FPSE17 – The Surly Stranger
Welcome to Flash Pulp Special Episode Seventeen.
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by the new Mob!
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 we present a short urban myth common throughout Capital City; a tale of aggravations, occupations, and palpitations starring two men and a dog.
Misdirection
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
For more information on this urban legend check out the wiki!
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Freesound.org credits:
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.
True Crime Tuesday: Perception Problems Edition
Today’s True Crime Tuesday is actually made up of articles handpicked by the mighty Opopanax, but, as I read through her suggestions, I noticed an odd thread running through the trio of tales.
We begin our journey of discovery in southeast Michigan, by way of The Daily Mail:
The robbery happened about 11:30 a.m. Saturday at a Fifth Third Bank branch in Macomb County’s Clinton Township, about 15 miles north-northeast of Detroit.
Police say a woman about 60 years old told bank employees she had a bomb in her cloth bag and demanded money.
It’s hard to divine intentions from such a short article, but I feel like Michigan’s current hard times will only bring on more of this sort of thing. This lady should be babysitting grandchildren or playing Cribbage, not robbing banks.
The suspect was roughly 200 pounds, Clinton Township Police Sgt. Deena Terzo told the Detroit News.
‘It was a closed bag, so you couldn’t see into it, and no one wanted to open it,’ he said.
I’d be jumpy too, given the state of the world, but the only real danger was perhaps that of being fed a hearty meal.
After [she] fled, the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad evacuated the building.
While performing an X-Ray on the bag, they discovered two cans of spaghetti sauce.
While I have sympathy for the those who were in perceived danger during the spaghetti heist, it’s hard to understand what exactly Richard Treis’ views are – and I’m not just talking about that milky Bond villain eye, either.
Text and image from STLToday.com
Seven people […] face federal charges, including conspiracy to make meth, possess pseudoephedrine and drug-making equipment, distribution of meth and maintaining a drug-involved premises.
Meth is definitely the drug of our time – its relative ease of creation almost makes a downward spiral of addiction and despair into a DIY project.
Still, sometimes, as with Bob Villa or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, it takes a team.
Police said Swinney had to mobilize at least 150 people over 24 months to comply with purchase restrictions while buying enough decongestants to support the needs of meth cooks[.]
Swinney recruited relatives, gang members, homeless people and random others, Briggs said. “Just about every day, they were standing outside of stores handing out $20 bills asking people to buy a $10 box and keep the change.”
Forget what I said about DYI projects, this is almost the Wikipedia of drug addiction. What do you do when that sizable a portion of your community has a hand in the supply chain?
Despite the ten dollar bounty, Swinney wasn’t losing any money –
The investigator said Swinney sold to Treis and others at $50 to $80 a box. Swinney told police he lived off of the money for the last two years.
– and the sight of green can make even the worst of people colour blind. (Maybe especially if you only have one good eye.)
Treis, 38, joined the Aryan Nations while in a federal penitentiary for meth-related crimes, according to Franklin County officials and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They said Swinney, 22, is a documented gang member.
As for Jerimiah Hartline, 19 – well, as UPI reports, he may as well have been blind as far as his driving skills are concerned.
The California Highway Patrol said Jerimiah Hartline, 19, of Tennessee stole the semi from a weigh station on Interstate 15 in Rainbow around 6 p.m. Saturday and drove it to Temecula, where he collided with a Toyota Tacoma that in turn struck a Toyota 4-Runner and a Mercedes, The (Riverside) Press-Enterprise reported Wednesday.
Investigators said Hartline struck two other cars before losing control of the truck, which flipped onto its side and blocked all four northbound lanes of the interstate.
Maybe it’s just me, but as soon as a truck gets flipped over I start thinking Arnold has come back from the future to save us from Robot Armageddon. Jerimiah had a different apocalypse in mind, though.
Highway Patrol spokesman Nathan Baer said Hartline climbed into a van and demanded a ride, but the driver instead pulled him out of the vehicle and held him with the help of other bystanders until officers arrived.
What danger was so imminent that he required such a dramatic escape?
“He said zombies were chasing him and he had to get out of here,” Baer said.
I think “rushing home to catch the latest Walking Dead” would have been an equally valid lame-excuse. There is, however, the possibility that his “doors of perception” were simply ajar.
