[Icelander]

My players noted that they wanted more background on the events that led to Team 'Driving Miss Piggy' being dispatched, so here is the first of two Intermissio posts, set during the events of Episode 2 and 3. I might continue the regular tale before adding the second Intermissio, it depends.
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Deputy US Marshal Natalie Garza parks her car on the lot by Pier C, before walking toward the superyacht Penemue. Even in through the shivery wintery fog, the elegant, sleek lines of the yacht amaze her. Galveston locals proudly claim that BOI (‘born on the island’) billionaire J.R. Kessler’s yacht is the fastest superyacht in the world. That can’t really be true, as the Penemue was built in the 1960s and surely some Arab prince has a faster modern yacht by now, but it certainly looks the part. ‘A 20th century pirate ship for a 20th century pirate king,’ Garza thinks.

Texas law enforcement has a complicated relationship with Galveston’s prodigal son. On one hand, J.R. Kessler has donated to every law enforcement charity and public-private partnership that benefited cops in this part of Texas for almost half a century. On the other, local legends link his name to the Maceo brothers of Galveston’s racy past and insist that he earned his first million running a casino in Havana during the height of the Mafia years there. And that’s only the most probable of the legends told of Kessler’s outlaw early years.

Personally, Garza likes the old buccaneer. Not that she’s met him personally, even though this will be her second visit to his yacht, but every islander seems to have a story about him and nearly all of them make him seem wonderfully eccentric and irresistibly charming. As a larger than life local character, Kessler seems like a throwback to the romantic frontier Texas Garza wished she could have seen. Of course, as the actual historical Texas of the Wild West probably would have made it hard for her to carry a badge and gun, maybe she’s pining for a Hollywood version of history.
‘Hell, if I can’t be Rooster Cogburn, maybe Marshal Anita Blake isn’t so bad.’

Trying to contain a goofy grin as she thinks of tough-guy Lucien Lacoste in the guise of one of Anita Blake’s effete paranormal paramours, Garza checks herself. ‘Do I really believe in spooks, curses, monsters and monster hunters?’ The events aboard the Aqueronte didn’t seem altogether real now that it was daylight, but they’d been real enough for investigators to seal off the ship as a crime scene. ‘And is it really any better to imagine that a young girl had ripped up the stomach of another teenager and eaten her innards for perfectly normal, human reasons than to believe she was possessed by a dark spirit?’

Touching the butt of her Glock 22 in reassurance and making sure her badge is clearly visible, Garza notes that the security around the Penemue is, if anything, even more extensive today than the day before. Not only professional-looking suit-wearing security personnel checking people as they come aboard, but also camouflaged counter-snipers in prepared positions, like the Secret Service uses. Kessler is probably safer than most heads of state.

As part of the ongoing investigation into the violent incidents of the last few days, Garza heard that the FBI is doing background checks on everyone who works aboard the Penemue, and there’s at least twenty people with a special operations forces background on Kessler´s staff, most of them employed through private security contractor companies. Judging from what happened on the Aqueronte, those folks aren’t there as part of some vanity security detail.

Lacoste wasn’t willing to come out and outright confirm that J.R. Kessler was operating a vigilante organization aimed at supernatural threats, but from what Lacoste said before they boarded the Aqueronte and what Garza saw herself, it sure seems to be the inescapable conclusion. As a cop, Garza should be planning to arrest everyone aboard that superyacht. More realistically, she should be bringing what she knows to the attention of higher authorities, who’d take the responsibility off her hands. ‘And then what?’

Even if Garza could somehow get federal administrators who spent their time in air-conditioned offices to believe her, it wouldn’t do anyone any good. It might cost her the job, as the boarding of the Aqueronte would certainly be scrutinized with a gimlet eye, and it would foul up a lot of people who seemed to be genuinely trying to help people, because the government couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Ultimately, it came down to whether she believed that Lacoste and the people he worked with were delusional psychopaths or not. Because if they weren’t delusional, vigilantism didn’t seem totally crazy, at least while authorities weren’t willing to accept the threat. Thinking back over her career in law enforcement, Garza remembered too many cases where she’d had doubts that there was a natural explanation to be quick to condemn the idea that there was something massively wrong with modern society.

