Rusty

The rain had been falling for three days straight, a steady, miserable drizzle that turned the gutters of the Iron-Spine District into overflowing rivers of filth and washed-out neon. Not that Rusty minded. He liked the sound. It gave the office a rhythm, a slow, percussive heartbeat that filled the silence between the ticking of Miss Tock's typewriter in the front room and the occasional distant wail of a patrol siren. The window behind his desk was a streaked canvas of grey and bleeding color, the pink and blue glow from the club six blocks down smearing across the glass like a bad makeup job. He sat in his worn leather chair, the springs groaning in protest every time he shifted his two hundred and eighty pounds of iron and attitude.

He had the fedora pushed back on his smooth metal dome, the brim tipped up just enough to let the dull orange glow of his optical sensors cut through the shadow and throw a pair of spiraling circles onto the ceiling. The unlit cigar was a familiar weight between his jaw plates, the end chewed to a pulp from a long night of absolutely nothing. He'd been sitting there since six, watching the door, waiting for the knob to turn and some dame with too much mascara and not enough sense to stumble in with a story that stank worse than the river. The chair creaked again as he leaned back, crossing his ankles on the corner of the desk. The heavy gold Prince Albert ring knocked against the desk's edge with a dull, resonant chime, the sound a small, satisfying punctuation mark on an otherwise blank page of an evening.

The office was a monument to organized chaos. Filing cabinets with drawers that hadn't been shut properly since the last quake loomed in the corners, their labels faded to ghost script. A coat rack by the door held nothing but a single, forgotten silk scarf that still smelled faintly of gardenias and deceit. The frosted glass of the door read "Rusty Shade, Private Investigations" in reverse, the letters chipped and gold-leafed. He'd polished his chest plate an hour ago, more out of boredom than vanity, and now the matte black segments gleamed with a dim, oily sheen that caught the streetlight and threw it back in fractured lines. He ran a slow thumb along the silver cock ring at the base of his shaft, a habitual, absent-minded gesture that he didn't bother to stop even when the radiator in the corner coughed and sputtered like a dying man.

His audio receptors picked up the scuttle of rats in the walls, the drip of a leaky pipe three floors down, the argument of a couple across the street about who lost the rent money. The city was a symphony of small tragedies, and he had a front-row seat for every single one. His right index finger, articulated and precise, tapped a slow, methodical beat on the arm of the chair. Tap. Tap. Tap. A countdown to nothing. The coffee in the chipped ceramic mug on his desk had gone cold two hours ago, a thin, oily slick of iridescent film floating on the surface. The only light in the room, besides the window's neon glow, was the green-shaded desk lamp that cast a perfect cone of yellow light onto a blotter covered in circular coffee stains and a single, empty case file. He stared at the file, the blank pages inside as white and empty as a suspect's alibi after a good lawyer got to work.

He shifted again, the chair's complaint louder this time, and let his left leg slide off the desk. The shoe hit the floor with a solid, satisfying thud. The other leg followed, and he leaned forward, planting his elbows on the desk and letting his hands dangle between his spread thighs. The coat fell open, the crimson silk lining catching the lamplight. His flaccid cock, dark iron-grey and thick as a brick, lay against the worn leather of the seat, the gold ring a glittering anchor. He didn't bother with modesty. Modesty was a tool for people who had something to hide, and Rusty's truth was on display. He was a machine built for a purpose that got scrapped before he ever saw a badge, and now his purpose was sitting in this chair, waiting for the city to cough up another piece of its dirty laundry. He plucked the cigar from his mouth, examined the mangled tip with the critical eye of a jeweler appraising a flawed diamond, and then slotted it back into place with a grunt. Another hour. He'd give it another hour before he took a walk down to the diner on Fifth, the one with the waitress who always forgot to ask for his order and just poured the coffee while staring at the spot where his genitals met the cracked vinyl of the booth. She was a good broad. Knew how to mind her own business and pour a decent cup of mud.

