Category: Movies and Television

My Three Love Babies

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.

Stopover at Petticoat Junction

Hack intended to continue his series of novels inspired by 1960s TV sitcoms with this tribute to Petticoat Junction, a rural comedy best remembered for its opening sequence showing three smokin’ hot sisters provocatively bathing in a water tower over their mother’s hotel. Unfortunately, the story was derailed because the actor who played the character of Uncle Joe in the show bore an uncanny resemblance to Hack’s abusive father, so it devolved into a memory piece about how every time Hack started making out with a woman during his teenage years, his father inevitably appeared and tried to make it a three-way.

That Girl

The alleys behind Van Nuys’ Skid Row were a place the city forgot on purpose. Even the rats walked with their collars turned up, and the only law that lingered there came in empty bottles and bad intentions. If hell had a back door, it opened onto that stretch of broken asphalt — and that’s exactly where Jonny and Boris found themselves when word spread that a gentle drifter known as the Little Tramp had cashed in his last smile.

He’d been a fixture of the gutters, a sad clown with a hopeful grin, until somebody snuck up behind him and cracked a bottle across the back of his skull. The alley had swallowed him whole, leaving only a stiff breeze and a smell strong enough to make shopkeepers across the way start dialing numbers they usually ignored.

Boris sniffed the air, his wrinkled muzzle tightening like a clenched fist. “Body’s been here a week,” the little pug muttered, pacing slow circles around the chalky outline of what used to be a man. “Maybe longer. Without the complaints, we’d never have known he was gone. Right now, partner, I got nothing — no footprints, no witnesses, just ghosts and broken glass.”

Jonny didn’t like hearing that. Boris was the brain of the operation, and when the brain ran dry, trouble usually wasn’t far behind.

Trouble arrived wearing a dirty overcoat and carrying a half-empty bottle of rye.

Whiskey Tom drifted out of the shadows like a bad memory. The boys knew him well — a twitchy psycho with a taste for violence and cheap liquor. He led them to his cardboard palace tucked against a graffiti-scarred wall, only a few feet from where the Little Tramp had taken his last breath.

Boris leaned in close. “You said you saw the killer,” he said, voice low and steady. “Start talking.”

Tom’s eyes darted around like loose marbles. His lips trembled, but the words refused to come — until a flash of legs and spotlight glow spilled into the alley. A brunette stepped through the stage door of one of Skid Row’s seedy 99-seat theaters, all curves and confidence, a mini dress cutting through the gloom like a sunrise nobody deserved.

Ann Marie.

Van Nuys’ sweetheart. The girl with a smile bright enough to make the streetlights jealous.

Jonny tipped his fedora. Boris blinked twice, stunned silent — a rare event.

Tom’s bottle rattled against his teeth as he raised a shaking finger.

“That’s her … she’s the one who did it.” he croaked, voice thin as a cracked record. “That girl!”

The Murder of Gomer Pyle

The Van Nuys Motel 6 collected corpses the way a cheap bar collects regrets—quietly, without ceremony. So the badges dragged their heels. But when Jonny and Boris heard the name of the stiff over the police radio, something cold crawled up their spines. Gomer Pyle. Marine Corps. One of their own.

John Law was still absent when they arrived, but it didn’t matter because since the death took place in a hotel, it was under the jurisdiction of the Hotel Dick. At the Van Nuys Motel 6, that meant Dutch Winsett, a man Jonny and Boris knew too well. They all went to detective school together and while Jonny and Boris graduated with honors at the top of the class and became legendary shamuses, Winsett came in dead last and landed here, king of mildew and broken vending machines. When they walked into the crime scene to see Gomer hanging by his belt around his throat from the ceiling fan, the scowl on his face when they walked in said he remembered every ranking on that final scoreboard.

“Well, well,” Dutch sneered. “Van Nuys’ favorite miracle workers. Hate to disappoint you, but there’s no grand conspiracy. Pyle checked in alone, got bored, got experimental. Breath-control play gone wrong. Case closed.”

He lifted two pieces of evidence like a magician revealing cheap props—a bottle of Jergens lotion and a box of Kleenex Ultra-Soft.

“Wait a minute,” said Boris. “You think that Gomer was playing with his pud using LOTION? When we did circle jerks in ‘Nam,  he’d douse his wang in Hellfire Hot Sauce from his hometown in Mayberry.”

“And Kleenex ULTRA-SOFT?” said Jonny. “He’d call you a pussy if you cleaned up with anything less than sandpaper.”

Boris hopped onto the nightstand, nose twitching as if sniffing out a lie. “This wasn’t an accident,” he said quietly. “Someone staged this.”

Jonny’s trench coat flared as he turned toward the door. “Only three hitters in Van Nuys could make a murder look this pathetic.”

“Give us twenty-four hours,” Boris called over his shoulder. “We’ll drag your killer into the lobby ourselves.”

