Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode two hundred and ninety-eight.
Tonight we present Mulligan Smith in Lingering, Part 1 of 1
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by the Hollywood Outsider Podcast.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight our private investigator, Mulligan Smith, conducts an unpleasant interview with a youthful caretaker.
Mulligan Smith in Lingering, Part 1 of 1
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
The conversation had fallen into a lull, and Mulligan could find little more to do than stare at the fake-wood pattern of the table top.
Finally, after brushing back a loose strand of dirty blond hair, the girl said, “I remember the first time he didn’t come back when he said he would.”
Smith nodded, not wanting to slow the momentum of her telling.
“I mean, he’d been taking his time more and more. When Mom got sick, we couldn’t afford like a home or anything, so she just stayed at the house. I don’t even know what it was like before then, I was too small. In the beginning Dad was working long days in a factory – he was making, like, plastic riot gear stuff? The thing is, the worse she got, the the more he disappeared.”
“One night, a couple years in, when she really couldn’t get up anymore, she managed to twist herself into lying on top of the tube for her pee-bag, and I wasn’t able to roll her over. She was kind of panicking – she was still mostly speaking then – and it got me upset, and I was trying to shove her over, but I wasn’t strong enough do it.
“He finally showed the next morning. I met him at the door when I heard the key scraping at the lock, but he kept muttering about going to bed. It took a big fight to convince him it needed to be done, but together we managed to get Mom moved.
“For a long while after I would sit in the chair beside Mom for hours, worrying that it was going to happen again, or that some other emergency was going to come up and I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
“That was when I was little though, like eleven or something.
“By fourteen, I was handling everything. I wasn’t seeing Dad often, and – it was like one of those meth warning posters, you know? I’d see him once every couple of weeks, and he’d be thinner, his eyes would be cloudier.
“He was working on and off, but I never knew where we’d get the money to cover the month’s bills. I would basically wait till he was passed out in his room, then hook a wad of cash from his wallet and stash it for food, which, frankly, he’d eventually eat most of when he decided to stumble in after a binge.
“I did some online stuff, filling out surveys and work from home crap, but it barely made anything, and we only had free dial-up, meaning we were screwed whenever the phone company unplugged us. That’s usually when I’d have to pawn something. At least I knew a place that didn’t look at Mom’s ID and point out that I wasn’t thirty-five, but if Mom hadn’t inherited the house I think we would have been homeless pretty early on.
“Anyhow, like I was saying, I woke one night, when I was fourteen, and there he was with his pants around his ankles. I mean, I shared the same frigging room with her! That wasn’t what pissed me off the most, though. He was talking to himself – I mean, trying to woo her, I guess – but by then the best she could do was grunt yes or no, and she was definitely making her no sound.”
The teen paused, gritting her teeth, and Smith did his best to nod comfortingly. Noting the emotional exchange, the uniformed man at the door raised a brow at the pair, but the private investigator simply shrugged in reply.
Finally, the girl continued.
“Mom’s cane was by the dresser. It was from the early days of her illness, when we’d had a bit of extra money for medical stuff, and even after it was obvious she wasn’t going to be walking again I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.
“He was standing there in the dark, rocking gently back and forth like he was on a moving boat, and he was having trouble getting Mom’s leg’s sorted. I kept seeing flashes of white skin in the light that came through the curtain crack, and his muttering just went on and on, talking about how he was going to “fix her once he got her fixed.””
“I lost it. I grabbed the cane by the bottom of the shaft and swung like it was the World Series. Caught him on the ear. The next day, across his temple, you could still see the mark from where the handle went from metal to padding.
“He hit me back, but he was so high it was like being beaten by one of those big plastic dancing men you see on top of gas stations – you know, the ones that stand in the wind and wiggle around? Anyway, I got him out of the room.
“I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, I just sat on the lip of Mom’s bed turning the cane around in my hands, feeling for all its little cool spots.
“It was a few days later that he stole all Mom’s meds to sell.
