Excerpts

Well, I was going to rant about what a dangerous crackhead Bill Parcells is, but I spent all my energy raving about the point in the Hamburg messageboard, so I've no interest in re-hashing it here. Sorry, friends. Ask me about it sometime.

Instead, you've been selected as a test-audience for several excerpts from my work-in-progress novel. You are reminded that this is a hurredly-written first draft (I've got 40 double-spaced pages so far in only two days of writing, so yah, it's coming rapid-fire), intended only as a bare-bones outline to be re-visted and re-written countless times, and added to, and deleted from, only after the sketch has been completed in (hopefully) several weeks. So don't pay attention to the quality of the diction, and just decide whether or not the plot sounds interesting. Dig?

The first two paragraphs:

As the sun rose over the 14-story Lazy Oasis Casino on Sunday morning, a lot of what we will loosely call people were still dropping coins into slots and watching for the right number combinations on their cards, and every single one of them looked up as a dark-skinned Olympian god emerged from the elevator and strode the floor with a cigar hanging from his lips and a Bloody Mary in his hands. This man looked like a movie star. This man was Johnny Mercer.

Johnny was no movie star. He was a brutal, calculating, and savage killer of the worst variety, and a highly paid one. This was for good reason. Johnny’s work didn’t just get the job done – it got it done so thoroughly that the corpses he left actually knew they were dead. And anyone associated with the corpse knew it was dead too, and they didn’t ask questions, or if they did they certainly didn’t linger around town long enough to hear the answers because otherwise they might find out things they really didn’t want to know. Sometimes ignorance can be – well, not bliss exactly, but what do you call that sensation associated with the choice between continued life and being ripped apart by a starving brown bear? Obvious? Sometimes, then, ignorance is obvious.

Action sequence from the end of Chapter 1:

“Fuck this punk,” spat another of the black giants. “Let’s just do it.”

“Nah, hold up, nigga,” said another. “He’s got a pretty face. Let’s take him downstairs and fuck his ass first.”

The others hooted at this, and as they were doing so Johnny’s left hand flew like the snap of a whip into his blazer and came out obscured by a jet-black 6-inch, .357 barrel pistol with “Mercer” engraved in immaculate cursive into a silver plate on the handle. He who had suggested killing Johnny right away was dead before he even saw Johnny move.

Johnny’s right hand plunged into the blazer and gripped the black plate marked “Johnny” on the handle of the white-gold twin-sister of the black pistol, but Funky Freddy put a bullet in his right shoulder before the hand could emerge and he dropped the weapon. Meanwhile, his left hand jerked slightly to the right and tore a hole in the thigh of another of the giants who roared with rage. His companions ducked for cover and pulled for their own guns, but by this time a giant to Johnny’s right had moved in and put a $300 chromium-enhanced baseball bat across his back.

Johnny fell to his knees and dropped the gun. Funky Freddy stepped forward and kicked it away.

“They were going to pay another gang do this,” he said, smiling down at his victim. “I had to agree to a real cheap contract just to land the gig.”

From the weird 2nd chapter:

This is rapid-fire evolution, or devolution, and you cannot be sure what works and what doesn’t anymore, so you don’t move anything, you just close your eyes …

The car was a ship, now, a burning ship in cold waters and it was sinking and all about him men dashed about, hammering at this, spraying water at that, turning screws, unscrewing, crying, laughing, shouting, whispering to each other. It was sinking slowly, but never going under, and somehow he understood that it would never go under, but neither would it ever reach its destination, and he wanted to help the men, but they would not stop for him, and he was too tired to chase them so he tried to find a life raft but he noticed the old man with the white teeth staring at him from farther down the deck and when he tried to go to him the man told him he could give him a life boat and held out his hand, and in his outstretched palm there was a gun. A pistol. A white-gold pistol with a black plate on the handle and cursive lettering and it looked familiar to him, so he asked the old man how he could use it and he said that it was easy, you just take it in your hand and hold it to your head and the ship will go away from you. The old man turned to walk away, toward an open door at the far end of the deck from which came a blue light but in which he could see no signs of what the room was or what it was for. He called to the old man and asked him what he could do to help these men whose ship was sinking and the old man laughed, his white teeth glowing in the light of the fire, and he said there was no helping these men, their ship was sinking and it was their own efforts to save it that were making it sink, and he said the lifeboat in your hand can only save six men including yourself.

