He said that he had lost his mind, and I told him that I would find it. It wasn’t the usual sort for one of my cases, but I took it anyways. I had nothing left to lose. There wasn’t enough credibility in the world to make me doubt him. And why would it matter?

I told him that I would never give up, that my life would lay itself on the line before I let him down. He nodded, smiled, and placed a stack of bills on the desk higher than I thought would have fit. I watched them, waiting for them to fall over, and they didn’t.

So I searched for it. In dumpsters, in bars, in strip clubs and in the pockets of tattooed and pierced ruffians. I searched as high as the rooftops rose and as low as the gutters sunk.

The thing that I never told him, though, was that I had always known where it was. It was safe, locked inside of the bottom right drawer of my favorite desk. It was safe, and it would stay there until he realized how badly he needed it. It wasn’t enough to realize that it was gone. He needed to know why.