The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
Hack noticed a lot of AI-generated parodies of the iconic scene from the 1991 teen flick Career Opportunities in which Jennifer Connelly seductively rides a coin-operated rocking horse (which is the only memorable thing about the stupid movie), so he wrote this ripoff novel around it. It’s surprisingly much better than the movie.
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Jack Webb!
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Sterling Hayden!
In Van Nuys, power wasn’t measured in money or muscle—it was measured in how fast you could get a booth at the Denny’s on Sherman Way. The city’s two-bit kings and third-rate royalty waited months for a shot at those cracked vinyl seats with a view of the flickering Van Nuys Drive-In sign next door. Even Snow Mercy—top trigger for the mob and the kind of dame that made traffic forget where it was going—could only muscle her way in twice a month. That changed when she latched onto a name that opened doors like a skeleton key: Thurston Howell VII, heir to the fabulous Lovey Howell fortune. After that, she was ringside every night, carving into a Moon Over My Hammy within earshot of the legendary wits of the Denny’s round table—Bro Joe, Robin Greenspan, and the rest of the breakfast intelligentsia—firing off wisecracks like they were getting paid by the syllable.
Howell. You read that right. Old money, deep pockets, and the kind of pull that made waitlists disappear. He hired Snow to ice Robert Vestal when Vestal got cute and tried to take a bite out of Howell Industries. Snow did what she always did—clean, quiet, no witnesses but the ghosts. Then Howell tells her to celebrate. Brunch. Same place. Same day. In Van Nuys, that’s like asking for sunshine at midnight. But thirty minutes later, there she was, elbows on the table, staring down a Grand Slam like it owed her money. That’s when she knew—this guy wasn’t just connected. He was magic.
Only magic’s a funny thing in this town. Turns out the real Thurston Howell VII was cooling his heels under house arrest in a Glendale villa, wrapped up in a sweetheart deal with the Feds. The guy Snow was splitting pancakes with? A ghost with a badge. A federal suit wearing Howell’s name like a rented tux, dipping into his bank account and his social circle to get close—real close—to the deadliest woman in the Valley. Close enough to map the underworld, piece by piece, until there was nowhere left for it to hide.
It took a special kind of agent with the guts, charm and finger trigger to sell a ticket to the high wire act he was attempting, and he needed a special kind of partner running the box office.
Jonny M. and Boris, your audience is ready for the show.
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:
Nobody laughs forever.
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Rob Reiner!
The four biggest gumshoes ever to haunt Van Nuys had no business breathing the same stale air, but there they were anyway — Philip Marlowe with his tired eyes, Sam Spade with a jaw like a busted brick, and the local legends, Jonny M. and Boris Pug. Fate, cheap clients, and a pair of heartbreakers across the alley had shoved them into the same crummy room at the Motel 6, watching silhouettes dance behind flickering blinds while the neon sign outside blinked like it had a nervous condition.
Five hours of surveillance will make saints swear and sinners hungry, so the boys called a truce with the telescope and broke out lunch. Marlowe swigged rye that smelled like paint thinner. Spade chain-smoked filterless Camels until the room looked like a house fire. Jonny and Boris demolished enough Taco Bell to qualify as a controlled demolition. When the wrappers settled, the talk got heavy — the kind of confessions that only come out when the world’s gone quiet and the job’s already chewed you up.
“She said the Black Bird would buy us a new life,” Spade rasped, striking a match that shook just a little. “All I had to do was ice Cairo and the Fat Man and we’d be sipping something cold south of the border. Turns out I was just another name on her hit list. Promised I’d wait for her until she got out… but the hangman beat me to it.”
Marlowe gave a humorless grin. “A general hires me to babysit his wild daughter, next thing I know I’m knee-deep in a story with more twists than a busted corkscrew. Everyone lies, everyone loses, and I end up patching my heart together with spit and baling wire.”
The two old pros looked over at Jonny and Boris, expecting tragedy served neat. The boys exchanged a glance — the kind priests share when a confession gets weird.
“Geez, that’s rough,” Jonny said, shifting in his chair. “Wish I could say the same, but my girl’s a twenty-five-year-old rock star who treats me like I hung the moon. Doesn’t even blink that I bang a different new hot chick every third or fourth case.”
Boris nodded, paws folded like a philosopher. “And my lady? Alley cat with a taste for trouble and a heart like dynamite. Plenty of dames throw themselves at me, but when you’ve got perfection waiting at home, why shop around?”
Spade and Marlowe traded a look — two hardboiled knights suddenly feeling like a couple of high school nerds who were given atomic wedgies by the co-captains of the football team.
“Don’t sweat it, fellas,” Boris added with a crooked grin. “Luck comes and goes in this racket. Speaking of which… anybody want to watch me light up Jonny’s Taco Bell farts?”
Outside, the neon flickered again, and somewhere in Van Nuys another bad decision was already warming up.
Happy birthday to the great Jennifer Aniston!
The Chief of CONTROL looked like a man who’d been arm-wrestling Armageddon and losing on points when Jonny and Boris stepped into his office. His shoulders sagged, his eyes were bloodshot, and the cigarette in his hand had burned down to the filter without him noticing.
“The Reds finally did it,” he said, voice flat as a toe tag. “They’ve perfected the Super Atomic Bomb. One week from today it drops on Van Nuys. That’s curtains. Final show. End of the world as we know it.”
Jonny frowned and glanced down at Boris. The pug adjusted his fedora and blinked, unimpressed. “What’s the holdup?” Jonny said. “Put us on the airfield. We’ll wreck the bomb before it wrecks us.”
The Chief stared at them like they’d just suggested stopping a hurricane with a cocktail umbrella. “Nothing,” he said, jabbing the air with a trembling finger, “NOTHING is more destructive than that bomb. It’ll scrub humanity off the map for hundreds of miles. There is no stopping it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Jonny said calmly.
Boris smiled. A slow, knowing grin—the kind that usually meant someone, somewhere, was about to regret their life choices.
“Parachute us in,” Jonny went on, “with a duffel bag full of McDonald’s new McCrispy sandwiches. Boris eats them all.”
The Chief opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“When that toxic pseudo-meat hits his pug colon,” Jonny continued, “it’ll brew up a stink so powerful it’ll de-atomize anything within range. Steel, concrete, Commie science—gone. Those red-hot eggheads planned for everything except one thing.”
He nodded toward Boris.
“A pug’s large intestine.”
The room went quiet. Somewhere, a clock ticked like it was counting down to doomsday.
Finally, the Chief sighed, defeated. He picked up the red phone—the one reserved for bad ideas and worse necessities—and dialed Washington.
“Get me transport,” he said. “And order a crate of McCrispys.”
Happy National Poop Day!
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Paul Newman!