Danger is Not My Middle Name #20

All detective movies finish in a drawing room. This is where the detective has assembled all the suspects, witnesses and assorted sidekicks into one room. A hush falls over the crowd as he starts to speak and untangle the twisted web of the mystery.

The conclusion of this story takes place in a tiny car…one I suspect Europeans did not design with humans in mind. I was in the back seat with my knees braced to my chest, trying not to look like an accordion…or sound like one for that matter.

“You’re Greta?” I asked, a little wheezy from the lack of oxygen.

Jennifer nodded.

“I’m the voice you heard on the phone. Yes. I needed to bring you into the case,” she said.

I smiled my most world-weary smile. “Because I was the first detective you saw?”

She shook her head. “No. I just said that because I wanted you to stop calling me ‘Toots.’ You have a special quality to you. Something we needed.”

“Oh?”

Pretty much every overweight Dungeons and Dragons player has a genetic predisposition to getting suspicious when a pretty girl tells them they’re ‘special.’ Comments like that are usually followed by ‘So do you want a date?’”

But she was nodding, looking me directly in the eyes. I noticed her eyes, one blue and the other green, were large and round and so very sincere. There was a little dimple that moved at the lower corner of her mouth when she spoke that made me very glad my knees were pressed against my chest.

“When I was looking for help, I simply passed my hand over the phone book and my finger came down on your name.”

I settled back. “I get it. Sure. Coincidence.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. Guidance. Destiny. You were supposed to be here. Without you, we could never have recovered the coin.”

Gerald was nodding.

“He already had the coin,” I pointed out.

She was nodding too. “Yes. You were chosen to help. Without you, he would never have made it out alive….plus you found the secret door no one else could find. Something happened in there…in the chapel, right?”

I remembered the strange sense of following the music to the keystone. I nodded.

“How did Gerald get in?” I asked.

She laughed. So did Gerald – which was not a pleasant sound.

“He was captured at the end of our fight. We knew we were losing. He surrendered, hopefully to be taken into their lair and very hopefully get the coin. Which he did. But he had no way to get out. Until you came along to unlock the door.

“We agreed beforehand that if the battle should appear lost, for me to meet him here. And I have been here every day since. Waiting.”

She finished with a smile, a flash of white teeth and something that almost approached shyness.

“So you followed me, and pretended to be Greta, because you didn’t think I could get the job done,” I said.

She thought about it and then nodded. “Well…would you have trusted you?”

Finally I nodded back, smiling.

“Do you know what happened to me in the chapel?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. But I know it was destined to happen.”

I told her about the vision (okay…I felt a little silly using the word ‘vision’ but there was no other way to describe it) of the man of fire.

She exchanged a sharp look with Gerald. Their eyes were talking to each other. In the end she shook her head.

“Strong suspicions. Nothing’s certain.” She stopped talking and looked me square in the eyes. “The driver, this McGee person, was sent by them. The Stokers must have intercepted our message to you.”

“He would have killed you and taken the coin,” said Gerald.

I gulped, which was difficult because my mouth was suddenly very dry. I turned and looked at Jennifer for a long moment and she looked back at me. We both knew something heavy was blowing in the breeze. Finally she spoke: “I hope you will stick around long enough so we can figure it out…together.”

I half laughed, half snorted. “You want me to?”

Her face was suddenly serious. She nodded. “Stay with us. Work with us. Become a Keeper.”

My jaw dropped and my heart was already setting up all the many reasons we should tell her to forget the whole thing.

“You want me to hunt vampires? With you?”

She nodded. “With us.”

I thought about it. My life flashed before my eyes. I thought about returning to an empty office, friendless and client challenged. I though about what an eternity of thinking about her and wondering how things WOULD have been with her. The decision was made.

“Jennifer,” I growled. “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“We’ll always have Glasgow,” said Gerald, laughing and it didn’t so bad this time.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” said Jennifer.

We all were laughing .I knew I was with my people. The fact that we hunt vampires for a living? That’s just a bonus.

***************************************

So that’s it for Mr. Diamond for the moment. Thank you all for your kind attention, your comments and your patience with someone who insisted on writing a story on a photography blog.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #19

A pair of students were wolfing down a meal as we staggered out of the chapel into the fading sunlight. It looked strange to see something so normal only feet away from where we had just come from. Had it been only a few minutes ago we’d been fleeing some clawed creature in the dark?

“I have a ride,” I told Gerald. “Greta sent him.”

He stopped and looked at me, suspicion painted stark on his sharp features. “Greta did?”

