Lucy Locket

I felt better at least for the bath, and my room-mate, bless his little PVC hotpants, had found me a shirt and suit from somewhere.  The shirt was comfortable; the suit fit in all the important areas (the sleeves were too long and tended to fall over my hands, but I could see where that might come in useful) and most importantly, he’d told me he didn’t want the clothes back.  I slipped my hands into the pockets to see if there was anything left behind and found a monogrammed handkerchief, a delicate blue silk number with a calligraphic M in one corner.  Whistling, I walked away from our little home and out into the night.

I was wandering aimlessly at first, letting my mind mull over the events of the last few days, and the weirdness that was transpiring.  Natasha Monkeybutt was up to something, but that wasn’t news, or even worth investigating.  She had the blessing of City Hall for the moment, and when she fell out of favour with them they’d deal with her in their own way.  Nothing I was going to do would hasten that fall, unless Mad Frankie got so upset with me that he decided to do something about her himself.  And that was as likely as a freebie from a girl with thirty years on the street.

I still wanted to locate Boy Blue.  Whether he knew what he was mixed up in or not, I wanted to find him now and find out what the hell he thought was going on.  And why he had that picture of Natasha Monkeybutt… well, for all I knew better, I couldn’t resist giving her tree a little shake and seeing if the Death-watch beetles were ticking yet or not.  And he was clearly annoying her, and that was reason enough to see if he needed any help in my book.  It’s not a big book, and there’s more pictures than words, but it’s my book nonetheless.

I turned down another street without really looking where I was going and nearly tripped over some woman’s child-buggy; a double-stacked double-wide thing that looked like it should be used for delivering outsize packages, not supporting the over-population of the city.  There were two children who looked to be of toddling age in the lower stack in little chairs that were like the classic push-chair from when I was a child.  I never had a push-chair, my mother didn’t believe in pandering to anyone’s desires.  I crawled everywhere once I could crawl, sometimes with her chivvying me along like a recalcitrant sled-dog according to people who knew her back then.  Above them, acting almost as a canopy, were two smaller bassinet-style things supported on a cantilevered plastic frame.  In one of those was a pudding of a child that had presumably hurt its mother to give birth to, and in the other were two babies placed top to tail and wearing little shark-themed onesies.

“Look where you’re going!” bellowed the woman pushing this contraption, who was so stick-thin that I could both the bones in her forearms.  I wondered that she control this buggy with all the weight that was clearly in it.

“If you’d left any room on the pavement…” I retorted, and attempted to step around her.  She wrenched the buggy as hard as she could, and to my complete lack of surprise failed to get it to turn even an inch.  I sidled past, listening to her scream in frustration and thinking to myself that she couldn’t know this neighbourhood very well.  When she the corner that I’d just come round, probably after a titanic struggle with the buggy, it went downhill.  Very gradually at first, but it got steeper as the river came into sight, and I couldn’t see her being able to slow the buggy down, let alone stop it.

I looked around me, and realised that I knew where I was, and wondered again for a moment what my feet had been up to.  I paused, and then decided to pay a visit for old time’s sake.  And to ask if Lucy knew about Boy Blue by any chance.

Lucy Locket’s was a non-descript house of three storeys in a three-storey neighbourhood with a large front garden who edges were lines with leylandii to keep peeping eyes out.  The front path was narrow and gravelled, and I knew that stepping off it was the cue for the dobermen to come leaping out of hiding and inspect you.  At the end of it was a couple of concrete steps up to a front-door with an imposing knocker that was never answered; but walk around to the tradesmen’s entrance and there was a buzzer and a peephole.  Lucy opened the door almost immediately to me, and I could smell the disinfectant and hear the strains of a badly-tuned piano.

“Mac!” she said, looking as though she’d embrace me if I weren’t me.  “You look… clean!”

Belle Peepers

I stumbled out of Bar Black feeling like I’d not had enough to drink.  Gaby’s little performance had been the icing on the cake after the revelations of the things I’d found in Boy Blue’s bedleg and the whole world seemed a little bit surreal to me.  I looked up at the sky, half-expecting to see a melted clock hanging there in place of the moon, while a lizard giggled to itself as it played guitar, but to my surprise I saw the first hints of dawn.  Medicinal pink cloud hugged the horizon, and the stars had faded away to nothingness.  A grey vault hung overhead, waiting to absorb the unwary, and I looked back down at the ground and hunched my shoulders up and tried to hide.

The jingle of cutlery alerted me, and I ducked.  Belle Peep’s handbag sailed over my head, just brushing the tips of my hair, and crashed into a wall; the side of Bar Black.  It tried to stick for a moment, then slid down with a gritty tearing sound.

“‘er what owns that bag wants to talk to you,” said a voice that made me wonder if people drowned frogs in chocolate.  It was glutinous and mucousy, and it croaked and hopped over sounds in the words like it would choke on itself if it didn’t.  I looked round, thinking I might recognise it, but all there was behind me was a filthy street urchin.  “Yeah, you, guv’nor,” said the urchin.  He moved then and I caught sight of a patch on the sleeve of his coat.

“You’re one of the Runners,” I said.  The voice made sense now, as William Physick, the criminal mastermind who ran the Runners, spoke that way too and didn’t like to be made fun of.  “What are you doing throwing a handbag away?”  The Runners got their name from the way that they ran off as fast as tube-mice after they’d picked a pocket or snatched a bag.

“It’s a message,” said the boy.  I could see more of his face now; he had a hare-lip and a nasty-looking scar down the right-hand side of cheek.  It looked fresh enough to be still weeping.  “It’s for you.  You’re Mac, ain’t ya?”

“I’ve had lots of names,” I said, and that was the truth.  “I don’t speak your language though, what kind of message is a bag thrown at my head.”

“Your problem, guv’nor,” said the boy.  “I’m just passing it on.”  He turned, and suddenly he was a blur of motion, disappearing at high speed away from me.  I thought of chasing him for a minute, but by the time I’d finished that thought he was turning the corner at the top of the street, and I knew that my joints weren’t up to running, let alone catching up with a Runner.  I sighed, and went and retrieved the bag.

I have no idea what Belle Peep needs a complete 48-piece cutlery set in her handbag for, but that the entirety of the contents.  What disturbed me more was that she, or whoever had sent me her bag, had known that I’d be able to recognise it from the cutlery.  That was sufficiently suspicious that I tipped everything out of the bag again, and went through the contents more carefully this time.  Other people drifted out of Bar Black and some of them were curious enough to walk a little close by, mostly seeing if there was anything they could lift and run off with, but the cutlery didn’t interest any of them.  It interested me though.  Every piece of it had a little crest engraved on the handle, and Belle Peep definitely wasn’t nobility.  Or even from a noble background.  Wherever this had come from then, she was carrying it around because it meant something to her.  Sadly, beyond recognising that it was crested it meant nothing to me.  I stirred it with my foot one last time, and then something sparkled in the mix.

