No Loose Ends: A Project Chaos Short Story

It was raining thinly and spitefully. The kind of rain that doesn’t really soak you, just threatens to. Water streamed down the windowpane in thick silver slashes, reflecting whatever pale light was being thrown on them from above. Outside, dusk had already conceded defeat, and something uglier had replaced it—fluorescent, buzzing, hospital lighting that didn’t shame itself with hues of purple or pink.

Somewhere nearby machines were running. There was the low thrum of mechanical digestion that paused for no man. As if the building were swallowing something and didn’t want to talk about it. Unfamiliar faces passed through the room, some in groups, others on their own. Avoiding each other’s eyes. Avoiding most anything else. That was how you knew a building was hiding things. No one in a room like that got there by mistake. And no one in a room like that wanted to say why they were there.

This was the kind of place where a man could just fade away. Where poor choices were made beneath fluorescent lighting because fluorescent lighting doesn’t scorn you like sunlight. Where the machines worked through the night and never whispered to a single soul what they witnessed.

There I was, rooted to the spot, hands shoved into my hoodie pocket. Drums revolved behind circular windows like watching bulbs that wouldn’t flicker. Something happened here, and I was going to figure out what. It was just who I was.

Then the dryer buzzed. “Finally,” said a woman sitting at one of the folding tables. The moment shattered when she rose to get her towels.

Some quarters got eaten by a change machine. A vending machine held only barbecue chips. The fluorescent glare overhead was the tired overhead glare of every laundromat since laundromats existed. The synchronized whirl of laundry had become just a row of dryers popping off one at a time, an unpracticed choir.

Overseeing it all was a hard-boiled sentinel, trenchcoat collar pulled up against rain I wasn’t actually standing in anymore. Me. Noah Clue. Jeans probably didn’t begin to cover what I was wearing: trucker hat, hoodie with a coffee stain on the cuff, gray track pants, plush hippo slippers.

I knelt at my laundry basket near the second folding table from the door, separating whites from colors with a disgruntled thoroughness bordering on scientific. I paired socks as always, snapping them together at the ankle like little gray handcuffs. One. Two. Three pairs neatly folded, and not a single hitch encountered. I reached for the fourth pair and extracted a single sock. By itself. It had no mate in the basket, nor anywhere else in sight. I radioed it in.

I sifted through the pile on the table. I searched the floor around the table, the chair, and inside my own shoe. Nothing. One sock, vanished.

Two socks had gone into in the wash that morning. I knew it as surely as you know you zipped up your pants before stepping out of the bathroom. A heavyset man wearing a flannel shirt peeked at me from over his left shoulder and then hurried his eyes back to wherever they’d been. I didn’t know what that was about. I decided not to think on it. Everyone knows people don’t glance away if there’s not something behind them. Two socks. Number 6. Toward the dryers I slowly turned. It deserved the kind of look you give a coffin. Rain traced thin silver lines down the window. Somewhere inside the same dryer, a load of unidentified socks and shirts tumbled silently, pointlessly.

The dryer had a rap sheet as long as your arm. And it sure as hell wasn’t moving. I cracked my knuckles—a classic intimidation tactic—and rolled up my sleeves. The dryer had means, opportunity, and at least three theft charges. Coin slots didn’t earn my trust.

I approached Number 6 like I was kicking down a door on a crime scene, planting one knee on the warm metal lip, flashlight app already blazing. “Clear,” I announced to no one. I felt along the drum, inspected the edges, tugged on the lint trap and held it to the light like it was gonna rat itself out. Lint. Just lint. Gray and fluffy as hell and about as chatty as lint can be.

I looked under the machine next, crouching down on the linoleum while a woman waiting for an open washer glared suspiciously. “Ma’am, I’m gonna need you to step back,” I said, but she was already four machines away. I peeked in between Number 6 and Number 7, where a sock could theoretically squeeze into Limbo if it were really trying. I dug through my own laundry basket twice, and then again, feeling around the inside seams like I expected them to conceal a trapdoor.

Nothing. The sock had disappeared clean away, and disappearances without any residue were the worst because they implied whoever—or whatever—did it knew exactly what they were doing.

I approached the service counter. A woman in a laundromat polo was filling the change machine. She worked there, yet she seemed blissfully unaware that a crime had just happened fifteen feet away.

“Noah Clue,” I introduced myself. She hadn’t asked who I was. “Where do socks tend to disappear to around here?” Now I was grilling her.

She didn’t look up from the coin tray. “All the time. Behind the machines, in the drum seal.” She looked up just enough to continue. “Want me to get the little grabber stick, or do you want to check your clothes one more time?”

