Django Durango

Virgil Dainty played a dangerous game with his lyrics, but he understood the magic of music. You could say just about anything in a song. The words were immaterial; what mattered was how they made you feel.

—

The recommended dose of Joy did not last through the night. That was why Uncle Jack came on first thing in the morning with his show, Wakey Wakey. His cheerful bombast cut through all thought and made it impossible to focus on the vague feelings of memory lurking under the dissipating fog of one’s last dose. Uncle Jack also reminded everyone to take their morning dose, so Wakey Wakey was a tidy solution to the problem of morning Joy lag for most people.

Virgil didn’t watch Wakey Wakey. When Virgil woke up in the morning, he rode that thinning haze out to the very edge his memory and used what he found there. As long as one didn’t linger too long, one could look at it all with some detachment, as if the memories belonged to someone else.

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“Before we begin, please listen to a personal message for Our Prudent Friend: The Fox is in the Hen House. The Fox is in the Hen House!”

“Really? Uh, I mean, Zanthus!” Ms. Henderson said the codeword to confirm receipt of the message. She could hear the man on the other end of the line snickering as she hung up the phone. She dashed back the safehouse in Edenham as fast as she could with bare feet. She’d need to catch Prudence before she left. “Before we begin” was code for “do not proceed”.

When she got back, Prudence was packing her spartan collection of toiletries back into her handbag, preparing to move on to the next stop in the underground.

“You may as well get comfortable here for now,” Ms. Henderson said. “We’ve just been told to pause all plans for the time being.”

“What? Why?” Prudence said, alarmed.

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Buster Edwards, a thief, had been casing Nick Lightbearer’s house for a week. It was now Friday and Nick still had not left. You’d think a rockstar would have events to be at, but Nick had spent the last five days lounging around his home in various states of lucidity and undress.

Buster came back from a long postponed piss break to see a tall, skinny someone up in the scaffolds, crouched in his spot and reading his notes.

“Fuck,” Buster whispered to himself as he ducked out of sight. He watched this interloper scurry across the scaffolding around the building and slip into Nick’s house through the third floor window entry point detailed in Buster’s notes. That lanky shit was gonna knick all of Nick’s knick-knacks!

Buster climbed back up into the scaffolds and waited. A while later, Nick finally emerged from the back door. Or… no, it was that stringbean fuck dressed as Nick. You could tell because he was about six inches too tall for the outfit. The pants were unfashionably high up the ankle and his jacket was too short on the waist. He had the wig on straight at least. Buster spied on him as he tore off down the street, pointing at passerby and greeting them with knock-off Nick-isms.

The real Nick was still yet to emerge. Buster chanced a few circuits around the scaffolding to peek into his windows but didn’t see him anywhere. Unless he had a secret basement or he was Harry fucking Houdini though, Nick had to still be in the house.

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Work had become very tense. Hickinbotham knew he was in hot water and was being scrutinized. He had been reassigned to patrolling the records room, which gave him a lot of time to ruminate on the man he’d nearly killed and who’s career he’d definitely ruined. It weighed on him, but all the same, he could still comfort himself with the knowledge, the simple fact, that all that unpleasantness need not have happened if that man hadn’t run, if he hadn’t been buying illegal drugs in the first place. It was his own fault that Hickinbotham had beaten him to a pulp.

Eventually, Hickinbotham was given an assignment. An arrest, another chance.

Arrests weren’t exactly common these days. It was more likely that a criminal would be collected by the doctors than the bobbies anymore. Perhaps though, despite the problems he’d created in apprehending Miss Boyle’s client, he’d distinguished himself as someone who could bring in a perpetrator in one piece.

He reported to Carmarthen House, determined to redeem himself.

Sergeant Sargent was his partner on this job. His presence suggested Hickinbotham wasn’t entirely trusted to do this with another lower ranking constable, but it also meant that when he did do a fine job of it, Sargent would see it firsthand.

“You’re going to need this,” Sargent said, handing him a loaded syringe. “Knockout Juice. We can’t use our truncheons on Dr. Faraday or we might knock the smarts out of her. Best to sneak up on her and tranquilize her instead.”

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Hickinbotham quite liked the night shift. It was peaceful. Just him and the occasional other constable passing like ships in the… well, the night. He found the ethereal calliope-esque tootling of a Jubilator on the next street soothing. And if it rained (which it almost always did) the streets would shine and sparkle even more than usual. The gas mask made it a little stuffy, but with the fog it couldn’t be helped. It was a sort of privilege to get to see the Village like this, something only Bobbies were afforded.

When he came upon the mangled corpse of a woman in the middle of the street, just on the periphery of a patch of pea-soup, her entrails flung hither and thither, he wondered if that was what had tempted her to break curfew.

He blew his whistle and the constables on the surrounding streets ran to his location. They made quick work of cordoning off the area. One of them popped back to Central to collect Constable Burne-Jones.

Burne-Jones stepped out of the Bobby Popper and approached the scene. He knelt down next to the corpse and inspected the killer’s handiwork.

“Yep,” he concluded, “It fits the M. O.”

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