d**k Richards: Private Eye

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

They call me a d**k because I am one: d**k Richards, Private Eye. Though there’s more than a little truth to it, at least I’m less of a jerk than this guy:

“The issue,” Count Fantabuloso says, leaning closer across the table between us, “is armament not of my issue.” He’s mastered that tone of voice that makes you feel stupid for asking a reasonable question, or in this case simply making conversation. I’ve been working with him long enough that I should probably expect it, but it still stings.

If you didn’t know the man, you’d laugh. Outlandish hat complete with wide brim and ridiculous feather, baby-blue alligator suit, indoor sunglasses rimmed with diamonds—his dress sense would put any pimp to shame, and he likes it that way. It makes people underestimate him. They don’t see the man in the opera cloak as a threat until it’s too late. This, along with his intelligence and ruthlessness, was how he became Tipton’s sole magical weapons dealer. If a dwarf in Tipton wants to brain a goblin, he gets his runic shotgun from the Count. If an elf needs components for a magical poison, she gets them from the Count. And if a troll thug looking to go up in the world even thinks about increasing its arsenal, it first gets permission to have that thought from the Count.

That’s why he’s concerned. One of his lieutenants, the Baron Marcus, recently found a handgun in a Dumpster. Count Fantabuloso keeps meticulous records so he knows it isn’t his. He doesn’t know where it comes from either, which is where I come in.

He nods and the Baron Marcus, who’s been hovering nearby, places the gun on the table in front of me. Beyond him several esquires, grunts in the Count’s organization, maintain a cordon of privacy.

You might wonder why I work for a guy like this at all, but while he’s very much a warlord, he qualifies as an enlightened one. Since he’d supply both sides in any war, with careful accounting and the persuasive application of force he can shut troublemakers down cold. In his own words: “Peace is a fool’s dream; tranquility learned.” The Count honestly thinks people will eventually become tame enough to think twice about violence. I doubt it will work in the long run, but I can’t argue with his results so far. If weapons start freely streaming into Tipton, the delicate balance of power the Count has carefully cultivated will topple like a fat man with one leg. Millennia-old racial tensions, hanging in the air like gunpowder, will explode the first time someone fires a warning shot. All in all, he’s a lot better than the other assholes I could be working for.

I glance at the gun, then take down specifics in my field notebook. When. Where. How. The Count doesn’t have much info, but it sounds like someone dumped it to avoid getting caught. I don’t know why the Baron Marcus was snooping around in Dumpsters, but I don’t ask. Everyone has their reasons and few are beautiful under close scrutiny.

“Please find this fool,” the Count concludes, “so I can beat him like an MMA poseur wannabe.” He brandishes his omnipresent Differance Stick, a heavy-duty cane topped with a brass knob. A small plaque on the side reads, “Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. Making a Differance Since 1831.” The feather in his hat—long, bright green, and hopefully fake—wobbles in agreement. I’d hate to meet the bird it came from.

After checking the safety, I tuck the handgun under my right armpit, into the spare holster Raven insisted I wear today. It feels reassuringly heavy in my hand, but there’ll be time to inspect it in more detail later. My favorite sidearm, a business gift from the Count, is stashed under my left.

Our business concluded, I excuse myself and make my way past the cordon of esquires. Tharaveir, the owner of this fine establishment, is making a rare appearance behind the counter, checking the till and scowling daggers at the Count. While the Pub, as it’s called, gains a certain cachet from being the Count’s favorite watering hole, whenever the Count actually shows up most patrons are too scared to stick around. With his gaunt, almost hollow cheeks and aquiline features, not to mention his five-foot-eight stature, it’s not hard to make Tharaveir as elven, but there’s more than the normal amount of casual menace leering from his blue eyes. He’s managed to get kicked out of both Alfheim and Svartalfheim—the elven and dark elven homelands, respectively—and if he ever decides the Count is more trouble than he’s worth, the s**t will shower down like an avalanche and the fan won’t have a chance. Tharaveir will never win, but he’ll never give up either.

I exit without incident and humanity explodes around me. Evergreen Court is only four stories tall, but the incessant squawking of specialty shops, restaurants, and ATMs, all clamoring for attention like hyperactive four-year-olds, is barely contained by the sound-absorbing foam embedded in the safety railings. A middle-aged man, in the slack-jawed, head-slightly-tilted posture that comes standard with vidscreen sunglasses, glides past on the moving walkway like a digital zombie. He’s far from the only one.

I shoulder myself into the tide of flesh, letting the walkway take me where I want to go. A “public service announcement” from a tattoo parlor informs me that the first five people to get a phoenix stenciled on their liver will win an all-expenses paid trip through the daytime talk show circuit, as if there aren’t enough attention whores already.

My next stop is an express elevator nearly filled to capacity. It smells faintly of deodorant. The corporate logos in the sound-absorbing carpet are worn flat and a kid lost in an e-book nearly elbows me in the stomach. It can be hard to tell whether those kind of moves are on purpose, but unspoken etiquette allows retaliatory knees to the junk. I don’t. Unspoken etiquette and legality are not the same. A panel near me displays the elevator’s maximum capacity and I stifle a sharp laugh. Every year, maximum occupancy goes down while maximum load goes up.

