Wayward Characters in Kansas City

Patrick Glancy

 

He walked into my office carrying a sleek leather briefcase and a slightly condescending grin that made him look more goofy than smart. His shirt was untucked and his hair was slicked back with the same kind of disgusting goop lounge singers and greasers used. Without being offered, he took a seat across from me and told me his name was Sebastian. Paul Sebastian. “I’m a screenwriter,” he said, almost with a wink. “You know, the pictures and such.”

I must have chuckled. “Screenwriter. Doesn’t anyone in this town write books anymore?”

“Sure,” he said, a bit too enthusiastically. “Only problem is no one reads em anymore. And even us poor scribes gotta make a living somehow.”

“Fair enough,” I said, prepared to drop the subject. “What can I do for you then, Mr. Sebastian?”

He leaned back in his chair, making himself comfortable. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, striking a match to my own cigarette. It was petty, but I didn’t care. Moments like that gave me a chance to remind potential clients that while I might soon be in their employ, I was not their employee. If that made any sense.

He stiffened a bit in his chair. The grin had left his face. “Okay,” he said. “I need your help tracking down a missing person.”

I nodded, probably looking a little bored in the process. That was pretty much the job. Most of the cases that came my way were cheating spouses or runaways with no real desire to be found again. Usually it had to do with debts or some sort of personal falling out. Never had I come across some kind of vast conspiracy or priceless treasure like the Maltese Falcon. Only rarely did the job get anywhere close to as interesting as Humphrey Bogart made it look like in the movies, a fact that I was sure Mr. Sebastian would fail to grasp.

He laid his briefcase down on my desk and popped it open. The lid formed a small barrier between us and I could not see what was inside. Sebastian reached in and tossed a bound sheaf of paper across to me. I glanced down at the title page. “Johnny Bullets” by Paul Sebastian. Jesus Christ, I thought, what a lame title. I suppose it didn’t say much for Hollywood that I could immediately picture it on a marquee with Jimmy Cagney’s name underneath. There was a coffee stain in the shape of a perfect circle in the lower right hand corner.

“I lost him on about page sixty-six,” Sebastian informed me.

I didn’t say anything for a moment until I realized that what he had just said made perfect sense to him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”

“Johnny Bulletino,” he said, keeping a straight face. “The man I want you to find for me.”

Christ, he’d actually named his hero Johnny Bulletino. These fucking hack screenwriters, I thought to myself. I had to get out of L.A. Little did I realize that the crazy little bastard in front of me was about to give me a chance to do just that. I picked up his bundle of paper and waved it back and forth. “This is a screenplay, Mr. Sebastian,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

“I told you I was a screenwriter,” he said. The grin had returned to his face.

I sighed. “So this guy you’re talking about is a fictional character,” I explained, as if I was talking to slow-witted child. I wasn’t trying to insult him, but I wasn’t exactly trying to spare his feelings either. “A fictional character that you created. You can’t just lose him.”

Sebastian laughed. “You’re obviously not a writer,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. Working this job, I’ve encountered my fair share of nut cases and smartasses. I just wasn’t sure yet which label best described Mr. Sebastian. Perhaps they both did. “Look,” I said, tossing his script back down on my desk. “I may not look like a busy man, Mr. Sebastian, but I assure you that I have better things to do with my time than play the butt of a practical joke.”

He reached into his briefcase again and held out an envelope to me. “What’s this?” I asked. Without even really thinking about it, I stuck out my hand to take it.

“Five thousand dollars,” he said. “And a round trip ticket to Kansas City. That’s where I lost him. But you’ll see that when you read the script.”

I thumbed through the envelope. It was filled with big bills and a train ticket. Without taking the time to do an exact count, I knew it felt right. I set it down on top of the screenplay and looked across the desk at Sebastian. I’ll admit I was at a loss.

“Five thousand dollars up front,” he repeated. “And another five grand if you actually find the son of a bitch.” He held up another stuffed envelope from his briefcase to show me that this was not an empty promise.