I nodded. “She sent him to pick me up at the ship.”

“How do you know?”

“When I got off the ship, he was there with my name on a placard.”

“And?”

I was offended. I was sore and my ankle was bleeding profusely from where the minion had clawed at it.

“And what?” I demanded, dismayed to hear the slight whine in my voice.

“Greta didn’t send him,” Gerald said.

“Yes she did,” I insisted. But the look in his eyes and the sense of my heart were sinking the declaration.

We’d been walking. More precisely, Gerald had been walking and I had been limping. We rounded the corner and before us was one of those tiny cars the Europeans favor. Leaning against it was Jennifer.

She watched us approach with interest. As she recognized me, her eyes widened and she rushed forward, nearly knocking me down as she threw her arms around me.

“Sam!” she said. I don’t think my name has ever sounded better.

“Jennifer,” I responded, since that seemed the appropriate thing to say.

Gerald was standing, arms folded, a crooked smile on his lips. He gestured toward Jennifer.

“Mr. Diamond, allow me to present….Greta.”

Danger is Not My Middle Name #18

We flew up the stairs, Gerald and I. Sometimes we fell and sometimes we collided. But somehow we neared the doorway.

I could hear the beast breathing now. We had rushed. But it had moved with furious feral speed, as though it could taste our blood already. The doorway was three feet away and I allowed myself to hope.

My mind left me at that second, the same way it had when the music guided me to this place. I saw something…the flash of something happening…somewhere. A man of fire becoming something else…and so very calm about it all. There was lighting…and a planet…and…

The vision slipped away into a fog of pain as something closed on my ankle. I felt the pressure on bone and the pinpoints of claws digging deep into my skin.

My moan and the beast’s howl of triumph came at the same time. Gerald paused, framed in the light of the doorway. I and the creature of the shadows were far behind him. He was frozen.

The creature tugged at me and my fingernails scrabbled frantically for a hold on smooth stone. Gerald looked at me a moment longer, then produced a blade of glistening steel. With one smooth motion, he leapt down and drove the blade forward in a smooth glittering arc.

If you’ve ever cut into a watermelon with a cleaver, you would recognize the sound. It was a meaty thunk, followed immediately by a cry of rage blended with the sharp surprise of pain. Abruptly the pressure on my leg stopped and I kicked hard, eager to be rid of the thing.

I staggered to my feet and Gerald threw one arm around my shoulder and manhandled me through the doorway. He let me go as we moved into the determined peace of the chapel. I fell hard to the ground. He spun and drove the point of his blade hard against a stone and the doorway closed.

Perhaps a second later there came the sound of something powerful slamming into the rock. I listened carefully, thinking that I could hear the howls of blood rage from the other side…but maybe not.

“What was that thing?” I asked.

“Minion,” Gerald said, luxuriating for a moment, leaning against the stone doorway.

“A what?” I asked.

“Minion. One of the Stoker’s guardians.”

“Holy crap,” I said. I inwardly noted I had been saying “holy crap” a lot lately and resolved to say something else in the future like ‘Holy Smokes’ or ‘holy….well…something else.’

The assault on the stone door was getting louder as though the thing expected it could claw through stone to get to us.

“It will stop in a minute,” Gerald said. “It’s job is to guard…and ensure we don’t come back.”

It stopped.

Gerald closed his eyes. He was the picture of an exhausted man. I noticed bags heavy under his eyes and for a moment his entire body seemed to sag.

“We need to go see Jennifer,” he said finally. “We have a lot to tell you.”
Comments

Danger is Not My Middle Name #17

Hands pulling at me.

Painful corners digging into my bones. Slow progress and the steady sound of “Thump Thump” that oddly enough was tied to the equally regular motion my head made as it jounced up and down. And then the dawning realization that it WAS my head, thumping over stairs.

Next came the sound of labored breathing.

I opened my eyes and saw a man’s face. Oddly familiar. I had seen it somewhere before. A racing magazine? Nah.

“You’re awake,” he whispered.

“Unnnghhh,” I responded.

“You fainted,” he said softly.

A surf of indignant sensation washed away the cobwebs.

“I did not,” I insisted.

A rough hand pressed to my mouth and suddenly his face was close to mine. Too close.

“Shhhhh,” he hissed. “You want to get both of us killed?”

Since it sounded like a rhetorical question I didn’t respond.

