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Wolf Pack
It is raining again.  It always seems to be raining around here.  Must be a theme I guess.  My feet are up on my desktop, and my hat is pulled down over my eyes.  It is quiet.  It is always quiet these days it seems.  In my hand is an empty bottle.  Third one this week.  The bell above my door rings as somebody enters.
“Closed.  Sorry.  Come back tommorrow.”  I say without bothering to look out from under my hat.  I really should get into the habbit of locking the door to my office.  Whoever it is either doesn’t seem to hear me or doesn’t care.
“That’s alright.  I’ll be on my way soon enough.”  Her voice is like velvet.  Smooth, sweet, dangerous.  Somewhere in the back of my mind something comes loose.  A forgotten memory that wants to surface.  I tip my hat up with one finger to get a look at her.  I can tell right away that this broad was going to be trouble; it is written all up and down her.  I take in every inch of her slinky, red dress.  Her graceious curves.  Her deadly smile and cold, blue eyes.  Before my alchohol addled brain can figure out if I know her or not, she makes her move.  I have no time to react as she draws the gun from her dress.  How she managed to fit that thing in there is a mystery to me.  I start to rise from my chair, but she fires before I can draw my own weapon.  It registers through the rapidly growing blackness that it was some kind of dart that she shot me with, and not a slug of hot lead.
***
I come to with a bit of effort.  My head throbs as whatever sedative she had hit me with slowly begins to wear off.  The gradual melting starts in my head and works its way slowly into my extremities.  It will be a few minutes before my arms and legs start working again.  I open my eyes and glance around.  Years of detective work have trained my senses to pick up the most crucial details.  I seem to be in a dimmly lit room.  Too dim to make out any details.  No windows as far as I can see.  The air is stale with the smell of mildew and liquor.  I hear movement behind me, followed by her voice.
"I see you’ve finally woken up, Detective Hardwell.  I've been waiting for this moment for years"
"That voice."  I groggily get out.  Her name hangs in my sluggish head, just out of reach.
"Glad to see you remember me."  She sounds pleased.  Expectant.  Slowly I make the necessary connections; draw forward from the fuzzy expanses of my memory the information I am looking for.  It hits me all at once.  My head wreels.
"Moxie.  Moxie Valentine.  I thought you were dead."
"Yeah, well, you thought wrong."  Her tone is cold and bitter.  Rightfully so.  My mind is starting to clear more.  Yeah, it is all coming back to me.  Late July, nearly twenty years ago.  I had met her by the old docks to finish our business.  I had come alone as planned.  She hadn't.  I could still remember the look on her face when she ordered her men to open fire.  I knew that any love we had shared had been a farce.  I had drawn my gun and trained it on her.  I almost hesitated.  Had wished for twenty years I had.  The bullet went straight through her heart.  Or, at least, I thought it had.
"So, Mox, how did you do it?  How did you survive?"
"Don't call me that.  You gave up the right to call me that when you shot me."  She moves away from me.  From the sound of her voice I guess she has her back to me now.  I try to move my arms but they hang uselessly at my side.  My legs are similarly numb.  They might as well be lead weights.
"As I recall, you shot me first."
I hear her footsteps behind me.  She is coming closer.  There is a snap as harsh lights come on, flooding the room and revealing my situation.  All around me the walls are papered with newspaper clippings.  My name appears in all of them.  Every one of my cases since I quit the force.  Twenty years of my history.  A disorganised record of my slow decline to the drunken Private Eye that I am today.
"I take it there is there a reason you brought me here, Moxie.”
"Just waiting for a ride from an old friend.  Couldn’t have carried you there myself."  She is right behind me now.  I wait for the inevitable gun shot to the back of my head.  She has been waiting twenty years for this; I can't imagine she will wait much longer.
"So Moxie, what's with the little scrapbook of my exploits since we parted ways?"
"Well, it took a while for me to recover from that bullet wound, Hardwell.  A long while.  So I occupied myself down here.  Kept track of the life you were leading.  The one we could have shared.  If only...  If only you hadn't stuck your nose out so far"  I sense a hint of warmth in her voice.  The remnant of something not quite dead.
That's right Hardwell, keep her talking.  Keep her talking till you find a way out of this mess.
"Listen Moxie…  Mox.  I didn't know you were involved with The Wolf Pack.  But even if I had, I still would have keep pushing like I did.  It was my job.  My life.  You would have done the same in my position."
"No, Jack.  I wouldn't have.  I tired.  I really tried to keep you out of it.  Placed clues for you to find.  Red herrings to lead you off the trail.  But you just wouldn't quit.  We could have had a life together.  Could have been happy...  But that is all in the past.  Twenty years, Jack.  Twenty years of a broken heart that just won't mend.  Twenty years to get my revenge."
   "And just what do you have in mind, Mox?  Drug me?  Drag me to a little hole and shoot me?  It’s not your style, Moxie.”
She is standing still now.  Laughing to herself.  I still can't see a way out of this one.  The only door in this place must be behind me.  With her between me and it.  Not even sure I could run given the state of my still numb limbs.  Maybe I can convince her to let me go.  Maybe I can work my charm and remind her why she loved me in the first place.
"No, no, this part wasn't my idea.  That was the Boss’s.  He has a thing for you, Jack.  Rest assured, my revenge will be much more...  original."  Her hand sets down on my shoulder.
