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.
“Slip fees are due on the first. Late fees are a dollar a day. I don’t care if your boat sank, you still owe for the water it displaced.”
“I’m not here to rent, Henry,” I said, stepping into the dim, yellow light. “I’m looking for Martin Dredge.”
He finally looked up, his eyes narrowing as he took in my soaked trench coat, my bandaged hand, and aura of a woman having a profoundly bad week.
“Don’t know him,” Boyle grunted, turning back to his paper. “And even if I did, I ain’t a directory service. Take a walk, sister. The docks are closed.”
“He wrote your name down, Henry. Said you were going to shank him over back rent.” I stepped closer, letting the heavy, wet wool of my coat brush his desk. “I need his slip number.”
“I told you to take a walk.” He reached a meaty hand for the desk drawer.
I drew my snub-nose with my good hand and planted the barrel flat against the racing form, pinning it to the desk before his fingers even cleared the drawer handle.
“Let’s do the math, Henry,” I said, my voice dead flat, like a pane of frosted glass. “Martin Dredge is currently lying on a slab in a morgue, half his face in his lap and a couple of iron spikes playing hood ornament in his chest. He was murdered around three this morning, a dark, lonely hour only suited for trouble.”
Boyle froze. The color drained out of his face, leaving it a sickly gray, the color of cheap concrete under a streetlight.
“Now, I doubt the flatfoots have a suspect yet,” I continued, leaning over the barrel of the gun, letting the cold steel do the talking. “They’ve got their paperwork to fill out and Dredge was just a low-life slag, a smear of grease on the dock. But if I make an anonymous call from my office and tell them the local harbormaster had a violent, documented financial dispute with the deceased… well. They love a closed case, a neat little package wrapped up with a red ribbon of blood. And frankly, you look like a guy who owns a shank and isn’t afraid to use it.”
He swallowed hard, his eyes locked on the cylinder of my revolver. “I didn’t touch him. I swear to God. He was a deadbeat, a tick on a dog, but I didn’t kill him.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said, the words cutting the damp air. “The guys who killed him don’t care about slip fees. They care about what he was carrying. And if I don’t find his boat before they do, I’m going to let slip to the Order of the Suspended King you were involved.”
That broke him. The threat of the police was a bad joke, but the threat of the city’s supernatural underworld was a one-way ticket to a watery grave.
“Slip 42,” he stammered, his hands coming up in surrender. “End of the outer breakwater. It’s a converted tug called the Rusty Nail. Just… keep the Foundry out of it.”
“Pleasure doing business,” I said, holstering the gun. The sound was a final, cold punctuation mark on the exchange.
I let the rust-patched corrugated steel door slam behind me, the cold air biting at my exposed skin. The smell of the docks clung to my coat, and my eyes were drawn to the black, churning water where breakwater surrendered to bay.
Slip 42. The last one. At the very edge, where the skeletal remains of the pier gave up the ghost and plunged into the churning abyss they called The Choke.
The wind had picked up along The Choke, creating the closest thing to white caps anyone was likely to see on the river’s surface, perhaps better described as jaundiced caps. I kept my hand on the grip of my snub-nose in its holster, expecting to find the Rusty Nail already reduced to splinters by guys like Gallow — either that heavy, crushing aura of Mr. Gallow’s stasis magic, or a hull cracked in half by the sheer weight of the Foundry’s men.
The converted tugboat was just bobbing gently against its tire fenders.
The dock groaned softly under my boots. The heavy brass padlock on the cabin door was tarnished, but unbroken. No alchemical rust. No shattered glass. The dust on the windowsill had gathered undisturbed for at least a day, and stillness that tasted like a setup.
The hair on my arms stood up. Gallow’s people were ruthless and efficient. They should have put this marina through a meat grinder looking for Dredge’s contacts or the dead drop for the attaché. But the boat was untouched. It wasn’t luck. It felt like a held breath in a dark alley.
I pulled a tension wrench and a hook pick from my coat pocket, and went to work on the padlock. My burned left hand screamed in protest as I used it to hold the lock steady, the throbbing pulse matching the slap of the water against the hull. The tumblers were gritty with river salt and corrosion, but they gave way with a heavy, final clack.
