Post by Lucien Hicks on Nov 22, 2013 5:52:22 GMT -5
My name is Lucien Hicks. I used to be a reporter, until... I got a D-Notice. I got blacklisted.
When you're a journalist who can't be a journalist anymore, you're pretty well fucked. You've got a set of skills and tendencies...habits... that aren't really useful anywhere else but journalism. For instance, following people discreetly. Perhaps while on five bucks worth of trucker speed. Also, I am a third degree black belt in chainsmoking and have enormous rage strength stemming from intense sexual frustration. That last bit is mostly a joke. Mostly.
You pretty much have to rely on anyone who'll still talk to you once you're out, 'cause it won't be many people. Most people who were your trusted sources will suddenly treat you as a pariah... thankfully, I'd made a few real friends through the years. My old buddy from the Times-Picayune days, Jackson Masters... we call him Jax, but we might as well call him Google. If the 'facts' I was getting back in the day didn't add up, Jax was a phone call away and he'd set me straight... if he didn't know, he'd ask the Internet. And he'd remember it. The guy's got a gift for fact retention that the T-P never noticed... otherwise they'd have tried to put him in charge. To Jax's credit, he never would've let them. Then there's my old friend 'Nike' Kensey... Nicolette Kensey, LCSW these days. She sees more shit as a social worker than I ever have as a reporter. I trust her more than I would most people. She knows humanity pretty well for a person who straddles the fences of gender and sexuality as much as she does... you can't really begrudge someone for not knowing who they are when they're constantly evolving, I guess. Either way, I've taken to calling her a fairweather lesbian. To her credit, she's finally started to think it's funny.
Then there's my old... 'buddy', Philbryte Yesterman... I guess you can't expect a guy whose parents named him 'Philbryte' to be anything but an asshole. We worked together at the T-P once upon a time, and again at the Ouroboros Dispatch until... uh, until I kinda got us shut down. Most of my co-workers understood that I was standing up for what I believed in and supported me for it. Most of them. I'm not sure why Yesterman's helping me, but I'm glad he's around... he's my only legit connection to the press industry now, and I can use him.
I've got a few other associates out there, too... a couple of college kids - grad students, now - named Stein and Spellman who've gotten me into (and out of) more trouble over the last few years than I could tell you about in this introductory blurb. And then there's the pro wrestlers. The Bankstons and Mister Charles... or the Polar Phantasm, Nightmare and Cornelius Casanova as they're known to the wresting-watching world. Meeting them... and knowing them... has been a strange chapter of my life, for sure. Strange, but wonderful... after all, it's hard to meet people that kind and generous who can still party that hard. Shit, Phantasm and Nightmare have spent the last year working for the god-damn American Security Agency and I still like the bastards. They're the only two spooks that I like. How much more of an endorsement can you get, really?
The print media has shrunk to an impossibly small size, leaving me and all of my old journalism buddies up a proverbial creek. Once I took the sum total of what I had left, I realized there was only one good option available to me... and I did the best I could with what I had.
I opened a detective agency.
Once upon a time, I spent my life hunting down the truth to share it with the world. Now I hunt the truth down, one client at a time. It's not the same... but it's better than nothing.
Better than nothing is good enough for me.
--------------------------------------------------------
"Did you read it?"
"Of course I read it- that's not the point! Dude, your column got us a phone call from the Secret Service. That's not good. That's NEVER good."
I was used to Jackson being worried about things. He wasn't very good with change... and he wasn't great with adversity. I guess it's a tradeoff... nobody handles facts and figures as well.
"Come on, the Secret Service? All I said was-"
"You said the government is trying to kill us."
"I said the government doesn't care if they kill us- it's different."
The editor's office door opened with a slight squeal. Jackson looked over at me from his desk.
"You better get in there. She's probably pissed."
Before I could react, the editor came out with a depressed look on her face. I've worked for M for years now... she's never liked confrontations or bad news, but she's always chosen to deliver them in her own way. Usually by leaving me a voice mail when she knew I'd be asleep... or unconscious. This time she strode over to us, face covered in pained resignation... and right then I knew it was way, way worse than I thought it would be.
