This is a serialized story. Start here for the first episode.
Kogan threw a heavy velvet cloth over the retort, a gesture that strangled the light and the visual connection. “Dredge wasn’t moving ordinary stolen goods for the Johnson who hired him, Locke. Not by a long shot.”
He walked to the door and worked the locks with the practiced care of a man who didn’t want unexpected company. The deadbolt slid home with a weary sigh. The second lock clicked like a rat trap. Then the heavy iron bar dropped into place with a definitive, bone-jarring clank. He flipped the sign in the grime-stained, chickenwire-reinforced shop window to “Closed,” turning the world outside into a dull rumor, and dimmed the lights, making the room a cave of shadows and secrets.
“The Order of the Suspended King, The Foundry,” he continued, his voice a rasp of granite on granite, “they don’t deal in assets. They deal in moments. That case you dumped on my bench isn’t a container; it’s a pause button. And whatever is inside it… they didn’t want it to finish dying.”
He turned to me, his face a pale, sharp mask under the lone, weak incandescent bulb that hung over the workbench like a cheap, cynical moon over a dead sea. “If they find you, they won’t just kill you, Locke. They’ll just make sure you never stop dying.”
“What about you, pal?” I asked. More a curiosity than a real worry. Guys like Kogan, they had a knack for landing upright, like a cat in a silk hat. “Won’t they be kicking down your door, looking to drag their forgotten treasure out of your oubliette?”
“If they managed to have followed you here,” his voice creaking like a rusted hinge in a darkened alley, “I’ll gladly hand the case over to them without batting an eye and waive my standard storage fees as a show of my excellent customer service skills. I ain’t got a personal beef with the Foundry, and I sure as hell don’t want one. They’re the kind of trouble that sticks to your soul like cheap liquor, and they don’t mess around.”
“I appreciate the honesty, Kogan,” I said, pulling the collar of my coat up against the damp chill of the room. “It’s a rare vintage in this town.”
“Yeah, just do me a favor, willya? Don’t come back for this unless you’ve figured out how to kill it or sell it,” Kogan muttered, his eyes darting over to the door of his office like it was the one place he might finally feel safe enough to take a deep breath. Or, maybe, he just needed a slug of something that could burn the rust out of his drainpipe and that’s where he kept his poison.
“First, I need to swing by my office,” I said. “Dredge was working for somebody. The Johnson who hired him to babysit the case is probably also interested in its welfare. Plus, I’ve got a box of iron-jacketed rounds under the floorboards that suddenly feel less like insurance and more like a required dress code.”
“Besides,” I added wearily, the fatigue a cold weight in my bones. “I could use a catnap and check some old files to see what they can tell me about a likely Johnson, or give me a refresher course on the Foundry. Better to know the map before I go stomping around in hostile territory looking to sponge up the hexes tossed my way.”
Kogan looked at me, the shadows deepening the exhaustion in his face. “Hey, a bit of friendly advice because I like you. Always have. If you’re going back out into the soup, keep your head on a swivel. The Suspended King aren’t the kind of folks to hire your average mook to kick in doors. They prefer to keep everything on the hush-hush.”
He took a step closer, his voice dropping low and barely audible. “Make sure you watch for the air getting thick, you listen for the rain stopping before it hits the ground. If the world suddenly feels like it’s holding its breath, Locke…Run. And don’t look back.”
He walked past me and unbolted a reinforced steel door at the back of the shop, the one that opened onto the flooded loading dock. The smell of the river and ozone washed over the chemical stink of the room.
“Out the back,” he said, gesturing to the dark, wet alley. “And do me a favor. If you’re going to get yourself stuck in a permanent Tuesday, do it outside my zip code.”
“I’ll try to pencil my existential doom in for a Wednesday, then,” I said, stepping out onto the rusted grate of the loading dock.
Kogan didn’t laugh. The heavy steel door slammed shut behind me, the cascade of deadbolts throwing behind me punctuated my footsteps on the asphalt sounding a lot like a coffin lid being nailed shut.
The alley was a canal of bad decisions and chemical runoff. The rain wasn’t falling so much as it was chewing its way through the smog of a city just beginning to wake up, carrying a bite of electrical charge that made the damp wool of my trench coat sparking blue arcs in the gloom. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets. My right arm felt strangely light, almost hollow, missing the fifty pounds of a frozen leather case I’d been lugging around half the night. It threw my center of gravity off, giving me the swagger of a drunken sailor on shore leave.
