The Long Fall Into Darkness

by Charlie Cottrell

  Inside, the warehouse was sparse and well-lit. The floor was concrete and our footsteps echoed as we walked across it.

  There were no windows, but there was a massive bank of computer monitors set up against one wall. Across the screens, images of the surrounding area flickered, cycling every few seconds. One of the ninjas was watching closely. Across the warehouse, others were setting up a sleeping area with cots and inflatable mattresses.

  “Doesn’t seem to have much in the way of creature comforts,” I noted.

  “This was a last-minute setup,” Vera replied, “so we had to forego some of the more refined elements. But it’s safe, at least.”

  “Hurray,” I said sarcastically. “I can’t wait to spend the rest of my days in this giant, empty box.”

  “Would you rather be dead? Because I can arrange that,” Vera said, clearly annoyed.

  I sighed. “No, I’m grateful, really. I just want to do something, y’know? Sitting around isn’t really my style.”

  “Not without a bottle handy, anyway,” Vera replied.

  “Hey now. I’d call that a low blow if it weren’t, y’know, absolutely true.”

  Vera placed a not-unkind hand on my shoulder. “Stay here. Try to relax. You are safe, and I will get to the bottom of this and clear your name. I promise.”

  I gave her a wan smile. “Thanks. Really. And if there is anything I can do…”

  “I will let you know, I promise.” Vera turned and left me standing in the middle of the warehouse, wondering how the hell things could get any worse.

  * * *

  The next week passed by without incident. I managed to get a hold of a deck of cards and played a few dozen games of solitaire. I won one. The boredom stretched out until it was all that I knew; I had only ever lived in that warehouse, and I would die in that warehouse, and there was no sky and we’ve always been at war with East Asia.

  Vera’s infrequent visits were a nice way to break up the rut my life was rattling around in, but they never lasted long and always left me feeling more than a little frustrated by the lack of progress.

  “We’re getting nowhere like this,” I said toward the end of one such visit. “I’ve been stuck here, what, two months now? Is this just your way of keeping me out of the way while you rebuild the Organization?”

  Vera shook her head. “Darling, if I wanted you out of the way, I’d just have you killed.”

  “Touché,” I said. “But also, not the point. I’m dying in here. Give me something to do that can help get these supposed assassins off my back. Please?”

  Vera sighed. “Eddie, has this worked any of the last dozen or so times you’ve tried it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what makes you think it will work this time?”

  “I’m thinkin’ really hard about it, and I wrote it down on that index card I got from you last week,” I said. I’d also just finished reading The Secret last week, which revealed my desperation: I was willing to read the fucking Secret, I was so bored. I wasn’t sure it’d help me actualize my potential, but it kept me from banging a hole through the wall with my forehead.

  “No.”

  “C’mon, for the love of God, you’ve gotta let me outta this place,” I moaned. “I am dying here.”

  “You’re doing nothing of the sort, which is rather the point,” Vera countered. “I am close, detective. I’ve tracked Carmen to a neighborhood in Old Town. I’ve corralled most of her assassins. And I’ve paid the cops to ease up their search for you while my lawyers prepare your case. The best thing – the only thing – you can do is stay here and be quiet.”

  I huffed and crossed my arms. “I am not happy about this,” I said.

  “And I do not care,” Vera said, standing and leaving the warehouse.

  V.

  Of course, at that point, I knew what I had to do.

  I had to sneak out.

  I waited a few days, of course. It would’ve been too obvious to go that same night after Vera and I had argued. But four nights later? That was optimal.

  The ninja turned off all the lights at night except for around the monitoring station. I slipped out of bed and quietly pulled on my shirt and shoes, having gone to bed in my pants. I tiptoed to the door and opened it silently. The door whished open into darkness and the quiet susurrus of the city. I took a deep breath and nearly choked; Arcadia in the Warehouse District does not have a rosy bouquet. I let the door click shut behind me and started padding away from the building.