"You finally did it, Lucien. You finally fucking killed us."
She dropped a document into my lap. I glanced speculatively at the page and noticed 'CEASE AND DESIST' in large letters at the top.
"We can fight this, though- first amendment, right?"
She shook her head slightly, sighing.
"There was a time when I'd have been the one leading that charge... but as it is, we're all lucky if we'll ever work in this business again thanks to you."
As if to reinforce this point, she did something I've never seen M do before. She cried. Jackson got up and left without saying a word. He doesn't handle emotion well, either.
"M, look... I'll make this right. I'll fight this."
Angrily, she sucked in a breath.
"You can't fight anything, Lucien- they cut your throat. That's the reason I'm crying. I believed in you, you son of a bitch! I believed in you and you made them fucking blacklist you!"
She handed me a second document... I only needed to glance at it briefly to know what it was.
"D-Notice."
"You got a D-Notice, Lucien. You're basically considered a terrorist at this point... nobody's going to hire you. Even if you started a blog it'd just end up on watch lists. You're as credible as Alex Jones, now."
I couldn't tell if she was trying to be funny or not, but I laughed anyway. This earned me a solid punch in the solar plexus.
"Are you fucking listening to me?! It's over! You hear me? The Ouroboros Dispatch is dead thanks to you... and you'll never work in journalism again."
She was sobbing again by the end of that speech. I doubled over for a second, breathing heavily. I thought about what my life might be like as something else...and wondered what that would be. I'd never really given it much thought - life after journalism - but I had a few ideas to kick around.
"Hey M-"
She stopped crying, collecting herself.
"Yeah, Lucien."
I looked up at her with a smile, hoping she had already exhausted her quota of violent reactions for the afternoon.
"-since we're closed for business and all... want to get good and drunk?"
She gave me the 'disapproving editor' face one last time.
"I'm upset at you on so many levels right now. I'm especially upset that I'm saying yes to that."
"Well, prepare to get even more upset."
I reached into Jackson's desk and took out the box of petty cash he kept on hand.
"Call it my final 'business expense'."
She just shook her head and walked over to the front door of our up-and-coming 'internet publication'... with a simple twist, she turns the 'OPEN' sign around.
"That's alright, I guess. For us, it's last call."
--------------------------------------------------
"Jax! Glad you answered-"
"Lucien, it's 3AM. I thought you were ODing or something-"
It had been two weeks since the Ouroboros went under. Correction: since I inadvertently sank it with my big mouth...
"Hah, hilarious. And fuck you, by the way. If I was ODing I'd call someone who didn't sweat bullets anytime they've gotta drive over the speed limit. Listen, it's important... I know what we're supposed to be doing now that we're blacklisted."
"Wait- YOU'RE blacklisted. I'm-"
"Don't fool yourself, man. They might've put me under, but they've got eyes on you now too. You're my best friend, man-"
"...that can't possibly be true. Can it?"
"Yes. Mostly. Just... look, get dressed and come get me. We've got research to do."
"Can't this wait until the morning?"
"...what, when the sun is up? Eww."
"*sigh* Give me forty minutes. This better be good, man."
"It's gotta be, Jax. It's the future. And anything's better than nothing, right? ... Jax?"
He'd hung up... I was so excited, though, that I almost called him back just in hopes of getting him excited.
------------------------------------------------
It bears mentioning, at this point, that I was excited because I'd had a particularly vivid dream. Not a lurid or sultry one... my Alicia Witt dreams had skipped me that particular evening. No, it was a dream which pointed me in what I'd hoped was the right direction... in this dream, I found myself sitting in a beachside diner in what appeared to be Southern California. I'd been there once or twice before*, back in my WCF days, and I'd always found that the Pacific Coast has a certain 'feel' to it... it was a 'feel' I definitely felt sitting in that diner. A waitress said something behind me, something like 'Hey Jim', and as I turned to ask her for more coffee than a person should legally be allowed I noticed a very familiar face heading toward me. I couldn't seem to place the man... he seemed familiar yet unknown somehow... like I'd met him a hundred times but never met him before.
