Apollo Stone : A Study in Noir
"Apollo, the son of Zeus and Leto, was angered and he descended from the peaks of Olympus with his bow and quiver upon his shoulders. The arrows rattled upon his shoulders as he moved in his anger, and he descended like the night." ~Homer's Iliad (Book 1, lines 43-47)
o Doorman.
Apollo Stone, a good detective, gets his mail from the little metallic-smelling room off the lobby. Or at least he pretends to get his mail. He fiddles with a mailbox a bit, looking very bored, and produces a fist full of junkmail from within his coat and walks deeper into the apartment building.
"If you are carrying junkmail, you belong." One of the lessons taught to him by his brother. Long gone. "Now, Apollo, listen, this is important okay?" He'd say "It has to be junkmail not just any mail. Can you say it back to me so I know you're listening, junk mail?"
"Dude, I'm thirty-three and you're twelve. I know what junkmail is." Apollo replied.
"No no but dude, like, It's really important though. If you have regular letters and stuff you might be there for business, or serving papers, or whatever. It needs to be junkmail because that means you're either a postal worker delivering that junk, or you're the poor sap who has to carry it up nine flights of stairs just to put it in the trash and carry it back down again a week later."
Junkmail in hand, he makes his way to the residential hallways. He knew that the object of his detecting was on the 4th or 5th floor, facing West. Client B, he liked to call them. Client A was who hired him, the actual client. Client B was whoever he was after. The Target. The Mark. The Fucker Who (allegedly) Did This'n'That. All popular alternative names. But for Apollo Stone, this secondary stakeholder was, if nothing else, a potential future client and deserving of at least that courtesy.
Apollo was here because Client B had posted a picture.
It was a picture of them wearing a mask, holding a gun, in their apartment. In the background of that picture was a sunset. There was also an auto-mechanic shop's neon sign. An auto-mechanic from a franchise that had just five locations in the city. Easy.
Stairs or Elevator?
Stairs. It was leg day, afterall.