Excerpt: Prince

My name is Bryant Conrad. I’m thirty one, UnBonded and am the chief of police for a third of Meric. I’m six foot five with short dark hair, sharp grey eyes and am rarely seen in anything other than a suit. I pay taxes, take dinner with the President. I live in a large house on the outskirts of a large town. It has a garden maintained by five gardeners who I’ve never met. My front room is meticulously ordered with a simple picture on the wall in black and white of my graduation from college. My parents are smiling brightly and I look embarrassed. People always say how we must be close.
That’s the part of me that everyone sees, the part of me that everyone thinks they know. The rest of me, the inside parts, are less common knowledge.
My name is Bryant Conrad. I go to the pub most evenings and drink enough that I can walk in a straight line but my thoughts don’t have to follow any kind of path. I took drugs when I was younger and wish I knew where to get hold of them now. I live in a huge house as far from the streets of town as I can be while still being the resident police chief. It has a large garden which I have walked through less than five times since buying the house three years ago. I’ve never visited many of the house’s rooms. My bedroom suite is covered with torn posters and a miniature armoury of weapons that I’ve stolen from police armouries over the years. It is a complete mess to the point where I kick through a pile of clothes on the floor each morning and have to smell them to find something clean to wear to work. When I start running out of clean clothes, I buy more and throw the first lot away. I fired all the in house staff when I bought the place because I like the quiet. My front room has been arranged very carefully to give the impression that I am an ordered man and a model citizen. There is a photo on the wall of my graduation where my parents look ridiculously overjoyed and I look like I would rather be anywhere else in the world. I haven’t seen any of my family since that day. They wouldn’t fit with the company I’m affiliating with.
At least, they wouldn’t fit with most of the company I affiliate with. The night I first met the boy who I knew only as Gabriel Prince in one of the seediest, most crime filled bars in the whole of Ellay, they would probably have fitted right in with their lack of schooling and their smell. The smell was the worst part of the slums where I grew up. The smell of urine, of depression, of thousand of people who couldn’t be bothered to get any higher in life than they already were. I was proof that it was possible, proof that just because you were born in the slums you didn’t have to stay in the slums.
“You want another one?” asked a bar man with more gaps than teeth and more brown than yellow in his mouth. His breath stank of rotten eggs and the rest of him wasn’t much better. “Yer empty.”
I looked down at the glass between my fingers and discovered that where there had been a very comforting glass of whiskey with three ice cubes there was now three eye cubes in a glass. Nowhere near as nice. I pushed it towards him. “Make it double. In fact, make it triple.” The idea being that the larger the drink was, the longer the gap before he came to fill it again and I had to look at his putrid face.
He pushed the glass back to me a few moments later, full to just below the brim with a wonderful golden liquid. If I was on duty I would have to arrest him already for serving me far more than the law allowed me to drink in one week, let alone one night. I pulled my torn and faded leather jacket tighter over a grey T-shirt which had probably been white when I bought it and thanked the Father, Son and Holy Ghost that I wasn’t on duty.