He clasped his briefcase shut and looked at me with the most serious expression he could muster. “Think of me as a lunatic if you prefer,” he said in a cool, measured tone. I got the feeling that he’d been practicing this part. “But this job offer is a legitimate proposition. And a quite lucrative one at that, I don’t mind saying. You stand to make an enormous profit from it, and all you risk losing is a few days of your time, in which case you will still be well compensated. All I ask is that no matter how absurd it might seem to you, you approach it and follow through on it with the same professional respect and attention to detail you would give to any other case.”

I heard him out and leaned back in my chair, still trying to size up this strange man. Nothing much about what he was proposing added up. Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of looking for an imaginary person, I was at a loss to explain how some hack writer was walking around with that kind of cash. Still, it was an awful lot of money, especially for a struggling private dick who was two months behind on his rent. And hadn’t I said I could use a vacation from L.A.? Against my better judgment, I took the job.

I started reading the script on the train. Hell, there wasn’t much else to do. The train left Los Angeles at eleven o’clock that night, which meant that most of the other passengers had called it a night shortly after we pulled out of the station. I wasn’t tired though, and since the bar in the dining car closed at midnight and it was too dark to stare out the windows, I decided to give Paul Sebastian’s unfinished masterpiece a day in court.

I confess that it was much better than I had expected. Nothing spectacular, of course, but not the total dreck the title implied. In fact, aside from a notable weakness when it came to titles and character names, it was evident that Mr. Sebastian possessed some amount of talent. Although, I will admit that the latter defect was particularly distracting. I mean, something about a world populated by a bunch of people with names like Logan and Madison and Addison just strikes me as somewhat ridiculous.

The story, itself, was relatively generic. It was one of those gangster pictures where the wisecracking hood works his way up through the underworld in an attempt to make a better life for himself, but faces the prospect of losing his soul in the process. What it made it stand out was the amazing amount of detail Sebastian had poured into his unfortunately named main character, Johnny Bullets. Rather than Cagney, I imagined him as a slightly taller, younger Claude Rains or maybe even an intimidating version of Joseph Cotten, and I couldn’t help thinking to myself that he really did leap off the page at you. Not in the literal sense that Sebastian had suggested back in my office, of course, but if any character was going to come to life…

I laughed and rubbed my temples. Maybe it was time I joined the other passengers and called it a night. I did feel very tired all of a sudden, and the steady locomotion of the train on the rails did little to help me keep my eyes open. Nevertheless, I pushed on through the script. I read the scene where Johnny proposes to his girl and the tense slip up that led to him killing a man for the first time, more of an accident than anything else. I pictured him attending his mother’s funeral in disguise because the cops were still looking for him and his life-changing chance encounter with a powerful mob boss. And then, just like that, he was gone on page sixty-six. On one line he was walking through a crowded farmer’s market, and the next line abruptly read: JOHNNY BULLETS EXITS. The other characters were left with nothing to do but stand around and wonder where he had gone. Sebastian had even gone to the trouble of writing all this out. It was stupid and unsettling at the same time.

It also didn’t leave much to go on either. Not that I really expected to find anything or anyone in Kansas City. No amount of sleep deprivation or willing suspension of disbelief was going to convince me that this was anything other than a bad joke or a total waste of time. But I had promised Sebastian when I took his money that I would treat this as seriously as any other case, and I was nothing if not a man of my word. There was an apartment listing in the script for Johnny and the farmer’s market where he had vanished. I figured I could at least check out those two places when I got to town. That way I could look Sebastian in the eye and enjoy the rest of my unexpected vacation with a clear conscience. First thing was first though. As soon as I hit my hotel, I was going to treat myself to a long overdue shave and shower. Then I was going to eat the biggest medium rare steak I could find before I did anything else.