Baer said police have yet to determine whether Hartline was under the influence of drugs.
FP323 – Misdirection
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and twenty-three.
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Way of the Buffalo 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 we present some sleight of hand meant as nothing more than a light piece of entertainment – a release after a long winter, and a long week.
Misdirection
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Derrick, eleven, hated the always-startling bleat of the store’s door buzzer, but, as he crouched behind the Pringles display at the end of the chip aisle and tried to disappear within his bulky winter jacket, he wished the thing had been used properly over the last ten minutes.
His mother was the problem of course – she’d been busy with her routine of making eyes at the clerk who operated the remote locking system, and the double-chinned man had been too absorbed in her giggling and the flirty fingers running through her bleached hair to give the would-be-customer pounding the button from outside much of a looking over.
Worse, the counter jockey had shown some doubt as to the intruder having a gun when he’d first been threatened, so, as proof, the thief had pulled out a compact black pistol and pointed it Derrick’s Mom.
“Now do you want to get to business, or should I?” asked the white t-shirt and red ball cap wearing gunman. His brim was drawn low over his brow, but, instead of hiding his face, it simply forced him to tip back his head to see where he was aiming his weapon.
The boy did his best to remember details, but the panic brought on by the thought of losing the last of his family – his father and sister had perished in a car accident some three years earlier – fogged both his brain and his vision.
One row over, hunkered beside a selection of band aids, cleaning supplies, and stationery, a thin faced man in a black sweater whispered, “wanna see a magic trick?”
“Shut up or the peanut gallery will quickly become the shooting gallery,” said the bandit. Despite the threat, and follow-up tears from the smock-wearing employee, the minor interruption was enough to draw the weapon’s muzzle towards the floor.
The fearful son’s attention, however, was still on the apparent magician, who was now holding up eight fingers: three on one hand, and five on the other.
At the front of the store, the cashier’s blurred vision was causing issues in moving five dollar bills from the register to the plastic bag he’d been informed to put it in, and the ground had caught as much as the sack had. This was not an acceptable loss to the goon, and he demonstrated as such by slamming the pistol through the row of tchotchkes and lighters that adorned the counter.
“Get it all, and hurry the fuck up.”
Derrick’s mother, noting his distraction, took a step back, hoping to put some distance – and possibly the island containing stir sticks and lids for the store’s watery self-serve coffee – between herself and danger; instead, it attracted trouble.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked the hood from behind the depths of his redirected gun barrel.
She stumbled, then stopped, as the stale cheeto and scratch card air caught in her tightening throat.
“Mom!” shouted Derrick. The death-dealer swung to the child, then returned to the still-not-breathing woman.
“Sit. The Fuck. Down,“ the man replied. “Christ, does this look like a public school to you? What kind of mother takes her kid to the 7-Eleven after midnight anyhow? And you, Minnesota Fats, what the hell is taking you so long to fill that bag?”
As apparent encouragement, the would-be shooter stepped closer to the bottle-blond, his free hand reaching for purchase on her t-shirt.
Unsure of what to do, Derrick turned to the nearby stranger for help, but the man only hoisted a single hand with five fingers – then four.
The un-buzzed door let out a single denying clunk.
What the child didn’t know was that the man in the hoodie wasn’t any sort of illusionist, he was simply very good at visualization. He could see the distance to his Blue Tercel, parked outside; he could picture the thick wallet sitting in the sticky-bottomed passenger-side cup holder; and he could count the strides it would take to reach the car – even for a big man.
At three fingers the boy no longer knew where to look.
At two the tough had begun to spin on his heel.
At one the entryway exploded inward, only to be replaced with the shadow of a crashing bus in the shape of a man.
Billy Winnipeg, nearly seven feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, with his forgotten wallet still in hand, was remembering the day he’d lept through the plate glass of a Manitoba laundromat after mistakenly thinking a patron was yelling at Mother Winnipeg. Once he’d explained, adrenaline had caused all three to laugh and laugh at the mistake, even as his face had bled onto the linoleum floor.
Billy was not laughing now.
However, it was twenty feet from the door to the gunman, and the Canadian, for all of his crazed bravery, was a deadman. The robber tacked his weapon away from the terrified mother, leveled it at the approaching blur, and steeled himself to pull the trigger.
