It's a question of time
So I'm checking Google news, like I do most mornings, and I see this picture out of the corner of my eye:
My first thought was, "Must be something about gay rights or something." But no, it's a promotional pic for the Mayweather/Hatton fight. Doesn't it totally look like they're about to make out? Both of them have their eyes closed! How are you gonna intimidate your opponent with your eyes closed and less than an inch away from him? I can only imagine the sexual tension building as they breathe on each other. And this is why boxing has gone downhill. Not because of the gayness, but just because I think modern fighters just don't have the tenacity or the will to actually want to hurt the guy they're fighting. They may as well switch to tennis, those guys aren't boxers.
Anyway, with regards to a dream I had a week or so ago, I actually transformed it into part of a short story. In the dream, Shaquille O'Neal and myself were detectives solving crimes and whatnot. Like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, obviously I was Sherlock Holmes, but Shaq kept trying to best me. It was funny. So I'd eventually like to write a detective like series using that premise.
I write when I play long poker tournaments so I don't completely zone out. But it's always hard to finish something since I keep changing it. And it'll probably be redone several times within the coming weeks. Anyway, here's what I have so far:
1
A crisp wind blew through the passage leading up to the warehouse. Having been deserted for the last 15 years, the walls of the forgotten hall were coated with the several layers of dust and spiders over the broken lights and sealed in windows.
“Dust and spiders. This whole job is dust and spiders.”
The warehouse was separated from the lot of warehouses that filled the surrounding area. It was on a hill. It used to be a favorite hangout of drug users and other shady folk, but a series of murders scared them all away. All that was left was the sound of the wind blowing up the passage from the lower storage units.
Three men made their ascent through the dim hall. The space began to narrow into a doorway. A rotted door with no knob swayed with the wind. Chunks were missing from the door. No doubt the result of several fresh bullet holes stretching back into the hallway.
As one man reached to push open the door, it creaked loudly echoing in the warehouse and the hall before falling off its hinges and into the room. The three men dressed all in gray and black watched it slowly yield to gravity. Yet only a small thump was let out as the door hit the floor, cushioned by the same coating of dust. There were fresh footprints and shell casings littering the warehouse floor and something else.
Combined in the dust and metal on the floor was blood, blood that had been made into a muddy mush as it mixed with the dust in the footprints.
“Some drag marks over here.”
“And here. Let me guess…someone got shot.”
A large man sighed. “That’s why my name’s gonna be on the door, big man, and not your’s. Ever.”
Shaquille O’Neal, the former NBA big man and four-time championship winner made his way back into the hallway looking for the bullet. After his playing days were over, he retired into police work and found he had a knack for investigating and old fashioned detective work. The seven footer met Inspector D. Ryan McKall, a large man in his own right, at a crime scene four and a half years ago.
“And I don’t wanna hear any arguments about the name now,” said Inspector McKall as he stooped down to examine the drag marks on the floor. Shaq and McKall always bickered over what they should call their private inspection agency, though they were often in the employ of the government and McKall still worked out of a police office, they had recent purchased a small office in the corner of the 5th floor of a local accounting firm’s new office building.
McKall’s gaze narrowed as he inquisitively inspected a pool of spent cartridges. Shifting through the mass of metal with his gloved hand, he grabbed a handful of empty rounds and then dropped them back on the floor. He nudged them back and forth, examining all their calibers and types until a single cartridge caught his attention. McKall rolled the hollow brass case in his fingers. A stunning revelation hit him as he sniffed the inside of the spent round.
“Big man, go dig a round out the wall of that passage we just came through. About twenty feet in.” McKall threw Shaq his pocket knife as he was walking to the hall. He stepped over the fallen door and went to work.
McKall watched the third man follow the drag marks in the dust out a side door and went back to examing the hundreds of casings on the floor.
Shaq walked back into the warehouse after having pried a bullet loose from the wall of the hallway.
“I’m thinking, Shaq‘s Police Shack.”
Shaq stood over McKall as he tossed the round up in the air like a coin. McKall caught it upon descent and examined it and the cartridge together.
“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. This is a bullet from a Single Action Army. I can’t be for sure until the lab work is done, but I’m betting it was an original not a replica.”
Shaq crossed his arms and looked around. The third wheel in the investigation appeared back in the warehouse and approached from behind, police department liaison Detective Timothy Berlin. The two looked around together, somewhat puzzled.
