I sit in the bar with a cowboy in my hand, waiting for the end. It began on a Tuesday evening, when I was given the job. My apartment had been wrecked the night before when I called to inform my previous employers that I wouldn’t do the job they hired me to do. Seems certain mobsters don’t take kindly to people not finding those they want found. I was lucky in that they were only able to break the cosmetic stuff before I arrived. At least I can still sleep in a bed that isn’t in tatters. I suppose I should have gotten the room fixed, but I needed to get off of Mars and I needed to get off quick. These types of bastards tend not to stop at wrecking a room.
That’s when fortune gave me one of its rare smiles in the form of a radiant woman. She was dressed in a provocative red dress, the kind you don’t see outside of old noir books. The surgical scars across her body were not as noticeable as she thought they were. She walked with a newness to femininity and spoke like she had always been one. Forgive me if I screw up my language. Sometimes I say something rather rotten when I’m trying to be sweet. But she was stunning. So stunning, I thought I was day dreaming when she entered my little room. All my work was done in there. I couldn’t afford anything more.
“Are you Ryan Chack,” she asked me with a voice affecting curiosity.
“Yeah. I’m him.” I rummaged the room for a box of cigarettes, but apparently the mobsters thought it would be a cruel joke to break all of them in a scuffle. Bastards. Still, a broken cigarette is just as good as an unbroken one, I lie to myself. Fortunately, the lighter still works. “Want one?” She politely refused my gesture. Fair enough. Not everyone gets the appeal of a broken cigarette.
“I have a job for you.” She was curt with me. As I would find out much later, she had a lot on her mind.
“What kind of job?”
“Two million right now. Twenty million when you finish.” The cigarette fell out of my mouth. “Plus expenses.” Now, as many people who know me know, I’m not always one to smell bullshit. And yet, this all rank of it. For starters, she clearly had surgery done on her, the kind someone with twenty-two million woolongs to spend would be able to hide better, let alone two million. As I looked at her closer, the dress she was wearing started to show patches of age and decay. I’d probably notice more in better light, but that might just be even more damning.
At the same time, I wasn’t quite in the position to openly question my employer beyond, “What did you say your name was?”
“Claudia. Claudia Valespie.” That clinched it. I quickly told her I would take the job, whatever it may be. One doesn’t say no to a member of the Valespie family, even the black sheep. The Valespie family was perhaps one of the oldest crime syndicates in the inhabited planets. Despite being Earth based, they had enough clout and power to keep their name on the board. The Blue Diamonds learned that the hard way. You can still smell their remains on Titan. The reasons why she was the black sheep of the family were obvious to me when she first entered the room. I didn’t say them, but she knew I knew once she said her name. She became sadder when she came to this realization.
“My boyfriend is on Callisto.” She presented me with the photo of the guy. He had a smooth face, almost like a baby’s. His eyes were soft and brown, though there was a hint of anger in them. His left center tooth had been chipped and there was a small scar on his lips. His skin was slightly tan, though not dark enough to hide the shiner. He had curly hair, though the sides were partially shaved off. Not in the way one has a mohawk. It looked as if someone had failed to give him a haircut and tried desperately to fix it. Then again, I’m bald so who am I to talk about other people’s hair?
“And you want me to find him?” She nodded. “What’s his name.” She told me. I must have given her a look of incredulity as she immediately followed up the name with a hideously fake laugh before giving me a fake name. I let it slide for the moment. Instead, I asked her if she knew what he was doing on Callisto and she instead told me that he was known to hang out at a bar called the Blue Crow. I’d find out in time what he did and why. I wish I hadn’t.
We drove to the spaceport in the most opulent of cars and towards one of the most mundane of spaceships. I suppose that’s fair. Callisto has a long history of hiding criminals on the run. It stands to reason that they can’t all be murderers. Seeing the moon made me think otherwise. I’d never been to Callisto. No one goes to Callisto unless the ISSP is after you for a sum greater than seventy-five billion woolongs. It was a shithole. Not like Earth where you could at least have a conversation. I mean a proper shithole. It was a barren, desolate planet where the only life was a driving city without any cars in it. And, to top it all off, it was cold as balls.
