“Who Is Quizmo Cartada?”
by Alma Alexander
It was the last day of the year and things had piled up. My secretary, Edith Brownlow, had gone on “leave of absence” back in October, and by this stage (3:58 PM on December 31 – and yes, I was at the office on New Year’s Eve because there didn’t seem to be any particular alternative that appealed at this point) I was beginning to suspect that the leave was more permanent than I had been led to believe. I was way overdue in finding a replacement. My desk looked ready for an architectural dig; there were probably cases from two years ago buried underneath the teetering towers of file folders, manila envelopes, dog-eared fuzzy photographs, and loose papers piled any which way. Organized, I am not. Also, if I am being honest about it, no really new cases had joined the pile since pretty much the time that Edith had left.
Hours away from the start of a new year, I was sitting in my office with my feet on the edge of my messy desk, alone, with a glass of my good brandy in my hand and only enough left in the bottle to trigger a sense of incipient loss, few real prospects, and grimly contemplating my future as a private investigator.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
The voice that drifted in from what had been Edith’s anteroom office was a low alto, gravelly, like it had known more than a few swallows of what I had in my glass right now chased with a lifetime of cigarettes smoked from an ivory-tipped holder. I contemplated not answering, but only for a moment.
“In here,” I called out, swinging my feet off the desk to the floor and hiding my glass in a handy half-open desk drawer. The smell of brandy hung in the air and she’d probably know about the presence of the demon drink but there was no need to provide any physical evidence if I could help it.
I heard the click of heels on the lino floor and then she pushed the door to my office fully open and stepped through.
I was pretty sure that nobody is born with hair like that, that she was a bona fide suicide blonde (dyed by her own hand, get it?) but the platinum bob suited both her exterior and, I suspected, her personality; if God had been handing out Blonde Bombshell souls to newborn babes I could see this dame getting a prime specimen. She wore a leather jacket that ended at her waist and hung open in the front to reveal a bright red top with a plunging V of a neckline, and emerging from the top was something almost too short to be called a skirt followed by two long bare legs that went all the way down to the floor. It didn’t look to me like she was dressed for the weather outside but she looked comfortable enough with the image if it hadn’t been for the slight wobble in her walk which told me that she wasn’t used to wearing those kinds of heels, her feet arched six inches off the floor in red patent leather pumps. Two different ankle chains – like she couldn’t make up her mind – hung around one shapely ankle, and she wore the kind of hoop earrings that are usually seen on mobsters’ molls in indifferent B-movies. Her mouth was a slash of crimson lipstick, and her eye make-up looked like it had been applied with a trowel.
A mess of contradictions, this one.
“John Crow, Private Investigator,” I said, repeating what was written on the door facing the corridor. “How can I help you?”
“I want to hire you,” she said.
“Clearly. You are here. I charge by the hour, plus expenses. And I require an advance.”
She dug in the oversized bag that she had slung over one leather-upholstered shoulder, and came up with a banded pack of Benjamins. “That’s two grand. Will it do?”
I reached out for the cash and made it disappear into the drawer, next to the brandy glass.
“It will do as a retainer,” I said. “What can I do you for?”
“I want you to find someone.”
“Okay, I’m going to need a bit more than that.”
“Quizmo Cartada.”
I did a bit of a double take. “What, now? Who is Quizmo Cartada?”
“That doesn’t matter. I just need to find them.”
“Them?”
“Those are their pronouns.”
“I see. And your name is?”
She hesitated. Not obviously but just long enough for me to know that the name that followed would be as fake as the color of her hair. “Beata Beauregard.”
Fine. Her money looked like it was real enough. “So tell me the story, Miss Beauregard,” I said, leaning back into my chair. “How did you lose this Quizmo, and where might I have gone to ground if I was him… them.”
“That’s what I need you for,” she snapped. “If I knew where to look I would have done it myself. And I have already looked, in all the obvious places.”
“At least tell me what the obvious places are,” I said. “I have to start somewhere and even if you already looked there are things you might have missed. I, on the other hand, am an experienced professional.”
She smirked at that, but I let it pass.
“Also,” I said, “you don’t happen to have a photograph of the missing person…?”
“They’re… camera shy,” she said, after another hesitation. Another lie. “But they’re… they’re about my height…”
“With or without the stilettos?”
She glared at me. “With,” she spat out.
“And they have… your coloring?”
The glare intensified, but I could see that she was keeping a tight lid on things. “No,” she said. “They are darker. They look… Greek.”