That’s when he felt the double bee sting at the base of his neck.
The supposed illusionist had managed some sleight of hand after all: During the distraction he’d moved ten feet closer to the counter, and he now held a taser in his grasp.
There was a soft crackle from the pair of wires hovering over the Doritos, and a single bullet misfired into yellowing ceiling panels.
Then Billy closed the distance.
As the brutality distracted the rest, Derrick emptied his over-sized pockets of the cold medicine and household cleaners he’d been told to take. His mother would be mad, he knew, but the uniforms and sirens would soon be at the scene – and, besides, as he caught glimpses of the now moaning gunman, the boy could easily see that it wasn’t worth it.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Freesound.org credits:
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.
FP322 – Emergency
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and twenty-two.
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Way of the Buffalo 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 we join Grady Pitts inside a downtown hospital.
Emergency
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
As the storm drifted by outside, Grady Pitts shifted in a futile effort to restore feeling in the lower half of his body. He’d held his position for three hours, and his legs had long moved past pins-and-needles and into general numbness.
To the left of the bench-row of plastic chairs he was watching a couple of twenty-somethings fretting their way through paperwork while their infant daughter wailed from inside her bright pink car seat. Her mother was rifling a thick purse as the father used his non-writing hand to ineffectually rock the bassinet by its carrying arm.
Grady wondered if maybe the girl had a pea up her nose. Decades earlier, when he was five and his brother was three, he’d shoved a frozen pea deep in his nostril, and, to Pitts’ ear, the girl’s shrill complaint sounded almost identical to his sibling’s terrified cry.
There was a terse exchange between the parents, concluded by a “you said you were going to bring it” from Mom that was too loud to be concealed beneath CNN’s constant muttering, and the woman turned a furious gaze on the room, seeming to dare others to note the disturbance.
Pitts wheeled away and attempted to look as if he hadn’t been staring by generally facing the television mounted on the wall.
There was a big man in dirty mechanic’s overalls sitting beneath the screen, and Pitts’ focus soon drifted to the frayed-edged blue towel wrapped around his right wrist. Blood had soaked through the cloth, and a spatter of drops had mixed with the oil stains on his pant legs. Despite the apparent severity of the injury, the fellow’s face was calm – almost bored – and Grady began to scrutinize his distant state of mind.
Had narcotics caused the man’s accident?
The flow increased from a drip to a steady stream of pooling red, at which point Grady could no longer watch.
Where were the nurses? Why wasn’t the line moving?
There was nothing for it but to keep waiting.
Now trapped between the squabbling parents and the leaking mechanic, Pitts took to counting the ceiling tiles, shuffling a nearby stack of magazines, then, finally, simply staring at the back of the head of the blond woman one row over from his own.
At first Grady believed she was napping, and that the gentle bob and roll of her shoulders was simply the result of snoring, but he was soon convinced she was actually weeping silently. He considered moving to her side and asking if he might be of assistance – at the worst perhaps talking would ease her wait – but he forgot the idea when she was approached by a man he assumed to be her husband.
He wore a gray polo shirt, and the the majority of his face had been removed by some unknown violence, though a sliver of the detached bone remained protruding from the gore of his exposed brain. He appeared impatient for a man on the cusp of death, but Pitts found his own attention drawn to a pulsing within the naked gray matter.
After a few moments a tutting aimed in his direction pulled him away from his morbid fascination, and he turned to see that an orderly in white was beckoning.
“Finally,” said Grady, “bout time I get service.”
Before he could rise, however, the hospital worker frowned and said, “you can’t be here, Mr. Pitts. This is an emergency room, not a bus stop, and your muttering is scaring the patients. If you’re in need of help speak with the shrink at the shelter, because there’s nothing we can do for you here.”
Thus dismissed, Grady collected his tattered ball cap and grocery bags. The rain had briefly broken, and he was eager to be free of the sickness surrounding him.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Freesound.org credits:
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.
FP321 – The Cost of Living: Part 3 of 3 – Coffin: At Loose Ends
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and twenty-one.
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(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3)
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, Will Coffin, Urban Shaman, and Bunny, his tipsy companion, find themselves overseeing a grisly scene at a rural farm – as well as the end of the flute playing woman.
