THE HAMMER FILES: The Case of the Red Purse

The Case of the Red Purse

The rain fell in sheets against the diner window, but inside, the air was thick with the smell of stale coffee and burnt toast. I was nursing a lukewarm cup, trying to forget about a dead-end lead on the politician’s wife, when the bell above the door jingled.

A Dame in Dark Glasses

She walked in, a woman in dark glasses, shaking the water from her coat like a stray dog. And clutched in her hand, a loud splash of color against the drab morning, was a red purse.

A cold knot tightened in my gut. Old Gus’s words from The News Depot roared back into my mind like a siren. “Now let me warn you… If you ever meet a femme fatale in dark glasses with a red purse, run. Don’t walk away. Run!”

She slid into the booth across from me without a word, her movements a blur. She didn’t order. She didn’t even sit all the way down. She just slid a small, damp piece of paper across the table. Before I could ask who she was, she was gone, swallowed by the rain and the city’s gray morning.

A Cryptic Note

I unfolded the paper. In jagged, hurried letters, a single phrase was scrawled:

“Remember December.”

The words hit me like a shot to the stomach, and my mind instantly rewound. December. The coldest month of the year. The month my father died. The year I started running numbers for an old bookie. I was just a kid, and I haven’t thought about that in years. But a cold thought hit me: I was still that kid, chasing the ghost of a dead man. The past was bleeding into the present, and I needed to stop it. I knew I wouldn’t find the answers in a lukewarm cup of coffee. I had to go back to the beginning, back to where it all started. I had to go all the way back to The Desk of Jack Hammer. There’s something there, a clue about that old bookie named… What was his name, again?