Hack watched the vampire horror movie Sinners with Boris and Jonny and didn’t like what he saw, in part because the bloodsuckers were all hayseeds dressed in rags. Hack longed for the day when movie vampires wore white tie and tails and opera capes, so he wrote this rip-off of the Ryan Coogler flick and recast the vampires as European aristocracy wearing formalwear from circa 1930. It was Hack’s way of making brutally murdering someone by torturously sucking the fluids out of their body classy again.
Karen sat uneasy in the leaky rowboat, the kind that made promises it couldn’t keep, praying it would cough them up on Alcatraz’s rocks by midnight so Jonny could hunt down his missing ticker. The fog rolled in like a bad alibi. Boris fussed with the oars, pretending to check knots, but his eyes told the real story. He’d seen it a thousand times: the way men kept their distance from women like Karen because beauty that loud made cowards of them. And Karen—poor kid—never knew the damage she did just by breathing. She wanted one man and one man only. From the moment Jonny had sidled up, all trench coat and trouble, tapping her for island know-how she gained from her job as the top tour guide on The Rock, she’d been lost. Boris watched the familiar spell take hold and sighed. The boss had that effect. Always had.
Jonny felt it before he saw it—the stare, heavy as a loaded revolver—aimed squarely at his rock-hard glutes. Same story, different dame. He turned, tore his shirt open, and let the night see the hole Jesse the Knife had punched through him back on Alcatraz. “Don’t,” Jonny said, voice low and final. “Don’t fall for me. Not till I get my heart back from wherever that rat hid it on Alcatraz. All I’ve got is danger and bad decisions.” The oars dipped. The boat crawled. Karen said nothing. She just stole glances at the man shaped like regret and figured—quietly, stubbornly—that she could make do.
Hack wrote this novel after María Corina Machado gave Donald Trump the medallion and certificate she received for being named the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner in a transparent attempt to make her his puppet president of Venezuela. And while Hack clearly doesn’t comprehend the insignificance of someone winning a trophy and then giving it to another person who didn’t, it’s even more fucking obvious that Trump doesn’t either.
You could have heard a pin drop when Madame Cherepakha took the stand. Jonny and Boris had seen her testify at many trials and she always had a strong impact on juries. Her showmanship was in top form as she took the crystal ball she had purchased at the Hollywood Magic Store, said a few “magic words” in her Native Russian that sounded to Jonny and Boris like pig latin, and a cloudy image in the glass of a figure wearing a trench coat fired a gun. “Ve do not hef such creetures in my country,” she said in a thick Bela Lugosi accent, “but here you call it a…”
“A pug?” asked Big Tim’s attorney Atticus Finch. The psychic shook her head as a gasp came up through the spectators’ gallery and every member of the jury glared at Boris as if they were seeing him for the first time…and they were disgusted by what they saw. The twelve hicks from Van Nuys took one look at a conjuror’s trick from a novelty store and were ready to throw evidence from six months of detective work in the dumpster so that they could execute one of the great heroes of the city. Boris sat stiffly, his jowls slack, his eyes wide and wounded—not with fear, but with the kind of disbelief that comes when the world you saved starts sharpening the axe. Cherepakha’s magic show was finished, and Jonny and Boris would have to pull their own rabbit out of a hat…and now.
Hack wrote this to commemorate the passing of Humphrey Bogart, who died 69 years ago today. In truth, the constraints of the Production Code in force at the time wouldn’t allow them to use the scene in The Maltese Falcon where the femme fatale has to take off all her clothes to prove she didn’t steal a $1000 bill in the 1941 Bogart film. But it is in the novel and the 1931 pre-code version so Hack plugged it into this book because we’ve had a stressful morning. He even made Natalie Wood the character to cheer us up that much more. Hack can be a nice guy when he wants to.
By the time the trio finally made it to the front of the line at the soup place, Jonny felt like he’d made some headway with Elaine. But Boris’ perpetually ravenous belly was focused on only one thing: lunch. The middle eastern proprietor starred down the pug with an intimidating glare that would have overwhelmed anyone else, but Boris’ only master was his stomach. “We’ll have three large mulligatawnies and make it snappy!” The man was unmoved. “Who brought this animal in here? Dogs are not allowed on the premises. Whoever it belongs to, take your mangy creature and get out! No soup for…”
Before he could finish his catchphrase, Boris leapt over the sneeze guard and delivered a kung fu kick to the insolent server’s jaw, sending him sprawling to the floor. While he laid there in a daze, Boris put him in the dreaded Ninja Death Grip so that if the pug increased the pressure of his paw even a fraction of an inch, the soupmaker would be meeting his maker that day. “I said we’ll have three large mulligatawnies, and it will be your pleasure to give them to us on the house.”
Jonny threw his arms around Elaine protectively because he’d witnessed this scene enough to know that if the Soup Nazi was foolish enough to resist, there would be blood spouting at least six feet in all directions. The sultry beauty returned the grasp with the firmness of a woman whose blood was about to boil over with passion. She looked at Jonny with a red-hot intensity, and he replied with the smug grin of a man who knew that he was about to spend the afternoon between tangled sheets.
