Second Saturday Stories

“We have to get off!” I shouted as I grabbed him around the waist launched the two of us overboard. Time seemed to slow down as we plunged off the side of the deck. As I was falling I could see back up to the wheelhouse. The captain was still there aiming the boat at the island ahead. I could feel the sweat on the captain’s brow, then we hit the water.

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Eddie heard her inhale, gathering herself for the rest of the story. “I didn’t hear him until he was standing in the doorway. The rifle looked incredibly long and I remember thinking that I was going to die in the middle of this obscenely tidy bachelor pad.

What he finds there will cast a shadow on the facts of the case and Eddie will find answers to questions he didn’t know he had. He’ll come to find that Bernard Oliver’s ties with the sinister underworld of Century City run much deeper than he originally thought.

He knew better than to try breaking his way out or shouting. He was in hot enough water, he didn’t need the driver pulling over to end him on the side of the highway. He needed time to think. He stayed still after the car stopped. Eddie knew if he tried to spring up he’d probably get a bullet in the belly for his trouble.

Running out of leads and luck Eddie is fuelled by exhausted desperation to finish the case. Can he put the pieces together in the limited time he has left, or will he be caught in the crosshairs a minute too long?

Eddie’s voice was a match scraping across sandpaper as he asked the question through blood and bile. He knew the answer, but he had to hear it from Bernie himself.  Oliver stopped his onslaught. Wheezing through his nose while he ran his hand through bangs slick with sweat and pomade. “What did you say?” he breathed.   “Where’s Margaret Hessen?” Eddie asked in that same graveyard pitch. 

In an uptown bar owned by Bernard Oliver, Eddie makes a chilling discovery that could spell not only the end of the case, but of Eddie’s entire career.

Eddie didn’t so much sit down as have his legs give out into the chair. He looked around the apartment grasping at meaning in the unfamiliar life. On the sports pages a name leapt out at him.

He finds solace in the familiar when remnants of his past surface to remind him of who he used to be, but that knowledge could cost him his life as a stranger confronts Eddie with two choices: leave town or die.