UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Finder.” You can read the entire story as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords.

And… that’s it! The start of a new year, and the end to all my stories. I’m all caught up and ebooked! Check out all the ebooks at my Stories page.

Though something tells me that I’m not done writing about Bim and Hanky J, from the story below…

Finder

Wedged into the unforgiving passenger seat of a twelve-year-old Ford Escort, I took a deep breath and shoved more food into my mouth.

My old friend Hanky J sat perched in the driver’s seat, waiting on me without watching me. We were down south, ten miles north of Arkansas City. Both of us cold and miserable in the rain, parked in front of a wide expanse of brown, slow-moving Mississippi.

I hadn’t even realized he’d stopped the car. I’d been too busy working my way through an economy-sized bag of Cheetos, chewing slowly, savoring each morsel. I was shoving handfuls of food into my gob, trying to get a line on our missing person.

She was still alive, fortunately. Though I feared that my connection to her—the image of a tiny, dark room without windows, and the weight of a jagged rock clenched tight in one hand—had grown weaker. That I was losing the taste of her.

Now Hanky J was shaking his head, giving me that look.

“What?” I said around my mouthful of cheese-flavored snacks. These were the crunchy kind, too, not the nasty puffs. Definitely beat some of the other shit I’d eaten in the name of duty. “I’m workin’ on it. Don’t stare.”

Henry Johnson, aka Hanky J (his self-made nickname, which I always though broke some sort of rule, somewhere), was a private investigator. His specialty in the past few years had been tracking down identity thieves online, but now and then he liked to branch out, especially when it came to missing persons.

Hank was also my best friend since first grade, the only kid at our school who’d been on the receiving end of more shit than a goofball like me from bullies like Darren, due to the fact that he was the smallest, not to mention darkest-skinned, kid in our grade.

I don’t know what possessed his parents to move to tiny Faison, Iowa, thirty years ago, but I owed them.

Hanky J did a pretty good job of hiding his disgust at being  associated with me right at that moment, with my flab as well as my crumbs spilling over the car seat and onto the console, my bag of nuclear orange junk food growing more and more empty.

He never said anything about it. I’m sure he just loved the fact that he had to fondle my left love handle each time he shifted his Escort into gear.

“This is my m.o.,” I began, though I knew I didn’t have to explain anything to him. “I can’t help—”

“Look. I’m freezing, and this rain is making me crazy.” Hanky crinkled up his nose and cracked his window an inch. “And you’ve got more b.o. more than m.o.”

“Screw you,” I laughed, but just for a few seconds. This job was getting to Hanky J. He usually never commented on my lack of showering and my overeating when we were on a case. I think it was the water. He hated being close to so much water. It was too much like the time he lost Alisa.

“She’s close,” I said after swallowing my most recent mouthful. I really could’ve used a 20-ounce Diet Coke about now. “And she was definitely here the night she got taken. Memory’s strongest from that night. They stopped by here, for something.”

Hank rubbed the point of his carefully manicured beard and sighed loud enough to drown out the rain for a few seconds.

“Bastard probably wanted to show her where she’d end up if she didn’t cooperate. This part of the river’s deep, and that spillway over there would’ve freaked her out.”

Hank pointed a tiny brown finger at the rocks lining the riverbed not ten feet from his Escort’s front bumper. Brown water gushed from a culvert ten feet wide set in those rocks, a horizontal waterfall churning into the river.

Just looking at it made my belly recoil and clench, recoil and clench, sensations I’d grown used to in the past two decades.

With a sigh, in spite of the ache in my full stomach, I shoved another handful of orange crunches into my mouth. Hanky J had to look away.

As I chewed, I closed my eyes, forgot about my employer/best friend next to me, and blocked out the shudder of running water and the patter of rain on the car roof.

I focused only on the food rolling around on my tongue like so much starchy debris, trying to reconnect with our lost girl.

Her favorite snack had been Cheetos. Just my luck; I was a sweets guy, not a salty guy. Get lost, gag reflex. Get lost.

* * * * *

You’d be surprised at how difficult it can be to find out a complete stranger’s favorite food. Especially if that person has just gone missing.

Hanky J and I were used to weird situations, though.

He could usually dredge up some good hints using his computer skills. I was sure a lot of the software he used was illegal in most states, but that didn’t stop him. If that didn’t work, he’d impersonate a cop and make a phone call or two to the missing person’s friends. Sometimes I’d figure it out on my own, guessing at foods, looking for that connection one bite at a time.

The trick, of course, was learning this information without becoming kidnapping suspects in the process.

I remembered my first find, over twenty years and about two hundred pounds ago. Darren, our hometown’s bully, had lost his dog, and he employed me under duress: “Find Buddy or start picking up teeth off the sidewalk.”

The looks I got for asking what kind of food Buddy liked to eat, all those years ago, were priceless. A pretty innocent question, to get a better feel for the dog.

Looking at the half-empty can of Alpo that Darren brought me from their fridge, covered in Saran Wrap, I felt a pang of empathy for the other kid, even if he had enjoyed knuckling my skull for most of the fifth grade. I don’t think Darren had been able to throw away that last bit of Buddy’s memory from their fridge.

At the same time, something went “thunk” inside my head, my Eureka moment, which occurred as I was sniffing a can of weeks-old dog food.

“Can I please have a spoon?” I asked.

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.