Emerald City Blues — Peter Smalley

Gumshoe. Flatfoot. Bulldog. Professional snoop. They've got a lot of words for someone like me. Most of them you wouldn't say on a Sunday in front of your mother. It's not easy being a private investigator in a town where no one is innocent, but it's twice as hard if you're a woman. I have to be twice as tough, twice as sharp, and take ten times as much horse manure to solve every case I take. Good thing I'm also ten times as much of a detective as all the coppers down at the station put together. Not that it would take a lot, but you know what I mean.

Right. So it all started when a man from my past showed up at my door one dark, rainy night. Of course, it's Seattle. I don't have to tell you it rains here, right? Right. So he was pounding my door. I was pounding a drink. He had a problem in need of solving. I solved problems for a needy living. It was a match made in heaven. Except that matches start fires, and fires are more in line with the opposite of heaven. I didn't know it yet but that's right where my world was headed with this case: straight to hell, with a whiskey chaser. I was about to be a lot toastier than I really wanted to be, and things were just getting warmed up.

But hey, someone's got to do it. Why not me? Oh, right. Because I'm a dame, just a flatfoot floozie with a closet full of tar-black memories and a chip on my shoulder the size of Gibraltar. Maybe so. But I'll get this case solved no matter what it takes. Even if I have to call on skills I haven't used since my Master went off to combat Germany's special occult forces in the Great War. He never came back, and I'm still half-trained at best. Hopefully it's the right half. If not, I'm a walking obituary.

Remind me again why I do this for a living? Oh, that's right: it's really not much of a living.