Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Lost Property

 

Boone didn't wait to see what black ink did.

He grabbed Elias by the collar and threw them both sideways into the shadow of the organ pipes as the clerk swept the stamp through the air where Elias's chest had been a half second before. It didn't hit anything. It didn't need to. The air itself seemed to curdle where the stamp passed, and every flower in the nearest vase turned black and crumbled to ash.

"Go, go, go!" Boone roared, and fired.

The white bullet took the clerk square in the shoulder. It didn't fold him into paper like the others. It just staggered him, one step, two, and the black stamp swung around toward them again, patient as a clock.

Elias didn't burn anything. He just ran, dragging Boone by the sleeve, straight through the side door into the alley behind the chapel, and didn't stop running until the red phone box on the corner swallowed them both whole and dropped them, gasping, onto the marble floor of Precinct Nine.

"What," Vega said, looking up from her desk, cigarette frozen halfway to her lips, "in the ever loving fuck happened to you two?"

"Black stamp," Boone wheezed. "Ain't never seen one before. Ate a whole flower arrangement like it was nothing."

Vega's face went the particular shade of pale that meant she knew exactly what that was and did not want to say it out loud in front of a rookie.

"Office of the record," she said instead, tightly, and something in her tone told Elias not to push it. "Later. Sit down before you fall down."

Vega ordered everyone to bed, and nobody got much rest anyway. By the next afternoon, Dale had a plan, three cups of bad coffee in him, and absolutely no ability to sit still.

"Lost Property," he announced, spreading a hand-drawn map across Vega's desk like a general planning an invasion, complete with little stick-figure drawings of everyone involved. "Talbot's personal effects, whatever he had on him when he got stamped, all of it gets logged and shelved there. If he left anything about the bridge, that's where it'll be."

"That's a Bureau building," Elias said, already imagining thirty more clerks.

"That's a Bureau closet with a security guard who's been dead since the Coolidge administration and reads the same newspaper every single day because it's the only one he's got," Dale said. "Trust me. I cased it for two years before I found this job funny again."

Vega chewed her cigarette, which had finally started burning down like a normal cigarette again, a small mercy nobody mentioned out loud.

"Fine," she said. "Dale, you're with me. Thorne, you're on distraction. Boone, you and Hattie stay here and figure out what the hell a black stamp is."

"I want to come," Elias said.

"I know you do. That's why you're on distraction and not inside the building alone with that mouth of yours."

"My mouth is a valuable asset."

"Your mouth is a fucking liability, Thorne. Distraction."

The Lost Property Office looked, from the outside, exactly like Dale had promised: a squat brick building with a bored guard reading a newspaper from 1931 behind a chest-high counter. Rows of numbered shelves stretched back into gloom, each one crowded with boxes, hats, umbrellas, and the odd shoe.

Elias's job was simple. Stand across the street. Wait for the signal. Burn a Scrap to cause a commotion the second Dale texted him.

The text came four minutes later. ready when u r, kid. make it good.

Elias took a breath.

"Burn."

BURN SCRAP? Power: Shadowstep Cost: One small memory Confirm?

"Yes."

BURNED: The sound of his old boss's laugh.

Memory Reserve: 74%

He shadowstepped into the alley behind a fruit cart three doors down, kicked it over with a crash, and bolted, hollering something about a runaway cart in the loudest voice he owned. A cabbage rolled under a passing carriage and exploded in a spray of leaves. It worked exactly as well as it needed to. The guard sighed, set down his newspaper with the put-upon patience of a man who had done this exact thing a thousand times, and shuffled outside to investigate.

Inside, Vega and Dale had ninety seconds. They used every one of them.

Elias got the full story back at Precinct Nine, over cold coffee, Vega's voice flat and controlled in the way it got when she was working very hard to keep it that way.

They'd found Talbot's box. A hat, dusty and unremarkable. A pocket watch, stopped forever at 11:42, which made Elias's stomach turn over in a way he wasn't ready to examine too closely. A folded photograph of the Corliss Street bridge, marked with small red circles at four separate points along the railing. And, tucked inside the hat lining, a scrap of paper with a single phrase scrawled on it in Talbot's neat hand.

DEPOT 14.

"That's it?" Elias said. "That's the whole fucking lead?"

"Welcome to detective work," said Dale, not unkindly. "You get a scrap. You chase the scrap. You find a bigger scrap."

Boone had been oddly quiet since they got back too, turning his hat over and over in his hands. Vega hadn't said much since they'd gotten back. She sat at the edge of the break room sofa, cigarette burning down for real now, staring at nothing.

"Cap," Elias said carefully. "You said you knew him. Talbot."

For a long moment, she didn't answer, staring at the wall like it owed her something too. Boone came and sat down on her other side, quiet, and didn't push.

"He was my partner," Vega said finally. "Before I made captain. Twelve years. He was the one who taught me the badge doesn't make the officer. The choices do." She exhaled smoke slowly. "About two months ago, he came to me. Said he thought the bridge deaths weren't accidents. Said he thought someone inside the Bureau was hunting Patrol officers specifically, using the erasures to hide it."

"What did you do?"

"I told him to be careful. And then, like a coward, I told him to keep it quiet." Her voice cracked, just slightly, just once. "I had a hunch the leak was close. Maybe inside this precinct. I thought if I reported it up the chain, whoever was doing this would know we were onto them, and they'd move faster, not slower. I thought silence would protect him."

"Cap," Boone said gently.

"Don't." She held up a hand. "I was wrong. He went quiet for three weeks, and I told myself that was good news, that was him being careful, and the whole damn time he was out there alone, getting closer, and I never once asked where he was sleeping or who he was talking to, because I was so goddamn sure I was protecting him by staying out of it."

"You didn't stamp him," Elias said, fierce. "You didn't do this. Some bastard in the Bureau did this."

"I let it happen. There's a difference, but it's a thin fucking one." She stubbed out the cigarette, hard, and for once it stayed out. "He was my friend for twelve fucking years, and he came looking for me at the end. I know he did, because that's who he was. And I wasn't there. I don't even know where he went to die."

The kettle in the corner started to whistle, and nobody moved to take it off the heat. Nobody spoke for a while.

"We're gonna find who did this," Elias said finally. "And we're gonna make them answer for every single fucking one of them."

Vega looked at him for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her eyes.

"Yeah," she said quietly, and for the first time since the Forge, something like her old steadiness came back into her voice. "We are. And when we find them, I want first fucking crack at them."

"Get in line, Cap," said Boone.

Dale cleared his throat, holding up the notebook they'd recovered, flipping carefully toward the back. "Hey. Uh. There's one more page. I didn't want to say anything until, you know. The moment passed."

He turned it around.

A short list, in Talbot's handwriting, under a single heading: WHO I TRUST.

Four names. Vega's was there, circled twice, underlined once.

Beside Hattie Marsh's name, in the same careful hand, was a single question mark.