Chapter 2: “The Man in the Woman”
I received the call an hour before midnight. When the phone rang, I took the fedora off my face and reached for the bottle of Jack I’d left over from the evening before, only to find it already emptied. I slipped off the old leather couch, stumbled around in the dark for a little while until I came across my desk, then I knocked the phone off the cradle and onto my ear.
“Ketchum,” I mumbled. I rubbed my eyes and shuffled toward the light switch. It was Gary.
He said, “The Chief told me not to call you but I figured, of all the people in Saffron, you’re the one with the most right to know.”
I flicked the switch and illuminated my office-slash-bedroom. The couch against the wall pulled out into a bed but I was often too lazy for all that noise. I kept a filing cabinet tucked away in the corner containing every document I ever needed or used in a case. Since last year’s lawsuit, I documented everything. I leaned down to pick up my fedora and threw it onto the coat rack by the door.
“What is it?” I said, shuffling toward the window that overlooked the alley between two floors below, the phone cord wrapping around my neck.
“It’s Bridgett,” he said. “She’s dead.”
Bridgett. That old dame. I hadn’t seen her in three years but I now felt the crushing weight of her death like a snorlax sitting on my chest. We’d spent the better half of our teenage years wandering around the country together and getting ourselves out from behind the eight-ball at every turn. I’d caught glimpses of her on the street corner now and then, red light district, but we hadn’t been familiar since her operation.
All I could say to Gary just then was, “Shit.” I dropped onto my chair, grabbed a pen out the drawer. I said, “When did it happen? What’s the address?” Gary told me the building: Pandora Gardens. It didn’t surprise me that Bridgett’d get cooked at an STD-infested rattata’s nest like Pandora Gardens, but it didn’t make the news none too easier to swallow. I sighed and wrote down the apartment number.
“We found her an hour ago. Forensics is still combing the floor,” he said. I heard the bustle of an active crime scene behind him. “But the force don’t usually invest a pretty portion of the annual budget into cases like this, you follow? That’s why I called you. Figured that you, like me, would take a personal interest in the case.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“Press pause there, Ash,” said Gary. “I need you to hold your snooping until after the case breaks on the news. Jenny can’t know I told you about an active investigation or it’s strike two for me, understand?”
I cursed quietly. “Is she on the flow or what?” I asked. “I’ve never gotten in her way before.”
“What about when—“
“Let’s not bump our gums, Gary,” I said. “Brock is dead.”
“You mean Bridgett.”
“Whatever,” I said. I stood and started to pace. My best friend from times of yore took the bloody dive and all I could do was sit on my thumbs and watch Channel 4. I caught myself. Watch your temper, I said. Things get broken when you lose your temper and the well of spinach is too dry for a new color TV.
I calmed down and stood in the doorway to my kitchen. “I won’t visit the room until the fuzz lays off it, then,” I said. “Just describe the scene for me while it’s fresh.”
Gary gave me the prelude: Witnesses watched Bridgett get on the elevator with a john, normal story. I shut my eyes at that point. A girl on the sixth floor, where her room is, saw Bridgett enter the room with the john but didn’t get a dust on his face. She said he wore a black mask or something queer so his face kept in the shadows even in the well-lit hallway. All this happened between 9:10 and 9:30.
I asked Gary how she snubbed it and he said, “I’d tell you she spent her last minutes getting carved up like a Christmas goose if I didn’t think it was too insensitive.”
“A knife, then?”
“More likely a sword,” he said, “judging by the blood paintings on the walls and bed sheets.”
“What else?” I asked, visualizing the scene. I’d sat back down at my desk and was taking notes. I wrote down all the different types of swords I knew that could be easily smuggled through a crowd of people like the one in the lobby at Pandora Garden. The katana seemed most likely to me, which suggested Yakuza, but Bridgett wasn’t one to get involved with that sort and Yakuza hatchetmen only ghosted those who deserved it worse, never going out of their way to ice casuals.
Gary continued, “She was flying high on D, which might explain why there are no signs of defense. You could stab a doper twenty times in the ribs before he got wise to what was happening to him.”
