Detective D. Case by Neal Goldy Read Free Book Online Page B

it.
              “I’m going to get some coffee, maybe even
another smoke. Don’t move ’cause I’ll be right back. And when I get back, we’ll
be able to talk about what you need to get off your chest.”
              When
he left the room, D. didn’t move, not in the first few moments. What had
happened to Advert, he had no idea. All of a sudden he altered his appearance,
becoming such a different person while contradicting the very claims he made
and dismissing the same warnings in order to accuse him of temper issues. It
really caught him off guard. Who had this man become? It sounded like a long
shot, but D. could see maybe – just maybe – Chief Advert had been possessed
from the unknown potency that had once taken his body to do their bidding.
    *****
     
    Advert glanced back to check if D. had followed him. No,
he hadn’t. And a good thing, too, otherwise he’d be in a miniature game of
cat-and-mouse (and he was the chief, after all!). He reached the kitchen and
went to where the coffee maker was, Advert pouring some stale coffee from the
decanter. Then, when no one was looking, he flipped on his walkie-talkie.
Unheard, mumbling voices shot out from the speakers. A little weight lifted
from the chief’s shoulders; finally, some protection, you know?
              He tasted the coffee. Yup, it still tasted
stale. Advert never could have afforded good coffee beans to make his brew
during working hours – if it tasted bad he always made a quick ride to a
convenience store, easy enough. Stale never meant good, but Advert supposed
that for now, he needed to set the detective straight.
              A voice – no two voices--came from his
walkie-talkie. He asked about any problems. They spoke of it. Okay, okay, he
thought, and told them he’d be right there. No worries, sir, just let me handle
things the way they should be. He didn’t want to keep D. waiting, but in any
case, the problem he needed to deal with involved D. anyway. The man had lived
long enough, and surely he could wait a few minutes?
     
    The letter D. found
in the bathroom of McDermott’s penthouse was a strange one, no doubt. The front
was written specifically for him, which he guessed was why it was put there in
the first place. He hadn’t read it before, but waiting for Chief Advert, he
decided to read it now in order to pass the time. On the greeting, D. noticed
the sender forgot to put a period after D, and nothing after. Was it
intentional or a typing mistake?
     
    Dear D
    Make
sure McDermott doesn’t see this when he looks for it. I had slipped it into his
letters hoping, when you investigate his place from Advert’s orders, you will
find it. I know you, and you know me, but we have never met. Don’t analyze it;
you’ll make things worse. 
    You
will experience the worst pain humans will endure when you look for the answer,
the key, to the disappearance of McDermott. Nobody will explain the cause of
this strangely disturbing phenomenon, not even scientists of the greatest kind.
A nightmare of beauty this will become.
    They
will be looking for you – the government, the police – and I say don’t worry.
Just find out not who took McDermott – no, that story’s well-worn off and it
sounds like it came from a tabloid—but why you were given this and not anyone
else.
    A poem was written on the backside of the note written to
D., a Chinese to be specific. He identified this from the strange characters on
the upper half of the letter’s flipside. D. had read about the differences
between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, so he figured out what language it was
written in. Below the original Chinese version there was the same poem, but
translated into English. Why put the original language on top? He thought it
easier to simply put the English one and be done with it.
    He
expected that this’d be slightly more complex, though. If the poem had been in
Chinese, it would have been more of a mystery to D.