The next day, there was an office memo put out about personal weapons. Everypony, even the report-reading analysts, were authorized to carry weapons, but now that someone might be hunting Shades, it became “suggested” that everypony arm themselves.
Various threats required various weapons to combat them. In this case, all signs pointed to an equine threat, so a gun made the most sense. We wouldn’t even need anything fancy, like silver bullets.
I didn’t own a gun of my own. Sure I’d grown up with them around, that was the kind of place Ponyville was, but when I left, things changed. You couldn’t have them at college and when I went to work in Mareami, all I did was sit behind a desk.
There was a small armory in every office, just in case. In cities where strike teams were based it was substantially larger. In Ponyville, it was run by the supply clerk, the same guy who you went to see to get paper and pencils.
I showed up at his desk. “I’d like a gun.”
He put a NAG Sauer 26 pistol down on the desk in front of me.
“Don’t I get a choice?” I asked.
“No, this model is federal issue. It’s the only kind we have.” He pushed some forms at me. I dutifully filled them out. It wasn’t like office supplies where you used them up and ask for more. The guns were put out on loan. You were authorized to keep and carry them. If you fired the weapon, you had to fill out more paperwork.
I finished inking the paper and picked up the pistol to inspect it. I knew my gun safety and didn’t do anything stupid. The pistol was empty.
“Do I get ammunition? How about a spare magazine?”
“More paperwork.”
I sighed. “Fine.”
After work that afternoon, I checked the yellow pages and found a shooting range. I briefly questioned whether it was worth the paperwork, but I eventually decided that I needed the practice.
The range was in a basement underneath a firearm and firearm accessories store. Before I went down, I bought a shoulder holster to put the gun in. The federal law enforcement agencies had begun to wear hip holsters under their suit coats, but I was old school.
Upstairs, the noise had vibrated the floorboards. Downstairs, it was deafening. It was a narrow room with concrete walls. The noise had nowhere to go. My earplugs helped only a little. I practiced quickdrawing from the holster a few times.
When I started shooting, a few ponies in the basement took notice, but quickly decided that I was nothing special. Let me hasten to add that I’m nothing terrible, either.
I left a while later, mentally figuring how long it would take me to fill out the ammunition expended form. I stopped to get a newspaper. It was time to get started on finding a place to live.
Forest startled me the next morning as I was going through a few apartment listings at my desk. They’d updated the front door barrier, and I hadn’t heard her thoughts as she entered the room.
“Looking for a place?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I’d gotten lucky the last time and had gotten an apartment from an outgoing Shade.
“Just remember, there are no perfect deals. Every place has its drawbacks.”
That was true. Some were too far away. Some were too small, even for one stallion. Some didn’t have parking for vehicles like mine. Some didn’t have parking at all. Some were the site of a notorious triple homicide. I had better things to do than deal with apartment ghosts.
While I was at work, though, I should probably think about work stuff. It was only day two of our partnership, but it seemed to me that Forest liked to dress casually. She played up her high school looks.
Since I had a gun now, I was probably going to be wearing a lot of suit coats. I kind of liked looking professional. Plus it would help me stay warmer in the oncoming autumn.
Forest and I were about to leave on another round of interviews when the red telephone rang. I picked it up.
“Harvest, when were you going to tell me you were back in town? You don’t call as often as you should.”
I was temporarily at a loss for words. “Mom…how did you get this number?” Forest heard me and looked surprised.
“Not even ‘hello?’ After you moved away, you didn’t come back to visit even once.”
“Mom, I’m at work. You can’t call me here.”
“Your cell phone stopped working.”
“I got a new one when I moved. I’ll give you the number, but you can’t call me between nine and five.”
I got her to agree to that and gave her my number. I was tempted to give her a false one, but that obviously wouldn’t do much good if she’d managed to get the number for the freaking Shade office. Besides, it wasn’t worth the hell she would give me.
“I think your mother is a security risk,” said Forest after I hung up.
