The Bonus

The crowd already knew how the cards were stacked. Still, the applause hit like a freight train when Johnny Rocco — the silk-suited emperor of Van Nuys — cracked open the envelope and read the name inside.

“Big Tim.”

Flashbulbs popped. Cigars glowed. Somewhere in the back, a trumpet wailed like it had a gambling problem.

The giant Neanderthal lumbered to the stage, all shoulders and menace, and accepted a solid gold bust of his own ugly mug like it was a communion wafer. Rocco draped an arm around him, smiling the kind of smile that never reached his eyes.

“N’yeah, see?” Rocco purred into the mic. “You’ve earned yourself a little reward. Any dame in Van Nuys. Name it.”

It was a tradition — a greasy ritual that had followed every Mobster of the Year for two decades. Usually, the winner picked some unlucky trollop who was working off her father’s gambling debt at one of the mob’s brothels. Easy. Predictable. Disposable.

But Big Tim didn’t play by anyone’s script.

He reached into his coat and held up an album cover — “Hasten Down the Wind.” His thick finger jabbed at the woman on the sleeve.

“Her,” he grunted.

The room went colder than a morgue drawer.

Linda.

Jonny M.’s girl. Off-limits. Untouchable. The kind of name that made wiseguys suddenly interested in their shoes.

Rocco’s grin froze, but he kept his voice smooth as aged bourbon. “You got taste, kid. Real class. But Linda’s a closed book. How about a sweet little nineteen-year-old redhead workin’ off her ma’s bar tab down at the Erwin Street cathouse?”

Tim’s eyes turned reptilian — the kind of stare usually only saw in National Geographic specials on Nile crocodiles. He shoved the album cover inches from Rocco’s nose.

“HER.”

Chairs scraped. Glasses clinked. Half the room calculated the distance to the exits, expecting the air to fill with hot lead any second.

But Rocco didn’t flinch. He studied the cover like a man reading tomorrow’s headlines, then let out a slow, wicked chuckle that slithered through the crowd.

“Well,” he said, voice low and dangerous, “looks like it’s gonna be her.”

He leaned closer, eyes glittering with bad ideas.

“Now let’s figure out how we make that happen.”

Boris’ Brain

The laboratory smelled like hot copper and bad decisions. Professor Morlock’s laugh bounced off the tile walls like loose change in a tin cup as he flipped open Boris’ skull with the smug precision of a butcher who knew he’d already been paid. Under the surgical lights, the pug’s gray matter glistened—every wrinkle a promise of genius Morlock had chased across continents and crime scenes.

He lifted a chrome ice-cream scooper from a tray of wicked-looking instruments and thumbed the lever like a gambler testing a loaded die.

“Finally,” he rumbled, voice deep enough to shake the beakers. “Boris’ beautiful brain meets Jonny’s scandalously perfect chassis. Homo Sapien Perfecto. After that, I run the mold through my cloning rig and stamp out a thousand flawless operatives. Imagine it—an army that never sweats, never doubts, never says no. God, I love progress.”

The scooper hovered over Boris’ exposed thoughts, one heartbeat away from turning brilliance into spare parts.

Then the lab door exploded inward.

A jet-black Tom Ford boot landed first, stiletto heel biting into the tile like punctuation at the end of a threat. Linda stepped through the smoke with twin silver Glocks steady in her hands—one aimed at Morlock’s forehead, the other at a part of his anatomy that didn’t enjoy sudden surprises.

“Show’s over, Professor,” she said, voice cool as a morgue drawer. “Drop the toy.”

Pussy slipped in behind her, eyes sharp, tail twitching with contempt. “You missed a detail,” she said. “Sure, Boris has the perfect brain. But you forgot the primordial goo sloshing around inside that skull.”

Linda smirked without lowering her aim. “A few hours of Boris’ galaxy-level intellect tangled up with Jonny’s… unique cranial sludge? Your super-soldiers wouldn’t conquer the world. They’d be glued to cheap editing software, cranking out ridiculous pulp covers and binge-watching black-and-white panel shows on YouTube at three in the morning.”

Morlock froze, the scooper trembling in his hand. The fantasy drained out of his eyes like liquor from a cracked glass.

“An army of Jonny M.’s that can THINK,” he whispered, horror creeping into his voice. “Sweet mercy… I’d have doomed civilization to endless bad ideas and worse fashion. History would’ve called me the second-greatest monster alive, right after Donald Trump.” He swallowed hard, shoulders sagging. “Forgive me. I nearly made the world an even stranger place.”

The lab lights hummed. Boris snored softly under anesthesia. And for once, even a madman looked relieved that someone had kicked the door in before the scoop came down.

