As soon as Sam walked through the door of the Hammett household she felt like she had stepped onto the set of a 1940s film-one starring Humphrey Bogart and complete with a baby grand piano. It really wasn't surprising; this was how she always felt. Her family had always been nuts about Bogart movies.
Her parents had named her Samantha—Sam, for the Samuel Spade character adapted from the movie The Maltese Falcon, the Dashiell Hammett novel. It had made it more inevitable since their last name was also Hammett, though no relation to the author.
Her middle name was Sabrina, chosen from the movie with Bogart and Hepburn. Her brother, of course, was named after the late and great film star himself. Both brother and sister privately thought that her parents, children of the sixties, had been bogarting each other's joints when they'd come up with the names.
Her uncle was the same. He relished the fact that his name was Myles; Myles Archer was Sam Spade's partner in the detective agency from The Maltese Falcon. However, his moniker had more to do with the fact that his grandfather had been named Myles than any movie nostalgia.
Walking into the vast den, Sam took a quick scan of the room filled with bookshelves. Some of the books were just good reading, while others were references and research materials in various dealings with ghosts, gargoyles and other things that flew or bit by night. Titles ranged from Raising Dead Children, by Dr. Spook; The Road to Hell, by Goode N. Tentions; Dancing with the Devil, by Ginger Astaire; Stoned Until Dusk: a Gargoyle Study, by T. O'Leary; to, of course, the ever popular Thirteen Ghosts, misleadingly compiled by Two Ghosts and a Banshee.
She spied her uncle in his favorite chair by the fireplace. He wasn't a handsome man; his nose was too big and his features too large for his thin face, but he was a good man who loved both her and her brother. He had once again fallen asleep reading.
Uncle Myles was in his late fifties, and tonight he was dressed in a dark pinstripe double-breasted suit. His typical fedora lay on the coffee table beside him. When it was on his head, he wore it slightly cocked to the right side of his face. Everything he did, he tried to emulate his idol, Humphrey.
Sam smiled. Her uncle had been looking for the Maltese Falcon for the past eighteen years, but other than that odd quirk he was fairly normal—considering the guy acted, talked and dressed like a reject from a Humphrey Bogart film festival. He even called women "dames" and "dolls." Fortunately, Sam wasn't into feminist sensibility issues. However, when all was said and done, there was nobody better at scouting out information. The years of practice her uncle accrued while looking for the black bird had sharpened his reconnaissance skills even more than Sam's own tracking skills of shadowing black vampire bats, black gargoyles and any other preternatural flying hazards that came her way.
Sam gently tapped her uncle's shoulder. "Time to wake up."
Opening his eyes, Myles reached for a toothpick in his suit pocket. "Hello, sweetheart, what's stirring?" He stuck the toothpick between his teeth and looked her over from head to toe, noticing the large mustard yellow bug stains on her coveralls. "Rough night?"
"You could say that again."
"Rough night?" her uncle repeated, his silver hair shining in the golden glow of the lamp.
She nodded wearily. Well, maybe he had another odd quirk. Sometimes he took everything literally. "He's at it again."
"The Fat Man?" Myles asked curiously, his eyes suddenly bright and alert.
"More like the Fat Russian," Sam corrected, wondering if Nicolas Strakhov was overweight. She knew he was in business with his two younger brothers, and that Monsters-R-Us was a family business, just like her own, but she didn't know what he looked like. Nor did she much care. Probably he was some macho, squatty foreigner with hairy eyebrows and fish breath from all that caviar. But was he overweight? Probably not. It was too hard to chase sharp-toothed little gremlins and leaping goblins if you were carrying around a bunch of excess baggage.
