Libris Craft had an idea to "arrest" the various nasties taken from her fridge but she needed help to realize her vision and wasn't sure what story to tell with it. So we agreed to collaborate. I would help her put together the physical pieces and write the story. Then we discovered it was a one-person task so we choose to each post on our piece of the puzzle, she on the process of creating the completion, me the story.

With the things being arrested by our colleague Sir J and myself filling out the paperwork while Libris set up and took the mugshots, I came up with the idea of a detective story told from the perspective of the rookie cop who is tied to desk and only knows what goes on on the street and in the interrogation room because of the paperwork.

I am not really a writer and I didn't do much (read: any) editing. (I know the tenses are all over the place and there are far too many commas.)

Without further ado, I give you the story of Libris Craft's Refrigerator:


The Unusual Suspects
Chapter One: The Rookie

Frigidaire City, a sprawling metropolis that eventually covered the county. It was supposed to be the crowning jewel of the entire Kitchen Nation.

The Upper City almost is. It gleams and sparkles in the light, seeming immune to decline or decay. The Upper City is a small, barely a third of the population is in Upper City. The residents are cold, aloof, and long-lived. If the Upper city is a jewel it's less than a carat in a tin setting, the kind that only a cheap kid would pick up hoping the sparkle would somehow make up for everything else lacking. There's no substance to the Upper City.

Lower City is the body and blood of Frigidaire. Down here in the muck, bodies are packed close, blood is cheap, and hope is a rare commodity. The thing is, most of lower city is good hardworking people who just want to get by. They never have much but they don't have need of much. That's what made it so easy for people like the Mustards to move in. Every year their territory spreads, their violence grows, and people get more afraid. The more afraid people get the harder it is to get anyone to talk. This city has a plague of silence it's rotting everything from the good roots in the lower city on up and the fat packages in the upper city think it won't touch them because it hasn't yet.

But we've all been guilty of that. I grew up in the Lower City, back when it was a safer place. The violence and the corruption were confined to the Door back then. We in the Shelves knew about it, but we did nothing. It had nothing to do with us. I left to join the military when I was still just a kid, with my parents dead I didn't figure there was anything holding me in the Fridge. When I made Bvt. Major in the field, the brass offered to let me keep it. But I'd seen enough of war zones. I wanted to go home.

When I walked into my old neighborhood it was like I'd never left the war. Sometime while I was gone the place where I grew up had turned into something out of one the horror stories from the Door. I don't when it happened. I hate the people like the Mustards that did it. But I hate the people like me and my neighbors who stood around sitting on our thumbs while it did. We were all fools to think the problems of the City would stay in the Door. The Shelves never showed any intention of fighting and they were the next logical step for the scum of the Fridge.

I went to sign up for the Frigidaire City Police. The Department is crawling with corruption, of course, but what else is there to do? There's nothing a dame like me could do alone to clean up this town. Call me crazy but I think there's hope for this city yet. I got myself assigned to the Door, I wanted to clean this city from the outside in. I thought there had to be one good cop left in this town.

Turned out there are two. Officers Sir J and Libris Craft. Sir J was the senior detective, he was old-school all footwork and chin music. The higher ups didn't always like his methods, but they couldn't argue with his results. It was his name went on the paperwork, a blessing and a curse. Libris Craft was a dame too, but unlike me she looked it. She knew it and how to work it too, she could get a confession with a smile and a flutter of her eyelashes and she could put a man half again her size on his back in in braclets just as easily.

I was assigned their rookie when I got my tin. Until they say I'm ready I'm tied to a desk and word around here is that means I could be at a desk for years. I didn't mind though. If they said I was ready, I would know I was. More than that, they would know I could be trusted.

Chapter Two: A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy
Old Mr. Mustard was just a small time grifter when he got to Frigidaire City. He had ambition though. He'd knocked up some rich man's daughter. I don't know why he did it, maybe he really was dizzy with her, but he married the kitten, took her old sap for all he could, and they ran to Frigidaire together. Old Mustard wasn't stupid, he knew a girl who was used to having the bees wouldn't stay on long with a two-bit fakealoo. So he walked into Fridge looking to build himself an empire.

It didn't take him much to cheat his way into most of the business in the Door. People needed help when they wanted to start a new venture or when they already had fell on hard times. That's when Old Mr. Mustard would come in. He had a lot of cash to wave around and before most people knew it they were in holes they couldn't get out of.

A few years in he hired himself some help in the form of some cousins named Barbecue. He started working his way into the Door and left the cousins to run a little insurance business where people already knew and feared the name Mustard. Sweet Tangy Barbecue was a lot like the old man. A snappy dresser and a slick talker. He could walk into almost any room and intimidate everyone in it without raising his voice or dropping his smile. Sweet went around to the folk in Lower City telling them they needed to but fire insurance from him. Anyone who said no was the unfortunate victim of a fire.

