Tag Archives: Hard Boiled Fiction

Contents Vol. 4 No. 4

Crime Fiction, Crimefighter, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to Volume Four, Number Four of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

Die Like A Man, Thierry La Noque’s debut serial novel,  is a story of a man who gives a friend a ride only to be pulled in deeper and deeper into the events surrounding the brutal murder of the daughter of a prominent businessman featuring  hunky young wannabe private eye, Ray Philips.  
Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) continues her mission to fly an unauthorized dirigible to Djibouti in Phyllis Huldarsdottir’s round-the-world steampunk adventure,  Cheése Stands Alone.  
Wayne Bruce survives his ordeal in the Southern Sahara and emerges as a new man with a new mission in Pierre Anton Taylor’s crimefighter drama, Just Coincidence.

chase blurbFIPhyllis Huldarsdottir’s Cheése Stands Alone, the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) in the search for her anti-Clockwork Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more of Cheése Stands Alone in Episode XV.

JCblurb1fiPierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father.  The backstory to his emergence as a crimefighter is revealed in Just Coincidence, Act Three, Scene I, Part 2

DLAM5

Die Like A Man, a brand new serial novel by Thierry La Noque, is a meta noir of a man who gives a friend a ride only to be pulled in deeper and deeper into the events surrounding the brutal murder of the daughter of a prominent businessman and the attempts to cover it up and place the blame on someone else. Ray Philips, a martial arts instructor, sometime event security, and bouncer working toward getting his private investigator’s license in a world where the private eye is quickly becoming an anachronism, is hired to find a missing husband, the famous crime novelist and infamous drunk, Stan Giordino by his petite pierced drug addicted wife, Stella. A stolen cache of drugs and money only complicates and implicates the wannabe detective, and puts him over his head and his life in danger. Not to mention that his girlfriend, Cissy, is dying of cancer.  Die Like A Man III & Die Like A Man IV

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety simply by clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 is now available featuring a full year’s worth of Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, and the complete Better Than Dead novel, as well as the early chapters of Mark Ducharme’s gothic serial, Carriers.

If you’ve made it this far, click  on the links above to read the entertaining  serial contents of Volume 4, Number4!

 —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

 

 

 

Contents Vol. 4 No. 3

Crime Fiction, Crimefighter, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to Volume Four, Number Three of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

Die Like A Man, Thierry LaNoque’s debut serial novel,  is a meta noir of a man who gives a friend a ride only to be pulled in deeper and deeper into the events surrounding a brutal murder, the daughter of a prominent businessman, and attempts to cover it up and place the blame on someone else. Drugs and money are involved in this second installment featuring La Noque’s young hunky wannabe private eye, Ray Philips. As well, Mark DuCharme ties up all the loose ends to bring his dark, sometimes humorous, gothic serial, Carriers, to its finale. Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) continues her mission to fly an unauthorized dirigible to Djibouti in Phyllis Huldarsdottir’s round-the-world steampunk adventure,  Cheése Stands Alone.  Wayne Bruce survives his ordeal in the Southern Sahara and emerges as a new man with a new mission in Pierre Anton Taylor’s crimefighter drama, Just Coincidence.

carriers vanMark DuCharme’s Carriers and it’s gothic air of  shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist. Taking place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city, dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read the final installment of  Carriers, Episodes XIII .

chase blurbFIPhyllis Huldarsdottir’s Cheése Stands Alone, the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) in the search for her anti-Clockwork Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more of Cheése Stands Alone in Episode XIV.

JCblurb1fiPierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father.  The backstory to his emergence as a crimefighter is revealed in Just Coincidence, Act Three, Scene I, Part 1

DLAM5

Die Like A Man, a brand new serial novel by Thierry La Noque, is a meta noir of a man who gives a friend a ride only to be pulled in deeper and deeper into the events surrounding the brutal murder of the daughter of a prominent businessman and the attempts to cover it up and place the blame on someone else. Ray Philips, a martial arts instructor, sometime event security, and bouncer working toward getting his private investigator’s license in a world where the private eye is quickly becoming an anachronism, is hired to find a missing husband, the famous crime novelist and infamous drunk, Stan Giordino by his petite pierced drug addicted wife, Stella. A stolen cache of drugs and money only complicates and implicates the wannabe detective, and puts him over his head and his life in danger. Not to mention that his girlfriend, Cissy, is dying of cancer.  Die Like A Man 3&4

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety simply by clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 is now available featuring a full year’s worth of Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, and the complete Better Than Dead novel, as well as the early chapters of Mark Ducharme’s gothic serial, Carriers.

If you’ve made it this far, click  on the links above to read the entertaining  serial contents of Volume 4, Number3!

 —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

 

 

 

DIE Like A MAN II

Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, , , , , , ,

by Thierry La Noque

CHAPTER 3

Ray woke in a fog, chilled, to the keening of gulls. He led a large dog by the collar along a yellow chain-link fence. Wet streaked the windshield inside and out. He had been stepping up huge granite blocks. He drew his legs back towards the driver’s seat with a start. A woman posed at the top. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t get a fix on the woman’s face. The interior of the Civic smelled like bong water. He blinked again, the dream now a mere speck on the event horizon.

The passenger seat was empty. He flung open the driver’s door to let the outside rush in. It was a cold gray wet slap in the face. Supporting himself on the seat and the door, he straightened his legs and stood, fixing his gaze on the forest of masts and antennas.

Bottle Point Marina. Colin had jammed his truck and he’d needed a ride to Bodega Bay where his 38 foot converted tuna rig, The Black Manta, was moored.

Cissy was going to be pissed. Frightened, worried. But above all, pissed. Ray flipped open his phone. The screen had just enough juice to let him know the battery was dead before it went blank. Cissy didn’t like Colin. She’d told Ray that he should know enough to stay away from trouble. He never had. Might never.

He surveyed the tangle of mooring lines, rigging, radio antennas, and orange extension cords looped and stretched throughout the private marina. One of the empty slips was where The Black Manta had been tied up the night before. He sat back in his seat and glanced at the tequila bottle in the passenger footwell. It reminded him of the pain behind his eyes.

Colin operated a small sports fishing enterprise. A couple of friends he had made in Iraq had gone in on the boat with him, a money-making scheme that generated more debt than income. That Colin had taken off without so much as a ‘thank you’ or ‘see you later’ did not surprise him. It had always been ‘what can you do for me’ especially now that he had returned a combat hero. Why they were sitting out in the cold uncomfortable car smoking dope and telling lies instead of on board the Manta was because Mr. Blood-and-Guts-in-Iraq couldn’t stand the smell of dead fish. The tequila wasn’t exactly the kind of anti-freeze Ray had in mind but it was all Colin had.

Drunker, Colin got nostalgic first. The old days, carefree summer vacations spent at the coast. Spying on the teenage girls showering in the cabin next door. Shooting off fireworks left over from the Fourth. The time they started a fire in the dune grass and the park ranger had chewed Ray out while Colin hid in the men’s bathroom. Yeah, Pirates of Penny Island, that too.

The tequila had helped Ray appreciate it more than he might normally. He remembered that at the end of those two weeks each year, sun scarred and wind burned, he was lean brown leather. That Colin’s mother buried little trinkets and toys all over the overgrown sandbar they called an island. And that she made treasure maps to them. They were all pretty easy to find except for that one they had spent all day searching for, flashlights nicking the long shadows of the dunes, with no luck. They never did find it. Bridgette would tease them about it, saying it was the best treasure ever.

One thing that stayed with Ray about those days was Colin’s mother, sitting on the couch to one side of her while she read to them from children’s classics late into the evening. The smell of her perfume, the soft warmth of her closeness, that may have been the best treasure ever.

There was a little catch-all diner that served espresso on Bay Flat Road by the highway. He caught a look at himself in the glass door. Rumpled, tossed, and fricasseed, Cissy would say. Public phones had all but disappeared. He ordered a double shot in a large cup. But a phone call now would be beside the point. He would face the music without preview.

Into the murk at the bottom of the cup he emptied five packs of sugar and topped it off with mostly half and half. He took a chair at a table by the window overlooking the parking lot and the highway beyond and counted his fingers. The square plastic clock on the wall put the time pushing eight. Not enough sleep. Good thing it was Saturday. Cissy worked the garage sales on weekends. He could pull the blinds and bury himself under the covers.

A Sherriff’s unit hove into view in his lane just as he entered the downhill hairpin curve a little further on, passing too close for the comfort of his wearied reflexes.

