Chapter 7

Lucy had an uneasy feeling of Déjà vu after she saw the figure of the dirty blonde girl sashaying up the stairs in the whore house up on Front Street. It wasn’t the familiar sight of a female heart-shaped ass that caught her attention, it was the way the girl swung her hips from side to side like some dark-skinned girl from uptown in one of those disgraceful cribs that treated all the girls with callous lack of respect.

It reminded her of her shameful days undercover as a mob girl and the things she had done to get the intelligence they needed to put of a lot of bad boys behind bars. She had done her best to cover for Tony, the young criminal because she was a bit soft on him for personal reasons. Unfortunately, he still got a long stretch for some things that couldn’t be covered up or excused by law enforcement.

She had been getting steady cock lately from “The Professor”. He was super nice and actually was really more of her sister’s boyfriend than hers. Thankfully, her sister was always generous in sharing her toys with her and it extended even to male admirers as well.

The recent assignment to the prosecutor’s office downtown as a female investigator came as a surprise. Lucy figured that her work undercover was a good background for that sort of high leverage job in law enforcement. One of the things she had insisted on during her undercover stint had been the absolute avoidance of “wearing a wire”. She had seen what happened to girls that had attempted the feat and were caught red-handed by the mob enforcers.

It was not a pretty picture.

Yet, the very first day at the prosecutor’s office, some pimply-faced young guy was extolling the value of wiring up all confidential informants because it was the most reliable evidence in a court of law. She didn’t deny that it was far better to have the words recorded on a physical tape for the judge or the jury, but the risk of wearing a wire was so great that she vowed she would never go into a meeting wearing anything remotely resembling a wire.

The prosecutor’s office was in a gleaming new building downtown with all the bells and whistles and with an assortment of young ambitious go-getters that were willing to do anything to grab the golden ring.

Lucy had been on that merry-go-round of hustling for fame and fortune ever since she could remember.

It was sort of a kick in the teeth to discover that all she was slotted to do was to show up at the new office and check in and then get bus fare to the “auxiliary office” located in a part of town that was a lot less desirable and with dangerous streets that reminded her of her undercover days. Apparently, the department was broken up into the “political side” and “the criminal side” and she had been stuck into one of the “criminal side” slots because of her law enforcement background.

One of the friendly long time employees told her, “The main office is for the hot-looking college chicks and the guys that swing both ways. You want a promotion or a desk with a window or a view, you go downtown and stick your ass up for grabs for any supervisor with some juice to get you a piece of the pie. Here, you get your ass in a sling and hope none of these pricks take a bite before you get your metal jacket on.”

Lucy smiled and got the gist, but didn’t understand the truth in those telling words.

The building was old but serviceable.

It had obviously seen better days. The interior of the building was actually an open air compound that was like some cage in the Bronx Zoo. There were trees of an exotic origin with little placards in brass that gave all the particulars. The garden paths were cobble stoned and Lucy swore they looked a little like the “yellow brick road” in the “Wizard of Oz”. It was a film of her younger years that was a favorite of her mother. Her mother had viewed that silly movie at least once a year, ever since she could remember, and it seemed so silly to her that she had literally gotten turned off by even the mention of it in casual conversation.

Each side of the interior park had an elevator bank that appeared lined with glass and iron framework. The four elevators had a back-up set of marble stairs right next to them and Lucy took the stairs instead of one of the ancient elevators because she enjoyed the exercise and there were only four floors to the building. She was disconcerted by the fact that people walking on the interior walkway that connected all of the offices on all four levels could sometimes be heard on the other side of the quadrangle because of the acoustics that did strange things in the dry atmosphere. Females wearing high heels were afflicted with the loud click-clack of their heels hitting down on the marble tile decks. Those walkways were all resplendent in black and white tile squares that reminded her of an old movie about some crooked cop that had a gun bigger than his cock and was afraid of heights. She had always had empathy for the not quite handsome character because she had the exact same phobia.

The offices of the prosecutor were located on the fourth floor and took up the entire length of one of the sides of the building. The runner that worked with the receptionist was a young girl with long blonde hair and a lisp that made her seem a lot younger than her actual age. She showed Lucy that all of the offices had a hallway that connected them together so you could walk from one office to another without disturbing anyone in a private meeting and you didn’t have to go back out on the open air walkway with the hint of being a penal colony with public viewing of every move no matter how slight.

It was obvious to her that this auxiliary office was populated by the worker-bees of the prosecutor’s office. It was the den of the drones that did the actual work. The downtown office was all glitter and front for the public relations aspect of political survival and the strange building in a sleazy part of town was the nuts and bolts of the entire operation.

Lucy was assigned to Team Charlie.

She assumed there must be a Team Alpha and a Team Bravo, but she didn’t see any signs to signify their existence and she figured it was none of her business anyway. Her stint undercover had trained her not to question things that didn’t need to be questioned and not to say a fucking word before you really thought about the consequences of what passed your lips as it related to your grasp on fragile reality in a land of hidden meaning.

The runner, a tasty little dish called Trixie told her in a somewhat muted tone of voice, “They don’t fuck with Team Charlie much because that’s where they send the weirdos doing their thing behind the scenes.”

At first, Lucy was mystified by Trixie’s words but she soon grasped the fact that Team Charlie was the catch-all department that acted as the cosmic glue for most of the cases and they were the ones that tried to put the pieces back together if humpty-dumpty fell off the wall of legal give and take. Now she was a part of that unit and she hoped that it would be a lot less dangerous than her undercover assignment.

Trixie sat next to her on the padded bench that ran the entire length of the hallway outside the bank of private offices. All of the office doors were thick, solid wood. She suspected that there was a metal section inside the wood panels that acted as a virtual shield against a forced entry. The glass cutout in the center was filled with a type of glass that one saw in laboratories or in prisons with that cohesion that prevented breaking or shattering in the expected reaction of glass to hard knocks. There was no chance of breaking, chipping, or smashing this composition of alloys without some tools of destruction better suited to a war-zone rather than a private office in the bad part of town.