Under Construction

(A FF challenge)

The astronomers were puzzled. Stars were disappearing. They were not proceeding to either brown dwarfs or blowing up. They were fading away and then just winking out, with barely some faint infrared signature remaining. It wasn’t random, there seemed to be a pattern. The stars were not that far away, at most 100 light years. They were largely in a single direction from Earth.

Nobody was too concerned. Not until the satellites that were observing the Sun began to detect a very faint decrease in solar output. It was barely detectable, but a small drop in the Sun’s output could cause an ice age. A larger drop could result in the “Goldilocks Zone” shrinking in, placing the Earth in the “too cold” region.

Gumshoes

When I was young, my father liked to read mysteries. His favorite writers were Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald and Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar). I probably read "A Deadly Shade of Gold" half-a-dozen times. Those books formed my concepts of what a fictional detective is like and how he or she should act. To this day, I can't stand wimpy PIs and the English cozies leave me cold.

Millar and MacDonald died in the 1980s. Spillane died in 2006.

The one thing I didn't care for were the last few Spillane "Mike Hammer" novels. Max Allan Collins collaborated/finished up three of Spillane's manuscripts (so far). I read them over the weekend. The only clinker of the three was the "Goliath Bone". The book is set in the last decade.

Collins or Spillane rewrote the back story for Hammer, because they had to, I guess. If you read the `40s-`50s books, you know that Hammer and Pat Chambers, Hammer's friend, were cops together on the NYPD. Hammer was a NYPD sergeant who went into the military after Pearl Harbor. Chambers stayed in the NYPD and rose to be a captain of homicide detectives.

The problem is, though, that in the "Goliath Bone", Chambers is still on the job, which would make him probably the only 90 year old cop in the NYPD. Collins changed Hammer's back story so that he went into the Army underage, then spent two years on the NYPD after he got out before he became a private investigator. That change maybe took a decade off Hammer's age, but he would still be either pushing 80 or past it, when he is running around Manhattan, getting into fights with bad guys. And the change in the back story leaves hanging the question of how a rookie beat cop would then become buds with a homicide captain. (Not to mention that the ending truly sucks.)

The other two, "The Big Bang" and "Kiss Her Goodbye" were set in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, and they work better. "The Big Bang" has two glaring anachronisms, but you can determine them for yourself.

Grand Finale

(Yes, another challenge)

Each year, the city held a Fourth of July fireworks display along the riverfront. At one time, local merchants paid for it. Nowadays, the fireworks were paid for by one of the local casinos. Maybe the local tribe wanted to buy some goodwill for the wave of petty crime and embezzlements that had been taking place since the casino opened. Maybe they wanted to mollify the families who had lost their savings and homes when one of the so-called adults had gambled them all away.

I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I had a job to do.

Robbery

(Flash fiction challenge)
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Frank sat in the car in a parking lot that was on the opposite side of the street and a hundred feet or so down the street from the target. The car was a nondescript silver Chevy sedan. Frank would have preferred a darker colored car, but even he had to admit that with every third car on the street being painted silver, the reasoning behind choosing this car was sound.

“Why we hitting this place?” The question came from Evan, the wheelman.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 5

Lena thought that, snow be damned, it would have been nice to have gassed up her Cessna after the flight to Grover City. If there was one thing that she had learned from flying, though, it was that regrets fixed nothing. She went out to the airport and pulled the Cessna from its hangar. She borrowed her hangar neighbor’s tow tractor to tow the Cessna to the gas pumps. She filled the tanks, towed it back, pulled it into the T-hangar, plugged in the pre-heater and set the timer, then went home.

She had e-mailed the airport operator in Jonesboro to reserve a rental car. Not too many small airports did it that way, but she had been there before and knew that the airport operator was trying to drag his operation into the 1990s. That wasn’t her major concern, though. The weather was.

Dusting

Crack.

Katie woke up when she heard that sound. She knew, without leaving her bedroom, what it was. Someone had forced open the sliding glass door to her balcony.

Her apartment was on the fifth floor. The balcony was not connected to any others. She wasn't wealthy, she could make ends meet is all. Her television was a twelve-year old tube model. The furniture came from discount places that sold overstocks and end-of-run clearance stuff. There was nothing in her apartment worth the effort to climb up four stories of the exterior of a building faced with rain-slicked smooth concrete.

This Ain't No Disco

Another flash fiction challenge. For this one, a word generator coughed up five random words, which had to be incorporated into the story.
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My cell phone buzzed with a text from one of the spotters: “TG N ANDR-53 E-S SOLO”.    Pretty simple: Our target was heading north on Anderson Avenue, at 53rd Street.  Target was on the east side and alone.

The sun had set ten minutes ago.  It was still fairly light, but dusk would soon be here.  The target never came out before sundown and she was back in her apartment before sunrise.

She had to be, she was a vampire.  She worked at night.  So did we.  I sang softly: “Heard of a van, loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go.”  My spotter looked at me askance.  Oh, well, back to work.

W00T!!

I'm not a writer. Oh, I've written stuff, mostly for my own amusement. Wrote a mystery novel, once. I even had an agent for that one, but no dice, chum. So awhile back, I just threw it up on Amazon Kindle's list just for shits and grins.

I'm horrible at selling myself. It just doesn't feel right to me. I can go argue a client's position and I'm pretty good at that. But when it comes to bragging on myself, I suck. Not like "Dirt Devil" suck, or even "Dyson" suck, but in "open up the air lock on Galactica" suck. During job interviews, when I'm asked "why should I hire you", I have to really restrain myself from shrugging and saying "you could do worse."

Did I tell you that I suck at selling myself?

So anyway, I was doing my bank statement when I saw that Amazon sent me just a skosh over ten bucks. Royalty payments. For that book. Which works out to a wage of, what, two cents an hour for writing it? (300 years ago, that'd be good money, I bet.)

But still, I'm a little bit tickled about it.

Zombie

A flash fiction challenge, based on the name of a cocktail.
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Sarah broke down her favorite rifle and began cleaning it.  It was a 5.45mm with a built-in suppressor. The bullets had steel penetrators inside.

She didn’t know what started the Zombie Apocalypse four months ago.  It didn’t matter.  What she did know was that the legends were right, the only way to stop those fuckers was to bust open the braincase.  The penetrators worked.  She also knew that the zombies came to the sound of guns.  If you didn’t want to fight a horde, you kept it quiet.  Zombies made a sound that was not a scream, not a moan, but if one made it, the others came.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 4

The sun had gone down by the time Lena touched down at Petersburg Field.  She was hungry, a little bit tired and it was getting cold, too cold and too late to be mucking around at the self-service fuel pumps.  She put the Cessna back into the hangar and went home.  There was some hot chocolate mix at home calling her name.  That would go nice with a bit of vodka.

The next morning was spent writing up her notes and observations from the day before.  she used Acme Mapper to determine the distance from where Jasper had been shot to the tree line of the next set of hills.  It was 1,200 yards.  Hell of a shot from a bench rest, let alone in the field.  

She noted the name of the pathologist who had done the autopsy. Lena’s law school had offered a course to acquaint lawyers in the reality of autopsies and scientific protocols.  She had taken the course, it had been taught by the same medical examiner who did Jasper’s autopsy.  So Lena called the doc, who remembered Lena and who was also free for a late lunch, say two-ish.  Lena said that was fine.