Chapter Text
Authority Regulator is a total asshole, and you hate dealing with him. The guy is just this trigger-happy jerk who views the police force as one big bazooka he can wield against the city. You mean, the city's lowlife. That's how he'd put it, and if you put it a different way, you wouldn't be surprised to have that bazooka pointed in your direction.
So you try to keep your head down and deal with him as little as possible. That's tough sometimes. You're not a lawman, but you consult with the department from time to time. A loose cannon can hit the targets nobody else sees, you figure, and for now, at least, the department agrees with you. You've all got a lot to do, balancing all the gangs in Midnight City. Kingpin's men, the Felt, your average gangsters with no affiliation, they make a lot of trouble. Kingpin doesn't own this place anymore, so his men are closer to being brandless criminals now, and the Felt are practically unpunishable. It's not that they're paying anybody off. It's that they're impossible to catch.
And then there's the Midnight Crew.
You can tell there's nothing Authority Regulator would like more than having those four marched in in cuffs. He's just waiting for the chance to put them where he thinks they belong. And, to be fair, the Midnight Crew are a bunch of criminals. That's what they do. They run speakeasies and they corrupt the media and they stay up all night playing jazz. That's what Authority Regulator rants about. You just keep your head down and try not to disagree with him too much. For a paycheque this steady, you'll agree jazz is a bad influence (as long as you don't have to get specific).
He likes to stalk around his desk when you're sitting in front of it and talk about how he'll bag the Midnight Crew. It's a heady fantasy, and you don't like to interfere with it. After all, the Midnight Crew are the bad guys. The main problem is that while that's true, the Midnight Crew are also... kind of okay guys. At least, Boxcars and Deuce are okay guys. You think Diamonds Droog might be a legitimate psychopath. And Spades Slick is crazy, but sort of a general kind of crazy. It sucks to deal with him, but he's not hurting anybody who doesn't mess with him first. And he keeps the others in check.
It's not something you notice right away. But you think Slick's insistence on keeping a team, and his particular team, stop these guys from being genuine and harmful threats. What would Diamonds Droog be doing if Slick wasn't ordering him around? You guess he'd have a freezer full of pieces of hookers, but that's just an estimation. It might be a couple freezers, and it might not be prostitutes.
The important part is that Slick has this god-complex, this insistence on ruling, not ruining. Sure, they wreck up the place and they take what they want, but Spades Slick has an eye to the public. Regulator is used to guys like Mobster Kingpin, empire goons who wreck what they don't want. Spades Slick keeps infrastructure. He knows he could own it, someday. And he prefers a working city he doesn't own all of to a set of ruins he doesn't. It's surprisingly practical.
He pays off who he can, walks over the ones who can't hurt him, and ignores the ones who might. Despite Spades Slick's legendary blood-thirst, he's more of a bureaucrat than a warrior. You're not sure why everybody thinks he's this monster of a man. He's just this guy. You don't know him all that well, but you think you understand him, which is more than most people can say. So you keep it in mind when you deal with him, and you don't mess with him, so he doesn't mess with you.
There's one thing you know, though. You know Authority Regulator doesn't get Spades Slick at all. And of the two of them, you're not sure who that's going to end up hurting more.