Category: In Uniform

Cat Scratch Fever

It was three in the morning, the hour when the streetlights flicker like dying stars and the only things awake in Van Nuys are the rats, the sinners, and the poor mugs paid to clean up after them. Jonny M. swaggered onto the scene like he was arriving at a Hollywood premiere rather than a sidewalk soaked in yesterday’s blood. While he kept himself occupied tossing charm grenades at the gorgeous lady cop assigned to the case—Officer Jane Law, the kind of knockout who could stop traffic and maybe even a raging bull—Boris crouched over the mutilated stiff with an expression that would curdle fresh milk. The little pug detective’s face had never exactly been a picture of joy, but tonight it was uglier than a politician’s promise.

Boris didn’t need more than a glance to know what he was looking at. The deep lacerations ripping across the victim’s torso weren’t the work of some dime-store switchblade or a hopped-up mugger with brass knuckles. No—these were the calling cards of something far more primal. Razor-sharp claws. The kind only an angry tomcat could wield with enough fury to send a man to meet his maker early. The pug lit a cigarette, letting the smoke curl around his thoughts like a lazy fog creeping over a cemetery gate. He was just reaching for his magnifying glass when Jane Law strolled over, heels clicking like a countdown to doom.

“You can put that toy away, Boris,” she purred. “We’ve already got the culprit.” Boris looked up, squinting through a ribbon of smoke, and saw her holding a pair of heavy steel shackles. On the other end of them stood a sexy tomcat in a little black dress, wide-brim hat, and eyes wide with terror. But this wasn’t just any feline femme fatale—they’d dragged in Pussy, Boris’ own girlfriend. His Camel hung from the corner of his mouth as he took the longest, slowest drag of his life. This wasn’t just another corpse on just another crooked night in Van Nuys. This was a frame-up, and unless Boris could crack the case wide open, Pussy was headed straight for a date with the hangman’s noose.

Historic Filipinotown

Jonny watched the Packard fishtail down the alley, exhaust coughing like a dying bullfrog, the blonde bombshell behind the wheel shrieking at her sister/daughter/niece/second cousin in that high-strung way that made every vertebra in Jonny’s spine beg for mercy. She’d been nothing but trouble from the moment she waltzed into the agency flashing those baby-blue peepers and waving a retainer check big enough to pave over her neuroses. But it was Jonny’s ex-partner on the force—a tall drink of nitroglycerin whose slow burn around him could’ve been detected by airport security—who made the next move. She raised her service piece for a polite little “stop or I’ll shoot” communiqué… only the communique went rogue, zipped through the dawn haze, and rearranged the dame’s golden noggin into something resembling a seven-layer dip left too long on a picnic table.

When the smoke cleared and the three of them gathered round the wrecked beauty, Jonny felt a jig bubbling inside him like champagne in a thin glass. She’d been a headache, sure, but sweet saints of the city, what a dish. He’d even bragged—loudly and to anyone within earshot—about the time he’d done the horizontal hula with her. Now, with her skull looking like a Jackson Pollock study in red, he couldn’t exactly break into a victory Charleston in front of gawking bystanders clutching their shopping bags and moral expectations. Jonny’s face needed to broadcast “tragic remorse,” but his soul was performing a conga line, and that was a tricky two-step to pull off without coaching.

Luckily, Boris knew his partner’s heart was made of equal parts confetti and ratchet straps, and he’d taken precautions. From the shadows stepped a lone trumpet player—Boris’ doing—blowing a low, mournful note that told Jonny exactly what emotion he ought to paste across his mug. With the horn’s wail guiding him, Jonny mustered up a look of deep, operatic angst while privately debating whether to stream some trashy reality show or the latest Bill Burr standup special on Netflix that night. Boris padded close, laid a steadying paw on his partner’s shoulder, and whispered the words that deepened Jonny’s fake grief just enough to fool the crowd and maybe, just maybe, fool himself.

“Forget it, Jonny… it’s Historic Filipinotown.”

Sleuth School

The Van Nuys Boarding School for Hot Virgin Girls, ages 18 to 22 had been desperate to add a little grit to their spotless campus. So when they started a detective course, they hired the only duo in the Valley whose reputations were bigger than their caseloads: Jonny M. and his pug partner Boris. The moment Jonny walked into the lecture hall in his trench coat and henna-dyed beard, every student sat up straighter. Gidget the All-American surfer, Judi the wholesome blonde triple-threat, Wednesday the gloomy goth who never blinked… they all watched Jonny with a starry-eyed intensity that could melt the varnish off a file cabinet. It wasn’t detective work they were interested in—it was Jonny. Three times their age and dumb as a post, but with a bulge in his wrinkled slacks that was all they could think about.

