The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything away; it just makes the filth shine. I sat in my office, the kind of place where the dust has its own zip code and the only thing working is the leak in the ceiling. My name is Miller. I used to be a cop until I realized that the law is just a suggestion for people with enough money. Now, I'm a private eye who specializes in the things that don't have a pulse.

Most people spend their lives running from the dark. Me? I started inviting it in for a drink.

It started with a case involving a missing heiress, but it ended with me seeing a "Shade"—a flicker of static in the corner of my eye that whispered secrets about the people walking past. Once you see them, you can't unsee them. Most people go crazy. I just got bored.

I stopped fearing the ghosts and started hunting them. It’s a living, though a lousy one. I don't do it for the money—the checks usually bounce anyway—and I certainly don't do it to save souls. I do it because the hunt is the only thing that makes the humming in my head stop.

One night, a dame walked into my office. She had legs that went on for days and a look in her eyes that said she’d seen the bottom of a very deep hole. She told me her husband had been "taken" by something that didn't leave footprints.

"I can find him," I told her, lighting a cigarette. "But I don't bring 'em back happy. Usually, they're just more static."

I tracked the entity to an abandoned movie theater in the Valley. The air smelled of ozone and old popcorn. The Shade was there, a towering mass of jagged edges and stolen voices. It didn't try to scare me. It tried to bargain. It offered me a glimpse of the world as it truly was—a chaotic mess of overlapping dimensions where death is just a change in frequency.

I didn't care about the big picture. I just wanted the target. I stepped into the static, feeling my skin prickle as the entity tried to rewrite my DNA. I didn't flinch. I've been hollowed out for so long that there was nothing left for the ghost to eat.

I trapped the thing in a lead-lined containment unit and walked out into the rain. The dame paid me in cash, and I spent it all on a bottle of rye that tasted like battery acid. As I watched the neon signs of the city flicker, I realized I wasn't a man anymore. I was just another predator in a city of prey, and the only thing I feared was a world where there were no more ghosts to hunt.

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