I bent down, regretting it as my vertebrae kicked up a fuss, and picked up a tiny silver ball that appeared to have been stuck to the handle of a spoon, where it would have gone unnoticed.  Two tiny slits in the side of it confirmed to me that it contained electronics and was probably a tracer device.  I tossed it down the nearest drain, left the cutlery in the road to foul the early morning traffic, and limped away.  I had my suspicions as to what might be happening here, and I wanted to get the bedleg hidden away somewhere safe before any more messages came my way.

Gaby

The pianist came out first, a dapper man in a tuxedo and tails, wearing a top hat that was a little bit battered.  When he turned and bowed before sitting down at the piano we saw that something had taken a large bite out of the crown of his hat at some point, and you could see his bald spot.  The hair that hung down from below the hat was long, lank, and the colour of the liquid you find in an old oil sump.  He sat with his back to us, raised his hands theatrically and cracked his knuckles.  A couple of people in the front row ducked, reflexively, and not all of them sat back up again.

Then Gaby sauntered out in her burlesque costume: a whalebone corset in burgundy lace, some fishnet tights, fishnet sleeves that ran from her elbows to her shoulders, sage-green high-heels, and a little too much puppy fat for the look of emo seduction she was going for.  She caught the eyes of the crowd, and pouted, crossing one leg in front of the other in the most strained pose I’ve seen in a while, and I can still remember an evening in an S&M club where if you couldn’t pay your bar bill you were hauled on stage to become part of the entertainment.  The pianist struck a chord on the piano, and I braced myself.

Gaby opened her mouth, and then closed it again.  She winked, and turned around, bending over to pick something up off the floor.  Someone in the audience wolf-whistled, but the rest of us were still reeling from being confronted with so much flesh – it was like a new island rising from the ocean and assaulting you with geography.  She stood back up again slowly and I realised that now I knew what watching Atlantis sink below the waves must have been like.  She turned around again, winked once more, and spread her hands apart.  She was holding juggling torches.

The pianist stood up and produced a gold-plated cigarette lighter from inside his jacket and struck the flint a couple of time until a tall yellow flame was produced.  Gaby held up her clubs, and he approached them at lit each one.  I turned to look at Tom, and to my surprise he moved over to my elbow, carrying a fresh Pink Lady with him.

“Fire?” I asked, sotto voce.

“Can’t stop her, Mac,” said Tom putting the drink down in front of me.  “We’ve pointed out the hazards, but she’s dating the Fire Chief’s daughter so he’s refusing to shut her, or us, down.”

“Wow,” I said.  I tasted the drink.  I was pretty certain there was a hint of bleach in there, but Tom’s being trying to poison me for a long time and bleach is nothing I can’t handle.  I coughed politely though, to let him feel that he was getting somewhere.

Gaby started juggling the torches as the pianist played something jaunty, and she actually wasn’t bad.  The lighting tech turned the spotlight down again so we could see the tracks of the flames through the air better and every now and then, as the clubs threatened to get out of control and escape from her, someone would gasp and there would be the scrape of thirty chairs being moved ready for people to run out of the bar if it caught fire.  Then she caught all of the torches and held them in one hand.  One by one she carefully put the flaming torch in her mouth and then pulled it out again, revealing afterwards a tongue of flame that she’d somehow managed to steal from each torch.  She blew the flames at the audience, who were on the verge of stampeding out of the bar by now.

Finally the pianist stopped playing and Gaby dropped her arms and extinguished her clubs.  The lights came back up, and the bar calmed down again and started drinking once more.

“Another drink, Mac?” asked Tom, innocently.

Letters and Words

The first thing that fell out was a packet of smokes and a lighter.  I picked them up quickly as I knew what Boy Blue smoked; sure enough when I opened the packet to check they were very fragrant cigarettes and all hand-rolled.  Very neatly too.  When Blue wants to do a job he takes his time and does it well, and that’s probably the only reason he can still get jobs in this town as an actual musician.  I’d heard him him play in a couple of clubs, usually when I was waiting to be thrown out, but once when I was aiming to get someone else thrown out, and he definitely improved the music.  Then I heard him play one night in his little bedsit by himself and if I’d still been able to cry, I would have.  I put the ciggies and the lighter in my inside pocket, with the idea that I might return them to him if I found him alive at the end of all this.  Then I paused for a moment and wondered why they were in the bedleg, which clearly wasn’t something he’d have been going in and out of every night.  I shook the leg a little more gingerly this time to find out what else was in there.

I had to put my fingers inside in the end to pull out the papers that were stopping it up, and Tom, the barman, couldn’t resist a cheap comment.  The guy sat to my left, who was still fulminating to himself decided that he’d had enough of perverts like me at that point and lumbered off his stool in search of somewhere else to stand or sit in the bar.  I barely even watched him go, knowing perfectly well that a bar that was happy to have me as a patron was going to have far worse than me to sit next to.  I just stretched out a little and occupied both stools, propping the bed-leg against the bar on the other one.

“What’ve you got there anyway, Mac?” asked Tom.  There were plenty of people trying to catch his eye, waving money, credit-cards and assorted numbers of fingers, but he still stopped by me and looked at the papers.

“Can’t say I know yet,” I said.  “I’ll have to learn how to read first.”

He closed his mouth, his words having been stolen from him, and then gestured at my untouched glass.  “Another drink, Mac?”

I tipped the drink down my throat and laid the glass in front of me.  “You’re a gent, Tom.”

“And you’re the scum of the earth, Mac.”

The first page I turned over startled me.  It was headed paper, and right at the top in an overly fussy typeface was From the desk of Miss Belle Peep, Proprietress of City Farm.  Underneath that was an address, phone and fax numbers, email address and then an eight digit number that went unexplained.  I checked the address, and it definitely wasn’t where I thought the farm was, at least not the one she’d inherited from her father.  I made a mental note; that needed checking out.  The rest of the page was taken up with a short letter discussing the purchase of seventeen sheep, though as I read it I felt as though I was missing something.  There were plenty of technical-sounding and looking references, but something about the letter as a whole didn’t gel with me.  Possibly because Boy Blue was hiding it and it simply didn’t look incriminating.

The second page was just a pornographic picture and I was about to offer it round the bar for the best offer when I looked more closely as the face and almost fell off my stool.

“Dirty pictures, Mac?” Tom placed my drink down and leaned over to get a better look.  “Is that really your kind of….”  He tailed off, and frowned.  Then he turned the picture the other way up, and then he stared at me.  “Isn’t that…?”

“Natasha Monkeybutt’s face,” I said.  “Yes.  The question is though, is the rest of it her?”

“You sure you want to be walking around with that, Mac?”

“You want to pin it up on your wall, Tom?”

