PREVIEW
It was 7:30am on a hot August morning. The alarm clock rang out, murdering a restful night’s sleep. A knock at the door seemed to echo through his one room loft apartment and office.
Will slowly sat up from the sofa where he’d laid all night. He rotated his legs to one side as if they were weighted — first one and then the other. The rhythmic knocking continued and hastened.
“I’ll be right there!” Will said as he stood abruptly, shaking the final moments of his slumber from his muscular shoulders.
As he passed by his desk, he pulled off its top a half-full coffee cup, and smelling it first to test it, he took a sip and placed the cup on the side of a small sink that appeared to jut from wall of the room. As he turned the sink on, he reached behind him to the doorknob on the left, turned the knob and opened the door dismissively.
“Good morning, sleepy head,” said the bouncy Molly as she walked happily into the room.
Molly had been coming by each morning, almost without exception, since Lucky had left the police force and moved from his apartment into the office flat. Each day she brought Will a fresh cup of coffee and a cardboard take-out container in a plain, brown paper bag, filled with eggs and bacon from the corner drug store.
As she had done hundreds of times before, it seemed, she swept through the door while Lucky washed his hands and face, and placed the plain paper bag on the desk. She proceeded to walk to the sofa, pick up the blankets Lucky had strewn beneath, folded them and placed them gently on top of a steel filing cabinet in the corner of the room.
“How’s tricks, Will?” She asked cheerfully.
Lucky turned from the sink and passed Molly as he reached into a pile of clothes on top of an end table near the sofa and grabbed a clean shirt.
“The same as yesterday,” he said half-heartedly, holding up his shirt before he put it on. “Just doing somebody else’s laundry.”
A few months after leaving the police force, Will had applied and been granted a license as a private investigator by the city. The past several months since hadn’t been exactly the life he thought it would be.
Most of his clients were middle-aged men or women, looking for an estranged spouse or sibling that had disappeared quite intentionally. Some were jilted lovers or wives and husbands suspecting unfaithful partners. The work was more jading than adventurous.
“Nope,” said Molly. “Today is going to be the day you get a big case. I just know it! At least you’re not stuck in the basement digging up old ‘perp files for that ritzy robbery case they’ve all been figuring.”
Lucky finished dressing and searched from the coat rack to the table top for his favorite tie. Finding it rolled up on the corner of the desk, he wrapped it around his neck and began to fumble with it.
“I sure hope so,” he said, reluctantly surrendering to her optimism.
Molly stepped toward Will and finished adjusting his tie and folding down his collar. As she stepped back away, she smiled.
“I’ll see you tonight?” she queried playfully. “We’re going to dinner after I get off at the station, right?”
“Sure thing,” Lucky replied. “I can’t wait.”
He smiled back at her. He couldn’t help but remember how dismissive he had been to her when he first arrived home from the war. He wondered, now, why she was so happy to be around him after all that had happened.
“Stay out of trouble, and I’ll see ya later, handsome,” she said as she straightened her hat on her head, opened the door and left, pulling it closed behind her. The foggy grey glass window on the door made a rattling sound as the door latched.
Lucky waved as she departed and smiled as he peered at his companion through the etched letters, that from his vantage point, spelled out “Lucky Marks: Private Investigator” backward in the grey glass.
He reached behind him to the coat and hat rack, grabbed his suit jacket and slid it on confidently, then rounded the corner of the desk and sat behind it in the wheeled wooden chair. He placed his interlaced hands at the back of his head and rocked back and forth with a satisfied contentment. No longer in surrender to Molly’s morning cheer, he could feel his own sense of hope and optimism rising inside him.
“Today’s going to be a good day,” he said rhetorically.
