Last Bender

CHAPTER NINETEEN           Finding an address in Spartan County is like trying to pick fleas off a schnauzer. Just when you think you’ve found your white ranch on Dylan Court you discover it’s a grey shingled two-story on Dylan Place you want, which is three miles that way taking a different battery of one-ways to [...]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN           Peter Lafferty still didn’t answer his phone. He and David Watts lived about fifty miles apart, Watts in Guernsey, Lafferty in Spartan County, both swank suburbs where upper management types rear litters of mallrats. They lie like barbells on either side of the city. Dead center is Five Joints, named for the [...]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Monozone was deep into panic. Beneath the zippered, gridlocked surface, under stockings, panty shields and contact lenses, inside the ironed shirt, the benzedrine suit jacket and gold crown, brushed into the rug, pinned up for the wig, tanned and henna’d, straightened, permed and dreadlocked panic surged and raged and churned and lifted till [...]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN           Every time I shut my eyes to sleep I saw exploding glass. Or felt the man’s blood rush down my fingers. I shook and chattered my teeth and soaked the sheets in sweat. At last I fell into a deep senseless sleep.           So senseless I failed to notice the alarm, the [...]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN           Wet wind blew against the windshield. We got out and walked, hands deep in P coats, through the smell of boat fuel and tar and the distressed cries of cattle punched to their knees in the abattoirs. Then more machinery, then the bells and horns of freighters cutting the rain and fog. [...]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN             At 9:15 Stronghole kicked the door in. That made it 100%, cause everything else was fucked up too. His shoulders were so big, he had to turn sideways to get in through the door. For two seconds we stared each other down, eye to eye, until he smiled. I didn’t move. [...]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN                 Bunuel may have been gone, but the giant hole he left behind was slow to close. Laraby would be pissed all right that he couldn’t be bought. I could hear it in my head. Standing up behind that desk turning purple. Asking, “Name me the cop who can’t be bought.”   [...]

CHAPTER TWELVE At first my eyes felt like smashed oysters. The soft inside all mixed up with the shell. Slivers of light noisily never aligned. My mouth full of blood and tooth chips. A gluey crust between my lips.             I was afraid to move. Afraid to feel the damage. I didn’t want to reach [...]

CHAPTER ELEVEN             On the way home I drank a half gallon of warm tonic water and twisted through the dial in search of something besides cooking shows. It took that and two aspirin dissolved beneath the torrents of bubbly drink to go over Clara Turback. She made some sort of a twisted sense. What [...]

CHAPTER TEN             Despite vigorous protest I left Linda a C note to pay my part of the check and drove uptown to twist Clara Turback’s arm. For the second time that day I found myself budging along with the creeps, the shysters, and the shaved freaks who push numbers and little guys around for [...]