BOILER

Boiler - Chapter 1

Detective James Toland dropped a coin in the slot, and it fell without much noise at all, like it never reached where it was sent. He pulled the handle and it snapped back sending reels off in search of lucky sevens, but all that came back were cherries and bars. He roughed his black hair and took the last coin from a red cup. He brought a cigarette and lighter from the inside pocket of his crimson coat. He got the cigarette to his mouth.

'Excuse me, sir.'

There was a young man standing awkwardly.

'You can't do that here.'

'What?'

'You can't smoke.'

'But I'm playing.'

'New rules,' the teenager said, pointing to a sign above an entrance where a dog was sitting. Another staff member shooed the dog away. Toland put the cigarette away and went back to the machine and played his last coin. The reels spun and stopped on cherries and anvils. A woman shrieked as coins rang into a basket. Toland took his hands off the machine and looked for that same cigarette. He glanced at her. She was black eyed, red lipped, and wearing a white fur coat that was dirty at her ankles. He walked down the aisle and stood in the door the dog had been sitting in. He smoked and watched the rain come down hard on the city, glittering red in the light, spilling from the mouths of stone gargoyles that clung to walls high above the street. Citizens hunched under umbrellas rushed through the rain. A truck carrying scrap metal rumbled up the street and sent a wave of black water up the pavement and went off with its cargo rattling. A yellow cab followed in its slipstream and stopped in the red light of the arcade. Toland waved it away and went back inside.

'You can't smoke here.'

'I didn't forget.'

'You'll have to leave.'

'I'm leaving, kid. Give it a rest.'

The boy stood there a moment or two, the colour leaving his face. Toland snatched a newspaper from a stack and headed into the deluge. He kept the paper over his head and ran through steam billowing out of a manhole and kept running until he came to the latticed windows of the Boatman's Bar.

The door swung open, hit the wall, and bounced back into a man being launched through it. The man went to ground with wet slaps and stayed there a while absorbing the rain, dragging his limbs around like a drowning spider. He got up the way toddlers do the first few times and fell into a parked car. He pushed away from the car and went down the street with his head forwards and feet scrambling to get under it before falling over again. Toland pulled him up and followed behind the man who kept rambling on down the street. He was making a good go of it until he began listing heavily to one side and was about to go over when a patrolman caught him.

'Can't you see there's a barrier here?' the patrolman said.

The man's face was a blank.

'There's a goddammed barrier here you almost fell through.' the patrolman pointed at the line of tape and squared the man up. 'This is a crime scene.'

Nothing changed in the man's expression. The patrolman spun him and slapped him on the back. 'Goddammed drunk. Get a move on.'

The barrier tape had been set around the Rising Sun Chinese Restaurant and a dark recess next to it. Toland flashed his ID at the patrolman and dipped under the barrier. He pawed at some of the water that ran down his neck and watched a patrolman and a bystander get hold of each other. They struggled together, lurching like two dancing drunks until another patrolman ended it with a club. Toland's captain was out in the rain, trying to get under an umbrella and being civil enough with the district liaison, the person responsible for handing out these sorts of contracts. The light from the welcome sign seemed to drift and an Asian man in a paper hat came out with a bag of food. He handed it to a woman over the barrier, and she faded away in the wet night air.