Bethal

The rain hadn't stopped over Kaalinagar in six days. In the old fish market near the docks, the drains had backed up with blood that no one bothered to report anymore. This was Bethal's city now or at least, that's what the walls said, spray-painted in red under every flyover: "Ask Bethal."ACP Aryan Rathore had built his entire career on one number: forty-one. Forty-one encounters, forty-one men dead before trial, and a department that called him a hero for it. He didn't sleep well, but he slept.

Tonight, number forty-two was supposed to be easy.The safehouse in Sector 9 stank of diesel and old fish. Rathore's team surrounded it in the dark, guns raised, rain hammering their vests. Inside, a single lantern burned.Rathore kicked the door in. A man sat alone at a wooden table, hands folded, smiling like he'd been expecting company for dinner.

Rathore:- "Where's Bethal?"

Man:- "You're looking at a ghost story, Inspector. Bethal isn't a man. Sit. I'll tell you what he is, and then you can decide if you still want to shoot me."

Rathore's hand tightened on his pistol. His rookie partner, Sub-Inspector Ishaan Verma, stood behind him, torch shaking slightly in the dark.

Rathore:- "I don't negotiate with corpses that haven't fallen yet."

Man:- "Then let me fall talking. That's the deal your city owes every dead man - one story before the bullet."

Rathore lowered his weapon a fraction. It was a mistake he'd repeat many times before this was over.

The man's name, they'd later learn, was Iqbal - a low-level runner, not the real Bethal, just a mouth Bethal had rented for the night to deliver a message wrapped inside a story. He spoke for eleven minutes before Rathore's men put three rounds in his chest. In those eleven minutes, Iqbal told them about a moneylender named Choudhary who had, four years ago, tied a farmer's twelve-year-old son to a tractor wheel for a debt of six thousand rupees, and dragged him through a field until there was nothing left to bury properly. Choudhary had never been arrested. Choudhary had, in fact, been Rathore's informant for three encounters.

Verma:- "Sir... is that true?"

Rathore:- "Every rat says something true right before you kill it. Doesn't make the rat innocent."

But Verma had seen the case file later that night. Every word had been true.

Three weeks passed. Two more of Bethal's foot soldiers surrendered themselves to Rathore's team - not to escape, but to talk. Each one told a story. Each story ended with a name Rathore knew, a case Rathore had closed, a man Rathore had once called clean.

The commissioner wanted the story-telling stopped, calling it "psychological terrorism against the department." Rathore wanted it stopped for a simpler reason - the stories were working on Verma like poison working on blood.

Commissioner Deshmukh:- "He's turning your own boy against you, Rathore. Every case those men mention, Verma goes and pulls the file. That's not investigation. That's indoctrination."

Rathore:- "Then I'll cut the source. No more talking. Bethal dies the moment I find him - no dinner, no story, no negotiation."

Deshmukh:- "You said that about the last one too."

He had. And he'd listened anyway.

They found Bethal on a Tuesday, in a decommissioned textile mill on the edge of the city, surrounded by machines that hadn't turned in twenty years. He was not what Rathore expected - no scar, no menace, just a lean man in his fifties with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, sitting on a crate, sipping tea like he owned the silence around him.

Rathore:- "Bethal."

Bethal:- "Rathore. Finally. I was starting to think your legend was bigger than your legs."

Rathore:- "This ends tonight. No story. No riddle. Just a bullet."

Bethal:- "Every king thinks the last riddle is optional. Every king is wrong. Sit, Inspector. Your boy already has - look behind you."

Rathore turned. Verma had lowered his weapon and taken a seat on an overturned drum, torch pointed at the floor, face unreadable in the half-dark.

Verma:- "Sir, five minutes. Just - five minutes. If it's a lie, I'll pull the trigger myself."

Rathore should have shot Bethal there. He didn't. That single hesitation is the hinge this whole story turns on - the exact same door Vikram once walked through, except this time, it wasn't curiosity that opened it. It was guilt Rathore didn't know he was carrying.

Bethal:- "You remember Sector 4, three years back? A gang war, they called it. Seventeen bodies in one night. You got a medal for that one."

Rathore:- "I remember. Drug syndicate. They were animals."

Bethal:- "Seventeen bodies, yes. But only six were syndicate men. The other eleven were laborers from a chemical unit next door, locked inside their own dormitory and set on fire so the syndicate's escape route would look like a massacre instead of a jailbreak. You called it a shootout. Nobody checked the burn patterns."

