Death and Mutants: A Bedtime Story

It was a shadowy night of inky pitch black mirth. I sat back in my rickety office chair and made a bet with my liver over a fifth of scotch that rested in the bottle. The koala bears of my subconscious wrestled with the sheer pointlessness of my being, but I didn’t mind. At least they took a bath once in a while.

Suddenly, a knock invaded my privacy and jangled my nerves. I looked up, the weight of the world pressing down on my bloodshot eyeballs, and she walked in.

“I hear you help the helpless.” She spoke without moving a muscle, her words drifting into my ears with the help of a city gone hush, to bed.

I leaned forward. “The helpless usually don’t have enough scratch to cover a date with a bottle of Jack. Now, the hopeless… there we can do business.”

“Fair enough,” she said, crossing the room to sit in my only other chair, an antique from an old case that netted me a bullet wound in my shoulder and a curse in my heart. “I need you to tail my boss, Big City Carl. I think he’s been stealing from the nursing homes he manages, and I can’t stands it no longer. I want him to be hung out to dry–”

“–leaving you with clean laundry?” I mused. “Fine. I charge a Grant a day, plus expenses. And stop flicking cigarette ash everywhere, it’s bad for my cat.”

The next day I hopscotched over to the East River, not as hoity-toity as some parts of the city but certainly a step up from the dive that I scuttled to every night. There I found him, Big City Carl, in the process of shaking down a retired geezer for his lunch money.

“There’s a particularly nasty kindergarten I know where you’d fit in perfectly,” I drawled. Carl froze, face scrunched up with the effort of composing sentences out of rogue subjects, verbs and conjunctions.

“Beat it, ya palooka,” he barked, but his hands betrayed his gruffness — the old fella fell out of his grasp and stumbled away.

I drew Francine, the only girlfriend I’d ever had who didn’t kiss and tell. “Bank’s closed, pal.” I didn’t hesitate to let her kiss Carl on the first date either, not when he reached for the hand-cannon strapped underneath one sweaty armpit. He went down like a sack of extremely rotten tomatoes.

That was that. A day’s honest work, as long as your boss was the devil himself.

She saw me later, her eyes reaching into my soul but finding only the low-hanging clouds of loneliness. “Everything’s Jake,” I lied, collecting my fee. Pocketing it, I stumbled into the darkness and pulled it like covers over my head for the night.