That was were Sweet's cousin Hotnspicy came in. I never saw Hotnspicy Barbeque myself, he was long under the grass by the time I joined, but rookies at the Door precinct will be hearing stories about Hotnspicy Barbecue when the dust of my bones has grown old. When people refused to pay their "fire insurance" to sweet, Hotnspicy was the one who set the fires. But that wasn't why he set the fires. He set fires because he liked to, because he had to. When Sweet died, Hotnspicy was off the leash for the first time in his life. An enitre city block in the Shelves went up before he could be stopped. The stories say he had to be kept in straightjacket to keep him from setting the big house on fire.

Turned out Old Mustard's girl was a good Catholic and by necessity, so was he. Over the next twenty years they had five children and adopted one more.

The oldest, Deli Style "Horseradish" Mustard, became responsible for the family's money when he was fifteen after he suggested laundering the cash from the protection racket through the track. As long as the Mustard family kept the track owner on the payroll family members could walk in with dirty money and walk out with an allegedly honest day's winnings.

He was also the one to hire Romaine Lettuce and get the family into counterfeiting.

The next mustard child was a girl named Honey. For a while it seemed she wasn't going to go into the family business, she went to college and then law school and became an attorney. As soon as she graduated she set up her own practice. It turned out all her clientele was either family or was employed by the Mustard family. She became a master of bribery and blackmail and in so doing she's made sure that not a single arrest of the Mustard family has stuck in the last ten years.

South West "Spicy" Mustard is the quiet sort. Like Hotnspicy was. Spicy Mustard is even quieter though. A family hatchet man he prefers to do his work from a distance. He's a poisoner. Spicy ships in a rare pepper from down south that's very toxic to humans. The tiniest piece of that pepper will kill a man before he's done getting up to shout at the cook.

Spicy Brown "Big Brown" Mustard was appropriately huge. The man looked like he bench presses trucks for a workout. He's the one who came home one day when he was six with a strange shadow. A grubby little kid who couldn't or wouldn't speak. His parents were dubious but Big Brown insisted and that's how Spicy Brown "lil' Brown" Mustard joined the family. Word is he's the most loyal follower the family has and he still hasn't ever spoken a word. Between the two of them though the Browns can deliver the kind of personal but impermanent message that neither Hotnspicy or Spicy had the sanity for.

The baby of the family is Annie Horseradish Mustard. They call her "lil' Annie" and, unlike her sister, lil' Annie gets her hands dirty. She's a master of B&E and surveillance but her real passion is as a pickpocket, safe cracker, and otherwise thief of all work.

When I started at the precinct Horseradish was going off his prime years and the others were aging no slower, in most crime families all the hardworking progeny would be chomping at the bit for Old Mustard to die and leave the business to someone. Yet the Old Bastard has been hanging on to life by his fingernails for years by then and none of the telltale signs of feuding and frustration were showing up. It looked like family had finally trumped business and every cop in the city was starting to wonder if the Mustards really were untouchable.

What could crumble a criminal empire from the outside when power struggle and jealousy can't even make a dent from within? Of course, it was a dame.

Chapter Three: The Canary
Money is stronger motivator than love these days. Cherry Fresh married Chem Maraschino for love, they fought over love, and she killed him over love. Now go back and replace the word love with money. Story makes more sense don't it.

Cherry and Spinach Fresh were the adopted children of a one of those good hardworking couples that didn't have much and didn't want much either. Cherry and Spinach though, had ambition. Spinach chased his by getting into the smuggling business out at the docks.

Cherry went looking for a husband. Cherry thought she'd won the lottery when she got Chem Maraschino to settle down. He wasn't Upper City by any stretch but he lived as close to it as you can these days. Turns out he wasn't all that settled. She might not have minded if he didn't have a habit of blowing large sums on his mistresses instead of on his wife. They fought, she shot him, took his money and left the Crisper for the Shelves. She spent every dime she had on protection and ended up a canary in a drum on the edge of the Shelves and living in the Door.

Meanwhile in precincts all over the city her wanted poster grew older on the boards and mostly, coppers stopped looking. If she'd kept her mouth shut, it might have stayed that way forever. But Cherry wasn't the sharpest dame who ever shot her husband and she felt the need to drown her sorrows. Most men don't like to see a woman drink alone, but Dipping "Whiskey" Sauce hated to see anyone drink alone. It's likely that everybody in the Door has gotten drunk with old Whiskey at least once. The man's a notorious lush, but he's usually harmless.

Perhaps his fatal flaw was hanging around with the Strawberries. Strawberry Yoplait was a classy dame with a capital K. Strawberry "Fruit on the Bottom" Dannon was a man with particular tastes that he was very fond of advertising louder and louder as he got drunker and drunker.

