The Misfortune Cycle: River Desert

Chapter 3

Torun took his time closing every single window in his laptop, eyeing every piece of evidence that helped him build the timeline of events he had taken the morning noting down in his notebook. It wasn't difficult by any measure. As rude as they were, the Boatmen were good witnesses, remembering a fair amount more details every time they repeated the incident.

Finally shutting the laptop down, he began to flip through his notebook.

The boat was going from Chittagong into Assam. It would require them to cross the Bangladesh-India border. Torun would ask to see their paperworks. The tracks of such information always helped with investigation.

Their journeys started two days before the incident, between 9:12 to 9:17 in the morning, from Daraihat Port, Chittagong. The fishes were loaded from dock number three, by a team of seven day laborers. Torun got the identity of the leader of the team, just in case the investigation leads them there.

After their departure, it was a straightforward journey. They stopped nowhere, ate and slept on the boat and answered nature's call into the river. Torun had a nice list of what each of them ate and where. He had even been tempted to make a list of how each of them had physically felt while shitting into the river, but stopped because it was too intrusive a question. Nothing was particularly odd about what they ate or drank, but Torun still made a note of checking out the dishes and glasses for traces of chemicals.

The men on Dinar's boat had been knocked out at most five minutes after they entered the Keota canal. The men on Jamal's boat went down three minutes after that.

Given the fact that Keota canal was one of the streams created by the twenty twenty four flood, it would be a rather tricky place to take a boat through. Five hundred meters in width, and Torun could see how it might've wrecked cargo boats. So why did they choose to take the boat through this particular route? Was it because it was particularly straight? Or was it because it was particularly unguarded?

Torun bit his lips. The investigation was proving to be rather murky without knowing exactly what it was that was in the boats. It wasn't just dried fish that's for sure.

Or maybe it was, and Torun is overthinking it.

Exhaling deeply, Torun stood up to get changed. Unlike yesterday, where he went to mostly interrogate, he'd be going for field investigation today. He wore a baggy yellow t-shirt and black Gabardine pants. Remembering his run in with Dinar, he put the pair of SR.22 pistols, along with their holsters, into his backpack. A couple of Roofie straws and a sampling kit followed them inside, and a camera. He was about to put the laptop inside as well, but he stopped short. Instead, he turned on the Google Drive Sync on his phone. If anything were to happen, he wanted the data to be safe in a server somewhere in America.

The morning was cold, but not enough to make Torun regret wearing only a t-shirt. Sunlight dispersed through the mist to define the shadows of trees. It was a beautiful morning and Torun was gonna ruin it for someone.

That someone turned out to be the rickshaw puller that carried him to The dockyard. The poor man must've been quite freaked out. Torun pulled out the firearms and their holsters as soon as they got out of the town. One of them went to his waist, hidden under the long t-shirt, the other on his leg, under the cloth of the pant.

Torun found Ashraful sitting in the tea stall, deep into a heated political argument.

".... We didn't think before twenty twenty four that such a bad flood will happen," a man in a print shirt was telling Ashraful, "But it still did."

"Tch!" Ashraful clicked his tongue, "That's not what it was, Chacha, it was just really bad luck!"

"So they say!" The man sipped his tea, "As if they could've stopped a river with piles of sand with weed growing on it."