Noir Tales...From The Future!

He was dead. And I was looking at the wound that killed him. Actually, I was looking through the wound that killed him...a one-inch laser hole burned right through his head. Even though the high-end killers had been using lasers for five years or so, it still caught me off-guard seeing the type of damage they did. Entry and exit holes exactly the same size, and the flesh in-between seared and cauterized so you could see the pattern of the hand made, and hand laid, Mexican tile he dropped dead on. Right through the hole in his head.

It happened in the kitchen. At least that's the word they used - even though any kitchen you've had personal experience with was about fifteen times smaller, and eighty times more practical. It was a room an architect designed to ooze "I'm too rich to ever cook." An interior designer had taken that theme, and ran with it. The things in the kitchen were selected for the off-hand chance a guest got lost in the house, and ended up there. They would be impress as hell. There was a computer interface in the coffee maker that told me the oven sold for three million retail. Seriously.

I thought to myself, "what the fuck does someone do with a three million dollar oven?" Of course the answer was, get lasered in the head and drop dead next to it - or should I say in-between it and your six million dollar walk-in refrigerator. Nobody would even notice the quarter-million dollar dishwasher fifteen yards away that offered hydrosonic cleaning technology, mass spectrometer linked to the computer (to ensure the best cleaning cycle for when you jammed Italian wine glasses, French porcelain plates and German cutlery in the same load), and U.V. bacteria and virus killing rays for every wash. I found that out from the interface on the cutting board after the C.S.I. team shooed me away from the coffee maker.

The cops all gave me dirty looks as I wandered around, but I was there on business, and they had no right to kick me out. The guy was the husband of my client, Vicky Valise, and she had hired me because she was worried about her husbands safety. Of course, you'd be right to say I wasn't very good at my job. But in my defense, I was hired only three hours before, didn't have a single lead to work on, and I spent an hour after that getting the oil changed on my beat-up flying car.

Anyways, she walked in wearing a red silk floral print blouse that wasn't buttoned up enough, a small Gucci clutch in one hand, and one of those mini-Schnauzer dogs in the other. The rest of her was wrapped in a short, tight, black mini-skirt, which let you know where her real assets were. There are legs, and then there are legs. She wore some sexy Steve Madden number on her feet with an understated bow that was a great excuse to start somewhere...if you were the kind of guy that needed an excuse to start somewhere when a woman wears a tight mini-skirt, and she's got a pair of legs that are, yaknow, legs that are legs.

Did I mention why I got into this business in the first place? We P.I.'s get to see a lot of legs.




(see what I did there? used the second of my "ways to begin" to start this little story! Totally works)