PROLOGUE
I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.
—Ross Macdonald. The Drowning Pool
THE POUNDING RAIN HAD STOPPED as suddenly as it had begun. Sheets of silver-green neon clung hungrily to the wet black asphalt like some reptilian skin. The smell of raw sewage and death lingered in the air like a long-lost friend. A pool of liquid red had begun working its way from under her—having jumped moments earlier from the office window above. Now lying there like some still frame, out of a front-page tabloid. Stone cold dead. Next to my feet.
They say that water cleanses. They also say that it makes up some seventy percent of our body. So, you'd figure that nothing should stick—not the pain or sense of isolation, not the dirt and grime built up from being in my business. Not even the image of her short, fragile existence, now pinned to the cold pavement before me.
But perhaps the problem lies with the other thirty percent. All that fat content. That's where it settles in nice and easy. Sure, you could go on some sort of diet, see a shrink, confess to the local parish priest or even just hide out in some bungalow equipped with a satellite TV with some two hundred plus channels. But where's that get you? A momentary lapse in memory—a blip on your timeline. In the end, it would all come flooding back—as it had done so many times before.
My name is James Cartwright. And I'm a private investigator.
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