Hardline

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

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I got out of the car, stepping straight into a blast of cold wind and little snowflakes that nipped at my face as they flew in at me. I looked around, didn't see anyone in the parking lot except Duffy, stepping out of our parked car with his hand on his gun and the same expression of skepticism that's been etched into the lines of his face since his face first had lines. A huge fat motorcycle was parked near the sidewalk, but otherwise our vehicle was the only one in sight. I drew my gun, and so did Duffy. I had never been in a gunfight at all before that day, but Duffy had seen his share. He was a combat veteran before he even joined the FBI, and he'd been in a few dicey situations as a special agent too. The sum total of my combat experience up until that day involved getting in a street-fights as a young punk, although those can be bad enough as I well knew.

I cross-stepped up to the wall of the motel and creeped as close to it as I could, without ever stepping directly in front of the window. The music was even louder from out here, and I could tell what it was now. I think the previous track was Minor Threat, but the one they were playing as I approached was really old “Oi!” punk from England, the Angelic Upstarts. Oi! music is sing-along punk, the kind of stuff skinheads and soccer hooligans would be into. In their own way, these guys were just as far behind the times as Jim Duffy himself. The UT guys were playing “Murder of Liddle Towers,” a relatively reflective song by punk standards. Almost an Oi! ballad you might say. It's about a man who got killed by the cops back in 1976, but not being a cop exactly I didn't take it personally.

I hadn't spoken with an Angelic Upstarts fan in at least a decade, and I never expected to meet another one considering that I was probably the only agent in FBI history who had ever listened to them. They weren't really a big deal even back in the day, at least not compared to bands like the Clash and the s*x Pistols. Pretty much restricted to the skinhead scene - but they weren't a racist band, so that didn't help me narrow down the Ultima Thule ideology much.

The thing is, the music selection didn't tend to support the CI's story. It was the kind of thing Blank Reg from Max Headroom would have played on “Big Time,” that show he ran from an old van on the outskirts of the city. Nostalgia punk, not fanatic anti-government militia music. Whatever that would sound like.

But then there was the quiet bit. In the middle of the song, Mensi's voice drops down to a whisper and all you can hear is him repeating himself over and over while the drums keep up a slow backbeat and the guitar drops back to a faint, insistent melody.

I slipped back into my own memories when I heard that voice, a place in my head I rarely let myself go back to. That night when the squat got evicted at last and the scene broke up, the end of an era and the end of the punk rock chapter of my life. We had a wrecking party, trying to see who could knock the biggest hole in the plaster with whatever we had at hand – our fists, our feet. And Duffy was right. The “A” in the Chaos Factor graffiti was in fact in a circle, and I smashed my fist right through that circle and won the championship wall-wrecker title for life. Popov Pete, on the other hand, was not quite so lucky. When he kicked at the wall he bounced right off it, took three steps backward and then fell over, unconscious on the floor with his open bottle of Popov in his right hand and his pink liberty spikes pointing back in the opposite direction like the needle of a compass.

It happened at the exact same moment in the song, a song I had never heard once in all the years since then. The song goes quiet and Mensi whispers, and the word he whispers is murder and he just keeps repeating it:

“Murder... Murder... Murder... Murder...”

On the night of the wrecking party we all started laughing, because it was so funny to see Pete collapse and fall down right when Mensi started in like that. Maybe it wouldn't have been murder exactly, but looking back on it, it probably would have been considered manslaughter if Pete had actually died from knocking himself out and we hadn't done anything to get him help. But then he woke up and started laughing right along with us and everything was fine.

Nobody laughed this time, though. When the quiet bit in the song started, I heard our CI screaming.