The Cost of Living: Part 3 of 3 – Coffin: At Loose Ends
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Coffin stood by the broad glass facing onto his apartment’s balcony, his eyes locked on something beyond dawn’s glare. Deeper in the dwelling, on the far side of the book shelves that lined the residence’s main hallway and behind a closed door, his roommate was snoring away a bottle of Grey Goose.
There was a note between his fingers, scrawled in a familiar hand. Though Will had been standing in that same position when the paper had been slid beneath the front entrance, the old mute had already disappeared by the time he’d pulled it wide.
There’d been no point in waking Bunny, the retirement home mentioned in the letter wouldn’t be open to visitors for hours yet, and she might be quicker to corral out of the apartment if she was closer to sober.
Shifting from one foot to the other, he waited for the grinding of motors and barking of full-bladdered dogs that marked the city’s first stirrings.
* * *
Fourteen hours later Coffin and his tipsy companion were far to the north. Will had not bothered to introduce the farmer by name – he knew his former client preferred the distance. Still, the buzz-cut man had not said no to the shaman’s hurried request.
The landowner had called the space his barn, but the interior was something more akin to a garage adjoining an indoor scrap yard. The cavernous corrugated tin walls sheltered the husks of tractors, trucks, fridges and machined fragments that, to Bunny’s eye, could have belonged to anything.
Most importantly, though, it housed the a four-columned car crusher.
A windowless Volkswagen Bug rested on the metal base, its long-lost headlights offering no assistance to the rows of fluorescents overhead.
The Japanese woman stood at the halfway mark between the sacrificial platform and the pair who’d driven her to the remote location. The hem of pleated black skirt had dipped into the sawdust and sand that covered the floor, and she bent low to work away the dirt with her thin hands. Even in her stooping, it was obvious her motions were well practiced so as not to disturb the white sling she wore across her shoulder.
“Christ, this seems a little fucking harsh,” Bunny told her bottle of Captain Morgan’s.
She’d been on hand when her friend had used his trinket to call forth the dead man in the retirement home. Although he’d had his face largely chewed away, the apparition had wished to talk only about the flute playing volunteer who would often slip into his room and whisper to the cannibal in the bed adjacent to his own.
It had been one of the few times he had heard his bunkmate speak – possibly because he himself had been largely paralyzed by a stroke. Still, the invalid had been aware enough of his surroundings to overhear their talk of human flesh and its preparation. He’d been trapped with the secret for years, and it had taken his own death to be allowed the opportunity to tell it.
He’d been eager for further conversation when they’d left, but the lilting tune drifting from the game room had acted as reason enough to excuse themselves.
Bunny had not, however, been on hand when, after they’d managed to follow the sleight musician to her suburban duplex, Coffin had knocked and entered.
It was rare for Will to suggest she hang back for her own safety, and the drunk had not argued.
Fifteen minutes later he’d returned to the rented car with the woman in tow, and, without providing any explanation or chatter, had begun driving.
Now, with the generator roaring and the hydraulics anxious to be about their work, Coffin, his eyes focused on a distant scrap heap and his lips taut, nodded and asked, “do you have any final requests?”
The stranger’s lips twitched upward, but her cheeks grew warm and wet.
“I will dance for you,” she replied.
Coffin’s hand tightened around the arcane tool in his pocket, but he shrugged.
Unsure of what would come next, Bunny held the Captain close.
The lines of the skirt bowed, and from beneath its folds extended eight black legs – jointed, spider-like limbs with a finely-pointed nail at the end of each. Retrieving her flute from her bundle, the arachnid woman began to play. Her movements carried her through the small sanded clearing with delicate care, and her nimble swaying disturbed no dust.
Briefly, the delicacy of the choreography and the gentle sweeps of the musical scale were enough to blot out the engine’s roar in Bunny’s ears. The drunk was unsure if the honeyed rhythm was somehow getting to her, or if the rum had finally started to do its work, but she was pleased to see her friend’s face unsoftened as the song came to a close.
It was not so much the grotesque proportions of the woman’s unfurled body that disturbed her as the chittering sound the woman’s mouth had begun to form around her woodwind, and the toothy maw-stretching that had been necessary to allow it to do so.
