February 10th, 6:50 pm - Strong Investigations, John
John had said goodnight to Sandy, his assistant, over an hour ago, when she had headed up the stairs in the back to the small apartment located above his office. Sandy was a student at the Seattle Central Community College, located just a half dozen blocks away. When he moved out of his last office just over a year ago, he tossed and turned but eventually made the decision to dip into some of the money he'd been holding onto and invest in the building he put his office into figuring that if push came to shove, he would always be able to rent it or sell it back. As a result he he managed to land a nice spot at 1575 14th Avenue, nestled between a beauty sallon and a little wine shop.
The office was small but the location wasn't as bad as the previous office and had the added bonus of having a decent apartment located above as part of the deal. He figured that renting it out would always be a snap and if he ever had to give up the house, he had someplace that wouldn't need a deposit and setup fees. Sandy had come in to apply as a renter while he had been doing interviews for an assistant. She was a pretty girl with naturally red hair and light complexion. Turns out, she was also intelligent. She needed a part-time job and an apartment, I needed a renter and a full time assistant. We decided on a compromise, she would take the time she needed as a part time student and pay half what he was requesting in rent. She would get hourly wages instead of a salary and work weekends. Before he had gotten home that evening, he had started to feel like he'd let a pretty face get the better of him. He had changed his mind inside of week. Frankly, he had no idea what he was going to do when she graduated in a couple of years and moved on to bigger and better things.
He had wrapped the last of the days business, compiling the final file to be presented to his client which would lock the coffin lid tight on a cheating husband. It was Friday night and the case, while paying the bills, was fucking tedious. He needed something to get his blood pumping again so he thought he might head over to Le Cirque. The girls were cute and the place was just disreputable enough to make it interesting to people watch. Anything to relieve the tedious grind. With one or two exceptions, his life had been an insignificant grind of mediocrity for the last four years. Soon even picking a fight with a vampire might seem like a reasonable thing to do.
Maybe he should hit the firing range later, he thought, as he settled a jacket over his shoulder rig. His gun of choice was a Glock 20, non-short frame configuration. John was a big man, and all the things that made the G20 unacceptable for most people made it perfect for him. At 6'4" and in excellent shape, he needed a larger weapon to match his hands and the recoil simply wasn't an issue, even with 200 grain loads. The greater stopping power and better ballistics were just gravy. In all honesty, he'd only actually needed the weapon a couple of times in the past three years and of those times, he'd only fired it once. He preferred his hands or knives partly because instant death is less likely but mostly but mostly because it was more fun. It also didn't hurt that he was better with them.
As he settled his leather jacket onto his shoulders he began shutting down the office for the evening.
