Clearly you’ve never heard that saying before but that’s ok. How ever you want to dress it up. You’re the same as you’ve always been and you’re never going to be anything else.

Rain leaked through bullet holes peppered across the rim of my enormous sombrero, dampening my cigarette with a light tssss. A subtle twitch of the muscles and it dropped from my lips. Gotta make a call anyway. I huddled into the phone booth, dripping, and pressed the receiver to my ear. 

"Turner, private investigator."

His voice rang loud and clear despite a breakfast of cigarettes and a brain flinging a shortage of neurons around like hot potato. I was speaking to the most well-practiced bullshit artist in the Cook County area. Private investigator? He'd been kicked off the force barely 24 hours ago. 

“Turner? Private what? I thought you were a cop?”

“Private investigator. And was being the key word.”

Kicked to the curb like a vagrant. He'd been my guy on the inside at the FBN. Where are we as a society, Turner would say over a rapidly-emptying whiskey sour, where an officer of the law - one of our boys in blue - needs to take on dirty work to feed his family? So he took a few bribes, turned a few blind eyes. What was the harm? 

“They finally got you, Turner? Everyone knew you were more gangster than cop.”

“Private investigator now. You need somethin'?”

You’ve got to be careful about your hidden benefactors as a dirty cop. It slots you into a hierarchy. That it ended up reflecting on him, his place in the assembly line identified and leveraged against him - this work of tantamount discretion and subtlety - spoke poorly to his ability to do it. 

“That depends. Everybody is talking about the snout who took a pot shot at one of our bookies in broad daylight. That you?”

Turner was known to have shot a few guys. What cop hasn't? But when a prosecutor tries to connect those murders to an organised crime syndicate, albeit unsuccessfully, you end up drawing the kind of heat that puts you on the phone with me, the guy trying to decide whether you need to retire somewhere darker, earthier, than Miami Beach. 

“I’m a private investigator now, chief, and unless you’re hiring me to find the fuckin’ point you’re making, you’re losing me.”

“Look, you were useful to me when you were a cop, not a private whatever-“

“Private investigator, Jesus, do I need to get you a fuckin’ dictionary?”

“Alright, alright, god damn.”

I shook my head and muttered ‘salty son of a bitch’ under my breath. I paused, taking a moment to really consider the nature of the call. 

“Nevermind, Turner. I’ll see ya when I see ya.”

Clink.

I remembered the last CA on my payroll. A guy I let walk. "It's been months since I've done a job. Weeks since I've had one!", he would say, drunk off his God-fearing ass and running his mouth in some sticky bar. Less than ideal. There was only one way to make sure the stories of Turner's time in my employ stayed lost in the ether. 

Matt_Murdock - I had a look in the dictionary, and what it says, amounts to saying that you are a giant horse's ass:

"The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar"

Now, if you aren't going to enter a story, or act as a judge, I'd like you to leave this conversation and let the creative writing community thrive in your absence.  

I’m glad that you are able to read, that’s a wonderful little skill you’ve picked up. Should really try working on the comprehension part but that might mess with your delicate sensibilities if you actually understood the things that people are saying to you. 

Best of luck with your rigged results. Feel free to stop constantly begging me to be part of your mess. As I’ve stated too many times for you to count, leave me out of your bullshit.

well, these two got my ass beat. no way am I beating live drama.

The old bum plants herself down on a comfortable bit of sidewalk and pulls out a bottle of booze

hey Senyor Zapata? wanna swig?