“I happen to take my job seriously, as you can see. Some might say too seriously.”

  This elicited a grunt or two. I heard some whisperings under some breaths. Those whisperings might have suggested that I was a dead man. I laugh in the face of such whisperings.

  I went on, “I’m here for one reason and one reason only: Your abusive leader, Steel Something-or-other—”

  “Steel Eye, asshole,” came a chorus of grunts, along with a “dipweed” and a “dumb ass” or two. What was a dipweed?

  “Right, of course,” I said. “Steel Eye. How could I forget? Anyway, Steel Eye had every right to be upset. Hey, another man fucked with his girl. I get it. But I’m not here to talk about that man. I’m here to talk about Camry.”

  They all stared at me, faces blank but alive in the fire light. A stiff wind made its way through the Pit. A dozen or so beards lifted and fell in unison. Two bikers were still wearing sunglasses, despite the fact the sun had set minutes ago. I admired their dedication.

  I continued, “Camry has decided to end her relationship with Steel Eye. Apparently, she did so in grand fashion, by messing with another guy and then splitting in the night. A helluva way to make an exit, but that’s beside the point.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” I heard one of them say to another. Hard to say who spoke, since most of their lips were buried deep within wiry facial hair.

  I powered on. “That’s where I come in. Somehow, some way, she ended up in my office, drinking my coffee, and looking for help. I happen to have a soft spot for damsels in distress...or anyone in distress for that matter. Call it a weakness. Call it mildly heroic. Call it stupid. But here I am.”

  “We’ll call you a dead man soon,” said someone nearby.

  I ignored the comment, although I did spot the speaker this time. I logged him away for future reference. He seemed the type to carry out the threat. Then again, most of them did.

  “So, here is my proposition: Camry moves on with her life. In fact, I am going to help her move on, with a new name, a new identity, new everything. I doubt any of you will find her, but here’s the catch: If I so much as catch a whiff that one of you is looking for her, I will be back.”

  “Yeah, fuck you.”

  “I thought you might say that. But wait, there’s more. If I so much as see a biker sniffing around my place, my shop, my girl, within a hundred square feet of me, I will be back.”

  This got some chuckles. These guys weren’t used to being threatened. They, perhaps, had never been threatened in all their lives. Being threatened was new to them. Hell, they were the ones used to doing the threatening.

  “Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I won’t be back alone,” I said.

  And with that, I raised my gun and fired into the air.

  Nearly a dozen figures stepped out of the darkness, each holding weapons of their own, and each looking more amused than the other, except for one, of course. Spinoza, I was certain, had forgotten how to crack a smile. Then again, knowing his past, I didn’t blame him.

  “I will be coming back with them,” I said.

  Chapter Eleven

  There were ten of them.

  I wouldn’t have expected anything less. Mixed with the ten were two cops who didn’t have to be here, two cops who were risking their careers and livelihoods—and lives—to be here with me now. As the men stepped into the firelight, weapons raised nonchalantly, I smiled and nodded at my good friends, Sanchez and Sherbet, homicide detectives with LAPD and Fullerton Police Departments, respectively. Sherbet was sweating a little. He was a bigger guy and the evening was warm. He nodded at me and turned his attention back to the group of ruffians before him.

  “Looks like you got the party started without us,” said an older guy who probably shouldn’t have been here, but had demanded to come anyway. His name was Aaron King, although he always reminded me of someone else. Someone I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Anyway, Aaron smiled at me and winked...and I almost had it...but lost it again. Who, dammit?

  “It wasn’t much of a party,” I said. “Until Numi showed up.”

  “Is that a black joke?” said the big Nigerian. “Or a gay joke?”

  Numi was new to the private investigator business. Mostly, he had taken over another friend of mine’s business. A friend who had now passed. A friend who had had the uncanny knack of finding the missing. I wasn’t entirely sure Numi had gotten over our mutual friend’s death.

  Rest in peace, Booker, I thought.

  “Neither,” I said. Numi was one of the few men on planet earth who would make me pause before a fight. “It was in reference to your lighthearted and jovial nature.”

  Numi shook his head and continued scanning the Pit.

  “What the fuck is going on?” said one of the bikers. That someone might have been about fifty-five, with a full gray beard stained with tobacco and God knows what else.

  “It’s called friendly banter, asshole,” said Nick Caine, another friend of mine who’d swung by a day earlier. Synchronicity at its best. Standing in the shadows behind him was his manservant or friend—I was never sure which—named Ishi. I noted Ishi was brandishing what appeared to be a machete.

  Sweet mama.

  Nick, an old-school relic hunter in the Indiana Jones tradition, was sporting a sawed-off shotgun and a revolver. He was, of course, freshly returned from God knows where, uncovering God knows what, and running from God knows who. Nick and I go way back. I think we had met in a bar. I think he had pissed me off. I think he then bought me a drink. I think buying me a drink is always the best way to soothe the savage beast...and to win my undying friendship.

  Nick had shown up at my office doorstep with a friend of his, a private eye named Max Long. Max hailed from a town called Mystic Falls, and he was my kind of guy: tough, fast talking, and good with a gun. I had asked if he was working on anything interesting in Mystic Falls, and he said something to the effect of: “You have no idea.”

