Finn's Golem

By Gregg Taylor

"I looked away from the wound and down to the face in the mirror. It was a good face. Tired, I guess. Fortyish, but firm. Some grey around the temples, but nothing that you noticed right away. Good jaw line. Could use a shave, but wasn’t likely to get one. A man, taken for all in all. I had only one objection to the face in the mirror. I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before in my life."
When private detective Drake Finn wakes up in the remains of his office with an impact wound on his head and a gaping hole where his memory used to be, it's pretty clear that he's up to his neck in his own special brand of trouble. A beautiful client that he's never met, a shady confederate he seem to have already sold her out to, and the forces that govern law, order and all that offically exists hovering in the wings, ready to erase him at a wrong move. And if that weren't enough, the smoking plasma cannon in his hand suggests he's probably carrying a murder weapon. Good times.
Equal parts noir detective story and speculative fiction thriller, Finn's Golem is a fast-paced one-two punch from the author of Black Jack Justice and the Tales of the Red Panda adventure series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregg Taylor
• Release date: Dec 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301317684

Gregg Taylor

Gregg Taylor's love of the classic adventure stories of the golden age of radio, comics and pulp fiction are the driving passions behind the "Tales of the Red Panda" series of books. The books began as a companion piece to his popular radio adventure series "The Red Panda Adventures", heard on independant radio stations around North America and around the world as part of the Decoder Ring Theatre podcast, and have gone on to reach new audiences who love the two-fisted adventure style that recalls the work of the legends of mystery and adventure. Like the classic Hero Pulps that inspired them, the Tales of the Red Panda books can be read in any order, with or without knowledge of the radio series.

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Finn’s Golem

by Gregg Taylor

Copyright 2012 Gregg Taylor

Smashwords Edition

*****

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*****

For Clarissa, Max, and Tess

in no particular order

This book is brought to you by Erin Fife, Allan Cooke and the Number 7.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

ONE

I don’t remember opening my eyes, just a gradual awareness that the shifting patterns of light before me were coalescing into tangible form. Like a baby shaking off a birth-slap, I could only stare straight ahead as I learned how to focus again. There was a hum from somewhere down the hall, dull and repetitive like a floor waxer, though I couldn’t have told you that at the time. In fact I couldn’t do much but squint and gasp for reasons that weren’t, as yet, clear to me.

I don’t know how long I sat there, reading the name on the door over and over again until my scrambled brains could make sense of it.

Drake Finn Investigations.

In time I decided that I understood all three of those words. This decision was not reached without some gravity and no small measure of relief from my rebooting consciousness. If you can only process a single piece of information, it helps if you can understand it. It makes a fella want to try for more.

A moment later, the revelation came that if I could read the words written in delicately peeling letters on the smoked glass of the door, then it stood to reason that the door must be open. I decided the mechanical hum down the hall might be getting closer and I was clearly in no state to entertain. Closing the door seemed like the best option.

A wave of nausea slammed into me as I tried to lift myself from the swivel chair, and it was only the previously unnoticed presence of a desk in front of me that prevented my complete collapse. The desk was pressboard with a plastic veneer on it made to look like wood. It was cheap and it wobbled, but it kept me from landing on my face and today I found that good.

Something on the desk top pressed hard into my hands as I steadied myself. It felt like it might have been broken glass, but I had other things on my mind as I sank back into the swivel chair hard. The chair protested this treatment with a metallic squawk. I quickly leaned forward, cupping my face in my hands and leaning my forehead towards the desk, fighting to maintain control of my breathing and to regain the basic functions of my body. The nausea began to subside. I took several more deep breaths to be sure. I didn’t know very much, but I felt confident that there was nothing about this situation that would be made better by vomiting.

It was about this time that I became aware of the pain in my head, which by this point failed to take me by surprise. Nor was I astonished when I was at last able to raise my cranium to find that my left hand was now covered in sticky, semi-dried blood. A few gentle prods of my fingers against my forehead confirmed my suspicions. There was what felt like an impact wound on and above my left temple, and a lot of blood in my hair. I was not having a good day.

For lack of options, I looked down at the desk. There wasn’t much to see. To my left was an Omnilink keypad and display which had gone into sleep mode, presumably sometime after I had. There were small pieces of shattered glass that smelled of old scotch scattered around the surface of the desk.

