Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The night was cold, and dark. And cold. And dark. And cold, and dark, and cold. Also it was raining.

The faint glow of the streetlight picked out a shadowy figure skulking through the inky blackness. The barest ember of a lit cigarette illuminated the careworn creases of his face and the scar across his left cheek. His stocky, imposing figure was briefly racked by violent coughing, because smoking totally gives you lung cancer. He stalked the sidewalks with his head down and his collar up. He was heading to a seedy building that looked almost ready to fall down, and had no sign of life except the single lit window on the second floor. And the cat that was nibbling a dead junkie's fingers.

That cat's gonna get a crack habit now, thought the man. That's how it works, right? Or is that HIV? He thought about shooting the cat to save it from its future misery, but he didn't want the local lowlifes to be attracted to the gunshot. He'd lost his pistol's silencer after the incident on the docks, and he wasn't quite confident enough of his makeshift replacement, a toilet roll tube with some Sellotape around it, to try it out yet.

Instead, he eased open the building's front door and ascended the stained staircase to the second floor. He dropped the cigarette butt in a plant pot that held a dead plant and several hundred cigarette butts, and approached the door.

The door read, Jackson Trythson: Private Detective over an image of a staring eye. Some wiseass kids had added "Trythson is super rubbish" underneath. The man didn't know whether they were uninventive in their insults or just kind of polite. Maybe both.

The man took a calming breath, then knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply.

The detective's office was shabby, with nearly every surface covered in sheets of paper. A three-quarters-empty whisky bottle stood on the desk (except this was American whiskey, so you spell it with an "e", like that). Behind the desk was a chair, and in the chair was a man. In the man's hand was a glass tumbler. In the tumbler used to be some whiskey, but the man had drunk it. The man was asleep, and going "zzzz". The man (the other one, the one that had just come in the room and wasn't asleep) shut the door, which made the man in the chair wake up.

"...burlap sack! Huh? What? White! What're you doin' here?" said the man in the chair.
"I need your help," said White, who was the man that had just come into the office and shut the door and that. "All sorts of bad stuffs are up in my grill, man. Please, Jackson. Forget the business with the pipecleaners and help your old friend."
"You were never my friend," said Jackson Trythson, Private Dectective, who was the guy who'd just woken up. "I just kept you around for the spare organs."
White grinned. "Just the same, you old joker."
Jackson grinned back. "Good to see you."

Then they had passionate sweaty mansex. It was totally hot.

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