Dick Winchester in... The Last Word

Book 1, Chapter 2

I watched the ceiling fan, forever trapped in its path. No matter where the blade tried to go, it always ended up right back where it started.

Spiraling. Just like me.

Jazz, sultry and melancholy, drifted out of the speakers in the ceiling as I lifted the last source of comfort I had to my lips. Many nights I found myself here, contemplating mysteries too deep to ever reach the bottom of while enduring the glares of all the Millennials who wouldn’t know class if George Gershwin came out of the stereo and beat them over the head with a piano.

It's easy for them. They live their simple lives, blissfully sequestered in their echo chambers listening to EDM or the latest Taylor Swift album.

Sometimes both.

I let them have their fun, their nights out drinking and sharing lighthearted banter about the rising cost of rent while home ownership remains out of reach. But they all learned in time that after 11:00, the Pershing Hall bar belongs to Dick Winchester.

For a while, they tried to contest the issue, cursing at me, calling me a “washed poser,” and trying to wrest control of the jukebox. But in time, they all got wise. Maybe it was when they realized I had spent fifty genuine American greenbacks to queue all of Louis Armstrong’s greatest. Or maybe it was when they saw me strike a match and light up in a non-smoking bar. In full view of the owner, no less.

“Hey,” Darren said, jarring my thoughts. “You gotta put some more money in soon.”

I followed his thumb to the digital jukebox. Its LCD screen showed that “Rhapsody in Blue” was nearly over, and, the queue of paid songs expired, it was about to switch to the default playlist. Some broad named Lady Gaga was about to wrest away my ambience.

“Good call,” I responded, sidling over to the display.

Another $20 of Miles Davis later, I returned to my seat and the $5 remaining of my $15 beer.

“Now this is a mood I recognize,” Darren said, nodding to the five empty glasses next to me, one of which had been repurposed as an ash tray. “What’s got you down, Dick?”

I let the question hang in the air for a moment, sending up another puff of smoke to keep it company. “The usual things, Darren. Life, love, loss.”

“Ah, another ghost, is that it?”

I felt the start of a smile. “Maybe it’s time to pick a new bar. You’re getting wise.”

Darren didn’t blink at that. “Sure, pal. Go ahead and find another joint willing to ignore Arlington’s indoor smoking ban. Or better yet, one that will tolerate you driving off all its late-night customers whenever you get the blues.”

“Hey, now, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were frustrated with our little arrangement.”

“I might be, but the thousand dollars in cash you end up spending each visit tends to cloud my judgment.” Darren winked.

I had found that the secret to making one’s fortune in this highly digitized world was to strictly stick to the one form of currency that left no paper trail, pun intended. A dollar passes between two hands, and that’s that. No receipt, no transaction log, no Uncle Sam sticking his nose into the deal. Without the overhead local, state, and federal taxes demanded, I ran the one food delivery outfit in town with no sales tax or service fee.

With the economic equivalent of a corkscrew digging into their backs, this generation was hungry for any cost savings they could find while still avoiding anything requiring additional time and effort like cooking or picking up their meals themselves. Thus, calls came flooding into my anonymized number—websites and mobile apps are more forms of digital surveillance—and I or one of my associates would deliver, no service fee or taxes anywhere in sight.

Naturally, we made off like thieves, and the only downside was the steady stream of threats coming from the greedy union men. But as long as you could tolerate a few bricks through your window a week as a car with a DoorDash or Uber Eats sticker burned rubber down the street, why question a good thing?

Of course, my home insurance agent gave me hell, but he should have done his research before offering me that policy. Not my fault that a few shady union heads would shed no tears if I ended up at the bottom of the Potomac one of these days.

Not to mention, they weren’t any more pleased with me after I had set off a crosstown turf war between the two main factions. Like it was on me that Amazon delivered a mail bomb to the wrong address. What other conclusion was I supposed to conclude but that DoorDash or Uber Eats was stepping up their game and it was time to respond in kind?

For this and other reasons too many to count, my Smith & Wesson .38 Special was never far from me these days for obvious reasons.

On cue, someone pushed open the doors to the bar. I idly spun on my stool, curious who hadn’t gotten the word at this point, when the DoorDash sticker visible on her sedan through the glass door jumped out at me. Our eyes met, and the split-second spark of recognition in her eyes morphed into something far darker as they narrowed.

I felt my fingers flexing around the grip of my gun, an instinctual reaction even though the Smith & Wesson remained snug in its jacket compartment against my chest. Would they be so brazen?

