Continued from Fluff Patrol Ch. 1
Officer Willie Olson heard sirens in the distance and knew there wasn’t much time. He bent down to talk to the whimpering Paul Rippentrop at eye level.
“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Rippentrop, since my partner roughed you up some, I feel like I owe you a deal.” Rippentrop looked up at Olson. “Those fluffies back there, the breeder fluffies, you’ll be taking the fall for those. My guess is, with your record, you’ll get about three to six months. However, if you’re willing to chalk that head wound of yours up to a trip-and-fall accident instead of it being made by my partner out there, I’m willing to go along with your story that the fluffy in the kitchen was an accident—hell, I’ll even say I saw it happen.”
“I will, too,” said Ulrich.
“You promise me I’m not going to see a lot of time for this?” Paul Rippentrop asked.
“Oh, yeah. We have a pretty flexible DA in this county, they know what fluffy ponies are like. Danger-prone, unlucky little bastards.”
“Bundles of dry fur, too,” Ulrich added. “They’re perfect kindling.”
The sirens outside grew louder, then stopped. Olson heard some police start talking to Inspector Michael York, and he hoped that his partner was of sound enough mind to answer their questions properly.
“You got a deal,” Rippentrop said, extending his hand. Olson shook it and searched Rippentrop’s eyes for sincerity. He found darkness.
()()()
“Good morning, this is Apple County News, I’m Chelsea McKeithen. In local news, the tragic and shocking death of a very rare brown fluffy pony occurred earlier this evening at a cul-de-sac in Bell, Texas. Officers on-scene say that the fluffy was ignited by a lit cigarette and it burned to death in seconds.
In the last ten years, it has been reported that only 10 or 15 adult brown fluffies existed either in the wild or domestically. This is due to a leftover gene going back to the first Hasbio prototypes that caused fluffies to reject brown-colored foals on sight due to their perceived ugliness, as a way for Hasbio to filter out colors that would have been less popular with the children they were targeting for sales.
The owner of the fluffy, 44-year-old Paul Rippentrop, has been taken into police custody for the ownership of three unchipped ponies. He has a history of abuse, though he and those close to him have stated that he has reformed since those days and any injuries sustained by fluffies under his care are accidental.
Today, a brown fluffy may command up to $200,000 from fluffy pony enthusiasts who see the brown fluffies as mistreated and more “genuine” than their brightly-colored counterparts. Biologists specializing in the species say that this is simply due to appearances and there is no inherent difference between brown fluffies and those of any other color.
()()()
Later that morning, in a small field behind a church on the outskirts of town, a few kids aged 10-12 gathered around a cardboard box. Holes were slit in the box lid.
“How many were you able to get?”
“12.”
“Aw, come on! That’s only going to be good for one game! You know these things splatter like water balloons right?”
“What?! Eww, gross, I don’t want to play anymore.”
“Oh, chill out, Clarice.”
One of the boys—there were 6 of them to the girls’ 4—lifted the lid from the box. The sounds of chirping and crying filled the air, as did the smell of shit and piss. There was no bedding in the bottom of the box. The fluffy newborns wriggled, bumping into each other, some twisting their legs, spraining them and squeaking in pain. They were 3 hours old. Greg—the kid who brought them—made sure to pick them right after they’d all had their first and last meal.
“Yuck. They pooped everywhere. And they’re all rolling around in it!”
“That’s what makes it fun. You really don’t want to get hit!”
A girl came forward and picked up one of the less filthy ones by the nape of its neck, where there wasn’t any feces. It chirped and screeched, the girl’s fingernails pinching into its tender skin. It was still young enough to have only a very thin peach fuzz instead of a coat. One could barely tell it had a blue coloring.
“They’re really cute, y’know?” The girl cupped the foal on its back in the palm of her hand, and rubbed its stomach on the part that had no shit on it. The foal started to coo. Its front hooves searched the air until they found the girl’s finger, then they held on.
“Aww, see? It’s giving me a hug!”