I stuck to the shadows, my boots splashing through gutters that ran with an oily, iridescent sheen. Kogan’s warning was a bad penny that rattled around in my skull. Half a block away, a delivery truck cut from stone-grinding idle to rain-piercing silence. The abrupt silence hit me like a blackjack to the back of my skull. I froze, my breath catching in my throat, waiting for the air to thicken into wet concrete, for the raindrops to hang suspended before my eyes.
But the rain kept falling, cold and mean. A stray cat yowled from a nearby fire escape. Just a stalled engine. I let out a breath that plumed white in the morning’s chill and kept moving.
By the time I turned the corner onto my street, the paranoia had settled into a dull, grinding ache right behind my eyes. I kept my head down, watching the cracked pavement to avoid the deepest puddles, which is why I saw the light before I heard the buzzing transformer.
A stretch of stagnant water near the curb caught the stuttering, epileptic reflection of hot pink neon. It was a cheap, broken promise in the gutter.
Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dash. Dot-dash-dash…
I didn’t have to look up to know it was the broken CAFE section of Cookie’s sign throwing a fit across the street from my building. I watched the pink light drown in the oily water, my brain automatically translating the chaotic strobe of the short circuit into nonsense.
SOUP IS LION.
“Good to know, Cookie,” I muttered, the words tasting like old pennies, shaking the water off my coat as I stepped into the street foyer of my low-rent office space. “Think I’ll stick to the coffee.”
The street foyer smelled like wet wool and the kind of cheap disinfectant that only makes the dirt smell cleaner. I pushed through the foyer door and started the grim climb to the third floor. I was tired, I was wet, and I was looking forward to a quick catnap on the cot, a little bit of research into our friends Martin Dredge and The Order of the Suspended King, and an otherwise very boring day of watching my socks dry on the radiator.
Three flights of stairs in a waterlogged wool coat is less of a commute and more of an endurance test. The stairwell was thick with the stink of boiled cabbage, ozone, and the kind of cheap floor wax that just seals the dirt in permanently. Luxury office suites these were not, but they were a step up from hanging my shingle up over at Cookie’s, even if the Cafe would have been a hell of a lot drier. Rent was dirt cheap thanks to The Rook’s relentless, static rain. Being located down in The Gills didn’t help elevate the property value, either.
The third-floor hallway was awash in the sickly, jaundiced glare of a fluorescent tube that was sputtering its way to oblivion, casting a slow, buzzing death in jittering, erratic strobes. I kept my fedora low, letting muscle memory be my only compass over the uneven floorboards until I reached my door at the dead end of the hall.
The top half of the door was a sheet of rippled, frosted glass—the kind that held secrets and distorted light. Across it, in gold leaf that had seen better days and too many storms, were the ghosted words: “Sunny Day arasol Co.” The “P” from “Parasol” was long gone, a victim of time or perhaps a better offer. Given the constant, charged downpour outside, the name wasn’t just ironic; it was a cheap, cruel joke left by some long-dead, blind optimist.
Taped squarely beneath it was my contribution to the local economy: a heavy-stock index card held up by four strips of cellophane tape that had yellowed and curled like dead fingernails. The dampness of the building had made the black marker bleed a little, but my boundaries were still clear:
V. LOCKE
Consultations & Retrieval
NO Love Potions.
NO Exorcisms.
NO Divorce Cases.
~ Knock Hard ~
I dug my keys out of my pocket and slipped the key in. It hadn’t always felt so cooperative, but we’d come to an agreement. I fed it oil, and it agreed to turn.
I reached for the tarnished brass knob. My thumb brushed the cold metal. I stopped.
Something was wrong. The hallway radiator, which usually hissed like a punctured tire in the late morning chill, was stone silent. The rhythmic drip-drip-drip from the ceiling leak just inside my office wasn’t hitting the steel bucket. The universe had apparently decided to throw a whole lot more my way than just the nonsense doggerel of “Soup is Lion” today.
It wasn’t just quiet. The silence was the heavy, pressurized silence of the space between heartbeats, the kind that reminded you there were places where familiar geometries and physics no longer applied.
episode post-mortem:
Not much to say today that hasn’t already been said, so I’ll keep this short.
Those readers ‘in the know’ might notice what seems like a minor detail near the end that will likely play a bigger role in future installments. A little bit of foreshadowing on my part. How clever! How totally original!
Or not. This is pulp, after all.
Anyway — I once again thank all of you who take time to read any of my writing, but especially my fiction. I am indebted to you for taking time to read my writing.
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