Then her eyes flicked to the plastic bag of food waiting on the counter at the end of the bar, and the static charge that had filled the air decreased. Slightly.

Still, she kept her eyes locked on mine the whole time, even backing out of the bar.

“Jeeze, Darren,” I said, still facing the DoorDash driver as she climbed into her tan Ford Taurus. “If I knew anyone would ever bother ordering your rank food to go, I would’ve added you to our list of vendors.”

“Bad enough I’m known as the place you like to drink at on Saturday nights,” Darren said, also staring at the driver’s car as she pulled out into the street. “I don’t need any firebombs going through my windows.”

“You know,” I said, “there have been a strange number of structure fires among our vendors, now that I think about it.”

“Yep, strange coincidence, ain’t it?”

“For sure.”

My thoughts turned back to the matter at hand, and Darren must have seen the shadow slide back over my face as I drained the last drops of my pilsner. He had another ready before I could even set the empty glass down, complete with the perfect half inch of foam,

“Thanks, man,” I said, laying another twenty on the counter. “You know, it’s a strange world we live in. One day, you’re on top, the next you’re wondering when the gutters got so judgmental.”

Darren set his elbows on the counter. “She left you on read, huh?”

“It makes you question. Question everything. Maybe it’s the fact that I live outside the normal, that gives me such a perspective on it all. We think we know what’s happening out there.” I gestured to the street visible through the glass door. “Really, we know nothing. It’s impossible to know what’s really going on. Why that car honked at you for cutting across two lanes of traffic, why that man yelled at you for spitting in his flower bed, why dogs always seem to curl their lip at you.”

Darren sighed. “Or why she didn’t text back?”

I pointed to him. “Bingo. It’s questions like these that keep a man up at night.”

“Have you ever considered the wild possibility that she just isn’t that interested?

“Of course,” I said, tapping the remains of my cigarette into the empty beer glass and striking a match. “But then why not just say that? To just vanish without a trace. Something else has to be going on. I can’t fight the feeling in my gut that this goes deeper.”

Darren got the look in his eyes I had come to know so well. The kind that said “Whatever you say, Dick.”

My intuition was reinforced by him speaking these exact words a moment later.

“That’s it, Darren.” I rose to my feet. “I’ve let this conspiracy carry on far too long while I turned a blind eye. These bastards are going to pay for what they’ve done to these women. To me.”

A new light entered Darren’s eyes as he rushed out from behind the bar and stepped between me and the door. “Whoa, wait a minute, Dick. You’re talking crazy. Believe it or not, this may be the one time that no one is out to get you.”

I felt a smile crawling up both sides of my face. “You know, Darren, you may be my only friend.”

His shoulders relaxed.

“But if you don’t move, I’ll blow you away.”

Darren’s eyebrow raised. “If it were anyone else, I’d say you were bluffing.” After I responded by patting the slight bulge in my jacket, he continued, “But, knowing you like I do...”

He stepped aside.

I pushed through the door, ready to take the war raging in my head onto the streets and right to the heart of their twisted web of lies.

Darren’s words followed me out. “You’re overreacting, Dick. Someone’s going to get hurt!”

“Damn straight,” I muttered in reply as the door to Pershing Hall slammed shut. I cracked my knuckles. “But it’ll be me doing the hurting.”

I set off the down the road, not sure of my direction but sure of my intention. Some cabal was abducting the women off these dating apps after they had come in contact with me. But who? DoorDash and Uber Eats came to mind, but even those dens of thieves lived by a code. This was something personal.

I moved between the throngs of partiers and drinkers stumbling along the main strip of Arlington, always clinging to the shadows. Finally, I found myself alone beside a half-finished apartment block. I breathed in, tasting the promise of confrontation to come.

A less paranoid man would have fallen right into the ambush.

But most men aren’t Dick Winchester.

I sensed the shape materializing out of the shadow of the building’s skeleton. Instead of freezing like they expected, I turned into the attack and responded with a fist to the specter’s jaw. The ghost recovered admirably quick and hooked me in the left cheek. Gritting my teeth through the blow, I lunged into the phantom and sent them tumbling to the ground with a slew of human curses.

Only after I had placed my knee on the ghost’s chest and plowed my fist into their temple a fourth time did I pause to remark how human-like it seemed.

“Who sent you?” I demanded, pressing my knee deeper into their sternum.

