The battered green farm truck sputtered and died just as it arrived at the end of a long gravel driveway. The driver, a teenage girl, swore under her breath and tried to restart it without success.

Damn thing. I told Mom and Dad it wasn’t running right. Now it’s gone and died on me. Perfect, just perfect.

She looked at the bags of groceries in the passenger seat and sighed. She grabbed them, opened the door and exited the truck, stopping to smack the steering wheel one more time for good measure. She divided the bags evenly between both hands and started walking up the driveway towards her house. During the course of her half-mile walk, she thought about the events of the past day and a half. First, there was the fight with her boyfriend. Well, not really a fight. She hadn’t even been able to respond to his statements...   read more »

Mrs. Peabody smiled over my right shoulder and said, in her genteel old Mrs. Peabody voice, “Why, hello there.”

I didn’t bother to look around. Mrs. Peabody talked to someone over one of my shoulders almost every time I gave her medications. Thing was, there was never anyone there. Not in this dimension, anyway. I...   read more »

Pale silver blue eyes slowly fluttered open, taking in every detail of where he was in a single blink. He was on an overstuffed sofa, a pillow under his head and a thick blanket thrown over him. There was a wooden ceiling fan above his head, slowly spinning, its lights were on but still...   read more »

*Spoilers*
*Profanity*
*Ruthless Humour*
---This story takes place AFTER my other two fanfics, i.e. in this order:

‘Wait Till Helene Comes’ (Not yet posted! Heh. I’m savin’ it for Hallowe’en.)
‘The New Orleans Patient’
‘Raised On Robbery’ (I was writing this one before I started on Helene, but I finished Helene first. Go figure!)

Again, I don’t own Pendy. Mr. Preston and Mr. Child do. They made him what he is. But, as far as I know, I wrote the poem first. However, Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Raised On Robbery’, which is in italics. And this is my first songfic, well, it’s sort of one. It’s not as good as TNOP, but y’all ought to have fun, regardless! I seriously recommend getting the cd – joni mitchell hits- if only to listen to the song...er, all of them, really. Especially the first and fifth. Heh. (album: Court and Sparks)

Also, while I’m at it, those of you who dislike...   read more »

Perhaps she had been possessed by demons temporarily. On reflecting back, Special Agent Anna Cady could not come up with any other explanation as to why she would have ever tangled, literally as well as figuratively, with Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. A momentary leave of her senses? Some sort of breakdown? Whatever it was, he had surprisingly responded in kind. Well, perhaps not so surprising. They had never treated each other with kid gloves.

It had been a bad day. A long, drawn out, annoying bad day, the kind filled with pressure from above, nasty sniping remarks from colleagues, constant questions about the last job she had been on from the AIC, and where was the rest of her paperwork? On days like this, Cady realized she was unfit company for man or beast by five o’clock. She left the building at the end of her workday without a word...   read more »

The Astor Tunnels were deserted. Explosions and floods had wreaked havoc here years before. Silence had since reigned over the tunnels...

Until today.

A low sloshing broke the silence. Most of the water had subsided over the years, filtering out slowly, eroding its rocky captors. The sloshing continued, ripples slowly played out from the figure, dancing about floating skulls and large chunks of cement. The figure came upon an intact pile of skulls; pausing before wading through them as if they were dead leaves.

He — definitely a male — grinned to himself as he came upon a small notebook. It was tucked inside a skull that was stranded upon a rocky ledge, jutting from the icy black water like and iceberg. Long slender fingers reached out, shaking slightly from emotion, to grab the notebook, open it, and begin turning pages, gingerly, lovingly. The notebook had been wet several times, but the ink...   read more »

The inability to sleep is never for the lack of trying. Pendergast often wondered if his inability to love was for the lack of trying. Love had evaded him the same way that sleep had, even as he laid comfortably in Margo Green’s arms, he felt the ache of emotional emptiness. He’d come to a conclusion earlier that night that Margo wasn’t in love with him, oh she did love him but it was something closer to lust. She was in love with the idea of being in love and to Pendergast it wasn’t the same thing.

...But he had no high ground to throw any ‘moral stones’ from. He’d only felt love for one person in his life... He’d thought he’d loved Charles Duchamp and maybe at the time he had, but...   read more »

Special Agent Coffey was in the interrogation room already, drinking a cup of coffee. He neither rose nor offered me a cup; I sat down in the chair Agent Rabiner indicated.

“Ms. Barrett, when did you find out that your client had escaped Herkmoor Correctional Facility?”

“This morning, when you called.” I had been awoken from the first decent sleep I’d had in weeks, I might add.

“Did you know that your client was planning to escape?”

“He never told me.” Indeed, I had preemptively told him that attorney-client privilege didn’t cover escape plans or communication with co-conspirators.

“But you guessed?”

“Agent Coffey, half of New York was betting my client would attempt to escape. If you were the only man who could catch a psychopath, wouldn’t you?”

His eyes narrowed even further. “Do you have any idea where Mr.”—he emphasized the title with pleasure—“Pendergast is?”

“Are you referring to my client or his brother?”

“You know perfectly...   read more »