Prologue

Sometimes I want to give it all up, quit the business when every case seems to be about taking pictures of spouses misbehaving, of trailing behind rude, rich client's wives or husbands, clicking away at sordid infidelity, spying through keyholes, acting like a fucking Peeping Tom. Twenty years of that can feel downright sordid and distasteful. I'm sure I can find something else I could make a buck at, probably more bucks than I ever have being a private investigator. Then a case comes up that gets me excited. I mean completely, thoroughly, unquenchably excited. I am in the midst of one now, and, as usual, I find myself in the midst of my frequent lover and mentor, Sandy Shaw. Inside her. Fucking her silly.

"Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Yeeeesssss," says Sandy, cumming for the third and final time as I stiffen up and ejaculate simultaneously inside her throbbing cunny.

I relax my body over hers. In our two decades together I've explored every inch of this woman, fucked her in every position and every orifice. But we more often than not end up missionary. She looks up at me and smiles, still beautiful after all these years. Her body has rounded, softened and sagged, as has mine over time, though for a woman in her mid fifties, she sure looks fine to me. Lovely, beautiful, radiant.

"You've ruined me for other men, you know, Joe," she says when her breathing quiets.

"You bring out the best in me," I say truthfully.

"Me or your latest undercover job?"

What can I say? She knows how turned on I get when I'm in disguise. Too many times to remember she has enjoyed amazing, relentless bouts of sex as a result. Remembering those moments gives me pleasure when alone in my bedroom masturbating.

"Why don't you give up looking for other men, who, as you say, can't hold a candle to my own masculine self, and let's get monogamous?" I say for the first time in our long, bizarre, satisfying relationship. I surprise myself with my words, but they feel right somehow.

I haven't noticed her face when I speak or how her breasts rise and fall at a steady pace. My mentor, my lover, the woman who had made me a man, a private dick, the only woman I have sustained any relationship with in my adult life, sleeps. Maybe I'll ask her tomorrow.

Slowly and carefully, I ease my body from between her thighs and lie on my side. I cover our nakedness with a sheet and a light blanket. Staring at her face in the darkness, never getting sick of its long narrow terrain, I begin to think of my life, of my crazy story. There's times when I think I should publish the stuff. Not an autobiography, but a series of mysteries, like some pulp fiction, except it's fact. Maybe with an embellishment or two. If I write how the memories come to me, just the way they come, it could very well seem to be just another mystery writer's imaginative tale.