[color=gray][h3][sup][sup]Austin McGlinn, badge number 3196, never could decide for long which of the two skiptracers he detested more.

Some days it was Conrad Olivier Beauclerc, a nose-picking, heel-wiping, titty-ogling cretin if ever he'd met one: five feet and eight inches of greasy scalp, hairy belly, and unwashed asshole. The kind of man who was in his line of work to kick doors and break thumbs, not to uphold any semblance of "law and order" in this town. The kind of man whose fistfight-swollen fingers grubbed everything they touched. And the body, the CCTV tapes, the witnesses—like a toddler sticking G.I. Joes in his mouth, Connie intended to grub them all.

As for all the other days, there was always his partner—García—a pile of shit stacked only a few inches shorter than Beauclerc. She ducked her way out of the pony car's passenger-side door and strode onto the scene with her usual aloofness, that infuriating kind of practiced indifference which said she thought herself the most mysterious, most dangerous person on the block, if not the whole of Vegas. That and the trench coat; the Clint Eastwood "intense, silent stare" thing she was always putting on; the scattergun "concealed" on her left leg (but who knew?—for how badly their pieces printed onto their coats, they must have [i]wanted[/i] people to see them). And the sunglasses-at-night routine the two never quite let down...

Pricks.

García, circling around the rear bumper of the squad car, noticed its passenger, still curled up inside the cage, and seeming no more regretful than when McGlinn had tossed him in there just a few minutes past. García nudged Connie by the elbow, directed his attention over to the window. The loiterer smiled sheepishly and waved with both hands, shackled as they were, giving them a cheeky rattle; the bounty hunters, looking bemused, waved back. It just about figured, didn't it?—the three freaks all knew each other from somewhere. Crawled out of the same sewer, maybe.

Hands stashed in roomy outerwear pockets, collars popped, the two sidled past the boom gates, plodded down the access ramp. If they didn't notice McGlinn's soured expression, then they most assuredly noticed his stepping forward-and-aside to obstruct them at the yellow tape. Connie's smile, as false as his one gold tooth, glittered the color of twenty-year-old newspaper, spit-slick and tobacco-yellowed. "Good to see you, too, Oz," he said.

"Double-parked within thirty feet of a crosswalk and in front of a public driveway. And that shitty music is a noise complaint waiting to happen if ever I’ve heard one."

"Aw, gee, mister. Please, [i]please[/i] don't tell my ma. She'll kill me for sure."

"And you know what, Beauclerc?—if I'm not in the mood for your jokes, then I'm sure as [i]shit[/i] not in the damn mood for another tampering report."

"You're right. We should just skip the paperwork."

For every step Connie took to the right, McGlinn took one to the left; inverse, ditto.

"The fuck you doing here, anyway?"

The bounty hunter tilted to one side; looked past the crook of the cop's shoulder—at the body, barely cooled in the hour or two since its evisceration; straightened out, looked him dead in the eye again. "Your job, by the looks of it. Excuse us."

But every pace he took McGlinn countered. Every nudge he attempted, McGlinn shoved back. Connie's every slip, step, and sidle—foiled.

His head tilted; his lips popped open. "Can't help but notice you're still in our way."

"You can finger all the corpses you want, [i]after[/i] the examiner's through with this one."

"I don't like sloppy seconds."

"I mean it. Maybe if it was [i]your[/i] ass who had to explain to the chief why you ruined another crime scene, maybe if [i]you[/i] had to fill out the reports, deal with the claims adjusters for hours—[i]hours![/i]—but no. No, you think you're riding out of here high and pretty like always, don't you?"

"...Yeah?"

"[i]No. Fuck[/i] you. Not this time. This time you—"[/sup]

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[sup]Julian Price smiled when he peered out the squad car's passenger-side window; when he peered down at the officers on the crime scene, and observed with no small amusement that they had busied themselves bickering with the two interlopers. But he could not savor the diversion for long; not when seconds mattered.

