Whatever Murder landed on, it was soft, it was wet and it was still warm. He bit into it and an acidic green fluid oozed out of the organ and into his mouth. Disgusting, thought Murder. He burrowed a little deeper and found the liver, which was much more palatable.

  A lifetime of trauma flowed into Murder. His name was Pedro Rodriguez. He remembered being happy as a kid. He used to ride alongside his father, who was the only taxi driver in their small town. He drove pregnant women to the hospital. He put bells on the car and drove cousins and second cousins to their weddings in the local chapels, which somehow seemed to outnumber the residents. Everyone knew his father’s name. He was honest, and happy, and a loving father.

  When the wall was built, everything changed. The cartels moved their supply lines farther east, straight through his town. After a few months, Pedro remembered being told that it was too dangerous to ride alongside his father, but he didn’t understand. Then one day, his father didn’t come home. There was a funeral. They had to hire a taxi from the next town over.

  Two years after his father was killed, when Pedro was just twelve years old, not even a man, he remembered being approached by a man who smelled of cigar smoke and cheap aftershave. He offered him a chance at revenge. Until that point, he hadn’t even considered it. He was still just a kid, an innocent little kid, but they gave him a gun and an address and waited with his mother and sister until he made the hit, or died trying. There was no going back after that, not really. He made the hit, if you can call it that. He shot an unarmed man down in his living room in front of his family. There was a boy there not much older than he was when he lost his father. Somebody on a waiting motorbike took him home, but the boy who walked through the door wasn’t the same as the one who had left.

  ***

  “What the hell is this doing here?” said the officer, wearing plastic bags over his shoes and standing in a space between bodies.

  Murder was lifted, wriggling and bloody, into the air by his tail. “Is this some kind of gang message?”

  “I thought it was standard gang etiquette to leave behind a horse’s head,” said a feminine voice from behind a mask that matched the woman’s chic forensic personal protective equipment.

  “What are you talking about?” said the male officer. “Gangsters don’t go around lugging horse heads everywhere. A little fish like this is concealable. Much more convenient.”

  Their eyes met for a moment; it looked like the woman was smiling under her mask.

  “Detective Florenz,” he said, holding out his hand and making a gloved fist by way of introduction.

  “Inspector Cole,” she replied, meeting his gloved fist with her own and giving it a light tap in the way that people do when they have something disgusting on their hands.

  The two paused and examined the scene around them as Murder dangled and gasped for breath.

  “What a mess,” said Detective Florenz. “Glad I’m not in forensics today. You lot have your work cut out for you, that’s for sure.”

  “I feel sorry for the crime-scene cleaners. They get the worst of it,” said Inspector Cole. She leaned in and took a closer look as the detective held up the wriggling little gut grockle for her inspection. “Garra rufa, aka doctor fish or nibble fish. A freshwater fish usually found in spas, not intestines. Okay, technically they’re probably found in the intestines of bigger fish all the time, but finding one alive, swimming around in the body cavity of a recent murder victim, is very unusual.”

  “What do you want me to do with it?” asked Detective Florenz, holding the fish out as far away from himself as possible.

  “Pop it in some water and then, I don’t know… There is a foot spa nearby. See if they’ll hold on to it for us, in case we need it for questioning,” replied Inspector Cole.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Ha, questioning,” the detective laughed. Then, locating a rather beaten-looking wide-mouthed bottle, the policeman half filled it with tap water and plopped the bloody little fish inside. “Any idea what went down?” he asked.

  “Looks like Hell’s Spawn invited a bunch of other gangs over and ambushed them,” said Inspector Cole.

  “That tracks with what we know so far,” replied Detective Florenz. “The guy in the tracksuit missing the back half of his head is Dimitri Vashenko. A real piece of work. Not even his mother is going to miss him. The guy on top of the pile I can’t recognize without a head, but judging from the boots and the swastikas on his arms, he was a member of the skinheads.”

