I woke up with my face smushed against my desk, my flews sopping in a puddle of my own saliva. I didn’t remember much after I left the bathroom, but my nose didn’t feel broken and I wasn’t in cuffs. That was a good start. I wondered if I’d find Dolores crunched up like an aluminum can against a light post outside, a streak of red on her grill and splashed across the windshield. My head was pounding like I’d been in a car crash, but Ted was too good a barman to let me leave under my own power when I was in a state like that.
I sat up and looked around through bleary eyes. The sound of the ClearLife factory starting up with a ruckus of bangs, whistles, and chuffs made me jump. It was the brief cessation that had woken me up—the clangorous absence of noise.
The factory only went down for a few minutes between each shift, so the racket gave me some sense of what time it was. Hot Type City barely had time to heave in a singular lungful that wasn’t black with noxious fumes before the smokestacks started belching again and the factory shit another hundred gallons of its fetid waste into the Gutter.
My mouth was full of cotton, and my stomach twinged when I moved. The ember from last night still smoldered inside, but there wasn’t much else in there to soak up the heat.
I bent myself in half to reach for the lower drawer, but stopped before I had it open. I spotted the empty bottle across the room through the gauzy sheets of dust motes. My hand went one drawer higher, where I found a bottle of Pepto. I unscrewed the cap, but tossed it aside and polished the bottle off with two gulps.
The chalky coating exacerbated my mouth’s fuzziness, but the coolness took the edge off the burning in my chest and stomach. I still needed to do something about the stubbed-toe ache in my head, and I smelled just the thing once I put some distance between me and the open Pepto bottle.
Cal had demonstrated his impeccable timing by getting a coffee brewing just when I needed it. It wasn’t unusual for me to sleep one off in the office, but when I did, I rarely got off my couch until well after noon. My nose twitched, and the aromatic fumes of hard tap water filtering through off-brand pre-grounds lifted me out of my chair and pulled me through the sty of my office.
The full pot came like manna from heaven. I thought again how maybe Cal did have supernatural powers like his sign suggested. Or maybe he had just heard me snoring.
A few draughts of scalding coffee tamped down the flame in my head and relieved some of the ache in my shoulders and back, but I could have done without the sharpness it brought to my senses. When the white noise cleared, a gruff voice crawled out of the formless ambiance and reached toward me. If I had any more in my stomach than coffee, Pepto, and rage, I might have vomited.
Across the room, through the grainy window of a boxy wall-mounted television, I saw Regis Fellini’s face again. His fondness for himself and his close dealings with Russel Sanders, who owned damned near every station that broadcast out of Hot Type City, meant the man got more screen time than the most prolific soap opera star.
I didn’t think it could get worse than his mayoral election, but that had all been local. Now, not even the national networks—of which Sanders officially owned one, and had a heavy hand in many more—were safe from his mug.
“That’s right, Lester,” Regis said with a toothy grin. “What we’re struggling with this election is apathy. Indifference has been on the rise for decades, but it’s finally coming to a head. We need people out there to energize young voters and show them how strong their voices are when they’ve got a candidate they know will fight for them.”
“And you think you’re that candidate?” the lemur sitting on the opposite side of the desk said, leading Regis into his next line on the teleprompter.
“Absolutely. Year after year, we see sleepy slugs winning elections and filling up congress with more of the same. Some of them have brilliant minds and long resumes, but none of them have the strength and dedication to see their promises realized. I do. Anyone who’s lived in Hot Type City for long will tell you these last five years have been different.”
“They’ve been different all right,” I grumbled as I looked around for the remote. Under Regis, corruption was at an all time high ,and welfare of anyone who found themselves beneath The Fold was at a low. His empty promises and high-minded rhetoric were worse pollutants than the sludge the ClearLife factory pumped into the river.
“I did what I could for my city, but I found myself blocked every step of the way, pushed around by the fat cats in Washington who think they know best,” Regis continued as I found the clicker between a rack of pamphlets about palm reading and a stack of fliers about palm beaches. “Now it’s time for me to take the fight to them.”
I crushed the power button with my thumb, but Regis stayed on the screen. He growled and flexed his arms so his claws came out. It was for show, beyond theatrics, into histrionics.
I smacked the remote against my open hand, rattling the batteries around, and jammed my thumb into the button at the top again, this time also jabbing the whole thing toward the TV. The straight-laced presenter’s solemn nod disappeared into the ether with a diamond shaped blink of white on black.
The bubbled glass screen became a security mirror, reflecting my angry mug. My emotional response was as overwrought as Regis’s performance, and I felt embarrassed about the dramatic posturing. I felt doubly embarrassed when I saw Cal’s face behind me.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“How’s business?” I asked, mostly to distract from my misplaced rage.
Cal shrugged as he poured himself a coffee. “Could be better. Always seem to get it from both sides. Either people splurge on the big packages despite my warnings, or they get mad at me for suggesting travel insurance. Then they’re even madder when no one steps on a nail and winds up in the hospital with tetanus. They think they wasted money buying insurance they never had to use.”
“But the only reason it didn’t happen is because of your warning? The knowledge of the possibility changed the outcome.” I was humoring him, warming up the logical part of my mind even if it didn’t apply when talking about that side of Cal’s business.
