The Radio Murders - The Radio Murders

Many of you have asked for an update on the next book in The Radio Murders series. I am happy to announce that The Radio Murders: The Caller is in the works. It is a book that was finished in 2003, but with new vision created by The Radio Murders: The Collectors, Caller is undergoing a major rewrite. I am personally thrilled to get this on a solid time-line for release early next spring. But for those of you who have supported my efforts I am anxious to get some of your feedback through previews of the work.

Here is a sample of the opening of this exciting story.

…Sometimes you gotta be dead before anybody knows you’re alive.

- Gene Minues,

Talk Radio Caller

Prologue

The Partners

Run! That was all the Spode could do.  For those moments in the wee hours, it was as natural as breathing and considerably easier.  He ran from the moment the back windshield smashed beneath his hand.  It was a fist - his fist - that came down on the Cadillac; a fist clinching a steel ingot, just heavy enough to make sure the job was done.  Once done, the Spode ran.

The neighborhood, with its alleys and hideaways, was a playground for the running man.  Arrested development, substance and environmentally induced, kept the Spodiodi Kid frozen in the worst of youth, while his body aged and decayed.  Some things still worked.  His long, matted hair knew where to go, even before his feet could line up on the varied wet and muddy surfaces.  It was fear and booze that made him so agile.  Rainwater streaked his face.  Briny filth flung from his hair and onto his lips.  Walls were climbed and repelled in one, sometimes two surprising motions.  The men in pursuit - the police, the Hispanic bus boys, and way back, barely able to climb the curb, the owner of the precious car – had no chance of catching the vandal.  To them the Spode was a semi-clever drunk and street person, who long ago washed his brain cells and humanity into the gutter.  Still, he was smarter than most, but it only served to annoy those from whom he begged spare change.

The run was more than halfway down the block, but the Spode had not once stepped into the glare of the streetlights.  The six unit apartment buildings were all delineated by something; a fence, a row of garbage cans, perhaps a dumpster, but none stopped the Spode. With each opening, he could see the cruiser spotlights flash menacingly in and out of his path.  More than once, he stopped on his heels to avoid the beam and then started again when the cruiser moved on.

There was never a thought about his friend, his best friend for the night if only because the evening started with Ralphy's bottle of gin. The Spode hated gin.  It was what his mother drank and the first drink on which he remembered getting shit-faced.  He was going to have his first sexual encounter then, but the bottle ruled the night.  It started a trend that continued to this heart pounding escape.

Sex gave him his nickname.  It was his girlfriend, his first physical love, who code-named their encounters. "Want to Spodiodi?" she would say, with the conjured word running up and off her slight under bite, a feature that became more pronounced with the invitation.  The mental image would still sustain an erection, no matter how many chemicals fought the process.  The name stuck, especially among the small group of blurry men, and the young girls smelling of patchouli and rebellion who were inexplicably attracted to the brood. The Spodiodi Kid’s real name was nearly forgotten.  There were few who cared.

The rattling sounds of his breath pounded in his ears.  His heart rate must be through the roof, he thought.  Ribs broadcast screaming agony, and something warm and sticky splashed into his eye, something that was neither rain nor the foul whip from his hair.  It came from his hand - his thumb - at first he thought it was sweat or rain, but the liquid did not sting when it landed in his eyes.  Instead it seemed to spread over his vision, giving the few distant lights a blinding pinkish hue.  Another drop hit his mouth as he pumped his hands in the dead run.  It was blood.  The bent knuckle, held in front of his squinting eyes, oozed red from a cut so deep that there was a glint of bone.  "Oh shit!" The Spode ran faster and jumped higher.  He needed a place to hide.

The night started with the routine bliss, gathering money from the day's begging and minor theft and discovering there was enough for at least a fifth and a pint of alcohol.  How much depended on what kind.  The Spode was not picky about such things, he just did not want gin and he told Ralphy as much. He told him more than once as they bobbed to the Package store.  Spode had a way of walking in all directions at once.  Never in a straight line, he would skip backwards to keep talking and leap ahead to climb a fire hydrant or swing on a street sign.  His was an engine of aimlessness that had two speeds: full and passed out.

Ralphy was solid and big.  Scanning the streets for predator and prey - his myopic gray eyes, behind thick glasses, darting with the Spode’s bounce – he kept up his side of the conversation.  Ralphy slumped into a nearly six-foot, four-inch frame, while the Spode stretched to just barely six-feet.  They made their way to the Package Store and Ralphy negotiated the purchase: a fifth of Tanqueray and a pint of Canadian whisky.  The Spode called it Rye.

When he saw the gin, Spode was beside himself with anger and let Ralphy know, until the larger man pinned the Kid to a wall by the neck. "Okay, okay! That limey piss is fine with me, if that's all you could get!" Spode's voice, munchkin-like, squeezed through a compressed larynx, differed only slightly from the rasping harmonic of death rattle and nasal squeal that normally came out of his mouth.

The debate concluded, Ralphy and the Spode made their way back to the makeshift enclaves on a dusty playground near Drexel Avenue.  Spode jumped to one of the net-less basketball rims and made a dunking motion that fell well short of the mark.  They drank the afternoon away and argued about everything from the Vietnam War to the elaborate hoax Spode believed to be the moon landing.  It was not an hour before Spode finished the contents of the pint.  His burned and damaged taste buds did not mind the draws from the gin bottle, once Ralphy acquiesced and carefully handed the green, glass cylinder to his drinking mate.