She addressed her uncle: "Strakhov's certainly not a straight shooter. The dirty rat hit us again—sabotaged us by switching our sunlamp for a fluorescent one. We had to use the iron netting and lost six of the gargoyles. No, the job tonight didn't go down easy—as you can see," she added grimly as she glanced at the rips in her steel-mesh coveralls. Not only could the gargoyles' slashing claws have hurt her and her brother, but also they both were now going to have to replace their coveralls. It was an expensive but necessary prospect, as a Paranormalbuster didn't capture creatures without the right equipment; there was too much room for error, and too much chance of ending up disfigured, put out of commission or killed.
"Tough break. You all right, precious? And Bogie?"
"We're fine," she replied. "Baby brother is cleaning out the truck."
Myles pulled an old Colt .45 out of his inner jacket pocket. "That dirty-rat Russian better watch out, or he'll be picking iron out of his liver."
Sam would have been concerned about her uncle waving around the Colt, but she knew he never loaded it. "Forget the threats. I'm on to Nicolas Strakhov's tricks now, and I've got a plan."
"Yeah, doll?" Myles put the gun back in his jacket pocket. "What's that?"
"I want you to find out when and where Strakhov's next two extraction locations are. I've heard a rumor and if one of his locations is where I think it is, he's gonna be up a creek without a paddle. Nicolas Strakhov isn't the only one that can play dirty pool."
"Does this wise guy cheat at pool?" Myles asked. "I could always challenge him to a game. Loser leaves town."
As tired as she was, Sam laughed. Her overly literal family was her family in spite of being fruitcakes. She loved them dearly—warts, blackbirds, fedora hats and all.
"No, the rotten louse doesn't play pool, Uncle Myles," she told him. "Just get the scoop on their doings as quick as you can. We'll give these brothers grim a surprise or two. You know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall." Her uncle had quoted these words as long as she could remember, and so far they had held true. The last giant she had taken down had knocked over a house.
"Got it, doll. You know, for a real looker, you also got brains. Must run in the family."
She kissed him on the cheek. "Yeah, it does." And with those words she wearily climbed the stairs to her bedroom.
Another day, another dollar. What a way to make a living. She should have been a hairdresser. Or she could have played piano in a bar. Well, if her husky voice didn't scare little children and goblins alike.
Actually, she sometimes played on an old honky-tonk piano to an audience at the Casablanca, the club owned by her Uncle Myles and his longtime friend Rick Bergman. And after a rough night of busting up monsters, when the bar closed at one o'clock, Sam would go over and play and sing to her heart's content.
Yes, her life was at times a lonely one.
Although she had quite a few friends, she did not have too many close ones. It seemed at times that her life was to have and have not, and if at times she found herself in a real lonely place in the desperate hours after midnight, so be it. No, she didn't have much time for herself or a social life, but she would take it on the chin and come back swinging. There was no reason for her to feel like a woman marked by fate, by her family and by her job. This was the nature of the beast, of this Bustin' business. And she loved the thrill. The work had gotten in her blood, infecting her with adrenaline lust just like many other Bustin' junkies around the country.
Her fate had been ordained at nineteen, when her world had come crashing down around her; her parents died and suddenly she was in charge. She had taken on the family business and learned to run it like a pro, juggling work, college and raising her twelve-year-old brother all at one time—always on a deadline. It had left her little time for hairdressing, undressing with a member of the opposite sex or even just letting her hair down, but that was how life went. Her life, at any rate.
Oh well, she thought as she pushed down her lacerated coveralls, her internal conflict was just that—hers alone. If at times her life might seem a Pyrrhic victory, leaving her like a frozen tree in the Petrified Forest with no love on the horizon, that was okay; she was what she was.
Washing her face, Sam glanced in the mirror. Maybe sometimes her life did seem like a dead end, but fortunately she had a good head on her shoulders and knew what was important. She could thank her lucky stars that she had a roof over her head, a family who loved her, a job that never left her bored, two pianos, a cuddly pet goblin and a big, soft bed.
Smiling, Sam climbed in between the soft green flowered print covers and closed her eyes. Tonight, Lauren Bacall or Humphrey Bogart had nothing on her; she was more than ready for the comforting embrace of a big sleep.