The Shamus Sampler II

by Nick Quantrill

  The Mule’s tone grew softer as he spoke, as though he recalled a dream. He wasn’t looking at me or anything else in the room. I don't know what he saw.

  “Sounds peaceful, Walter.”

  The Mule drew in a deep breath. “Yeah.”

  “But it does call for a witness,” I thought out loud. “Just in case.”

  “In case of what?” The Mule made the most honestly bewildered face I’d ever seen.

  “How’s that drink?”

  “Fine, just fine. You know Mr. Simeon—nothing but the best.” His lips curled into a smile, but his left eye flashed that odd squint.

  My thoughts raced beyond our little corner of the world, beyond that immediate moment. I saw the future, I did. I suspected that The Mule would find his peace later that evening. Later that evening, the police would discover a bottle of the finest bourbon laced with enough poison to knock off a battalion. They’d find traces of the poison in The Mule, too. Of course, they’d also find a note in his jacket or pants pocket. In Walter’s own words. In his own awkward hand. Would the cops come up with more than that? Would they find any direct trace of Von Runck? Would they discover that the vain, eccentric, anti-social Simeon Von Runck was really a pussycat, a diehard pragmatist of the sentimental order?

  I shared one more drink and one more conversation with The Mule. We didn’t have anything important to say, and we enjoyed saying it. When I left him at the bar, he looked worry-free. I could imagine it, hearing his big-barreled voice crowing, “Mr. Trouble? Never heard of him.”

  I wound my way through the party folk. Meandered to the door. I hesitated just before exiting and turned about. Peering through and around the crowd, I spotted Von Runck in a far corner. He stood as still as an owl, an owl with a drunken smirk. He’d been watching.

  I motioned to Von Runck with an index finger raised to the brim of my fedora. He returned the salute with a slight raise of his glass then faded back within himself. His face bowed downward to his drink, a crooked smile screwed across his lips. I left the penthouse, shutting the door behind me, real quiet.

  *****

  Ben Solomon lives and writes in Chicago. His nameless, retro-detective first came to life as part of a monthly, online series that launched in February 2013. Subscription information and more can be had by visiting http://thehardboileddetective.com/

  The First Time He Smelled Fresh Death

  by

  Michael W. Clark

  This might be the most unique story in this Sampler and is an excerpt from a novel that can be read as a standalone short story as well. Just read it to see why it’s not your average PI yarn.

  Marlow had to get a Kevlar vest from Jose. Marlow’s older one had been shot at just too many times to be reliable. Marlow wanted to talk his way through this first visit. Marlow wouldn’t bring in a weapon; a hunter like Denton would see it. It would cause trouble; guns always do. They had to go in unarmed, it was safer but the real world has always done whatever it wanted, no matter how much Marlow wished otherwise. They both needed some reasonable protection. Denton seemed to be the type to do whatever, shoot whatever he wanted. But just maybe Denton wouldn’t shoot a customer. Marlow had ordered the smallest size package of each raw food item using the Albert Phinney name sake. He left an e-mail on the Denton Ranch web-site stating he was sampling their products for freshness and his animal’s likeability. He and his colleague also wanted to come to the Ranch for a site visit. Maybe they could pick up the order personally in the next few days? Marlow was setting the stage for the Jackson recovery dog-knapping.

  Marlow was doing his first sit ups since being punched by the bullet. The fading bruise still hurt, but not the type of pain that indicated damage, more a reluctance for action. Marlow had all the lights out in his town house. He was naked and sweating. He turned over to do reverse sit ups, when his memory shifted to the first massacre he had seen. He was still a professor when it happened. He was stuck teaching Symbolic Logic. The Philosophy Chairman punished faculty members by making them teach the logic courses. Marlow always acted badly. If you acted badly, you taught Symbolic Logic. Ergo, Marlow always taught Symbolic Logic. Symbolic Logic was supposed to be a mathematically based representation of the human logical process. It never worked. Symbolic Logic was taught as an example of how difficult connecting the real world to the world of the mind truly was. The futility of it was the punishment. Students hated the entire endeavor and the teacher for being futile.

  In another flight of academic rivalry and in-fighting, the Philosophy and Mathematics Departments argued over who should be responsible for its teaching. Neither department wanted that responsibility and the accompanying student grief, so in a compromise, the Philosophy Department taught the class but the class was held in the Math Building Conference Room.

  Marlow attempted, tried really hard to make that Symbolic Logic class interesting. He would come to class in Spock ears, in a Professor Moriarty costume, an Albert Einstein wig and smile. This specific day he had on a Rene Descartes outfit. He felt like a transvestite with the high heeled shoes, powdered wig, and all, but that was the way they dressed back then. The walk across the campus to the Math Building was less than fun, but he still got laughs, which was his objective.

  When Marlow / Descartes got to the Math Dept. Conference Room, all eight of his students were standing quietly in the hallway. It was a very quiet bunch of students that term. Marlow asked them in a British accent Why they were all standing in the hallway?

  Someone finally mumbled. “Door’s locked.”

  “Sure there is someone in there?” Marlow had looked at his calendar. No classes were scheduled in there before his class.

