There are subtle ways to end a story. Death, loss of a friend, loss of an enemy, or a simple  change of mind following a heartfelt conversation. The end comes along and you realize only too late that it came without provocation, without hesitation. It came without warrant and without a second thought. The story is over before you realize you’re in the epilogue, and your friend, your partner, sits across the desk from you with his head bowed to look over the fresh stitches in his arm. Gun shot wounds heal ugly. You can’t tell him this, not then. He’ll learn. You’ll both learn.

I faced the villain on the rooftop under the afternoon sun, his hat in his hands and a smile on his face. The man looked at me as if he were looking at a priest. Guilt seeped through the his pores; he stunk of bad choices.  I’m sure I didn’t smell any better.

The gun, a yard away on the gravely rooftop, winked at us with a spark of light from the setting sun.  It dared us to make a move. It dared me to be a different man. It dared him to be the same.

I looked at his eyes instead, yellow with malnourishment. Even beneath the man’s hat I could easily see his hair was greasy and thin. The longer I took him in, the less I liked my chances of being able to talk my way out of the situation.

Charlie had pulled every fiber of that standoff from me.  He wanted to know how I got off that roof with my life. How we all did; Scoop, the brave, young newspaper jockey and Charlie, the bleeding detective in the shadows of a decrepit staircase. And me, the man who just couldn’t get enough grit under his fingernails.

As we sat in our office with the fixed window and our names painted on the door just like the first day, I told him that if a man is gullible enough to toss away a weapon, he also might be fragile enough to crack. I didn’t regret my decision to come out from behind that vent on the roof. Not then, and not afterward, when blood pooled in the sunlight right next to that gun.

“What do you want?” the man had asked me. I had waited for his mark, and when it came I told him exactly what I wanted.

“I want to take you to jail,” I’d said.

His eyes had dropped to the gun, then to the top of my head. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I’d seen that grasping glance before.  I admitted to Charlie that if the man dived for his weapon I wasn’t sure what I’d’ve done. Charlie looked at me at first with humor when I’d told him this, then with pity. He knew all too well then that everything we’d overcome on that rooftop, everything we now owed our lives to, came down to luck.

I poured myself a drink and lit a cigarette. All this in a minute, maybe less, but it bought me time where I could sort my thoughts. Charlie needed to hear this, and maybe I needed to say it, but damn it if I would tell my story by someone else’s watch, even my partner’s.

The man on the roof thought for a long time about God knows what. He lifted his hat and scratched at his head. His hands were gnarled and boney. “You expect me to come quiet?”

“Yes I do.”

The noise from the street below grew and the wind whistled across the openings of the pipes sticking out of the roof. The man in front of me started to look away, toward Scoop and where Charlie lay on the dark stairs.

I blew smoke into the air between Charlie and me, watched it wisp away into nothingness against the ceiling of our office.

Steam lofted through the air between the villain and me on the rooftop, steam from the vents that I’d hidden behind when I came out from the staircase.

“I know it looks bleak,” I said and the man’s eye darted to my feet. “We can work this out. But you shot a man, and you didn’t even know his name.”

“I knew his name,” the man had said. “He may have had a few aliases over the years, but Mr. Gorbateski always went back to his roots. And to his daughter.”

“Gorbateski,” Charlie said. He leaned to his right in the chair, careful to not rest his patched-up arm on the arm rest.”That’s the man who bought the shipping yard after it went under. Got it for almost nothing.”

I watched Charlie for a moment, tried to find something in his face. Recognition, maybe, or maybe a clue to lead me to something I’d missed.  Or maybe, I was looking for myself.

“You’re trying to figure all this out,” the villain had said to me when he saw my reaction to the name.

“We shot her. We shot him, too, though it was me pulling the trigger on that one. We didn’t need to kill him since we were trying to wound him by shooting his daughter. It just worked out that he was waiting outside when she went in to talk to you.”

“You knew she would come to me?” I’d said.

“’Course we did,” the man had said. “Who do you think put your name in that paper on 4th street.”

“Those bastards,” Charlie said and used his good arm to slam a fist on our desk. “I can swallow shooting a man in cold blood, I can even tolerate taking a bullet from a man who killed for a couple of trains on the East side of town. But when that man tarnishes our reputation, which is barely a reputation to begin with, with false acclaims in a bogus newspaper, that’s where I draw the line.”

