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+--- Thread: Andre DuBois (/thread-1141.html)
Andre DuBois - Andre DuBois - 04-23-2019
Andre sat on the floor, chin on his hands, legs crossed. A heavy sigh rumbled his chest almost as loud as the grumbling in his stomach. A ball bumbled toward his knee, and Andre picked up the soggy, sad little toy and tossed it back across the room. Toddling feet chased after the toy, but Andre returned his forehead to the bars lining the window. Far below, grown-ups stood in a circle. He recognized them, the ones with purple and black clothes. More grown-ups wandered into the basketball court; clothes blue and gold.
The ball rolled to his feet this time. Andre picked it up and tossed it without looking away from the window. The purples realized the blues were there; the basketballs were tossed aside as the two circles merged into one. Pattering feet chased the ball again. Andre rose to his knees, hands gripping the bars to pull him upward. The ball was ignored, now. Tiny hands joined his at the bars, nose tip-toeing high to watch with him.
Pop! Pop! Pop! went the gunshots. Purples and blues fell down into red lakes. From their window on the sixth floor, Andre and Marcus watched the fight unfold. A rock sunk low in Andres’ stomach. When Marcus picked up the ball, Andre turned away from the scary scene with little more than a shrug, and they went back to playing without watching the rest. Someday, when they were bigger, he’d take Marcus to play basketball for real. They’d have fun. Someday…
“Can I have a snack?” Marcus asked, tugging on his shirt. Andre cast an uncertain look toward the kitchen. The little door knobs were easy to pick open, but they weren’t allowed to have anything yet. He bit his lip, remembering the last time he stole food too early.
“Not yet, Marcus,” he said and pat his little brother on the top of his fuzzy head. He always rubbed Marcus’ head to make him feel better about the bad things.
“Come on, let’s go see the stairs,” he giggled devilishly, and they hurried to the hallway.
The front door was easy to escape. All the locks, latches, bolts and slats were on the inside. It just took one little chair to reach the top…. there! The door swung open as Marcus returned, pockets bulging. He had to hold his shorts up with one hand as they hurried down the hall. All their clothes were hand-me-downs, a couple sizes big. Using a rope, Andre cinched the loops snug around Marcus’ belly one day to keep them up like a belt. It was lucky he found that broken jump-rope in the trash.
The stairs were at the end of the hall beyond an elevator that was boarded up before they were born. The other kids said that the gears were pissed on too many times by homeless bums so that they rusted through. One day, the elevator plummeted to the basement and everyone in it died a smooshy death. Or so the kids said. Andre thought it was a stupid story.
Marcus ran past him to the stairwell, plopped on the floor and dangled his legs between the poles, kicking happily. Andre joined him a moment later, smiling as they both emptied their pockets. A little pile of bullet casings formed mounds at their sides.
3…2…1 go! The gold ‘rocks’, as Marcus called them, dinged every time they hit the glass bottles strewn about below. Dings were one point. But if you hit Eddie, who lived in the corner of the staircase, it was two points. If you hit Eddie on the head and he woke up, it was five points. Andre always won; he had great aim.
Life wasn’t always so innocent. The horrors surrounding the Robert Taylor homes were not as bad as what sometimes lurked within. On their way to school, Andre and Marcus heard screaming from an apartment two doors down. The girl that lived there was going to have a baby – there were always babies around – but just as they hurried past, the screaming stopped. They huddled in the corner, trying to make themselves as small as possible, when a man stormed out, his face as thunder. Andre learned early on to not poke into other peoples’ business, but that rock settled in his stomach again. He peered in carefully, even as Marcus pulled on his hand to get him to leave it alone; Marcus was inherently smarter than him, something Andre would not truly appreciate until later in life. The pregnant lady of all 16 years old laid in a pool of her own blood: stabbed to death. The rock lumped to ice; numbness flooded his limbs as he stared.
That’s probably how their mom died.
That day something shifted inside. Andre refused, for the first time, to let himself cry. The tears sizzled on the heat of his own eyes, then he clenched his jaw and raced after the killer. Outside, the murderer pulled the soiled shirt overhead and dropped it in a gutter. Nobody was afraid of being caught for murder. Police avoided their streets.