“Well, obviously she knows things she shouldn’t, but it’s never come back to bite me before.”
“We should go down to the communications department and see who was dumb enough to give out your number.” She cracked her fetlocks.
“It won’t do any good. I’ve tried to find out how she does it before. Maybe there’s something that runs in the family.” I tapped the side of my head.
Forest shrugged. “Maybe.”
We grabbed a car again and went out. Ponyville does have a downtown section where traffic is heavy, but the Shade office wasn’t in it. After a dozen blocks or so, I realized there was somepony following us.
“You see that old blue car behind us?” I asked.
Forest shifted so she could look at the side mirror. “The ’85 Clopsmobile?”
I thought it was an ’86, but whatever. “It’s been behind us since we left.”
I turned at the next available corner. So did the car. “I suppose you have more experience with this,” I said. “What do we do?”
“Don’t take too many corners, you don’t want to make them suspicious. Get us to somewhere with no traffic.”
I wasn’t sure what she was doing. If somepony was following us, I personally would have gone into heavier traffic to make picking us out more difficult. I remembered Sunbeam and Chalk Line, the dead Shades. I also wanted to have more traffic around to discourage potential bad guys from shooting us.
Meanwhile, Forest had reached into the glove box and come out with a small video camera. Just because we were in charge of regulating the supernatural community didn’t mean we used stone age technology. The camera was provided in Shade cars for whatever agents saw fit to use it for. I had occasionally watched video reports where the camera was set up on the dashboard of a Shade car to record a chase.
In the mirror, I saw that the car was still following us. We had come to a mostly abandoned industrial complex on the south side of the city. Forest set up the camera facing backwards and told me to stop the car.
The other car rolled to a stop about fifty feet behind us. For a few seconds, nothing happened. My eyes were glued to the mirror and I clearly saw the passenger poke a Woozi submachine gun out the window.
Without waiting for advice from Forest, I slammed the accelerator pedal down. To my surprise, Forest jumped out of the car.
I grabbed the emergency brake lever and jerked the car around to go back. I heard the Woozi being fired. It abruptly stopped and there was a shriek that sounded only vaguely equine.
My hoof had never left the gas pedal and the car raced back to where I had left Forest. I saw that there was blood on the inside of the other car’s windshield.
I stopped the car and got out. At some point, my gun had appeared in my grip and I didn’t know how it got there. I came around the hood of my car, hobbling on three legs as I kept the gun up, and approached the driver’s side of the other vehicle.
The driver’s door opened and Forest tumbled out on top of the driver. He was a young stallion dressed in gangster clothes. She hit him in the face and then flipped him over and sat on his back. He moaned and didn’t seem inclined to move from that position.
I shoved my pistol back in its holster and looked into the car. On the passenger was another young gangster. He was slumped across the front seat and bleeding from the head. The Woozi was on the floor of the back seat. There was blood on it, so I guessed that was what he had been brained with.
Forest raised a hoof and licked blood from it. It didn’t look like her blood. I looked away, turning to go back to our car.
I put out a call to the Shade office and within a few minutes a cleanup crew came out. They put the two stallions in a van and drove their car away. I didn’t know where they were going and unless I was shoved into cleanup duty, I didn’t care.
Forest hummed as she got cleaned up so we wouldn’t have a mess inside the car. I was struck with how utterly nonchalant she was about violence. Don’t get me wrong, I would have gladly filled out the forms for every pull of a trigger if I thought it was warranted, but I guess she’d just had a lot more time to get used to it than I’d had.
With what had happened, it didn’t look like Forest and I were going to get the interviews done that day. I drove us back to the office. The adrenalin rush was wearing off, and I had to force myself to concentrate on the road.
We talked with Water Drop at his desk. Sunbeam and Chalk Line had been killed not that far from the office and we had been followed since shortly after we left, so it seemed likely that whoever was after Shades knew where our office was. In all the reports I had ever read, I didn’t remember anything like this happening before.
“Now that we know,” said Forest, “we can be on the defensive. Let’s bring in a strike team.”
