Liquid Cool: The Cyberpunk Detective Series (14 page)

"Screw you! My insurance is not paying for that. Get a spray can from the local market. One coat. I may even have a can in the trunk for you."

I desperately tried to reach for his face and claw it off, but Flash restrained me.

"You touch me and I'll sue you and take that pile of junk from you!"

My head was throbbing I was so enraged. It took Flash fifteen minutes at least to calm me down but I did, eventually.

His insurance did pay, but it was a bargain basement on. All I got was ten percent of what the cost was. I sued him in small claims court. He never showed up and I won my judgment, but the clerk said good luck getting him to pay. There would be an arrest warrant filed, but no police was ever going to act on it with murderers, rapists, and gang members to deal with.

I did all I could do, so I did all that I shouldn't do, channeling all my OCD negative energies at him. I found out where he lived, where he worked, his girlfriend's house, his favorite market, every place he went, and stalked him. I stalked him twenty-four hours a day. And I made sure he saw me.

At the beginning he laughed at me, throwing a curse or two at me, and an occasional obscene gesture. Then he got angry, especially when I followed him to his girlfriend's or when they went to a restaurant for dinner.

The girlfriend was never amused by me and one time she came out to go somewhere--he was still in the residence--and saw me and ran back inside. Soon after, I could see that she was getting scared--and so was he.

There was a massive rainstorm, so much so that the hover-cars were staying out of the sky. But not me. I staked out a spot right across from his place and I could see their silhouettes watching me from the third story. If they were on a higher floor, they would have ignored me, but people who live close to the ground look out their windows to the ground. It's just what you did. And there I was.

They thought they were clever one day and sneaked out their residence the back way into their hover-car and had gone to another neighborhood, clear across the city. I illegally bugged their car and I set it to ring my mobile if their hover-car started up.

The looks on their faces when they came out of the restaurant and saw me was priceless. They were
really
scared and bolted away from me. I realized that I had reached into my jacket for something and they thought it was for a gun.

The next day, the Guy Who Scratched My Vehicle came out of his residence, his girlfriend standing behind him and watching, and he threw a brown paper bag at me.

"Take it psycho," he said. "You got your money. Go ahead and count it."

I picked up the bag from the wet ground and opened the bag. I knew they expected me to just take it and go but I walked a few feet, sat right on the sidewalk, and counted every last bill. They watched me with utter contempt.

When I finished, I got up and left, glancing back one last time to glare at them. I actually didn't gain anything in my episode of madness. I got every dime to fix my car, but the expense in time and money of following them and doing the surveillance on them was all on me. But I felt good, as most fools do.

I never expected to see them ever again, but there was the Guy Who Scratched My Vehicle and the same girlfriend standing in my new detective's office, staring at me with smirks.

"Well, well," he said. "A detective. I should have known."

I had just gotten a basic desk and three chairs for my new office. Basic furniture and delivery was quick and easy. I could feel my blood starting to boil. Why were they here? How did they find me? I wasn't even looking at them anymore. I sat behind my desk, looked up, and there they both were sitting down in front of me, smirking.

"You probably thought you'd never see us again," GW said.

"I kinda thought that's how we left things."

"Were we surprised to hear that you were a detective."

Was this more of Phishy's doing? "Who told you that?"

He smiled. "Yeah, I was told that too. You're a confidential detective."

This had to be Phishy!

"Well," he continued, "the wife and I need a detective. We did some looking around the Yellow Pages and there's so many of them in there that it makes your head spin. And when you have no one to recommend someone, you're just playing Russian roulette with your wallet. Then we heard about you. We said, we got personal experience with that psycho. He locks his sights on you and you're done. He'll never stop, till he gets what he wants. Don't ever be on the opposite end of his sights when he locks on you. The perfect detective. Surprised you didn't do it sooner."

"What makes you think I'd ever take you as a client?"

"People beating down the door to hire you, are they?" his girlfriend-wife quipped.

"You can't still be sore about the incident? I paid you your money. So we're even steven."

"Any man who hurts a man's woman, his kids, his family, his pets, his
vehicle
...you damage a man's vehicle and...he needs to be put down. You scratched my vehicle. I would never work for someone so venal. No way. No how."

The smirks from their faces were gone. They realized that I was
not
over it.

"You really are psycho. Hold a grudge for this long. It was over five years ago. Yeah, you're the right psycho for this and as the wife said, no one else is beating down the door to hire you."

"Listen here, I have integrity. I have standards. I'm going to pick the clients I work for. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going have solid clients with integrity."

His wife burst out with a laugh.

"Good luck with that, psycho," he said and turned to his wife. "Watch this."

He threw a bag on my desk and leaned back. The smirk had returned to their faces.

I looked at the bag--slightly open, filled with small bills. I looked at them, looked at the bag, stared at it. This was a critical junction in my life--what kind of detective would I be? Principled or just some
ratty
PI for hire. In other words, starve or have money for bills and food.

I grabbed the bag of cash.

Humble pie. I, of all people, was not one to eat anything I didn't know all the ingredients of, and that was apart from friends poisoning me back in grade school. But there had to be an exception to every rule. Humble pie wasn't its real name; it was some kind of natural cross-bred apple--humble pie was apple pie and it was damn good. I had it often and though I was sitting in an old-style diner in a seedy part of the city surrounded by other grimy establishments all around, I was enjoying pie.

