The Man Who Diked Logs

The rain pounding on the roof of Beigey's car sounded like a bad jazz drummer on his twelfth bump of coke; it was loud, arrhythmic and annoying. Of course, the mood he was in, Beigey would probably be annoyed if the spirit of Abraham Lincoln came by with a warm apple pie and a pint of twelve-year-old scotch.

Beigey was sitting in his car in a growing puddle, water still running off of him though he'd been out of the rain for a good five minutes. There was a full half-inch of water in his shoes and his pant legs were clinging to him like a Republican senator clings to his "values voters".

To top it off, the low profile he was meant to be keeping as he snooped on his client's wife meant that running the engine--and thus the heater--was a non-starter. So Beigey sat there shivering, cursing his non-water-resistant shoes and deeply regretting the choices that had lead to his career taking pictures of 42-year-old soon-to-be-divorcees giving sloppy blow jobs in trailer parks.

Speaking of said giver of blow jobs, as Beigey wiped the condensation from the inside of his windshield, he noticed her emerging from the double-wide across the road, a newspaper shielding her hair from the downpour. She ran to her car, opened the door, turned around and blew a kiss at the cro magnon man filling the trailer's doorway. Then she hopped in her car and pulled out. Beigey turned his key, counted to ten, hit the wipers and followed.

With the amount of rain hitting his windshield, Beigey might have had a malevolent toddler standing on the roof of his car, aiming a water cannon straight down. "It's a fucking cruel irony," Beigey thought, "that you only ever really think about the fact that you need to get new wipers when it's raining." The passenger-side wiper had split and was whipping one thin piece of rubber around like the world's worst rhythmic gymnast doing her shittiest floor show.

The rain was coming down thicker than 70s porn bush. Beigey couldn't see twenty feet in front of him. His target's tail-lights had been just ahead of him a moment ago; now, she could be anywhere.

The wheel jerked in Beigey's hand as he hit a large puddle. He kept the car going more or less straight, but decided to slow it down. Just as his foot hit the brake, the front wheel sank into another puddle, this one roughly the size of Lake Champlain. The car lurched like Beigey's stomach after consuming a liver and rocky-road sundae. In the time it took for him to ponder whether you're meant to steer into a skid or out of it, the car had left the road and slid down a hill, stopping only when it found a tree it liked and wrapped itself around it like cheese that you wrap around a raw hot dog and then you eat it because sometimes people get desperate, okay?

It took him a moment, but Beigey regained his senses and began taking stock of his situation. He couldn't move his leg; it appeared to be pinned. Water was now pouring into the car through the shattered windows. It was now getting deep enough to cover his ankle. He was going to drown in this piece of shit Datsun.

Unless. Unless he could tear enough branches off the wrecked tree to dam the water up. He gritted his teeth. "Good thing I've got crazy-good Lincoln Log experience," he thought.

Happy Birthday, Beigey!

The Simple Art of the Murderous Deal

José was aghast. He'd been aghast before, but he'd never been this kind of seriously huge ghast. 

The dame in his office was telling him a story too awful to be true. José poured himself a shot. He tossed the bourbon down his throat and then poured himself a second one because the first one had clearly been just a warm-up. The bourbon had made him a little less ghast and he was ready to proceed.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Clanton. Can we back up just a moment? This orange-faced creep..."

"Danald."

"Right. So Danald has threatened to have you thrown in jail...why?"

Mrs. Clanton's eyes turned moist, like that weird sponge you used to use at the post office to wet stamps. She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed her eyes. "That's the thing, Mr. Amador: he never has a coherent justification. He just keeps babbling and making up nonsense reasons."

"Right." The next part made as much sense to José as ghost pepper lubricant. "And, and he has people who listen to this horseshit?" José really felt like a third shot might be the ticket here.

"Many," Mrs. Clanton responded. "Enough that I am getting nervous."

"Mrs. Clanton, this guy sounds like the biggest piece of shit since King Kong ate tainted clams. What can I do to help?"

