Ransom, P.I. ( Volume Two - Dark Corners): Ransom, P.I., #2

Ransom, P.I.

Volume Two - Dark Corners

Daniel Ransom, failed novelist and current private investigator, has had a bad week. After the shocking death of Nicole Faure, the one-time love of his life, Daniel continues his investigation into the disappearance of Nicole’s brother. He’s hoping for a quick and easy case.

What he finds instead is a small town swept up in a terrifying new religion, an oddball cab driver, an obese war criminal, and a significant number of people who want him dead.

Can Daniel crack the case and find the missing person before it’s too late?

I

It was blood or it was mud. One or the other. I couldn’t be sure which. Both had been a motif in my life the past few days. And both were a dark brown when dry. But the world had gone mad, it was spinning out of control, and I was determined to slow it down. I was going to start with this little brown spot on my coat.

The last twenty-four hours had seen me attacked by the man I was hired to find, tied to my own bed, and forcibly injected with a drug that was not only incredibly dangerous but also my only real clue as to what the hell was happening. This experience, of course, led me to the home of my client and one-time paramour, Nicole Faure, the following evening, where I watched the one and only love of my life murdered for absolutely no reason by Pierre Dupont. And because enough is never enough in the incredible, inscrutable life of Daniel Ransom, PI, I was subsequently dragooned at gunpoint into indentured servitude to the very man who killed her.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d had better days.

In the beginning I was hired to find Nicole’s brother, Alexander, and the drugs he had shoved into my veins were still playing merry hell with my head. Reality was bleeding into something else, something even worse, and I was seeing things. Horrible things with teeth and claws and brimstone came from all corners. Living shadows crept around the fallen body of Nicole Faure, my client and my only love, and devoured her still-warm, still-beautiful corpse right before my eyes. The whole world felt like it was crashing in through my eyes, my nose and my ears. Everything was a jumble of pain, demons and delusion.

But, if nothing else, I was determined to make some sense of this stain on my trench coat.

Looking at the thing, studying it with my eyes, wasn’t going to sort this one out - that much had become abundantly clear. I ran my fingers back and forth over it slowly, with varying pressures, but they told me nothing either. I gave it a sniff. Nothing. It just smelled like a sweat and cotton. With a quick flick of my tongue, I gave the spot a little lick and quickly spat out the window of the motorcar as it rambled down a dirt road, somewhere between where we had left and where we were going.

Manon looked at me like I had lost my mind which, to be completely fair, I almost certainly had.

It was mud, I told him, satisfied that I had explained myself fully and not really giving a damn if he didn’t agree. If Manon had complained or called me names or so much as grunted, it would have been the most he had spoken since we sputtered out of Paris hours ago. Or maybe it was minutes. I had no idea. Time was completely lost to me.

The car was my prison cell, for the moment, and Manon was one of my jailers. He rode next to me in the back seat and was either mute or the most boring man I’d ever seen. Or both. Handicaps and ennui are not mutually exclusive. Especially in France.

My other jailer, Bedel, drove us and at least had the decency to scream at me to shut up whenever I spoke. His vocabulary was limited, it must be said, but his volume was remarkable. In another life, in another time, I imagined he could have made quite a name for himself on the stage of the Palais Garnier, the home of the Paris opera.

They worked for Pierre Dupont, I had painfully discovered hours ago, and on that long southward drive, whenever the world went too mad, when the shadows were all that I could see, when even staring at spots on my coat wasn’t enough, I used the thought of him to pull my focus inward and provide a brief moment of clarity.

I arrived in Paris in 1938, a child with childish dreams of fortune and celebrity, not knowing what sort of man I would be. I failed, of course, and fell in love, only to run away like a proper coward when Hitler started marching. When things were safe, when real men had done the real work of saving the whole damn world, I crawled back to Europe to find the city I loved, the City of Lights, did not exist any longer. Not really. Paris was a shell of its former self and so, I suppose, were we all. And I still had no idea what sort of man I would be. Probably I wasn’t going to be a great novelist, this much had become clear. And I certainly didn’t want my father’s life of publishing parties and sycophants and boredom. I was lost.

Utterly unable to write even something bad, I had become a detective for reasons passing understanding. Looking back on it now, from behind the high walls of a dank, drafty castle where I am jotting down these scattered thoughts as barbarians pound at the gate, I suppose it was the romance of it all that drew me to private investigation. I was desperately searching for something to say. Privilege and gutlessness had left me with a slender palette to draw from and I thought, perhaps, I could live a noir life. A living testament to the hard-boiled things Raymond Chandler thought up and wrote down for pulp magazines like Black Mask.

Or maybe it was all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fault.

Chandler, after losing his job as an oil executive, of all things, had become definitive in the last few years, and Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cainand were inescapable and brilliant as well. And Edgar Allen Poe, of course, has the distinction of having invented the detective story nearly a century ago, with his The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the genre sing. Doyle made it magic. His Sherlock Holmes, his perfect calculating machine, cast a shadow over all the days of my life. If I could be clever, I believed, if I could be that incredibly, phenomenally, unbelievably clever, I would be invincible. I wouldn’t miss the celebrity I never knew or the friends I never made or even the girl I let slip away when I ran, with my tail between my legs, from perhaps the most righteous war the world has ever seen.

But I was no Sherlock Holmes. That much was clear.

And in all my silly cases that took me to the alleys behind the back-alleys, and to the cities below the city, in all my conversations with prostitutes and pimps and drug runners and robbers and rapists, I never quite found what kind of man I would be.

But now I know.

I’m the kind of man that will murder Pierre Dupont.

When we get to wherever we are going, I quietly promised my captors, I’m going to escape and, very soon thereafter, I will kill your employer. Be careful where you’re standing when I do.

Bedel laughed and even Manon managed a smile before sharply punching me in the face. I shifted my jaw a few times and smiled. The trees, bare and grey in the French winter’s grip, sped by. It was mud, after all, and for perhaps the first time in my mostly worthless life, I had a calling, a raison d'être.

II

The purpose of this trip was to locate Alexander Faure. Ostensibly, we were all working towards the same goal. But it certainly didn’t feel like it. Before her untimely passing, Nicole had hired me to find her brother, a mediocre artist who was suddenly finding some measure of success in the Paris art scene. He had been missing for some time and she came to me, after all those years, to find him. She was worried he was mixed up with the wrong crowd and, heavens, was she ever right. I found him, or he found me, I should say, but he escaped again and, apparently, owed Mr. Dupont more than just a little bit of cash. After killing Nicole right in front of my eyes, Dupont tasked me with continuing my investigation into Alexander’s disappearance, only this time is wasn’t to save him, it was to deliver him for execution.

The motorcar pulled up to the edge of what one could call a town if one were feeling very generous, with a scant few lights smattered upon the black horizon, and Bedel turned off the ignition.

All right, he said.

All right? I asked, genuinely confused and wondering if his eyes were actually just gaping holes spewing smoke or if that was another effect of "The