D meant Desire. Or death. Or drain bamage, as some commercials were fond of saying. Again, I wasn’t surprised that Bridgett was using. I wrote at the bottom of the page a capital D and circled it several times while Gary told me to promise I wouldn’t interfere with the police investigation.
I said, “I wouldn’t want to keep you guys from giving your usual stand-up performance.” I thanked him for the wire and hang up. I ripped the sheet from my notepad and carried it back over to the couch, where I sat down, dug into the seats for the remote, and turned on the television. There was a movie on TV. Four boys were walking on railroad tracks. I put on the news.
Bridgett’s regular room was on the sixth floor of Pandora Gardens. From the street below, I looked up and saw that most of the windows on every floor were lit except for the sixth. A busy night, I thought. A gang of broads were standing outside the front under the neon sign and I couldn’t help but to peep at their softer spots as I approached the entrance.
“How about me?” said one of them. She was a looker with the eyes of a doped-up kitten.
“Maybe later, sweetie,” I said. “I’m here on business.”
“Might your business require a trip to the sixth floor?” she asked. The other girls quietly moved away from her and we were left alone in the entranceway. Under the neon glow it was almost impossible to see but I could tell that this skirt was tired and scared. It’d been four hours since I’d gotten the call and three since I caught the breaking news. By now the scene would be clear and most of the evidence bagged and tagged, but the Saffron P.D. had a tendency to miss the obvious especially after prime time. They’d probably run another sweep in the morning before reopening the floor to the public so I knew I had to act fast.
“What do you know about Bridgett Samson?” I asked.
She leaned toward me and said, “Come to my room and we’ll talk.” I surmised this dame to be the witness Gary had told me about.
“How much?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” she said. “And that’s a hell of a lot more than I told the police.” I’d meant how much for her time but her answer sufficed just as well. My wallet contained but four fivers and some change, not enough for a classy lady like this one.
“Why trust me over the police?” I asked, more for my amusement than to satisfy my curiosity. It was a fight to keep looking into those dreary eyes without straying down to examine the fine lines between her halter top and her smoother-than-most flesh. It’s nothing revolutionary for a man seeking information to seek something a little more in the process, I thought, but business, in this case, had to come first.
She nodded toward the building and said, “Follow me.”
On the elevator ride up I learned her name was Eevee. I resisted the urge to call her name “cute” because she’d probably heard it from every john she’d ever entertained. We were quiet all the way up to six, staring at the door. I’d only ever been inside Pandora Gardens once and that was eight years and two brief marriages ago. The lobby had the smoky air of a brothel and was dimly lit to hide any scars or bruises on the girls’ faces. Even in the brighter light of the lift, though, I saw that Eevee was the kind of broad with whom a man could settle down and have a handful of kids.
We reached level six and the elevator doors grinded open. A weak emergency bulb at the end of the hall provided only enough light for me to make out the door covered with police tape and little else. They’d shut down the floor but didn’t keep a guard, as I’d hoped. Eevee led me in the opposite direction down to the end of the hall. She fished for the key concealed in the lining of her skirt and let us in.
She turned on the lights. It was a normal place like a regular apartment and I could tell she both lived and worked at her office and maybe had the same story as I. Off to one side was the bedroom where she did her duties, but Eevee grabbed my hand and led me to the living room by the windows. We sat down next to each other on the love seat, her skirt riding up her legs as she crossed them. It wasn’t a gun in my pocket but I hid it well.
“Why trust me?” I asked again.
She nodded thoughtfully and said, “I know who you are. And I know you and Bridgett were close once.” She looked beyond me, examining her memories. “You wouldn’t remember me, but I was the little girl in the front row at the Indigo Plateau holding a sign that said, ‘Go Ash! Give him a bash!’ Corny, I know, but I was only eight and it meant everything to me that you should win. I had my own dreams of becoming a master one day.”
I remembered her not for the sign but because of the shirt she wore. It was a hand-drawn picture of my pikachu. She might’ve sensed a drop in my mood because she set her little hand on my knee and squeezed. I made like I didn’t remember her. I’m not a man of sentiments.
“What kind of shit was Bridgett in to before she got whacked?” I asked.
