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Eventually Ken turns back towards us. Walks forward from the shadows a different man. Just like that. Flashes of his little girl and whatever horrors his mind played for him, flashes of his kid brother and the sins Ken committed to protect Francis, coming back now to stab him in the back. Betrayal lodges deep. Past bone and into the soul.
The decision Ken has just made, bathed in the ink from a night here in country that God has overlooked, he becomes someone else. Something else.
He walks up, holds out his hand. Now we’re talking.
I pull a drop gun I took from a gang-banger months back. He didn’t need it anymore; he was quite dead. The drop gun goes to Ken’s open palm, then it goes to Francis’s head and my .44 doesn’t have to worry about being traced.
A gunshot later and I am heading home to wash the brains off of my face. Contact shots are bad about that kind of thing.
2
My name is Richard Dean Buckner.
People call me either Richard or Mr. Buckner. No one calls me Dick.
No one.
3
An overflowing ashtray.
The air is blue with so much smoke. I crush another butt into the glass dish after using it to light a new cigarette. Two old, yellowing cigarette carcasses shift in the pile like demolition rubble. They almost cause a landslide. I drag deeply, exhaling through my nose like a raging bull snorting heat into a crisp morning.
I rub my neck where several years ago I was assaulted with a hypodermic needle loaded with a lethal dose of the Big Fry. Hit attempt. To kill an elephant you have to hit it with a missile. I guess I’m something more than a typical elephant because the missile failed. Not without cost, though.
The PD called me unserviceable. I think that bitch Flemming picked the word on purpose. The PD retired me unceremoniously with a pension check just big enough to legally argue they gave me something.
Black and white photographs are scattered across my desk and ink blots like square leaves falling off a zebra tree.
My desk’s far edge is lined with origami. Two swans, with their flat heads and triangle beaks, tread water on the wooden surface and swim without moving an inch. A sailboat with so many imperfect folds it would do better as an anchor. It sails in the empty sea along my desk, prow facing the swan, invisible waves rolling and hitching it to nowhere. A paper rose, a table with two chairs. A whale. All so imperfect.
A half-dead fan spins above me. Two dim bulbs dangle from it, casting light in search beacon fashion. It, being tossed around by the fan’s wobbly spinning, jumps and bobs and dives and swings, throwing light here and there and back here again. Trying to read by the lone fan’s erratic behavior gives me headaches.
The blinds behind me are drawn loosely, allowing grated, wedge-on-top-of-wedge blocks of waning sunlight to fall over the room. A fake plant rises out of a cheap, wicker pot and leans into the corner; a drunk using the wall to hold himself up while he searches for his next step.
I blow smoke rings up at the fan and watch them get thrown about and torn into thousands of small gray strips. I rub my face and sandpaper lining my jaw grits under one palm.
The phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Richard?”
“Hello, Abe.” Abe Baldwin is my main man. He is a terrible trial lawyer who has a crusader complex bigger than a movie star’s ego. He spent a few years in the city’s district attorney’s office, but he is horrible at research and even worse at arguing. The sign of a good cook is if they are fat. If Abe were as bad a cook as he is a lawyer, we would have lost him a long time ago.
The writing on my office door says I’m a private investigator. In between jobs for Abe I take pictures of rich housewives banging the pool boy, rich husbands banging the maids, dirty cops taking pay-offs, blah blah blah. The usual, makes-ends-meet fare. There’s plenty to go around.
Abe will call me with a special case every now and then, and I look into it for him. He called me a few weeks ago about Ken McDonald and his daughter.
“How did it go?” Abe asks.
I sip my bourbon and coffee and say, “His brother did it.”
“Francis? He confessed?”
“Yes.”
Abe sighs with relief. “Good. Because Ken McDonald went to his brother’s house last night. He made a huge scene. Cops and media huge. Smacked around his sister-in-law.”
