Noir Flash Fiction
Loud Betty is Silent Tonight
Detective Frank Banning finds a hard truth he can’t let lie
I was too old for this shit. Beat up and broken, riding out this job for a decade longer than my knees and jaw could take.
“For what? A cat food pension in a dumpster fire of a city,” I spat the words into the aging garbage at the entrance to a piss-soaked alley.
My hand squeezed the grip of Loud Betty, my weighty soul mate, and my kinda girl. She was tough as nails and spoke the truth harder than any other. Plain, simple and in your face.
I knew what I’d find at the end of the alley, but my steps didn’t slow. After this long on the job, hiding from the truth didn’t help. Better to whip back the white sheet and see what’s missing.
My chest feels tighter and the old ticker is thumping hard. I can’t help but feel like another part of me is gonna be dead and numb in the morning.
This bastard was a real piece of work. The kind of human excrement that was never actually mothered. Just fell out of a sewer somewhere spawned by alligators. Thirty years on the force and I’ve never nothing like this.
The papers are calling him the Butterfly Collector. You can tell none of those desk jockeys ever walked the crime scene. But he fit right into this damned city. Hell, all we’re missing are the flames.
Sal, why’d have to go after him alone?
I remember the day she got bumped to detective. That smile, the incandescent pride. And her fresh commitment to make this shitty world a better place.
“Hey, Banning, check it, we’re on the same level now.”
“Never, Sal. You’re too good for down here.”
“But we can be partners now?”
“I don’t have a partner.”
“Exactly,” she rifled through the case files on my desk, “What’s this?”
“Just another sicko in the city, Sal.”
“Let’s get him.”
A hundred cases later she still had that moxy.
“Kid, you knew I was proud of you, why’d ya need to do this?”
Sal doesn’t answer from the back wall of the alley. She doesn’t turn at the sound of my voice or my slow footsteps. She doesn’t so much as flinch at the sight of my scowl or the glint of cold heavy steel in my hand.
She stares out at me. Her gaze hard and unforgiving. Another face I’ll never forget. I close her eyes, before calling it in.
The flashbulbs pop and soak the air with chemical judgment. Sal’s a body of evidence now. Another insect dissected and left naked to the wide, her soul bared and dripping into the muck.
That bastard was gonna die.
Slow, and off the books.
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Zane Dickens’ stories go bump in the night, ka-boom in space, and roar with adventure in fabled lands. And if he can help it, there’s a streak of humour too (maybe not this time, but usually. Promise).
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