Black Jack Justice by Greg Taylor, read by Christopher Mott and Andrea Lyons.

Chapter 1. The name's Justice. Jack Justice. The life of a private detective lends itself to a certain amount of introspection.

You live far enough outside the shop-worn cliches of day-to-day living that you never quite feel like a part of the world at large, yet you are forced to be a keen observer of it.

And as you observe, you can't help but notice some of the more unpleasant proclivities of that nice, normal society that goes about its business outside your door every day, pretending that it doesn't have a

dirty little secret. But it does. They all do. And when it all goes wrong, that is when they come to

see me. Sadly, while the life of a detective lends itself to this sort of deep thought, the men who

choose this line of work are generally pretty poorly suited to such meditation.

At no point in my illustrious academic career did I flip a coin to choose between detective work and philosophy.

And there are some pretty compelling reasons why that is true.

So although my perch offers me a unique opportunity to analyze the human condition and the great truths that bind us

all, I am frequently disappointed by how often those observations take the form of something that

your mother always told you and her mother before that. Today that truth seemed to be,

it's always calm before the storm, the dull patter of largely disinterested rain against

the windows, the soothing rattle of the coffee

percolator, the radiator just beginning to sing. Together they were a quiet symphony of comfort.

And further to that comfort, there was a small, mousy man sitting in the client chair,

which, though it might mean trouble, also meant rent money, and this I found good.

How do you take your coffee, Mr. Mayfield? I asked him.

He seemed startled by the question at first and smiled a little sheepishly at his own reaction.

I had only asked him because it seemed polite, and it might imply that there were options available to him.

There was neither milk nor cream in the small ice box in the corner,

which also had not held ice in over a year.

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