Johnny Browning, private dick, in: Come to Jesus; or, The Abrupt Sleep of the Innocent
I finally woke up when I slipped on the worn rubber tread of the stairway and bashed my head against the textured plaster wall of the stairwell. The impact was hard enough that a radial crack spiderwebbed out from the point where my head greeted the wall.
Sitting there, the first thing that occurred to me was that I had no idea what time it was. The second thing that occurred to me was that not only did I not know what time it was, but that I didn’t know how I ended up on the stairs. I had no memory of waking up, driving across town, parking my car, running my electronic key in the parking garage entrance, or even climbing up these stairs, at least not until I fell and busted my melon. I may not have known how I got there, but why I didn’t remember was clear: the chromium ooze in my head teamed with the roiling lava in my gut and the parched membranes of my mouth to indicate that there probably wasn’t much left of the second fifth of rye that I opened last night. “What a fucking life” I heard a low, scratched, and worn voice mutter. A second later, I identified the voice as my own.
I crawled to my feet and continued my climb to the sixth floor. The stairway, worn and unkempt, rolled like the sea underneath my feat, and the ancient hand rail creaked under my weight. I struggled open the ill-hung door with the crudely scrawled “6” on it and edged into the hallway. I ducked into the restroom and steadied myself with both hands clinging to the dirty sink for balance. I poked at the hand towel dispenser, vainly trying to get a towel to mop my face, and finally settled for a handful of rough toilet paper from one of the stalls. My head was bleeding slightly, so I dabbed at it with the toilet paper, and then filled my cupped hands with water and soaked my hair. I then combed it back with the fingers of both hands. The water mixed with oil, blood, and crud to form a rather disgusting hair gel, and my too-long hair curled wildly around my face. I tried to brush the dust accumulated in my tumble off of my pants and jacket sleeves. I stood up, straightened my shining red tie, and pushed the blooms from my oversized black dress shirt into my black dockers. Without even looking in the mirror I knew I was a vision of degradation in black with scuffed Docs, red tie, and a charcoal grey three button jacket from a suit which had long ago lost its other components. The day was here, as it usually was, without my permission. Permission wasn’t called for . . . capitulation was. Preparing myself for the inevitable capitulation, I shouldered through the restroom door and down the hall toward my office.
My little office suite consisted of two rooms: the front room held a cheap vinyl-covered couch, a few mismatched chairs, some low tables to hold magazines, and an empty desk that would be where my receptionist would sit if I could afford a receptionist. The pebbled glass on the front door had my name stenciled on it sans any further explanation . . . “John Browning”. The office number was marked vertically on the over painted door frame with cheap metal stick-on numbers most commonly used on mailboxes . . . “668”, or, as I thought of it, “neighbor of the beast”. Actually, some superstitious building super at some point had skipped over “666”, so in reality my office was 23 Fifth Street #666. I always wished that the super had left it alone. I wasn’t afraid of bad karma; I was bad karma.
The waiting room was separated from my actual office by another ancient wooden door with a pebbled glass window, this one unmarked. Behind that door were two cheap metal desks formed into an “L” anchored against the left wall, an ancient computer, a couple more mismatched wooden chairs, and some metal file cabinets that I had dumpstered. Though my actual office was always locked, I left the front room open 24/7, so that anyone who may want to see me could wait in some squalid version of comfort for me to arrive. This morning, I found (to my painful dismay) that the door was ajar, and in the front room some busted-up knucklehead was leafing distractedly through a three-year-old Sports Illustrated, apparently waiting for me to show up. I pushed open the door and walked past him wordlessly, hoping that he would disappear if I simply ignored him.
“Mr. Browning?” His voice was small and shy, almost fear itself.
“Uhn” I grunted, still hoping he would disappear. He remained silent while I picked up my mail and unlocked the inner door to my office. I sorted through the mail as I walked back behind the desk, pulling my phone bill out and placing it on top of the stack of credit card offers and coupon fliers (this would be the disconnect notice I had been expecting for a couple weeks). I opened the large window behind my desk and briefly basked in the panoramic view of the piss-soaked alley below. The hum of air conditioners filled the room, and I cursed my luck for having to live through another Central City summer with no air conditioner. I fired up old faithful on the desk, its cooling fans groaning as it loaded Windows. I then turned on a small black iron cage fan on the window sill, and cursed again as the fan blew the papers off my desk and on to the floor. I bent over, picked up the papers, and sat down in a broken chair behind the desk. Fumbling through the detritus on the desk, I found the remote for the shelf stereo perched on top of the filing cabinets, and punched “play”. MF Doom throbbed low through the office. All the while, the poor hump stood in the doorway, building his courage to address me again.
