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Fresh blood trickles from the re-opened scabs on Jean Vicquemare’s knuckles. Cracked by his opening and closing and opening his hands, pressing his hand back to stretch his wrist. He doesn’t notice the blood until it stains his precious paperwork, smeared over some details of a report on a Frittte robbery.
“Damnit.”
Bright red, mixing with his nice fountain pen ink. In the light of the precinct it looks black, but in sunlight it’s a deep, royal sort of purple. It doesn’t escape him how the purple ink stains always covering his hands from poor technique mingle with the seemingly constant bruises from what he tells his coworkers is the unfortunate reality of the bloody-murder precinct.
He crumples the piece of paper. Throws it in the trashcan next to his desk – full of similarly stained and useless papers – digs through his files to find the same paper, begins filling it out again.
By the time Judit is leaving the station, it’s dark outside. Jean stares at his paperwork for the day scattered over his desk and decides this is a problem for later. He pulls his coat on and starts packing up – maybe today he can get out without being stopped, everyone has left by now, it’s so late – and then there’s the familiar feeling of Harry’s hand on his back, trailing up to his shoulder. He’s wearing too many layers to feel any warmth from him.
“Leaving, Jean?”
He glances over. The Lieutenant is standing just to his right, wearing his patrol jacket over a suitably obnoxious tie and half-bleached dark blue pants that are too tight around the crotch to be good for actually patrolling in. Street lights are visible outside but can’t quite shine through into the station enough for anyone around to see how close they are now.
“Just packing up.” Jean replies. Curt.
“So am I.”
Jean stares pointedly at the desk, the fountain pen he spent a bit too much money on, the little case he keeps it in. He tucks it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He does not shiver when Harry squeezes his shoulder, and he does not groan when he stands up straight and he feels Harry’s breath against his neck or his shitty, greasy, unkempt mutton-chops brush his cheek.
The buzz of the station generators is a little too loud tonight. His hand aches. Harry’s brushes over his bruised first knuckles, glides down to pause at his strained wrist. A bad punch.
“You look like you could blow off some steam.”
Not tonight. I can feel a hairline fracture in my hand. It’s been too long a day at work for this. My apartment is dirty. I haven’t washed my sheets since you came over two nights ago. There is still blood on my floor. I had not invited you.
“You sound fucking pathetic.” Is what leaves Jean’s mouth.
It would be better if Harry would scream, or cry. He slumps against the side of the bed in silence, panting like a dog, fresh bruises blooming across his ribs. There are no pretty or poetic words for what they are doing. It is violent and it is sick and there is a bloated corpse of a man bleeding out onto Jean’s floor.
The floors creak. “You sound like you want to hurt me.”
Harry drives his own car to Jean’s house. It’s more appropriate if they drive separately. Harry doesn’t particularly care about following fraternization rules, but Jean hears too many jokes about his “hetero-sexual life partner” to risk being seen driving Harry around well after dark. At least with his car there Jean can argue that he just showed up, as the Lieutenant is known to do.
No stars shine through the light-polluted sky of Jamrock. It’s all darkness, the color of arterial blood. Jean’s apartment is in the very back of the complex situated under a light fixture that’s been broken for months. Since Harry arrived one night, sweaty and clearly drunk, banged on Jean’s door, and when Jean didn’t respond, smashed the glass and wailed so loud it sounded like a banshee, screaming how he would cut his throat out, then and there.
Today there’s a pink note shoved into the crack of the door. It gets stuffed into Jean’s inside coat pocket, but not before he takes a glance at the big letters on the top – DISTURBANCE NOTICE – and is promptly filed away for later. The un-oiled hinges scream as Jean opens the door, and Harry comes tumbling in after him. He has definitely had drugs since leaving the precinct and arriving here. Jean sees it in his tremoring hands and too dilated pupils.
As soon as the door clicks shut, Jean finds himself pressed against it. Heavy breaths against his face, too hot, too wet, and the feverish look in Harry’s eyes is scarier than it is anything else. It’s fucking enraging, actually.
“You want me to beat you half to death and you can’t even be fucking sober to feel it?” He snaps. Hands dig into his sides.
The noise Harry makes in response is disgusting. A choking animal.
“I should be cleaning my fucking apartment. You’re out of your fucking mind, Harry. A disgusting fucking pervert not worth the shit on your RCM boots.”
Palpable silence falls over them. It’s broken by the thwap of Jean’s left hand – the unbroken one – making contact with Harry’s face. More of the damned gurgling, choking sound. The smell of sweat and body odor is too much. Jean shoves Harry back away from him and begins to walk into the kitchen. He can hear Harry standing there, panting.
