The Rain makes some cities ugly. It makes some beautiful. Some cities, the rain doesn't even touch. It still rains on them, it just doesn't do anything to them except make them wet. The buildings and the sidewalks, if there are any, and the pavement. The cities that actually _have_ pavement, that is. And, of course, the people in them. Their hair. Their skin. Their fur, if that's what they've got. Or their scales. Or, in the case of the man leaning against the lamppost, just soaking his raincoat and slouched fedora.
His name was Jake, and if name's say alot about a person, his name lied. With a name like Jake Flamingo, a person would expect something... different... about him. But he wasn't. He just wasn't different. He looked like a mobster, or a G-Man or maybe even a gumshoe or an undercover flatfoot. Or maybe he looked like just some other schmoe working the street. Mostly, all those descriptions would have been wrong. Mostly. But partly right, in a way.
Jake Flamingo "found" things. Some people might have called him a spy, others a tracker. He'd been called all those things, and a few things that weren't quite so friendly. Problem was, Jake never knew what it was he was looking for until he "found" it. Usually, he just knew that he had to find something, but hadn't the faintest clue exactly what it might be -- usually, he just knew where to start looking. And what self-respecting P.I. would go to work knowing only one of the five "Ws"?
Which was why Jake stood now, in the dark. In the rain. In his "where". Looking for a "what" he didn't know anything about, much less a "who", a "when", or, as he'd asked himself so many times, even a "why". And he stood there anyway, not questioning. Not complaining. Just waiting. Waiting for one of those other "Ws" to walk into the street and say "Heya, Jake, get off your kiester and hop to work!"
When he heard the scream from a block away, he figured he just might've found one of those other "Ws"
The stiff didn't belong there. Not that any dead body belonged anywhere except maybe six-feet under, but this particular stiff didn't belong in the alley where Jake found it when he finally got to it. A thin, young, oriental man dressed in slick, shiny clothing that shed the rain like rubber but obviously wasn't. A fancy pistol still clutched in his cooling deathgrip.
Rain dripped from the brim of Jake's fedora as he bent down to check the guy over. No bullet wounds. No stabs or cuts or broken bones. No blood spilling onto the wet pavement and washing away in the pouring rain.
Jake patted the guy down; found a wallet tucked inside an inner pocket of the corpse's jacket. A lightning flash lit the alley blue-white as he reached for it.
"Drop the Moroccan, greaser, and grab some air!"
The voice behind him was firm, authoritative and familiar. Jake smiled as he slowly stood and turned. Thunder rumbled lightly through the sky.
"Put the heater away, Riley," he said calmly. "It's me."
Riley was a cop. Maybe not one of the greatest cops, but he did his job the best he could, so you at least had to give him an "A" for effort.
"Flamingo?" Riley asked, peering into the darkness beneath Jake's fedora.
Another flash of lightning lit the alley, reflecting bright green from the dual-irises of Jake's eyes, swallowed up in the black pupils that overlapped to form a dark figure-eight in each eye. Riley shuddered. There was no mistaking _those_ peepers.
"Shit! It _is_ you. Damn!"
"Got a bee in your bonnett, Riley?"
"I do now, Jake. I hate getting tangled up with you. You're a jinx."
Jake grunted.
"Did you see anybody?" He asked.
"You got here before me, what did you see?"
"C'mon, Riley, you know my lay. I don't know what's happened until afterwards, same as you." Jake paused and frowned. "So... uh... you wanna eyeball the dead cat or you just wanna bump gums out here in the rain?"
"Oh. Yeah."
Riley stepped around him and knelt down in the darkness.
"Hey, Riley?"
"Yeah, Jake?"
"Where's your torch?"
"Won't work in the rain."
"Figures."
"How did this gink get iced, Jake?"
Jake scanned the alley.
"I was working on that one myself."
Riley pulled the gun from the dead man's fingers.
"Ya' think he plugged anybody?"
"Don't be a bunny, Riley. You see any other corpses around here? He didn't even have a chance to burn powder in that zap cannon; blinkers and beepers don't work in this quarter."
"Okay, Jake." Riley stood and put his hands on his hips. "You got all the answers. Why was he killed? Or was it even a murder?"
"He was iced, alright. You don't jack out your rod when you're pump's givin' out." Jake looked at the wallet and threw it onto the dead man's chest. "And he wasn't mugged. Our friend Tony Weng has a wallet full of berries and nobody pinched 'em. You know what I think? I think it was a highkicker from a Chinese chorus line."
Riley chuckled a nervous chuckle.
"Come on, Jake, this isn't Chinatown!"
"Yeah, then what's Tony there doing here? And who else can bop a guy in this quarter without leaving any marks and then make a clean sneak when I popped in on the scene not thirty seconds after they did the deed?"
Riley let the thunder answer for him.
"Let me see your torch, Riley."
Riley fumbled the flashlight from beneath his slicker.
"I told you it don't work in the rain."
Wet fingers slipped on the steel barrel and it hit the ground. Hard. The lens shattered in a spray of glass. Through whatever law of physics makes things work better when they're subject to physical shock, the bulb burst into glowing, radiant life.
"Ahhh, dammit, Jake."
"At least it works now, Riley," Jake said absently, his gaze caught by a brassy reflection under the dead man's jacket. " He stooped for a closer look. "Pipe this, will ya'?"
Riley craned to look.
"What is it?"
A simple metal disc about the size of a cross-section of a baseball and about as thick as two nickels. Fine lines etched into both sides of its surface could have been scratches, decorations, or letters from an Asian alphabet. A long, thin, triangular hole had been punched into its center. Jake stood and held it up for Riley to see.
"Looks like a big, Chinese coin to me." He explained.
The rain finally got to the flashlight and the bulb exploded with a sharp blue spark, bathing the body in darkness once again.
"Awww, dammit, Jake!"
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