After Charlie said this, when the hard look on his face melted to a smirk, I nodded. Not because I agreed with him, but because I liked that he was there. Despite the fact that he was fool-headed enough to get shot, I was glad that he was my partner. And I wished that he’d been on the rooftop with me. 

“Why Gorbateski?” I’d said, but the villain had kept his composure. His face straight as an arrow, though his palms had sweat on them.

“Yeah,” the man said with a voice that dripped with malice. “Why would anyone have a hit put out on the biggest piece of scum in the city.”

“You’re no hit man,” I’d said. I told Charlie that the man laughed at me then. The man laughed a wheezy laugh that made me itch. Charlie smiled again, sympathetic this time. He knew how this all ended, and he knew how tempted I’d been to end it right then when the laugh came at me. And in Charlie’s eyes I saw what I’d felt only moments before. Charlie was happy I’d become his partner.

“You’re right,” the villain had said and pulled off his hat to run his knobby hand through his nasty hair. “I’m not exactly the hit man type. But I can point a gun, and pull the trigger, too. That’s not a skill too many people have these days. Anyone can point a gun. It takes gut to use it, though. And you know what else? I come cheap. Because I like pulling the trigger.”

At that’s when it had happened. I told Charlie about the crunching sound, like a dog that’d finally gotten a bite through a nice chunk of bone.  The villain fell sideways to the gravel. I watched as the brick that had struck the man in the head landed on his chest then slid off of him. The dust he’d raised cleared in the breeze, but the blood pooled.

“What the hell did you do?” I’d shouted and turned to find Scoop near the stairs with a pale face.

Scoop straightened himself and stammered before finding words.  Before he spoke, I saw something in the way he stood, something in the way he held himself after throwing the brick that would end our villain’s speech. I saw hope. He didn’t look mean or scared. Scoop looked sure of himself, sure, but he looked like he did what he thought was right.

When we’d gotten back to the office, Charlie had asked me why I gave Scoop our card and told him to call when something came up.  He didn’t like the idea of me enforcing a kid. When Charlie had asked me that then, I didn’t have an answer. As I told him my story, and he sat across from me at the desk after all this was done and I looked back at how it all ended, I knew I’d found my answer.

“If we don’t ask him for help,” I said to Charlie. “If we don’t give him something to do, someone else might. And in a city like this, where guys get shot for just reaching out at an opportunity, where whole families crumble beneath angry boots, it may be good for the kid to see that guys like us are still out there. We may not be perfect, and we may survive just by getting lucky, but if I told that kid to scram and find his own way in the world, I can’t help but think it might be his body we’re tracking the killer of next time.”

I chewed on the filter of the cigarette. It’d gone out sometime during my story.

On the roof, I’d stepped over to the man who lay bleeding. Up close, I could see the blood leaking from his temple, could smell it heating up in the sun, could almost taste it. I’d toed the man’s arm. It’d moved with no resistance. Against the small of his back, I’d found another gun. Smaller than the other, but just as deadly.

“I saw him reaching,” Scoop had told me then. “He was drawing you in, not the other way around. He was going to shoot you.”

I’d stood, more to get away form the dying man that anything else. The small pistol rested heavily in my palm.

“He never would have given away his employer,” I said to Charlie. “Scoop saved my life on the rooftop.  Save us all. We owe him.”

Charlie leaned back in the chair and it groaned with him. On the desk two mugs filled with cold coffee sat, ignored since I’d poured them. I waited for Charlie to speak, and as I did I lifted the mug closest to me and sipped at it.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Charlie said.

“What’s that?”

“We heard Scoop stomping around like an elephant when we went into that house,” he said. “That’s how we found him and all. But then he sneaks up to the guy on the roof, close enough to lob a brick at his head, and you two don’t hear him coming.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How about that.”

“Fucker shot me in the arm.”

Charlie’s breath was hot on my ear and he groaned when I moved him.  He leaned against the wall, the light from the newly opened trap door above us showed me the wince etched into his face.  His left arm leaked blood.  I wiped at my cheek, blood there, too.

“Scoop, I need you to find something to throw,” I said.  Scoop didn’t move.

“Scoop,” I said again, just as calm as the first time.

“Something to throw,” he repeated and ran off.  I took off my tie, just a shade off from Charlie’s blood.  Charlie turned to face me, offered his shoulder. I found the wound on his upper arm, just more than a graze.  A shallow wound that would bleed a lot. With both hands I tied the tie in a thick knot around the hole in Charlie’s arm. He groaned again.