I sat in a faded and stained yellow booth by myself. Other identical booths lined the circular wall of the diner. In the center were four-person square tables--all empty--and both the main counter and open kitchen grill was opposite the main entrance. The counter had old bar stools, each with the butt of a customer seated, eating and drinking whatever. There were only seven other people in the yellow booths lining the wall, sitting solo like me. Seven of us were on one side, and way on the other side was one punkish, mustached guy who had glanced at me more than once since I entered and sat down. Even now, after I had ordered and started stuffing my face with my humble pie, he was pretending not to watch me. Seven of us were male and one was a female. She was the only female in the place, besides the waitress, and this lone female had also glanced at me more than once.

I was almost to the end. I never licked a plate of food but I scraped every last morsel of humble pie with the fork. My drink was gone and I gave off
the hint of
a customer who was done, satisfied, and ready to get out into the rain to go about their day.

"Hey, Mister." The girl was now standing at my booth--not the waitress. She slid into my booth opposite me. "Can you believe this rain?"

"It's a wet one out there," I said.

"You said it. Wet all around. What are you going to do now?"

I pushed my empty plate away from me and started wiping my hands with my napkins. "It's funny you asked. Is that a dove tattoo on your forearm?"

She smiled as she extended her arm over the table to me. "Yeah, it's sweet, huh?" She admired the design.

I slapped the handcuff on her wrist.

The girl jumped up, first with a look of fear and then came a flash of anger.

"What the..." she yelled.

She pulled her handcuffed arm, but the other end I had handcuffed under the table. The table was old, but it was sturdy enough.

"Help!" she yelled looking at the other customers, but mostly at that seventh man way on the other side.

People barely registered any concern at all, including the waitress and the cooks behind the counter.

"You should sit down and relax."

"Help!"

I was not about listen to a screaming fifteen-year-old female delinquent--though she probably had graduated to other criminal designations by now. I reached into my jacket for my mobile and was already dialing the number. It was pressed against my ear.

"I found her," I said into it. "Get down here now. Action Alley. Cafe Fifties is
its name." I hung up.

"Who are you talking to?" the girl yelled at me.

"Who do you think?"

"Help!" She repeatedly yanked her handcuffed arm as if she wanted to pull it out of its socket.

"Stop that," I said.

"Help! I'm being kidnapped!"

I stood up.

"Gentlemen, and lady. I am a private detective and was hired by this girl's, if that's what you want to call her, family to find her so they can take her ass off the streets before she gets STD'd or dead, whichever comes first. Please ignore her."

I really didn't need to say anything because that's what they were already doing--ignoring us.

The girl was going crazy, yanking her arm and screaming. I had enough and got up. I decided to stand at the main entrance, but kept my eye on her--and that seventh guy from the corner of my other eye.

The Guy Who Scratched My Vehicle arrived about fifteen minutes later. How he got to the Cafe so fast, I didn't know. But he wasn't alone. There was a shorter and older man with him--the splitting image of him. It wasn't his twin, but his father. It was freaky how similar they looked. So GW knew exactly what he'd look like in about twenty or so years--all gray and balding. But the star of the show was what else was with them. A shortish, roundish, fattish woman with a big, fluffy, yellow hairdo. It had to be a wig. These were his parents? The father was wearing some kind of leather tank top and the mother was wearing a sleeveless dress that came to her knees. Both were wearing white socks visible just under their knees, with their boots. My God, if I were GW, I would never go out in public with them.

The trio were through the door and staring at me, and all I had to do was gesture with my chin.

"I handcuffed her so she couldn't run away. She was yelling and screaming before you came, but now she's hiding under that table doing her impersonation of a ninja."

They walked over to my table and the mother bent down. Then it erupted. GW was the clone of his father. The mother and daughter were clones too. Only the girl was the slim as a twig version before her metabolism quit and she blew up to be a fatty too. The girl, still hiding under the table, began cursing simultaneously at the mother who was screaming her own obscenities. I've heard some cursing, but even I felt I would need to wash my ears out with soap. Finally the girl came out and was standing almost nose to nose with her mother--both screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. All I could think about was the spit they were showering each other with. I couldn't believe what I then saw. The mother punched the girl in the head, dropping her to the floor. That was the end of the cursing and screaming.

The mother joined father and son who had been watching the whole exchange like zombies. The trio walked back to me.

GW turned to them. "I told ya, Ma. I found the guy to find her. He's a psycho when it comes to tracking people."

The mother, who obviously had no perception of personal space, was inches from me when she said, "You're a good detective. Those cop bums couldn't find our daughter. No one could. You found her in one day."

"There's more," I said.

"More?" she asked, as her head cocked back like a chicken.

"You don't think your daughter was led into temptation all by herself. The source of her corruption is sitting right behind you over there."

The trio followed where my finger was pointing to the punkish guy sitting in the booth way over. I almost felt sorry for him as his head shot up in the air when he noticed GW and company's eyes locked on him. I saw their eyes narrow and their mouths contort into snarls. They bolted after him.

The punk jumped out of his booth and up over the counter into the kitchen. The cooks yelled at him as he ran through and I heard what could only be the back door thrown open. GW's mother rolled over the counter after him with GW and father following. She may have been fat compared to their skinniness, but she was twice as fast as them.

I stood there shaking my head. How long was I going to have to be here? I couldn't just leave the girl handcuffed to the table unconscious. I walked back to the adjacent table and sat. I was tempted to order another piece of humble pie, but I decided to just wait.