The coffee trade was brisk, and the young girl in the green apron at the coffee bar wore a frown. A gaggle of campers from the nearby campground were crowding in the door. “Cruz! I’m gonna need a hand!” she yelled without looking up from the steamed milk she ladled into a paper cup.

Ever drunker, Colin got paranoid. It hadn’t stopped him from doing a line, and then a backup. Ray wasn’t interested. A little weed and the last of the tequila was all he needed to mellow. And once mellow, sleep would soon be along. Colin’s rant was one he’d heard before. How once you’ve killed, what’s to stop you from doing it again. Like jumping off the high board at the pool, once you’ve done it, it’s nothing the second time. Ray beginning to fade had nodded in agreement though not quite sure why. The Army trains you to do that. To kill and kill again. Which is why when soldiers come back home from the action some don’t exactly make the adjustment to not killing. And some are not very nice people, criminals even.

The black Escalade slid into the parking lot just as Ray got up to leave. Compared to the assortment of low mileage hybrids and outdoorsy station wagons sporting hard shells and bike racks, the SUV looked like a pit bull in a Jack Russel kennel. It parked parallel to the rear of several cars, one of them Ray’s, blocking him in. A short brown man in a hairnet and wife beater dropped to the pavement from the front passenger’s seat. He was taking last minute orders from the others behind the tinted glass. There was raucous laughter as someone said something in Spanish.

Ray walked around the front of the SUV and made eye contact with the driver,  gave him a cursory nod. He passed behind the Civic to reach his driver’s side.

“Are we blocking your way?”  It was said with a pleasant mocking tone. The window behind the driver had come down just enough to reveal the eyes, gorgeous shimmering long lashed ebony eyes. “We’ll only be a minute.”

Ray shook his head, “De nada. I’m not in a hurry.”  He opened his door and dropped into the seat, leaving his legs to hang out. He was beat, and if he looked anything like he felt, he wasn’t a pretty picture. And in no hurry to face hurricane Cissy.

He caught the movement in his side view mirror, the Escalade slowly inching forward and leaving him room to back out.

Ray waved a hand, not sure if the gesture would even be seen, and pulled out onto the highway. A Sherriff’s unit hove into view in his lane just as he entered the downhill hairpin curve a little further on, passing too close for the comfort of his wearied reflexes. Not far behind, a white Crown Vic powered up the grade, and Ray, from habit, checked the plate. Exempt. That alone would not have merited more than a passing thought. It was the second Crown Vic followed by a canine unit that gave him pause. With the county dicks out in force like that, something had to be fishy.

CHAPTER 4

Cissy Marleau stood five seven, almost five nine on her tip toes. She put her arms around his neck and brought her lips up to his. “Oh Ray, I was so worried.”  She kissed him hard. Ray brought his arm around to support her but she dropped back on her heels and, flatfooted, cracked a slap on the side of his face. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

Cissy was a blonde often a redhead very rarely a brunette. She beat on his chest crying “Damn you, damn you” until he held her wrists and she stopped. She hadn’t slept. Face puffy, mascara smeared making her big blue eyes appear bigger than they were. She had a fierce little way of holding her mouth when she was angry or distressed so that it was slightly askew to the trembling sharp chin struggling to hold its composure. Ray released the wrists and she attacked him again, this time catching him on the arm just below the shoulder.

“Ok, cut it out, that hurt!”  Ray grabbed her wrist and held it firmly.

Cissy summoned all her intensity into a taut angry glare. “Now you know how I feel, Ray. How could you? After all we’ve been through. Out all night with. . .” She stepped closer with a sniff as Ray pulled back defensively. “. . .some tequila swilling whore!”

“Cissy, I wasn’t out with another woman.”

“I smell fish.”

Ray smelled at his clothes and then his hands. There was a very slight odor. “Musta been on the tequila bottle,” he said half to himself.

“I hope I’m not hearing what you just said. How did it get on the bottle?”

“Uh, Colin. . . . “

“. . .because I was not born yesterday. Was it that bitch, Charlene? Don’t. . . .”

“It was Colin, Colin had it on his boat. He’s a fisherman. Fishermen smell like fish. It was on his hands. We passed the bottle around. Some of it got on my hands.”

“Don’t, Ray.”  Now she was disgusted. “Don’t lie to me.”  She pulled the rose satin kimono tighter around her slender frame, shivering with nervous energy. “I can accept that it might be Charlene. She’s sniffing after you whenever you work the door at The Beast. She’d drop her panties for you at the snap of your fingers. It would be pathetic if you weren’t so good-looking.”  Cissy regained her ironic composure and placed the flat of her hand on his chest. “What am I supposed to believe, Ray? This has happened before.”

“Believe me, baby, it’s not what you think.”  It was the wrong thing to say. Ray looked down into her eyes and watched her go quietly crazy, an instantaneous insanity that would tolerate no excuse, no explanation, nothing but complete and absolute admission of guilt.

“Don’t you dare tell me what I think! I know what I think! I think you’re seeing some sleazy man-stealing bitch! I don’t believe this Colin story one bit. When was the last time you even saw that loser? A year or more, right? At that dive bar, the Double 40? He pulled a gun on you!”  She had stepped back and fixed him with the look of someone whose mind was made up. “No, I’m not going accept that.”

“I told you, Colin. . .we go way back. I owe him.”

“Owe him for what, Ray? You never say what it is you owe him for. Every story you tell about him and you being buds in grammar school, you always end up holding the shitty end of the stick. I told you before, the guy is a waste of space.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Am I your friend, Ray?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Simple question. Yes or no.”

“Yeah, of course! Why do we even have to go there?”

“I find it hard to believe that I’m your friend and that he is also your friend because I could never be his friend or be a friend to any of his friends.”

Ray shrugged, weary, fed up. He had done nothing wrong. He had nothing to admit, nothing to confess. “You are way over the top, Cissy. You need to step off.”

“Step off, Ray? You think I need to step off!”  Cissy’s hands shaped themselves into claws.

“Listen, baby, you don’t have to push me to the wall. I’m not thinking all that straight. I apologize for not calling but my phone is a piece of shit. I’m sorry you worried. I don’t like it when you worry. I’m beat and I need to crash. It’s not too late for you to hit the yard sales. We can talk about it when you get back and after I’ve had some sleep.”

Little Sister twisted her body in the way only an animal with a rotating backbone can, yet Cissy held her firm. “Tell me you didn’t forget the fucking cat food!” 

Cissy inclined her head as if to appraise him from another angle. “You know I like to use the Civic when I go out to buy other people’s junk. If I drive up in my Mercedes the prices triple.” Then with a slightly bemused smile, “You really don’t like it when I worry?”

“Yeah, baby.” Ray pulled her toward him. “You know how I feel about you.”

Little Sister, Cissy’s ancient Black Persian, had been pacing back and forth in front of an empty food bowl during the little melodrama adding comments of her own, pitiful strangled yowls that worked as entreaties as well as demands for attention. Cissy scooped up the scraggly ball of fur and held her close to her face saying girlishly, “Is Little Sissy hungry? Yes? Is she hungry?”  The cat turned its head and seemed to be staring at Ray accusingly. “Do you have the cat food?” Cissy asked, “Little Sister’s hungry.”

Ray looked at her blankly, “Cat food?”

“Don’t play dumb, Ray, I asked you to pick up some cat food. Before you left. Yesterday. I specifically said, don’t forget to get some cat food. And you said ‘yeah, the special expensive kind.’  And I said, ‘nothing’s too good for my baby.’  And you said, ‘I don’t like cat food’ because you think you’re funny.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“You didn’t get the cat food.”  The intensity of Cissy’s body language was transmitted to the cat. Little Sister twisted her body in the way only an animal with a rotating backbone can, yet Cissy held her firm. “Tell me you didn’t forget the fucking cat food!”  Cissy’s eyes bugged like they were going to jump off her face. “You forgot the fucking cat food? You motherfucker!”

Little Sister, front paws flailing and hind legs quivering finally broke loose from Cissy’s hold and, with what looked like some help from her, landed just above Ray’s chest, catching a claw down the side of his unshaven jaw before dropping to the floor. Ray stepped back, pulled his hand from his face and stared at the blood on his fingertips. “What the fuck was that all about, Cissy? Shit! You are whack. I’m fuckin’ outta here!”

Cissy, her eyes the size of saucers, put a hand over her mouth to hold back the gigantic oops. “Oh, Ray, I’m sorry. . .I’m so. . .I didn’t. . .I mean. . . .”