“Greek. With a name like Quizmo Cartada.”
“Look, are you going to help me…? Or are you just going to shoot the breeze?”
“Fine. Can you at least tell me where this missing person was last… missed?”
“Their apartment. 1356 16th Street. Third floor. Number 3B.”
“Let’s start there, then,” I said. “I’ll sniff around and ask certain acquaintances to keep an eye out. How do I get in touch with you?”
“You don’t. I’ll be in touch with you. How long do you think you’ll need?”
“With this wealth of information as a starting point?” I said, and she knew enough about sarcasm for her mouth to tighten in a scarlet line at those words. “How about you stop by next Monday? About the same time?”
She tossed the platinum curls. “All right. But you’d better have something for me.”
“Oh, I will,” I said. “My bill will be ready. Remember, I charge by the hour.”
She gave me another glare, for good measure, and wobbled out on her high heels, presenting me with a fetching view of a peachy rear upholstered in that scrap of skirt and a retreating scissor of those endless legs.
Well, but I had work to do.
No time like the present – everyone would be too busy chasing the end-of-year boozers and fireworks to notice that someone was just using them as cover to do some serious investigating. I peeled off a couple of notes from the wad that Beata had left with me; I knew the area and this wasn’t a building with a doorman on duty but I thought it was prudent to have some cash in hand just in case a nosy janitor or an overly punctilious super needed having their palms greased in order to ensure access. I swung past the filing cabinet and dug out my camera from the rear of one of the drawers – photos always showed something that the naked eye failed to notice – and headed out of the door to that address on 16th Street.
I didn’t need to part with my cash; absolutely nobody stopped me as I made my way up to Quizmo’s third floor apartment. The place didn’t seem promising at first glance – like Beata had said, she’d probably looked already and found nothing of value here. It also looked like it had already been tossed long before I got here, unless this Quizmo character was a dyed-in-the-wool slob who saw every horizontal surface as storage and never put anything away in living memory. There was clothing that should have been in the laundry weeks if not months ago – one shirt was positively crusty – strewn about everywhere. A column of ants was migrating between a crack at the base of the kitchen counter and a sink filled with unwashed dishes, as well as a pile of greasy take-out cartons, everything from several pizza boxes to containers from local purveyors of Chinese, Thai, and Indian cuisines. This guy didn’t appear to care what he ate. Food was apparently food: no more, no less. There were no bottles or cans, though, no signs of drink. Well, but that was something.
A thing scuttled out of sight under some of the debris – too big for a cockroach, too small for a mouse, but I didn’t investigate that any more closely than I had to. I made sure the place contained no dead bodies or signs of blood, although whether it had been the scene of a fight was debatable given the state of it. I took photos of things that looked relevant, and poked under a few pieces of discarded clothing, just to be thorough. I did find a matchbox from a bar whose name rang a vague bell for me, and pocketed that, as well as a couple of business cards – I left the pristine ones, and tucked the dirtier and more dog-eared – the more used – ones away against future inquiries (one of them, to be sure, was for a local plumber which to be honest didn’t sound all that promising but you never knew). There was a notebook on the nightstand beside the unmade bed but it was unhelpful in the worst way – there had clearly been pages torn from it but what remained behind was wholly blank. I took it anyway; ever seen those scenes in movies where someone finds out secret messages by rubbing a pencil on the top empty page to reveal pressure lines from something written on the missing page above? Never worked for me, but there was always a first time, I guess.
The bathroom I inspected cursorily because it was more than I could really handle – the bathtub looked like it had not been cleaned in years and the last thing it had held was closer to green slime than to any kind of water. The toilet lid was closed and I didn’t even bother to lift it – too afraid of what I would find in there. I checked in the medicine cabinet as well, but it was empty except for a single solitary razor blade languishing on the middle shelf. The odd thing about the bathroom almost wafted right over my head but then I thought about it for another second and I got it: there was nothing in the bathroom that suggested personal care of any kind. No toothbrush or toothpaste, no comb, no soap, not even (and in this place that struck me as bizarrely significant) even a dirty used towel. I couldn’t even see any toilet paper, not even an empty cardboard roll on the holder. If this Quizmo had packed anything to take out of here they sure picked the most bizarre thing they could – they ported out toilet paper but left all their clothes behind…?
Clothes, but here was the other odd thing. No shoes in the place. Not even slippers, flip flops, or Crocs. No footwear at all. Either Quizmo owned only one pair of shoes and they had walked out of here wearing them, or they lived life barefoot (which, if they did, would make my life easier – people would remember an insane creature padding around the city streets with their frostbitten toes on display).