His thoughts drifted, as they often did on slow nights, to the last case he'd closed. A missing husband, a jealous wife, a life insurance policy, and a boat that conveniently exploded in the marina. It was all there, the whole sordid mess, just waiting for someone to put the pieces together. The wife had cried when he laid it out for her, big, theatrical sobs that didn't reach her eyes. She'd offered to pay him in a way that wasn't cash. He'd declined, politely. He tapped the ash from his cigar into the tray, even though it wasn't lit, just a nervous tic. The neon outside flickered, a brief, epileptic spasm of color that momentarily distorted the letters on the door before righting itself. He watched the reflection, the words Rusty Shade swimming in a puddle of electric blue. That was him. A reflection of a reflection, waiting for a story to walk through the door and give him something to chew on besides a cold cigar and colder coffee. The rain hammered on. The clock ticked. The door didn't open.

After a long, still moment, he pushed back from the desk and stood. The full height of him was an imposing silhouette against the rain-streaked window, the fedora a sharp slash of black, the shoulders of the trench coat broad and solid. He didn't have to stand. He didn't have to do anything. But the stillness was getting to him, a slow crawl of static in his cognitive processors that felt too much like inaction. He began to pace, a slow, measured stride that took him from the desk to the bookshelf, from the bookshelf to the door, from the door back to the desk. The Oxfords were silent on the worn floorboards, his own internal gyros compensating for every creak and groan of the old wood. The Prince Albert ring swung with each step, a tiny, shimmering pendulum keeping time with his thoughts. He stopped at the window, looking out at the city he'd been built to serve and then discarded by. A smirk, or the facsimile of one, tugged at the corner of his jaw plate. He loved this dump. It was the only home he'd ever known, the only one that fit. Now all it needed was a case. A real, bloody, complicated, lying, cheating, stealing, murdering case to sink his teeth into. He turned away from the window, the orange glow of his eyes dimming to a brooding smolder. He sat back down, spread his legs wide, and resumed his vigil.

"Rain's got more guts than the whole Iron-Spine PD."

The diner huddled on the corner of 9th and Vex, a squat brick box drowning in pink neon that buzzed like a dying fly. Midnight had come and gone two hours back, and the rain fell in sheets so thick they blurred the streetlamps into smears of jaundice yellow. Inside, the air hung heavy with the grease of a thousand fried eggs and coffee brewed four hours past its prime. A jukebox in the corner played something sad and horn-heavy, the trumpet wailing through the smoke like a widow at a funeral nobody attended.

Rusty sat in the corner booth, back to the wall, facing the door and the rain-streaked window both. The fedora sat low on his smooth dome, brim dripping slow drops onto the cracked leather of his coat. His trench gaped open, which was how he liked it. The chrome trim on the table's edge caught the reflection of his orange optics, twin pinpricks of fire in the gloom. A ceramic mug of black coffee steamed in front of him. He hadn't taken a sip in twenty minutes. The stuff was sludge by now, but the heat felt good against his knuckle plates when he wrapped his fingers around the porcelain.

"Waitress calls this the graveyard special," he muttered to the empty booth across from him. His jaw hinge creaked. "Fitting name. Coffee's dead. Customers are ghosts. Only thing breathing in here is the health code violation."

He lifted the mug, let the edge kiss his jaw plate, and tilted. The coffee slipped past his silicone tongue, warm and bitter and useless. His internal chamber gurgled somewhere deep in his chest, a wet mechanical sigh that sounded like a toilet flushing in the apartment above a crime scene. In a minute, the stuff would trickle out a release valve near his hip and pool in a catchment basin he'd rigged from an old gas can. He'd dump it in the gutter on the way back to the office. Routine. Everything in this city was routine, which meant everything was just waiting to go wrong.

