“You ever notice how bad…” talking to myself—of ashes—and oil slicks in my whiskey’s-chicory, watching the rain slide down the window pane waiting for the whisky to calm my regrets, flicking the Zippo for another cigarette, click, shut and open again to the flame, inhaling the foggy, of my mind’s intifada, shaking off my insomnia as my bones kick-in for a new day on the bayou—another day of chasing rainbows and puppies that leave no fingerprints. Slade Mulligan, middle age, gumshoe for let.
The neon sign outside the diner buzzed like a mosquito with an attitude, painting the rain-streaked window in sickly green and pink. My reflection stared back—a hollow-cheeked ghost with a five o’clock shadow that could sand wood. The whiskey wasn’t working, Or maybe it was working too well. Either way, the mosquitoes weren’t drowning, they had learned to swim in my cup.
Then she walked in. Not the dame you’d expect—no stilettos clicking like gunshots, no fur stole whispering secrets. Just a woman in a yellow raincoat too big for her, clutching her purse. She slid into the booth opposite me like a sigh, her eyes darting to the door twice before she spoke as if I were her man, Godfrey, home from the war. “They took my weather vane and then some moon apple pie,” she said, and I knew right then it wasn’t the whiskey making the room tilt.
The smell of wet wool and something sharper—fear or cheap perfume—mixed with the diner’s grease and my cigarette smoke. Her fingers trembled when she opened her purse, pulling out a Polaroid soaked at the edges. A weather vane, alright—rusted copper rooster spinning crooked off some farmhouse roof. But beside it, blurred in the flash, was a shadow too long and too wrong for any bayou midnight.
I tapped ash into the chipped saucer between us. “Moon apple pie,” I repeated, testing the words like loose teeth. She flinched, and suddenly I saw it—the way her left sleeve rode up just enough to show bruises in the shape of thumbprints. Not fresh. Healing ugly. The kind a woman gets when she do the hoodoo. Stretching the neck of the chicken on the weather vane.
The photo trembled in my grip now, too. The longer I stared, the clearer the shadow became—it was me, not cast by the rooster, but standing beside it. Taller than a man should be. Shoulders hunched like it wore a Sunday suit three sizes too small. And the head… Christ. The head was just a smear of flashbulb white, but I could feel it grinning. She leaned forward, raincoat rustling. “They come for what’s owed,” she whispered. “And they always take the sweetest first.”