First was the matter of his hands. Easy enough. Threading them between two bars of the cage, Julian threw himself to one side, hurled all his weight and all his leverage against the thinnest, weakest bones, their snaps and pops delighting him, off-key yet played in time, like a music of the body, a chord of the innards. That done, with only the faintest wince he squeezed the flopping, jellylike appendages; wriggled them, in their crushed, compact state, from between the ratchets of the handcuffs. With a quick rouse—a stirring, silent yet unignorable—he made short work of mending them anew, for he soon had need of them to set to work on the partition. For that, he put his purplish wrist to his mouth, and slit it open with a tooth. As the precious ichor dribbled from the wound, drop by drop, little polished rubies, he smeared them into the laminated metal, which began to steam, and smoke, and hiss.

One rivet at a time, one bar, one weld seam, the Malkavian had spewed from his noxious vein enough corrosive blood to free a section of the partition, whereupon he set it gently (almost affectionately) aside. Then, neck twisting, shoulders contorting, ribcage sprawling, he began to twist and slither himself through the squeeze of the resulting gap: over the center console and—plop—right into the driver's seat.[/sup]

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[sup]"—Is that clear enough for you? Let me know, knucklefuck. Just let me know that I’ve finally, [i]finally[/i] gotten it through your thick, knucklefuck skull. You in there, Beauclerc? It finally break through to you that you’re not getting past the wire, or what?"

Though his hands sat glued to his hips, Connie's eyes rolled, they wandered; his head lolled side-aside as his attentions meandered the ceiling. Only his little chuckles and grins let McGlinn know that he was trying damn hard not to let this diatribe—these allegations—itch at him; only emboldening the cop, of course, to keep on digging. That is until something shifted. Something in the air. Seething, all the sudden, with intent. It began with the bounty hunter's weight shifting from one foot to the other; his hip cocking; one of his swollen, ruddy hands drifting toward the small of his back, where McGlinn knew him to keep his five-inch Bowie. But by the time that cauliflower-knuckled hand had found its purchase around the coffin handle, the cop had already muttered, "Nice try, smartass," and grabbed Beauclerc by the shoulder, and pressed the muzzle of his Glock 19 deep against the man's belly and pressed the man flush against the muzzle.

"Whoa!" McGlinn's partner guffawed, reaching for his own station-issued weapon, but Teresa García only shot him a glare, and clicked her tongue into a tut, and tapped her coat where it draped over her left leg.

For several long moments there was only the ambience of traffic U-turning at the blockade up on street level; of a desert wind billowing stale and tepid down the avenue; of fluorescent bulbs buzzing and wheezing their last. Let's not do anything stupid, McGlinn was beginning to say, c'mon Connie this ain't funny anymore, when the sound of steel dragged from leather rasped down his spine. Mottled and gray was the blade, the bone scales smooth and worn; but god how the whetted edge glittered like moonlight trapped in water.

McGlinn didn't know what stayed his finger; what kept it one click, just one sorry click, away from sending the hammer slamming down onto the firing pin into the primer into the powder straight into Beauclerc's guts all hot and tunneling. Beauclerc's friends-in-high-places—his inroads with the chief, the commission board, hell, maybe even the mayor himself, that assured he'd always walk out of shitstorms like this one with nary a scratch? That he had a gun to his stomach and he didn't care? Or the stories—the ones told in creepy whispers back at the precinct—the ones you had to know where to press your ear what to hear them—that he leapt from three-story windows and kept on rolling—like a rhino—that he'd take four, five slugs in a Code 36 and not go down?

The knife's point, curved like a toenail clipping and narrow as a fishbone, teased its way past McGlinn's breastbone, past his throat, past his ear. Connie wavered it menacingly. But after a second which felt like a year, the only thing he plunged the blade through was the yellow tape, which fluttered noiselessly to the grimy concrete floor.

As the two bounty hunters walked past the petrified McGlinn, as the knife's edge [i]shhfk![/i]—back into its scabbard, he released a breath which singed the insides of his lungs. He looked down at his hand, the one clasped white around the molded polymer grips of the Glock—shaking, he realized—and pawed the handgun clumsily back into its holster.[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]