Chapter 49: Business as Usual... (Patreon)

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

- Edmund Burke

---

His mother had raised him to believe that early was on time and on time was late, so it was 7:45 am when River Ward walked through the front doors of Watson's NCPD precinct, fifteen minutes before his shift actually started. The air smelled of burnt synthi-caf, and the fucking misery could be felt weighing the entire place down. Ward looked around, taking in all of the officers in this shithole that clearly didn't want to be here.

He was wearing a clean jacket, a pressed shirt, and the newly issued detective's badge clipped to his belt just like the good boy he was, being exactly to spec on what the department handbook recommended for first-day officers. Little did he know this shit was meant to draw attention to him and guarantee everyone in the building would see it and form an opinion about him.

And opinions were like wildfires. They formed and spread fast.

The desk sergeant looked up from his terminal at the badge on Ward's hip and then at the face he didn't recognize. Then he didn't waste another second on him before returning to his terminal without giving Ward an ounce of acknowledgment. Two patrol officers walking toward the break room glanced at River and then exchanged a look between themselves, while a third officer who was at a desk near the entrance processing paperwork that was almost certainly fabricated did not look up at all.

"Everyone's got their fucking panties in a bunch," Ward whispered to himself as he took in all of the cold shoulders. But he wasn't too surprised. He had transferred into Watson knowing what to expect from one of Night City's shittiest precincts. After all, his previous captain had told him that Watson's NCPD division was "operationally compromised at multiple levels" and that a new detective transferring in with a clean record and a reputation for filing internal complaints was going to get a "fuck you" as a Christmas gift if he was lucky.

He walked through the bullpen toward the office he had been assigned, which was in the back of the building and past the interrogation rooms and the evidence processing area. It was a shared office with two desks and a window that looked out onto the alley behind the precinct, just another way for the precinct to tell him just how much they valued his presence.

As he was approaching the office, he heard a voice call out from behind him.

"Hey, you! Baldie that looks like he just walked out of the supply closet." Ward turned around to see a man standing next to the synthi-caf machine in the alcove between the bullpen and the break room, holding a steaming coffee pot in a chrome hand. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with a lean and weathered build. 

Ward recognized the man from the personnel file he had reviewed before the transfer. It was his new partner, and the man whom he was going to share an officer with, Detective Jamie Sheen. He had fourteen years on the force, seven of them in Watson, and his clearance rate was well above average for the precinct but below average for the city. In other words, he was good at his job, but the fuckers higher up didn't want him solving certain cases and therefore refused to give him access to them.

"You want a coffee?" Jamie asked, holding up the pot.

"Sure," Ward said.

"How do you take it?" Jamie asked while turning to grab a foam cup.

"Black," Ward replied.

Jamie poured two cups, one black and one with enough cream to turn the coffee from a dark black to a bright beige. He then handed Ward the black cup and leaned against the counter beside the machine.

"So," Jamie said, taking a sip of his own coffee. "You're my new partner."

"That's what I've been told," Ward said.

"River Ward who transferred from Central. You got a clean record too, with three commendations. You also have two internal complaints filed against fellow officers, both substantiated and resulting in disciplinary action." Jamie said casually. "Looks like you have given yourself quite the reputation, Ward."

"Huh, that good or bad?" Ward asked.

"Depends on who you ask," Jamie said as he gestured with the coffee cup at the bullpen behind Ward. "Most of the people in this building would say bad. They'd say you're a badge-polisher who can't keep his mouth shut and who's going to make life difficult for everybody who's been making life easy for themselves."

"What about you?" Ward asked. "What would you say?"

Jamie took another sip of his coffee and looked at Ward over the rim of the cup. His eyes were brown and tired. He had spent years watching this place rot from the inside, but he wasn't going to change his ways.

"I'd say it's about fucking time they sent me somebody who gives a shit," Jamie said. "Come on. I'll show you the office. The window doesn't open, and the AC hasn't worked in a couple months, but the view of the dumpsters is spectacular."

Ward walked beside him, and as they walked, he took in the precinct's environment. The bullpen was a standard NCPD layout, desks in clusters and terminals on every surface, though there were some differences. For example, the evidence locker's keypad had been replaced with a model that required dual-officer authentication, which was the type of shit that precincts would only do if their higher-ups or internal affairs had stuck their fist up someone's ass.

