Chapter 5

From there I’m not too sure exactly what happened. All I knew was that it was two days later and I was back in my own grubby little apartment. The insistent ringing of the phone finally woke me. It was Uncle Wally ... again.

“It’s been two days and Tom wants to know if you’d made any headway in finding his family.”

His voice was so loud I felt he was practically yelling into my ear. It felt even worse due to a tremendous hangover headache so I put it on speaker and rolled away from it.

Oh damn, my big case with the big cheque. I hope it’s still in my shirt pocket because that’s the one that’s gonna get the landlord and banker off my back. I groaned and shook my head to try and make myself a little more awake but the hangover was a doosy and Uncle Wally’s strident voice wasn’t helping. Right at the moment I just wanted to get rid of him so I thought fast.

“Oh, yeah, tell old Tom not to worry. I just spent the last couple of days finishing up a couple of very important cases I was working on. Now I’m ready to start looking for his family. I should find something about them in a few days,” I assured my uncle.

Then I fell back on my bed and groaned again. I was tempted to crawl back under the sheets for a few more hours sleep but reluctantly decided to rouse myself. I took several aspirins for the headache and a long shower to try and shake off the hangover. After I pulled on some clean pants and assured myself that Tom’s $10,000 cheque was still in my shirt pocket, I scrounged around and made some coffee. I thought of breakfast but there wasn’t much to eat in my fridge. I thought it was just as well because I didn’t think my stomach could handle anything solid at the moment. As I starred bleary eyed into the mirror and tried to hold my hand steady enough to shave I tried to recall exactly what had happened during my party with Susan. However, my head was hurting too much to think so I give it up.

With the shaving process over with only a couple of small nicks, I sipped the hot coffee while starring out the window at my Charger which I couldn’t even remember driving home. Thank God it was still in one piece and parked nicely beside my mini van. Its grill was full of bugs due to the flying trip to Edmonton and back but it looked none the worse for wear.

That’s it, I promised myself. I’m going to stay away from booze, drugs and women, especially Susan. Well, at least until I finish this case and get my hands on all of the $30,000 old Tom had promised me.

The ringing of the phone interrupted my musing. I recognized the voice of Lucky Louie the moment he started talking. He’s part bookie, part loan shark and I was into him for a few thousand bucks since my last gambling spree didn’t pan out like I’d planned.

You see, I love the horse races. I go as often as I can but I seem to have a knack of picking the wrong ones. If I try to be cautious and bet on the one that’s practically guaranteed to win, the damn horse somehow or other fails to live up to its expectations. Then if I go for the long shot it ends up to be just that, a long shot that stayed a long shot.

“Jay, just wondering if you’d forgotten about me,” Louie’s voice softly purred in my ear as if he wasn’t worried about a thing but I knew different.

It was all an act. When Lucky Louie was happy he used a loud, jovial voice that over rode everything. It was only when he was pissed that he spoke more softly. Sure enough, my judgement proved to be right.

“I really think you should settle up your debt as quickly as possible.” Louie’s voice was now so soft I could barely hear it which meant he was getting really pissed. And if there’s one thing I knew was that you didn’t want to piss him off too much because when it came to collecting outstanding debts he didn’t show anybody much mercy.

I fingered my big cheque and tried to mentally calculate how much of it I would have left after Louie, the bank and my landlord. Did you notice I put him first? I decided that was wisest because I didn’t want to get in his bad books. Those that did never seemed to fare too well.

“Sure Louie, glad you called. I just got some money and was thinking of paying you back,” I assured him.

“How much is it anyway?” I asked.

“Well, there was the original $2,000 emergency loan as you called it plus the interest,” Louie replied.

“So what’s the total Louie?”

“$3,000, what the hell. Look Louie, are you sure that’s right. It’s only been a couple of weeks. That seems kind of steep, doesn’t it?

“Well sure it is but if you want good interest rates you go to the bank and if you come to me for a loan than you pay my rates. They may be a tad higher but you’re guaranteed to get the loan ‘cause I don’t ask all those stupid questions a banker does. I thought you knew that already Jay?” Louie replied in that super soft voice that scared the shit out of me.

“And by the way, it’s closer to three weeks than two,” he added.

Since you don’t dare argue with Louie I quickly decided I could see the wisdom of his creedo. I promised I would be at his office in a couple of hours.

“Yeah, sure, paid in full,” I assured him.

After hanging up I added the ponies to the list of things I was gonna try and stay away from. Damn list was getting longer by the minute. How the hell can a guy have any fun at all? I wondered.

However, since there was no use feeling sorry about it, I poured myself a second cup of coffee and prepared to go to work. Prior to the advent of the computer the Yellow and White Pages of the telephone book were what people used when they wanted to find a business or a person. I don’t even think they’re printed anymore because everybody uses the computer now. It’s easy. All you have to start typing names into a search engine like Google and see what comes up.

Sometimes it’s downright scary when you discover how much about a person you can discover by just a few simple strokes of a key. In some cases where they’ve joined Face Book or other social medias and got carried away it’s like you’re laying their life out bare for anybody to see. I really don’t think most people know how easy it is to find all kinds of personal and private things about them. You just got to know how and where to look.

I took another sip of my coffee, dug out the names and faded photo of Tom’s family and set them on my coffee table than started up my lap top. I took another sip of coffee and stared at the names while waiting for it come alive. Which one first? I shrugged my shoulders, realizing it really didn’t matter because one was probably as good as the other.

I decided on the wife first, mainly because she was the oldest. Therefore she might be the most likely to have an internet presence due to the fact that computers were so foreign to her that she knew little about internet privacy. However, after typing her name into several different search engines I came up with nothing. Maybe she’s just one of those old timers that barely use the internet at all, I thought as I began typing the son’s and daughter’s names into Google. Since they were of the younger generation and grew up with computers, I was sure I would find them somewhere on the internet but again no luck.

That surprised me. There was nothing, their names weren’t even on Face Book or Twitter, the two most popular social medias. I considered that very unusual as the majority of the young people can’t stay away from computers. But it’s not their fault. They grew up with them and by now they are addicted to them.