Here is an early draft of the first chapter of my story called The Nightmonger Murders, featuring Thomas Martel, P.I.:
THE NIGHTMONGER MURDERS
By: W. H. Mitchell
Copyright © 2025 W. H. Mitchell
“Down Hearted Blues” (1923) – Music by Lovie Austin, Lyrics by Alberta Hunter
ONE
The sun planted itself like an angry seed behind the buildings of Regalis, the Imperial Capital. Split into three districts, the city shared the same sun but not the same light. In the Ashetown district, where mostly non-humans lived, the days were never quite as bright as in Middleton or the West End, and the nights were always a bit darker.
Thomas Martel watched the fading light from the roof of a parking garage deep in Ashetown. Although he was human, he called Ashetown his home and worked as a private investigator mostly for the local non-humans.
Martel was in his late 40s with dark brown skin. He was a big man, six-feet-two with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. He had short black hair with a fade along the temples and a trimmed beard with strands of gray running through it like wisps of smoke. He wore a long leather coat, denim pants, and a tan button-down shirt. A maroon tie was tied loosely around?) his neck.
While the roof of the garage was exposed to the elements, the parking spots were the only ones he could afford, and Martel knew better than to park on the street where his gravcar would be stripped of parts by morning.
Martel thumbed the key fob and heard the locks of his Dunbar LeRoy click. The LeRoy was not a new model and had seen better days. Its corners were boxy and sharp, and patches of rust had appeared where the original blue paint had worn away. On the driver’s side, a glancing bullet from a nine-millimeter had gouged an ugly gash along the side paneling. Martel had covered it with a length of silvery duct tape, which wasn’t much of an improvement.
Martel walked past the other stalls until he reached the elevator at the edge of the roof and took it down to street level. When he stepped out onto Marlowe Street, he wandered east toward his office, but he hadn’t gone more than a block before noticing somebody standing in an alleyway.
“Hey, Monty,” Martel said.
Monty was a Dahl, an elf-life race with high cheek bones and pointed ears. Unlike other non-humans, the Dahl had cooperated with humans and became trusted advisors to human nobility and the government. They held an elevated place in Imperial society that other non-humans could only dream about.
Monty, like all the other Dahl living in Ashetown, was not like most of his people. He was a junky and an outsider, cut off like a planet that had spun out of its orbit.
Monty stepped out of the shadows of the alleyway. He was dressed in a green embroidered vest and matching pants that puffed out at the bottom. A purple cape was draped over his shoulders, pulled forward to hide his arms that, even for a Dahl, were pale, almost translucent. To Martel, he looked like a genie who had run out of wishes.
“How’s it goin’, Martel?” he said, his purple eyes like wild, lavender flowers from a neglected garden.
“Just coming back from a case,” Martel replied casually.
“You make much money as a PI?”
Martel shook his head slowly. “Not enough.”
Monty reached into his pants and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He dug into the pack but fumbled the cigarette which fell to the pavement. He muttered his annoyance.
“You smoke?” Martel asked in surprise.
Monty looked at the private detective like he hadn’t considered the question before.
“Naw, man,” Monty said. “I just like burning myself…”
He pulled back the cape to reveal the scars going up his arms, although only some of them were from burns.
“Hey, you got a light?” he asked hopefully.
Martel stared at the burn marks for a second before speaking.
“No,” he replied.
Monty shrugged and picked up the cigarette, jamming it back into the pack and then into his pocket again. Martel started to leave but looked over his shoulder.
“Take care of yourself,” Martel said, concern in his voice.
“Yeah, man,” the Dahl said. “You too.”
Martel continued on another block until he reached his office building at the corner of Marlowe and Vine. The building was six stories tall with a bracketed cornice along the roofline. The walls were white granite that had blackened over the years.
The main entrance was up a set of stone steps in the center of the building. A little farther down the sidewalk, past the entrance, was a concrete stairwell full of cracks that led down to the building’s basement and a dive bar called Le Sous-Sol.
Martel kept going past the main entrance and went down the concrete steps to a red door. He pushed it open and went inside where the air was filled with equal parts smoke and the sound of someone singing.
An oak counter went down the left side of the room with stools covered in red vinyl lined up along a brass rail. Booths filled the right side like darkly lit enclaves with burgundy-colored seats of leather cracked by time and pitted by cigarette burns. Round tables and wooden chairs filled the middle of the room and at the back was a low stage where a Dahl woman was singing. Named Roxie Blues, she wore a full-length gown of purple sequins that glittered like starlight. Her auburn hair flowed down her back as Roxie sang into a silver microphone mounted on a chrome stand. Her voice was like satin:
| Gee, but it’s hard to love someone when that someone don’t love you. I’m so disgusted, heart-broken, too. I’ve got those down-hearted blues. Once I was crazy ’bout a man. He mistreated me all the time. The next man I get he’s got to promise me to be mine, all mine. |
Martel went to the bar where he had a pick of empty stools. Behind the counter, a Gordian named Red asked what he wanted to drink to which Martel said, “Bourbon, straight.”
Red took a square bottle from the shelf next to an old photograph of his younger days. He was wearing boxing gloves and a swollen black eye. The current version of the bartender was a little heavier, with a layer of fat covering the underlying muscle. The rest of him was short and stocky with a bald head and a snout like a wild pig. A pair of tusks protruded from his lower jaw.
