The apartment's dirty. The apartments always are. Sam sighs, glad that the smell of the cigarette he smoked on the way over still clings to his raincoat and his hair and covers the scent of mould and desperation. There's a window broken, gauzy curtains flapping listlessly in the drizzly afternoon, a mangy ginger cat yowling on the fire escape outside.

"So what've we got, then?" he asks Ted, the beat cop who radioed in the scene. Sam's never liked Ted, who takes crisp envelopes under the table from Sharkey's boys and sleeps around with the girls they pull off the pavement on Bagshot Row, and Ted hates Sam for making detective and getting a nice little office all of his own.

"Not a lot. Couple of photos stuck behind the radiator that we fished out, some old newspapers stuffed in cracks in the bathroom walls. Looks like they cleared out at least three days ago."

Sam nods, then proceeds to ignore Ted entirely as he wanders the room and runs his finger through the dust on the cracked kitchen counter. The photos are strewn in a heap, some stuck together from the wet in the air. The faces in the pictures are ones Sam has come to know as well as his own over the past three months.

Frodo Baggins and Rosie Cotton. Stupid small-time kids, Sam's got it from all accounts that the fella, at least, was a junkie. Usually to be found borrowing the cash registers from diners and liquor stores, or the occasional larger scam in conjunction with two or three other no-hopers. There were thousands of couples just like this Frodo and Rosie in the city, and Sam had seen them come to all sorts of ends a thousand times before.

But these two were different. These two had managed to outrun half the force week after week after week, and most of the underworld was on their tails too. When the wolves and the foxes are both after your blood, you don't stay alive in the forest for long, yet somehow they were.

"Why did you do it?" Sam asks the snapshot of Frodo, wearing a singlet and suspenders with black pinstripe pants, laughing (had Rosie taken it? Were the pair lovers, brother and sister, enemies locked together?). "Why'd you take Mr Smeagol's ring?"

Of all the people to rip off, why rip off the Don of the biggest Family this side of anywhere? Why take the single thing most likely to bring a bloodhunt down on your heads? Why stay in the city, only a step ahead of those who pursued you?

Sam ran one exasperated hand through his hair and sighed, wishing there were answers to those questions locked inside this shithole of an apartment. Wishing there was an answer to why he couldn't get these two stupid kids out of his head, out of his dreams.

~

Pretty Good Year | email Mary