Put The Sepia On Read online

  Dedicated to Wesley Slover and Orson Welles. One of those is more famous than the other, but there’s time yet.

  PUT THE SEPIA ON

  By Nick Feldman

  This is, one would hope rather obviously, a work of complete fiction. Any similarities to any real events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, and a bit of bad luck for the real people; this is not a happy story.

  © Nick Feldman

  Contents

  1. A Blue, Sick World

  2. But The Dead Are Happier Dead

  3. A Man Who Likes Talking To A Man Who Likes To Talk

  4. It Takes A Lot of Lights To Make a City, Doesn’t It?

  5. Hate Is A Very Exciting Emotion; Haven’t You Noticed?

  6. A Bright, Guilty World

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: A Blue, Sick World

  Keep your head on your shoulders and a gun up your sleeve.

  As credos go, it’s not terribly inspirational or comforting. It doesn’t speak to any profound or divine truth at the center of human existence. It wasn’t, to my knowledge, said by any historical figure much worth listening to. But it’s worked out so far for me.

  My name doesn’t much matter. I have one, but I lie about it as often as not, and in this big ugly city a name’s an easy way to get yourself noticed, and getting yourself noticed… well that’s just altogether a bad plan.

  People don’t really know me by name anyways, they know me by what I do. I’m a detective. I may not be a particularly good one, but that’s alright because as far as I know, I’m the only man in this city dumb or lucky enough to do that job, so competition is pretty sparse. And whatever else there is to say about me (lots, and most of it impolite), I do the job.

  Mostly, that means looking for people who vanish. And people vanish a lot around here. Sometimes I find them. Sometimes there’s no trace of any part of them. And sometimes I just find the traces… or the parts.

  It’s easy to disappear in this city. Nobody’s going to look for you except me, and even then only if I get paid. Your family, if you know them, are probably too doped up to notice before your next birthday, and too worn out to care when they do. Your friends, if you have any left, are too scared to look in the kind of places disappearing people go. The Dogs aren’t, but if the Dogs are looking for you it’s not because they miss you, and certainly not because they worry about you. And that just leaves the Corporation… for them to notice you were missing, there’d have to be a couple thousand of you. Enough to show up in the quarterlies. Other than that, you’re product. You’re inventory. You’re eggs. And nobody notices when one egg falls off the truck. Even if it falls off on a hot day, and cooks and rots on the pavement till it stinks so bad you can smell it a block away, the closest to “noticing” it anybody gets is to wrinkle their nose and complain about the smell. They don’t give two shits about the egg.

  So that just leaves me. I’m stone cold sober, except for all the whiskey. I’m not afraid of the kind of places that make it easy to disappear, or at least, not as much as I ought to be. I’m not one of the Dogs, and I like eggs more than the Corporation does, even the rotten ones. I’ll look for you, just so long as somebody asks me the right way.

  And while I wait for somebody to ask me, I’ll sit here in my office, such as it is, with my feet up and hat low, almost asleep. The desk, which accounts for a solid third of the furnishing, doesn’t have much on it. Cigarettes. Ashtray. Bottle of booze when business is good. Bigger bottle of booze when business is bad. On those rare occasions I want to look legitimate, I put a notepad on it. The desk, not the bottle. Sometimes I even scribble notes on the front page so it seems like there’s more to what I do than asking questions and breaking fingers. Big gun for effect. Up my sleeve, there’s a smaller one for survival.

  As for the other two thirds of the furnishing, there’s the rickety chair I sit in, leaning back against the wall, and the even shoddier chair anybody else who wanders in here sits on. Other than that, blank space and a handful of cockroaches. A dim bulb flickers, because cliché is all I can afford.

  She walks in a little different than the usual, but it’s a subtle distinction; usually they swing their hips, but her hips just swing, and for the fences. She’s dressed in the best clothing a girl with broke parents and strong morals can afford, but she wears it well enough. I guess she isn’t so bad off- I’ve seen women get by with a quarter of the fabric… and they only wore that much for weddings and funerals, and only then when the people involved were blood relatives.

  Yeah, and those hips are all right, too, but the eyes are where she really has it. Grey, and sad, and just a little scared. But determined, like an unusually brave baby deer… or a she-wolf doing her very best impression of one. That may sound like a dig, but I’ll take a wolf over a dog any day of the week. I’ve got a little respect for a hunter; a scavenger’s just a parasite with a better ride.

  She stops a few feet from my desk. Fewer of my feet than hers, which are small and crammed into brown shoes that were probably red, and pretty classy, back when she was in diapers. She takes her time, probably waiting for me to greet her. I consider it, but it just doesn’t seem like it’ll be worth the effort. I’m not a dog or a wolf, or even a deer, but I can still smell broke. And she’s been showering in it.

  “Umm…” she starts unsure, like she’s never done this before. For all I know, she never has. And, since I’m the only PI in the city, I know plenty. She stops. Either the deer act is pitch-perfect, or she honestly doesn’t know how to start. I do it for her.

  “I’ll take your name, for starters,” I say.

  “I’d… feel more comfortable if you took off your hat and sat up and looked at me.” I’d feel more comfortable looking at you too, sweetheart, but it’s been my experience that when I look too long at hips like those my asking price goes down while my medical bills go up.

