Every Tuesday he pays. With what?
For twenty years, private investigator Richard Kane has made his living noticing what people would rather keep. He can read a lie in a pair of hands. He can look at a scar and name the year it was made.
He cannot account for Tuesdays.
An ordinary missing-person case brings him to a club called VELVET, where the door opens before he touches the handle, a drink he never ordered is already waiting, and the bill has no figure on it. The woman at the bar knows his name. He never gave it to her.
Her pulse does not change. He checks it twice.
Every Tuesday he goes back. Every Wednesday he wakes with a clear head, six hours gone, and something small missing — a page out of his notebook, matches out of the box, a memory he only notices weeks later. Not even the taste of the drink survives the night, and the taste was all he was promised.
So he starts counting the matches. Counting, he can do.
What he is paying with — that takes longer. And by the time Kane works out that the search has closed in a circle on himself, he has stopped wanting to be let out.
Nothing here is taken. Everything is paid for.
The novel The Flaw is coming. Leave your email and you'll know the release date before anyone else. Nothing else — no noise.