Category: Dangerous Dudes

Murder at the Ballet

It was the kind of night Van Nuys polished its shoes for. The annual arrival of the Robert Vestal Ballet Company always drew the city’s top hats and bottom lines—bankers with waxed smiles, councilmen with wandering eyes. Slumming among them were two guys who usually worked the alleys instead of the aisles: Jonny and Boris. They didn’t belong to the upper crust, but they’d bought tickets anyway. Tonight wasn’t about culture—it was about Dévyon DuMon, an old friend from Paris, cleared by their legwork when a Dali masterpiece went missing and everyone needed a villain with good posture. DuMon danced like a gardenia-scented hurricane, all jitterbug and perfume, too sweet for the detectives’ taste—but the Bro Code said you show up for your pals, even if it means five hours of tights and tragedy.

They were well into hour five when the ballet took a hard left into hellfire—DuMon leaping offstage in some double-cabriole heroics to save his lover Andromeda from Cerberus or damnation or whatever the program said. Jonny and Boris had been trading naps when a gunshot cracked the air like a bad alibi. The house gasped. A scream followed. Then Robert Vestal himself staggered into the lights, a fresh bullet signature stamped on his forehead. He tried to say something—“DuMon… DuMon’s to blame”—and then he folded, bleeding into the boards that had made him rich.

The detectives were onstage before the applause could die. Boris went to work, eyes sharp, mind sharper. Jonny did what Jonny did best—offered comfort to the two hottest ballerinas in the vicinity in the hopes of getting a three-way going later that night. Too late for Vestal. Boris checked his watch to mark the time of death just as DuMon pirouetted back onstage, blissfully unaware. That’s when Victoria Page, the prima ballerina and Vestal’s lover, broke like cheap glass. “He did it!” she screamed. “Dévyon hated Bobby from day one—ever since I told him I wouldn’t touch him while Bobby was still breathing!” The crowd buzzed. Boris shut it down with a look. “Everyone’s a suspect,” he said. “Including Jonny and me.” Then his gaze settled on DuMon, hard and cold. “But I’ll admit—right now, it sounds like you pulled the trigger.”

Happy National Ballet Day!

Sharp-Dressed Sinners

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.

The Protectors

Jonny was just cracking open the morning paper when Boris staggered out of the crime lab like a sailor off a week-long bender. The pug’s eyes were bloodshot from pulling an all-nighter with nothing but fluorescent lights and government-issue coffee to keep him company. The Feds had dumped a stack of anonymous death-threat letters on him—nasty business aimed at the newly announced Nobel Prize winners. Boris had worked the envelopes like a maestro, but the only thing he could pull from the saliva was the ghost of fast food: Big Macs and Filet-O-Fish fingerprints in biochemical form. He muttered something about cholesterol profiles and brand loyalty before face-planting onto the nearest chair.

Meanwhile, Jonny scanned the front page, brow furrowing at names he didn’t recognize—Barack Obama, Robert Fauci, and one Albert Einstine… Einsteen… some German egghead whose name looked like a winning Scrabble hand. But then his eyes snagged on a name he DID know, one that hit him like a thrown blackjack: Bro Joe, fresh winner of the Literature Prize for that book he’d written about the crackpots haunting the local Starbucks. Jonny shut the paper with a snap, marched to the old rolltop desk, and fished out a pair of dusty passports. He tossed one to Boris, who caught it like a man grabbing the last donut at a stakeout. “Pack your trench coat,” Jonny said. “We’re flying to Sweden. Those Nobel nerds don’t know it yet, but along with a certificate and a novelty-sized penny, they just won the two best bodyguards in the business.”