Cooper Harley, unlike several other people in this town, wasn't woken up by the phone call, because he had yet to go to bed. 

"I know it's around here somewhere," he muttered, tossing aside yet another couch cushion in the cluttered living room. It be wrong to say he had torn the place apart looking for what he had lost, because the house was already a disaster zone. If the state governor had happened to pass by and peek in a window, His Excellency's first impulse may have been to mobilize the national guard and call FEMA- the place was really that bad. Rather, what Cooper Harley was doing was rearranging the mess slightly. When the distinct sound of his expensive cellphone reverberated through the living room, he groaned and ground his decaying teeth. "Jesus Christ," he said. The words hung in the air, unsure of whether they were a prayer or simply blasphemy, as the mobile chirped again.

"For fuck's sake, I can never find anything," he complained as he picked up the same couch cushion, expecting to miraculously discover his cellphone hiding underneath it. No such luck- just a lone sock, an empty pizza box, some drained AA batteries, and a broken dog collar decorated the nice hardwood floor beneath the errant cushion. Did he own a dog? He couldn't remember. Probably not. 

The phone stopped ringing, going to voicemail, and silence filled the living room of the Queen Anne. A scant second later the ringing began anew.

"Piss!" Cooper Harley muttered, trying to force his matted hair back into the brown rubber band that halfheartedly and ineffectively restrained it. He looked around the cluttered room, trying to concentrate on the chirping ringtone. Damn this mess. Maybe he should clean up his house- or better yet, hire someone else to do it.

His eyes, or maybe his ears, lit on an empty, inside-out bag of potato chips. Somehow, in the last twenty-four hours, his phone had worked its way inside that bag. He upended it, caught the ringing, vibrating mobile in his hand as it fell out of the bag. Clearing his throat, he pushed the little green button and held it up to his ear.

"Cooper Harley speaking," he said in as polite of a tone as he could manage. He listened, still picking through the wreckage in search of the first thing that had gone missing. "A murder, huh? In this little town? How about that," he said tonelessly, tossing aside an old magazine and a flowerpot. Did he own any flowers? He couldn't remember. Probably not.

"Go down to the crime scene? Jesus Christ, dude, why the actual fuck would I want to do that? I mean, c'mon, let's just march up to some cops with a neon sign that says 'Hello, I am a drug dealer hanging out near the scene of a homicide, we cool?'" Harley lay down on his belly, checked underneath the coffee table. His horrid teeth broke in a wide smile. There it was. "No, dude, I'm staying right the hell where I am, here in the comfort of my own home. Don't call me unless it's important. Yeah. Bye." Hanging up, he lightly tossed the phone in a more or less random direction. The fact that this rigamarole would be repeated the next time he received a call did not occur to him. But ti didn't matter.

He had found his pipe.

Leaning back on the couch, he pulled a baggie from the pocket of his designer jeans. With the eye of a true connoisseur, he selected one of the whitish crystals inside, dropped it into the scarred bowl of the glass pipe, smiling in anticipation. The grin turned into a frown as he patted his pockets again, then looked around the trashed living room.

"Where the hell is my lighter?"