I glanced at my watch, noted the hour so that I could properly invoice Beata for the time I had spent here, and left the place as I had found it – unlocked, and like some sort of domestic bomb had gone off in it. That bar would be a place to start.
Turned out the reason the name was familiar was because the bartender was (or had been) a friend of mine. Well, a passing acquaintance anyway. I saw him recognize me as I recognized him, but we did not hug and express our joy at seeing one another again after such a long time. Midnight was still a couple of hours away but there were a number of people who had apparently chosen to await it here and had already started in on the celebrations early; the place was raucous with shouted conversations and giggles and music blaring from somewhere. I squeezed into an empty slot at the bar and ordered a scotch, and then sat there sipping it, taking a good but (I hoped) unobtrusive look around the place.
I saw nothing that I could attach to Quizmo’s disappearance, on the surface, but just as I was finishing off the drink the bartender drifted over to me, swiping at the counter next to me with a dubious cloth to give himself an excuse.
“Long time,” he said. “What brings you by?”
“Looking for somebody.”
“Of course you are. Do I know him?”
“A Greek by the name of Quizmo Cartada.”
His eyebrow lifted. “That does not sound like a Greek name.”
“I know. It’s all I got. Also, he had a matchbook from this place so I know he was here.” I dropped the preferred pronouns. My friend had clearly not been a close enough acquaintance to know that detail.
“You don’t have a photograph?”
“If I had would I have offered you that description?”
“Fair enough.” He gave the counter another swipe. “There was a guy – may or may not have been your Greek – but he might have been, he had the look of it. Yesterday, it might have been, or the day before. He also looked pretty desperate.”
“You remember all that?”
“He was distracted. He paid for his drink – drink, singular – in cash… with a hundred dollar bill. I mean, I carry decent stuff but nothing with that kind of price tag.”
I remembered Beata’s pack of hundreds. This one might have belonged to the same source.
“Did you point it out to him?”
“Nah,” he smirked. “I assumed it was a tip.”
“Sure you did. What else do you remember about this big tipper?”
“He left with the psychic.”
“The what, now?”
“Laila…something. She comes in here to drink when her visions of a better life fail to materialize… or perhaps because the bad ones did. She drinks herself back into clairvoyance and then staggers back to wherever she nests to continue staring into the future. She seemed to see something in him. She’s an odd bird.”
“Where does she, uh, nest?”
He shrugged. “There’s Psychic Row, right up the street. Bunch of houses with neon signs luring in punters who want to know what’s coming down the pike. She ain’t the crystal ball type so she’s the Tarot reader, or the pure clairvoyant next door, or maybe even the unidentified one that just has ‘psychic’ in the window and hopes for the best.”
“Was your big tipper by any chance barefoot….?”
Another eyebrow lift. “Barefoot? In the city? In December? I don’t know. I didn’t notice.”
“Thanks for the help,” I said, but unlike Beata he didn’t react to the sarcasm.
“Any time,” he said, giving the counter a final smear. “Come back and see us soon.”
The Psychic Row ended up consisting of a dead-end street with a lot of crud in the gutters, and some half a dozen terraced houses, each of which sported assorted supernatural come-hither signage in the front windows. I skipped the one with the bright pink neon crystal ball seeing as my friend from the bar said that he didn’t think it was Laila’s shtick, and the one next door to that, the one with ‘Clairvoyant’ in its window in bright red, had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on its door which I assumed meant that she was with a client and so I gave her the professional courtesy of privacy for now. I popped my head into the next house in line, the Tarot reader. She looked up as I opened the door, sitting by a small round table with a fringed cloth on it and a pile of cards in front of her.
“Welcome,” she began, “and how can I…”
“Sorry, sister, not on the cards tonight. I’m looking for Laila – you ain’t her, perchance?”
She looked a little disgruntled, but answered politely enough. “I’m Isis. There’s two girls sharing the premises in that house on the end – one’s a masseuse and is there during the day and the other uses it at night, for readings. Not sure – I think one of them’s a Maya. The other might be your Laila.”
“Thanks. Appreciate it. Happy new year.”
She flipped over the top card on her deck. “Happy new year. Watch for surprises. That one’s on the house.”
I tipped her the hat I wasn’t wearing and backed out again, trotting along the row to the house she had pointed out. It had, indeed, twin signs in its window. “Massage” was currently out, as might have been expected. But the “Psychic” one was off, too. Neither of the two were open for business tonight, apparently.
