FriendBurst Blog

This is an old ms post from 2007.  I wrote it for a Halloween Contest using the title tracks from four cds that friends suggested.  Originally I had a picture for every track title, but some of the titles are very strange (probably why they were suggested to use) and it made for a lot of incongruitity.  So… using artistic license, I’m editing quite a bit on the pictures, but not on the story.

The CDs utilized in the creation of this story are: Significant Other by Limp Bizkit; All the Lost Souls by James Blunt; Fallen by Decryt; Forgotten Freshness (compilation/Double Album) by Insane Clown Possee. Google them if you want the track names or msg me and I’ll send them to you. Please watch the videos (in order) before beginning the story, as they kinda set the mood and stage for what is to follow. Enjoy!

“Hey, Vato, why don’t you come over here and show me what you got, you miserable excuse for a piece of crap.”

I taunted those dismal pretexts for Zoot Suiters every chance I got. Not that he was wearing a Zoot Suit—they’d been outlawed for years, ever since the ’43 riots. Los Angeles was still a powder keg, though, a real frontier of evil, and it was my job to keep the peace in this little corner of the city of Angels. The gentleman in question chose that moment to make a quick retreat down an alley; by the time my partner and I could cross the two lanes of traffic to reach him, he had vanished, leaving nothing behind except a still smoking cigarette. That was the way it had been for the last couple of months. Our reputation was preceding us everywhere we went.

My partner, Willy Bubba, and I had just managed to capture the Southwest Strangla in a shoot-out that occurred as the felon was exiting a pawnshop in Hollywood. He was known as Jimmy Fingers to his confederates, a gang of petty thieves that had been working the tourist trade in Hollywood. The Pawnshop owner, one Sam Beard, had tipped us off that there was bad blood between Fingers and his cronies. Beard said he had overheard a couple of the boys arguing over what to do about Fingers. They knew that Jimmy was pulling jobs by himself of late; they knew he had shadowed the Strangla’s last two victims because they had seen him. Hell, they had even spoken to him on one occasion. Fingers said he was trailing the guy over a broad, as a favor, but they weren’t buying it.

The papers were giving the Strangla lots of press lately. There had been five victims so far: three women and two men. All had been strangled with such force that the impressions of the murderers’ hands were evident on the necks of the victims. What the paper did not mention was that all the victims had been brutally sodomized with the business end of a broken bottle. And at each crime scene, several cigarette butts with long ash trails, suggesting that they had been dropped while still burning. Willie Bubba thought the cigarettes were left in the hopes that they would cause a fire. He might have been right about the first time it happened, but there had been no resultant fires and I was pretty sure they were left as a way to taunt us. “See how careless I am–and still you can’t catch me,” I knew that was what he was thinking. But now his luck was running out. I was on the track of Mr. Jimmy Fingers and I would not be denied this collar. It was the end of October, fall was setting in slowly this year: it was still too damn hot. And according to our informant, it was about to get even hotter for Jimmy Fingers.

One of the movie studios, I think it was Metro, but it might have been RKO, had sponsored a contest that had the entire city putting on costumes and dressing up on Halloween. The winner would be given a walk-on role in some movie that would come out the following year–sometime in 1947. It even had detectives and top brass playing dress up–just like the tourists Jimmy Fingers and his gang of pickpockets usually targeted. Beard said that Fingers and the gang were planning on join in on the festivities, complete with costumes they were acquiring from him. They would all be wearing full dress uniforms of the Los Angeles police department. The gang planned, according to Beard, to kill Fingers and frame the police for the crime. The brass came out in force for the stake out. There must have been four or five men from downtown present, including the chief-of-police, Edward Johnson. We took up our positions and waited, as the gang was celebrating Halloween on Military Street.

It was a blood bath that resulted in Mr. Johnson’s head exploding like a dead pumpkin —Halloween would never be the same again for any of LA’s finest. We both received commendations, making the grade for promotion to Detective. I was ready for it too. I’d been walking the same two dog beats on foot for over a year and a half and knew I was headed for a breakdown or some other kind of mental warp if I didn’t get off those streets and soon.

They had us working the graveyard shift at that time—reporting for work at midnight, the witching hour. And if the gang wars didn’t die down soon, it was going to be a red Christmas. A very red one, especially since the latest flare-ups between the Military St. Pachuchos and those cross dressin’ queers that had been wandering into Pachucho territory up north of Ventura Boulevard. They were invading the territory and claiming it for their own. They strutted up and down those streets, all dressed up in crimson and fur.

“Santa’s a fat bitch lately,” I remarked to Willy Bubba one night as we sat down to dinner at Barney’s Beanery. I was talking about the drag queen we had nicknamed ‘Santa’ since he had recently put on about 30 pounds. Santa cruised for sailors who were interested in some exotic clown luv and nookie while their ship was in port. It was quite a trek to the Valley in those days, but the sailor boys always found a way to get there, often paying up to 85 bucks an hour for their perversions. “I’m broke,” Willie Bubba reminded me when the waiter brought us the tab. “Jeez, Louise, there’s nobody like you when it comes to blowing your paycheck.” I paid the bill, leaving a tip of 50 cents or so on the table. “I gotta go take a piss, don’t go off chasing some hairy fairy while I’m gone, Bubba,” I said. He could tell from the way I said it that I wasn’t falling for any bullshit tonight.