“Uh, Mr. Browning?” his voice, still small, faded quickly against the greasy hip-hop beat of the stereo.
“Jesus, a minute, will you? I just fucking got here!” I barked at him. I reached for the liter of Old Overholt in the deep bottom drawer of the computer desk by the wall, pulled out a small juice glass, filled it two thirds full, bolted the rye, filled the glass again, and set it on the desk without offering my guest any. I shot a glance at the cheap plastic travel alarm clock sitting on top of the computer tower: it was eight forty-five in the sorry ass morning. Funny how, on a normal day, I’m lucky to show up before noon . . . but when I’m on a drunken tear, by body runs on some horrible auto-pilot, and I’m always up at seven-thirty, now matter how torn down I am. Grunting again, I opened the phone bill: it was, as I expected, a disconnect notice, and I had two days to take care of it. In spite of the fact that Ma Bell thought I was a residence instead of a business, I still had managed to rack up almost two-hundred ninety bucks of back charges, and there was no way in hell that they would give me another extension. A bit of quick arithmetic revealed that I was approximately two-hundred eighty-five dollars short of covering this little inconvenience.
“Please, Mr. Browning, I need your help.” Now his voice was pointed into a whine.
Resigned to the existence of a hump in my doorway, I finally looked up to take him in. I noticed that he was even more busted up than I felt . . . he stood trembling, supported by crutches, one arm in a crude sling, a bandage on his head, both his eyes blackened and filled with blood. He looked like he had a near-fatal car crash in his immediate past. I gestured roughly at one of the chairs in front of my desk: “For the love of god, sit down.” He slowly folded himself into one of the hard wooden chairs, the look on his face grateful, like that of a dog when you finally stop beating it. “Now, just why is it that you have chosen to darken my doorstep on this evil little morning?” He looked at me, puzzled. This was not going to be my day to connect with the world around me in any meaningful way. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I growled, to clarify.
“I need your help . . .”
“Yeah, well, that part is clear.” He opened his mouth to speak again, but I cut him off. “Before we go any further, there is the matter of my fee. Three hundred bucks.”
“But, you don’t even know . . .” he stammered.
“Three hundred bucks. That’s what it takes to get me started. If I solve your case in an hour, you don’t owe me any more. Except expenses, ‘cause I need some food real soon. And another bottle. Three hundred bucks. If I decide not to take the case, I’ll give you two hundred back. Minus expenses, of course. It’ll cost you a hundred bucks for fucking up my morning, even if there is nothing I can do for you.”
“Uh . . .”
“Three hundred bucks right now, or I run your sorry corpse out the door and toss you down the stairway for good riddance.”
He looked at me stunned for a long minute. Finally, he reached in to a bag he had at his side, pulled out a checkbook and a pen, and started pitifully to try to fill the check out using the hand restricted by his sling.
“Whoa, hold on there, cowboy. You writing me a check? Do I look like a fucking bank? Huh? Do I look like a bank to you? And even if I was a goddamn bank, you figure I’d take your lousy check? Give me cash, or I bust that chair over your head and send you on your way.” I had to admit, I could be pretty brave with cripples.
If possible, he looked even more stunned. Without looking down, he pulled his wallet out of the bag, and dug three bills out of it. “I, uh, I’m afraid I only have three hundred dollars on me.” His hand shaking, he laid the bills on the desk.
My first luck of the morning: I had managed to name his price, and he had the cash on him. I grabbed the bills, looked at them, then wadded them up and stuffed them in my shirt pocket. “Well, you’d better hope I can fix your jam fast. I can bill you for expenses, but I need my fees up front. This is your first hour - I’ll call you later when I need more. Now, suppose we start by discussing just why in the hell you came to me, and not some other mope.”
“Well, first I checked with the Forsythe agency, and when I told them my story, they referred me to you.” A small speck of spite now colored his speech. “And they didn’t charge me up front.”
“Yeah, well, you’re lucky he didn’t pick your pocket on the way out. Now you’re with an honest detective, and an honest detective gets his cash up front, so there will be no . . . ah, misunderstandings, if you catch my drift.”