Rathore's jaw tightened, because he remembered the smell of that night - chemical and flesh, a stench he'd never fully scrubbed from memory. He'd assumed it was the drug lab burning.

Bethal:- "You want proof, not poetry, I know. So here it is - the man who lit that fire works for you now. Head of your informant network. Subhash Pillai."

Rathore:- "Pillai's clean. He's fed us three years of intel."

Bethal:- "Clean men don't burn eleven sleeping laborers to cover a smuggling route, Inspector. But sure - ask him yourself. Ask him why his left hand still doesn't open past forty degrees. Diesel fire does that to tendons."

Verma was already writing the name down. Rathore hated him a little for it, and hated himself more for not stopping him.

That night, Rathore confronted Pillai in a lockup cell lit by a single bulb. Pillai's left hand, when Rathore grabbed it, curled at exactly forty degrees and would not straighten.

Pillai:- "It was them or me, sir. The syndicate would've killed my family if I didn't clear that dorm. I didn't choose the fire. I chose survival."

Rathore:- "You let me wear a medal for your massacre."

Pillai:- "You wanted a villain that night, sir. I gave you one shaped exactly the way you needed him."

Rathore left the cell without another word. Outside, in the rain, he vomited for the first time in eleven years.

The second story came a week later, and it was worse - a story about a girl named Meher, fifteen, who had died in what the department logged as "an accidental fall" during a raid Rathore himself had led. Bethal produced a phone video: Meher hadn't fallen. She'd been raped and thrown from a third-floor balcony by a constable trying to make a "clean" scene for the press. The constable still worked under Rathore. He still smiled in the mess hall every morning.

Verma:- "Sir, we have to open an inquiry."

Rathore:- "Every inquiry we open, we hand Bethal another win. Don't you see what he's doing? He's not confessing crimes, Ishaan. He's making us investigate ourselves to death while his own network runs free every night we're distracted."

Verma:- "Or maybe he's the only one telling us the truth in this whole city, and we're the ones who've been the story's real monster the entire time."

Rathore:- "You've known this job three years. I've buried twenty-two years in it. Don't lecture me about monsters."

Verma:- "Then explain the tendons, sir. Explain the girl on the balcony. Explain why every story he tells has a name, a file number, and a body that matches."

Rathore had no answer that didn't taste like ash.

Bethal's endgame revealed itself on the night of the monsoon flood, when half of Kaalinagar's power grid failed. He didn't hide anymore - he walked into the department's own evidence warehouse, past two guards he'd already paid off, and hung Pillai's body from the rafters with a placard around his neck: "Forty-one is a lie. Ask the tendons."

Rathore found him standing beside the body, unbothered by the corpse swinging gently above him, rainwater dripping from a broken skylight onto both their shoulders.

Rathore:- "You're a murderer lecturing a murderer. That's the whole trick, isn't it? Make me doubt myself long enough that you look righteous by comparison."

Bethal:- "I never claimed to be clean, Inspector. I've killed twenty-six men with these hands, and I'll tell you the name and sin of every single one, unlike your department, which can't even tell you the names of the eleven laborers it burned. That's the difference between us. I keep a ledger. You keep a scoreboard."

Rathore:- "And what happens when the ledger runs out? When there's no one left to punish and it's just you standing in a warehouse full of corpses you made?"

Bethal:- "Then I hang from these same rafters, and someone else picks up the ledger. That's how it's always worked, since the first vetala ever climbed onto the first king's back. The story doesn't end, Inspector. It changes hands."

For the first time, Rathore raised his weapon and didn't lower it.

Rathore:- "Last story you'll ever tell. Make it count."

Bethal:- "Fine. Last one. Free of charge, no riddle attached - the boy behind you, Ishaan Verma. Ask him whose son the twelve-year-old on Choudhary's tractor wheel was."

Rathore didn't turn. He didn't need to. Verma's breathing had already changed, ragged and broken, the torch trembling harder in his grip than it ever had in any raid.

Verma:- "My cousin. He was my cousin, sir. I begged you to reopen that case two years ago. You told me some debts have to be paid in blood, and closed the file."

The rain fell harder. Somewhere below, the warehouse generator sputtered and died, plunging all three of them into near-total dark, lit only by the flicker of the dying skylight bulb.

Bethal:- "You've spent your whole career deciding who deserves to bleed, Rathore. Tonight, for once, let someone else decide."

Rathore:- "You think putting a gun in his hand makes this poetic? It makes it cheap."

Bethal:- "No. It makes it honest. You've never once let the people you've hurt hold the weapon. I'm simply finishing what your forty-one encounters started - real justice, delivered by the ones you actually failed."

