Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is our weekly contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise every Wednesday.

This, our third Six of the week, and (a) continuation of the previous Ian Devereaux Six is the product of the courtesy of D. Avery‘s suggestion of a name for our story’s hitchhiker/possible-time-traveler/and all-around-mysterious-antagonist, who Ian, in a display of characteristically-questionable judgement picked-up on the Southeast Expressway. Our story continues as he is about to drop her off in front of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro. (This support and camaraderie from our Miz Avry is not an isolated instance. Denise‘s little bloghop community is quite accommodating to writers new and un-new alike.)

This week’s prompt word:

VAULT

“Don’t stop the car,” leaning over the center console, staring out through my driver’s-side window at the entrance to the Six Sentence Café & Bistro put my passenger’s voice close enough to detect two anomalies: the enthusiastic awe of a young person on a roller coaster for the first time, and, the second, courtesy of my friend Leanne Thunberg’s gift with dialects and accents, a sour, edge-of-the-prairie twang the slid under the verb ‘stop‘ but jumped off before the object ‘car‘.

Acquiescence, despite it’s bad rap in much of the literature celebrating private detection and it’s practitioners, got the upper hand and I eased off the brake as we rolled past the surprisingly-well lit entrance; the doorman, a guy with a beard, an attitude and the character to go toe-to-toe with Lou Ceasare, (to his credit he and Lou became friendly), in no small part the result of my not telling the younger man how the owner of the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge only recently swore-off manslaughter as the preferred modality for conflict resolution; “I guess either I’m gettin’ soft or belong in a boardroom like a fuckin’ CEO; sometimes, Devereaux, delegating work takes the spirit out of a guy, know what I mean?”

‘Pull over up there, by the diner,” I smiled, as given the relatively early hour, there was a parking space in front of the New York Systems; putting the car in Park and knowing better that to grab at any part of my erstwhile passenger, I persisted from the relative safety of a running engine and a rolled-down window,

“Wait, before you leave, being a private detective by profession and inquisitive by nature, I need to know, what’s your name?”

“Sybil Trainor and don’t say you heard it from me.”

A quick U-turn let me keep my former passenger in sight, if only as a dark silhouette distorting the sidewalk with intimations of raw carnal power twisted with skewed emotion; I looked as I passed the Café entrance as the light over the door illuminated the young woman, now with hair the fiery red seen in old-timey depictions of Lucifer as he would stride confidently in the vault of a heaven rejected.

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