Sufficiently Noir Title

The dame that walked into Warty Hugeman’s office had legs that could stop traffic and a face that just broke your heart. She was distraught. Upset. Out of her wits. With the cigarette haze and smell of cheap hooch hanging in the air she was beautiful. She shut the door behind her and stepped to the slats of the window blind. She parted them barely and looked up and down the street before she spoke.

“Mr. Hugeman,” she said, her breath ragged. “You have to help me. There are people after me. Bad people.”

Warty pushed the brim of the fedora back so that she could see his eyes. They seemed to glow in the dim office.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, eyes screwed half shut from the cigarette hanging from his lips.

“They are going to kill me like they did my sister,” she said. She was twisting her purse as she spoke. A small graphic in the periphery of Warty’s visual field told him she was carrying a weapon in it, a small caliber gun most likely.. He wasn’t worried. It would never penetrate his ballistic gel skin.

“Siddown,” he ordered her. He dug in his desk drawer for another glass. It had a couple of paper clips in it, which he shook out. He poured her a stiff three fingers of his pre-war scotch and slid it toward her.

She hesitated before it.

“Drink it,” he said. “You need it right now.”

“I’ve never had hard liquor before.”

“A dame like you? I figured all the boys would be lining up to take you for drinks.”

“No,” she said, blushing. “That was my sister. She was the pretty one.”

“The pretty one, eh? She must have been a stone cold knockout then.”

The woman’s blush deepened.

“Drink it. If someone’s trying to kill you, no sense having to face them down sober as a church mouse.”

She pick up the glass and drained it in one go, coughed, but kept it down.

“Good girl. Now tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s the matter of our inheritance, Mr. Hugeman. Our father was very well off and when he died it all passed to my sister and me. She hated him. She set out to spend all his money on things he would have hated. Parties, men, booze. Fast cars that she’d leave on the side of the road when she ran out of gas. Houses she’d sleep in a single night and then abandon. Our father died three years ago, and as hard as she tried she still had decades of money left.”

“What about your inheritance? Did she come after it?”

“No, nothing like that. She let me do what I wanted. Animals, Mr. Hugeman. I’m setting up shelter for the small things that people reject or hurt.”

Warty knew she was really talking about herself. He had dinner plans a hundred thousand years ago. Mammoth with four or five of his future selves. They would be mad at him if he was late. It was the first time they had mammoth. That even with time travel he managed to be late was a perversity of being young that he had been told he would grow out of.  They could subjectively wait. This was the best use he had gotten out of his 1948 private eye office so far.

“So what happened to your sister?”

“She was killed, Mr. Hugeman. Shot in the heart with an arrow, of all things?”

A electric shock rose Warty’s spine until his scalp tickled. “What kind of arrow?”

“Does it really matter?”

“What kind? Did the police tell you?” He was leaning forward know, all his extra senses extended around him in an invisible net.

“Flint and wood. At first they thought it might have been stolen from a museum, but all the parts were new.”

“Alynne. That bitch.”

The woman rocked back in her chair. “Excuse me, sir?”

“Oh, not you, you silly bint. She knows I’m here. She knows I’m in 1948.” Warty pulled his omniwave omniscanner out of his desk. Nothing. She must have learned to mask her signal.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Sir, I really must object to your language.”

“Look, lady. This is not about you or your sister. This is about me and a very dangerous woman that’s been trying to kill me for nearly a billion years.”

“Why, that’s absurd.” She began fumbling at the clasp of her purse.

“You pull that gun on me and I’ll shove it right up your ass.” Warty stared her down a few more moments before he began pulling gleaming weaponry from the desk. His trusty revolver, looted from Wild Bill Hickok’s grave, the knife he had killed Zombie Space Hitler with, his nuclear maser pistol he had bought in 2638, the year he met Marissa. She had kissed him the first time he had melted a man with that pistol. He ran his thumb along the fractal grip.

Warty realized she was backing toward the door. “Get out,” he roared.

He would not die here tonight. He knew that. But Alynne didn’t. So that made her deadly.

THE END