“You’ll live,”  I said, and I stood to admire my handy work, and my brave friend.

“That’s more than I can say about that fucking kid up there,” he said through gritted teeth.  And he stood up, the top of his head white sunlight.  His hat had fallen off, vanished below us in the dark.

“We’ll see what we can do,” I said.

Scoop returned from his search with a brick and a short piece of rotten wood that looked as though it had been pried from a wall in the hallway.

I grabbed the brick, weighed it in my hand, and traded him for the wood. It had some heft to it despite the fact that it had just about hollowed with rot.

“Stay here,” I instructed them both. Charlie arranged the knot of my tie on his arm and Scoop looked at the brick in his hand, but neither argued.

I climbed to the highest point of the staircase I could get to without exposing myself.

I waited, counted to thirty, hardly breathed.  Then I found him.  There was gravel on the rooftop, and the man who shot Charlie stood about ten feet from the trap door.  I couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything on the rooftop, but I could hear him shifting his feet.  I could hear his breathing, thick and fast through his nose.

I lifted the wood, brought it back, and threw it high in his direction.  I heard the gasp that followed and wasted no time in jumping up the last few steps and tumbling over myself, and ending up just behind a boxy, metallic air duct.

“I saw you,” he called at me.

“I got a medal for you for that,” I called back at him. “Come and get it.”

“What are you doing?” he yelled. “You just trapped yourself.”

“We’re surrounding you,” I said.  His shifting in the gravel had ceased.  “Scoop, on my mark.”

“What are you doing,” he said, his voice raising. “Stop it.”

“Ready Cloudy,” I heard Scoop from the stairs. I didn’t intend for him to do anything, I wanted him to stay out of the way, but his playing along helped a great deal.

“Stop this,” the man who shot Charlie called to us. “Stop this now.”

“On my mark,” I shouted to Scoop.

“OK,” the man said. “Ok, we can talk. Let’s talk.”

“A little late for that, son,” I said.

“I want to talk,” he said. “Let’s just talk. Look. Look.”  The unmistakable sound of a heavy object falling to the gravel at his feet. 

I waited. Being a detective, even a new one, tested my patience more than my nerve, more than my stamina or grit.  The ability to wait proved to be a valuable tool.  As my career progressed I discovered that the game could often be won when I could merely wait longer than my assailant.  As I waited on the rooftop that day, the sun beat the back of my neck, small rocks dug their way into my knees, and I discovered how important the wait could be.

After an amazing amount of time, he said, “Let’s talk.”

All of the anger had left his voice.  I could almost taste the dejection in his tone.

“Ok,” I said, and I stood.

I caught sight of him just as my head came over the top of the duct. His empty hands were held up in front of him. When I reached my full height I saw the gun laying at his feet.

I came around the duct and stood ten feet from him in a spot where the reflection of the sun shone on his gun at his feet, kept my attention on it without having to look away from the man’s eyes.  He had been sweating, his loose shirt was damp in spots and his pants were dirty. Heavy circles under his eyes and the sallow quality of his skin told me he hadn’t slept.  The hat on his head looked tattered on his shaggy head. There was no watch on either wrist, and his hands were callused.

I showed him my own palms, proved that I was unarmed, and said, “Let’s talk.”

Turns out we did find the paper’s twin.  On a desk beside the window on the top floor of the building.  The window looked down at the street in front of our office. Open only a crack, just like the other one.   

I lead the way out of the room and then down the hall. I strained my ears, listening for any sound that would lead me to what I was looking for. Whom I was looking for. I couldn’t hear a damn thing over that kid’s heavy feet.

I stopped short.

“Can you lift those boots a bit or should I get you a couple of pillows for you to walk on?” I whispered with a half glance over my shoulder.  When we carried on Scoop did his best imitation of a church mouse.

“There’s nothing here, Cloudy” Charlie said after we’d stuck our noses into each deserted room.  “Unless you think the killer is hiding in that broom closet.”

How could I miss it?

“That’s not a broom closet,” I said.  I went forward and pulled the slim door at the end of the hall open.  The dust beneath the doorframe, already disturbed not so long ago, danced easily.  We did out best to see through the dark and the musty air into that room.  I pulled out a match. The spark hurt our eyes, but when it was gone we could see into the small space. I hadn’t expected to find a staircase, but I’d hoped. Beneath the mops and the brooms, some cracked a few without heads, a narrow set of stairs led up to a trap door.

