Every city has its secrets, and one of those secrets is usually something about the number of men who have been murdered trying to learn the rest of the secrets. The world of a private investigator is a dangerous one, but a little danger never deterred Jack Magnum, P.I. from taking a case before, and it wouldn’t today. It started off like any other day, with a knock on the door, swiftly followed by an unrealistically beautiful woman walking into his office. The first words out of his mouth had been, “Why do you keep calling me Jack Magnum? It sounds like a porn star name. I don’t care how you get your rocks off, buddy, but leave me out of it.” The entrancing beauty before him smiled a smile that didn’t reveal much information at all about why she was smiling.
He’d dealt with women like this one before. In fact, he dealt with one every single episode except that one holiday special a few seasons back. But that didn’t stop him from being lured in by her beauty, convinced that this one would somehow be different from the seventy-five others that preceded her. Jack Magnum had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and he aimed to keep it that way. As she sat in silence, apparently collecting her thoughts, he raised an eyebrow at her, wondering what this cat had dragged in for him. “Seriously dude, my name’s Howie. Howie, with an ‘H’. It doesn’t sound at all like Jack. And there aren’t even any women here; you just walked up and started telling some ridiculous story.”
The beauty let a few crocodile tears spill down her cheek as she told her story. Jack Magnum didn’t believe a word of it, but he nodded consolingly in all the right places so she would think he was buying into it anyhow. It didn’t matter whether or not he believed her, in any case. There was some story behind her visit that he needed to get to the bottom of, and the quickest, surest way to do that was to simply play along. He needed her to cut to the chase. “Come on, man, another customer just walked in the door, and you’ve been going for like six minutes with this crap. The morning rush is about to start, and I don’t feel like explaining to my manager why some story-telling joker has been holding up the line for half an hour. If you’re going to order something, please just do it now. You can tell your story over in the corner or something.”
Jack Magnum, P.I. took an order for a mocha latte, low fat with no whip. The woman did not leave a tip. She hoped there wasn’t any spit in her coffee.
Tags: coffee, detective, his last name is a type of condom, jack magnum, mystery, tip your waiters