I looked closely into his face. Both heart and male orbs went into immediate panic mode as realization dawned. I was looking into the face of Gerald – Fitzroy! He was the man I had initially been hired to follow. He’d last been seen about to do mortal battle with the undead Stokers underneath the Unfinished Church in Bermuda. My partner, Jennifer had gone down to help him while I fled…oops…while I made a strategic retreat. Neither of them had been seen again.

I did my best to form a fist and drive it into his jaw. My body wasn’t quite ready to take orders yet, so instead of smacking him, my pinky finger embedded itself in his right nostril.

He looked understandably confused for a moment and then swatted my hand away.

“You’re an idiot,” he said.

“And you’re dead,” I responded.

“No I’m not,” he hissed, shaking me by the lapels for emphasis.

“You went to fight an army of the undead in Bermuda,” I said. “You’re toast. History.”

He shook me again. I was getting a little tired of this.

“We escaped,” he said.

“We?”

My heart skipped a beat. Could Jennifer be alive?

He nodded curtly. “Jennifer is in the car. Waiting for this.”

He produced a small coin from his pocket. It was covered in ornate carvings. One side was gold and the other silver. I could feel power radiating from it.

My jaw dropped.

“And I have been waiting for you. You took long enough, by the way. We need to get out of here,” Fitzroy/Gerald/Whatever his name really was hissed. “Before they realize it’s gone.”

As if on cue there came a high keening wail from somewhere below us. It was inhuman and as it pitched up and down the scale, the emotion it carried moved from grief to fury.

Gerald looked at me, eyes wide with what could only be described as terror and scrambled up the stairs.

Heart pounding, I followed.

Then I heard the sound of claws scratching on stone. The keening wail had become a growl of animal fury. It, whatever it was, was coming up the stairs directly for us, coming fast, panting with the naked desire to rip…to rend…to tear. The doorway loomed in the distance…impossibly small and simply too far away.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #16

We may be taking a little break in the story over the next few days to bring you up to date on some VCD (Very Cool Developments).

As you may or may not know, Auto FX has just released the latest update to Mystical Lighting. It's available now at www.autofx.com. On the face of it,it appears to be a radical departure from the classic Mystical Lighting 1.0. I'll be taking a hard look at the demo over the weekend.

Good or bad remains to be seen. I use Mystical Lighting 1.0 frequently -- so do a lot of you. It'll be interesting to see if 2.0 is as vast an improvement on 1.0 as Mystical Tint Tone and Color 2.0 was on the "mostly useless" MTTC 1.0. MTTC 2.0 blew us away. Hopefully Mystical Lighting 2.0 will have the same effect. Time will tell.

I'm trying to line up an interview with Cliff Weems, from Auto FX about his latest creation and posting the interview here.

2010 promises a bumper crop of Photoshop releases. We're all looking forward to seeing what Adobe's going to do with the new CS5. Alien Skin is working on a new Bokeh update, which yours truly will be helping them with. We'll keep you posted.

Look for that interview...and a the last three episodes of STOKERS later in the week.

Now: Back to Mr. Diamond:

********************************************************************************

The darkness closed around me like an accountant’s fist and even when the door should have been just a few feet away from me – it loomed what appeared to be miles above.

Pungent scent filled my nostrils and made my eyes water. This didn’t matter a whole lot, I decided, because I could barely see anyway. Bogie would have had a flashlight or simply happened across a richly guttering torch. But this wasn’t a movie and there was nothing. As I moved forward I knew that a single misstep would send me tumbling down these stairs and who knew how far I would fall? Maybe forever. Maybe longer.

“Are you out of your freaking mind?” my heart snapped. “Do you realize what you are doing here? What you are risking here? You are like, going to get us killed, you freaking dumbass moron.”

“What else were we supposed to do?” my brain asked my heart coldly. “We have to know what’s down here.”

“We do?” asked my heart, dripping sarcasm. “Why is THAT?”

“Because we have to know,” explained my brain patiently. “We must experience...”

“Dork,” my heart hissed.

“Chicken,” my brain hissed back.

“Moron,” the heart cried – a little louder this time. “We’re in a black pit working our way deeper into darkness, blockhead.”

“You want us to stay where it’s safe and NEVER know what’s down here?” my brain responded, and then began casting about for an appropriate invective. “Mr. Poopypants.”

“That’s the best you can do?” began my heart.

“We think we should do whatever is safest,” chimed in my male orbs softly, speaking in unison.

It went on like that for a long time. My body parts have a long history of arguing with each other.

I continued down into the darkness, my hand carefully tracing a path along the wall. The light was closer now. I could see it moving on the wall with the oddly flickering dance that a fire throws.

