Three Days Before The End of Daylight Saving

Cold nights were always slow, but this night was especially barren. I hadn’t seen a car even slow, let alone stop on my block all night. Maybe the unexpected late-October snow flurries kept everyone at home. About 30 more minutes of this, I was going to call it a night and walk home.

Right on cue, a haggard Chevy sedan pulled up to my corner with the window already down and cigarette smoke trickling out. I bent down into the open driver’s side window and sized up the prospector.

Fat in the face with a shaggy head of brown hair tucked tightly into a Wisconsin Badgers baseball cap, a couple-days of stubble and a husky frame cased in a red polo shirt, he looked like a man pushing 40 who hadn’t yet thrown away his wardrobe from his fraternity days. He opened up our chat with a red-faced cough, making me unsure of his rosy cheeks were from the cold or embarrassment.

“Uh, hey, uh, are you available?” The aged frat boy spit out the words as fast as possible without eye contact.

“I am sure am. Can I get in?”

The man nodded and I walked around the car and got into the passenger seat.

From my closer vantage, I could tell the man was big, but not necessarily strong. I could take him if I needed to.

That thought gave me a sliver of comfort as he pulled the Chevy onto the road and we drove away together.

“Christopher,” the man took one hand off the wheel and gave me a shake.

“Landon. Where we going Christopher?”

“Madison.”

“It’s gonna cost you a lot to take me over to Madison Christopher. It’s a thousand dollar minimum for me just to leave Milwaukee.”

“Well,” Christopher chucked his cigarette butt out the window. “That’s okay, I’m looking for something different than what you probably expect.”

Christopher reached into his pocket and handed over a few hundred dollar bills.

“Is it okay if I tell you about it on the way?”

I took Christopher’s cash and nodded.

“My full name is Christopher Harris, I’m a private investigator from Madison and if I look familiar, it’s because I was an honorable mention All-Big-Ten inside linebacker on the 1999 Wisconsin Badgers Rose Bowl champion team.”

Christopher handed me a business card which backed all of this up. I thought his tagline about being the familiar football player was weird and not just because I didn’t give a shit about football.

“Oh.”

“So here’s the deal Landon. I have a rich client, a politician, over in Madison who is worried his college-aged son is gay. He worries if it comes out his son is gay, it could hurt his political career. Stupid, I know, but it is what it is. He hired me to try and find out if his son truly is gay. I figured, the easiest way to do it is to find an attractive young man like yourself, try to get him to discreetly offer him a tryst and I can confirm or not confirm as much as possible based on how he reacts.”

Holy shit this was a mindfuck, but it seemed easy and lucrative.