The apartment turned out to not exist. Not that I was surprised. After I had cleaned up at the hotel, I asked the porter for directions to the best steakhouse in town, and while I had his ear I figured I might as well see if he could point me toward the address listed for Johnny in Sebastian’s screenplay. He said he’d lived in Kansas City his whole life and had never heard of Pepper Street. I had thought it sounded too phony to be true. Damn Sebastian and his ridiculous names. Just to be safe, I consulted some maps at the front desk, but neither I or the extremely helpful and patient clerk could find anything useful. My stomach rumbling, I called off the search and turned my attention back toward getting that steak. In the morning, I would stake out the farmer’s market.

I assume they have farmer’s markets in L.A. too, though I can’t say I’d ever visited one. The hours are a bit early for my taste, and I’m not much of a chef, so having fresh ingredients in my pantry isn’t exactly a high priority. Now if they sold fresh tobacco, that might have been a different story. But I suppose I was in the wrong part of the country for that, in either case. However, I made a mental note that if I ever made it down to some place like Charlotte or anywhere else on Tobacco Road, I would have to check out what their local farmer’s markets had to offer.

With that in mind, I bought an apple and sat down under a shade tree in a spot that provided a good view of the festivities. I got there early. The sun was still coming up and several vendors were in the process of assembling their stalls. I didn’t have much in the way of expectations, just a hope that it wouldn’t be too hot of a morning.

About an hour or so later, I found myself smiling at the thought that this whole enterprise would have been a lot easier if Sebastian had written a western or some bad B science fiction movie. I mean, how hard could it be to pick a cowboy or some green alien with tentacles out of a crowd, even in Kansas City? And then I saw him. Johnny Bullets. I don’t know how I knew it was him. The very idea of it was preposterous, and even if it wasn’t, the only description I had of him was a few vague lines in Sebastian’s script. Yet I knew it was him the second he walked into my eye line. I had no doubts.

He was thinner than I had pictured on the train, and there was a tiny dot of a birthmark under his left eye that Sebastian had neglected to mention. His hair was blond, but even from where I was sitting, it was clear that it was a bad dye-job. He wore dark blue slacks and a matching pair of suspenders over a long sleeve white shirt. The sleeves were rolled up to just below his elbows. A black driving cap was slouched over his eyes in an obvious attempt to hide as much of his face as he could. His tense mannerisms betrayed the fact that he was trying to go about unnoticed. But from who? One of the fictional thugs from Sebastian’s script? From Sebastian himself? Surely, he couldn’t know about me.

There was a woman on his right arm. She was stunning, but clearly overdressed for early morning grocery shopping. I got the impression that neither of them had been to bed yet. Her hair was flaming red and fell in loose curls to the middle of her back. I couldn’t see her eyes from where I was at, but I pictured them to be a light emerald green. She seemed to be aware of his uneasy posture, but she didn’t share it. In contrast to him, she appeared to be in a cheerful mood, taking note of the different produce on display and laughing at humorous observations made out of my earshot. The best he could do was crack a wry smile.

Before I realized what I was doing, I was on my feet and following close behind them. I tossed the apple core into a nearby bush. There was no plan at play here, but I had a fairly good idea how this was going to end. I would be apologizing for interrupting this nice couple’s morning stroll and then I would walk away, seriously considering the very real possibility that I was losing my mind. But I didn’t even know how we were supposed to get to that point. So I just shouted above the din of the market as loud as I could. “Johnny Bullets!”

The mention of bullets drew a few sideways glances from the shoppers in my vicinity. The couple was roughly ten feet ahead of me. He spun around out of reflex before he could stop himself and saw me standing behind him. When I saw the panic in his eyes, I knew I had made a mistake.

