STORIES

 from:  LOOSE FISH

Chapter One: Cruz
Cruz Agency Case 703 Revisited

Four months ago I quit the agency. Have had three dozen calls from Cruz since then. He wasn't a chatty man. No hello. No good by. Just, job's here if you want it. Every Sunday morning. Hard to figure. But I wasn't going back to Sacramento. Portland suited me just fine. Lived on a boat up a river. Friend of a friend of an acquaintance had gone off to India. Needed somebody to baby sit this 28-footer. Worked for me. Had a nifty mobile cellular phone, a laptop computer, a PI license and I was in business.

The call came at just after four o'clock Thursday morning. I had fallen asleep in my clothes. Had pulled my Pendleton blanket over me. Rain beat on the deck of the aft cabin. A few drips, but I was sleeping like a dead man. Took me ten rings to get the eyelids open, throw the blanket off, curse, find the phone.

A voice said, "Get down here. First flight out. Cruz was beaten and stabbed. In ICU. Only thing he's said is your name. Get down here." All in a rush. Barely intelligible.

Winters.

"Take a breath. Start over," I said.

"He wants you. God knows why."

"Where?"

"Where? Mercy General. ICU."

"No. Where'd he get it?"

Silence. Then, "Someone hit him in the head a couple of times. Stabbed in the chest. he's got defensive slashes on his hand and that nasty hooked knife of his was bloody. Second thrust hit his sternum and slid off between ribs. Tough son of a bitch. Laid there. Didn't die.""

I took a breath. Wrong 'where.' Again, but no matter. Winters was rattled.

"I'll see what I can manage," I said.

He sighed. What it sounded like. Hung up.

I looked at the phone. Needed a drink. A bottle of Bushmills sat on the shelf beneath the port light. I had a swallow. The mercury lights of the marina cast shadows and eerie glows through the rain. Threw some things in my day pack. Called Dow. He set it up. There was a 6:10 flight to Oakland. Nappy got me there as it was boarding.

But hell, I'm way ahead of myself.

Cruz.

Didn't know I cared.

 from NANSEN'S CAT

DoubleNickel Detective Stories

Introduction

My face in the mirror was nondescript. Unremarkable. Plain. I didn't mind. Plain brown wrappers always get lost in the glitz. Disappear in a crowd. Good thing for gumshoes. Plain, that was me. Damn near invisible. Short cropped black hair, brown eyes, forehead flat, nose a tad wide, small mouth. Face in profile looked like a cardboard box. Blockhead. Appropriate. Lately getting a little jowly. With love handles and damn little love. Facts of life.

All of the above hung on a medium frame. Still wear size 10 shoes. Still 70 inches top to bottom. 5’ 10” and 190 pounds. Give or take. Lately, seemed to be too much muscle turning to fat. Fine, so I’ve gone to seed. With a plain brown suit who needs muscle tone. Screw it. Got a tie with an ugly knot, too. Wear it a little loose at the collar, askew. Some fatigue there, in that face. Anxiety. A modicum of alertness. Modicum. And wit. You say ‘askew,’ I say, ‘gesundheit.’

Hardy har har.

“Shucks,” I said to the face in the mirror. “'I am the boy who does enjoy invisibility,'” I warbled, sighed.

Schmuck.

Damn good at crossword puzzles, though. Damn good.

Jerk.

I pulled back an eyelid. Got a lens on a fingertip. Epicanthic was the word. Had to look it up. Twice. My father was Japanese, but my mother was Irish. The eyeball looking at me was brownish. Most of the time. Poked it in my eye. Did the other one. My face in the mirror was still nondescript; but older. Swell.

My mama used to love me, but she … Palo Alto. Doublenickel.

I frowned at the face in the mirror.

When I was a small boy growing up in Palo Alto, I wore glasses on that face. Small round lenses with silver metal frames. Those lenses were about the thickness of a nickel; and they looked like nickels. Double nickels. Some buddy of mine tagged me with that name, and it stuck with me until I left My Home Town and went off to College. Doublenickel. When things were really rolling, they just called me Nick. I got kind of partial to Nick.

Nick.

from AMIGOS, a farce:

Chapter One

a rhapsody, yes, a rhapsody, indeed, a rhapsody in blue overplaying a coarse, cloudy sky from which a blimp emerges, trailing vaporous tendrils, with the west end of dallas shimmering in a distant smudge of particulate matter and rising, heat driven, toxic gases, circling the city, lowering now and closing on the brown black scrubby waste of land that surrounds the decaying sprawl of the greater metropolitan area, coming in, lowering, over the sere scar of the greenway, littered with the makeshift shacks of the refugees from the coast, smoke from the many cook fires hovering, blanketing, rising slowly, diffusing into the coarse, cloudy sky, the blimp passing silently overhead following the brown, turbid flow of the trinity river, lowering, closing, coming over some industrial no man's land, parnell street perhaps, closing to mean, empty streets: a lone derelict wandering aimlessly, lost; closing to a frowzy flat topped three-story cinder block building mottled with gutter rust and graffiti and as the all but silent, inimical hum of the blimp's electric motors pass over the building opens to a dingy office without a window and a fat man sitting behind a desk

CALL HIM HUMP. (A grown, perhaps a chuckle. Allusions have some mysterious power. For those already out of the loop, persevere or piss on it.) Some years ago, him short on cash and bent on self-mutilation merely to vent boredom, the crux of Hump’s career walked into his office. Walked, perhaps, is an exaggeration. The woman (isn’t it always) poked her head past the door and hesitated, hand to throat. She had the right office. Said “Humphrey Ureaker” in big gold letters right there on the speckled glass; and beneath the name it said “Investigations” in black little letters. The man himself appeared to be something less than the sum of his parts.

Egg shaped with short arms and legs, Ureaker sat behind a metal desk with a bent leg, the leg propped with what appeared to be a hockey puck. The man's jowly head painted with its freckled face sat atop a humpty-dumpty body that strained everywhere against the constriction of clothing: flesh swelling over collar, flesh testing the buttons of shirt, flesh pulling apart the seams of trousers. A tuft of red hair, cropped military about the ears and nape, lay across the skull. A pug nose set between wide, watery blue eyes centered the face. Ears with no lobes. A mouth with thin lips. Bad teeth. The florid face and chubby cheeks hinted at a jovial though perhaps puerile nature: a roly-poly boy. Ureaker’s raspy voice and quick sarcasm soon dispelled such a notion.

No one thought of the man as pleasant.

“Call me Hump,” he liked to say.

And immediately discomfiture visited.

There came a knock on Ureaker’s door.

“It’s open,” he said.

A white, trapezoidal box sat on his desk, top flaps spread. Chinese writing on two sides proclaimed Eternal Happiness Awaits On Mt Huang Po. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, Ureaker daintily extracted a rather greasy piece of General Tso’s chicken. He licked the fingers of his right hand with a quick pink tongue.

An early lunch. Again the knock knock at the door.

Squint-eyed, he slipped his .38 loose from the holster beneath his arm and pointed this instrument of death at the door.

Hump: Cause I’m over it and ain't nobody gonna bust mine, he liked to say.

“Entrar amigo. Despacio,” he said to the door with a voice not unlike filing burrs off a piece of angle iron with a dull 12" mill bastard file.

The door opened slowly a crack, creakingly; then wider until a woman’s head poked into the room.