She’s a crafty one.

I thanked her, then floated over to the long table near the detergent dispenser. A squat plastic machine buzzed to itself beside stacks of single-use packets of soap, feeding them out to those who inserted exact change. I searched behind it. I searched underneath it. My thought was that a sock set on hiding could find refuge in the most unexpected places.

I was ready to dispense justice, but nothing. Whoever had taken the sock was a criminal mastermind.

The woman folding a stack of bath towels into thirds at the next table glanced over without pausing her motions. “You lose something, hon?”

“A sock.” I gestured vaguely. “Gray. About yea big.” Two fingers held roughly sock-size apart didn’t really communicate the size of anything.

“They do that,” she said, and went back to her towels.

I nodded slowly, like a detective nodding at a witness that had just handed over the smoking gun. I decided she was worth watching. The woman who noticed things. At this point, I was no closer to my sock, and alarmingly more convinced that finding it would take vigilance of some sort.

I straightened up and scanned the room, taking my time. The way I figured men in my situation ought to scan a room. Noticing everything.

Near the vending machine, a young man wearing a hoodie pulled low on his head was tapping his foot on the linoleum floor rapidly and irregularly. He looked at his phone, glanced at the door, and looked back at his phone. Energized by anxiety, I concluded. Filed under Person of Interest and continued my observations.

The man sitting at a two tables down really caught my eye.

With his shoulders hunched, he was folding laundry down low in his basket, his coffee-shop apron still half-tucked into his waistband like he'd just finished a shift. His shoulders slouched, and he peeked first over one shoulder then the other, over and over without pause. Every time someone walked past him, he'd just pivot his body slightly, like turning a safe around from a window. He pulled something white once out of the basket, quickly balled it up and shoved it under a folded towel before anyone could see it.

My body tensed up. Slowly I drifted closer, pretending to read the lost cat poster on the notice board, and snapped a photo of the number—just in case I needed an excuse to hang around longer. The guy noticed me right away. He tensed up and turned another twenty degrees away from me, now shielding the basket with both forearms as if it held the CIA's secrets.

Guilty, I decided. Nobody hides a laundry basket like that unless they don't want you to see what's in it.

I was two tables down from the basket guy when I spotted someone new. Watching. Tall and thin. Unflustered. He carefully folded identical black socks, row after row, with the unruffled air of a man who’d never wrestled with his sock drawer. Dozens of them. Identical black socks. And he paired them without hesitation, because pairing them required no thought.

For a moment there I thought I had it: I called it Operation Sock Drawer, and it was a veritable mountain of socks, offering more than enough proof for a conviction, more than any single missing gray sock could ever justify… unless that lost sock was the only hint of a larger scheme.

Then I examined further. Black. Every last one was black, exactly the same, ribbed at the ankle, completely different from the gray sock still laying there askance. Wrong color. Wrong type. Not even remotely connected.

Dead end. Some detective agencies busted drug cartels. I had busted a man’s sock drawer, and it was surprisingly orderly.

I refocused my attention on the basket man, who'd now seen me look at him twice and was hugging his laundry bag tightly to his own stomach like a commuter cramming onto a subway car with a suitcase full of diamonds.

The man clutched his bag, spun on his heel, and walked briskly over to the row of washers, glancing over his shoulder twice before he arrived.

I trailed behind him, maintaining what I thought was a careful distance. I stayed two machines behind the man at all times, surreptitiously studying random dryers with exaggerated interest when the man glanced back at me.

In fact, now that I was paying attention, the rest of the laundromat seemed occupied by people who'd previously escaped my notice.

There was a man by himself washing one item at the folding table. He was wearing a full tuxedo: bow tie and tails. He was alone in the otherwise empty machine, washing… one item. Peering through the round little window, I watched it spin: a T-shirt that looked exactly like what he was wearing, down to the bow tie and lapels. The guy in the tuxedo hadn’t said a word. But I knew the type. Government. Intelligence. Probably both.

Made a mental note to avoid eye contact. You didn’t make eye contact with that type of person… ever.

Further in, a fellow was seated in one of the two plastic chairs, a ventriloquist's dummy resting against his side. Its painted eyes were focused on some spot in the middle distance that happened, as far as I could determine, to be precisely where I was standing. Every few moments he’d tighten the dummy’s jacket or straighten its arm, seemingly oblivious, and it would return to staring right through me with the blank, watchful expression of something that had witnessed things you don’t talk about.

Its silent partner, I thought, and nodded at the dummy. To professionalism. It did not nod back. Figures.