Verma stepped forward, his own service pistol raised, pointed not at Bethal - but at Rathore.

Verma:- "You closed my cousin's file, sir. You called him collateral. Two words, one signature, and a boy's death became a paperwork inconvenience."

Rathore:- "Ishaan - put it down. He's using you. This is exactly what he wants - the department eating itself from inside."

Verma:- "Maybe it should. Maybe it's been rotting long enough that eating itself is the only cure left."

Bethal watched the two of them with something close to satisfaction, the closest thing to peace his face had shown all night.

Bethal:- "There it is. The real riddle was never about me, Inspector. It was always about which one of you would break first - the man who kills for the badge, or the boy who finally understood what the badge costs."

The gunshot, when it came, surprised everyone in the room - including, for a fraction of a second, the man who fired it.

Rathore fell to his knees, not from Verma's bullet, but from Bethal's - fired from a second pistol hidden beneath the crate the moment Verma's attention had turned. Bethal had never intended for the boy to pull the trigger. He'd only needed Rathore looking the wrong way.

Bethal:- "Forty-two, Inspector. Should've been your number a long time ago."

Verma stood frozen, weapon still raised at a man who was no longer standing, staring instead at Bethal, who was already walking calmly toward the shattered warehouse door, ledger tucked under one arm like a man leaving after a long day's honest work.

Verma:- "Why didn't you let me do it? I would have."

Bethal:- "Because then it would've been your ledger, not mine, and yours deserves better ink than this. Go home, Ishaan. Bury your cousin properly this time. And if this city ever grows another Rathore - you'll know where to find me."

The last thing Verma heard, before the rain swallowed Bethal's footsteps entirely, was a voice almost gentle in the dark.

Bethal:- "The story doesn't end. It just changes hands."

But that wasn't the end. Not even close. Two nights later, Bethal's crew hit back hard while Rathore was still in the hospital with a chest wound that burned like hellfire. They caught Constable Reddy-the one who threw Meher off the balcony-outside a roadside dhaba. Reddy was stuffing his face with vada pav when four masked guys dragged him into the alley. No guns at first. Just fists and blades.

The biggest one, a thick-necked bastard with knuckles like bricks, slammed Reddy's face into the concrete wall. Blood sprayed across the bricks as teeth cracked loose.

Masked Man:- "You remember the girl? Fifteen years old. Screaming while you tossed her like trash."

Reddy gurgled, trying to beg, but the man drove a knee into his gut so hard something inside popped. They tied his hands to a rusted pipe overhead, feet barely touching the ground. Then the real work started. One of them pulled out a jagged piece of rebar and went to town on his legs-crunching kneecaps, splitting shins until bone poked through skin in wet, jagged spikes. Reddy screamed until his voice gave out, piss and blood pooling under him.Another crew member leaned in close, whispering the whole time about the video, about how Meher's mother still cried every night. They didn't shoot him quick. They carved "ASK BETHAL" deep across his chest with a rusted knife, peeling skin in slow strips so the pain stayed fresh. When they finally slit his throat, it was from ear to ear, arterial spray painting the alley walls red. The body hung there till morning, swinging in the rain like a warning sign.Rathore heard about it from Verma the next day, the kid's eyes hollow now.

Verma:- "They made it last, sir. Reddy was begging by the end. Crying for his mom like the girl did."

Rathore:- "This is what Bethal calls justice? Butchery?"

But deep down the rot was spreading. Rathore started seeing shadows everywhere. He pulled old files at night, alone in his flat with a bottle of cheap whiskey, the rain tapping the window like fingers of the dead. More stories leaked-Bethal's people whispering in chai stalls, in auto stands, even in the department corridors. Another raid gone wrong two years back, where Rathore's team had gunned down a whole family in a slum because they thought the father was hiding guns. Turned out the guns were planted after the bullets flew.

Bethal didn't just talk. He acted raw. One raid on his safehouse turned into pure slaughter. Rathore led twenty men through narrow gullies, boots splashing in sewage. They kicked in the door and walked straight into hell. Bethal's guys were waiting with iron rods and country-made pistols. The first cop through the door took a shotgun blast to the face-head gone in a red mist, body dropping like a sack. Rathore fired back, hitting one guy in the shoulder, but the bastard kept coming, swinging a machete that carved a deep gash across a constable's arm, nearly severing it. Blood jetted hot across Rathore's face.

Rathore:- "Push forward! Take them alive if you can!"