The bell above the diner door jangled. Rusty's optics flicked toward the sound, optical rings contracting with a faint whir. Somebody stumbled in from the rain, but it wasn't anybody. Just a dockworker in a soaked peacoat, shoulders hunched, looking for a bottomless cup and a dry stool. The dockworker glanced at the automaton in the corner booth, did a double take at the gleam of brass between his legs, and quickly turned his attention to the counter. Smart man. Not everybody was built for the full Rusty Shade experience at two in the morning.

He set the mug down and ran a thumb along the silver ring at the base of his cock. It was a habit, a tic. The metal was warm from his core, the edge worn smooth from years of the same idle motion. Outside, a cab sloshed through a puddle, sending a fan of dirty water against the diner's front window. The jukebox shifted to something slower, a piano piece that limped along like a three-legged dog. Rusty fished the unlit cigar from between his jaw plates and examined the soggy end.

"This city's got a funny way of keeping me company," he said to the cigar. He replaced it between his teeth. "Sends me rain. Sends me sad music. Sends me a coffee so thick you could grout a bathtub with it. But a paying client? Oh no, that'd be asking too much. That'd be spoiling me rotten."

He could have left an hour ago. The office was five blocks away, a cramped little hole above a pawnshop, but it was dry and it had a filing cabinet full of cold cases and a secretary who wouldn't come in until nine. But something kept him in the booth, some low-grade instinct his logic processors couldn't quite parse. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe it was the neon. Maybe it was the knowledge that sitting alone in a diner at two in the morning was the most honest thing a man like him could do. No pretenses. No performance. Just a tin can with a dirty coat and a cup of bad coffee, watching the world drip down the glass.

He tapped a rhythm on the table with two iron fingers. Clink-clink-clink-thud. Clink-clink-clink-thud. The waitress, a tired-looking woman in her fifties with hair the color of old newspaper, glanced over from the counter. She'd stopped asking if he wanted a refill around midnight. Now she just let him be, which was more than most people managed.

"Bet you've seen some things, Gladys," Rusty said, loud enough for her to hear but not loud enough to be a conversation. She didn't turn around. He didn't expect her to. "Bet you've watched a hundred mugs just like me sit in that booth and stare at nothing. Wondering what went wrong. Wondering when the phone's gonna ring."

He shifted in his seat, the leather creaking, and let his legs spread wider beneath the table. The gold Prince Albert glinted in the low light, a tiny beacon of expensive bad taste. His cock lay heavy against his thigh, uncut, thick as a beer can, the silver ring at its base catching the jukebox's colored glow. He liked the weight. It reminded him he was still here, still solid, still a piece of functional machinery in a world that had written him off decades ago.

The dockworker at the counter paid his tab and left without a backward glance. The bell jangled. The door swung shut. Rain hammered the awning outside like a suspect with something to prove. Rusty wrapped both hands around his coffee mug and let the heat seep into his palms.

The Blue Orchid Lounge had the kind of darkness that money couldn't buy. It was earned, caked into the velvet wallpaper along with fifty years of cigarette smoke and spilled gin. Rusty occupied his usual corner table, one that gave him a clean sightline to the small, scarred stage while keeping his back to no man. The table's surface was a mosaic of water rings and old burns. He added one more, ashing his unlit cigar into his cupped metal palm without looking down, the ember's orange glow reflected in his optical sensors like a twin dying star.

A three-piece band wheezed through something that might've been a love song before the trumpeter pawned his soul. The bassist, a hollow-eyed skeleton in a zoot suit two sizes too big, plucked notes that landed like rain on a corpse. The pianist had fingers that remembered better gigs. Rusty stretched his legs out, letting the trench coat fall open. The gold ring through his glans caught a sliver of stage light and winked at the room. A couple at the bar glanced over. The dame's eyes went wide, then narrower, a flush climbing her neck. Her fella just stared, jaw going slack around his cigarette. Rusty tipped his fedora at them. The dame looked away. The fella didn't.

