“Crumb”
A hard-boiled cozy, featuring a cynical broad who runs a tea shop and keeps a cat. Wanna make something of it?

What others are saying…

Delightful and devilish stories about our four-legged friends. However, cute and cuddly at times, these critters can also play out human emotions. Revenge, anxiety, love and doubt, are just a few of them. Stories are short, easy and quick reading. And most definitely, a good evening’s enjoyment.
— Patricia Harrington
author of Winter’s Soul

Excerpt:

My scarlet nails extracted an evil-looking little black cigarillo from the package with the curvaceous señorita on it.

I offered Jake–ex-Detective Sergeant Jasper Perkins, my current love interest–a smoke, but he shook his head and lit mine for me, then his own filtered menthol. We were sitting within shouting distance of my shop, in The Tobacco Barn’s “sampling room”–a glass-fronted, air-tight lounge, exempted from our town’s no-smoking ordinance and guaranteed to offend the sight of every non-smoker who passed.  A hollow-cheeked man scurried by, his hooded trench coat flapping around his sweatshirt and jeans, coughing into a big cloth handkerchief.  I caught his eye and blew smoke rings.

Sharp winds and cloudy skies had turned into a hell of a storm.  The wind lashed the trees that Planning and Zoning had made the builders leave around the parking lot and rain smacked the shop windows like transparent paintballs.  The radio was threatening severe storms and possible tornadoes, but the place was still crawling, shoppers dodging from building to building, money burning holes in their pockets.

Jake peered across the corner of the lot at my place, Ma Barker’s Tea and Crumpets.

The rain stopped and the wind died away.

“You got a customer,” Jake said.  “That guy in the trench coat just went in.  Dude’s bald as a post.”

“Suzanne can–”

I jerked to my feet, stubbing out my cigar, pulling my handbag strap onto my shoulder.

“What’s the matter?”  Jake caught up with me on the walkway.  “Friend of yours?”

“Friend of Snake’s.  That’s Snuffy.  Not a tea shop kind of guy.”

The wind picked up again as we got to Ma Barker’s.  The two of us fought the door open and had to dodge to keep from having our heels crushed when the wind blew it shut.

The first thing I saw, even before I saw Snuffy, even before I saw the body, was the blood.  Then I saw the corpse.  Some guy I didn’t even know was spread-eagled on the floor by the counter, his white down windbreaker already a soggy scarlet, a hole twisted to one side but probably originally centered on his heart.

Then I saw Snuffy, doubled over with his prescription inhaler stuffed into his mouth, squirting and sucking it in and holding his breath like it was the best damn joint he’d ever toked.  The hand that wasn’t holding the inhaler gripped an eight-inch blade, and that hand was covered in blood.

“Yo!” he gasped.  “You got a freakin’ cat in here?”

I only meant to call, but I ended up shouting:  “Suzanne?”

“Get out, Ma,” I heard her voice, real weak, from the other side of the counter.  “Snake told him to kill us both.”

“Nobody move,” Snuffy said, as I started toward my daughter.  “I’m closer to her than you are.  Stay put, if you want to buy her a little time.”

“Who’s the dead guy?” Jake wanted to know.  Cops.

Back to DARK THINGS II: CAT CRIMES