But alive wasn't happening. A short, wiry fighter jumped from the rafters, landing on Verma's back and stabbing down with a screwdriver-once in the shoulder, twice in the side. Verma roared and flipped him, smashing the guy's skull against the floor until it cracked like an egg, brains leaking out. Another Bethal man charged Rathore with a broken bottle, slashing his vest open and cutting deep into his forearm. Rathore grabbed the wrist, twisted until bones snapped, then headbutted him, nose exploding in a crunch of cartilage. He finished it with three close shots to the chest, the body jerking like a puppet with cut strings.

The fight spilled into the back rooms. One of Bethal's women-yeah, he used women too-slit a cop's throat from behind while he was reloading, blood gurgling as he clutched his neck. Rathore tackled her, punching her jaw until it hung loose, but she still laughed through broken teeth before he knocked her out.

They cleared the place but lost four men. Bethal himself slipped out through a sewer grate, leaving behind a fresh ledger page pinned to the wall with a knife: names, dates, Rathore's own signature on falsified reports.

Days blurred into blood. Bethal hit an informant network next. They caught Subhash Pillai's replacement in a moving car, forced it off the road into a ditch. Dragged the guy out, smashed his good hand with a hammer until fingers were pulp, then poured acid from a stolen chemical drum over his legs while he screamed. The smell of burning meat mixed with diesel as they questioned him about Rathore's new hideouts. He spilled everything before they doused him in petrol and lit a match. The fireball lit up the night, his body thrashing until the flames ate the screams.

Rathore was breaking. He cornered one of Bethal's runners in an abandoned godown, rain pouring through holes in the roof.

Rathore:- "Where is he? Tell me and I make it quick."

Runner:- "You still don't get it, saab. Bethal is the city. Every time you kill one of us, another story gets told louder."

Rathore beat him bad-fists cracking ribs, boots stomping until the runner's face was swollen meat. But the guy kept smiling through bloodied teeth until Rathore put a bullet in his knee, then another in his gut. Slow death. Verma watched from the door, saying nothing.

Verma:- "Sir... this isn't us anymore."

Rathore:- "It has to be. Or he wins."

The final night came during another flood. Bethal walked right into Rathore's trap at the old docks, but it was a trap that snapped back. Gunfire erupted across the warehouses-muzzle flashes lighting the rain like lightning. Bethal's crew fought dirty, throwing Molotovs that turned two cops into screaming torches, rolling on the wet ground as skin bubbled and peeled. One officer got his arm hacked off at the elbow by a sword, blood pumping out in thick ropes while he howled.

Rathore pushed through, shooting a man point blank in the stomach, watching intestines spill as the guy tried to stuff them back in. Verma took a graze to the head but kept firing, dropping two more with clean chest shots that exploded out the back in red chunks.

They cornered Bethal on a pier, waves crashing below, wind howling.

Rathore:- "No more stories. No more ledger."

Bethal stood calm, blood on his shirt from a cut above his eye, but that smile still there.

Bethal:- "Forty-two was just the start, Rathore. Look around. Your department is bleeding out. The people know now. The stories spread faster than your bullets."

Verma raised his gun again, hand steady this time.

Verma:- "For my cousin. For all of them."

But Bethal moved first-faster than a man his age should. He lunged, knife flashing, slicing Verma's wrist so the gun dropped. Rathore fired twice, hitting Bethal in the side, blood blooming dark. Bethal grunted but tackled Rathore into the railing, fists flying. A punch cracked Rathore's cheekbone, another split his lip. They grappled, rolling near the edge, knuckles smashing teeth, knees driving into guts. Bethal headbutted Rathore hard, vision exploding white, then drove a thumb into his eye socket, nearly popping it.

Rathore roared and smashed an elbow into Bethal's throat, crushing cartilage. Bethal gasped, blood bubbling from his mouth, but he laughed wetly.

Bethal:- "See? We're the same. Monsters with badges or without."

Verma picked up his gun with his good hand and fired. The shot took Bethal in the chest, spinning him. Rathore followed with two more, dropping him to his knees. Blood poured from Bethal's mouth as he clutched the ledger to his chest.

Bethal:- "The story... doesn't end. Changes hands..."

He toppled backward off the pier into the black water, rain swallowing the splash. They never found the body. Just the ledger, washed up later, pages filled with names and sins, including Rathore's.

Verma stood there in the rain, bleeding, staring at the spot.But.... Gun pointed towards Rathore...

Verma:- "It's over, sir"Rathore wiped blood from his face, the city lights flickering in the flood.Rathore closed his eyes gun pointing to Verma's head....

THE END...Ask Bethal...