Ray push back out the kitchen door. “Fuck you,” he intoned in a dismissive monotone. He strode past the Mercedes parked in the driveway alongside the house and punched the rear panel with the side of his fist. It was an older model C class, undaunted and undented by the ineffectual blow.

Next Time: The Pick Up

Contents Vol. 4 No. 2

Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to Volume Four, Number Two of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

Dime Pulp debuts a new serial novel, Die Like A Man, by Thierry La Noque, in Volume 4, Number 2. It is a meta noir story of a man who gives a friend a ride only to be pulled in deeper and deeper into the events surrounding a brutal murder of the daughter of a prominent businessman and the attempts to cover it up and place the blame on someone else. Drugs and money are involved in this initial outing of La Noque’s wannabe private eye, Ray Philips. As well, Mark DuCharme’s gothic Carriers is quickly approaching its denouement. Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) continues her mission to fly an unauthorized dirigible to Djibouti in Phyllis round the world steampunk adventure,  Cheése Stands Alone. And in Just Coincidence, Wayne Bruce survives his ordeal in the Southern Sahara and emerges as a new man in Pierre Anton Taylor’s crimefighter drama. 

carriers vanMark DuCharme’s Carriers and it’s gothic air of  shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite,  told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist. Taking place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city, dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read more in the latest installment of  Carriers, Episodes X-XII .

chase blurbFIPhyllis Huldarsdottir’s Cheése Stands Alone, the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) in the search for her anti-Clockwork Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more of Cheése Stands Alone in Episode XIII.

JCblurb1fiPierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father.  The backstory to his emergence as a crimefighter is revealed in Just Coincidence, Interlude II

dlamfi1

Die Like A Man, a brand new serial novel by Thierry La Noque, is a meta noir story of a man who gives a friend a ride only to be pulled in deeper and deeper into the events surrounding the brutal murder of the daughter of a prominent businessman and the attempts to cover it up and place the blame on someone else. Ray Philips, a martial arts instructor, sometime event security, and bouncer working toward getting his private investigator’s license in a world where the private eye is quickly becoming an anachronism, is hired to find a missing husband, the famous crime novelist and infamous drunk, Stan Giordino by his petite pierced drug addicted wife, Stella. A stolen cache of drugs and money only complicates and implicates the wannabe detectives, and puts him over his head and his life in danger. Not to mention that his girlfriend, Cissy, is dying of cancer. The beginning to this meta noir begins here: Die Like A Man 1&2

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues,  is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 will be available in early February ’24 as part of the annual archival review.

If you’ve made it this far, click  on the links above to read the entertaining  serial contents of Volume 4, Number 2!

 —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

 

 

 

DIE Like A MAN

Crime Fiction, , , ,

by Thierry Le Noque

CHAPTER ONE

The sun is in my eyes and I’m going to die.

Ray Philips tried to care. It was only one weepy eye, anyway. The other had swollen shut. He was watching the sun set, face pressed against the hard scrabble at the side of a narrow road on the dry yellow flank of the Mayacamas range.

Soon the amorphous orange orb would be obscured by the rear wheel of the Escalade parked almost on top of his head. The oily stench of highway heated steel-belted tread was repelling yet strangely familiar, like the odor of asphalt, revved engines, and burning rubber on hot August nights.

They were waiting for somebody, two pairs of high-heeled western boots and the one pair of expensive loafers. One pair of boots belonged to the young Mexican male with a shaved head and sparse goatee. He was seated, his back to the wheel above Ray, holding the side of his face with one hand and punching Ray in the ribs with the other.

The somebody they were waiting for was preceded by the crackling crunch of the wheels of an approaching vehicle on gravel. It came to a stop behind the SUV. One car door and another closed with the solid thunk of a luxury sedan. And footsteps approached. “What the fuck happened to you cholas?”

“This guy’s some kind of kung fu martial arts motherfucker.” Boots got to his feet and leaned a hand on the side of the SUV. “But we took him down, fucking stomped him good. Son of a bitch,” and let drop a gob of blood speckled spit.

“I want to get a look at the guy who could kick all your asses. He better be one bad fucking hombre or I’m going to kill all you fucking pussies.”

Hands grabbed Ray’s ankles, dragging him out from under the SUV. The toe of a boot wedged itself under his right side and flipped him onto his back. His legs didn’t want to follow and twisted under him shooting a bolt up his spine. He reopened his eye to focus on a dark face close to his, teeth bared, eyes bugging.

“So this is the motherfucker who’s been stealing from me? You think you can get away with that shit, motherfucker? You think so, huh? Nobody steals from me! You understand! Now you’re going to fucking tell me where you’ve got my product, and my fucking money!”  Narrowed lips drawn across the bared gold-capped teeth flecked with spittle.

Sultry, feminine, a voice said, “I know this guy.”

“You know this motherfucker?”

Ray turned his head, focusing on a slender oval framed by long dark hair. “This is the guy I told you about, at the county jail.”

“This guy?”

“Yeah. That’s him, I’m sure.”

Mean face withdrew to become an oblong blur on top of a shadowy narrow frame. “Alright, he gets a bye. This one time. I’m not done with him.” Feet scuffled off. Car doors slammed shut, one after another. Wheels crackled, crushing clumps of dirt to dust in their leaving.

Ray watched the Escalade make a wide turn further up the road and head back toward him. He could have said a prayer but he didn’t remember any. The SUV slowed as it passed and the driver spat red out the window at him. They were going to have to do better than that.

CHAPTER 2

Ten days earlier, Ray Philips pocketed his pay as a bouncer checking IDs at the door of La Bête Noir, also known as ‘The Beast,’ the college bar on Mendocino Avenue. He swung his suitcoat over his shoulder and walked out into the cool early morning in his shirt sleeves. A tall man in his late twenties, broad shoulders of an athlete, square jawed, sleepy amber green eyes beneath thick eyebrows and curly black hair just short of shaggy, he had concluded that a suit was a kind of uniform. Bar patrons, especially the young and callow, paid deference to the authority of the uniform which made his job matching faces and ages with what was represented on little plastic cards much easier. Of course there were times when it had the opposite effect. Then it got ugly.

He fit the key in the door of his battered Civic hatchback in the parking lot behind the bar, giving a thought to Cissy, probably waiting up for him with a bottle of white wine and a see-thru something from a specialty boutique. She’d said she had something important to tell him as he was heading out the door for work the previous evening. Sex was at the top of his list of important things.

He was surprised by the man in the faded red hooded sweatshirt standing on the other side of the car. The man had stepped out of the shadows. “Hey, Ray.”

“Colin, what are you doing here?”

“I need a favor.”

“What happened to your face?”

Colin’s hand went up to the purple swelling on his forehead. “Uh, bumped a guard rail coming down Calistoga. Kinda totaled the front end of my truck. That’s why I’m here. I got a fishing party to take out in the morning. I need a lift out to the marina.”

“Those scratches look pretty bad. Get them bumping the rail, too?”

“Me and Mandy. . . you know. She got some claws.”

“The makeup sex must be great. You two are always fighting.”

“That’s history man. She can go fuck herself for all I care.”

“I’ve heard that song before. You should set it to music.”

“How about it? This gig is gonna help pay the groceries, and get the mortgage company off my ass.”

Ray knew bullshit when he heard it. He shrugged, “Yeah, ok, get in.”

Ray saw it coming from far off, closing fast. It powered past them in the opposite direction, unmarked, strobes flashing in the grill, gang unit eating up the pavement, heading for the 101. After it passed, Highway 12 was empty, as deserted as on the day after the apocalypse, practically all the way to Sebastopol.

“I called your phone. You didn’t pick-up.”

“I keep it turned off. Battery’s not holding a charge.”

“You’re still packing that old flip thing? That is so yesterday. Man, get a real phone.”  Colin held up his, luminescent oblong screen blue. “What you got is a paper weight.”

“Takes money, money I don’t have.”

“Say the word, Ray, I can cut you some action. You wouldn’t have to do much.”

“Colin, I don’t want to hear about your fucking action. I told you that.”

Colin shrugged and turned his head to stare at the vague silhouettes passing backlit by orange streetlight glow.

The first time Ray met Colin Knox was in first grade on the playground at St Rose first week of school. Colin was bumping chests with an older kid, second or third grader. The bigger kid had his hands balled into fists and his face looked ready to explode. Colin was oblivious, jaw working, mouth spitting out words. The ruckus had attracted a few others, mainly friends of the bigger kid. Ray didn’t like the odds his fellow first grader was facing. He stepped between them just as the big kid was about to give Colin a shove. Ray got the shove instead. He shoved back.