The wraith only answered by lifting a trembling finger halfway to the sky. I followed his finger, eyes scanning the many floors of the brick apartment building across the street. At the very top, silhouetted by the light flooding through a glass sliding door, a figure stared down. Our eyes met despite the distance. Then the shadow turned and retreated into the confines of its layer.

“Well, then,” I said, rising to my feet. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

“You’re welcome,” the wraith gasped.

Only then did I notice the piece of paper clutched in their hand.

Pershing Plaza. Apartment 1501. Come alone. Any cops and you never see her again.

I held up the note. “So, you were just coming up to hand me this, huh?”

The specter nodded where it lay in the gravel.

“Oh. Sorry about, uh,” I gestured to the signs of our struggle, “all of this.”

The ghost didn’t even have the decency to accept my apology, but I quickly overcame my irritation as I turned my eyes back to the lone light showing at the top of the apartment building.

So I had been right this whole time. But they had chosen the meeting place well. I couldn’t just go rushing in there, gun drawn and ready to go. I needed to think. To plan.

The kind of plan only a man like Dick Winchester could come up with.

“Yes?” the metallic voice came through the intercom at the front door a short while later.

“Yeah, I have a DoorDash delivery for 1501. Sorry, I can’t remember the name. Let me check the recei—”

“Come on through.”

The telltale click of the magnetic locks disengaging reached my ears. I pushed the door open, scanning the lobby.

If the man had looked up from the desk, he would have seen a man in a leather jacket with a bulge on his left side and no bag or box of late-night delivery anywhere in sight.

Instead, he continued reading his book without so much as a glance. A biography of the Dillinger gang, I noted with approval.

I guess I could have charged in gun drawn and ready to go after all. I made a note for the next time I justice needed doing inside the Pershing Plaza apartments as I strode through the lobby and past the fitness center to the elevators.

As the elevators doors slid open on the 15th floor, I knew it was the opening of the final chapter of this sordid conspiracy. Each step brought me closer to the ending. Closer to the truth.

At the door to 1501, the static crackling in the air around me, I paused. My first instinct was to kick it open, but nothing had happened as I expected so far tonight, so I opted for the unexpected in return.

I knocked.

When the door swung open a few moments later, the broad who peered out was met with my best smile and “friendly neighbor down the hall” voice.

“Hi, there,” I said. “I got your note and thought I’d come by.”

She opened the door the rest of the way and waved me inside.

I overcame my initial hesitation to step in front of her in the narrow hallway as curiosity drew me forward.

The hallway carried on for a dozen feet before branching off to a narrow kitchen on the left and opening up to a massive living space on the right.

The space was lacking any kind of furniture. Lacking, that was, except for a single chair, which wouldn’t do much good for sitting, since it was already occupied by a squirming female with eyes so white her irises looked like Froot Loops®.

Beside her, a walrus of a man stood with arms crossed, while another loomed behind her. I recognized his narrow form as the shadow I had seen haunting the balcony.

The former shadow spoke first. “Well, well, we finally meet at last, Mr. Winchester.”

“Who the hell are you?” I fired back.

“That’s not important.” He walked with a slight limp, placing his spindly fingers on the captive’s shoulders. “Let’s focus on the reason we’re both here, yes?”

I met her eyes. “Kirstie, look at—”

“Katie,” the female goon behind me cut in with a cough.

“Katie, look at me.”

Her eyes met mine.

“We’re going to make it out of this, okay?” I gestured to the thugs surrounding me. “These people have no idea who they’re messing with.”

“Oh, she’s not going anywhere,” Spindly Man said with a crooked grin. “You see, Mr. Winchester, Katie is of particular interest to my employers. They want her for our enterprise, and there’s no room for loose strings with this business.”

“So you brought me here to kill me, is that it?”

“Please, Mr. Winchester, please. Killing is so 20th Century. We simply brought you here to explain this new development and ensure you let sleeping dogs lie, yes? In return for your cooperation, we promise not to release this archive of compromising tweets we found on your Twitter from 2008.”

“2008?” the female goon muttered behind me.

I felt a prickle of sweat forming on the back of my neck. “I was younger. I had just gotten Twitter. It was an election year. I’m not proud of who I was. But I’ve changed. I swear!”

I turned back to find her rolling her eyes.

“I have!”

They had me dead to rights, and Spindly Man knew it. “Just walk out that door, Mr. Winchester. Walk out, never look back, and these go back into the recesses of Elon’s failing platform where they belong.”

“Just... walk away?”

