Early morning.
Though it was another bright, sunny day, inside Chicago's Central Precinct the officers all sat stiff and silent, like cicadas in autumn, with only their ears occasionally tilting toward the captain's office.
"You're the most irresponsible cop I've ever seen!"
"Motherf*cker!"
"You kill a guy and then just walk away? Are you a cop or a goddamn gangster?!"
"Do you have any idea how many complaint calls I got yesterday?"
"I ought to fire your ass!"
Chief Griffin's furious roar cut straight through the wooden door and into every officer's ears outside.
They glanced at one another, grins of schadenfreude spreading across their faces.
They were not exactly happy to see Rorschach get chewed out. They just enjoyed watching a highly capable colleague get his head handed to him.
As for being fired?
Those were just words. The chief threatened to fire Rorschach every other week, and then, once the heat died down, not only did he not get fired, his rank shot up faster than one of Musk's rockets.
In the office, facing the spray of spit flying at him, Rorschach spread his hands helplessly and explained, "He shot at me first. Glock 43X. I waited until he emptied all ten rounds before I fired a single shot in return. I was purely acting in self-defense."
"Self—self-defense?"
Across the desk, a pot‑bellied middle‑aged white man in a white dress uniform actually laughed in rage when he heard that.
He jabbed a finger at a crime scene photo on the desk and snapped, "You call eight rounds of twelve‑gauge buckshot self‑defense? The guy might have been Black, but he wasn't Blade!"
"Uh, you know me, Chief. I've got serious trust issues when it comes to my personal safety."
"You still dare talk back?!"
The chief shot to his feet, grabbed the ashtray off the desk, and looked about ready to bash Rorschach over the head with it.
Ginny, who had not dared say a word since they walked in, rushed forward to stop him. But her small frame was no match for the chief, who weighed well over two hundred pounds; he simply pushed her back step by step with his bulk.
Seeing this, Rorschach stood up with a sigh, slid an arm around the chief's shoulders, patted his chest soothingly with his other hand, and smoothly changed the subject.
"Other people might not understand what it was like, but you do, Chief. This was a straight-up gunfight. I had to protect the little hostage and look out for a brand‑new rookie at the same time. Sure, my methods were a little rough, but everything I did was to keep innocent people safe."
"Bullshit. It was just a gunfight. You think I don't know what that's like?" The chief perked up immediately, and his mouth launched into a familiar rant about his own glorious past.
"I enlisted at nineteen, fought in Desert Storm at twenty‑five, then aced the police academy two years in a row. The intel agencies came calling, the FBI was fighting over me. If it weren't for my family, I'd be in the Pentagon right now!"
Listening to the old man brag, Rorschach could not help muttering, "Too bad you ended up in Commercial Crimes and never fired a shot in your entire police career."
"I—"
The chief choked on his words.
It was true; he had seen combat as a soldier, but once he graduated from the academy, he was assigned to Commercial Crimes and had spent decades as a cop.
What he dealt with most were not gangs and bullets, but contracts and safes. Every time he thought about it, he felt a little sore.
"You don't know shit, kid. I've busted more con artists than you've ever met in your life. Back in my day I was the best safe man in the whole division. There wasn't a stash a fraudster could hide that escaped my eye."
Chief Griffin snorted. After puffing himself up in front of the rookie, he could not be bothered to keep picking at Rorschach and waved him off.
Rorschach let out a silent breath of relief, tossed off a casual salute, and turned to leave. As he passed Ginny, though, he slowed, put on a mock‑ferocious face, and leaned to whisper in her ear:
"Don't you dare badmouth me to the chief behind my back."
"Tch."
Ginny turned her head away and ignored him.
Once the fuming Rorschach had left, Chief Griffin looked across the desk at Ginny—sweet‑faced enough to pass for a Hollywood starlet rather than a cop—and spoke slowly, clearly troubled.
"Ginny, I got another call from your father."
————————
Half an hour later.
Rorschach was sitting in the squad car, working through an order of fried dumplings he had just gotten delivered, when the door suddenly yanked open and Ginny slid into the seat, expression blank.
"…"
Rorschach shot her a glance, too lazy to ask what the chief had said to her alone. He finished the last dumpling, brushed his hands off, and pulled away from the curb toward his patrol area.
As a patrol officer newly demoted not long ago, his daily routine now was to wander the South Side a few times without any particular destination, then randomly drag a couple of Black guys who rubbed him the wrong way out of wherever they were and beat the crap out of them.
Boring, but he enjoyed it.
And clearly, the new partner beside him was not someone who could keep anything in.
"You're not even a little curious what the chief and I talked about?" Ginny suddenly turned to him, blinking. "You're not worried I said bad things about you?"
