Samantha Cole
Samantha "Sam" Cole
Suit.jpg
Portrayed By: Eva Green
Fullname: Samantha Cole
Apparent Age: 34
Race: Human
Occupation: Private Investigator
Significant Other(s): None


Early Career

August 4th, 2005 — 12:46 am

I know where empty is. It's behind me. I'm not empty any more. I have a life. I have my life, and I have a motive in life. It's a lovely life. This is a lovely life. A lovely city. A lovely world. Or maybe I'm just drunk. Yeah, that's probably it. I'm drunk, but it makes things so bloody lovely. I never really had a 'diary' before. Diary. That sounds so…girlie. Okay, take two. I've never really had a journal before. That's better. But sometimes, yanno, you just gotta write. You just gotta… write… to commemorate the occasion. And tonight, I just had to write. No one's listening to me, but the paper will listen. Well, the computer. Considering paper really is a thing of the past. My typing is far more legible this hour of the night than my writing anyway…

But I'm babbling. Getting back to the dirt. I won't quietly accept this world. The city is corrupt. This life is corrupt, with dirt, and shit, and gangs and the mob and divorce and muggings and everything you could ever imagine. But I won't accept it, though it took me forever and a day to do anything about it. Three years, actually. Three bloody years to get my license. And tonight, it finally happened. I, Samantha Eleanor Francis Cole, am a private investigator.

I started as a cop, I thought that would be the route. The way to make things clean, make things right, find some justice in this bloody grey world. And it worked for a while. I fought the system, the notions that a girl can't be a good cop. I made it all the way to Detective. Sam Spade they kept calling me. I was one of the best damned detectives on the whole force. Everything was going great until that damned physical a year ago. Damned, stupid, idiot doctors. So I passed out once. So what? You know the long hours we work, surviving on nothing but coffee and bagels? I'd been up ages working on this case and it just happened but no, they insisted on a physical and damn me they found something. Long QT Syndrome. There's a huge ass explanation about a defect in the electrical rhythm of the heart and occasional arrhytmia's but the long and short of the matter is it's easily controlled by beta blockers. But still, because there is a 1 in a million chance high stress situations could kill me they smacked me down to a desk job so fast my head spun. Something about insurance liability. I, "Sam Spade" Cole, was going to be a desk jockey the rest of my fucking life? No deal. So I figured I'd go into the private business. Get my own office, do my own thing. Damn what the doctor said about stress. I'd work free lance, take the real cases. The good cases. Do some real good in this city, god knows it could use it. And when the precinct decides they need my help they can hire me as a consultant.

Not that anyone else really cared. No one did, but me and JD, so we went out and celebrated. Me and Jack Daniels went to the bar and celebrated real hard. He's a good pal, JD. He was waiting at home for me too. Just sitting on my desk, waiting for another toast in celebration. JD and Sam Cole, PI. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship…

Life as a PI

December 1, 2005 - 3:32 pm

I look around my office and wonder if all the work, all the time wasted, all the blood and sweat and tears was worth it. It took me the entirety of one hour to unpack my entire life. Just two boxes, a desk, and a phone older than me. I put the phone into the jack on the wall. Not that it will ring, the guys from Bell aren't coming until Tuesday to hook me up, but I plug the phone in. It seemed something better to do than sitting here, staring out the window, down onto the dusty greys of December on 2nd Avenue in down town Bangor.

I've had my license officially four months now. In that time I've worked without an office, just trying to start myself up with enough money to get things like a phone, an add in the yellow pages, this office, and still manage to eat a half meal a day. I've taken on 4 cases in that whole time. At 250 dollars a day, and all but one of them managed to pay, I could afford this place. A nice, little, cozy nook on the 15th floor of a building forgotten by time, at the corner of 2nd Avenue.

Just opening the door kicked up dust. The window is a metal frame with saran wrap taped over the edges in some laughable attempt to keep out flying leaves and bird shit. The room is freezing. But you can't really feel the cold when you've gone numb. And the blurry, saran-wrap picture window really does provide a nice few of down town. At least I'm facing east. I can see the city from here. I can see the lights, the cars, the ant-like people milling through their dirt-hills of taxis, skyscrapers and Starbucks. It all seems like some kind of distant dream, sitting here, staring at the city which I've tried so long to help.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being a fool.

