So You Used to Be Human - Book 3 (Original Version)

Chapter 6: Bad, Bad Men

Pete was half covered with blood, and he was pretty much freaking right the fuck out even as he hauled ass out of the car.

"It got all fucked up man! Everything just happened so fast, and then the gun went off, and I didn't mean to shoot her Donnie, I really didn't, but we gotta do something!"

"What the fuck did you do?"

"He's got someone in the car with him, man. I think it's a girl!" One of the other two men were looking at the car and had spotted Jaime.

"Why's he covered with blood? Is he hurt? Pete, are you hurt?

"I shot her in the fucking face!"

Silence.

Then: "We need to take her to the doctor or something..."

Donnie stepped forward hand raised to shut Pete right the fuck up.

"You shot a chick in the face and then bring her here, to my safe place, to my fucking home? Are you fucking stupid Pete? Do you know what we do here? Don't answer that, just shut up and listen you dumb fuck. What we do here is not exactly legal. The idea is that you're supposed to go out and stick your fucking gun into the face of fucking stupid people, get them the fuck out of their fucking cars and then bring the car, not the person, back here so we can strip it down and sell the fucking thing for parts. Your job description does not include shooting bitches in the fucking face and bringing them back here. Your job description does not include shooting people at all, in fact, you're not even supposed to have any fucking bullets in your gun so if you do something stupid and get caught you go down for a lesser assault charge, but mostly, so stupid shit like this doesn't ever, ever happen! I set it up this way for a fucking reason, and it's to protect all of us here in this place."

"But she's going to die--"

"But I don't give a fuck! You should have dropped her ass off at the nearest curb or at the hospital yourself if you felt like being a saint but that's not what we do. We do crime, we cover our asses, and sometimes people get hurt. We're not the Boy Scouts Pete, and you gotta remember that. We are bad, bad men."

On the security camera footage, this all plays out from a distance. I grabbed the tape and watched it later when it was all over. It was Claude's idea of course. He has a habit of noticing security cameras even where they shouldn't be and has quite a few ideas about the truth of what the cameras show.

You see, Security cameras have a tendency to lie.

Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating ever so slightly, or just confused, so I'll scale it back a little more towards the truth at we can all be comfortable with. Security cameras show exactly what happened, but they never tell you why.  That's the plain truth of it.  And that is why they have a tendency to lie.

Anyone looking at any of the CCD camera footage from that night would have seen glimpses of an event and even if they managed to piece it together to form some long narrative, they still wouldn't ever get the full truth of what was going on.  Watch, follow from screen to screen how a man (me) runs at impossible Usain Bolt Plus speeds after a speeding car.  First, you'd see the car speed past going a little too fast for its own good but not fast enough to attract attention, and then wait for it, wait for it and there it is, that fast moving impossible figure moving across the screens.  Maybe the footage is from an ATM or a traffic camera, a storefront or even the lobby of an apartment building, but line them all up and follow the progress across 3 miles of city.  Always the same car, always the same running figure so close behind but never catching up.

Those cameras tell you their story, but never the story about how my muscles burned and how my lungs screamed curses at me, threatening to kill me, just to stop working, threatening and then begging for mercy.  It wouldn't tell you the story of how I couldn't stop, not now, not ever, didn't want to stop, couldn't lose sight of that car, even if took ten miles