It was then that I heard the first sound. It was a leathery step. Think of the sound two pieces of paper make when you rub them together.

“That’s it. We are like TOTALLY screwed,” my heart moaned.

My mind came to complete attention and began studying the darkness in front of me.

The sound came again. Closer. Coming our way. Definitely.

Very quietly, my male orbs went back into hiding while my heart gibbered incoherently and the figure on the stairs grew closer.

My heart pounded in my ears….and for a second I thought I was going to faint. For a second I stood peering into the face of the Abyss…alive with color and stars and things that moved with impossible speed.

Then the darkness took me and I knew nothing at all.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #4

The sun is beating down on me like a thousand tiki torches held just a few inches away from my skin. I’m looking around me, making an effort to look everywhere except at the subject – so whenever my eyes would ordinarily pass over him, I shut them tight. It’s the old ‘if you can’t see me, I can’t see you’ strategy. It’s a little something I picked up in the Ray Hunker Correspondence School of Detection of Des Moines.

There’s a guy beside me. Curly hair steadily crawling up his forehead. His chest is covered in hair too (maybe he’s a bear?) and while he sleeps there’s a little trickle of drool running a little rivulet down his chin. He’s snoring softly.

I do what the tourists all do. First I turn down the thirty-seven offers from various service staff to fetch an over-priced drink. Then, I stare at a single twenty-something in a very brief bikini walking slowly around the pool, pretending she doesn’t know every mug in the immediate vicinity isn’t imagining a moving violation with her. She moves like a cat, if this cat had a body designed by teenage boys and a face so beautiful it makes your eyes ache. I cover my interest by scratching my belly, which I suck in as far as possible as beach bunny girl saunters by.

Even our subject is entranced. I see him undressing what little she is wearing and then something happens. Her eyes meet mine and she half smiles. What do I see there? An unspoken question? It’s certainly not the standard “oh…it’s just YOU” dismissal I have come to expect. I look around me casually. Can it be?

Only the drooling sleeper and I are in this direction so there’s a pretty good chance she is actually smiling at me so I half smile back. I hold off on my sexy bedroom eyes because I hardly know her and have no idea how much unexpected white hot desire she can stand.

I need to switch gears here...much as I hate to divert your attention from a pretty girl to cat puke. It’s important. Trust me. I once had a cat (for about four days) that made these wet sounding compulsively belching noises just before horking a hairball onto the carpet. I hear one of these nearby – which I ignore since I am still looking at Blonde Bunny Babe, totally forgetting I already have a girlfriend, which I don’t. Not really. Actually.

A voice near my ear surprises me so badly that I nearly swallow my tongue.

“Do it now,” she says.

She? Who she, I wonder.

“Do what?” I ask through barely moving lips – another skill I have Mr. Ray Hunker of Des Moines to thank for.

“The narcolepsy,” she says. The “She” (in case you haven’t been following this tale) is Jennifer Jonas…a fellow dick, operating under cover of being my girlfriend as we track the mystery man on board the ship.

“…what?” I ask. The Bunny Babe is still looking at me. I am only foggily aware of anything else on the planet. A pretty girl is smiling at me and I’m not even wearing my fedora at a rakish angle. Holy crap!

“Fake an attack now, while everyone is watching .The medical officer just came on deck. He’s watching you.”

“Right now?” I ask. Bunny Babe is going to think I am a geek. No. She’ll KNOW I’m a geek. Damn damn damn.

“Yes. Now.”

I sigh and breathe one word “No.”

“Time for your medication now, darling,” says Jennifer in a way too loud voice.

“Huh?”

“Do it NOW,” she hisses, and spills half a glass of ice water on me. My body wants to jump out of the chair, arms waving, legs jerking. Beach Bunny Babe, who has the body of a goddess and the reaction time of a sloth, is still looking at me. But then so is everyone else. I fall back against the cushion and try to lie still. I don’t make little mewling noises as the ice water passes through the trunks. I am, after all, a pro. Instead I lie perfectly still, like a man in a coma.

Jennifer slaps at my cheeks a little too hard and I make a show of slowly coming back to consciousness. Being a trained observer – I notice three things:

1) Beach Bunny Babe is gone.
2) So is our subject and
3) The sleeping drooling guy is dead.

It is number three that concerns me the most. I can tell he’s dead because he is no longer snoring and the little river of drool has been replaced by a tinier river of blood. His head is at a near impossible angle. I point and Jennifer follows the direction of my finger.

She takes a sharp intake of breath as she puts the pieces together.

