“White Summer” by Brian Greene

Danny was a guy who made an impression. When he came into the restaurant to apply for a job as a waiter, a couple weeks before Memorial Day weekend, he did so wearing a flashy suit. I’d been working at the place—a steak and seafood eatery on the top floor of a Holiday Inn at […]

“One-Shot Deal” by R. Daniel Lester

At the yacht club, the dock creaked and swayed beneath my feet. There was brine in the air and the smell of money in my nose. Big money, family money. Ancient dollars that had sired so many other dollars it was exhausted and weary and just wanted to be left alone. I felt about as […]

“End of the Line” [excerpt] by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

Like a silver eel the streamliner rose from the flats of the dusky desert, skirting the toes of the wrinkled hills, sweeping upward into the clear green twilight in the pass. Thunder followed it under the ground and a wind rushed outward at its passing. Lizards and cactus owls and a few jackrabbits froze at […]

“The Action Man” [excerpt] by Jay Flynn

The dawn seeped, thin and gray, through the restless morning fog, lightening the hardly-moving surface of the bay, alerting the birds in the live oaks and pine forests of the hillsides. It caused a rooster to crow and a dog to bark at the rooster. And in the house that backed up on the yard […]

“Bit Player” by Jim Shaffer

I sat in a small bar just off Broadway somewhere in the fifties. It was my first time there. A cold snap had descended on the city, and I just wanted to sit some place warm, relax, and have a drink. Mellow jazz crept from the jukebox. It could have been Ben Webster. It had […]

“The El Segundo Saga” by Jenean McBrearty

You might say my partner, Ronson, was killed by cherry Life Savers. “These babies helped me quit nicotine,” he’d always say when we had to stop at a drugstore to buy more. And we stopped every night on patrol. He was in Walgreens buying a roll at the same time a punk decided to rob […]

“The Baby Doll Murders” [excerpt] by James O. Causey

Tierney’s room was three blocks off Fremont, on a quiet side street. He paid twenty a week for the converted bachelor apartment which consisted of one small bedroom and bathroom. In the bottom bureau drawer, hidden between two undershirts, was a hundred and eighty dollars. My stake, Tierney thought sardonically, putting the money into his […]

“Make Mine Bloody” by Paul Greenberg

“That woman has the charm and personality of a mackerel. How she makes a living here, I’ll never know,” said Johnny. “And she can’t make a drink for shit. This thing tastes like a bloody nose,” said Bobby. “Hey, what the hell is this anyway?” “A Bloody Mary, extra bloody, just what you asked for,” […]

“Riot at the Cattle Prod” by Jim Ruland

The Cattle Prod was packed with every kind of punk in Southern California. Every rowdy boy and reckless girl she’d every partied with was here. Not the actual people per se but the personas they projected, because everybody went undercover at the punk rock show. The sick-of-it-all sons and daughters of dildos and douchebags, each […]

“Border Feud” by Lance Mason

That summer in Oxnard was hot, humid in the mornings, with dew on the grass, and it smelled of the lima bean harvest and the sugarbeet mill out on Wooley Road. Now it was night, just on nine o’clock under a low, lemon moon, and Chuy Muro, in his ’39 Chevy coupe, was pulling across […]