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Harry is a fucking animal. The whole precinct knows it – it's useless to argue otherwise, and really, nobody tries. A fiend the likes of which are hard to find, a chain-smoking infernal machine, a crabby can-opener on speed. Temps, en avant! Encore, along the broken streets, and right into the mud. Face-first. Puking all over the evidence and the crime scene. Solving the case in record time. World – peace; disco – inferno.
Jean doesn’t know why he is still here. Truth be told, he does – but then he wants to hang himself a little bit less (lies; he always wants it just the same). He drags himself after Harry, trails through the city’s cloaca, scraping his palms against the wood-plank fences. He fills out reports. He chews through his cigarettes without having the time to light them up. He drags himself along and wishes to choke the whole city with his bare hands. Fucking Martinaise. Fucking RCM. Fucking corpses, thawing out in the spring. Jean documents an interrogation and dreams of drowning himself in a piss-smelling sink. Harry watches the witness’s eyes intently and then proclaims that the rubber boots with a hole in the heel don’t have anything to do with the case.
Harry rushes forward, punching through space like a motor carriage caught mid-crash in a blurry photograph. “Did you know that there are turtles living in Esperance that were mutated by radioactive waste and come out at night to eat river trash?”, - Harry starts to unzip his trousers (probably to demonstrate what those mutated turtles might look like) but stops mid-way. “Stand down! The boots were important after all…”. Jean presses his sweaty head against the cold concrete wall of the interrogation room. It helps, but only a little.
The corpse was indeed meant to be fed to the turtles; the coroner confirmed a match to the size of the bite marks on the corpse and on the boot. It was too late – the body was already found. Harry tears his leg open during their chase after a marine biologist across some crumbling rooftops. Jean loudly hopes it leads to an infection but then quietly knocks on wood so as not to jinx it. His heart is hammering somewhere in his throat, a hellish stitch in his side – he’s not young anymore – but the criminal is getting close. Temps, en avant! The roof is covered in graffiti. Harry, still dripping blood, is engaged in a heated debate about the influence of the pale on the sea urchin population with a pudgy man wearing dirty glasses. Jean breathlessly whispers “shut up” to both of them and coughs through the arrestee’s rights. He’s tired. Harry’s eyes are red from the wind, and the yellowed white of his eye is cocooned in oily tears, wobbling like a jellyfish.
“You’re fucked. In the head. You know that, right?” – Jean has no voice, no strength left and he sits down on a crumbling support beam.
“They have no brain, out there, in the dark, not enough to see that they’re dying – and we watch them, their hollow needles breaking apart, and build ships to traverse the space they cannot escape. Do you understand!?”– Harry is crying. Yellow tears stream down his red face, while the red blood seeps into his torn yellow pants.
Jean doesn’t know what he wants – to hug Harry, pressing his face into a sweaty, un-uniformed armpit, or punch him so hard that life finally starts making sense.
“Feed the turtles. What you want right now is to feed the turtles. Come on”, - Harry reaches out his hand.
Jean thinks about two corpses in the river’s muck. About a dry headline. About wizened heads extending from under the malformed shells. Some of the shells shine with fluorescence: “HARDCORE”, “VAN EYCK”. The heads sway, eating the seaweed off the river rocks. One of them curiously chews on a policeman’s boot and lets go, disappointed – doesn’t taste good at all.
“If we’re going anywhere now, it will be to the infirmary”, - Jean stands up with a crack of his joints and heaves Harry’s arm over his shoulder. The wind tousles their hair, gets into their eyes and ears, and Jean wonders why the hell is he still alive, why are both of them alive, - and starts looking for a way down.