Chapter One

The need for private investigators is down. Can a team of them come together to help one of their own after he's seen holding a sniper rifle on national television, aimed at the President's motorcade?

A twelve foot-by-twelve foot room is laid out as uniformly as one could possibly imagine. Two parallel columns of six desks with a large break table on the left and a massive white board mounted to the wall on the right.

            The scratched up tile indicates the room was once occupied by busy workers flocking desk to desk, frantically trying to accomplish a common goal. If someone were to walk in today, however, they wouldn’t be able to tell.

            Half of the desks are vacant, and of the desks with belongings on them only two-thirds of them have someone using them currently.

            A woman in her late forties sips from a mug with the now faded words “Motivated P.I.” printed in black on its white surface. In the desk across from her sits a man, roughly the same age, who’s flipping through a James Patterson novel.

            “Maybe if you put that book down and got out there we’d actually have a case,” another man, appearing to be in his mid-twenties, says as he sits on the corner of the older man’s desk.

            The woman rolls back, spinning in her old swivel chair to face the guys. “We could all go out there, walk into every precinct in the city, and still never see a case. It’s a different world now.”

            The younger man scoffs. “Huh, funny how you guys didn’t mention that when I interviewed.”

            The woman arches her left eyebrow as she rests her elbow against her desk. “Seeing as your other option was remaining an unemployed college dropout, I don’t think you would’ve chosen any differently. Right, Coop?”

            Cooper, the older man, nods in agreement. “We saved your a*s, Griffin. You’re welcome.”

            Griffin’s eyes roll as he blows air between closed lips, making them vibrate. “Oh, please. I’m the resourceful, tech-savvy one, remember? I would’ve been fine. Monica over there is just jealous she’s not the prettiest one here anymore.”

            Monica and Cooper share a look before Monica speaks. “Did he just call himself pretty?”

            Cooper gives his shoulders a shrug. “He is a part of the self-obsessed social media generation. Should we be surprised?”

            “Yeah, yeah.” The youngest of the three rises from the desk, spinning around on his left heel as his right leg kicks out and both of his arms go straight in the air as if he gives up. “Hashtag outta’ this b***h!”

            Griffin vanishes down the hall and into the elevator as Cooper rolls his chair into the aisle way. He’s hunched over with his elbows on his knees. “What the hell is a hashtag?”

            Monica laughs in her co-worker’s face. She points a freshly manicured nail in the direction of a stack of books on Cooper’s desk. “Okay, those books aren’t the reason we have no cases. It’s your refusal to evolve. We’ve been shut out.”

            The salt-and-pepper haired man shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think me sending a tweet out to the world is going to help us very much.” He leans back in his chair, the back rest on it shifting to accommodate his new position as his left ankle comes up to rest on his right knee. “Nope. I blame the feds.”

            “Coop, it doesn’t matter who we blame. The fact is if we don’t get a case soon, we’re screwed.”

            “I’m just saying. It makes it hard to get a case from the local police departments when the feds are showing up every twenty seconds and commandeering investigation after investigation. Because they’re certainly not going to hire us.”

            “No… No they are not.” Monica tips the mug to her lips, a loud guzzling sound echoing inside the mug as she sips the last of the contents. “I’m going to fill up. You ready for another?”

            “Uh,” Cooper turns his head to peer at his desk. The mug that sits center, right atop the ring that’s permanently stained into the wood, with steam rising from within it. “I’m good for now. Thank you.”

            As the sound of coffee being poured into a mug takes up the job of being the only sound in the room, Cooper returns to his desk where he picks up his book. He’s halfway through the book, which doesn’t seem like all that great of a feat. Now consider the fact that he’s only been reading since yesterday morning.

            He’s so enthralled with his reading that he doesn’t even react to the brunette woman coming up behind him. Monica sips her coffee as she glances over his shoulder at the book. Once she loses interest in trying to decipher the tiny print on the page without her reading glasses, her attention diverts to the stack of books.

            Each book has a coffee stirrer tucked in-between pages to act as a bookmark. In each novel, the coffee stirrer is placed approximately forty pages before the end of the book. “Hey, Coop.”

            “Mmhmm?” he hums without so much as a blink.

            “Why do you never finish these books?” Monica reaches out, running her fingernail up and down the lined up coffee stirrers, creating an almost melodic beat.

            “The ending gives everything away.” He presses his thumb into the binding of the book he’s currently reading to keep it from shutting as he turns his head over his shoulder. “I like to solve the cases myself.”

            “Well, okay. But if you don’t read the ending… How do you know if you’re right?”

            He clears his throat as he turns the book over, setting it face down on his desk with the pages still open. “Whenever we solve a case, how do we know we’re right?” He can read the confused expression on the brunette’s face, so he continues. “There’s no trophy or confetti or all-knowing being telling us we got it all one-hundred percent right. We just gather the evidence and the justice system builds the case from there. Maybe the outcome is right, maybe it’s just a well-built case. Endings with exposition give an unrealistic depiction of how crime-fighting works.”

            Her confused expression fades, a more blank expression replacing it as she tilts her head and blinks twice. “I never thought about it that way.”

            “Yep.” Coop turns back towards his desk, snatching the book up as if nothing happened. “Most people don’t.”

