The Long Fall Into Darkness
Hazzard Pay: Book Six
Charlie Cottrell
Part One: Fall From Grace
I.
It always starts with a fall: a fall from grace, a fall from power, a fall from the top of a ten-story building. Some falls are metaphorical, while others are…less so.
But sometimes, a fall isn’t a fall. Sometimes, the fallen one was pushed.
As a society, we’re obsessed with watching the mighty fall. We love a good failure, even more than we love a good underdog story. Seeing people win? Yawn. Seeing someone who had everything lose it all? We eat it up like Mom’s home cooking after a month of starvation. If we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s not our most endearing trait.
My own fall from grace has been going on for the better part of twenty years now. I started out as a beat cop with a lot of promise, lost my job due to some conspiratorial bullshit, and slid into a bottle and never really crawled out. From there, it was private investigator work, which is about as lucrative an occupation as eight-track repairman in this day and age. Everything was going fine—I was minding my own business, drinking myself to an early death, and occasionally snapping compromising photographs of consenting adults—until I got tangled up with the Organization.
What’s the Organization? Think Capone, or Gotti, or Gambino, or Hoffa, or whoever you want. The point is, they were organized crime. The most organized crime anyone had ever seen. The Organization ran crime in the city of Arcadia, all under the authority of the shadowy figure known simply as the Boss.
Turns out, the Boss was a lady named Vera Stewart. I found out her secret identity—long story—and together, we kinda-sorta cleaned up some of the less desirable elements of crime in the city. She eventually took a long, hard look at what she was doing with her life and decided to start ending crime instead of committing it. Too bad for her she got shot by a vigilante group out for blood and vengeance.
In a situation like something out of a comic book, I was the man on the spot when she died, and I got saddled with control of the whole operation. I spent the better part of two years trying to close down all the illegal activities run by the Organization, but did I get any thanks for it? No. Instead, I just got outed as the Boss, and now I’m Arcadia’s most wanted.
I was sitting in a hospital bed, recovering from several stab wounds and a lot of blood loss. Vera Stewart, who turns out was not quite so dead as we’d been led to believe, was sitting next to me, explaining why I now had an even bigger target on my head.
“Carmen revealed your identity as the Boss,” she said, gesturing to the vid window floating in the air in front of me. There was a news article there, detailing my identity as the leader of the Organization but definitely omitting the fact that I’d spent the past two years trying to dismantle and eliminate anything even vaguely illegal about it.
“God, she’s the worst,” I moaned, falling back into my bed. “What am I gonna do?”
“Well, you can’t go back to the office on Church Street,” Vera said. “The cops know about it. But I have a safe house you can hide in until this blows over.”
“The one on Sycamore, or the one on 115th?” I asked. Vera gave me a look. “What? I’ve spent two years learning everything I could about the Organization. You think I wouldn’t find out about your safe houses?”
“Those aren’t safe houses, Eddie,” Vera said. “Those are my personal homes.”
I blinked. “Um…” I said, my skin flushing bright red.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, don’t I feel like an ass,” I said.
“You should. But for now, we should take you to one of my real safe houses and get you settled in. You’re well enough to move, finally.” She pointed at a chair across the room, where a suit, coat, and hat were folded over the back of the chair. “Get dressed. We leave in ten minutes.”
II.
I was ready in eleven minutes, and not just to throw Vera’s perfectly-planned exit off. Getting dressed when your body is covered in lacerations and stab wounds is tricky at best. Things pulled and stung every time I tried to do something as simple as put on my shirt. To say that I got dressed gingerly was to undersell just how wounded I was, and just how close to death I’d come.
I exited my room, a cane in one hand and my hat in the other. “Ready,” I said, putting on the hat with a small flourish. Vera was standing there, a foot tapping impatiently the only sign of her annoyance and temper flaring. I knew her well enough at this point – despite not having seen her in a couple of years when she was supposed to be dead – to know it was the quiet rumbling of the volcano preparing to erupt. Villagers who knew the signs would’ve been finding a virgin to sacrifice.
“Follow me,” she said, setting off through a dimly-lit hallway toward a door clearly marked “Exit.” Outside, the bright daylight temporarily blinded me. I blinked and held a hand up to the brim of my hat, attempting to block the cursed daystar from my eyes. It helped a little, enough to see a long town car pull up to a stop at the curb in front of us. The back door opened up and an enforcer stepped out, holding the door open for us to slide in. I followed Vera into the car and settled in. The enforcer got in after us, and the car pulled smoothly away from the curb and accelerated.
“So, be honest,” I said, “how bad is it, really? How likely are the cops to shoot on sight if they see me?”
“You stand a better chance of winning the lottery than surviving on the streets right now,” Vera replied.
“So, you’re saying I should go buy a lotto ticket?”
“I’m saying you should stay in hiding, and you should definitely not buy a lottery ticket.”
“Oh.” I scratched my jaw and noticed I hadn’t shaved in at least a few days. “Um, what’s your plan, anyway?”
