About ten minutes later, highly depressed by everything that had happened to me and even more depressed by the monstrous heat that suffocated the city, I decided to quit playing fucking games and close this stupid case once and for all. It had managed to piss me off before I even started it.

I made a lightning-fast knife hand strike in the air to demonstrate my determination and convince myself the situation had to be changed, but I didn’t achieve much. My gesture didn’t produce the desired special effects like hissing noises or thunderbolts, as usually happens in kung fu movies. Well, the air moved a bit, but that was all. Still unsatisfied, I repeated the strike, hoping to be more successful this time, but failed again. And, you know, when you do silly things, you usually get stupid results! It all came out as if I wanted to hail a cab, which I actually did.

In the next second, we heard a nerve-wracking tire screeching too close to us, and a beaten Chevy materialized out of nowhere like a ghost in a graveyard. It almost ran over our toes. Then, before we knew it, the cab driver jumped out of the car and pushed us into it in panic, after which he stomped on the gas, violating every possible speed limit in this area. It was totally against traffic regulations to stop here, he explained, and gangs of fat cops had been watching twenty-four-seven to bust his poor ass. “I just made an exception for you because I have a heart of gold, you know,” he assured us, but I rather suspected him of laying the groundwork for his tip later.

Anyway, while still explaining his motives to us, the man kept driving fast and furious, and we flew through a dozen blocks even before we knew where we were going. As a result, we were given a detailed tour of the city, visiting its most remarkable sights and attractions in no time, such as the public cemetery, the pound, the wrecking yard, and a few others.

As I said, I was determined to close this case, and after fifteen minutes of pointless racing through the streets, I thought it was time to get out of the car. Lara was dead against it, though, pointing out that I couldn’t close anything until I found her sister.

“But I never agreed to take the case!” I insisted, scandalized.

“But that didn’t stop you from taking my money and spending half of it on strippers.” She counterattacked cold-bloodedly, which I actually expected. Unfortunately, I had nothing to counter her counterattack with. Then, with an expression even more solemn and serious than those of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore’s monument, the blonde-haired general informed me that I had no civil rights anymore and was practically a slave to her until I finished the job or returned the down payment. And since I had no money to reimburse her for her losses, eventually, I had to admit she had some point—although not a very strong one. It all led me to another decision—to find her stupid sister as quickly as possible and get rid of them both for good.

After conducting an in-depth analysis of the situation, considering all the variables, and realizing we weren’t that far from the Twelfth Precinct anyway, I decided maybe it was wise to drop by that place—particularly its toilet. It was almost the time of day when I usually took care of my bowels, and besides, we could also check on what this mysterious Inspector Greensboro had to say about Lara’s sister’s shitty friends. I suspected he had something. This way, I would kill two birds with one stone, which would be wonderfully effective.

Happy with my new decision, I informed the cab driver about the sudden change in our plans, but the bastard played dumb and hit a few more blocks before turning the wheel and finally heading downtown. Soon, he zipped along George Washington Boulevard like a mad dog and stopped dead just a few feet from the precinct’s front door. Then the motherfucker kicked us out, almost forgetting to ask for his money because gangs of fat cops were waiting to bust his poor ass and issue him a ticket, as he put it. Seconds later, we stood on the sidewalk, and the Chevy was already speeding down the street in a big cloud of smoke. It was moving so fast that I doubted the driver could stop the car before hitting the Pacific Ocean on the west coast!

We quickly turned around and headed to the entrance—mainly because of my urgent needs—and then passed by the receptionist’s boot. The guy inside had sunk his teeth into a chocolate donut as impressively big as the Appalachians, and he didn’t even notice us. Since his face was distorted by bloodlust and he had smeared himself with chocolate cream so severely, we decided not to disturb him. We thought it might only get worse if we did it. Instead, we moved further inside, and it happened only a second before he jumped up with his cheeks still ballooning with food and literally ripped a hundred-and-two-year-old lady to pieces while searching her handbag for hidden bombs and grenades. She came right after us and tried to follow our lead, but unfortunately, she didn’t have our luck.

