DISCLAIMER: I'm not Rick Riordan, nor am I involved with private investigation or law enforcement in any capacity.
WARNINGS: human trafficking — as always, feel free to skip any parts that make you uncomfortable!
WORD COUNT: 1,635
STORY NOTES: idk if I just want this to be a gen story or add pairings in, but I'll keep you updated.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Awesome, my first story in nearly 2 years. Yes, it's short, but it's more of a tone-setter than anything. Percy'll be making his debut next chapter. I don't know a great deal about crime stuff (to put it broadly) but I'm trying to do my research. Feel free to comment in reviews or whatnot.
THIS IS THE ROAD TO RUIN AND WE'RE STARTING AT THE END
1: Cas
Everyone always told her that hate was a strong word, but the fact remained that there was no other word for it: Thalia Grace hated her job.
She was certain that there was no other profession more misunderstood, vilified, glamorized, and generally over-dramatized than that of a private investigator. Her office wasn't some drab affair with a bottle of cheap whiskey in the desk and her name neatly painted on the door. She owned one ten-year-old New York Mets baseball cap, not a rumpled fedora. She answered her own phone — no need for a peroxide blonde sitting around doing her nails, harboring a secret crush for the PI and chomping her gum like a Wisconsin milk cow into the ears of clients when she did answer the phone.
Thalia probably wouldn't have minded the crush, but that wasn't the point. There was no Maltese Falcon, and not once had some leggy dame oozed into her office, planted her perfectly toned ass on her desk, and breathlessly asked for help.
Honestly, who the hell used the word "dame" anymore, anyway? Just those stuffy Brits a quarter of a world away, where it was some kind of title dropped on you by a queen who wasn't nearly half as entertaining as America's queen, Lindsay Lohan.
If anything in Hollywood and pulp fiction was true about being a PI, it was the bitterness. There were only so many times you could pay off the sleazy junior vice-president at the bank for a peek at someone's anemic accounts, or snap off a roll of pictures of a cheating spouse before you realized that people just generally sucked.
Thalia Grace hated her job, but she was good at it.
Too good. It paid the bills and then some. It let her keep her own time. And it was, relatively speaking, easy.
Thalia had never been one to walk away from easy when she could find it.
And really, this job had started out easy enough. A girl named Bianca had skittered into her office two weeks ago, breathless from fear and nerves.
Seemed like her kid brother had taken off and a week of searching on her own had turned up with nada. Thalia had tried to be as gentle as possible.
"Shit, do I look like Joe Friday to you? Call the police."
A charm school graduate she's not, our Thalia.
However, her heart had softened and she had even managed to produce some tissues when Bianca had burst into tears. Between the sobs, hiccups and startling moose call of a nose blow, Bianca had explained why the cops couldn't be involved. Their mom had died, see, and rather than let Children's Services split them up, they had taken to the streets together. Now the kid, Nico, had gone missing.
Thalia wrote down everything: names, numbers, addresses, favorite hangouts, nicknames, anything, everything. She assured Bianca she'd find her brother in no time. Finding runaways was her specialty, after all. She knew how they thought.
But now, two weeks later, this easy job had turned into a total bitch. The kid had vanished. It seemed a lot of people knew him some of them not the best people, but no one had seen or heard anything about him lately. Thalia was a little worried now and just desperate enough to put in a call to the Head Snitch himself.
That was how she found himself here, sweating in her car, waiting in front of one of the nicer Italian places in town. As much as she hated the man, she had to admit the little bastard had taste.
She glanced down at the file sitting in the passenger seat. A picture Bianca had given her was paper clipped to the outside. Thalia picked it up and studied it for what seemed like the millionth time. A typical teenager stared back. A mop of dark hair sat atop an olive-skinned face, and brown eyes sparkled over his laughing mouth.
"Better times," she murmured.
She let the file drop back against the steering wheel with a slap. Blowing her damp bangs off her forehead, she scanned the sidewalk again. "Come on," she muttered in frustration, pulling the neck of her tank top away from her neck. As if on command, the Weasel materialized out of the crowd, looked at her pointedly before shuffling into the restaurant.
Thalia turned and activated the alarm on her car before strolling into the eatery, right past the prissy hostess that managed only to sputter when she brushed her off and headed to the table in the darkened back corner where the snitch of all snitches sat made a huge show of sitting down and putting her combat-boot-clad feet up on the chair next to the greasy little man.
