“I need you to find my daughter. She’s been missing for eight months.”

If you’re a cop, you don’t want to hear those words because eight months means there’s no hope at all. If you’re a private detective, you might like those words because parents will keep you in billable hours for a long time. On any given Thursday, though, you don’t want to hear those words if you’re a private detective like Marty Gecko. Thursday’s aren’t work days. Thursdays are drinking days.

Besides, Marty doesn’t like real cases. He takes cases like cheating spouses, tracking out debtors who skip town and catching employees stealing from the register. Those are easy cases. They don’t take any time at all and that means he has plenty of time left over for the important things in life, important things like good single malt scotch and...well, that’s all that’s really important in Marty’s life at the moment. After all, what good is co-owning a bar if you don’t get to drink the good stuff?

Co-owning. That’s the real problem. It’s hard to blow off a case when Bobbi stares at him the way she does and wiggles her rear end the way she does and makes comments the way she does and keeps being Bobbi the way she does. He doesn’t want the case but he’ll take it and no matter how much he’d rather find his way through a fifth or two of the best the Highlands have to offer; he won’t be able to set it aside until Sandra Knockee gets home or gets justice.

Maybe just one glass first. Make it a tall glass. Damned cases shouldn’t start on Thursdays.

Have a look inside:

Clearly, the Father above appreciates my sense of humor and attention to detail because Heaven waited for me on my desk.

Heaven in this case was the still one-quarter full bottle of eighteen-year single malt scotch, and I showed remarkable restraint (out of respect for the aforementioned Father) and used the glass still on the desk instead of drinking right out of the bottle. It went down smooth, and I grabbed the laptop and fired it up.

There was still nothing on Google. Nothing on Yahoo or MSN either. No doubt about it. This was going to be a case I actually had to work. I didn’t want to. In fact, I considered calling Knockee and dropping the damned thing, but there’s something about making a commitment that sticks with me when I’ve also exchanged the watermarked slip of paper the client gave me for a stack of hundreds. I sighed and pulled a piece of paper out of my desk drawer and wrote down a few ideas.

I’d probably want to start with some of Sandra’s friends, ask them about why she’d want to leave. I’d also want to check at the bus stations and such places to see if anyone saw her, though the chance of anyone recognizing her after eight months was pretty slim. That reminded me that I didn’t have a picture of her yet, so I’d have to track one down from the family as well.

I poured myself another drink. See, the problem with a case like this was that I could show a hell of a lot of activity, but that wasn’t the same as actually getting anywhere.