I knocked, but got no answer. I had no compunction about picking the lock if I had to but I tried the door first, anyway. It was actually not even closed, but lightly ajar; it swung open at my touch.
Inside, it was dark; I fished out the pocket LED flashlight I had on my keychain and poked holes in the shadows in various directions. An unoccupied massage table was pushed against the far wall; a small round table, similar to the one in Isis’s room, flanked with two mismatched chairs occupied another corner. As far as psychics went, this one didn’t seem to be able to predict her own way to good fortune – this was the kind of place that people with literally no money to spend on divining their future but desperate enough to try anything would come as a last-ditch resource. A cut-rate psychic. Visions for nothing. Unsolicited advice for free.
But the seer wasn’t here. A door led out of this front room into the house beyond but the darkness and silence persisted from that quarter, too; the place seemed quite abandoned, and the door that had been left open suggested that whoever might have been here had fled in a hurry.
I shone my light around the inner door, and stepped out into the hallway. A flight of narrow uncarpeted stairs led up into an upper level; the only other rooms opening from this hall were a cubbyhole equipped with a solitary and sorry-looking toilet which squatted there trying to remember its last good scrub, and a workaday kitchen with worn cabinetry, a gas range, and a lumpy-looking massive old-fashioned dinosaur of a fridge that looked like it had sailed into this place in a time travel capsule from the dawn of fridge creation. Both rooms were quite empty of life (if you didn’t count a tiny scuttle in the corner of the kitchen. Mice always find a way.)
The bottom step of the staircase creaked as I put my weight on it, and I paused; waiting for a response, receiving none, I carefully continued to make my way to the upper floor, my flashlight illuminating one stair at a time as I prepared to step on it. Fifteen steps later (I don’t know why I counted, it just seemed probably useful) I was on the top landing. Two doors opened on either end of it, to my left and my right, both closed, leading to what I assumed were bedrooms; one of them was Laila’s, but I had no way of knowing which. As I hesitated, I was caught full in the snout by an unspeakable smell coming from beyond the third, half-open, door, presumably leading to the bathroom. It was an unholy mix of the beach at low tide (briny, with all the exposed sea creatures left behind by an uncaring ocean in the process of expiring, presumably), mold, something oily like diesel, and a sweet reek of incipient corruption and corpsification. I gagged at it, pulling the front of my shirt over my nose as my eyes watered. What in God’s name was behind that door…? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had an inkling that the answer to the lost Quizmo Cartada’s whereabouts lay in that Room of Eternal Stench, and if I was to report to Beata, I had to find out what it was. With my shirt still covering my nose and mouth, I stepped forward and pushed open the bathroom door.
Several things fell into place as I stepped inside. That dog-eared and obviously frequently used plumber card I had found in Quizmo’s apartment, and the state of the bathtub therein. The lack of footwear (or the need thereof). The piles of clothes strewn all about.
Because what lay in the bathtub was a creature that did not require shoes (its limbs being more of the tentacle variety) or clothes (being currently, presumably, in its birthday suit and nothing more), in a pool of green slime in the tub. It did not look remotely ‘Greek’, but I was pretty sure I was looking at Quizmo Cartada, and they were not even human.
The creature in the tub emitted a sort of low moan and its tentacles writhed for a moment; and then it gathered itself together and reformed into the shape of a human male with, yes, a mop of tight dark curls and the soulful eyes that might have merited that ‘Greek’ description. He… they, I had to remember… stared at me with mute despair.
“Quizmo Cartada, I presume?”
“Did she send you? The executioner?”
“Executioner?” There had been no mention of murder when Beata had hired me.
“They sent me here. To watch. To learn. To spy. But they had no idea how difficult it would be to hold this shape, for any kind of time, and how much I would want to…”
“Laila…?”
“Right until the moment I fell apart, this is first time I’ve ever been near her place, and she fled screaming… yes… have you come to kill me?”
“My mission was to find you, only that. I was informed you were missing.”
“And now that you have found me, are you going to go straight back and tell her…?”
“Actually I thought I would take me a little longer than it did. So if you want a head start…”
Quizmo stared at me. “You’re letting me go?”
I knew I was supposed to be frightened but I was no Laila to turn tail and run away wailing. If I stopped to think about it, the closest name I could put to what I was feeling for this creature wasn’t fear, but pity.
“I think you’re a little outside my jurisdiction,” I said, after only the briefest of hesitations.
“She doesn’t like failure.”
“I can handle her. I’ve had worse clients.”
