The Corkboard

Calloway Bay sits on the wet edge of the continent, where fog comes off the harbor and doesn't bother leaving, where the neon bleeds on the asphalt and the jazz stops just before you find where it's coming from. The Depression wrung the bootleg fortunes dry and the smart money went respectable — the most dangerous thing money ever does. A private detective keeps an office here, a bottle in the desk drawer, and a telephone he probably shouldn't answer. He answers it anyway.

The cases are singular, but something runs underneath them all — a name attached to half the city's ledgers, a man so thoroughly respectable that the law sees right through him. The detective has pulled at that thread from different angles, through precinct houses and newspaper offices and rooms smelling of cigarette smoke and old debt. He has worked beside people who have paid prices he can't put in his notes. The machine that once worked with guns has learned to work with paper, and paper is harder to find in a man's hand when the time comes.

Every case stands alone. You don't need to have heard the first forty to understand tonight's. Pick it up where you are — the station doesn't keep office hours, and Calloway Bay never runs out of calls.

Or don't choose at all — tune into the live broadcast and let the station pick.