Red stained sheets are laid out on Jean’s sofa, the closest they had made it to being washed at the end of the day when he came home from work yesterday and decided it was slightly more dignified to sleep on a bed with no covers rather than one soaked in blood. Then he realized the mattress looked even worse and slept on the floor, sitting upright, head propped against the corner of the mattress.
Harry had not taken the time to ask if he was okay before he left. Though Jean was hardly the one who needed checking in on after he’d kicked Harry so hard in the ribs he could have sworn he heard something crack. He had resorted to that after hitting him in the face at the wrong angle and losing the ability to move his finger right.
Harry had not offered to drive him to the hospital, but really, with the shape he was in, it was Harry who should have gone. Today Jean watched him hobble through the hallways of the Precinct politely informing everyone that no, really, he’s okay, just got roughed up by some drunks, you should see how those guys look right now.
Pick up the sheets, shove them into the washing machine while Harry is busy driving himself out of his mind. Don’t think too hard about the hungry look in his eyes. Don’t think about the groveling or the begging or the threats to himself. Do not think about the way his eyes are boring into your back now, how he so desperately craves suffering. Do not think about how you would like to give it to him.
Seven A.M., Thursday. Jean wakes up alone on his sofa with blood still under his fingernails. Two and a half or three hours sleep, by his guess. It’s still dark outside. The sun will rise in twenty minutes, but it never seems to be enough to break through Jamrock’s smog.
There’s not a trace of Harry’s presence anywhere. Of course he couldn’t have considered cleaning up after himself. His sheets are still in his washing machine, now mildewed, but Jean takes them out and hangs them outside his apartment window to dry anyway. It’s too much to think about rewashing them right now. One of the “open floor plan” kitchen/living room chairs is knocked over and more than slightly broken. Wood chips lay strewn across the floor.
He takes a broom, throws them in the trash, along with the broken half a bottle of the cheapest beer Frittte sells laying sadly on the floor. That had come into play at some point last night. There’s more than a little blood on it and a few droplets trailing out from it. By the shards of glass laying around it, he’d thrown it to the ground with incredible force. He doesn’t quite remember.
There’s more. The blood is already seeping into his floorboards and it’s too late to deal with it now. At seven forty-three Jean leaves for work in his usual black slacks and white shirt. Usually he would iron it out before, make it smell a little nicer, and for those first ten or so minutes it would hang pleasantly warm on his back, but he’s already late as it is so he piles into his MC and ties his tie while speeding down the highway.
Some of the lights are still off when he arrives at the Precinct – in fairness, most people avoid going to this job early, but the thought of the still incomplete reports tugs too hard at the back of his mind to wait any longer. He doesn’t turn any of the hallway lights on. Pryce gets weird about “unnecessary spending,” and the sun is finally starting to shine through the clouds and smog.
Jean walks down the dimly lit hall to the too-small office space dedicated to the Major Crimes Unit. His desk sits pressed against the window. Someone came through and tidied it slightly. Cheap ballpoint pens placed in the little cup he uses as a penholder, papers sorted by what case they’re for, nicely stacked on each other. As he looks over he realizes a couple case files he shouldn’t have left out have found their way back into his filing drawers.
Quick, clicking footsteps approach as he sits down and begins properly assessing what paperwork he has left before patrol. When he looks up, Judit is standing above him, leaning against the corner of his desk.
Something strange in her eyes. He doesn’t like the look she’s giving – pitying, the way her eyebrows have scrunched up and her hand covers her mouth.
“Jude.”
Judit Minot pulls a chair over and sits down at the edge of the desk.
“Are you … alright, Jean?”
He turns to face his desk.
“Just fine. Did you do this?”
“I did. There were some rather sensitive files out … Pryce would not have been happy. So I put them away.”
Hands flitting through his folders, Jean finds them immediately. She knows his organizational system..? Has she done this that many times?
“Why are you making that face?”
As soon as he points it out, Judit lowers her hand from her mouth and resets her face into a more neutral expression. There’s a sorriness in her eyes. She hadn’t meant to look like that, to put him on the defensive. Though Jean spends a fair amount of time on the defense these days.
“Did you stop by Processing before you came here?”
“What? No. Do you think I want to start my day staring at corpses?”
Her eyes soften sympathetically.
“You just… You and Harry haven’t had any murder cases?”
“Say what you mean, Judit.”
Judit’s mouth twitches downward slightly. She looks past Jean out the window for a second, turns and looks from her chair into the hallway to make sure no one is coming before her eyes settle back on Jean’s. That same strange look she made earlier is creeping back onto her features. Nose and eyebrows scrunched up.
