Detective

job. But, as I discovered, most private detectives don’t carry guns. Oh, sure, some of them do. I’ll be talking to some of Richard’s other operatives and see that they have a piece tucked in the front of their pants. I always think, “How can they do that? Why aren’t they afraid they’ll shoot themselves in the leg, assuming they don’t blow their balls off?” But somehow they never do.
    In all my months on the job, I only had a gun pulled on me once. It happened on just my second week on the job, and it probably would have ended my detective career if we hadn’t needed the money so damn badly. It happened that I had to serve a divorce summons in upstate New York. Richard doesn’t generally handle divorce cases, just accident cases, but this was a favor he was doing for a former client. She and her husband were divorcing, so Richard gave me the papers to serve. I was told it was an amicable divorce, so rather than drive 50 miles upstate and find out the guy wasn’t home, I called him up to ask him about it.
    Naive me. It turned out the guy was living with his mother. I got her on the phone, and she gave me a song and dance about her son not being there and not knowing when he would be in. So I reported back to Richard, who called the client, who provided the information that the guy was indeed living there, and what’s more, he worked in Manhattan somewhere and left the house for work every morning at seven sharp. So Richard gave me a description of the guy, and told me to get up at five in the morning, drive up there, stake out his house, and serve him when he left for work.
    So I did it. As I said, it was my second week on the job. It was the first summons I’d ever served, so it was almost even fun. I got up there by 6:45, found the address, and discovered it was a private house on a corner lot, with cars parked on both sides. I picked a spot across the street from which I could see both sides of the house, and sat in my car to wait.
    Sure enough, at 7:00 the side door opened and a young man with long hair and a beard came out the door, carrying a coat over his right arm. I’d been given the description of a man with a mustache, but I figured a mustache could become a beard, given a little time, so I got out of my car and started across the road.
    “Charles Petralini,” I called out.
    He stopped and turned around. “Yeah.” I had him.
    I crossed the road and walked up to him. He shrugged the coat off his arm. In his right hand was a single-barreled shotgun with no stock, your basic, ugly, lethal, concealed weapon.
    “Whaddya want?” he snarled.
    What I wanted was to get back in my car, drive off, quit the detective business, and never serve another bloody fucking summons the rest of my life. But I couldn’t do that.
    “I have divorce papers from your wife,” I said. I reached into my jacket pocket, very slowly so he could see that was what I was taking out. I held them out toward him. “I was told you were expecting them.”
    He snatched them from me and looked at them. Then he looked up at me. “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “That’s cool.” He looked down at the papers again. Then he looked straight at me, his face hot with anger, and his hand clenched around his gun. “But I never want to see your face again, douche bag.”
    I didn’t ask him how he knew my name. I just got back in my car and drove off. It was a good twenty miles before I convinced myself the son of a bitch wasn’t following me.
    That was my first experience with what I presumed was a loaded gun. Picking up Pedro’s in the bathroom was my second.
    This was my third. It was also my first time firing one. I’m sure I did everything wrong. I gritted my teeth and winced as I pulled the trigger. There was no noise, because of the silencer, but the gun jerked like a son of a bitch, and I nearly fell on my ass.
    I steadied myself, looked, and discovered that by some miracle I had managed to hit the broad side of a king-size mattress, a good six feet away. It had been close, though. The small round hole was near the top edge of the mattress. I had aimed dead center. No matter. It would only make the bullet that much easier to dig out.
    I took out my pocket knife and began to look for the bullet. It had gone clean through the first mattress. I flopped it over. There was an exit wound in the back. The king is dead, long live the king. The queen was also dead. I flopped her over too. There was no exit wound in the other