Fiddle Game by Richard A. Thompson

night, and the room was lit only by a bit of spilled light from the neon sign in the front office. It took me a while to remember where I was, even longer to remember why. As the pieces of the day came back, first grudgingly and then with greater ease, I went to the sink and washed my face, then changed out of my rumpled clothes and thought about what to do next. Going home seemed like more trouble than it was worth, and there wasn’t anybody waiting for me there, in any case. I went into the front office to see if Agnes had shut down her computer for the night. Stroud’s briefcase was where I had left it, and I flipped it open and rifled idly through the contents, looking for some inspiration. Not finding any, I put the phony badge in my pocket, to look it over later, and went over to the computer.
    The screen on the monitor was dark, but when I fooled with a few keys, it came to life, showing the in-box on the email. It reminded me of what Agnes had said, and I wondered if we might be on the brink of an age when an arrested criminal will demand a laptop, rather than a phone. Brave new squirrels.
    There were several unopened new messages. As far as I was concerned, they could stay that way until morning. Except for one, that caught my eye because it had the little red envelope-picture that Agnes had told me about. It also had a return address that included COX in the middle of a lot of other jumbled letters. I sat down in front of the monitor, grabbed the mouse, and did a double click on that line. I don’t know how to do much on Agnes’ machine, but what I do know, I know all to hell. The incoming message, what little there was of it, filled a new window.
    mr. jackson,
    i believe you are in possession of a certain valuable musical instrument that is the rightful property of my family.
    i understand that you acquired it in good faith, and i am prepared to reward you handsomely for its return.
    can we talk?
    That was it. No name, no phone number, no particulars at all. It didn’t even come right out and say the word “Amati.” From whom were we keeping secrets, I wondered? I stared at the message for a while, not sure how to react. My first instinct was that it had “Phony” stamped all over it. But my instincts have been wrong before, so I decided not to erase it just yet. I might decide later that I wanted to reply to it, after all, so I left it where it was and shut down the machine. I forget why. Agnes must have told me once that it was a good thing to do.
    By now, my stomach was waking up also, reminding me that I hadn’t had anything to eat since the half hamburger at Lefty’s, about two years ago. It was pushing eleven-thirty. Joe Bock’s hot dog cart, which he fondly referred to as “Bock’s Car,” would have been rolled away for the night a long time ago, and Lew’s Half-Deli and C-store down the street and The Downtowner Café would likewise be closed. There were a few bars downtown, besides Lefty’s, where you could get a sandwich or a microwave pizza, but I didn’t feel like bar food. And I definitely didn’t feel like Lefty’s. I decided to take a walk. This isn’t a big enough city to have a Chinatown, but we do have an area of mixed Asian, Italian, Irish, and Unaligned Redneck, where some of the joints are open late, and I thought a stroll in the night air might clear my head. I put on a light windbreaker and left, locking the door behind me.
    I headed west, past the Courthouse and the County Jail, past high-rise offices with selective blocks of floors lit up for the night cleaning crews, past the Central Library that looks like the Bank of England and the Catholic soup kitchen that looks like nothing at all, towards the oldest part of the city. The semaphores got farther apart after a while, the street lights were replaced by antique replicas that worked just as badly as the originals, and the canopy of dark sky got closer to street level, trying to take over completely. Past Seven Corners,