Project Purple

1 - The Detective

His nose told him he had probably found his missing person.

The smell, followed by his stirring stomach; the detective knew what waited for him on the other side of a hilly clump of wild vegetation-the fetid, cloying reek of death.

It was July. He was in a deep ravine, traipsing through thick brush. Cactus. Weedy grass. A long vine-like branch slapped his face as he brushed by. No one had been here in a long time-except for maybe the corpse of Mr. Perez, his missing person-if his theory was right.

Nothing seemed to flower. Just pricks; everything was sharp, like it didn't want intruders. A couple of dying palms. No one had ventured this far to look for Mr. Perez, that was clear-no matter what the others said. The tall, wild weeds, undisturbed, ruled this area.

Why was he following this hunch? - Because that's what he did; all good cops followed the hunch, and the detective considered himself a very good cop.

"Man, you're one stiff bastard, you don't give up,' a guy at the station gushed a few years back, "You're like rigormortis on a three-day corpse."

Everybody had a nickname at the station; the place was obsessed with labeling everyone. But the nickname "Rigor" stuck for a reason-He just didn't give up. He found people-dead or alive. He was good at his job.

Rigor just didn't quit.

When a white male went missing from a bush party a few weeks back, Rigor found him in a seldom-used freight elevator shaft-two broken legs, but alive. The guys were having some kind of a Burning Man festival-one with pool-side service- and the guy had fallen down drunk into a thirty-foot shaft that no one had known about or thought to look in. But Rigor had.

A couple of other cops said they'd already searched the area for this missing Perez fellow, but Rigor knew what that meant: a cursory look, then the two cops would go in and watch the pole dancing at the little shit-hole that called itself Harry's Hole In The Wall, a seedy establishment that catered to repressed men who came for the pole-dancing and lap dances, unmindful of the riggd slots all around them. Everything was rigged at Harry's Hole in The wall.

It was hot in the ravine. He took off his jacket and carried it in his arm, his black holster now getting its share of slaps and briar brushes. He stayed the course, following, as best he could, the dry cement-cased storm drain...

...That wasn't dry on the night his Mr. Perez had disapperared: It rained like hell last Thursday night, and that meant there would be a gush of runoff that would carry a body quite a ways through this jungle miasma.

Rigor edged his way upwards along the hillock that spanned the embankment of the drainage ditch. The smell hit him harder now, making him gasp.

The Las Vegas strip was ten minutes away, though Rigor lived and worked in Henderson, The diamond in the desert, as the city's promotional board liked to say. Just ten minutes from the glittering Las Vegas strip, Henderson was home to all the 'little people' that made the desert leviathan Las Vegas function - It's cooks, cocktail waitresses, dancers, singers, its cops, it's hookers, it's Harry's Hole In The walls.

People were always disappearing. Las Vegas was not called Sin City without reasons. But Rigor knew it was also a hard fact that most people eventually turned up by themselves. But sometimes they didn't.

Rigor was on the short side and balding; he was only thirty-five, but it was Rigor's eyes-You could see fifty years plus in those eyes; purplish bags underneath, with the thick facial wrinkling of a much older man. He was a shabby dresser, too; always the same grey suit, fraying at the collars, worn way past its expiration date.