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Detective Bradley leaned back in his chair. He stretched, and how I envied the bastard for that.

I didn’t envy Jenny Kim, though. Unlike most snakes, Bradley obviously relaxed before striking. He was, I guessed, about to make his big play.

Jenny, cut off mid-explanation, blinked in wary confusion.

Then Bradley leaned forward, reaching across the table fast and hard to point his finger right in her face.

She shied back, but there was nowhere to go.

“Let’s start again,” he snapped. “With the truth.”

She stared at him for a moment. “I’m telling you the truth!” she said, panic creeping into her voice at last.

Bradley smirked.

“It was a good plan, Jenny. Bring in a bag full of old leaves. Fake a transaction. Hand the cash over to an accomplice… and then go crying that it was fairy magic.”

The poor girl tried to say something, but didn’t get a chance.

“You figured,” Bradley went on, “That we’d hand you over to the… the Borderland Guard. They’d buy your story, pat your poor little hand and give you a cup of tea, and go out looking for the bad, bad elves who tricked you.”

I wondered what he’d been about to say, instead of Borderland Guard, before he caught himself. The Pixie Patrol? The Freakshow? Something worse?

We know, you understand, what the more mainstream branches of law enforcement think of us.

Jenny Kim couldn’t say a word. She stared at Bradley, lost in the intricacies of his baroque theory.

“But you overplayed your hand, Jenny,” he went on and on, “You tried to cover too many bases. Because we talked to Liz Wheeler, and she hasn’t heard from her brother about a gift of money or anything else.”

“But-”

“And,” he cut her off, “We talked to Glenn Jackson.”

“You… no!” Jenny said, “He was leaving. Giving his sister some of his money and leaving. Going away.”

“He was in his apartment this evening,” smugged Bradley, “He told the officers who spoke to him that he hadn’t been out all day, and after what they had to do to wake his drunk butt up, I believe it. He wasn’t at your bank, he’s never heard of you, he doesn’t have a magic bag of cash and he’s not leaving town, Jenny.”

“No,” she whispered, “No, it’s not true.”

“We know your boyfriend came to see you today. You gave him a bag.”

“Henry? Yes, he… he came to see me. I gave him some groceries I bought for him to bring home.”

“Kind of funny,” Bradley said, “You didn’t mention that before. But don’t worry, we’re asking him about that right now.”

“You arrested my boyfriend?”

Bradley smiled again. I was getting to really hate that smile. “Arresting,” he said, “Comes later. We’re asking him some questions. Let’s talk about your money problems.”

“My student loan?”

Bradley leaned forward, gently this time. “It’s not too late,” he said, sounding all throaty and sincere, “You can return the money. You can help yourself, Jenny. You can help me to help you.”

That was it.

“You unbelievable douchebag!” I snarled.

Jenny stared at me. Bradley stared too, flushing with anger. Detective Colby, still slouched quietly in his corner, wasn’t staring though.

“I seem to recall we discussed that your presence here is a courtesy, Officer.” Bradley snarled back, “And that you were not going to interfere with a police investigation.”

Oh good

, I thought. Now it’s a real pissing match. Well, in for a penny…

“I seem to recall hoping that you weren’t going to be a complete spurking idiot, Detective, but I’ve gotten over the disappointment.”

Bradley sprang out of his chair. Jenny flinched, and yeah, for a second I thought he was going to go for me. But he glanced at Colby and seemed to pull back a bit. He straightened up and fixed his tie. But the look he gave me still wasn’t very friendly at all.

“Outside,” he said, jerking his thumb at the door. “Now.”

“So,” Detective Bradley said, looking like he thought he was being a really cagey guy, “A Mr. Glenn Johnson came into the branch.”

The girl – Jenny Kim was her name – shook her head, sending the tears streaking down her face and running every which way. It had done a real number on her mascara; she looked like a drowning raccoon.

“No,” she said, her voice hoarse, “Jackson. Mr. Glenn Jackson.”

Bradley looked at her coldly for a minute, then pretended to glance at his notes and smiled.

“Of course. Glenn Jackson. My mistake.”

I sighed. He was playing the trick – which always works on douchey Law & Order spinoffs – of trying to get her to make a mistake when she repeated her explanation, trying to catch a lie or an error that would make her story fall apart.

