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.