In the Custody of Dogberry

Jonny and Boris were excited when they learned that they’d have to travel to Messina to investigate the murder of Robert Vestal. But instead of a relaxing trip to Sicily, they’d be slugging it out in the backwaters of Messina, Alabama — a place where the humidity clung to your skin like a bad alibi and the locals looked at outsiders the way a junkyard dog looks at a mailman. Vestal’s murder had dragged them across the country, but the only thing getting slaughtered so far was their patience.

They’d barely set foot on George Wallace Boulevard when trouble clocked in. Jonny had been absent-mindedly giving Boris a bellyrub outside the diner — a perfectly innocent moment by Van Nuys standards — when a deputy named Verges with a badge too big for his brain wandered over. One look at their drivers’ licenses and the man’s eyes narrowed like a pair of cheap blinds.

“California, huh?” he muttered. “That may be the world capital of homosensitivity but perversion ain’t legal in these parts.”

Ten minutes later they were cooling their heels in a holding cell inside the sheriff’s office, labeled in chalk as Community Protection. The air smelled like old coffee and older grudges.

Sheriff Boscoe Z. Dogberry made his entrance like a man auditioning for a play he couldn’t read. He spoke in grand flourishes, dropping ten-syllable words where a simple grunt would’ve done the job. Illiterate maybe, but determined to sound like a dictionary that had swallowed a thesaurus.

Boris stepped forward first, all lab-coat dignity wrapped around a pair of fawn-colored paws. “Look, Sheriff,” he said, sliding a hundred-dollar bill between the bars like a peace offering. “I know it looks unusual — a human and a pug working together — but there’s no funny business. We both have girlfriends. I date an alley cat named Pussy, and Jonny is in a relationship with the 25 year-old version of rock star Linda Ronstadt. So you see that there’s nothing weird going on.”

Dogberry squinted at the bill as if it were a snake that might bite. “Pray thee, fellow, peace,” he declared. “I do not like thy look, I promise thee.”

Jonny sighed. The sheriff’s stilted speech sounded like it had been chewed up and spit out by a tractor. Boris glanced at Jonny, then added two more hundreds to the stack, crisp green confessions fluttering in the stale air.

“O villain!” Dogberry barked, puffing up like a rooster with delusions of grandeur. “Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this!”

Jonny coughed to hide a laugh. Boris didn’t even try; the pug just fished out two more C-notes with a weary flick of his paw. Dogberry’s eyes gleamed. He snatched the money, unlocked the cell, and pocketed the evidence of his own moral flexibility. “If you’d coughed up that much at the beginning,” the sheriff said, straightening his crooked badge, “you could’ve saved all of us a lot of time. What do I look like, an ass?”

My Three Love Babies

You could’ve shaved with the edge of the silence that hung over Casa de Jonny that afternoon. Boris stood beneath the dusty ceiling fan, a stack of DNA paternity reports trembling between his fawn-colored paws while the air smelled faintly of cold coffee, old cologne, and regret. The little pug’s brow folded into worried creases as he traced the labyrinth of numbers and genetic hieroglyphics like a priest reading bad news from a crooked bible.

Jonny didn’t bother looking at the paperwork. He studied the three young mugs planted in his living room instead — strangers who’d knocked less than thirty minutes earlier and brought trouble with them like a storm rolling in off Ventura Boulevard. Each kid was a ghost of a woman Jonny wished he’d forgotten: Rosie, Davida, Lisa — three walking disasters whose names were etched into his memoirs under a chapter titled Women Who Should’ve Come With Warning Labels. Their sons carried their mothers’ eyes and posture, but the rest… that was all Jonny. The rasping hyena laugh. The sloped Neanderthal brow. The faint aura of a man who believed soap was a government conspiracy.

Jonny folded his arms and waited. He didn’t need a scientist to tell him how this picture ended.

Boris finally lowered the papers. His voice came out flat, professional — the way it always sounded when a case went from messy to catastrophic. “No doubt about it, pal. These boys are the fruit of your loins. DNA like this doesn’t show up outside a zoo exhibit… and every strand points straight back to you.”

Jonny exhaled through his nose like a man signing his own death warrant. “All right,” he said, straightening his tie with grim ceremony. “Let’s skip the foreplay. I assume you three came here to whack me. Bad news — the only way through me is through Boris, and his betrayal fee isn’t exactly blue-light special material. And if you did scrape together the cash, my operatives would avenge my death, and some of them…are Vulcans.”

The boys traded confused looks.

“Kill you?” said Roscoe — Rosie’s loudmouthed, MAGA-loving kid — blinking like Jonny had just spoken Martian.

