That’s a lot of dicks, or how to get 53 criminal charges in one day as a coroner

In what must have sounded like the opening scene from Reservoir Dogs, detectives in Bloomington, Illinois did not answer the question of how many severed dicks would be necessary to be charged with serious crimes - though I would posit the number is one, unless it's your own - but they did answer the question of whether this many pickled dicks in glass jars was sufficient to be arrested and charged. They answered it with 53 criminal charges against this guy, a man heading straight to the Funeral Parlor and Coroner Hall of Shame.   

 

This guy, not surprisingly, is the one with all the dicks

Now, it seems to me that there are certain jobs that are less likely than most to lead to criminal trouble and civil lawsuits.  The funeral/coroner trade seems to be one such trade.  I have no actual statistics for that.  I just made that up, but it would seem to be so.  You don’t have too much opportunity to commit murder, at least at work.  But even in the world of funeral homes and coroners, there are some things that society draws a line at:  It is generally frowned upon to use aggressive land conservation/reclamation strategies by re-selling grave plots and stacking bodies without disclosure to the old or new owners of said plot like occurred in Chicago. 

It is also generally frowned upon to neglect your work in what I am guessing was marijuana-induced problem solving strategy for too many inputs for a certain factory in Georgia where crematorium workers were discovered with hundreds of bodies, some dating back ten years, that had yet to be cremated.  I'm guessing that had to do with the problem with only so many hours in a day and too many bodies and taking a break to smoke some weed to calm down the nerves, and then the next day there are more bodies stacked up, requiring more weed smoking until you've got a serious problem.

It is certainly frowned upon to make overly aggressive attempts to teach lessons about fiscal responsibility.by dumping the body back on the surviving relatives porch when they don't pay the funeral bill.  

Necrophilia is obviously very frowned upon.  And then there's this: It is 53-charge arrest territory when the police, while investigating a human body part trafficking ring show up at the county coroner’s home and find jars of hundreds of pickled dicks.  Fox News Bloomington, Illinois, reports on Paul Houston whose job was to examine the dead who were involved in potential criminality.    He has been charged with 53 criminal counts. He was probably charged with at least 40 based on his mugshot, and the other 13 for all the dicks. I'm assuming he didn't wear the eye-liner to work, but who knows.  Maybe Bloomington is that kind of town.

  

Because even without the eyeliner, that whole situation is jacked up.  He is likely going to the coroner hall of shame.  This is seriously jacked up. It is so jacked up that no fiction writer could put it in a crime novel and get away with it.  Probably the best novel about a bent undertaker was William Gay’s novel Twilight.  Gay’s novel is awesome.  Read it.  But even William Gay, that master of Southern Gothic prose, wouldn’t have made up something like all those dicks. 

The previously-mentioned shenanigans got funeral homes sued, they probably had to hand out a lot of discounts to keep up business, and in the land conservation scheme, $10 million was paid out in settlements and fines, and some workers went to jail for fraud.  But no amount of discounts would have saved Paul Houston and his jars of dicks, not to mention the body-part trafficking ring.  That’s just messed up.  It begs the question of how the bodies were being disposed of after the coroner made his reports. Presumably some local funeral home or crematorium employees were part of the body-part trafficking ring.  Surely they noticed the lack of genitalia.  Surely they thought that this guy was a new kind of freak when they went to harvest the other organs to traffic them and saw junk missing hundreds of times.  It's probably pretty hard to turn in a guy for keeping cadaver junk when you are trafficking the non-junk related parts.  

The Bloomington police seemed justifiably appalled.  Fifty-three criminal counts seems like a lot. It seems like enough to keep this guy away for a long while.

                                                                                             

Ammonia and scenes that require action to follow – starting my third book

Loyal and faithful readers of this blog - which is irregular at best depending on the news cycle and whether the feral hogs have decided to go on the offensive, and whether the creepy clowns rear their stupid heads again – we have two events on the horizon.  Two book readings/signings in the near future.  September 22 from 4-6 pm at Murder by the Book in Houston, and October 20 at the Fort Worth Book Fest.  