He recoiled and wandered off to serve some other desperately thirsty customer, and I rolled the picture up and put it back in the bedleg.  That was lit dynamite as far as I was concerned, and I wondered what the hell Boy Blue had been doing with it.

That left one more; a scruffy, torn-covered notebook.  I opened it and learned inside a couple of paragraphs that this was Boy Blue’s diary.  Doubtless there’d be an explanation for the picture in here, but his handwriting was atrocious and the bar was far too noisy (and nosy) to sit here and try and puzzle it out.  I’d take this one back to the morgue.

“Showtime, Mac,” said Tom as the lights dimmed and Gaby was spotlighted on the tiny stage.

Dead sheep

I looked around Blue’s flat when my vision stopped swimming and the blur had cleared up.  The floor was still covered with drying and dried blood, and small clouds of flies hovered here and there, dipping down from time to time to feed.  The smell wasn’t too bad yet, but I suspected that Monkeybutt’s men had used some deodorant while they were in here; cheaper than masks, probably sourced from a Monkeybutt company, and bad for the environment.  I shifted slightly, and realised from the tacky, pulling sensation that I’d landed in a puddle of semi-dry blood.  It didn’t seem worth moving for the moment though.

The pulp paperbacks were gone, so Monkeybutt or her men had taken them.  It seemed a bit odd as they could hardly be evidence, but maybe they’d taken them out to the van to read while they were on stakeout.  The dead sheep were still there, at the foot of the bed.  I could see from this angle that they’d both had their throats cut, presumably to get decent spray on the blood and cover as much of the room as possible.  The sheep-killers looked to have been sending a message, though why to Blue was still a mystery.  He was a grotty little lowlife, it was unlikely he had any money or possessions worth threatening him over.  So what did that leave?  Information?

The bed looked odd.  I blinked and looked at it again, trying to work out what was wrong.  It was a double bed with filthy sheets and a blood-stained duvet.  The sheets were wrinkled and pulled away from one corner of the mattress, which also looked filthy.  There were crumbs – well, I hoped they were crumbs – scattered on them where the duvet didn’t cover them up, and there were three pillows, all missing pillowcases.  I suspected Monkeybutt again, taking things that she hoped she could make a case from.  She was probably having them analysed for DNA to find out who Blue was sleeping with.  I could have told her if she’d asked: Blue didn’t bring people back to his flat because he was ashamed of it.  All of his conquests (and the last one I knew of was three years ago and the poor kid was both blind and blind drunk) usually ended up in a dark alleyway somewhere listening to him whisper that outdoor sex was more erotic.  I tilted my head to the side, and the bed straightened up, and suddenly it was obvious.  The bed was lopsided, one corner raised up more than the other three.  I straightened my head again and studied the corners.

It was the bottom right leg, closest to the wall, that was too long.  I guessed that the safest leg – top right, pushed into the corner made by the walls – was a little too awkward for him because he’d have to drag the bed out to get to it.  Bottom right was conveniently close to where I was sprawled, so I took a closer look, pushing the duvet out of the way.  The leg looked normal until I ran my thumbnail down its length and it caught about a inch away from the bottom on a nearly-invisible seam.  I sighed, and stood up, shook myself a little, and then sat back down, cross-legged.  I had to bite back a moan from the effort of bending my knees like that, but once they’d locked in place I felt a little better.  Then I lifted the bed.  The long leg dropped neatly out, revealing that it had been poking through the bed-frame and up into a hole made in the mattress, and was actually as long as my forearm.

I wanted to open it there and then and find out what Blue had that needed hiding like this, but I was acutely aware that Dan Drough and his officers would be send back by Monkeybutt in short order, possibly with riot shields if she was feeling generous, and that I’d barely looked around the flat.  I slipped the bed-leg down my trouser leg, gripped the edge of the bed to haul myself upright, and stared around the room some more.

There was nothing in the way of decoration or ornament, and there was no musical instrument either.  Or scores for that matter.  I frowned then, thinking back; had I seen any when I’d been here the first time?  The more I thought, the more I was sure that I hadn’t.  I could imagine Blue having his horn with him if he’d been out, but where was the rest of the stuff?  There wasn’t enough here, like maybe he’d already skipped out before the sheep-killers arrived?  Did he know he was running out of time?  And did that mean that the bed-leg down my leg was already empty?

I walked, a little stiff-legged thanks to the bed-leg, over to the only other door in the room, and opened it into a bathroom.  There was a toilet, a sink, a bath and a closed-over shower-curtain.  I pulled the curtain back, the rings whisking against the bar, and found a mirror on the wall and a sheep’s head in the bath.  I met its gaze for a moment, and then pulled the curtain back.  Nothing here then.  I turned to go, and then I turned back again.  I scanned the room again, and frowned.  No towels, and there were no cupboards in this place to put them either.  So where were they?  Had Monkeybutt taken them as evidence?

I left the bathroom and considered the front-door.  I knew Monkeybutt had it wired up, but what did it connect to?  I didn’t really want to risk my life again on the bricks outside the window.  Then I spotted the wire on the inside, and traced it over to the duvet, which when pulled back revealed a radio transmitter.  It was a matter of moment to remove the battery, and then I opened the front-door.  Looking around Blue’s impoverished room I finally found a heavy glass ash-tray on the floor and used it to smash the lock on the outside to look like someone had forced entry, then left the door open and walked off.  If Blue was coming back, I was sure he’d thank me.

I remembered about how slippery the floor was only after I’d taken two steps in the direction of the stairwell.

Boy Blue's studio

I thought about taking the bus, but it was starting to get light, and the night buses in this burg only pick up if they feel like it.  The bus drivers’ union has a line about refusing to pick up anyone obviously dangerous, or likely to endanger the other passengers, but the statistics speak for themselves: last year more people on night buses were held up and robbed by the driver than by anyone getting on the bus.  Taxis generally don’t stop for me, and there weren’t enough people around for me to steal someone else’s cab, or even persuade someone else to flag the cab down for me.  I was walking again, as it seemed I always did.  It got you intimate with the city of course, and there aren’t many back alleys, rat-holes and forgotten streets that I don’t know about.  I even know about the trap streets, both the ones the mapmakers use and the real trap streets that you should know better than to walk down.  Mad Frankie’s Anger Management take things a little too literally at times.

The rain had stopped and the moisture from the ground was starting to swirl up and around into fog.  Someone up at the museum had explained how it happened to me once, while I was on a stakeout for a bag-snatcher and snatch-bagger who had a thing for academics and people in horn-rimmed glasses.  Somehow the city created a layer of warmer air above the ground, which was cooled by the underground rivers and waterways, and the moist air got trapped between the two layers and just hung around, shrouding us all in icy white curtains that could get thick enough that you couldn’t see your hand held out in front of you and left you soaking wet when you went back inside.  I smiled a little at the thought that knowing how it all worked still didn’t stop me getting wet or blind by it, and plodded on, one foot in front of the other, just like my old dancing coach used to mutter.