“That honestly never crossed our minds,” muttered Yitzchak, Lisa’s pale goth boychik, his eyeliner darker than a blackout curtain.

Wrong-Way Bourland, Davida’s linebacker-built prodigy, stepped forward and cracked a grin that felt disarmingly sincere. “We didn’t come here for revenge, old man. We came because after all these years… we finally wanted to meet our daddy.”

The room went quiet again — not sharp like a blade this time, but heavy, like the moment before a boxer realizes the fight he trained for isn’t the one he’s about to have. Boris glanced at Jonny. Jonny glanced at the boys. And somewhere deep in the cluttered chaos of Casa de Jonny, a detective who’d stared down killers without blinking suddenly looked like a man who didn’t know where to put his hands.

Stopover at Petticoat Junction

Hack intended to continue his series of novels inspired by 1960s TV sitcoms with this tribute to Petticoat Junction, a rural comedy best remembered for its opening sequence showing three smokin’ hot sisters provocatively bathing in a water tower over their mother’s hotel. Unfortunately, the story was derailed because the actor who played the character of Uncle Joe in the show bore an uncanny resemblance to Hack’s abusive father, so it devolved into a memory piece about how every time Hack started making out with a woman during his teenage years, his father inevitably appeared and tried to make it a three-way.

That Girl

The alleys behind Van Nuys’ Skid Row were a place the city forgot on purpose. Even the rats walked with their collars turned up, and the only law that lingered there came in empty bottles and bad intentions. If hell had a back door, it opened onto that stretch of broken asphalt — and that’s exactly where Jonny and Boris found themselves when word spread that a gentle drifter known as the Little Tramp had cashed in his last smile.

He’d been a fixture of the gutters, a sad clown with a hopeful grin, until somebody snuck up behind him and cracked a bottle across the back of his skull. The alley had swallowed him whole, leaving only a stiff breeze and a smell strong enough to make shopkeepers across the way start dialing numbers they usually ignored.

Boris sniffed the air, his wrinkled muzzle tightening like a clenched fist. “Body’s been here a week,” the little pug muttered, pacing slow circles around the chalky outline of what used to be a man. “Maybe longer. Without the complaints, we’d never have known he was gone. Right now, partner, I got nothing — no footprints, no witnesses, just ghosts and broken glass.”

Jonny didn’t like hearing that. Boris was the brain of the operation, and when the brain ran dry, trouble usually wasn’t far behind.

Trouble arrived wearing a dirty overcoat and carrying a half-empty bottle of rye.

Whiskey Tom drifted out of the shadows like a bad memory. The boys knew him well — a twitchy psycho with a taste for violence and cheap liquor. He led them to his cardboard palace tucked against a graffiti-scarred wall, only a few feet from where the Little Tramp had taken his last breath.

Boris leaned in close. “You said you saw the killer,” he said, voice low and steady. “Start talking.”

Tom’s eyes darted around like loose marbles. His lips trembled, but the words refused to come — until a flash of legs and spotlight glow spilled into the alley. A brunette stepped through the stage door of one of Skid Row’s seedy 99-seat theaters, all curves and confidence, a mini dress cutting through the gloom like a sunrise nobody deserved.

Ann Marie.

Van Nuys’ sweetheart. The girl with a smile bright enough to make the streetlights jealous.

Jonny tipped his fedora. Boris blinked twice, stunned silent — a rare event.

Tom’s bottle rattled against his teeth as he raised a shaking finger.

“That’s her … she’s the one who did it.” he croaked, voice thin as a cracked record. “That girl!”

The Murder of Gomer Pyle

The Van Nuys Motel 6 collected corpses the way a cheap bar collects regrets—quietly, without ceremony. So the badges dragged their heels. But when Jonny and Boris heard the name of the stiff over the police radio, something cold crawled up their spines. Gomer Pyle. Marine Corps. One of their own.

John Law was still absent when they arrived, but it didn’t matter because since the death took place in a hotel, it was under the jurisdiction of the Hotel Dick. At the Van Nuys Motel 6, that meant Dutch Winsett, a man Jonny and Boris knew too well. They all went to detective school together and while Jonny and Boris graduated with honors at the top of the class and became legendary shamuses, Winsett came in dead last and landed here, king of mildew and broken vending machines. When they walked into the crime scene to see Gomer hanging by his belt around his throat from the ceiling fan, the scowl on his face when they walked in said he remembered every ranking on that final scoreboard.

“Well, well,” Dutch sneered. “Van Nuys’ favorite miracle workers. Hate to disappoint you, but there’s no grand conspiracy. Pyle checked in alone, got bored, got experimental. Breath-control play gone wrong. Case closed.”