“For a while she was peddling D to pad her income,” Eevee explained. “Girls like her don’t attract the richest of tricks, if you know what I mean. She had the soul but not the pro skirt’s body. She kept mum about her dealings at first but after awhile I could tell she’d started using.” I nodded. She continued, “So I got concerned and started asking questions but she shut me out the last months before she…” Eevee sniffled and wiped her nose. “Before they got her.”
“I’m guessing the police will suspect her pimp of putting out the hit,” I added. “It’s not wise for a girl to hide any of her income. But then, the easiest answer ain’t never the right one, is it Eevee?”
She shook her head and got a box of tissues from under the couch. Pulling out a wad, she continued, “If anyone had the fancy to off Bridgett like that, it’s whoever supplied her with the D. That’s what I couldn’t tell the police. Because I don’t want the same thing to happen to me.” She started to sob. I moved closer and put my arm around her so she could bury her head in my jacket. I looked to the window, because I always hated to see a dame cry.
I whispered into her ear, “Is there a fire escape out your window?” Faint against the black starless sky stood the silhouette of a motionless creep. He’d been standing there the whole time for all I knew but only after focusing could I discern the outline of someone in night black ninja rags, his face concealed behind a black mask. For a moment before Eevee could answer, “Yes,” the assassin and I made eye contact and I caught something familiar in those icy blue sockets. As quick as he’d seemed to appear, he was gone.
I stood up and pulled Eevee to her feet. She dropped all the tissues and looked up at me, surprised. I whispered, “Get to the elevator and get off at any floor but the lobby.” She started to protest but I pushed her toward the door. “Call the cops. Ask for Gary.” She hastened for the door, opened it, and closed it behind her. I reached inside my jacket and unclipped my piece from the shoulder holster, then moved to the side of the room away from the fire escape window.
The room was deathly quiet except for the glass as it vibrated in its windowpane for the nighttime wind. If the son of a bitch wanted to bust glass and make a theatrical entrance, I’d throw in his direction a lead firestorm before he could even recover. I waited as the wind whistled outside. Had he left? Why the spook job if he’d only meant to observe?
No. He was around. I edged closer to the window to get a better peek, my Walther PPK trained on the night sky. As the wind got stronger, the window vibrated more loudly, until finally the bottom half cracked and exploded and a small object glided into the room. It landed quietly on the love seat. My first instinct told me it was a grenade but the real object, I realized, meant a far worse time.
“Shit.” The Poké ball opened with the hiss of escaping air and the rapid expanding of compacted molecules. I started pumping lead into the monster before the formless bright red blob even finished materializing but the hollow points did shit to its diamond-tough armor. I skipped for the door and had my hand around the knob before the onix took full form. I turned back and watched it raise its behemoth head to the ceiling, facing me and making ready to turn me into a man-sized pancake.
I popped another at its face hoping to put out an eye but the beast only took offense and lunged forward. I leaped into Eevee’s bedroom, feeling the wind up my pants as the onix crashed past me and through the door into the main hallway. The wood splintered and exploded under the creature’s force like the wrists of an osteoporosis victim. I held onto the bedpost to find my footing, and scanned the bedroom for an exit. No windows. I looked back at the doorway and realized that the giant son of a bitch was having a hard time turning. His thick trunk of a body bent and deformed the wooden walls as he writhed. I rushed around the hooker’s bedroom looking for nothing in particular—come on, Eevee, no rocket launcher under the mattress, no pipe bombs? Shit!
The next explosion of wood told me that the onix had found an out. His tail disappeared upward and I knew he’d tunneled into the floor above. I moved into the hallway, looking both at the giant hole he’d made and the broken window should the assassin be waiting with a peashooter. I heard screams from above, followed by a series of gunshots and the gut-wrenching sound of flesh being smeared into carpet. The room felt suddenly cold with the window open, and I moved out into the hall, pistol trained on the gaping hole. No use taking the elevator, I thought, so I moved toward the stairwell. Just as I opened the door the onix dropped from the ceiling like a cascade of black rock and roared something fierce, but he overshot his mark and pushed all the way to the floor below sending up a cloud of smoke and dust and screams.