Everything was subject to change in the morning anyway. The new police commissioner was about to change everyone’s assignment, and we were hoping for Homicide. It would be a prelude, our intro, if you will, into terror.

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She had raven hair and ruby-red lips. In future years, maybe 1973 or so, they would write songs about her and how beautiful she was. But when I knew her then, the sailors just called her Fat Sweaty Betty. She was one of those girls who were drawn like moths to the flame of notoriety that Hollywoodland offered, back in the day. She was going to be one of the brightest stars in that firmament called Tinsel Town. And she was also going to be mine. Back in those days, you see, it was before all those new-fangled inventions that blast music from the radio right smack into your ears just like some kind of sonic reducer. But I can’t hear the music. Not anymore.

The news was all over the papers about the murder of Miss Elizabeth Short—they picked up on my nickname for her right away: “The Black Dahlia” they were calling her. That was so much nicer than what the sailors had called her and I thought she would have liked it, if only she could have known. But Fat Sweaty Betty lay in pieces, bloodless, re-arranged in my bloody dream with that clown luv smile permanently carved into her sweet face.

“It’s just the American way,” Bubba insisted after the cased had been officially marked as Unsolved and taken on the trappings of a legend. With each twist and turn the leads evaporated. Bubba turned up dead one morning; failing to come back from that suburban death camp they were relocating suspects to during the last year of the war. The station logs said he had gone up there to investigate a suspicious call from a young girl named Annie. His charred remains were identified by means of the SDHNC tattoo on his left forearm that had miraculously survived intact and unburned. In his hand were two scraps of paper, containing the only 2 clues to the crime that were never released to the public: “n 2gether now” was scratched in pencil on one of the two slips which was obviously a shred of a much larger page. The other contained the line “9 teen 90 nine” written in blood.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“I really want you,” Betty smiled up at the man, trying not to show her fear. “If you would give me some love.” There was the beginning of a tear in one of her eyes, and yet, she could not look away from the wicked blade he held. She knew her life depended on keeping him happy and distracted. And for about a day and a half, she did.

“Here,” she moaned, taking his other hand and slowly pushing it down towards her soft, wet spot, “just like this. See? I trust you.” She reached her hand between her legs, gently caressing herself and guiding him to touch her in languid circular movements that made her breath come faster in spite of her fear (or perhaps because of it she wondered).

“Trust?” He smiled to himself as he pulled her against him roughly, nuzzling her neck with his mouth. Suddenly, the iron control that he had been exercising seemed to evaporate and he was filled with a hatred that was beyond him. “No sex! Yet.” The words came harshly against her throat as the knife found its’ way up under her rib cage, easily stopping her heart and leaving her with a surprised look on her face as the life slowly ebbed from her. “I’ll take everything, see? Let that be a lesson learned, bitch,” he whispered as he began to make the cuts that would allow him to taste her more easily, “you won’t make that same mistake again, at least not in this lifetime!”

He was laughing now as he began to bite the wounds, lapping and sucking the tasty red fluid that gushed all over his hands and face as he reached around and nicked an artery with his knife. He was aroused now; his cock was finally beginning to rise, becoming engorged fully as he drank more deeply of her life and indeed her very soul. Her life danced before his eyes as it was leaving her body. He saw it all: the mother who was always threatening to break stuff in an effort to get Betty to comply with her sadistic desires. He saw that her uncle, Mr. Rotten treats the young girl to Piggy Pie at Joey’s House of Wonders on a weekly basis. She was groomed for this from the day she was born. The man knew this. And it excited him more than anything he had ever experienced in all the years that he could remember (and there were many years that he could recall…) He was covered in her blood now. His member shining red with the blood that acted as a lubricant as he violated every opening with great abandon.

“I am not alone,” he thought as he approached his moment of bliss. He could feel the forces of evil surrounding him, each demon and sprite waiting to take their turn with the now smiling corpse of Fat Sweaty Betty. “Come on, baby,” he says to no one in particular. “I’m going to carry you home.”

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The fires are burning in Hollywoodland today. It’s wiping out the last traces of clues. The outro is being played even as I stand in front of my peers seeking asylum. “I didn’t mean to kill ’em.” Not Bubba and certainly not that little girl Annie. They just got in the way of me getting my shine on.” And with that, I got back into the bright and shiny new police cruiser, and slowly headed up the 405 into the Valley, turning my back on the lower level minions who aspire to my greatness. It looked like 9 teen 90 nine was going to be a good year. The wind was picking up and the smell of brimstone was in the air once again.