“Jean, you smell like… well, like decomp. Are you okay?”
He turns away, stares at his papers. The pink slip that had been in his apartment falls out of his coat pocket as he reaches for his fountain pen. The fountain pen comes first – the pink slip is snatched up by Judit’s quick fingers as he places the pen down on his desk.
She places it in front of him wordlessly. With a little sigh she stands up, pushes the chair back to the other desk and turns to walk away. If she noticed Jean’s newly bruised knuckles she opted not to mention it.
Then he realizes why.
Lieutenant Harry du Bois strolls into the Wing. Well, strolls is a strong word for it. It’s more of a proud hobble, like a peacock with a broken leg. His typically brightly colored, obnoxiously patterned, wildly workplace inappropriate outfit is what really pulls it all together.
She makes that same face as Harry makes his way over to Jean’s desk, though this time it’s a little better hidden. Jean does not miss the way she glances over at him with brows knitted together and lips pursed to whiteness. Her jaw looks wired shut with the intensity she has it clamped down.
What’s clearly an attempt to cooly lean against Jean’s desk is more of a topple against it, Harry’s elbow hitting the corner a little too hard. He doesn’t seem to notice at all. His eyes graze over Jean’s paperwork, then catch on the pink slip.
Neither Judit nor Jean can catch him before he can pick it up. Despite the fact he’s clearly on too many stimulants to count, or maybe because of it, he moves just too quickly as he snaps it up off the desk. Jean can’t help his reaction – he’s tired, he’s angry, he had too long a night with too little sleep and that damn slip isn’t any of Harry’s business – he slams his hands down on the table and jumps slightly out of his chair towards Harry.
Harry laughs in his face.
“What is this..?” He murmurs. He turns it over in his hands, feeling it over for the opening. “Reaal snappy. Sattuhhh… officer.”
Of course Harry of all people would drive his ass to work even when he could barely speak. By the glance out the window it’s maybe eight-thirty, the Jamrock morning rush is finally starting to pick up for most people working normal hours at normal jobs.
“Not your business, Detective.”
His eyebrows quirk up. “Mmmhm.. souns like a job for the can-opener. Right, Judy?” The Expression is plastered over his shit-eating lips as if by subconscious instinct. It looks more like an animal snarl than a real smile.
Judit, for what it’s worth, appears to be too disgusted by the wafting smell of booze, must and body odor, plus that apparent decomp smell that Jean can’t seem to pick up, to be very concerned with being called Judy. She simply shakes her head and presses the heels of her palms to her eyes. Is she about to cry?
Harry shrugs. “Well, it’s not my job to listen to you.”
That’s it. Judit is about to turn, Jean sees her hands tucking into her pockets and the way she shifts her weight right as he lunges to hit Harry on the side of the head. The heel of his palm, the bony bit, the bit that hurts, makes contact just under Harry’s ear at the base of his jaw. The pink paper slips from his hand with a clear horrible popping sound from Harry’s jaw which now hangs strangely to the side. A slight pang of guilt when Jean remembers Harry already has issues with his jaw, and an even more worrying sense of satisfaction at the damage.
Harry just stands there staring blankly for a second. Finally it seems to hit what just happened and Judit puts a hand on the inside of his elbow, pulling him away. “Come on, Detective,” She says, voice quiet and gentle, “Let’s get you to the doctor. It’s not so bad. They’ll have you out in twenty minutes. Come on.” It’s lost in whatever is happening in his head. The gears are turning, Judit must see it too or she wouldn’t be growing increasingly insistent with her tugging on his arm.
He relents. Judit drags him out into the hallway. There’s no dirty look shot back at Jean, just a desperate pleading gaze as she rounds the corner.
A problem for later, Jean tells himself. An incident report will be filed, Pryce will have something to say about workplace behavior and whether he needs to be re-assigned, Jean will make his same argument about how many people can really put up with the Detective like this, and things will stay the same.
Judit comes back some fifteen minutes later. She barely spares a glance back towards Jean as she goes over to her desk, fiddles around in her drawer, and when she returns it’s with a tiny bottle of a delicate smelling perfume in hand.
She holds it out like an olive branch. Peace. It’s in no fancy glass container – cheap plastic tinted slightly yellow. The end is a rollerball rather than spray on. When Jean just stares blankly she sets it down on his desk and pats it a couple times. The pink slip sits unopened.
“So.. what is that?”
Jean glances over at it. “Oh. It was on my apartment door when I went home last night.. I haven’t actually checked.”
Judit pauses.
“Well, whenever you’re done with that, you should go. There was a call-in last night about some man who turned up dead on the side of the river.”
“I’m not a Detective,” He mutters, “That’s not my damn job.”