I sighed again, just to make my position clear. Bradley gave no indication of having noticed, but Colby glanced at me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His cards were so close to his chest they were ticking his bronchi.

“Mr. Jackson, he’s not a client at your branch, though, is he?” Bradley asked.

“No. He said… he said he’d had some good luck and come into some money, and he wanted to give some to his sister.”

“And Ms. Jackson does bank with you.”

Jenny slumped. “Ms. Wheeler does. Yes.”

She was staring down at the table, now, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but her tone told me that despite her posture she was moving past fear and confusion and getting closer to pissed off. I wasn’t sure how Bradley would react to that. I didn’t think it would go well for Jenny, although it might be less boring for the rest of us.

She was gazing down the edge of the precipice of an utterly ruined life, and the spurking hell of it was, it didn’t even matter. Her story hadn’t changed the last five times she’d told it, and it wasn’t going to just because it didn’t fit Detective Bradley’s worldview.

This Jackson guy had come into the branch, with an old suitcase that was full of cash. Small bills, but enough of them to make a big difference if you were down and out. Johnson had been pretty down and out, it sounded like – Jenny had thought he was a panhandler at first, and maybe he was. But even a panhandler gets called “Sir” at the bank when he has a bag of cash money and wants to make a deposit.

If he’d just done that – just passed his money on to his sister and left – it would still have turned out to be a problem, but it wouldn’t have been one for Jenny. But Jackson had decided to change his small bills into big bills, Jenny said, because he was going to do some travelling and didn’t want to lug the bag around. So he’d given her cash, she’d given him cash. Not what you’re supposed to do when someone doesn’t have an account with the bank, but Jenny hadn’t seen any harm. She’d been touched that he was giving his sister some of his new-found wealth – making restitution, he’d said – and wanted to help him out. She’d been doing a good deed, and of course it wasn’t going unpunished.

Because a few hours later, when that transaction had been reviewed, the stacks of cash that Jenny Kim had carefully counted for Glenn Jackson, thousands of dollars in five and ten-dollar bills that she’d traded for the bank’s fifties and hundreds… they were gone. Where they had been, there were stacks of dried, dead autumn leaves with no particular cash value at all.

And Jenny Kim was well and truly spurked.

I was thinking about taking up smoking. Partly because none of the other things I normally do to relieve stress – drinking, screaming, masturbating, eating pizza till I can’t move, or some combination of the above – are entirely workplace-appropriate, not even for my workplace, with its laissez-faire attitudes towards dress and personal conduct.

But the main reason I was thinking about hitching myself to the lung cancer express wasn’t that I wanted an even less socially acceptable pastime. It was because, George, the clever spurk, had begged off on being present for the rest of the awful scene that was unfolding in front of us, on the pretext that he needed a smoke. And since at least one of us had to be there, that left me standing there envying his foresight at developing a habit so toxic that it gave him an excuse to leave the room any time he wanted to.

Maybe, I thought, I can cite female problems. Or explosive diarrhea. Anything’s better than…

Anything was better than watching the poor innocent girl sitting there, about to be devoured by monsters. Crushed by uncaring powers beyond her comprehension. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

The beast stirred, ready to strike a death-blow. It glanced at its notes.

“Let’s go over this again,” said Detective Bradley, as the girl sitting across from him sobbed quietly, overcome with exhaustion, confusion and fear in about equal measure.

Cops. I thought. Spurking cops.

But I didn’t say it. It had been made very clear to George and me that although our presence was mandated by regulations, that this was their show, and any interference – apparently, saying or doing anything qualified as interference – would not be met with a great deal of appreciation.

Bradley, the young one, had the real hard-on for keeping us on the bench and trying to wring a confession out of the suspect. You could tell, just by the way he talked and moved his hands, that he fancied himself a real sharp investigative mind. Like on Law & Order, but not the good one, the annoying spin-off with the smug, douchey detective who always tricks people into confessing and then acts like he’s Sherlock spurking Holmes.

Colby, the older one, must have been the senior officer. But he was hanging back and letting Bradley run the show, slouching in the corner. I couldn’t figure out if he was playing good cop, or just letting his partner run with a hunch.

Either way, it was a huge pain in the ass.