An Ill Wind Blows

by Charlie Cottrell

  “Should I tase him?” Maya asked.

  “I…think…that…would…just…make him…mad,” I gasped out.

  The guy shoved me up against the bar and placed a forearm across my chest, pinning me down but giving me the chance to take at least a shallow breath. “Look, buddy, I really don’t want any trouble,” I said with complete honesty. “I was just…admiring the lady, honest.”

  “Right,” the bodyguard said, hoisting me higher. “An’ I’m th’ Boss o’ the Organization.” That was genius-caliber repartee from an enforcer like this guy.

  “Pretty sure you’re not,” I replied with absolute accuracy. I decided it was time to make a scene. Mr. Montgomery wouldn’t be happy with me, but this was getting out of hand and I didn’t want the enforcer doing something permanently damaging to me or Maya. I lashed out at his delicate bits with my foot, which is a cheap but tremendously effective opening shot in any fight. It’s dirty, underhanded, and ends fights quickly, making it invaluable for someone who is occasionally dangled from the paw of a bruiser like this guy.

  In theory, the kick would drop the guy, who would in turn drop me. This would give me the chance to, say, grab a heavy bottle off the bar and smash it over his thick skull, or pull a stun baton out and give him a few good whacks with it. For the grand finale, a solid left hook – and my left hook ain’t too shabby, if I do say so myself – would level the guy, leaving him on his back and much the worse for wear.

  It was a beautiful theory, a wonderful plan. But, like most plans, it did not survive its first encounter with the enemy. Whatever gen-mod the guy had—and I was fairly certain by now he’d definitely been modded—made his nether bits tougher than normal, so all my kick accomplished was hurting my foot. The guy grunted and hurled me down the bar. I skidded along, knocking bottles and glasses off with a chorus of shattering noises, reached the end, and slid right over the edge, landing on my face. I rose slowly and painfully to my feet, aided suddenly by the thug’s massive paw reaching out and grabbing me by the lapels and lifting me up off my feet again. He drew back his other fist, ready to turn my face into a fine, pulpy mess. I figured this was the end of my career as a sunglasses model, over before it even began.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Maya fumbling with her stun gun. She wasn’t going to get the guy before he got me. My life flashed before my eyes, and there were lots of bits that were blurred by an alcoholic haze.

  I was just getting to the interesting bits that didn’t involve getting stabbed or shot when a small, soft hand was placed on the thug’s hand. I heard an equally-soft voice say, “Put him down, Henry,” in tones that – no matter how soft – still had complete control and command over the monosyllabic thug. The bodyguard complied, dropping me unceremoniously to the floor in a choking, coughing heap. I looked up, rubbing my injuring throat, and saw the tiny figure of Mrs. Montgomery standing over me, berating a grown man at least three times her size.

  “I’ve told you at least a dozen times, Henry, you don’t hit anyone in public,” she scolded.

  Henry had the decency to look embarrassed by the whole situation. “Yes’m,” he mumbled.

  “Now, apologize to the nice detective,” she continued.

  “Sorry, Mr. Detective,” Henry grumbled, not really looking or sounding like he meant it at all. I coughed in reply, which was about as good as it was gonna get at that moment.

  Maya shuffled up behind me and asked, “Um, what just happened?”

  “I think I just got saved by a tiny socialite,” I replied quietly, rubbing at my sore neck and wondering what I’d done to deserve the life I got to lead. Whatever it was, I repented, wholly and earnestly.

  Mrs. Montgomery nodded at Henry, patted him on a well-muscled arm – she couldn’t reach his shoulder – and shooed him away to the other side of the room. She offered me her hand as I stood back up; I took it and shook genteelly. “Good evening, Detective Hazzard. You are Detective Hazzard, I presume?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” I replied, a little surprised that she recognized me.

  “I thought so,” she mused, more to herself than me. She turned to Maya. “And you must be his protégé, Maya Janovich.”

  “Um, yes,” Maya replied quietly.