(* - Editor's note: Lucien has been to SoCal many times to interview WCF stars; his interview with Eric Price is especially classic! -B.)
The man sat down across from me as if we'd known each other for years. I gasped slightly, raking my poor beleaguered brain cells for clues to the man's identity.
"You look like you just saw a ghost, friend."
I smiled awkwardly and watched with some humor as the man produced a pack of cigarettes, lighting one at the table.
"I thought you couldn't smoke indoors in this state anymore."
As he smiled and laughed, shaking his head, I realized why this man was so familiar to me.
"What do you mean 'anymore'? It's 1978, man... you can smoke anywhere you damn well please. You can even smoke on an airplane!"
I'd seen him a hundred times before... on television. I was obviously dreaming; this I knew even in my subconscious state. After all, I was sitting in a diner in Southern California in 1978. Across a table from Jim Rockford.
"Why am I here? Why are you here?"
"I'm here 'cause I live right there."
He points out of the window, gesturing with his light menthol cigarette toward a silver metallic mobile home with more than a few dents in it. The sunlight reflects off of a golden automobile in the parking lot... even without a clear view of it, I know it well. Thoughts of the car make me smile. Holy shit, I'm talking to Jim fucking Rockford! Even in a dream that's freak-out-worthy.
"You're here because you don't know what to do with the rest of your life. Spent, what, nine years as a journalist? That's a hard life."
"Tell me about it."
"I don't have to... you already know where you've been. Me, I spent five years upstate on a murder rap... innocent, mind you. Once they figured that out and let me go, it was hard for me to get work-"
"Nobody wants to hire an ex-con."
"-even an exonerated one. And I wanted to help people, you understand..."
"...so you became a detective."
"Don't get me wrong, there's nothing glamorous about it... and I stay out of anything that's an open investigation. That's my first rule."
It hit me, what my brain was telling me... what Rockford was telling me.
"...you became... a detective..."
"Who knows... you might think about doing the same. Always good to have a brother Shamus out there, somebody you can trust-"
"You can trust me, Rockford. I'm a fan. I'm your fucking homeboy!"
I laughed at myself, thinking suddenly that no one in 1978 would understand what I meant by calling them my 'homeboy'. Rockford ignored my ramblings and continued. I wrinkled my brow and tried to make mental notes of what the man was saying... but I knew as soon as he finished talking I would ask him to show me how he makes that 180 turn at full speed in reverse.
"...and here's a tip from me: get a gun. But hide it better than I do mine. For some reason, everybody seems to look in my cookie jar."
------------------------------------------
A month later, Jax and I both got our licenses. We reached out to the rest of the Ouroboros' staff, but M had stopped answering my calls and Yesterman - never my favorite of the bunch - had actually managed to get a job as a copy editor at the Times-Picayune. Or what was left of it, anyway.
In the spirit of the Dispatch, we decided to call our operation the Ouroboros Detective Agency. We couldn't afford office space, but Rockford had inspired me... I took initiative and make a 'shingle' for my front yard. South Murat Street had its own pair of private investigators, now... watch out, Mid-City. Watch out, New Orleans. Private eyes are watching you; they see your every move.
Please don't begrudge me that Hall and Oates reference- I've been waiting to use that one for quite a while.
I had my friend Rob come by and set us up some serious computer systems... honestly, I barely know how to use the damn things. Jax has gotten good with them, though, and at this point that's good enough for me. The only real problem I had with them... or with any of the operation, really... was that we didn't have any money to pay for them. The best I'd been able to get us for work was some pro bono stuff for Nike Kensey... she'd become something of a whiz kid as Little Miss Social Worker, and as such she kept getting tougher and tougher clients to represent. Whenever things got a bit hairy for her, Jax and I were there... and by that I mean I was there and Jax was a phone call away, usually somewhere trying to find a 'real job' (as he often stated to me without any humor intended).
It was a Tuesday, I think... I was napping on our office's couch, which on off hours (and occasionally, as was the case then, during on hours) doubles as my bed. The office's phone rang, jarring me awake. I caught it on the third ring, mere moments before our answering machine would've picked up (Jax wanted to get a modern voice-mail system, but Rockford had inspired me and that meant old-school answering machine).