“Where do you suppose it goes?” Scoop said. The crack in his voice had been replaced with a shaky kind jitter, almost a stutter. 

“The roof,” Charlie and I said together.

  

“It looks as deserted as every other room here,” Scoop said. “It doesn’t look like anyone has come this way in near a decade.”

“Look again,” I said and held the match out to cast a richer light on the steps. The same kind of disturbance I’d noticed in the dust under the door showed on the steps. Not quite footprints, but definite imprints, places where the things inside had been moved aside and then replaced. And the top stop looked clean, the polished wood shimmered in the match light.

“Let’s go,” Charlie said.  For a moment I felt a twinge of fear leap through my heart.  I thought Charlie meant to turn back, leave the place and the case to be solved by someone else.  Someone who would undoubtedly be too late.  Then he charged forward, stepped smoothly passed me and took the lead up the stairs. He didn’t bother to replace the mops and brooms as our predecessor had on his trip up, and neither did Scoop when he followed behind me.  In the movement my match went out.

There were only about ten steps, steep ones that felt more like a latter than stairs. We hunched together in the dark on the top five or so, crammed in just below the unopened trap door. 

“What if he’s armed?” Scoop said. 

“Then so are we,” I said.

I heard a metallic click as Charlie undid the latch.  A blinding light broke in, shattered the illusion of blackness, and turned my world into a red blanket when I closed my eyes against it.

I blinked to clear my vision and when I could see properly again I found Charlie squinting through the crack out to the rooftop. We waited.  When nothing happened we waited a bit longer.

Then Charlie pushed the door another inch.

“Stop!”  A voice from the other side called down at us. It sounded distant, as if it were not right over the door, but close to it. 

Charlie froze, but did not drop the door. “Who’s there?”

“None of your business,” the voice called back, not an inch closer than before. “Shut the door and go away.”

“It’s over, son,” I yelled to Charlie’s back. “There’s a whole bunch of us down here and we know what you did.”

“You’re lying,” the voice came. A man.  A scared man.

“Not this time.”

“I’m armed,” he said. “I’ll shoot you if you move that door again.”

“Do you really think that’s going to help your situation?” I was surprised how confidently I was lying to this armed stranger. I’m not sure what made me think to do it.  Maybe it was the only weapon I’d found in my arsenal.

After a long pause Charlie spoke up.

“We’re going to come out.”

“No you are not,” the man cried.

“Just want to talk is all,” Charlie said. We’d heard this colloquialism used before during the police resolutions we’d observed, and I thought this other man might have heard the same.

“I got a revolver here that’s pretty chatty,” the man said, and to my great displeasure he sounded closer than before.

“Is that what you want?” I called out. “Another body on your conscience? And do you really think shooting another man will save you?”

There was nothing after that for a long time.  Charlie pushed the door open another two inches.  Waited. No gunshot, and the man stayed quiet.

Charlie shoved the door hard and it flew open. “We’re coming out.”

Charlie got his head and shoulders out of the trapdoor before the amazing crack broke through the air.  The sound still echoed in my head when felt the entire weight of Charlie fall on top of me and a sticky warmth splattered my left cheek.

I stepped across the street with determination in nine long strides. Charlie followed.  When I came to the door of the building that he had told me up in our office had been abandoned, I waited for him.  The kid who had entered not five minutes earlier had left the door ajar.  Its brass handle glinted in the morning light that reflected from each window on the side of the street from which we’d just come.

Charlie stood behind me, not panting, but out of breath. I gave him another moment, took the time to see if the boy had left foot prints. Several scuffs on the third and fifth step of the stoop told me he had polished his shoes in a hurry, left a bit more polish on one foot than the other. I pictured a boy who worked hard and long, with no pause, and little time to keep up his appearance.  A boy old enough to move out of his home and away from his parent’s care.

“Ink,” Charlie said.

“What?” I asked him. He’d shaken me from my thoughts and when I looked at him he smirked.  He enjoyed the shock on my face.

“It’s ink,” he said. “On the step.”

“Not polish?” I said.

“No, look,” he bent to the third step.  With two fingers he swiped up a section of the scuff mark and brought it up for me to examine. Honestly, at the time I couldn’t tell the difference between cheap polish and newspaper ink.  Made me damn glad I had Charlie at my side.