Spindly Man smile widened to an impossible size. “Precisely.”

I met Kir— Katie’s eyes one last time.

“I’m sorry,” I rasped, my voice catching in my throat. My feet felt like lead as I took a step forward, the female shuffling aside to unblock the entranceway.

Lead. Wait a damn minute.

“Not so fast,” I said, drawing my Smith & Wesson revolver.

“Whoa, shit,” the hired muscle gasped in unison. Spindly Man’s face had gone pale. Good. Let them feel what it’s like when the cards aren’t all in their deck.

“O-okay, Mr. Winchester,” Spindly Man spoke. “Just take it easy. No need for anything rash.”

“Oh, you mean, like this?” I squeezed the trigger twice, and the walrus sank to the floor.

Ears ringing from the concussion despite the impressive amount of floorspace in this apartment, I paused, wondering for the slightest of milliseconds if I should shoot the female goon. Then I realized that was my ingrained sexism speaking. After all, wasn’t equality just that, equal treatment?

I pulled the trigger twice more in the spirit of Fourth-wave Feminism.

The muscle neutralized, I turned toward Spindly Man who was now shrinking behind Katie.

“So, then.” I couldn’t help the thin grin forming. “Who are these employers you spoke of?”

An indignant look came over him. “What? What employers? That was a script. No one said anything about a gun—”

I raised my oldest friend until it was level with his forehead. “Then you’re of no use to me.”

“Wait, wait—”

I dealt the final blow for justice.

Then I turned my attention to freeing Katie.

“I knew it,” I said to her as I gingerly removed the duct tape from her mouth. “I knew there had to be a reason you stopped answering my texts. My pickup line was perfect, my messages were just the right mix of flirty and clever without being too forward, and besides...”

My voice trailed off as I saw her turn her eyes down.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look, you’re a nice guy and all, Dick, but it’s just not a great time for me with work and a move coming up.”

“Oh.” I blinked for a moment. “That’s cool.”

Katie looked up. “It is?”

“Sure, it happens. I get it. It’s 2023.”

Her shoulders relaxed. “I’m really glad you’re okay with it.”

“Yeah, all you had to say is you weren’t interested right now.”

It was Katie’s turn to blink. “Really?”

I looked around at the room. “Was... was all of this an elaborate scheme to get out of telling me that?”

She grinned sheepishly, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Yeah, I guess it’s kind of silly in hindsight.”

“Hey,” I said, offering her my hand to help her up, “I’m just glad no one got hurt.”

She took my hand, and together we stepped over the body and down the hall. Opening the door, I was surprised to find nobody had come out of their doors at the sound of the gunfire.

Katie must have seen the confusion in my face. “Really good soundproofing in this building.”

“You don’t say.” I nodded. “I might consider moving in.”

She winked. “I know one place that just became vacant.”

We laughed together, and I pointed down the hall. “Well, how about a drink to celebrate our new non-relationship? I know a great spot nearby. And if I talk Darren’s ear off, he may even give us the happy hour prices.”

The levity dropped from Katie’s face. “What did I say about dating?”

“Oh, well, I didn’t mean it as...” I saw the traces of a smile forming on the sides of her lips. “You’re screwing with me, aren’t you?”

She chuckled and gave an exaggerated sweep of her hand. “Lead the way, Mr. Winchester.”

As we strode down the hall, I smiled. All was as it should be: a conspiracy brought to light and dismantled, an innocent woman rescued, and a suave man’s dating app strategy vindicated. For if his style could net him friends like this, how bad could it really be?

Yep, think of how many lives might be lost if not for a few good men like Dick Winchester.

###

Dick Winchester will return in... The Case of the Vanishing Security Deposit

Until then, join Dick on his debut adventure when a package arrives on his front door. No name, no return address, and only the dim outline of an Amazon drone rising into the sky. As the box starts ticking in his hands, will Dick solve the mystery of what the package holds in time?

More Dick Winchester in...

The Opening Salvo (Book 1)

1. The Box with No Name
2. The Last Word — you are here
3. The Hat Trick
4. Dick Winchester Episode 1: Gratuity Not Included
5. The Terminus — print exclusive*
6. The Fairy Tale
7. The Cop Out — print exclusive*
8. The Enlistment
9. The Cliffhanger
10. The Cliffhanger, The Prequel
11. The Cliffhanger, The Finale

*When the book is released in September 2024

The Counterattack (Book 2)

• Opening chapter: The Deflation