I was feeling pretty happy that day, before it all went to hell. I was virtually glowing with success as I entered my office, because it had been a great day. People all over Birmingham were singing my praises for a job well done. I had just completed a case--a relatively simple one, actually--and no one had gone to the hospital, or the morgue. One rather strange perpetrator was currently in jail, but even he might get off without too harsh a sentence. I had caught a kidnapper, but not just any kidnapper. This one had kidnapped only prize show dogs. In addition, he was an Elvis impersonator.

You can't make this stuff up.

The Elvis-obsessed young man's intention was to finance his envisioned one-of-a-kind tribute tour to the King with the ill-gotten doggy ransom money from Birmingham's richer residents. I had foiled this nefarious plan, and therefore, I was a happy man, and not just for that reason. Added to my mere sense of success was the fact that today had also been a particularly profitable day. I felt better and had more money in the bank than I'd had in a very long time.

I'd gotten a break and managed to locate the underground kennel run by the faux Elvis, who specialized in dognapping, before any of the prize animals came to any harm or got resold. The ersatz King of Rock 'n Roll had been very busy; a string of such crimes had victimized dog owners throughout the wealthier neighborhoods of Birmingham for months. These were no normal dog owners, of course, but the owners of thoroughbred animals that were pampered and groomed to enter dog shows. The doo-wop desperado had been stealing purebred dogs from these upscale families for about eight months. I had been offered individual rewards from some owners, and others had called, pleading with me to help them. I had decided to take on each case as a single account, gambling that the dogs were all safe and being held in a kennel somewhere by the same thieves--and I'd been right.

After returning each happy doggy to its grateful owner, I had then collected fees from no less than thirty well-to-do and elated owners, fees that now safely resided in my bank account. All the owners had their dogs back, the bad guys were in jail, and no one had even gotten hurt. Add to that, I wasn't broke--in fact pretty far from it--and I was home safe and sound, and all of this for the first time in a long time. Things seldom worked out much better than that, I decided.

Home for me was Birmingham, and she was big enough to keep me pretty busy. I'd been a police officer there for a good long while, a sworn officer of the law, fighting the good fight, until I lost a battle with the bottle and they had taken my badge. I'd finally won my personal war with alcohol, as much as anyone ever could, and when I finally had enough strength to put my life back together, I took the work that was left to me.

I had been a police detective once upon a time, and a good one, too. My talents and experience behind the badge now served me well as a private investigator. The first year or so as a freelancer had been rough, but I had slowly made a name for myself in the business as a hard-working, honest guy to deal with. In the end, the work I had done, and my own determination to do it well, had won out.

I've been a private detective for several years now. Sometimes it is unforgiving work, but today, I had really shone. I was, I'll say it again, one happy man.

Although I didn't know it, that was about to come to an end. In about thirty minutes, my whole life was going to change. A dark rewind was going to take me back to a place of nightmares and mad laughter, of lost little girls and freaks with mad eyes. A door was about to open before me, and beyond it was a road to a strange and evil place, stranger and more evil than any I had ever seen before.

For now, though, I was content as anyone could possibly be, and blissfully unaware of what lay in store.

I lived the life of most private investigators, with its practical necessities that others in my trade would easily recognize. While business took me out of town on occasion, it seldom took me out of the Southeastern United States. Most of my cases were of the find-them-and-bring-them-home kind. Those were the cases that paid the bills. It was, with some exceptions, work of a decidedly regional variety.

People who had a relative who had run away to Poughkeepsie, for instance, would not hire a private eye from Birmingham to go find him, for the most part. It was much more logical and cost effective to hire someone in Poughkeepsie to bring the errant lad or lass back home. The same was true of Birmingham, and everywhere else, for the most part. People hired hometown detectives when they had no idea where the loved one had flown, or when there was dirty business to be done in their very own city.

I kept my office in the Brooks Building, a decrepit brownstone in the old Birmingham downtown district. The new downtown had modernized and moved to the northwest in the late 1970s. I was the sole remaining tenant in the Brooks Building.

I climbed the aging flagstone stairs--the elevator had given up the ghost ages ago--and unlocked the door to my third floor office. I walked in, past the long-vacant secretary's desk, and into my inner office. I kept my office on the third floor because the rent was cheaper up there. At least, that's what I told people. In truth, I also liked the view.

From my third floor vantage point, I could almost make out who was eating at Sally's Diner--the only other business in Brooks Plaza that could still be described as 'open for business' beside my own--and I could see the street, and the Birmingham skyline. The jets coming and going from Birmingham International Airport were clearly visible. Sometimes you could make out the airline insignias if the smog wasn't too bad.

I saw that the message light on the answering machine was flashing, so I pressed the "play" button and began to make coffee while I listened. The voice of an elderly lady came first.

"Oh, Mr. Longville. May God bless you. This is Mrs. Schumacher. I just wanted to tell you again how grateful we are for your fine work in bringing Tallulah back to us. She's very happy to be home. Please use us as a reference if ever you need one. You are a fine man and a great detective. Have a wonderful evening, and God bless you."

I felt my head swelling for the hundredth time that day. Mrs. Schumacher was a kindly and rather wealthy widow, who lived in Mountainbrook. Tallulah, her show poodle, was her sole companion.