As if she had suddenly emerged out of the blacktop, Sister Constance Marie caught him by the tiny hairs at the back of his neck and marched him straight to Mother Superior. Ray got detention for the rest of the week. Colin and Ray were inseparable from then on, and Ray was adopted into the Knox clan.

Colin’s dad was a bantam. His name was Howard but the way he said it, it sounded like ‘hard.’ He wore a big gold ring on his right pinky and had a gold cap on his left eye tooth. He was the service manager at Zumwalt, the dealership on Santa Rosa Avenue. There was always a brand new Chrysler in their driveway.

Bridgette was Colin’s mother though everyone called her Gidget and she didn’t seem to mind. She was the most beautiful woman Ray had ever seen off the TV or movie screen. She loved to laugh and act up, joke, have a drink. She used to say that they were distant relatives of the people who owned the Fort. And she’d add, “Very distant.” It was years before Ray actually got the joke. She was fond of Ray, a second mother to him considering the amount of time he spent at Colin’s, and the amount of time his own mother, Kay, spent avoiding him to be with her latest boyfriend.

The Knox’s had a timeshare on the coast overlooking the Russian River, and every summer for two weeks in July, Colin’s mother invited him along. To think back to that time, for Ray, those were idyllic days. Colin and he were blood brothers, pirates of the cove, and the tiny island that hugged the south shore of the estuary where they’d built a makeshift bulwark was their lair, their treasured isle.

“This is crap, I might as well be listening to static.”

“Don’t fuck with the presets.”

“Got any real tunes?”  Colin opened the glove box to wads of oily paper towel and jumper cables.

“Look in the back. Cissy picked some up at a garage sale. I don’t know what they are.”

Colin unbuckled and lifted himself from the seat to grapple with the half-crate and bring it forward to his lap.

“Put your seatbelt back on.”

“Jesus, what’s this, a fucking school bus?”

“I can’t afford a ticket.”

“You think you’re gonna get pulled over?”

“Always a possibility. Cops, this time of the morning, are bored and need something to keep them awake. A traffic stop gets the adrenaline pumping.”

“You know this for a fact? Why, because you went to cop school?”  Colin switched on the dome light to pick through the CD’s.

“Shit, turn that off! I can’t see. . .shit!”  Ray yanked the steering wheel hard right. The left rear bumped over something big.

Colin glanced over his shoulder as Ray switched off the dome light. “What the fuck was that?”

Ray peered into the rearview. “I dunno, debris, lumber of some kind. Shit!”

Colin laughed. “Chill, man, you drove over a piece of wood, big fucking deal. Tell you what.”  He reached into his sweatshirt and produced a fatty. “We’ll fire this puppy up and everything gonna be fine.”

Ray nodded. “Yeah, but wait till we get through Sebastopol. The cops there are real pricks. If we get stopped I don’t want my car smelling like Bong Central Station.”

“You are one paranoid motherfucker, you know that?”  Colin turned his attention back to the box on his lap. “There better be some head banging brain damaging obliteration in this collection of garbage.”

The second time Ray came to Colin’s rescue was at Los Guilicos Youth Detention Center. Colin was in a showdown with a trio of very large thugs and was about to have his ass handed to him, or worse. By then Ray was well on to being large himself, nearly six foot, tall for a ninth grader. Colin was still a runt, a runt who tried to make up for his size with his big mouth.

They’d lost touch around sixth grade. By the start of high school, they barely saw each other. Colin attending elite Newman and Ray struggling to keep from being booted out of Montgomery.

And Ray was running with a bad crew. In particular, Jaime Jimenez who went by the name of Jimmy Jim and an Asian kid known only as Huk. Ray had a rep, too. Tough white punk prone to murderous rage.

One Friday night while they were goofing around on their way to hang out in Courthouse Square, they ran into a gang of older boys near Fremont Park. Hand signs were flashed, challenges made. The older teens weren’t going to let them pass until they claimed. No one saw it coming. Huk stabbed the one talking trash in the neck. By the spurt of blood, he’d hit an artery. The cops picked them up beating feet down Talbot. That same night Colin had been picked up in a drug sweep. It was a short reunion. Ray had taken two of the thugs down before the staff broke it up.

Ray was labeled an at-risk juvenile and released on the condition that he attend counseling. Kay was at the end of her rope with him. Things needed to change or Ray would end up in a group home.

His counselor, a young guy with a big red beard and bad breath, was the one who suggested the way out. There was a martial arts studio a couple of blocks from Ray’s apartment. Maybe he should give it a shot, channel his aggressions. Ray had passed by the place dozens of times. It was decidedly uncool. A bunch of little kids in white pajamas thinking they were Bruce Lee. Ray reluctantly accompanied Barry, the counselor, to a tournament at the dojo. That was all it took.

“Bandit at six o’clock.”

Ray glanced at the flashing lights in his rearview mirror. They were just about to leave the city limits.

“Ok, stay calm, they don’t have PC,” Colin blurted.

“Probably cause? Since when do cops need probable cause?”

Colin pulled the hoodie over his head and leaned against the window. “I’ve been drinking and you’re taking me home.”

Ray navigated to the shoulder of the road, turned the engine off and placed his hands at the top of the steering wheel. He watched the officer exit his vehicle and walk cautiously toward them. “And where do you live?”

“Uh, I dunno, you’ll think of something. I’m sleeping. Don’t wake me.”  Colin feigned the deep breathing of sleep.

The cop stood at the window and waited for Ray to roll it down. His flashlight scanned the interior. “License and registration, please.”

Ray lifted the registration from the visor and handed it over with his license. “What seems to be the problem, officer?”

The cop had his citation book out. “Left rear taillight.”

“Really? The taillight’s not working? Mind if I see for myself? It was just in for a service. They should have caught that.”

The officer stepped back from the door and to the rear of the Civic, citation book in his left, his right hand to his hip. “Please stay in the car, sir,” glancing down at the license .

Ray made sure his were in plain sight. “Well, you are right.”  He thumped the rear panel and the light blinked on. “Loose wire. But thanks for catching that, Warren.”

Ray took the hard look. “Oh, fuck. Philips! Why didn’t you say something?”  The policeman double-checked the driver’s license in his hand. “I ain’t seen you since. . . .”

“The academy?”

“Yeah, right. It’s been a while. What you been doing with yourself?”

Ray shrugged. “This and that. Teaching martial arts at the Runway Club.”

“You’re still doing that, huh? What’re you now, a black belt?”

“Something like that. Doing some part-time at Morgan Josephson. Gonna test for my State investigator’s license.”

“No shit, you’re working for MoJo? My old man did some work for them, insurance stuff, you know, after he retired.”

“So I heard. Your dad was a good cop. How’s he doing these days?”

Warren shook his head. “Aw, we got him in a nursing home. He don’t even know who he is.”

“Sorry to hear that. How about you, how do you like working for Sebastopol?”

“It’s alright. If you don’t mind being a security guard for a bunch of over-the-hill hippies.”

Ray laughed. “That’s a good one, Warren. Mind if I use it?”

“Sure, I don’t care. One of our dispatchers came up with it.”

On cue the radio rasped. “Edward Boy 5, ready to copy your 10-28?”

Warren answered on his portable. “Disregard 10-28. Code 4 on the 11-95.”  Then to Ray, handing back his papers, “I gotta ask you about your vanity plate. What the hell does that mean, GMTIOO?

“Gumshoe. My girlfriend got it for me.”

“No shit, that says gumshoe?” Warren stared at the plate, grinning. “I get it, gumshoe, PI, private investigator.” And turning to leave, “Get that light fixed, ok?”

Ray waited until the patrol car made the U-turn before he got back behind the wheel.

“Who the fuck was that?”

“Warren Kroner.”

“Herb Kroner’s kid? Shit, they let anybody have a gun and a badge. My old man said Herb was one of the dirtiest cops in the whole county.”

“Yeah, and now he’s blowing spit bubbles and pissing in diapers. Some kind of justice.”

“Fucking cops. You heard how they shot that kid, didn’t you? Just fucking shot him. What’d he do, looked at them cross-eyed?”

“You don’t have to tell me. I blame the cowboys who teach the Lethal Force module. It’s shoot first, ask questions later. The way they see it, you shoot somebody on duty, nobody can touch you.”

“Fucking trigger happy cocksuckers.”

