Belligerent Rejectamenta

I’d been sitting at the bar for an hour and a half, nursing a bourbon and keeping tabs on my mark in the mirror behind the barkeep. As near as I could tell, the subject had no idea I’d been following him, which is always good. I followed him in at a nice unremarkable 15-minute lag, in hopes of avoiding suspicion. It wouldn’t do at all to get made this early in the game…I like to have a better feel for what’s really going on with a case before anybody involved can figure out I’m working it. Saves on the black eyes and bloodied noses in the long run, and if half the rumors about Peter Albany were even partially true, I’d be in for worse than that if I got caught unprepared.

Albany’s past, or what little I could piece together, was a long string of involvements with the seriously weird. He’d lived for a bit in one of the more notorious “occult commune” houses in San Francisco in the Seventies, followed the scene to New York in the Eighties, and abruptly fallen off the face of the planet some time in the Nineties. Rumor had it he was involved with some sort of group that attempted a millenial working, but if the rumor was true, nobody had any idea what the intent might have been. Despite pushing 60, he appeared to be in remarkably good shape. From the expensive tweed coat and cashmere scarf to the bulging money clip he was peeling to cover the 18-year single malt he was drinking, it was clear that whatever he was into now was treating him well.

“You ready for another one?” The bartender snapped me out of my clandestine observations with a hint of sarcasm. I’d been nursing the same double for over an hour, so I imagine he was impatient to see me spend a bit more money. Fair enough.

“Sure. But make it a single on the rocks, if you don’t mind,” I replied, sliding a $20 to him in hopes of appeasing his mercantile instinct. I shot a glance at the mirror to make sure Albany was where I’d left him, and was dismayed to see he was no longer alone. A dark-haired man, slight of build, sat with his back to me, elbows on the table, talking urgently to Albany. The older man’s face maintained a studied neutrality, but it was clear from what little body language I could read that his new companion was very worked up about something and fighting to keep his manner subdued. After a few minutes of this, Albany leaned in conspiratorially and spoke a few words and then gestured for the fellow to be on his way. The newcomer rose and turned toward the door, and he caught me looking in the mirror. Our eyes met for only an instant, and I mentally cursed myself for the lapse. From the look on the fellow’s face, some sort of confrontation seemed imminent. My mind raced for some sort of decent line of bullshit while I fought to keep my poker face on and seem nonchalant.

I was saved the hassle of lying to the guy when all hell broke loose. Half way across the bar floor towards me, Albany’s pal stumbled a few steps, and the front of his very business-like shirt blossomed a pair of very unbusiness-like red patches. With that ubiquitous look of incredulity common to the unexpectedly shot, he dropped to his knees and collapsed on the floor. Before he’d made it all the way down, bar patrons started shouting and screaming, tables and chairs were knocked over, and the mob made a mad dash towards the exit. That’s when I spotted the two men in the long coats sporting silenced pistols. They didn’t seem a bit fazed by the crowd rushing their way, and hadn’t so much as glanced my direction. They weaved through the mob waving their guns around, heading purposefully towards the table in the back where Albany was, or at least had been, sitting. The old man had vanished, and I was of a mind to do the same. The bartender was on all fours behind the bar, crawling for the kitchen door. If I bailed out now, though, I’d never have a clue who this guy cooling in a pool of his own red red kroovy was, nor what connection he had to Albany.

Dropping off my barstool, I made for the corpse on hands and knees. There were enough people still screaming and running around in a panic I figured I might pull this off unnoticed. The shooters seemed more keen on examining the corner where Albany had been at the moment, but I knew that wasn’t going to last. I skinned the sportcoat off Dead Guy, rolling it up and tucking it under my arm. There was a small .380 tucked into a holster at the back of his waistband, so I nicked that and put it in my own coat pocket (you never know when having somebody else’s gun might be handy). Before I could check pants pockets, I heard a shout from the back, and looked up just in time to see the terrible twosome turning their attention and their pistols my way. I was up and running towards the bar before they could fire, and vaulted the bar somewhat ungracefully, taking glasses, bottles, and some fixtures with me.

