Hard Rain in Dinosaur City

by Rick Hollon

Content warning: mention of death, mention of sex work, violence, smoking, drinking.

You can just smell it when your former gent slinks his way into Dinosaur City. It’s a scent that means trouble.

Even the rain doesn’t wash out the smell. It sticks in the air like sap hardening its grip around the wings of a dragonfly. All the bars and dives are closed except for the kind you just stepped out of, the kind where brontosaur ladies keep you company for your last few dollars and most of your cigarettes, the kind where the booze gets you where you don’t want to think, but you can’t stop. For that you need the good stuff, the gut rot that’ll lay you cold on a nameless slab in Our Lady of the Holy Nest’s basement for the long snooze. Never been a gent yet that can ruffle a raptor when they’re that far down.

     The wind kicks up, but the rain presses down on everything like the way he used to weigh down on you on the squeaky dirty mattress you once shared. You tap your last cigarette out of the pack with the tip of a claw and scowl out at the night. The hot city, its lights like drunken eyes, red and blurred in the rain. You reach for a match so you can smoke the smell out of your brain but your claws slip and the cigarette shreds into feathery bits of paper and dead leaves and blows out of your fingers.

     You crumple the pack and let it fall, hunching your shoulders and stalking out into the storm.

     You can’t tell if it’s the rain or the pounding behind your eyes, but the pavement doesn’t seem so straight as it used to. Your killing claws snag into some kid’s battered old bike and you spend a minute clattering and kicking and cussing until you get free. Rats and shrews and possums laugh at you from the steps and windows above, chittering out insults like Two Legs and Bird Brain. Snarling, you kick the broken wheel out into the street. Your trenchcoat sags and your feathers are limp and the color of cheap whiskey. Your killing claws flex.

     The case. You gotta think about the case.

     You force your misgivings down. You wouldn’t be working this case if you didn’t need the scratch. It’s not good business to stick your snout where it isn’t wanted, and the birds alone know how high the stink of this one goes, but a raptor’s gotta eat.

What’s more, a raptor’s gotta drink and have a tail or two for company to keep the smell of a certain gent out of mind. Hard times lead to bad decisions.

     Like walking through the storm to the docks. That’s the last place anybody admits to seeing the late unlamented Andrei Tarbovich Rex—a.k.a Stubby, a.k.a. the Pinch. Not so much a kingpin as a clothespin, holding his little corner of the racket between his two claws like his life depended on it.

Obviously, his life depended on something else, something that didn’t agree with him.

The docks reek of fish and swamp mud and rotten secrets floating out into the Inland Sea. Once upon a time it was your kind of place. You made your name here, brawling against ankylosaur bruisers and running errands for the dame who broke enough laws they made her mayor. But she was the sort who didn’t like to reminisce about old times, see, and you’ve been swimming against the current ever since.

Your claws tap against the wood. You catch his scent again right before he catches your temple with a bean-shooter. You slump down like meteor, and the next thing you know you’re a damp fish strung from the beams of a nameless warehouse, and he’s looking mighty chummy about it.

God, but he’s still a trim bird. Lips smiling predator red, shimmering blue dress worth more than your apartment block, feathers fresh as a canary’s. The gun leans up against a chair as if its role in the festivities has ended, but you know it’s there and he knows it’s there and goddamn but you still wish you could kiss him one more time.

“I’m not enjoying this,” your old gent lies.

“I take it this goes to the top,” you say, or you try to. The booze and blood rushing into what’s left of your old skull chokes your words more than you’d like. No good for the reputation, though you’ve begun to doubt you’ll need it much longer.

You make the attempt anyway. “Who killed Rex?”

He stalks you across the warehouse floor, trailing a single claw across your rumpled rags. His scent chokes you up with memories of fine summers before either of you fell into this game, of stealing fish from boats and learning how to wrestle each other in the privacy of the old library. It also brings up the day he broke your toes and sent you packing from the docks, courtesy of Madam Mayor.

He glides that claw under your chin, still smiling, as if his thoughts swam the same channels. “My meal-ticket wouldn’t want me to say,” he says, exaggerating a pout.

He turns and rifles through what’s left of your overcoat, kicking aside your little sidearm, but comes up with nothing more than an empty crumpled pack of your smokes.

“Still your brand, babe?” he drawls, but something finally softens in his eye, and before coming back to you he saunters to his pocketbook draped beside the gun and fishes out a pack, square and new, like a lungful of the old days. He offers you one and lights it, and the two of you smoke there in the warehouse under the steady drum of the rain.

“What a way to end up,” you say. Your noggin is clear. Outside it’s nearly dawn.

“What a way,” he agrees, and bends down to kiss you one last time.

__________________________

About the Author

Rick Hollon (they/them or fey/fem) is a nonbinary, bi/queer writer from the American Midwest. Feir work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Prismatica, Idle Ink, (mac)ro(mic), and elsewhere. Find them on Twitter @SailorTheia.