Saturday Night Pulps

continued from Chapter 4 Tonto Ramirez stared at the men standing over him, blocking the television. Their dark, tailored suits told him they had money, but with the mind-numbing painkillers coursing through his system, that was all he could wrap his mind around. That, and they looked dangerous. But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except his grandmother coming home with his refill. “I told the cops everything I know,” he said, tired of people coming to him with questions. First it was the cops, then it was the reporters, then more cops. Now, these guys. They didn’t look like cops, in their expensive suits, but they acted like cops, barging in on him when he was just trying to chill. One of the men smiled at him with a cold line that stretched across his face. His short, white, crew-cut reminded Tonto of an albino he had known, but couldn’t remember his name. Alpha something. “Well,” said the man, “we’re not cops, so maybe you can tell u...

                                                             Chapter 4 - Media Blitz Previously...Chapter 3 Beneath the City “…so who is this strange new menace to our city? Does he have a name? Where did he come from? And what are the police doing about it?” * Tonto Ramirez watches the glow of the television. Vaguely, he sees the pretty television reporter…what’s her name…Covington…Marsha Covington…but he’s not listening to her. What does she have to say that’s so important for him to hear? He doesn’t care about the news…he doesn’t care about anything anymore…not since that night… Besides, with the amount of morphine coursing through his system to stem to pain of his missing leg, it would be hard to follow the words coming out of her, filtered through the speakers. Tonto knows who she is talking about, though, a...

                                               Cut Throat Chapter 3 - Beneath the City Chapter 2 Hell Hound “You know who I am?” The patient’s eyes stared up at Detective Bledsoe. Tonto Ramirez’s erected a wall of stubbornness behind his drug-widened pupils. The harsh lights of the hospital room brought the bandages wrapped around the stumps of his leg and throat into a clear, antiseptic focus. The eyes went left, then right, then back to Bledsoe. Tonto nodded. “That’s right,” Bledsoe said. “I’m the one they call the Hell Hound, because I always get what I want. You may not know it, but right now you’re lucky. Not because you survived when none of your homies did, if you call what this is surviving.” The detective’s eyes went down to where Tonto’s leg should have been and came up again. “No. You’re lucky because you have something I need. Information....

Cut Throat Chapter 2 : Hell Hound Chapter One: Enter, Cut Throat L.A. is a dirty city. It’s even dirtier when a high rise on Spring Street is filled with dead bodies. Slit throats and decapitations. Severed arms and legs. Puddles of blood you have to step through just to get a look at the victims. If you consider members of the toughest gang in L.A. to be victims. A lot of people don’t. Even other cops. Got what they deserved , is whispered through the hall as I tally up the body count. Twenty-five corpses. Twenty-five men and women, slaughtered, without a judge or jury. “What do you think, Detective Bledsoe?” I turn to the uniform on my right and shake my head. He doesn’t care what I think. I can see it through the smug smile he wears in the shadows of the blood-splattered hallway. “I think there’s a lot of dead people in here,” I say. Another uniform leads me up to the conference room. We step over bodies to climb the steps in the stairwell and come ou...