As for me? I was just another out-of-business private eye with a half-tank of gasoline and too much curiosity for his own goddamn good. I yanked the wheel and my old black pony groaned, pulling off 9th Avenue onto the tunnel road. It glared up from below, the orange-lit maw of the city. One slip of the hand and it would swallow you up whole. I’d seen it happen before. The first broad.

>>7475457
Your subject-verb agreement makes me weep.

I didn’t even know about her until she turned up a floater in the Hudson. You could see it from the newspaper. Water in her lungs, and a pair of starry doe eyes that never stopped getting excited to be seeing the Big Apple first-hand. Pretty. The innocent-looking kind of pretty. Small-town Georgia girl sweet on a big-city guy doing his nation proud over there in Korea. She told him she’d wait for him when he shipped out; life has funny ways of making you break your promises. Thanks to some friends in low places, I got hold of the pictures that the press wouldn’t publish. Including the one of the symbol carved into her back.

Next three didn’t even make it as far as the river. The guy was smart, he was changing his two-bit routine, but soon enough, he picked up a pattern. Same symbol, same place. He took the girls early in the morning, waited ‘til their Joe or their Johnny had hit the head, slipped off to shower, or made their way downstairs to whistle for a cab. He wanted us to know when they were gone, and wanted us to see them when they came back. Street corners, plazas; after the first one, he got brave, just like the guy who did the Dahlia back in ‘47. But our guy? He always made sure our boys in blue found them in the early morning of the fifth day gone.

I took a long nip of the good stuff, let it melt its way down through me to calm the nerves. It was night number four for this doll. I was out of the tunnel, now, pulling off to head up through the very edge of Jersey. That pale moon was staring down at me, calling out for me to turn back, but between the scotch, the stone, and the fact that I had nothing left to lose but sleep, I kept my hands on the wheel. I’d put the rock down in an oil rag next to the flask on the Buick’s passenger seat; edges were wicked sharp and brittle. First time I picked it up, the end all but fell apart, the little pieces slipping away around the now-empty band of once-worn skin on my ring finger. Couldn’t have been much bigger than grains of sand, but with every one that fell to the floor, I felt like it was fading, slipping away, whatever clue it was; just like Julia.

It was basalt, long and jagged. They picked it out of Doe Eyes’ side, figured she must have hit a little traffic on her way downriver. I didn’t buy it. When the coroner turned away, I turned a little Johnny sticky-fingers and pocketed it. If you’d have said, three weeks ago, I was gonna solve this thing with a rock, I’d have told you to get your head out of where the sun don’t shine, and that Conan McGrath wasn’t no rock-duster. But when I was a kid, Dad used to tell me that you only had yourself to blame if you missed a clue; and I just couldn’t shake what my gut was telling me about this thing. When it all came to it, and every lead turned up dead, flipping us the bird whilst we were at it, I hit the downtown library. Basalt. You find basalt in New York state, dollars to donuts, it’s come from one place.

The Palisades. I pulled off the parkway and onto the country roads, lighting a smoke one-handed. The trees atop the cliffside twisted outwards like broken bones. There she was. The Hudson by night. The crescent moon cast down a silvery sliver of light across the still waters, turning across it the Buick spluttered forwards, like a knife slashing in the dark. If the river was the one up there on stage, stealing the show – and right then, it felt like that was all she was made for – the Palisades were her muscle.

A few miles later, the parkway was gone, swallowed back up into the threadbare web of highway routes and interstate roads; and I was alone, running headlong through the trees into nowhere. I wound down the window and watched through the rain as the streetlights slipped away, their orange snake eyes dimming in the night. I took another drink and glanced the other way over the river. From there, under the rich haze of the dark, the city that never slept looked just about comatose. I could’ve sat and watched it twinkle in the distance, like a diamond in the ocean, for years. The stars had other plans. They danced along to the left and cast a milk-white stare over a grey convertible hiding under the trees.

The road was wide enough for me to pull over to the side, get out, and take a look. It was too dark from here. I took another nip, grabbed a flashlight from the trunk, and made myself damn sure I had Pop’s old thirty-eight weighing heavy down under my shoulder. The first beam landed on the car – a slate-grey Plymouth. Jackpot. Behind it, I could see more in the distance, and stepped forward. Fords, Chevrolets, Cadillacs… they looked like they hadn’t been there a minute, and the tire tracks were fresh enough to prove it. A ready-made automobile graveyard, all well-polished, luxury coupes or convertibles. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to hide them.

Wasn’t long after that I found myself caught up in the intrigue of it all, burrowing further down the rabbit hole. There must have been twenty, thirty, maybe even forty cars, some parked right up to the cliff’s edge. And where the cars ended, the trail began. It was one man wide, moving slow but steep down the face of the Palisades, winding along. There wasn’t enough dirt to give way to any footprints, but it felt warm, like it’d been walked only moments before, and like whoever had walked it still had unfinished business here. The lower I got, the louder the Hudson became, lapping the edge of the cliffs, and after about a quarter-mile, with the noise of the waves drowning out just about everything else, I found the jetty.

It was natural, a small outcrop on the edge of the cliff face. Would have been a perfect place to look out over the river with a sweetheart on your arm, if it wasn’t for the blood. It had dried, now, but nobody had bothered to even start cleaning it. There was a lot of it, and under the light it tinted the black-grey of the bluff red. At the very cusp of where the jetty stopped, the trail ended – and just as it did, that’s where I saw the only thing incomplete about this whole picture. A jagged split in the rock, just big enough to be…

I took Doe Eyes’ piece of basalt out of my pocket and crouched to compare. It fit perfectly. And just as I went to turn back to call it in, I heard it; a faint cry, from somewhere behind me. I spun, and so did the flashlight; and its gaze landed on a crack in the rock face – the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind. Caves. Before I knew what I was doing, I had Dad’s snub Colt in one hand, making my way in. I knew the right thing to do was to phone it in, get some sirens and a few more pistols at my back, but it didn’t feel like I had the time. Maybe it was the whiskey, or the fact that the sky was starting to lighten. Didn’t matter either way.

That's all I have for now. Thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

>>7475461
Thanks for letting me know; I haven't proofread this yet -- haven't even finished it -- before submitting it as a final piece so there are bound to be some mistakes.

Anybody else who can see something like this, if you'd please let me know, I'd appreciate it.