  I notice myself taking off my hat and sitting up. I’m such a sucker. “That better?”

  “Much, thank you. My name is Coral. And you are…?”

  “Curious.”

  “I meant your name.”

  “So did I.”

  “Really?

  “No.”

  I let the silence hang around for a bit, to see how she takes to it. She doesn’t.

  “I want to know what your name is,” she says, a little pushy now. Good play if it was a play; most wolves oversell the demure and helpless bit. I was starting to trust her almost as far as I could throw her, assuming of course that I was pitching one-handed, and didn’t want to throw her very far.

  “Yeah, but you want something else more than that, don’t you?”

  She bit her lip, which worked just how she wanted it to (if she wanted it to), and I felt bad already. Lucky for me, I’d seen that show before and I knew enough to wait for intermission before I clapped.

  “I need to find my brother,” she said, finally, and I knew it was her older brother without needing to ask. It was how unsure she seemed about the whole thing, like she was violating some family pecking order by looking out for her elder. She didn’t seem to realize he was almost definitely dead. I decided to help.

  “He’s almost definitely dead.” She didn’t like that, but she powered through. Nice thing about being number one in a field of zero plus one, you don’t have to worry about offending your clients into the arms of the competition.

  “Either way,” said the deer-wolf, “I’d like to find him. I can pay you.” And finally, she said the magic word. I stood up, stepped around the desk, and looked her in the eyes. Noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Her eyes were clean, focused. No dope.

  “Been skippin’ your meds?” I ask her, just to see if she’ll cop to it.

&nb
sp; “Have you?” she replies, and I almost think I hear a howl in the background.

  “Only when I’m drinking,” I say, opening the bottle. I pour myself a couple fingers. I point the bottle at her, but she shakes her head, and she looks afraid. First time in this part of town, or a damn good imitation thereof.

  “His name is Robert,” she says after a long pause where she tries to think of any option besides dealing with me and my bottle of whiskey.

  “So’s mine.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Where’d you see him last?” Silence. I pick up a pen to look more professional. Never mind that it’s out of ink.

  “Where did you see him last?” I ask her again.

  “Home.”

  “Unhelpful. I’m going to need more than that.”

  “He’d… he’d been talking to the Dogs.” My least favorite word in the whole world lingered in my office, and spat in my ear.

  “Dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea why?” She shakes her head. The lie isn’t in the way she shakes it so much as in the way she stops. It’s a guilty stop, sudden and doubtful, like the first time your momma caught you with the girl next door. She’d get better with practice.

  “Any idea why?” She looks at me now, surprised, wondering how I knew she was lying. She says nothing, but gives me a half-convincing annoyed shrug. I sigh, and lean back in my crappy chair. It creaks a little.

  “Any idea why?” I ask for a third time. She tries the shrug again, and even she doesn’t believe it this time.

  “I don’t know?” I should not take this case. I should not take this case. I should not take this case.

  “I’ll take the case.” Write this on my fucking tombstone:

  “Here lies Mr. Detective,

  He’d have lived a longer, happier life,

  If instead of sexy, lying clients,

  He’d have just settled down with a fat and pleasant wife.”

  After taking a moment to digest my own stupidity, I ask the only question left to ask that matters.

  “Any idea where I should start?” I know the answer before she gives it to me, but it still ticks me off.

  “The Dogs.” In the interests of theatricality, I check the ammo in my big, obvious gun. I already know my small, useful one is loaded.

  “Ok. Let’s see the money.”

  “How much?”

  “Everything you’ve got, and enough besides to cover medical.” She produces enough. Barely.

  “Do I get it back if you don’t find him?” I pocket the money, and pull on my coat.

  “You get it back if I can’t find any pieces of him.” I start for the door, because when the Dogs are involved, even the pieces have a bad habit of disappearing around dinnertime. I’m halfway out of my office, and I hear her sob. I’m supposed to say something here. Everything that comes to mind is true, and mean.

  “The pain you’ve gotten used to will keep you from regret,” I manage, without much conviction. It does the trick, and she stops sobbing. She smiles at me for the first time, and I almost give the money back, because the odds say that when this story ends that smile will be harder to find than her almost certainly dead brother. But I keep it, because the money will still be good enough for whiskey.

  “What was that?” she asks, comforted or damn good at playing it that way.

  “Something my grandmother used to say.” I’m not lying, I just neglect to mention how senile she was when she said it, or how little I liked my grandmother. I grab my hat off the rack, nod to the client that’s likely to get me killed, and walk out the door.

  No point asking for her address; if I make it back alive, she’ll come around to see what her money bought her. If she’s real lucky, it might be as much as a finger. If I’m real lucky, I’ll be there to show it to her.

  Chapter 2: But The Dead Are Happier Dead

  I hit the streets like they owe me money. Maybe they do; I’ve certainly put in some hours keepin’ em clean. In the same way that a single toilet’s flush keeps a sewer clean.

  It’s raining, because of course it’s raining. Streets get slick when it rains, giving me one more way to slip up. I think this one puts me in the triple digits, easy. But I took the job, and I know a couple things. I know a few places to ask, and ways to phrase the question. Just might make my knuckles sore if I have to ask too many times.