“I tried the law, I tried going through the courts, but it was impossible. After the first time I called the cops he was smart enough not to bring his meth home, and he only came back when he needed money, or food, or a good night’s sleep.
“Social Services came around once, but he managed to convince them that I was just going through a hard phase in life, with Mom being in the condition she was, and his being out of work and supposedly spending long days looking for a job. The lady ended up giving me almost like a speech about not crying wolf, and how I should appreciate what I had.
“When she left he told me that, if I ever tried anything like it again, he’d have me removed from the house and he’d take care of Mom himself.
“He randomly started slapping me then. He wasn’t my Dad anymore, the drugs had turned him into some sort of angry lizard person. All knuckles and unpredictability.
“After that I knew I was on my own.
“I mean, maybe there was another solution, but I was – I was so frustrated, so scared, so frigging exhausted. I felt ninety. I knew Mom didn’t have long left, and I just wanted her to have some peace.
“She was locked in there, which was the saddest part. I’d read to her – she was really into, you know, books with castles and magic and justice? I mean, we both were. I still am, I guess, but it’s impossible to find anything decent in here. Anyhow, she’d try and say stuff and it would just make her mad that she couldn’t talk properly, but her eyes – her eyes were always so warm and thankful and wet like she was trying to cry but her body was too broken to let her.”
If Mulligan had not been a man who paid his bills with his observations,he would have missed the practiced motion that casually wiped away the damp on her cheek.
“I looked it up on the internet,” said the girl. “Knowing which kind was best, and how much it would take, was a lot easier to understand than some of the medical articles I had to plow through for Mom. Buying helium wasn’t much of a problem, and we already had an oven bag and the tubing. I was pretty used to dealing with that sort of business by then, so it almost felt like I was just administering another type of meds when I tucked it over his head.
“It was exactly like I’d read – I mean, I wasn’t exactly using it for suicide like it’s supposed to be, but there was no struggle or anything, no coughing. He just stopped snoring eventually. Though, I think he was so stoned I’m not sure he could have gotten up if he happened to noticed I was killing him.
“I watched his warm breath build up on the inside of the bag, then, when it stopped, I removed everything, walked four blocks, and chucked it all in a dumpster. It didn’t feel much different than having to empty Mom’s pee-bag.
”One of the reasons the euthanasia folks like that way of doing it is because it’s so hard to trace.I talked to a couple of the EMS people and a police officer, but I guess drug testing had them convinced he’d just overdosed. I kept expecting to be hauled off, that everything was finally over, but nothing happened.
“Mom passed eight months later. I was holding her at the time.
““I turned myself in for murder later that day. I hadn’t even called 911 about her body yet.
“I had no money and I didn’t trust the social services people, so I don’t know what other option I had.”
Smith looked to his left, his gaze sweeping across the cream-coloured cafeteria that acted as the Capital City Juvenile Detention Center’s visitation area.
“At least I get to go to school in here,” the girl finished.
Mulligan closed the notebook he’d kept on hand, the fresh page still unmarked.
“I think my client is just going to have to accept the loss of his heirloom,” he said. “It’s pretty clear your dad smoked or injected whatever it was worth. I guess I could give that pawn shop you mentioned a try, maybe the owner was allowing trade from a minor because he knew your pops and how hard up you were.
“Now, uh, since your parole officer has cleared me on the list, I may as well use the access, right? Most of those shops have a pretty decent selection of books – I’ll grab you a couple of slabs of swords and sorcery.”
The girl let her tears flow then, and she did not hide them.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.
– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.
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Hello, and welcome to FlashCast 74.
Prepare yourself for: Beer pong on demand, the British royal vampires, robot combat, generic elves, and The Murder Plague.
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Huge thanks to:
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[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC73PHdQX04″]
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Backroom Plots:
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Also, many thanks, as always, Retro Jim, of RelicRadio.com for hosting FlashPulp.com and the wiki!
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If you have comments, questions or suggestions, you can find us at https://flashpulp.com, or email us text/mp3s to comments@flashpulp.com.