"Heh. The chief and I have literally been through life‑and‑death together. You really think he'd believe a rookie over me?" Rorschach scoffed. The girl clearly had no idea how he could screw up so many times and still get his badge and rank back every time once the storm passed.
Aside from his own skills, it certainly did not hurt that the brass liked him.
Ginny could only purse her lips helplessly at that. Then, almost as if talking to herself, she muttered in a low voice, "It was my dad. I've only been in Chicago two days and he's already called the chief more than ten times, asking him to give me some desk job that doesn't involve field work—or better yet, transfer me out of Chicago and back to D.C. He's always like this. Even though I'm over twenty and finished the academy, he still treats me like a little kid."
Hearing that, Rorschach rolled his eyes.
He hated these born‑with‑a‑silver‑spoon types the most. They enjoyed all the convenience and resources their parents gave them and still had the nerve to go on about independence.
With her looks and personality, if she really stayed in the South Side, she would not last three days before someone set her up with a loan shark, left her neck‑deep in debt, and sold her off to some strip club.
Though it did sound like her old man had some serious pull…
"So who is your dad, anyway? A senator?" Rorschach asked, curious.
"He's…"
The words were on the tip of her tongue when Ginny suddenly stopped. Her eyes flicked, and she smiled at Rorschach. "I can tell you what he does, but in exchange you have to answer one of my questions."
"Fine. You first." Rorschach agreed with a nod.
Satisfied, Ginny said, "He's a senior official at CTU in Washington. He's in charge of an entire counterterrorism team. I can't tell you his name, though. That's classified."
Rorschach gave her a surprised look. So the girl's father was high up in CTU?
He did not know the agency inside and out, but as someone in law enforcement, he was well aware of its status. It was an organization with authority to operate both at home and abroad, reporting directly to the Attorney General, with enormous power.
No wonder the girl looked so sheltered—raised in a rich neighborhood, with a father who was an official with special privileges, she had probably been soaking in honey her whole life.
"Your turn to answer my question!"
Ginny turned to face him fully now, curiosity written all over her face. "Yesterday at that Black couple's house, their handgun clearly went off ten times first. So how did you walk out without a scratch? You didn't even have a tear in your clothes. I mean, that was a closed room, and he was firing at close range."
She looked him up and down. Sure, the body was solid, but there was no way it was bulletproof.
Rorschach raised an eyebrow and kept his eyes on the road, not answering.
Just as Ginny was starting to suspect he was going to pretend he had not heard, the brakes suddenly screeched, and the squad car jolted to a stop. The inertia sent Ginny's upper body flying forward, and her forehead smacked straight into the dashboard.
"Ow, that hurts…"
Rubbing her head and still trying to figure out what had happened, she heard Rorschach roar beside her, "I've been shot!"
"What?" Ginny whipped her head around in terror. All the windows were intact, and there was no blood on Rorschach's body. But then he barked out another string of shouts:
"What's our location, rookie?!"
"Wh‑what location?"
"Where the squad car is! The spot where I got shot! I'm about to bleed out. You need to notify dispatch and get me backup as fast as possible! So where are we? What's our location? Our position?!"
"I—"
Ginny yanked the door open and stuck her head out to look, but she had only patrolled the South Side for the first time yesterday. She had no idea what the streets here were called. Panicking, she could only spin around searching for a street sign. Then Rorschach's disappointed voice sounded inside the car.
"And now…I'm dead."
He grabbed her by the collar and hauled her back inside, staring at her with a blank expression. "The moment you knew your patrol area, you should've started memorizing every street, alley, and landmark in the district. Because of your negligence, your partner can only lie here and bleed out."
Ginny froze for a beat, then could not help apologizing in guilt. "I'm sorry, I really just forgot…"
"Out. As punishment, you're running behind the car today." Rorschach cut her off and pointed outside.
Seeing how cold he sounded, Ginny pressed her lips together. She was not happy, but she still opened the door.
Just before she stepped out, though, she suddenly turned back to him. "Wait, you still haven't answered my question. How did you—"
"Out. Do I need to repeat myself?" Rorschach shoved her out of the car, slammed the door, and hit the gas, the squad car sliding past her and roaring away.
Watching the cruiser pull so far ahead it was almost out of sight, Ginny suddenly understood.
"That bastard pulled that whole stunt just to dodge my question, didn't he?"
Meanwhile, in the squad car, Rorschach saw her furious red face in the rearview mirror and could not help shaking his head with a smile.
Sure, he did not want to answer her question, but memorizing every location in your beat was Patrol 101.
That did not really count as him weaseling out… right?
As for how he had dodged those ten rounds from the Black guy yesterday…
Rorschach steadied his thoughts, and four blood‑red characters slowly surfaced in his mind:
The Eye of Judgment.