The Painted Gun. Bradley Spinelli

      1

      At 4:14 p.m. I was smoking a cigarette. My smoking pattern had finally come full circle. After five religious years of pack-a-day Marlboro Reds, I quit, started up again, switched to Lucky Strike filters, switched to Drum hand-rolling Dutch tobacco, quit, started up on Lucky Strike Straights, switched to American Spirit Blues, quit, started again on American Spirit Yellows, quit, and finally resumed my regimen of Marlboro Reds, a pack a day. I was now convinced that the chemical additives that had driven me to Spirits in the first place would kill me quicker than the cancer the tobacco alone would eventually cause.

      By 4:19 the cigarette was burning out in the brown glass ashtray, sending a lone last tendril of smoke in a sacred mission to the ceiling. I looked out the window to the dismal backyard—beaten dirt and broken concrete, straggling stubborn bushes, empty plastic trash bags. I was having a thought, a post-cigarette thought, of fullness, hope, and genuine optimism. It passed quickly. For lack of anything better to do I was reaching for the box of Reds when the phone rang. I looked at it in disbelief and waited a full five rings before I picked it up.

      “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”

      I cleared my throat and remembered I should have spoken first. “Yeah. Crane here.”

      “Itchy, damn you. Why the hell don’tcha say hello like a normal guy?”

      “Whatever gave you the impression I was normal?” It was McCaffrey, a second-rate private investigator down in LA. I had done a local research job for him a couple of years before and never been paid. Since then I’d been fortunate enough to be out when he called. I was looking out the window again, wondering why I had felt so optimistic just a moment before.

      “Right as ever, Itchy. Listen, you busy these days?”

      I took a moment to shake out another cigarette and toyed with it between my fingers. I didn’t have to turn my head to know that my desk was empty, nor did I have to shift my weight to feel the anorexic leather wallet in my back pocket. “Yeah, McCaffrey, I’m pretty busy. Quite a few irons in the fire right about now.”

      “Well, let ’em get cold. I got one you’re gonna want to be in on.”

      “Fuck you, McCaffrey. Your checks don’t bounce, they just never get cut.” I hung up.

      I lit the cigarette in my hand and leaned my chair back on two legs. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the far side of the room and realized that my beard was the only part of me not looking thin. I began to have second thoughts about giving McCaffrey the brush-off.

      I started my “information services”