“I’m going to find my sister and kill her, first of all,” Vera said matter-of-factly. “After that, find a way to clear your name.”
“I feel like those priorities are backward,” I said.
“No. If Carmen is out there, she is a danger to you and everyone else. She has to be taken off the board first.”
I shrugged. “Fine. Just set me up in your safe house with a case of smokes, a few bottles of nice whiskey, and a personal chef, and I’ll try to tough it out.”
Vera chuckled. “Eddie, this is a safe house, not a five-star resort. You’ll have a bed, a bathroom, and a microwave. That’s it. In fact, give me your computer.”
“Excuse me?”
“You can be tracked with it. Give it to me.”
I grumbled but handed the device over. “You better get me some books or something, then. I’m not just going to stare at the walls for days on end.”
“I’ll see to it. What sort of books would you like?”
I thought for a moment. “It’s been a while since I read any Kierkegaard,” I said.
Vera arched an eyebrow in surprise. “Really?”
“Hey, I’m a smart guy. I read stuff,” I said defensively.
“Fine. I’ll see what I can do.” The town car rolled to a stop, and Vera’s enforcer got out. “We’re here,” she said, following the enforcer out when he signaled the coast was clear. I slid out of the car behind her, holding my side where the Saint Blade, master assassin, had tried to disembowel me just a few days earlier. My lips curled up in a flash of grim satisfaction at the knowledge that his sister, Kimiko, had killed him shortly thereafter.
I looked at the safe house Vera was going to cloister me in. It was an old townhouse on the edge of the Old Town/Downtown divide, made of rusty-brown bricks and blue siding. The door and window shutters matched the siding, and each window had heavy curtains drawn tight.
“It’s a gas range,” Vera said as she showed me around.
“God knows I hate an electric stovetop,” I said. Vera gave me a weird look. “They cook unevenly,” I explained. “I’m not a complete heathen, thank you very much.”
There wasn’t much more to the downstairs, just a half bath and a dining room with a rectangular table and a half dozen tall-backed chairs around it. Vera showed me upstairs, where there were three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
“The master has an ensuite bathroom,” she said, showing it to me. There was a simple tub with a shower head, a single sink, and a toilet. Nothing particularly spectacular, but how fancy does a bathroom really have to be? The master bedroom had a queen size bed, a dresser, and a small walk-in closet. “I’ve taken the liberty of buying you some clothes and stocking the dresser and closet for you,” she said.
“So considerate,” I said. “You think of everything.”
The other two bedrooms were currently empty, except for one that had a single bed and a basic nightstand. “Your bodyguard will stay here,” Vera said.
“Who is my bodyguard, anyway,” I asked, “and will they carry me in their arms like Kevin Costner?”
Vera barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes. “It’s one of Kimiko’s ninja, a man named Yoritomo. He is currently setting up the panic room.”
“There’s a panic room?” I asked.
There was, in fact, a panic room in the basement.
It was a utilitarian affair, as panic rooms ought to be. There was a solid metal door, with a keypad on the wall inside. It contained several large bins full of emergency rations, two unpadded benches, and a wired landline that looked to be straight out of the 1980s. Yoritomo was stacking boxes of granola bars against the back wall when we walked in.
“All the comforts of home,” I said. “Though it’s lacking a bathroom.”
Vera pointed to a bucket in the corner.
“That is just completely uncivilized,” I complained.
“With luck, you won’t ever have to use it,” she said. “It’s only here for emergencies.”
“Well, your lips to God’s ears, I guess.”
We made it back upstairs to the foyer, where Vera shook my hand at the door.
“Stay quiet and don’t leave the safe house,” she said sternly.
I gave her a mock salute. “Ma’am, yes ma’am!”
Vera frowned at me. “I’m serious, Eddie. Everyone in Arcadia is out to get you right now. Trust no one. I’ll be back in a few days to check in on you.” And with that, Vera left me to my own private prison.
III.
It’s the monotony that’s the worst of it. Just hours upon hours of doing absolutely nothing, just sitting around watching your hair grow. Yoritomo wasn’t much of a conversationalist, either. It didn’t help that he only spoke, like, three words of English.
So I was left to my own devices, of which I had precisely zero. I spent a fair amount of time in the kitchen, trying to figure out new and exciting ways to prepare instant ramen and failing miserably. I ate them anyway, because Vera – despite assurances to the contrary – had brought me no booze. “You need to stay sharp in case the worst happens,” she’d said.
“No, I need to stay drunk in case the worst happens,” I’d replied. “I’m not going to confront the reality of my own mortality without at least a couple of shots in me.” But, since Vera was the one bringing me supplies every few days, I ultimately didn’t have much of a say in what was available to drink.
Time passed so damn slowly. I spent a few days trying to grow a beard, then shaved it off when Yoritomo gave me a weird look in the hallway one morning. I convinced Vera to send me a legal pad and a few ballpoint pens and wrote a lengthy dissertation on the practical effects of sobriety in detective work, then spent a few days taking it apart in the oral defense. I also swiped a couple of pieces of fruit from the kitchen and tried to get them to ferment in my bathroom, but that experiment turned out to be a truly terrible idea that led to several days of vomiting.
