On the Edge

Originally this was simply a detective novel spoof that I gave up on. But today Neil is having a Write Like the Opposite Sex day contest, so I delved into the sewers of my abandoned drafts and pulled this one up for air. No way will it win, but here it is anyway. You can read my last spoof here.

"Can I warm that up for you Hon?" asked a raspy voice, sending a warm, moist breeze of carcinogenic ash across the table.

Detective Carmichael Marion Edge VII inhaled deeply and closed his eyes for a moment, absently scratching at the layers of Nicoderm patches on his bicep. "Yeah," he said, "sure."

He turned to look at his waitress, a pair of wobbly double D's slung in a polyester hammock that crushed them into a single, tubular entity. He knew well the constellations of freckles winking back at him. Them and their cousins too, farther South of the equator. The left one was adorned by an embroidered patch that read "Paulette." And so he called it, but was too embarrassed to ask the other its name. He ought to know and was too much of a gentleman to ask.

"You sure you don't want a coffin nail? I got a spare pack in my locker." She leaned over and poured what passed for coffee from a glass decanter, a light brown liquid that may or may not have passed through a pre-measured coffee filter unit.

"No," he said. "I mean yeah, I'm sure."

"Your call. I get off at two," she said, and walked away, plastic heels grinding into the gritty linoleum.

He turned back to the rain streaked window and his target, the Mile High Club across the street. Once a parasite of the long closed municipal airport, at one time it aspired to some vestige of credibility but never quite managed it. It finally gave up in the late 90's along with everything else. An old single engine turbo prop was still perched on the roof of the place, an old city landmark and proving ground for randy teenagers. The only reason they didn't condemn the dump was its placement on the Historical Society's preservation list; it held steady at number nine, well behind the old water tower and the lamp post Mayor Krenshaw had crashed into during the Great Budget Crisis of '73. And of course there were the bottomless pockets of the proprietor of Mile High, one Dooley Grimes.

Edge had been after Grimes for years, but until now the slimy bastard had kept the wheels of his operation as greasy as Paulette's blouse after a turn with the deep fryer. Finally he'd messed up though, and Edge had the goods. And he'd deliver them as surely as Grimes had run over Edge's Blue Tick Hound all those years ago.

God, he'd loved that dog.

Just then a man came out of the Mile High, a black silhouette against a blacker night. He paused just outside the door for a moment and seemed to lock eyes with Edge before turning to walk down the alley past a row of abandoned warehouses. Not Grimes.

He drained his coffee with a single gulp and stared at the residue stained fissure that ran across the bottom of the cup. When had he last slept? He wondered. Must have been 1987, the year he'd made detective. The year his mother succumbed to fatal cumulonimbus of the ginglymus. The year he'd lost his trust fund and all his savings on the stock market in one fell swoop, thanks to the "inside tip" of one Dooley Grimes.

It had been 21 years. 21 long years dreaming of revenge. 21 years of just scraping by, the single detective in a one horse ghost town where the most exciting thing that ever happened was when Tommy Tonkerson became Tammy Tonkerson and got her own talk show in Helsinki. And while Edge suffered in mediocrity, there was Dooley Grimes, slowly buying out the entire town and turning it into some kind of wannabe Route 66 hot spot. Like that's what the town needed.

But Edge had him now. Everyone has a weakness, and he'd finally found Grimes'. An officer of the law, with a lot of time on his hands and a wealth of information at his fingertips, Edge had discovered, quite by accident, that Grimes was the city's one and only registered Republican.

The lone Republican in a town full of Generation X blue collars who'd been out of work for nearly five years, ever since Kazinsky's Kettle Korn, an American institution since 1951, had pulled out. The X's had been producing Y's and Z's ever since, having nothing better to do, and the town was little more than a breeding ground for the Democratic party. They were a hot spot on every campaign trail, the very picture of a small town America with dreams refocused from enterprise to the social programs that kept them solvent. If the town was divided at all, it was by a fuzzy line that separated the Clintonites from the Obama... Ites.

And now their very favorite person, the man they'd come to see as their savior, turned out to be a die-hard corporation humping big hairy Bush lover.

And Edge was the lucky man who had him by the short and curlies.

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