A drunk homicide cop from Houston once told her that there were cases where every murder police was either lying to themselves or lying on the written reports. Maybe they’d always been there, maybe they were recent, but there certainly seemed to be a lot more of them these days.

Presenting her badge to a mustachioed guard at the gangway, Garza introduced herself and said she was there to see Lucien Lacoste. With impeccable courtesy, the aristocratic man introduced himself as Guillaume Armant, Penemue’s head of security, and asked her, in a thick French accent, to wait while her appointment was confirmed. Garza considered pushing it, but suspected that even with a warrant, Armant wouldn’t let her in without confirmation from his superiors. He had the stubborn look of a consummate security professional, as well as representing, by proxy, enough money and influence to make any legal consequences extremely hard to enforce.

Fortunately, Lacoste didn’t take long to confirm that she was supposed to be there. Even then, she is accompanied by a tall, handsome blond man wearing full tactical gear. Captain Winding was a Recon Marine and had been in command of the military contractors who’d reinforced them at the Aqueronte the night before and must have spent the entire night answering questions about his presence there. Lack of sleep sure didn’t show in his fresh-faced countenance, though, even though he must be at least Garza’s age.

“How are you holding up, Marshal?”
“[Fornicating] peachy, that’s how,” Garza snarls at him. “I just love lying to federal investigators and my [defecating] bosses. It’s the entire [fornicating] reason I joined the Marshals Service.”

Apologetically, “Hey, if you can come up with a plan to make the federal government acknowledge the threat and do something effective to help those who need it, I’ll back you up without reservation, no matter what happens to me afterwards. Until then, this is the best we can do. It might be illegal, dishonest, crazy, whatever; but we’re still serving and protecting, right?”

With a fierce scowl, Garza prepares to dispute that statement with some choice words, but her reflexive combative instinct is overruled by the fact that all in all, she probably agrees with that pernicious reasoning more than she disagrees. So she confines herself to saying, “Look, plenty of bad things can be justified that way too. Not to mention that it would be our asses doing hard time and while I’d rule any bitch-ass women’s prison I got sent to, your ass is entirely too pretty for Leavenworth.”

Flashing an infuriating laid-back grin, Winding answers, “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll take it under advisement. In the meantime, there are forty-two girls who lived because of what we did.”

Looking grim, Garza replies, “It was touch and go for three of them, all night, but yeah, I think they’ll pull through. I don’t know what kind of life they can have, though. Rape and human trafficking are [fornicating] evil enough, but how do you recover from something like that?”
Winding shakes his head sadly. “I don’t know, dude. I guess we hope they blocked out the worst and that they get good counseling.”

Placing her hand on the tall man’s shoulder, Garza stops him to glare into his eyes. “You’ve got trouble remembering some parts too?”
Shrugging, Winding says, “It’s soft focus, kinda. Figure it’s a coping mechanism or something.” He touches a silver amulet around his neck. “Thank the big dude up there.”

As they reach their destination down in the hold, they meet five people coming out of the library with a luggage cart. Moving to the side of the hallway to let them pass, Garza notices that one of them, a woman being carried by a handsome young guy with long dark hair, is wearing her Juicy Couture tracksuit. Looking closer, she’s shocked to discover that it’s not a woman at all. It seems to be a small pig, drooling happily in a happy dream state.

Shaking her head, Garza enters the library and sees Lucien Lacoste joking around with his friend, Teddy Smith, who is cleaning a workstation spattered with paint. At the sight of the massive, muscular Lacoste, her stomach does a barrel roll, but she stifles her giddiness to greet him with her best scowl and hands on her hips. “Y’all better have a real good explanation why there’s a pig in a wig wearing my clothes!”