We briskly moved forward, and I began a frantic search for the can, leaving Lara behind. I saw her idling and watching the posters hanging on the walls to praise our policemen’s heroism. On them, mutants in uniforms with arms like sequoia trunks and chests like petroleum tanks disarmed villains whose limbs looked like chicken legs. I ignored the exhibition completely because my bowels were already threatening to give me a huge problem, and I was worried I would literally drop the ball right here, in the hallway.

Soon, I found the place I was looking for—it turned out to be empty of people—and I did an excellent job inside. Everything went so smoothly, and for a few minutes, it even felt like paradise. The firm and shiny lavatory pans, the cool touch of air in their deep throats descending many feet under the ground, the tranquility, the sweet scent of primroses, and the tender murmur of urinals—it was magical!

However, when the reason for my visit there slowly faded, the magic did, too. The tranquility turned into ordinary waiting for something more to happen; the murmur of urinals dissolved into the trivial noise of pipes, and the sweet scent of primroses became the smell of cheap toilet deodorant. It was still pleasant but definitely not a paradise! And since I had no need to stay there anymore, I stood up, washed, and quickly stepped outside to fight the shitty world waiting for me. My first task was meeting the mysterious Inspector Greensboro, whose business card I still had in my pants on Lara’s ass.

I looked at the cop. He sat behind his fancy oak desk in his cozy little office, lavishly decorated with photographs of political celebrities from this decade and the 1970s. The guy supported his right temple with his index finger, just like a Greek philosopher, but since his pose lacked the hidden artistic meaning of the ancient statues, he just looked phony and irritating.

A heavy and oppressive silence hung between us as he stared at us thoughtfully.

I stared at him, too. The man was a bit unpleasant. He had dark oiled-back hair, a cleanly shaved face with stylishly groomed brows, bluish-green eyes as big and round as waste coat buttons, and a dull, empty gaze that was impossible to read. Judging by the unhealthy yellowish tan of his skin, he probably attended a solarium every Sunday, and his jacket was worth the GDP of some banana republic in the Lesser Antilles, along with its crop and all the serfs who gathered it. There was an unnecessarily large badge on his left lapel, which read his name.

The officer remained silent in his philosophical pose for a while, but since we were silent too, eventually, he sighed like a martyr who wanted to be remembered for his immense suffering. His gesture was too exaggerated, and he made an excellent impression of a dying protagonist in the last act of a tragic play about love and betrayal.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what it is that you want from me,” he informed us tiredly, pausing theatrically after every other word. “Since you’ve found,” he finger-quoted the last word, “my business card in your pocket, you assumed I could tell you why it was there and who all the people in this picture were. Do I presume correctly?”

I puffed, frustrated, and looked at Margaret Thatcher’s portrait behind his head to avoid his eyes. That was exactly what we wanted, and we had already told him so at least three hundred times. He was so quick on the uptake! At the same time, the inspector’s eyes kept ping-ponging annoyingly between the picture on his desk, the business card next to it, and our faces repeatedly. At some point, I thought he got lost there, and I felt the urge to reach out and slap his face.

Nevertheless, I kept it calm and only gave him a silent nod. Lara, who sat in the chair next to mine, chewing gum, didn’t perform so well, though. She suddenly grunted like an angry hog and accidentally spit the gum out, which fell in the middle of Greensboro’s fancy desk. She quickly mumbled something that was obviously meant to be an excuse but sounded more like swearing and then reached out to take her property back into her mouth. In addition to its inadequacy in hygiene, her gesture was also disgusting, and it immediately ruined our chances of getting what we wanted. I suspected we wouldn’t obtain any information now, and our visit here was entirely in vain.

Surprisingly, the inspector didn’t react at all. Instead of leaping to his feet to condemn us with eternal disgrace or arrest us, he only looked at the place where the gum had been with mild irritation. Then, in a strangely calm voice, he said something that simply knocked me down.

