episodic short fiction | a Vivian Locke noir
It takes a lot of nerve to slide uninvited into my booth when I’m halfway through a bad week and a worse cup of coffee — it could have just as likely dishwater as coffee by the sheen reflecting my mug in the surface. Usually, I’d just tell the stray to take a hike. But the guy smelled like burnt ozone and sheer panic, and before I could even complain about the static-charged puddle he was leaving on the seat across from me, he slammed a frost-encrusted attaché down on the cracked and stained laminate.
“Ya gotta take it, Locke” my disheveled interloper said by way one of the worst pickup lines anyone has ever tried on me. He did not even have the decency to eye my cleavage as he spoke.
The recognition came quick. I had seen him around. My stray was a freelance bagboy working the streets and alleys in the neighborhood. Not the kind with a name I would recall, as I had no use for a courier of his subspecies. Nor was he one to have his picture up for anyone’s employee of the month — he had a reputation of being Lady Liquor’s lover. He was street lowlife that even the smallest bosses would only scrape from the gutter as an act of desperation to put to work.
The frost began to creep from the crusted exterior of the bag towards my lukewarm dishwater, chilling the air around the booth.
“C’mon Locke,” he whined, fumbling for a manilla envelope in his jacket with frostbitten fingers. He slapped the envelope down. “I’m outta my depth here. I can’t courier this hunk of lead no more. You can have all the dough, just take the sonofabitch before —”
He looked outside into the static charged rain left behind as a parting gift by some old grift-witch before they bound her and took her off to the pen. Everyone cackled along with her for the first few months of static rain. Then joke fell as flat as road-killed rat when it kept falling. And falling. The laughter stopped after that. Still in rained, laugh-track or not.
“— before they find me, Locke.” He looked at me, desperate for my reply.
Lightning crackled across the nearby lamppost, Frankenstein-ing it back to life for as long as the charge would hold before the dead street lamp flickered and went dark once again. My uninvited date jumped and I thought I might have to borrow Cookie’s spatula to peel him off the ceiling.
His voice cycled up the octaves like a motorbike in first gear. “They’re out there, Locke! I saw ’em. I’m done for!”
He turned and ran toward the glass door of the diner, looking back to mouth “I’m sorry.” I was surprised he took the time to open the diner’s door inward and did not just take his chances jumping through the glass pane to race away from the still-flickering lights at Three A.M. and Fourth Street.
I looked into the rain where Prince Charming had been looking but saw no one or no thing — a fact not entirely unheard of in this part of the The Gills. Seemed everyone but yours truly in this part of the city could mumble a spell for fading into the shadow. There were times when taking to fade might be useful and I cursed the genes of my parents, both certified Hollows.
By the time I’d looked back at the attaché so unceremoniously dumped at my table, the frost had made a skating rink of the stuff cosplaying as coffee and was creeping perilously close to that overstuffed envelope of what my bagboy had claimed to be cash. Feeling chivalrous, I saved the stained manila envelope from becoming a frozen paperweight and looked inside.
Bagboy had not been lying. From what I could see, the envelope was chocked full of my last month’s belated rent. My talent for accounting on the fly said the contents would satisfy next month’s rent as well. Maybe until June, if I was frugal. I tucked the envelope into my own trench-coat and went about deciding if the attaché warranted casual disposal or as a keepsake to satisfy my curiosity. The latter quickly won over.
“What’s that, Vivian?” asked Cookie from the counter. Seeing the frost grow outward, he quickly added, “Whatever it is, you need to get rid of it.”
The frost was starting to creep down the center-post of the table and the rime threatened to glue the case to its surface. I nodded, “Yeah, gimme a sec, willya.”
Some women carry different lipstick to suit the occasion. That would not help me in my line of work and, instead, I carried a pocket full of deadlight fetishes for my particular occasions and in line with my social status as a Hollow. As I managed to find one attuned to stasis and was about to crack it open, a scream came from the direction our bagboy had scooted. I cracked the deadlight, which made it glow a lovely shade of afterlife, and the frost began to slip back to the deadweight attaché.
I snapped my fingers at Cookie and pointed at his stash of — well, relatively clean — towels and he tossed one at me. I could still feel the chill creeping out of the bag through the rag, but the deadlight appeared doing its job effectively, if not perfectly. With that, I followed delivery boy’s path into the never-ending static rain of The Gills, lugging my over-sized freezing fish line sinker at my side.
To be continued…
Episode Post Mortem:
The case files of Vivian Locke seem like something I can return to as time goes on, so I’m going to treat this fiction series as if that is the plan. No promises.
As I started brainstorming what was initially meant to be a hardboiled occult detective noir bit of flash fiction based on a prompt that I received from AI, I realized there was little chance that I would be able to fit in the whole story in less than a few thousand words. So, instead, I decided to publish it in bite-sized episodic chunks of approximately flash fiction length.
Warning: this story is still being written.
I tried to both embrace and subvert some of the genre’s tropes (female detective rather than male, for subversive example; cornball first-person narrative for keeping to genre).
We’ll see if I pull it off, but bear with me, dear reader.
Impressions of this first episode are encouraged, if you are so inclined to put them into the comments. Thanks for everyone’s continued support as I try to get back into writing prose (rather than strictly poetry).
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