Rainy Day Romance

The rain came down like a busted fire hydrant on Ventura Boulevard, turning the night into a shimmering smear of headlights and neon. Jonny M. and Boris had been nursing lukewarm coffee on their fifth hour of stakeout when the sky cracked open and dumped a month’s worth of water on Van Nuys. They sprinted for the nearest shelter—the crooked awning of the Meet Cute Boutique, its pink lettering flickering like a dying heartbeat. By the time they skidded to a stop, Jonny smelled less like a hardboiled detective and more like a wet dog named Boris, and Boris smelled like something that would make a wet dog file a complaint.

Out of the watery haze stepped a vision with long black hair plastered down her back, glasses fogged to milky ovals, and a white tank top and denim shorts soaked so thoroughly they left no secrets to the imagination. She laughed—an easy, musical sound that didn’t belong in a neighborhood where most laughter came in the form of a threat. She introduced herself as Chloé, talking fast and bright, telling Jonny and Boris—though mostly Jonny—about her wild life, her dreams, her disasters, her scrapes with luck both good and bad. Jonny listened like a man hypnotized, nodding along like every word she said was a gospel he’d been waiting to hear. By the time the storm tapered off into a lonely drizzle, he was halfway to picking out baby names.

But Boris… he wasn’t sold. Something tugged at the back of his mind, a splinter of recognition he couldn’t dig out. That night he shook himself dry, curled into his trench-coat nest, and tried to sleep. Instead he bolted awake in a cold sweat, heart pounding like a tom-tom drum in a cheap jazz club. He suddenly knew where he had seen that smiling face framed by long black hair: on a wanted poster thumbtacked to the bulletin board at the station. Chloé. Wanted for murder. And Jonny, poor fool, had fallen headfirst into her story—without once noticing the blood on the last page.

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.

Romeo’s Closing Night

Actors’ Day in Van Nuys was supposed to be a harmless holiday—parades of washed-up thespians, discount makeup at the drugstore, and free coffee for anyone who could quote Hamlet without stumbling. Jonny M. and Boris the pug had finally scored something rarer than a fair fight in this town: a night off. They even had tickets—actual paid-for tickets—to see the legendary tragedian Jehoshaphat Merlin give his 5,000th performance as Romeo with his ramshackle traveling Shakespeare Company. Merlin was eighty-three if he was a day, with more wrinkles than a bulldog and a voice that shook like a cheap neon sign in the rain, but the crowd came anyway. Folks didn’t watch Merlin for Romeo—they watched him for the ham. And he served it thick, with gravy.

Juliet was played by the stunning blonde starlet Juliet Valentina, a woman so beautiful she made the moon look overpolished. Acting, however, was not one of her gifts. She couldn’t “cat her way out of a paper bag,” as the critics liked to say, but no one cared—as long as she kept glowing like she’d been dipped in stardust. The rest of the company tried to claw their way through the performance blind, because the only light on the stage was the follow-spot glued to old Merlin’s face. Everyone else lurked in total darkness, save for Valentina, who shimmered on her own like some celestial stage prop. It was the kind of theatrical disaster only Van Nuys could love.

Then the night cracked wide open. Merlin had just launched into one of Romeo’s longest soliloquies—something about love, death, or maybe indigestion—when a gunshot ripped through the auditorium. The old actor staggered, gasped, and collapsed in a heap of brocade and bravado. The stage went pitch black. A collective scream rose from the audience. Then, just as abruptly, the house lights snapped on and the curtain dropped like a guillotine. The theater manager trotted out, sweating like a sinner in church, and announced that the great Jehoshaphat Merlin was “indisposed,” the show was cancelled, and refunds were “not an option in these difficult financial times.”

But before the stunned audience could finish booing, a final message drifted from behind the curtain—Merlin’s voice, weak yet unmistakably theatrical, requesting, “If Jonny and Boris could please come backstage… to investigate an urgent matter.” It was the old showman’s last line, and he delivered it with all the pomp he had left. Jonny looked at Boris. Boris looked at Jonny. Actors’ Day had turned into murder night, and it looked like the Jonny & Boris Detective Agency was clocking back in.