One question I get a lot when I talk about writing is how I start a book. I have a full time legal practice, so I don’t think about writing fiction all day, nor can I write fiction all day.  I write crime novels, so I begin with a crime.  I have characters that I want to introduce.  I don’t have a vision of what characters look like, even in my own head, and don’t describe the physical features of the characters unless it matters to the story, and only then to the extent it matters to the story development.  I have characteristics and personalities, some minor details, and most importantly the language they use.  I have the characters explain themselves to the reader through their action, their words and word choice.  By the time I write the first chapter, I have a list of the main characters with their necessary traits, the overall arc of the story, and all of the chapters of the first third of the book listed out with three or four sentence (max) descriptions of what will happen in the chapter.

And then I have to actually begin the story.  How do you start a crime novel? I set the characters into a situation that requires some sort of action and contains important ambiguities, some that the reader will recognize while reading it, and some that the reader may only discover later when the characters themselves discover it.  The opening scene may have action or may just require action to take place after it.  The opening scene doesn’t have to introduce the main characters of the story, though it can simply set up a scene that they will come into soon. What the opening scene has to do is launch the action.  I set a scene, put in characters, then I see what they will do, discovering what the characters will do as I write each scene.

My second book, Ghosts of the Mid-Country, is done and published.  It is a continuation of the first murder mystery/legal thriller, Devils Walk Through Galveston.  The third book, now tentatively called The Hydra and the False Prophet’s Creed (though that will probably change) again follows the book that preceded it, bringing back some of the main characters, with a new crime. It has to stand on its own for people who haven’t read the prior books, and also has to allow loyal readers to pick it up and be met with familiar characters at a point they remember from the end of the prior story.  It has to give enough information that the new readers aren’t lost and the loyal readers are not bored.

Here’s the first chapter of the latest book, The Hydra and the False Prophet’s Creed. Tell me if you like it. And come see us on September 22 in Houston at Murder by the Book, or October 22 at the Ft. Worth Book Fest. http://fortworthbookfest.com/

1. Ammonia

            The Deputy Sheriff smelled cat piss on the plume of white smoke rising over the trees behind crop fields.  A hell of a lot of cat piss.  It meant one of two things.  It meant that there was gonna be a hell of an explosion right quick or it meant meth.  He listened to the police band radio and heard nothing.  He called into the fire department in De Valls Bluff and got no report of any farmer’s anhydrous ammonia tank leaking or on fire.  He called he VFD in Watensaw Township and got nothing there, either.  He called back to De Valls Bluff and said get the meth crew.  He called the High Sheriff and told him to bring backup.  He wasn’t going in alone to a booby-trapped meth lab that could have some lit-up motherfuckers wanting to shoot while they were trying to salvage the operation or get out to the backup lab.  Fucking meth labs.  He had about ten minutes or more before the other deputies would get out there with a constable.  He drove around the area until he was sure it was in the woods and not in back of some industrial barn with industrial sized tanks of fertilizer that would blow up everything in a half-mile area.

            The Constable met him at the cross-roads where 217 met a dirt road down into the forest bordering the White River.  Near to the pretty birds that the Yankees came down to see.  Not near enough to the river that some ornithologist would stumble onto them.  He had an idea where to look.  The Constable didn’t show surprise.  He didn’t show knowing, either.  He showed up in some rinkny-dink Pontiac Sunbird ragtop that he’d owned before getting elected and was using the county money to pay off, hoping that a criminal didn’t have a knife to cut out the roof again and run away with his hands cuffed.  That shit was hilarious.  It got him a new roof on the county dime and the Commissioners laughed because the dude was caught not far away.  But the Commissioners said they weren’t paying for another one so he’d better be damn sure that anyone he arrested was free of sharp objects or he was paying for his own roof the second time.  He was still butt-hurt over that.  He was untrained, but elected and got along with the black folks which was enough to get him re-elected.  He was brave and reasonably smart, so he hadn’t gotten killed. 