FlashCast is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
In honour of Movember, today’s TCT contains a couple of tales regarding an entirely different sort of stash.
First up we have Jose Santiago, who really should have shook a leg when he saw the police coming – alas, he felt himself too clever. From The HuffPo:
Police in Wilmington, Del., arrested Jose Santiago on Friday after responding to a 911 call for a disorderly subject. When officials arrived on the scene, they saw Santiago, 51, in the middle of the street, NBCPhiladelphia.com reported.
Santiago seemed to be intoxicated and was yelling obscenities, but was taken into custody without incident, Officer Mike Ivey told Delaware Online.
Upon booking, the cops discovered Santiago had several outstanding arrest warrants. He also allegedly had 2.5 grams of crack cocaine and 2.8 grams of marijuana hidden inside his prosthetic leg, the Associated Press reported.
At least, however, the drugs in question were arguably Santiago’s own – Kent Wycliffe Easter, 38, and Jill Bjorkholm Easter, 39, went out on a different sort of limb. From NBC News:
The couple hatched the plot to retaliate against the [elementary school] volunteer who they believe was not properly supervising their son, prosecutors said.
The couple is accused of planting a bag of Vicodin, Percocet, marijuana, and a used marijuana pipe behind the driver’s seat of the woman’s unlocked vehicle and then calling police to report she was driving erratically and had drugs, the indictment said.
“(Kent Easter) is accused of telling the dispatcher that he was a concerned parent who had witnessed an erratic driver park at the elementary school,” the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. “He is accused of claiming to have witnessed Jane Doe, whom he identified by name, hide a bag of drugs behind her driver’s seat in her car.”
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode two hundred and ninety-seven.
Tonight we present The Murder Plague: Fencing, Part 3 of 3
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3)
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by Nutty Bites.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, Harm Carter meets his theoretically murderous neighbour.
The Murder Plague: Fencing, Part 3 of 3
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
She was maybe forty, with hair that had likely been short-cropped a few weeks previous, but was hanging shaggily across her brow by the time she pushed open the shed’s green doors.
She moved along the lawn like a cat, keeping tight to the fence and stopping to test the air whenever an unexpected noise ricocheted down our little alley of backyards.
I was sure she was The Carpenter.
My eyes ached from a lack of sleep, and my legs were stiff from my all-night vigil, but I felt vindicated somehow. Here was a clever someone deep in their homicidal delusion, and I was staying one step ahead. Nevermind that I hadn’t thought much of the shack before she’d stepped from it, I’d known someone would appear by dawn and here she was.
The woman did not check on the now no-doubt-dead fellow at the pool’s bottom, however. No, instead she hustled to my fence – our shared fence – and hopped over. It was as she made the jump that I realized there was a gun belt on her hip.
She paused when she discovered the patio entrance barricaded, but only long enough to slip in through a basement window that I hadn’t realized was open.
Moments later a bellowing hello ascended from the depths, and continued to be repeated throughout the ground floor.
My mind raced. Had The Carpenter seen me at my lookout? Perhaps someone so ingenious couldn’t actually be mad – perhaps she was sane, just as I considered myself, and she hoped to form some sort of alliance.
The shouting stopped as she mounted the flight to the second story, and I guessed that she’d considered that any further yelling would only unnecessarily give away her approach – that if I was going to answer, I would have by then.
Still, she came, and I grew increasingly certain she knew exactly where I was.
There was no place to hide. The bed was a child’s, and too low to the ground to fully cover me. The closet was crammed tight with brightly coloured craft-making kits and forgotten halloween costumes. Worse, if she did happen to be insane, neither spot would provide give me a chance to swing my blade in my defense.
In the end, when she entered, I already had my hands raised and my open palms clearly showing.
Now, you must understand that the infection is a self-reinforcing idea. You’re paranoid about appearing paranoid, so you do your best to act normal – except, of course, that there’s a murderous apocalypse outside your door and you probably SHOULD seem rather nervous.
I said, “well, hello.”
“Oh, uh, hi,’ she replied.