Forsythe agency, my ass. Harry Stuberville called his little divorce and blackmail joint the “Forsythe Agency” ‘cause he thought, correctly, that “Forsythe” would get him more action than “Stuberville”, what with Stuberville’s proximity to Stupidville. He got plenty of action from all the bovine business widows nailing their husbands trying to schtupp seventeen-year-olds . . . enough action to get him a McMansion in the suburbs, a nice office in the good part of town, and a bright yellow hummer with his logo on the door. He wasn’t much of a detective, though: he could never figure out that I was the one dumping sugar in the gas tank of his obscene yellow beast.
Harry had a habit of sending me all of his lost causes. Actually, he thought it was funny to waste my time with bullshit . . . though I should have been grateful, because without the bullshit, I had nothing. As a matter of fact, the last skell he sent my way was an alien abduction case: the guy was convinced his wife was abducted, and he wanted to hire a private dick to prove it, so he could sound the alarm and get the Army to get him his wife back. I ran the fool for about five grand in a couple of weeks before I told him what I found out in the first day . . . that his wife ran off with his brother and was living with a bunch of Filipino cockfighters in Florida. I owed Stuberville on that one. I felt so warm and fuzzy toward ol’ Harry that I dumped water in his gas tank instead of sugar, just that once.
Sad sack didn’t seem to be convinced, but he didn’t have any other choices, so he stumbled into his story: “Now, you should know, I’m a god-fearing man. I’ve lived my whole life on the straight and narrow. I go to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and I always give as much money as I can to my minister. I’ve been a Republican my whole life, and I’ve voted in every election since I’ve been old enough to vote . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, just get to it, will you?”
The mope didn’t even seem to notice my impatience. “. . . I stand pickets outside the baby killers’ offices whenever I have the time. I’m a vet, a Marine . . .”
“You? A Marine? I don’t believe you. You’re nothing but a little simp.”
He tried his best to draw himself up in the chair, but ended up sunk back down. “I’m a vet. I saw combat action in the gulf war.”
“What, you mean George Herbert Walker’s gulf war?”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, that explains a little. You punks need to stop calling that a war, and stop pretending like you saw anything close to battle action. All that war consisted of is bombing Bagdad into a parking lot, and then shooting a bunch of towel heads when they tried to surrender to you on the way in. And the only worthwhile thing you could have done, offing Saddam Hussein, you didn’t do.”
He tried to stammer a response: “Well, nevertheless, I . . .”
“Look, just skip the damn autobiography, and get to the point.”
“Well, I just want you to know the kind of man I am, so you understand how odd this whole thing is . . .”
“Alright already, just get to the fucking point!”
His face turned as red as the blood that soaked the bandage on his forehead. “Okay, okay. Well, lately, I’ve been having queer thoughts. I, uh,” his voice fell to a whisper, and he barely got the words out. “I’m not sure that I trust the President any more.” He fell silent, his eyes on the floor in front of the desk.
“You don’t trust the President anymore.”
“Yes.”
“The President.”
“Yes.”
“George W. Bush, the President.”
“Yes.”
“Well, whoop-dee-do. Welcome to the race of sentient beings. Wish there were more like you, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to put up with his bullshit for eight years. Now perhaps a punch line will show up soon for this little dog-and-pony show, because I’m about a minute and thirty seconds away from throwing you down the back stairs.”
He scrunched down further into the chair like a lost little boy. “It gets worse. I actually, uh, I publically stated that I wasn’t sure that the war in Iraq was a good thing. And I said it as a vet. And then, I signed a petition.”
“You signed a petition.” At this point, the dull screaming in my head threatened to turn itself into a full-blown migraine. I began kneading my brow.
“I stated publically that I felt lied too about the WMD’s. And I signed a petition.” He looked up at me pleading. “Honest, I didn’t know what I was doing. Pretty soon, I started getting e-mail from moveon.org. But, I swear, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I mean, even if I don’t trust the president, I’m not a commie, I swear!” With that, he let out a little sob.
Personally, I was losing my will to live. I tried to inject sympathy into my voice, but it was a hollow ploy: there wasn’t a sympathetic bone in my body. “Please sir, try to find a point, and then get to it with all due haste.”
“Well, after that, things started to happen.” Silence.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What kind of things?”