I rushed down the stairwell skipping three steps at a time and bumping into the walls at each landing, my piece leading the way. By the fourth floor I realized that this creature had one mission – me — and that he wasn’t going to chill until one or both of us took the final ice bath. He’d tear this whole building apart and kill everyone inside to get to me and I was already four months behind on paying for the school bus I destroyed last year. That in mind, I turned and started for the roof. One of us would take the dive.
By the time I reached the eighth floor I knew that the onix had joined me in the stairwell. I peeked down and glimpsed his black rock edges swirling upwards like a fast-rising torrent of oil. I reached the top and shot the padlock off the roof access. I pushed through and onto the flat gravel rooftop of Pandora Gardens, absorbing the windy nighttime panorama of Saffron City and rushing to the building’s edge.
I cursed as the relentless monster squeezed through the door, sending bits of the wooden frame in all directions. He didn’t skip a beat in starting towards me and I knew this wouldn’t be as simple as jumping out of the way and sending him into the bitter hands of gravity. If he did take the plunge he’d only crash through the street and put more lives at stake. I jumped off the roof and landed on the fire escape, twisting my ankle on the metal gridwork. Below me some number of floors, I got a slant of the assassin. The assassin looked up at me briefly and I looked up at the onix, which now leaned over the edge as if to reach down and snatch me up like the grocery store’s claw machine. It was well aware that the frail landings wouldn’t support its weight, so it turned around to find another way to its prey.
“You, wait!” I shouted, turning back to the assassin. He was at least four floors below and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of experience as a private investigator it’s that you can’t chase and catch someone dressed up as a ninja. To my astonishment, he grabbed hold of the railing and jumped over the edge, dropping several yards to the dark alley below and disappearing into the shadows. Desperate, I flamed the last of my shells into the darkness in the assassin’s direction until my clip ran dry. “Fuck!” I shouted.
I then turned to the window of whatever floor I was on, and waited. With the quickening of my heartbeat the onix burst into the empty apartment in a cloud of dust and wood chips, stopping for nothing, not even the fear of going over the edge with me. I’d always thought I’d die in a dark alleyway behind a brothel but I never considered it’d be at the hands of a pokémon. Just as the monstrous creature reached the window, it paused, frozen in space and time as the bits of debris fell around it. I blinked twice, and then the onix turned into that red outline of itself that shrunk more and more until it disappeared inside a small hollow Poké ball, imprisoned. I held my breath as the ball swayed back and forth, rolling around on the carpet as the demon struggled to free itself. It finally stopped and I finally exhaled.
Through the window, I saw Eevee stumbling down the main hallway. She had her hands over her bloody guts, and fell to her knees in the crater of a doorway the onix had made for itself. I prepared to kick in the window, and then her eyes caught mine for just a second before her head tilted to the side and shut down for good. I stood outside in the freezing whistling wind. Eevee was dead.
I leaned against the squad car parked across the street from Pandora Gardens, hands in my jacket pockets. Gary was interviewing a few witnesses and had told me to wait around as Jenny’s coming and she’s had better wake-up calls. I watched the activity around the building. All the hookers and johns had been evacuated and escorted around town. The building owner sat on the curb with his head buried in his hands. Two men in aluminum getups walked out of the building holding together a heavy glass containment cube. I saw the Poké ball inside the container. They’d likely inject saline into the ball’s hibernation solution and then throw it into the evidence locker at the precinct. Too bad, I thought. That onix would tear through the underground ladders and make a hell of a keep, through it’d made Swiss cheese out of the Pandora Gardens. Then I saw the two paramedics push their way through the crowd, and the bloody sheets over the stretcher. Her little hand had fallen out from beneath the sheets and swayed breezily as they moved her, and I looked away.
Gary approached me, pocketed his notebook, and said, “You may have figured it out already, but Eevee was something hot awhile back. Before the ban. We found six gym badges and a handful of unused balls in her dresser drawer.”
I nodded and pulled out my smokes. I offered him one, he shook his head.
I said, “Family?”
“In Vermillion. Didn’t even know their little girl was a hooker.” Gary sighed and said, “I won’t lie, Ashy. Outlook’s bad, thanks to your symphony of destruction. Consider dropping the case and letting me and my boys handle it for now.” A cracked window on the seventh floor exploded under the wind and the bits of glass crashed onto the sidewalk. Gary said, “You have to admit we’d keep a lower profile.”
