Neon Mirage

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I was riding shotgun, and that wasn’t just an expression: there was a goddamned sawed-off twelve-gauge in my lap, and I didn’t like it. At all.

When you’re the boss of a business, the owner of a company, the fucking president of A-1 Detective Agency, you’re not supposed to draw duty like this. I had six operatives for that; I was thirty-eight years old and had been at this racket long enough, and was successful enough, to pick and choose which jobs I wanted to go out on. If I wanted to spend all day behind my desk, I could do that (and these days I frequently did). I was good on the phone, and that’s eighty percent of being a good private detective. If I ever had any thirst for adventure, Guadalcanal had taken it out of me. I rarely carried a gun, in this glorious post-war world.

But nonetheless, here I was: riding literal shotgun in the bodyguard car following James Ragen and his fancy Lincoln Continental down State Street, filling in last minute for an op of mine who took sick, wondering if today would be the day the Outfit decided to blow my tough little Irishman of a client to kingdom come.

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