“I make my living with my fists but I’m not one of your lowlife private detectives.
“For one thing I’m careful about my client list — I only work for dames who got gams, real elegant like. For another, I drive a Vette.
“Nice people like you pay money to people like me to make problems go away. But I got a problem of my own, one of them existential problems (for those of you who don’t read that means a problem that exists).
“Of all the geniuses working away on fancy laptops in the windows of this two-bit java joint, I have to end up on the hard drive of a complete and total jamoke. I exist only as a fictional character whose future is in this guy’s hands.
“What does he know about your character development, your mood, your narrative tension? Not a damned thing, that’s what. He made his living by WRITING ADS for God’s sake — Mr. Urge-To-Action. The only plot he’ll ever get close to is in the cheap, no-headstone section of Rosehill.
“When he’s not over there yukking it up with his crew, or counting to ten in Spanish, he’s running off to the bathroom (buy Kimberly-Clark). I keep telling him to see somebody about that prostrate thing of his.
“Anyway my story’s going nowhere, and fast. Did I mention I killed a guy twice?”