Yoritomo spent all his time on guard, peaking out the windows and running scans of every room in the safe house for malware and spy cameras. When he wasn’t keeping the place safe from spyware, he was asleep. I’m not even sure the guy ever stopped to poop.
A month and a half passed in this way.
“I give up,” I moaned, slumping down into the recliner in the living room. “Go ahead and tell the assassins where to find me. At least fighting for my life would give me something to do.”
“For about five minutes. Then, you’d be dead,” Vera Stewart said as she came into the safe house.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” I said, trying to slump even further down into the recliner. “Please say you’ve caught your sister and revealed I’m not actually the Boss and that I can finally leave this dank pit of iniquity.”
Vera arched an eyebrow at me. “How is this place a ‘dank pit of iniquity,’ Eddie?” she asked.
I threw my hands up. “I don’t know, but it sounded good and I am so goddamn bored! Let me out!”
“You’ll die, Eddie,” Vera said slowly, like she was explaining physics to a child.
“But I’ll die free, and isn’t that what everyone wants?” I stopped. “Well, okay, no, scratch that. I want to live free for a very long time, but you get what I’m saying, right?”
“I’m not having this argument with you again,” Vera said as she walked into the kitchen with a bag of groceries. “I brought you some fresh fruit and vegetables. Do try to eat them.”
“Why? Were they out of wholesome, processed food at the store?”
Vera closed her eyes and rubbed her brow like a migraine the size of Nevada was trying to settle there. “You…vex me, detective,” she said with a sigh. “There is simply no other word.”
“I could probably think of a couple if you give me a minute,” I replied.
“We are working as fast as we can to clear your name. You have to be patient.”
“Have you met me? Would you describe me as a patient individual?”
“I’d say you’re an individual who is trying my patience at the moment, but no, you are not a patient man,” Vera admitted. “Regardless, do not leave. Stay away from the windows. And do try to be wearing pants the next time I come by.”
“That’d be a lot easier if you gave me some sort of schedule for your arrivals,” I said. “Oh, and irritate.”
“What?” Vera said, confused.
“I said I could come up with some other words for you. Irritate is one. So is annoy, displease, upset…”
“Yes, thank you, Eddie, I can see this is time well-spent,” Vera said as she left the safe house.
“I’m gonna purposefully not be wearing pants when you come back!” I shouted at the closed door.
* * *
I wasn’t wearing pants when Vera walked in five days later.
“Howdy,” I said lazily, tossing her the most half-assed salute possible. It might’ve only been a quarter-ass, come to think of it.
“Eddie, you have to get out of here,” Vera said. I sat up.
“Come again?”
“Now! There’s no time to waste. They’ve found the safe house.”
“Who has?” I asked.
“Targets incoming,” Yoritomo said from upstairs. I jumped out of my chair.
“Lemme go put on some pants,” I said.
“No time!” Vera snapped. “They’ll be here any second. Go out and get in the car.”
I rushed for the door, tugging it open and hustling outside in my skivvies. “What about my pants?” I asked as we ran to the waiting ca
r.
“I’ll buy you new pants! Now shut up and get in the car!” Vera yelled.
I yanked the door of the car open and dove in, Vera right behind me. She slammed the door and ordered the driver to go. He floored it and the car leapt away from the curb, accelerating quickly as he whipped it around a corner. Something pinged off the window, and I looked to see the glass had spiderwebbed. “They’re shooting at us,” I said.
“The glass is bulletproof,” Vera replied. “Stay calm.” Two more shots ricocheted off the glass, sending more cracks crazing across the surface. “Mostly bulletproof,” Vera corrected. “Faster, Murphy,” she said to the driver.
“Yes, ma’am.” The car, already moving at a pretty good clip, sped up, pressing me back against the car seat.
“So, what’s the plan? We just gonna live in this car from now on?” I asked.
“No. We’re moving to a secondary location,” Vera said. “Another safe house across town.”
“And how do we know this one’s going to be any safer than the last one?” I asked. “I was barely there month and a half [DS1]before they found it! And just who the hell’s after me, anyway?”
“We don’t know who it is,” Vera said, “but trust me, no one will find you at the new location.”
IV.
Vera’s next safe house turned out not to be a house at all.
“It’s a warehouse,” I said.
“Which, I should point out, is still technically a house. Of sorts,” Vera said.
I frowned. “I’m more likely to die from tetanus here than an assassination,” I said.
“No, inside it’s state of the art and very clean. I have Yoritomo and several other ninja already inside, armed and ready to defend you to the death if need be.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “Are there, um, pants in there for me?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God. It’s a bit chilly out here.”
“Come, let’s go inside.”
Vera led me into the warehouse, pausing at the door to punch in a security code at the door. The security pad beeped and the door slid open silently.
The Long Fall Into Darkness Page 1