As the dancer’s skirt descended and became again hushed, Coffin said only, “very beautiful,” and Bunny found nothing on her lips but her bottle.
Replacing her instrument, the woman turned, entered the passenger-side door of the rusted Volkswagen, and bowed her head.
“Wait, is that a god damn baby in there,” asked Bunny, her eyes on the now bulging sling across the woman’s neck.
Will answered by leaning to his left and depressing the large red button hanging from the ceiling above.
His companion had not seen the desiccated bodies, wrapped tight in intricate webs and affixed to every flat surface of the beige-walled duplex. She had not seen the faces of those who had obviously struggled against their bonds until they died of dehydration – nor had she seen the results that had followed, the shrinking of skin and drying of flesh that had prepared their bodies for the Jorogumo’s – the spider-woman’s – consumption.
They were spared any sight of the woman’s compression, but not of that which had resided within her bundle – first four, then eight, then a dozen hair-filled digits began to work their way at the gap between the descending roof of the Beetle and the resisting door. In the final seconds a fat red eye joined the scurrying legs of the woman’s arachnid brood – first it seemed to accuse, but it quickly bulged under mechanical pressure, then simply smeared with the crumpling metal.
When the machine was powered down, and the silence of the country evening filled the shop, Bunny finally asked, “sweet corn in crap, what the fuck was that?”
“It was better than the alternative, setting her on fire – in Japanese folklore -” began Coffin.
“No,” the bottle-wielder interrupted, “I mean why did the bogeywoman just walk under the newspaper all by herself?”
“Well,” said Will, “she lived for hundreds of years as the last of of her kind, and she knew she wouldn’t even be that if someone found out who she was.
“Even for a being like that it’s tough to be alone. That’s why she was chatting up that cannibal, but, like she told me back at her place, how long can someone discuss cooking? Especially with a cow?
”She’d been carrying those egg sacks around her neck for decades and as far as she knew they were never going to hatch. Even the old folks home – which must have seemed like a fridge full of wizened TV dinners – had stopped having any allure.
“Her loneliness stacked up. That’s what put her in the seat.”
Captain Morgan did a brief headstand, and the quiet returned.
Finally, Bunny said, “well, shit, I’ll have to start spreading some vicious gossip about that huge furry fucker living in the stairwell.”
Despite the scene before them, despite the unpleasant work of the day, and even despite his own dour nature, Will’s throat gave out a single surprised laugh.
Reaching for the light switch he replied, “I think I saw a dairy bar with a liquor license a few dozen miles back on the main road. I’ll buy you a shake.”
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Freesound.org credits:
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.
FC86 – Sick Ass Jams
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashCast086.mp3](Download/iTunes/RSS)
Hello, and welcome to FlashCast 86.
Prepare yourself for: Horror-themed aerobics, eye-for-an-eye justice, 19th century movie posters, Evil Dead, and Blackhall.
* * *
Huge thanks to:
- Threedayfish (Facebook – Twitter) for his cinematic considerations
- Scott Roche (scottroche.com – Twitter) for his podcast review of Compensating Controls
- Tibbi (Spiraling Sideways – Twitter) for her Amble & Ramble
* * *
-
Pulp-ular Press:
- Paralysis punishment
- Ferrets sold as toy poodles
- South African crime fiction debate
- 19th century movie poster
- Micro-Cthulhus
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIFXINIeOig”]
* * *
-
Skinner Co. Announcements:
- Join the Facebook Mob to stay current on the upcoming Mob Movie Night, Gaming Night, and Board Meetings
* * *
-
Mailbag:
- Send your comments to comments@flashpulp.com!
- Nutty mentioned:
- Rich the TT mentioned:
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUY4WP60yoM”]
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnesVqoOPwA”]
* * *
Backroom Plots:
* * *
Also, many thanks, as always, Retro Jim, of RelicRadio.com for hosting FlashPulp.com and the wiki!
* * *
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 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
FP320 – The Cost of Living: Part 2 of 3 – Mulligan Smith in The Best Medicine
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and twenty.
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp320.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3)
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, PI Mulligan Smith finds himself pondering a murder while reclining near a jovial man on the edge of death.
The Cost of Living: Part 2 of 3 – Mulligan Smith in The Best Medicine
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
The building smelled of peppermints and medicine, and Smith couldn’t wait to be free of its cinder block walls – yet he had a job to do.