The astonishment on her face caught me off guard: Didn’t she know I was waiting?
In truth, misunderstood motives were the heart of the sickness.
Her fingers were on her gun belt, but I think my demeanour slowed her. Clearly I was hiding an unexpected surprise if I was so calm about being exposed, right?
I was no longer guessing at her intentions, however, as my corrupted brain had moved into a dance for survival. It decided flattery was my best option for extracting information.
“I’ve been observing your work,” I said, “you’ve got a brilliant set up over there. It was like watching a magic trick unfold when that fellow disappeared.”
Almost as if to underline the statement, the shattered ruin lying in the dark at the bottom of the pool began screaming again. I suppose the pain must have caused him to black out for a time.
The assumed Carpenter raised a brow at me. Her conversational tone was punctuated by the muffled pleading from across the way.
“It isn’t mine, actually,” she said. “Barry and Rhonda were always waiting for the end of the world, and I guess they finally got it. Rhonda vanished a couple days into their construction efforts, but Barry managed to last a few weeks before accidentally impaling himself in the middle of the night with a swinging pickaxe-thing he’d rigged above his bedroom door.
“Honestly, I was just over there collecting some of their food stash when I noticed you in my house. I knew the shed’s shotgun had already been set off, so I pushed the corpse all the way inside and hid. He didn’t smell terribly good, but he had a can of tuna in his pocket which made for a nice snack.”
I hadn’t recognized her from the scattered family photos that now seemed to stare at me. Her face had hardened and her stomach was now taut.
Worse, The Carpenter had been dead all along. As if the ghost of his madness, only his traps had lingered.
In retrospect, I think she was trying to goad me into an excursion. Maybe her confidence was up due to my raised hands. Maybe she hoped that I would head in and engage another of the pitfalls, thus making her scavenging that much easier.
Maybe it’s just tempting to make myself believe there was a threat.
“Frankly,” she continued, “I thought it was you who’d fallen into the Mortenson’s swimming hole. That’s why I came back.”
Whatever the case, there was no ulterior motive, no clever plan that had brought her directly to my perch – it wasn’t crazed genius, it was simply bad luck.
She leaned towards the window to peer at the dying man’s premature burial, and her touch slipped briefly from her pistol’s grip.
The bread knife I’d found in the kitchen dropped cleanly from my left shirt sleeve.
Was she infected? Likely, but I didn’t give her the chance to prove it.
Then the house was mine.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.
– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.
Today’s True Crime Tuesday comes bearing strange gifts.
For example, our first story demonstrates that it takes a special kind of fetish to haul folks into illegal waters. The Wisconsin State Journal reports:
Cedarburg police believe they have identified the man who has been impersonating a reporter and contacting female high school athletes in Wisconsin, […] Gary Medrow, 68, of the Milwaukee suburb of Greenfield, has multiple convictions over the past 30 years of improper use of a telephone and impersonating a police officer, according to police and court records. On Friday, Medrow was charged in Ozaukee County Circuit Court with two counts each of disorderly conduct and unlawful use of a phone.
This may seem like a straight forward, if creepy, case, and you may even be wondering how it ranked for inclusion in this TCT – please allow me to, er, lift some of the mystery:
In 1997, Medrow was convicted […] of unlawful use of a telephone and impersonating a police officer. In that case he made a collect call from the Milwaukee House of Corrections, said he was investigating a car crash and asked a Marshall woman if she could carry other women.
A 1998 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story that profiled Medrow, who at one time was a patient at Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, said Medrow had a fetish for “calling women and trying to persuade them to lift other women and carry them around.”
About two weeks ago, the caller called the daughter of Rob Hernandez, an assistant sports editor at the Wisconsin State Journal. The man indicated he wanted a photo of the Verona girls golf team in a pyramid or on one another’s shoulders, asked for the names of teammates and wanted to know their heights.
Mr. Medrow’s isn’t, however, the strangest load I’ve recently seen carried in the news – from Express.co.uk:
TEN sad-looking Shetland ponies were found in a night-mare position after astonished traffic cops stopped a dodgy-looking white van at a service station.
