17 Resentment Court: Exclusive Shocker Review Sneak Peek
17 Resentment Court, David Stoesz’s new crime novel, zips and zings through the alleys, restaurants, and corporate offices of the rainy Northwest metropolis of Plankton — with a few murders along the way. Per a canine compact between the Shocker’s Blue Dog and Mouse House Books’ CEO Mosley, the Shocker Review will be serially publishing the first three chapters. Longtime editor and former Elliott Bay Books bookseller Diane Sepanski calls 17 Resentment Court “a dementedly funny noir.” Mosley calls it “a tremendous achievement, a feather in my fur.” You can buy it in paper or ebook. Enjoy!.
1. In a pagoda gazebo
I came to Plankton to get away from a woman. A woman with a dirty mind, a heart like a rollercoaster accident, and a husband. One time she drew five stars on my cock with a Sharpie. After I went limp they looked like asterisks. When she left, I was going to throw myself into the Ohio River. Instead, a bus ran over my foot, and I got a bunch of insurance money and left for Plankton.
Things went bad for her, too, but not because she was heartbroken or anything. Her husband found out. I agreed to meet him, and offered to let him hit me in the face. I didn’t know he would be so good at hitting. My right eyeball was still bloody when I arrived in Plankton. That might have explained why people weren’t friendly. I doubt it though.
Plankton is on the ocean. It rises like a pinch of flesh between a bay with jaggedy edges and a lake shaped like the dot of a question mark. The bay is called Hello Bay and the lake is called What Lake. It rains a lot.
My cab from the airport was shuttered like a confessional by a storm on the windows. The cab said “Plankton Welcomes the Pope” on the side. The Pope had just been there.
“You want to hear something funny?” I asked the driver. He didn’t look like he wanted to hear something funny. “Your sign says, welcome to the Pope, and my name is Pope.” He didn’t react. Which was fine. But there’s something called “making an effort.” There’s also something called “meet me halfway, dickhole.” Not for this crowd though. Talk to them for more than three seconds and it’s like you’re soliciting a blow job.
Frank Boise was probably good at hitting. He was a former college football star and still had the build to match. To me, he was a floating array of soft-tissue targets. Nuts, eyeballs, underarms. He’d probably take me though, to be honest.
When I saw his ad — INVESTIGATOR SEEKS OPERATIVE — I’d had enough of limping around town and trying to chat with people who edged away from my bloody eyeball. Whatever an operative was, it couldn’t possibly be more boring than tapping at a keyboard and looking at a screen. That’s what I did at the job I had before I came to Plankton.
Boise’s office was in Trapper’s Yard, Plankton’s “historical” district, a few old brick buildings huddled on streets of re-created cobblestone at the edge of Hello Bay. Boise was on the second floor of a building with a lion’s head over the door and old-timey doodads in the eaves. His receptionist wore a lavender dress and armor of absolute disinterest.
I took a brochure about Zion’s Gate Alarm System from a little stand on her desk. It casts an unbroken net of electric current around your home. Anyone breaking this net will trigger a siren and a call to the dispatcher. I was lost in the pixelated breasts of the stock-photography wife when Boise appeared in the doorway and summoned me into his office with a blank smile aimed over my shoulder.
He had a mustache, a little poof of an Afro, arms like tugboat lines sprawled across his oak desk, and championship clippings yellowing on the wall behind him. He handed me his card, glanced at the threadbare details of my job history, wrote a few things down. Then he told me what he wanted me to do.
“There’s a guy named Maurice. We need to get him a message, but he doesn’t have an address. You’ll probably find him at Yick Fung Overlook. You know where that is?” I did. It’s a park built into a hill in Chinatown. “You’ll might catch him if you go there now.”
He pushed two envelopes across the desk. One envelope said M and the other said You. “Give this one to Maurice, and keep this one. There’s twenty bucks in there. Wait, did I say twenty? I meant thirty. Yours free and clear.” He smiled again. “Come back after you see him and I’ll give you another thirty. I may ask you some questions about what you see, so keep your peepers skinned. You’re actually going to be undercover.” He widened his eyes a little at the word. What a thrill for the kid, undercover as a gullible dipshit. I noticed the fittings on Boise’s windows were stamped with the Zion’s Gate logo: a fist holding a bolt of lightning. Why a fist? Why not a gate?