Boris noticed the way the class hung on Jonny’s every word, sighing at the way he flicked ash from an unlit cigarette or shuffled evidence folders with a weary hero’s grace. The girls couldn’t concentrate worth a nickel, and the syllabus was going down faster than a getaway car on Sepulveda. So Boris, being the brains of the agency and the only one immune to Jonny’s accidental charisma, marched himself into the filing room and dug up a case cold enough to freeze the whole classroom’s hormones where they sat. The unsolved murder of Robert Vestal—a butchered body, a trail of dead-end clues, and a mystery that had gnawed at the agency for months.

Jonny remembered the case like a bad scar: every alley, every witness, every lead that crumbled like cheap chalk. But Boris slapped the file down on the desk and announced to the class that this would be their final exam. Suddenly the room’s dreamy haze sharpened into something electric. The girls straightened in their seats, pencils poised, eyes alert. For the first time they weren’t imagining Jonny as the hero of their perverse daydreams—they were imagining themselves as heroes alongside him. And with Jonny’s grit, Boris’s brains, and a classroom full of would-be investigators hungry to prove themselves, the Robert Vestal case was about to get hotter than it had ever been. They were hunting for a killer waiting to be caught… assuming he didn’t catch the hunters first.

Operating Room Nurse

Happy Operating Room Nurse Day!

Jonny M. didn’t so much arrive at the Van Nuys Hospital emergency room as collapse into it, slumped on a gurney with a head injury that looked like it had been delivered by a choir of sledgehammers. The docs on duty froze like amateurs at a nightclub raid. Only one creature in the Valley had the paws steady enough, the heart cold enough, and the brilliance fierce enough to crack open a skull and make sense of what was inside: Boris the pug, Jonny’s trusted partner in crime-solving and, on nights like this, the only neurosurgeon worth his weight in dog biscuits. With a grim nod and a surgeon’s cap perched between his ears, Boris barked his orders and assembled a surgical team worthy of a miracle.

Boris chose each member of that team with the care of a jewel thief picking which diamonds to pocket. But the operating-room nurse? That poor sucker had to be whichever body was on shift. Tonight it was Jennifer Brooks — the blonde knockout in a white mini-skirt nurse’s uniform who had walked out of her dime-a-dance past and into a profession that still didn’t trust her. The staff whispered about her behind clipboards and coffee cups, but fate didn’t give a hoot about reputations. It had tossed her into the eye of a storm, and Boris needed hands, skilled or not. With no better option, he thrust her into the center of the action.

For the first hour, the surgery glided along like a well-rehearsed ballet, if ballets came with more scalpels and less grace. Boris worked with uncanny precision, his tiny paws moving like lightning. But Van Nuys Hospital had its quirks, and one of them slithered straight out of a wall crevice — a desert rattler, coiled anger and venom. Before anyone could shout, it struck at the nearest warm target under the drape, sinking its fangs into Jonny’s exposed and defenseless grotesquely misshapen wang. The room froze. Even the heart monitor seemed to hold its breath. In this hospital, such incidents were bizarrely routine, but this time the dose of venom was catastrophic.

The team stared at each other, pale and panicked, until the truth dropped like a brick through a skylight. Only one person present had the right training — the real-world, desperate, back-alley experience to drain a tainted taint the old-fashioned, messy way. Jennifer Brooks. She had done things in her former life to survive the nights, things the hospital board would never put in a handbook, but those same nights had taught her how to save a man on the brink. Her eyes narrowed, her jaw set, and in that moment she wasn’t a dismissed dancer or a forgotten blonde — she was the last line between Jonny M. and the long, dark ride home. And she wasn’t about to let him take it.

The Teabag Misunderstanding

Hack went to brunch with a group of people when he heard his friend Eddie discussing his recipe for sweet tea. But since Hack is almost completely deaf now, the only words he clearly caught were “Southern Sweet Teabags,” and, Hack being Hack, assumed Eddie was discussing a deviant sexual activity. By the time the confusion was straightened out, Hack had this book entirely written in is head.