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.
I flailed with what little motion I was still allowed, my hand slapping against the only thing close enough to reach as I began to tumble in slow, swimming motions towards the Cafe’s rooftop: The neon “E” in CAFE rising over the roof of Cookie’s shop.
My fingers hooked around the scorching glass tubing and the rust-eaten iron frame. The glass shattered with a crackling crunch in my grip.
zzzzzzzaaaaaapppp
Four thousand volts of dirty city electricity surged through my arm. It was a white-hot whip crack that smelled of ozone and burnt hair, a jolt that hurt like hell, but the shock did something my friend Gallow hadn’t accounted for.
The electricity broke the stasis.
The magical “thick air” shattered like cheap glass. Gravity snapped back to normal with a sickening lurch.
I swung wildly from the broken sign frame, my ribs slamming into the damp, unforgiving brick of the diner. I clawed for purchase on the wet masonry, a frantic scramble for life. Hauling myself onto the greasy gravel of the diner roof, I was shaking, smoking faintly, and clutching a hand that felt like it had been used as a grounding wire, burned raw and useless.
I looked back across the alley.
Gallow stood silhouetted against the overcast skies, perched on the edge of my office roof. His gaze drifted from the gaping chasm below to the sparking, broken wreckage of the neon sign I’d just silenced.
The “CAFE” was a corpse of twisted metal and glass. Dark. The only light left in this corner of the city was the stubborn, cheap pink glow of COOKIE’S, a beacon that just refused to die.
The stuttering strobe was gone. I had to admit a momentary tear almost slipped from my eye, although I couldn’t say if it was the pain screaming from blackened hand to still-spasming shoulder, or if I would no longer be delivered the mad wisdom in the vein of “TEETH ARE RENT” or “GOD IS TUESDAY” in morse code from the sign as I passed underneath on my way to the office.
The Foundary’s man didn’t try to jump. He knew he was too much bulk for a graceful exit. He just watched me, a shadow committing the shape of my escape to memory. Then, slow as a bad habit, he turned and walked back into the rooftop stairwell. The sound of steel crumpling like a cheap metal postcard before being tossed into the gutter moments after he disappeared from view.
I didn’t have much time.
I slid down the greasy alley wall of the diner, landing on a week’s worth of collected sins and refuse, and tried the lock on the heavy steel kitchen door. I was sweating out the time it would take to pick the tumbler, so it was a cold mercy to feel it swing out with a sigh. I crawled inside and leaned against the door, remedying its carelessness by throwing the thick bolt home with a satisfying, final clack.
I went from the freezing, ozone-charged silence of the alley into a wall of noise, steam, and the scent of frying onions — the smell of a thousand late nights. The kitchen of Cookie’s Cafe was a chaotic ecosystem of clattering pans and shouted short orders, fueled by grease and caffeine, a dark heart beating beneath the city’s neon skin.
Cookie was a man built like a refrigerator that had learned to box, moving with the low-slung menace of a tank rolling over cobblestones. He dropped a plate of hash browns when he saw me playing cuddle games with his back door. He took one look at my smoking coat, my shaking hand, and the wild desperation in my eyes.
“You look like a wet rat that licked a fuse box, Viv,” he grunted, kicking a crate of potatoes under the prep table. “Trouble?”
“Heavy trouble,” I rasped, sliding into the narrow gap between the industrial dishwasher and the swinging door to the front counter. “The kind that doesn’t knock.”
Cookie didn’t flinch. He just wiped his hands on a greasy apron, the kind that had seen more sins than a street preacher.
“Front,” he ordered, his voice a low growl that cut through the sizzle of the flat-top. “Keep your head down.”
He strode up to the counter, where a dame who called herself June was ringing out a customer. At least, that’s what the nametag made by way of suggestion, although I had my doubts. He moved with the slow, deliberate confidence of a man who knew exactly where the bodies were buried.
“Move. I’ll handle the register,” he said. It wasn’t an invitation.
I was wedged behind the front counter, a narrow slice of real estate between the churning chrome of the milkshake machine and the cold steel of the cash drawer. The air was a cheap perfume of lemon polish and the ghost of a thousand fried meals. My hand was keeping time with the relentless, dull throb of the jukebox bass line, a miserable, private drum solo in my bones. A couple of working stiffs on their lunch break laughed loudly at a joke I couldn’t hear over the music.
The bell above the front door didn’t offer a cheerful jingle; it just clanked, a sound like a jail cell banging shut.
The diner’s temperature fell off a cliff. The grill’s hungry sizzle turned to a muffled whisper, as if a wet rag had been thrown over the whole operation. The lunch crowd’s easy chatter evaporated, replaced by the uneasy, squeaking symphony of vinyl booths as bodies shifted, looking for an exit that wasn’t there.
I froze, sucking the stale air out of the room, and listened to the heavy, slow, and sickeningly wet crunch of boots working their way across the linoleum. And then stop. The silence was deafening.
“Hey, battleship! You’re blocking the pie case and my girls are carrying hot coffee. Move it or buy something,” Cookie said. His voice was calm, but I heard the metallic click of him sliding his “customer service” baseball bat out from under the register.
“I’m on the hunt for a dame,” Gallow’s voice cut through the air, a low-frequency growl that made the cheap diningware jitter like a drunk on a cold night. “She smells of ozone and a job gone wrong. The stink of a hot wire and a hotter haul.”
“Interesting perfume, pal, but I don’t run a smelling contest. A man goes around sniffing skirts, people start thinking he’s either a perv or a lunatic. If that’s all the gas you’ve got in the tank, then m—”
“Vivian Locke.”
Cookie paused, pretending to consider my name.
“Nope. Don’t know the name,” Cookie said, his voice flat as a month-old beer. “And you’re blotting out the light in the doorway. You here to buy something, or just here to run up my gas bill?”
A pause followed, long and thick, the kind of silence that turns the air into something you could chip away at with a pickaxe.
“This place…” Gallow muttered, his voice tight, like a wire drawn too taut. “It… it boils. Too much motion. Too much heat.”
“It’s a greasy spoon, wise guy. We sling hash. Fast.” Cookie pulled back, poured a slug of bitter coffee into a cracked mug, and slapped it onto the counter. “Here. Drink up.”
The heavy clink of ceramic on the counter directly above my head was the sound of an ultimatum.
“House blend,” Cookie said, the hospitality in his voice as abrasive as sandpaper. “Fresh off the boil. On the house. Drink it down and beat it. You’re killing the festive mood ‘round here.”
Gallow made a sound like a cracking glacier and stepped back.
“Chaos,” he muttered, the steam rising from the coffee like a personal insult. “Consumption is a variable we cannot calculate. This location is… contaminated.”
The heavy boots crunched backward. The door opened, letting in a gust of wet wind, and then closed with the hollow finality of a coffin lid. The pressure in my ears popped. The grill sizzled back to its familiar, greasy complaint while the jukebox picked up with some dame wailing about someone leaving her for someone new.
“He’s gone,” Cookie said.
I hauled myself up, wincing as my bruised ribs protested the movement like a bad memory. Cookie was staring at the front door, looking less frightened than utterly annoyed. He poured the coffee he’d just offered the Foundry’s “representative” into the drain.
“Guy gave me the creeps,” he said, the sentiment as dry as old cigar ash. “Like talking to a tombstone in a cheap suit.” He looked at my hand. “First aid kit is in the back. I’ll get the whiskey. You look like you need to forget something.”
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