Despite the murder that had taken place in the room, Mulligan was only on hand to look into possible negligence on the part of the nursing home. The scene of the crime was the last stop on his self-conducted tour – a trek launched under the vaguely-worded guise of his being a patient’s son – and the dead man’s empty cot provided a convenient, if too firm, surface on which to briefly rest.
Besides, bedridden Walt, the victim’s roommate for some three years, offered outbursts of chuckling and a constant stream of twitching, but no complaints.
Smith had been informed by Julius Crow, a talkative walker-toter the PI had encountered in the residence’s barren game area, that the laughing invalid had not spoken a comprehensible word in the length of Crow’s time wandering the converted mansion’s halls.
“- and that’s six years longer than the doctors gave me – six years longer than I wanted – so you better believe it,” the stoop-shouldered man had told Mulligan before completing his sentence with a loud snort. It was such a common conclusion that, by the end of their conversation, Smith assumed the man was used to providing the explosion as a method of punctuation for his hard-of-hearing friends.
“When I first heard about ol’ Gregor,” Julius had continued, “I thought ‘a death at an old folks home? Yeah, that’s a fuckin’ surprise’ – if you’ll mind my Frenches.”
Mulligan had interpreted this “hurk” as meant to be comical, but said nothing.
Crow had happily chattered through the detective’s silence. “Weird what makes the news, you know what I mean? For example, the staff here – especially the nurses – are a good crowd. It’s sort of an accident that they are – they’re certainly not paid enough to be, but they’re all doctors and such back in the countries they’ve come from. They like to practice their English on me, and I get the impression Deep Creek Manor’s lack of VISA requirements and flexible hours means they can work and still slog their way through school to be recertified. I feel for ’em in that respect, most already have more education than I ever did.
“Now, it definitely ain’t always perfect, but no batch of human beings ever is. What I’m getting at, though, is that sometimes staff just disappear – you talk to them on a Monday night and they say they’ll see you in the morning, then nothing.”
This grunt had seemed closer to a mix of disgust and wonder.
“The ornery buggers around here write ’em off because they aren’t pale enough for their taste, and if someone doesn’t show, they immediately say the missing person was probably busted by immigration. The other employees don’t want to raise a fuss and draw attention, and the Bargers – the folks who run the place – seem to find it easier to hire new people than to track down the missing.
“A dozen able-bodies disappear and no one says ‘boo,’ but a single old fart has his face chewed off and everyone starts runnin’ around with their hands in the air.”
Mulligan had shrugged as he watched a slender Japanese woman take up seating at the edge of a worn plastic-bottomed chair in the game room’s corner. She was drawing a wheelchair bound crowd as nurses rolled in blank-eyed patients.
The snort was what had brought Smith back to business. He asked, “you said things aren’t always perfect – what did you mean?”
“Look out on the garden in the back – it’s the story of this place. Beautiful bit of work once, probably been here as long as the land’s been settled, but now it’s just a riot of thorns and weeds. Even the poor buggers who had to jump fences and run from dogs to get here refuse to go in there – and why should they? The owners bought this place, filled it, then forgot about it.
”Same situation goes for the inside. Everyone does their best, but even with the Bargers’ endless pool of suckers there’s never enough staff – especially after lights out. If they think you’re immobile they don’t swing by to check on you very often. That’s exactly what happened with Gregor. Walt’s laughing aside, they were both basically vegetables – the Russian didn’t do much but drool and shit in the three years I knew him – so the night crew probably didn’t think to poke in on them. Then some crazy bugger snuck in there and got to gnawing on Gregor’s head while Walt just chuckled to himself in the dark. Could he even feel it? We’ll never know I guess. Hella past time for him to go though – for all of us to, really.”
His ears had remained focused, but Smith’s gaze had again fallen on the woman in the far corner. Her practiced fingers had extracted a frail looking flute from the depths of the white baby-sling she carried across her shoulder, and Mulligan had found himself wondering if the child inside might rouse when her practiced fingers and taut lips began to project a tune into the room.
It had not.
After contemplative nose-clearing from Crow, Smith returned to the task at hand.
