Dealing in time

Why on earth would a woman in her mid-thirties ask for time to be taken away? They never ask for time to be taken away.

He’d been dealing in time for decades. Living in the same 1920’s terrace house on Gloucester St since he’d returned from the Second World War in 1945. Seventy two years ago and yet he did not look a day over 46. The age he was when he first moved in.

He didn’t think about it much these days; age really meant nothing to him anymore. Today though, with the young woman asking what she had, he had reason to pause. He would be 118 years old this year, in all of that time he had never had someone ask to have time taken away.

Yeah, sure he had his regulars, although they had diminished somewhat in the ’70s and ’80s. Most, if not all, dead due to the gangsters Abe Saffron, George Freeman and others. Even Mr Saffron himself had been a regular right up until he died in 2006.

His customers always asked for time to be added. They wanted to maintain their youthfulness, live longer to reap the rewards of their oft ill-gotten gains. None, even Abe Saffron himself, an apt user of his services, had ever thought to take time away.

An Explanation

Zack sat still, the white noise of the ceiling fan, rhythmic, clicking, blending in with the stillness and silence of the room. The brightness of the outside a contrast to the shadowed mahogany of his office; a shadow broke by the square of sunlight laying across his desk and onto the floor.

This was his space, his floor to ceiling bookshelf with barely a book on it, filled with boxes of case files, Manila folders all held together with string.  Plush red carpet and a single cone light hanging from the ceiling, it's glow too weak to counteract the sunshine.  The smoked glass door of his office open, with his name emblazoned in gold. Zackary Gumm, Private Investigator.