The door slammed behind them just as the distant wail of sirens finally crept into the parking lot. Tears welled in Dutch’s eyes at the realization that Jonny and Boris had once again made a fool of him…but he swore that THEY would be the fools in the last chapter.

Silence of the Pugs

Boris felt his fur prickle the moment the steel door clanged shut behind him. The corridor outside the holding ward for homicidal lunatics smelled like bleach, cold coffee, and regret. His little paws clicked against the tile as he hurried toward the exit, Hannibal Lechter’s velvet-smooth voice still echoing in his ears. The meeting had yielded answers—but answers didn’t slow the ticking clock. Somewhere in Van Nuys, Buffalo Jill was sharpening her dreams with a knife, and Jonny’s elephant-like epidermis was already measured for the next addition to her chilling man suit.

Across town, Jonny hung in a nightmare cut straight from a pulp magazine cover. A dirt pit in a suburban basement. A single bulb swinging like a drunk with a secret. Above him stood Jill, looming over the edge, her shadow falling across him like a funeral veil. She was dressed down to a black tank top and the same model of blood red thong that Jonny had recently purchased at Victoria’s Secret to stuff in his mouth when he took his mid-afternoon naps.

“It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” Buffalo Jill crooned, voice syrupy and cruel. She nudged a bottle of Jergens toward him with the toe of her boot. The smell of cheap roses filled the pit as Jonny worked the lotion into his wrinkled hide. Truth was, he liked how the salve opened up his stubborn pores, but he’d written enough erotic fiction for publication on the Dark Web based on this very scenario to know that he had to stretch out the perverse torment in order to intensify the amorous climax. Jonny tilted his head back, eyes half-lidded with defiance and mischief, playing his part like a second-rate actor chasing a first-class curtain call.

“First,” he said, voice low and steady, “tell me how naughty I’ve been.”

Ponderosa

The prairie sky bled red like a fresh wound as Jonny and Boris sat by a lonely campfire, boots stretched toward the flames, letting the smoke curl up into a sunset that looked like it had been poured from a whiskey bottle. A month riding the dust trails had taught them one thing — silence out here wasn’t peace. It was a warning. They turned around to see four men of about the same age on horses, but since one of them had gone prematurely gray, he was in charge.

“I’m Ben Cartwright and these are my sons Hoss, Joseph and Adam, although Adam will be leaving us soon because he’s a Drama Desk Award-winning Shakespearean actor and our adventures have gotten too ridiculous for him. This is our ranch the Ponderosa that we operate exclusively by ourselves, with only our cook Hop Sing to ease our loneliness. Who exactly are you strangers?”

“This is a RANCH?” asked Jonny incredulously. “It’s so big, we thought we were riding from one end of Texas to the other.”

“We’re from the future,” explained Boris nervously as he realized that the Cartwrights were between him and his Colt .45. “We took our time machine to check out the Old West. We didn’t mean to trespass.”

Old man Cartright calmly dismounted while Hoss and Adam boxed in the boys with the horses as Little Joe retrieved Boris’ pistol. The patriarch gave the pug a disinterested glance and then fixed a long, cold look at Jonny.

“Time machine, eh?” said Cartwright as he stroked Jonny’s cheek with his gloved hand. “I’ll say this…they make ‘em with REAL pretty mouths in the future.”

Heaven Knows, Mr. M.

Boris and Jonny got the summons like a bad hand at a crooked table. Rufus T. Firefly’s office smelled of panic and cigar smoke, and the Dictator for Life was pacing like a man who’d misplaced his spine. “I’ve got sour news, boys,” Firefly said, voice cracking like cheap shellac. “You fled here to dodge that lunatic Donald Trump, and now he’s kicking down our door. The orange windbag’s declared war on us for our helium reserves. As if he didn’t already sound ridiculous every time he opened his mouth.”

Boris cocked an eyebrow and scratched his jowls. “I thought our spiritual ringer, Sister Ana of Armas, handed him her Nobel Peace Prize to keep his beady little eyes off our goofy gas.” Firefly snorted. “The man’s got the memory of a three-day-old gnat. He forgot. That’s why you’re here. Boris, you take the northern front and try not to get us all killed. Jonny—your job’s heavier. Sister Ana is the soul of this tin-pot republic. She breathes, we breathe. You get her south to our friends. It won’t be pretty, but you’re the only mug I trust to pull it off.”

Jonny opened his mouth to protest the partner split when the door swung open and the good sister walked in. They’d heard the hymns about her kindness and charity, but none of them mentioned she was built like trouble with a halo slapped on top. Boris clocked it instantly—Sister Ana froze when she saw Jonny, her angelic face melting into the same hungry look every Van Nuys tramp gave his pal when she’d already picked out the motel. The pug had seen that look a hundred times. It always ended the same way—wrinkled sheets, bad decisions, and regrets that didn’t last past breakfast.