I Told You So

“Someone will die; I can feel it in my body,” said the sultry redhead.

Though a private eye, investigator of things past, and not really into fortune cookie wisdom, she reeled me in. Well… Gotta admit it was her figure more than the quackery, but I decided to play cool and see where it would lead.

“Any evidence or just a hunch?”

“I don’t have any, but I feel it.”

“Sorry, doll, but hunch alone won’t pay the rent. Don’t care what you feel, but what I feel is I got nothing to work with.”

“It’s useless… I should know by now no one would ever believe me…”

And she left, slamming the door.

Could’ve followed her, but—business as usual—a shot of rye at my usual joint seemed more appealing. Had too many loonies in my life to deal with another; or so I thought. Fate, though, that cruel mistress, had other plans. Like a bad penny, she turned up again…

“You following me, doll?”

“I thought you could change your mind about my… case.”

Felt like she knew I was more interested in her than her case and decided to play the vamp instead of the psychic. Cute trick, but I wasn’t buying it.

“Look, doll, unless you cough up some details, there’s nothing I can do. Besides, people croak all the time. Old news here.”

“Someone will die; someone dear to you.”

“It trims the list to myself, though I don’t reckon anyone’s after me.”

“I know. You’re a loner. I can sense things about you.”

“Cut the crap, doll. You’re parroting me like some carnival mystic. Phony act. Besides, I’m a loner when I want to. When I don’t, I know pretty well how to tail a dame.”

“Do you think you can tail me?”

“Sounds like a proposition, but dames with trouble tend to be more trouble than they’re worth.”

“You know what, sport? Let’s play a game. I’ll leave, and you’ll try to tail me. If I don’t catch you by the time I get home, you can come in. If I do… We go our separate ways, and you’ll never hear from me again.”

Before I could reply, she was gone. A sucker for a challenge I am and would’ve fallen for it anyway, but the way she moved her hips made it even harder to decline. So I tailed her—and, damn, what a good tail it was.

Sure, I could’ve cracked any tail, but she didn’t make things any difficult—seemed more like a play, and let’s just say I did my role well enough to earn my reward. I tailed her; we made love that night; and the next, and the next, and the next. Lovers, just like that.

The following weeks were flawless; I was less of a loner; she seemed less of a nutcase. In fact, she seemed normal. Well… Almost. There was this tiny moment: in one of those days after doing typical couple stuff—and I don’t mean the typical couple stuff, but things like going outta dinner, and so, which we started doing by then—,  we were cruising by a deserted warehouse that looked like it hadn’t seen a lick of paint since the Depression. That’s when she drops the bomb—“Here. That’s here where someone will die.”

I said nothing. I hoped that by being silent, things would go back to normal; and they did—after that one-time event, she didn’t say or do anything strange. She was back to normal. We were back to normal.

Then, one day, she simply vanished.

Her house was untouched but empty. I needed to find her before going crazy. The problem was I knew almost nothing about her. I was so inebriated by love I didn’t bother to ask her personal things—it felt like I was living a fantasy, and I’d like to keep it that way.

I tried, though. I searched her like crazy. I went back to all the places we’d been together, asking if anyone knew her. It was to no avail. She was like a ghost.

I kept trying until there was only one place left—the one I’d skirted around and buried deep in my mind because I only wanted to hold onto the good memories of her. Yet, after revisiting them all, there it was: the final stop looming before me—the warehouse.

I went there as soon as I remembered it. Not the brightest of the ideas going back there at night after drowning my sorrows, but I felt heroic storming out of the bar to come to her rescue. She had to be there. She wasn’t a nutcase after all; she knew all along, and I was to blame for not believing her.

In the warehouse, besides the flicker of light from my crappy flashlight, all there was was darkness. I didn’t need to search too much, though: there she was silhouetted against the window. At first, I felt relieved to see her safe and sound; that feeling, however, was short-lived. I reckoned, “If nothing bad happened, what the heck she’s doing here?”

I called her. She turned towards me, saying nothing. I walked towards her. Then, I fell. Couldn’t see the hole in the ground. As consciousness began to slip away, I strained to hear her voice one last time.

“I told you. I told you someone would die.”

THE END

(NOTE: 906 words; 4,712 characters, excluding this note and the title, counted using LibreOffice. Nothing special inspired me besides my love for film noir and hard-boiled detective stories. I wanted to try a fast fiction/short short story and thought this was the best genre to do it. Wrote the story first, in one day, then did the image in the next.)

Word Count: 1066
Hours Spent: 20
Software Used: DAZ Studio 4 With IRAY, Photoshop