When this dame walked through my office door, all I saw was trouble. Trouble, and the longest pair of legs in California. By that point in the morning I was having trouble telling whether there was one or two of her. Didn’t matter – they both looked good, but they both looked bad, too.

However, I had bills to pay. And since I hadn’t been sapped, stabbed, or shot at in at least a week, I was getting restless. I downed the shot, put the desk bottle back where it belonged, and listened to an improbable story about her runaway husband.

All of that is prelude to me being on top of a parking garage the next morning, being shot at by the improbable husband, instead of sitting in my stuffy apartment reading philosophy and sipping the best bourbon I can afford.

Which is usually the exact same thing as the cheapest bourbon I can find.

I didn’t want to have to kill this bum – that brings down more heat than it’s worth. Besides, wives who pay for you to bring their husbands back usually want them to still be warm and fully functional and mostly unpunctured.

I would have appreciated him pausing the gunfire long enough for me to explain myself. “Hey, your wife asked me to…”

A couple more rounds hit the concrete wall above me. He screamed, “My wife? Don’t talk to me about my wife! She was a saint!”

“She wants you to come home! That’s all I’m here for!”

The car window above me exploded from his next shot. “Who are you? How did you find me? My wife died two years ago!”

I thought this one might get weird. Still, it beat spending the morning getting quietly drunk and brooding.

Or so I thought then.