Ray steered back onto the roadway. Pungent smoke filled the interior and he cracked a window to let the night air blow through. He took a deep toke and then coughed his lungs out all over the speedometer. His eyes watered, his nose tickled, and the dome of his skull detached itself and floated above his head.

Colin laughed, hacking up a billow, and slapped the dash to the beat of a head-banging anthem. “Just like old times, homes!”

Next Time: Fish & Tequila

Contents Vol. 4 No. 1

Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to Volume Four, Number One of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

van3The new year at Dime Pulp begins with the return of Carriers by Mark DuCharme and it’s gothic air of  shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead. Carriers is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, and is told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist, Johnny. It takes place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city. Dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people like Johnny to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read more in the latest installment of  Carriers, Episodes VIII-IX .

Also returning to the start Volume 4 off on the right foot are Dime Pulp regular authors Pierre Anton Taylor and Phyllis Huldarsdottir  with Phyllis’s steampunk adventure,  and Perre’s crimefighter fiction, Just Coincidence.

lcnew2Phyllis Huldarsdottir returns  with Cheése Stands Alone, the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) in the search for her anti-Clockwork Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more of Cheése Stands Alone in Episode XII.

Batman-Logo-121Pierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father.  The backstory to his emergence as a crimefighter is revealed in Just Coincidence, Interlude I

dime dropFIAlso returning for the 2024 inaugural issue is Dropping A Dime, the editor’s pithy commentary on pulp fiction, this time asking the vital question What Is It About Poets and Pulp? 

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues,  is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 will be available in early February ’24 as part of the annual archival review.

If you’ve made it this far, click  on the links above to read the entertaining  serial contents of Volume 4, Number 1!

 —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

 

 

 

Contents Vol. 3 No. 8

Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Eight of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

CARRIERSfi2Carriers by Mark DuCharme returns with it’s gothic air of  shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead. Carriers is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, and is told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist, Johnny. It takes place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city. Dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people like Johnny to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read more in the latest installment of  Carriers, Episodes V-VII .

btdv2n10fiIssue 8 brings to a close Colin Deerwood’s long running serial, Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, featuring the unpredictable peregrinations of private investigator Lackland Ask, aka Stan Gardner, aka Sam Carter, and now Dr. Jerome Paulsen, O.D. leaving on a freighter for Cuba one step ahead of the law, the mob, and the draft board. All the loose ends (and there were many) are tied up or disposed of (are they?), and now the fugitive confidential agent can exit stage left. Find out how the story ends in Better Than Dead, Episode 30.  (A note from the author reminds us that the cover of this issue is from an original Black Mask magazine, c. 1940, and as such was the catalyst and inspiration for the more than 150 pages of serial crime fiction that followed. )

doncoyoteThis issue also introduces a new private eye, Don Coyote,  brain child of Mike Servante, a newbie to the musty (and labyrinthine) halls of serial crime fiction although an aficionado of the genre, in a metatextual story that promises to be a lot of fun, titled The Man From La Mirada Perdida, A Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Adventure. Read  inaugural episodes i & ii in this latest offering of imaginative crime fiction from Dime Pulp.

Dime Pulp regular authors Pierre Anton Taylor and Phyllis Huldarsdottir were unfortunately caught up in the  seasonal vortices that often cause time displacement, especially as the days get shorter,  and the imprudent certainty that there is still plenty of time to get everything done.  Phyllis’s steampunk adventure, Cheése Stands Alone, will return in Vol. 4, Number 1 in early 2024, as will Pierre’s crimefighter fiction, Just Coincidence.

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues,  is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 will be available in late January ’24 as part of the annual archival review.

If you’ve made it this far, click  on the links above to read the entertaining  serial contents of Volume Three, Number 8

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from  monthly issues to once every forty-five days (more or less—mostly more). Thus Volume Three will (hopefully) consist of eight issues (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.

 —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

 

 

 

The Man From La Mirada Perdida—i & ii

Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, , , , , , , , , ,

A Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Mystery

by Mike Servante

i

 

—Ever work for a private investigator before?

—I can’t honestly say that I have.

—But you’ve had experience working in an office, answering phones, typing?

—It’s all there in the resume.

—Yes, of course. So why don’t you tell me in your own words.

—I was a receptionist for a law firm, Stag, Stagger,& Staggered. I answered phones, took messages, routed calls, sorted mail and put it in the appropriate mailboxes. And did some light typing. The legal secs did the important stuff.

—Just a minute, did you just say legal sex?

—No, no, legal secretaries, that’s what they were called, legal secs, legal secretaries.

—Alright, go on.

—The firm had an investigator on retainer, but I never saw him. Only his mail.

—Only his mail what?

     “His mail, envelopes, packages, legal briefs, that sort of thing.”

—I see, mail, briefs, packages.

—But that was a while back. I haven’t been in an office environment since I got married.

—You’re married?

—Was. Widow.

—Oh, I’m sorry. My condol. . . .

—It was several years ago.

—Yes.

—And I’ve had to rejoin the workforce.

—Your husband, uh, Mr. Pansy?

—Corrigan, Jake Corrigan. Pansy is my maiden name.

—Ok. Mind if I call you Saundra? Or Sandy?

—If it comes with a pay check, I’m ok with that, though I’m not particularly fond of Sandy.

—Pay check, right, good you brought that up. If you were to accept this assignment I can only use you parttime, three days a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, eight till noon, I will pay you for your time each week on Friday. I hope those are enough hours for you. Maybe once business picks up we can add more time.

—That’s fine. Like I said I’m rejoining the workforce after years of being a housewife. I’d like to take it slow. Plus I get Jake’s pension.

—Oh, yes, pension, that’s good. What did your husband do?

—He was a cop.

—Really? That’s very interesting, a cop?

—He never talked to me about the job. Said he didn’t want to depress me.

—I see. That was thoughtful.

—I have a question. Do I call you Don or Mr. Coyote?

—Boss is fine.

  

dcovaltxtI’m a good judge of character. She was in her late forties, going gray pixie cut that went with the pixie face, dangling silver earrings, intense blue eyes, mascara thick eyelashes, not so subtle green shadowed and precisely drawn eyebrows. Her lipstick was a synthetic shade of orange and probably applied with a palette knife.     

 What choice did I have? The only other applicant was a high school girl who had arrived with her mother who wisely stayed in the car. She’d snapped her gum while looking around the small office, bewildered, pointed to the typewriter, and asked, “What’s that?”

This woman in the colorful summer dress and gold brocade shrug appeared evasive and reluctant when I asked about her experience. Anyone can write a resume, I wanted to get the depth of her understanding by how she used her words and if she was familiar with the nomenclature.

She brought up sex almost immediately. I don’t want to say that I have that effect on women, but I am not uninitiated in the ways of the world. When I questioned her bringing it up, she covered skillfully and made it out to be a misunderstanding on my part. I don’t make those kinds of mistakes. And as if to further tease, she brought up male briefs and packages. I wasn’t born yesterday. Packages, that was just blatant.

Next she tried the pity angle. Widow. What was I supposed to say? How did he die? And she coldly brushed off my expression of sympathy. I could tell she was desperate to get the job, her repeated emphasis on the need to return to the workforce, but maybe at her age it’s a challenge, and she’s desperate.

I guess that’s something I’ve never known, I come from money. My grandfather was a jeweler, from the Ukraine, one of three Koyoskozko brothers who were headed to Alaska during the gold rush to claim their fortune. Grandpa jumped ship in San Francisco, tired of puking his guts at every swell of a wave. He apprenticed to a jeweler, a fellow countryman, and learned the business. With the ’06 quake, the business was destroyed. Like many made homeless by the catastrophe, he headed north, following the circumference of San Pablo Bay until he reached the wet lands on the northwest side of the bay once owned by General Vallejo. There on a river that drained into the bay sat a relatively untouched settlement known as Petaluma. He took it to be an Indian name. He was successful, changed his own name to something easier to pronounce, Coyote, though at the time he didn’t realize its import as a mythical figure in the lore of his adopted country. Eventually he had jewelry outlets in every major burg in the valley. My father inherited the business and became even more prosperous by investing in real estate. When he died I inherited millions. He’d eased out of the jewelry business a while ago although I had worked for him as a courier when I was going to the University in San Francisco. I often carried satchels of very valuable jewels in the trunk of my Impala as if they were nothing more than a bag full of old tennis togs. I had a permit to carry, then, and still do.

