I trudged into my office, exhausted. The only thing drawing me onward was the thought of the scotch in my desk, but the bottle made a hollow thunk when I pulled the drawer out. I watched it rock, the few remaining drops of liquor sloshing like the fringe of a crashed whitecap spreading over the beach.

I found a glass under the rubble of a fallen tower of paper, but the mastic of a long-forgotten spill kept it glued to the desk. There wasn’t more than a mouthful left in the bottle anyway, so I abandoned the search, made sure no one was at the door, and drank it straight from the source. The fire wicked away an instant after I swallowed, leaving my mouth with a profound vacancy.

The empty bottle taunted me, so I tossed it aside. It landed on a cluttered couch stuffed in the corner of the room. I wondered if I could sneak the cost of a new bottle into the itemized list of expenses I was working up for Virginia. I would have drank the whiskey with or without her case, but the frustration of chasing after her son had made it medicinal.

She might not notice, given how torn up she was, but I had a feeling getting money out of her would already be like squeezing blood from a stone. I had worked hard the last three days, but when I fluttered the pages of my notebook, I saw alternating splotches of white and black. White where I had left space to answer open questions; black where I had scribbled out something I found to be useless or untrue.

I hadn’t found a goddamn thing worth mentioning since the footsteps at the crime scene. The few leads I picked up after that had all gone nowhere, and I couldn’t get any of my old sources to talk. A second interview with Adora, a tear-filled session of commiseration with Al’s widow, a vacuous series of visits to Al’s other clients, and a few confrontations with musicians steeped in the heady scent of marijuana, cigarette smoke, and pretentious polyrhythms had all amounted to precisely jack shit.

With the few cases I had worked recently, all the culprits tried not to leave a trail. As far as I could tell, whoever took Ethan had actually succeeded.

There were a few signs he had been there—the bullets he left in Al, the singular footprint, the scratches on the dumpster, and a set of tire tracks too common to be any good—but it was all ethereal. I had only caught those bits by the tips of my finger, and I couldn’t hold them. I never believed in ghosts, but the crime scene gave a compelling case for their existence.

The old Howl would have taken this as a challenge. He would have jumped on the chance for a worthy opponent, someone he could butt heads with and compete man-to-man and mind-to-mind. I wasn’t that man anymore.

I thought of the prospect of a weeks-long slog of turning over nothing, stymied at every step by the police who insisted their way was the only way. I wanted to crush myself up and stuff myself inside the bottle I had thrown away and let the fumes carry me off.

Even if I could stomach the thought of such an arduous battle against a faceless foe, I couldn’t afford to spend months on a single case. Virginia would have a hard time settling the bill for just the hours I’d worked so far, and this dump I called my office had a mortgage attached to it. The invoices from the lender already came stamped with a bevy of colorful past due and final warning messages. They’d foreclose on me in a second if they thought they could move the blighted property and stunted hovel built on it.

If I could somehow cinch this case, it might jump-start my career. It would at least get me enough novelty jobs to haul me out of the deep pit of my spiraling mental state. Alas, Al’s body, the only bit of evidence the killer left, would be in the ground shortly, taking my chance of solving his disappearance and earning my paycheck with it.

I hadn’t gotten an invitation to the funeral, but from my experience, they didn’t usually check for them at the door. My skills had dulled, but I was still detective enough to scoop the details. A reporter at the Daily Glyph by the name of Marcella Furone had picked up the story and tried to turn it into something more than it was. Like me, the absence of evidence had hindered her. Unlike me, she had a column to fill, so she had spewed as much useless detail as possible to pad the length. The date, time, and location of the funeral and the suggestion of a wake to follow had spilled out in the rambling. So did my name, but I skimmed over those sensationalized parts meant only to sell papers.

I didn’t expect to learn anything useful at the funeral, but I figured I might as well stop by for the culture. I was just about as far from a religious man as you could get without renting a sailboat, but judging by Al’s surname and the demographics of the city, I could be near certain he was Irish Catholic. The ceremony would be a mire of turgid homily and mournful lamentations, but the wake would be a free-flowing font of booze.

With an empty bottle, a burgeoning headache, and nothing else on my plate, I decided to pay my respects. The ceremonial portion would be starting soon, a damn shame I’d miss it. Factoring in the time it took to get Dolores chugging and whatever hellish Thursday evening traffic stood in the way, I didn’t have time to get home and get cleaned up. I’d need some coffee at least, to shake off the weight of the last three sleepless days.

I dragged myself away from the window and let the smell of simmering coffee pull me to the lobby. The heat indicator light on the pot was already glowing behind its amber lens. Cal’s knack for always having a brew ready when I needed one almost made me question if the wild claims he made on his sign were more than hot air.

Like everything I bought, the filters I supplied for the office were as cheap as they made. This one had torn and let some grounds into the pot, but it was hot enough the bitter taste and extra grain didn’t bother me. Chugging hot coffee had kept me running through the academy and the long, stressful hours as a beat cop . My mouth and throat had been forced to adapt to regular doses of scalding liquid. It had exacerbated the natural gravel in my voice, and helped launch my star-crossed career as a spokesman.