“Don’t get attached to the crap-rat, Stacy. You know their poop burns on contact, right?”
“That’s stupid, Tom,” Clarice piped up. “If it burns, why aren’t they being burned?”
“I don’t know!”
“Let’s go ahead and sort them,” Greg said. “I looked up the rules online—you have to sort them from brightest to dullest colors. And then we have to sort ourselves alphabetically.”
“That’s a pain. Can’t we just draw straws or something?”
“Do you want to do this right, or not? Because I can take these back to the clinic before my parents come back.”
“Fine, you big palooka.”
A couple of the other kids snickered. Greg wished this wasn’t a boys vs. girls game, because there was nobody there he wished to stain with fluffy turd more than Tom.
Ten minutes later, a line of twelve foals were laid out on the ground, a foot apart. “Ready… set…”
Stacy eyed the row of foals and picked out the one that had the most blue-ish color scheme. It was the only one not releasing a series of shrill chirps.
“GO!”
All ten kids closed the thirty-foot distance between themselves and the foals in seconds. The biggest boy there was a pudgy 11-year-old named Sam, whose parents owned a fluffy that only begged for spaghetti and shit all over the lawn. Sam, day in and day out, found himself cleaning up after it, watching it when it went into the backyard to make sure it didn’t hurt itself, having to talk to it gently like it was a baby, and now he was about to enjoy this a lot more than he should. Grabbing a blue unicorn foal with such strength that he snapped its two front legs, he swung his arm back and hurled the foal at the oldest girl on the girls’ team, a 12-year-old named Janice whose budding figure was stirring feelings in Sam that made him angry in how inscrutable they were.
Most of the foal’s shit had voided down Sam’s arm when he scared it by grabbing it so suddenly, but a little remained in its body until it struck Janice’s eye as she was about to throw her own foal. With a shriek, she dropped her foal, a red earthie that shattered its skull when it landed. Janice had a stripe of liquid feces running vertically from her right eye to her chin, just barely missing her lips. She didn’t feel any pain on impact, but the warmth of the shit and her humiliation sent her running out of the yard to her home down the street. After her two-week grounding, she’d never talk to any of these kids again. The foal that struck her eye died instantly from a broken neck.
Stacy dodged two foals as she found the blue foal, doing her best to pick it up gently even as another girl came within a foot of snatching it away. One of the foals she dodged struck the back wall of the church. A fetid mixture of blood, piss, and diarrhea exploded from its body on impact, little pieces of its destroyed body sticking to the bricks while other chunks simply bounced off, soon to be picked up and taken home by the residents of a nearby ant-hill. The second foal rolled a little and came to rest in a patch of grass. This foal’s end would be even worse, as it had managed to cling to life. Greg had thrown it, and he knew how to handle a foal properly. This foal would spend another hour alive, three of its four legs snapped, one of them clean off. The ants would pick it apart as it drew its last breaths, unable to scream or cry anymore due to weakness, its death from starvation robbed of its peace by a slew of ant bites.
Tom grabbed two foals, being the fastest one on the field, and chucked them both at a girl named Francine, who he’d had a crush on since fourth grade. The two would go on to date a little in high school, but Francine’s vow of celibacy would cause Tom to break it off, and they would never see each other again after graduation. In the meantime, one foal sailed over Francine’s head, a few drops of fear-poopies staining her blonde hair, before striking a window and only leaving a bit of a stain, as its bones were too soft to even crack it. The other foal would get her in the teeth, staining them with shit, and she would spend the next ten minutes vomiting, crushing the foal’s head as she ran to a nearby tree.
The other six foals would be thrown hither and thither across the flat patch of dead grass and ant colonies that comprised the church backyard. All of them would succumb to broken skulls, cracked spines and ruptured internal organs within a minute of being captured and thrown. The children themselves were merely stained, the ones wearing dark clothes being the luckiest as their shit patches and blood splatters were not visible. One could smell the rank, vaguely sweet scent of the creatures’ diarrhea on the clothes, so many of them changed before they went home, picking up a set of 3 plain white t-shirts from a dollar store about a third of a mile down the highway. All in all, a strange experience, and one none of them were too keen to replicate, save for Sam and Greg. As for Stacy, she had hidden with her rescued foal behind a shed in the corner of the lot, soothing the foal so that its cries wouldn’t give them away.