“So, amongst the hundreds of spent rounds on the floor, you find one fired from what you believe to be a single action pistol and think it’s important?” asked Tim.
“You’re right, there should be five others,” McKall paused to look around once again. “But there’s not. So that is important.”
As if his own words were disturbing him, he started to walk in circles. Seemingly looking at nothing but himself, McKall mumbled aloud while nodding his head from side to side. The math wasn’t adding together in his head.
“Unless. Unless it was left to be found.”
Detective Berlin chimed in, “Well there are no bodies. The drag marks lead outside and end where tire tracks begin.”
Shaq joined McKall in shaking his head, “What the hell happened here?”
The dawn was just flooding through the bullet holes in the wall and some of the broken windows as the two left Detective Berlin as his crew to clean up the mess.
2
“Round up the usual suspects. See what they know about any gang deals happening in this area. Arms, drugs, whatever.” McKall sipped his coffee and went back to his newspaper. “I have to see a man about a horse.”
The outdoor café was quiet in the morning, but business would pick up in a few hours as lunch drew near. McKall and Shaq usually had a small breakfast or a drink when they were called on duty in the wee hours of the morning.
Shaq finished off his orange juice with two giant gulps, “You think this was an outside job?” He belched. “Assassin maybe?”
The waitress came back to the table with a fresh glass of orange juice, “Just squeezed it myself.”
She seemed giddy in front of Shaq, but even more so in front of McKall. Her smile widened as she topped off his cup of coffee without having to worry about ruining the mixture of cream and sugar. McKall drank black coffee.
“Well if there’s nothing else, gentlemen, I’ll excuse myself.” She bowed and backed away from the table, disappearing into the of the café.
McKall grunted a disappointed, “Hmm“ then continued his conversation with Shaq.
“A possibility for sure. I want to know more about who’s operating in this area. Shouldn’t be too hard to find out.”
He took one last sip of coffee and tucked his newspaper under his arm. “We all done here?”
McKall reached into his wallet and put down a hundred dollar bill on the table. After finishing the last sip of his coffee, he neatly folded the bill into a small package so it would hide under the cup completely.
“You’re such an asshole. You torment that poor girl.” said Shaq as he stood.
“It’s her birthday today. I didn’t forget.” McKall smiled and laughed all the way to the car.
3
“To the office!”
The office was spacious, yet cramped. Two oversized, leather chairs sat behind a large, antique work bench from a violin workshop in Germany. Desk lamps were used to light the columns of old case files stacked twenty five high each to make up for the poor alphabetization. The files would continue to pile up until they were eventually sent to the police for storage.
The walls had their own lights. And under the lights, the personal favorite armaments of McKall and Shaq. Mainly automatics of all shapes and sizes, pistols with and without silencers, two shotguns with drum magazines, a multi-round grenade launcher, and one authentic, 15th century samurai sword which was used as a letter opener by Shaq. Owning such weapons was definitely illegal in every state, an issue which the pair skirted by keeping evidence tags on all the weapons, even when they carried them. Which was also illegal.
“I told you it was worth it to spring for this door.”
McKall knocked on the frosted glass. The door was an antique from a famous Old South plantation. He never told anyone how much he spent on it, to both purchase it and have it transformed to mirror the doors opening into the offices of the private eye investigators he remembered from childhood.
The only thing missing was the bold, black lettering of his name. Instead, there was a piece of white construction paper taped to the glass. Written on it was:
Inspector Ryan McKall
Shaquille O’Neal
Private Investigative Employment.
Inquire Inside.
And crudely drawn at the bottom of the page was a large, black man and a shorter, fatter white man. The black man was smiling and waving, inviting customers inside. The white man was scowling and had his arms crossed over his chest.
McKall noticed the paper after he finished admiring his door and crumpled it up into a ball.
“Uh oh! At the buzzer!”
He ducked around Shaq and slammed the paper through a plastic basketball hoop and into a nearby trashcan. It hit the bottom of the can with a thud and McKall fell to his knees.
“I’m going to Disneyworld!” He raised his hands to the sky and cried before getting back to his feet and walking to the desk. “Keep that shit off my door. When you buy a door, you can put what you want on it.”
One thing that pisses me off is the shitty investigator characters shows like CSI and the like have created. I mean, they own, but they're such assholes about it. And not in a good way, in an annoying way. And that's what annoys me. So I wanted to create two totally different characters that still own very hard in detectiving. And one of them happens to be Shaquille O'Neal and the other is based on me, but owns even harder than I do(impossible, but this is fiction).