            Monica looks down as her phone beeps. She withdraws her iPhone from her back pocket, eagerly rushing back to the break table. “Oh, the President is here! Want to watch it on TV?”

            “No thank you,” Cooper scoffs as he turns the page in his book before mumbling under his breath. “Freaking bureaucrat is the reason the feds can just come in and take cases that aren’t their’s. Jerk.”

            The female counterpart seems far more enthused by the arrival as she turns on the television mounted on the wall above the break table. The scrolling marquee across the bottom of the screen reads President Phillips Arrives in Atlanta. Monica squeals with delight, an action Cooper can’t resist mocking.

            “Oh, don’t be such a cynic!” She scolds her friend.

           

            Griffin is in the streets, his phone chirping in his hand while he’s typing. He seems irritated as his eyes wander to the top of the phone where he sees a Facebook notification that he doesn’t even bother reading before he swipes upward, making it disappear from his sight.

            He picks his head up as the roar of thousands of voices grows louder. In the distance of the major boulevard, he can see a motorcade travelling slowly in his direction.

            The red head was completely oblivious to the police barricade barring any form of access to the street from the sidewalk he is on until now. It’s as if he’s sucked into a vortex, his mind finally focused on something other than his phone as he locks eyes with the grill of a black SUV in the distance.

            Red and blue lights flash beneath the grill, but it’s barely visible as the vehicle travels directly into the path of the sunlight.

            Griffin is completely enamored, unaware of anything or anyone around him. That is until he hears a commotion behind him.

            “Hey, let go!” Griffin turns just as a man in a black hoodie bumps into him. The man is lurching over, his arms concealing something as he sprints into a nearby high-rise apartment complex that’s still under construction. “He stole my purse! That man stole my purse!” A frantic, beautiful woman screams.

            Griffin’s male instincts to save the ‘damsel in distress’ kick in, overpowering any sense of fear he may have as he quickly rushes into the building after the man. The door shuts behind him, and it’s suddenly eerily quiet, all of the ruckus outside muted by thick soundproofing on the lower floors that are completely finished.

            He looks upward as he hears short and quick footsteps, each one louder than the last. He sees a staircase at the center of the entryway and dashes to it, slipping in through the plastic tarp that’s draped over the entryway.

            With each floor he ascends, the noises from outside increase and the completion of the floors he’s on continue to lessen. As he reaches what he thinks to be about the fifteenth floor, he’s out of breath and out of walls. The steel beam shell is still around the staircase, but the cement that encased it no longer exists. Or rather it doesn’t exist yet.

            He hunches over, taking a moment to catch his breath with his hand on the last foot of railing. Just as he’s about to continue on, a muffled cough convinces him to stay. He narrows his eyes curiously as he steps out onto the floor where steel beams, sheets of glass and paint cans are scattered over the concrete.

            Griffin peers around, the sudden silence sending chills down his spine. Despite the cheering outside, the altitude he’s at now makes their shouting a dull roar at best. It’s this relative silence that remains until the loud ringing of a gunshot pierces the silence, echoes through the space and practically deafens the young man.

 

“What the hell was that?!” Someone in the office cries out. Cooper drops his book, the thick novel slamming against the blue and white tiled floor, completely shut without as much as a crease to mark his place.

Frankly, it’s the last thing on Cooper’s mind as he rushes over to the television set that now has all six employees that bothered to show up to work gathered around like a 21^st century watercooler. Only instead of discussing the latest office gossip, they’re watching chaos unfold live on national television.

            The motorcade, led by the SUV that first captured Griffin’s attention, speeds off down the road. All bystanders on the grid of sidewalks in the immediate area’s intersections disperse.

            “I wish we could see what’s going on out there!” A younger female looks around the room, mentally cursing whoever’s decision it was to lease the internal office space with no windows.

            Monica has ideas of her own as she snatches up the controller and changes the channel to a local news station. “Gunshots! There were just two shots fired from what sounded like some kind of sniper rifle!” The handsome male reporter shouts, one finger in his ear so he can hear everyone back at the station in his monitor over the catastrophic chaos around him.

            “Where did the shots come from, Rick?” The female anchor asks, her image appearing on the left half of the screen.

            “I don’t know, it echoed but I see a lot of people pointing,” Rick turns and surveys his surroundings, his head and the camera panning up in the direction that a majority of people seem to be pointing. “There!”

            “Oh my God!” Monica’s mouth gapes open as her eyes turn to a look of pure sadness and disbelief, her palm coming up to cover her mouth which she’s seemingly incapable of closing.

            “Is that…” Coop doesn’t even want to finish his question as the camera zooms in on the slender figure of a young, red-headed man standing in an opening meant for a window. If that isn’t a gut-wrenching enough sight, it’s made worse by the sniper rifle in his trembling hands.

Reviews

[Cyndy Robinson]

Good pace, I love stories that reach right out and grab you into the action right off the bat, and you have done that here. Very good use of transitionals and preparing the story in the beginning for what is coming later. To often people just throw necessary facts in when they realize they need them. A very well written nicely flowing first chapter. If there were typos or grammar issues I didn't notice because I was into the story, which is what we all strive for!