She sat across from me, a silhouette against the flickering bulb, her perfume a poison I was already inhaling. She was the kind of trouble that wore a lipstick smile and a story full of holes like asphalt.
“He’s a collector,” she said, her voice like broken glass dragged over silk. “Collects everything. Stays in the dark with his things, like a rat in a vault.”
I watched her through a cloud of cigarette smoke, not a muscle in my face moving. “And you want me to spring his lock?”
“I want you to find what he took,” she hissed. “A box. He calls it his moonlight. It’s got things inside that belong to me.”
Her name was Daiquiri, and her alibi smelled cheaper than her perfume. But a private eye doesn’t get to be choosy when the rent is knocking on his skull with a baseball bat. I took the case, pocketing the folded bills she offered. They felt like bad news in my hand.
I found the hoarder on the city’s crooked spine, in an apartment with no number on the door. It was a tomb, piled with the ghosts of forgotten things—newspapers brittle with age, a hundred clocks all frozen at different hours, and the smell of mildew and decay. He was a small, dusty man with eyes like two dead buttons, buried behind a stack of lurid skin magazines from another decade.
He knew what I was there for. “Looking for the moon, detective?” he coughed, a dry rasping sound. “We all are. We hoard the night, thinking we’ll find some light in it. But the darkness just gets thicker.”
His eyes drifted to the corner, where a single, unmarked wooden box sat under a thin sheet. It hummed with a soft, otherworldly glow. I had found the “moonlight,” but a hoarder’s night is a long and lonely place, and I had a feeling the light inside that box wasn’t meant for me.
Powerful work.
Thank you, Thomas.