He hesitated just a moment to push the girl aside. She clearly had no idea what was going on as she stumbled clumsily into the grass. One of her high heels snapped and she took a nose dive into the dirt. It might have been comical under other circumstances. As it was, it gave me just enough time to duck out of the way. I saw him pull the pistol from his pants pocket. It was a small gun with an abnormally loud report, like a bomb going off in the square when he squeezed the trigger. I fell to the ground and braced myself for the impact. It happened so fast, I don’t remember closing my eyes. But I didn’t dare open them again until I heard the slug ping off a nearby lamp post.

By that time, Johnny had already turned and fled through the crowd. I got to my feet and gave him a half-hearted pursuit, but quickly gave up. As the gawkers pushed in for a better view, it became impossible to navigate through the crush. It was probably for the best anyway. I don’t know what I would have done had I caught up with him, other than get shot. The last glimpse I had of him was darting through traffic more than a block away. Then he was gone.

I made my way back to where he had unceremoniously dumped his lady friend. Some bystanders had helped her back to her feet and she was brushing the dirt from her clothes. She held her now mismatched shoes in her hand and was complaining of a grass stain on her skirt. “Are you alright, miss?” I asked. Playing the gentleman has never come naturally to me, and I was sure that she wasn’t going to buy it.

She pushed a strand of red hair out of her face. Her eyes were as green as I’d imagined them. “Who are you supposed to be?” she asked. “A leg breaker or somethin’?”

“Would it help my cause with you right now if I said I was?” I asked, making it clear that I was taking note of her disheveled appearance.

She looked like she was about to shoot some smartass remark back in my direction, but then she stopped. She took a moment to look me up and down and then she grinned in spite of herself. “It might,” she admitted.

“Where’s he going?” I asked, getting straight to the point.

She broke eye contact and looked back down at her ruined skirt. “I don’t know,” she said. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t really give a damn right now. He can go to hell for all I care.”

I couldn’t help smirking, but she was too preoccupied to notice. I was sure she wasn’t being entirely honest with me, but I also knew enough about questioning people to know that leaning on her just then was unlikely to get me anywhere. I held out one of my business cards to her. It had my hotel’s address and phone number scribbled across the back. “In case you reconsider your feelings,” I said. “Or just wanna get a drink.”

She eyed me closely again. That shade of green was damn near hypnotic. “Quite the smooth talker, aren’t ya?” she said. But she took the card.

I left before the police had a chance to arrive and spent the afternoon walking nowhere in particular. Kansas City is a lot like Los Angeles in its general layout. By that I mean that unlike the big cities back east, which tend to be built vertically, western cities are usually sprawled out over great distances. Of course, there are also major differences between L.A. and Kansas City, most notably the latter’s lack of an ocean, moderate climate, and earthquakes. Kansas City also moves at a slower pace. Not in the negative, stereotypical way we often look at our Midwestern neighbors, it just possesses a more methodical, reserved demeanor. That, combined with the illusion of open spaces, makes it an easy place for a man to get lost in his thoughts.

I didn’t even notice when the road changed from pavement to rock under my feet, and I had no idea where I was when I realized the sun was starting to set, other than it appeared to be a hay field and there were no houses or buildings of any kind within sight. With no other real options, I turned around and started walking back to town. I was lucky enough to hitch a ride a few minutes later. The young man who picked me up said he was on his way to St. Louis to bury his mother. He drove too fast and excitedly chattered about the store he was going to open with the money he was set to inherit. “Buying bulk is the future of retail,” he claimed. I sort of tuned him out after a while.

I tried to think about what I was going to do that night. I hoped the redhead would call, but I wasn’t holding my breath. And if she did decide to get in touch, I preferred it having nothing to do with Johnny Bullets. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel like getting shot at again. More that I had simply lost interest in the whole situation. I didn’t know what to make of any of this business, and I didn’t really care anymore. I’d already made five grand from this nonsense and was ready to go home. The only thing keeping me in town was the fact that the train Sebastian had booked for my return trip didn’t depart until the next morning. That and the faint hope that I might see the redhead again.