Bump in the Night

This novel was based on a true story when Hack was sleeping on Jonny and Boris’ couch, only to be awakened from a resounding crash that came from their bedroom. He went to check it out to find them arguing about whether Boris had fallen to the floor after he jumped out of Jonny’s hands when he was trying to help him down so he could pee, or whether Jonny has pushed him. The incident was forgotten the next day, save for this manuscript that Hack had cranked out after the pair went back to sleep.

The night was black as spilled ink, and the only sound in the room was the lazy rattle of the ceiling fan until Boris the pug started up his usual whimper. Jonny M., the eternal wreck of a man, stirred under his threadbare blanket, cursing softly at the ceiling. “You again?” he muttered, voice thick as the whiskey fumes clinging to his pillow. The little mutt needed to pee — he always did around this cursed hour. With a sigh that could have curdled milk, Jonny reached down, his hands trembling like a man holding dynamite with a short fuse. He scooped Boris up, the way he’d done a thousand nights before, trying not to think about how the dog had more control over his life than any dame ever did.

But this time was different. The pug squirmed, slick and stubborn, twisting out of Jonny’s grasp like a greased eel. Before Jonny could catch him, Boris slipped, hit the floor with a sound that made Jonny’s stomach twist. Thud. The kind of sound you don’t forget. “For crying out loud, Boris!” Jonny barked, flipping on the lamp. The light stabbed through the shadows, catching the little dog lying there like he’d been clipped by a freight train. Jonny knelt down, heart pounding, and snarled, “That’s what you get for jumping, you dumb mutt.” But the pug’s glazed eyes blinked once, twice — and then narrowed in accusation.

“You pushed me,” Boris said, voice rough as gravel dragged across the truth. Jonny froze, his blood turning to cold soup. A talking pug was trouble enough, but a talking pug calling you a killer — that was another kind of nightmare. “Don’t play innocent, Jonny boy,” Boris growled, struggling to his stubby feet. “You been looking for an easy out ever since Linda started asking questions.” Jonny’s head snapped toward the bed — Linda, her black curls like a halo of deceit, was still there, breathing steadily. Asleep. Or maybe pretending. The city was full of lies, and the biggest one might’ve been lying right next to him.

The Trim Machine.

Jonny M. was the kind of guy who made women flinch without knowing why. Something about the way he smiled—too wide, too needy, like a man selling counterfeit charm in a cheap suit. His best and only friend was Boris, a squat little pug with the brain of a physicist and the patience of a saint. Jonny lived off instant coffee and failed pickup lines while Boris tinkered in their dingy Van Nuys garage with glowing tubes, copper coils, and theories that would’ve made Einstein sweat. Nobody thought much of the pair—one too dumb, the other too furry—but that night, when Boris’s machine began to hum like a choir of dying angels, the air split open like a cheap dime novel cliché—and sucked them both in.

When Jonny came to, the world had changed. The smog of Van Nuys was gone, replaced by a city skyline that gleamed like chrome and sin. His reflection in a mirrored tower made him gasp—his skin smooth, jawline sharp, eyes glinting like he knew what he was doing. The first woman he met nearly fainted when he smiled; the second one followed him down the street without a word. Jonny M., the guy who couldn’t score a phone number if he’d mugged Ma Bell herself, had become a walking fantasy. Boris, puffing and panting beside him, adjusted his tiny lab coat and said in his gravelly voice, “Looks like the wormhole did some editing.”

Jonny took to this new world like a rat to whiskey. Nightclubs welcomed him with open arms and low-cut dresses, and the air smelled of perfume and bad intentions. But beneath the glamour, Boris knew something was off—the women’s laughter echoed a beat too long, their eyes shimmered like mirrors, and every corner of the city hummed with that same low frequency as the wormhole machine. Jonny didn’t care; he was too busy basking in a life he’d never earned. But as the pug scientist watched his friend drown in charm and illusion, he began to suspect the truth: this wasn’t paradise—it was the punchline to a cosmic joke, and Jonny M. was still the fool in the middle of it.