I scrambled for the kitchen door, and heard the angry buzz of a subsonic slug tear through the air to my right, coupled with the meaty thunk of another slug tearing a into the doorframe just above my head. The barkeep was already at the back door when he heard the racket I made crashing through racks of pots and pans. As he slammed into the crash bar and into the staff parking lot, I could hear the distant howl of sirens. Covering the length of the kitchen in four running strides, I joined him out back and slammed the door behind me. Two more shots rang off the other side of the metal fire door, eliciting howls of terror from the barkeep and a wince from me. These guys weren’t about to give up on me that easily.

Fuck.

“What got me into the detective business? That’s easy. Elementary, even, to use the term oft-misattributed to Holmes.

The books.

It was always about the books. I ran the gamut from Encyclopedia Brown to the Hardy Boys to Sherlock Holmes, devouring all of it I could get my hands on. By the time I was 12, there was nothing Doyle had written that I hadn’t read, at least regarding the Great Detective. I couldn’t give a shit about his dinosaur stories. And then there was Batman. Fucking Batman. World’s Greatest Detective. When the right people wrote his scripts, and remembered that intellect was his whole schtick, and not stupid gadget-of-the-week gags made so popular by Adam West, then Batman belonged right up there in the Detective Pantheon with the rest. Hercule Poirot and Auguste Dupin…I could go on for hours. These fictional men were my gods, dig? And the best part about it? If I could make myself smart enough, I could become them.

I picked up my first Encyclopedia Brown book at a fair in third or fourth grade. Paid something like two bucks for it. I’ve still got it at home somewhere, along with the rest of the series. See, with the Brown mysteries, all the clues were in the story. If you read carefully and had the head for it, you could solve the mystery yourself. I agonized over some of them for days, tempted to peak at the solution in the back, but all the time knowing that my detective idols would never have become legends if they did that, so I fought the temptation and persevered. Solved them all, eventually. Looking at them now, they’re all kind of obvious, but shit, I was eight. Logic doesn’t come easy at eight.

Of course, when I got into Doyle and Dixon, the clues weren’t in place, which was a great disappointment to me at that age. Denied the chance to solve the mysteries, I switched my focus to methods. Based on the books’ description, I assembled a fingerprint kit like the Hardy Boys used. I amassed a reference library covering as many subjects as I could manage. My parents saw me asking for chemistry books at 12 years old and figured I just wanted a jump on high school, so they never asked many questions. I did get one outright refusal, but in fairness I don’t think I would have bought a 12-year-old a book on forensics, if I had been in their place. I devoured everything I could get my hands on, in as broad an array as I and my tiny school library could manage.

In high school I came across the other side of the detective fiction coin — hard-boiled stories from Spillane, McBain, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammet…all those guys. The cigarettes and black coffee and bourbon and snub-nosed .38 revolvers. Grim men, deadly women, and hard luck. I began to suspect that being successful as a detective outside the tidy idealized world of Doyle or Christie was going to involve becoming hard, but at that point had little clue how one went about doing it. Especially when one was a pasty bookworm that rarely went outside. So I went out for sports, because all the noir guys were in good shape…football was a total bust, as I was too slow and too small, but I did OK with track, despite having acquired a nicotine habit. I signed up for the judo club at school, and learned just enough to know it would get my ass kicked if I ever tried to use it. Then I started picking fights. Nothing too much, really. Just rising to the bait when some lunkhead wanted to give the skinny underclassman some shit. I got pounded routinely, but I learned how to manage myself in a dustup and how to keep moving when I was hurt.

College took me eight years because I couldn’t settle into a major. I dabbled in psychology, criminal justice, sciences of several stripes, logic…the works. When the debt load started looking too nasty, I closed out an English degree and graduated. Books. Always it’s about the books.

After that I worked whatever job gave me a decent paycheck with minimal effort, and started freelancing as a bail bondsman and private eye. Bullshit divorce cases, mostly, and DUI offenders that wanted to skip out so they didn’t have to do their 60 days in the county lockup. But both angles gave me contacts, and that’s what I needed most. It also gave me a decent look into the legal system in practice, as opposed to the theory I got lots of in my criminal justice classes. I also got in good with the boys down at the station. Donuts. There’s a reason for the cops/donuts cliche. I made it a habit to bring a box whenever I had to go bail somebody out late night, and for that I got run of the firing range and the first phone call when they thought they had a skip cornered.

The rest, as they say, is history. I eventually had enough freelance work to do that I bailed out on my day job, and being a bondsman kept the rent paid.

Not much else to tell, really.”