Bolg, PI: Away with the Fairies

By Dave Freer

A humorous, satirical noir detective urban fantasy, set in a small city in flyover country, which has an unusually high population of Trolls, werewolves, fairies and a dwarf.

Private Investigator Bolg, a Pictish gentleman who happens to be vertically challenging, a self-proclaimed dwarf and tattooed so heavily he appears blue, finds this restricts him to oddball clients. In this his first case, a wealthy fruitcake who want to dance with the fairies. Most PI's would do their best to avoid this because they know there are no fairies. Bolg would like to avoid it because he knows the fairies too well, and they're mean.

Aided by a gargoyle informer and an ancient Celtic wizard, he sets about trying to oblige his client, and keep both of them alive. It's no sinecure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Freer
• Release date: Sep 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301436620

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Bolg, PI: Away with the Fairies by Dave Freer Copyright 2012.

Electronic edition published by Dave Freer, September 2012.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Bolg, PI: Away with the fairies

Dave Freer

You’re not a dwarf! You’re a freak! said my current employer, angrily.

It was ten past midnight, and we were both hidden downwind of some of the ancient stones of Ireland... which had been expensively transplanted here to MittelAmerika, by an idiot with much more money than sense.

If he’d had much more sense he wouldn’t have done it at all. And if he had just had a little more he’d have been a lot more selective about just which stones he brought from Kerry. Unfortunately, like my current employer, he had had more money than brains.

I’ve been called a freak before. It was actually one of the better jobs I’ve had, and quite lucrative. Good hours, generally friendly fellow workers and a lady contortionist who had a thing about dwarves. I’ve got used to people looking down their noses at me and laughing over the centuries. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, just that if it is going to happen, you may as well get paid for it. I’ve been a lot of things. Drain-cleaner, horse breaker, circus clown, Lady’s factotum, siege-machine builder, henchman to vampires, pox-doctor’s clerk, sailor, apothecary, King, peasant, Duke, minstrel (Okay, I failed at that), bull-semen salesman, spy, juggler, fool, buffalo hunter, the gig with the travelling freak show, and lately Private Investigator. Yeah, I’ve been around. Not dying is preferable to dying, but it gets expensive keeping body and soul together. And generally speaking if you’re, shall we say, memorable on account of being 4'7'’ and heavily tattooed (mostly in blue) all over, including your face, it’s best to choose low profile jobs, where they don’t notice when you pretend to die after seventy years and pop up somewhere else. Kinging and that sort of thing gets remembered and noticed. Sewer-workers don’t, unless you’re upwind.

She was paying. So I shrugged. Yes. I’m a freak. I’d thought this was going to be one of those easy jobs that I could do in ten minutes, but that I’d spin out for a week, to pad the expenses a bit and have the client thinking they got their money’s worth. I was a dwarf too, depending on how you interpreted the word ‘dwarf’. It’s been an insult, and assumption that you’re a little non-human singing gold gold gold and doing some mining in between baking apple pie for Snow White or fighting Orcs and dragons, to a description of size. Words are rather like fish, slippery things that squirm between your fingers and spine you when you try to hold them. The medical term for the genetic condition these days is achondroplasia. I’ve lived with ‘dwarf’ for a long time, and I’ve found it can be used with extreme respect, as long as you demonstrate suitable competency with a crossbow, double bladed axe, hand cannon, fowling piece, or a truck-mounted Gatling gun. These days I carry a Glock, which is more reliable and less hard work to lug around. It generally works just as well.

But I was under the impression you were a dwarf. A real dwarf.

I sighed, counted to ten, wondered just how much longer it would take until the wild hunt finished their sky-ride and came to salute the throne-stone--now a rock in the foundations of a pile that called itself ‘Delipode Castle’, ornamenting (for various values of ornament) Flyover country. Look Ms., you hired me to find you a fairy. Not to be a dwarf.

Jane Clodpole, or Ms. Emmaline Zarathusthra, as she called herself, was not inclined toward respect. Not unless you had mystic crystals, ley lines on your palms and a personalised Necrolimnion signed by Aelister Crowley and Madam Blatavatsky. Then she’d kowtow.

And she was also my first customer. I’d set up the business three months back, partly because money doesn’t go as far you think it’s going to, and partly because the licence application didn’t require much in the way of ID. That’s one of the problems with being either long-lived or undead in this modern world.

It didn’t take much at all, let alone ID, to set yourself up as a private investigator