"Ouroboros Detective Agency... professional fact-finders for hire."
I heard a surprised laugh.
"Lucien... man, you must've lost your mind."
"...Casanova?"
"Renegade reporter turned renegade detective. I'll be god damned."
I hadn't heard from Cornelius... or any of my old wrestling acquaintances... in quite a while. It felt like too long, actually. Suddenly, I got that sinking feeling... according to his wife, it's a familiar feeling to anyone who knows the Polar Phantasm.
"What's up, Cornelius? How's GEW? Sorry I haven't made it by Bullet's in a while-"
"Man, I've been back in Pennsylvania for months. Been out the game for a while... teaching kids' martial arts, if you believe that shit."
"Wow. Actually, I bet you'd be a great sensei."
"Nah, man, the sensei's my girl. I'm just the assistant."
"Someone tamed the wild Casanova? Wow- this, I gotta see. Thought you were property of the world's ladies, one and all..."
"I guess shit done changed for all of us, man. Hey, check it out- that's kinda why I'm calling you. You heard from Polar in a while?"
Sinking.
"Nope... I sure haven't. Not since he told me they were having a kid- hey, did they have the kid?"
"...man, see, now I'm worried. I haven't heard from either of them two in months... nobody has. Not even Frank."
"...shit, I haven't thought about Frank in ages. If he doesn't know where they are-"
"-I know, right? None of his old Cryogenix boys know where he's at. Frank said to try him at home, but there's no answer... and I can't take off to Colorado, I got shit to do in town."
I thought about how to break it to Jax that I was taking off across the country. I wondered if he'd call the police on me for stealing his car. Then I remembered that I was likely one awkward situation away from being a 'person of interest'... and it struck me, the humor of the situation. Here I was, about to put myself through hell to hunt down a federal agent...
"...look, you're a detective now, right? I can pay you something... get you a flight out there, all that. I got a little money."
I'd forgotten Cornelius was still on the phone.
"Well then... looks like you just hired the Ouroboros Detective Agency."
--------------------------------------------------------
2: D-Notice
[(c) Wrestling Championship Federation 2013. All rights reserved.]
When you're a journalist who can't be a journalist anymore, you're pretty well fucked. You've got a set of skills and tendencies...habits... that aren't really useful anywhere else but journalism. For instance, following people discreetly. Perhaps while on five bucks worth of trucker speed. Also, I am a third degree black belt in chainsmoking and have enormous rage strength stemming from intense sexual frustration. That last bit is mostly a joke. Mostly.
You pretty much have to rely on anyone who'll still talk to you once you're out, 'cause it won't be many people. Most people who were your trusted sources will suddenly treat you as a pariah... thankfully, I'd made a few real friends through the years. My old buddy from the Times-Picayune days, Jackson Masters... we call him Jax, but we might as well call him Google. If the 'facts' I was getting back in the day didn't add up, Jax was a phone call away and he'd set me straight... if he didn't know, he'd ask the Internet. And he'd remember it. The guy's got a gift for fact retention that the T-P never noticed... otherwise they'd have tried to put him in charge. To Jax's credit, he never would've let them. Then there's my old friend 'Nike' Kensey... Nicolette Kensey, LCSW these days. She sees more shit as a social worker than I ever have as a reporter. I trust her more than I would most people. She knows humanity pretty well for a person who straddles the fences of gender and sexuality as much as she does... you can't really begrudge someone for not knowing who they are when they're constantly evolving, I guess. Either way, I've taken to calling her a fairweather lesbian. To her credit, she's finally started to think it's funny.
Then there's my old... 'buddy', Philbryte Yesterman... I guess you can't expect a guy whose parents named him 'Philbryte' to be anything but an asshole. We worked together at the T-P once upon a time, and again at the Ouroboros Dispatch until... uh, until I kinda got us shut down. Most of my co-workers understood that I was standing up for what I believed in and supported me for it. Most of them. I'm not sure why Yesterman's helping me, but I'm glad he's around... he's my only legit connection to the press industry now, and I can use him.
