This romantic lark is a departure from Hack’s usual hardboiled style. It’s a memory piece loosely based on an episode during his brief stint with the Merchant Marines when he had a 24-hour pass in a strange city spent with three women he met on the dock. The reality was that they were sex workers who gave him his first case of syphilis that resulted in the insanity which plagued him in his later years, and the night concluded with the women stealing Hack’s wallet and pushing what they thought was his lifeless body into a canal. It ended happily, with the syphilis eating away the facts of the evening from his brain until he now regards it as one of his most cherished memories.
The night hung over Van Nuys like a damp overcoat nobody wanted to wear.
It was 11:30 p.m. in March, and the thermometer outside a pawnshop on Ventura Boulevard insisted it was ninety-six degrees. The Valley baked like a cheap pie left too long in the oven. But Jonny M. always played whatever part fate cast him in to perfection, right down to the costume. That meant a wool three-piece suit, a trench coat heavy enough to stop a .38 slug, and a fedora tilted low enough to make a choirboy suspicious.
The sweat ran down his spine like a criminal fleeing the scene, but Jonny didn’t notice.
He was staring into the most beautiful pair of eyes he’d ever seen.
They belonged to Ingrid.
Ingrid the Swedish knockout. Ingrid with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and lips that could make a bishop forget the Ten Commandments. And right now those lips were close enough to make Jonny forget every case he’d ever worked—except the one that had just wrapped up behind him.
Across the street, the gallows creaked in the warm night breeze. Robert Vestal’s murderer was still doing a slow dance at the end of the rope.
Hardest case Jonny and his partner Boris had ever cracked. Every crook, skirt, and two-bit chiseler in Van Nuys had wanted Vestal dead. But only one had the guts to pull the trigger.
Now justice had its pound of flesh.
And Jonny was about to collect his reward.
Ingrid leaned close, her voice soft and sad like a violin playing in a smoky bar.
“But what about us?”
Jonny tipped his hat back and looked at her like a man studying the last good thing in a rotten world.
“We’ll always have Tarzana,” he said. “We didn’t have it. We lost it… until you came to Van Nuys. Then we got it back last night.”
Her eyes shimmered.
“When I said I would never leave you.”
For a moment the whole world held its breath.
There was only one thing missing.
Rain.
A proper farewell like this needed rain—sheets of it, cascading down like the heavens themselves were crying into their whiskey. But the Valley hadn’t seen so much as a drizzle in thirty years. Not since the refinery went up on Oxnard Street and chased the clouds away like unpaid bookies.
Jonny leaned in anyway. Some moments were too perfect to wait for weather reports.
He stuck out his tongue, ready to seal the deal—
—and felt a drop of water land on it.
Then another.
Within seconds the sky opened up like Niagara Falls. Water poured down in thick romantic sheets, soaking Jonny’s trench coat and plastering Ingrid’s hair to her perfect face.
Jonny blinked.
He slowly looked up.
Perched on top of a nearby streetlamp was Boris—the toughest pug detective in the San Fernando Valley—holding a garden hose fitted with a chrome shower head. The anthropomorphic canine grinned down through the artificial monsoon like a plumber who’d just fixed the world.
“Mother Nature may not have shown up for you,” Boris called down in his gravelly accent. “But I’ve got your back.”
Jonny smiled.
Across the street, a handful of unlucky stiffs stood sweating at a bus stop in the brutal heat, wearing the least amount of clothing the law would allow. They watched the rain-drenched lovers with the bitter envy of empty souls who knew romance had passed them by.
Jonny didn’t care.
He grabbed Ingrid, pulled her close, and planted a kiss that would’ve made the devil himself take notes. His nicotine-stained tongue dove into her mouth while the fake rain danced across their heads like confetti at a crooked wedding.
Sure, he was losing the most beautiful woman God ever put on this lousy planet.
But Jonny still had the most perfect partner a guy could ask for.
The warehouse crouched at the edge of Van Nuys like a guilty secret, its windows blacked out and its steel doors hanging half open as if the place had tried to confess and then thought better of it. Jonny and Boris stepped inside, their footsteps echoing through the dark like a pair of warrants nobody wanted served.
