Practicing My New Craft

Cards and letters have been pouring in complaining that I have not been posting new items often enough. Well, the truth is I have been busy writing good fiction instead of these fact-intensive essays. For the curious, I am enclosing the opening page or so from my new novel. I hope you like it.

Newt

Incident at a Motel

Police Sergeant Richard J. Pickles, feared throughout the community of criminals as “Big Dick Pickles,” was glad he had worn his Blackjack StormTrooper™ boots today. He had bought them for stomping protesters when he worked in Chicago, but now they complemented the Tampa uniform rather nicely and helped him feel better about washing out of MPS, Florida’s famed Motorcycle Patrol School. The boots made short work of the flimsy motel door. Inside, the room looked like someone had dropped a cherry bomb into a punchbowl full of cherry Jello™. Congealing red globs dripped lazily from every surface. But this was no Jello™ explosion, he sensed instantly from the familiar iron tang filling the air and the headless corpse still sitting on the bed.

He saw no perp in the room, but the bathroom door was closed, and he intuited that more trouble may lie within. Drawing his Smith & Wesson Thugstopper™ .45, he splashed quickly across the room and laid waste to another door. Even Big Dick was taken aback to find yet another headless corpse sitting in the tiny room filled with entirely too much blood. Clearly someone had declared open season on heads. Big Dick meant to find out who and, as was his sworn duty, put a stop to it.

He quickly checked both bodies for a pulse and determined that first aid would be messy and probably fruitless. From the more advanced stage of clotting, he could tell that the corpse on the bed was the first to become deceased. Holstering the old Thugstopper, Big Dick considered calling for backup but decided he could handle this one himself. He had recently passed the civil service Forensics III certification and, like a teenager with a new driver’s license, was anxious to test his skills. The carpet squished softly as he strode back across the room.

Heading for his Crown Vic™ Copolator™ squad car, he stepped gingerly around the broken door, which now dangled from a single hinge. The number on the door electrified him: 104! The radio report, he remembered now, had directed him to room 401. Damn. He had discovered the wrong crime.

To be continued ….