I've got a few other associates out there, too... a couple of college kids - grad students, now - named Stein and Spellman who've gotten me into (and out of) more trouble over the last few years than I could tell you about in this introductory blurb. And then there's the pro wrestlers. The Bankstons and Mister Charles... or the Polar Phantasm, Nightmare and Cornelius Casanova as they're known to the wresting-watching world. Meeting them... and knowing them... has been a strange chapter of my life, for sure. Strange, but wonderful... after all, it's hard to meet people that kind and generous who can still party that hard. Shit, Phantasm and Nightmare have spent the last year working for the god-damn American Security Agency and I still like the bastards. They're the only two spooks that I like. How much more of an endorsement can you get, really?
The print media has shrunk to an impossibly small size, leaving me and all of my old journalism buddies up a proverbial creek. Once I took the sum total of what I had left, I realized there was only one good option available to me... and I did the best I could with what I had.
I opened a detective agency.
Once upon a time, I spent my life hunting down the truth to share it with the world. Now I hunt the truth down, one client at a time. It's not the same... but it's better than nothing.
Better than nothing is good enough for me.
--------------------------------------------------------
"Did you read it?"
"Of course I read it- that's not the point! Dude, your column got us a phone call from the Secret Service. That's not good. That's NEVER good."
I was used to Jackson being worried about things. He wasn't very good with change... and he wasn't great with adversity. I guess it's a tradeoff... nobody handles facts and figures as well.
"Come on, the Secret Service? All I said was-"
"You said the government is trying to kill us."
"I said the government doesn't care if they kill us- it's different."
The editor's office door opened with a slight squeal. Jackson looked over at me from his desk.
"You better get in there. She's probably pissed."
Before I could react, the editor came out with a depressed look on her face. I've worked for M for years now... she's never liked confrontations or bad news, but she's always chosen to deliver them in her own way. Usually by leaving me a voice mail when she knew I'd be asleep... or unconscious. This time she strode over to us, face covered in pained resignation... and right then I knew it was way, way worse than I thought it would be.
"You finally did it, Lucien. You finally fucking killed us."
She dropped a document into my lap. I glanced speculatively at the page and noticed 'CEASE AND DESIST' in large letters at the top.
"We can fight this, though- first amendment, right?"
She shook her head slightly, sighing.
"There was a time when I'd have been the one leading that charge... but as it is, we're all lucky if we'll ever work in this business again thanks to you."
As if to reinforce this point, she did something I've never seen M do before. She cried. Jackson got up and left without saying a word. He doesn't handle emotion well, either.
"M, look... I'll make this right. I'll fight this."
Angrily, she sucked in a breath.
"You can't fight anything, Lucien- they cut your throat. That's the reason I'm crying. I believed in you, you son of a bitch! I believed in you and you made them fucking blacklist you!"
She handed me a second document... I only needed to glance at it briefly to know what it was.
"D-Notice."
"You got a D-Notice, Lucien. You're basically considered a terrorist at this point... nobody's going to hire you. Even if you started a blog it'd just end up on watch lists. You're as credible as Alex Jones, now."
I couldn't tell if she was trying to be funny or not, but I laughed anyway. This earned me a solid punch in the solar plexus.
"Are you fucking listening to me?! It's over! You hear me? The Ouroboros Dispatch is dead thanks to you... and you'll never work in journalism again."
She was sobbing again by the end of that speech. I doubled over for a second, breathing heavily. I thought about what my life might be like as something else...and wondered what that would be. I'd never really given it much thought - life after journalism - but I had a few ideas to kick around.
"Hey M-"
She stopped crying, collecting herself.
"Yeah, Lucien."
I looked up at her with a smile, hoping she had already exhausted her quota of violent reactions for the afternoon.
"-since we're closed for business and all... want to get good and drunk?"
She gave me the 'disapproving editor' face one last time.
"I'm upset at you on so many levels right now. I'm especially upset that I'm saying yes to that."
"Well, prepare to get even more upset."
I reached into Jackson's desk and took out the box of petty cash he kept on hand.
"Call it my final 'business expense'."