Red poured the bourbon into a glass without ice and passed it over to Martel who was too busy listening to Roxie to notice.
| Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days. Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days. It seems that trouble’s goin’t to follow me to my grave. |
Martel turned back. “How much are you paying her?”
“Too much,” Red said.
“It’s not enough,” Martel disagreed.
Red crossed his meaty arms. “Pay your tab and maybe I could…”
Martel finished his drink and set the glass down to be refilled.
“Let’s not go crazy…” he muttered.
When Roxie was done with her set, she thanked the crowd and the spattering of applause before stepping off the stage and heading to the bar where Red had a glass of white wine waiting. Compared to the short, sturdy glass Martel was drinking from, Roxie’s had a long, slender stem that mimicked her slender form.
She looked up at Martel, who towered over her even while sitting, and asked, “How are things?”
“So-so,” he replied.
She grinned knowingly. “Just so-so?”
“Yeah.”
“You seem a little bothered,” she noted.
“I ran into Monty on my way over,” he said. “He looked worse than usual.”
Roxie lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug and sipped from her fluted glass.
“He’s had a hard life,” she said.
“Is he one of the Forgotten?” he asked.
“Who isn’t around here?” she replied.
The Forgotten were Dahl who had been exiled by their own people. The reasons for exile were varied but usually involved non-conformity or using outlawed mind magic called Dark Psi. They were called the Forgotten because the Dahl government used powerful psionics to erase memories of those exiled from all Dahl everywhere, including friends and family.
“I thought your people didn’t do that anymore,” Martel said.
“True,” Roxie said. “They even returned everyone’s memories, but not everyone had a home or family to go back to.” She glanced at Red who had been scowling at Martel.
“What about Monty?” the detective asked.
She gave a little laugh tainted with sarcasm.
“He said this is where the chems are,” she said, using the slang term for drugs.
“Hmm,” Martel murmured. “He had needle tracks on his arms. That’s no way to live.”
“Who said it’s living?” she replied.
They drank in silence for a while. The rest of the barroom had filled with patrons coming in from the darkened streets, gorging on alcohol and cigarettes. The Sous-Sol was never really full, but there were enough locals present to at least make it seem lively.
When Roxie had finished her wine, she got up. “Time for my next set.”
She smiled at Martel, but he saw in her dark eyes an inner sadness, if only for a moment, before she turned and headed back to the stage. It was then that Martel noticed the dirty looks Red had been giving him.
“What?” Martel asked.
“You ask too many damn questions!” Red grumbled.
“I’m a detective. That’s what I do…”
The bartender crossed his doughy arms.
“You know Roxie was one of the Forgotten too, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, but didn’t her family get their memories back?”
Red leaned over the counter, his snout flaring.
“When Roxie went back to her home planet to see them,” he explained, “turns out they had died in an accident before the Dahl government returned their memories. They died without knowing they had a daughter.”
“So, she came back here?”
“Where else could she go?” Red asked. “No family. No home. Just this lousy bar!”
Roxie’s voice rose over the low din of the other patrons, cutting through their cigarette smoke and desperation. Martel felt like crap.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Red waved it off with a pudgy hand. “Whatever.”
After drinking for a few hours, midnight being a distant memory, Martel had settled into a steady numbness by the time Roxie had finished her last set. She said her goodbyes and left, along with the remaining patrons, leaving just Red and Martel in the bar.
Red kept peeking at the digital clock beside his boxing photo. When the numbers turned from 02:59 to 03:00, he reached for the glass in front of Martel.
“Go home,” the bartender said. “It’s closing time.”
Red took away the glass and washed it briefly in the sink below the counter. He toweled it off with the usual dirty rag and plunked it next to the others on the shelf behind the bar.
Martel rose from the stool but didn’t feel much like going home. He gave a half nod to Red and trudged toward the door and the broken stairs outside. Once at ground level, he took a deep breath of the cool night air. It smelled of abandoned buildings and abandoned dreams, but it took the edge off the clouds in Martel’s mind.
Instead of going into the building’s main entrance and up to his office, Martel turned east on Marlowe and crossed Vine Street at the empty intersection. It was dangerous in Ashetown this late at night, but Martel could feel the tug of his shoulder holster and the heavy weight of the .44 magnum he called Maxwell hanging under his left armpit.
The buildings on these blocks were twelve to twenty-stories high, with offices in the upper floors and storefronts on the first. Security gates like metal lace guarded the stores that were still in business. The vacant shops, which outnumbered the protected ones, were like empty shells with broken display windows and looted shelves.
Along the sidewalk, streetlamps created circles of light, but many of the lamps were burned out, leaving only patches of darkness. Martel passed through both the light and the dark, thinking about old cases and whatever popped into his head.
After he had walked for a few minutes, Martel saw flashing lights, washing the storefronts in reds and blues like hot and cold water. Martel approached along the sidewalk, the lights painting him in the same two-color palette.
He turned the next corner south and saw police gravcars blocking the road. They were like sentinels with a black and white livery and the words Regalis PD printed on the sides. A light bar on their roofs was the source of the flashing colors.
Between the cars, yellow and black caution tape was fluttering up and down in the early morning breeze. Martel joined a few bystanders, mostly late-night workers and barflies, hanging around on the outside of the tape. On the inside, uniformed officers stood stoically while a police detective kneeled beside a body lying face up on the street. The corpse wore a green embroidered vest and a pair of matching pants that puffed out at the bottom. He was resting on a purple cape now drenched in blood.
“Monty,” Martel said.