The two drunks laughed at bad jokes, and the absurdity of it all, until their sides hurt.  Spode started breathing hard; he stood, bent at the waist, and moved to the minimum of human tolerance for what he had to do.  Ralphy barely noticed the heaving and splatter of Spode's insides. The blood and bile were becoming a daily occurrence and difficult for Spode to ignore.  He tried to remember the song, an old Rolling Stones song that pretty much summed up his life to this day.  He snatched and jerked for every inch and maneuvered back to his space in the dirt.  Spode plopped down with a throaty breath of someone twice his age. "Just can't seem to drink her off my mind…" The song formed in his head and on his lips.  Ralphy did not appreciate the rendition, nor the accompanying gust of foul air.

"Man, you better get over to the clinic, you been chuckin' blood all over the place."

"Just marking my territory."

The evening wore on. The two friends started telling stories with redundancy that even the drink could not disguise.  After a short nap, the darkness became inviting and the park became increasingly dangerous.  Drunk-rolling was more popular than baseball in the South Chicago neighborhood.  The Spode felt sicker than usual and knew he had to put something in his stomach other than ethanol.  They stumbled from the tattered shelter on the back lots of Houston Playground, heading south to East Hyde Park.  There were still a few diners that allowed them a seat and a shared meal.  Fewer still where the cigarette smoke was so pervasive that the ambient shroud of carcinogens masked the smell the pair brought to an establishment.

The spot was simply called Irv's, and it was a cross between a classic kosher deli and greasy spoon.  No Rabbi in the modern world would verify the claim that Irv's maintained a kosher kitchen, but many of the old Jewish couples who frequented the deli had little choice but to trust the owner. Irv himself was anything but Kosher.  At five foot ten and over four-hundred pounds, he waddled through the narrow aisles of his restaurant, squeezing sideways and often rearranging the place settings, in use or otherwise, with his massive midsection.  The patrons either did not mind, found it charming or, while in various stages of altered consciousness, did not notice.

The Spode hated this practice. The plate flew from the table, held clear in the Kid's hands while the lumbering proprietor rubbed by.  The thought of Irv's belly coming into contact with his food was one of the few things the Spode found disgusting.  It became clear that Irv was wedging past the table, in part, to harass the unwanted diners who had overstayed their welcome by several hours.  A pair of french-fries on the scratched china plate and the refills of water were the only things between Spodiodi and Ralphy and the door.  They had enough money to pay the five ninety-five, they just had no place else to go.  The next adventure would not take place until eleven, when Ralphy's girlfriend left work at the local pizza parlor to join the boys for a nightcap.  Ralphy saved the bottom inch and a half from the Tanqueray bottle for her.  He knew it would not go far, but she usually had a pocketful of tips and Ralphy thought of it as priming the pump until she would treat them at the bar.

"Time for you boys to finish up." The voice came from behind Ralphy and drew closer, accompanied by the scrap of stiff cotton and hairy flesh against Formica. "You been taking up space and fouling the air long enough. Pay up and go!"  Irv was approaching the booth at a fast pace, fast for him.  Spode picked up the plate again.  This time Irv snatched it from his hand. The grease, layered from several meals, lubricated the dish enough to slide freely from Spode's fingers.

"Hey, man, we wasn't done with that!  I still got fries there!" Irv did not look at the plate, it was doubtful he could have seen its contents below his mounds of fat.  Still, he flipped the pair of fries into Ralphy's lap.

"Now you are finished!  Pay your bill and get out!"  Irv's glimmering comb over and gold-filled grin burned in Ralphy's eyes.  Spode could see his friend begin to lose control and prepare to go into action.  He was one of the few who could stop Ralphy from committing any number of felonies.

"Why you fat, vat o' human slime-soap, don't you know I'll slit your throat with a plastic spoon and feed your carcass to the hogs at high noon?"  Ralphy lunged at Irv and got one thumb pressed into his triple chin. Spode held the other arm, just in time, as he tried to wrestle the powerful attacker away from the fat man. "Let me go, Spode, I'm through with this gargantuan pig turd!"

"Ralphy! C'mon, man, let go!  You go back to jail you'll do a quarter at least, you got priors, man!" Ralphy thought about the time he spent inside.  He had seen it all, from a delinquent boy's farm to county time.  There were even nine forgettable months in Joliet and he was not about to let Irv send him back there.  His grip loosened and Ralphy fell back to his seat.

"That's it! I'm sick of you stinking, drunken Hitlerjugend!  Leave my restaurant and if you return, I call the copper, you hear me!"  Ralphy stood and stared the fat man down.  He squeezed down the isle until he cleared Spode’s side of the booth.  Spode pulled his body out of the booth and pushed Ralphy toward the door.

"Fuck you, you old beheyme!" Ralphy spat at the restaurateur.

"You call me an animal? It is you and your kind that ruin the neighborhood. You and all the rest of the schwartze, the shikers, the shaygetz! The whole lot of you!  You think you know my language, then I know yours…go to hell, fucking assholes!"  Spode held onto Ralphy's arms and worked him toward the door.

"You better watch yourself, Irving, that's all I got to say." They left the diner, but Ralphy's slow burn was just beginning.