Wayward Characters

Part Two

If you missed part one, you can get caught up here— Wayward Characters Part One.

Now let’s pick up where we left off…

…And before he took her back to the writer, she told her where to find the horse. However, she warned him the others might put up more of a fight.

She was more right about that than she knew. The hotel room was trashed. Furniture was overturned, cushions ripped open, empty bottles were strewn across the floor, and jigsaw puzzle pieces had been dumped in all the flower pots. The cop posted on guard duty raised the police tape and gestured for Cillian to come inside.

Someone had scrawled a bunch of bad jokes on the windows in lipstick. The bodies of two flappers lay wrapped up together in a fake bearskin rug on the floor. They looked like they could still be alive, even with blood drying under their noses and across their chins. Cillian could almost swear their chests were rising and falling, a slight snore escaping from the heavier one, but that was wishful thinking. They were gone.

An even worse sight waited for him in the master bedroom. The cop opened the door for him, but didn’t go in himself. The horse was splayed out across the king-size bed, but thankfully someone had draped a blanket across the body. The only parts of it visible to Cillian were the four legs, which hung stiffly off the edge of the mattress. Each of the feet were adorned with brand new, shiny silver horseshoes.

Cillian shook his head and covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. He’d seen enough. The smell was overpowering, and flies were already buzzing around the corpse. He stepped out of the room to where the cop was waiting. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

“Overdose,” the cop said. “There’s some really potent stuff going around. Easy to overdo it, even when you’re as big as a horse.” He pointed to the flappers. “And his girls tried to keep up. Poor things never stood a chance. I’ll never understand why anyone would do that to themselves.”

Cillian didn’t reply, but he knew. The koala said it best. The world was a mean place, and sometimes people had to do whatever they could to feel better, even for just a little while. Not surprisingly, the horse was overwhelmed by it all and went overboard. Sebastian wasn’t going to be happy, but he couldn’t say Cillian didn’t find the horse. He was due another ten grand. That left just the ape.

The ape was the only character in Sebastian’s book with a name, and that name, Pierre, was almost as ridiculous as its accent and French-Canadian background. None of it fit him, but these handicaps did not hold him back either. Of the three escaped characters, Pierre the ape was the only one cut out for life outside Moonbeam Junction. Perhaps it had something to do with his ability to pass for human, a very hairy human, but a human nonetheless, or maybe he just came from stronger stock, but the ape adjusted to life in the real world much faster than his peers. Or maybe he simply possessed the cruelty to match it. By the time Cillian caught up with him, the ape was working as an enforcer for Dizzy.

It took the detective months to track him down. In the meantime, Cillian paid off Dizzy with the money he got from Sebastian, spurred in part by reports of Dizzy’s new button man, a hulking behemoth who reveled in tearing people’s arms off. That should have tipped him off right away, but he didn’t put two and two together right away. When he did, he started following Dizzy at a safe distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of his new goon, but he crossed paths with the ape entirely by accident.

Dizzy was sleeping off an all-nighter at his downtown loft, so Cillian took advantage of the inactivity to grab a coffee. On his way back to the apartment building, he cut through the park and literally bumped into the ape. He was sipping from his cup, skimming the latest racing form, and it felt like he ran into a wall. The cup fell from his hands and splashed across his shoes.

Frustrated, he kicked the cup away, and realized he’d been eclipsed by shadow. He raised his head, mumbling a half-hearted apology, and froze when he made eye contact with Pierre. The ape wore a sharp navy-blue suit. A tilted fedora and black fur obscured his features, making him almost passable at a glance, but the lack of shoes was a dead giveaway.

The ape appeared mildly annoyed at first, but when he saw the expression of recognition on Cillian’s face, he knew something was up. He had a dame on his arm, a breathtaking blond with killer gams and a red dress, and she looked annoyed too, until she saw a change come over her escort. Her face twisted into confusion. She must have sensed what was coming next, but she didn’t have time to protest.

Pierre shoved her aside without a moment of hesitation and bolted down the parkway. Her heel snapped as she tried to steady herself, and she face-planted into a patch of yellow flowers. Cillian’s first instinct was to help her, but he couldn’t risk losing the ape. So he left her in the dirt, spitting flower petals out of her mouth, and went after Pierre.

Dodging a group of kids playing tag, Cillian closed the gap, only to watch the ape scale a ten-foot brick wall with minimum effort. By the time Cillian got to the top of it himself, Pierre was bounding through traffic, bouncing off the roofs of stalled vehicles like they were tiles on a hopscotch board. Cillian had no chance of catching him in a foot race, but perhaps he could cut him off.

Cillian cut through the alley to where his car was parked. Shifting into drive, he rushed back to Dizzy’s building just in time to see Pierre hop the fence separating it from a worksite. He watched the ape pause to catch his breath, and casually pulled up beside him. The ape snorted and his muscles tensed when he saw the detective. “Relax,” Cillian said, holding out one of his business cards. “I just want to talk. Don’t make me take the car off-road.”

The ape refused the card. “I know who you are,” he said, without offering any further explanation. “And I’m not goin’ back, eh.”

Cillian winced at the stupid accent. “And I can’t make you,” he said. “Nor do I want to get beat down for trying. But I do want to get paid. So why don’t you get in and we can have a short talk, and then I can tell Sebastian he owes me for making the effort.”

The detective reached across the seat and opened the passenger-side door. The ape rolled his eyes, but he got in. Cillian recapped his efforts in tracking down Pierre’s friends. The ape already knew about the dead horse, and he showed no emotion upon learning that the koala had returned willingly. Perhaps he already knew. After all, they did have the same employer.

“Can I ask why you’re so determined to stay?”

The ape snorted. “Is that a serious question, eh?” he asked. “Did you read that book?”

