Sunday 29 April 2012

April Showers

There is something wonderful about April. A month of rain and wind that causes misery to more than half the populous. Of course the gardeners rejoice at their plants and shrubberies being watered by the skies and the farmers dance joyously as there crops and fields get doused with torrential downpours. But the average person moans and wails about the weather. The same people that moan about the rain also moan about it being too cold in winter and too hot in summer.

These people are - in short - annoying.

They can find almost anything to complain about, it gets dark too early, its too light outside, its too far to walk to get the paper, it hurts when I get shot. Okay well maybe the last is something most people would complain about.

But for me April is a wonderful time of year. The streets are practically empty as the generally public choose to stay out of the rain as much as possible. It makes walking from A to B an easy endeavour and not only that but there is such a joy to be had walking in the rain. To be buffeted by the wind and have my face splashed by the rain is one of the very few pleasures in life that I do take time to enjoy.

Sadly there is one other individual who also enjoys such activities and also may have started a  puddle water fight when he found me yesterday. Yes I speak of course of the most annoying man to ever grace the planet, Sergeant Frederick J Barlow.

Having taken time off after the arrest and incarceration of Henry A. Weldon, Fred finds that he has all sorts of time to make himself annoying on a whole new level. It has also meant that my enquiries into the death of Patrick have had to be some what covert until Fred returns to duty. 

As he was a friend of Fred's, he would obviously want to help with finding the man that killed him. However the order from the top brass was that the crime had been classified as an accidental death and was not to be investigated further. Fred would gladly disobey such a directive, but I wasn't about to let him risk his career when I was perfectly capable of seeking out his killer on my own.

So for another three days I have to endure the company of Fred and put off finding myself a murderer who I haven't quite decided what I am going to do with yet. If it is raining I am sure Fred will find me for further aquatic games, which in truth have been sort of fun so far...just as long as nobody tells him that it's okay.

Wednesday 25 April 2012

The 80s

It was a commonly held view between men and women of sensible and logical character that there are very few good things to come out of the 80s and that fashion is not one of them.

In fairness to the decade, some brilliant films and music were made during it but why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why would anyone want to bring back backcombing and shoulder pads?

My sense of style hasn't changed much since I was fourteen - black biker leathers and black leather custom crafted body armour tend to be as timeless as blue jeans and white t-shirts and have the same effect on the opposite sex. This means that I don't have to keep up with all the ridiculous trends that seem to seize the imagination of the general population.

I was walking down the street today when I happened to wander into some of the clothes shops on the high street and after about half an hour really began to question whether or not I had been knocked out, stuffed into a DeLorean and then dumped back in 1986.

The only thing that convinced me that I hadn't been was the prat who walked straight into me, cursed me with more expletives that the average member of the population actually knows and then went back to playing with whatever app is currently the centre of his life on his iphone.

Was such a pity his phone exploded two seconds later and the sound of the gun shot did send most of the public out and about into a general panic. 

As much as the guy was asking for it, whoever decided that bringing the style of the 80s back needs to be shot more.

Tuesday 17 April 2012

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 23

The last two days, I should have been trying to capture Henry A. Weldon, but my mind has been otherwise occupied by thoughts of Patrick.


Patrick, a man who I did not know well, a man who by all accounts should have meant nothing to me, but a man who had shown me compassion without reservation or condition. He had been murdered and wanting to pay a debt of retribution to his killer had kept my mind in a state where not even the promised money for acquiring Henry A. Weldon was enough to make me concentrate.


I had spent hours wandering the streets of the city looking for any evidence as to the whereabouts of anyone who would know who would kill a man of God on a street corner on Good Friday, but no one was ready to talk. Not without some form of incentive.


Henry A. Weldon still remained comfortable in his ridiculous residence as far as the men in suits and the police were concerned. In truth he was not. He had decided, given recent events, that he would be safer if he were not at home. Considering how much I wanted to kill him, this was a fairly sensible idea.


Unfortunately his whereabouts seemed to be common knowledge and much easier to learn than the identity of a priest-killer. A pool hall on the outskirts of the city was rumoured to have a backroom where poker games were held during times of crisis for the crime bosses. This made it a more than likely location for one man running away from one P.I. to go into hiding.