“So, who won that?” asked Greg when all of the foals had been thrown. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Really?!” Francine shouted, then gagged as the cool afternoon air hit her tongue, which she still tasted fluffy shit on even though it had been rinsed out. Francine wouldn’t be able to taste food correctly for a week. “We did all that, and you don’t even know who won! You retard!”
“Hey, shut up, Frank, I didn’t say I was going to count! Who didn’t get hit?”
A brief pause. Everyone looked at everyone else. All the kids with bright clothes had at least one visible smear. All of them could remember being hit except for Sam, Greg, Clarice and…
“Stacy!” Greg said. “Where did she go?”
“I saw her get that yellow crap-rat!” Clarice shouted. “I bet she took it and ran away!”
Francine scoffed, then spit on the ground near where she had just voided her stomach. “What a freak! Why does she want to play with one of those things? She’s not getting an invite to my birthday party next month, that’s for sure.”
“You weren’t going to invite her anyway,” said Janice. “Remember when she cried when the health teacher showed us that video with the fluffy being put down?”
“Yeah! It wasn’t even freaking abused; it was just old!” Francine said. “She’s all ’Oh, huu huu, poop-rats are people too!’”
Everyone in the field laughed. Stacy used the bottom of her shirt as a sort of make-shift cradle for the foal she rescued and sniffed back the tears forming at the corners of her eyes. She wondered what she’d been thinking, trying to hang out with these kids. They were awful! But even having awful people to be around was better than having nobody at all. At least, that’s what she’d spent the last two weeks trying to tell herself.
()()()
“Inspector?”
Inspector York jolted up from the table he had almost fallen asleep at. He was in the break room with a small cup of cold water he could barely touch and a couple aspirins next to it. York saw that it was Olson who’d just entered the break room, getting ready to make a pot of coffee.
“What’s up?” York said.
“Keep this on the down-low,” said Olson in a low voice, “but the guy from last night is going to cooperate. He’s taking the fall for the unchipped ponies, but we’re going to let the brown fluff skate by as an accident.”
Anger flashed across York’s face for a moment, then he grimaced, his headache pounding away just behind his eyes. “So he gets away with the murder?”
“He gets away with the murder and you get away with police brutality,” Olson said. “Or, to put it another way, he gets a few months in county and you keep your job. Unless you want to go to the captain and tell her how he got that bloody knot on his forehead.”
York could honestly only halfway remember doing that. He seemed to be in a dream when it happened, and like dreams often did, it was fading fast from memory. The eight beers he washed that memory down with late last night didn’t help matters.
“I know you’re pissed off,” said Olson. “So am I.”
“I let my anger get ahold of me,” said York. “It was right there, Will. We might have been able to retire off the money we got from selling that thing, and that fucker didn’t seem to even realize or care.”
“I did some reading up on him. He’s an old-school abuser, that Rippentrop. Been doing it since fluffies first set foot on man’s soil. You know how they are—it ain’t about money to them. It ain’t about getting revenge or breaking even for all the shit fluffies cost us. He just likes it.”
“If that’s true, then why even breed for a brown fluffy?”
“To make its childhood shitty as possible, of course. To us, brown fluffies are made of gold, but to that thing’s parents, it was made of shit, and you know they made sure it spent every waking moment knowing that. Bet you fucking 20 dollars that thing never had a moment of happiness in its life, and I’ll bet you another 20 that Rippentrop didn’t have much to do with it. A bad set of fluffy parents can do so much more damage than a man can do, I know this from clearing out enough herds to earn me a spot in hell if God’s a hugboxer.”
“That’s amazing to me,” York said. “He threw away thousands—maybe even hundreds of thousands—to torture an animal that talks.”