She just shook her head and walked over to the front door of our up-and-coming 'internet publication'... with a simple twist, she turns the 'OPEN' sign around.
"That's alright, I guess. For us, it's last call."
--------------------------------------------------
"Jax! Glad you answered-"
"Lucien, it's 3AM. I thought you were ODing or something-"
It had been two weeks since the Ouroboros went under. Correction: since I inadvertently sank it with my big mouth...
"Hah, hilarious. And fuck you, by the way. If I was ODing I'd call someone who didn't sweat bullets anytime they've gotta drive over the speed limit. Listen, it's important... I know what we're supposed to be doing now that we're blacklisted."
"Wait- YOU'RE blacklisted. I'm-"
"Don't fool yourself, man. They might've put me under, but they've got eyes on you now too. You're my best friend, man-"
"...that can't possibly be true. Can it?"
"Yes. Mostly. Just... look, get dressed and come get me. We've got research to do."
"Can't this wait until the morning?"
"...what, when the sun is up? Eww."
"*sigh* Give me forty minutes. This better be good, man."
"It's gotta be, Jax. It's the future. And anything's better than nothing, right? ... Jax?"
He'd hung up... I was so excited, though, that I almost called him back just in hopes of getting him excited.
------------------------------------------------
It bears mentioning, at this point, that I was excited because I'd had a particularly vivid dream. Not a lurid or sultry one... my Alicia Witt dreams had skipped me that particular evening. No, it was a dream which pointed me in what I'd hoped was the right direction... in this dream, I found myself sitting in a beachside diner in what appeared to be Southern California. I'd been there once or twice before*, back in my WCF days, and I'd always found that the Pacific Coast has a certain 'feel' to it... it was a 'feel' I definitely felt sitting in that diner. A waitress said something behind me, something like 'Hey Jim', and as I turned to ask her for more coffee than a person should legally be allowed I noticed a very familiar face heading toward me. I couldn't seem to place the man... he seemed familiar yet unknown somehow... like I'd met him a hundred times but never met him before.
(* - Editor's note: Lucien has been to SoCal many times to interview WCF stars; his interview with Eric Price is especially classic! -B.)
The man sat down across from me as if we'd known each other for years. I gasped slightly, raking my poor beleaguered brain cells for clues to the man's identity.
"You look like you just saw a ghost, friend."
I smiled awkwardly and watched with some humor as the man produced a pack of cigarettes, lighting one at the table.
"I thought you couldn't smoke indoors in this state anymore."
As he smiled and laughed, shaking his head, I realized why this man was so familiar to me.
"What do you mean 'anymore'? It's 1978, man... you can smoke anywhere you damn well please. You can even smoke on an airplane!"
I'd seen him a hundred times before... on television. I was obviously dreaming; this I knew even in my subconscious state. After all, I was sitting in a diner in Southern California in 1978. Across a table from Jim Rockford.
"Why am I here? Why are you here?"
"I'm here 'cause I live right there."
He points out of the window, gesturing with his light menthol cigarette toward a silver metallic mobile home with more than a few dents in it. The sunlight reflects off of a golden automobile in the parking lot... even without a clear view of it, I know it well. Thoughts of the car make me smile. Holy shit, I'm talking to Jim fucking Rockford! Even in a dream that's freak-out-worthy.
"You're here because you don't know what to do with the rest of your life. Spent, what, nine years as a journalist? That's a hard life."
"Tell me about it."
"I don't have to... you already know where you've been. Me, I spent five years upstate on a murder rap... innocent, mind you. Once they figured that out and let me go, it was hard for me to get work-"
"Nobody wants to hire an ex-con."
"-even an exonerated one. And I wanted to help people, you understand..."
"...so you became a detective."
"Don't get me wrong, there's nothing glamorous about it... and I stay out of anything that's an open investigation. That's my first rule."
It hit me, what my brain was telling me... what Rockford was telling me.
"...you became... a detective..."
"Who knows... you might think about doing the same. Always good to have a brother Shamus out there, somebody you can trust-"
"You can trust me, Rockford. I'm a fan. I'm your fucking homeboy!"
