The Big Easy

⚜️ The Big Easy: A Winston Fairchild Short

They call it the Big Easy. They say the sweet jazz is the only thing that sticks to the soul. But in New Orleans, the air preserves sins like flies in amber, and nothing is ever easy.

Meet Winston Fairchild, a Private Investigator with a specialty in the cases the cops won't touch—the kind that stinks of sulfur and brimstone. He walks the thin veil between Heaven and Hell, policing the dead and the damned from his humid French Quarter office. His tools? A trench coat, cheap bourbon, an antique pipe wrench subtly plated with cold iron, and his sharp, highly effective assistant, Katrina.

When a frantic Mrs. Moreau arrives looking for her missing husband, dock worker Henri, the case smells like a standard infidelity stakeout—until the trail leads to a condemned warehouse on Piety Street. Mrs. Moreau found a strange stain there, one that smelled metallic, "like when you strike a match".

Fairchild knows that scent: the calling card of a low-grade demonic presence. Henri Moreau wasn't running off; he was snatched.

Now, Winston and Katrina must navigate the Ninth Ward, tracking a shadowy entity—a Glimmer—to stop an amateur mage who is learning how to open a passe-temps (a weak spot in the veil) and trading human life for a cheap taste of power.

With a silver-sigil half-dollar, a pouch of consecrated salt, and the cold iron pipe wrench, the two hunters must crash a dangerous lesson and save an innocent man before the amateur Summoner finishes his homework—and before the universe's true debt collector arrives.

In the city of ghosts and bad deals, Winston Fairchild is about to find out that this hunt isn't just business—it's personal.