  Anyway, Nick, Ishi and Max were here now, and that’s all that mattered. Ishi didn’t say much. Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure he spoke English, and I sure as hell didn’t speak Tawakankan, which may or may not be a made-up language.

  “What do you say, Monty?” I asked my private investigator friend, Marty Drew, who now ran around looking for ghosts with his wife and medium, Ellen, a sweet lady who kind of freaked me out. “Do you see any spirits here?”

  “There’s spirits everywhere, Jim,” said Monty. “At least, that’s what my wife tells me.”

  Monty, I knew, was a skeptic at heart. But, apparently, he’d seen some shit that he doesn’t want to talk about. Maybe it’s best he doesn’t want to talk about it. I like my little world just the way it is, free of ghosts and things that go bump in the night.

  Standing next to Monty was another good friend of mine, private investigator Roan Quigley. Yes, a fancy name for a thug. In a way, we were all thugs. We just practiced our thuggery mostly on the right side of the law. And, yes, private investigators often stay in touch, especially when we need a little help. Like now, although I wasn’t entirely convinced that I needed help tonight, but, hey, a little back up never hurts anyone.

  Roan had been doing a pretty good job of disappearing of late. He still wouldn’t tell me where he disappeared to, but I would wear him down eventually and get to the bottom of it.

  Rounding out the ten was another good friend of mine from Los Angeles, park ranger Jack Carter, who might have the coolest job of all of us. He had a cute daughter who may or may not be smarter than all of us.

  “All of you are dead,” said a big guy in the front row. The big guy might have been drunk.

  “Who said that?” asked Numi.

  “I did, motherfucker,” said the guy, standing and facing the Nigerian. “Big man with your gun.”

  I watched Numi step around the fire, slip his gun behind him in his waistband and hit the big guy even harder than I might have hit Steel Eye. We all watched the guy tumble head over ass—and very nearly into the fire. When he was done tumbling, he didn’t move. He might have been dead. No one seemed to care.

  “Now,” I said, grinning at this motley gang, both mine and the Devil’s Triangle, as I released Steel Eye who spun around and faced me, “do we have an agreement?”

  The man with the washed-out eye studied me closely, then looked at my rag-tag gang of thugs, each wielding their preferred weapon, and each looking ready to use it. Finally, he nodded. “We do, and you can go fuck yourself.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I said.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was an hour or so later, and we were at a place called Patty’s, a dive bar a few dozen miles away just outside of Palm Springs.

  Monty the ghost hunter was playing darts with Nick Caine and Ishi. All three, I thought, could use some work on their technique. Jack the Park Ranger and Roan my disappearing investigator friend were taking it to a few unsuspecting drunks at the pool table. I happened to know that Jack and Roan were better than most at billiards, although I’ve been known to give them a run for their money. Max Long, the private eye out of Mystic Falls was currently doing his damndest to impress a pretty young waitress. His smile might have been winning her over. Detective Sherbet had left after a few drinks. I was about to make a joke about drinking and driving, until I remembered that drinking and driving wasn’t very funny. Sherbet patted me on the shoulder as he slipped out. He looked older than I remembered, and far more tired. I think it might have been well past his bedtime. Aaron King left soon after. Earlier, Aaron had seemed a little too eager to jump on stage for his turn at karaoke, singing “Love Me Tender.” That he had sounded exactly like Elvis Presley concerned me more than it probably should have.

  Now there were four of us at the bar, drinking, our elbows up on the scarred and aged wood. We could have been cowboys from days of old. But we weren’t. We were private eyes and thugs, and damn good at both. I was drinking Blue Moon Pale Ale and remembering fondly my detective friend out of Boston, a big guy named Spenser, who was, last time I checked, nearly as tough as me, although I wouldn’t want to mess with his friend Hawk.

  Private eyes are a weird breed. We come in different shapes and sizes. Some of us are brawlers. Others are computer nerds. All of us live in the fringe, much like those bikers. We just followed the law a little more. Not always, granted. But usually.

  Spinoza was drinking water. My old friend had given up the hard stuff long ago, after the accident with his son. I would have given it up too. Spinoza, the smallest of all of us, was leaning back against the bar, an elbow propped up behind him, watching Max work his magic on the waitress. Or trying to. Spinoza gave the impression of not listening, or of being easily distracted. I think that was his M.O. I knew the little bastard was hearing everything within twenty feet of him. Occasionally, he and Numi commented on Max’s pick-up technique.

  “That won’t be the end of it, you know,” said Sanchez, sitting next to me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Some will come looking for you.”

  “I know that, too,” I said.

  “You gave Steel Eye a shiner.”

  “I did. Gladly.”

  “He’s going to have to save face.”

  “He will,” I said.

  “He’ll be coming for you, too.”

  “I would be disappointed if he didn’t.”

  “You look terrified,” said Sanchez.

  I drank more beer, watched Nick and Ishi both literally miss the dart board. They might have been the world’s best looters, but they sucked at bar games. I yawned and said to Sanchez, “What was the question again?”

  “Wasn’t a question, and never mind. So what about the girl?”

