“OK, well then – the last time I saw Dean was in Monaco…”

Visions of intrigue on the French Riviera, this busty little blonde hanging off my arm wearing something soft and clingy, as we raced the moon through the gold lit streets of Monte Carlo, burst onto the horizon of my ever vivid imagination even before she could continue. 

Only to be dashed upon the rugged shores of the Mediterranean a second later when she finally did.

“It’s a crowded little ‘burb within the city of Lawndale. College students mostly, but some of us, like Dean and myself got locked in tight by way of useless degrees, and stayed on well past graduation.” 

As she diddled her way through their consequent meeting whilst working at the same dining establishment, seemingly coming no closer to the last time she saw Dean than she was when I originally happened upon her seated across the desk from C.C.- I left off listening intently. Willing to take my chances on the accuracy of my old war buddy turned private eye’s deft investigative note taking- I started to do some sensory detective work of my own. 

She was fiddling with the clasp of her handbag as she spoke, snapping and unsnapping it rhythmically, as if feeling her way through her own story. Much like the tapping of a blind man’s cane seeking a path clear of obstruction, she was nervously weaving her way through her own neural highways, carefully targeting important information, building a backstory if you will. 

Something about that just didn’t sit right.

I got the feeling she was doing so in an effort to influence the trajectory of our investigation. That is, if it really was an investigation she was interested in at all.

It felt too orchestrated. As if she already knew “who done it”, whatever it was, and was just looking for a convenient place to park the blame. 

And what more convenient fall guys, than C.C. and I, two past their prime Vietnam vets who lunched regularly on IPA and answered their own telephones from the back office of a third floor walk up detective agency- that proudly bore the name of a guy that had been named after a bottle of pop.

Every Sunday, when tnkerr posts the weekly On Line Writer’s Guild prompts, they are led into with an unrelated original story, poem or vignette. This week, I challenged myself to not only use the three phrasal prompts offered, but to use them in a continuation of the story that tnkerr posted as a lead in. 

Clicking on the first line of my story, which incidentally is the last line of tnkerr’s, will take you back to that story, giving you the scenario upon which this continuation elaborates.

Oh, and by the way, the three phrasal prompts this week are:

1. racing the moon
2. the tapping of a blind man’s cane
3. locked in tight