He lifted two pieces of evidence like a magician revealing cheap props—a bottle of Jergens lotion and a box of Kleenex Ultra-Soft.

“Wait a minute,” said Boris. “You think that Gomer was playing with his pud using LOTION? When we did circle jerks in ‘Nam,  he’d douse his wang in Hellfire Hot Sauce from his hometown in Mayberry.”

“And Kleenex ULTRA-SOFT?” said Jonny. “He’d call you a pussy if you cleaned up with anything less than sandpaper.”

Boris hopped onto the nightstand, nose twitching as if sniffing out a lie. “This wasn’t an accident,” he said quietly. “Someone staged this.”

Jonny’s trench coat flared as he turned toward the door. “Only three hitters in Van Nuys could make a murder look this pathetic.”

“Give us twenty-four hours,” Boris called over his shoulder. “We’ll drag your killer into the lobby ourselves.”

The door slammed behind them just as the distant wail of sirens finally crept into the parking lot. Tears welled in Dutch’s eyes at the realization that Jonny and Boris had once again made a fool of him…but he swore that THEY would be the fools in the last chapter.

Silence of the Pugs

Boris felt his fur prickle the moment the steel door clanged shut behind him. The corridor outside the holding ward for homicidal lunatics smelled like bleach, cold coffee, and regret. His little paws clicked against the tile as he hurried toward the exit, Hannibal Lechter’s velvet-smooth voice still echoing in his ears. The meeting had yielded answers—but answers didn’t slow the ticking clock. Somewhere in Van Nuys, Buffalo Jill was sharpening her dreams with a knife, and Jonny’s elephant-like epidermis was already measured for the next addition to her chilling man suit.

Across town, Jonny hung in a nightmare cut straight from a pulp magazine cover. A dirt pit in a suburban basement. A single bulb swinging like a drunk with a secret. Above him stood Jill, looming over the edge, her shadow falling across him like a funeral veil. She was dressed down to a black tank top and the same model of blood red thong that Jonny had recently purchased at Victoria’s Secret to stuff in his mouth when he took his mid-afternoon naps.

“It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” Buffalo Jill crooned, voice syrupy and cruel. She nudged a bottle of Jergens toward him with the toe of her boot. The smell of cheap roses filled the pit as Jonny worked the lotion into his wrinkled hide. Truth was, he liked how the salve opened up his stubborn pores, but he’d written enough erotic fiction for publication on the Dark Web based on this very scenario to know that he had to stretch out the perverse torment in order to intensify the amorous climax. Jonny tilted his head back, eyes half-lidded with defiance and mischief, playing his part like a second-rate actor chasing a first-class curtain call.

“First,” he said, voice low and steady, “tell me how naughty I’ve been.”

Two Lunatics in Search of an Author

The plates were empty, the champagne was warm, and the kind of trouble that only shows up after dessert was already circling the table like a vulture with a reservation. Linda and Pussy slipped away toward the ladies’ room in a swirl of perfume and promises to get themselves ready to return to Casa de Jonny and give Jonny and Boris their Valentines Day gifts, a night of violent anal sex without lube.

Boris tilted his champagne flute and chased the last rebellious bubbles with his tongue. The little pug adjusted his white tie and tails like a diplomat preparing to start a war.

“Ever notice something, boss?” he muttered, voice low enough to dodge the waitstaff but loud enough to land like a brick. “We’re catnip to every dame in Van Nuys. Me — a pug with a vocabulary and a tuxedo, cruelly castrated before I was shipped across the Pacific. And you — a 64-year-old moron with a disposition like a cracked ashtray, dating a legendary pop star who looks 25 on a bad day despite her being born in 1946 and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.”

Jonny blinked slowly, like a man trying to read a clue written in invisible ink. “What’s your point, Boris?”

Before the dog could answer, a thin man with a pencil mustache and a tragically ambitious French accent glided up to the table. The restaurant manager. He smelled faintly of garlic and deadlines.

“Messieurs,” he said, bowing just enough to suggest either respect or indigestion. “Monsieur Werker requests that you conclude this philosophical digression. He intends to dedicate several pages to… how do you say… your evening of bareback cornholing, and your existential debate is slowing the rhythm of the narrative.”

He clicked his heels and vanished toward the kitchen like a stagehand fleeing a spotlight.

Jonny stared at Boris. Boris stared at Jonny. The silence hung between them like a bad alibi.

Finally, the pug sighed, straightened his bow tie, and delivered the line like a verdict.

“My point, pal,” he said, “is that none of this makes sense… unless we’re just characters trapped inside a pulp crime novel.”