I like it, I like it, I like it small

When he arrived back at his office, the Detective noticed the fire escape door through which he'd gone down to the alley was still propped open with a Yellow Pages from 2008 still in its original wrapper. Someday that'll be worth a fortune, he thought as he nodded to the Dance Instructor and the Outreach Worker, each staring at their computer screens with a mix of anticipation and disinterest, more or less the same position they'd been in when he'd last seen them more than 24 hours earlier. Only their clothes were different.
His were the same.
"Late night, Ace?" the Outreach Worker didn't even look up.
"Yeah, you look like shit, man," the Dance Instructor added.
"Is that smell coming from you?"
The Detective took off his sports coat. He held it up to the window to see the tears along the shoulder seams and the scuff marks on the arms. The corduroy was almost worn through.
"I liked that coat," he said as he slumped into the chair behind his desk, rousing his laptop from its sleep to show his LinkedIn profile still in edit-mode. "I don't know where to get corduroy in this town anymore."

There I Go, There I Go Again

"So what do you think, Gaétan's going to come after you? He must be in his 80s by now. I wouldn't worry."
"He was old when he burned the farm down. I can't imagine he's held together by anything more than hate by now."
"I dunno. Prison has a way of taking the fight out of old men. Trust me on that. He's probably in a nursing home somewhere."
"That should make it easy for you then."
"Make what easy?"
"Finding him. You'll find track him down for me, won't you?"
"I don't know. My whole life changed the last time I got involved in your family feud. The last few days notwithstanding," the Detective gestured toward his face, "I kinda like my life now."
"But that's just it," the Actor said. "This is what you do now. This is who you are. I'm not asking you to stick your neck out or do anything unprofessional. This is your profession. Come on, man."
"It's unprofessional of me to even be talking to you, you know what I mean? I mean, you wanna hire me? Come to my office, I pay rent there for crying out loud."
"You want me to hire you? Really? We're friends... I thought... "
"What? What did you think?" 

Don't they know I can't read lips?

The Detective felt blood both inside and outside of his mouth. His left eye was swelling towards shut. The man with the mean face had stopped asking questions, even rhetorical questions, but hadn't yet grown tired of playing with his fishing club.
The Detective thought back to his days in the dishpit at Diner Mike's. Line cooks and waitresses, seemingly half his age, looking at him with a mix of pity and confusion. "Cautionary tale," he'd heard one of the cooks say to another behind his back. The Detective absorbed it the same as he was absorbing the blows from the fishing club.
Mistaken identity, that's all. This isn't me. This is Hislop. This is some dishwasher. I'm back in the alley behind the office now, watching a couple of crows play tug-of-war with a Zip-Loc bag full of generic Froot Loops. 
The club finally broke against the Detective's jaw. Some external force lifted his head and through his one open eye he could see the man with the mean face's mouth moving. Whatever he was saying, it probably wasn't nice.
One crow stretched out its wings and started to fly away. The other crow wouldn't let go of the bag, so it ripped, and the sky filled with red, green, orange, yellow, and purple rings.
The Detective struggled to speak. He had to spit out a lot of blood before he could get any air past his lips. The man with the mean face, sensing his captive was about to make a full confession, leaned in.
"The real ones have blue loops, too, now" the Detective was able to whisper. "That's how you know the difference."

just behind the dawn

The Detective lost his job at the newspaper after the Gaétan Incident. Another few years and he would have lost his job to the slow death of industry, so he didn't hold a grudge. The Actor, who was by then finishing up a MFA in creative writing at UBC, convinced the Detective to come out west, write screenplays together. The Actor even helped the Detective find a job. Which was how, at the age of 29, the Detective found himself getting up 7 in the morning to ride the B-Line across town to wash dishes at a popular brunch spot on Main Street.
The Detective had dishwashed his way across the country a decade earlier, from Banff to Montreal. It had never been particularly inspiring work, but it was all the more demoralizing to end up back in the dishpit with 30 on the horizon. Demoralization, it turned out, was inspiring, and the Detective spent every pearl diving moment thinking of a way out. 

stung by the city

The door rolled up, filling the back of the cube van with a gray light that stung the Detective's eyes despite its typical Vancouver haze. Two large men climbed in and mercifully blocked out the gray again as they got closer. They took the Detective by his arms and dragged him out onto gravel. He didn't have the strength to lift his head high enough to look around. His feet couldn't keep up so they dragged behind.
A door opened and gravel turned to worn industrial grade carpet. Jagged gray to fuzzy gray.
"Hislop?"
Fingers grabbed his hair from behind and pulled his head up until he saw a small man with a mean face in a gray sweatshirt under a leather vest. He recognized the smooth wood of a small fishing club in the man's hand a moment before it came up to crack him across the face.
"Who do you think you are, Hislop?"
Another crack from the club.
"I'm not--"
Another crack.
"What were you thinking?"
Crack.
"I'm sorry."
"You're sorry?"
"Yes. I'm sorry. Please don't hit me anymore."
Though his eyes were still bleary from the gray daylight and teary from the beating, the Detective felt sure he saw the meanness in the small man's face drain away. Blank eyes stared back at him. Then the mean came back. Then the club came back. Then darkness again.

both for people who like to dance fast

Gaétan Desforges was an 80-year-old farmer from Saskatchewan who, 12 years ago, had burned down the Actor's family's farm east of Saskatoon. No one was hurt, except Gaétan, who suffered bites to his legs and arms from the RCMP dog who took him down after an eight-hour armed standoff.
The Actor's grandparents, who'd lived on the farm for decades until about 3 years before the incident, refused to say anything about the incident. Not to the police and not to the Actor. The Detective, who'd been in a different line of work back then, had used his media credentials to arrange a prison interview with Gaétan and sent the Actor in his place. The Detective had been a better friend in those days.

a permanent figure of jacked up sorrow

He woke as if from a restful sleep full of pleasant dreams. The Detective's awareness very slowly expanded beyond the inner machinations of his own mind. The first thing was the grape soda. His clothes stuck to him where they were saturated. There was another smell, sweet too, but industrial. He thought first of whether or not he had a pair of pants at home he could change into. Then he wondered if the sugary purple syrup would attract flies if he didn't get a change of clothes soon. Jesus, he thought, I'll be a real life Pigpen.
He began to notice his surroundings, the vibration of the moving truck, flares of daylight from the roll-down door, the throbbing behind his ear.
He realized he might soon be attracting flies for a much more permanent reason than spilled soda pop.