Mrs. Clanton's eyes turned steely, like a ball-peen hammer you'd use to crack someone's skull open. "Beat the crap out of him."

So José beat the crap out of Danald and felt much better about everything and slept like a baby. Seriously, if everybody could beat the crap out of this guy, the whole country would feel a lot better. Yup.

Happy Birthday, Beigey!

Nut Job on Noon Street

"A poem is rhyming words," the old man said to José.

José had been hesitant to take this seat on the bus, as there was a woman with a screaming baby in the seat on the other side of the gap from the man who'd just spoken. The thing was, though, that José's feet were killing him. He'd chased a murderer into a lightbulb factory two weeks ago as he'd wrapped up The Case of the Blah Blah Blah Something. (José had come up snake-eyes on titles as he'd sat down with his case files.)

As a result of the lightbulb factory chase, José had spent a good three hours in the E.R., having a squeaky-voiced intern pick shards out of his soles with a pair of tweezers. A pint of bourbon a day had, it turned out, not been the prescription he should have used and, two weeks later, his feet still hurt as bad as his heart had the time Mary Jane Kresky had turned down his request for a handie outside the junior prom.

Because of his pedal discomfort, José had decided that grabbing a bus was the best way to cover the four blocks between him and the spot where he was supposed to be meeting a guy with some information about Cheating Husband #3,795, who José was being paid to photograph with the 21-year-old phlebotomist his client believed he was presently banging.

Standing on the bus was torturous at the best of times. Invariably, you got stepped on, shoved and bashed in the crotch by whatever back-pack-wearing cretin decided that it was utterly crucial to the survival of the species that he/she needed to get past you immediately, your inability to move and the Laws of Physics notwithstanding. But standing on the bus when you were lugging a camera around and your feet felt like two exposed nerves slapping up against a dental drill was a whole other level of impossible.

So José sat. He saw the open seat and he took it, a mere pico-second ahead of some aged nun who smelt of lentils. He'd taken the seat despite the screaming baby, because he felt a little ear-drum rupturing was maybe preferable to having his feet explode below the ankle, which would take a good three inches off of his height.

He hadn't figured on any further misery-inducing factors. But here was Captain Chatty, offering his thoughts on the lyrical arts.

José gave an affirmative grunt, laden with enough terseness to clue in even the most determined gabster that he didn't wish to converse. The old man was undeterred.

"I keep a slice of baloney in my back pocket for emergencies," he informed the universe.

And that's when José experienced the moment that every urbanite dreads. That instant when you realize that you've sat down next to someone crazy.

There are signs, you see, that can mean multiple things. Perhaps the person is arguing with the passenger seated on their other side and not with the ghost of Charles Nelson Reilly. Perhaps they're moving in that strange way because they've got some odd, atonal orchestral piece on their headphones and not because that particular rhythmic pattern keeps the demons at bay. And you sit there, hoping against hope that the behavior that's set your hackles on edge rests on the non-crazy side of the Venn diagram. But then there's that one little extra thing that sends the whole thing cascading down the Hill of Lunacy. Maybe the person starts directing his rant at more than just one person. Maybe the person's movement shifts from "possible interpretive dance" to "bull getting ready to charge." When that happens, you need to make a determination: Is this person so batshit that I need to move the hell away from them? Or are they just kind of cooky and I can safely occupy this bonkers-adjacent space until my stop?

José's instinct told him to move. Then his feet told instinct to shut the hell up and that they would move only when there was absolutely no choice.

So he gritted his inner teeth and settled in for the long haul.

The old man looked right at José. "I once snatched a duck out of mid-air and ate him while he was still flapping," the old man boasted.

José looked harder at the racing form in his hand.

"The President has been replaced by a gay Plutonian and I have proof. Wanna see?"

José pretended to search out the window for street signs.

The old man leaned closer. His next words wafted moistly directly into José's ear canal: "Alpacas are gentle, considerate lovers."

This finally proved too much for José. He pulled the "stop" cord, deftly elbowed the old man in the throat and hopped off the bus. As his feet began to dully throb, he thought, not for the first time, "Man, it would be so nice if I could just photograph people cheating on their spouses from my office."

