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CONSTANCE

She crept around the corner, her emblazoned bag clutched in her hands tightly despite its secure snag to her shoulder, and peered past the shadow of a dumpster, looking for signs. She stood awkwardly on the heel of her boots, trying to maintain a somewhat attractive persona in the shadows of the alleyway, a slightly quirky image of herself in mind. Connie, the stalker. Connie, the walker of the night.. No, no… It didn’t sound good enough.

She let go of the bag for a slight moment, wiping the clammy sweat of her palms on her jean legs, then placed them softly on the cold brick of the building beside her, poking her head over the edge to spy again. She even flipped her long waft of blond hair, taking in the musty air-- a rather ungodly scent of rotting restaurant scraps, evaporated rain fumes, and a touch of wet stone. One would usually dislike the smell, describing it as a lump in the throat, but she, on the contrary, loved it. It made her feel mysterious. Eccentric. Like in the movies.

Connie the mysterious. Connie the unknown. Still not quite right.

There wasn’t much to see in the alleyway around the corner, which she watched so carefully. Just an old, rusting fire escape hanging by one bar off the edge a flat rooftop. The occasional pattering of rickety metal, undoubtedly a result of a portly, spoiled rat scampering away. She despised rodents and would normally feel a tingle creep up her shoulders, but not tonight-- not her night. Besides, Connie the Enigma was afraid of nothing.

She shook her head, rolling her eyes up at the black sky, feeling somewhat embarrassed. Was she really still such a kid on the inside? First, she actually decided to go through with the damn thing, and next thing she knew it, she was spending her day off tracking down a target and pretending she was a mistress of the night. Kind of like in those Japanese cartoons she loved as a kid; All she needed was a kunai knife, and maybe a pet falcon sitting on her shoulder.

Nevertheless, she let the guilty pleasure overwhelm her. After all, she was being a bit daring. The risks of what she was doing-- if she took it to a new level-- would undoubtedly result in prison, or perhaps worse. The idea excited her. And she would not get caught; There was no way anyone could catch someone as sly as Connie Cunning. Or Cunning Connie. No, still not right-- god damn it.

An old door swung open and smacked against the building opposite of the corner she hid around, spilling a golden light into the alleyway, followed by the foreign sounds of Italian bicker coming from inside. She had no clue what they were saying-- not that it personally mattered--, but watched curiously despite of it. A man with a hearty beard and yet a rather skinny body ripped his baker’s hat off of his head and threw it inside, then swung his arms behind him and started to untie a stained apron. More Italian jabber came out of his mouth, which echoed off the walls around her like surround sound in the theater. The door shut in his face and he cussed-- she could tell it was bitter and the word itself was rather ugly and left a dirty taste in her mouth-- and he pouted for a moment, stomping his foot on the apron and rubbing it into the wet ground, then marched off into the street, where the real world began.

She blinked and cleared it from her mind, figuring it was miniscule and happened quite frequently in the city, then rearranged herself against the alley wall, her head still peering around the corner. She had lost the mysterious character that was once in her mind.

Hours and hours, plain-old Connie waited, staring in the alleyway until she got so tired of standing that she sat on the floor, knowing that a mixture of soggy gravel and askew tar chunks would undoubtedly be stuck to her jean bottoms by the time she stood. The ground was cold and uncomfortable, and she tried again and again to feel the excitement. But her eyes grew heavy and the lights of the restaurant eventually flickered off, and nothing was left or alive in the alley. Nothing but her.

Connie, the loser, fell asleep.

*****

ROYSTON

“Roy, you got the fax?” a voice asked in a cheery, yet ironically oblique direction of tone. Roy finished typing a sentence into the old Compaq and turned awkwardly in his chair, tapping his hands against the armrest and looking up at his ‘office buddy’.

“Yeah, I got it,” he replied plainly, chewing on the corner of his lip, running his tongue over a piece of raw flesh on the inside of it; he really needed to quit that habit, before he ends up kissing some girl and getting AIDS from it.

He snorted to himself with amusement at the thought.

“Well man? What do you think?”

There was a pause. Roy could see a little bit of the adoring animation die out of the guy’s smile.

“Is it uh… Is it great stuff or what?” he asked, his smile completely gone.

“Oh. Yeah, yeah-- great stuff-- awesome stuff. Really loved it, man. Thanks for showing it to me--”

“No problem. I told you I had quiet the taste, eh?”

A loud, semi-obnoxious roar of laughter came out of the standing comedian as he clasped his hand against the office cubicle, wiping at his streaming eyes. Roy let out a small chuckle, though it wasn’t all completely there. He hadn’t read the fax at all. Well, he read the title-- A GIRL WALKS IN A BAR by Steve Sherman-- and stopped right there. Roy doubted anyone could blame him.

