And we return to the noir future of Sybil X…

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He half-sank to the ground as I propped him up, eyes pinpoints of fear and hatred as I applied the gun to his right nostril. His breath was rancid whiskey-tainted, and staccato in the sudden silence:

“Where is he, Marcus?”
“Can’t you guess, dear? And by the way, cut the hard-boiled act. You know it never worked with me.”

I clicked the safety catch off my Glock:  “Look, I don’t have time for this, you maudlin alcoholic old git. Just. Tell. Me.” Through his jagged teeth, and the blood bubbles, he smiled.  He didn’t have much time to go, and I realised how little as the blood started to well up behind his shattered laptop:

“Phil?”

“Oh, of course it was your ex, Carl. Did you honestly think he was willing to accept the ceasefire between us? Oh, and he said that…there was one more ‘balancing act’ to go.”

“Did he mean…oh shit. The Family Court. That parole hearing, today. Is that what he meant, Marcus? Marcus?” But Marcus Vansittart would say nothing further in this life, as he managed a solitary nod before his head lolled back and his eyes glazed over.

Thtough my teeth, I hissed out that I had other urgent business as I slammed shut the car door. Phil. You angry little fool. Only it wasn’t an act of foolishness, was it? Marcus may not have been a pedo but he was a ridiculous romanticist about their squalid little acts of child sexual abuse, and there have been eight paedophiles murdered in the city this year. All of them slaughtered through different modus operandi- vivisection, car explosives, stabbing, decapitation, shot through the head, delayed action poisoning, or shot at point blank range. Each with precision and planning, except that Phil Grant had a learning disability and couldn’t even read. And like it or not, all of those predators had served their time. All right, yes, I despise them for what they did to children, and what they’ll probably do again. But this isn’t the way to resolve all this.

The carfone rang, and I inpatched: “Prof. This’d better be urgent.”

“Carl, I know that it’s Philip. But in a way, it isn’t.”

“I don’t have time for this, Prof. He geepsed the local environment for what might be a safe spot to have a go at old Joe Curlew, whose parole hearing is today. Unless this is-”

“Carl? Philip is probably the executive alter of a Multiple Personality.”

“What? But he never…”
“In his case, the initial abuse must’ve been so bad that his personality fragmented in earlier life. He eventually evolved an alter to deal with it- who turned in quite a chillingly detailed vox-assignment for my forensics class last year, on Reginald Kray. I think it’s named for sixties British gangster Reggie Kray.”

“Are you sure about this? Most of the recognisable Multiples are females.”

“It fits the psychographic profile, especially of those so-called “Bacchante” or “Maenad” killings of paedophiles and incestuous male perpetrattors we’ve heard about in Europe.’

As we shut off, I checked the carchrono. I was going to make it. And it had to be just me, I couldn’t risk anyone else’s life in this situation. I hoped I could come to some understanding with Phil about this. We’d been close once upon a time, but the pressures of my job had driven a wedge between us. And Marcus. That old git and I had belonged to different generations, with different views of the world- analytical and evidence-based versus romanticist. We had blazing political rows on several issues. But those differences weren’t enough for Reg to murder him, even if we had quarrelled over and over again  with that old fruitcake over police ‘reticence’ to capture the serial killer that had terrorised the city.

 I bolted toward the door, with pursuit cars bottling up the street entrance and exits, cutting off any escape that Reg/Phil might take. Power was out to the lifts, so I used a fastwinder to counter that. I keyed in the exitcode to the floor I’d guessed he must be on.

The rifle crack rang out a full thirty seconds before I reached there. Damn! The layout! I’d forgotten that, and Joe Curlew, paedophile rapist of seven children and former head of Christians Allied for Life and Family, lay with gore and bone blasted out of his skull on the forecourt, several hundred metres below.

Reg was waiting as the door opened, nicking my shoulder with his protective fire. Unfortunately, it happened to be my gun hand. As I sank to the floor, clutching the wound: “R-Reg? Come on mate, let me talk to Phil.”

“I’m sorry it had to be you, Carl. I know you aren’t anywhere near a bleeding heart when it comes to pedos. Not like Vansittart.”
“Hey.,., Marcus may have been a surly old curmudgeon…but…that gave you no right to shoot…an elderly libertarian fruitbat in …a wheelchair, kid…”

“Oh, nice try. Come on Carl, the Tory razorgangs and their male-backlash Men’s Party allies slashed funding to kids rights groups in the Teens remember? We never had a chance.”
“So this is what I get for bringing Holy Joe down there to justice in 2015?”

“You didn’t finish the job. But you’ll live. Unlike all those other scum.:
“And what next, Reg? Do you go after the pedos….that did get let off? Or based on hearsay and rumour?”
“You should talk to Sawdust Baby, one of my other alters about that. He’s the one that endured everything that our sicko pig of an old man dished out to us, while Phil was somewhere else. And yeah, I was the one who slit the old perv’s stomach when we were thirteen…”

“Don’t do this, Reg. There’s a man in there I used to love more than….life itself. Let me talk to him again. Please.”

“Phil is gone, Carl. You and Prof Williams were wrong, he was never the dominant alter. I was. And there’s no way I will let Singleton ‘justice’ catch me, and brainburn me.” In rapid order, he cracked a packet of blister capsules, probably surplus from the Persephone Rose Deliverance Centre:

“I…loved you too…” He managed to grate, before the other lift doors opened, and SWAT and paramedics finally got to us. As I was ferried across town to hospital, I felt hollow inside. Cavernous. As if an abyss had opened up, and could never be filled again.