Three of the desk terminals in the nearest cluster had privacy screens installed only at angles that blocked sightlines from the captain's office, which was the type of stunt you only pulled when you didn't want your superiors to see what they were working on. And the break room's bulletin board, which in a healthy precinct would have been covered in shift schedules, BOLOs, and the occasional birthday card, was instead dominated by a laminated flyer that read WHAT YOU SEE IN THIS BUILDING STAYS IN THIS BUILDING.

"Charming workplace culture," Ward said with a hint of amusement.

"Ehh, you get used to it," Jamie said. "Or you don't, and transfer out. Most of the good ones transferred out years ago. What's left is me, Martinez, a handful of patrol officers who are too stubborn or too stupid to leave.  And now we got you."

"What about the captain?" Ward asked.

"Shiiiieeeeet. Captain Flores is a good man in a bad position. The fucker knows what's happening, but he doesn't have the institutional support to stop it. So he does what he can, keeping the honest officers alive and hoping that somebody higher up the chain eventually decides that Watson is worth cleaning up." Jamie stopped at the office door and pushed it open. "After you, partner."

The office was exactly as Jamie had described. Ward's desk was the one without anything on it, while Jamie's desk was buried under a small mountain of case files, coffee cups, and a framed photograph of a woman and two kids.

Jamie started walking Ward through the filing system and the unwritten rules of Watson precinct when the front door of the precinct opened, and a commotion started.

Every officer in the bullpen shifted, their postures changing as conversations died. A patrol officer who had been leaning back in his chair with his boots on his desk dropped his feet to the floor and sat up straight.

"Oh, fuck me," somebody said from the desk cluster near the entrance.

"Who the fuck called him?" somebody else asked.

"Nobody called the bastard," another said. "He just fucking shows up."

"Somebody's getting fucked today," another officer said.

Ward turned to look at the front door to see a man of about five-foot-ten. He was slim and wearing a wine-red suit that was at least two decades out of date. The lapels were wide and the shoulders structured. His shoes were polished, and his dark hair was combed back, and adorning his face were wire-framed glasses with a wine-red tint to the lenses that matched his suit.

"Morning, chooms," the man said, setting the briefcase down on the nearest desk without asking permission. "Now which one of you kicked the shitcan?"

The officers looked at each other with genuine confusion since nobody in the precinct had arrested anyone high-profile in over a month. The kinds of arrests that attracted the attention of lawyers, which were pretty much dinosaurs in rarity in Night City, had been deliberately avoided by the whole department. Shit, that was why they all took bribes.

"Who is that?" Ward asked Jamie quietly.

Jamie took a long sip of his coffee, watching the man in the wine-red suit survey the room with a relaxed expression.

"That," Jamie said, lowering his cup, "is Matt Murdock. Watson's NCPD worst fucking nightmare, parading around in a shitty style that should've been left back in the 2040s where it belonged."

Murdock turned his head in their direction, his wine-red glasses catching the light.

"I heard that, Sheen," Murdock said, his smile widening. "But I'll let it slide because you're one of the only three people in this building I don't have a file on."

"Three?" Jamie said with a chuckle.

"Yup. You, Martinez in records, and the janitor. Everybody else in this precinct has taken money from somebody they shouldn't have taken money from, and I have the receipts." Murdock adjusted his glasses with one finger. "Speaking of which, I'm looking for a client."

Jamie shook his head and took another sip of coffee.

Ward looked between them. "Why is he Watson's nightmare?"

Jamie lowered his voice, though not by much. "If he was just your run-of-the-mill corpo lawyer, that would've been just fine. But he loves to play Robin Hood and helping the needy due to his upbringing. So for the last six years, he's goten real good in getting people out of exactly the kind of bullshit charges the NCPD files when they need to fill their quota or when somebody pissed off the wrong officer."

"I thought defense attorneys went out of fashion decades ago," Ward said.

"Shiiiieeeettt," Jamie said. "There's a reason he's been doing this for six years. He's good at his job as a corpo lawyer, and he's very fucking good at being a defense attorney. He's even made a personal hobby out of collecting leverage on every dirty cop in Watson, which, as you may have noticed, is nearly all of them."

"He's got files on them?" Ward asked.

"Files, recordings, financial records, witness statements, and at least three officers' personal correspondence with known fixers stored on a deadman's switch that will dump everything to N54 News if anything ever happens to him. Probably," Jamie said as he finished his coffee. "The man is untouchable, and every officer in this building knows it, and that is why every officer in this building just shit their pants when he walked through the door."

