This is a little bit of a preview at the next installment in the Other Stories portion of this fic. Enjoy some good old fashioned noir!
The light from the window falls in bands over my desk like the bars of the cage they'd be slamming on Andre Gone right about now. Another case closed, another perp in the clink. I suck the smoke from my cigarette, feeling the burn as another bit of my lifespan down the drain. These days those are my two biggest enemies, booze and the smokes. But I don't worry too much. I'm not a lifestyle coach. I'm a private eye.
The name's O'Mire, Daniel O'Mire. You can call me Croc. Everyone does, even the dames.
I tilt the barrel of my .45 toward the door as someone walks through it without knocking. Speak of the devil, there's a dame coming in right there, trouble in a big shiny metal suit. Any second the smoke from my cig could be mixing the smoke from my gun, and I want the dame to know that. I hear a lot, and nothing I hear about this dame is good.
She says she had a job for me. I say, hey, I'm all ears, and so is my .45. I pull the hammer, and the gun clicks like my spine in the morning. She spins me a yarn; says, you know Andre, Andre Gone, yeah, well, he was only the tip of the iceberg. And if the dame is telling the truth, this is the kind of iceberg that sunk the Titanic. She tells me all about this operation going on. A local gang, the Pirates, comes up more than once. Now, in this town you don't drop the butt of your smoke of the sidewalk without a cop waist the size of a tire blaming it on the Pirates, but what this dame's saying is fitting with a lot of what I've been hearing. A big toothy-smuggling deal, illegal critters from Tetra and back passing through Maridia Port. I've been to those docks, and I can tell you, the whole setup stinks like the leftover pieces of that Zoomer you found in your vent.
Still, I'm a private eye, not your vigilante justice boy in a cape, so I wasn't much entertaining the dame's proposal. But she got awful persuasive, and with the barrel of that big gun pointed in my direction I found her arguments very convincing. Half an hour later and I'm on the streets, and the rain is coming down hard. I'm not what you'd call a social climber, so I don't have a whole lot of friends, but I've got people who'll talk to me about anything given a particular set of green circumstances.
Today's flavor is an old mafioso by the name of Slade. He's the son of the biggest crime boss this city ever saw, K. Rayd, who met his iron slug thirty years back rather than pay a bar tab. By his word, Junior's been as clean as anyone in this town, and by anyone's he's at least cleaner than me, but if I can supply non-taxable income he's suddenly the most experienced crook on the block. We have our differences now and then, but we settle with fists, not bullets.
Today, though, Slade's on edge. I'm picking up on something fishy in the air today, and it's not just rainwater from the docks. He'll barely talk to me, and the usual greenbacks hardly get a peep out of him. I'm wondering whether to bluff about some dirt I have on him or to introduce him to the friend I hold closest to my heart—a little down and to the left, to be exact—when he looks around, shifty like a stool pigeon in the lunch line, then leans in close and tells me how, in his honest opinion, I should drop it. If not, he remarks with typical sincerity, I might find a lead at Club Crateria. Bryn Star, I should ask for Bryn Star.
What gets Slade spooked gets me spooked, but I get the feeling that blonde dame could make life a lot more difficult for me than it already is for me, and believe me, I don't more complications on top of the ones my heart's already got. So I head to the club, a classy joint that looks like it was built out of the parts of a couple stripped cars. I tell the bartender I'm looking for Bryn, and he laughs in my face like I'm Fat Man's Weekly Humor Column and tells me me and everyone else. I take this to mean one of two things. One, Bryn's a very popular girl and probably a dancer, or two, someone was here before me asking the same thing very recently. Or, both. I ask the walking eggcup about it, and, as it turns out, it's both.
Now I'm in a hurry, out again in the rain, because if the kind of people I'm thinking of are looking for this girl, then pretty soon there won't be much of her left for me to find. The bartender was short on dough—plenty around his midsection—and in relieving that issue I learned where Bryn lived, and luckily it wasn't far. Running in the rain with tarred lungs and a bad heart, though, anything can feel far.
My .45 is out of my coat and in my hand before I step through the busted door and into the living room. Someone beat me there, and they made one hell of a mess before leaving in quite a hurry. Looking at the scene I think either that, or Bryn owns a big dog with anger issues.