“Humans are animals that talk,” Olson said, stepping away from the coffee machine as it worked. “We torture and kill each other all the time, since recorded time. Some people get a rush out of that shit. Gives guys like us a job.”
Captain Weston walked briskly into the room. “Olson. You’re needed. Someone called in some dead foals behind Eastside Church of God on Highway 4. Looks like a person killed them.”
“Shit,” Olson said. “I just got a pot brewing. I gotta find Ulrich.”
“He’s on his way, he’ll catch you up. Head on over there.”
York stood up but the captain motioned for him to stop. “I need to speak with you for a minute, Inspector.”
“Uh—” York felt his stomach tighten. The slight vomit-y sensation in his stomach felt like it had expanded. “Okay,” he said, gulping back the saliva that was gathering in his mouth. “Can I use the restroom first?”
Captain Weston shrugged. “Yeah. Fine. Just meet me up at my office when you’re done. It’ll be quick, since I need all three of you out there at that massacre scene.”
()()()
“And that…”
Officer Vincent Ulrich stood at the church wall facing the backyard, where a splatter of foal juices had crusted and dried in the hot Texas sun.
“…is number 11. God damn it.”
The other ten lay in evidence bags in the backseat of Ulrich’s running car. Ulrich had sustained ant bites through his plastic gloves in the process of picking up the literal pieces. The whole place stank of sun-boiled rot and shit.
Another car pulled up and Officer Willie Olson stepped out of the driver’s seat. Ulrich saw he was alone and felt a bit of guilty relief. He could tell when he got to the precinct this morning that York had been hitting the sauce again, and this smell out here would have triggered a pretty fierce puking fit, Ulrich reckoned.
“I got 11 foals, Will, all dead from blunt force trauma,” Ulrich said. “Seems to me like it wasn’t just one guy doing it all.”
“What makes you think that?”
Ulrich shrugged. “About half of them were on one side of the field, the other half were over here by the back wall. It’s like they were being tossed back and forth or something.”
“Why in the hell…?” Olson said. “Some people have a strange idea of entertainment.”
“Um…”
A high-pitched voice called out from around the corner. A small girl was waving at the officers. “Hi. I’m the one who called.”
Olson stepped over to the kid, who shrank away unconsciously from the tall stranger. “What’s that you have in your shirt?”
The girl reluctantly revealed a foal wrapped in her shirt. She cupped it in her hands, showing it to the officers. “I rescued this one.”
The foal was letting out a series of rapid peeps and chirps, tears streaking the thin blue hair beneath its eyes. Ulrich took one of the foal-sized milk bottles out of his pocket and took the foal from the girl. The baby fluffy took after the small nipple presented to it with gusto, trying to chug the whole thing, but Ulrich tipped the bottle so there would be pauses between swallows. Foals’ stomachs were very small and paper-thin, prone to bursting if they drank too much, too fast.
“I knew it was hungry,” said the little girl. “It sounded just like the ones on TV, in those feral safari shows.”
“Were you here when this happened?” Olson asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t remember everyone’s names, but I know the kid who brought them.”
“What were you guys doing?” Ulrich asked. “Some kind of fucked-up game of catch?”
Olson shot Ulrich a look for swearing in front of the kid, but he had to admit he couldn’t come up with a better phrase for what seemed to have transpired here.
“I didn’t throw any of them,” the girl said defensively. “I mean—I was going to, because that’s what we were all there for, but I saw this foal and I didn’t want to do it anymore. So when the other kids started to throw, I just ran.”
“They were throwing them at each other?” Olson asked, trying to mask his incredulity. “Like a water-balloon fight?”
“Dodgeball,” said the little girl, her eyes drifting between Olson and the fluffy foal in Ulrich’s hands. “Or, uh, Greg called it ‘dodgefoal.’” He said he learned how to play it from the Internet.”
“He should have eaten some fucking tide pods, instead,” muttered Ulrich.
“Vince,” Olson said, “how about you watch your mouth in front of the kid?”