There was a desktop telephone with more buttons on it than an office of this size needed. It had probably been bought secondhand, though I honestly couldn’t recall. The receiver was off and had been for long enough that the line had gone dead. I fumbled with it and returned it to its cradle, in the process activating the speakerphone and filling the office with a loud dial tone. I mashed the keypad on the phone until the noise stopped and took another deep breath.

Near the telephone was a small scratch-pad with heavy yellow paper, unlined. There was nothing written on the pad, but the surface of the desk was littered with pages torn from it. Each page bore stray words or numbers, half of which were underlined as if to suggest importance. But what they could have meant was a little beyond me just now. Several of the papers lay near the keypad crumpled up, as if discarded and pushed aside. Three or four were spattered with blood, which I took to be mine. They all might as well have been written in Synth – they meant nothing to me.

I pushed my head up a little higher. The office was probably ten by fifteen, maybe a little more. There were two filing cabinets on the wall opposite the door. The walls were cinderblock, plain and painted in a brown that was slightly warmer than the industrial standard but only slightly, as if by accident. There was little on the walls to give it character beyond a number of pages from the scratch-pad that had been thought important enough to tape up. One bore the number of a taxi company. Another said Good Noodle and was underlined three times. I couldn’t read the others from my perch but I abandoned the search for clues on the walls nonetheless.

There was no window in the room. There was a small sink in the corner with a mirror above it and a yellow plastic bucket underneath, perhaps to catch occasional drips from the pipes. The plastic pail did not look new. Nearby I could see a small refrigerator which had been upset and lay on its side, the motor still humming. The door was ajar and it was clear that the unit had held little more than a dozen small packets of mustard and a bottle of soy sauce, which had stained the floor when it fell.

In short, it was a dump, but it told me nothing. It told me that I probably wasn’t rich, which didn’t seem like much of a revelation. There was a framed certificate on the wall which declared that Drake Finn was a fully licensed Private Investigator, sanctioned by the city and the state. Without meaning to, I glanced at the still-open door as if for confirmation. It had not changed its opinion.

Drake Finn Investigations it still read.

Well, Drake Finn, I declared to no one in particular, what the hell have you been doing?

My head was throbbing like I’d just come off a three-day bender and the condition of the office said that just might be the case. My general state of mind didn’t disagree either, but the impact wound on the side of my head said otherwise. Whoever’d sapped me had known what they were doing all right, but who were they? I was prepared to accept that I’d been asking for it, but I’d still have liked to know why.

The hum in the hallway was getting closer. It didn’t seem to be a threat, but I could not count the number of ways that I did not want to exchange pleasantries with the janitor just now. Closing the door seemed the thing to do if I could get my legs under me for a minute. I considered the door, and the journey I would need to take to get there. I would have to walk around the desk and a hard-backed chair opposite that I presumed was for clients or other guests, past the filing cabinets, and cross six or eight feet of mostly open floor. It wouldn’t normally have been daunting, but it did mean whoever had tried to brain me hadn’t snuck up on me. This annoyed me. Had I just sat behind my desk and let them waltz right up to me?

My guts churned as I pushed myself to my feet and I could see at once that the answer was no. There were plasma burns, two of them, on the wall beside the door, and the air still carried a strong whiff of ozone. All the more reason to get to that door.

My foot knocked against something on the floor and I could hear a small, heavy object rattle as it rolled across the tile, but I kept focused on my goal and made it to the door, the smoked glass rattling softly as I shut it. As I leaned against the frame, I could see that the burns were still fresh. I looked down and saw what I had kicked on my way to the door. A nice little GAT double-Z hand cannon. I picked it up and flicked the safety on. I could hear the soft whir of the plasma generators powering down. The gun was perfectly balanced. It felt good in my hand. But was it mine? I turned it over and saw at once that three charges were gone. I looked back to the wall and counted the two burns, just to be sure.

I lowered myself to one knee, gingerly. The GAT wasn’t a delicate piece of hardware. It didn’t just burn flesh, it punched a hole right in it. It usually cauterized what it hit, so I didn’t expect to find any blood on the floor. But I wasn’t that surprised by what I did find – a small amount of coarse, grey ash that told me the plasma charge had found flesh. Swell. Without thinking, I slid the GAT into a shoulder holster that I hadn’t been aware I was wearing. Yep. It was mine all right.