That woman is wily, I’ll give her that. When I politely asked if I could address her by her first name she immediately turned it into an offer of a job.

sandy2ovaltxtI don’t know who he thought he was, thinning red hair, tall and gangly with quite a beak, too. He dressed conservatively for this neck of the woods, slacks, open collar shirt. I’ll admit I was desperate. After Jake’s passing, I had to keep up the house payments and that meant cutting corners on other necessities. Besides, being housebound as a homemaker for a couple dozen years, I was ready to re-experience life as a single woman.

My husband used to say I was a ditz, but what did he know, he was a lummox. Jake worked as a Napa PD patrol officer till he dropped dead at Swank’s Steakhouse in Santa Rosa. The red meat in his gut didn’t agree with the red meat of his heart. As someone from his family said at the wake, “He larded up.” Certainly no one on my side of the family would have said it, out loud, at any rate. And it was true that the slim handsome police cadet I married turned into a wide load, pot-bellied, booze swilling porker right before my eyes. The sorrier he felt for himself, the more pounds he put on, and the meaner he got. He was an accident that didn’t wait long to happen.

I’m from around here, born, bred, and schooled. My folks and their folks and their folks before them were pioneers in these parts, chicken ranching, sheep and cattle, apples and prunes, they did just about anything that had to do with growing or grazing. Of course Coyote Jewelers was known far and wide. My wedding ring came from their showroom in Sonoma, or as my dad used to call it, Sonombula because it was a sleepy little town back then, before it got overrun by grapevines and all the snobby money, snooty attitude, and high prices that followed. Growing grapes was suddenly an art when all it was really was just good farming. That’s my stock. I’m not afraid of honest work and I expect to be respected for doing it.

I knew enough to be on my guard, having worked as a waitress while I was taking secretarial courses at the local business school. Guys always bring sex up and then when you call them on it, they act all offended like and pretend that’s not what they meant. Happened at the office, too. And though I hadn’t expected it to come up in the job interview, there it was. Everyone knows a legal sec is short for legal secretary just as a para is short for paralegal. If I hadn’t got married I think I would have tried for paralegal, get the training and all.

In the meantime, I needed to get work and his acting like a jerk wasn’t making it easy. I wasn’t going to catch the drift? Mail, package, briefs. I come from a big family, brothers, cousins, uncles, all of them brain in the gutter. I’ve heard it all. And I wasn’t going to fall for it. If that’s what he thought, he had another think coming. Saundra Pansy was never a pushover whatever you thought of the name.

Guess he got the drift. Boss said I was to start Monday, eight sharp.

ii

—It’s not electric?

—Um no, but it’s authentic.

—It looks like it weighs a ton.

—It’s a 1939 Royal KMM with the patented Magic Margin system. See, if you hold down the right or left margin lever and slide the carriage to the desired location you ‘magically’ set the margin. It still has the original round glass-topped keys. I paid $5 for it at a flea market, and it still works as well as when it was new. I even ordered extra ribbons.

—Right. . . ribbons. That’s quite a museum piece.

—Oh, it is perfectly functional.

—And this lever?

—That’s the carriage return.”

—Ok, now I remember seeing a video of one being used when I was in business school. We practiced typing on electric typewriters.

—But you assured me you could type!

—Oh yeah, no problem, if it’s qwerty, I let my fingers do the walking, and I can do it blindfolded. I can also do Gregg but it’s been a while so I might be a little rusty.

—Greg?

—Yeah, you know, the shorthand guy.

—Shorthand?

—Transcription. Like I said, it’s been a while.

—Good, good, for now typing will be enough. And this is an elegant machine. You shouldn’t have any problem with it, freshly oiled and cleaned.

—You don’t have a computer?

—No I don’t believe in computers. But look, I even had some stationary printed.

—Stationary?

—I hired a graphics firm to design the letterhead and the logo. Don Coyote & Associates, Private Investigations. I think the howling coyote in the oval frame like that is quite well done.

—That looks like a wolf.

—No, no. I’ve been assured that it is, in fact, a coyote.

—Have you ever seen a coyote in the fur?

—I’ve seen pictures. Many pictures.

—Well, alrighty then, if that’s the case.

—Oh, no, no case yet, but I’m hoping in the near future to develop some leads, lure clients in need of investigative services.

—And in the meantime is there any correspondence you’d like me to write, calls you’d like me to make, appointments you want me to schedule, dictation? I’m ready to get down to business.

—Good, and I don’t know if I have to point this out, but that is what is called a rotary dial on the telephone. It’s a 1937 Stromberg Carlson, very rare.

—It works? I thought it was just part of the décor. Like the typewriter.

—It is in perfect working order, as functional as the day it rolled off the assembly line. It has the original bell. Wait till you hear it!

—I’ll assume it doesn’t take pictures.

—Of course not. The telephone is for the ear, not the eyes. This is not some Dick Tracy outfit with wrist radios and video phones. Don Coyote, Private Eye, is nothing if not authentic!

—Ok, you’re the boss. I’m ready to get to work. I just don’t want to waste your time and money sitting around not doing anything.

—Well, first of all you need to get familiar with the type of job you’ll be doing and probably the best way to do that is to begin by creating a catalog of the files and reference books in my office.

—Like a librarian?

—I have a collection of rare pulp fiction magazines and obscure post war crime fiction paperbacks. Oh, and my film noir library, private eye memorabilia, crime scene photos. I would recommend that you read a few of those novels to get a feel for the business. I’m thinking along the lines of Mike Hamm. . . .

—You’re going to pay me to read?

—Well, no, I see it as something you could take home and do. To bring you up to speed. A private eye’s secretary requires specialized knowledge.

—So I would be doing more than just typing and filing? That sound like I’d need specialized training. On company time.

—Are you going to answer that?

—Don Coyote & Associates, Private Investigations, how can I direct your call? One moment please. It’s for you.

dcovaltxtI don’t know how to say this. My expectations might have been too unrealistic. She chews gum. Maybe she was nervous. I suspect that she is rather unqualified and I will eventually have to let her go. As my father used to quote my grandfather as saying, “The biggest problem in running a business is employees.” She is rather plain in a well-scrubbed sort of way. And maybe someone should have told her that colorful plastic jewelry was no longer as popular as it might have been, if ever, in the fifties, say. And even though she was made up to match the bangles and bracelets, she couldn’t hide her lack of refinement when I showed her to her desk.

That typewriter is a classic machine, indestructible, a workhorse. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was from an estate sale, everything had pretty much sold at auction except for a few odd items, like gooseneck lamps, and the old typewriter. One of the heirs was selling them at a flea market where, on occasion, I browse, looking for old magazines and paperbacks. A hand printed sign propped on the machine read BOAT ANCHOR? $5 or B/O. Finding a typewriter repair shop and restoring it was probably the hardest and most expensive part. Even the repairman had never encountered this old of a model, a 1939 Royal. His experience had been mainly on lightweight plastic chassis portables and dreadnaught electric office machines. He also repaired watches, something else experiencing technological displacement.

As soon as I questioned her competence she immediately brought the conversation around to sex. She said she was alright with quirky, and then something that she had done blindfolded with someone named Greg involving shorthand, whatever kinky fetish that was, but I could just imagine. I can only assume she was desperate. She kept saying that it had been a while. Then she brought up computers. And that’s a sore spot with me. I find them dehumanizing. Unfortunately I can become quite irrational when confronted with the issue. I deflected by showing the stationary I had printed but she wanted to make an argument about whether it was a wolf or a coyote depicted in the oval of the logo. I can see that she has a petty side.

I definitely got the feeling that she was in over her head. She was undoubtedly confused by the rotary dial on the telephone. She tried to laugh it off by making a joke. I have very little patience with mockery especially when it pertains to the degradation of values under assault from the techno sphere. I’ll admit it, I’m a technophobe.

And when I suggested that she educate herself for the role she would play as a secretary to a private investigation firm, she turned it into a labor negotiation. I was about to assert my prerogative as the employer when the phone rang. I’ll admit, she did answer the call quite professionally.

sandy2ovaltxtHoo boy! I didn’t think I realized what I was getting into. That machine, a manual typewriter, was carpel tunnel syndrome waiting to happen. I thought he was kidding. Maybe a monitor would cleverly pop up from a hidden compartment on the mahogany desk. No such luck.

I had to remind him again that I was qualified as a secretary, I’d even included a copy of my diploma from Empire Business College with my resume. I found a clean copy that my crazy friend Lola Lamont hadn’t altered the heading of the certificate to Vampire Business College though in truth that’s what we all called it—they didn’t suck you blood, just your money. But from the look on his face, it might have been TMI, too much information.