Steve was a great guy and all. He livened up the typical office life which Roy despised deeply, giving people prank coffees and reciting jokes he heard from Comedy Central the previous night-- anything to raise a little laughter in the damned place. He was middle-aged and chubby, but had the energy and enthusiasm of a hyper little child, along with the humorous, perverted mind of an adolescent. And he was intelligent, too, though he didn’t ever show it in a serious manner. Steve was the most unattractive, silly, annoying, and easy-going man that Roy knew, and yet there was a charm radiating from his personality that made him impossible to disown. Roy hated that about the guy, but loved it at the same time. It would be nice to just say, “Steve, get the hell out; I need to finish this” every now and then, but he could never live with himself if he did such a thing.

The laughter turned into an endless series of gurgling chokes and coughs, and Roy looked up with concern as the man pumped his chest until he could speak clearly enough to continue. He was about to ask if everything was okay, or perhaps recommend getting those lungs checked out, but Steve’s amused face showed no sign of worry. Perhaps he was used to it.

“You get the rip about”-- hack-- “Yoda in the part where Vader asked the girl about a Jack Daniels?”

Roy paused for a moment, racking his mind for some kind of connection between the two things. Starwars and a beer, Starwars and a beer… He opened his mouth to simply say that he didn't understand, though he had a feeling that even if he had read the fax, the comparison between the two still wouldn’t be funny. Nonetheless,a hewing cough interrupted his train of thought, incinerating his chances of returning any sort of answer; a cough so coarse sounding that imagining what it felt like made Roy’s chest hurt.

“Ah, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I didn’t make that one clear. Just reread that thing tonight. We’ll talk about it later. I gotta head over to the main office and see if Nancy found my fake cigarettes yet, anyway.”

Roy waved him off and watched Steve weave through the other cubicles, wondering if his friend was disappointed that he had not asked about the prank with Nancy.

*****

ROYSTON

‘A girl walks into a bar and sits down at the table. Suddenly, Darth Vader marches in and orders her a Jack Daniels. She turns around and looks at him, amazed. Yoda comes out with the round of beer, and says, “Darth, I’m not letting you order Laya another male prostitute.”’

Roy sighed and tossed the papers in an empty drawer, which he thought of renaming to the ‘crap cabinet’, seeing as half the things in it were trinkets and manuscripts to Steve’s shenanigans. Two years he had worked in the office, and he had probably been passed a hundred and one manuscripts in that time-- all of which were pointlessly unentertaining. Every time a new one circulated amongst the fifth floor, he couldn’t help but to enjoy the artificial smiles everyone put on as they complimentedSherman on his ‘amazing’ new piece. They lied so horribly, with that cheesy look of appreciation, reminding him of his own childhood memories; The stale crackers and prehistoric mints his grandfather used to give him, and how he would stick them in the side of his mouth where he couldn‘t taste, chewing on air as an attempt to at least pretend that he liked it. And then he would smile cutely and thank his grandfather, much too similar to the smiles that his co-workers gave Steve.

Roy wondered if he had ever been tricked like that. There were times where he scraped together money as a kid for mother’s day gifts-- things like plastic mugs and tacky bracelets-- and knew that she really didn’t like them when she insisted that she did. And times where he had cooked meals and his grandmother would gasp in delight, while he couldn’t even hold down his lunch by the second taste. He was quite aware of when people lied to him. Steve and his grandfather lacked that special talent. Maybe they were the blessed ones.

A wave of guilt overcame Roy and he began to open the drawer again, sticking one hand in and shifting around for the papers, though his concentration was soon cut short. The alarm sounded all around him, and he jumped, slamming his hand against the cabinet rooftop and cursing sorely.

“What the hell is that noise--”

“Emergency! Please Exit the building! Emergency!”

Roy glanced up at the spinning red lights with a spiteful frown, taking the robotic intercom message as a sign beyond any concrete reason-- as if supernatural forces had slapped his hand away from Steve’s stupid manuscript-- and slowly rose from his seat, pissed without any solid reason. Some of the office workers around him simply stood and headed for the stairs, others a bit more dramatic;theoccasional narcissistic officewomanscreamed and ran for the elevators, shouting useless comments like, “It’s worse for us! We’re on the fifth floor!”

He was even sure he heard one man moan that they all were going to die, though it could have been a satirical comment. Still, it wasn’t helping, and he couldn’t help but to feel his heart beat a little faster as he threw himself down the stairs, waving his hands around to the people around them, motioning for them to hurry out of the building.