Sometimes I wonder if it's foolish to actually think that I as one person can change a god damned thing outside this room. Staring at the door, I get the sickening sense my hand might be the only one that ever turns the knob. Just another relic forgotten in the dusty, shadowed corners of the city. Shoved off to the side, with the homeless, yesterday's news paper, and the Styrofoam cup from the coffee you got at the convenience store that will never bio-degrade. Convenience, yeah.

And then I remember the look on that guy's face when I was carrying his little girl back to him from her fuck job of a mother who'd run off with the kid two weeks ago. You know, that was the only job that I didn't get paid in full for. At least, not in cash. I guess the guy paid me in other ways. I remember seeing his face, and seeing the fact that it is possible even in this messed up, black, white and red world, to make a difference. Damn him. Damn that man for giving me heart. Damn him to hell. Because he's damned me to hell.

He's damned me to the hell that is a shabby, dusty one room office on the 15th floor of a building that probably should have been condemned long ago. He's damned me to the hell of sitting, waiting for the phone to ring or for the sound of the barely functioning elevator to cough its way up to my floor, containing some new customer with some new trouble that I could care less about. Some man searching for his cheating slut of a wife, some businessman looking for the dirt to get his 'partner' fired. But because men like that exist, and little girls like that need to be found, I'm sitting in this office and waiting. I'm waiting for the day someone with a real heart left walks through that door.

One day they will. And I'll be here, with JD and by 40 year old phone, and a soul that is still willing to help. Until then, I work for the shit to make the money to keep my in this "office complex." Until then, JD and I have nice long conversations until midnight about subjects I'll blissfully forget the next morning. Until then, I survive. I'm ready to survive. It's about all I can really do.

Life in the Cold City

August 25th, 2006 - 3:48 am

Sometimes, in the late hours of the night, when the city has gone from loud and obnoxious to quiet and dangerous - when the masses of cars and people have gone to sleep for the night and only the criminals, drunks and prostitutes roam the street next to police cars and ambulances - when it has been dark for so long that it seems the dawn might never really arrive and JD has long ago lay empty on the floor, I swear I could hear the city speak…

Sometimes, when a few moments of utter quiet actually filled my little office on Second Avenue, when all I could hear was the soft exhale of me smoking my cigarette and the radiator in the corner of the room, I swear I could hear the city whisper to me. I never really could understand what it said. It was like listening to voices down the hall or in another room. Important, strong, drive voices. Voices that told me something I needed to know but were trapped behind imposing doorways or up too many flights of stairs. And I would strain to listen, I'd stop breathing just to hear, and they'd go away. The voices were never really there. Just the wind against the poorly installed window pane. Just the dying breaths of the elevator down the hall. And I'd tell myself I was losing it.

Sometimes, the sirens of the ambulances and police cars that I'd hear at 5 am screamed at me. They didn't just wake me up from a feverish, drunken sleep because they were loud. They screamed at me. They screamed of good men dieing of heart attacks. They screamed about someone's little brother getting shot by a gang. They screamed of the 3rd grade teacher miscarrying her fourth child. They screamed every unborn baby's name. And I'd wake up, sweating, breathing, listening to those screams. I'd wake up wanting them to know I knew, to know I understood and I wouldn't let them be forgotten! I'd wake up in a panic, thinking there was something important I had to do. I had to answer those screams?

And they'd just be a siren passing two streets down. Just a horn, a loud, blaring noise and nothing more. And I'd tell myself I was losing it. I'd tap JD on the shoulder, ask him to curl up nice with me so I could get back to sleep, and drink myself to a peaceful dawn. None of it is real, right? I just have to buckle down and get to some true work. I'll figure it out eventually.