“The bracelet she wears…”
I thought back to Beata and all the things I recalled about her appearance. I could vaguely recall a bangle she wore on her right wrist, thick and almost leathery – an odd piece of jewelry but then the whole of her was a little over the top and so I had just skipped past it.
“Yes,” I said, “I think I remember the bling. What about it?”
“It isn’t bling, and it is deadly. Stay out of its way. It has a sting that is more venomous to your kind than anything you have ever known.”
“Thank you for the heads-up,” I said. “I’ll make sure I stay out of range.”
I looked at them, lying there in that slimy tub, helpless and pathetic in both their forms (even if they too might have carried a venomous sting somewhere about their person), and sighed.
“Do you need…a hand?”
The ludicrous nature of that question addressed to a tentacled being did not escape me, or them. They offered a wan smile in return.
“If you can help me into the nearest body of salt water…”
I thought about it. My car was a junker and it could probably take the stench in its stride – it usually smelled like a cat had had kittens in the engine compartment, anyway – but on the downside of that I didn’t have the vehicle with me, having walked here, and I didn’t think that going back just to fetch the car would be a good idea. Maybe the Venomous Woman would be watching for something like that, letting me lead her straight to Quizmo – who had clearly committed the cardinal sin of “going native” and now needed eliminating. And I really didn’t think I could persuade a cabby of any stripe to let Quizmo into the car that was his livelihood, because they would probably have to junk the entire vehicle afterwards. So as an undertaking it was… problematic.
We could stagger to the docks, on foot, it was New Year’s Eve still and Quizmo would probably be taken for someone who had partied too hard – but I didn’t think I could carry them, or even just support them, all the way there – particularly if Beata caught even a whiff of this smell on me at any point thereafter (and I had a feeling I could scrub myself in scalding water for a week without getting rid of it). I would be dead meat if I then professed to know nothing of Quizmo’s whereabouts. Hell, even this close proximity meant that I would probably have to burn the clothes I was wearing before entering Beata’s presence again.
“Sorry,” I said. “But the docks are thataway…” I pointed in the proper direction. “And if you start out now you can probably get there before you turn into a cuttlefish again. But why does salt water matter?”
“The octopus nation… is an ally… they would hide me…”
“Unlike the human nation,” I said.
“I would not have to hold the human shape in the water,” Quizmo said.
“I’ll tell her I didn’t find you,” I said. “Good luck.”
And then I thought of something.
Out in the street, half buried under all the junk and litter, there had been… a grille. A stormwater drain. The kind that had a cartoon fish painted next to it with an admonition (pretty optimistic of them, to expect it to be heeded in this quarter) that nothing noxious should be put down that drain because… it led directly to the ocean.
I brought the existence of the drain, and the possible route it might provide to where Quizmo Cartada needed to go without incriminating anybody foolish enough to try and help them, to their attention. Hell, it was the best I could do under the circumstance. It’s been said that stranger things lived down in the sewers, anyway.
“Thank you,” they said faintly, to my retreating back as I turned and made my way back down the stairs and out of that house.
I swung by my place, stuck my head under the shower to get at least some of the whiff out of my hair and wiped down the rest of me with a damp washcloth, and changed into less odoriferous clothing – I dug out my cleanest dirty shirt that did not bear the stench of alien octopus, new socks, and shoes that were less than adequate for the season (but the pair of shoes which had encountered Quizmo Cartada were… a project that would have to wait). And then I went back to the office to think things through.
Beata would be back, that was a sure thing. And I had to have a story for her. One that would leave her in a good enough mood not to use the assassination bracelet on me on the spot. I didn’t have that long to put one together, and I had an awful feeling that Beata would not honor her original return date. That was not a dame who would allow you a sense of security; if she could jump me, she would.
I needed a drink for this, and I still had a little bit left over in that bottle in the office that needed polishing off – and there was the second-best bottle of brandy in the back of the filing cabinet that needed a dent to be made in.. It was still New Year’s Eve. I didn’t feel like a party, but a man was entitled to a drink on New Year’s Eve.
I don’t remember how many glasses of brandy I put away, but it was more than enough to make me pass out in my office chair, faceplanted on my desk. A twinge in my back as I swam back to consciousness let me know that I was no longer as young as I might have wished to be, and if I insisted on playing a young man’s game there would be a price to pay for that. But before I could lift my head properly I knew I was not alone, and that all my plans for staying far away from Beata Beauregard’s murderous bracelet had just flown out of the window… because I was staring at a woman’s hand, resting on the desk not too far away from my face, and damn, but I knew that bracelet.