"And what's up with the suit?" Ward frowned.

"The suit is Murdock," Jamie said. "To my knowledge, he wears that exact style every single day, different colors but the same cut. And every single day somebody has to tell him it looks like shit at least ten times a day, but I doubt he cares. Actually, I think he does it on purpose. Hard to be intimidated by a man in a wine-red suit from the 2040s, right up until he pulls out the file that shows your offshore account balance and asks you to explain it on the record."

Murdock had already crossed the bullpen and was approaching a desk near the back where a heavyset officer with a shaved head and Gorilla Arms was doing a very poor job of pretending to be absorbed in his terminal.

"Officer Durrow," Murdock said, setting one hand on the edge of the desk and leaning on it with casual intimacy. "Always a pleasure to see you."

"Fuck do you want, Murdock?" Durrow said without looking up.

"I want to know where my client is," Murdock smiled. "Her name's Judy Álvarez. Booked sometime in the last seventy-two hours. And I want to know who arrested her."

Durrow's jaw tightened as he glanced at Murdock. Then he looked around at the room before finally looking back at his terminal.

"Wasn't me," Durrow said. "That was Quincy. And he's on patrol today."

"Then be a dear and phone him for me," Murdock said, smiling.

"I'm not your fucking secretary," Durrow said.

"No, you're an officer of the law with a very interesting offshore account that we should talk about sometime," Murdock said, his smile vanishing. "Phone him. Now."

Durrow picked up the dispatch handset reluctantly. He then keyed the channel, and the dispatch speaker on his desk crackled to life, audible to everyone within thirty feet.

"Unit seventeen, this is dispatch relay, come in," Durrow said.

There was a bit of static before a man answered. "This is Quincy. What do you have for me?"

"Quincy, it's Durrow. Murdock's here. He's looking for a, uh..." Durrow glanced at Murdock.

"Judy Álvarez," Murdock supplied.

"Judy Álvarez," Durrow repeated into the handset.

There was a pause on the other end.

"The Hispanic girl with the firetruck?" Quincy's voice came through the speaker, and every officer within earshot was now listening while pretending not to. "She was out joyriding an NCFD engine with no registration or license. She even ran a red. I booked her for theft of an emergency vehicle, unregistered operation, traffic violation, and resisting."

"Resisting?" Murdock asked, leaning closer to the dispatch speaker.

"She told me to go fuck myself," Quincy said.

"That's verbal disagreement, not physical resistance. I have the body cam footage request already filed." Murdock straightened and adjusted his glasses. "Officer Quincy, my client obtained the vehicle from a registered scrapyard in Rancho Coronado. I have the scrapyard's sale receipt, the date-stamped transaction record, and photographic documentation of the vehicle's condition at the time of purchase, which was, and I quote, 'a gutted hull with no engine, no electronics, and no functional systems of any kind.' My client rebuilt the vehicle herself over the course of a year using parts she fabricated or sourced independently. I have the receipts for those parts as well. The vehicle was abandoned property at the time of acquisition, which under Night City Municipal Code Section 14-7, Subsection C, constitutes legal transfer of ownership upon purchase from a licensed salvage dealer."

There was silence on the other end of the line for a little while.

"Look, Murdock," Quincy finally said, his voice shifting from defensive to tired. "I don't want any fucking problems. If you want the girl, then fine. All charges dropped. Shit never happened. But the firetruck stays. The NCFD found some modifications they liked, and they want to keep it for evaluation."

"The terms are acceptable," Murdock said. "Which station has the truck?"

"Station twelve. On Fifth," Quincy said.

"Thank you, Officer Quincy," Murdock said while tilting his head toward Officer Durrow. "Always a pleasure doing business with the NCPD."

The dispatch channel clicked off, and Durrow set the handset down and returned to his terminal without looking at Murdock. Murdock picked up his briefcase, adjusted the wine-red suit jacket, and turned toward the exit with a smile that said he was having fun.

"I'll wait for my client outside," he said before walking out.

As soon as Matt Murdock left the precinct, the atmosphere shifted.

"Every single fucking time," somebody muttered from the desk cluster.

Jamie looked at Ward and raised his empty coffee cup in a small salute.

"Welcome to Watson, partner," he said.

