T. A. Pratt’s stories have won a Hugo (and lost a Nebula and World Fantasy Award), and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places. He lives in Oakland CA and has a website at www.timpratt.org
Despite lacking much in the way of tact and having a tendency to solve all her problems with violence, Marla Mason has been chief sorcerer and protector of the city of Felport for a few years now, and no one’s succeeded in assassinating her yet.
Dusted: A Cosa Nostradamus Story
by Laura Anne Gilman
“Sylvan Investigations. Daniel Hendrickson speaking.”
People tend to be surprised when they hear the name of my agency. I guess it’s not what they expect from a big city PI. They don’t expect the investigator to pick up the phone, either. In all the movies the PI has a cute secretary/gal Friday answering his phones and trying to block the bad guys from rushing into his office.
I handle the cute myself, and I answer my own damn phone. Overhead’s bad enough without having to pay someone else’s salary, too, and I prefer to work alone.
The caller didn’t care about my dimple or my boyish grin. He wanted to sell me a subscription to the Post.
“Not if you paid me,” I told him, and hung up. Some day they’d invent call discarding. Like call forwarding, only it would hang up preemptively on telemarketers.
I really needed a job. Not for the money — my pension from the NYPD took care of the basics, and I lived a pretty simple life. But I was bored. Bored was bad. Bored was boring.
“Mr. Hendrickson?”
I looked up to see a man standing in my doorway. Fifty-ish, solidly built, with graying brown hair and worried eyes.
“I was told you … you find missing people?”
I pushed back my chair and considered him. “That I do.”