“But wasn’t it you who was supposed to give me that information, Mellrow?” he wanted to know. “And wasn’t it me who was supposed to receive it?”

“Excuse me?” I blinked my eyes, confused and not knowing what to say. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“You don’t,” Greensboro continued even more confusingly, “or you don’t want to? If you really meant to cancel your contract, you didn’t have to pull this elaborate show here. You should have signed a check instead and called it a day. It’s not like you’re a prisoner or something!”

Being completely in the dark about the meaning of his strange words and utterly shocked by his unexpected and unprovoked hostility, I opened my mouth in disbelief and forgot to close it. I could swear I had never seen the guy before, but I could also swear I had never seen Lara’s sister, and yet she had seen me. Moreover, the cop had some point—his business card on the desk—which didn’t exactly help my case. On top of that, after hearing what the man had to say, Lara started snorting agitatedly in my left ear, trying to get some explanation from me. Fortunately, she was too surprised to ask the proper question, so she only sprayed saliva on my cheek.

“Contract?” I repeated stupidly after pushing my clingy assistant away. “What contract?”

“Listen, Mellrow!” Greensboro openly showed his annoyance at last. “This is too much, even for a patient man like me. And, by the way, it’s too ridiculous, even for a weird guy like you who knows no boundaries of ridiculousness. I really have no time for this!”

“No, wait a minute!” I quickly tried to stop him before he kicked us out. I suspected he wanted to do this. “You should know I’ve recently suffered a terrible car accident and lost my memory. I must remember everything that has happened to me in the last few days, or else my condition will worsen!”

Right after I stopped talking, I sensed Lara turning her head toward me, surprised. I believed she considered my idea very good because I soon heard grunting noises as she tried to build on it, chewing her gum simultaneously, “It’s the absolute truth!” she said. “Since then, he has developed multiple personality disorder, and one of his personalities needs to be treated very gently because it tends to split further.”

When she stopped talking, it was my turn to look at her, surprised. Unlike her, I definitely didn’t find her explanation helpful. And to make things even worse, she blew a giant bubble in front of my face while diagnosing me.

At this moment, I sharply turned my head to look at the inspector because I noticed him rolling his eyes impatiently in the corner of my vision. He was clearly pissed off, suddenly holding his hand out to me with a lousy theatrical gesture as if we met for the first time. “You know what? Let’s do this again!” He sighed, frustrated. “I really don’t have time, so for the sake of it being over soon, I’ll participate again in your weird show. My name’s Greensboro. So nice to meet you!”

I stared at him without moving because I didn’t know how to react. He seemed very angry. Lara didn’t think so, though.

“Nice to meet you too! I’m Lara Haggblom,” my blonde-haired client cried, promptly grabbing the inspector’s hand without feeling awkward. In fact, I only thought she said that because she kept chewing the gum, and half of the words didn’t even come out of her mouth. The guy was so lucky she didn’t spit it in his face!

“Now, what will be the next step in this farce?” Greensboro continued his weird act. “I suppose we should resign the papers, right? Since you’ll be working for me again… well, you’ll pretend to be working, at least, maybe we should—”

“I will do what?” I didn’t let him finish.

“He will do what?” Lara almost didn’t let me finish, too.

The man looked at us, even more confused. “Since you’ll be working for me again, I suggest we review the financial part before the case details. This was the order we did the last time, and it worked very well. The thought of money kept you awake and interested because you clearly considered the rest of the meeting very boring.”

I had a sneaking suspicion that I should be offended by these words, but I actually wasn’t. I was so surprised to hear them that I dramatically lost my shit and felt utterly unable to reply. In fact, it was even worse. My life was suddenly as empty and meaningless as the life of a male mantis at the moment when his sexual act with his hungry female partner was over. In this horrible situation, Lara was obviously in the role of my partner because she choked while anticipating her dinner, hiccupping impatiently by my side. Hearing her, I hiccupped, too, and after a few seconds, I hiccupped again. Then, I did it again and again, and eventually, I started hiccupping like hell.