---

Santi was elbow-deep in the compound-boosted V8 that sat on the assembly bench under the overhead lights, more of its freshly printed internal components laid out in labeled trays around its perimeter. With the crankshaft seated and the main caps torqued, he was now working on the connecting rods.

Before installing them, Santi checked each one of them over one last time to ensure they were within the design spec he had created. Once each wrist pin was oiled and aligned, they were pressed into position.

The projector was running something on the north wall while the speakers were connected to the radio, tuned to 89.7 Growl FM. The bass vibrated through the concrete floor, and Santi could feel it in the soles of his feet. Sasha was lying on the couch with her back on the cushions and her feet up in the air, her legs resting on the backrest.

"So let me get this straight," Sasha said, tablet balanced on her stomach while she scrolled through something with one hand. "You walked into a NetWatch facility, stole a classified weapons program, fought a Voodoo Boy, won, almost died, got carried out by your crew, woke up in a ripperdoc clinic in Wellsprings, drove to the Afterlife, renegotiated your pay from eight hundred K to eight and a half million, and then went to see Vik at four in the morning."

"That about sums it up," Santi said, not looking up from the connecting rod he was installing.

"Then you rested for a day and now you're just building an engine like nothing happened," Sasha said.

"Something happened. I'm choosing to deal with it by building an engine."

Sasha flipped around on the couch, going from inverted to sitting upright in a single fluid motion, and crossed her legs beneath her. She set the tablet aside and looked at him.

"That's wild though," Sasha said. "You've shot into the big leagues, Santi. You're running gigs for Dino Dinovic. You're allowed into the Afterlife. You've got solos and infiltration specialists on your crew. Not even a year ago, you had found what I swore was the motherlode and got this place. Then you were doing solo runs for Regina and a couple other fixers, and now you're stealing classified shit from NetWatch listening stations and coming home with millions."

"I know, right? It's preem," Santi said, reaching for the torque wrench. "But the only real difference I can spot is the paydays are bigger and I have to work with a crew instead of running solo."

"Yeeeaaaaah," Sasha said, dragging the word out in a way that allowed her to acknowledge something while simultaneously preparing to pivot the conversation in a different direction. "So what are you going to do with all those eddies?"

Santi paused with the torque wrench in his hand. He had seated the connecting rod cap, but had not yet tightened it. He thought about it for a minute. The question should have been easy. Most people who came into sudden money had a list of shit they wanted to get. A car. An apartment. Chrome. Clothes. Guns... lots of guns. A way out of whatever corner of Night City they were currently surviving in and into whatever slightly less terrible corner they had been dreaming about.

"To be honest with you," he started. "I don't really know."

Sasha unfolded her legs and leaned forward on the couch, her elbows on her knees, her chin on her fists.

"How can you not know?" she asked. "You have millions of eddies, Santi. Millions. Most people in Night City would kill for a fraction of that. Like, hell, we've both actually killed for wayyyyyy less. And you're just going to shrug?"

"Yeeeep. I'm shrugging," Santi nodded, and then shrugged.

"That's insane," Sasha said.

"Yes? No? Maybe," Santi said.

"It definitely is," Sasha stated. "You have more eddies than most fixers make in a year, and you're standing in a warehouse in your bare feet building a car engine like a guy who makes twelve eddies an hour at a ramen stand. You don't even own a car you can drive right now. You take cabs everywhere."

"Cabs are very convenient," Santi countered. "Plus, the Widowmaker is going to be a car I can drive."

Now it was Sasha's turn to counter Santi.

"The thing is going to be a weapon of mass destruction shaped like a car," she said. "It's like a Hellhound, but a car. Like a nomad's ride. And it'll take you months to finish it. What are you going to do in the meantime? Keep taking cabs?"

"Like I said, cabs are very convenient," Santi deadpanned.

"Yeah, no shit," Sasha sighed. "But cabs are for people who don't have four million eddies just chilling in their account."

Santi set the torque wrench down and looked at Sasha, who held his gaze with unflinching directness.

"Okay, so if you don't know," she said, sitting up straighter and crossing her legs beneath her, "then here's what I think you should do. Buy a place to live."

Santi rolled his eyes and pointed his index finger up while rotating his wrist. "I already have a place to live."

"This is a warehouse, Santi," Sasha said. "You live in a warehouse. Your room is quite litterally above a workshop and under a highway overpass. There is a server room and a fabrication line and a car lift and enough raw materials to build a tank lying around, which, newsflash, you're kinda doing just that. This is a base of operations, a place you use to work. What you need now is a place where you can go home to. A real place. Like an apartment or a house. A place you can go back to, kick back, and just exist without worrying about whether the next gig is going to blow the building up."