Then she reaches down and lifts a wallet out of a bag beside the body. She grabs my arm and together, with a parting nod at the medical officer, we exit the pool area.

“Did you see the…ummm….subject leave?” I ask.

Jennifer shakes her head. The movement is tight.

“Did you see what happened to…y’know…the dead guy?”

Again she shakes her head.

“This just got a whole lot more dangerous, didn’t it?” I say.
This time she nods. She holds her lower lip between her teeth.

“I think now is the time to tell you some things you need to know,” she says with the air of someone who has made a decision to step way over the line. “These are things you should have already been told. Let’s go back to the stateroom. These are things you really need to know, Mr. Sam D. Diamond.”

“The ‘D’ stands for ‘Danger’ you know,” I lie.

“Uh huh,” she responds, trying hard not to be too impressed. “Hurry up. I don’t think we have much time before it kills again.”

“It?” I ask.

She nods. “It.”

Danger is Not My Middle Name #3

The first thing I feel is some kind of nail being stuck into my temples. The pain is razor sharp, like a cleaver. The next sensation: I feel myself being rocked gently back and forth. Am I in a cradle? I try to re-construct the last few moments.

Stand by bar, hat at rakish angle. Check.
Undress a hundred women with my bedroom eyes. Check.
Watch the subject like a hawk. Ummm…check.
Follow the subject into the night. Check? Check?

I don’t remember anything after walking through the doorway – just this enormous explosion of light in my head. Did I walk into a door…again? Did an astroidette come down from outer space and smack me? Was it one of those damn undead bloodsucking orchids? I thought they were an urban myth.
Something cool is pressed to my forehead. It feels good and it seems to draw the pain out of my head. I try to open my eyes, but they won’t cooperate, so the end result is me wiggling my eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“Are you awake then?” It is a businesslike female voice.

“Unnnngh,” I respond. It’s the best I can do. My words get lost somewhere inside the fog in my brain.

“You took a nasty blow to the head,” says the voice. Is it English? Irish? I did very poorly at accent identification at the Ray Hunker Correspondence School of Detection, incorrectly identifying a female German prison guard as a rich Italian heiress.

I try to open my eyes, but wind up only wiggling my eyebrows. Again.

“That looks ridiculous,” she says.

“Unnnngh,” I say again.

“You just watch your tongue, mister Diamond.”

I feel fingers picking at my eyes and my instinct is to bat them away. But my hands still haven’t quite caught up with my brain and they simply flap around like birds on a strange street drug.

She, for I am now reasonably certain it is a she, slaps my hands away and pries my eyelids open. Something crusty that you don’t need to know anything more about, falls to the ground and I am looking into soft green eyes, framed in a purely female face direct from some heavenly cloud. My heart does a happy double beat.

“We may not have much time,” she says. “You are on board the Grand Princess cruise liner.”

“Unnnngh?” I ask.

“Oh. Good question. I brought you here. As for as anyone else is concerned, we are lovers, sharing stateroom C327. Stop leering like that. It’s disgusting.”

“Unnnngh?” I ask

“Me? I am Jennifer Jonas. Your…client hired me to follow you in case something like this happened. I told them you have a sleeping disorder – that you can conk at any second. Now that I think of it, you’ll have to remember to do drop to the ground in a dead sleep at least once or twice…preferably in the buffet line or a crowded theater.”

“Unnnngh?”

“No. I didn’t see who hit you. When I came upon, you were already down, lying in a pool of your own vomit.”

“Unnnngh?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake. It’s just an expression. ‘Came upon’ simply means ‘saw.’”

“Unnnnghhh?”

“I am a private dick. Like you. Only much better.”

“Unnnngh?”
“I worked in a dentist office for three years. I understand you perfectly. Now go to sleep. You’ve had a concussion. Rest.”

There’s a matter of fact nurse vibe happening here that I am finding very sort of…never mind. I close my eyes and drift off.

The next morning my girlfriend and I (a thing which excites me tremendously because I have never had an actual girlfriend, although I once held hands with Nancy Antel in a darkened theater for three full minutes because she thought I was someone else) go up to the Horizon buffet for breakfast because our subject does.

We watch him and he has no idea. We’re pros. We are the wind. Breaking.
We are sitting beside another couple. They have the cabin next to ours. He is a dazzlingly handsome man who is looking with patient tired eyes at a drop dead gorgeous woman. Her attention is fixed on a laptop screen.

“It’s still fifty freaking cents a minute,” he says.

“I know,” she responds. “But this is flickr.”