I was having a bad day.

I pushed myself back to my feet and gingerly made my way to the sink. I turned both taps on full and let the water run. I looked in the mirror at the wound on my head. It was ugly all right, and it would be for quite some time. There wasn’t so much a cut – the flesh had been torn by the pressure of whatever had hit me. It must have been a hell of a shot. I lowered my head and poured a handful of water over it, biting my tongue as I did so to keep from shouting obscenities at the pain. I repeated this process a half dozen times and dabbed myself dry with a roll of brown paper towels that had been on the floor next to the sink. I looked again at the wound. It was red and purple, and there was a swell bump on its way. The open wound still oozed but didn’t start bleeding again in earnest, so that was something.

I looked away from the wound and down to the face in the mirror. It was a good face. Tired, I guess. Fortyish, but firm. Some grey around the temples but nothing that you noticed right away. Good jaw line. Could use a shave, but wasn’t likely to get one. A man, taken for all in all. I had only one objection to the face in the mirror. I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before in my life.

I found it hard to imagine this day getting any worse.

TWO

I almost jumped out of my skin when the telephone buzzed. It was loud and discordant, like something was wrong with the mechanism and it had been cheaper for someone to throw it out than to fix it. I wondered if I'd fished it out of the trash. The journey back to the desk wasn’t one to be undertaken lightly. I went back to dabbing at my head with the damp towel without the smallest intention of answering the call. I was more than a little surprised when someone else did.

Drake Finn Investigations. How can I help you? The female voice purred as if she were standing next to me with my hand on her ass. I looked around quickly and saw exactly what I expected, which was nothing. But the voice had been there, clear as day.

Good afternoon, Della. It was a man’s voice now, and I noted with some embarrassment that the speakerphone was still active from my earlier run-in with it. Always wonderful to hear you. The voice was naturally deep, but not as deep as it was trying to be. There was a hushed, gravelly tone and an air of mystery that rang just as false. It was the voice of an ordinary man trying to impress a beautiful woman, one whom I still couldn’t see.

I completed my turn back towards the desk but stayed where I was, leaning on the sink for support. The woman’s voice came again, more casual and bemused. Why hello, Mister Felco. How nice to hear from you. Her voice was laced with a tone that suggested nothing less than that she was playing with the top button of her blouse at the mere sound of his voice, but was trying not to show it. I could see the green display lights on the phone rise and fall as she spoke and smiled at my own folly, and that of my caller. I might not have recognized my own answering machine, but at least I wasn’t wasting energy trying to talk it into bed.

I was hoping to speak to your lord and master, Felco continued, trying to sound like a jovial man-about-town. Is he in?

Oh, I’m sorry Mister Felco, Della said with what sounded like an audible little pout, as if she were truly disappointed for him. "He’s out on a case right now. Is there anything I can help you with? The pause before she said I" was minute, a fraction of a fraction of a second, but it would have been enough to send his imagination whirring. I could see her myself. Della. Brown hair piled up on top of her head, probably with a pencil or two tucked back there for good measure. Horn rimmed glasses unable to hide the fire in her eyes. Full hips and long legs, with an appealing tendency to sit on the edge of my desk and roll cigarettes for me as I thrashed out the particulars of a case. Too damned bad she wasn’t real.

If nothing else, it told me a little something about myself. Cheap office, broken second-hand telephone, very, very expensive administrative assistant simulation. Felco broke the spell by talking again. I could almost hear the flush in his voice.

I think I should perhaps leave a message for him, if I may, he breathed.

Of course, she said, as if there were only one thing that could please her more and she wanted it badly, and soon. Shall I write it down, or send it to his voicemail?

I think perhaps the voicemail, he said coyly.

Oh dear, Della purred, as if intrigued. A man with secrets.

Not at all, he said, as much as possible as if he were, in fact, a man with many secrets. Perhaps an international spy of some sort, but trying to be casual. This was a very sad courtship display. But I think Mister Finn and I ought to finally meet face to face to finalize our business arrangements. I could hear his smile, and it was oily. The word business stuck out, almost as much as if he had said legitimate business. If it had been on the up and up, he’d have just said arrangements. Perhaps sometime soon you and I might meet face to face as well, Della.

I’d like that, she almost whispered. I couldn’t