“It wasn’t clear at first. People started shunning me, but that wasn’t a problem. Sometimes prophets and truth tellers are shunned.”
“Christ, drop the Ghandi complex, will you? All you did was sign a petition, not lay down in front of some fucking tanks.”
“Anyway, people shunned me. They were talking behind my back.”
“Paranoid much?”
“But I could put up with it. That is, until I lost my job. Just up and fired, no reason given. Ol’ Joe, who used to be one of my closest pals, just gives me the pink slip. And all he says is that ‘we don’t need your kind ‘round here’, but when I asked him what kind that was, he didn’t answer. And then it started to get even worse.”
“Pray tell.”
“Well, next Sunday, I went to church with my wife by my side and my little girl holding my hand. I don’t mind telling you, when I get my mind made up, I’m a tough guy. So I walked in there, head held high, to seek solace in my Lord. And then, it happened.”
“Look, I’m on the verge of collecting social security over here. What happened?”
“The people, they were out front waiting for me. They were just glaring at me, and standing there, barring my way into the church. And then, these little girls, they were doing ring-around-the-rosie next to us, but they kept singing ‘nak-ed ki-iss, nak-ed ki-iss’, over and over again. Then this little boy, he couldn’t have been much more than seven, turns to his mom, and in a loud voice, says hey mommy! there’s that guy that likes to fuck ten-year-old girls! Well, I don’t mind telling you, I turned white as a sheet. ‘It’s not true! It’s not true!’ I said over and over again, but it was too late. I was banished. Two days later, my wife left me with my daughter. All she leaves is a note that says that I am never to try to find her or my daughter, ever again.” Sobs racked his body as he sat, a discombobulated pile, in my rough wooden chair.
I was starting to think this was another one of those “please find my wife and child for me” cases, when a little voice shouting through the fog in the back of my head told me otherwise. I stopped rubbing my eyes, and looked at the human pile in front of me.
“Listen, I don’t suppose you went online to check out the sex offenders registry, did you?”
All he could do was nod affirmative.
“And you were on it?”
Another nod.
“Your address listed and everything?”
Yet another nod.
Call it instinct, but I didn’t have this hump pegged as a baby raper. In fact, barring the evidence that he had a daughter, I would have pegged him as likely being a virgin. But no, oh no. There was something much more nefarious going on here. I reached across the desk, shot back a glass of rye, filled up, shot another, then filled up again. I steeled myself for what was to come. Yup, this one was a doozy, all right: a good Republican’s life goes to hell when he publically disagrees with the president. For a split second, I tried to remember if I knew whatever happened to Dick Lugar, since he hadn’t been seen around lately . . . but then, I focused on the case at hand, and boy, was it ugly. This one had Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over it. “Man, that’s tough” is all I managed to say, my wit escaping me temporarily.
My client sat in the chair, sobbing quietly.
My head was spinning. Karl Rove was out of my league. Sure, maybe I could get the element of surprise, but he had an army of private contractors at his disposal, and they were mean. Ignorant, mean, and lethal. I frantically plotted a course of action in my head, but I was only spinning my wheels.
“Go ahead. Maybe now you tell me how you came to be so busted up.”
“It was about a week ago. I went over to one of those godless Unitarian churches, where no one would know me. I just wanted God to know that I was still trying to work in his name. Anyway, after the service, they had a meeting, so I hung around.” He looked up, pleading. “I just wanted some companionship, and this was as close to good Christian people as I could find on short notice.”
“You’re wandering again.”
“Well, it turns out that this was one of them anti-war meetings. And . . . I know I shouldn’t have . . . but I betrayed our President again. I felt like Peter after the crucifixion. I said I didn’t trust him, and that I felt lied too. You know, about the WMD’s.”
“Yeah, yeah, I follow you.”
“So anyway, that was another public betrayal. But, I swear, I just did it so the Unitarians would like me. After that I was walking back toward my car. As a matter of fact, it was right in front of this building. And then, a black Denali pulls up, and a bunch of guys pop out.
Christ, it was the private contractors. Fucking Haliburton.
“So they shove me into the alley, and without saying a word, they start working me over with aluminum baseball bats. Most of them were big thugs, dressed in black, and smelling of oil. I only caught a glimpse of one of them: he was an old, flabby, pasty guy with big jowls and glasses. He kept jabbering at them, things like ‘Work the knees! Work the knees! You, quit screwing around, work his kidneys! Goddamn it, drop your shoulders when you swing that bat!’”