            The Constable got out of his Sunbird and walked to the driver’s window of the Tahoe and asked the Deputy if he knew anyone cooking back there.  The Deputy took offense and said so.  He told the Constable to get back in his convertible and wait five minutes.  They weren’t going in until they were damn sure there wasn’t a fertilizer tank that was gonna explode. 

Ghosts of the Mid-Country – Crime thriller is out now, buy it, tell your friends

Loyal readers of this blog, thank you. Thank you for reading and sharing it.  Our numbers are way up this year since my hiatus to write my new novel is over.  And now the novel has dropped.  It’s available on Amazon and through the publisher, SNR Creative. 

It’s a crime thriller that follows parallel stories that weave together in the end.   

There are four dead bodies in a mechanic shop in southwest Houston, one witness who is shot in the back with a wild tale of witnessing the killer, a MS-13 gangster.  The police don’t believe him. The gangsters hunt him.  A drug and bullet trafficker works his way up and down the middle of the continent, leaving bodies in his wake until his blood-lust removes the protection of the cartels he serves and the revenge abduction of children trafficked sets off a wild manhunt across.  A young attorney wakes up in jail with no recollection of how he got there or the waste his life has become. He seeks redemption in a death-penalty appeal of John Doddy, the Train Car Killer who begins to talk, giving up the secret tale of his life that draws all the violence in a fulcrum around him until it meets its end.

Ghosts of the Mid-Country is the sequel to Devils Walk Through Galveston, and continues the story with beloved and reviled characters, answering its questions and delivering on its promise.  It has two five star reviews on Amazon already.  Two weeks ago, I gave a teaser from the beginning of the story.  Here is one from the middle. 

43.  Churning

Six a.m. and Western South Dakota was quiet.  The call came in to Houston and he recognized the number.  He answered without introduction, which was his custom, “You’re two days late reporting.”

“It was a long ride back.  We didn’t stop anywhere I could call.”

“From Chicago to the Black Hills, there was nowhere to call?”

“I’ve got less than five minutes.  You want to talk about my schedule?”

“Did the bullets get to the Mara kid?”

“No.  He got double crossed back. The bullets went to the original guy.  The bald buy. Nobody says his name.”

“The guy who comes in like a ghost.”

“And who goes out like one.”

“How’d it go down?”

“Red made a call and told him the offer that was being made. He matched the price and paid some extra if the kid was thrown in.”

“Thrown in?”

“Kid’s gone. Kid went with the ghost.  You have a better idea where the kid is than I do.  I doubt he ends up back in Texas.”

“Where are the bullets?”

“They got on a train going south.”

“You get the train number?’

He gave it up.  The DEA agent in Houston wrote it down quick as he could and heard something stir in the background.  Heard before the guy did and said, “Out” and was off.

He was on his computer tracking one car on Union Pacific, trying to see if he could find out where it was, where it would go. Trying to see if they could intercept it, or track it or see who picked it up.  They’d tried to engineer a double cross and found out where loyalties lay.  Found out part of what they wanted to.

§§

The boxcar was hot, even with the wind whistling through the slats.  It was at speed and locked from the inside with the jerry-rigged hasp he put on to make sure no one got in while he was inside.  He needed the lock to sleep.  He needed the safety of it now that he was alone on this trip and had to let his guard down for three hours. 

Judas slid into the slot a foot wide between the pallet and the boxcar wall and laid down, resting his head on his arm and let himself go into nothingness for three hours.  Three hours of the sleep of the dead and he wouldn’t need any more for two days.  He could wake and sit in half sleep until they stopped at a yard or stopped for a temporary break for track maintenance.  Trains now moving on half the track they did when they deregulated.  More track coming on line every year since 2009 when the oil fields in the Bakken opened with those in the Eagle Ford and the oil had to get out.  Those harder to use for his purposes.  Those mostly made up of tanker cars coming out.  Some box cars coming in, none out.  All the space and fuel reserved for oil. For hundreds of thousands of barrels every day that had to find a market.  So he was still relegated to the lesser dry freight track but it served his purposes   He knew the guys in the yards and had coopted with drugs or money or fear or all of each. He needed a tiny bit of space and time on millions of miles of track, on millions of miles of train cars snaking all over the country, every once in a while, north to south.  And here he was. 

