Mean Streets

I'm John Taylor, private investigator. I don't do divorce work, I don't chase after the Maltese Falcon, and I am most definitely not on the side of the angels. Either variety. I do, however, wear a white trench coat, get in over my head more often than not, and get personally involved with my female clients far more often than is good for me. I have a gift, for finding things and people. I'd just finished a case that hadn't ended well. A man hired me because his imaginary friend had gone missing, and he wanted me to find out why. Apparently this man's imaginary friend had been his constant companion since childhood, and had never gone off on his own before. The client got quite tearful about it, so I gave him my best professional look, and my most reassuring smile, and promised him I would waste no time in tracking down his imaginary friend. As cases go, it wasn't that difficult. I found the imaginary bastard in the first place I looked. He was having an affair with the client's wife. I put the three of them together in the same hotel room, and left them to it, knowing there was no point in even sending in my bill.

It was all the client's fault, really. Far too imaginative, except when it came to his wife.

And there I was, consoling myself with a large glass of wormwood brandy, while Dead Boy made heavy going of something that heaved back and forth, and looked like it was trying to eat its way through the glass. Being very thoroughly dead, though not in the least departed, Dead Boy doesn't need to eat or drink, but he likes to pretend. It makes him feel more real. And since his taste buds are quite definitely damaged, it takes more than the usual hard stuff to hit his spot. Dead Boy knows this appalling old obeah woman who whips up pills and potions especially for him, potent enough to make a corpse dance and a ghoul show you her underwear. God alone knows what it would do to the living; certainly I've never been tempted to find out. For the moment, Dead Boy was drinking a graveyard punch, made with ingredients from real graveyards. I just hoped it was no one I knew.

For once, Dead Boy was in a better financial state than me, so he was paying for the drinks. He'd just started a new job, as doorman for Club Dead, the special club for zombies, vampires, mummies, and all the other forms of the mortally challenged. (Club motto: We Belong Dead.) I didn't see the job lasting. Dead Boy has all the social graces of a lemming in heat or a sewer rat with bleeding hemorrhoids. But, since he was in the money, I was ordering the best of everything, in a big glass.

The oldest bar in the world is called Strangefellows, these days. You get all sorts in here, the living and the dead and those who haven't made their minds up yet, along with gods and monsters, aliens and shapeshifters, and a whole bunch of things that shouldn't exist but unfortunately do. Something from a Black Lagoon was sitting slumped in one corner, big and green and mossy and stinking of brine, drinking whiskey sours one after the other and mourning over the one that got away. The Tribe of the Gay Barbarians, tall muscular fellows resplendent in fringed leather chaps, nipple piercings, and tall ostrich feather headdresses, were challenging all comers to a game of Twister. A dancing bear was giving it his best John Travolta moves. He looked pretty silly in the white jacket, but given his size no one felt like telling him. And a group of rather disreputable-looking dwarves were selling tickets to see The Incredible Sleeping Woman. (I'd seen her. Forty years of catatonia had not been kind, which was why the dwarves were no longer allowed to bill her as The Incredible Sleeping Beauty.)

One of Frankenstein's female creations was singing a torch song, the transvestite superheroine Ms. Fate was reading a gossip tabloid with great concentration, to see if he was in that week, and Harry Fabulous was doing his rounds, selling chemical adventures, knockoff Hyde formula, and short-time psychoses, for really quite reasonable prices.

Just another night, at Strangefellows.