“Can’t say.” The depth of Cal’s disaffection was mournful. He might not be mystical, but he had a knack for reading people and situations. He could’ve made a decent detective if his record wasn’t smirched with a couple misdemeanors in his youth. Karmically, he was much better off, but karma didn’t keep the lights on.
“You know, you could make a lot more money if you tried upselling. Really lean on what makes those whales go all in.”
Cal cocked his head.
“You know, put a little fear in ’em.”
“Hmm…” Cal’s tongue stuck out the side of his mouth while he thought. It snaked up to his lidless eye and ran over the lens like a bowler polishing his ball.
From my perspective, his eye-wetting was akin to me dropping down and scootching my ass on the carpet to get rid of a stubborn itch. Cal was too proper with his clients to do it in front of them, but apparently he felt we had a different kind of relationship. It was more comfortable than I liked, but I had a strong stomach.
“Doesn’t seem right,” he said once his tongue was back in his mouth. “I just want to help people.”
I waved my hand. “People don’t want to be helped, Cal. They want to take advantage of you. They want more than what’s theirs. Maybe you’d move more bloated policies if you led people to think the deal was too good. Imply you’d get in trouble for offering them such a good price so they thought they were pulling one over on you.”
“I don’t think I could do that to someone, Howl.”
“Then how about you pump the fortuneteller schtick instead? People are turned off thinking your attention’s split. Seems like it’s a hell of a lot easier to tell people they’ve got a ghost hanging around or their Great Uncle Carl says hello than it is to juggle the insurance and travel agent gigs at the same time as your medium scheme. A lot less paperwork, too.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Cal sounded worried, not upset. “I already told you rent wouldn’t be a problem this month.”
“Sorry. Don’t mean to tell you your business. Just looking for problems I can solve.”
“Case not going well?”
“Case isn’t going at all. Kid’s mom cashed out last night. Said she doesn’t need me anymore.”
“So you are worried about making your mortgage payment.”
I thought of the late notices piling up on my desk, but shook my head. “No.”
He turned to look straight into me with one of those big, round eyes. It was skin-crawlingly intimate, but I couldn’t turn away. He saw deeper into me than he should have.
“You’re not going to drop it. You can’t.”
I wished I could. Maybe I would have if I had something else to distract me.
I looked around the office, my eye going from racks of literature to the bubbling water cooler to the sizzling coffee pot. There weren’t any long lines of prospective clients in the way to stop me from taking in the whole desolate place in a second.
“I could help if you’d like,” Cal said.
I raised my eyebrow.
“Twenty dollars for a tarot reading, forty for scrying, I might be able to knock off a few dollars for—”
I let a snort slip out, but Cal didn’t look offended. It took a lot to move him.
“Thanks for the offer, Cal, but I’m out of pocket now. Even if I had a client on the line, I don’t think she’d sign off on an invoice that included psychic services.” Twenty dollars would go a long way in cheap scotch.
“I understand,” Cal said. “Maybe I could do something quick pro bono.”
“Yeah, sure. That’d just make my day.”
Cal didn’t pick up on my sardonic tone. He nodded, then lowered his head with his hand on his chin. Without lids to close, it looked like he was staring at the floor, but when I searched his eyes, I saw a sprawling abyss.
I watched my warped reflection, bulged out in the middle and pinched in at the top and bottom, shift back and forth as the minute stretched on. I sipped my cooling coffee louder than was strictly necessary, hoping the sound would snap him out of it. He stayed sunk there.
When my cup was dry and still the only movement was the squash and stretch of my body in the funhouse mirror of his eyeball, I considered slipping away. I could tell him when I saw him next that I’d gotten a call or a client had walked in or a nuclear bomb had gone off one block over and I had to dip out to check on Dolores. He wouldn’t have noticed any of those in his supposedly oracular trance.
I shuffled back a step, ready to make a break for it, when Cal’s head snapped up. He shook his shoulders like a warm-blooded mammal might shiver with a gust of cold air, then locked his focus on me again.
“What did you see?” A little genuine curiosity stole into my voice before I caught it. One thing could be said for Cal’s act: he had an air about him that invited awe, and he knew how to wield it.
“It was strange.”
“I would expect nothing less,” I said.
Cal wasn’t listening. He turned inward again, this time only remembering. “I saw Ethan. He wasn’t moving and there were cockroaches scurrying… He was… He was…”
“Dead? Lying in a ditch? Out in the woods?”
“That part’s unclear,” Cal said, moving on. “I saw a fight. One of them had a gun.”
For a moment, I opened my mind and let the idea of psychics and mediums being real take a quick tour. I wanted to believe.
“The other one had a hammer.”
“A hammer?”
Cal nodded seriously. “A rubber mallet. The other guy saw him coming, pulled the trigger and… Bang.”
My skepticism returned in a rush. “This guy with the hammer? He got shot?”
Cal shook himself, coming back down to this plane. “No, sorry. That’s what the gun said. A little flag came out of the barrel, said Bang in big red letters.”
I looked from Cal to the inert television in the corner and back. Clearly, he had fallen asleep one too many times with his set tuned to the channel that ran cartoons early in the morning.
“Does that help at all?” Cal asked, looking up at me.
I grunted as I started back down the hall to my office to get my hat and coat. “I’m sure it’ll come in handy later.”
Cal wasn’t bothered by the curt dismissal, but I made a hasty exit regardless. I didn’t know where I was going when I put my hand on the doorknob, but I had all the time in the world to figure it out.