Three A.M. Read Free

thousands, the fog started in and changed everything. Fucked everything up.
    I hadn’t driven a car, thrown a baseball, lounged on a bench … nothing like any of that in a decade and a half. It’s amazing how little you can do when you can’t see a goddamn thing.
    The pills started taking hold before I was finished with my cigarette, but I still wanted a second so I lit another off the embers of the first and inhaled deeply. I loved that little burn at the back of my throat when I took in a lot of smoke. Let me know I was doing something. Killing myself, sure. But fuck it—I was in charge. I was aware.
    I pulled open the window and lay on my back in the middle of the floor. After a minute, damp gray air crept across my body. It was cold tonight. I smoked my cigarette and looked at its little orange tip, my own personal orb, glowing in my own personal haze. My thighs and stomach grew chill and wet as the heavy air passed over the hairs of my body. I shivered, smiling like a half-wit, and ran my left palm across my chest and down along my torso, blowing smoke into the mist.
    The sun always used to bother me. When it shone in my eyes, I hated it. As a carefree kid, I hated when it heated my shoulders, or later baked my fatigues while I was out on exercise runs … when it cooked our backs while we did push-ups out in the grass.
    And the grass made my flesh itch. I missed diving into cool water, though, stepping into the river, being wet and cold all over. I ran my hands over my face and thoughts and shoulders and clinched the cigarette butt between my teeth. Fucking sun. I had hated it and the grass, but I missed it all. I would gladly have gotten a thousand little cuts and itching, sticking grass all over my body and rolled in the sun now, but it was never anything but the mist and no more cool blue lakes and no more deep blue. Just fog and a world at arm’s reach. Around the corner was a million miles away. So fucking pathetic. Goddamn disgusting just blubbering and jacking off there lying on the floor in the fucking mist in my own little chambers and running hands all over my body until I was lost in the pills and dreams I never recalled after a few minutes when I’m awake and grasping for them and they drift away.…
    *   *   *
    Oatmeal and coffee and some bar that was supposed to have fruit and vitamins and shit in it. All I tasted was the shit. That was my morning routine. That followed by pushing the heels of my hands against my head to hold the pounding headaches at bay. I knew I did it to myself, but somehow the painful pragmatism of avoiding morning hangovers never beat out the gratification of a good drinking session at night. Ever.
    For some twisted reason, I did my best thinking hungover. So in a backwards way, enjoying myself at night usually led to a productive day. If drinking alone and stumbling around in alleys and popping pills can be called enjoying myself, that is.
    I had a beer with the last bites of my bland-ass oatmeal. “I need a woman to keep me from doing shit like this,” I mumbled aloud. A woman would have been nice for sex too. And, well, companionship. I got over the sentimentality of the latter thought fast enough whenever it popped up. Keep it down, Tommy. It’s just you and the bad people out there in the foggy city.
    I had been finding myself more work as a strongman than as an investigator. Clients paid to have me scare people into paying up, or into not straying too far from their marital bed, or to stop asking questions.
    The one actual case I had been working before Rebecca came along was a robbery. A big one that had taken a whole hell of a lot of planning. Over four years, in fact. The police had given up and so the guy had come to me. Eddie Vessel. Thin shoulders and pale skin. He ran a business that housed information for other businesses and for individuals, and someone had been stealing info and money. And staplers and pens and such, but that wasn’t why he hired