Month: November 2021

Hack wrote this as an origin story of how Jonny and Boris met as a couple of honest cops who tried to maintain their souls in the most dishonest city on earth. It contradicted every book he had written about them up to this point but it’s a surprisingly good read:

Van Nuys was the kind of city that wore its sins like cologne — thick, cheap, and impossible to wash off. Neon lights flickered over broken sidewalks, and the smog hung low like a dirty secret no one wanted to confess. Jonny M. was one of the last honest cops left in the precinct, a man whose knuckles were as scarred as his conscience. He’d seen every shade of bad this town could throw at him, but he kept showing up anyway — tie crooked, jaw set, heart still stubbornly human. When Internal Affairs stuck him with a new partner, he figured it was another joke. But Boris wasn’t your average partner. He was a pug — short, stout, and dead serious — with eyes that had seen more evil than most men could stomach and a nose that never missed a lie.

Together, Jonny and Boris patrolled the mean streets where sirens were lullabies and justice came in bruises and barked warnings. The crooks laughed when they first saw the duo — until Boris caught a gunman by the pant leg in a liquor store sting and refused to let go. Word spread fast through the underbelly: the man with the cold stare and the dog with the sharper instincts were making the rounds. They didn’t play politics, didn’t take bribes, and didn’t scare easy. In a precinct where every handshake came with a hidden deal, Jonny and Boris were the only ones still working for the badge, not the payoff.

It wasn’t long before the city started biting back. One humid night on Vanowen, a bullet meant for Jonny shattered the glass beside him, and Boris leapt before the echo died. When the smoke cleared, the shooter was on the pavement, whimpering louder than the pug’s growl. Jonny lit a cigarette, rain dripping off the brim of his patrolman’s cap, and looked down at his partner. “Guess we’re still the good guys,” he muttered. Boris just snorted, tail twitching like a punctuation mark in the dark. And together, they walked into the night — two honest cops in the dirtiest town on earth, keeping Van Nuys from devouring itself one busted jaw at a time.