The smell hit first—grease, chemicals, and something else that made the back of your brain itch.
Jonny’s eyes adjusted to the gloom and then stopped dead.
Across the floor stood a tall figure in yellow and red, lit by the flicker of industrial lamps. The face paint, the grin, the circus colors—it was Ronald McDonald himself.
But what made Jonny’s jaw tighten wasn’t the clown.
It was the hair.
Perched proudly atop the clown’s painted skull was a luxurious brown toupee. Jonny knew that rug the way a safecracker knows tumblers. It was the very one that normally crowned his own noble dome.
Which meant the ridiculous red clown wig now stuck to Jonny’s head like a practical joke from a sadistic barber wasn’t a mistake.
It was theft.
Jonny’s fingers curled slowly.
Boris, meanwhile, had locked onto the man Ronald was talking to.
The pug’s breath caught in his throat.
Some faces fade with time. Others burn themselves into your memory like a branding iron.
This one had a name.
Dr. Jacob Merlinski, DVM.
The butcher of Boris’s youth.
Years ago, when Boris had stepped off the boat from Korea and onto the hopeful concrete of Ellis Island, they told him the American Dream came with paperwork. Forms. Regulations. And one small surgical procedure.
“There are already too many dogs in this country,” the officials had said with bureaucratic smiles. “If you want to stay in the Land of the Free, you’ll have to give up the equipment that makes more of you.”
And so Boris, young and hopeful, had been wheeled under bright lights and cold steel by the very man now standing across the warehouse floor.
Dr. Merlinski.
The pug felt phantom pain just looking at him.
“It’s for the greater good,” they had said.
But now Boris noticed something else.
A conveyor belt.
It rattled across the warehouse like a mechanical confession. Hundreds—no, thousands—of freshly hacked-off doggy ballsacks slid along the belt in a grisly parade of lost legacies.
They disappeared into a humming stainless-steel machine.
Ronald and the doctor watched the process with the satisfied chuckles of men who thought they’d beaten the system.
The machine whirred.
Ground.
Pressed.
Breaded.
A chute opened.
Golden nuggets spilled out onto a tray beneath a heat lamp.
Boris stared.
His already oversized eyes widened until they looked like two dinner plates staring into hell.
McNuggets.
Chicken McNuggets.
The truth landed on him like a freight train full of broken promises.
He hadn’t been welcomed to America.
He’d been processed.
His crown jewels… sacrificed on the altar of fast food.
Deep fried.
And served with tangy barbecue or honey mustard.
Boris’s lip curled back, revealing teeth that hadn’t forgotten how to bite.
Beside him, Jonny slowly cracked his knuckles.
The clown laughed.
The doctor laughed.
But they hadn’t noticed the two detectives standing in the shadows yet.
And if there was one thing Van Nuys had taught Jonny and Boris, it was this:
Boris hit it with a shoulder like a runaway freight train and the cheap wood shattered inward. The two partners stormed through the splinters and stepped into a chemical kingdom that smelled like sin, ammonia, and fast money.
The meth lab spread across the room like a mad scientist’s fever dream—glass beakers bubbling, burners hissing, coils of tubing twisting like snakes in a medicine cabinet from hell. Blue crystals glittered on trays under the lights like a jeweler’s display for the damned.
The lab boys scattered.
They skittered for exits, trapdoors, and side halls like cockroaches when the kitchen light flips on. One dropped a flask that shattered like a gunshot. Another dove through a half-open door.
Jonny didn’t even blink.
Neither did Boris.
They weren’t here for the roaches.
They were here for the king roach.
Across the room stood a man in a yellow HazMat suit, still as a corpse at a wake. Calm. Waiting. Like he’d been expecting them all along.
Jonny walked toward him slow and easy, the way a man strolls up to the gallows when he knows someone else is wearing the rope. His Glock came up smooth and steady.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
The man tilted his head. Behind the mask you could almost hear the smile.
“Oh, you know,” he said softly. “You all know exactly who I am.”
He leaned forward a fraction.
“Say my name.”