That would be Rove.
“And then, he, it, climbed out of the back of the SUV. He was dressed perfectly in a dark suit. He was about as old as the other guy, but he didn’t look as seedy. The weird thing was, he had these wires, cables almost, two of them, attached to his chest. They ran from his chest to something that looked like one of those battery carts, the thing that you use to jump your car.”
No. God, no. It couldn’t be.
“So the thugs part like the red sea, and this guy moves towards me, and I realize that he is talking, but I can’t understand a word he says. His voice is like a gray fog. Like, you know when you’re out in the country, and there are crickets and cicadas roaring all the time, but you don’t notice it, ‘cause it’s just like background noise? Well, his voice was like that. You only noticed it by its absence when he stopped talking.”
God, no. It couldn’t be; but it was. Dick Cheney. This thing had just jumped to a whole new level.
“ . . . and he had a ball bat too, but it wasn’t one of those aluminum ones. It was one of
those old wood models.”
Yup, it sure was Dick Cheney. He favored old Jimmy Foxx model Louisville Sluggers, and they made them special for him. I heard him many a time disparage the “toothpicks” that modern players used for bats, and he considered aluminum bats an abberation. “Give me an old-time Louisville Slugger” he used to mumble like a mantra, over and over again, when other people actually thought he was discussing energy policy.
“ . . . so he was going on, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. His voice was like tires on wet pavement. But, even though I didn’t know what he was saying, I was getting an impression, something like ‘Come to Jesus’. I didn’t understand that, since I already was a Christian, and I told him so. But all he did was scowl and mumble. After a long time, he nodded at this guy who was standing next to the battery cart. They guy hits a switch, holds it for a second, then turns it off. For just a second, the old man seems to vibrate, and for just a flash, fire animates those horrible, cold, dead eyes. Then the old man says the only words I actually understood when he said them. ‘Good stuff’, he says, then raises his bat. Then the bat comes whistling at my head, and that’s the last thing I remember until the next day. I woke up in the alley, and I’m pretty sure it was the alley outside your window. Some street person was urinating all over me, apparently to wake me up. He says ‘You awake, boy?’, but doesn’t stop peeing, even though I tell him I’m awake.”
Oh yes, this was nasty business, alright. I remember the night they found him, ‘cause a copper came up to my office and tried to pin the beating on me. Now, I’m not above roughing up some hobos for sport, but it just so happens I had an air-tight alibi for that night: I was in the drunk tank for public intox on the other side of town. Still, the copper seemed to be doing an unusually half-assed job trying to frame me up for the beating, like he really would rather the whole thing just go away. I started digging through my desk drawers looking for a loose cigarette, and cursed when I couldn’t find one.
Sad sack caught his breath and started in again: “Please, sir, I need your help. I need someone to clear my name, and I need to find out who is doing this to me. I swear, if I have to, I’ll change! I’ll put the W. stickers back on my car. I’ll go undercover, I’ll infiltrate the Unitarians. I’ll give you any money I have just to get me my life back. Please, I beg you!”
I started to lay the 411 on the sorry hump, but I didn’t have the nerve to do it. I couldn’t tell him that nothing could be done. In the eyes of Haliburton and the reigning US government, he had gone over. Flipped. Dove into the deep end. Screwed the pooch. Betrayed the might and right of the very regime that God himself had elected. Betrayal was the thing that these thugs would never tolerate, least of all from one of the sheep they considered their own.
Damn Dick Cheney, my arch nemesis! There was only one thing I could do, and I had to summon the last minuscule shred of decency left in my body to do it.
As he finished his story, tears of incomprehension filled his eyes. “So, what do you think? Please, Mr. Browning, can you help me?”
For a moment, I almost felt sorry for the poor sap. Almost. For a moment. “It’s Johnny. Johnny Browning. Call me Johnny.”
“Johnny, can you help me? I’m not a rich man, but I’ll give you what I have.”
I bolted another rye, then refilled the glass. “Yeah, I can help you. Write me a check for another hundred dollars, for expenses. After that, we should be even.” I was turning soft on this mope. He painfully scrawled the check, and handed to me with a giddy flourish.
“Really? You can help me?”
“I can solve your problem, yeah.” I opened the top right drawer of my desk and pulled out my nine. After rummaging through floppies full of porn in the drawer, I managed to find my silencer. I solemnly screwed the silencer onto my nine.