For your convenience, the shortest (easily not the best) of the peices that appear in the 3rd chapter, entitled "Headlines":

AP News Bulletin (7-02-2011)
Chicago: Authorities revealed today that they have uncovered email correspondence between two high-ranking members of what is believed to be opposing crime organizations.

Details of what the emails contained are being kept quiet, but it is believed that they outlined a truce between the Kairos City based crime syndicate known as the Ninth Circle, and Bill and Augusten Burroughs who run organizations in several cities including Kairos and Chicago.

Authorities did acknowledge that the emails were sent late last year, although they declined to give specific dates.

One agent, speaking anonymously, said that his access to the emails had been limited, but from what he understood the crime families had been working together peacefully and slowly merging since October of last year. This, he explained, would account for the sharp decline in organized-crime related violence in Kairos over the past nine months.

The agent added that the emails referenced in vague terms a figure who they believe to be Johnny Mercer, a casino security director who disappeared last November and is believed to have been murdered by a drug dealer.

At this time, no other details are being made available to the public.

Two gruesome excerpts from Chapter 4 (don't read on if you're not a fan of gangster related violence):

“Who hired you?” Johnny asked.

“Eat a dick.” The man was trying to be tough, but you could see the terror in his eyes. Louie knew that the offender had also noticed the wire cutters in Johnny’s left hand.

The security guard took off his shirt, and Louie saw that this guy was capable of pulling a boa constrictor in half with his bare hands. He took two steps forward and drilled the offender right between the eyes, knocking him backwards off the table they had set him on.

“There’s two ways out of here,” Johnny said loudly, with no attempt to conceal the menace in his voice. “One is in the wheelbarrow.”

“Look, man,” the offender said, voice quivering as he picked himself up from the concrete floor. “I don’t know what you mean. Nobody hired me, I just –

With his left arm, the guard grabbed the offender by the neck and slammed him back down into the table while the right arm reined blows down on his body.

Johnny put a hand on the guard’s shoulder and the blows stopped. The offender whimpered pathetically.

“Louie,” Johnny said without looking over his shoulder. “Help Ted hold this guy still.”

Louie and the security guard took hold of the offender’s arms and legs and braced for resistance, but none came. At least not until Johnny reached for the zipper on the offender’s jeans, at which point the guy must have suddenly remembered the wire cutters in Johnny’s left hand and started doing weird math in his head that could not have been too far off from the truth. His limbs came to life like a crazed science experiment gone awry, and his torso lunged and twisted in unnatural directions. They kept a firm grip, and Johnny reached his right hand into the offender’s slacks and emerged with a long and narrow shaft.

(I've skipped over a lot of the bad stuff ... this comes about a page after the above):

Five minutes later Louie came out of the bathroom after the last of his dry heaves passed.

“Feeling better, sweetheart?” Johnny asked, as if talking to an old friend.

“Not really, Johnny,” Louie groaned. “I think my stomach’s in the toilet.”

“Feel like paying a visit to a guy named Crepshaw?”

“No. Not for less than ten grand.”

Johnny laughed. “That’s alright. I’ll take a couple guys over there tomorrow morning. We’re taking a limo down to the 49ers game in the evening if you want to come along.”

“I got a thing, Johnny. Thanks though.”

“Ah, no big deal. Next time.” Johnny lit a cigarette and turned back to his book. Sartre. "Nausea."

The name of the man who had hired the offender was Larry Crepshaw, a lawyer who worked for Bill Burroughs. The offender had suddenly come explicitly clean about this.

And duct-taping a burning dick into the mouth of the dick’s owner is not as hard as it sounds. Not for Johnny Mercer.

...

Allright. Those are just some fun excerpts. This baby is flying out of me. Fiction has never comet his easy to me. EVER! So I'm pretty excited about this damn thing, and I'm rolling with it until the tank runs out of gas. Leave your comments, old chums.

A Presto ...