Didee Fuller looked about half his age, slumped across from me in his pajamas with the specter of a black eye floating above one cheek. Looked about six. Small, skittish and unafraid. “You know who I am, Didee?” I gave him eyes as unblinking as my star tattoos under them. Didee chuckled. Maybe more of […]
We dug in the weeds for the body of Baby Dawkins until full moons of dirt opened under our fingernails and our skin wore quilts of sweat. Even traffic cops dug. Amos Dawkins stared through a nailed-shut window. I couldn’t tell if he was looking for his missing daughter or watching to see if we’d […]
Otis stood on the same corner as ever, eyes like a man lost in a whole new city. I watched him from the roof of the Mini-Mart. His feet shuffled into empty spaces, looking for friends in the cement cracks with the lost coins. I watched him and traced my handcuffs. His ear found an […]
We roll hard in the Fifth District. When I roared in on my first raid, an Old Crows arsenal on Abundance Street, I came with seven unmarked sedans. We don’t roll with SWAT action heroes like in South Central LA. We don’t get choppers like Dallas. We don’t even have machineguns like the Eighth District. […]
The Abby Normal Case was my first true Red Ball — the kind of case where you can’t resist putting in overtime at the office and you can’t sit still in your chair. One raw-eyed night those weeks, Andsell stared at our photo spread. “Seems like it should be simpler,” I said. “It is. We […]
Carly never won a damn thing in her short life that she didn’t lose. I wouldn’t call her a loser, though. She was a champ when it came to letting things slide. Won Honor Roll and blew it with truancy. Won a Nerf cannon at the Carver Desire Baptist church raffle and had it broken […]
If there’s a Fifth District cop more afraid than I am, it’s Homicide Detective Sergeant Hendrick Andsell. I’ve never met any cop better than hiding that fear. I met Andsell on my third day as a Narco Detective. He swallowed me up in the squad room with a look that added another three feet to […]
Even I couldn’t believe Jasper Dixson when I first saw him, dancing by the bullet holes. I was casing the crowd at the daily drug-connected shooting. Some banger with Scarface dreams had put a drum clip of 7.62 into a Grubs house on Law. My job was to scope for faces familiar to my Narco […]
It took years for Bebe Pink to lose everything. I met her like I did most of the worst: As a rookie patrol in 2002. Bebe didn’t have much then—just a rap sheet long as the complete works of Shakespeare, only bloodier. I flipped through it as she stared me down in interrogation. It was […]
I met Ryan Bedlam at the wrong end of a bat. I’d had other plans that day in the Spring before the storm. The weather was like good body oil. The sun didn’t have fangs. I’d planned on getting some poboys at the Louisa Mini Mart and hitting Pontchartain beach with my partner, Hakk. Dirty-30 […]
From the Valley to the Big Easy, Matthew C. Funk has infiltrated the worlds of Shotgun Honey, Dirty Noir, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp, and just about every venue in between with his special style of crime fiction. Here at Shotgun Honey we have had the pleasure of publishing his series of Jari […]
It started when I found Tyrell on the steps of Carver Desire Baptist. Tyrell was a gangly sixteen. Bookworm mind. Groundhog smile. Proud of nothing but the case of Star Wars figures he used to carry everywhere. He even showed me, his friendly neighborhood Narco detective, a few times. Sad kid. Gang kid. Went by […]
