Part Ten
In the rundown Castro District, Cattrell spent the better part of the day smoking cigarettes at the Fedora Bar, and drinking whiskey.
After losing count, he flipped the barkeep a digital coin and escaped into the night air.
A bat occasionally dotted the sky; a barfly or two roamed the streets. The days of children laughing among the park benches and street signs were long gone. Only the chill and the cold remained.
He walked not for love of the wind or the fog or rain, but to remember Neniva. His second wife. Unlike Sybil, who he lost, Neniva was the one who lost him.
Cattrell stood in front of a neighborhood fountain, now dingy and emptied, remembering the quiet wedding vows they shared there. Three years later, she took him back to the fountain only to leave him there standing alone. Now, the fountain heads barely spit water, but regurgitated rusty moss.
Click. Rrrr.
He found her three weeks later in a hotel bathtub, a maggot infested body that bore the marks of tar. She spent her last nights in Heaven, the club everybody went to when they injected the black gum. The sizzling chemical smell in that cramped bathroom was a stench he would never forget.
Click. Rrrr. That made the fifty-seventh shot of the fountain to add to his collection. One for every month she had been gone.
Cattrell flicked a half-smoke cigarette into the empty fountain, and walked back to his car. It was 6pm, and time to speak with Cassandra.
The moon peered down on him with tears in its eyes, and he returned the gaze.
Read from the beginning:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine
To be continued (installments 11 through 18 of this story are coming soon.)
"The Girl and the Pendulum" is an 18-part future-noir science fiction story about a a private investigator's search for a missing android. How can a man who searches for missing women find lost artificial intelligence? I welcome feedback on this story about a man and his difficult case in a post-war, post collapse world. Stay tuned, as I also will begin publishing my 300,000 word epic novel "The Messiah" on Steemit in 2017.
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