  “I know a woman,” I said. “Runs a shelter for abused women. She’ll help her start over somewhere.”

  “She’ll probably just go back to him or someone like him.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “But you’re hopeful she’ll turn her life around,” said Sanchez.

  “With infinite disappointment,” I said, “comes infinite hope.”

  Sanchez looked at me. “Martin Luther King?”

  “Duh,” I said.

  “So where is she now?”

  “With Sam for now.”

  “Samantha Moon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like her.”

  “So do I.”

  “But she scares me.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “She’ll be safe with Sam,” said Sanchez.

  I nodded. And while the singers paraded across the karaoke stage, and while Nick and Ishi and Monty still sucked at darts, and while Jack and Roan killed it at the pool table, and while Max finally pocketed the waitress’ phone number, and while Numi and Spinoza stared off into the far distance, Sanchez and I sat quietly, contemplating hope, disappointment and another beer.

  The End

  Return to the Table of Contents

  The Fire Lord

  The wind carried the smell of the sea as the young man squatted motionless on the edge of a cliff. Behind him, the town was ablaze. His town, his home town. Before him, the sea was in turmoil, and great whitecaps crashed against the black rocks far below.

  He was tall and lean, and had many times been compared to the giants in the far north. He had never seen such giants, for theirs was a sheltered life, a simple life.

  His clothes had been burned from his flesh, and he stood naked in the chilled wind from the sea, yet still somehow feeling the waves of heat from the fire that had engulfed half of his town. There was nary a scar on his skin.

  A fire he had walked through.

  He recalled again running from the stable, feeling his clothing falling free from his body, burning away like bark from birch in a hearth. At first, Gravere thought he had been extremely lucky. But as he checked his body and found no burns, no damage of any kind, he knew something was very, very wrong...and that his life was about to change forever.

  And as Gravere had burst through the burning doorway, gasping and screaming, he caught the wide-eyed stares of those rushing to fight the fire. Their rushing had stopped immediately when they had saw the young man emerge from the fire unscathed. Gravere had naturally fled, all the way to the cliff’s edge.

  Now from his vantage point, Gravere could see that perhaps half of the town was going up in flames. As he watched the flames, cold and scared and certain he was dreaming, a bright light suddenly appeared from the darkened skies above and descended slowly. Gravere, shocked, watched as it reached the ground before him.

  It looks, thought Gravere, edging a half-step backwards toward the cliff’s edge, as if someone set ablaze a boulder, a boulder which is shining with a light as white as my gran’da’s hair.

  “You are my son,” came a voice from the white fire, a voice that crackled like the sound of so many burning sticks.

  Gravere, admittedly, could barely make out the words, what with the crashing surf, thundering wind and the crackling fire ball hovering before him. Still, he edged further out onto the cliff, his right heel now hovering in space. A brisk wind rode up the face of the cliff and really gave his fanny a chill.

  The white flame glowed even whiter, a white so deep that it brought to Gravere visions of the linens of the gods. That is, until the flaming white rock dropped to the moist soil below where it proceeded to crackle and hiss like an irritated, albeit poisonous, chicken snake. The white fire promptly went out.

  What remained was a charred and lumpy mass that began to take on the shape of a man. A longish man who was, in fact, now lying face-down in the mire. The man raised his mud-stained face. “How come I can’t ever get this right?”

  Gravere was not certain if the question was rhetorical, and, certainly, Gravere had no ready answer for him; at least, not an answer that would be useful. So the young man remained silent, which is what his ma always told him to do when he had nothing of importance to say.

  The man sat up and sluiced his face clean with the edge of his hand. As he did so, Gravere recalled the man’s words...words that Gravere, until now, hadn’t quite pieced together.

  “Sire, did you say something about being my father?” Gravere’s voice was surprisingly calm, considering he had recently walked through fire and now stood at the edge of a cliff after witnessing a burning man descend from the sky.

  The man continued scraping his face clean. “I said you were my son. There’s a difference.”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Gravere, noting that his toes were growing tired supporting his entire weight like the toes of those lithe dancers, the ones who come to his town at the beginning of Spring and at the end of Summer each year, are somehow able to do. For me to stand on my toes well, thought Gravere, I would need much practice. However, I think I could do it. In fact, if this fire-spirit doesn’t kill me, perhaps I will take up practicing standing on my toes, though I don’t quite as of yet know what good it will do me.

  “The phrase ‘You are my son’ was spoken to you allegorically, a sort of metaphysical kinship from one soul to another, expressed most accurately with the ‘son’ declaration. ‘I am your father’ conjures images of physical paternalism and religiosity and—in a universe not too far away—a popular movie, all of which are unrelated to this situation.”

  “What’s a movie?”

  “Never mind that,” said the once-burning man. “I am here to spare you from death. No need to thank me, for I am just doing my job. However, I wasn’t supposed to come into your life until years from now. But I made a judgment call, and I felt you needed some explanations before you did the final deed.”

  “What ‘final deed’ of which do you refer?”

  “Why, you were going to cast yourself from this very cliff.”

  “Actually, the thought never crossed my mind.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you so close to the cliff?”