W. 228th Street, between Kingsbridge Avenue + Broadway

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

With a kind of smoldering magnesium heat, Tiny Schwarzbaum is reminded once again why he hates pairing. It's not Big Bug he hates, pumping data from the TacWomb in the precinct basement. Tiny's never met his partner. As far as he knows, Big Bug is just some crippled shlub floating in a saline tub with nutrient feed in one arm, catheter up his putz, and sensor machines from the NYPD's Unified Tactical Platform where his face and shoulders should be. The poor bastard's whole world is a network of unmanned aerial drones, broad-spectrum scanners strapped to stationary balloons, and a time-share with the Port Authority for the antique Anti-Terror Hazard & Espionage Net Assessment satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the city. Somewhere in the maze of bacterially-grown circuits and artificial neurons that make up his prosthetic upper body, is the pairing mechanism that let's poor Big Bug communicate with Schwarzbaum. So how can he hate? Big Bug is just a messenger.

What six-foot-seven Schwarzbaum hates is the crawling sensation every time his partner squirts strategic goo through the ether: feeling of ticks and fleas at the back of his skull. For instance, Schwarzbaum feels fairly John Wayne-ish standing over his eighth kill of the afternoon, the middle of this big old abandoned mattress factory on W. 228th Street. Then Big Bug shoots him an overhead infra-red scan indicating the guy he actually came for is huddled behind an nearby aluminum door, with a heat source Big Bug announces as a Magnetic Accelerator Cannon. All of Schwarzbaum's three-hundred and eighty-four pounds of swagger evaporates into the creepy crawlies. Roughly then, the hate starts pumping, and his brain starts shutting down in segments, starting with Patience, then Self-Control.

"Such a way to make a living," he mutters, flexing the segmented metal of his prostheses around the the aluminum door's hinges.

By then, Big Bug drops a kind of siren alert that the MAC is powering up, and while he may mean well, it goes off like an instant migraine. Schwarzbaum, kraken of the fighting 50th Precinct's (nearly) vestigial Vice Squad, quite literally staggers. The segmented chrome tentacles where his arms should be writhe like garden snakes. Pairing doesn't give him eloquence to express himself meaningfully to Big Bug. Instead, he remembers what it was like to have hands, envisions callused hairy mitts clearly, and has them fold neatly into two great 'fuck yous', which he sends tumbling down the pipeline. Big Bug responds with something like bruise-colored lights. Schwarzbaum tightens his shiny tentacles around the door, and pulls.

And there is Mitty Baptiste, narcotics chief of Jesus Christ's Ecstatic Army of Truth, foxholed behind a desk that looks like some kind of military surplus salvage, the MAC's tripod planted neatly at its center. Schwarzbaum is stupid with hate at this point, and doesn't waste time with peaceable parlay. Baptiste's JCEAoT has run enough rainbow-colored powders through the Bronx's under-12 demographic to fuel a continuous hallucination through the next millennium. His addled minions have torched the Bronx's oldest masjid, three Mormon temples, a Sikh community center, and the regal old Catholic Church up by Castle Hill. The more mature members of his militia (which is to say, the ones who have survived Baptiste's unique cocktail of religious frenzy and low-grade chemical run-off) have turned to running numbers, hacking Federal data trunks, identity invasion, prostitution, organ-theft, and racketeering. The Organized Crime Task Force has tagged Baptiste as the kind of virulent human plague New York City can no longer tolerate.

But worse, he hasn't split his profits with the proper authorities at the 50th Precinct.

Meaning whatever gripes Tiny Schwarzbaum has about pairing will have to wait until he's got Mitty Baptiste by the throat.

And squeezes.