Some would claim it’s hard to tell, but the streets around me grew poorer and I knew that I was getting close to where Boy Blue had lived.  Might still live; I didn’t know that he was dead yet, just missing, presumed sheared.  A road-sign appeared on the side of a house: Schalk Road.  I turned in, and cut across the carpark of a housing block.  At the other side I clambered over a waist-high metal fence, wishing I was still limber enough to just jump it, and pushed through the rhododendrons until I emerged in the car-park of a different housing block.  Across that, under a low arch, and I was in the car-park of Boy Blue’s housing block.  Every now and then I find myself wondering if the town planners ever bothered to learn about geometry in school, because the way they put things together beats human comprehension.

There were no police cars or vans in the car-park, but I knew what I was looking for, and in the furthest corner from the entrance was a maintenance van from Tar’em’n’car’em.  Monkeybutt had left someone behind to keep an eye on the scene and tell her who turned up.  The question now was, how many of them had she left behind?

These blocks are poor for a reason: their construction was done on the cheap three decades ago, and it shows.  I went back to the arch and levered a brick out of the wall with not much effort at at; there were plenty of places where the local kids had already pulled bricks and half-bricks out.  I dropped the brick on the floor, and it cracked into two pieces readily.  I picked them both up, and lobbed one of them at the van with an underarm throw.  I can throw overarm, but it usually dislocates my shoulder when I do.  The brick sailed parabolically through the air, and landed with a thud on the top of the van, where it shattered into a rain of brick nuggets.  I waited two seconds, and then threw the second one, which struck surprisingly close to the first.  The van engine started up and the van reversed across the car park to the other side.  When it stopped, the engine still idling, a man opened the rear doors and stuck his head out, looking up and back rather than from side to side.

“Bloody kids,” I hear him call, though his voice was thin and reedy at that distance.  “They must have figured out we’re not local.”  He ducked back inside, closing the door behind him, and I went and fetched another brick.  Two more thuds, and the van moved to the gate and waited there, the engine running.  I kept waiting, and was rewarded with the sight of a burly man with a prominent bald spot swaggering across the car park from the building.  I recognised him as Lieutenant Drough, one of Natasha’s side-kicks.  He was known behind his back as Dan, for the obvious reason.

“What’s the matter?”  He had a strong inner-city accent; all t’s replaced with stops, dropped h’s and g’s and trouble with any word of more than three syllables.  “Why’s youse moved the van?”

I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but before it got very far a microwave crashed into the car-park from the fifth floor, and Dan turned to look.  It was a slow, deliberate turn, and followed immediately by a slow, deliberate getting into the van.  It was the inner-city completely: I’m not scared of you, and I think I know who you are, so I’m just going to get my mates and then I’m coming back.  I’d be more impressed if I didn’t know that whoever threw the microwave was also getting their mates, and their mates’ mates, and it looked like there’d be a little bit of action here in about an hour.  The van pulled out of the car-park, and I limped my way across to the entrance to the block.  I needed to be in and out before Dan came back.

Jigsaw puzzles

The overflow morgue smells clinical; the air is cold and tastes slightly of formaldehyde, but there’s a rancid note like off-butter underneath it all.  I kind of like it, but that might just be familiarisation, given how much I come here to think.  The trolleys are hard, cold steel, but that’s pleasant when your body’s as abused and damaged as mine: I don’t have to support anything, and the chill numbs the aches and pains of a life lived long.  I exhaled and let Death hug me just a little closer.

The sheep thing bugged me still.  Why had someone gone to the trouble of dragging one up all those flights of stairs to slaughter it?  And where was Boy Blue at the time?  Did he open his door and have a sheep bleat at him, probably angry and panicked by that point?  I knew Blue a little, and I expect he would have panicked too, probably backing up into the room while the sheep was goaded forwards.  There was so little in his room – even I have more in mine, though most of it belongs to my room-mate and probably wouldn’t fit me – that he’d reach the mattress before he knocked anything over.  Then he’d end up sitting down on the bed while the sheep bleated and pawed the ground, its eyes rolling madly in its triangular head, while behind it some shadowy figure made threats.

No, that just didn’t work.  How did Blue get out in that case, and why kill the sheep?

I adjusted my position on the trolley slightly and felt my shoulders go numb, which was a blessed relief.  Let’s try again.

Could Blue jump out of the window?  Not and stand up again, and certainly not run away.  Too many floors to fall.  Could there have been something below the window when he jumped that he could land on?  Seemed unlikely, but I hadn’t checked when I was there.  That would be lucky for him (I presumed), and stranger things did happen.  People thought that odd coincidences only happened in stories but that was because they didn’t do the numbers: with as many people in the world as there are, a one-in-a-million chance should be happening to a few hundred people on any given day.  Maybe yesterday had been Blue’s day?  He probably thought he was overdue one, most people did.

But was there an easier answer?  What if Blue wasn’t there when the sheep-killer arrived; could the murder of the sheep be a warning message?  Well, then the sheep had to be important and either Blue had been angering French farmers or… well, Belle Peep had already shown up in my investigation hadn’t she?  Her father, Bo Peep, had run a small inner-city farm before his death about ten years ago, and rumour had it that Belle kept the farm going but that the tours were for much more select groups with special interests.  Could Belle have a quarrel with Blue?  Or did Belle just supply the sheep for someone else who had a quarrel with Blue?

Something tickled at my foot, and I kicked out.  There was a soft outrushing of breath and a second, sharper, intake of breath so I opened my eyes.  Two medical students, easily identifiable by the looks of terror on their faces and the textbooks they were clutching were backing away from my trolley.  One was doubled over, as though he’d just been kicked in the pit of his stomach and the other was making the sign of the cross repeatedly across his chest.

“I’m not dead,” I said slowly.  It seems like that’s the one thing that should be easy to grasp about this situation, but in my experience it’s the bit people have most trouble with.  I blame all these zombie movies, and the occasional zombie outbreak.  “I’m having a think.”

“In the morgue?” said the self-crossing student lowering his arm.  His other hand, holding a heavy textbook, remained ready to swat at me in case I decided his brains were enough for a meal, which I rather doubted.

“It’s quiet, and I don’t often get disturbed,” I said.  “What are you doing here?”

“Homework,” wheezed the other student, slowly coming upright again.  “We’re a bit behind in class, so we got the keys–“

“Permission!” injected the second student quickly

“– and the keys to come down here and catch up a bit,” continued the first.  “We weren’t going to use your body, we were just wondering how badly advanced your state of decomposition was.”

“Still living,” I said with a snarl.  “You want the room next door; all the bodies in here are missing limbs that need to be put back with them before they can be autopsied.”

