This is part 1 of an ongoing serial story.  See my Introduction / FAQ for details.

Part 1 (vs. the Tooth Fairy), Segment 1: 

“You get what you pay for,” Eddie shrugged. His scuffed combat jacket 's green and brown cammo hashed in the opposite direction of the booth's red and orange tiger striped seat covers. The fact that he semi-regularly went out of focus, made my stomach churn more than the “onionish” rings I had just eaten did alone. The fast food/ strip club he insisted we meet at was beyond tacky. He didn't strike me as the type to drool at women, and Eddie certainly couldn't eat anything because he simply want really here. It was to his benefit as well. My gin tasted of old boots.

Like everything else he had done since I met him, Fast Eddie Pizraccio probably set it up specifically to annoy me. His probable plan was working far better than my digestive system at this point. There was no way I was going to risk vomiting in the bathrooms. The mostly naked servers had disappeared in that direction when Eddie came in, though several smiled and waved at the badger as they went. The lone cook had legged it out back shortly afterwards.

“I'm paying a shit-ton. And all I get is a brain damaged goon.” I pointed to a nearby green and purple leopard-spotted booth where his monstrously huge partner was eating a jumbo-pak box of crayons with a lip-smacking gusto that belied belief. “And a reclusive detective who won't meet me in person.” Turning my back to him as he flickered slightly to the left, I grunted. “Who has a shitty hologram projector.”

Considering the projector was stashed someplace on The Badger, and the way the big man was scarfing brightly-colored, kid joy, it was actually surprising that Eddie wasn't projected on the ceiling or in the street. I hadn't figured out the trick yet. It was possible he hijacked the building systems, but I had met him outside before, so my money was on his flunky.

Eddie brushed some imaginary lint from his jacket. “Look Doc., I said it would take a couple of days. That didn't mean 2.” He wave his hand as I started to object. “ I know what it means, I went to more than the 6^th grade. Just because I operate outa North Prov doesn't mean I'm subhuman. I have degrees. I live here by... choice. It was a general statement, not a promise of 48 hours. This is complicated.”

There was a crunching noise from the next table.

“Sharpener.” Eddie continued on without looking. “You hired me Watts, because I'm the guy who can do what you need done. It is like finding 1 stalk of hay in a haystack, finding your scumbag out here. It doesn't help the haystack is full of needles either, and a lot of them are used.” He snorted and looked at our reflections in the mirrored ceiling. His a bit off on the blue spectrum.

I clenched my hands. I wasn't usually so impatient with people, but maybe my year of mostly working with cadavers had impacted my people skills... or maybe Eddie was a button-pushing prick.

“A guy like YOU wouldn't have come down into this sleaze... “ He gestured expansively to include both Gerry's Booze n' Boobs (now with table service) as well as the general neighborhood. “... if it weren't really important. Hell, from what I've seen so far, nobody else will touch this. One more crazy killer on the loose in this town doesn't concern the local companies much. So far I can't even prove that this person is more dangerous than my partner over there. Or even that he exists more than I do in this building.”

He had a point. Nobody could point me to anyone better at him... for missing persons, or things. Fast Eddie Pizraccio had a reputation for not getting killed afterwards too, but not just by using his own computer skills though.

Eddie's moderate nerdyness (even with his meticulously styled blond hair ) was certainly offset by the massive man who was now eating the cardboard crayon box. The Badger's black combat jacket and pants strained to contain his muscular six and a half foot frame. It looked like it had been extended to fit in some places, but it might just have been patches placed over the oldest of the knife cuts and bullet holes . Odd pieces of metal plating and combo-ceramic were tied on with bright pieces of string, possibly covering more holes, and not trying to cover what were obviously blood stains. Long, black and surprisingly clean hair was randomly cut into a freeform mess that reminded me of Albert Einstein... if he had been attacked with hedge shears and a baseball bat.

