Second Saturday Stories

I feel my legs start to twitch. I move my weight to the balls of my feet. The conversation is turning ugly, why can’t this old skeleton go haunt someone else. I feel the weight of the revolver in my waistband but my mind shies away from it like a bad memory. 

Ho Percy.” Harry whispered “what in God’s name are you doing to yourself?” Still clutching the trash can the officer meets Harry’s gaze and lets out a low whistle while the other move their tear through the living room.  “You try the hospitals?” the cop asks Harry.  He can only shake his head. 

“You lost or something?” I speak through a fat lip and watch her eyes crawl over the covered record player in the corner, the puddle on the floor, my old desk, anywhere but my face. “You can stare." I tell her "I know I look beat up.”

Inside she hesitates, caught by the eerie silence after the cacophony of car horns outside. The name next to a buzzer matches the one on her now useless scrap and she lets it tumble into an overflowing waste basket. She checks the buzzers again and notices a different name, one she wasn't sure she'd find. The man she spoke with told her it had been a long time Since Percy and Louise Slate ran All Seeing Investigations, and that if it was still there then he must need money in a bad way. 

My door slams then and I jump out of my skin. I can only sit, dumbstruck that I haven’t moved from my desk. Distantly I can hear my conscience scolding me. The air feels heavy. Was someone watching me? A black figure obscured in the frosted glass? or had I finally been reduced to jumping at shadows? 

Percy elects to run rather than help his old friend; but soon finds himself stalled while scowering his old office for supplies. Visions from his past, both real and imagined, terrify him with memories of violence and lost love. Is everything he experiences a product of his whiskey addled brain, or are there other worldly forces doing the devil's work? 

I remember getting out of the July heat in Nancy's. I sat nursing a cup of coffee despite the sun. I hadn’t slept in two days tailing a bookish husband as he cavorted through the brothels and underground casinos with a vigor that would make the Romans blush. After tailing him to the Crimson Lady I’d earned a break. His wife would get her divorce, or enough hush money to move out of the dive they shared

A half packed suitcase laying open on his couch brings with it the crashing realisation that he's running out of time to leave his apartment and disappear into the streets of North Bay. 

I don’t remember if any words were said, or who swung first. All I remember is putting every ounce of anger behind my right hand and stepping in. One of us spills blood on the concrete. The next memory I have is Harry driving his fist into my cheek and my vision erupting like a flash. 

When a wealthy woman hires him to find her husband, Percy sees it as his chance to escape a life that is becoming a noose around his neck. Using the case to lose himself in the city, Percy wades deeper into a landscape of greed, violence, and corruption of the human spirit.