“I wouldn’t mind, but headquarters is probably not going to approve that just to take out a few street thugs,” said Water Drop. “Right now, we’re going to move up personal weapons from ‘suggested’ to ‘required’ and put out information about what to be on the lookout for. Depending on what we shake out of the two stallions you beat up today, we’ll decide where to go from there.”
Forest and I got up to go. Water Drop said, “Song, nice work today. Peach, nice work for a desk jockey.” It was a rather backhoofed compliment, but I was okay with that.
Out in the office, we had to tell the story for everypony else. I was unused to the attention and told Forest that I would write the after action report while she socialized. I’d read enough reports at my desk back in Mareami that I knew what to write.
After action report by Harvest Peach
Subject: Forest Song and Harvest Peach's violent encounter
Two stallions followed Song and Peach away from the office, possibly with intent to kill them. After traveling to a location away from the public, Song engaged the stallions in hoof to hoof combat and subdued them. Peach provided moral support and called a cleanup crew.
End of report.
Report readers reserved the right to send the report back to the writer to redo it with more detail. Investigative agents usually tried to spend as little time as possible on the reports while still putting down enough so they wouldn’t get them sent back. I figured it was my duty to make my first report minimalist to test the readers.
The rest of the day, more ponies stopped by to hear the story than had come to meet us the entire first day. My report was sent back, so I expanded it to roughly double the length and it was accepted.
After work and taking Forest home, I went to see some apartments. I looked at one that was about the size of a closet and one with the history of water leaks. I was going to go see another one, but drove past when I saw the crime scene tape was still up. I found one I liked, but the only parking was three blocks away. In the end, I settled for the tiny one and agreed to move in as soon as possible.
When Forest walked into work the next day, she wore an unbuttoned shirt over her usual t-shirt. There was a wide black velvet belt studded with silver-colored adornments under it. I assumed it was decorative, until she took the shirt off to sit down at her desk and I saw that it was actually a pistol belt.
There was a revolver on one side and spare cartridges in loops on the other. I noticed that there were a few different kinds of ammunition, presumably to kill different things.
Despite everypony now packing heat, it was business as usual in the office. The intelligence gathered from the two thugs was in. Their leaders had told them to kill off Shades. They knew where our office was, but since they were low-level grunts, they hadn’t been told who we were. Meeting Forest had been a nasty surprise. Unfortunately, that ignorance worked both ways. They didn’t know who their leaders were working with or why. That meant we would just have to capture somepony who did know. Easy enough.
The trouble with that plan was that when the two stallions didn’t come back, the ponies we were after would know something was up and take steps to protect themselves.
Water Drop called a meeting with all the investigative agents. We needed to get the information and act on it faster. That meant we couldn’t wait for a cleanup crew, and we would have to do the interrogations ourselves. He distributed Shade-published manuals about forcing information out of somepony.
Forest told me she had helped write the manual, so she didn’t need to reread it. We came up with a list of ponies to go see and set out. I read while she drove.
The manual was illustrated, in case you couldn’t visualize what it took to do something like remove an eye with simple tools. I had never practiced amateur surgery before, and didn’t really want to start, so I figured I’d let Forest handle it.
The two guys we’d captured had given a few names and locations of where their leaders might be. It was a long shot that they would still be there, but it was worth a try.
The first name on our list was Steel Bolt. He had gotten the two thugs the Woozi. There were two places he might be.
At the first address, a young mare answered the door.
“We’re looking for Steel,” said Forest.
“I don’t know anypony named that.”
Forest shifted her posture like she suspected the mare was lying. As for me, I knew she was.
“Steel Bolt, your boyfriend?” I said. The mare stuttered a little, trying to think of something to say.
“We really need to talk to him. If you know where he is and don’t tell us, you can be an accessory. We’ll haul you both downtown.”
Luckily, we had the mare shaken. If she’d asked to see a badge, we might have had a problem. That might be something to have in the future.