Then he trots out this stationary with a heading like it was from a comic book. A picture of a coyote, he says, in a clunky oval frame. It was a wolf. I’ve seen coyotes numerous times. Even shot one on my uncle Brad’s sheep ranch over by Two Rock. I know what a coyote looks like. They’re vermin. But he’d seen pictures.

And speaking of pictures, he had to point out the antique telephone like I haven’t ever seen pictures on ones almost exactly like this one. My gran even had one on her bookshelf, used it as a bookend to hold up her collection of picture albums. He got a little touchy at my joke about taking pictures so I’m going to guess he had his funny bone surgically removed.

But I gotta hand it to the guy, his setup is right out of an old black and white movie which I can’t watch because without the color, there’s no meaning, and I lose interest real fast. The place is on Western just off the main drag in what used to be the original family jewelry store, a three story brick walk-up. The downstairs showroom is now an antique store so he doesn’t have to go far for his décor. His office is on the second floor, the door at the end of the hallway at the top of the stairs. It’s one of those old wooden doors with a frosted glass panel on the upper half and in gold lettering it says Don Coyote & Associates. I haven’t a clue who the associates are but I figure I’ll find out soon enough. Inside is a small reception area with a couple of old chairs up against the wall and across from the big mahogany desk where I’m supposed to work. There’s another door on which is written in the same gold lettering, Don Coyote, Private Investigator, and call me crazy, but I’m guessing that’s where the files and reference books are that he wants me to catalog. And read.

He has another think coming if he thought I was going to take work home. If I learned one thing from Jake Corrigan, it’s don’t take the job home. And the only thing I’m going to flip when I get there is the channels. Even McDonald’s pays you when they train you to flip burgers. I could see that that was going to be a bone of contention. If you want me to do a special job, train me. I’m a fast learner. I was about to let him know where I was coming from when the phone rang. It startled me at first. It was loud. And it was a real bell, not an electronic facsimile. I picked up the handset and immediately went into receptionist mode. It was a woman’s voice. She was sobbing, “Help me, oh please, Don Coyote.”

Next time: la bola desnuda or don’t go bowling naked

Contents Vol. 3 No. 7

Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fiction, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Seven of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

CARRIERSfi2 Carriers by Mark DuCharme returns with it’s gothic air of  shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead. Carriers is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, and is told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist, Johnny. It takes place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city. Dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people like Johnny to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read more in the latest installment of  Carriers, Episodes III & IV .

LCinset21Phyllis Huldarsdottir returns  with the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) searching for her anti-Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more in Episode XI of Cheése Stands Alone!

Batman-Logo-121Pierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father. In this new episode, the young crimefighter continues to investigate the unexplained death of his father, and the robbery murder of old Rick, the candy store owner, as well as the strange new street drug, Wacky Waxx. Read more in Act 2, Scene 2, Part 3

BTD headLast but certainly not least, Colin Deerwood’s long running serial, Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, continues its unpredictable peregrinations featuring private detective Lackland Ask, aka Stan Gardner, aka Sam Carter, on the run again when he learns that his bucolic hideaway in the Three Lakes area is also where his nemesis, mob boss Yan Kovic, aka Mr. K, is ducking the feds. Now it is even more imperative that he make himself scarce, especially after a crooked local constable in league with Mr. K’s hoods try to finish him off. In the meantime, thanks to the moonshiner’s daughter and a lusty cousin, he learns a surprising revelation about his paternity. On his return to the big city from the country, still on the lam, Lackland Ask has to scare up some cash and make plans to flee the country under an assumed name with one minor hitch: he has to be blind. Read more in Better Than Dead, Episode 29.

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues,  is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above.

If you’ve made it this far, click  on the links above to read the entertaining  serial contents of Volume Three, Number 6

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from  monthly issues to once every forty-five days (more or less—mostly more). Thus Volume Three will (hopefully) consist of eight issues (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.

 —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

 

 

 

Better Than Dead—29

Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, , , ,

by Colin Deerwood

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I was hotter than a two dollar pistol when I stepped off the bus at the main terminal, and for a couple of reasons. The obvious one was I had gone from the fire back into the frying pan. The city was Kovic’s territory. I figured that there was still a price on my head. And the law was looking to question me about Ralphie Silver’s murder.. The Bombay mob and probably the diamond syndicate were still after their revenge and the missing rocks. The other reason was Marie Wilson, the moonshiner’s daughter.

She had flagged the bus down, endured the scolding from the driver, and lugged her suitcase back to where I was seated.

I explained to her again that she couldn’t come with me.

She said that she was going with herself and that we were just going in the same direction.

I told her that I couldn’t be responsible for her in the big city, and that I barely knew where I was staying myself which was kind of an exaggeration as I had a pretty good idea.

She replied that she had been planning this trip to the city since her last year in high school and that she would be staying with her friend, Irma, who lived in a woman’s residence while she trained to be a court stenographer, and which she deemed perfect as she herself hoped to eventually find work as a newspaper reporter like Rosalind Russell in that movie with Cary Grant. And the first thing she was going to do as a reporter was investigate Constable Thorndyke and prove that he was responsible for the disappearance and drowning deaths of those girls. She had it all planned out. She would haunt the newspaper morgues and find all the articles and notices of girls missing up in the Lakes country and then stitch together an airtight case proving that Thorny was behind it all. And anyone else who might have turned a blind eye. She was going to get revenge for his victims.

I had to tell her that revenge didn’t have a rudder or a steering wheel and there was no way of knowing where it would take you. I knew that from experience.

She was quiet after again insisting on her resolve to expose Thorny for the monster he was.

I was thankful for that and settled into looking at the countryside passing by from a corner curve of the window. I had my jar and expensive cigarettes. The bus stopped every so often along the route, picking up passengers heading into the city. An old gal in white gloves and shoes like leather bricks gave me a nasty look and asked me to put out my cigarette. Cracking the bus window open was as much as I was going to do. She wasn’t pleased with my non-reply and found a seat up toward the front after complaining to the bus driver who reminded her that it was a free country.

The motion of the ride had made Marie drowsy and she leaned her head on my shoulder, giggling and speaking random words as she drifted off. I didn’t think too much about it as I had other things on my mind like getting a new identity and finding a way to get out of the country before they reinstituted the draft. If Alice could find a buyer for Ted’s art piece, it would be easy. If not, it would be hard and I had to be prepared for that.

The rumble of the bus crossing the bridge into the city shook Marie from her snooze. She’d smiled at me, drowsily and then hugged my arm to tell me that she was going to change her name if being a reporter didn’t work out and she went to Los Angeles to become an actress. She would take my last name and call herself Eve Gardner as that Stan Gardner was the name I used when I’d introduced myself to her.

I gave her some free advice. Stay away from Los Angeles. And if she couldn’t do that, she should dye her hair brunette and call herself Ava. There were too many blondes named Eve in the movies. She showed her appreciation by stroking the inside of my thigh and nibbling on my ear.

The bus made a quick wide turn that threw us up against each other and then face to face, almost lip to lip, and I could feel her heavy hot breath on my cheek. Or was that mine. I was breaking a mild sweat and I could tell it was destined to be another hot summer day, hotter than I’d expected. But destiny often has its own wicked sense of humor.

With a hiss of airbrakes, the bus had come to a full stop at its destination. Passengers were standing and stretching, some of them glancing our way.

Marie stood up, a little flustered and, grinning in embarrassment, straightened her blouse, grabbed her suitcase, planted a kiss on my cheek, and said “Bye, Stan, it’s been nice knowing you. Don’t be a stranger.”

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I banged on the door to Alice’s studio keeping to the shadows. The wrought iron fence at street level blocked the view into the alcove under the stoop. A man had died on the sidewalk on the other side of that fence, a man wearing motoring goggles, sliced to the quick by Linkov’s sword.

No one was answering the door and that had me worried. Alice was home most of the time working on her art. The last time I’d been on the other side of that door there had been a dead body, also wearing goggles, stretched out across the floor, also victim of Linkov’s rapier. Both of the dead thugs had been looking for me and Rebecca, presumably after the diamonds because, not solely by coincidence, a crew of similarly goggled robbers had descended on Herr Doktor Soloman’s apartment with guns blazing. I was pretty certain they weren’t the Thieves of Bombay, it didn’t fit with the way they operated. And it definitely wasn’t Yan Kovic’s style. Who they were was still a mystery.

I felt a presence loom over my shoulder. It was Linkov, Alice’s neighbor, the crazy Russian painter. He didn’t have his sword, but his scowl was threatening enough.

