I hate goddamned fucking kids on goddamned fucking skateboards. They're all assholes who don't give a flying fuck about anything except showing off the latest trick they've learned to do from other fucking assholes on skateboards. They wouldn't bother me if they stayed in one of those skateboard parks, but they don't. They think the sidewalks belong to them.
I wish helmets and pads had never been invented. It's fun to watch them when they fall down and bust their ass. It would be more fun if they really got busted up a little when they do. Maybe then they'd develop some common sense. At least a cracked head would weed out the biggest assholes, for a while at least.
They're a real pain in the ass. They seem to think everybody walking down the sidewalk should get the hell out of the way when they go weaving back and forth from one side to the other. This little asshole whizzed by me just as I stepped out the door of Phil's Package Liquors with a new bottle of scotch. You shouldn't have to look both ways when you step out of liquor store, so I didn't. His backpack caught my arm and caused me to drop the paper sack with the bottle.
Now, nobody sells twelve-year old scotch in a plastic bottle. That would be like painting a Cadillac with dog shit. Twelve-year old scotch always comes in glass bottles, really nice glass bottles. If you drop a glass bottle, it breaks. That's what happened, and my forty-five dollars worth of twelve-year old scotch splashed all over me, the sidewalk and a particularly hot little brunette who happened to be walking by.
She was pissed and called me a stupid jerk. I was pissed too, and I yelled at the kid on the skateboard.
"You fucking asshole. I hope you crash and break your neck."
The kid stopped, turned around, grinned, and gave me the finger. The hot gal was using a tissue to wipe the scotch off her pantyhose and told me she thought I should buy her a new pair.
I thought about saying I'd do that if she let me take the old pair off and put the new pair on, but I didn't. Twenty years ago, I would have, and she'd probably have smiled and blushed when she said, "no, thank you", but not today. People are so goddamned sensitive about everything these days, she'd probably have had me arrested or something. That's OK though. I never liked pantyhose on a woman anyway. Nylons and a garter belt are hot, especially if they're black, but panty hose...well, they hide every thing I like to see and they're an absolute bitch to get off a woman.
Instead, I went back inside Phil's and bought another bottle of Glenfiddich. When I came out that time, I did look both ways. I was hoping the kid would come back so I could trip his ass. He didn't though. That pissed me off again.
I was still pissed when I got back to my office. It was only four in the afternoon, but I figured a couple fingers of Glenfiddich might help, so I wiped out the jelly jar on my desk with my shirttail and popped the cap on the bottle. A couple swallows later, the smooth, smoky taste took away a lot of my pissedoffedness. After another, I was almost back to normal. My ex claimed my normal is what most people call being a bastard, but then she was a raving bitch. Besides, my job requires being a bastard most of the time.
I'm a PI. For those of you who take great pride in abbreviating everything with two or three letters when you text, that stands for "Private Investigator" and not some bullshit you just made up in hopes it'll make some internet dictionary someday. We used to be called "private dicks" too, but I suppose "dick" isn't what they call "politically correct" today. That's a damned shame. I liked being called a private dick.
Some of the subjects of my investigations have had other names for me. Still do, too. Those names aren't politically correct either, but that doesn't seem to stop them from using them. I guess it depends on if you're the one doing the offending or if you're the one who thinks they're being offended.
Anyway, I've been a PI for about thirty years now. I learned my trade right out of high school when PI's were real investigators. We didn't have computers or cell phones or GPS units in our cars back then. We relied on our skills and our experience with just how fucking stupid people can be in order to do what our clients asked us to do.
It took a lot of walking and a lot of talking to people with some scams thrown in to get people to show us what we wanted to know. None of us back then ever really broke the law. We just stretched it until it squealed. When I used to do skip traces, it squealed pretty loud sometimes.
I rarely do those anymore. They pay pretty well, but they're a bitch. Skips will do about anything to avoid going back to jail, and that includes causing a lot of pain to the guy trying to take them there. It may surprise some, but the women were the hardest to find and the worst about scratching and biting. Every woman should have to register her purse as a deadly weapon too. The goddamn things usually weigh a ton and they hurt when they hit you.
I do use some of that new technology now. I have a cell phone with a GPS map program, and I traded my old 35mm camera for a Nikon digital a few years ago to save the cost of film and developing time. I use both, but mostly I use my head like I've always done. I don't have to remember which buttons to push to use my head. All I have to do is think.
I lit a cigarette before opening the mail I'd picked up off the floor in front of the door. Before you start, I already know, so shut the fuck up. Hell, after all the TV commercials and billboard ads, a blind and deaf moron would know by now that smoking is bad for you. Most people would say drinking a double scotch at four in the afternoon is bad for you too. Thank God I don't live in California. Everything is bad for you there except maybe snow peas and water and they've probably just not gotten around to testing them yet.
What I figure is living is bad for you. If you live, you're going to die. I, for one, would like to spend the time before I cash out by really living, not by trying to do anything and everything to postpone that event. There are too many people who didn't smoke, didn't drink, ran a mile every day and watched every single calorie they ate who died in car crashes or had heart attacks before they were forty. I don't have any desire to lay in bed in a nursing home either, although if the nurses had nice tits and asses and let me have a feel a couple times a day, it might be tolerable.
No, I figure when your time's up, it's up, no matter what you do.
So, lets just come to an agreement before I go on. I'll take care of my business and you take care of yours, well, unless I'm investigating you. If I am, I'll soon know more about you than you do. I'm fifty one, and if I don't know what's right for me by now, nothing you say is going to change that. It'll just piss me off and I'll tell you to go fuck yourself. That'll piss you off and we'll never get anywhere.
The only thing in my mail that day was a handful of subpoenas and summons from a couple law firms I work with. Unless you've gotten one, you probably don't know what one is or how you get it, but when a lawyer needs you in court, he'll get a subpoena or a summons, and somebody has to deliver it to you. I'm one of those somebodies. It's one of the ways I make my money besides investigating and that's a good thing considering today's PI market.
There are a couple high-priced PI firms in the area that use all the latest technology in their investigations. If your lawyer thinks he has a good case, meaning one he can settle out of court for at least a few hundred thousand or get the millions he'll sue for if it goes to trial, the high-priced firm gets the job. They'll hand your lawyer a report filled with video clips and digital photos on a computer disc or flash drive, and a detailed record of their investigation on fancy paper in triplicate for about the price of a nice used car.
If the case is iffy, I get it, though I don't get a lot of those. I understand though. Lawyers are just looking out for their bottom line so they won't take cases that don't show promise of generating enough income they can buy a few more custom-tailored suits and maybe that new, red sports car they've been drooling over.
Usually I get what I had in my mail -- some sort of notification to a person they have to appear in court. I deliver the notification in person. It doesn't pay quite as well as investigating -- only a couple hundred each -- but it pays my office/apartment rent and keeps me in cigarettes, scotch, and frozen dinners.
I do get some walk-ins from time to time. Usually they're people who would rather as few people as possible know about their problem or people who would rather have that nice used car instead of a fancy PI report. Since I'm the only one in my office and my fees aren't all that high, that attracts some people.
None of the subpoenas or summons looked interesting and I had a couple weeks to serve them, so I tossed them back in my in-box and took another sip of scotch followed by a drag on my cigarette followed by another sip of scotch.