“Right,” said the first student starting to leave, but then stopped as the second looked at me quizzically.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I’m supposed to be here,” I said.  “Night watchman.”

“Oh.”  He didn’t look convinced, but I didn’t care.  They wandered off, whispering to each other and looking nervous, and I slipped off the trolley.  I was going to go and check out Blue’s place again and see what I’d missed when Monkeybutt turned up, and then I was going to go and find out if Belle Peep really did still have her daddy’s farm.

The overflow morgue

The mortician at the overflow morgue lets me have my own key because she got tired of trying to find how I’d broken in again.  She sighed as she threw it at me, and then laughed as I struggled to bend enough to pick it up.  I’d had a particularly difficult time with a particularly tricky case the night before, involving a sadistic acupuncturist, a loose goose and a bag of leaf tea and I really wasn’t set up for bending, stretching, or even moving faster than a stumble.

“Sweet beggared Moses, Mac,” she’d said, without any more malice in her tone than people who don’t know me use, “what have you done to yourself this time?  I don’t know, but you keep coming in here so you may as well call it home.  It’s people you know who keep this place in business, so perhaps I should show some gratitude, however indirectly.”

I hooked the key with a shoe and started to pull it up my leg to where my aching fingers could reach it.  “I like it in here,” I said.  “It’s quiet, no-one tries to bother me or interrupt my thoughts.”

“Who in their right mind would bother you, Mac?”

“People wanting me dead, mostly.”

“So you’re giving them a bit of a head start, eh?  Where better to hide a dead body than a morgue?”

“The graveyard, but it involves digging and a bit of heavy lifting.”  I got my fingertips to the key and tried to straight up again.  It proved painful, and from the sound of her laughter, humorous too.

“Don’t scare my assistant,” she said.  “And try not to let anyone official catch you.  If they come in while you’re thinking hard –,” her tone suggested that she thought I was sleeping, “– don’t sit up and greet them.  Not unless you’re trying to add to the population here yourself.”

I grunted, mostly with the effort of dragging my shoulder up so they were level with one another and she left it at that.  As she walked off I remember thinking that from the rear she was stunning, but when you saw her face she was breath-taking.  As in, she took your breath away so much that you couldn’t even beg for mercy.  She could have given Medusa tips on both make-up and hair-care.

I let myself in to the morgue and sniffed.  There was a strong blast of formaldehyde in the air, but there were the subtle, almost-citrussy notes of chloroform underneath.  I asked Miss Sapphire about it once, wondering if it’s supposed to smell like Japanese lime and she just wrinkled her delicate little nose at me.

“You sniff chloroform, Mac?”  She shook her head and exhaled very gently, a ladylike take on a very masculine gesture.  “How are you even still alive?”

I walked through the little entrance office without signing the visitors book; I figured that this was like a home away from home so I wasn’t really visiting.  And if I wasn’t here there was nothing to explain if someone noticed a trolley out of place, or a roll of bandages borrowed for a while.  In the next room the temperature dropped noticeably.  The overflow morgue is dug into the ground for insulation and they keep it cold enough that it doesn’t smell much except in summer.  The floor sloped steadily downwards as I headed towards the corpse bays where the bodies for autopsy are prepped.  There was pretty much always a free trolley there, and I have faith I’d wake up before they cut too deep; while if I slept in the fridges I might not wake up until I was in the chiller cabinet.  They lock those doors from the outside too.  I asked about it, and the mortician just shrugged her shoulders.

“Mad Frankie went to the city council and insisted,” she said.  “Sat there in the Mayor’s chair, banging his fist on the table and insisting that we put security in, saying that he wanted to know that when he died he wasn’t going to be some necrophiliac’s sex toy.  God only knows what kind of people he hangs out with, Mac.  Well, God and you, from what I hear.”  I had my own opinions about why Mad Frankie might want to be able to lock people into a morgue fridge, and I wasn’t going to speculate.

The corpse bays were unusually crowded, and when I started opening body bags and checking the contents I found that everyone seemed to be missing an arm or a leg, sometimes both.  Then I found the bag that contained all the arms and legs and realised that the mortuary staff would be doing jigsaw puzzles come the morning, and I permitted myself a grim little smile.  This wasn’t Mad Frankie’s style, he was much more direct.  This looked and felt like Natasha Monkeybutt to me, deploying some police weapon without due care and consideration.  I pushed the bag of limbs onto the floor, climbed on to the trolley and lay back.  I exhaled deeply, closed my eyes, and tried to think about all the things that had happened since I went looking for Little Boy Blue.  And I realised that I still hadn’t found out where he was and why someone had dragged a sheep up to his room to slaughter it there.

Jack Horner

“Why’d you want to know about yourself?”  As I’d hoped, the kid wasn’t thinking fast enough to spot that I’d been asking for own name a minute ago.

“I’m that paranoid,” I said.  It was the truth as well.  In my line of work it doesn’t take you very long to start feeling like there isn’t anywhere that isn’t under surveillance.  It doesn’t help that Mad Frankie and his Anger Management has paid-for access to all of the police CCTV cameras either; between that and his network of informers a man can’t piss up against a doorway without Mad Frankie knowing and sending you the bill for having it cleaned again.  I know; I have six from him.  One of which complains that I managed to give the door dutch elm disease, which I’d contest if there was a court that would hear the case.

“Hah, that’s just healthy in this town,” said the kid sounding twenty years older again.  “Well mister, I can tell you that you come in here every Thursday looking right different to how you look now, and you order a plum pie from us, with six plums.  Fancy one now?”

I shook my head, and waited for him to continue.  He didn’t, so I had to speak again.  “What else?  What’s my name?  How do I pay?  When was the last time I stiffed you?  How often do I sleep with your aunt?”

He looked a little taken-aback by the staccato questions rattled at him like machine-gun fire, and indeed he even took a step backwards.  Over in the corner the aunt knocked over a tub of ketchup which started to very slowly ooze from captivity.  She righted it before it got within an inch of the lip and wiped the table anyway.

“You’re Jack Horner,” he said.  “You sit in the corner eating your pie, and you mostly do it by sticking your thumb in, pulling out a plum, and making a song and dance about being a good boy.  Frankly mister, you’re weird, but you always pay up front so it kind of makes it hard to throw you out.  And if you’ve slept with my aunt mister, then it’s a bit weirder still that you keep trying it on with me.”  He was a little red-faced by the end, but a long way away from anything I’d call attractive.

“How many thumbs have I got?” I said.  It was a strange question but the vague description of Jack Horner was ringing bells in my head; tiny little silver bells like a carillon in a morose major key.

“Count ‘em for yourself, mister,” said the boy.  “Do you reckon you’ll come up surprised?”

“I think you might,” I said.  “I’ve got three, haven’t I?”

He looked at the counter, and his gaze didn’t move for a moment.  I wondered what he was thinking, and then, too late, realised that my hands were both resting on the counter.