  “Yeah.” Said one of the other students. “I got here about a half hour ago. I heard shouting, then some screaming. Been quiet for awhile.”

  “Must be a dissertation exam.” The Math department was known for being loud, not like the Philosophy Department. Marlow pulled the curled locks of his powdered wig back and put his ear against the door. It was cold hollow metal, hard to hear anything through it, still, no loud voices or talking was even slightly audible. Marlow didn’t have a key to any of the rooms in the Math Building, but Marlow had been picking locks since he was six years old. He stood so the students couldn’t see Rene Descartes commit breaking and entering. Marlow was getting rusty; it took him longer than he wanted to work the lock. When he opened the door, the smell was what first struck out at him. It was the first time he smelled fresh death. There were three blood soaked torsos on the conference room floor. Pieces of arms and legs were all mixed in together. Blood and feces and urine were splattered around the floor, walls and table. The unexpectedness of the scene perplexed Marlow, but he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. By the window stood a tall, thin white male with wild spiked hair; a Math Depart. Graduate Student named Burney Rasonow. He held a bloody hatchet. His front was covered with the same foul splatter as the room. He seemed calm and as quiet as a Philosophy student.

  Burney turned his head slowly to look at Marlow. “Rene Descartes?” Burney asked.

  Marlow nodded. “Mathematician, Philosopher extraordinaire.” Marlow held his arms open like a tap dancer’s finish.

  Burney tipped his head back slightly with recognition. “Maybe you’re wondering what happened?”

  “I think why is more appropriate of a question.” Marlow wasn’t sure what to do; talking seemed to be a better alternative to chopping.

  “That bastard Schwartz published my work and left my name off of the paper. Because, he said, it had been a class project and wasn’t mine to claim. They weren’t even going to allow me to put it in my thesis.” Burney twisted the hatchet in his hands. The blood was sticky and clotted, the twisting resounded with snaps and pops. “It was a year’s work. I don’t have enough money from my small stipend to eat regularly. I couldn’t do this for another year. I just couldn’t!” Burney hung his head and looked out the window. Students walked and hurried to class ri
ght below him. The sun was bright for a change.

  “Could you hand me the hatchet?” Marlow reached out slowly with his left hand. “We don’t want anyone else or you getting hurt.”

  “Oh yeah.” Burney said with a casual tone and handed the blood caked hatchet to Marlow / Descartes handle first.

  Marlow wished he had a handkerchief in his hand to cover the gore on the handle but he wanted to get the weapon away from Burney ASAP. Burney’s murderous rage had been exhausted, but now he had to live with his actions. Marlow turned back around, opened the door and told the quiet group of standing students. “Go get security.”

  “But you already unlocked the door. It’s our turn.” Said one of them.

  “Uhh!” Marlow shook his head. “Something has come up. Class is cancelled, but someone get security to come over.”

  “You mean the Campus Police?” Asked another of the students.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever they’re called. Get them here now!” Then Marlow shut the door.

  Burney hadn’t moved from the window. He just stood there. Marlow just stood there. What rational thing can you say about a massacre? All Marlow could think of was, “Fractions, fractions, I always hated fractions.” He didn’t say it out loud.

  Burney remained calm from then on and throughout his arrest and prosecution. Burney pleaded guilty and didn’t ask for leniency. His sentence was twenty years in a psychiatric treatment facility. All he said after the sentencing was. “Now I have time to think.”

  Up until that time Marlow’s definition of staying in shape had been not getting fat. This massacre changed his definition. He immediately started lifting weights and taking Aikido classes. He had never stopped. It also started his search for real good and real evil. Marlow wanted to reassure his own psyche that there were ethics in the world; that there was a code of behavior for humanity; that human actions were not conditional and open to interpretation. So far, after almost a decade and a half, he had not found such reassurance. All behaviors could be rationalized; especially killing. Humans always killed to survive. They just rationalize it away to make themselves feel better. These perpetual rationalizations also could be the basis of America’s desire to hide death in an institution; let professionals deal with it. Death and killing were messy businesses. To admit that killing and death were an important part of being human contradicted the So-Much-Like God assumption of Christian America.

  The Ubermensch, the Super-Animal that was man, so removed from nature, so much like an angel, seemly achieved by wishful thinking only. Marlow grew more skeptical of humanity’s distinctiveness and superiority as his years and experiences stacked up. Humanity survived all the disasters that Mother Nature threw at it simply for the same reason cockroaches survived for over three hundred million years; there are billions of them and they are everywhere on the planet Earth.

  Excerpt from the novel, The Ambivalence of Good and Evil.

  *****

  Michael W. Clark has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from U.C.L.A. He has been a research scientist as well as an entrepreneur. Along with these professional endeavors, he has been writing fiction and poetry since he was a teenager. He has four poems and nineteen short stories published in various print and electronic journals. He is the creator, editor and contributor for the fiction and non-fiction website, www.ahickshope.com. He presently lives in Santa Monica, CA.