  The area around the warehouse wasn’t well-lit, which surprised me at first. I’d have thought the ninja would want the place lit up like a Christmas tree, but then I figured they probably had night vision cameras scattered around the place. I waved jauntily in the direction I thought one might be and sauntered off into the inky darkness.

  Coming around the side of the warehouse, I caught sight of a single streetlight a hundred meters on. It was flickering, because no city workers were going to take the time to come to this neighborhood and replace an old bulb. Under its dim light, I could make out the shape of a person – male, female, it was difficult if not downright impossible to tell – standing there, hat pulled low over the eyes and the collar of their coat turned up. I couldn’t make out any of their features, but I also couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that they were staring right at me.

  I shook it off and kept walking, picking up my pace slightly but not because of the person who was staring at me. No, definitely not ‘cause of them. It was chilly out and I didn’t have my coat, okay? No other reason.

  As I walked past the stranger, the streetlight went out completely.

  Now, I like to think I have a finely-honed danger sense from years on the job as a hard-boiled detective. Sure, it’s failed me every single time someone has shot or stabbed me, but I blame the alcohol for my dulled reflexes.

  This moment, however, was different. I was stone-dead sober, like a born-again convert in the very first church pew Sunday morning, and my nerves were taut and razor-sharp.

  So, when the knife slid into my side, I was so keyed up I yelped, twisted around, and wrenched the knife right out of my attacker’s hands. Mind you, it was still buried in me at that point, but he wasn’t going to get another shot with that particular blade, thank you very much.

  I reached down and felt the handle of the blade; it was smooth and worn and felt an awful lot like an old steak knife. A weapon of convenience, then. So, this wasn’t so much a premeditated murder effort as an attack of opportunity. I held the knife in place and whirled to face my assailant.

  “What the hell, man?” I snapped. “Why you gotta make me bleed my blood like that?” My attacker remained silent, but their hands grasped and opened several times in rapid succession. “At least the damn thing was sharp, asshole,” I said, starting to note the warm, slick blood oozing out of the wound and down my hand. Maybe going for a walk had been a bad idea after all. “Tell you what, you go turn yourself in at the nearest police station, and we’ll forget this ever happened. Deal?” I was starting to wobble on my feet, and my vision was getting dark around the edges. I made a sudden grab for the mysterious attacker’s hat, but they dodged back, much faster than me, and I stumbled and fell to the street. “You motherfucker,” I mumbled as everything went black.

  * * *

  You’d be forgiven for thinking that was the end of me, but it wasn’t. I have survived worse, and I survived this attack. Admittedly, the ninja showing up thirty seconds later to chase off my attacker and get me back to the warehouse, where they patched me up and put me on an IV of blood and some other good stuff that kept me knocked out for the better part of the day, probably helped a little.

  I woke up on my cot, Vera Stewart sitting next to me with a stern, motherly look on her face.

  “And what have we learned, Detective Hazzard?” she asked condescendingly.

  “Never accept candy from strangers,” I mumbled. I tried to sit up and felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my side. I sucked
air through my teeth and cursed. “Damn, that hurts!” I fell back onto my cot.

  “Well, it ought to. They nearly perforated your kidney with a serrated steak knife, you idiot.” She tossed the knife into my lap. I picked it up and stared at it.

  “Any idea who the asshole was?” I asked.

  Vera shook her head. “No. Probably not a professional assassin, given the amateurishness of their attack. Lucky you.”

  “Yeah, I feel lucky,” I moaned.

  “Shut up. Stay inside. Don’t do anything stupid like this again, do you understand?” Vera said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, tossing the knife onto the nightstand next to my cot. Well, I call it a nightstand. It’s really just a cardboard box turned upside down.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find who did this and make sure they pay.”

  “Oh, is Kimiko gonna run ‘em through with that fancy-ass sword of hers?” I asked. Only a small part of me smiled at the thought. Honest.