In the other rooms, all of them trashed, I find little in the way of clues, but it doesn't look like Bryn Star had been dragged out, either. I'm on my way to the bedroom, maybe to figure out where she went or at least if she'd skipped town, and I let my guard down long enough for a heavy lamp to sneak up behind me and crack me but good in the back of the skull, and all I get to think before I hit the ground and the breaker in my head is thrown is, I got my lights knocked out by a lamp.
o – o – o
I push my way through the molasses clogging my brain and work on focusing my eyes. My head aches like it's split neck to eyebrows, and for not the first time I wonder how long I've really got until my old body figures it's had enough and gives out for good. I make the effort to get my eyes moving, but I already know I'm not at the docks thanks to the lack of smell. That's good. It means the chances of waking up to a bullet in the brain are a little lower.
I try to move the rest of me and that's when I realize I'm trussed up tighter than your Thanksgiving's turkey, tied in fact to chair. Whoever did it's not that great at knots, but it looks like the old quantity over quality approach did the trick here. I'm less free than I was when that dame walked in with her proposition. Seems I've got time to think, so I think about the dame. What's her angle? Is she working for some old enemy of mine, wants to see me squirm? I think it's either that or she's a stoolie; wants out of the Pirates with no risk I'll clue them in—thanks to that barrel she was toting, she knows I'll end up with a side of butter even before they find her. Mutually assured destruction, they call it.
My thinking is interrupted like your regularly scheduled programming as in walks five foot seven of pale blue eyes, pale blonde hair, and pale white skin, and right away I see why Bryn is such a popular girl—one of two kinds of reasons, anyway. She's a little smaller than the sort I was on the lookout for—usually big, burly henchmen who look like a nature channel special on bears, with guns—so that explains how she got the drop on me. Question is, why? And depending on the answer to that, why hasn't she killed me?
We get acquainted. First there's a lot of talk of who I am, which I'm not too keen on answering, but pretty soon we work out that I'm not with the guys who trashed her place—mostly after I tell her how if I was, my partners would have still been around to other her m after she tried splitting my skull (take that how you will). So I get to asking her about her, and she isn't filling me in on what I really want to know. Dancer at Club Crateria, yeah, I got that.
Who are you, Bryn, really?
She unties me and my hand heads for my tender cranium reflexively. She isn't apologetic. Dames are like that. I'm wondering how I can get her to trust me enough to fill me in on just what the Pirates are up to when the most unlikely bunch provides the perfect solution: a hit squad. My friend makes an increasingly not-so-rare appearance and introduces himself to the goons while Bryn and I move away from the windows like it's a grade school tornado drill. I'm thinking it's unusually smart of the goons to come looking here a second time so soon, and then I remember the lard-soaked bartender's sweaty palms grabbing at my money. Is everyone in this town crooked? Zebes used to have some honest types…
The rebuttals to my friend's high-caliber arguments remind me to get moving, and quick. I take Bryn out the back door and up the fire escape—up is the last place they'll expect, and I know a shortcut of sorts. Bryn yells that there's no other way off the roof, but I know different. She actually makes the jump surprisingly well, and we're on the next roof, then down, and then we're gone before the goons have even stopped shooting up Bryn's empty apartment.
Bryn's decided it's in her best interest to stick with me, and she tells me we should head down to the Norfair district. Norfair's hardcore downtown, the lowest you can get in this already low-down town, and I recommend we move in a less rock-bottom direction, but Bryn is not open to my suggestion. I figure she's got a reason, and down's where we head. The roads we take on our way there are like recently vacated warzones, and my heart's doing the uneven bars at every shadow I see. Normally I wouldn't be this nervous, but I don't like the way this night feels, and besides, I don't want anything to happen to Bryn.
As we go, the red glow coming from Norfair gets stronger—everything is lit blood red in Norfair. The more I think about what Slade told me, or rather what he didn't tell me, the more convinced I get that what's going down is something that could blow the whole town to hell if it goes south, The Pirates are bad, sure, but their leadership's never had enough spark in the brain to run your grandma's pacemaker. Head honcho's a guy by the name of Scott, street name R, years ago a lackey of K. Rayd's. A real piece of work; nasty in a fight and cruel, period, but easily defeated by a first-grade math problem. Point is, someone must be organizing them. I keep my thoughts to myself, something we private eyes are inclined to do until we've got some evidence behind our hunches, and I figure I'll just wait and see where Bryn takes me.
That red-hot glow gets brighter and brighter, and I get the feeling we're getting closer and closer to something real bad.
A/N: So, intrigued yet? This will be continued shortly!
...I admit, this is nothing more than a combination of knowledge of noir style obtained from Sin City and Calvin and Hobbes's Tracer Bullet stories.