Author: michael raven

an episodic Vivian Locke noir

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

I carefully wrapped the impossible token back into the velvet and shoved it deep into my coat pocket. The brimstone receded, swallowed by the scent of old fryer grease.

Leviathan’s Cross was the mark of the Meridian Club. They wouldn’t let a banged-up, worn-out gumshoe like me past the bouncers at the door of that upscale joint in a hundred years, let alone to the back room where I could suss out which of the fat cats was my likely Johnson and shake them down.

an episodic Vivian Locke noir

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

The flat edge of my hook pick slid into the narrow crack. I braced my knee against the hull’s sickening rock, the whole procedure a grim reenactment of the dentist who’d torn a wisdom tooth from my jaw last year. The relief at the time, when it finally came, was probably the whiskey talking. It sure as hell hadn’t been in the dentist’s technique. My ribs ached for days afterward.

The square panel popped loose with a wet, suctioned thwack, spitting out a blast of freezing, diesel-slicked air. It hit me in the face like a fistful of brass knuckles, carrying the rotten-egg stench of the river water sloshing just beneath the deck.

I plunged my good right hand into the darkness, steeling myself for the shock of freezing bilge. My fingers didn’t find water; they found cold, dry iron.

an episodic Vivian Locke noir

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

Stillwater Moorings was a cruel, dark joke. The water in this part of The Choke was a chemical soup, a shipyard graveyard littered with rusted hulls and skeletal docks. The air hung thick with the metallic miasma of decay and industrial waste—the signature scent of a forgotten port.

I tracked Boyle to the end of Pier 4. His office was a miserable shack of grimy, corrugated tin that rattled in the cold breeze. Inside, the gloom was barely pierced by the sickly yellow flicker of a sputtering kerosene heater. Boyle himself, a heavy man with a slump, wasn’t counting money; he was hunched over a crumpled racing form, poring over the odds with the grim focus of a man searching for one final win.

He didn’t look up when I kicked the door shut behind me.