There are subtle ways to begin a story.  A whisper in the ear in a colleague.  Hailing a taxi on a busy street on your way to a meeting.  Slugging a punk in the nose for selling drugs in your neighborhood.  Subtle beginnings have never been my style, unfortunately, and this one is no different.  A girl walked in my office wearing a red dress.  The paint that spelled out my name on the glass of my door hadn’t dried yet and she pushed it in like a sheet moves on the line on a summer day. We didn’t notice her at first, not until she’d taken three full steps in.

Our celebratory scotch clink hummed in the air and Charlie’s cigar hung full from his lips, stuck between two rows of gnarled, aged teeth. She didn’t announce herself, just stood there looking at us with eyes like sapphires floating in the night air that had come in with the siren noise and smell of something spicy cooking below.

I set my glass down on a stack of blank papers on top of my worn out new desk.  She took the invitation to sit, crossed her legs like a charmer dances with snakes, and then she swallowed a big breath.  We offered her a drink so she could speak easier, but she turned us down. Said she’d had enough action that night. We said we didn’t mean it that way.  She said, “yeah, you did.”

“What brings you to this part of the city,” Charlie said. He stood by the window to send his smoke out. The breeze blew it right back at us, but he kept it up just the same.

“Somebody told me this is where dreams come true,” she said. Even in her state of shock she had a mouth on her.  I knew it then that she would be trouble. She’d knocked ever bit of confidence out of me and we hadn’t even broken the ice.

I took a draw from the scotch Charlie had poured me, let the warm liquid burn the back of my tongue. Found a pack of cigarettes in my breast pocket and took my time to lite one.

“Can I have one of those, mister?” It was then that I realized she hadn’t taken her eyes off of me since I first noticed her. Probably longer.  Her fingers brushed against mine when I gave her the slender, white cigarette, and again when I lit it. Before I could ease back into my chair she gave me a face full of smoke, breath, and perfume.

“How’d you hear about us?” I asked her.

“Newspaper add.  Down on fourth street.” she said through the thickening fog in the room. “Some kid is selling papers with your name in them. David Cloudy and his Partner Charlie. Brand new detectives with something to prove.”

“Good kid,” I said. “So you found us. What kind of trouble did you bring two baby detectives?”

“I need some information and I need to get it quiet,” She said. All of the sudden she’d started talking fast, like we’d opened a flood gate.  Below the sirens and the shouting coming in the window I heard Charlie scratching away in his notebook.

“Information on what?” I said.

“My father,” she said, and she looked away from me then, right out the window. And her face went pale as if the moon had settled down right there in my office. It happened all at once. The window shattered, Charlie shouted, the wood of the chair she had been sitting on smacked into the hard wood of the uncarpeted floor. And she screamed.

I crawled around my desk, the shards of glass and splinters of wood that lay between us cut my palms, but did not rip the sleeves of my jacket.  Even in her dying moments she looked at me. Watched me get to her on my elbows and knees. Her breath jerked out of her like it was being tugged from one end and she were holding on to the other, but only just.

“I’m…I’m…I’m,” she tried to tell me.  I listened through the heavy ring that had settled into the middle of my head. “I’m sorry…Sorry.”

I had nothing for her. Nothing to offer this poor girl in her last moments. My hand just didn’t seem big enough to cover the hole in her chest.

The police came and cleaned up.  And hours after we’d left the new office for the bar down the street Charlie bought our second round. 

“Only the greats get a start this big,” he told me over his pint. He looked at me like a dog looks at its master after it wet the rug. But he let it drop. He let me sit and absorb the evening and the events that would shape the beginning of my entire career even while I absorbed the watered-down alcohol from a shitty bar.  At some point in during the night he asked me a question. He looked at me in the gloom that can only come just before sunrise when the street is littered with only a few hopeful individuals trying to get in one last good time before tomorrow actually starts. He asked me as he stood on the bottom step of the stoop of our building while I screwed around with the banged-up door knob.

“Are we gonna take the case?”