Excerpt: Murder Ink

“You got some kind of explanation for why you were pissing in my deep sink in the hallway?” Lt Fisher asked with quiet menace.
I looked around the room at the florid faces floating in and out of focus. The precinct captain looked particularly angry. He had that look one gets after a high, hot and heavy enema. He had just spent 20 grueling minutes in front of a relentless press, and an even more grueling hour listening to the Mayor vent. An avalanche of shit was going to roll downhill, and I was sitting at the bottom watching its approach with drunken aplomb.
“You ain't got a sink in your office,” I slurred defiantly.
Fisher's face went from red to puce. The throbbing veins in his forehead writhed under his skin like fire hoses running amok.
“You're fired, you drunken fuck!” he roared. “Give me your shield and firearm now!” “And take that uniform off!”

“Piss off, I don't have any civvies with me.”
“Frankly, I don't give a rat's patootie if you go bareass and ballnicky into the street. If you don't take it off I will have “B” squad come in here and remove it for you. You are an utter disgrace to this city and its police force and I will not have someone see you and think you are still employed here.!”
Somewhere in the back of my head, someone was moaning piteously in despair. Seven long years of failure and frustration had just come to a disasterous conclusion. It was an impossible outcome for someone with my skill and training to fail so completely. And yet I had. Twenty people had been killed, the latest of them in front of a crowd of eyewitnesses. I had been standing about ten feet away, in charge of the security detail. We had blurred pictures of the perp. Dozens of different descriptions by hysterical witnesses. That's where the trail ended. No forensic evidence at all.
No fingerprints. No DNA. No motive. No criminal history. No discarded weapons at the scene. This man was a ghost. A gruesomely efficient ghost who left random body parts mixed in heaps of their own steaming entrails. There was never enough left to re-assemble into anything resembling a whole human corpse. The coroner had a nervous breakdown. The public wanted answers. All I had was questions and an empty bottle of Chivas.