Chapter Text
Let's start with what we know, all right?
A number of months back, a private investigator named Patrick Sloan took a case from a young lady like any other, looking for protection from some lummox she'd played the Polski Pony with and who didn't take too kindly to her sampling some other fellow's pierogi. Most cases like this end one of two ways. First way, when the John gets told he can't see the dame, he decides he don't like getting delayed, he tries to stage a raid, so Sloan leaves him splayed, gets paid, maybe even gets laid. The second way, lady realizes the John was her desire, has second thoughts about her hire, tells him he's fired, Sloan's tired, wonders if he should retire. Pretty standard stuff, the bread and butter of a sleuth in a world that doesn't much take kindly to independent sleuthing.
Except this case ended in a third way. The lady went missing. Forever. And the next case Sloan takes ends up taking a similarly tricky tack. Then another. Then another. Word on the streets becomes that Patrick Sloan can't properly protect his clients. Business dries up.
His associates find him a lead. Seems there's a new upstart in town. Drugs, disappearances, trashing “protected” properties, that sort of thing. But the only name that gets tied to this is just three letters. DMK. Patrick Sloan's associates, Peter Inesco and “Ace” Dick Dunn, end up tying these initials to the disappearance of at least one or two of Sloan's missing clients.
So it seems that to get anywhere to the bottom of this, Sloan needs to get all the way to the top. But how do you get at a Don when you can't even put a face to the name? Or a name to the name, for that matter. Well, Sloan thinks, if it takes a thief to catch a thief, it takes a kingpin to catch a kingpin. And everyone knows there's only two names in town with that kind of clout: The Felt's main man, Lawrie English, and the Midnight Crewster of many names, Jack Noir. These two have been locked in a turf war for some time, as both their legitimate business practices seem to come in conflict. Rumor has it that their supposed illegitimate business practices had called something of a ceasefire.
It all seems a bit tenuous, Sloan's figured. Maybe one of them would be willing to provide a favor in return for tipping the scales. But who to side with? Not a difficult choice, considering that English wasn't taking visitors, no one having seen the man in public in some eight years or so. Even if that weren't the case, The Felt seemed to be composed mainly of asocial weirdos. Either way, striking a deal with the boys in green seemed neither efficient nor desirable to Sloan.
The alternative was also not particularly desirable, as Sloan's colleagues continued to remind him, but Sloan was a man with no convenient options. So he pulled some strings and scheduled an appointment with José Vantas, president of Vantas and Son Real Estate, and nom de guerre of Jack Noir, Spades Slick, Blackjack Vance and all sorts of other cute monikers. He decided to sit down, adult to adult, man to man, and convince him to do things tit for tat.
This didn't go well.
So he shows up uninvited to a meeting of the Midnight Crew. This time he makes sure that his words are backed up with bullets, and his bullets are backed up with more bullets from more guns carried by more people.
This also didn't go well.
Luckily, it caught the attention of Paolo Diamante, aka Diamonds Droog, the coldly fuming second-in-command of the Midnight Crew. He decided shrewdly to dispense with the tension and stop the macho posturing and take Sloan up on his offer. Masterminding a brilliant plan, Diamante laid out the strategy by which the gangster squad and the sleuth team would take the Felt Manor by storm.
The idea of this dreamteam sat like oatmeal and sour milk in the guts of everyone involved. But in the end, it seemed the most logical course of action. Sloan needed an angle at the DMK, something only the mob could get him. Slick needed English's claws removed from the sensitive parts of his metaphorical behind.
So maybe nobody does what they want. But sometimes morals have to be put aside in times of war. So with heavy hearts, but heavier wallets, everyone set off to spend their last day before the raid as they will.
But we covered all this before. I just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page.
Because from here on out... well, things get a little dicey.