I laughed at myself, thinking suddenly that no one in 1978 would understand what I meant by calling them my 'homeboy'. Rockford ignored my ramblings and continued. I wrinkled my brow and tried to make mental notes of what the man was saying... but I knew as soon as he finished talking I would ask him to show me how he makes that 180 turn at full speed in reverse.
"...and here's a tip from me: get a gun. But hide it better than I do mine. For some reason, everybody seems to look in my cookie jar."
------------------------------------------
A month later, Jax and I both got our licenses. We reached out to the rest of the Ouroboros' staff, but M had stopped answering my calls and Yesterman - never my favorite of the bunch - had actually managed to get a job as a copy editor at the Times-Picayune. Or what was left of it, anyway.
In the spirit of the Dispatch, we decided to call our operation the Ouroboros Detective Agency. We couldn't afford office space, but Rockford had inspired me... I took initiative and make a 'shingle' for my front yard. South Murat Street had its own pair of private investigators, now... watch out, Mid-City. Watch out, New Orleans. Private eyes are watching you; they see your every move.
Please don't begrudge me that Hall and Oates reference- I've been waiting to use that one for quite a while.
I had my friend Rob come by and set us up some serious computer systems... honestly, I barely know how to use the damn things. Jax has gotten good with them, though, and at this point that's good enough for me. The only real problem I had with them... or with any of the operation, really... was that we didn't have any money to pay for them. The best I'd been able to get us for work was some pro bono stuff for Nike Kensey... she'd become something of a whiz kid as Little Miss Social Worker, and as such she kept getting tougher and tougher clients to represent. Whenever things got a bit hairy for her, Jax and I were there... and by that I mean I was there and Jax was a phone call away, usually somewhere trying to find a 'real job' (as he often stated to me without any humor intended).
It was a Tuesday, I think... I was napping on our office's couch, which on off hours (and occasionally, as was the case then, during on hours) doubles as my bed. The office's phone rang, jarring me awake. I caught it on the third ring, mere moments before our answering machine would've picked up (Jax wanted to get a modern voice-mail system, but Rockford had inspired me and that meant old-school answering machine).
"Ouroboros Detective Agency... professional fact-finders for hire."
I heard a surprised laugh.
"Lucien... man, you must've lost your mind."
"...Casanova?"
"Renegade reporter turned renegade detective. I'll be god damned."
I hadn't heard from Cornelius... or any of my old wrestling acquaintances... in quite a while. It felt like too long, actually. Suddenly, I got that sinking feeling... according to his wife, it's a familiar feeling to anyone who knows the Polar Phantasm.
"What's up, Cornelius? How's GEW? Sorry I haven't made it by Bullet's in a while-"
"Man, I've been back in Pennsylvania for months. Been out the game for a while... teaching kids' martial arts, if you believe that shit."
"Wow. Actually, I bet you'd be a great sensei."
"Nah, man, the sensei's my girl. I'm just the assistant."
"Someone tamed the wild Casanova? Wow- this, I gotta see. Thought you were property of the world's ladies, one and all..."
"I guess shit done changed for all of us, man. Hey, check it out- that's kinda why I'm calling you. You heard from Polar in a while?"
Sinking.
"Nope... I sure haven't. Not since he told me they were having a kid- hey, did they have the kid?"
"...man, see, now I'm worried. I haven't heard from either of them two in months... nobody has. Not even Frank."
"...shit, I haven't thought about Frank in ages. If he doesn't know where they are-"
"-I know, right? None of his old Cryogenix boys know where he's at. Frank said to try him at home, but there's no answer... and I can't take off to Colorado, I got shit to do in town."
I thought about how to break it to Jax that I was taking off across the country. I wondered if he'd call the police on me for stealing his car. Then I remembered that I was likely one awkward situation away from being a 'person of interest'... and it struck me, the humor of the situation. Here I was, about to put myself through hell to hunt down a federal agent...
"...look, you're a detective now, right? I can pay you something... get you a flight out there, all that. I got a little money."
I'd forgotten Cornelius was still on the phone.
"Well then... looks like you just hired the Ouroboros Detective Agency."
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2: D-Notice
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