“Not at the moment,” he said.  “Which is another weird thing mister.  I don’t think you’re who you’re claiming to be, so either you buy a pie and eat it, or you get out.”

“I’ll take the plum pie,” I said.  “Six plums.”

I sat down at an empty table, though they were all empty so it gave me an unaccustomed choice.  I sat as far away from the aunt as I could get and twiddled my thumbs.  The only man I know who’s got three thumbs and is so proud of it that he won’t shut up about it is Jack Crown.  He had a girlfriend for a while, a girl called Jill Hill, and then he lost his job after an accident he won’t talk about and needed alternative work.  He found it, but he’s secretive about it, and he’s a hard man to track down if he owes you anything.  He owes me a bucket and some brown paper, so maybe that’s why I’d not seen him in an age and a half.  But then there were the rumours that he’d found work for Natasha Monkeybutt, so maybe I wasn’t seeing him because he didn’t want me to.  Monkeybutt wouldn’t be above setting a tail on me and thinking she could get away with it.

“There you go mister not-Jack,” said the boy slamming a small pie down on the table.  The crust jumped slightly from the force, and when it settled back I could see the first plum glistening between the crust and the side of the dish.  I slipped my thumb in and pulled it out.

“What type of plum?” I asked.  “Victoria?”

The kid gave me an old stare and, turning away, said, “I think you mean Whose plum, mister.”

I was starving.  I ate it anyway.  I even paid him afterwards.

White-knuckled

I’ve gone through life white-knuckled and knock-kneed, and running away from the Blue Swan was no different.  Thankfully Jackie was still playing doggo and staying where I’d told her to, so I wasn’t pursued.  As I veered left at the T-junction I heaved a huge breath into my aching lungs and wondered when I be able to stop running away.  I didn’t think there was a whole lot of hope unless I’d finally broken my legs.  I took the next left, a quick right, and then fell against the first lighted doorway that I saw and only sobbed a little when it didn’t open for me.

No-one had followed me, it seemed.  I wheezed heavily, getting my breath back and feeling the aches and pains molest me like an eighties television presenter, but there were no running feet, no cries for people to stop me, and best of all, no sounds of gunshot or angry people hitting defenceless street furniture with heavy tools.  Eventually I pulled my legs in, listened to the cartilage in my knees crunch, and wondered what I was going to do next.  I was still looking for Boy Blue, if only to let him know that Natasha Monkeybutt was looking for him too, and I was kind of curious about whoever had redecorated his room with sheep’s blood.  I knew there were better things to do than get involved with any part of a case more than treating it as just a job: like Miss Sapphire had said, people tend to die around me and it’s better that I don’t let myself get attached.  I’ve watched kids get orphaned while I was on their case, and I’ve watched relationships fizzle and die just because I’ve been sat at a nearby table.  My record is emptying an entire restaurant on Valentine’s day, with all the men going one way and the women another.  It’s not a proud moment, but I ever write up a CV it’s going on there.

Then there was the Jack Horner angle.  There was a name I’d not come across before, and I thought I knew all the low-life in this city.  From what Miss Sapphire had been saying it sounded like it might be a pseudonym, which is a long word for a small-time crook.  And he had to be small time, or Mad Frankie would be putting me on his case in the hopes that he’d be the next victim of the MacArthur curse.  Or blessing, depending on who you asked.

The gentle patter of rain started, soot-laden droplets splashing down on the filthy, pot-holed streets and making me glad I was sat in a doorway.  I looked out across the street into the fading light of late-afternoon, and the door I was leaning against pushed out squashing me against the wall.

“Move it, you piece of crap,” snarled a woman with a red face like she’d been washing it in the floor-scrubbing bucket.  She was wearing a heavy woollen coat and carrying a handbag like a mattock.  She swung it at me to make her point, and I ducked, to avoid it.  “Get out of my bloody doorway,” she continued.  “It’s scum like you that make an honest woman like me afraid to walk the streets at night.  You disgust me, you tramp.”  Her handbag struck the wall with the clatter of cutlery and she didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.  I wriggled out from behind the door as she put her weight against it, and I just got out of the way in time.  The door struck the wall and the glass in the top quivered with the impact.

“Now look what you’ve made me do, wretch,” she said.  Little flecks of white spittle flew out of her mouth, and I flinched away.  I have a mild germophobia about other people, which my doctor says he can’t understand given where I seem to spend most of my time.  Then he orders me out of his office before he autoclaves me, which is a threat I know he’d like to make good on.

“Harridan,” I said, racking my brains as to why she looked familiar.

“Hah!  Big words.  What a shame your wallet can’t match your mouth.”  Her words dripped with sarcasm the way a cobra’s fangs drip with venom and suddenly I knew who she was; the last time I’d seen her was a few years ago when she was still a stripper at Lucy Locket’s.  She’d been hanging upside down from a sequined pole wearing a g-string, high-heels and an ill-fitting wig that didn’t really hide either her dandruff or her cradle cap, glaring at me while I crawled under the seating pursuing the Legless Wonder.  She’d spat at me then too, and I’d thrown a handful of change at her.

“Belle Peep,” I said, my cough hacking its way through her surname and dragging it out for a whole six seconds.  She didn’t look happy that I knew it.

“The next show’s at nine,” she said.  “Pay on the door.”

I looked up: the doorway I was in was the side-door of the Municipal Library.  I don’t know if she saw my quizzical face (it’s a lot like my orgasm face, I’ve been told, which fact I ascribe to the infrequency of my orgasms) but she swung her bag at me again.  I dodged once more to the sound of crashing cutlery, and then she was past me, stalking off down the street like an old whore with too much pride to pick her breasts up off the floor and retire.

“Jack Horner,” I muttered under my breath, hoping it wouldn’t start my cough off again.  My doctor’s written on my records that he’s hoping its consumption and refusing to test me for it so as not to jinx things.  “I know how to find you.”