I'm outta here.
My first thought was, "Must be something about gay rights or something." But no, it's a promotional pic for the Mayweather/Hatton fight. Doesn't it totally look like they're about to make out? Both of them have their eyes closed! How are you gonna intimidate your opponent with your eyes closed and less than an inch away from him? I can only imagine the sexual tension building as they breathe on each other. And this is why boxing has gone downhill. Not because of the gayness, but just because I think modern fighters just don't have the tenacity or the will to actually want to hurt the guy they're fighting. They may as well switch to tennis, those guys aren't boxers.
Anyway, with regards to a dream I had a week or so ago, I actually transformed it into part of a short story. In the dream, Shaquille O'Neal and myself were detectives solving crimes and whatnot. Like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, obviously I was Sherlock Holmes, but Shaq kept trying to best me. It was funny. So I'd eventually like to write a detective like series using that premise.
I write when I play long poker tournaments so I don't completely zone out. But it's always hard to finish something since I keep changing it. And it'll probably be redone several times within the coming weeks. Anyway, here's what I have so far:
1
A crisp wind blew through the passage leading up to the warehouse. Having been deserted for the last 15 years, the walls of the forgotten hall were coated with the several layers of dust and spiders over the broken lights and sealed in windows.
“Dust and spiders. This whole job is dust and spiders.”
The warehouse was separated from the lot of warehouses that filled the surrounding area. It was on a hill. It used to be a favorite hangout of drug users and other shady folk, but a series of murders scared them all away. All that was left was the sound of the wind blowing up the passage from the lower storage units.
Three men made their ascent through the dim hall. The space began to narrow into a doorway. A rotted door with no knob swayed with the wind. Chunks were missing from the door. No doubt the result of several fresh bullet holes stretching back into the hallway.
As one man reached to push open the door, it creaked loudly echoing in the warehouse and the hall before falling off its hinges and into the room. The three men dressed all in gray and black watched it slowly yield to gravity. Yet only a small thump was let out as the door hit the floor, cushioned by the same coating of dust. There were fresh footprints and shell casings littering the warehouse floor and something else.
Combined in the dust and metal on the floor was blood, blood that had been made into a muddy mush as it mixed with the dust in the footprints.
“Some drag marks over here.”
“And here. Let me guess…someone got shot.”
A large man sighed. “That’s why my name’s gonna be on the door, big man, and not your’s. Ever.”
Shaquille O’Neal, the former NBA big man and four-time championship winner made his way back into the hallway looking for the bullet. After his playing days were over, he retired into police work and found he had a knack for investigating and old fashioned detective work. The seven footer met Inspector D. Ryan McKall, a large man in his own right, at a crime scene four and a half years ago.
“And I don’t wanna hear any arguments about the name now,” said Inspector McKall as he stooped down to examine the drag marks on the floor. Shaq and McKall always bickered over what they should call their private inspection agency, though they were often in the employ of the government and McKall still worked out of a police office, they had recent purchased a small office in the corner of the 5th floor of a local accounting firm’s new office building.
McKall’s gaze narrowed as he inquisitively inspected a pool of spent cartridges. Shifting through the mass of metal with his gloved hand, he grabbed a handful of empty rounds and then dropped them back on the floor. He nudged them back and forth, examining all their calibers and types until a single cartridge caught his attention. McKall rolled the hollow brass case in his fingers. A stunning revelation hit him as he sniffed the inside of the spent round.
“Big man, go dig a round out the wall of that passage we just came through. About twenty feet in.” McKall threw Shaq his pocket knife as he was walking to the hall. He stepped over the fallen door and went to work.
McKall watched the third man follow the drag marks in the dust out a side door and went back to examing the hundreds of casings on the floor.
Shaq walked back into the warehouse after having pried a bullet loose from the wall of the hallway.
“I’m thinking, Shaq‘s Police Shack.”
Shaq stood over McKall as he tossed the round up in the air like a coin. McKall caught it upon descent and examined it and the cartridge together.
“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. This is a bullet from a Single Action Army. I can’t be for sure until the lab work is done, but I’m betting it was an original not a replica.”
Shaq crossed his arms and looked around. The third wheel in the investigation appeared back in the warehouse and approached from behind, police department liaison Detective Timothy Berlin. The two looked around together, somewhat puzzled.
“So, amongst the hundreds of spent rounds on the floor, you find one fired from what you believe to be a single action pistol and think it’s important?” asked Tim.