Greensboro only looked at us—totally bewildered now—and since none of us stopped hiccupping in the following two minutes and the situation began to look ridiculous, he reached out his hand to press a big red button conveniently installed in the right corner of his desk. Before doing it, he paused for a moment, still hesitating.

“You know, I’ll be careful not to ask what you ate this morning because you may feel uncomfortable trying to remember!” The inspector cracked a stupid joke and smiled. And the biggest irony was he didn’t even have an idea how damn right he was not to ask! I couldn’t tell him that even if I had breakfast just minutes ago because my brain felt like a jellyfish drying up on a lonely beach for over three weeks.

“Very well, then,” the cop nodded tiredly after realizing we wouldn’t say anything to stop him. Then he decisively pressed the button. As I watched him do it, I wondered why the damn thing had to be so alarmingly red. It literally gave me the creeps, and I suddenly thought he wanted to execute us. Maybe his interrogation team was going to rush into the room with machine guns, filling our heads with bullets as we sat in our chairs lined up like Mexican pumpkins on a wire fence. However, instead of it, we heard a slight humming and a hidden door quietly opened to our right. From there, an unearthly creature looking like a mermaid in a formal skirt and jacket appeared, floating in the air with her feet barely touching the floor.

I turned my eyes to her, surprised because I found her appearance weird and captivating. Her arms were slim and finely shaped like fancy French ballpoint pens; her shoulders and collarbones followed the smooth and graceful curves of a paper clip; and the tips of her fingernails were so pointy that if she dipped them in an inkpot, she could probably use them for writing. As a whole, the austerity of her figure reminded me very much of an old-fashioned typewriter, in the middle of which—at the place where the letters “f” and “j” would be—the bulges under her jacket delicately marked the location of her breasts. The creature was obviously Greensboro’s assistant, and I wondered what she was doing behind that secret door. I found it very peculiar to hide your secretary in a closet instead of putting her in front of you like a shield against idiots and nuisances.

The woman slowly crossed the office with the dignity of an ancient queen; she came to us, silent and strict, and put a yellow folder on her boss’ desk. Then she turned around without saying a single word, and her subtle presence dissolved into the air before she even walked out of the room. I didn’t hear the door click behind her. After she disappeared, Greensboro briefly nodded at the folder. I looked at him and nervously stirred in my chair, clearing my throat and stretching my spine. Then, I timidly reached out to grab the folder and look inside.

At first glance, the sheets there seemed like a little crime story. It had a plot, characters, and everything else, and it all was sprinkled with a pinch of professional jargon and abbreviations. After reading it for a while, it sucked me into it and got me interested. I recognized the protagonist; I grasped the complicated financial intrigue and identified the climax with the legal catches and deadlines. In general, I coped very well with the task of making sense of the situation, and I could have done that even better if Lara hadn’t distracted me by breathing heavily in my ear while chewing her damn gum.

After a few minutes, I was done reading and ready to give my analysis. As a whole, my opinion would have been mainly positive if it wasn’t for a small problem. I noticed a few very irritating secret clauses—they were typed in tiny letters, smaller than fruit flies—which spoiled the appeal of the entire story. And since the protagonist was a guy who looked just like me—he had the same name, occupation, and style—it irked me even more. On top of that, I soon noticed the most disturbing detail at the very bottom of the document—the man’s signature, which looked exactly like mine again.

As I finished the disappointing crime story, I shuddered unpleasantly. A tiny part of my lost life suddenly appeared out of nowhere, hoovering threateningly over my head and knocking its bony fingers on my crown to let it in. If I had been standing up at that moment, I definitely would have wanted to sit down. If I were sitting in my chair alone, I would have wanted to stand up. However, since Lara kept hanging on my shoulder, trying to get her share of the story, I couldn’t move and just remained flabbergasted and shocked. Unfortunately, playing possum was no option here because it wouldn’t save me from the troubles I would face as soon as we left the precinct, and I knew it very well. At some point, I just had to explain what I had read to my assistant, which was kind of problematic because I literally had no idea where to start.

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