Waste Management

"It all started when I took out the trash." He began. The man wore a gray business suit, with coal-black shoes. His hair was short, even, and combed neatly forward with no apparent traces of gel. He stood with his hands locked behind his back and facing he wall-sized window in his office.

"I was just thinking," He continued casually. "Thinking about how easy it would have been to get rid of something this way. Nobody would look, or even think where to look, at least not until it was too late" He turned to face the detective sitting in the chair accross from his desk. "Timing, was the key."

He slowly walked back to his desk, taking a seat as he spoke. "It wasn't long after that, that I figured out if I wanted something to be found, I could do it the same way. Only then, I would have to discreetly mark the bag, something that's fairly easy to do. Needless to say..." The man gestured towards his expensively decorated office," Things tended to work out for me."

He smiled. The man was clearly enjoying this more than the detective. "You still haven't answered my question." The detective asked, staring the gray-suited man in the eyes. "Why did you do it?"

The man didn't relinquish his grin. "Why does anyone do anything these days? Money." The grin vanished, and his tone became blunt. ""I'd given him plenty of opportunities to pay me, but he just couldn't come up with it." He scoffed. "Maybe he would've had it if he'd had the common sense to give up his gambling addiction for a week."

It was the detective's turn to talk. "And that was reason enough to bury a man alive in a Force-Flex bag?"

The gray suited man turned around. "No, of course not." He was completely serious. "I never take care of such things personally." The grin returned. "And that, Detective Williams, is why I've been so honest with you thus far."

The man leaned in, and looked the detective dead in the eyes. "I want to make a deal. I can give you names, phone numbers, locations, everything you and your friends at the precinct could ever want."

Detective Williams sat back in his seat. He pulled something from his pocket, and flung int across the desk. It bounced lightly for a moment, and slid before landing in front of the gray-suited man. "Do you know how you can tell the difference between a real police badge and a fake one?"

The gray-suited man shook his head, still staring at the wallet in front of him. He opened it, and saw the badge Williams had shown him when he'd first knocked on the door to his office half an hour before. Confused, he looked up to see the barrel of a .45 caliber pistol. "A fake badge is made of aluminum, much lighter than a real one. It's not even heavy enough to make a dent in a wooden table."

Former detective Steven Williams, expelled from the force two years previously, and brother of the recently deceased David Williams, pulled the trigger.

And the brou-ha-ha comes to a dramatic, messy end!

It is lacking something, I'd need to read it a dozen times more to figure out what, but aside from that elusive something, this was pretty good. I liked it.

-Ethsharrin Hopsarrith