Here he was three hours later groggy, trying to make out the geography, the topography all the same: flat. There was the must of the water roiling nearby.  He stood up and peered out and by the twilight saw the bluffs across from New Madrid, new he’d be coming into Cairo soon.  Knew there’d be a stop here or across in Paducah.  Usually a problem with the tracks around here. Usually a break for a couple of hours and he had an itch. He had an itch that needed a scratch.  Hadn’t had the itch in a couple of months and it itched bad.  He’d find someone to scratch it.

§§

A lion in a zoo will take raw meat thrown into his pen and eat it. He’ll taste the blood.  He’ll remember he likes it and eat it silently and it’ll fill his belly.  It won’t fill his lust to hunt. 

He could taste the blood lust in the back of his throat, the iron on his tongue. 

Ghosts of the Mid-Country – New Book About to Drop, Pre-Order It

This blog post is a call to action made directly to you, loyal readers.  This is not tangential, though funny, information placed in your general direction, so you can snark at Taco-Drunk Florida-Man, make appropriate plans to hide your beer from rampaging feral hogs, and know to avoid bootleg butt-injections with fix-a-flat (seriously, don’t do that). 

No, this is a direct, though possibly delayed depending on how you choose to order, call to action.

Proof copy above  - your book will be available for resale

My new novel, Ghosts of the Mid-Country is coming out in about a week and a half.  On June 1, it will drop.  It will not drop on Memorial Day weekend because you will be eating far too much barbecue to read a thrilling murder mystery, drug and human-trafficking caper, with a side of serious (un)requited love story thrown in, just to even things out and push the story along.

Some of you know – though not enough based on the Amazon statistics of books sold recently – that my first novel, Devils Walk Through Galveston, is a page-turning crime-law novel that follows schizophrenic murderer from Mississippi, down to the Texas coast where the city of Houston is in an uproar over unsolved murders being linked to one man. It’s the story of the cops who hunt the killer in an atmosphere where ends justify means, until it gets in front of a jury and the means are examined under a microscope by attorneys with their own motives and side-deals that break down in the heat of battle.  It’s a page turner. Everyone who reads it loves it – all five-star reviews.  Buy it here on Amazon.

And turn some pages because Ghosts of the Mid-Country is the sequel. It stands on its own. But it stands even better, Rocky II style, on the shoulders of the first novel.  In Ghosts of the Mid-Country, an overworked attorney wakes up in jail with amnesia brought on by job stress and his marriage falling apart. At the same time, there is a quadruple murder in Southwest Houston with one witness that no one believes.  The police, searching for the murderer or murderers uncover links in an international drug and human trafficking ring operating on both sides of the border and up into the heart of the country, circling around the fulcrum of Houston.  It is the story of an unlikely hero, pushed to the brink and set up as bait to draw the evil closer to those trying to stop it.  It answers the questions of Devils Walk Through Galveston.  You’ll love it. A teaser is below.

You have less than two weeks to read Devils Walk Through Galveston to get ready.  If mass amounts of barbecue and beer are not in your immediate future, you have time.  If you are going to get bloated on sweet, salty brisket and Bud Light next weekend, then pre-order Ghosts of the Mid-Country from the publisher, SNR Publishing, division of SNR Creative: http://www.snr-creative.com/snr-publishing/. Or put it on your calendar to order from Amazon June 1.  Anyone who orders from SNR Publishing, and wants it, will get a signed copy, just ask when you email them.  Anyone who orders from Amazon and gets me the physical book (by sending it to SNR Creative), I’ll sign and send back at my cost.