It's now or never Hardwell.  Now or-
***
I wake up again.  My head is throbbing once more; this time from whatever it was she clubbed me with.  I open my eyes and close them again.  Slowly I open them to a squint.  A spot light shines right in my face, making it impossible to make out anything around me.  I try my arms but they are stuck at my side.  My legs are similarely imoble.
"Sorry bout that Jack.  I would have warned you, but then you would have tried to talk me down."  Moxie’s voice is coming from somewhere in front of me.
"You know me too well Mox.  You sure we couldn't make it work again?"
"No, Jack.  It couldn't work again.  Never again.”  Her voice has regained its cold edge.  The light snaps off and I finally get a good look at my surroundings.  The room is small, square.  I seem to be at the center, tied to a chair.  Moxie is in front of me, standing next to the spotlight.  Next to her is a face I never thought I would see again.
"James McGee.” AKA:  Jimmy “The Wolf” McGee.  “Fancy meeting you here"  I try to sound confident.  It ends up coming out as if I were a frightened child telling the monsters at the end of his bed that they don’t exist.  He smiles, showing off those signature predatory canines of his.  He was known as the “Wolf of New York” for a reason, and those pointed ensizers is only part of it.
"Nice to see you remembered me."  His voices is deep and smooth.  The kind of voice that lulls you into feeling safe just before the fangs sink into your throat.
"How could I forget a face like that, Jimmy?"  It was slowly coming together in my mind.  But some things still didn’t add up.  Moxie had tried to kill me the last time I got too close to The Wolf.  Now she has brought me right to him?  I can't help but wonder what McGee has in store for me.  Probably better than the revenge Moxie has planned at any rate.  I do wonder about the timing.  Why strike now?  I have been out of the game for years.  I’m a hasbeen.  A washed up PI barely making his rent on low key adulatory cases and finding missing cats.
"And I could never forget yours either, Jack.  You came closer than anyone else to blowing my operation into the open.  Dangerously close.  But that is all ancient history, isn’t it?"  He sounds so calm.  In charge.  I’m at his mercy and that is just how he likes it.  Like a cat toying with its meal before the killing blow.
"Cut to the chase, McGee.  I got cases sitting on my desk.  Why me?  Why now?"
"Ah, but that’s just it.  You do have cases sitting on your desk.  But they are hardly worth working on.  In fact, you haven't had a real case in years.  That is why I decided to go for it now.  Nobody will miss you."  A cold feeling settles into my chest.  I don’t like the sound of that.  Back in the day, I had colleagues end up at the bottom of the Hudson because they got to close to New York's Wolf.  He had it out for me alright.  And there was nothing I could do to save my skin.
"Well, I guess you better get it over with then, huh?  What will it be?  Cement shoes, like O’Connor?  Or will it be an accidental death.  Burned to death in my apartment after ‘falling asleep with a cigarette in my hand?’"  I am a bit surprised at the venom in my own voice.  Maybe it is true what they say about cornered rats.  McGee chuckles like I told a dirty joke.
"Hardwell, I have no intention of killing you.  In fact, just the opposite.  You see, I have the hardest time holding onto my skilled men.  They keep getting it into their heads that they can make it on their own.  Obviously I can't just let them leave.  Not with everything they know.  But it does hurt my operation when I have to bring in fresh blood every couple months to replace the ones that, shall we say, find themselves spending all their free time at the bottom of the harbor."  He pauses for a moment and grins again.  It sends a shiver down my spine.  “What I need is somebody who knows the game and is smart enough to not try to climb the ladder too high or too fast.  Somebody that can take orders and do the job right.  Somebody like you.”  I can't believe what I hearing.  The biggest mob boss in the Northeast is offering me a job?  I can't even begin to consider it.  The thought alone sickens me.  And yet…  "I would like to hire you on in a permanent capacity as one of my hands.  You have skill.  Wasted skill.  If you could find me, then you can find so many of my enemies too.  Of course, I couldn’t exactly walk into your office in person.  So I had an old aquantence of yours pick you up.  You understand.  So, what do you say?”
"And if I refuse?"
He grins.  Oh, that grin.  It is enough to melt your insides.  I swear he is sizing me up for the proper size pan to use later, once the oven has been preheated.
"If you refuse, then I let Valentine have her way with you.  I understand she has spent a good part of the last fifteen years building up a large collection of rather poisonous reptiles.  And their anti-venoms."  Moxie is grinning now too.
"They say the recovery from the black mamba is the most painful part."  She says with a coy smile.  “I wonder what it will feel like after the twentyeth time.”  I swallow hard.  Somehow I knew this was never actually a choice on my part.
"So, you want me to do some digging around for you?  What’s it pay?"  I am sweating like one of my whisky bottles left out on a hot day.  Did I really just ask Jimmy, The Wolf, McGee how much he pays?  This is insane.  But...  Hell.  Sane hasn't been working out so hot for me of late.
“The pay is better than you can imagine.  Living expenses and enough to keep Moxie occupied with other pursuits.”  He flashes those distinct pearly whites again.  He seems to be looking right through me.  It is the look of a man that is not used to hearing “no” and with good reason.  I swallow hard again.  Can I really be concidering this?  I dedicated the first half of my life to stopping people like him.  Well, maybe it was time I found something interesting to do with the last half of my life.  Something more interesting than finding the bottom of different colored bottles every day.  I take a deep breath.
“Deal.”
McGee smiles and nods to somebody behind me.  I feel the ropes around my wrists and ankles loosen and come off.  I rub my wrists and keep a wary eye trained on Jimmy.
“Welcome, Detective Hardwell, to my pack.  I think you will fit in just fine.”