The killer leaned on the hood of a car, laughing with some other men that Andre recognized. Rippling with muscles, tattoos covered his chest and neck, he looked like a giant. The rest paid no attention to a snarling kid on the sidewalk. The gangs were all killers. Every kid knew it. By ten years old everyone was sucked into one group or another. It started easy: stealing, begging, running or spying. By fifteen, kids had their own guns. There was a reason they weren’t allowed to look out the windows at home: stray bullets flew wild when fights broke out. Three holes already punched the walls of Mr. Pratt’s apartment before they moved in, and cardboard was stuffed into broken, neighboring windows. By seventeen, kill or be killed. Survive. Fuck the world and survive. That was the big game.
But not them. They would be different! Not them… Andre clenched his little fists and stepped off the curb. The killer looked up. Fear gobbled the rock in his stomach.
“You—” he said, voice breaking, then gasped.
Marcus grabbed his collar and yanked harder than ever before. He stumbled backward. The gang men laughed, but before they could get closer, the boys scampered to their feet and ran away.
“That was stupid, Andre!” Marcus said. Andre snorted. They fought their way to school but didn’t say anything else about it the rest of the day.
Nightmares lurked inside and out, but they were locked in a cage. The walls changed, but horror followed them to each new prison. After the first half-dozen foster changes, Andre’s hope was razor thin, but every time the case workers showed up, he held Marcus’ hand and whispered that the next house would be better. They would go someplace better… someday.
By the time they were transferred to Mamma Lawson’s care, Andre was big enough to stick up for Marcus for real. He took a few cues from his wiser little brother and started to keep his head down. The only thing he wanted to do was make it to school and back without being shot, coerced, or attacked.
Those were dark times. Even Andre admitted their somber reality. Foster-siblings crowded the apartment. Babies were often left to his care; Andre always ended up in charge. He spanked one once for getting into the knife-drawer, but the crying ripped crags throughout his soul. He hated being the bad guy, but he knew no other way to protect them from themselves. He vowed to never hit a child again, no matter how bad they were, but shit!, he was only twelve. He had no idea how to raise a kid. Except Marcus, but Marcus never got into trouble. Besides, he didn’t exactly remember Marcus at one year old. Andre was only three, himself, at the time.
They were definitely dark times. Something happened under that roof that changed Marcus, but Andre never knew exactly what it was, but he had suspicions. A few months later, they were removed, again, and placed with a family that lived in an actual house with grass. The perfect picture of the place conjured bad memories of the religious, sickening Swerlin family, but like always, Andre said things would be better here. Silently, he braced himself for more of the same shit. Maybe he was numb to it all…
A year later, he allowed himself to believe that things were truly better. Maybe this was the family that was really going to look out for them for all the right reasons. Not only did they not beat or scream at them, but they always had food. They gave them real school clothes from real stores. There were no other kids in the house: just them. For Marcus’ birthday, their foster parents put up a basketball goal above the garage just for Andre and Marcus to use all by themselves. Finally, Andre relaxed enough to sleep well at night. Their high school wasn’t scary. He even played on the basketball team.
Those were the best years of his life. They had internet. Andre got a tablet as a present pre-filled with dozens of books. By the time he came out to his parents, and he actually began to think of them as his parents, he wasn’t afraid of repercussions. ”We just want you to be happy, Andre. You deserve a little happiness,” they said. Andre wept alone that night in his room. They were so lucky, but he was terrified of losing it all.
Marcus was brilliant and made the kinds of grades that only made Andre want to match them. Rather than math books, Andre devoured everything else; a mind that was desperate to be filled. Maybe someday he dreamed of being a lawyer, but nah, no, he held no interest for defending the broken laws of corrupt governments. He wanted to help real people. Go back to the place he began. Walk the streets boldly, show all those people that not everyone was a coward. He was accepted into police academy after high school. He was a street officer by the time Marcus got his scholarship to college.
Channeling changed everything.
It made sense, the analogy to Star Wars; they didn’t know what to call the power anyway. At the minimum, Force meditation made Monday morning Yoga sessions even better. At its best, it made chasing criminals a hell of a lot easier.
Street cop was a thrilling life, but he wasn’t naïve. All the daily dangers a patrol cop faced in the streets of southside Chicago made no serious difference to the lives of the people living there. It wasn’t long before Andre dreamed of being a detective. He aced the qualifying exam on the first attempt, and although interviews took months, and he had to finish his degree along the way, Andre walked the precinct with new swagger. He did look fine as shit in the uniform, too.