The front desk clerk called out to me when I entered the hotel lobby. I’d been considering the possibility of charging Sebastian another grand for my near death experience. It wouldn’t be the full ten thousand I stood to make if I brought in Johnny Bullets, but six grand was nothing to sneeze at. I figured I had earned it for playing along with this crap for as long as I had. Besides, I don’t know what else he could have expected me to do. After what had happened at the farmer’s market, my guess was that Johnny had already blown town. And even I didn’t know how to track a fictional character that didn’t want to be found. It wasn’t like he had credit cards or a social security number or any of the usual markers. And beyond the two weak jumping off points suggested by the screenplay, which I’d already exhausted, I didn’t even know where to start. All of this, however, was quickly forgotten when the front desk clerk handed me a slip of paper. “You have a telephone message, sir,” he informed me.

I unfolded the paper and looked it over. There wasn’t much. Only an address on Vine Street and a time, nine o’clock, followed by the name Alice and a crudely drawn heart. I looked up at the desk clerk, who was watching me read it. His blushed when our eyes met. “She insisted I draw the heart,” he explained. Then his cheeks reddened even more. “Actually, she wanted me to put on red lipstick and kiss the paper, but that is where I draw the line, sir. We compromised on the heart.”

I laughed out loud, which only seemed to add to his embarrassment. Feeling a bit guilty but definitely in an improved mood, I slipped him a few bucks for a tip and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks,” I said. “Much appreciated.” Then I practically bounced up the steps to my room to get ready for my date.

I bought a bottle of expensive cologne from the little shop in the hotel lobby and splashed liberal amounts onto my neck. I thought it smelled a bit like aged cheese, but the girl behind the counter assured me it was “all the rage with the dames these days.” That’s an exact quote. At the club I was met by a host in a tuxedo with a pencil thin moustache. “We’ve been expecting you, sir,” he said, motioning for me to follow him with a slight tilt of the head.

The place was called The Bouffant. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was supposed to mean. It was a negro jazz club, but there were more than enough upscale white patrons to prevent me from standing out. A big band was onstage, playing what seemed to be a popular rag, judging by the audience’s reaction. I’ve never cared much for jazz, myself. It had nothing to do with race or anything like that. In fact, I quite enjoyed the blues. One man laying out his troubles with only a guitar for accompaniment, I could get behind that. But all this random blowing on horns, it just sounded like so much noise to me.

“Here we are, sir,” the host said. He had led me beyond the dance floor to the dining area and pulled out a chair at a table for two. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the redhead who called herself Alice that was waiting for me. My disappointment must have showed in my expression. Johnny Bullets smiled in his seat, chewing a bite from his already half-eaten dinner.

“Not exactly who you were expecting,” he said.

“Not exactly.”

“Sorry about that,” he said without much conviction. “I just wanted to make sure you’d come. Please join me,” he suggested. He was dressed in a similar fashion to the way I’d seen him in the farmer’s market, only now he had a jacket on and no hat.

I held open my own jacket in the interest of full disclosure. “I’m not armed,” I told him. There was an intentional tone of reproach in my voice.

He laughed and dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin. “Yes,” he acknowledged. “I’m afraid I owe you an apology for this morning. I didn’t know what you intended to do and I panicked. Poor manners on my part, I’m afraid.”

That seemed a bit of an understatement. “You knew I was from Sebastian?” I asked. I already knew the answer.

He nodded. “Writers can be so possessive of their ideas,” he said. He motioned again to the empty chair. “Please, sit down.”

I didn’t see any reason not to, so I sat down. “Are you hungry, Detective?” he asked. “Would you like something to eat? My treat.”

I was starving, but I told him I was fine. “How ‘bout you just tell me why I’m here talking to you instead of the redhead, Johnny?”

He winced at the mention of his name and shook his head. “Don’t call me by that ridiculous name,” he said. “I’m going by Jack now.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Jack, huh?” I said. “Must have taken you forever to come up with that one. What’d you decide on for a last name?”