She looks sympathetic. Harry is out of commission, her eyes say, Pryce said it falls to you. Her mouth says, “I’ll go with you. It’s safest to have a partner out with you, and I don’t have patrol until this evening.”
“Right.” A pause. “Thank you, Judit.”
The pink slip – DISTURBANCE NOTICE – is all fine print on the inside. It’s all in legal jargon, but Jean gets the message as he skims it over. Loud noises at night. Terrible smell. Rot and mold. Tenant complaints. In the last paragraph, the one deviation from the typewriter script, in his landlord’s awful hand is “I understand you are an officer. I don’t want to get you in trouble, Mr. Vicquemare. But this is becoming a frequent complaint. I haven’t seen or heard from you … visit my office or I will tell your coworkers to check in on you and make sure you’re even alive.”
Two hours later, having braved the Jamrock traffic to get to the other side of the city, Judit and Jean stand over the river where the body was pulled out. The area has been cleared but the mud shows many, many footprints, and the body has clearly already been picked over by a few people. Desperate people, Jean tries to remind himself.
They step into the ankle-deep mud. Jean hems and haws about his slacks and nice shoes, the cleaning and repolishing he’ll have to do when he gets home.. Judit is silent.
She’s making the face again.
Jean pretends not to notice. “Do we have an estimate of when he died?” He asks. His thumbs are tucked into his pockets. Even if he doesn’t feel it, he can at least try to look professional.
Judit doesn’t even answer. Just stares at him.
“Ah. Um..” She catches herself, pulls her notebook from her little bag and flips through it. “Two weeks ago, we think. The water has been cold but something has clearly been picking at him. Not just people.”
“Right.”
“Jean, you really can’t smell that?”
So that’s what has her staring. And then the realization hits – Jean is standing over a two-week old decomposed body that’s spent a fair number of those days in the river running through Jamrock, and not only has he not reacted to the smell of the dirty water, something most residents at least turn their nose at slightly, he’s a foot away from this corpse and hasn’t shown a single sign of upset at all. No twitching lip, no furrowed brow. His eyes are watering from what must be ammonia by the sting but he can’t seem to smell it.
He takes a deep inhale. Leans a little closer to the body. Something he could justify as “closer examination,” and he supposes that really is what he’s doing as he takes another too-deep breath.
Absolutely fuck-all. He smells nothing.
Judit’s worried face. Her tense eyes. Harry’s wild-animal snarl, a smile with too many teeth. The stares from younger officers. The pink slip. The blood in his mattress, in his floors, his sheets that went unwashed for days. How long has Judit been looking at him like that without him knowing? How long has the pinched-face look of his coworkers he had put down to disdain been Jean looking and smelling like a walking corpse?
There is nothing he can do now. This is a problem for later, he tells himself. The little roll-on perfume Judit gave him sits in the inside pocket of his suit, along with his too-expensive fountain pen. He pulls it out and pops the cap open. This he can smell, sort of. Deep breath in. Coffee, and some fruity scent underneath. Mostly the smell of very strong coffee.
He rolls it under his nose. At least like this he can smell something. Then on his wrists – it’s been a while since he put in the effort, but he does know how this is meant to be used – and from there rubs it onto his neck, just under his jaw.
If he listens closely, he’s sure he can hear a little sigh of relief from Judit. At least today he’s actually been around a corpse to justify the smell of death wafting from him and his wrinkled suit.
“Come on, Officer. Let’s finish this up…”
“Right.” He snaps back to reality. The overwhelming smell of coffee.
Judit’s gaze is a bit softer.
“You smell better already. Please use that again before you come into the station. And get a shower.”
“Yes.”
That night, in Jean Vicquemare’s apartment. Blood rots his floorboards. He tries to ignore the fear pulling at him that there’s maggots in his mattress. When he moves, is it springs digging into his back or bugs?
His blazer is haphazardly thrown over one of his chairs. The coffee scented perfume is held against his nose, cap popped off to expose the rollerball. A deep breath in. The smell of coffee. He pulls it from his face. Blood stains the thin blanket pulled up over his legs. Darker, redder blood is on the edge of the bed. An unclean knife sits in his bedside drawer.
He keeps the bedside lamp off so he doesn’t have to look at it.
Another deep inhale of coffee scented perfume.
Another deep inhale of his rotting sheets.
The chemical reactions from the rot bring tears to his eyes. There’s jargon for it – jargon he can’t remember now at just past two in the morning. But he doesn’t gag or feel bile rising in his throat.
Another breath of coffee scented perfume.
He presses his face fully into the sheets, buries it in them.
He smells absolutely nothing.