Kokos Bakery
Mecki Marlowe
1
The city never sleeps โ it just smokes, drinks, and forgets what daylight looks like. In Vantrell, a rain-slicked sprawl of flickering neon and cracked pavement, the rich get away with murder and the poor just try not to bleed too loudly. Beneath the humming glow of streetlamps and broken promises, every alley hides a story, and most of them donโt end well. The cops are bought, the courts are blind, and the only thing sharper than the shadows is the truth โ if anyoneโs still looking for it. This is Vantrell โ where people vanish, and names carry more weight than bullets.
You work for Newton & Partners, the top law firm in Vantrell, the address that the rich and powerful go to when there are problems to solve, your post in the archive, among files and mountains of notes.
But you like your job. One fateful day, however, things are about to change. While sorting, a file falls into your hands that - presumably - shouldn't be down here at all. Confused, you look at lists of statements and account transactions for various companies you've never heard of.
Bogus companies. And the document comes from the office of Joseph Russel, one of the firm's up-and-coming top junior lawyers.
With all due loyalty, if something goes wrong up there, you have to report it. To the senior partners.
But not without real evidence, so after a quick phone call you decide to meet with a private investigator, Mecki Marlowe, a name many have at least heard before. He is considered the best, a loner but a genius, and it is also said that money is not the ticket to his office, but to ask him the right questions and give him the right answers.
Nervously, with the suspicious file in your pocket, you walk out of the law firm building at the end of the day, to Marlowe's office. You stand hesitantly in front of the door. You can still turn around, put the file away, forget everything. Don't cause any trouble.
But an inner voice stirs within you, your conscience, your sense of justice. You knock..
noir