He twitched like a freshly caught trout.
Looking around nervously before glaring at Thalia, "Jesus, Grace, give me a break here," he whispered, leaning across the table. "You know my information gathering skills have made me enemies everywhere."
Thalia took in the sweaty sheen of his splotchy face, the greasy black hair hanging in his eyes and the badly wrinkled brown Hawaiian shirt before answering, "Gee, I thought it was just your funky smell."
The man leaned back in disgust, his paranoia never letting his eyes rest anywhere for very long. "Insults will get you nowhere," he grumbled.
"True," Thalia conceded, straightening in her chair and picking a piece of lint from her pants, "but an obscenely expensive lunch from this place will get me what I want, right?"
The man's smile reminded him of an oil spill. Rolling her eyes, Thalia waved down a waiter.
Thalia picked at her food as she watched the Snitch eat.
To put it gently, it was a train wreck and there were bodies everywhere.
As he chipmunked his cheeks with another meatball, she forced herself to look down at her own plate. The salad was good — not twelve bucks good, but good.
She had gone vegetarian not out of any tree hugging-Earth-Mama-animal rights consciousness; she basically thought cutting meat out of her diet might help her chill out a little. Seven years later, Thalia was convinced it had just made her meaner.
Her inner demon was dying for a greasy cheeseburger.
Scowling, she ran a hand through her hair and sipped her grossly overpriced iced tea as the Snitch wolfed down some frothy concoction of a dessert. Thalia could be patient. He might be a disgusting toad, but Chris Rodriguez always had the best information. He leaned back with a less than discreet belch. It seemed food had lowered his defenses.
"Please tell me feeding time at the zoo is over," Thalia said wryly.
He smiled his nasty smile at the waiter and said, "Coffee." The server hurried away, no doubt glad to be out of Rodriguez's greasy orbit.
"So," he said, leaning toward her, "what do you want?"
"The last hour to be seared from my memory," she said as she tossed him the file.
He only snorted before looking at the picture. Rodriguez was suddenly all business. He had been a street kid himself. "Cute kid," he murmured. "What's the deal?"
She watched him carefully as he looked through the file. "His older sister showed up in my office. Kid's been missing about three weeks now. I've followed everything I could for the last two weeks and come up with vapor. I've never seen anyone disappear like this," she said, letting some of her frustration show in her voice.
"No cops, huh." It was a statement more than a question from him. The two just shared a knowing look.
He sighed heavily, closing the file. "Well, Grace, unfortunately, I don't know the kid and haven't heard anything specifically about her. However," he leaned in close then; the paranoid snitch was back, "I've been hearing some nasty stuff the past month or so...something about a white slavery ring. Street kids with little or no family have started turning up missing. Just a few here and there, but enough to get mouths moving. I got it on a good enough source that I actually went to our mutual friend in the Department with it. The name I keep hearing is Cas, whatever that means."
"Cas?" Thalia scoffed. "What, like Supernatural Cas?"
Thalia didn't even watch Supernatural.
"Just Cas."
Thalia frowned darkly. "Alright. Cas, huh? And it was real enough for you to go to Jackson with it?"
Her face scrunched in distaste at Chris's nod. She had only crossed paths with Detective Percy Jackson a few times, but that had been enough.
He ground at Thalia's gears. Not even being the half-time partner of Annabeth Chase could save him in her eyes.
Thalia tossed her credit card at the waiter. She didn't even want to see the bottom line.
They emerged together into the late afternoon sun. Rodriguez's head immediately dropped down between his hunched shoulders, as if he was expecting to get clobbered from behind at any second. Thalia deactivated the alarm on her car.
"I thought PI's were supposed to drive something discreet," he said incredulously. "How the hell do you stake anyone out in that thing?"
Thalia looked lovingly at the metallic blue Mustang convertible. Slipping on her sunglasses, she turned to Harris and said, "Who the fuck cares as long as I look fabulous behind the wheel?" She laughed like the devil himself as she made her way to the car.
By the time she was settled in, Rodriguez had already melted back into the mass of humanity moving along the sidewalk. As she lowered the top on the Mustang, Thalia decided to talk to Bianca again and hit all her street sources one more time.
This time though, she was armed with a name — Cas.