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BLACKOUT

Mel Waldman

    I followed the intoxicated private eye into the bleak streets of Coney Island. Christmas Eve, and I trudged through the heavy snow. The night was long and white and maybe holy. Brooklyn was covered in deep snow for the first time in decades.
        The guy I was tailing tonight was my client. He had hired me to find out what he did after dark when drunk and into a blackout. The money was good and I couldn’t afford to turn down another job. Recently, I said no to some freaky clients. I’m hungry but not dumb. But I don’t mind following a fellow P.I. after hours into a few bars. So I took the gig.
    He drifted from bar to bar and swallowed a lot of whiskey. He didn’t see me in the dark corners where I drank Scotch on the rocks. But I guess somewhere in the postern of his wet brain musta been a faint memory of the blob he hired. Maybe.
    A few hours into the night and he picked up this flaming red whore. They staggered into the icy night across the deep snow past Nathan’s and into the House of Horrors, not the fleabag hotel nearby. I waited a while but not too long. Especially after the slut rushed out of the joint alone.
    I watched the bitch scurry off. I entered the House of Horrors.
    Killing lights assaulted me, surrounded me, and swept me away into a kaleidoscopic ocean of unreality. I staggered across the sprawling room and saw the ghostly form in the distance.
    Beneath the exhibit labeled The Pit and the Pendulum was my client. Bulging eyes of terror looked quizzically at me from another world. I leaned over, gazed compulsively at the corpse and said: “Dead!” And then the lights went out.

    They didn’t kill me. Eventually, I woke up. When I opened my eyes, they smiled wickedly at me.
    “What do you want?” I asked feebly.
    “You!”
    “Why?”
    “There are reasons.”
    “Reasons?”
    “Yes. But they are irrelevant right now.”
    “I see. And if I refuse to cooperate?”
    “You have already suffered consequences.”
    “Because...?”
    “A matter of some freaky clients you rejected.”
    “What do you want from a small-time P.I.?”
    “Nothing. And everything!” They sauntered off.
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “Wait!” they said in unison, as they moved toward the door. “Just as your predecessor did. We’ll contact you soon. Code name is Blackout. We’re a secret organization. Officially, we don’t exist but ... We are everywhere.”


    Before they vanished into the white night, I cried out: “Did he know?”
    Never looking back, they reached the exit and asked dispassionately, almost imperceptibly: “Do you?”



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