After serving as a medic in the Vietnam War, Vincent Bayonne settled in Central City. He’d seen too much death, barbarity, and destruction to believe in the things that brought him to Southeast Asia. He’d changed, and his hometown no longer felt like home.
In Central City, Bayonne found his calling. He donned a different uniform to resume his mission to protect and serve. Law and order promised the possibility of decency, but he didn’t find humanity on either side of the thin blue line. Instead, he bailed the bilge of society’s sinking ship.
After passing the detective’s exam, Bayonne looked to narcotics for an opportunity to erode a driving force for chaos and barbarity. Unfortunately, life undercover as a disgruntled, self-destructive Vietnam veteran hit a little too close to the truth. Bayonne found precious few ways to serve or protect and too many ways to erode the boundaries between his reality and his undercover identity.
He turned to the enigma of murder.
In Vietnam, he couldn’t stop the killing, but he could heal the wounded. As a patrolman, he couldn’t stop crime, but he could hold the line between civilization and chaos. In narcotics, he couldn’t eradicate addiction, but he could suppress the substances that destroyed. In homicide, Detective Bayonne discovered the question he’d been too afraid to ask his entire adult life.
Why would one human kill another?
Bayonne had wondered that since he first met death in 1964.
Ultimately, death never left him. Bayonne couldn’t preserve the tattered beliefs he held dear. Try as he might, he couldn’t hold the center. Too many forces pushed against him, and he slid toward chaos.
Bending toward compromise, Bayonne realized that civilization was never perfect. It wasn’t an ideal but an experience. All of his attempts to create something better, to staunch the bleeding, arrest the guilty, and find the truth, those actions weren’t an attempt to create something else.
His attempts to help, like the work of so many others, gave civilization shape and substance.
In the mirror, Vincent Bayonne saw a man destroyed by his desire to preserve something greater than his efforts. His drive to control eroded the strength that helped him hold the line. He arrived at a crossroads, a point where he saw the value and necessity of the other side. His mission couldn’t exist without the criminals he hunted. He and his enemy existed only in a state of perpetual struggle, constantly spinning and ultimately indistinguishable.
What would he do next?
Only time will tell.
