Reliquary

Only this time it wasn’t a dead thing, but a massive wrapped brick of heroin, thrown off the Humboldt Rail Bridge during a shootout with police the previous night. Ahead, a police launch was waiting beneath the railroad bridge, engine off, bobbing slightly in the striped shadows. And then there was the mystery of the flask at his lab marked ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE. And in the backs of everyone’s minds lay the unspoken, but dreaded, spectacle of the Crown Heights riot of a few years before, which had gone on for three days before finally drawing to an uneasy close.