09/19/2025
[My first novel - ten years in the writing, off-and-on, alongside its next two siblings - releases on October 21, and is available for preorder on this website (signed), via your favorite online bookseller, and even through your local independent bookstore (who will need to order it, but they’ll appreciate your business!) A good carnival barker always offers a taste, so here’s where it all begins. As the curtain goes up on the world of C.T. Robillard, Houston private investigator who lives in a future slightly ahead of us, he finds himself engaged in the classic sport of private investigators everywhere: getting one’s self into hot water…]
Ten-thousand glittering facets to Houston, and I was cashing out next to the ship channel.
There were so many more worthy places to suck a final breath. Inside Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, on the 55th floor of Quadrant Tower overlooking the rocket fields—hells, even the food court at the Art Car Palace would be better. Go quirky or go home.
Not me. I was getting kissed goodnight by the grimy lips of commerce. Dredged and developed from Galveston Bay all the way to the mouth of Buffalo Bayou, the ship channel was industry and diesel and stink for miles. I’d love to know who lost that bet. Hey Sam! First one to get dragged under by his whiskey has to build a working port in a landlocked city. Then again, we’re down the coast from the city still settling beneath the sea. You find all kinds of outside-the-box thinking along the Gulf Coast.
It wasn’t how I wanted to spend a Friday night.
Vetrov punched me again, left temple, and I thought I saw stars. No mean feat with the light pollution from the refineries. Vetrov gloated. “Someone whistled around the house today, I think.” Gloating was good. It meant his oyster was ready to shuck.
“I’ve just about got you figured out,” I said. “I know you lure the kids by promising what they need. Money, shelter, food, even plain old love—that’s the easy part with a runaway. I know once they get into your car, no one sees them again. I know you drug them, because you toss out your empty anesthetic bottles with the regular trash. Kind of careless, Anatoly. But there’s still one thing I’m missing: the how.”
The son of a bitch laughed at me. “You’re a PI? You’ve followed me down here at least twice. You must know the ‘how’ by now.” He spread his arm at the waterway beside us, as if introducing the tugboat moored along the concrete apron.
“No, no. The ships, the pay-offs, I get all that. What I’m missing is how someone as stupid as you could have created such an efficient system in the first place.”
I braced for the punch I’d invited. Vetrov didn’t disappoint. Side of the head again. My equilibrium stuttered. Failed. I landed on my side. Tasted blood. I hate the taste of blood.
“You think you’re smarter than me?”
I kept talking. It helped me focus. “I’m not the one who grabbed the under-age daughter of a city councilman. Good reason to flee the country, though. I hear he carries concealed.”
“Flee? Please. I come, I go. Not the first time. I get a new name and credentials, I come back in six months.”
“A new identity every time you screw up? That’s got to get expensive.” I pushed up to my knees, slower than I was able. “With that kind of overhead, I can see why you have to kidnap runaways for sex.”
He waggled a finger at me. “I don’t sex them. It’s bad form to mix business and pleasure. I deal in raw material. What the pimps do on the other end, when the boat docks in Saint Petersburg? No matter to me, so long as the deposit is confirmed. You? I kill you for free.”
His hand dipped into his sport coat, came back with a gun. No surprise there. I’d sized up the bulge under his arm hours before, when he left his building. He dug in a pocket, came back with a silencer. While he was occupied, I flexed my wrist, felt the collapsed baton drop into my hand from the clip up my sleeve. He was still screwing the silencer in when I popped the riot baton and shattered his wrist with a quick upward swing.
He grunted and lost the gun. It clattered across the concrete, a steel crab that dropped between the tugboat and the dock side with a plunk into the water below. Good place for it. I reshaped his knee with a side-swing. He folded hard on the concrete. I hit it again for good measure. A string of Russian invective rattled between the man’s teeth. He might as well have had marbles in his mouth.
“If you want to curse at me, speak sailor English. Or French. French worked for Mémé.” I stood.
