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HARDBOILED JESUS: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL Part 1a
03.09.06
(Part 1 is here)
“You’ve got the wrong guy for this kind of kinky shit,” Jesus said. “You want a priest.”
Carmichael waved his one working arm and shook his head. “You don’t understand. My penis was in a sealed jar in my vault and has been since it and the rest of my body parted company in ’97. It has considerable sentimental value to me, and the jar itself is an antique.”
“Finding stolen property’s a job for Robbery, you sick fuck. I’m a homicide detective. I’m not playing your weird little games.”
“But this is a matter of homicide, Jesus.”
“Your two dead guards don’t count.”
“No, but doesn’t the rest of the city?” The old man rolled the chair forwards until he sat level with Jesus’s navel. “I am eighty-four years old, and I have led a life filled with every form of perversion known to man. Involving man, woman or beast. I have travelled the world in search of the ultimate filth and degradation. Consequently, my body is home to a host of venereal diseases, infections and parasites; my wang, even more so. While I am now bound to this chair, and my member itself rotted from my body nearly ten years ago, I can assure you that the afflictions I and my genitalia have carried down the years would have killed me many times over were it not for my truly astonishing consumption of various narcotics.”
“These drugs – themselves quite lethal in the quantities in which I abused them - and latterly, these machines,” he said, waving at the wall of monitors, “have protected me from the full horror of what I carry. The worst of it all was, of course, contained, held trapped, within my cock. My penis, you see, is quite incredibly toxic.”
——
It was so tempting to name the whole story ‘HARDBOILED JESUS AND THE CASE OF THE TOXIC COCK’, but I felt that would’ve been giving the game away.
Books
A dozen people trapped in a roadhouse during a storm, three corpses buried in a field, and a good chance no one's going to make it through the night alive. Burial Ground is the last Alex Rourke novel.
One mistake. Seven years of a child's life. In The Darkness Inside, Alex finds out the missing kid in a case he worked on in his FBI days may not have been killed after all. And that the man he crossed the line to put away may not have worked alone.
A single bullet blows Alex's world to pieces. He finds himself in the strange Vermont town of Bleakwater Ridge trying to piece together what's happened, alone except for the dead and The Touch Of Ghosts.
A silent murder suspect, caught red-handed at the scene, draws former FBI agent Alex Rourke back to his home town of Winter's End in northern Maine. But it soon becomes clear that there's far more to the place, and to his own past, than he ever realised.
Short Fiction
Wish, featuring gay Nazis and the terror of living urban myth, appears in the Ken Bruen-edited Dublin Noir, as well as in 2008's Best British Mysteries anthology.
Twenty Dollar Future, about the tragic making of a child soldier in east Africa, appears in Jen Jordan's Expletive Deleted anthology.