“You’re right, there should be five others,” McKall paused to look around once again. “But there’s not. So that is important.”
As if his own words were disturbing him, he started to walk in circles. Seemingly looking at nothing but himself, McKall mumbled aloud while nodding his head from side to side. The math wasn’t adding together in his head.
“Unless. Unless it was left to be found.”
Detective Berlin chimed in, “Well there are no bodies. The drag marks lead outside and end where tire tracks begin.”
Shaq joined McKall in shaking his head, “What the hell happened here?”
The dawn was just flooding through the bullet holes in the wall and some of the broken windows as the two left Detective Berlin as his crew to clean up the mess.
2
“Round up the usual suspects. See what they know about any gang deals happening in this area. Arms, drugs, whatever.” McKall sipped his coffee and went back to his newspaper. “I have to see a man about a horse.”
The outdoor café was quiet in the morning, but business would pick up in a few hours as lunch drew near. McKall and Shaq usually had a small breakfast or a drink when they were called on duty in the wee hours of the morning.
Shaq finished off his orange juice with two giant gulps, “You think this was an outside job?” He belched. “Assassin maybe?”
The waitress came back to the table with a fresh glass of orange juice, “Just squeezed it myself.”
She seemed giddy in front of Shaq, but even more so in front of McKall. Her smile widened as she topped off his cup of coffee without having to worry about ruining the mixture of cream and sugar. McKall drank black coffee.
“Well if there’s nothing else, gentlemen, I’ll excuse myself.” She bowed and backed away from the table, disappearing into the of the café.
McKall grunted a disappointed, “Hmm“ then continued his conversation with Shaq.
“A possibility for sure. I want to know more about who’s operating in this area. Shouldn’t be too hard to find out.”
He took one last sip of coffee and tucked his newspaper under his arm. “We all done here?”
McKall reached into his wallet and put down a hundred dollar bill on the table. After finishing the last sip of his coffee, he neatly folded the bill into a small package so it would hide under the cup completely.
“You’re such an asshole. You torment that poor girl.” said Shaq as he stood.
“It’s her birthday today. I didn’t forget.” McKall smiled and laughed all the way to the car.
3
“To the office!”
The office was spacious, yet cramped. Two oversized, leather chairs sat behind a large, antique work bench from a violin workshop in Germany. Desk lamps were used to light the columns of old case files stacked twenty five high each to make up for the poor alphabetization. The files would continue to pile up until they were eventually sent to the police for storage.
The walls had their own lights. And under the lights, the personal favorite armaments of McKall and Shaq. Mainly automatics of all shapes and sizes, pistols with and without silencers, two shotguns with drum magazines, a multi-round grenade launcher, and one authentic, 15th century samurai sword which was used as a letter opener by Shaq. Owning such weapons was definitely illegal in every state, an issue which the pair skirted by keeping evidence tags on all the weapons, even when they carried them. Which was also illegal.
“I told you it was worth it to spring for this door.”
McKall knocked on the frosted glass. The door was an antique from a famous Old South plantation. He never told anyone how much he spent on it, to both purchase it and have it transformed to mirror the doors opening into the offices of the private eye investigators he remembered from childhood.
The only thing missing was the bold, black lettering of his name. Instead, there was a piece of white construction paper taped to the glass. Written on it was:
Inspector Ryan McKall
Shaquille O’Neal
Private Investigative Employment.
Inquire Inside.
And crudely drawn at the bottom of the page was a large, black man and a shorter, fatter white man. The black man was smiling and waving, inviting customers inside. The white man was scowling and had his arms crossed over his chest.
McKall noticed the paper after he finished admiring his door and crumpled it up into a ball.
“Uh oh! At the buzzer!”
He ducked around Shaq and slammed the paper through a plastic basketball hoop and into a nearby trashcan. It hit the bottom of the can with a thud and McKall fell to his knees.
“I’m going to Disneyworld!” He raised his hands to the sky and cried before getting back to his feet and walking to the desk. “Keep that shit off my door. When you buy a door, you can put what you want on it.”
One thing that pisses me off is the shitty investigator characters shows like CSI and the like have created. I mean, they own, but they're such assholes about it. And not in a good way, in an annoying way. And that's what annoys me. So I wanted to create two totally different characters that still own very hard in detectiving. And one of them happens to be Shaquille O'Neal and the other is based on me, but owns even harder than I do(impossible, but this is fiction).
I'm outta here.