Starship

Anger and hate. That's all I have.

All day I try to starship myself to an island paradise guided by stars. Fuelled by anger and guided by whiskey, I tally up the scores on the insurance case.

The Scotsman practically owns the insurance company, it's his rabid dog. The medical papers I found finally made sense: the company provides life insurance, the names on the reports are potential claimants. Everyone is a grey line on a page, existing in coma, or dementia, or sickness. The company finds the people who are due to die, and it cheats them of mercy. It keeps them hanging on to the world, digging in its claws, so that the Scotsman can keep his money. After a year, sometimes two, of existence, the company can justify taking their names off the books. And as soon as the threat of a claim is gone, the company lets the poor bastards die.

The house always wins.

I figure, somewhere down the line, someone got wise to the Scotsman's game. He panicked, and tried to set me up. He set me on the case to find a red herring, using Charlie to lead me along to all the right clues. I think back to the warehouse, with its TV light and piles of paper. It wasn't chance that had me see Charlie there. She was planting evidence for me to find, not removing it. I had trusted in that serene spirit, and I had almost got caught.

The Scotsman played his hand at the hawaiian bar, out of town. The police should have found me with the bodies, and that bastard would have planted everything on me and escaped his sins.

Somehow, I escaped. I got lucky, although sitting here in the dark with only regret and anger, luck doesn't feel like a lady.