Meanwhile, the Force gave him a sense of peace, with that, clarity. He studied constantly, and he shrewdly completed all the case simulations training demanded. Life was good; he worked hard and studied harder. Then, at 24 years old, he happily agreed to his foster parents adopting him as their formal son. He was in a long-term relationship and had a stylish (although small) loft apartment. The day the Bureau of Detectives approved his transfer to homicide division was the proudest day of his life.
That gleaming badge lost its luster pretty quick. He was assigned to twenty cases the first day. By the weekend, hundreds of unsolved murders piled his desk. Some of them went back decades.
Throughout it all, the Force was his ally. He had no issues wielding that allegiance whenever it was needed. He did earn himself a reputation; a man who got things done, who dug out answers others were incapable of discovering. It was a gray line to walk, but he clung to his morals; walked the job according to a code.
Act not for personal favor or wealth.
Seek knowledge and enlightenment.
Act not from anger, fear, aggression, or hatred.
Act while calm and at peace.
Guard peace.
Defend, protect and serve.
Never attack.
Respect all lives.
Seek knowledge and enlightenment.
Act not from anger, fear, aggression, or hatred.
Act while calm and at peace.
Guard peace.
Defend, protect and serve.
Never attack.
Respect all lives.
Several years working as a detective, and Andre was basically a walking legend on the job. Maybe that was exaggerating, but the idea is right. After a year or two experience, most applied to transfer to safer districts, leaving the worst, his own, to be a proving ground for the young blood. To be honest, they weren’t long-term positions anyway. By 30, most of his peers were promoted to Sergeant and thus back on the street or transferred to another bureau. Some sold out for the cash and skipped out of the PD completely to seek work with the federal government. Not him. Never for the government. Any government. That he stayed in his precinct for years meant he was practically a demigod, and there were always plenty of rookies.
It was the early hours of another Thursday morning when he was notified of a homicide that would change everything.
By the time he arrived at the crime scene about 7 AM, the coroner was already gone with the body. Folks were wise to scatter long before the cops showed up. Anyone loitering about a crime scene in the middle of the night was likely a suspect. Best to hide your face on days like that.
It was a poor neighborhood in the 11th district, the most violent of all Chicago, and the precinct out of which Detective DuBois worked. He strolled past the tape with the flash of a badge hooked to his belt. Plain clothes or not, everything from swagger to sidearm, to the scan of his penetrating stare might as well have painted COP on his forehead. He fucking loved it.
One of the officers walked up as he pulled latex gloves on his hands, squat down, and surveyed the scene from street level. No gunfire was reported. No signs of foul play at all, except for the gruesome body deposited like a dog in the street. He was no expert, but even to his eye, the blood splatter wasn’t consistent with that inflicted by edged-weapons. That rock formed in his gut… it was like an invisible hand ripped the body limb by limb. No tire marks. No drag-tracks. It was like the killer was a ghost. If so, what a fucking terrifying ghost that was, and that left an ominous possibility. One that went straight to the top of his mental list:
A Force-user.
Talk about terrifying.
“We have an ID on the victim?” All the usual motives scrolled through his head: drugs, turf, theft, assault.
This wasn’t a random encounter: wrong-place at the wrong-time. It had the stench of pre-meditation all over it.
The officer opened a screen and read off the coroner’s preliminary report.
“Male. Mid-50s. Dental records suggest an id,” he said, lowering the screen for Andre to skim. It was standard procedure. A simple 3d scan of the head cross-referenced myriad databases for identification. AI analysis compiled the most likely identity upon triangulation of a few simple pieces of information any half-assed coroner could compile.
He glanced briefly at the screen, only to freeze when he saw the contents.
He snatched the screen and zoomed in on the head, the globes of his eyes flitting from his gaunt face to the name at the top.
Dunakin, Pratt.
He pushed the screen back to the hand of the officer, jaw flexed tight. Pratt Dunakin was one of their earliest foster parents. Back then, he lived in the Robert Taylor homes projects in Bronzeville on the south side.
Andre remembered running away from Pratt one time when fury laced his veins with fire.
He squeezed his eyes tight and pushed the memories away along with the tablet. The remainder of his crime scene analysis was shit work. Catching the killer of that rat-bastard wasn’t exactly top of his priority list.