“Fuck you.”
“That’s better. Where’s Leilani Kant?”
Vetrov clutched his leg above the misshapen knee. “You let me go or she dies.”
“Not likely. I’ve been a feather on your tail the last three days. She’s not with you. She’s not at your place. You don’t have an accomplice. That means you hid her until you could sail. You wouldn’t deposit her on the ship you’re sailing with ahead of time, in case it left without you. You keep coming down here. She’s down here.” I had some ideas. I’d lost him the day before along this stretch. But there were a hundred squirrel holes along the ship channel, and I had no guarantee he wouldn’t burn her if caught, just for the hell of it.
I knew I was right. Being right wasn’t enough. I stared down at him. “Where is she?”
“You’ll never find her.”
The temptation to beat an answer out of him came and went. I had no use for human traffickers, and I was already annoyed about taking a bell-ringing, but so far he’d volunteered everything. I wasn’t handing him a Get Out of Jail Free card.
I grabbed him by the broken wrist, not to torture him, though the fresh burst of angry gibberish was a bonus. I looked at his hand. Pulled it close and inhaled. Thought about where I’d lost him and what was down here. There was a faint stink to his suit, a specific, oily reek to his hands.
I let Vetrov fall and pulled my cell. “Barrett.”
There was a small chime and she was there. “Go for Barrett.”
“There’s a spur road off Peninsula. Three maintenance outbuildings. The nearest one to the street has bilge pumping equipment. You’ll find her there.”
“I’m on it. Leave your channel open.”
Vetrov studied me the way one might a magician.
“Process of elimination,” I said. “You wouldn’t stash her on a private company’s parcel. Too easy to be caught where you shouldn’t be, or one more criminal mouth to feed with a payoff. Eliminate those, plus all the corporate buildings and docks, and she has to be in one of the port management buildings. Add the piquant bouquet of oily wastewater sucked from between hulls, and the pin drops right into the map. How am I doing?”
Sirens crowded the humid night sky, distant but approaching. Police hoppers. Finally. At least three, bleating like flying sheep in the sky lane.
“She’d better be alive,” I told him.
He spat at my feet. Missed. “What if she’s not? What can you do then?”
“For starters, I can toss you into the channel to look for your gun.”
The police hoppers descended from the ribbon of aerial traffic, angling towards a lot beside the access road. Vetrov knew he was caught. He got a head start on his Miranda rights by shutting up.
Barrett’s voice came back over the hand-held. “I’ve got her, Thib.”
“Is she alive?”
“Yeah, but you should get over here.”
I didn’t ask. I zip-tied Vetrov’s wrists behind him and left him awash in red and blue lights.
It was five minutes on foot to the storage building off Peninsula. Barrett met me outside. I followed her through the maze of pump units, compressors, and other equipment. The same smell as on Vetrov permeated the space. The cryo-tube was in the rear corner of the steel-walled storage building. The tarp under which it had been hidden was to the side in a pile.
The tube rested on a workbench. It looked like an oversized bullet and buzzed like cheap neon. The silver finish seemed to glow. I noticed what remained of the red and blue NASA logo on the tube’s side.
Barrett shined her flashlight through the glass panel on the side of the unit. Within, I saw the stored form of Leilani Kant. I took a picture with my phone.
“Really, Thib?” Barrett’s expression suggested I needed to grow up.
I shrugged. “The cops are going to take a hundred of them. Do they ever offer me any for my case files?”
“I hope you have space for a few more.” Barrett pointed under the bench. Another tarp. The second tube held an Asian girl who didn’t look older than 14. Two more tubes parked in the space yielded a girl and a boy, faces dirty from life on the street, packed like so much frozen food for a host of ugly appetites.
“Is it too late for you to send him looking for his gun?” You might think the disgust in Barrett’s voice was enough for both of us.
You’d be wrong.
EMBER SINS hits the streets October 21.