Just then, the door chimed, and a figure stepped in, shaking water from a jacket. They had a big canvas bag they were dragging behind them with EVIDENCE painted across the side in block letters. They tossed it down beside the folding table with a loud and completely casual thud, and then wandered off to the change machine without another glance in its direction. I looked at the bag as if it were a winning lottery ticket. It was confirmation. I couldn't yet say of what, but it was confirmation. I mentally underlined that word twice. For emphasis.

Behind me, the laundry bag guy had doubled back two more times. He ducked behind a support column and proceeded to fold something white and shapeless with his back squarely to the room. He’d shoved himself nearly into the corner.

“You gonna hide behind that column all night,” I said out loud, “or are we gonna talk?”

A woman folding sheets across the room eyed me like she had a list of follow-up questions and had decided to table them all.

I didn’t notice. I was focused on the guy with the bag. He’d gone stiff at the sound of my voice, and was now looking back over his shoulder.

The dummy, meanwhile, continued to stare.

I squared my shoulders and walked purposefully into the man’s line of vision. Enough was enough. Someone in this room was going to start answering questions.

“You’ve been moving around a lot.” I spoke in a tone that conveyed the start of a hostage negotiation.

The man jumped. Laundry bag to his chest like a shield. “I—what?” “All night. Changing direction. Watching the door. Hoarding that bag like it owes you rent.” I whispered quietly. “I’ve seen you fold three items and hide two of them. I know when someone is hiding something.”

The man’s face turned several colors of red rapidly. “Look, man, I don’ know what you think you saw—”

“I saw pale fabric. Stuffed. Quickly. Multiple times.” I crossed my arms. “You wanna tell me what’s in the bag, or are we gonna do this the hard way?”

“There’s nothing in the bag.”

“There’s always something in the bag.”

The man hesitated, jaw moving for a second as if he were chewing over his decision. A few heads nearby had swiveled—an older woman at her table arranging clothes, the person working the counter, and a fellow by the dryers who was clearly feigning disinterest. Public arguments have a way of gathering a crowd, laundromats are no exception. Finally, he broke.

"Fine," he said, low. Angry. Mortified. He yanked the bag open far enough to force one hand inside and rip something out before backing down. "They're briefs, okay? White briefs. I didn't want people staring at me fold my underwear, so I've been trying to do it when no one could see me. Okay?" He held them up for one second of sheer humiliation—plain white undies that were without question briefs—before jamming them back down into his bag like a corpse in a trunk. I hadn't expected it to get this personal.

I stood there with my mouth agape as an entire theory vaporized into one thing: a mundane fact. A grown man had not wanted someone looking at his underwear. For a moment, I entertained the notion that this could still somehow factor into something greater… it couldn't.

“No stolen clothing,” I mumbled to myself.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I cleared my throat and tried to recover some fraction of my dignity. “Sorry. My mistake.”

The man picked up his bag, his dignity, and what little pride he had left and headed towards the door without turning back.

I looked away from the space where the man had stood. The case was dead…officially and embarrassingly so.

That was when the older woman spoke up from the folding table behind me.

“You know there’s a sock stuck to your back, right?”

I slowly rotated on my heel. Somewhere behind me the earth was already beginning to quake. The older woman gazed back, her face holding the same calm, faintly amused look she'd worn since the evening began. A folded towel sat in her lap, and she was showing no signs of hurrying herself.

“There’s a—I’m sorry, what?”

“Your back,” she said, and pointed with one folded corner of the towel. “You’ve had it there since before you started interrogating that poor man about his underwear.”

Fingers probing my back, I felt it nestled right where I'd been patting. A lone gray sock stuck to my hoodie by the magic of static electricity, right where I'd left it. I tugged it off and stuffed it in front of my nose. There was my missing sock, found, accounted for, and most importantly, unabashed.

The truth had been following me the whole time.

I never used a dryer sheet. Never had. Some things just never stuck. No capers. No genius. No criminal enterprise run out of a pile of identical black socks. Just cling. The older woman nodded minutely with satisfaction and returned to folding her towels, silent.

I lingered for another moment beneath the flat fluorescent lighting while rain continued to tap lightly against the windowpanes, while the dryers kept whirring softly in their patient apathy, before I finally paired my sock with its mate—snapped them together at my ankle, gray against gray. I gathered the rest of my laundry into the basket, swaddled it against my hip. Walking past the folding tables, past the vending machine, past the man with the dummy whose painted eyes followed me to the door. Outside, rain had eased to nearly nothing.

Case closed.