People always make the mistake in thinking that no one will talk. There are of course a variety of ways to make a man talk. Some are in it for the money, some adverse to pain and others well, those are best not mentioned. So finding out where people are and who is responsible is only a matter of time. So my patience was wearing thin, but even if I couldn't get to Patrick's killer right now, I could take out Henry A. Weldon.


Normally doing any form of gunplay requires some amount of concentration, but I always think that anger is a great substitute for concentration. Kicking in a back door doesn't take much effort. Shooting two well built, broad shouldered bodyguards doesn't require a marksman and kicking an over inflated with self-importance man in the back, binding him with cable ties and throw him without ceremony at the feet of men in suits.


Shame that all that was in the pool hall was a load of dusty tables...

Sunday 15 April 2012

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 21

21 days into a 14 day job is never a place a P.I. likes to find themselves, especially if a good chunk of that time was spent in prison. On the plus side I am finally out of that God-forsaken cell. 


This is partly due to one Sergeant Frederick J Barlow who seemed to have spent the last 5 days on his hands and knees begging for me to be released. This could in part be due to the amount of insults that get hurled at him every time he is forced to walk past my cell and partly due to guilt that he is ultimately responsible for my current position. 


Any time I get arrested, it's always Fred's fault. I shoot a man in the shoulder for giving me a hard time and get arrested, somewhere along the line I can blame Fred for it.


So now being free was great but I was owed a significant amount of money by one Henry A. Weldon. The men in suits that had me arrested (even though it is still Fred's fault) it turns out have been working with Mrs. Weldon trying to get evidence against Henry A. Weldon on drug smuggling. No wonder the woman seemed to be sleeping around.


The reason I had been hired was to follow her and find out who her contacts were and hand them over to Henry A. Weldon...if there is one thing guaranteed to make me more angry than being held in prison on false charges or real charges, it's the criminal underworld thinking that they can use me to do their dirty work when they are paying me rates for doing something completely different!


I may have brokered a deal with the men in suits to cover the costs that Henry A. Weldon incurred in exchange for all the information I had and me managing to nail the creep to his own expensively plastered wall. 


My five reasons for not killing Henry A. Weldon just got a lot shorter and my five reasons for killing him just got an awful lot longer.

Sunday 8 April 2012

Easter & Patrick

Why is it that chocolate seems to have found it's way into every form of main stream societies celebrations? The shelves of shops seemed to be packed to overflowing with the stuff months before big calendar events and people wonder why there is an obesity problem...


I have no big problem with people celebrating religious events, I would rather not go around upsetting God in his heavens when there are enough people on earth whose wrath seems to be aimed my way. I'd rather not invoke any higher power's displeasure as well. What I do have a problem with is the way that people seem to think that a religious festival is an excuse for a holiday and to celebrate and try to make me join in...


I'm not religious, my faith is in my guns and my own intelligence. I was raised that way, no one has ever spoken to me about God to try and convince me otherwise, most have just assumed that I am a terrible sinner beyond saving I think. The closest any one has come is the pastor/priest/vicar whichever it is that Fred goes to see for spiritual guidance, a man named Patrick.


The man didn't preach at me, he talked to me, like a human being...the only other person who has ever done that really is Fred, well in my adult life at least. He asked me what I believed and why so I told him, didn't tell me I was wrong, didn't tell me to change my ways or how I needed to change my life before I ended up in hell (my father always said that's what church goers did). He simply said that he would pray for me.


I'm not sure what pull that would have with the Almighty but it felt nice to know that there might be someone looking out for, for no other reason than they wanted to. I found out two days ago that the guy was shot just round the corner from my office. Turns out he was coming to see me about something and didn't want to risk phoning. Fred had offered to come with him, but he'd said it couldn't wait. 


Whatever it was, somebody shut him up. That somebody obviously didn't know that they were going to kill the only person I have ever met that shows the world to not be a dark and dismal cesspool of evil. To take them from the world, from me has definitely got my attention. 


When I find them they are going to be praying for mercy, which is ironic really, since it's their fault that all of my mercy died when they killed Patrick.