“Well,” says Joe, “do you know this Jack Wolfgang?” He watches the empty road in front of us.

  “Yeah,” I finally answer. “I know him. Or, I used to at least.” Even I can hear the doubt in my voice as I wonder if the Jack Wolfgang I remember is the one that really exists.

  This is where my past shines a little light on the subject: unlike Joe, I grew up in Seattle. I wasn’t even born when that Serb shot the Archduke and his wife, starting the most horrific war in man’s recent memory, and I was still nursing when Dad got the letter in the mail.

  He was drafted.

  He always regretted that, saying he wished his service had been voluntary, but he felt more responsible for his wife and child than some fight on foreign soil that had nothing to do with us. He couldn’t bring himself to volunteer, but he was never one to hide from duty, and so when the letter came in the mail, he answered appropriately.

  “We can’t do it all in life. We have to choose our poisons, or we end up drinking more than our fair share,” he used to say.

  When the Lusitania sank in May 1915, Dad says he was suspicious, but he never questioned it too much. When we entered the war on April 7th of 1917, he didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t feel he had much say, and when Congress passed the Selective Service Act in May, he says he didn’t think it’d end up affecting him. Then, when Registration Day came in June, he just did his civic duty and signed where he was told to, but he never thought he’d actually be selected.

  “Our nation is headed in a dark direction,” he would tell me growing up. “It’s not just things like the draft; those are only symptoms of what’s going on. I’m not smart or wise enough a man to see it all, but I can tell you we’re headed into a dark night where the ivory towers of the elite will look down over the black wasteland us normal people live in.

  “I can’t do much about it, but I can send you to college and hope that maybe you can help fix a thing or two in your own time. We’re losing our country, Phillip. You’re inheritance is being taken from you. Secure it all costs, and pass it on to the next generation.

  “America is more than just an idea to be tampered and noodled with. America is this land and its people. It is history and heritage. Without those, there’s no future for the more perfect union.”

  So, we both worked hard and saved as much as we could. Dad took advantage of the booming stock market, and when he felt he had enough, he sold it all to pay off the house and match me in paying for school. Then, the whole market collapsed.

  “What’d I tell you? A dark night,” he’d always say whenever we heard news of hardships or saw pictures of the desolation struck by the Dust Bowl. “Everyone got too greedy. You only ever take what you need. When you start scrambling for more, you risk losing it all. Remember Icarus? Don’t fly too high when it’s beyond your means. Take the race slow and steady because it’s long and hard. When you get to the top, make sure you don’t forget what it took, and you go back and make the way easier for everyone else, whether they’re climbing or not.”

  What does this all have to do with Jack Wolfgang? Well, I went to school. I got my degree with the hope of being a philosopher, but philosophy wasn’t going to pay all that much during a global depression, and I knew I needed to see things as they really were or else I’d end up like the ones Dad always talked about living in their ivory towers and looking out into the black wasteland, unaware they were in fact the ones responsible for desolating the land.

  I knew the ivory masters well enough at this point: they’d lectured me and graded my papers in college. My formal education was as complete as I felt it needed to be; now, I needed the informal. I needed experience.

  So, I joined the Seattle P.D.

  “I met Jack before the war,” I tell Joe. “We were street cops in Seattle. He was a great officer. Worked hard. Always had something worthwhile to say. Good attitude. I liked the guy. By all accounts, he was a real American.”

  “You don’t think he hurt the girl then?”

  “No, and I refuse to believe he did something like this until I have to.”

  “His car is at the scene. Doesn’t raise a red flag or two with you?”

  “It does, but a man’s reputation is worth something. We’ll do our due diligence, and the truth will come out one way or another. He didn’t hurt that girl, though. There’s something else going on. Jack Wolfgang’s not a monster.”

  “I’ll have to trust you on that. I told you, though: a case is always more than it seems.”

  “I mean, the guy’s a P.I. now; maybe he was up there looking in on someone. Maybe he was supposed to watch Clara, hired by her parents or something. We just don’t have any semblance of a full story.”

  “Now your thoughts are running. Just took it getting personal for the college man to really understand.”

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  “You’re not wrong, Joe. Go ahead with the report. What other clues do we have in there?”

  “That’s all she wrote, boyo. The rest is up to us.”

  “Do we really need to go to the cabin first, or can we just go talk to the girl? I’m dying to hear her side of things. Straight from the horse’s mouth and all.”

  “Always inspect the scene for yourself first. It’s extra work, but gives you context for everything you’re about to be told.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Tell me more about this Jack Wolfgang fellow. What was he like as a cop?”

  “We all used to go out to a bar once in a while. You know how it is.”

  “You? In a bar? Drinking?”

  “Yeah, I used to drink like a fish,” I say with a wry smile. “The boys’d all be long under the table while I was still knockin’ ’em back.”