I covered with a groan as I straightened up and got to my feet. “I thought we said next Monday,” I said, my voice gravelly with sleep and brandy.
“I thought I would check in,” Beata said.
“It’s New Year’s Day,” I said, with a frown. “I told you that things would be slow…”
“You found him, didn’t you.”
It was not a question, it was a statement. Lying was pointless, but there was more than one way to skin the truth, as it were, and I just stopped planning at all. Whatever was in my mouth, I would give her, the truth and nothing but the truth… just not the whole truth.
“I found something,” I said. “If that was your Quizmo Cartada, then somebody had got there before me and dissolved him in acid or something. There was a bathtub filled with green slime, and it stank to high heaven, and…”
“Not at his place?”
“No, not at his place.”
“Where?”
I stared her down. “That is not your business,” I said. “You sent me to find a person and all I found was a mess. The owner of the place where I did find your guy had long since fled the premises by the time I got there, and I can completely understand why – I would have run screaming myself if I had walked into that in my bathroom. But there was nothing and nobody alive in that place when I went in or when I went out and I suspect they will have to rip out that entire bathroom before they can call it clean again. I don’t think you were telling me the whole story, ma’am, and you still aren’t. But you handed me a job, and I didn’t come back hauling your guy in a set of steel bracelets for you, so here.” I hauled out her cash from the drawer where I had stuffed it the night before, and tossed the wad of money onto the desk, not without a twinge of deep regret. “I took out a hundred or so, for expenses. The rest is all there. Can’t do anything more for you, and so I’m returning your retainer.”
Her painted lips curved into what was almost a snarl, but then she reached out and swept the money off the table and into the bag she was holding.
“Who knows about this?” she hissed.
“Lady, it’s New Year’s Eve. Everybody’s pissed, or sleeping it off. And anyone who might have been awake and aware enough to see anything last night probably went straight away and drank himself under the table,” I said. “I certainly did not speak of it to anybody, even if I’d had a chance to do so which I hadn’t, and in any event…” I straightened out even more. “You’re a client,” I said. “There’s confidentiality.”
And besides, I added to myself, silently, who the Hell would believe me anyway?
Was it my imagination or did the bracelet on her wrist writhe, ever so slightly…?
I did my best to pretend I did not notice.
“If that is all,” I said, “can I get on with the rest of my hangover now?”
“See that nothing we have spoken about leaves this room,” she said.
“Absolutely, your worship,” I muttered, and sank back down into my chair, letting my head drop back down onto my folded arms.
It took every ounce of self-control I had not to twitch a muscle, to ride down a temptation to lift my head ever so slightly so that I could sneak a glimpse of what was before me, but I controlled myself and just sat there collapsed into a heap, trying to give an impression of being beyond caring.
It seemed to work. After a long moment of silence I heard her turn and walk away, the heels clicking sharply on the floor. She did not close the front door after her but I heard her footsteps recede down the corridor and then I wanted, for a long time, in silence, until I was absolutely sure that she was gone. Only then did I release the tension in my back, and realize just how much tension I had been holding there.
I didn’t know what would be open at this hour but something always was and I knew most of the dives. I gathered my coat and hat and took myself straight to one of them, a seedy backstreet bar – not the one where my friend worked, one where I was pretty sure I knew nobody and nobody knew me – and ordered a stiff double scotch. I downed it, and signaled for another. In the grey early light of a new day, a new year, I swore to myself that I would turn over a new leaf. Hire a new secretary, perhaps, and see if I couldn’t bring order to my affairs. Get enough new and legitimate cases so that I wouldn’t have to ask ‘how high’ if a woman with fake hair and a fake name dropped in to tell me to jump, and ask me to run a fake human to ground. I really hoped Quizmo would make it to their octopus people. Because, with my third whiskey, I swore to take a solemn vow of silence about this entire job and that nobody would ever hear the answer to the question “Who is Quizmo Cartada?” At least, not from me.
Happy bloody New Year.
_______________
Alma Alexander‘s life so far has prepared her very well for her
chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the
maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and
in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown
small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles
in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short
story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific
Northwest of the USA (where she lives with two obligatory writer’s
cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can
find out more about Alma and her books on her website
(www.AlmaAlexander.org), at her Amazon author page
(https://amzn.to/2N6xE9u), on Bluesky (@almaalexander.bsky.social), at
herFacebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAlmaAlexander/), or
at her Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/AlmaAlexander)”