Case File Entry #5: Exhibit B - The Fog Spreads

The city didn’t sleep. It just shifted. By morning, porches dripped with cobwebs no one remembered hanging. Pumpkins sprouted overnight like mushrooms, wide-eyed and grinning. Street lamps glowed amber even though the bulbs were white. Radios whispered “cozy vibes” on every frequency.

Exhibit B wasn’t a single photo. It was the whole block. The whole borough. The whole damn city.

Inside the café, things weren’t faring better.

Peralta had gone full chorus line, sitting on a table with a guitar he definitely didn’t walk in with. Foam steamed around his feet like stage fog. He crooned, “Vintage tee, brand new phone” to an audience of blank-eyed civilians. Nobody clapped. Nobody laughed. But he kept singing, “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan . . .” The spice had him on repeat.

Gibbs lasted longer. Three decades of rules will do that. But all it took was a redhead with a smile and a steaming latte to crack him. He took one sip. Just one. By noon, he’d signed up for a pumpkin-carving contest downtown, eyes glowing like candlelight.

Kids scooped seeds with plastic spoons. Parents gnawed their lips over those flimsy orange saws that snap before the lid’s cut. And Gibbs — stone-faced, eyes lit like warning beacons — reached into his jacket. He didn’t pull a toy. He pulled steel. A folding knife, combat-grade, blade glinting under the pumpkin lights. The crowd gasped. He didn’t blink. The cut was clean, surgical, like a crime scene autopsy dressed up as holiday cheer. I muttered to the file: “Rule Nine was never meant for gourds.”

That left Jessica. Leather jacket. Whiskey glass. Glare strong enough to hold back the fog—for now.

I pinned the evidence to the file, red ink bleeding across the page:
Peralta — compromised.
Gibbs — compromised.
Jones — last hope.

And outside, the fog kept spreading.

By Ivy Harrow