The Dick

Cleft Moraine regarded himself as an old-style traditional dick, but apart from that, he also worked as a private eye, or at least that’s what it said on his office door. Lately, though, work had been slow. These days it seemed that most people didn’t care if their wife or husband was having an affair, being as they were usually too busy updating their own social network statuses to notice.

Moraine was drinking, these days, drinking to forget. Although, all he seemed to do was forget how to stay in his chair after about the third or forth bottle. Spongecake Sugarthighs hadn’t been the love of his life, but she’d damn-near broke his back one afternoon in a hotel room on the south coast and for Moraine, that was as close to love as he’d ever got. She’d left him though, as they all left him when they found that he was such a complete dick and would never be anything different no matter how they tried to change him.

It was late in the afternoon with the sun setting over one of Tipton’s finest pork scratching factories; even through Moraine’s grime-encrusted window, he could see it had been a fine day. He realised it must be late afternoon because he had already fell out of his chair and his glass was empty, lying on its side on what had once been a carpet next to his head. He heard a noise and turned his head… slowly.

A pair of black high heels was standing on his carpet by his empty glass. The shoes contained feet and the feet joined nylon-encased legs that went up, disappearing under a knee-length skirt.

‘To save you straining yourself to look, yes, they are stockings,’ A voice from somewhere up above the legs said.

‘Good,’ Moraine said. ‘I’ve always preferred stockings.’

‘I’m surprised you’ve got the legs for them,’ the voice said.

Moraine looked up to where the face would be, if the low sun had not been shining through his office window at exactly the wrong angle for him to see anything of her face. Although, he realised, from this angle her body was well worth paying attention to.

At least, until one of those high heels kicked him in the side.

‘Do you always consult from the floor?’ she said, an edge creeping into her voice.

Moraine knew that getting up at this hour of the afternoon was usually more trouble than it was with, but this could be a job. He was a dick, true enough, but not that much of a dick to turn down a job offer… it would be nice to eat again.