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“Die, you son of a bitch, die,” and the assailant, brows knit solid above angry eyes, slammed the cleaver down, again and again, parts and pieces splattered all over the kitchen. The strong, muscular man finally wore himself out, sat down at what was left of his kitchen table, an ironic smile spread across his broad face, and poured another cup of coffee. “I hate telephones,” he croaked, reaching for a bottle of amber heaven to add to his coffee. His telephone was in a couple of hundred pieces, scattered all around him, but still ringing. His booze fogged brain slowly told him it was his cell phone ringing. “I’ll kill it too, if I knew where it was.” Sunday mornings are hard on the man whose card reads, “Simon Sol Dorsey, Private Detective.”
Known to his enemies as Son of a Bitch, what few friends still around have referred to him as Sol. He was in his mid thirties, a hulk of a man, and one who carried an attitude even when alone in his kitchen. He was standing in the middle of that filthy kitchen, holding the cleaver, buck naked, and didn’t give a damn about anything. “I need a nap, or a fair to good woman, or maybe another drink. Damn that phone.”
He knew the sun was up, he doesn’t remember coming home, and it is now dawning on him that he has no clothes on. “Must have been a good night,” he muttered to himself, feeling a bruise or two, an ache here, a scratch there. “Guess I didn’t bring anybody home with me. Shame.”
He glanced out the kitchen window at swirling gray fog, rivulets of water slip sliding down the dirty glass, and his mood grew proportionally to the grime. He stumbled to the fridge, found a beer, popped the cap, and took it down in slightly more than five seconds. That was followed by another cup of coffee, well laced. “Come on Dorsey, get your head together.” Another session of one-sided conversation, something he was almost famous for, and then a short nap.
Some people sleep and work based on the clock, not Dorsey. He spent most of last night on the prowl, up and down the filthy streets that surround Franklyn Street in this fair city. Working for a client? Nay, good person, he was looking for as much fun as he could have, and with a lady of the night simply known as Simba, he had lots of fun. He was paying for it this morning, and a long nap, mid morning would help his attitude, some.
His attitude toward crime, criminals, law enforcement, lawmen have derived from what he read as a young boy; swashbuckling lawmen, private dicks with the ethics of an angry water buffalo, and criminals beaten into submission. The first third of the twentieth century would have been a fine fit. He was a lost soul in the twenty first century. Modern technology and prevailing social mores were not his best friends. He destroyed his first two computers before he discovered their value in research. His laptop was capable of taking abuse, his telephone wasn’t.
When he woke up, a couple of hours after the cleaver episode, he was back sitting at his kitchen table, his telephone was still spread around the room, his head hurt more than his knuckles, and that caught his attention. His knuckles were bloody and bruised. “Strange,” he said out loud, “Usually when my knuckles look like this, my jaw hurts, my ribs hurt, and I have at least one black eye.”
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