CreepyPasta

Bad Night

You're making a mistake."

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Mr. Monahan. Our decision has been made."

"But..."

"There's nothing more to be said. Your final check will be in the mail tomorrow. Molly and I thank you for your services." -click-

Jack Monahan sat behind the desk in the dingy room that served as his office, staring at the now silent receiver held in his hand as if willing the voice at the other end to come back. After a few moments, the phone started beeping, letting him know it was still off the hook. Jack resisted a strong urge to bash the thing to pieces against his desk and instead ever so carefully placed the receiver back on the cradle with a resounding click of its own. The sound echoed hollowly throughout the room, perfectly mirroring the empty feeling that had suddenly appeared in his gut. Dammit, he'd been so close!

His right hand, almost of its own accord, reached down to the drawer where he kept a bottle of cheap bourbon, half empty and soon to be more so, and a glass that was only slightly dirty. He set the two next to each other on the desk and, after a moment's consideration, returned the glass to the drawer. He removed the top from the bottle and took a long swallow; a slow burning sensation traveling from his belly up to the base of his throat drove the empty feeling back ever so slightly. Jack sighed. Drunk or no, either way this was going to be a bad night.

The case had been about kids, but for Jack it had started with just one. June Benson, eight year old daughter of Chase and Molly Benson, had gone missing after school one day about three weeks ago. Her parents were decently well off but no ransom or other demands had ever come. The cops asked some questions at the school, filed some paperwork, and ultimately ruled her as a runaway. The Bensons weren't satisfied with that assessment and had hired Jack to follow up where the uniforms wouldn't. Jack agreed with them that something smelled off.

A little digging showed the rabbit hole went down a helluva lot deeper than June Benson. Carefully applying some financial lubrication, Jack got one of his old contacts in the department to spill the beans; there were a lot of kids that had gone missing in the last two months, almost three dozen all told. Part of the reason for the general lack of panic was that most of the kids were low income, if not outright homeless. On top of that, Jack's contact heavily hinted that there was pressure from a very long way up the food chain to keep a lid on the cases and sweep each and every one of them under the rug. That thing that smelled off started to stink like a fish market.

Jack hit the streets. He went to June's school and the surrounding apartments. Then, finding nothing, he rolled up his sleeves and waded into the scum on the other side of the city. He canvassed the halfway houses, the tent city under Eastbrook Bridge, the Wakeside slum where cops would only go in force. Everywhere he went he asked the same questions: Has anyone seen anything? Does anyone know about these missing kids? For a week he was disappointed, until finally, he got a bite.

The informant was obviously a junkie, and was even more obviously looking for a fix. But he said he'd seen something, namely two goons in suits shoving a black bag over a young boy's head and throwing him into an unmarked van outside a crack house the junkie had been flopping at. What's more, and what earned him the twenty bucks in Jack's outstretched hand, was he'd heard one of the goons say a name: Marx. Suddenly the pieces had begun falling into place.

Graydon Marx was the owner of a pharmaceutical subsidiary that kept a production plant outside of town. It made a sick kind of sense that Marx might have decided to take kids as unwilling, unpaid subjects for new drugs they were testing, and he was one of the only individuals with both enough political and monetary pull to keep the mayor's office and police department on lockdown. Granted, it was a long shot, and June didn't fit the profile of the rest of the missing kids, but Jack had been desperate to find even the thinnest thread to follow.