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.
His right hand rested on the arm of the chair, thick gray fingers slightly curled. Hovering exactly one inch above his open palm was a corroded copper coin, a virtual twin to the one I’d left behind with Kogan. It wasn’t spinning. It wasn’t falling. It was perfectly, impossibly trapped in the dead air, a suspended threat that made the hairs on my arms stand up — the kind of bad luck you could feel like a rotten tooth in your mouth.
He just sat there, acting as the paperweight for the entire room.
“You’re trespassing,” I said, my voice dry in the stale air. I kept my hand on the doorknob, just in case I needed to make a quick exit from reality. “And you’re violating the laws of physics. I can evict you for the first one. The second one is just annoying.”
The man didn’t move his head. He didn’t even look at the coin suspended over his palm. “The laws of your world are built on decay, Ms. Locke.” His voice was a low, grinding rumble, heavy as a cement block dropped onto a cold floor, hitting my chest like physical pressure. “I am exempt. I am Gallow. I speak for the Suspended King.”
“Gallow. Subtle. Let me guess, your partner is Mr. Guillotine and he’s waiting in the Buick?”
“I have no partners. Only a quota.” He slowly closed his hand. The hovering coin didn’t drop into his palm; his fingers simply swallowed the space around it. “You have stolen a moment that does not belong to you, and the clock is running on borrowed time.”
“If you’re looking for the briefcase, you’re late,” I said, leaning against the doorframe like my heart wasn’t trying to chisel its way out of my ribs. Gallow didn’t flinch.”It’s currently rigged to a thermal detonator in a rusted locker down at Lower Central. If I don’t punch in a code every sixty minutes, the entropy core wakes up and turns the entire El-See into a firestorm. I have…” I checked my watch, the second hand completely dead and unmoving beneath the glass. “Nineteen minutes.”
It was a good lie. It had stakes, urgency, and a specific geography, the kind of lie you’d tell to buy yourself a few more breaths in a city that had long since run out of them.
Gallow didn’t blink. His voice was like dry ice on a hot night, cool and sharp. “We are not slaves to the march of time, Ms. Locke. Time is enslaved to us.”
The air in the room instantly turned to wet concrete as he took a sluggish, leaden step towards me. The pressure popped in my ears, driving the breath from my lungs. The stasis was so heavy it tasted like rusty metal on the back of my tongue. It was the flavor of rot and stillness that slowdanced across my tongue.
Plan B time, I thought, the metallic tang of desperation sharp on my tongue. Kinetic energy. It was a savage, final gambit. It was the last, ugly hand I had to play in the tightening silence.
I kept my hand away from my .38. The shimmer around him wasn’t an aura; it was a snag, a tripwire for any bullet I might send his way, turning my hot lead into a cheap fishline sinker before it came within a foot of his face. So, I grabbed something with more heft, hoping the heavy brass umbrella stand, low-tech and full of ugly purpose, was heavy enough to make it to Gallow and give him a good knock on the head.
I put the whole collection of rotten hours since three a.m. into it, seasoned it with a liberal dose of silent, grim prayer, and aimed it squarely at Gallow’s granite mug.
The brass umbrella stand left my hand fast enough, a fleeting gleam in the gloom. But the moment it crossed the center of the room, the Gallow’s stasis caught it. It decelerated violently, the heavy brass warping the thick, miserable air around it as it drifted into a lazy, underwater float.
Gallow watched it approach with zero concern. He was a statue carved from bad intentions, and this was just another Tuesday.
With my uninvited guest’s attention distracted, I went into motion. I threw my weight forward, away from the concrete air and my office door, aiming myself directly at the frosted glass window overlooking the rain-sodden alley. It was a cheap exit, but I was out of better ideas, and the alley promised shadow and a few seconds more of a life I wasn’t ready to cash in yet.
I hit the glass. The stasis field, weak at the edges, fought me. The pane didn’t shatter; it exploded in slow, jagged, agonizingly sharp shards that hung suspended around me for a cruel, drawn-out moment.
I tumbled through the frame, tasting the cold kiss of rusted iron on the fire escape. The freezing, biting, static-charged rain of The Gills swallowed me whole. I’d never been so happy to have Rea’s Curse spark across my face. Real rain, or damned close enough, moving at real speed. It was a hell of a warning light, telling me Gallow’s stasis field was a short-leash dog, limited to about twenty feet, which was all the running room a dame like me needed to make a clean break.
I scrambled up, dragging air into my lungs like a man surfacing from a deep, black well. The pressure in my chest had eased outside the stasis, allowing me a ragged breath. Inside the office, the Gallow hadn’t moved. He was just standing there, the brass umbrella stand a hair’s breadth from his chiseled face. He didn’t turn so much as pivot his head toward the shattered window, his movement an unnerving, jerky stutter, like a reel of cheap film catching in the projector.
“The King waits,” he droned, the words hollow and wooden.
“Let him cool his heels,” I spat back, and stumbled to the ladder, my fingers fumbling for the cold, damp metal rungs with my hands. I was a dame that had run out of both time and luck, and I needed to get out of Gallow’s stasis range before he snared me again.
I hauled myself over the final, slick rungs of the iron ladder, the rain trying to wash the grip from my boots, and tumbled onto the gritty, tar-paper expanse of the office roof. It was a cold, lonely perch up there, the city lights below smeared into an oil-slick rainbow on the wet surface.
I heard Gallow’s heavy footfall behind me, the metal fire escape groaning under his leaden weight. The air behind me curdled into a thick, wrong silence that tried to suck me back into the stairwell.
I didn’t look back. The rain was a cold, slick sheet between me and the fire escape. I only looked across the alley.
Eight feet of rain-slicked nothingness separated me from the flat roof of the diner, a void dark enough to swallow a bad memory. Bridging the gap, anchored to the diner’s brickwork, was the massive, rusted iron framework of the neon sign.
It glowed, defiant in the downpour, a siren in the neon night:
COOKIE’S CAFE
The ‘CAFE’ still pulsed, the neon pink tubes firing off a desperate, manic morse code; a staccato, epileptic repeating rhythm that was a siren in the downpour: SOUP IS LION.
I heard the fire escape ladder behind me shriek as it was torn from its anchors in slow motion, a dying metallic scream against the night. Gallow was on the roof, and the deck was quickly becoming stacked against me.
I took three steps back, the only running start I was going to get.
“Please don’t be slippery,” I whispered to the wet, black tar paper, a prayer to a city that didn’t care.
I ran. I hit the edge of the parapet and launched myself into the void.
For a second, I was flying, a brief, clean moment of freedom. The angle was right. I was going to clear the gap and land on the diner roof like I owned the place.
Then, Gallow stepped to the edge behind me, blocking out the last sliver of weak moonlight winking from behind the rainclouds.
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