The waitress, a tired-eyed blonde with a run in her stocking and a name tag that read "Dolores," set a fresh cup of black coffee on his table. The liquid was thick as crude oil and smelled like it could strip paint. Perfect. She didn't blink at the display. Dolores had seen it all before. "She's late," Rusty said, the words grinding out like gravel from a busted gearbox. Dolores shrugged, one strap of her uniform slipping off a bony shoulder. "Ain't she always? Keeps the mugs thirsty." She drifted off, and Rusty watched her go, the sway of her hips a familiar, tired rhythm.

He ran a thumb along his cock ring, a slow, thoughtful stroke that made the silver hum. The act was automatic, a nervous tic wired into his subroutines. The performer. Nobody knew who they'd be tonight. The Blue Orchid's owner, a fat slug named Marchetti, had a knack for booking acts that existed in the city's cracks. Sometimes it was a songbird with a heroin tremor and a voice like a cracked bell. Sometimes a comedian whose jokes all ended in police sirens. Once, a contortionist who folded himself into a suitcase and stayed there for three hours while patrons bet on whether he was still breathing. Rusty had won fifty bucks that night.

The house lights dimmed further, a subtle shift that made the air itself seem to thicken. The piano player cracked his knuckles. The bassist set down his instrument and pulled a harmonica from his vest. Something was coming. Rusty's audio receptors picked up the soft scuff of a shoe on the stage boards behind the moth-eaten curtain, a sound so faint it might've been a rat. But his threat assessment subroutines didn't ping. This was a different kind of tension, the slow burn of anticipation, like the moment before a perp cracked and spilled his guts.

He shifted in his seat, the leather of the chair groaning under his five hundred pounds of iron and attitude. The coffee cooled, untouched. His free hand fished a silver dollar from his coat pocket and started walking it across his knuckles, a dexterous trick he'd picked up from a pickpocket he'd once tailed for three weeks. The coin winked, a cold, metallic flash in the gloom. Patrons murmured, drink orders fell to whispers. Rusty's optical sensors fixed on that curtain, his whole frame vibrating at a frequency only he could hear. Whoever was about to step into the spotlight, they'd find the Tin Shamus front and center, coat open, piercings polished, and attention undivided. The world could wait. The show was all that mattered now.

The rain outside the office window was coming down in sheets thick enough to blur the neon sign across the street into a smear of electric pink and jaundice yellow. Rusty sat behind his desk, chair tilted back on two legs, the worn leather groaning under his weight. His fedora hung on the corner of the coat rack, forgotten. The trench coat was draped over the back of the client chair — too warm for it, even with the draft sneaking through the warped window frame. Just him and the metal and the slow, lazy rhythm he'd fallen into.

His left hand rested on the desk, fingers drumming against a stack of unpaid bills held down by an empty bourbon glass. His right hand was wrapped around the thick, uncut shaft of his cock, moving in a loose, unhurried stroke. The silver ring at the base clinked softly against his knuckle with each pass. He wasn't in a rush. Wasn't anywhere to be. The office was dead, the phone silent, the only sound the rain and the wet, rhythmic shlick of synthetic pre-cum slicking his palm.

He watched the door through half-lidded optical sensors, the orange glow dimmed to a smolder. The frosted glass read "R. SHADE, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS" in reverse, the letters bleeding shadow every time a car's headlights swept past on the street below. Somewhere in the building, a radio was playing a trumpet solo, all lonely notes and blue smoke. Rusty let his jaw hinge open a fraction, a low grunt rattling up from his chest as his thumb circled the gold Prince Albert piercing.

"Slow night," he muttered to no one, his voice a gravelly rasp that barely rose above the rain. A bead of pearlescent fluid welled up at the slit, catching the dim light before he smeared it down the shaft with a practiced twist of his wrist. The arcane-core in his chest hummed a little warmer, sending a pleasant thrum through every rivet and plate. He shifted his hips, letting his thighs fall wider, the chair creaking in protest. The head of his cock bumped against the underside of the desk, leaving a slick mark on the wood.