Trouble is a Dame

November 9, 2009 - 2:55 am

Business is good, actually, finally. Not wonderful, but good. I'm getting to the point I have finally been able to drum up clients. Not always the sort that I like. In fact, the more business I get, the more aware I am of just how few good souls are actually left in this god-forsaken city. But it's work, I'm alive, and the city seems to think I'm doing something right. I've actually made enough to get some guy to come in and professionally install a new window, instead of the one I tried to put in when I first moved into this joint. And I got a new mattress for the wall-bed. I'm actually using it instead of the couch to sleep on these days. When I sleep.

JD and I are still as good friends as ever. Best buddies. Don't know what I'd do without him. He just makes work a little easier. I don't think the city and I will ever be quite so close as JD and I are, but we're working on it. He gets me clients, and I occasionally do work for him. But this most recent case? I don't know if it was the client, or the city, or just my shitty luck, but I'm in trouble.

Organized crime is, well, organized better than ever these days. Ever since the crack downs in the 70s and 80s, even criminals outside of NYC have learned to watch their backs. So what looked like a normal smear-job ended up getting me in a lot deeper shit than I originally ever dreamed. Sometimes I wish I had a partner to tell me to keep my nose outta where it don't belong.

Not that I'd listen. Not that I've ever listened to common sense or one practical ideal in my life. So, I'd probably be in this situation no matter what. It started as a normal smear job. Some girl, a cute dame, working down at the Paparazzi's as a singer on the odd night. The guy who came in told me he thought she was selling herself behind the scenes and wanted evidence. He posed like her boy friend, hurt because he was being cheated on. I knew he wasn't, though. He didn't know enough about the girl and kept missing the details in his own story. It's okay, he was paying 300 a day plus a retainer fee. That's enough to make me shut my trap and do the job.

So I'm tracking the girl one night after a nice few sets at the Paparazzi's. And instead of going to some sleazy motel where she could sell herself without a question, she hauls ass down to the Plaza. I shoulda backed out then and there, but once more, common sense just never was my strong suit. And so I pulled off my trench coat and fedora and straightened my suit enough to look like I actually belonged in the Plaza, and followed the girl right in.

5tNext thing I know, I'm on the top floor listening outside of one of those doors again. Only this time, I can understand the voices. And they're not happy. The guy is talking about the woman screwing up some sort of job, and I didn't think it was a hand job. I didn't hear enough, but I have the sinking feeling the girl was to kill someone and didn't finish her task. I could have heard more, but then I heard the click of a gun and I wasn't just going to let the dame get shot so I burst into the room, my own .44 in my hand, and leveled it in the direction of the male voice.

An olive skinned man in his middle forties, he looked every bit the gino complete with slicked back, dyed black hair and a gold pocket watch chain leading inside his sports jacket.

"Put the gun down, and no one gets hurt." I calmly explained, meanwhile trying to usher the girl behind me. She wouldn't hear of it, and neither would the man. "Just put the fucking gun down." That's when instincts kicked in. I saw his thumb twitching, just ever so slightly. His gun was now aimed at me instead of the dame, and he was trigger happy. Time just seemed to slow down, or maybe I forced it to slow down. I'm not sure which. Next think I knew, my wrist was absorbing the kick back of my own gun and the guy was going down in a pool of his own blood.

You know, I'm never that good an aim when I actually try.

Rest of the night is a bit of a blur. The dame ran out of there before I could tell her to stop. I called the police, reported it was self defense. Got hauled into the precinct for about 4 hours of harsh questioning, and then let out when they actually decided to believe my story. I left the dame pretty much out of it. I've always been a sucker for a pretty face. But she knows who I was, and she knows who I killed, and that's way better than I or the police are doing now. Gino didn't have any real ID on him and his prints aren't on file.

Welcome to the city, boys and girls. Where the shit is hidden under pavement and behind glass walls of sky scrapers, and no matter how hard you try to dig your way out you just keep getting pulled down. Let's hope this time I don't suffocate.

Notes

Sam was once a well respected cop with the Bangor PD. She's still got lots of friends and lots of back up from any clean cops and politicians in the city. If you're not so clean, however, she was known as the woman who couldn't be bought, and that made her a lot of enemies too.

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