DARK LIGHTS © 1987 Chapter 1
It was a dark and rainy night, and there were poodles everywhere. Prowling the storm-spattered streets of Noirnia In her rusty roadster, private investigator Celia Spunk caught a rear-view-mirrored glimpse of a gleaming 1940s Hudson just like the one rumored to belong to the Chainsmoke Killer…
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… but it turned at the next corner, into the darkness beyond the neon gleam of the Roadside Bar & Grill.
With a split-second to decide, Spunk hung a tight U-turn in the bar’s narrow front parking-lot, killed her headlights, and followed the Hudson up the sidestreet. She could’ve pulled in at the pay-phone outside the bar and called the boys in blue. But that was sure to go just like before: the trail would be long cold by the time they showed up and, rather than admit it, they’d mark her down as having cried wolf. Again.
<small>Up the side-street, small clapboard homes threw yellow-gold smears from unshuttered windows onto the rain-slick pavement before giving way to larger, imposing houses set back from the roadway, their lofty trees and pike-iron-gated garden walls warning off passersby. Not far ahead, one such gate glittered redly through the drizzle as it closed behind the tail-lights of the slowing Hudson.
<small>Spunk sped up and then cruised innocently past, slumping down a little in the driver’s seat to show as low a profile as possible so she could eyeball the Hudson’s back license plate. Repeating the sequence under her breath, she drove on up the rain-slick street, looking for a wider-place or curve to make another u-turn. Once she found it, loomed over by even grander domiciles, she put the roadster in idle at the curb, slapped the glove-box open, grabbed out the ever-present pencil and wire-bound notepad from it, and jotted down the letters and numbers from the plate, muttering them once last time.
<small>Then shifting back into gear and switching headlights back on, she cruised back down the street again at proper, conservative, residential-neighborhood speed. Sure enough, there was an address-plate on one of the squat pillars those pike-iron gates were hinged to. Muttering again, she committed it to memory without an instant’s pause in passing, and didn’t halt until back at the restaurant corner, where she parked the roadster in a space at the end of the designated row, added the address to the notepad, and tapped the pencil on the rim of steering wheel, considering her next step.
<small>It was early evening yet, but not too early for a beer, a burger —her first actual meal of the day, not counting cold coffee swigged down at moments across the past 18 hours— and some intensive thought about what plan to put in motion. That reward had better be her’s if she seriously meant to restart her career in this new town, under this name. She couldn’t afford the PD claiming the catch if she brought them in too soon, but she didn’t mind admitting she wanted their backup when it came to the final moves. How to engineer it so they didn’t blow her off but didn’t turn up on site too soon either….
<small>Pocketing the notepad and checking her jacket for her wallet, Spunk got out of the roadster and headed for the welcoming double doors of the tavern, nodding absentmindedly to the big guy just arrived who waved her in ahead of him...</small></small></small></small></small></small>
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