  “Detective,” Mrs. Montgomery continued, turning back toward me. “I understand that you are currently in the employ of my husband, Mr. Rupert Montgomery.” She snapped open her clutch, a small, expensive-looking rectangle of soft leather, and rummaged around in it while she spoke. “I would appreciate it if you would cease and desist, and work for me instead.” She held out a small datachip.

  “But I’m supposed to—” I began.

  “Detective Hazzard, as much as I admire your dedication to your trade and your client, I will be blunt with you: I am not having an affair, despite what my husband may have led you to believe.” She gestured with the datachip in her hand, and I reached out and took it. I plugged it into the access slot in my handheld computer and punched up a vid window to check it out. It turned out to be a credit chip containing $30,000. It was twice what her husband had paid me already.

  It’s an eternal conundrum for private eyes: the bidding war. Someone pays you to do a job; someone else pays you more to not do the job. Do you stick with the original client, following the principles of loyalty and ethical business practices? Or do you take the bigger paycheck and go drink your concerns about loyalty and business practices away?

  I whistled softly and ejected the chip, handing it back to Mrs. Montgomery. “That’s…a helluva lot of money,” I mused. “Just what am I doing to earn such a princely sum?”

  “Simply leaving me be,” Mrs. Montgomery replied, smiling sweetly. “I have business to attend to that has nothing to do with my husband, so I would like to keep him out of it. Which means you must leave.” She nodded at Henry, who came back over and crossed his arms, straining the seams of his jacket. “Henry here will get you a cab to any destination you choose, so long as you don’t go running back to my husband to report what has happened here.”

  “‘Scuse us for a second,” I said, motioning to Maya to huddle up for a private conference.

  “What are you gonna do?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. Part of me would love to take the money and knock off for a stiff drink, but I’ve got this niggling feeling that we’d end up in deep trouble if we tried that.”

  “Can we trust Mrs. Montgomery?” Maya asked.

  “At least as much as we can trust her husband, I’d think,” I replied. “Which is to say, no, we can’t trust her at all. There’s something weird going on here, Maya, and it’s not just a cheating spouse.”

  “So, what are we going to do?”

  I frowned and gave it a moment’s consideration. Detectives learn to trust their gut; the head and the heart are terrible liars with no common sense, but the gut won’t steer you wrong. Assuming you’re not just hungry, anyway.

  “I think we take her money and see what happens. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Mr. Montgomery won’t get mad that we didn’t get the proof he wanted.”

  Maya frowned. “What are the actual chances of that?”

  I gave her a cockeyed smirk. “Not good, honestly, but I don’t see what else we could do. I don’t feel like trying to take on our friend Henry over there.” I heaved a sigh and turned back to Mrs. Montgomery.

  Tipping my chin at Mrs. Montgomery, I declared, “Okay, you’ve got a deal. But I need your word that you’re not up to any hanky-panky.”

  Mrs. Montgomery favored me with a dazzling if somewhat cold smile. “Detective, I assure you that I only have pure and honorable intentions, my husband’s misgivings notwithstanding.” She passed me the credit chip, which I slipped into an inside pocket in my coat.

  “Well, I guess that means we can knock off early tonight,” I said to Maya as we headed for the exit. “I got a little banged up, but I got paid and I had a damn good Scotch, so we’ll call this one a win.”

  “Um, how are y
ou going to handle Mr. Montgomery tomorrow?” Maya asked.

  I shrugged. “Dunno yet. I’m sure I’ll come up with something good, though. We can always just say she didn’t show up.”

  “But wouldn’t that betray the trust our client put in us?” Maya asked. Oh, Maya: so naïve. So waif-like. How she’d survived several years working for the Organization – not to mention the past couple of years working for me – was a minor miracle. There was something about her wide-eyed, aw-shucks attitude that made you want to protect her. She brought out the maternal instinct in everyone, even me. It occurred to me – not for the first time – that maybe it was all an act, that no one could be that oblivious to the way of the world. But every instinct I had – the ones that weren’t drunk, anyway – told me she really was this straight forward and honest.

  “Look, kid, Montgomery is a rich, powerful man. He could do horrible, horrible things to us if he wanted.”

  “This isn’t, um, making me feel better about lying to him,” Maya pointed out. Okay, maybe she wasn’t as flakey as I thought.