So finding Claudia’s beau and convincing him to get off the planet wouldn’t be too hard. I started at the Blue Crow. Bartender seemed nice. Or, at the very least, he could act like he wasn’t thinking of the ways he could skin you to make a quick profit. Most of the clientele were either passed out or more focused on whatever was on the tv. Currently, it was that bounty hunter show that everyone watches for some ungodly reason. I never really got that show. It’s just two people talking about who’s going to die or go to jail soon. Sure, the lady had a nice rack and the guy looked like he’d be good for a fun one night stand, but the show just wasn’t worth it. Why watch some crap show with T and A when the internet exists? Or hell, just hire some prostitutes. I didn’t say any of this to the patrons. Even drunk, they were quite a fearsome bunch.
I asked the bartender about the lad. “Yeah, I’ve seen him,” he said with a rather uncharacteristically scornful tone. From the way he was talking to me before, I got the impression that he wanted to sleep with me before skinning me. I wasn’t much of a looker, but I had a similar build to the guy. Twinks, I think the term for us is. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Then again, the way he said “him” rubbed me the wrong way. He must have noticed as he quickly followed up with, “He comes to the bar once in a while. Usually to listen to Gren. But Gren don’t play sax no more.” I didn’t ask what happened to Gren. His sour face told me the whole story. “Nowadays, the guy hangs out with the… other ladies.” I socked him in the face before heading out. Fortunately, the other patrons were more focused on the sudden increase in free beer to care about me.
“We’ve seen him, ya,” said one of the ladies. Her name was Vanessa and she wasn’t rich enough to look like Claudia. She could barely afford a razor to remove the five o’clock shadow, let alone the surgeries to make her look more like herself. Still, she had a beauty to her. The kind usually talked about scornfully by people who believed normality trumps humanity. She was quite sad, even when she was cheerfully talking about her life. She couldn’t quite stop telling me all the little details. How she realized who she was on Callisto, how she met others like her, how she loved and lost and loved again. So many stories, none of which are mine to tell.
When her story reached my quarry, she told me he was a sad lad. He claimed to have “accidentally” killed a mob boss, the head of Valespie family. A cold shiver went down my spine. The kind you get when an unwanted hand of a ghost touches you. I tried not to say anything, but Vanessa could tell I was worried. She held me, not the way a lover holds someone. But like one holds a fellow person when they realize that there’s no life on other planets, all that’s left is just one sentient species. That we are truly alone. She told me that my bounty, for lack of a better word, was hiding in an abandoned church. And then, she told me the rest of her story.
My life seems to be haunted by abandoned churches. My dad died in one, my mom was born in one, and my brother disappeared in one. I found Steven a few days ago after being hired to find him by some mobsters. It appeared that he had taken on some debt with the mob and had gone into hiding. They just wanted the money and, failing that, him. My job was finding people and he didn’t go by Chack, so they thought I’d be perfect for the job. I recognized my brother instantly. It had been a few years since I’d seen Steven and while he’d gained a few scars and his hair had gone grey, he was still the same kid I knew. Still the same little shit who stole my lunch money and gave it to the homeless girl outside our dump of an apartment.
I found him on the outskirts of Tharsis. He was tending a farm with a wife and three kids (two girls and a boy). We exchanged pleasantries. I asked him what kind of business he was doing with the mob. His wife looked rather worried about this question. It turned out that he didn’t owe squat to the mob. His wife used to be a moll for the mob who helped her “sugar daddy” (I think that’s the right term for kindly saying pimp) skim off from the top. Certain people in the mob caught wind and the sugar daddy put the blame on my brother, a sweet kid who would talk to Julia, his now wife, from time to time. The kids were all his from a marriage that ended in tragedy. That’s not my story to tell though.
He practically begged me not to sell him to the mob. I looked at this guy, who I haven’t seen for years, who I cared about so god damn much, who I was furious for leaving me alone with only the cruel awful world to keep me company, and I said to him, “Of course I’ll keep you safe. What are older brothers for?” He broke down in tears.
When I arrived at the empty church, it was… empty. People had once lived in the church. Some of the fires were still charred with ash and embers. But those who were there were just ghosts haunting the church like God did. I looked around for something, anything to help me find my missing person. Providence came in the confessional. There, he must have been sleeping. Because it was in there that I found his wallet. It had two hundred woolongs, which I pocketed, a picture of the guy and Claudia Valespie (and it was indeed the guy I was looking for) and a photo ID with his name on it. It was the first name that Claudia had given me, the name I thought couldn’t possibly be his. How could two people both be named “Ryan Chack?”
More As It Develops
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