“It’s fine,” said the little girl. “I have friends at school who talk like that.” She didn’t, but saying so made her feel cool, for some reason. “Can I have that fluffy? I promise I don’t want to hurt it.”
Olson shook his head. “I’m sorry, young lady, but that foal is evidence.”
“But I saw that other guy pick up the other foals and put them in the car!”
“And that’s another reason you shouldn’t have this one,” said Ulrich. “I spent probably 15 or 20 minutes doing that, and all the while you were carrying a starving foal.” Ulrich pocketed the mostly-empty bottle and rubbed the foal’s tummy gently with one finger, eliciting a belch. “These things can die if you don’t feed them at least once every two or three hours.”
She lowered her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Olson bent down to eye-level with her. “You’re not in trouble… yet. It’ll stay that way for sure if you can tell us where Greg got his foals.”
()()()
York exited the bathroom, wiping his chin one last time to make sure it was clean. He felt somewhat better after he’d induced vomiting, but his throat did hurt. It was better for him to get it over with right then, rather than doing it right in front of the captain. He had a hunch what this was going to be about and he didn’t want to appear guilty.
The Captain’s office was down a small corridor opposite the front door of the station. As York walked down the hall, he counted the framed pictures of congratulatory newspaper clippings and past captains as a way of calming himself, the way a child might count sheep. He paused in front of the captain’s door, took a deep breath, and then knocked. “Come in,” came the response from the other side. York opened the door and the smell of incense filled his nostrils. Normally a smell like that would be a reprieve from shit and dead animal smells, but the only time he ever smelled incense is when he was in here, and usually it was bad news if he was in here.
York took his seat across from Captain Weston. She leaned forward and looked him in his eyes. “Do I need to be worried about you?”
“No. Why?”
“Because I am, and I don’t have time to be. I took a look at the mugshot, the mark on Paul Rippentrop’s forehead. Then…” Captain Weston pulled a gun from her desk drawer and set it down in front of Inspector York. It was the service weapon that every cop in the station had one of. “I took a look at the bottom of this gun handle. Couldn’t help but notice a pattern that the corner of a table wouldn’t make.”
“What are you accusing me of, here?” York asked.
“I think you know, Michael.”
Inspector York stood and made for the door. “Call me back in here when you’re ready to talk about this in more depth. I have a crime scene to—”
“Olson’s and Rippentrop’s stories don’t match up.”
York took his hand from the door handle. In his head, he was cycling through the possibilities of what the captain might choose to do. Or worse, what she’d have to do. “S-So? Rippentrop was in a daze, he was inhaling smoke and had a head injury. He probably just didn’t remember anything right.”
York saw Weston’s eyes brighten. “You won’t argue your way out of this. If I choose to believe your bullshit story, I want one thing in return: you’re going back to your AA meetings.”
“Who told you I left?”
“Who do you think, Michael?”
York sighed and then took his seat at Weston’s desk again. “I didn’t think George would care if I ducked out.”
“He’s worried about you, Michael. We both are.”
“How do you find the time?”
Weston stood up from her desk. “Don’t be a smart-ass. You start going to those meetings again, and maybe I’ll look the other way on this Rippentrop thing. But I expect a change in this antagonistic behavior you’ve had lately, against suspects and fellow officers.”
With that, Weston dismissed York. He left the room his head began to spin all over again. He knew Weston would call her brother to make sure he made it to the next meeting, whenever that was. The walls of the corridor felt like they were closing in on him, so much less space than there was when he was walking to the other side. He needed to make a call.
()()()
If one were looking for themselves a fluffy to adopt in Bell, Texas, their best bet was the local Fluffmart. A large variety store not dissimilar to a Petco, only prone to give people headaches between the bright pastel colors, the loud voices coming from the TV monitors running Fluff TV, the chemicals and fake smells meant to drown out the odor of fluffy waste, and the pleading voices coming from the end of the store where they kept the fluffies ready for adoption. Ever since kill-friendly shelters were outlawed in a slurry of hugbox laws in the mid-00s, fluffies could only be euthanized in instances where they had entered a ‘wan-die’ loop or were suffering from a terminal condition. This left some fluffies in Fluffmart for years, awaiting adoptions that never came because it was easier to just pluck a feral out of an alleyway than do the paperwork for a proper adoption. That is, as long as one was okay with risking being caught with an unchipped fluffy.