Happy Birthday, Beigey!

Buzz-Killer in the Rain

José wiped the rain from his eyes and tried to pick out which damp blur down the block was carrying a handgun. The possible concussion, along with the one bite he'd taken of the cookie, was making concentration just a little bit harder. "To hell with that," he thought. "I'm not letting this son of a bitch get away. It's so weird that people think of vanilla as an absence of flavor when it's a flavor of it's own. Oh, right. The gunman."

José had been picking up his weekly supply of edibles from Safflower and Rainbow's Hempatorium when he'd noticed the squidgy guy jittering things up by the hacky-sack display. Safflower was ringing up José's usual package of Budder, assortment of Ganja-Pops and a baker's dozen of Kush Krispy treats. Rainbow had treated José to a complimentary Hazy-o sandwich cookie when Captain Twitchy made his move.

First, he did his best to turn José's skull from convex to concave with the butt of his gun, which dropped José to the floor like a sack of wet cat turds. Then he reached across the counter and snatched the cash from the register. Safflower made a grab for him--most likely while saying, "Dude!" or something similar; José was too busy bleeding from his scalp to notice--and caught a bullet in her shoulder in response. The guy raced to the door like a sinister, armed gazelle. And he was gone.

Which was why José was running flat-out in the drizzle, chasing after a guy who'd already shown that he found shooting people morally acceptable. Normally, this level of exertion/danger would come with a paycheck attached. This time, José was doing it gratis.

He'd first walked into the Hempatorium six months ago, when a bulging disk sent him scrambling for a way to be able to lie down without simultaneously shitting his pants. José had never been much for the chronic. He'd always preferred an intoxicant that came with a distinct possibility of vomiting.

Safflower and Rainbow had showed him that weed could get him just as plowed as bourbon, but not make him take a swing at every third person he saw. They'd introduced him to pot that you eat, which meant he never had to slow up on his cigarette smoking. But most importantly, they'd showed him that not every hippie deserved to be drown in a bathtub filled with patchouli.

José had been a regular at the store ever since. He'd grown very fond of Safflower and Rainbow and they'd taken a shine to him as well. In fact, they'd given him his first hippie nickname, "Windshear." José had no idea what the hell that was meant to convey, but he'd been utterly baked when they did it, so he'd been touched.

His rage that this prick shot a friend of his helped José focus on staying on the guy's tail instead of pursuing the question of whether the rain that was falling on him right now maybe was once part of the river that carried Washington across the Delaware. The water cycle takes those droplets everywhere, man. No! The son of a bitch ducked down that alley. Get your ass in gear!

The gunman tripped and went skidding in the filth on his chest. José was nearly on him now. If he had a utility belt like Batman, he could have thrown some kind of bola to entangle the guy and keep him on the ground. How did Batman manage to keep all that shit on one little belt? Never mind that! The bastard was about to get up.

As the guy raised himself to his knee, José leapt at him and knocked him back down. "Why is Dave Brubeck my groove!?! Answer me, motherfucker!"

The gunman had no response to that. José cuffed him and dragged him back to the Hempatorium to wait for the cops. The EMTs were loading Safflower into the ambulance when José and the scumbag arrived. Safflower looked like she'd gained a bullet's-worth of weight, but nobody acted like she was going to croak.

José called to her. "Safflower!"

The EMTs paused in their loading as Safflower lifted the oxygen mask from her face and responded, "What, man?"

José looked at her solemnly. "I forget what I was going to say."

Happy Birthday, Beigey!

Trouble Is My Business License

Jose checked over his shoulder. Two big, uniformed guys. Guns. Hands near their holsters. They hadn’t been there before Jose had raised his voice at the clerk.

Jose threw a little water on his internal fire. He attempted something approximating a smile to the demon-creature on the other side of the window. She stared back at him through glasses as thick as hockey rink ice and showed zero sign of returning even the strained politeness.

“Listen,” Jose said, “I apologize for raising my voice. I just tend to get a little loud when I’m being anally violated.”