The man spreads his hands wide in a “so what” gesture.

Interested as I am in this discussion, I have to leave. Our subject moves outside to the deck chairs.

I nod once to Jennifer and follow him, taking the chair just a few down from him. I make a show of stretching and laying my towel out…looking around me as I slip off my shirt and suck in my stomach. Once seated, I nonchalantly snap a shot of my feet with my camera – so I look like any other tourist. It’s touches like that that make me a pro.

I have no idea that in five minutes, someone is going to die.

New Ways to Present Travel Images

I have been trying to come up with a new way to present travel photos. I really hate the old "Aunt Hazel and I went on a tour through the potato fields of Idaho and only took 6,345 pictures. Here they are in no particular order."

The last trip, Sheree and I took through the Amazon -- I blogged every single day. This trip I want to try something different. So here it is: a travel story featuring one photo a day. The only rule: the images all have to be taken on this trip.

So here goes nothing. I present a new project called "Danger is Not My Middle Name."

I’m the guy you bring your secrets to. Dirty secrets and family secrets. The kind of secrets you only whisper to a lover when the lights are out. Secrets are my business.

My name is Samuel D. Diamond. I tell pretty girls that the “D” stands for ‘Danger.’ But it really stands for “Delbert” – which is why I only use the initial. My first name isn’t really Sam either…and my last name is something you couldn’t even pronounce which is why I changed it to “Diamond.”

I’m a private dick – and save the clever comments. I‘ve heard them all.

My office is in New Orleans, a single sweltering box above Ray’s Boom Boom Room on Frenchman Street. The rent’s cheap here because when Ray has a band on, the “boom boom” sounds make it impossible to hear. Ray’s a friend of mine. Even though he doesn’t know it. I paid him his first months rent a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been here ever since...guarding the secrets of anyone who will pay me…even though no one has actually hired me yet.

But when she walked into my office, I could see secrets written all over her. She was sleek like a panther is sleek with blue eyes that invited the unwary to enter them and disappear forever. I could already feel my heart doing a slow fade. So I made a point of looking away with an air of affected disinterest. Make her wait for it, I thought cunningly.

“You must be Mr. Diamond,” she said in a voice that begged for more conversation, just so you could hear it. Just so you could be warmed by it in places better left unmentioned.

I didn’t answer. I just flipped my fedora back so she could get a gander at my eyes. I was Bogie. She was Lauren. She hid her flush of desire well. To a casual bystander, it would have appeared as though she didn’t feel the heat at all. But like I say, she wanted me. I’m pretty sure. .

I fixed her with my number ten grin – which usually causes hearts to melt and underwear to fire through the air…sometimes even someone else’s. But she simply looked back at me with those glittering green eyes.

“You must be Mr. Diamond?” she asked again. She pretended to inject a little irritation onto the question. Coquettish little thing, I thought.

“I am,” I said, keeping my voice several octaves lower than ordinary. I tend to squeak when I am get hot and bothered, which doesn’t fit at all well with the “Danger is my middle name” image. Neither does the fact that I am a recent graduate of the Ray Hunker Correspondence School of Detection of Des Moines – which is why I keep my framed diploma (which was a ten dollar option but I figured what the hell…) in the desk drawer.

Being a dick is still much better than my old job as the assistant to the assistant security director at Cavalcade of Value Shopping Mall in Seligman, Arizona.

“I need your help, Mr. Diamond,” she said.

“Help is my middle name,” I quipped cleverly.

Confusion flickered across her face. Then she shook her head, as though to clear away the cobwebs.

“The job I need you to do is dangerous.” Her eyes flickered over mine and I was glad I was sitting down. “I want you to follow a man. He’s going on a cruise out of Fort Lauderdale. You’ll have to go to Europe, I’m afraid.”

A single tear spilled out of her eye and rolled down that delicious apple cheek.

“Will you help me, Mr. Diamond? Please?”

It’s not often a pretty girl will even talk to me, let alone say “please.” (There was Ingrid Johanssen from my Dungeons and Dragons game several years ago. She asked me once to “Please pass her the attack dice” just before she kicked my butt back into the seventh ring of Argamoth. But she looked like the seventh level cave troll she was playing and I don’t think she ever liked me much anyway.)

Why was I thinking of Ingrid? I smacked myself in the forehead for being so goofy and when my vision cleared, I saw that look of confusion on her face again.

She had placed a cashier’s check on my desk. There were a lot of zeros there…and a ticket for a cruise.

“You bet, toots,” I growled. “Danger is my middle name.”