  “My point is, he’s powerful, yes, but he’s also a politician. Those guys are professional liars. Like, even more so than I am, and lying is easily 90% of what I do all day.”

  “I thought you searched for clues,” Maya said. Oops, there was that naiveté again.

  “Well, there’s some of that, but it takes a lot of fast talking to get where you need to be to find the clues. My point…my point is, he may not have been completely on the up-and-up with us when he asked us to check up on his wife, so we’re not really under any obligation to be completely honest with him, either.”

  “Oh,” Maya said, lapsing into a thoughtful silence as we got in the car and started back to the office. “So, does that mean it’s okay to lie to you?”

  “Of course not. I don’t lie to you, Maya.”

  “Just our clients?”

  “Just our clients. And occasionally Captain O’Mally. And my mother.”

  “Your mother?” Maya asked, confused.

  “She thinks I’m an accountant in Pismo Beach.”

  “Why don’t you tell her what you really do and where you really are?” Maya asked.

  “Because she might come visit me if I did.”

  IV.

  I woke up in my office the next morning to see the concerned, upside down face of Miss Janovich peering down at me. I flinched involuntarily, tipping the precarious balance of my ancient desk chair and spilling its contents – me – out on to the floor.

  I rose with barely-muffled curses and wobbly legs, clutching the desktop to pull myself back up. Maya fretted and fussed like a kicked puppy.

  “Ohmigosh, Mr. Hazzard, I am so sorry!” she wailed, trying to help me up but really just pulling ineffectively at my elbow. “I didn’t mean to surprise you! I was just, um, surprised to see you here. I thought you’d go home after we finished the case last night.”

  “You know I basically live here since my apartment got blown up, right?” I asked. Not that I’d spent much time in my apartment back before it became an exhibition in the effects of C4 on turn-of-the-century architecture, mind you. But now I didn’t really have the option.

  I mean, I guess I had options. I could’ve found another shoebox-sized apartment, kept a ratty futon and a few old tchotchkes there, and had a place to hang my spare tie and jacket. But I didn’t really feel like it was necessary. Besides, all the important stuff was right here in the office, and I’d made sure when we chose the location that it had all the amenities an up-and-coming private-detective-cum-gang lord would need.

  Maya was still fretting over me and apologizing, so I cut her off with not-intended-to-be-mean, “Don’t worry about it,” and hauled myself into something like an upright position. “Anyway, it’s only…um…damn, what time is it?”

  “It’s 8:30,” Maya replied.

  “What? Like, in the morning? That’s a real time?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Um, yeah,” Maya said. “But, uh, there’s something you should see.”

  “Not without coffee first,” I replied.

  “No, I think you really need to see this first. It’s super-important.”

  “Nothing is as important as the first cup of coffee. The building could be on fire, and that would still be less important than my first cup of coffee.” I slipped past her and made my way to the coffeemaker, punched in my drink order, and waited for the machine to pour some of that liquid life.

  “Mr. Hazzard, it is reeeally important,” Maya said from behind me. I turned to see her hopping from one foot to the other, her hands wringing a microfiber rag for all she was worth.

  “Maya, unless our client has died, I can’t see why this is so important it can’t wait for coffee.”

  “Mrs. Montgomery was murdered!” Maya burst out, her eyes wide with horror and fear.

  I paused, my hand mere inches from my steaming coffee mug. “I know I didn’t just hear you say what I heard you say,” I said slowly. “That would be absurd. We just saw her last night. She had that slab of muscle Henry with her. There’s no way she was murdered.”

  “She was! It’s all over the newsfeeds this morning!” Maya expanded a minimized vid window and showed me the story. Sure enough, the headline read: Local Politician and Philanthropist’s Wife Brutally Murdered! You Won’t Believe How It Happened…

  “Well, shit, I stand corrected,” I said, taking a long, hot sip of coffee. I could feel the aches and pains of a life lived too hard fading slightly as the coffee took hold of my system and shook everything awake.

  “What are we going to do?” Maya cried, now actually nervously chewing her rag.