“Excuse me?” said the clerk.

“You’re forgiven,” said Jose. “Now, could you please explain to me how--when I sent in the renewal for my business license a good two weeks before the deadline--it’s possible that my license has lapsed?”

The clerk yawned in a way that managed to be snippy and condescending in equal measure, clacked her bright red fingernails on the keyboard and asked, “I’m sorry, sir. What was your business, again?”

“I’m a private detective,” said Jose, for the fourth time, each time through increasingly gritted teeth.

“Is that a real job?” the clerk said with a smirk Jose desperately wanted to wipe off with a bazooka.

“It is,” Jose said.

“Well, there are real cowboys, I guess, so why not this?” Jose’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the counter so hard the marble threatened to crack.

“Listen, miss, once again, I apologize for raising my voice, but you have to understand that, without that license, I cannot operate my business, which means that I cannot take money from my clients, which means their cases will go somewhere else.”

The clerk shrugged, a move which made Jose wish that he could nail her shoulders down so that it could never be repeated.

Jose took out his emotional spatula and scraped up the very last, micro-thin layer of patience left in his being. “Miss,” he said through a jaw clenched enough to turn coal into diamonds, “I would like to speak with your supervisor, please.”

“My supervisor is off today,” said the clerk with the tiniest of wicked gleams in her eyes.

Jose felt the rage beginning to well up within him, like the stomach contents of a poor bastard who just ate a whole plate full of tainted clams. “Is he,” Jose managed.

“She,” said the clerk as what seemed to be a triumphant little shiver passed through her body. “So…not your lucky day, I guess.”

Jose thought, “I am about to do something I will almost certainly regret mere seconds after I do it.” He took a deep breath, but it did absolutely no good whatsoever. “You trucking punt!” he yelled, or words with a similar sound. The two security guards made a move. Jose sent his foot into the closer one’s balls.

The other guy dodged a roundhouse left, was re-joined quickly by his pal and the two of them wrenched Jose’s arms into positions arms were not meant to be in and frog-marched him down the hall and through the lobby.

It was only as Jose was tossed ungently down some cruelly hard and sharp-edged stairs that an explanation for this occurred to him: the Broemeling case. Councilman Broemeling’s wife had hired Jose to find out who the councilman was playing “hide the ordinance” with after hours in council chambers. This was the week Jose had caught a big break in the case. He was a day or two away from nailing the councilman’s junk to the wall.

A city councilman would have enough juice to throw a wrench in someone’s business licensing. Maybe Jose and his two friends, Fist and Rage, should pay the councilman a visit.

Happy Birthday, Beigey!

A Corpse Too Far

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Jose’s head was pounding, like a kangaroo was stomping a thousand cockroaches to death inside his skull.  Pounding so loud, he could actually hear it.

Usually, it took a bottle of gin or a cross-country flight next to a chatty evangelical to make Jose’s head hurt like this, but he didn’t remember coming within a thousand yards of either recently.  In fact, speaking of memory, Jose was having a little trouble remembering much of anything that would explain the pounding.

Adding to his problems, it was pitch black and there was some sticky dampness in the vicinity of his head. 

Upon further assessment, Jose discovered that the darkness was due to the closure of his eyes.  Once he’d opened them, though, he immediately regretted it.  If he’d had access to a time machine, he’d definitely have traveled back to that happy period of time when his eyes had been shut.

The dampness he’d been feeling was due to the fact that he’d been lying in a pool of blood.  “Pool” was an understatement.  There was enough blood on the floor to fill Lake Superior, or, at the very least, two Eries and a Champlain.

Given the level of his cranial discomfort, Jose thought for a moment that the blood might have poured forth from this own skull.  That notion was instantly dispelled when he saw the old man lying on the bed and the gaping head wound the man was sporting.

Adding to veritable nightly news broadcast of information that the opening of his eyes had brought with it, Jose realized that the pounding was coming not solely from his own brain, but also from the door on the other side of the room.