Steal your prayers

They used to call her Jackie back in the day, back when names had a meaning to her.  Now she wears tin-foil curlers in her hair to keep people from reading her thoughts, dresses out of dumpsters, and is the kind of hooker you go and find when you've already caught every disease going and need something worse to chase them all out of your system.  She was standing on the other side of the road as I exited through the hatch, my chest scraping along the pavement on some kind of slime – I was hoping for vomit as that washes out – squeezing spots on the side of her neck and peering at me like she was hoping she could frisk me before I woke up.  Her eyes were as crazy as ever, and her lips were so red I knew instantly I didn't want to know what she was using for lipstick.  She scuttered over to me like a hermit crab spotting a new hideout.
"Jackie," I said quickly.  A normal man would have stood up and chased her off, but I wasn't about to try standing for anyone until I'd got my breath back, and whatever I'd slid in across the pavement was making me retch.
"I'm Bella!" she said, her voice a half-shriek, cracked and scratchy.  "I'm Bella!"  She tilted her head sideways like a bird and eyed me again.  I felt like day-old carrion being scrutinised by the vulture, and suspected that I looked a lot like it too.
"Bella then," I said.  I got my hands underneath my chest and tried to remember if there were any tricks to doing a push-up.  "It's Mac."
She recoiled, and I felt insulted.  It's one thing knowing that there are fungi that consider you too far down in the sewer for their children to grow on, but it's quite another to meet any such fungus.  I pushed with my hands and they sank into whatever I was lying in without actually moving me any higher up.
"I'm Bella!" she squawked again, and I wondered how much of her brain had been scrambled by the tin-foil hair-curlers.  "I'm all sparkly!"
I pushed harder and managed to lift myself enough to get my knees underneath me and then my feet underneath them.  I felt like an accordion, but it was enough to lurch, unsteadily, to my full height and lean against a wall while my lungs heaved like a blacksmith's bellows on a midwinter evening.  "What are you doing here, Jackie?" I asked.  I didn't really want to know the answer, but I wanted her to keep in mind I was still alive and could probably fight back.
"I'm Bella!" she said again, and I wondered if she counted as a woman.  My mother, on those rare occasions she'd talk to me before she obtained the restraining order, had told me never to hit a woman.  I try not to disappoint her more than twice a year, and I still had four months to go.  "I'm turning tricks for Edward."  I thought about this: Edward couldn't be the name of her pimp because there wasn't anyone mad enough to take her on.  Even the guys who had two live hookers and three dead ones wouldn't take a chance on Jackie – or Bella, or whatever name she thought she had when she woke up that morning – in case they ended up with just her.
"That's great, Bella," I said, managing at the last moment not to call her Jackie again.  "I bet you're doing a great job."  There were no noises coming from the doors nearby, so either none of them went into the Blue Swan or they were still trying to sort out the fire-retardant chemicals.  I eyed the hatch warily, just in case.
"I'm pregnant!"
That was a low blow; just as I was trying to inhale and getting ready to move, she hit me with news that  I'd have sworn was physiologially impossible.  I actually stopped breathing through shock, and had to bang my fist against my sternum a couple of times to get things going again.  While that was happening, I thought I saw the hatch move very slightly.
"By Edward?" I asked, nervously.  "Is he the father?"  Had the hatch flexed a little then?
"No silly, by Jacob."
"Jacob was the name of that dog you used to keep on a chain," I said, concentrating on the hatch.  It looked like someone was trying to beat it open from the inside.
"I'm pregnant! By Jacob!"
"Right," I said, the horror of what she was saying knocking politely on the front-door of my attention while the definitely-flexing hatch kicked in a side-door and starting shouting.  I checked both ends of the street and decided to go with the closer.  It looked like a T-junction at the stop.  "Gotta go, Jackie, stay... stay... stay!"
She froze, and I lumbered into a run, my knees clicking like castanets and my feet slapping against the floor like an overenthusiastic penguin.  Behind me the hatch banged open and dark smoke began to billow out, while the bouncers slumped across each other, greedily sucking in fresh air.  Jackie – or Bella – stared after me, her eyes wider dilated than an elephant's cervix during the birth of twins, and as I rounded the corner I heard her say plaintively, "They steal your prayers."
"They can't if you never say any," I muttered to myself, and then I had no more breath for anything other than running.

Heading downtown

The Forensic squad didn't exactly move aside to let me pass, but they also didn't drop anything in my way, or give me a helping push between the shoulders when I reached the top of the stairs, and I've learned to be grateful for small mercies.  I ooh-ed and aah-ed my way down the stairs as muscle and bone protested against misuse and my brain ignored them.  I spend most of my waking day in pain anyway, so a few more misfiring nerves is nothing I can't cope with.  At the foot of the stairs I stopped and sniffed – fresh urine, about ten minutes old, I thought, so likely not the Forensics team – and then went out into the night.  Heading downtown.
The orange glow of the sodium streetlights picked out light and puddles; it had been raining for nearly two weeks now, like the city was in mourning for the loss of its innocence.  I had my doubts about the purity of the city before its fall, but I can understand regret on a deep, physical level, and I sympathised.  I mostly plodded through the puddles, splashing myself and any random passers-by as I did so, but here and there I could see the eddies and currents that told me the hole was deep and dangerous, and then I'd have to stagger around it, trying not to slow down and stop in case my hips seized up and decided they didn't want to go on.  The city outsourced the road-repairs to a company called Tar'em'n'car'em, telling people that a modern company didn't worry about letters when there was punctuation to replace it and that the name was descriptive of a vibrant, forward-moving, fast-thinking, business-capable organisation that would bring traffic back to the streets and free-up the snarls of modern transportation.  And, best as I can tell, no-one stopped to listen to any of those words and they voted all in favour of it.  So now when it turns out (though not so many people know this yet) that Tar'em'n'car'em is a subsidiary holding company that links ultimately back to one Natasha Monkeybutt, and that it's worth worrying about anyone who tries to describe their line of work as "business-capable" or talks about "bringing traffic back to the street" (where did it go?  The playgrounds?  What traffic are we talking about here?).  The company repairs potholes by the cheap expedient of digging material out of the pavements, because the cars don't drive on the pavements and pedestrians should be made illegal.  So we have holes that run down to the sewer systems, to old rivers that were long built over, and to darker, danker places where strange creatures are rumoured to live.  And when they fill up after long rains, and you misstep and plunge into the depths, you can find yourself lost and drowning far too fast.
Still, it's convenient for people like the Anger Management, who specialise in finding locations for people that prove rapidly fatal.
I passed a pizza joint that was doing a busy trade at this time of the evening and my stomach rumbled.  I don't much care for pizza; tomato's just a little bit acidic for my stomach these days.  Even so, the smell of the baking dough and the slightly-rancid anchovies was enough to make me drool, and my thoughts turned to where I might get some food from.  I could see what my room-mate had left in the fridge, but I'd been living with him for long-enough that I knew it was likely to be some combination of alcohol and lube and probably not that nutritious.  Then, as a bus roared past, filled with screaming passengers, I saw the dim lights of the Blue Swan tavern across the road and remembered that there was a line-cook working there who owed me for rescuing his daughter a few years back and probably wouldn't spit in any food I ordered.  That was good enough for me.