Leaning next to the booth was The Badger's preferred weapon, or maybe some kind of tribal totem. At some point it must have been a street sign, but it wasn't interactive-graphic, placing it and him at least 50 years out of fashionable date. Just a sharpened triangle of metal bolted to a long metal pole, complete with a ferrocrete plug on the other end. The word “Yield” still glinted in some kind of reflective red paint. I doubt if I could have lifted it with the chunk of road surface attached, but I'd seen The Badger twirl it like a baton and cave in the front of a Taxi that hadn't let him jaywalk. It was an even odder choice of weapon, considering the fact everyone (and especially their grandmother) in North Prov carried hand cannons that could drop an armored police officer at a hundred yards. It explained the condition of his jacket, but not the fact he wasn't hamburger.

TheBadger never really looked me in the eyes. He was always looking someplace else, probably wired up to (and including) the eyeballs with bodyguard wetware. My medical scan-plusses didn't pick anything up, so he had to be ex-military. The hulking brute never really said much of anything either, at least in actual words, when I was around. He might very well have killed more people than the guy I was after, but I'm not sure anyone was bothering to keep count in this neighborhood... maybe for a betting pool. It was almost a certainty that he wasn't sane enough to count to any significant number.

I'm not sure why I was even counting. It certainly wasn't to win anything, especially not popularity with my co-workers. The victims of the “Mouth Murderer” had literally come across my desk as an intake medical examiner for the Reuben and Reuben scientific research company. Caring was definitely not in the employee handbook.

Part of my job was to check the incoming wholesale and privately donated (we had a drop box) bodies mostly from the local city morgues and our national supply house. If we wanted to use them in our clinical studies and training programs, they had to have something pretty wrong with them (for our medical students to find) or be in especially good shape(for our studies). I had a lot of good general medical training, so I was pretty good at my job, way better than a lot of specialists that held the other shifts were. Ernie the podiatrist on 1^st shift kept letting anyone with nice feet though, even if their liver was leaking out their ears.

I'd counted 45 bodies with faces that had been crushed in a little over 4 weeks. All were from the local morgue. The R and R cops weren't interested in the surrounding community, more than they considered the whole place an excuse for target practice. Nobody but our dental program cared that none of the poor people had any teeth, not even fragments.

For some reason, even after a year at R and R, I still couldn't get my head around the neutral disconnect my fellow employees had when dealing with the bodies. I never said anything, I needed the job. But, my Med training had come from the Army. The dead and dying I saw every day in Utah, out on the front lines, were people I knew. Sometimes, they were just barely recognizable parts of people I knew. The dead people at R and R were just that, people. Someone else's friends and loved ones. They weren't a box of Hydrogen batteries or cloned medical rabbits and weasels. Everyone had a story, and this group had something far worse than the random violence of North Prov.

I had hocked my car, which honestly was costing me more a year to park semi-securely in South Prov than buying a new car every six months, and hired these two on the recommendation of R and R's security chief.

Jenson was probably screwing with me, or getting a kickback. The idea of throwing money away to clean up the streets really amused him. The fact Jenson know who Eddie was, and that The Badger hadn't smeared him across an alley someplace, said something about the forces of local corporate law and the recluse detective. I'm not sure what exactly, or which party came out looking worse for the association.

I realized I had been sitting hunched over my gin clenching and unclenching my hands as Eddie just watched me, mildly amused

“Sad, sad Doctor.” The Badger rumbled in a deep basso voice as he absently stared at the slowly twirling mirror ball over the vacant stage near the fry station.. I'd never heard him say anything before.

He turned and grinned at me, eyes flashing with visible red laser light of an active scan. His sharpened polycarbonate teeth, black as night and caked with colored wax... like a child's clown nightmare.

“...better have auto insurance, or the Gecko will be sad, sadder still.”

I raised an eyebrow as I flinched back, slipping off the booth seat and falling beneath my table in a puddle of my cheap boot gin. It was a good thing too, because a 2073 Buick hopped the curb and came crashing through the window behind me, and landed directly on the huge man, causing Eddie to flicker out of existence in surprise.

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As always, this work is (c) 2009 T.J. Whitfield Jr.