Boise produced a red cowboy hat and put it on the desk. “Also, I want you to wear this when you go.” He smiled weakly out the window to express how incidental this detail was.
“Do you have any questions?”
I told him I didn’t, since he obviously wasn’t going to tell me anything.
“I’d tell you more, but then I’d have to kill you.” He laughed as if he’d just made that up. Then he gave me a couple of pens that said Frank Boise on the side. “These are good pens. I’ll give you a free business tip: never put your name on cheap shit.”
He was right about the pens. They turned out to be excellent.
Boise was getting bored. “This is just a one-time thing for now,” he said, drawing his performance to a close, “but I’m sure there’ll be more stuff for you later.”
More stuff. I was already leaving with two envelopes, a cowboy hat, a business card, some truly excellent pens, and a brochure describing his security system. Outside, I put on the cowboy hat and opened the envelope for Maurice. It had a piece of paper that said “Reindeer.”
Yick Fung Overlook was a 20-minute limp to the south. The cops tolerated drug activity there to keep it out of other parts of town. It was named for a businessman who built hospitals and paid for school orchestras. I’d read the plaque when I’d been there to buy weed.
I bet if Yick Fung were still around he’d have been pissed. “Look, white man,” he’d say, “we built your railroads. We did your laundry. I even put that clarinet in your daughter’s mouth. Take your drug dealers back.”
A path zigzagged to the top of the park, where there was a gazebo shaped like a pagoda. It was too early for the guys who sold hard drugs, but not for the woman who’d sold me weed before. She was sitting on a table inside the pagoda gazebo.
“Got a cigarette?” she asked without looking up. She was already smoking one. She wore a jean jacket and a second jean jacket on top of it with the sleeves cut off. I shook out four cigarettes and put them on her table.
“You lookin’?” She nestled further into her jean jackets. She was doing a great impression of someone not excited to see me. Maybe she didn’t like my hat. Still, she was at that moment my second-best friend in town, right after Boise. And I was lookin’, having smoked my whole stash on marathon limps around Plankton. I exchanged the envelope of cash from Boise for a plastic bag. She managed the entire transaction without moving anything other than her wrist.
I leaned against a post and lit my own cigarette and helped her blow smoke toward the airport, which you can almost see from the top of Yick Fung. “Say,” I ventured after a minute, “do you know a guy named Maurice?”
“No.”
“You don’t know a single person named Maurice?”
“What did I just say?”
“Not even in the past? Like maybe a Maurice in your kindergarten class?”
“That’s stupid.”
I leaned and smoked some more. “So is it a pretty good day for airplanes?”
She finally looked at me. “What?”
“Nothing. Just shooting the shit. You ever do that?”
“Do what?”
“Talk about bullshit with someone to pass the time.”
“Why?”
“Yeah, no reason, I guess. Well, it sure was nice catching up with you.”
She turned her attention back to the horizon.
Descending, I spotted a foot sticking out of a planter. It belonged to Ed Cranberry, though I didn’t know that yet.
I limped on by. Someone else would spot the foot. I’m sure they’d feel real important when they called it in. I wasn’t so desperate for a conversation that I wanted one with the cops.
The news said the cause of death was poisoning. He had also been stabbed. And apparently shot with a pellet gun. No word on if he’d been tickled. Then he was dumped in a cement planter on Yick Fung Overlook. A Parks employee had found him not long after I saw his foot. It was news for a day, then nothing. No angry vows by the police to track down the killer, no interviews with his colleagues about what a great guy he was. Plankton was apparently unimpressed. Also, no mention of Boise, and no clue as to why he’d chuck a limping out-of-towner into a half-assed setup job.
Ed Cranberry had a daughter. It wasn’t hard to find her number. “Hello, Helen Cranberry?” I said when she answered. “I’m sorry to call you at a time like this. I’m investigating your dad’s death. My name is Frank Boise.”
Chapter 2 coming soon!
17 Resentment Court is available in physical and digital editions.
