Chapter One

A mysterious red head approaches Darvish with a case.

Chapter One

           

I was rolling a cigarette when I heard two taps on the frosted glass of my office door. A nice and curvy silhouette lay over the words on the glass ‘Edgar Darvish . . . Detection.’ and I told it the door was unlocked.

A tall red stepped in wearing a pink blouse and a dark pink skirt that ended at the knee, she was curvy in the right places and her smile told me she was looking for help in more ways than one. At least, that’s what I let it tell me.

I licked the paper of the cigarette, smoothed it down and speared my mouth with it.

‘Could you roll me one of those?’ she asked with a voice you could cool your drink with. She took a seat in one of the chairs opposite my desk and crossed her legs. I began rolling a cigarette.

‘The first one’s free,’ I told her. ‘The second costs you a story. You can pay for it now, if you’d like.’

She smiled a smile filled with perfect little teeth. I liked this girl. ‘The name is Lynn, I may have dug something of a hole, but I’m not sure if I should keep talking till I decide whether you’re the right man to help me out.’

I finished rolling the cigarette and slid it to the edge of the desk. She lent over and put it into her lips. We lit up from the same flame and I was a little shocked to realise her left eye was not her own. Well, it wasn’t the one she had been born with. It was good work, a cyber replacement that looked so real you’d think it was �" from a distance. The metal pupil contracted, tried to get a good focus on me up so close.

I drew back. ‘I don’t like it when the eyes I’m talking to might belong to someone else,’ I said.

Lynn took a long drag of the cigarette and gave a little smile. With a finger she pressed something behind her left ear, the pupil closed and the iris that had been such a nice blue changed to black. The eye rolled into the back of her head and I was only looking at white. ‘Is that better?’ she asked.

I nodded. ‘What kind of man are you looking for, Ms. Lynn?’

‘It’s a nice little place you’ve got here,’ she said, looking around.

‘I would call it little,’ I said. My office is a room mostly taken up by a desk with a chair on one side and two on the other. On the walls I have an old photo of Mount Aer in winter, last year’s calendar and mirror with a crack in it. There’s a bathroom to the side with a plastic toilet and a sink with one tap labelled ‘cold.’ I have a fan hanging from the ceiling for when I’m feeling extravagant and a few bottles of spirits nursed to last the years.

‘So, are we going to talk about my wallpaper, or do you have something to ask me?’

            She sighed. ‘I need a man whose not afraid of danger, because I have danger a plenty and I don’t mean to deal with it alone. I need a man who can do a round with a firbolg on a bad day and ask for more when the bell rings. I need a man who can drink with the best of them and not find himself in the gutter two bottles later. I need a man who can crack government files with nothing but a telephone and a smile on his face. I need a man who can face the skeletons in my closet and still call himself a man, because that’s what you’ll have to do and maybe more. In short, I need a real man, not some dumb thug packing heat at his hip and nothing between the ears.’

            ‘Sounds like you didn’t read up on me then,’ I said and put out my cigarette. I wasn’t in the mood for smoking, it turned out. ‘But I’ll do it for cash.’

            She didn’t smile. She suddenly looked as sad and alone as a dropped cigarette in the rain. ‘I suppose you’ll want to hear what it is, or who it is, rather, that I have gotten in with.’

            ‘Tell me,’ I said, not without a bit of tenderness. ‘And I’ll tell you if I’ll be any good.’

            Lynn stared down at the desk with her one blue eye and started talking. My one lamp flickered for a moment and I remembered how long it had been since I paid the electricity bill. ‘A year ago I ran in with a boy I thought I was falling in love with, his name was Lawrence Seer, a beautiful, if not rather stupid boy. We fooled around, moved from place to place until we found ourselves here in Slim-Nacre. I guess that’s when things turned sour. You see, I hadn’t known it when I met him, but Lawrence was something of a dark fish, a gambler and a drinker. I don’t mind a few games of black jack and a drink, but Lawrence was messing with a seedy crowd and he got himself into debt.

            ‘We didn’t have the money to pay people off and, as it happens, this man bought Lawrence’s debts and told him he could work it off over a few months for him.’

This is never good news for someone in my city. ‘Who was this someone?’ I asked, though I felt I already knew. The room started feeling that much darker.

She confirmed my hunch. ‘Paul Caribez,’ she said.

There are plenty of private dicks like me in Slim-Nacre, with all that goes on it’s a wonder why there aren’t more. But I had had dealings with Caribez before, perhaps this was why Lynn had sought me out. He was a reformed techno junkie turned gang man with a taste for the more sordid affairs of the Nacre underworld. Not the type to work the streets anymore, he would have had one of his fingers find Lynn’s squeeze. Caribez was no big player, but his name was known. It was also known that he was about as friendly as a shark on a diet.

‘What happened with Caribez?’ I asked. ‘Where’s your man Lawrence?’

She didn’t cry, but I poured a drink from my sad set of labels all the same. Her organic right eye shimmered with a tear, but did not break. ‘Lawrence is dead. Four nights ago I came home from the night café where I work and found him with a hole the size of a coffee mug burned through his chest. Our apartment was torn to pieces and his screen was missing.’

I handed her the whiskey and she took a good hit, wiped her nose.

‘Are you with an agency? Did you call?’ I knew the answer. If she was with a good agency, she wouldn’t have approached me. In Nacre the police aren’t a trusted force and any man, woman or xenien who wants to do any good for the people end up working for one of the many privatised security companies.

Lynn shook her head. ‘I don’t know why he was killed. He had been working off the debts, as asked, they had no reason to kill him.’

‘There are always reasons to kill someone, Lynn, most of the time they aren’t even good ones. Now, do you remember anything strange that Lawrence might have said to you? What was it Caribez had him doing?’

I decided it was time for me to pour myself a stiff one. When you find yourself diving into the ocean at night with one lungful of air hoping to snatch a pearl from a shark’s mouth it’s good to at least feel warm... sorry for that one.

‘I don’t know,’ Lynn gushed. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. Once he came back with a black eye and burns all over his fingers but even then he wouldn’t speak. He was tagging along with a short mean looking man with a few gold teeth and a metal hand, one of Caribez’s men I assumed. I know he was carrying a gun...’ she trailed off.

‘And?’

‘And, just once, he came home with a box of papers �" actual paper papers. I only glanced at them, all numbers and charts, but he was entranced. That was a week ago. He told me things were going to get better.’ She stared up at me with that look in her eyes that only belongs to the desperate and I decided that I had been wrong when she had walked in. She was in need of only one kind of help, and that was a kind I happened to be good at.

‘You know,’ I said slowly. ‘This is an interesting case, and I think I’ll take it on �" but you have said nothing about payment.’

Lynn nodded and opened her little pink purse. From it she drew a little black velvet bag tied up with a little black bow. She undid the bow and pulled out a little gold ring with her little fingers. The diamond on the little gold ring was, well, it wasn’t small.

‘Lawrence’s debts were his problem, and a problem I thought we could manage. This was my secret, a family heirloom if you will.’ Lynn’s eye was suddenly like the diamond on her ring, hard and brilliant and full of light. ‘I want you to bring about some kind of justice, and when you do I will sell the diamond, give you half, and then get the hell off of this rock.’

I looked at the diamond, I looked at Lynn. I smiled. What the hell, I thought. ‘I’ll take the case.’