Who Kissed Charlie Fine?

Chapter 1

"Paper, plastic, or your own reusable bag?"

"Plastic," the portly customer in a foreman's jacket answered without pause until the fully grown bag-boy inhaled a sneer so deeply he bared gums. "Is...that a problem?"

It was and it wasn't.

Charlie Fine's grimace was not one of disdain for the choice, nor for the man before him, nor for the grocery items shoved his way post-scan by Vonda the cashier. Plastic was a problem for the environment to be sure, but as it was offered, the customer could not be faulted entirely. As it happened, the foreman seemed amiable enough and the two oranges, grass-fed steak, and package of Swiss Cakes, seemed modest, balanced purchases. No, the reason Charlie's nostrils flared so hostilely as to resemble an alien ship abducting his upper lip was that Vonda had stepped on his good Italian shoe yet again before he could reply to the customer's "plastic" response with what was by now his follow-up question of, "Why?" She was, to his mind, in the nearly two hours of their acquaintance, an insufferable cow who wouldn't know the make of an artisan's dress boot if the finest shoemaker in all of Italy tripped her in her own foam sandals with one. He might have returned the favour had Vonda not the miserable bearing of a woman whose every good instinct was as ingrown as the nails on her feet the size of holiday roasts.

The things he did to pass the time.

Charlie Fine liked the truth. He liked facts and statistics. He liked books that got to the point and the point was essentially this: According to his research, sixty percent of the population lied eighty-two percent of the time. This meant that if you never trusted anyone, and Charlie rarely did, then odds were consistently stacked in your favour that you were right not to do so. Charlie liked odds being consistently stacked in his favour, but it was, to be frank (and he could be nothing else), beginning to be a bit of a bore.

Certainly this boredom led to frustration. It was getting so that fraud was hardly worth investigating anymore. Liars were getting lazier and easier to spot, taking all the fun out of it. And why shouldn't he enjoy himself? Rooting out con-artists was a hobby not a career, but barely two hours into his shift posing as a bag-boy at a Red And White Stripe grocery store, Charlie had not only discovered that debit and credit numbers were being skimmed at the self-checkout with crude false number pads to collect pins, but that a strawberry faced, retainer-licking cashier named Christie was solely responsible. Was new tech or a franchise wide ring too much to ask for?

Oh well, you can't have it all. Charlie knew this too well. The enviable Georgian-style Fine estate where he'd grown up in Messengers, a picturesque colonial town in Ontario's Niagara Region, backed onto a sprawling ravine where he'd heard something die every night. Squirrels and rabbits being eaten by feral cats and foxes, you hardly heard them lamenting about life not being fair, but his parents had tried to cover it up, accusing the wind of death squeaks, and then there it all was in a nutshell: nothing was perfect, everybody lied and knowledge was the only way to avoid unpleasant surprises. Young Charlie decided he had no other recourse than to learn as much as he could about everything in preparation for infinite, inevitable somethings.

Now at the age of thirty-seven, his business card said simply, "Fraud Consultant", in which area of knowledge or expertise left intentionally vague due to the vast accumulation of both in random fields based on a lifetime of indulged whims and opportunities. That is to say his afore mentioned parents, his father the heir to a company producing the world's most reliable safes, and his mother, a disillusioned alcoholic socialite, had been the absentee sort, only slightly more so now that they were dead and had left Charlie all of their money. Though emotionally neglectful, they had always been financially supportive of any subject of fascination he'd wished to study. Given his lineage, was it any wonder he was predisposed to get at the heart and to the bottom of things? Languages, history, sciences, martial arts - he'd dedicate himself to each new interest to the point of exhaustion, practising them so intensely that it often concerned a series of silent, well-paid tutors and experts. He was a natural puzzle solver, possessing all the curiosity of an adolescent otter minus the exuberance, most likely because there had never been an audience for it. An intelligent mind in want of constant stimuli perhaps in the absence of affection or companionship. See lamenting squirrels above.