“Too low a profile,” I said, blowing smoke. “You gotta make noise to get this city to respond anymore. And besides, this time it wasn’t my noise. For all we know, the ninja wanted Eevee casketed, not me. He’d probably come back to finish the job and off her as a witness, but when he saw me there, he sent in his pokémon instead. It saw me first and assumed I was the target, that’s all.”
“It’s likely,” Gary nodded. “But Chief Jenny won’t take that into account. You were here, so she’s gonna blame you. I’m just giving you a heads up.”
A CSI approached us holding a small plastic bag. He said, “Might consider calling the tooth fairy.” Gary took the bag from him and held it in the streetlight. I gave it the up and down myself, and said, “That ain’t just a tooth. It’s half a jaw.” Contained in the bag was the bloody and shattered bit of someone’s gap, gums and nerves attached and exposed with flecks of dirt and glass fragments, shreds of skin dangling like loose threads.
“Fuck me,” said Gary.
“And exhibit B,” said the CSI. He gave us another bag containing four empty shells. My shells, that had fallen through the fire escape and into the alley below.
“Looks like you scored,” said Gary to me. “Blew off half the assassin’s face.” He handed the bags to the tech and said, “Run this to the lab. Find out who this guy is, or was, and check every emergency room in town. With damage like this he couldn’t have gotten far.”
“Don’t be a bunny,” I said dryly, still surveying the gore. “This hit was professional. If this cat needs a medic it won’t be at any hospital we know about. Check halfway houses and alleyways first, then veterinarian clinics with known criminal backgrounds. With any luck the son of a bitch will have dropped dead from blood loss a few blocks from here.”
A black Pontiac pulled onto the street and two flatfoots moved the black and yellow barricade out of the lane, allowing the car to enter the perimeter. It parked near us and Gary nonchalantly walked away from me as Jenny got out of the car. I prepared for the earful and a bit of disciplinary masturbation since that’s all scolding ever was to me. To my surprise she approached me without throwing knuckles, bags under her eyes that a quick makeup job wouldn’t cover.
“Chief,” I nodded. She wore a light blue jacket and a navy blue skirt that went down to her knees. For a dame in her early forties she was still a looker with quick and long lover’s legs and a stare that could melt the polar ice caps.
She gave me the up and down, examining the damage I’d taken. She said, “Are you hurt bad?”
I shook my head.
“Give me a nail,” she said, nodding to my smoke. I gave her mine and lit another. “The only reason I’m not presently in the process of prying off your prick is because my psychologist says I’m too tightly wound,” she said. “Sorry, verbal exercise. They sooth me.”
“Whatever it takes,” I said.
“So what did my witness tell you, Ketchum?” she asked. Before I could answer she said, “Did she tell you about Desire?” She read my face and could tell. She said, “Did you think we wouldn’t be wise to it by now? We knew from the start all about Bridgett’s racket and we were using her to get closer to the source.”
“Team Rocket,” I muttered. “Did Bridgett know?”
Jenny laughed. She took a drag on the cigarette and blew a ring of smoke toward Pandora Gardens. She said, “Giovanni is our top priority. Bridgett was just an unfortunate casualty.”
I frowned and flicked my cigarette under the squad car. “And what was Eevee? Another unfortunate casualty?” I asked.
“I knew you and Bridgett were familiar once so when I got the call I took no surprise that you were involved with this,” she explained. “But here’s the dip. You’re an ambitious boy so I’ll let you investigate Bridgett’s murder because I know you’re going to anyway. But I’m an ambitious girl and the Desire case is mine to bust. Are we on terms here?”
I shrugged, and said, “You know I don’t like limits.”
She smiled and flicked the cigarette to my feet. She looked toward Pandora Gardens and said, “I’ll put you on the police payroll for a month and a half if you oblige.”
I started to protest but my belly growled something bad. Being on the precinct payroll meant the end of stale noodles and the start of fancy meals like kingler stew and dodrio burgers. The dame had me by the guts and I had to submit.
I said, “I want a company car, too.”
“Tough shit,” she said.
is not an exit 
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