I slid the padlock out of the hasp, eased the door open about three inches, and stopped. A bad feeling, cold as the river mud, settled in my gut.
Dredge was a bagboy, a nickel-and-dime runner. Slag like him didn’t just lock his door and settle in for a peaceful night’s sleep. He had a hard drinking habit, heavy debt, and creditors looking to collect who knew where he crashed. This was too quiet. Too clean.
I pulled out my widow’s prism and clicked on my pen flashlight. The prism, an irregular chunk of slag glass set in a tarnished frame, didn’t need the light to function, but I sure as hell did. The illumination was a crutch, the only thing holding back the creeping vertigo and the worst kind of migraine. Resonants sniff out magic with a whisper; Hollows like me need a tool for it. And that kind of help always comes with a cost.
I swept the narrow beam down toward the threshold ahead of the prism, looking through the smoky glass. And there it was. Barely an inch off the grimy floorboards, a nearly invisible thread of monofilament fishing line was strung taut, a cheap tripwire across the doorway. I traced the treacherous line with my light into the deep, bruised shadows of the cabin. It was tied directly to the trigger guard of a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, tied to a busted chair leg and aimed dead-center at my kneecaps. A messy kind of retirement plan.
I carefully high-stepped over the wire, easing myself into the cramped, low-ceilinged cabin. The air was thick with the stink of stale beer, damp wool, and the sharp, metallic tang of a man’s own paranoid sweat.
I left the overhead lights for the suckers and the honest men. Moving strictly by the narrow, dishonest beam of my flashlight, I began to pick apart Dredge’s peace of mind, one desperate trap at a time. A sliver of cardboard slipped behind the shotgun’s trigger neutralized his setup. Then I moved to the small kitchenette.
The widow’s prism cut through the gloom, showing the rough outline of an otherwise invisible ward scrawled on a poorly disguised false panel above the fold-away dining table. The glyphs screamed ‘daggers’, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was waiting for the poor sap checking behind that panel. I thumbed a cheap ward-breaker deadlight from my coat pocket and nudged it toward the panel until the pale green flicker of the trinket gasped and died.
Just to be sure, I used my hook pick to open the panel. No more traps. Nor anything behind it but dust, spiderwebs, and the sour taste of disappointment.
Opposite the table, he had taped a row of rusted razor blades underneath the handle of the only drawer that looked big enough to hold a lockbox. I used the barrel of my gun to slide the drawer open from the side.
It was a waste of time. Empty, save for a few roach casings and a rusted spoon.
He wanted someone to bleed for looking in the obvious places. Which meant the real prize was somewhere only a desperate man would willingly go. It was a place I hadn’t seen yet, but knew I would.
The promised migraine was a freight train in the distance and the vertigo had already arrived at the station. Bilge water sloshed just beneath the floorboards. I had to stop thinking like a gumshoe and start thinking like a man waiting for his big, ugly payoff. I needed to turn something up, and fast.
Where does a man hide something too rich to see the light of day?
I knelt on the threadbare rug and pulled it back, exposing the scuffed, water-warped deck.
Through the widow’s prism, I could see a faint cutout obscured by grime in the wood flooring. I flipped my snub-nose around, gripping the cold steel barrel, and tapped the heavy brass butt against the floorboards near the faint line revealed by the prism.
Thud. Clack. Thud.
Hollow. The sound of empty space and river water sloshing against the hull just inches below. I crawled two feet to the left, near the edge of the rusted kitchenette cabinet, and kept tapping.
I stopped. The electrical burns on my left hand pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I tapped the spot again.
Clack.
It wasn’t a hollow echo. It was a dense, dead, heavy sound. Wood hitting wood, with something solid displacing the space underneath. I ran my pen-flashlight over the boards. It looked perfectly seamless, but when I pressed my thumb hard against the grain, the wood gave way just a fraction of an inch, revealing a hairline cut disguised by decades of river grime.
It was a tiny, custom-cut access hatch leading straight down into the oily, freezing bilge of the boat.
I slipped the flat edge of my hook pick into the microscopic seam, braced my knee against the rocking of the hull, and pulled.
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