There was another message, very similar in tone and assurances, this from Mrs. Petty, a lady who lived a rather similar life to Mrs. Schumacher, in that she was a wealthy widow who focused her life on her dog, and dog shows. Further equally glowing praise issued forth from the answering machine.

Roland Longville, savior of the richest lapdogs in Mountainbrook, I thought to myself with a wry smile. If anyone met me on the street, they would never guess.

I am a big man, six foot three, and still muscled like the linebacker I once was at the University of Alabama, where I had played football on a scholarship. I had graduated from there with a double major, one in Criminal Justice, the other in English. I am a black man, or more accurately, a brown one, born and raised in North Birmingham, in the old Westmoreland Heights projects, the poor kid of a single mom. I've seen more than my share of man's inhumanity to man, but I have tried to rise above it.

A crescent-shaped scar shows on the left side of my face, running from the corner of my eye to the corner of my mouth. My skin is a medium brown; the scar is a thin loop of lighter-colored skin that tightens that side of my face ever so slightly when I am tense or angry, and gives me a rather sinister look. In those moments, the scar becomes paler, and my face gets darker. Sometimes, when I pass women on the street, especially affluent young white women, I see them grip their purses just a little bit tighter.

If only they knew, I would think to myself, and I have to shake my head. I got that scar when I was a young policeman. I cornered a rapist who had been terrorizing women in Birmingham. The man had raped his victims and then slashed their faces. The Mountainbrook Slasher, the media had dubbed him. I had stopped that man, too, and he was much, much worse than any misguided young man who kidnapped dogs and dressed like Elvis.

I had spotted an open window one night at 2:00 a.m. while on a routine patrol, and I surprised the Slasher as he attempted to commit what was to be his final crime. We had fought, and I got cut several times, the worst being the cut on my face. As for the Mountainbrook Slasher himself, he had been a mentally disturbed young man from a wealthy family. He had fallen on his own knife in the struggle, and later died of peritonitis in the hospital. The man's death had put an end to the attacks. I got a decoration for valor in the line of duty and a promotion to detective, and, of course, the scar. Such is life.

I have other scars, too, but not the kind you can see. After a shooting incident in North Birmingham, a young officer had died on a crime scene, and many had blamed me for her death. No one blamed me as much as I blamed myself, though. I had taken to the bottle after that, and for over two years I had surrendered myself to its blinding embrace. I had finally fought my way back to sobriety, only to find myself alone, my once-promising career down the tubes, and with dim prospects for the future. With the help of my old partner and constant friend, Lester Broom, I had set myself up as a private detective, and started over.

But such grim times were far from my mind at that moment. I poured myself a cup of strong black coffee and sat down with a bemused smile to listen to the rest of my messages. When Mrs. Petty hung up, there was a beep, and silence. I reached forward to clear the machine when another voice came on the line. My hand froze. The voice was very vague, as though it was coming from the bottom of a well, or someone was speaking through a wet towel. It wasn't the voice of another happy dowager. There was something desperate in that voice, the sound of someone earnestly trying to get a message across. I listened hard to make out the words.

"...in your mail..." was all that I could make out. The voice wasn't familiar. It had a faint, musical quality to it, but that was all. Like a young girl, perhaps, though I couldn't be sure. The words on either side of the phrase were lost in static, or noise. I had the strange sensation that the speaker was surrounded by people who didn't want the message to be heard, but for some reason limited their objections to making rude noise to drown out the message. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

I rolled my chair over to my computer, which sat on a side desk, and checked my email. Nothing there. Maybe, I reasoned, the person on the phone had been referring to my postal mail slot downstairs. That must be what the caller was talking about ... snail mail.

With an increasingly weird feeling, I went down the stairs to the mail slot, careful to pocket my .45 before doing so. The world is full of kooks, I reminded myself, as I strolled down the stairs. I had made the news, after all. That might attract any number of psychos, for no other reason than they simply wanted to do me harm, so they could make the news, too. Or maybe their dog told them to come to the Brooks building and shoot the heroic doggy detective. A similar excuse had been used by a maniac once before, after all.

I looked out the front windows into the slanting red light of Birmingham in the death of afternoon. There were no kids across the plaza, no car with the engine running, no lookout peering surreptitiously around a corner to watch some prank unfold. There was no bag of flaming dog poop on the stairs. It didn't feel like a practical joke, either. Something about the voice had been, oddly ... commanding.

I picked up the mail from the lobby floor. There was a power bill, but nothing else. Maybe the call was a prank, after all.

You know it wasn't, a little inner voice told me. The little voice is one of my peculiarities. It warned me sometimes, and chided me at others. Over the years, I've learned to take that little voice very seriously. Now, though, I was at a loss as to how to proceed. I stood there for a second, then shrugged it off.

Just a prank call. I walked back upstairs and grabbed my overcoat and pulled it on. I caught sight of my reflection in the office door. Hell, Roland, you even look like a private eye. I smiled to myself. But that strange uneasy feeling stayed with me, just the same.

Time to take it to the house, I decided. For the first time in more than a month, I was going to spend a quiet evening at home and actually watch a ball game, or a movie on television. Hey, perhaps even an oldie, a good old detective film noir, and maybe, just maybe, I'd even get to watch it all the way through.