Morally Ambiguous (Lo longer being updated)

Chapter 1

 For writing a brilliant Mafia story that inspired me to write some crime fiction and encouraging me to keep up the military fiction :)

I was used to snooping round back alleys for criminals but now it was the other way around. Shadows danced across the crumbling brick walls of the dead end alley, their shapes clearly showing the myriad of weapons they carried. Their footsteps echoed off the tall, imposing buildings and their frozen breath wisped up into the clouded sky. I was doomed to a quick death unless I thought quickly. Luckily, in my line of work, you learn to be sharp eyed and resourceful. A fire escape was always a convenient escape in these dead end situations.

My hands burned like a fire as I wrenched a large bin over, painstakingly screeching it across the five meters to the fire escape. Light snowfall and freezing temperatures were making this hasty exit a lot more difficult, and the thin sheet of ice on the floor was making it a hell of a lot more dangerous too. As I jumped up and gripped onto the thin metal rungs, they began rounding the corner, firing off shots in my direction. I bobbed and weaved; doing my best to avoid the lead pinging from the cold metal around me, trying to climb up the thin stairwell.

 Reaching the top, I looked for all possible avenues of escape, but found none. Steps creaked and the thin metal groaned, one by one the suited men ascended, brandishing handguns like some kind of trophy. Other than a long fall, all hopes of escape were lost. As they prepared to fire, holding their guns like gangsters from the ghetto, what would usually be considered a saviour came crashing through a rooftop door, in the form of the NYPD.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite on the cop’s good side today, despite being their colleague less than a week ago. After killing one of their teammates, it was unlikely I would ever really wriggle into the police’s good books again. It may sound a little confusing now, but I promise it’ll get a little clearer later. Now I was alone, with my two most powerful and influential enemies cornering me with nowhere to hide.

It was set to end as I always thought it would, right from the beginning. A Mexican standoff. It was funny, in a weird sort of way, that it had happened where it did. Although my story was nothing like the movies, it ended the same way all good stories about detectives did. Think of a few places you would expect to a final standoff to occur in and I bet one of them was an opera house. And that is exactly where I was, high up on the roof, wind blowing in my hair and the cold embrace of pavement fifty feet below me. Come to think of it, this was nothing like how the movies showed being a cop.  I was surrounded on all sides by two forces of huge power in the city. Mafia to my left, NYPD to my right, I slowly backed up at the sight of their guns drawn, not only on me but on each other.

The tale of how I got here is no ordinary, prime time police drama. There’s no white as white cop who defeats all the forces of evil that threaten his beloved city. The story may have begun the same, a humble NYPD detective doing his best to help rid the city of crime, leading into some turmoil. Being surrounded on a roof, almost off the edge, seemed a lot like some endings I’d seen too. But in between, all hell broke loose and somewhere along the line, I went off the beaten track and into a grimy underworld full of pain and suffering. Everyone expected my story be about how I helped rid the city of crime. The truth is much darker than that.

The city is as rotten as the filthy inhabitants living in it. They scurry around, getting on with their lives, ignorant to what’s going on around them. Hell, my story will probably only ever be seen on the news once, a late night broadcast telling of a shooting or probably a police suicide. All too often, things are looked over, glanced at, never to be cared about again. If I’m lucky, there will be an inquest or some form of investigation. Knowing the way some of the cops here worked, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made up some story about drugs or a hit being behind my death.

The reason I’m up here is a twisting tale of deceit, corruption, treachery and blackmail. Dirty cops and vicious mobsters abound. Don’t expect to hear about me sparing lives and avoiding collateral damage. None of that mattered on my path. At all cost I wanted to accomplish my mission from the start. To clean up this stinking, rotten city. By whatever means necessary, they took away my livelihood, my freedom and my family. By any means necessary I was going to take their lives. I am Former Detective Elijah Burrows, now enemy of the state, Elijah Burrows. I did whatever I needed to get to this point and now all I wanted was to survive to enact my full revenge. But to understand why I’m standing on the precipice, teetering on the edge of a lonely death, you have to go back to the beginning, back when I was just moving up from being on the beat, to my first detective position.