  First place I stop is the smart place to stop; one of the only bars that really sees Dogs in with the drunks. Mostly the Dogs keep to their own places, with higher ceilings and higher proofs, but every now and then they wander out to one of these places to make shady deals with people who can get things they can’t, or maybe just to appreciate some women who don’t stand eight feet tall. In fact, the women in these bars always seem even shorter, because they spend so much time bent over the counter, or on their knees.

  Places like this have a distinct look, smell, and sound that can be summed up in one word: brown. And not a classy oak brown, either, but a scummy, low-rent brown that sticks to your shoe and rifles through your wallet when you’re asleep. It almost makes you gag, but your instincts are sharp enough to know not to open your mouth, because you don’t want that one word that says it all rolling around on your tongue. Oh, and there’s a pool table, too. The felt is brown too, but it wasn’t always.

  This particular establishment, they know me. That makes it easier to know who to talk to, but harder to get him to talk. Lucky for me, there’s a Dog I know here. Most of the Dogs don’t like me, since most of my work has me yankin’ their chains, but he’s ok. I helped him out of a bind with the Corporation a few years back, and he tells me things I need to know in exchange for more whiskey than anybody under six feet tall oughtta drink. Lucky for him, he stands about 9’6. He doesn’t see me yet, so I make for the bar first.

  “What’ll it be, pal?” the bartender asks me without looking at me. Not because he’s rude, but because he’s blind. He wasn’t last time I came in, though. His glasses are brown.

  “Whiskey. Leave the bottle.” I drop a big enough chunk of change on the counter. It gets wet. “And a glass of scotch.”

  He brings me what I ask for, and I take it to my Dog’s table. As Dogs go, he doesn’t look too bad. No real severe mutations or extra body parts, although one of his eyes has a little hair growing out the left side of it. But just a tuft. He’s got that same yellowish, leathery skin they all have, but that just comes with the territory. I set the bottle on the table and sit down, sipping my Scotch.

  “Must be a big favor,” he says, biting the top off the bottle, glass and all. I consider telling him his mouth is bleeding, but it’s not like that’s a foreign flavor for Dogs. Hell, he might have done it on purpose just for seasoning.

  “Don’t know yet. Might be nothing at all. I’m looking for a guy.”

  He snorts down about a fifth of the bottle. “So post a personal.” He thinks he’s funny.

  “I’m looking for a guy who’d been talking to Dogs,” I say, and he points at me, because, again, he thinks he’s funny. “Guy by the name of Robert.” His face tells me he knows the name. He takes a hard look at the bottle I bought him before he decides if his voice will corroborate.

  “That right?”

  I nod. “That’s right. And I’m going to find him.”

  “Sure it’s worth it?” he asks, swilling the bottle past the halfway point now. It only improves his breath.

  “Money’s right,” I tell him, because I hadn’t lied in a few minutes and was starting to get rusty.

  “He was at Lime’s, two, maybe three days ago.” It’s all he says and it’s all I need, and I really, really didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to say it, either, and makes that point by choking down the rest of the bottle in one go and getting up to leave. No point trying to stop him. I sit alone, finish my scotch, and try to talk myself into going back to my office and giving that sweet little deer or vicious little wolf her money back. Unfortunately for me, I’m
too smart to fall for my tricks.

  I head to Lime’s, and try to reason with me. It’s just a bar. Sure, it’s a bar I have some history with, but it’s JUST a bar. A Dog bar, yes, but still… it’s a bar. I’m good at bars. I know where the exits are, and I like whiskey.

  By the time I get there, I almost believe myself. It’s a nice joint, by Dog standards, meaning mostly that the stolen furniture is high-end and the bloodstains are mostly dry. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty full up on Dogs; big, hairy, brutal, violent Dogs. They’re drinking, too, so their tempers are going to be particularly charming.

  On the upside, it’s not too hard to find Robert, and he’s alive. He’s the idiot non-Dog sitting alone in the corner trying to keep his hand from shaking while he sips on whatever they gave him when he stammered out “beer”. Nobody’s hassling him, at least until I sit down beside him.

  “Robert.” He starts, which is too bad, because it attracts the attention of the Dogs. Now they want to know why I’m here, but they know he’s not to be touched, so they’re not sure what to do. One lumbers into the back. Damn.

  “Who… are you?” he quakes and shivers as he asks me.

  “You sister sent me, Robert. Gotta admit, I’m curious why this is where I found you.” He’s looking around, nervous. He’s worried the Dogs will think I know him. That he brought me here. Or at least, that the Corporation sent me here for him. Good. I don’t want him to feel comfortable here. The less comfortable he is here, the easier it’ll be to convince him to come back.

  “It’s… it’s more complicated than you think. You should go.”

  “No soap. I’m here for you, Rob, and if I go you’re comin’ with me.”

  “You can’t stay!” he’s sweating visibly now, and I can tell they smell it. Great.

  “Sure I can; if you can choke down that rotgut, I’m sure a hard-livin’ shamus like me can handle it.”

  “Shamus?”