  Vera looked hesitant for the briefest of moments. “No,” she finally said. “Kimiko is…off on another assignment at the moment.”

  “You mean she’s gone,” I said. Vera had the decency to not look me in the eye. “Look, she probably just needed some time off after killing her brother. Makes sense to me.”

  “No. She has quit my service. She said she didn’t have it in her to be a hunter and a killer anymore.”

  “Did you offer her more money? That’s how I always convince Miss Typewell to stay. She makes more money than I do, now.”

  “I would rather not talk about it, detective,” Vera said, standing in a huff. “Anyway, I must be off. Behave yourself.”

  I tossed her a weak mock-salute. “Sir, yessir.”

  VI.

  If I’d thought time moved slowly before, it positively dragged now. There was always a ninja following me around, noting everything I did. Considering that mostly consisted of napping, eating, and going to the bathroom, it couldn’t have been any more of a pleasure for them than it was for me.

  Vera, meanwhile, was no closer to finding Carmen or the person who’d tried to kill me. Or to getting me off the hook with the police. Or getting the bounty on my head removed.

  Things weren’t going great, is what I’m saying.

  Without fancy modern medical equipment, I healed slowly from the knife wound. A patch of stim-mesh slapped over the wound helped it heal over fairly quickly, but the internal damage would take time to mend. In the meantime, I was sore and moving hurt.

  “Maybe y’all should’ve left me to die out there,” I said conversationally to my bodyguard one afternoon. At least, I think it was afternoon. There weren’t any windows in the warehouse, after all, so I had no actual idea.

  “That would have gone against our code,” he replied flatly.

  “I’m guessing it’d also be against your code to bring me a pack of smokes?” I asked hopefully. His only answer was silence.

  We were quickly approaching two months of being cooped up in one safe house or another when things finally started happening. None of it, however, would be good.

  I was dozing in a camp chair while most of the ninja were off patrolling around the warehouse or watching the monitors when a knock came at the door. This in and of itself, was unusual; when Vera came to visit, the ninja usually were well-aware she was coming before she ever got the chance to knock. I woke with a start and tried to straighten up, a process made rather more difficult by the canvas chair I was splayed out across. One of the ninja at the monitoring station crept toward the door, a knife in one hand and a Taser in the other, ready to strike whoever was on the other side of the door.

  He never got the chance. The door blew inward, taken right off its hinges by an RPG or some other explosive. The ninja was thrown like a ragdoll across the warehouse and landed in a misshapen pile on the other side of the building.

  The other ninja in the warehouse sprung into action. One leapt for the door, weapons drawn, while another slapped a button on a panel by the monitoring station that set off a silent alarm across the Organization. I tumbled out of my chair and clawed my way into a standing position, fists up and ready to…well, I’m not sure what I thought I’d do, but I was ready to do it.

  A muffled whump from the door sent the ninja who’d headed that way flailing across the warehouse, various limbs pinwheeling in different directions as the explosive that’d hit him square in the chest blew him apart. The rapid report of automatic gunfire cut loose next, and the ninja by the monitoring station fell in a hail of bullets.

  In a matter of seconds, my highly-trained bodyguards had been dealt with, leaving just me facing whoever was behind this attack. From out of the smoke surrounding the doorway strode a man I hadn’t thought I’d ever see again: Xavier.

  “Come, Eddie,” he said, a machine gun in one hand and an RPG launcher in the other. “We have much to do, and very little time in which to do it.”

  VII.

  “Um, Xavi, what the actual fuck is going on?” I asked.

  “I’m here to break you out. Come on, we don’t have much time before the rest of her goons show up.” He turned and started toward the door again.

  “Wait, hang on a sec. I’m here under Vera’s protection. Why the hell would I go with you? You just killed all my bodyguards.”

  “If I could kill them so easily, they were not very good bodyguards,” Xavier said. Okay, fair point. “And you’re not being protected here. At least, not for the reasons you think. Vera is holding onto you as a bargaining chip.”