I polished off the first cup in a few gulps, then poured myself a second. The hot lava of the first hit my empty stomach hard, setting in like lead as it cooled. I gave it a minute to stop boiling before adding the second cup.

Voices behind the main office’s door came closer. The venetian blinds blocking the window rattled like a handful of dice as someone worked the handle. I hunched over and hoped I was invisible without my signature hat and coat. When the door opened, the middle-aged cow Cal ushered out was too perplexed to notice anyone was there, much less to recognize him from TV ads that went off the air half a decade ago. She was the wrong age to have been targeted by those ads anyway: too young to be a mother of school-aged children and too old to be one of those children herself.

She blinked repeatedly as Cal coaxed her to the door, but her eyes never really cleared. Like most of Cal’s clients, she thought she was satisfied with the service she’d received, but she couldn’t pin down why.

“I hope you enjoy your trip to Barbados, Mrs. Dammen,” Cal said as he held the lobby’s door open. The cow was stuck in front of the empty portal, not quite ready to go back out into the world. “Do you have all your paperwork? Itinerary, pamphlets, hotel, airline information?”

“Huh? Wha…” Mrs. Dammen looked down and saw a bundle of colorful paper crinkled up between her worrying hands. “Yes. I have it all… I think.”

“Don’t worry too much. I’ve got it in my records if you need to call for a refresher before your trip, okay?”

“Huh?” she shook her head, but got lost in the protruding orbs of Cal’s eyes. “Right. Before my trip. I’ll call you.”

“That’s it. Number’s on this card here or you can find me in the phone book. Worst case, just drop by and I’d be happy to walk you through again. I’m always ready to help.”

The woman’s mooing continued. Cal reassured her he had it all planned out and everything was going to be okay.

“Just remember,” he said, when she was finally out the door, “stay away from the beach while you’re there. The hotel pool is better anyway.”

I watched the exchange from the corner, sipping my coffee. Cal leaned out to make sure the slow-witted woman didn’t get trapped in the antechamber like a fly bouncing around inside a car.

I peeked in Cal’s office while he was distracted. I never saw him bring anything in or out, but somehow his office looked different every time I shrugged off the hood of indifference long enough to take notice.

Now, he had the white brick of a computer terminal clunked down on top of a vibrant red silk with an intricate gold pattern and tassels. In front of the computer, there was a small display of brochures, like the racks strewn about the lobby. A stack of hefty three-ring binders made a short, cyclopean wall at one end of his desk, but there was a gap where Cal had pulled one out and laid it open in front of his client’s seat.

Cal’s more mystical knick-knacks—a pure crystal ball, a deck of artificially aged tarot cards, and an ornate box with the lid turned up to reveal a bundle of sticks inside—were relegated to a counter at the back, shaded by a bonsai tree on one side and a fern on the other. Calendars and charts papered the walls, but a second glance revealed that while some were banal listings of days and corresponding events, others tracked the positions of the stars, the phases of the moon, and other esoterica I didn’t recognize.

Cal came back from the door humming to himself, and I looked back at the dregs in the bottom of my cup. I didn’t want to look too interested. If I did, he might try to talk to me about it.

He went into his office and I heard the wet tick of his tongue moistening his eyeball after the long consultation. He came back with the binder and brought it straight to the combined photocopier-fax machine.

“Big client?” I asked, wasting time so I could be sure the woman had vacated the premise. I didn’t have the patience to deal with her, and I needed to save my social energy for the wake.

“Every client’s a big one,” Cal said.

“But not every payday is.”

“If you’re worried about rent—”

“No, it’s not that,” I said. “Just thinking out loud.”

“You keeping busy these days?”

“Not so much.” I checked the clock hanging on the wall. I wasn’t sure if it was running slow or fast or even running at all, but my reaction would have been the same regardless. “Shit, I have to be somewhere.”

Cal pressed a paper onto the glass pane of the copier and hummed as the scanning beam broke around the edges and reflected off his glossy scales. “Watch out for potholes on Veranda if you go that way.”

“Right. Thanks for the heads up.”

I crushed my coffee cup and tossed it in the garbage on the way out. Cal was always brimming with spontaneous advice like that. It was hard to trace how his mind made these connections, but I found things went better when I followed them. I had no intention of taking Veranda, so I discarded the information as casually as I threw out my coffee cup on the way out the door.

The exterior door creaked and flexed as it opened. I took care in closing it instead of letting it fall shut, just in case it chose that moment to break. When it did finally go, I’d have to spend time and money I didn’t have fixing it.

While easing the door closed, I made the mistake of looking at the double-decker sign beside it. The one on top was bigger, recently cleaned, and new enough its colors hadn’t faded. It read, “Casey Calypso’s Insurance, Travel Planning, Tarot, and Palm Reading.” The eclectic mishmash provided just enough whimsy to soften the blow of reading my sign beneath it.

Seeing my own sun-bleached name wasn’t so bad, but the fringe of bushes I had allowed to run rampant in the thin strip of sere dirt between the sidewalk and the building only partially blocked the line beneath it. I saw the tips of dirt-flecked letters through the haggard peaks of the leaves. That was when I wished it was me, not Al, that the pallbearers were currently lowering into a grave across town.