Put The Sepia On by Nick Feldman

Chapter 1: A Blue, Sick World
    Keep your head on your shoulders and a gun up your sleeve.
    As credos go, it’s not terribly inspirational or comforting. It doesn’t speak to any profound or divine truth at the center of human existence. It wasn’t, to my knowledge, said by any historical figure much worth listening to. But it’s worked out so far for me.
    My name doesn’t much matter. I have one, but I lie about it as often as not, and in this big ugly city a name’s an easy way to get yourself noticed, and getting yourself noticed… well that’s just altogether a bad plan.
    People don’t really know me by name anyways, they know me by what I do. I’m a detective. I may not be a particularly good one, but that’s alright because as far as I know, I’m the only man in this city dumb or lucky enough to do that job, so competition is pretty sparse. And whatever else there is to say about me (lots, and most of it impolite), I do the job.
    Mostly, that means looking for people who vanish. And people vanish a lot around here. Sometimes I find them. Sometimes there’s no trace of any part of them. And so metimes I just find the traces… or the parts.
    It’s easy to disappear in this city. Nobody’s going to look for you except me, and even then only if I get paid. Your family, if you know them, are probably too doped up to notice before your next birthday, and too worn out to care when they do. Your friends, if you have any left, are too scared to look in the kind of places disappearing people go. The Dogs aren’t, but if the Dogs are looking for you it’s not because they miss you, and certainly not because they worry about you. And that just leaves the Corporation… for them to notice you were missing, there’d have to be a couple thousand of you. Enough to show up in the quarterlies. Other than that, you’re product. You’re inventory. You’re eggs. And nobody notices when one egg falls off the truck. Even if it falls off on a hot day, and cooks and rots on the pavement till it stinks so bad you can smell it a block away, the closest to “noticing” it anybody gets is to wrinkle their nose and complain about the smell. They don’t give two shits about the egg.
    So that just leaves me. I’m stone cold sober, except for all the whiskey. I’m not afraid of the kind of places that make it easy to disappear, or at least, not as much as I ought to be. I’m not one of the Dogs, and I like eggs more than the Corporation does , even the rotten ones. I’ll look for you, just so long as somebody asks me the right way.
    And while I wait for somebody to ask me, I’ll sit here in my office , such as it is, with my feet up and hat low, almost asleep. The desk, which accounts for a solid third of the furnishing, doesn’t have much on it. Cigarettes. Ashtray. Bottle of booze when business is good. Bigger bottle of booze when business is bad. On those rare occasions I want to look legitimate, I put a notepad on it. The desk, not the bottle. Sometimes I even scribble notes on the front page so it seems like there’s more to what I do than asking questions and breaking fingers. Big gun for effect. Up my sleeve, there’s a smaller one for survival.
    As for the other two thirds of the furnishing, there’s the rickety chair I sit in, leaning back against the wall, and the even shoddier chair anybody else who wanders in here sits on. Other than that, blank space and a han dful of cockroaches. A dim bulb flickers, because cliché is all I can afford.
    She walks in a little different than the usual, but it’s a subtle distinction; usually they swing their hips, but her hips just swing, and for the fences. She’s dressed in the best clothing a girl with broke parents and strong morals can afford, but she wears it well enough. I guess she isn’t so bad off- I’ve seen women get by with a quarter of the fabric… and they only wore that much for weddings and funerals, and only then when the people involved were blood