He took another bite of his food. It looked like some fancy chicken dish, but I was no gourmand, so I couldn’t say for sure. It was covered with cheese and what looked like mushrooms. I have to admit that it smelled pretty damn good. “No official papers have been filed yet, but I’m leaning toward Jack Straw,” he said. He lit up a little. “I got the name from a history book I checked out at the library. Jack Straw was a fella back in the Middle Ages who helped stir up a bit of trouble called the Peasants’ Revolt. A bunch of people got tired of being told how their lives were supposed to go, so they rose up and did somethin’ about it. It failed, of course, but I can’t see how that matters much in the big picture. Straw was supposedly one of their leaders and some people say he got his head chopped off for his troubles. But unlike the other leaders of the rebellion, for whom we have concrete evidence of their fates, historians can’t agree on whether Straw was actually a real person or just some kind of Robin Hood-like legend. He exists only in the sketchy middle ground between truth and fiction.”

“Fascinating,” I said, looking across the table at him with a sour expression on my face. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I just didn’t know what the point of any of this was supposed to be. “What’s that got to do with me though?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, I suppose. You asked the question, I answered.”

We were both quiet for a moment. It was an awkward silence I felt compelled to break. “What now then, Mr. Straw?”

He took another bite of his chicken and leaned back in his chair to consider the question. He seemed to be savoring the food in his mouth. “Do you remember the best meal of your life?” he asked.

It was a completely random question and I had no interest in playing along. “Nothing springs to mind,” I told him.

“I do,” he said, leaning forward again. “One night, when my wife was eight months pregnant, she cooked up some homemade enchiladas. She was a good cook and the food was outstanding, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not what made the meal so memorable. We sat on the floor in the living room with the coffee table pulled up to our chins. Like we were Japanese or something. The radio was on in the background, but I don’t really recall what was on it. We were too busy talking. The two of us had been going through a rough patch and that was the first night in forever that things had felt right.”

I lit a cigarette and tried not to yawn. “Touching,” I said.

He chuckled. “It is,” he agreed. “Except it’s not really my memory. It’s Sebastian’s. His attempt to mine a seminal moment of his own life for dramatic purposes.” He laughed out loud. “How fucked up is that? I mean, hell, I don’t even have a wife. Not really anyway. Just a figment of Sebastian’s imagination.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to expect anything. “I have all these fuzzy memories of former lives, previous incarnations dismissed by form rejection slips. They’re like half-remembered dreams from the night before of walking on the moon and slaying dragons. I have loved damsels in distress and I have hung from the gallows with curses on my lips. But it was all just ink on wadded up paper that’s been tossed in the wastebasket.”

He paused for a moment to sip his wine. “Surely, you can’t begrudge me the desire for something real. For a fresh start.” He said all of this calmly and matter-of-factly, without any hint of pleading or desperation in his voice. Like a lawyer with a trump card up his sleeve. None of it mattered much to me though.

“I was hired to do a job, Mr. Straw or Bullets or whatever the hell you wanna call yourself,” I said.

He interrupted me before I could go any further. “I will not be going back with you,” he said. There was a not so subtle threat in his expression.

I sighed. “I’m not a kidnapper,” I told him. “I don’t force people to do things against their will. I was paid to find you and I’ve found you. Now I can call Sebastian, tell him where you’re at, catch the train home to collect the rest of my money, and be done with this whole weird business once and for all. What you and he decide to do moving forward is your own damn problem.”

He looked at me very seriously for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Did I tell a joke without realizing it?” I asked.

He wiped his mouth with his napkin again. “Sorry,” he said, regaining his cool composure. “I was just thinking about something that’s been on my mind ever since our meeting in the market this morning.”

I crossed my arms. I was ready to go, but my curiosity got the better of me. “And what would that be?”

“Do you know how many people I’ve killed for Sebastian?” he asked. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Is that question supposed to scare me?”

He shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “It’s a sincere question and I don’t know the answer because there are too many to keep track of. Hell, it’s my whole reason for existing, right? I’m a killer. In that screenplay alone I bump off at least a dozen poor bastards and it was barely half-finished.” He leaned on his elbows and steepled his fingers over his plate. “And yet I missed you at near point blank.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Your point?”

He leaned back. “Only that I’m starting to wonder if I’ve really escaped anything at all,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes at him and lit another cigarette. “I don’t follow,” I said.

“Well,” he said, pulling his hands apart. “It does seem a tad convenient, doesn’t it? The hardened killer missing his shot as the hero ducks out of the way.”

I laughed. “You calling me a hero?”

He shrugged. “Protagonist then, if that term makes you uncomfortable,” he said. He paused to let the waiter leave the check. Then he leaned forward again, speaking in an almost conspiratorial hushed tone. “Doesn’t it make you wonder about certain other things though?”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that you’re a private detective on a clearly unrealistic case, for starters,” he said with a grin he couldn’t quite hold back. “Or that you were conveniently set up by a femme fatale tonight. That feels a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Or that you strike your matches on your thumbnail and crack wise every other time you open your mouth?” He laughed again. “Hell, if you were anymore of a noir cliché, my friend, you’d be in black and white.”

I watched him crack up laughing again, feeling a kind of rage swell within me. I’m not sure why he was getting under my skin, but he was. “It makes me wonder if both you and Sebastian aren’t as fake as me,” he said, pulling himself together again. “And we’re all part of some other writer’s story.”

I picked up the unused steak knife from beside the empty plate in front of me. “What if I put this in your eye?” I countered. “Would that convince you that I’m real?”

He didn’t look frightened in the least. Instead, he just shrugged. “If that’s what’s in the script, there’s not much we can do about it,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and fought back the urge to stab him in the leg just to make a point. In the end, I tossed it back on the table. “Stop trying to mess with my head,” I warned him. “It won’t work.”

He nodded and took out his wallet. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s something to think about before you make that call and catch your train.”

He dropped some wrinkled bills on the table and got to his feet. “Well, it’s been nice dining with you, Mr.-” He stopped and cocked his head toward me. “What was your name again, Detective?”

“Longstreet,” I told him. “James Longstreet.”

“Longstreet,” he repeated, rolling it around in his mind for a second. “That sounds familiar.”

I nodded. “There was a Confederate general in the Civil War with the same name,” I told him.

He considered this for a moment and grinned. “Huh,” he said. “Sounds like the kind of name a writer might randomly pick out of a book. Sort of like Jack Straw.”

Before I could reply, he patted me on the shoulder and stepped past me. “Fare thee well, Mr. Longstreet,” he said. “Best of luck in your future adventures.” In the time it took me to turn around, he had disappeared again.

I didn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t that I believed Straw’s crazy theory. I couldn’t accept that I was little more than a fictional construct in some writer’s story. I knew I had grown up in Fresno, California and that I had kissed Julia Shultz when I was thirteen years old. I vividly remembered going fishing with my grandfather and renting my first hole in the wall apartment when I was eighteen. I knew I had dreamt of flying an airplane like Charles Lindbergh when I was a kid and that the real reason I’d settled on becoming a private detective was because I loved Sherlock Holmes stories. These things were real and concrete in my mind and no amount of head games would shake them loose. And yet I never did call Sebastian. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps Jack Straw or whatever the hell he wanted to call himself had a point after all. I couldn’t begrudge him a fresh start.

At the train station, I slid my pass across the counter to the ticket agent. He stamped it and told me the train to Los Angeles boarded on the east platform. I thanked him and went west. I heard him calling out from his little cage to correct me, but I ignored him. This was not something I’d planned before my arrival at the station. But if I really had become the caricature that Straw had described, I figured I might need a fresh start too. Besides, I had five grand in my pocket and a powerful urge to track down a certain redhead.

LONGSTREET EXITS.