15 hardboiled stories featuring Robb White's series character: not for the faint of heart nor the cozy mystery lover
Ex-cop Thomas Haftmann, formerly of Cleveland Homicide, works as a private investigator in the resort town of Jefferson-on-the-Lake. You will follow his cases in these 15 short neo-noirs. Among them are “The Kneeling Woman,” “No Escape, No Turning Back,” “The Riding Boy,” “The Slave Master’s Dungeon,” “Archangel’s Daughter,” “A Woman With Tea-Colored Eyes,” and “The Dog Returneth to His Vomit.” These have been collected from a variety of outstanding publications and blog sites, ranging from Powder Burn Flash to A Twist of Noir to Sex and Murder Magazine. Get ready to know Thomas Haftmann’s dark world of murder and madness.
Excerpt
The Dog Returneth to His Vomit
I told her why I was there in simple sentences with one-syllable words. She looked blank, and I suspected she was high. Leona Portis usually was. She asked me for the third time as if I had no better reason to be standing in muggy heat dripping sweat down my back and under my arms than to pull her leg.
“You jes’ lookin’ for a dog?”
“That’s all, Leona,” I said. “Some little girl is heartsick over it.”
“This missing dog, its name is Bruce?”
“Yes, Leona, his name is Bruce.”
“Kinda fuckin’ name is that for a dog?”
She masticated that information for a long while in her dope-ravaged brain. I had a pang of anguish when I recalled the young beauty she once had been but kept my smile pasted on. Private detective, concerned citizen, axe murderer, whatever—she wanted me gone because I was stepping all over her high.
“I don’t know nothin’ about no fuckin’ dog,” she said.
That was supposed to end our chat, but I’m used to dealing with all kinds of lowlifes of all ages and conditions. It’s an occupational necessity. In my cop days, I’d have tried another gambit, and then we’d go round-and-round on that for a while—she’d say this, I’d say that—and so it would go until either I wore her down or she conned me as she had in the past.
Instead, I hit her in the solar plexus.
She doubled up like a broken puppet. No one was hiding under the shrubbery pointing a video phone at me, so it would have been my word against hers if anything came of it and that wasn’t likely. Leona’s before-meth and after-meth mug shots are among the favorites that line the muster room walls at Christmas parties. She’s a station house joke. But I had no more time for this. Her husband was being released from the lockup right then and I didn’t want to deal with him too.
The punch would make her nauseated for a while but wouldn’t leave a mark. She was already pockmarked with needle tracks and livid bruises in clusters of yellow-black patches up and down her arms and legs. All courtesy of Danny Portis, owner of this shit heap trailer and Leona, too, purchased from the Mongols when she was a pretty teenaged runaway. That was before she discovered black tar heroin on the strip and hooking along our resort’s infamous strip known as “Little Minnesota” for the number of blondes, mostly dyed, who are attracted to quick tourist money in high summer. Danny’s a known associate of the Aryan Brotherhood—at least, so Danny says in the biker bars along the strip—but I never saw the triple-sixes and Shamrock tats of the Brand. He did a two-year bid in Lucasville on the Ohio River for cooking meth. Whenever he’s not bouncing Leona around his trailer, that’s pretty much Danny’s full-time job. In other words, he’s a permanent waste of human skin.
PI novel set in Manhattan during the 1980s when art galleries and model agencies were the two most glamorous businesses in the world. Dangerously well written.
Read Chapter 1 here: https://www.lit4u.com/art-and-beauty-chapter-1/
Literary Titan
PI novel set in Manhattan during the 1980s when art galleries and model agencies were the two most glamorous businesses in the world. Dangerously well written.
Read Chapter 1 here: https://www.lit4u.com/art-and-beauty-chapter-1/
Literary Titan
An eye-opening look into the world of human trafficking. Pilar thought she was destined to die until she met Becky. A fairy tale ending to this story with the help of Tess is called Justice. It was time for someone to hit back because the courts in S
