Morally Ambiguous (Lo longer being updated)

Chapter 2

The door slammed shut behind me as I began my journey across to the precinct. My wife Sarah had been whinging to her friends about how hard it is to find a good job, and how she’s stuck with her horrible colleagues so my goodbyes went unanswered. It didn’t matter anyway; I would have ignored her response if she had replied. The car was still at the garage after she smashed into the back of someone. Not only did I have to pay for his whiplash and car repairs, but now I had to take the subway to get to bloody work.

Sometimes I wished that I had gone back to the UK, where I was born. When I was fourteen we moved over here for Dad’s business. To this day I still don’t know what he actually did for a living. After living in semi-rural South Wales for half my life, I still had a bit of an accent and was still getting used to the US’s way of pronouncing things. I have always despised the way they say “Aluminum”. How hard is it to add an extra i?

Even then I wanted to join the police, long before emigrating. The police back in Britain were a lot less interesting and exciting than over here which I guess influenced my decision to stay quite a lot. At least now I had a family, a stable income and I was just about used to living in New York. The subway was still a nuisance though. I left with plenty of time to spare before work, enough to grab a coffee before being crammed into an overcrowded carriage filled with the stench of body odour and homeless people.

After reaching the nearest Starbucks, I grabbed a quick latte to go and jogged off to the train with three dollars less in my pocket. I often wondered what made Starbucks so special and different to other Coffee shops. Most of the time, it tasted worse. With my too milky coffee in hand, I boarded the subway up to the precinct and hopped of at the station.

The precinct was only five minutes away and I had fifteen before I needed to be there so I took it slow, sipping at the frothy, weak coffee. The slightly bitter taste swilled around in my mouth as I stared up at the type of buildings that made New York City famous. Highrises blocked out most of the sky, like towering walls of steel and glass. It really made you feel quite small in the world looking up at these imposing hulks of metal. I took comfort in the fact that I was helping to protect these massive behemoths of buildings and this world famous city.

Even with all the tourism and trade bringing vast wealth to the city, it was still rife with poverty and litter. Everywhere you looked there was someone busking on a street corner or sitting under the shelter in front of shops. It was a shame that even in this day and age, poverty still affected even the richest of first world countries. With all the crowds of people moving through every day, it wasn’t even like the homeless got noticed, trampled underfoot by the masses of workers.

At least this was a nicer area. Some of the places I had patrolled were wretched, grimy places with boarded up windows and sofas in their front gardens. That was where I did most of my detective work now too. I was Narcotics division, and in these little hell holes, drug dealing was prevalent. You couldn’t walk five paces without smelling a different illegal substance, from marijuana to cocaine. Dealers found solace in these places, they could lay low and make the poor poorer, dragging them into their debt and forcing them to help repay it by stealing or mugging people. In my opinion, drug dealers were the worst species on the planet. Scum sucking bottom feeders making their money off the addictions and misery of the less fortunate, drawing them into a shady underworld whose shackles they would find difficult to escape from. My job was to stop these evil criminals, and I relished in it.

As I reached the precinct door, it automatically swung open for me and I stepped into the main foyer, flashing my badge to the woman on the front desk. I stepped into the wide open room through the right hand door, filled with computers and desks for each cop. I wandered up to my desk, adjusted the height on my chair and sat down to read my emails. The chief wanted to see me as soon as possible.

Not taking a chance at getting him mad, I wasted no time on logging out and briskly walking up to his office, where my partner Sam was already waiting for me. As I sat down, the chief addressed us.

“Hello, Sam, Elijah. We are temporarily transferring you from the Narcotics unit to Organised Crime for these cases.” He handed us a dossier each, filled with drug dealer profiles.

“We are getting more and more confessions from drug dealers, mentioning that an organised group is trying to draw them in and take a cut of their money for protection. It’s got to the point where they are happily confessing to their crimes if it means we take them in to custody and get them away from the group. Things are obviously bad and we need to stop these men before they start building this drug business into something really big. There are some leads and everything else you need to know in there and we’ll notify you if anymore dealers come in the door but now you’re on your own to put these guys behind bars. Sorry about the short brief but I’ve got some things to attend to and a very busy day ahead of me. You alright with that?”

We nodded, stood and left the room. Straight on the job, we both stepped outside into the forecourt and went our separate ways to pursue some leads. I was going to go after a guy who used to be an organised crime informant and Sam went off to find out what he could in the dark, dingy districts, where the drug trade festered and grew like an infection on the city.

I had got no information out of any contacts or leads on the lists and the frustration at this futile attempt to find the group was becoming unbearable. Just as I was getting to the point of giving up, my phone began to ring. It was Sam with some brilliant news. They had brought another drug dealer in. And this one looked like he was willing to co-operate.