How did the pony-crammers attempt to explain their unlikely cargo? Did they claim to be transportation managers for some upcoming Hobbit-related promo event?
Neigh.
In an even more absurd twist, the drivers – on their way to Romania when they were stopped at Offenbach, Germany – claimed they’d had no idea they had livestock on board.
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode two hundred and ninety-six.
Tonight we present The Murder Plague: Fencing, Part 2 of 3
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3)
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp296.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)
This week’s episodes are brought to you by Nutty Bites.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, Harm Carter finds a home for himself amongst the infected maniacs.
The Murder Plague: Fencing, Part 2 of 3
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
I could have helped. I would have, probably, if I was in my right mind.
The doctors tell you about your lack of culpability, but Hitchcock’s doesn’t touch your memory. You dream of things you’ve done, details you’ve forgotten for years, and there are, of course, plenty of things you remember always; the feeling of resistance against the blade, or the smack of the hammer, or the simple thud of a trap being sprung.
You never escape the memory of the rush of victory against a hated enemy – even if that enemy is only the cancer patient grandmother from next door.
Sometimes you even dream that your delusions were true.
Now – when I was a boy we’d start our ball games with one lad tossing another a bat. They’d then hand-over-hand the handle till the winner grabbed the top. Meeting someone during the plague was like that, but coming out on top usually meant a knife in the other fellow
That’s how the following period felt in my mind: A series of escalations, with the opening toss of the bat being the chance revealing of the pool.
It was like staring at my opponent’s shadow and trying to guess what they looked like. I didn’t know if it was a man or woman, but I knew they were crafty. It must have taken quite a bit of work to construct the grid they’d laid across the pool, to hinge and balance the planks, then lay the sod camouflage.
Worse still, Capital City was largely powerless. Unless their fortifications had been built at the immediate onset of the plague, they’d used only hand tools.
It would mean less noise while getting the job done. Yes, I thought they were crafty indeed.
Without doing it consciously, I started thinking of my neighbour as The Carpenter.
I became convinced every object in my opponent’s yard was booby trapped, and that the homemade abyss was but one defensive line of many. The propane grill was obviously a bomb. The four broad steps leading to the rear patio door were likely break away, divulging some sort of foot-sole impaling devices beneath. Below the overhang of the house stood a green dutch-doored shed. Touching the latch would no doubt mean decapitation, or some equally ingeniously horrible fate.
Standing there, absentmindedly listening to the screaming while my thumb and forefinger still held the fuzzy pink curtain, odd ideas came to me; like lingering till the wind was favourable and trying to set fire to the opposite string of houses, or finding a car and rigging the gas pedal so that it slammed into the cream siding, or even just ringing the bell and seeing what would happen if I asked to borrow a cup of sugar.
All were discarded as distinctly too risky. I considered on.
Would The Carpenter appear to check the tiger in his trap? No, he or she would wait and see if the death throes brought anyone else – so, in turn, I would wait to see what The Carpenter would see.
My fevered mind began to feel my neighbour’s presence in the void they’d left. Of the four windows I could see clearly, two were covered with slat blinds and the others held thick floral-patterned drapes. I suspected the blinds in the bottom-right had been slanted just enough to allow a view of the outside, as neither row had been cracked for a better view, but every now and then I would come around to convincing myself that there was a flutter at the upper curtains. I was a fisherman uncertain as to if he was actually feeling nibbles on his line and never getting a solid bite.
The shrieking became wailing, and the wailing became weeping, then, no more than an hour later, there was nothing but silence.
It got late, and I got tired, yet I couldn’t leave my post. The Carpenter, I was sure, would hold out till the darkest moment of the night, then venture forth. By the time the moon was deeply within cloud cover, however, I was positive it would be dawn.
I peered carefully from behind my flimsy veil, determined to be just as crafty, and patient, as my worthy adversary.
At dusk the shed opened, and a thin faced woman stepped from its depths.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.
– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.