  Voices

  by

  Nick Andreychuk

  How can I say no to a story by a Derringer Award winning writer? That’s easy… I can’t! So, here’s one of his best out of more than 300 short stories published…

  “It’s spooky, Harden, them voices I keep hearing.” Jet looked around the low-rent pizza joint, as though he suspected his ghosts had followed him there from home. My eyes reflexively did the same. Not much to see, though, just a loner munching on a greasy slice two tables down, and a teenage couple sucking face at a corner table.

  I humored his paranoia by leaning forward as I spoke. “You need a shrink, Jet, not a private eye.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not makin’ this shit up.”

  “Then call the Ghostbusters.” I sat back, smiling at my own joke.

  “Would ya just listen to what I’m sayin’? It ain’t really a ghost. I need you to find out who the hell it is.” He looked around suspiciously again. “They’re after my nest egg.”

  “Hmm.” I let the thought sink in. “How much would you say that’s worth these days?”

  Jet lowered his voice and leaned in close enough for me to feel his bad breath. “Let’s just say I have enough stashed away to buy a little place in the islands once I.A. gets off my ass.”

  I refrained from laughing out loud. Internal affairs wanted to lock Jim “the Jet” Jenkins up bad. They didn’t have any solid proof yet, but they knew all about his nest egg. So did I—millions of dollars stolen from drug busts. Even though we’d been partners, I’d never seen a penny of it. My choice, not his; but still, it’d cost me my job. Now he lived a life of leisure while I scraped by as a private investigator.

  “Maybe what you’re hearing is just a manifestation of your guilty conscience,” I said.

  Jet studied my face. He never could read me playing cards, so I didn’t know why he bothered. “C’mon,” he said, “that’s ridiculous. Besides, what do I have to feel guilty about, ‘cept maybe the fact that you never took your half? Here’s your chance to make up for your bad choices. Help me out here, and you’ll get some of it back.”

  I shifted uncomfortably on the cracked vinyl chair. “Yeah, well, regardless of where your money comes from, I have to admit I could use a little—hell, a lot—of it right now.” Rent, car payments, mortgage on my ex’s house, college tuitions, and a partridge in a pear tree—they all added up, and my financial statement was in the deep red. “Just how much of ‘my half’ are we talking about? If I find out why your imaginary friends have resurfaced after all these years, that is.”

  “Very funny. You’re a regular chip off the old blockhead. Unlike some losers I know, I had friends when I was a kid, so I didn’t need imaginary ones.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes.

  Jet put on his best car salesperson’s smile. “C’mon, what d’ya say, partner? You’ve always been there for me.”

  Yeah, and look where it got me.

  But, truth be told, he’d been there for me before too. Once...when it’d really counted. We’d been on an undercover op and some low-level yes-man had fingered me as a cop. He didn’t actually know that I was—the little weasel just didn’t like my climbing his shoulders to the boss’ ear. He wanted to get rid of me. Almost did...permanently. Jet took the guy out, then used some well-placed explosives to take care of anyone else that might’ve flapped their lips. Coincidentally, the deceased’s laundered cash burned up in the conflagration.

  “Partner?” Jet repeated.

  Funny how he’d avoided my ‘how much’ question. Odds were he really had no intention of parting with any significant portion of his nest egg. Jet’s the type of guy who’d collect the money from the gang at a restaurant, use a coupon to pay the bill at the cash register, then pocket the difference.

  I looked him right in the eye and said, “Okay, I’ll help you out.”

  Jet smiled the same denigrating smile he always did when I looked the other way. I could read his mind: ‘Same old reliable Harden.’

  That smile had to go. “Just so long’s you realize we’re not partners anymore, and I have bills to pay.”

  The smile vanished. He nodded, then said, “What’ll it run me?”

  “Hundred large.”

  After he picked his jaw up off the table, he chuckled. “Wow, I should’ve been a private dick all these years. That’s quite the pay rate.”

  “Oh, it’s just for special clients.”

  “Well, what if you turn up squat?”

  “If I don’t solve your case, then you’ll pay my book rate, like any other client.”

  “And how
much is that?”

  “I get your first born.”

  Jet picked up his cup and rattled the ice cubes around. “You might as well just take these.”

  Yeah, I knew what he meant. His wife Katrina was such a cold bitch; her offspring would be like ice. “Fifty bucks an hour plus expenses.”

  Jet looked relieved. “Done.”

  I pushed my sleeve back and looked at my watch.

  “What,” Jet said, “does the clock start now?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay then. Your days are numbered.”

  “Is that how it’s gonna be? I solve your problem, or else?”

  “What? No! That’s what the voices keep saying: ‘Your days are numbered.’ And, ‘You can’t escape.’ Shit like that.”

  “Oh.”

  No obvious clues in the threats. At least, not the way he relayed them. “So you only hear these voices at night, right?”

  “Only at 2:30AM.”

  “Has Katrina heard them?”

  “No, and when I woke her up the one time, the voices stopped and she freaked out on me—made me pay the entire next day for disturbing her ‘beauty’ sleep.”

  Okay then. “Have you ever been alone when you’ve heard them?”

  “You think Katrina’s helping them out?”

  “I’m thinking she snores funny, and you hear voices in the whistling of her nose.”

  Jet snorted derisively, making a funny noise with his own nose. “I can tell the difference between a chainsaw and the English language.”