If Fluffmart was too corporate for one’s tastes, another option was a considerably more expensive mom-and-pop shelter that made up for lack of quantity with a guarantee of quality. Fluffmart just took whatever crap they could find on the street, chipped it and resold it for legal adoption. Mom-and-pop places specialized. A particular place called “Smarty Syndrome” was located three miles down the street from Eastside Church of God, and it specialized in actually-intelligent fluffies as opposed to boisterous, idiotic smarties that got themselves and entire herds killed through poor decision-making. It was here that Officers Olson and Ulrich found themselves, with bags of dead foals set on the counter in front of a stunned teenage girl with dyed blue hair.
“My parents are going to fucking kill him, dude…” she said, referring to Greg, her little brother. “They’re going to be back from Oklahoma any second—oh, man, I hope he didn’t sneak these out while I was here…”
“Well, I tell you what,” said Olson, handing the girl his card, “my partner and I are going to head on out of here, but you give your old man this card—” he handed her a card with his personal cell and the number of the precinct on it—“and tell him to call us or come to the precinct to make a statement. And we’re going to need to talk to the boy as well.”
“Like I said, he’s probably over at the 7 Eleven on McKinney, if you guys need to speak to him now.”
“It ain’t gonna make these foals any less dead,” Ulrich said, shrugging. “Good day.”
Olson and Ulrich left the store and headed to their respective cars. “It’s a shame that kid’s probably gonna see juvie time for this,” said Ulrich. “It’s not like he did all the killing.”
“He did all the kidnapping. And besides, he’s not doing any time.”
“How’s that, Will?”
“I didn’t give that girl my card so her daddy could make a statement. This guy’s going to owe us before it’s all said and done.”
Ulrich grinned. “You sly bastard.”
“It’s not much different from what we’ve been doing, Vince. We make a visit to the guy ever couple weeks, he sets aside his rarest fluff for us, we make a tidy profit. In exchange, his kid stays out of juvenile for stealing and killing unchipped foals, gets a little counseling. Everyone comes out on top.”
Olson’s phone rang. Both of them stopped. Olson took his phone out of his pocket. “It’s York. Looks like the captain’s done with him.”
“The captain got onto him?” Ulrich asked.
“Over the Rippentrop thing,” Olson said before answering the phone. “Olson.”
The officer listened for a second before he instinctively held a finger up the other person couldn’t see. “Okay, for one thing, Michael, you got yourself into that mess, I’m the one who tried to help you get out of it. If anything, I’m going to get pulled into this shit now that Captain Weston knows I lied… no, I took Rippentrop’s statement myself, he’s been in county all day since unless the captain talked to him herself, which she didn’t, because she already told you how she found out… uh-huh… okay… fine. Fine. We’ll talk later.”
Olson put his phone away. “Fuck!”
“What’s up?”
“York wants us to lay off the illegal shit for a couple of weeks until he can get back into the captain’s good graces.”
Ulrich swore as well, then shook his head. “Fucking great. So what about what we just did?”
Olson looked thoughtful for a moment. “What about it?”
Ulrich stared at Olson. “I don’t follow.”
“Why bother telling him? We’re the only two who know about it, and anyway, we’ve never met his ‘contact’ who re-sells our stolen fluffies. I’d say that makes us even.”
“I don’t know, Olson,” Ulrich said, opening the door of his car. “This shit with keeping secrets isn’t going to end well, I think.”
“Secrets,” Olson replied, “are the biggest commodity we trade in with this business. Bigger than money. Because if we keep them all just as they should be… we’ll all stay free.”
Olson got into his car and drove away. Ulrich wondered to himself where the man learned such a lesson.
–TO BE CONTINUED–