The sirens were so loud that his head pulsated and he had to hold his hands over his ears,making his suit sleeves feel tight around the shoulders. As he stepped out of the building, he noticed a crowd of people on the lawn and decided to follow. It reminded him of the code red’s and fire drills of elementary school-- a nonsense squawk of voices telling each other their hypothesizes of what in the bloody hell was going on, rumors spreading like wildfire, though it was quite safe to say that no one really knew what they were talking about.

He waded through the crowd and turned occasionally to notice how those from cubicles near him followed, as if he were the leader of the area. It confused him, but he ignored it, walking on coldly until he stopped at a place most comfortable to him-- the rear of the mob.

“I bet it’s just a faulty wire,” some woman he recognized from the third floor said, smiling and nodding at him as if he were a little child that to be reassured that everything was fine. He nodded back at her, figuring just about the same, though his shoulders dropped a bit at the thought that someone else was judging him. Or maybe he was just being an over-analyst, as usual. Wait-- why did he even care?

The delay outside was agonizing and the wind blew his hair in his face-- he really needed to get that shit cut-- causing his eyes to itch irritably. Everyone around him talked, but all he did was wait, an exasperated frown on his face. Damn, did he hate his job.

*****

FABRIZO

Fabrizo boarded the public bus, his head hanging low with one dirty hand scratching at his beard, the other holding onto a black backpack lazily. The door behind him closed with a squeak, and he dropped a few coins in the front slot, tipping his head courteously at the driver. Fabrizo knew the struggle of a working man. He had dealt with it all his life. And surely, driving a bus that reeked of changed diapers and lonely women with twenty cats was no place that poor man wanted to be.

He sat near the back, holding onto one of the poles for security, knowing that the turns on narrow streets often caused him to swing a couple of seats away. There was a lot of verbal conversing to his left, and an obese, sleeping woman to his right. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, but he could understand her snores. She was having a troubled sleep, no doubt.

Fabrizo didn’t speak English. In the city, the inconvenience of only Italian was a little less. He stuck to his district-- ‘Little Italy’-- like a leech on a regular basis. It was rare that he ever left the area, and it was no comfort that everything in the main city was either written in Spanish or in English. Nevertheless, he would make it. He had before.

No one really understood the life of an immigrant. Of course assimilation was necessary to a degree. But at the same time, the ’American Way’ was only for the Americans. He had no beautiful house with a pool in the back, or hotdog cookouts with the neighbors. He didn’t attend the football games or watch the world series much on television. He couldn’t even afford a television.

And even if he learned English, he knew it would be hopeless. He had seen it before. His own brother had ventured out of the city at night and taken night classes until he could speak fluently. But the accent was still there, and as long as the accent was there, people looked at him strange. People treated him different. The prejudiced of an accent was remarkable.

Fabrizo always felt like an outcast, and he doubted that there was anything out there that could ever change that.

He heard sirens and looked through the front bus windows, noticing all the heads crane to the side. He conformed to such a notion and looked out his own window, seeing through the tint a rush of fire trucks speeding by. A fireman stood with his head out the window and spoke into a radio dispatcher, his words echoing around the street at the same beat of the twirling lights. Fabrizo didn’t understand, but assumed that the information was useless, and wasn’t worth thinking about any further.

As usual, he tuned out from the world around him.

*****

CONSTANCE

Connie rubbed at her eyes and woke at the sound of a siren, sighing and groaning as she rolled her shoulders around and stretched her knees. She was loiteringin the same alleyway as the night before, but took a moment to stare it down, admiring how different it looked with a small squeeze of sunshine leaking inside it.

She liked the idea of waking up in the alleyway, like a nomad with no place to go. Connie had always found it strange how she always wanted the rough part of life while she had it made, with her upscale apartment in the Marriot and freelance job that paid up the pipes just for her to sketch a little design now and then. She didn’t have a worry in the world, and she knew it. Perhaps that was why she was making her own worries-- taking a risk for once. But it was all worth it, anyway. She would wish all the luck away if it were possible.

Slowly rising, she grabbed her purse and felt her body ache a little from sleeping on the ground. Under the light, she looked at her hands and noticed the imprints of dirt in every crevice of her skin. Suddenly, she wanted a shower. She couldn’t be the sexy detective if she was dirty, could she?

She reached into her bag and pulled out her laptop, rearranging herself on the ground, her back leaning against the wall. She opened her diversion folders on the desktop and navigated her way through the files until she found the right document, double-clicking its hieroglyphic name.

Her wary eyes scanned over it with a slight twinkle of fascination visible, a smile creeping over her face.

“Sounds like only a few blocks away,” she whispered to herself with relief, her body tingling with exhilaration. “I’m going to meet him. I’m finally going to meet him.”

CHAPTER ONE