Second Saturday Stories

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. 

He made it as far as the bathroom when someone started banging a fist against the door. The pressed plywood muffled the voice but Eddie heard him as if the guy was standing in the bathtub. “Century City Police, open up!”

Above his clawing need to be free was a deep panic in being where he wasn’t welcome. That he was trespassing against some ancient warning slated against him in a past life, but by who, he had no idea.

For fans of hard-boiled detective mysteries, Second Saturday Stories offers a tale told in six parts