Mardock Scramble полностью

“Well, the comatose student’s family had put in a pretty staggering request, you see. In order to pay off the debts of the father’s factory, they had to try and wrangle a huge sum of money out of the Broilerhouse in the shape of child welfare reparations. But in reality, the student was just as guilty as he was a victim, and really he was just reaping what he had sown. And the student’s family didn’t help matters either—his younger brother tracked down one of the other dealers and assaulted him. It was pandemonium. Eventually, though, the missing girlfriend re-emerged. It turned out that she had fallen asleep in a car in a drugged-up state and slept for three days solid. It was only when we discovered the girl that we managed to get to the bottom of the case and were finally ready to go about solving it.”

–So how did you go about solving it?

“In the worst way imaginable.”

The Doctor put his hands to his forehead. It was as if all the horrors of the time were flashing right in front of his eyes.

“If the truth were made public, everybody involved in the whole sordid affair stood to lose. We tried to imagine what would have happened, and it went something like this: the student’s family would suffer the worst—they’d lose their factory, the younger brother would be arrested for violent and disorderly conduct, and not only that, they’d end up having to pay out reparations, never mind receiving them. The whole family would live out the rest of their lives in debt. The police and the Broilerhouse would suffer an embarrassing loss of face, and the university where the whole sordid scene was set would be known forever as ‘the drug school.’ The drug ring would split up into smaller units, and one of these would eventually rat on their police connections, causing additional scandal. So, you see, we were in a real predicament. If we were to let things slide then the Broilerhouse would do more than rap us on the knuckles—they’d repudiate our usefulness, our very reason for existence. So with enemies all around us, or so it seemed, Boiled came up with the worst possible solution to the case. He didn’t even tell us what he had planned.”

–What did he do?

“He annihilated.” The Doctor spat the word out as if he were vomiting up an indescribably bitter object. “First, he shot the comatose student.”

The Doctor saw Balot’s eyes widen but just shrugged his shoulders weakly. “Yes, he killed the very same piece-of-shit student that we were hired by our client to protect in the first place. Then, he found the junkie girlfriend, dragged her back to the car she’d been sleeping in, and shot her. After that, he rounded up the students in the university who were involved in the drug ring and killed them one by one. Then he went after the ringleaders who were involved behind the scenes and killed every single one of them too. Accurately and swiftly. Oh, and in the process of this he also killed a number of corrupt cops along the way.”

–How many people did he kill?

“At that point, eleven.”

–With Oeufcoque as the weapon?

“Oeufcoque trusted Boiled completely. He thought that Boiled was acting according to his own directions.”

–Oeufcoque’s directions?

“When we discovered that the student was at the heart of the drug ring, Oeufcoque said that we should tell his father the truth. Try and get him to drop his claim for reparations. Oeufcoque was just trying to work out what the right thing to do was, until the bitter end. Boiled headed out with Oeufcoque in order to do as Oeufcoque suggested, but along the way Boiled decided that he had a better way to solve the case. For the next forty hours or so, Boiled told Oeufcoque that he was protecting the family from the drug ring, who were now out baying for the family’s blood. They went on a killing spree—nearly twenty people in total. Boiled’s story wasn’t totally unbelievable, as some of the drug ring were actually out to get the family.”

–How come Oeufcoque never worked out what was really going on?