Killer Eulogy and Other Stories by Warren Bull

Author:Warren Bull [Bull, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

ONE LAST JOB

I knew there would be a bank robbery. I just didn’t know if I could work up the energy to care about it. Because of my poor health, it was a struggle to get out of bed each morning, and I wasn’t hired to protect the bank. It was a miracle I was hired to do anything. Of course I was pretty sure Mike, who hired me, was taking a big chunk of my fee. I have a reputation left over from my pre-World War II private detective work and from the piece of tin pinned on my chest by some general with nothing better to do. It was enough to impress a client who never laid eyes on me. The Joe with the dough was forking over big bucks to Mike for me to do my missing person thing. He insisted on remaining anonymous.

What Joe didn’t know was, between the drugs for cancer and side effects from additional medications, I was only awake and alert in brief bursts. Half the time I was headed toward or already in the bathroom. I’ll spare you the exact details.

Personally, I had no interest in who Joe was or why he wanted to find the sweet young thing he was looking for. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered to chase a runaway skirt, figuring a woman had the right to change her mind. Maybe she figured out her Romeo was not really going to dump the old lady, marry her, or stop chasing other skirts. Maybe she changed her mind just because. Of course there was a time when my suits didn’t hang on me like I was a scarecrow. There was a time when I could earn a living and pay my debts without straying too far over the line between what I thought was right and what I thought was wrong, a time when I used to buy green bananas.

With the final darkness approaching, I found that the line that determined what I would and would not do had moved, and I wasn’t entirely sure how far. Now I didn’t mind taking a rich man’s money to sit in a comfortable chair in a hotel lobby. The owner of the hotel imagined he owed me something for what I did in the war against the Nazis, so my being there didn’t bother him. I had pictures of the money honey in my wallet for times when I forgot what she looked like. I read the paper, slept, looked at pretty women coming in and out of the hotel, and gazed out the window for as long as I could stand it every day.

I should have died in the war. Better men did. I was lucky enough to survive and unlucky enough to develop a cancer that was eating me alive. The VA doctors told me there were new drugs, ironically enough, developed from chemical warfare agents used in the First World War. The drugs slow the cancer down by gradually poisoning me.

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