I jerked my head toward the top of the stoop and we went inside.  I rested my palm against the door and let it click shut behind us.  In the dark I could hear Charlie breathing again.

Through habit, my fingers dug into the pocket inside the breast of my jacket, found the near-full pack of cigarettes, and slipped one out. Once I had the cigarette between my lips I offered the tip of the rolled white paper a flame from a match.  They met and for a brief time they glowed together, the only light in the place. Charlie tapped me on the shoulder and I shook the match out. Blew some smoke for us to walk through, and we went deeper into the house.

I heard him, and Charlie must have, too. We held our breath.  The kid had found his way upstairs, must’ve been digging through some boxes, not a worry about how his heavy shoes sounded on the bare boards.  Work shoes.  Maybe boots. Charlie tugged on my arm and we went up a staircase.  Above us a spattering of new and used spider webs hung in a window caked with dust. Just like the building, the webs were seemingly abandoned. I watched a lazy fly twitch in a thread as the last bit of life cooled out of her.

Dim light leaked through the thin filter of dust against the window, showed us the top three steps, and a few feet of the landing above. When we came to it we could see several pairs of tracks leading from the stairs to the hall.  One set led off into the dark, the other to a room off to our left. Kid needed to learn to pick up his heels when he walked. We chose the path to our left, followed the noise.

I sunk my teeth into the filter on my cigarette, tasted the bitter insides that came out, and pulled clean air through the ugly tobacco.  We stood quiet in the doorway to the room the kid had found. Watched him shift through a box, move it off to the side, and start in on another.

Charlie coughed and I dropped my cigarette. The kid turned around just in time to see the small embers die out beneath my heel.  His eyes glinted, then went dark. The light came from the window behind him and hid any expression on his face. He made no move after he caught sight of us.

He said nothing at first. Neither did we. We stood in the doorway and watched the fly caught in our web.

Eventually, he spoke.  His voice cracked, and he talked too fast.

“You’re not police,” he said.  Not a question.  “What are you, a couple of private eyes?”

“Yeah,” said Charlie.  It was the first time I’d heard him call us Private Eyes. Didn’t feel right. Not then.

“You armed?” he said.  Again his voice cracked. He seemed to be doing it on purpose.

“No,” I said. Lifted my heel off the now extinguished cigarette. 

“How long you been working this case?” Charlie asked.  I knew a shot in the dark when I heard one, especially coming from Charlie.

“Couple weeks,” the kid said.  “What about you?”

“A day,” Charlie said.  We had no reason to lie to this kid, but really, I wished Charlie would shut up.  I couldn’t throw him a look in this dank room, so I elbowed him instead. This did not go un-noticed by the kid.

“Could’ve picked a better case to start with,” the kid said, and he actually laughed.  His laugh had no hint of those cracking vocal cords. Sounded genuinely cheerful.

“What’re you doing here,” I asked him, point blank, an attempt to throw him back off balance.  It worked a bit.

“Looking for something,” he said.  Turned his back on us, picked up a newspaper off the desk by the window.  It was then I noticed the window was open at the bottom, just enough to see out of if you made an effort to look.  “This.”

He held up the paper.

“You looking for old news?” Charlie said.

He moved the paper in the light and we saw a hole right in the middle of the first page.  A hole the size of the one in our window. “Not exactly.”

“Where’d you get that?” Charlie said, stepped forward to grab at the paper. Caught it easily, the kid wanted him to have it. Wanted to show us just how clever he’d been.

“Just here,” he said.

“What’s your name,” I asked him from behind Charlie.

“William,” the kid said. “But you can call me Scoop.”

“You’re a newspaper jockey,” I said.

“A reporter,” he said, that crack came back up in his voice.

“Alright, Scoop,” said Charlie. “What can you tell us about this paper? And how did you know it would be here?”

“Easy,” Scoop said. “Some scumbag shoots a dame, he’s going to be looking to hide behind something better than a window. If you read the papers, especially the stories about people getting shot, almost every time there’s a newspaper the bum hid behind to remain inconspicuous.”

“Seems redundant,” I said.  Took the paper form Charlie to have a look.  No way around it. The hole looked right.

“Maybe,” said Scoop. “But that’s just how it is. Trust me, I’ve read a lot of those stories. Even wrote a few.”