  “Right. And you’re busting me out outta, what, the kindness of your heart?”

  “No. I need you more than she does.”

  “Well, at least you’re honest in your mercenary attitude. That’s kind of refreshing, if not exactly reassuring.”

  Xavier looked over his shoulder at me as we exited the warehouse. “I need you alive and out of Vera’s clutches. Simple as that.”

  “Of course. So simple. Makes perfect sense.”

  “C’mon. There’s a lot more going on here than you suspect.”

  Isn’t there always? I thought, but I kept it to myself as I followed Xavier away from the warehouse. I didn’t hear any sirens in the distance, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. No one came down to the Warehouse District if they could avoid it, even first responders. Which didn’t mean we should hang around; I already knew from experience that there were some unsavory folks in the neighborhood who’d stop at nothing to stab me at the very least.

  Speaking of Mr. Stabby… “Hey, I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone hanging around here who wasn’t a ninja? About your height, coat and hat covering their face, like to stab private detectives?” Xavier shook his head. Of course, my assailant wasn’t around tonight. It’d’ve been too convenient for Xavier to have killed him, too.

  “So, where to?” I asked.

  “We’re going to break in to a police station,” Xavier said.

  “Well, that sounds like fun.”

  * * *

  It was not fun.

  “This is an absolutely awful idea,” I said, standing on the rooftop of a building next to Precinct #4. The wind had picked up and was whipping my hair and coat around. “Why’s it gotta be so cold? It’s only October.”

  “Quiet. We’ll zipline across to the precinct roof,” Xavier said matter-of-factly. There was nothing matter-of-fact about what he proposed, though.

  “I feel like it’d be easier to walk in through a door on the ground,” I said. Xavier ignored me as he aimed a high-powered harpoon launcher thingie at the precinct rooftop, which happened to be a few floors lower than the roof we were on, and pulled the trigger. It fired with a muffled thwump, launching a wicked-looking harpoon and a thick length of cable across the distance to the precinct roof, where it lodged solidly into the stonework. Xavier placed the base of the launcher against the roof we were standing on and pushed a button. It made a mechanical whirring noise, then a sharp plink as it essentially bolted itself to the
surface of the rooftop.

  “Come,” he said, latching a carabiner onto the line and connecting it to the harness he wore. He stepped off the side of the roof and slid down the line, landing on the precinct roof like he was simply going for a walk along a perfectly flat sidewalk. He turned and motioned for me to follow.

  “Um, I’ll just stay here, if that’s okay with you,” I yelled across the chasming[DS2] void. He motioned for me again, more intently this time, and I sighed as I hooked my carabiner to the line. “I hate this so much,” I moaned. I took off over the edge of the roof, sliding along the line much faster than felt safe. “Shit shit shit shit shit,” I muttered under my breath as the precinct rooftop quickly approached. I slid into the gravel coating the roof of the precinct house, kicking up rocks and curses as I came to a less-than-graceful stop. I unhooked my harness and stood up, brushing myself off.

  “You should have been quieter,” Xavier hissed at me. “Do you want everyone to know we are here?”

  “Does it mean we get to take the front door out of here if I do?” I asked.

  “If we are lucky, we will do exactly that,” Xavier replied cryptically.

  “Hold up, Xavier. You’re not planning on killing anyone in there, are you? Because I’m not okay with that.”

  “No, no one will die,” Xavier said. He wrenched the door that led down into the precinct house open and stepped inside. I followed, still not quite sure what the point of this was.

  “What’re we doing here, exactly?” I asked.

  “Searching for information,” Xavier said.

  “And why was it vital that I come along on this little espionage mission?”

  “You’re the one who can help me find what I need.”

  “Okay, vague,” I mumbled, following him down the stairs. Xavier padded down the stairs silently, despite wearing clunky combat boots, and I puffed and wheezed along behind him. What the hell was he hoping to find here? Why did I need to be here? When was he going to let me stop and take a breather?