Jonny squinted at him.
“Do what?”
The detective scratched the side of his jaw like a man trying to remember where he parked his car three hangovers ago.
“I don’t… I don’t have a damn clue who the hell you are.”
The man stiffened.
“Yeah you do,” he said, a little sharper now. “I’m the cook.”
Silence.
“I’m the man who killed Gus Fring.”
Boris snorted.
“Bullshit,” the pug growled. “Cartel got Fring.”
The yellow-suited figure cocked his head.
“Are you sure?”
Boris glanced up at Jonny.
Jonny looked like a man who’d just realized he left the stove on in another life. He slowly shook his head.
The man straightened, confidence swelling in his voice like a brass band warming up.
“That’s right,” he said. “Now…”
He pointed at himself.
“Say my name.”
The room hummed with burners and boiling glass.
Finally Boris spoke.
“Heisenberg.”
The man spread his arms like a conquering emperor.
“You’re goddamn right.”
But the pug wasn’t finished.
“Werner Heisenberg,” Boris continued calmly. “Father of quantum physics. Author of the uncertainty principle. Winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize.”
The yellow suit froze.
“You also ran the Nazi atomic program during World War II,” Boris went on, straightening his tie. “And after the war—”
“All right, all right!” the man snapped, waving his hands. “They get it now.”
Nobody in Van Nuys was surprised when Robert Vestal was found dead on his living room floor one lazy Monday morning.
The discovery was made by his housekeeper, who had been working for Vestal long enough to know two things about the man: first, he was rich, and second, he was widely hated. Vestal had spent a lifetime double-crossing every two-bit hood in town and breaking the hearts of every floozy who had ever been foolish enough to trust him. By the time he finally caught a bullet, most people in the city figured it was simply the bill coming due.
What was surprising was what happened afterward.
Jonny and Boris of the Jonny & Boris Detective Agency soon learned that Vestal had anticipated his own violent end. In a final gesture that was equal parts arrogance and gallows humor, the crooked financier had set aside a tidy sum in his will for the two detectives—on the condition that they bring his “inevitable murderer, whoever it turns out to be,” to justice.
It sounded simple enough.
The trouble was that everyone in Van Nuys had a motive.
Vestal had cheated gamblers, swindled businessmen, blackmailed politicians, and jilted more women than a traveling magician. Half the town had wanted him dead, and the other half would have happily held his coat while someone else did the job.
Somewhere in that crowd was the killer.
But only one of them had pulled the trigger.
“I don’t have a clue,” Boris admitted, which was a rare confession for the sharp-witted pug detective. “Everyone in this berg hated Vestal’s guts, including you and me. How are we supposed to narrow down the list of suspects?”
Jonny leaned back in his chair and stared gloomily at the ceiling.
“This whole thing reminds me of one of those terrible detective novels,” he muttered. “You know the kind. Written by that awful pulp fiction writer. I forget his name…”
“Hack Werker?” suggested Boris, who was the more well-read of the two partners.
“That’s him!” Jonny snapped. “He writes those idiotic mysteries where you don’t know who the killer is until the last five pages. Then suddenly it turns out to be some minor character who wasn’t even introduced until the end of the book.”
Boris nodded thoughtfully.
“Yes, those are pretty bad.”
Jonny sighed.
“I’ll bet HE could figure out the ending to this ridiculous plot.”
For a moment the office fell silent.
Jonny looked at Boris.
Boris looked at Jonny.
Then, as if by some mysterious act of detective inspiration, identical light bulbs seemed to flick on above both their heads.
“Hack Werker lives in an old van parked behind the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor on Laurel Canyon Boulevard,” Boris said, already reaching for his fedora.
Jonny raised an eyebrow.
“That’s a long shot.”
Boris settled the hat firmly between his ears and headed for the door.
“Partner,” he said, “this case is ridiculous enough to call for desperate measures.”
He paused at the doorway and grinned.
“Besides,” the pug added, “I’ve got a powerful craving for greasy pizza and mojo potatoes.”
And with that, the two detectives set off to consult the one man in Van Nuys who might know how their strange mystery was supposed to end.