On a hot muggy July night a pair of patrols spotted them stripping on a street corner. They were insistent that they were not drunk, just hot. It really is amazing how adept at resisting arrest three drunks with their pants around their ankles can be. Sir J had been in the area to talk to a CI on an unrelated case and he managed to get bracelets on them while the elbows watched in awe. the patrollers went back to patrol and Sir J poured the three of them into the back of his car to take them to lock up.

The Strawberries had lost coherency but Whiskey's a talkative drunk. He was more than happy to have Sir J to chat with on the way to the drunk tank. He started telling him about this girl. "Sweet thing she is" he said "voice of an angel, should be singing on a real stage not that dump almost in the Door" he said "would've gone for her if it weren't for that shooting her husband business." He happily informed Sir J of her name and schedule at the club when asked. Most people in the Door have gotten drunk with Whiskey but most learn quickly not to get so drunk you loose the brain-to-mouth filter. Whiskey's been over the edge with the rams so long his is long gone. Whiskey does many things, keeping secrets is not one of them.

The next night Sir J waited until Cherry was done with her set, then checked her elbows outside the staff door. Being an expert in men, Cherry started the waterworks almost immediately. Being Libris Craft's partner, Sir J saw through that move almost immediately. When Libris walked into the interrogation room, Cherry knew her goose was cooked. An amateur player like Cherry didn't have a hope against a pro like Libris.

Women who shoot their husbands don't a get a lot of sympathy in Fridge. It's generally agreed that thy should have added to the healthy divorce rate instead. Cherry knew good and well that without some kind of deal she'd dance for what she'd done.

Cherry did have much in way of options as far as dealing went. Sir J and Libris made sure she was negotiating with one of the few DA's that was on the level. So she did the unthinkable and she offered up the Mustards. Was it really possible that a two-bit black widow held the key to the biggest crime family in the Lower City? No one breathed while Cherry told her story.

Since taking over the Door, the Mustards had had a finger in every import/export business in the Fridge legit or otherwise. Sambal "Chili Paste" Oelek and his right-hand Cajun Style "Savory Remoulade" Mayonnaise were looking to get some under the table trade going with some associates in the east.

The two of them were foreign and hired a pair of local boys as guides, guards, and men of all work. Medium Chunky Salsa and his little brother Mild had been goons for hire around the door for years, they knew what was what. But Chili Paste and Savory Remoulade didn't want to pay the Mustards operational fees. It wasn't Mild Chunky Salsa's fault, but it was he that got dosed by Spicy Mustard as a message to his new employer.

Medium didn't take his brother's death well. What he did next... you could say he commit suicide. He went after Spicy Mustard one night at the docks. Cherry was out there that night to give her protection payment to her brother to pass along. Spicy was there to pick up his shipment of his weapon of choice. Medium was there to give Spicy lead poisoning. What he didn't know was that there was to be a Mustard family dinner that night. Spicy's siblings were waiting in a nearby car while Spicy conducted his business. When Medium attacked, the rest of the Mustards went to their brother's aid. Every last one of them took part in the murder of Medium Chunky Salsa and we had a witness.

In the end, it was that very family bond that held them together that would take them down. It's almost enough to make a girl believe in love.

Chapter Four: Honor and Theives
Honey Mustard's job was to keep the family and those they employed out of jail. She was very good at her job. She had a a gift for blackmail and for bribery. More city employees than I wanted to think about got a supplementary pay check from Honey Mustard. Cherry Maraschino made a deal to save her life. She was a murderer and the sister of a career criminal. She was the sort of person that saw a lot, but not the kind to inspire confidence in a jury. Between the two of them getting convictions for the Mustards was going to be very difficult. Libris made the find that saved us.

She was on the team serving the search warrant for Honey Mustard's office. The place was in shambles from the team looking for hidden documents. The paintings had been taken off the walls in search of safes and Libris decided to check the paintings themselves for false backs. It turned out a rather hideous imitation of a Caravaggio had a false back behind which was Honey's ledger. Horseradish was a stickler for knowing where the money was going so Honey had carefully documented the date, amount, and recipient of every payment she had made. Libris Craft was holding a sordid record of every dirty cop, DA, judge, clerk, or bailiff in the Lower City.

We found ways around all of them until warrants in their names could be issued. It took out almost half the justice department and slowed every legal process in the city for weeks. But in the end they tumbled, one at a time. Most trying to save their necks by informing on others.
Chapter Five: Dominoes
The last few honest cops in the city were at the center of the largest organized crime bust in Fridge history.

Whiskey and the Strawberries spent the night in the drunk tank and went back to their lives of madness and debauchery in the morning.

Cherry Maraschino was let loose after she testified and met a man from the Upper City who found the idea of a reformed sinner downright sinful. She goes by Cherry Garcia now and her husband has enough money to keep that the case.

With the new shortage of detectives, my career went onto the fast track. I made detective after less than a year as a rookie.

I told you there was hope for this town.