This romantic lark is a departure from Hack’s usual hardboiled style. It’s a memory piece loosely based on an episode during his brief stint with the Merchant Marines when he had a 24-hour pass in a strange city spent with three women he met on the dock. The reality was that they were sex workers who gave him his first case of syphilis that resulted in the insanity which plagued him in his later years, and the night concluded with the women stealing Hack’s wallet and pushing what they thought was his lifeless body into a canal. It ended happily, with the syphilis eating away the facts of the evening from his brain until he now regards it as one of his most cherished memories.
The night hung over Van Nuys like a damp overcoat nobody wanted to wear.
It was 11:30 p.m. in March, and the thermometer outside a pawnshop on Ventura Boulevard insisted it was ninety-six degrees. The Valley baked like a cheap pie left too long in the oven. But Jonny M. always played whatever part fate cast him in to perfection, right down to the costume. That meant a wool three-piece suit, a trench coat heavy enough to stop a .38 slug, and a fedora tilted low enough to make a choirboy suspicious.
The sweat ran down his spine like a criminal fleeing the scene, but Jonny didn’t notice.
He was staring into the most beautiful pair of eyes he’d ever seen.
They belonged to Ingrid.
Ingrid the Swedish knockout. Ingrid with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and lips that could make a bishop forget the Ten Commandments. And right now those lips were close enough to make Jonny forget every case he’d ever worked—except the one that had just wrapped up behind him.
Across the street, the gallows creaked in the warm night breeze. Robert Vestal’s murderer was still doing a slow dance at the end of the rope.
Hardest case Jonny and his partner Boris had ever cracked. Every crook, skirt, and two-bit chiseler in Van Nuys had wanted Vestal dead. But only one had the guts to pull the trigger.
Now justice had its pound of flesh.
And Jonny was about to collect his reward.
Ingrid leaned close, her voice soft and sad like a violin playing in a smoky bar.
“But what about us?”
Jonny tipped his hat back and looked at her like a man studying the last good thing in a rotten world.
“We’ll always have Tarzana,” he said. “We didn’t have it. We lost it… until you came to Van Nuys. Then we got it back last night.”
Her eyes shimmered.
“When I said I would never leave you.”
For a moment the whole world held its breath.
There was only one thing missing.
Rain.
A proper farewell like this needed rain—sheets of it, cascading down like the heavens themselves were crying into their whiskey. But the Valley hadn’t seen so much as a drizzle in thirty years. Not since the refinery went up on Oxnard Street and chased the clouds away like unpaid bookies.
Jonny leaned in anyway. Some moments were too perfect to wait for weather reports.
He stuck out his tongue, ready to seal the deal—
—and felt a drop of water land on it.
Then another.
Within seconds the sky opened up like Niagara Falls. Water poured down in thick romantic sheets, soaking Jonny’s trench coat and plastering Ingrid’s hair to her perfect face.
Jonny blinked.
He slowly looked up.
Perched on top of a nearby streetlamp was Boris—the toughest pug detective in the San Fernando Valley—holding a garden hose fitted with a chrome shower head. The anthropomorphic canine grinned down through the artificial monsoon like a plumber who’d just fixed the world.
“Mother Nature may not have shown up for you,” Boris called down in his gravelly accent. “But I’ve got your back.”
Jonny smiled.
Across the street, a handful of unlucky stiffs stood sweating at a bus stop in the brutal heat, wearing the least amount of clothing the law would allow. They watched the rain-drenched lovers with the bitter envy of empty souls who knew romance had passed them by.
Jonny didn’t care.
He grabbed Ingrid, pulled her close, and planted a kiss that would’ve made the devil himself take notes. His nicotine-stained tongue dove into her mouth while the fake rain danced across their heads like confetti at a crooked wedding.
Sure, he was losing the most beautiful woman God ever put on this lousy planet.
But Jonny still had the most perfect partner a guy could ask for.
The plates were empty, the champagne was warm, and the kind of trouble that only shows up after dessert was already circling the table like a vulture with a reservation. Linda and Pussy slipped away toward the ladies’ room in a swirl of perfume and promises to get themselves ready to return to Casa de Jonny and give Jonny and Boris their Valentines Day gifts, a night of violent anal sex without lube.
Boris tilted his champagne flute and chased the last rebellious bubbles with his tongue. The little pug adjusted his white tie and tails like a diplomat preparing to start a war.
“Ever notice something, boss?” he muttered, voice low enough to dodge the waitstaff but loud enough to land like a brick. “We’re catnip to every dame in Van Nuys. Me — a pug with a vocabulary and a tuxedo, cruelly castrated before I was shipped across the Pacific. And you — a 64-year-old moron with a disposition like a cracked ashtray, dating a legendary pop star who looks 25 on a bad day despite her being born in 1946 and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.”
Jonny blinked slowly, like a man trying to read a clue written in invisible ink. “What’s your point, Boris?”
Before the dog could answer, a thin man with a pencil mustache and a tragically ambitious French accent glided up to the table. The restaurant manager. He smelled faintly of garlic and deadlines.
“Messieurs,” he said, bowing just enough to suggest either respect or indigestion. “Monsieur Werker requests that you conclude this philosophical digression. He intends to dedicate several pages to… how do you say… your evening of bareback cornholing, and your existential debate is slowing the rhythm of the narrative.”
He clicked his heels and vanished toward the kitchen like a stagehand fleeing a spotlight.
Jonny stared at Boris. Boris stared at Jonny. The silence hung between them like a bad alibi.
Finally, the pug sighed, straightened his bow tie, and delivered the line like a verdict.
“My point, pal,” he said, “is that none of this makes sense… unless we’re just characters trapped inside a pulp crime novel.”
Sunday bled out slow and sour at Casa de Jonny, like cheap liquor seeping into an expensive rug. Jonny, Linda, Boris, and Pussy lounged in obscene comfort while Pinion the butler performed the last rites of Christmas—stripping the tree bare, needles biting through his tuxedo trousers, sap clinging to him like a bad memory. He dragged the dead pine half a mile downhill to the dumpster, its branches clawing the pavement in protest, before returning to serve Champagne, catnip, and pug food with hands that still smelled of resin and defeat. Inside, the air was warm and golden, heavy with luxury and self-satisfaction. Outside, something watched. Pinion felt it in his spine, a cold finger tracing tomorrow’s date.
They ate like royalty on the edge of a cliff. Lobster tails flew, laughter cracked, bubbles hissed in crystal flutes as Boris snorted happily and Pussy rolled in narcotic bliss. Pinion’s unease earned him nothing but mockery. “There’s nothing out there, Pinion, you idiot,” Jonny sneered, beauty and cruelty sharing the same smile. “Go get us another bottle of Moët & Chandon Imperial Vintage 1946 from the wine cellar.” As the butler turned away, dignity straightened but fear stayed hunched, he caught it again—a hideous green blob skittering behind a cypress, moving wrong, like a thought that shouldn’t exist. He nodded and obeyed, because that’s what servants do when the world pretends it’s safe.
The cellar steps groaned beneath Pinion’s shoes, each one a countdown tick he could almost hear. He knew then what Jonny didn’t: looks, brains and excessively large penises don’t stop Mondays. They arrive anyway, wet and hungry, dragging the week behind them like a corpse. The green thing outside wasn’t just flesh—it was inevitability, slime wrapped around the calendar. Pinion tightened his grip on the bottle and squared his shoulders in the dark, alone with the wine and the truth. If anyone was going to slow the dread creeping toward Casa de Jonny, it wouldn’t be the laughing gods upstairs. It would be the butler with pine needles in his cuffs, standing between Sunday and the thing that came next.