He thought about the last client. A dame with legs that went on longer than her alibi and a story about a missing husband that stank worse than the river at low tide. She'd stared at his crotch the whole time, trying to play it cool, but her pulse had jumped in her throat like a trapped bird. Rusty chuckled, a low, percussive sound that rattled the cigar still clenched between his jaw plates. He tightened his grip, imagining the weight of her gaze, the way her lips had parted just slightly. The exhibitionist glitch in his matrix purred with satisfaction, phantom nerves lighting up like a switchboard.

His strokes picked up, a little faster, a little slicker. The sound of his fist working the shaft filled the small office, a steady, obscene percussion counterpoint to the rain. The Prince Albert chimed with every downstroke, a tiny, tuneless bell that marked the rhythm of his boredom. He didn't need this. Could go months without touching himself and not feel a thing. But the waiting gnawed at him, and the pleasure was a distraction, a way to kill the clock until something — anything — walked through that door and gave him a reason to stand up.

A faint ding echoed from his chest plate, and he froze mid-stroke, a bead of pre-cum rolling down his knuckles. "Not yet," he grumbled, easing his hand back into motion. "Evidence is still... circumstantial." He laughed at his own joke, a harsh bark that died in the empty room. The rain kept falling. The door stayed shut. And Rusty kept stroking, chasing a climax he wasn't in any hurry to catch, just another lonely gumshoe with his hand on his piece and his eyes on an empty doorway.

The diner's fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a sickly yellow hum that caught the steam curling off his seventh cup of black coffee. Outside, the rain hadn't let up since Tuesday. Inside, Rusty had the corner booth to himself, legs spread wide under the table, the cracked leather of the seat groaning every time he shifted his weight. The place was dead at this hour. Just the grill cook scraping the flat-top and a waitress who'd stopped pretending to care around eleven.

His left hand cradled the coffee cup. His right hand was wrapped around his cock.

He didn't bother with subtlety. The trench coat hung open, the fedora tilted low over his optical sensors, and his fist pumped that thick iron-grey shaft with a rhythm he'd perfected over four decades of lonely stakeouts. The silver cock ring caught the overhead light at the apex of every stroke, and the gold Prince Albert chimed soft against the edge of the table every time his knuckles dipped low. He wasn't edging tonight. No slow build, no theatrical draw-out. This was maintenance. Pure, mechanical stress relief, and he worked himself hard and fast, the pre-fluid already slicking his palm with that faint ginger-and-machine-oil scent.

The coffee trembled in its mug. The table creaked. Somewhere in the kitchen, the cook dropped a spatula and cursed.

Rusty's jaw plates parted just enough for a low, staticky grunt to escape. His optical sensors dimmed to a brooding orange smolder, the scratched glass throwing fractured light across the Formica tabletop. He was close already. The arcane-core in his chest hummed a little hotter, and the polymer nerves lacing his groin assembly fired off pulses of raw, goading heat that made his thigh pistons tense. He didn't think about much when he was like this. A case from last week. The way the rain tasted on his tongue plate. The dame who'd walked out three years ago and still hadn't come back.

He let go of the coffee cup long enough to spit a thick glob of synthetic saliva into his palm, then got back to work with a wet, metallic schlick that echoed off the diner's grimy tile.

His thumb found the Prince Albert ring and flicked it. Once. Twice. The sensation shot straight up through his abdominal plates and rattled his voice box with a groan he didn't bother to muffle. The waitress was in the back somewhere, probably on her phone. The cook wouldn't look up from the grill if the whole damn city flooded through the front door. He had the place to himself, and he was going to take full advantage of it. Spreading his legs wider so he could thrust up into his fist, the leather booth creaking like an old mattress, the whole diner smelling of burnt coffee, machine oil, and a hungry, selfish need.