an episodic novelette | a Vivian Locke noir

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

Gallow didn’t bother to try to grab me, he just extended the stasis field in my direction. As my rear foot left the parapet, the air in the middle of the alley thickened into a cold, invisible molasses. My momentum died a drawn-out, gasping death; its final rattle was the only fast thing about my rain-drenched descent. I wasn’t falling; I was drifting. My arc flattened out, the cafe’s rooftop now a cruel joke I was destined to miss. Instead, I was going to hang there, a suspended fool in the ceaseless drizzle, until the Foundry’s enforcer reached out and plucked me from the sky like a rotten apple from a tree.

an episodic novelette | a Vivian Locke noir

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

I pushed the door open.

The office was exactly as I’d left it, only wrong. The air was thick, like cheap cigarette smoke, and the silence was heavy enough to cast a shadow. The ceiling fan was frozen in mid-spin, a broken promise of a breeze. A water droplet hung suspended in the air, halfway between the scarred ceiling tile and my rust-stained bucket. The dust motes in the shaft of street light weren’t dancing; they were stuck in place like insects in amber — a still-life of a dead moment.

And sitting in my client chair, looking like a statue carved out of gray meat and bad intentions, was a man in a rubberized trench coat. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t blink. He was just a shape in the gloom, a problem I hadn’t ordered.