  “Nothing,” I said, walking back to my desk and righting my chair before flopping into it. “We weren’t hired to keep her alive, just to follow her and take pictures. And then, we got hired by her to do…well, not that. It’s sad that she’s been killed, but it isn’t our business.”

  “It is, actually,” said a voice from the anteroom. I looked up to see Kimiko standing in the doorway to my office.

  “How do you figure?” I asked. I was annoyed. It was too early for cloak-and-dagger bullshit, too early to find out that curvy, voluptuous young women had been murdered, too early for anything but a hangover, and I had already had my fair share of those over the years.

  “Eyewitnesses reported that Mrs. Montgomery was last seen in the company of a man matching your description, and the bartender at the Hotel d’Palm’s bar told police about a physical altercation between yourself and her bodyguard.”

  “That’s all circumstantial,” I said, trying to wave the evidence away. I knew I hadn’t committed any murders last night. Couldn’t O’Mally and his boys just take my word for it?

  “It’s enough to get the cops over here to bring you in for questioning,” Kimiko responded.

  As if on cue, there was a loud knock on the outer door behind her. A muffled voice called out, “Eddie Hazzard, open the door! We’d like you to come with us!”

  “Crap,” I grumbled, dragging myself out of my chair and toward the window. Outside, an ancient metal fire escape was clinging desperately to the side of the building. It should’ve been condemned. In fact, I’d made sure of that myself when we’d first bought the building by going outside with a screwdriver one night and loosening all the bolts that held it to the outside wall. If anyone tried to climb up the thing, it wouldn’t work out so well for them.

  In hindsight, that might have been less clever than I’d originally thought.

  “We have to get out of here,” Maya wailed. “They might think I helped you murder her!”

  “I didn’t murder anybody,” I snapped back. “C’mon, we’re going out the hard way.”

  “There are other ways out,” Kimiko commented wryly.

  “Yeah, but how many of them involve grappling hooks and being able to blend with the shadows?” I asked as I opened the window.

  Kimiko thought for a moment. “Seven. The other three involve scal
ing down the building with your bare hands at some point.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the fire escape.” I glanced down at the rusty metal. “And with tetanus,” I added. I grabbed Maya around her upper arm and pulled her after me. “Let’s go!”

  Outside, the fire escape was exactly as rickety and unstable as I’d imagined. With the two of us out there, there was no way the thing was going to stay up long enough for us to climb down the proper way.

  My fears were confirmed when I heard the low groan of the bolts pulling away the last little bit from the wall, followed by the shrill pop as the metal struts holding the fire escape aloft gave up the ghost. The fire escape began to twist and shudder, slowly sagging toward the building next to it like a staggering drunk looking for a shoulder to lean on. Maya yelped a bit as we picked up speed, then the whole structure rattled and screeched as it slammed into the brick wall of the other building. We thought it was done, but we were wrong: the fire escape gave another groan as it slipped further down the wall, the metal twisting and snapping like dried sticks. The whole thing finally came to a rest just a meter or so off the ground, so we were able to hop down and leg it up an alley to make our escape.

  We continued on for several blocks, dodging and weaving through side streets and alleys to throw potential pursuers off our trail. Not that it would matter once they got serious about it and started tracking us with CCTV and drones. Maya, in her capacity as tech guru, had already done a lot to make us untraceable through GPS and biometric scans, but if the APD put drones in the air, they’d find us in no time.

  “We should get under cover somewhere,” I said. Maya nodded, her eyes still wide from the whole ordeal. “And then we need to find out what the hell happened last night and try to clear our good names.” I reconsidered that for a moment. “Well, your good name, my rather tarnished but still mostly okay name. C’mon, I think one of the safe houses is nearby.” One of the first things I’d done when I took over the Organization was ask Maya to put together a thorough asset list for me. I wanted to know what the Organization controlled, how much of it they controlled, and whether or not it was something I could use to take the system apart. On the list had been a series of safe houses, locations set up for Organization members to lie low when the heat got too hot. The irony of actually having to use them for their intended purpose myself was not lost on me, but I didn’t have time to appreciate it at that moment.