I went to the window, looked out at our office across the street.  Our window was almost a whole floor up. Something wasn’t right.  From my vantage point I could just make out the bullet hole in the glass. It was possible that the shooter had been able to shoot the window from this spot, but it’d be much too difficult to hit the blonde.  A car drove by and a soft crunch rose from the asphalt. Drew my attention to the street below. I found the source of the noise to be a patch of glinting light against the black street in front of our building.

“I think you’re on to something with this paper here, Scoop,” I said. “And I think that if we look in a room a few floors up, we might find its twin.”

I stared at Charlie for a long time, waited until the a few cars had passed by.  In the end I answered him with a movement. The door knob turned easily with an extra bit of effort and Charlie followed me through the door and up the staircase.  We walked up a single flight of noisy stairs beneath a flickering, naked lightbulb that hung between narrow walls with peeling wall paper.  I could smell the mold in their exposed boards.

Moments later we stood in our office.  Charlie grabbed a newspaper from a chair in the corner and separated the pages. With tape from the squeaky drawer in my desk he made a newspaper window shade to cover the hole that reminded us both of how much blood had splashed over our floorboards not so long ago.

The office was quiet for some time.

We didn’t need to speak, only consider our options. Charlie’s question hung in the air around my hat like smoke in a bar. I inhaled it deeply and savored the flavor; like copper off an unlucky penny.

Charlie pulled his notebook from the inside pocket on his jacket. The pages stuck together, but only on the edges and none of the ink bled. He took it to the table near the door, the one with an old typewriter, and he began to hammer away on the keys. I watched my friend work, watched the jerky movement of his shoulders when he bent to reset the platen, and watched when he rubbed his eyes in exhaustion.

When Charlie finished he slid his newly typed notes on the desk in front of me and left the room.

“See you in a few hours,” he said over his shoulder, didn’t bother to shut the door. I listened to his footsteps thunder down the staircase and then the door slam behind his back.  Charlie had been gone for a full ten minutes before I looked at the page in front of me. Six lines of black text stood out against the white paper, each letter looked different, pronounced or faded in odd spots.

It read:

 

Girl, maybe 19, blond hair. Sour look, blue eyes, dark eyebrows. Dye job?

Husband, criminal/victim, suggest abuse, no marks on girl.

Clouds in sky, bad omen, rain later? She wore the wrong shoes.

Quick talker, nervous or rehearsed. 

Boy on fourth street talking about us. Selling papers with our name.

She’s asking for info.  Asking for trouble. Last words: “I’m sorry”.

 

I let the paper fall from my fingers and land back on the desktop. It looked up at me and I realized my heart was pounding.  She asked for trouble alright.  Got a stomach full of it.  And now she’s dead, cold and gone the way I never expected one of my clients would have to go.  I should have expected it.  You don’t get into the crime solving business and get away without a few bruises, a few losses.  Back in the beginning I had a weak stomach.  But not so weak that I would give up.

The morning came and Charlie brought me coffee from a shop down the street.  They always burned it, but on that day that’s the kind of coffee I needed.  Unfortunately, that shop would get a lot of business from us in the coming months.

Over the coffee I told him that we’d accepted the case.  Charlie and Cloudy would get to the end of this if it killed them.  Sure.

The first thing we did was take down that newspaper Charlie had put up the night before. We pulled it away form the window like a scab and revealed a jagged hole in the glass the size of a wine cork.  Cracks ran out around the edges of the hole in about an inch and a half diameter. The whole thing looked like a terrifically blood-shot eye.

We peered through that eye at the building across the way. In the morning light I could make out the places along the sides where bare brick had been exposed. Some of the window frames had lost their sills. All of the windows were dark, nothing moved inside.

“The way I see it,” Charlie said. His breath carried the taste of his coffee. “Whoever shot our girl did it form one of the top two floors, maybe the roof. She had a bullet in her gut.  You can’t get that angle from the street. And I expect they were watching her when she entered our building. They could do that easily from the roof.  But they must’ve been watching her for a while to know she’d come to us.  They may have been watching us, too.  Still might be.”

“Who owns that building,” I said.

“It’s abandoned,” He said.

“Then why is that kid walking in the front door?”

Charlie followed my gaze down to the sidewalk across the street. We watched the kid, some punk in a short hat with a vest on and a white shirt on underneath that.  We watched him yank open the front door and disappear inside.

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?”