Here’s your teaser: Ghosts of the Mid-Country, Ch 3.

Houston, two weeks before, seven a.m.

A warm morning in Southwest Houston. Early fall and the temperature was in the sixties, summer finally calming down. Windows down on Fondren Street. A few mothers in yards idly glancing over at children playing in the grass in the early morning, watching to make sure they didn’t get near the sidewalk. The street a mix of businesses and homes. Massage parlor brothels and transmission shops. The neighborhood a mix of Latin and Southeast Asian. Tricked out Hondas and low- riding Impalas sleeping off the night before.

The metal roll-top door to Taitz Body Shop was down. The business was set to open in half an hour. Four cars in the parking spots to the side, the chain across the driveway still closed. Music played inside. The muffled beats crept out through the one open window of the office. Traffic picking up at Laredo Taqueria down the street. People were walking and stumbling into the line that stretched outside. Four uniformed policemen waited patiently for their turn. They ignored the stink of last night’s weed on the plaid cotton shirts and torn jeans of the laborers getting breakfast before walking down to the empty lot to wait for a day’s work.

Four muffled shots came from the garage. Deafened by the distance. High pitched, low caliber. They sounded like a hammer hitting metal. Hammers hit metal at the body shop all the time. No one on the street stirred. No one in the taco line moved.

The garage door raised up a foot and slammed down. Two more shots. A little fat man rolled out bleeding from a shot to the back of his shoulder. He got up and ran, staggering, off balance, to the taqueria, collapsing in front of a pick-up screeching its brakes an inch from his leg. The police ran to him, turned him on his back. One asked, “Where?” He pointed at the garage down the street. Three ran toward it. One stayed behind, radioed in an ambulance. The laborers in line moved away slowly. Walked down the street. Trying to disappear from the onrush that would come.

Right to Remain Silent, But Not the Ability

It is a hallmark of Anglo/American Law that a person accused of a crime has the right to remain silent.  It is a hallmark of Anglo/American criminal law that very few of the accused have the ability to remain silent. 

In England, all you have to do is shut your mouth.  In America, you can go with option A, shutting your mouth, or you can choose option B and go all Dave Chapelle and say any of fifty ways, “I plead the fifth.”  

It sounds awesome for the common man.  It is awesome for the common man.  Why, do you think that The Man would allow this to happen, to make it difficult on himself to convict criminals? There was the nasty history of torturing suspects to get supposed confessions, and other overzealous police practices. 

Potentially overzealous police

I don’t think that’s why The Man allowed the right to remain silent.  It’s because the vast majority of people have no ability to remain silent.  It damn near never happens. Accused criminals find all kinds of ways to vomit up the truth to the police within about ten seconds of the police pulling up and asking why they pulled you over.  

Think I made that up? I didn’t. It happens time and again, with a couple of recent examples. The Sun, world’s greatest news source, reports on Barry Hodge, who was driving his work van when he was pulled over by officers. Could Barry keep it together like Jay Z?  No, he couldn’t he was sweating and shaking and vomited out the truth, that he had a £700 stash of cocaine in a Kinder Egg shell before telling police he had more in his house.  Hodge told the stunned officers: “I just want to be honest I’ve got another two ounce of prop in the house and loads of benzo. You can just go round and get it.”

This kid is not gangster, not at all.

Snake Charmer Not Charming Enough

There is sad news coming out of Malaysia, where a famed snake charmer apparently wasn’t charming enough and got bitten by a cobra.   This would not normally be news, as cobras are endemic to Malaysia and people get bitten by them all the damn time, which really sucks for Malaysians.  

Not an actual ad for Coca-Cola

And this was no normal snake charmer sitting around with a lute and trying to coax the snake back into a basket with Kenny G level slow jams to calm the snake down. That dude could put me to sleep in about ten seconds with his syrupy versions of jazz classics that were as big an affront to music history as was his haircut.  Let’s reflect on that a moment:  what is worse, Kenny G’s rendition of John Coltrane classics (CLICK HERE FOR THE HORROR) , or that haircut. 