She said, “He’s not here. He should be back soon, though.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
I went to move the car. If Steel had half a brain, he’d know something was up if he saw it parked in front of his place. When I came back, the mare was sitting in a chair in the kitchen while Forest leaned against the wall.
“This is Geo,” said Forest. “She says Steel keeps the guns under the bed.”
“Has he got anything back there now?” I asked.
“I haven’t checked.”
I went to find the bedroom. Sure enough, there were guns under the bed. Mostly pistols, a few sawed off shotguns, and a few submachine guns. It was quite a pile.
I came back out. Forest stopped talking to Geo and moved out the doorway as I came in.
“You’re better at this than I am,” she said, meaning getting information. She left the room.
“Better at what?” asked Geo.
“Waiting,” I said. “She hates it.”
“What are you going to do to Steel?”
“We just want to talk to him and find out about a particular weapons deal, although we probably should find out if those weapons under the bed are legal and arrest him if they aren’t.”
Geo fidgeted. She thought that they probably weren’t legal.
“Do you know anypony he hangs out with? Somepony we can go to if he doesn’t show up?”
She named a few ponies. I wrote it down in a small notebook. I kept it tucked in my hoof so she couldn’t see what I had written. With the addition of information she unknowingly gave me access to, I wrote down quite a bit more information than she said. I was even able to get a little about the ponies’ appearances.
Forest came in. “He’s here.”
I stood up but didn’t draw my pistol. Geo seemed like the type that would scream if I did. I just flexed my joints a little and got ready if I had to. Forest went to stand behind the door.
The key turned the already unlocked deadbolt. Did Steel expect it to be locked or was he not thinking about it? Did Geo usually lock it while he was gone? Had she unlocked it to let us in? I couldn’t remember.
The door swung open and Steel came in. He took a step inside and Forest slid a foreleg over his throat to cut off his air and put a hoof on his mouth to keep him quiet. In a matter of seconds, she had him on the floor, unconscious.
We borrowed the sheets off the bed and tied both his and Geo’s legs. She was probably not much of a threat, but she might get in the way. We sat both of them up against a wall and waited for Steel to wake up. Geo was crying quietly. Forest and I would let her go, but we couldn’t do that until after we finished talking to Steel in case she decided to tell his friends we were there.
Steel moaned and opened his eyes. He looked around, realized what was going on, and a panicked look crossed his face.
“You got a Woozi for a couple of guys,” said Forest. “Explain.”
To his credit, Steel didn’t play dumb. “They just wanted it, okay? They said they had some ponies to take care of.”
“That was us,” I said.
“Look guy, I’m sorry. I don’t have anything against you personally.”
“Do you know who does?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you heard anything about a large number of ponies being targeted? We aren’t the first to get attacked.”
“I’ve seen a lot of activity going on. I’ve got more business than usual.”
“Selling guns?”
“Right. And that’s all I do, no drugs.”
“Who have you been selling to?”
“It’s not like I keep a copy of the receipt. A lot of these ponies I’ve never met before. They just show up.”
“Is someone referring them to you?”
He thought for a moment. “Yeah, most of them have been coming from the Street Angels.”
“Tell us about them.”
“They haven’t been around very long. It’s mostly just roughing ponies up and small stuff. I’ve just done business with a few of them. I don’t know any of them personally.”
“Why have they been more active lately?”
“I don’t know. I’m not one of them.”
“Why did they come after us?”
Steel started to speak and then stopped. “You never told me who you were.”
“It’s not important,” said Forest. “We’re not going to arrest you, but you should really get into an honest line of work.”
With that, we left. “Why don’t we call the cops on him?” I asked after walking back to the car.
“Enforcing local and federal laws isn’t our job,” said Forest. “And if we called too many tips in, somepony would get suspicious.”
“It doesn’t seem right letting him go, especially after he sold a gun that somepony used to try and kill us.”
“I hate to use the Greater Good argument, but one small-time arms dealer isn’t worth risking the police learning that there’s a secret branch of the government out there.”
