Eleven Years and Ten Months.

Asha sits in front of two monitors, watching CCTV clips.

Officer Holland walks past behind her, then he comes back, peeping over her shoulder at the time stamp of the video she is so focused on.

“You are so stubborn; you just won’t drop the Anderson ca… That’s not… is the time on the recordings right?” He asks as he pulls a chair over, interested in what she is watching.

Asha takes one glance at him and chooses to not let herself get bothered by his presence there. “It’s a CCTV recording from eleven years ago, it’ll be twelve in two months.”

“Why are you watching a recording from so long ago? Unsolved case?”

“Yes, its an unsolved case. The exact one that brought me into the police force.”

Holland glances at her but there is no specific facial expression except for her thinly pursed lips as she focuses her being on the video. Then she suddenly hits the pause button.

Holland looks at the screen, a blurry face of someone holding a gun, outstretched into an alley.

Asha sighs, and then plays it. The camera is unable to listen to sounds but it sees very clearly that three shots are fired from the gun into the dark alley where people were running helter skelter, trying to run and save their own lives.

She pauses the video and goes back ten seconds, pausing it on the mysterious man’s face.

“Since you are here, id like you to check something for me with an unbiased eye.”

“Sure. Then after, you’ll tell me what happened eleven years ago, deal?”

“Deal.” Leaving the paused and slightly enhanced picture on the screen, she whips up a picture of Mandall’s face from the internet. Given that the man is a wealthy persona, there are pictures of him online even though he pretty much has no social life. There is a particular one she found, it’s a picture of him shaking hands with another well known wealthy man, with his side profile turned to the camera so it’s the perfect one for comparison.

She zooms it in and holds it beside the paused frame. “Do you see any resemblance between these two side profiles? Are there are smidges of resemblance there or am I thinking too much of it?”

Holland pauses and nods. “I see some kind of resemblance here; you can tell by the jaw’s sharpness. It’s the same thing. Who is he? Or who are they?”

“The one on my phone is Mandall Hall, CEO of the Hall Group of Companies.”

“That wealthy family?”

Asha nods. “I ran into him at the hospital yesterday and my mind automatically came back to this unsolved case. He is somehow related, fiancée, I presume, to the daughter of the Worth family.”

“What? Aren’t the companies like the most well known rivals in the business world?”

“I don’t give two shits about that. So you asked what happened in this case right? I’ll tell you. I was twenty two, fresh out of the university and on the search of a job to take care of my family. Both Dad and Mum were recent retirees and we were living off their pensions. You see the alley in this video? Right at the top of it is where my house used to be. That day, I heard there was a major gang fight in the area and rushed home. It was over. Our house had burnt down and my parents were lying the street, dead. Each of them with a gunshot to the head.”

Holland watches her as every expression of pain passes through her expressive eyes.

“I lost all my family to that shootout. As I had been wailing out there, I saw a man in black suit walk past the alley after ours and I saw the side profile very clearly, his white shirt had stains of blood and so did his face, worst of all was his hands. He held a gun in his left hand and the sleeves of his shirt on that end was deeply red, and I saw at the neck that he had a white shirt on, not red.”

“Wow. That is so evil.”

Asha sighs heavily, closing her eyes for a moment to wash back the scene that had unfolded in front of her back to the back of her head where she had stored it for years. “As soon as I saw Mandall Hall, the resemblance just flashed back into my head. They have the same height, the same physique and worse, the same facial resemblance. But he said it wasn’t him, even had the galls to seem angry.”

“Wait a damn second. You mean you threatened him? You spoke to him? Showed him this picture?”

“In the heat of the moment, yes. I did. And I told him to his coward face to come true or I’ll catch him myself.”

“Oh my goodness, you have fucked up big time. He’ll know that someone is on to him now and everything he wasn’t cautious about before, he will take extra care with it.”

It dawns on Asha and she goes speechless.

“I didn’t think of it like that.”

“Obviously. This is why its good to be hot headed only sometimes, not all of the time.”

“There is one thing I did not tell him though. I saw him pass the alley that day. All I mentioned had been that I saw him with my own eyes. So he does not know somethings like… uhm… that I know that he is left handed.”

“How do you know that?”

“He had the gun in his left hand remember, before he went out of sight, he swapped it into the right to use the left hand to pick a call, I got that glimpse pretty clearly. He is left handed.”

“Were you able to check Mandall’s own?”

“No. there was no situation he had to do something to show his prevalent hand. I’ll keep my eye though.”

*

“Someone knows who I am.” He speaks out as he stands by the window. “Even though I have tried my best all of these years to lay low.” He mutters as he returns to the swivel chair.

He exchanges a look with his second hand man.

“Why did that happen? That detective is pretty brazen. All of those accusations one at a time. And yet, she hit the nail on the head. I thought I ordered you to make sure that video and picture was destroyed at the time. Why did she have a copy?”

“I’m sorry sir. I have no idea how she still has it too. She must have kept a copy herself or had someone who kept it for her because we made sure to clear her phone of everything back then.”

“We have only two months before we have to stop laying low, before we can show ourselves as who we are again. I am tired to living like this but just for a damn statute of limitation, I have lost eleven years, soon to be twelve. But now, another issue is propping up because of a damn persistent officer.” He stands up from the table and walks over to stand by his right hand man, his voice dropping down to a menacingly low level.

“I don’t care how you do it but I don’t want any hitches in these two months. Do you hear me? Now, I hope you did not leave your desk unmanned?”

“I did not.”

But, the door bursts open and two men bursts in, two of them holding pistols in their hands.

“Did you think because you have been under cover for years, we won’t be able to find you? You sons of bitches now live like kings while the rest of us were sent off to jail. You will join them, not those in jail, but those you had killed.”

As they charge, one of them got for the right hand man and the other head for the main man instead.

He smirks as he sees the man running to this direction. With one fluid movement, he picks him up and throws him over his broad shoulders.

His right hand man makes short work of the other man too, knocking him unconscious.

He turn around to the one he had flipped to the floor, who is writhing in pain. “Say hi to them for me. Some of us know where we are going anyway, does not matter when.” With one long swing of his hands, he punches him the neck and the man go slack.

“Ahh…” He sighs in peace. “I have missed being in the action. My arms ache.” He throws out his hands and there is a loud snap.

Both his eyes and the other man’s eyes widen.

“I just dislocated my own arm.” He laughs mirthlessly as the hand go limp.

“I’ll get a doctor here immediately.”

“Sure.”

He pokes at his own hand, his eyes cold but his lips laughing.