What's breathless is me seeing that haircut

No, this cobra murdered the snake whisperer worse than Kenny G murdered John Coltrane’s “In a sentimental mood.”  Here's the real one.   For God’s sake, don’t listen to the Kenny G version ever again after hearing this.

No, Abu Zarin Hussin (pictured above with a real cobra and coke) wasn’t doing this for fun, like the jackass in Florida who imported a king cobra, then let it get on the loose.  

These were natural born cobras that terrorize Malaysia.  Abu Zarin Hussain headed the King Cobra Squad of the fire department. That’s right. They have a King Cobra Squad to deal with actual cobras.  You would think that the State of Florida would have tried to coax him on a sweet free agent contract to deal with all the cobras running around that state.    But they didn’t, and he was still in Malaysia dealing with Cobras every day.  Accordingto the New York Post, he trained other “smoke eaters” to catch the cobras without killing them, where apparently he would let them go, so they could wreak havoc again. 

Instead of delivering a crane kick to the face, which is how everyone knows you deal with the Cobra Kai, as well as ordinary cobras, he tried to talk sweetly to it. 

Cobra about to get a crane-kick to the face

And it bit him in the grill.  That’s cold blooded, because cobras are actually cold blooded creatures, and damn mean.  So, unless you have got Kenny G levels of sweet syrupy, soul-less clarinet, or can deliver a swift crane kick to the face, stay the f*ck away from cobras. 

Radioactive Hogs Take Over Northern Japan - Seek Tribute Paid in Beer

Dear readers of this once-thriving blog, I have been absent for a long while.  I have been writing and editing my second novel, Ghosts of the Mid-Country, which comes out in May.  Read it, for real, when it comes out.  

I have been remiss in not notifying you of the various scourges that wage war on our beloved lands.  The clowns have come and gone – thank God – now that the remake of IT is out of the theaters and into the that deep recess of our collective terror.  Florida does what Florida does and becomes ever more Florida by the passing day – too many Florida things to recount. 

But, the one scourge that will not go away is back on the loose.  It has been hiding in the deep woods, looking for tasty pecans, and for tastier beer.  Not content to let us keep the delicious nectar of the gods for ourselves.  That’s right, the drunken feral hogs are back!!   And they are growing.

CCTV footage in Hong Kong has spotted a giant feral hog who is tall enough to get into dumpsters on its own.

 

They call it Pig-zilla.  It’s farking huge.  Distant cousin of its fallen brethren Hogzilla from Georgia who was taken out before his time.  We thought he was just some relic of the deep woods. And we knew the scourge of the Fukushima Diachi power plant disaster in Japan. And we know what happens when radioactivity hits an otherwise ornery creature. It creates hogzillas for real.  One year ago, it was reported that hundreds of radioactive wild boars had taken over two Japanese towns.

They were not content with those two towns, though.  They have taken over damn near the whole of northern Japan, where the population is older, and was not close enough to the power plant to get their own radiation to fight off the hogs, hulk-style.  Just this last week, the South China Morning Post reported the scourge has moved North in force.  They noted that in southern Japan, “The papers are full of reports of boars in train stations and parking garages, around school dormitories and even in the sea, swimming out to islands.”  They are now in areas that were believed “too cold and snowy for them.”’  They apparently didn’t understand the power of radiation and beer. Radiation that makes a man’s pants turn purple and rips his shoes off every time he gets mad. 

 

They could try to shoot them, but they’re not in rural Georgia where residents are armed to the teeth for the second invasion of the Yankees.  The Japanese have to get a permit to get a gun and shoot a hog, which seems like bullshit.  So no, they can’t be shot, and they can’t be reasoned with when they charge busses like this:

They can’t be reasoned with when they go looking for beer in dumpsters, like this one in Hong Kong.

They can be bribed, or shown fealty, same thing really.  Just give them beer and get out of the way.  

God help us if they get drunk, get mad, and show up in purple pants.