I supposed she had a point.
We went to check out the next name on the list, Chip Module. We didn’t specifically know who he was, but his name had been dropped by the two we’d captured, so we might as well go see him.
Module lived in a nice apartment building. It was a change from some of the places we’d been so far in the investigation. We used the cop bluff to get past the front desk and went up to his place.
The peephole went dark after we knocked on the door. After a moment, a stallion’s voice said, “Who are you?”
I quickly checked to see what answer he wanted to hear. “We have a message.”
“But who are you?” He was smarter than expected.
“Replacements. There’s been some trouble.”
A few seconds passed, and then the door opened.
Careful, he might have a weapon, thought Forest.
The window curtains were open and a lot of light was coming into the apartment. Module was partially hidden behind the door, in case it turned out we were there to jump him. We walked in and he shut the door.
He took us to a table in front of a window with a decent view. As I mentioned, it was a nice place. We all sat down. “Okay,” he said. “What is it?”
There wasn’t really a way we could keep bluffing. Forest pulled her gun and pointed it at him. It seemed like a decent idea, so I followed her lead.
“Actually, we were lying to you,” said Forest. “We’re the police, and we want you to tell us everything you know about the Street Angels.”
“I don’t know anything,” Module blustered, still surprised over the turned tables. Too surprised apparently to realize this was not standard for police.
“Then why did two stallions who tried to kill us know your name?” I asked.
“Wait, you’re cops? I didn’t know.” He knew that Shades were to be killed, but wasn’t told what Shades were. Now he thought we were some special branch of the police.
“Is there somepony bigger up the food chain that you’d like to turn in for a plea bargain?”
Module thought. He was in over his head and everything was happening too fast for him. He wanted out as fast as possible. Yes, there was someone he could give us. Silver Anniversary—
Before Module could open his mouth to say it, the window beside us shattered. Forest and I ducked to the floor instinctively.
Module slumped and fell out of his chair with a wet squish. Most of his head was missing. I felt a sudden rush of vomit and tried to keep it down. I was mostly successful, and swallowed what I couldn’t hold back. There was bound to be a police murder investigation now that Module was dead, I and couldn’t afford to leave clues like puke lying around in his apartment.
“Come on,” said Forest. We crawled out of range of the window and then bolted out of the apartment and back down to the street. She slowed down so I could keep pace, dialing her phone to call the office.
Forest looked up at the broken window and across at a building that was of similar height a couple of blocks away. It was an older office-type building with windows made of those thick glass blocks. We ran towards it.
“You can’t open those windows,” said Forest. “The shot had to come from the roof. You take the elevator, I’ll take the stairs.” I appreciated the chance to catch my breath. I ducked inside and pressed the button for the top floor. As the doors closed, I drew my gun and hoped nopony would stop the elevator on the way.
I stepped out on the top floor. Forest was already there, breathing only a little heavier than normal. Her gun was out, and she motioned me back into the stairwell. There was one more flight of stairs up, and then the door to the roof. The door was slightly open, letting in a sliver of sunshine.
We went up slowly and quietly. At the top, she nodded to me, and I pushed the door open wide as fast as I could. We both stepped out, covering the roof with our guns, but there was nopony there.
There was nowhere to hide on the roof. There was simply nothing there. I guessed that it was possible that somepony could have made it down to the street after firing the shot, but I doubted they would have had time to take care of their weapon, even if they were a pegasus. A city block is a 16th of a mile, and we were several blocks from Bob’s place. That was a couple hundred yards. Making a headshot at that distance required some specialized equipment.
Near the parapet closest to Module’s building, there was a large brass casing. It was a spent .50 caliber round. It could definitely have caused the damage to Module’s head. In the open neck of the casing was a piece of paper rolled up.
I pulled it out and showed it to Forest.
Forest,
Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to startle you. Who’s your friend?
Feather
“What in the world does that mean?” I asked.
Forest gritted her teeth. “It means we have a serious problem.”