The thing that really brought this home was the realization that a pounding head rarely bellows, “Policia!  Policia!  Abre la puerta!”

The reality of the situation slammed into Jose’s head with the force of a pageant mother slapping her daughter.  The voice on the other side of the door was hollering in Spanish because he was in Guadalajara.  He was in Guadalajara because he’d traced the missing father of his gorgeous blonde client here.  He was tracing the missing father of a gorgeous blonde because that was the sort of thing private detectives do and because he was hoping to get the chance to play a few rounds of Naked Yahtzee with her after he’d found her daddy.

Given the large, drippy hole in the head of said father, Jose was guessing that a Naked Yahtzee session was a long shot.  Of more immediate concern was what would happen if the men on the other side of the door were to find him there when they eventually gained entry.

Jose made a quick assessment of his options.  None of them seemed even as appealing as a handjob from a Teamster. 

He could hide in the closet.  Which would work, but only if the city of Guadalajara routinely employed lobotomized cops.  He could try to run past the police when they opened the door and hope he’d be too fast for them to see.  Seeing as how he lacked superpowers, that one seemed tricky.

Which left the window. 

Jose crossed the room, tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.  He peeked his head over the ledge and nearly puked on the pigeon that was sitting there.  The room was eight floors up, which was not as bad a fall as, say, thirty floors, but nowhere near as survivable as a trip through a ground-floor window would be.  Jose made a mental note to only trace missing people to first-floor rooms from now on.

The hotel pool looked to be maybe two yards from the base of the building, but Jose had usually shown up drunk to his high school physics class, so he had no idea if he’d be able to jump far enough.

Now there were added voices in the hall.  Jose’s Spanish was rusty, so this new conversation could be the police demanding that the manager unlock the door with his key or two people arguing over a coconut cream pie recipe.

Either way, his time was running out. 

Jose took a few deep breaths, heaved himself up onto the ledge, said a silent prayer to Thor, God of Thunder and leapt out into the warm Guadalajara night.

Happy Birthday, Beigey!

The High Widow

Jose knocked back the shot the way a sprinter takes those first steps off of the starting blocks: with purpose and determination. He was going to get drunk or die trying. Not that he’d ever heard of anyone who’d died trying to get drunk. Maybe. If you count that guy in Tukwilla who’d accidentally slit his jugular with a broken bottle of Thunderbird, then yeah, sure.

But Jose had enough experience getting alcohol from bottles into his gullet that he wasn’t worried about any kind of mishap. And he didn’t foresee any complications that might prevent him from getting lit. Good and lit. Lit like a klieg light at the premiere of the movie “Beigey Gets Drunk.”

He called the bartender over. “Listen, Jonesy,” he said, slapping a hundred dollar bill on the bar like a man killing a very expensive mosquito, “I don’t want this shot glass empty for more than five seconds at a time, hear me?”

Jonesy knew he meant business. “You got it, Beigey.”

He refilled the glass. Jose emptied it. This happened a few more times without much variation.

A dame sat on the stool next to Jose and watched, impressed, as he downed the shot like a lion downs an old, fat water buffalo.

“My,” said the dame, lighting a cigarette in that sexy way that makes a man forget about the word “carcinogens”, “we certainly are in a hurry to get sauced, aren’t we?”

“If you’re going to do something, why waste time?” Jose shot back and then belched in a way that was actually kind of charming.

The dame had two shots in front of her. She slid one in Jose’s direction. “Well, let me help you speed yourself along, then, Mr. …”

Jose took the proffered drink. “Amador. Jose Amador. And thank you.”

“You're welcome, Mr. Amador.” The dame said. She gave him a slight nod of her head as she put the shot glass to her ruby red lips and took the alcohol into her mouth in a way that made Jose wonder if she took other things into her mouth. Y’know, like penises.

She put the shot glass back on the bar and then it was Jose’s turn. He tossed the liquor back and then looked at the dame. She looked like a gal who’d been around the block. But a block in a good neighborhood. No tattoo parlors or OTBs on her block.