Other than the fact that looking into the face of a dead monster dredged up memories Andre preferred remained buried, he’d mostly moved on from the case, filing updates only as required. Months later, he was walking by the desk of one of the rookies when a small font caught his eye. Dunakin, Pratt.
He stopped as the rookie looked up. He quickly locked out his screen and moved toward the break-room like nothing at all was bizarre about it.
It was odd.
Andre opened the station first chance he could. Seniority clearance summoned the recent work histories. Pratt’s reports filled the screen. His own work was there, but so also were updated versions. Hyperlinks to other cases filled the lower screens.
He clicked, eyes devouring everything within heartbeats.
Then another.
And another.
Myriad cases that made a web of analysis suggesting the rookie was investigating a series of murders. Andre’s frown drew deep lines. This was the analysis of a serial killer. Why is a rookie searching for a serial killer? Why didn’t I get this assignment? A pang of jealousy stirred.
If questioning his own value to the bureau wasn’t enough, the knowledge that some of the cases were people he knew going all the way back to childhood was worrying. Did the bureau know his personal connections to the victims? Was that why—? No. Not possible.. The rock formed to boulders in his stomach, and he winced as the last screen opened.
It was his own profile. Hyperlinks faded to the background. A list of his residences; known-associates. His friends. His dating life. His school. Everything… He swallowed uncomfortably. Someone was coming. His heart fluttered in his chest as his fingers flew across the terminal commands. He thrust a data stick in his pocket and hurried away.
Other than the fact that he knew many of the victims – lived with some of them – the most likely reason the murder cases never crossed his assignments (he assumed) were the fact that nobody cared about them. No wonder they were assigned to a rookie. Half were a dead end and the other half, such as in the case of Knowles, F, well, resources aren’t wasted catching the killer of a child abuser.
Andre lived by a code, but he wasn’t an actual Jedi here. Killers came in shades of evil, he knew that; and the dead needed a voice, but some deserved louder voices than other. Yet, he clutched the data stick feverishly, devouring all the information contained therein while cloaked in the darkness of his own home. Alone.
Of everything he learned over the next few days, one problem kept him awake at night: he was a suspect. That was why so high profile an assignment was given a rookie rather than him. Soon, odd things happened around the office. Cases he worked for weeks were suddenly pulled from his assignment docket. Midnight calls to crime scenes ceased. Officers hovered uncomfortably near as he examined evidence. Seniors reviewed all his interview reports with a fine-toothed comb. On his days off, patrol cars drove his neighborhood more than ever before. He grew more nervous by the day.
They were building a case against him. Was the District Attorney in on it yet? They thought he was some kind of serial killer. Should he go talk to the DA in person? Get a lawyer? It definitely looked bad that these murders appeared to be carried out by a channeler, and he was definitely one of those.
That left him with only one concrete conclusion: that there only one way to prove his innocence.
He had to find the real killer himself. Before it was too late.
Description:
Age-26. An avid bodybuilder, Andre takes a great source of pride in his physique, working out 5 days a week at Gold's Gym. Sleeves of tattoos cover his arms. A larger piece of rearing horses and spears fills the span of his back. His hair is kept trim and short, but he is fond of interesting designs shaved to the scalp, which he changes often. He typically wears a beard, likewise shaved into interesting designs around the mouth and chin. He wears a cubic zirconia stud earring in one ear and a yellow-gold statement ring on his thumb when off-duty. His off-duty clothes are flashy and colorful. The plain clothes of an on-duty detective are typical button-down shirts, slacks and a sturdy belt. He is very adept with a pistol and accepts nothing less than perfect scoring aim while on the practice range.
Occupation:
Andre DuBois is a Detective for the Chicago Police Department, Homicide Division. He is stationed in the 11th precinct, infamously known for making up the most violent streets in America. That might be a stretch. They're at least tied with Detroit for the title.
Powers:
He is an adept-level channeler. Due to previous training and practicing with Marcus, he will likely progress quickly to expert in-game. Potential strength = 18 (average Asha’man is 21).
Rebirth:
He is the soul of the Greek hero, Odysseus. He is wise, calculating and intelligent, but also a warrior. Yet he will act as needed to accomplish the task at hand, even walk a morally fine line when its required. He is thoughtful but is known to give in to temptation (particularly gambling) at times. He is cocky at times to the point of being off-putting but also extroverted and generous to praise others.