before I recovered. Quick and strong, but he hadn't gotten my I.D. I raced home anyway.
As I raced I thought about my career as a detective and all the things I'd seen. They'd never make up for somebody as crazy as The Horror. His name couldn't have been more appropriate, because from the moment he kidnapped that transport I could tell he was dangerously insane. The message he sent and the faces he drew on his victims. His shaky hands, though I couldn't help but wonder if that was an act because he shot and punched and moved damn well, his clacking jaw as he spoke. I couldn't help but think about my coworkers, and their seeming lack of humanity that was parodied so well by something as horrifying as a human-shell of real-life Horror. I thought about the line that I had established that made me different from the people that killed their loved ones over petty squabbles and the serial killers that killed for their love of being sick and twisted and the sight of dead people and whether or not I would cross that line if I saw my loved ones hurt. If I had the chance to choose between killing my Horror or taking in its human form, would I do it? If he had strangled the life out of Seema would I strangle the life out of him? It was a tempting offer indeed, but morality always seemed to get in the way.
I opened up the door to our apartment on the twenty-third floor, expensive, furnished by my lovely wife using her incredibly expensive taste and my seemingly endless pockets at the time. When I opened up the door, the furnishings of the apartment, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, were painted with the blood of the closest two to me. The sight was hundreds of times worse than I could have imagined. How had he had so much time to do this to them while I chased him? I walked immediately to my room, not wanting to look at the dismembered limbs and intestines of those that I had failed so horribly. But no, they weren't Seema, or Adrian. No. They were dangling from two ropes from the ceiling, already dead and holding cards that said "Thanks for all the help".
I weeped, The Horror laughed. In two weeks my life had fallen to shit and I would never be able to get it back. Again, I had to ask.
"Why me? I had to know. Wouldn't you?
"No reason."
I quickly rose from the ground and grabbed the unarmed killer by the collar. "Tell me why you loon!"
He chuckled, and chuckled, and chuckled. And I fumed even more, only this time I was armed. I shoved him to his knees and pulled my gun on him. I had him and he continued to laugh, and I knew that I didn't have him at all.
"Why me?"
"I wanted to torment the police." He answered finally, smiling all the while, "So I needed a detective to humiliate and who better than their lead homicide guy? Catcher of serial killers, The Chef, Sanguine Sinclair, Valkyrie...The three reasons why you got so famous. Wouldn't wanna be a perfect four-for-four, would we?"
My gun readied, and he laughed.
"Oh I know who you are. You're one of the few guys left with integrity. You'll threaten me with your gun but you'll arrest me and I'll be escaping jail in no time, making everybody look like a fool. Not just you, if that makes you a little bit happier."
He was right. God damn why did he have to be right?
"Oh you'll stand there, saying, oh, poor me, this guy out smarted me at every turn and now he knows I ain't even gonna kill him. You'll look angry and snarl, whine about your dead wife and kid. All the deal people around us." He laughed still and I realized something. Even though he was right, he was different. All of the serial killers I'd caught up until that point had just been insane people who had no other way to become famous. The Horror just wanted people to be scared, whether he lived or died by the end of the ordeal, people would lose faith. And he liked killing people, so he'd go out doing what he loved, becoming even scarier for his just pure acts of randomness and seeming instability that should have led to his capture.
But he'd live or die that night, and he was 100% certain he'd live. I was having second thoughts.
"Boo hoo, my dead wife! I couldn't save her!"
Reduced to doing impressions at that point. I wanted to believe he was panicking, but he really could go on until I killed him or cuffed him.
I fired three shots into his face. I stood there for several minutes until a knock came to my door, and I answered it by opening the door only a crack so the person couldn't see the horrible scene inside. It was three people, all neighbors, a few more had stepped outside their doors.
"Everybody leave the building now...police business." It was an easy front to hide behind, but it worked. Everybody started leaving, and I immediately looked for everything and all things that would ignite quickly. A little bit of fuel, a bunch of useless papers, whatever would work, I took and just spread across the ground until they were all out, and then poured the rest of the fuel in a straight line from my hanging wife and son to the front door.
And the memories stopped there, and I no longer held any remorse for the life I would be burning away. I dropped the match and heard the fire starting, and it had grown much more intense by the time I had left the building. Apparently it had already consumed my entire apartment by the time I had gotten a taxi and made my way to the space port. From there I went to Coruscant, and on Coruscant I found a slummy dive bar and a pilot who would fly me straight to Rhen Var for all of the money in my pockets. I agreed, of course, because I no longer cared by then. I just wanted to go some place cold and forget I was a warm blooded being.
Of course, Rhen Var had much less law than Coronet, Corellia. I took up the private detective business, with my new-found ability to step over the line coming increasingly more in handy with the deadly, lawless ways of the frozen ice planet. My first year there was more or less that on a monthly basis until things settled down a bit. But the place needs a hero much more than it does a sad, decrepit, aging man with nothing more to offer than cynicism and more dead bodies on the ever-growing pile? I haven't forgotten my failures, and I haven't learned from them much either. What's there to learn other than life's random and you should keep living it just to see how it plays out? Though I fear I'm beyond my time after the fiasco with my Horror, but being fearless helps in this Galaxy. Especially on a planet without much to do besides freeze to death and commit crimes?
As I close this out, the interesting bits of my story gone, all I have to say is this: The line is there for a reason, but if all the air is sucked out of a ship traveling at light speed do you not have a failsafe to help you live? Crossing the line is that failsafe, and you should never do it otherwise. But it is necessary, and it will not change you unless you let it.