He expected to see the gun: I was a roughneck detective, after all. The silencer didn’t throw him either. What threw him was the silence. He just had to fill it.
“So, ah, you’re going to help me, right? Shouldn’t you at least know my name?”
I always kept my gun loaded, which is not necessarily a good idea, given my drinking habits. “Pal, as of today, you never existed. No one knows your name, or ever knew it, for that matter.” I leveled the nine at his forehead and squeezed the trigger three times. Three hiccups, and a thin curl of smoke. He sat there staring at me in complete incomprehension, a look that he must have worn frequently in his sad little life. The thing that was different, now, was the three holes in his forehead. I watched silently as the incomprehension gave way to lifelessness, and carefully laid the gun down on my desk. I downed the glass of rye, and then dumped the dregs of the bottle into the glass. There was one last swallow, so I took it. I paused again to check myself, to make sure I was steady. I then picked up my phone, and punched the auto-dail button that had no label. A gray voice answered on the second ring.
“Yeah.”
“It’s me. You have a problem. Or rather, you had a problem, and I took care of it.”
“So?”
“‘So’ my ass. I need cleanup, and I need it now.”
“Relax. Go get some lunch. It will be taken care of.”
“It better be. And maybe this time you send some pros. Those Haliburton fucks you use are worthless.”
The voice was like water in the pipes in the wall. “You don’t need to worry about it. It’s taken care of.”
“Why should I trust you? Why should anyone trust you, you shiesty bitch?”
“You just need to let me take care of my business. You stick to something you’re good at, like drinking, or masturbating.”
“Fuck you. And by the way, I’m off the hook now, so never speak to me again.”
“First of all, you called me. Secondly, you are never off the hook when your country calls.”
“You’re not my country, asshole. Fix this. And fix it now.” I slammed down the receiver, grabbed the poor mope’s check, shut off the stereo, and headed for the door. For the first time that I can remember, I locked the outer door of my office.
I crept slowly and silently down to the parking garage, pausing beside my old Chevy to listen for squealing tires that would mark the entrance of the private contractors, but I heard none. Out in the Central City heat, I found a First National to cash the check. I looked at the check, and found out that the mope’s name was Jeremy Smith. Poor Jeremy Smith. He never got with the program.
I slipped a small clear glove over my hand so that, when they fingerprinted me while cashing the check, nothing would register. Of course, they had my name, but that hardly mattered. I had so many names. They charged me fifteen dollars to cash the check, but I barely noticed. I would just get it back with a little short-change grift at the White Castle next door.
A few minutes later, I left the White Castle with a sack full of five sliders, an order of chicken rings, a watery coke, and copies of USA Today and The Central City Gazette. I also left the White Castle twenty-five dollars to the good. I took my time, reading each paper cover to cover, slowly grazing on the greasy microburgers, which was the only way I could keep them down. After roughly an hour and forty-five minutes, I figured it was safe to head back, slowly and aimlessly, toward my office.
When I got back to the sixth floor, everything was as quiet as a morgue. I stalked up to my office: the outer door was closed, but unlocked. I slowly swung the door open . . . everything out front looked the same as when I left it last night. I tried the inner door; it was locked. I unlocked it, slowly swung it open, and let the room reveal itself to me. Everything was undisturbed, as if the whole office had been time warped back to the moment before Jeremy Whoever’s shadow darkened my threshold. The clutter was on the desk, the stereo glowed silently on top of the file cabinets. Even the dust looked weeks old and undisturbed. I guess there were no private contractors on this job.
I sat down carefully behind my desk, and fairly quickly found four signs that someone had sanitized my office: I opened my top right drawer, and my gun was cleaned and oiled, glinting shiny as if it were brand new, with a fully loaded clip. The silencer was brand new, and a high-tech one at that. Next, I opened the deep drawer on my computer desk, and found a brand new sealed bottle of Wild Turkey rye. I broke the seal, poured myself a glass, and found clue number four: on top of my mail, my phone bill was still sitting out, but now it had a bright red “paid” stamp on it.
Life could always be better. But lots of times, it could be even worse. I reached down, opened the deep drawer on my front desk, pulled out a funnel, a lockpick, and a five pound bag of sugar. It was time to go find Harry Stuberville’s nasty yellow hummer.