Santi set the torque wrench down and turned the rest of his body to face her.

"You can keep this place as your base," Sasha continued. "Keep it as your workshop and server room, but have somewhere else, somewhere that's just yours... Somewhere you and your mom can actually relax in."

The mention of his mother shifted something in Santi's expression. It was minuscule, but Sasha caught it.

"That's a smart idea," Santi said after a moment. "I'll be on the lookout for something. More for Ma than me, honestly. She's been through enough. And although I did pour almost a million eddies into this place, getting a place that doesn't vibrate every time a truck goes over the Ringroad doesn't sound too bad. Mom deserves better."

"She does," Sasha agreed.

They were still in the middle of the conversation when the grey-side entrance burst open, and Judy came flying through it like she had been physically launched from a vehicle that had not fully stopped.

"SANTI!" Judy yelled.

Santi set the torque wrench he had just picked up back on the bench, turned, and had approximately half a second to register Judy crossing the ground floor at a dead sprint before she barreled into him with a hug that nearly knocked him off the stool he was sitting on.

"Thank you thank you thank you thank you," Judy said into his chest, which was about as far as she reached, even while he was sitting on a stool.

"Hey, no problem," Santi said, steadying himself with one hand on the bench. "Wasn't much."

"Bullshit it wasn't much," Judy said, pulling back and looking up at him. "Your lawyer got me three hundred thousand eddies."

"The fuck?" Santi blinked. "How?"

"Okay, so after he got me out of the station, right, with all charges dropped and everything, we went to the NCFD station on Fifth because that's where they had the firetruck." Judy talked fast, her hands moving animatedly as she retold the story. "And the NCFD didn't want to give it back. They said they'd found some of my modifications and they wanted to keep the truck for evaluation, which is corpo speak for 'we're keeping your shit and there's nothing you can do about it.'"

"And?" Sasha asked from the couch, now sitting fully upright with her legs back to being crossed and her tablet forgotten beside her.

"And Murdock just looked at the NCFD captain, smiled, and said that if the truck wasn't returned to his client within twenty-four hours, he would be filing a civil suit against the city of Night City for unlawful seizure of private property," Judy said. "And since the NCPD had already dropped all charges and acknowledged the vehicle was legally acquired, would be a very easy case to win and a very embarrassing one for the city to lose."

"And let me guess, they caved," Santi said.

"They caved so fucking fast I got whiplash," Judy said. "But they still didn't want to give me the truck. So they offered me a settlement of three hundred thousand eddies in exchange for allowing them to keep the truck and retain the rights to evaluate my modifications for potential integration into their fleet. Apparently that Murdock dude was some bad mumbo jumbo for them, so he negotiated for about five minutes and got them up from one-fifty to three hundred, and I signed the deal on his datapad in the NCFD captain's office while the captain looked like he was going to cry."

"That's nova," Santi said.

"That is extremely nova," Sasha agreed.

"I know!" Judy said, her hands thrown wide. "Three hundred K! For a firetruck I got for free in a scrapyard because I was bored! And the NCFD is going to use my junction box design! The one I made on your CNC! They're going to put my work in actual working fire trucks, Santi! I think I'm going to have a techie aneurysm or something!"

Judy was grinning from ear to ear.

But before anyone could say anything else, the music that had been playing on the speakers shifted, and the song "Going To Heaven" started playing.

"I hope there's an increase in morbidity," the singer's voice poured through the speakers, reaching the halfway point of the song. "Await the final part of the trilogy. I hope there's an increase in morbidity. Hopefully, drastically, blessed be thy inequity-"

The song was cut halfway through as the frequency was seized by an emergency broadcast ringing. Santi's hands stopped what they were doing, recognizing the emergency broadcast ringing as the same one he had heard a few weeks ago when Body Heat had cut to a field correspondent in Sacramento who had died on the air.

"This is Growl FM breaking into our regular programming with a priority alert. We have confirmed reports from multiple sources that an NUSA Army division has been spotted approaching Night City's outskirts from the northeast corridor. I'll say it again. A confirmed NUSA military formation is advancing toward Night City. We are awaiting further details and will continue to broadcast updates as they become available. Chooms, stay safe out there."