  “No.” Joe looks at me like a live wire just bit his face. “What’d you have then?”

  “Lime and soda, though I made sure to say it was gin and tonic when asked.”

  “You cheeky scoundrel!” roars the Irishman.

  “Bahaha!” I burst with laughter.

  “You had going me there, Marlowe. And here I thought you used to be a real man and not some dirty Prohibite.”

  “If that’s your only metric, you wouldn’t have thought much of Wolfgang either. He didn’t drink either.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. While everyone else was getting sauced, we’d sit with our sodas and talk.”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “He knew a lot about history and literature for a cop. He had a lot of strong political opinions, too. He really couldn’t stand Roosevelt.”

  “I’ll have to hear him out on that.”

  “I don’t recommend getting started.”

  “No?”

  “He always used to go on for a while. He could really get people hanging on his every word. The life of the party when he wanted to be. When his wife was there with some of the other ladies, she was the only one who could shut him up. She’d just come and put a hand on his shoulder. He’d turn and look at her with the most loving eyes. Then, she’d start straightening his tie and running her fingers through his hair. Can’t say I wasn’t a little jealous; they made even me think about settling down and starting a family.”

  “Why don’t you then?”

  I pause and wonder how I want to answer that question.

  “I have too much work to do. If I don’t make that sacrifice, I’ll never achieve what I’ve set out to do. Everything in life is served with cyanide or arsenic. You can’t avoid poison entirely. You can only pick your flavor. We all die in the end.”

  “Sorry I asked then.”

  “Sorry to be so serious about it. Maybe a better man could chase both. Maybe it takes the right man finding the right woman. I’m not sure, and I don’t know if life’s long enough for me to find out. I’ll leave it to the lovebirds. Me? I’m a workhorse. I’ll stick to what I do best.”

  “Wise words.”

  “Thanks. I learned them from my Dad.”

  I take a deep breath to get back on track, the kind that tastes like the air from the good times. Right now, it tastes like a smokey bar, and I could almost hear the joyful chatter of not merely the men I worked with, but the men I shared a country, a homeland with, and I wondered if Joe tasted something similar when he took a breath, if he tasted a smokey bar in Dublin from his youth. Then I realized how deep from within my heart I was drawing out what I was about to say, and I said it anyways because I knew it was true and I meant it: “He was the only man on the force I could engage with intellectually, and those conversations we had told me who he really was. Suspecting him is barking up the wrong tree, and we’d be idiots to do it.”

  “I hope you’re right, Marlowe,” said Joe with all the sincerity of a friend condoling another over the loss of their loved one.

  “Me too.”

  I let the engine hum by itself for a moment while I try to remember how to tell the story that’s come to mind.

  “One thing that really hangs around in the back of my mind and shows its ugly face from time to time is the day he shot two men.”

  “Killed them?”

  “On the spot. Couple of guys hit up a jewelry store. Allegedly, Jack gunned them down in ‘cold blood,’ but you know it’s never how the rumor mill describes it.”

  “You never brought it up in your bar stool chatter?”

  “Didn’t get the chance. Never saw Jack again at the bar. Not long after, he left the force. As it seemed to most of us, he just didn’t show up one day. I heard through the grapevine that Chief said he’d put in his resignation and wanted to keep it quiet. Didn’t want to bother anyone on his way out. I think he was through with it all and wanted to move on to greener pastures, but I’ll never really know. Thinking about it now, seems like the guy went from on top of the world, surrounded by cohorts and loved ones, only to fall. Only to become a husk of what he was. All I heard about him moving on was that he went and joined the Army. A lot of us made that decision not too long after. December was a cold month that year.”

  “You don’t think he had a change of character somewhere along the road?”

  “No. I don’t.” My grip tightens around the steering wheel for no good reason. “He could have been hiding something all along, I suppose. Anything can happen. Maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought I did.”

  “Don’t doubt your friend, Marlowe,” says Joe with the kind of voice a father uses when he is warning his son about a grave danger. “You’ll regret that when he comes out clean.”

  “Won’t I regret it if I believed he was innocent and he comes out rotten?”

  “Not as much. Not in my experience. It’s right to hope. Hope for the good in men. Don’t let this job make you jaded and cynical. Cynicism is the wolf in wisdom’s sheepskin. You said it right: we’ll get to the truth, and it’ll be what it is. That’s our only job. Find the truth and deliver it. We’ll let the jury judge.”

  “That’s a different tune than you were singing earlier.”

  “It’s a different world now than the one I was remembering. Perhaps that’s for the best.”

  Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed!

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  by SneakyFrog

  David died, broken in more than one way.

  Hailed as a monster, he seeks the power to protect what matters.

  Intense, character-driven, with a deep magic system.