Parked on top of some stellar cheek bones were blue-grey eyes that punched a hole in the back of a man’s head. Her face was framed by jet-black hair with one defiant streak of white; just enough to say, “I’m not a college girl anymore, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still experiment with bisexuality.”

Jose was just pondering his next move when three things hit him. The first was the realization that he’d met this particular dame before. The second was the disturbing feeling that he was a whole lot drunker than eight puny shots should’ve made him. The third was the floor.

Jose woke up feeling like the Rockettes had done two matinees on his skull. An attempt to wipe the vomit off his chin brought with it the revelation that his hands were tied. That was never a good sign.

He opened his eyes to find himself in one of those tiny, dimly-lit rooms he hated so much. Behind him, he could hear an inhalation of breath and thin paper crackling as it burned. Someone had a cigarette and was not sharing. The sign of an inconsiderate kidnapper.

When the smoke was blown in his direction, though, it was definitely not tobacco he was smelling.

“Okay, I give,” said Jose. “What the hell did I do to piss of the Jamaican mafia?”

“This isn’t business, Mr. Amador. It’s personal.” Her voice slid into his ear like a knife wrapped in velvet.

“Mrs. Flart, wasn’t it?”

The dame stepped around the chair and stood in front of him. The eyes were a touch blood-shot now, but still just as icy.

“That’s right, Mr Amador. I’m glad you remember. Do you also remember how you killed my husband?”

“Well, Mrs. Flart, I’m going to go ahead and assume that that grass you’re smoking has done more damage to your brain cells than my scotch has done to mine. Because my recollection is that Johnny died at the hands of his cell mate after he declined an invitation to toss said cell mate’s salad.”

“You’re partially correct, Mr. Amador, but you’re conveniently omitting the fact that Johnny would not have been in the aforementioned cell if you hadn’t gotten him arrested.”

“I’ve always lived by the rule that people who don’t want to be forced to toss someone’s salad shouldn’t kill their business partners, Mrs. Flart.”

“That’s a good rule, Mr. Amador. I’ve got another rule in which you might be interested.”

“Do share, Mrs. Flart.”

“My rule goes something like this: detectives who stick their nose where it doesn’t belong deserve to be shot in the head.” She pulled a .22 out of her purse, by way of illustration.

“I’d say that’s less of a rule and more of a point of view, Mrs. Flart.”

The Widow Flart brought a fresh match up to the joint in her gloved fingers and took another hit.

“Be that as it may, Mr. Amador,” the words left her mouth accompanied by a good deal of pungent smoke, “I’m going to go ahead and kill you.”

The beginnings of an idea touched down in Jose’s mind. As he had nothing else going, he picked it up and ran with it.

“That’s fine, Mrs. Flart. But before I go, could I ask one thing?”

“You can ask.”

“Do you have a Ho-Ho?”

“A Ho-Ho?”

“That’s right, Mrs. Flart. A Ho-Ho. Moist chocolate cake and fluffy whipped cream, rolled up together and coated in chocolate. One of those would really hit the spot right now, don’t you think?”

Did Jose detect the slightest of wavers in the widow’s cool steel gaze? He pressed ahead.

“I could really go for that or maybe a pizza. Chewy crust with some garlicky, basil-tinged sauce and nice, fresh mozzarella melted in pools all over.”

He could see the widow’s jaw working involuntarily. She licked her lips.

“Or maybe there’s a place around here to get some good fries. Nothing like a basket of hot, salty fries, fresh out of the fryer, maybe with a little malt vinegar sprinkled on top.”

The gun was still pointed at Jose, but the hand not holding a gun was wiping drool away from the widow’s mouth. “Yes. That all sounds pretty good. I think I actually want a milkshake. But, hey man, I’m still going to shoot you. Just, I think maybe I’ll run next door and get some onion rings first. I’ll be right back.”

With that, the widow ducked out of the room, then came back in and took five minutes to find her wallet.

When she’d left the room a second time, Jose jumped into action.

“Ten minutes, tops, to get these handcuffs off,” he thought. He smiled. “I can do it in four.”

Happy Birthday, Beigey!