Natasha Monkeybutt

"You know," I said, my voice a low growl, "I'm thinking that I'm not going to get my money back by standing around talking to you, Monkeybutt.  You can find out who lived here from the neighbours."
"And what if I don't want to talk to the neighbours, Mac?"
"Then you're not doing your job, Monkeybutt."  She winced a little that time.  "Something got murdered in here," and I gestured around me at the sticky red floor, "and that's a noisy business."
"And you'd know about that, wouldn't you, Mac?"
"I've heard the noises coming from the police interrogation cells, if that's what you mean?  From the cell adjoining, most often."  I stared into her eyes, daring her to deny it, and she stared right back, her eyes tiny cold ice chips hidden deep in her head by the layers of makeup.  For a moment I wondered if there might be a tiny powderdrift happening below one eye, but then she moved her head and her face was as smooth and glacial as before.
"Tell me who lived her, Mac, and you can go."
I almost pushed past her, but I could see her Forensics team coming down the corridor now, and while I reckoned I could just about outrun any of those fatties, the crap they were carrying would slow me down a lot if they just dropped it, which they probably would.  They had a roll of plastic sheeting as wide as a man (well, not as wide as one of them, obviously), little cases they carried by the handle, bigger cases that they wheeled along, plastic buckets that sloshed and some carrier bags that... that were take-out food by the smell.  I found myself slightly nauseated that they could bring themselves to stomach food at a murder scene like this, and I've been in this game for longer than you'd like to imagine.  I've seen men killed in inventive ways, and in boring ways, and sometimes I've contributed in some small way, to the execution of justice.  My mind bounced briefly back to watching a man fall from the roof of a hotel because he wasn't expecting me to appear from behind a heating vent, and then later of trying to get information out of him before his shattered ribs and punctured lungs did for him.  In retrospect, kicking him in the side to make him talk faster was probably counterproductive.
"Mac?"
I looked at Natasha again and decided to tell her what the neighbours would.
"I was sleeping at the time, and I never go out of my own flat anyway," I said.
"That's what the neighbours will say, Mac," she said.  "You're not a neighbour here.  You're not a neighbour anywhere.  Even the rats and cockroaches band together and form housing associations to get you evicted."
I nodded.  My living arrangements are unusual by most people's standards, but they work for me and people like Monkeybutt don't need to know anything about them.  "Fine, Monkeybutt," I said, and ducked.  My spine cracked like I was stamping on those wretched Housing Association cockroaches and pain shot up and down both my arms simultaneously, but my head just got below the sweep of her arm and she ended up slapping the doorjamb instead of me.  She said nothing, but I could see from the whiteness of her fingers that it must have hurt.  "Little Boy Blue lived here, the jazz musician.  He's a hep cat, and he might have been out working tonight, so this blood might not even be his."
"I see," she said nodding.  "And the eviscerated sheep?  You don't think the blood might be theirs?"
"I don't think for people who don't pay me," I said smoothly.
"So you don't think, then?"  The slap might have missed but that jab hurt almost as much.
"I've got a home to go to," I said, and she looked like she didn't believe me.  Little gasps of powder broke from her forehead like bonzai volcanic eruptions as she frowned, tiny craze lines showing me where the frown-lines should have been.
"Go then, Mac," she said.  "And keep your nose out of police business.  I'm shutting down all organised crime in this city, and I think you're a crime all by yourself."
"Feeling's mutual," I said, and had the pleasure of seeing yet more puffs of powder escape her face as she tried to look bewildered underneath all that make-up.

Little Boy Blue

The sunlight was weak and gray through the curtains, struggling to illuminate the den of vice within.  I was stood in the doorway, my piece in my hand and holes in my pockets.  I'd left the leather gun-holster behind at a pawn-store twenty minutes earlier, so I had no choice but to hold the gun.  It had given the bus-driver a bit of a turn, more because I could tell he wanted to throw me off the bus for they way I smelled.  But he relented and the rest of the passengers just resented me in silence until I got off at my stop and they broke out in spontaneous applause.  I hate bad winners.  I put a bullet in the bus's back wheel and walked off.
I looked around the room.  This was the last known address for Little Boy Blue, one-time jazz musician and trumpeter, now a little down on his luck, scraping the edges of the barrel, and pushing little bits of this and that for Mad Frankie and his Anger Management.  It was no kind of life for a real person, but Blue was a lowlife, the kind of scum that apologises for its existence when you stumbled across it behind the garbage cans.  He'd even offer to slit his own throat to save you having to get your own knife dirty.  He wasn't here now, all I had were two dead sheep, enough blood to bathe in, and a pathetic collection of paperback pulp novels.  Looked like Blue liked to read in his quiet time.
"MacArthur?"  The voice behind me actually sounded surprised, which in turn surprised me.  I turned, and found myself looking at the Head of Organised Crime Prevention, Miss Natasha Monkeybutt.
"Monkeybutt," I said, nodded with professional calm.  My hat slipped down over my eyes, and I had to push it back up onto my forehead with the barrel of the gun.
"You know it's not pronounced like that," she said, equally calmly.  "Thinking of committing suicide Mac?  We'd miss you."
"Sarcasm ill becomes a lady," I said, forcing a smile.  She recoiled a little, my teeth are on the black side of black.
"And murder ill becomes a private eye," she said.  "If that's still what you're pretending to be.  You don't fool me for an instant, you know, Mac.  You don't.  You like to think you're independent, but you still jump when Mad Frankie sneezes.  I know he's got a handler for you, and it's just a matter of time before we have a name.  And when we pin you down, we'll make you talk like a nun released from a seven year vow of silence standing in the House of Gigolos."
"I thought they closed that place down?" I looked around the room again while she was talking.  Something weird had gone on here.  Who had brought two sheep up six flights of steep, narrow stairs and then slaughtered them in Blue's little studio flat?
"I," she said, with emphasis.  "I closed it down Mac, just like I track down and close down all other kinds of Organised Crime in this city.  Batman's got nothing on me."
"Both your parents dead now, then?" I said innocently.  I wanted her to leave so I could get to finding out why the sheep had had to die.  Her face turned purple, and I thought for a moment that she was going to hit me.
"I think you'd know if my father had died," she said, tightly.  I nodded, he was the Pensioneer General, running the funds for pretty much every pension in the city.  His death would send shockwaves through the financial markets and probably start a run on the banks.  Didn't bother me though, my money was stashed away in a dirty sock under a filthy mattress in a small... well, that's probably all you really need to know about where I keep my cash.  It's pretty safe.
"This is a crime scene, Mac, you need to leave.  Now."  I could hear footsteps and the laboured breathing of the police department's finest officers coming up to smother the room in plastic and pull it apart, fibre by fibre, hunting for the answer in the details.  I nodded again, cursing inwardly that I'd not got there sooner.
"Yeah," I said.  "Looks like Blue's already skipped the joint, probably taking my money with him.  Little rat."
"You know who lived here?" Suddenly Natasha Monkeybutt was focusing on me, her eyes wide and glistening like a little girl who's just been told her parents have sold her for a trip to Antigua.
"Maybe," I said, edging past her.  She put out her hand, then thought better of touching me and pulled it back again.
"I think you should stay for a while, Mac," she said.  "It seems like you might have evidence on you after all."