I take the Jennings Court exit and, a short walkway later, arrive at the entrance to my office. Or, more accurately, the entrance to my office complex, even though I’m the only tenant. Situated in a corporate red light district, it’s a modest beige door set into a beige wall. Self-help corporations, financial advisors, maid services, and the occasional franchised ethnic deli flaunt themselves around me, corporate whores all. Judging from the crowd gathered in the central open space, the guy in the hippo costume is about to make his annual bungee jump. It’s one of the more successful marketing promotions, and one year there was no one inside. When it hit the floor, the stuffed hippo costume exploded into coupons and vouchers to a shocked silence, and then applause. That was the year I stopped watching. I think about joining the tourists, but the odds of him getting caught in the cord are too low to make it worth my while.

I touch my door and the reactive film laminate shows a numeric keypad at eye level. I punch in the security code and the door slides aside. The narrow hallway beyond leads to six doors, three on each side, before dead-ending at a seventh. They’re all the deep, rounded red of convincingly fake wood, all sport decorative brass hinges, and each bears an inexpensive plaque with my name. The decoy doors also lead to offices, but those are trapped. Of everyone who’s tried to kill me, only one group has guessed the right door—the second on the left—on the first try, and they were as surprised as we were. The paranoia might seem like overkill, but word of mouth counts for a lot, and that word says anyone who wants to hire me presses “0” to leave a message at the outer door and waits for me to get back to them. Anyone else is probably trying to kill me. I could just move my office, true, but even though the Count pays extremely well, and even with the help of a black hat who owed me a favor, buying this much space was a hefty investment. I’m not letting it go unless absolutely necessary.

The inner door, as always, is locked. I trace a pattern on it with my finger and it swings outward.

I’m not sure why, other than her sense of humor, Raven’s office is decked out the way it is. Lightweight aluminum filing cabinets, stained a mottled brown, line the walls, but all they do is look impressive. There’s nothing inside and I don’t even know if they actually open. A ceiling fan with three blades turns slowly, churning air-conditioned air. Cheap blinds hang over two wide LED panels, filtering a dirty yellow light into the room. Raven’s desk, authentic wood from a certified, carbon-negative tree farm down in Ecuador, looms against the rear wall, its left end flush with the empty doorway to my office. For some reason, she thinks there’s still enough nature left to be worth saving.

I slide my field notebook, a thin brick with limited memory and an electrosensitive screen, into its holster in the armrest of my desk/chair. Stiffened fiber optic cables, woven into a surprisingly comfortable chair, sprout processing elements molded into arm- and headrests. A thin screen always hangs at just the right angle. The entire thing glints, beads of light moving through the cable like an ethereal ant farm, as the notebook copies itself to permanent storage. As usual, I almost forget that the stylus doesn’t stay with the notebook; it has its own slot where it can recharge.

I place the Count’s mystery gun on my table. It has a black surface, gridded with white lines, and I whip out my phone to take a few pictures of the gun from different angles. An app calculates its dimensions, distills a silhouette, and appends everything to the message I send Raven.

“You ever seen anything like this?” I say. The grip’s wooden, but the barrel is metal. There are no obvious markings, magical or otherwise, but no obvious seams either. The wood joins the metal perfectly, as if the two were grown together, and any magic capable of that usually leaves a physical trace, a sigil or at least a mark.

Raven’s head appears on the wall in front of me. Her hair is black with dark purple highlights, wound into a prim bun, and she’s wearing thick-rimmed emo glasses to match. My phone interfaces with my desk, and it’s projecting her response. Sophisticated algorithms, or so I’ve been told, filter out the background for her privacy.

“Nope,” she says. “What does it shoot?”

Biting back the urge to say people, I go with, “Haven’t checked yet. I wanted your general impression first.”

“Aww...how sweet,” is the reply. Her head morphs into a giant yellow smiley face.

I shake my head. Emoticons are back in fashion as retro kitsch, and of course Raven joined the bandwagon as soon as possible.

The face morphs back into her head, and her hair is now orange. It changes colors along with her mood, even in person, but her eyes always stay green.

I pick up the gun and pop the clip. Nine shaped-quartz rounds in a wicker magazine appear. There’s room for ten. I check the chamber. Empty. I snap pictures of the clip, then an individual bullet, and send them to Raven too. This gun is definitely odd.

Crystal rounds are typically the province of dwarves, but these show none of their trademark precision. The blunt ends still carry traces of the rock matrix they were hewn from and the facets, while they taper to a point, are ridged and glassy, like they’ve been chipped off or even melted. Plus, dwarves wouldn’t bother with wood. Living, or even once-living, things have an aura that interferes with their craftsmanship.

The metal barrel makes elves unlikely—their magic fails around iron and steel—but I can’t be sure it’s actually steel without testing. Silver can be hardened remarkably and elves love silver. (It’s shiny.) Still, there are none of the leafy decorations elves festoon absolutely everything with, like flower children deprived of Ritalin. The handgrip, while sporting a fetching two-tone effect, might as well be sanded smooth. That doesn’t leave many other factions with the technology to produce something like this.

“Dark elves?” Raven suggests. “They’ve picked up a lot of dwarven habits down there.”

“Maybe,” I say, but I hope not. Things turn vicious for absolutely no reason at all when dark elves are involved. Their glamour plugs gleefully into humanity’s bestial instincts. Thankfully, immigration agreements keep their numbers in check. If they’re making a move to change that, bloodshed will be unavoidable.