A hard-boiled tale of shaky city intrigue

It was another rainy night in the shaky city. I was sitting in my two-bit office overlooking the Square, nursing a slug of cheap scotch and counting the rats running along the roof-line of the old ruined cathedral.

Then she walked in. She wore a canary-yellow hi-vis jacket and hard-hat and carried a Southern Response clipboard. She looked a million dollars. Or, as EQC would say, she looked $25,000 tops and that’s our final offer.

She spun me a yarn about some risky customers, wanted me to dig the dirt on them. This wasn’t my line of work. I used to move in classier circles, busting numbers rackets down behind the dog-track. But I had no choice. I’d been deep in hock to Easy-Loans Louie ever since two hired goons from Wilson Parking had wheel-clamped my jalopy. I needed the money.

I told her I’d charge five C-notes plus expenses. She told me I’d take two C-notes flat, chiselled me down like an Arts Centre mason on a block of stone. You had to admire her moxie. I drained my scotch and hit the streets.

I pounded pavements until I found the address she’d given me, corner of Desperation Avenue and Fatigue Street. There are a million stories in the shaky city and this house had two of them, one of them more or less on top of the other.

I knocked on the front door. The guy who opened it was a broken man, a dead ringer for the ‘‘before’’ photo in an ad for Temazepam. I sold him a tall story about being a Fair Go reporter. He sobbed uncontrollably and let me in to take a gander.

The place looked like a wrecking crew had been in. If Southern Response needed me to dig dirt I wouldn’t have to look far – I could see it through the cracks in the hallway floor.

I took out my lucky marble and rolled it across the kitchen. It pulled up short, rolled right back and stuck fast against a skirtingboard. It was just as I suspected. Nothing about this place was on the level.

I shone a flashlight up the chimney. It zigged and zagged like cheap cigarette paper. No doubt about it, this whole operation was crooked from top to bottom.

Then I saw it. The smoking gun. Out in the open on the sap’s writing desk. A sharpened pencil. Talk about your dangerous weapon. The guy was about to write a letter, complaining, blowing the whole thing wide open. With a micro camera hidden in the palm of my hand I snapped half a roll of film. Then I broke the pencil clean in two with one swift chop of the hand.

I made my excuses and left the way I came in. Outside I used a roll of duct tape on the broken weatherboards. That would stop the story leaking, but not for long. I had no time to lose.

I hot-footed it back to the office, typed up my report and billed the dame from Southern Response. Case closed. Then I took the rest of that scotch from the safe and, like so many houses in the shaky city, got badly plastered.