Aspirations

A black sedan with tinted windows was parked right across the Mulligan. Inside it was a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a very attractive lady in her late twenties, patiently waiting and looking at the bar entrance.

The lady soon got bored and started checking on a file in her hand. In it were photographs of nine girls that had gone missing. Photos of Rachael and Amber were also included in the file.

Before all those girls had gone missing, David happened to be the last person to meet them. Naturally, that brought suspicion from the NYPD. With so many missing girls, all disappearing within the span of a year, it had become a major case.

As the lady went over the information on the girls, she couldn't help but gnash her teeth in anger. "Most of them are young girls barely past their teenage years. Did this David kid really kill them all?"

The middle-aged man in the driver's seat looked at his partner and said, "Olivia, don't come to a conclusion just yet. Although everything points to the kid, we still don't have any conclusive evidence." Seeing that his partner still wasn't convinced, he added, "What if someone's trying to frame the kid? Have you thought about that?"

Olivia, a new addition to the NYPD major case division, nodded in realization. "Ah, I didn't think about that." Suddenly, she came across one of the photographs in the file and gasped. "This Amber is actually a prostitute! This David kid is a real degenerate."

The middle-aged detective looked at his partner and sighed, then muttered under his breath, "I guess that makes all men degenerate."

"What was that, Phil?" Olivia absentmindedly asked as she went through the information on David.

"Nothing, nothing…. Look!" Phil pointed at David, who had just left the bar and was heading out. "Let's follow him."

As the pair covertly followed after David in their car, Olivia, who was still reading the youth's file, said with some puzzlement, "How strange… there's no digital record of his activities in the last year. It seems the discrepancy started the day his father was buried."

"It could just be that he joined the Rosettis and has stayed low since," Phil replied as he slowly drove the car while keeping a good distance from David.

"But that should still be impossible right? No credit cards, no camera footage, no phone recordings, no social media... it's like he's a ghost," Olivia said, slightly taken aback.

She looked at Phil, who had a pensive expression on his face, and continued, "You should know how difficult it was for us to track him down. If it wasn't for him being well-known in Hell's Kitchen, we might never have found him."

Phil mulled over his partner's words and indeed found them reasonable. When he thought about it, the kid was almost like a special ops agent. His gaze landed on the youth who had just stopped at a food truck.

His eyes narrowed as he solemnly said, "This kid's more than meets the eye."

"I know, right!" Olivia replied. Suddenly, her eyes widened as she thought of a possibility. She looked at her partner and incredulously asked, "Phil, you think he's a UC?"

Phil didn't reply, but thought about it for a long time. In the end, he shook his head. "It's highly unlikely. He's only seventeen years old, after all."

The pair continued speculating as they watched David eat a slice of pizza on the sidewalk. A few minutes later, they watched him walk toward a corner.

A few moments later, Phil too turned around the corner and was taken aback. David had walked inside the alley earlier, but by the time the detectives drove by, he was nowhere in sight.

"Where the hell did he go?" Phil looked around and got out of the car. Olivia got out of the car and began looking everywhere inside the alley as well.

A few minutes later, after confirming that David had indeed disappeared, she looked at Phil and asked in slight surprise, "Do you think… he found out that we were tailing him?"

"No, that's impossible." Phil shook his head and confidently said, "I made sure to keep a suitable distance from him." In the end, he sighed, "Forget it, we'll tail him again tomorrow." With that, he turned around and walked back to the car with Olivia. However, just as they turned around, their eyes widened.

They saw David sitting on the car's bonnet and waving at them. "Yo! Lookin' for me?"

The two detectives were slack-jawed. Phil was the first to recover. Since he knew they were already busted, he might as well be direct in his approach. He walked toward David with wide and confident strides.

His first goal was to intimidate the youth and try to get as much information from him as possible. He introduced himself, his tone filled with authority, "Detective Phil Greyson, N... Y… P… D…."

However, when he approached him, Phil realized that his intimidation tactics meant nothing in front of the youth before him. The closer he got to him, the more dangerous he realized the kid was.

To Phil, David appeared to be a massive mountain that he could never scale. The sheer size of it sent shivers down his spine. Beads of sweat began forming on his forehead as he thought, 'This aura… just how many people has he killed?'

Phil was an army veteran, so he could recognize a killer when he saw one. And the aura that David was emanating sounded a blaring alarm in Phil's mind. 'He's dangerous!'

David stretched out his hand and smiled. "I'm David."

Phil snapped back to his senses and shook hands with him, all the while feeling extremely uncomfortable in his presence.

"So, what do you guys want?" David asked.

"Eh… uhm…. We, uh…." Phil was so scared that he couldn't even form coherent words. Right at that moment, Olivia walked toward David and slammed the photographs of the missing girls on the bonnet.

"You little bastard, what've you done with them? Speak the truth if you don't wanna go to jail!" she roared at him.

David saw the pictures of girls that were all familiar to him. His eyes narrowed as he mumbled, "I've been on dates with all of them… but they always ghosted me after the first meeting."

He got up from the bonnet and carefully looked at the pictures. After confirming that all of them were indeed his dates, he looked at Olivia and asked, "You said they've gone missing?"

"Hah! Don't act dumb. Tell me what you've done to them." Olivia sneered.

David rolled his eyes at her and then asked Phil, "Are they actually missing?"

Seeing David's genuine expression, Phil was also puzzled. "Y-Yeah… you don't know where they are, do you?"

David shrugged and pensively said, "I don't. I always thought that they ghosted me. Turns out they actually went missing."

He spoke to the two detectives for a long time and fully cooperated with them. After he left, Phil stared at his departing back and thought, 'Even though you might not be related to the missing girls' cases… I must still keep an eye on you.'

...

Later that night, David met up with his boss, Nico, and told him about what had happened earlier that day. As they were having glass after glass of bourbon, Nico asked, "So you're saying all those girls went missing after you met them?"

David, whose face was flushed red from the alcohol, exaggeratedly said, "Yes, boss! And here I thought, I was being ghosted by them…. I always wondered, how can a handsome man such as myself not get any girls? Turns out they'd been kidnapped, hahaha!"

Nico rolled his eyes at him and scolded, "You idiot, you're missing the point here. Someone's targeting you."

"Eh?" David rubbed his chin and replied, "Hmm, you're right. Do you think it's those Buccanti bastards? I've killed quite a lot of their men, ya know, hehehe."

"Who knows?" Nico shrugged, then added, "I'll look into it." However, he had no plans of doing anything.

David's heart warmed when he heard that. He patted Nico's shoulder and smiled brightly. "You're a good man, boss! You're like the family I never had…. like a big brother."

Nico smiled and didn't reply. However, he inwardly scoffed. He then heard David say, "Boss… you know what my dream is? I've never told this to anyone… except one person."

"What is it?" Nico asked in amusement.

David's eyes turned bright as he spread his arms. "I wanna travel the world and see everything there is to see. I wanna be a wanderer!"

Nico smiled and outwardly encouraged him. However, on the inside, he couldn't help but sneer. He came to a decision then and there as he thought, 'You punk, I'll do everything in my power to keep you under my thumb. You'll just be a caged bird and never leave this city.'

[Countdown: 327 days…]