Cillian nodded, acknowledging that it was awful. “But that’s your world. And this isn’t.”

Pierre forced a laugh. “Says who? You? Sebastian?”

“Your friends saw it that way.”

Reluctantly, the ape conceded the point. “Some people are satisfied with the familiar. Or terrified of the unfamiliar. Either way, they’re willing to put up with boredom and misery and who knows what else, so long as they feel like they have some semblance of control. Even if deep down they know they don’t have any control at all, that everything they do is being directed by some unseen scribe. But that’s not me, eh.”

“You’d rather be a gangster instead.”

The ape chuckled. “Maybe,” he said. “For the time bein’ anyway. Don’t act so smug. You ain’t any better than the rest of us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Pierre the ape met his gaze. “Have you never considered the possibility that you might be a character in someone else’s story?”

Cillian rolled his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If someone was writing me, I suspect they would have made me more successful. Or interesting. At the very least, my life would have an actual arc.”

The ape was amused by his rationale. “Only if you’re the protagonist,” he said. “But look at you, eh. You’re a stock character if I’ve even seen one. Basically a walking noir detective cliché. Heck, man, you’re practically in black and white.”

Cillian thought about this for a second, and then quickly tried to push the thought out of his head. The only problem was that once it was there, it was not so easily dislodged. “So, if you’re the writer now, what comes next?” he asked.

The ape shrugged. “That’s the fun part,” he said. “It’s the only mystery that’s actually worth solving. You’d think a detective would have figured that out by now, but I suppose you can’t help the way you’re written, eh.”

“Would you shut up about that?” Cillian said. “You’re make-believe, not me.”

“Whatever you say, chief,” the ape said, reaching for the door handle. All I know is before I do anything else, I need to track down my lady and sweet-talk her into forgiving me for throwing her face-first into the dirt.”

“Hang on,” Cillian said, stopping the ape from exiting the car.

“What?”

“What am I supposed to do then?”

Pierre was visibly confused. “Whadda you talking aboot?” he asked. “I guess you could buy my girl some flowers, since you’re the reason she ended up in the flower garden.”

“No,” Cillian said. He wasn’t sure why he was so agitated, but it wasn’t something he could just switch off. The conversation with the ape had triggered something in him, and he felt like he needed more. More of what, however, he couldn’t say. “Let’s say I am nothing more than a supporting character in your great escape story. What am I supposed to do after you walk away?”

The ape didn’t dismiss him outright, but he did shake his head as he stepped out of the car and rose to his full height. “Were you not listenin’?” he asked. “You don’t need a pencil or a typewriter to create your own story. You just gotta have the guts to find out what’s next on your own, instead of waiting around for someone else to tell you.”

Pierre walked away, leaving Cillian alone in his car. He felt like a rube, letting the ape get in his head like that. He wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination. He’d lived a full life. He had vivid memories, and an identity forged by an abundance of experience. He wasn’t just a two-dimensional caricature, a whim of some jerk who’d seen too many noir movies. That whole notion was ridiculous, and yet, at the same time, it was exciting. The possibility of walking away and starting over as something completely different was enough to make his hands tremble as they gripped the steering wheel. Until that moment, he had no idea how desperate he really was for a change. But could it actually be done? Or was he simply an unhappy man torturing himself with a delusional fantasy?

There was only one way to find out. Cillian took a deep breath and pushed open his door. Picturing a world entirely different from the one around him, he lifted his foot out of the car and stepped into it.

Two weeks later, a package arrived for Paul Sebastian. The writer was hard at work on his new Moonbeam Junction book, although this one was a solo adventure featuring the koala as the main character. He had mourned the horse, but was still optimistic about getting Pierre the ape back for a sequel, even though he had lost contact with Detective Cillian altogether. Earlier that morning, he left a message at Cillian’s office that he was willing to raise his bounty if the detective could deliver Pierre by the end of the month.

The ape really was the heart and soul of the series, and writing without him was a drag. So he was not disturbed when the postman rang to deliver his package, though he was certainly intrigued. It was a plain brown envelope without a return address. Sebastian tore it open and saw that it was his original Moonbeam Junction manuscript, only with new pages detailing Detective Cillian’s pursuit of his missing characters.

He flipped through it until he got to the scene of Cillian and Pierre talking in the detective’s car. His heart sank as the detective let the ape go, understanding that Pierre was never coming back. But what surprised him even more were the lines that followed. He read as Cillian questioned his own existence, and felt a pang of heartbreak for the troubled man. Then he read the last line.

Detective Cillian stepped off the page.

There was nothing after that. Just a bunch of blank pages. “Huh,” Sebastian said to himself, flipping through the empty pages. “It worked. It really worked.”

Sebastian put down the manuscript and leaned back in his chair. His eyes drifted upward, scanning the curved ceiling from left to right and back again as he pondered the meaning of what he’d just read. To a casual observer, he looked to be a man lost in deep thought, but in reality, he was anything but.

In fact, he was carefully searching for anything that might pass for the edge of a page.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Pulp. I hope you enjoyed my weird twist on classic noir, and didn’t mind the wait between part one and two. Like my previous story, “Huns,” this premise has been with me a long time and taken many forms, including a novel that just didn’t quite work like I hoped. A very different, less cartoonish version of it was also published in eNoir over a decade ago under the title of “Wayward Characters in Kansas City.” The novel introduced the animal characters, but it was a bit more hardcore, and included a graphic suicide by a stuffed koala. This version is toned down quite a bit in comparison, especially when it comes to the aftermath of the horse’s death, but I think it works for what it’s supposed to be. But who knows, maybe I’ll revisit it again in the future. If you subscribe, you’ll get all the latest stories and book news, and even if you don’t want the emails, I’d love it if you shared this story to help get the word out on Powder Blue Pulp.