“The people aside, you talk like you’d rather not be here,” he’d said, “six years too many? Past time to go? Doesn’t sound like you’re terribly enthusiastic about the facilities.”
“Ah, hell, it’s not that. Take Ms. Yamato over there – I know half the people in here with their mouths still working think she’s Chinese and not Japanese, and it don’t matter how many times I tell them otherwise. Imagine all these bastards up and around, bitching that illegals are ruining the country and video games are turning today’s youth into Godless killing machines? Death has its purpose, even if it’s not a pleasant one. Maybe some day we’ll be in space or downloading our brains, or whatever, but for now we’re built to make room for new ideas by being forced to let go of the old ones, even if we don’t want to.
“Besides – what else does a guy like Walt have to hope for but a visit from the reaper?”
Now, as Mulligan sat not five feet from the guffawing man, Mulligan realized that perhaps Walt had been looking forward to more than Julius might imagine.
Smith swung his legs beyond the bed’s edge and zipped his hoodie. With his shadow falling over the snickerer’s lumpy sheets, and his hand on the tazer in his pocket, he asked, “you just have a good evening, or have you been running a con these last few years?”
There was no answer, but the rolling of Walt’s shoulders slowed, and his blue eyes focused on his visitor’s face.
Mulligan nodded, convinced that the man was no danger to anyone who wasn’t immobile. “So, one day you found the symptoms on the downswing and you got the munchies? I doubt the guys investigating this are much used to dealing with the health problems associated with cannibalism, but I know kuru when I see it. You may not serve a lot of jail time, and I doubt you’ll ever be linked to whichever corpse originally gave you the laughing disease, but at least you’ll make a nice medical oddity for the doctors to prod – well, until it finally kills you.”
Would the lack of a diagnosis be enough to prove negligence on the part of the Barger’s? The PI didn’t know, but the discovery might be enough to earn him his paycheck.
As he departed, Smith was chased into the hall by a burst of involuntary laughter, and out of the building by the melancholy notes of Ms. Yamato’s woodwind.
He reached for his phone.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
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True Crime Tuesday: Good Intentions Edition
Whichever wise old philosopher coined the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” must have been peeking ahead to today’s True Crime Tuesday.
We open on Ruth Amen, an office manager from Florida. (Of course it’s Florida.)
Ruth, as the HuffPo reports, just wanted to throw her boss a nice surprise birthday party – but she forgot one minor detail.
Amen, 46, who worked at Gulf To Bay Realty, organized the party for one of the owners of the Boca Grande, Fla., business, without getting permission to use company cash to pay for the event.
It turns out, however, that where there’s high-priced cigar smoke, there may be fire:
That inspired those bosses to take a closer look at the books she had handled for them as office manager for 10 years.
After ten years of employment who can say they wouldn’t occasionally misuse office resources? You know how these things start – you bring home a few pens, a couple of sticky note stacks, then, suddenly:
Investigators accused Amen of using nearly $92,000 in company finances to pay her personal credit card debt. She also issued herself $65,000 worth of “extra” paychecks and didn’t deduct the cost of insurance from her paychecks, DigTriad.com reports.
Oops. $157k buys a lot of “extra” sticky notes.
Dustin Canup, 20, and Sareena Morrison, 18, on the other hand, were looking for something more meaningful in their lives than office work – unfortunately, they weren’t content to just buy a puppy.
From westword.com:
According to the Loveland Reporter Herald, which cites an arrest affidavit, police received a tip last week concerning a fifteen-year-old girl with a 970 area code who was advertising for sex online.
Don’t be confused, the girl in question, Morrison, was actually of legal age, but the six-year-old she was attempting to purchase a tryst with clearly wasn’t.
Detectives subsequently traced the number to Morrison, who lives in Berthoud, and laid the groundwork for a sting operation by texting her under the guise of a man with a six-year-old child. Morrison is said to have arranged a meet with father and daughter at a Loveland motel, where she and a male companion would take part in sex acts with the girl.
You may be thinking, “didn’t they watch Dateline’s To Catch a Predator?” to which I would reply: “Yes, probably too much so.”
Shortly after their arrival at the motel, detectives busted Morrison and Canup, who was reportedly packing a large knife and a pair of handcuffs.
[…]
[T]he pair intended to rob the man and take the little girl with them to raise as their own child.