It was the beard. “Linkov, it’s me, Lackland Ask. I’m looking for Alice. You know where she is?”

He squinted closely at my mug. “Yes it is beard.” He shrugged and walked away, a finger of his hand pointing up. “Top floor skylight studio.” Linkov was never big on small talk.

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Alice was happy to see me in her typically understated fashion. She had a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. “You’ve grown a beard.”

“Nice to see you, too, Al. Looks like you’re moving up in the world.”

That provoked a smile from behind a wreath of smoke. “You might say that. My friend Lee, the artist who used to work here moved to the island when her boyfriend came back from Wyoming and let it to me.” She used the paintbrush to indicate the small space with a bed and a sink and not much else. “You and Becky stayed here one night. Remember? It wasn’t that long ago.”

I glanced around the studio. It did look familiar.

“There were more canvases stacked against the wall. My watercolors don’t take up as much room.”

I remembered the skylight. And I remembered Rebecca. It was a painful memory.

“And you guys left some things behind.”

She handed me a little cigar box. Inside was Rebecca’s pistol, a Remington 51, often referred to as a purse gun, the bank deposit envelope I had placed the post office package notice I had lifted from Della’s mailbox for what I later learned was the jade, the Empress’s Cucumber, now empty, and to my surprise, the little cloth sachet that had once held the diamonds and which Becky had claimed she lost in the coalbin, also empty. Suddenly my head was spinning. Something wasn’t adding up and I had to sit down to figure out how come.

“Lack, are you ok?” Alice guided me to a chair by a table, the cigar box in my hand weighing a ton.

I had questions. For myself. Did the empty sachet mean that Rebecca had had the diamonds all along? Were they in her coat pocket when she took the plunge from the fourth floor of the Serbian Social Club? Even so, why was the bank envelope in the box and empty, the package slip gone. I knew she had it on her when we took the room at the Lattimer Hotel. So if she fell to her death how did it end up in the cigar box? She’s told me that she’s left the pea shooter behind so no surprise in finding it here. And it was loaded.

I stuck the pistol in my jacket pocket. I couldn’t decide what to do with the bank deposit envelope or the empty sachet. They were telling me something, something I didn’t want to believe.

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Alice took me to see the doctor. His name was Patterson. He was a retired pediatrician and he collected art and wrote poetry. We met uptown at a gallery in a part of the city I hardly had the occasion to visit in my line of work. It was Swellsville, gilded windows and polished brass, Even the air smelled sweeter.

She’d already laid out the details of what had gone on the last couple of weeks I was hiding out in Little Lake. After the horrific attack on her by the goggle men, and the dead body bleeding out in her studio and the other one on the sidewalk out-front, and the police investigation and all the confusion of their questions, she was set upon by reporters with more questions. One of them got a look at her watercolors and liked them and he told his friend who was the art critic at the newspaper. The critic dropped by since he was visiting the loft of a big name artist who worked in the neighborhood. He loved what she was doing and introduced her to the uptown gallery owner who right away bought a sampling of her sketches and now was interested in some of her larger landscapes because he was certain he could find buyers for all her watercolors. He wanted to include her in an upcoming group show with well-known painters, and even talked about mounting a solo exhibition of her “work” as she called it.

It was as if the dark cloud of the dead bodies of the men who had attacked her had a silver lining. Suddenly she had money, or more than she’d had before. I liked her new outfit and it fit right in with the gilt and shiny black lacquer of the gallery. With the exception of the beard, I looked pretty much the same, rough around the edges in my second hand tweeds, battered shoes, fedora, and dark glasses. Bright daylight still made my eyes water and ache. I looked like a blind man beggar Alice had abducted from a street corner. Under my arm was a box containing Ted’s art piece she said this Dr. Patterson might be interested in buying.

The doctor was all smiles when he saw Alice, and held out his hand. “Alice, so nice to see you! Roland has been showing me your sketches.”

Alice returned the smile, a little embarrassed. Her popularity was still new to her. She nudged me with an elbow.

“This is Jerry. . . .”

I saw her mind go blank. She’d forgotten the alias I was going to be using for this deal. I shifted the box to my other arm and held out my hand. “Jerome Paulsen, doc, nice to meet you.”

The doctor was a clean looking older man with wire frame specs, a white collar natty tweed suit, and a perfectly tied bowtie. He didn’t hide that I wasn’t what he’d expected. “You are an art collector?”

I shook my head. “Ixnay, doc. Only this piece Ted gave me. I thought I might get into the collection business but it turned out to be more than I can afford.” I smiled to myself at the little joke that I‘d been in the collection business, but that one required a strong arm.

The doc gave me a thin lipped smile in return. “May I see the item?”

On the way to the gallery, Alice and I had gone over the way the deal could go down. I remembered what the art collector everyone hated had originally wanted to give me for it. Alice reminded me that his name was Huddington. He’d offered a grand, but Alice said that with so few pieces by Ted after the bonfire, I could probably ask more. Start at five but don’t go lower than three, she’d advised. Five grand was a lot of money but she said that for some people, it was peanuts. I wasn’t going to argue. I’d only been expecting a grand and even then I couldn’t understand why someone would pay those kind of peanuts for what was in the box.

Art, she’d said.

I was obviously in the wrong business.

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The doc didn’t blink. I blinked. I think Alice blinked. He reached into his suit coat pocket and took out a thin leather rectangle.

“To whom shall I make out the check?”

I looked at Alice. Alice looked at me.

Patterson smiled and nodded like he understood. He called Roland, the gallery owner, over and they left together speaking in low voices.

I could see that Alice was going to get teary. “This was one of his favorites,” she had said when we boxed it up. I tried not to feel bad. The sale of Ted’s art piece would pay for my ticket out. I figured he’d understand.

When Roland returned with Patterson, he had a manila portfolio in his hand which he opened to display five bundles of cash, each with a picture of Ben in the oval. He gave the envelope to Patterson who handed it to me.

In return the good doctor got the box of something someone had made from bits and scraps scattered around the furniture repair shop and placed in a handmade wooden box behind a pane of glass. I still didn’t get why, but I did understand that a gallery could be a kind of bank. You could make a deposit with art and you could make a withdrawal in legal tender. This kind of collection business didn’t sound half as dangerous.

I gave Alice one of the bundles when we got back to her place. “Finder’s fee,” I said.

I didn’t expect the hug. She got tears on my lapel and wiped her eyes.

“Maybe Ted gave you this piece for just such an occasion,” she sniffed. “He knew you were a trouble magnet and you were going to need to use it someday.”

She had a point. Ted himself had even said,” Trouble finds you like gum finds a shoe.”

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Alice came with me when I picked up the passport forms at the Federal building. I had to copy the information from Jerome Paulsen’s birth certificate into the appropriate boxes.

Alice peered over my shoulder. “What are you going to put down as your occupation? Peeper?” she teased.

I thought for a minute. “Optimist!”

Her laugh echoed in the small stuffy office. Heads turned. A clerk looked up with a scowl.

“Yeah, like an eye doctor, a private eye doctor.” I smiled at my joke.

“You mean an optometrist. Like Doctor Patterson urged you to see. Optimist means someone who is an idealist,”

I shrugged, “Yeah, that could be me, the optimistic optometrist”

While we had been making nice with Patterson after taking his five grand, he asked me if I’d been in a fight recently. Maybe my mug suggested the possibility although the evidence that I led with my chin was covered by a beard. He asked me to take off my dark glasses. He looked in my eyes. He wanted to know how bright light affected them. I told him it was painful and that they watered. He wanted to know if I’d been hit in the head. When hadn’t I? In my job you take a lot of lumps and it’s never a fair fight. He said I probably had a concussion. If the eye problem continued I should see an optometrist to get fit with special glasses.

“Lack, didn’t you see this?” She pointed at the bottom of the birth certificate. “Here, where it says Medical Condition.”

The doctor had recorded Jerome Paulsen as “Blind.” “So now I’m am a blind optimistic optometrist,” I joked, “Maybe I should put doctor in front of my name.”

Alice laughed but not as loudly this time. “Why not, you’ve got the beard for it. And put an O.D. after it.”

“O.D.?”

“Doctor of Optometry.”

“Doctor Jerome T. Paulsen, O.D. I think I like the way that sounds.”

What does the T stand for?”

“Trouble.”

She smirked, “Are you done filling it out?”

“Yeah.”

She looked it over. “Pretty good for a blind man.”

“You’ll have to guide me to the window.”

“Just as long as I don’t have to bark.”

Next Time: The Owl Unmasked