  “Looks like he doesn’t meet the minimum entry requirements to be a skinhead,” said Inspector Cole.

  “No, he doesn’t, does he,” said Detective Florenz. “Not after he found a really quick way to take off his hat. But we have two men in custody. Responding officers found one guy sleeping right where you’re standing, and another man,” the detective shuddered slightly, “…ex-man, unconscious by that puddle of blood, piss and tears over there by the back door.”

  “X-Man?” asked Inspector Cole, raising a well-defined eyebrow. Inspector Cole had reasoned that if she was going to spend all day wearing a mask that covered most of her face, then developing and maintaining a strong eyebrow game was of the utmost importance. “Was he wearing a costume?"

  Detective Florenz was staring at a patch of blood on the ground and shaking his head, apparently unaware that he had been asked a question.

  “X-Man, like the comic books?” Inspector Cole repeated, putting one eyebrow down and raising the other, turning her head slightly as she did so.

  “No. The other kind,” replied Detective Florenz. He took out his phone and showed Inspector Cole the image that was doing the rounds among the more jaded officers back at the station. Usually it was his colleagues from highway patrol who shared pictures of decapitations for the shock value. This was worse.

  “What a mess,” agreed Inspector Cole.

  “Alright, I’m heading back to the station,” said Detective Florenz. “I’ll swing by the foot spa on the way and see if they can confirm the species or ask if they noticed any fish go missing.”

  “See you at the next homicide,” said Inspector Cole, returning to her work poking yellow rods through every bullet hole she could find in the walls.

  In the harsh sun of the early afternoon, the detective parked his cruiser in the small parking lot across from Mr Whiskers Fish Spa, Salon and Cat Petting Center and approached on foot, carrying Murder in his plastic bottle.

  Through the pink hue of the water, Murder could see that the lights were off and the door was closed. A rather rattled-looking Sally had closed the shop early after her run-in with Hands and Derrick.

  Detective Florenz rapped at the door.

  “Hello? Is anybody there?” the detective called out. He put his hand to his head in a lazy salute and pressed it against the glass to get a better look inside. “Looks like no one’s home.” He turned around and started walking back to his car.

  Murder was so close, he could probably leap out of the bottle if he really tried. But then what would he do? He considered his options. The detective would probably try again tomorrow. He concluded that the best thing to do was to sit tight and wait. Then Murder noticed that they weren’t quite making their way straight to the car. If they continued walking in a straight line like this, they would miss the car by maybe fifteen feet. Curious, thought Murder, then he saw what they were walking directly towards and regretted not taking his chances when they were closer to the front door.

  “Well, I tried,” said the detective, “but I’ve not got time for this shit.”

  Murder started tumbling. The water no longer sat in the bottom of the bottle; it clung to the sides as it spun, and for a split second Murder remembered what it was like to surf the waves of Hawaii, to be in the open ocean and experience the thrill of standing in the middle of a tube of roiling angry water. In the midst of the swirling chaos, Murder found his center. He was the order in the chaos, he was the harmony in a sea of discordance, and he would wash over this planet like a tidal wave.

  Reality, and ten fluid ounces of bloody water, came crashing down on Murder as his tumbling little bottle came to a violent squelching stop. A grid pattern of light penetrated the darkness, revealing what looked like the inside of a stormwater drain. Murder examined his surroundings. He was still in his lidless plastic bottle, which now lay on its side, and most of his life-giving water was now a rapidly evaporating puddle. He was at the bottom of a five-foot vertical shaft that was covered at the top by a steel grate at least an inch thick, with a curbside gap that was maybe six inches wide. Mr Whiskers could probably fit through that, but getting back out would be tricky. To his left and his right, a wide pipe, maybe one foot across, stretched into the darkness. Even though Murder could still feel that he was part of the collective, for the first time since he spawned in this world, he felt alone.

  “Mr Whiskers? Sally? Anybody?”