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By T.J. Watts

Fort Lauderdale shows its sunshine sparkle and its darker underbelly in this I-95-speed novel about two over-the-hill cops, pushing sixty, back on the job, and out on the streets pulling the midnight shift. Aging beach bums, Duncan Moon and Jesse James Vacario, are just trying to make it to retirement, but a blithe serial killer, a society-column-respectable drug baron, along with hookers and druggies and killers, oh my, have other ideas. Welcome to South Florida during the hurricane season. The book is funny, and it’s dangerous with short chapters and fast prose. It’s got car chases, buddy cop rapport and repartee; shots fired, and stuff blows up. Oh yeah, there’s local history woven in. Okay, you’re right, there’s even some romance. Ride along with Moon and Jesse on their last gasp chance to make it to the finish line while dodging hit men, strippers, the DEA, a category 5 hurricane and a cast of characters directly out of "Ripley’s Believe It or Not." To paraphrase Dave Barry in his tongue-in-cheek ad for tourism, "Come back to South Florida. We weren’t shooting at you."

ISBN 978-1-59431-782-8 fiction/crime/mystery

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Prologue

The woman sat very quietly in the filthy plastic chair as if being quiet might make her invisible. Outside the window a flock of egrets, spooked by a noise or a predator, flexed their wings and vanished into the washed-out blue of a fast fading evening sky. Inside the window, the air was still and fetid with the sharp scent of mildew and partially eaten fast food quickly going bad. The woman did not want to call attention to herself by moving. She stared straight ahead at the well-worn wallpaper in the tiny kitchen.

She knew that he was standing there watching her, but she would not turn to face him. She wanted to rub her wrists because they were numb from the plastic ties that held her arms fast to the chair, but she did not move.

"You are my first." Walter said the words slowly with pauses between each one. "You're my very first, I mean if you don't count Mama, but you can't count Mama 'cause she was old."

Walter reached out his hand to touch the woman's face, and she instinctively pulled away. Walter hit her hard. The blow glanced off of her cheekbone and snapped her head back overturning the chair. Walter picked her up and reset the chair.

"Now, listen here, you. You are a prostitute, like on television, and I bought you fair and square."

As he spoke in a slow, childlike cadence, Walter ran his hand up her thigh. She clamped her legs together. Walter wrenched them apart.

"Come on mister. I was hungry. Just let me go. You can have the money back."

"I don't think that you like me," Walter told her while he drew imaginary lines on the inside of her thigh with his porcine fingers. "That makes me angry."

Walter walked to a drawer adjacent to the squalid, rust stained stove. He rattled it open and took out a boning knife. He held it pressed against his chest and turned his head to look at the woman over his shoulder.

"You shouldn't make me angry," he told her.

"Mister, you're crazy. Just leave me alone."

Walter's face folded into a puerile pout. "Not crazy," he said. "Mama said I was not crazy, and Mama knows."

Walter walked back to the woman. He showed her the knife. Her eyes went wide. She started to scream. Walter put the knife down across her thighs and reached for the duct tape. She fought against her bonds, and again the chair fell to the floor. The knife clattered on the dingy linoleum and stopped inches from her face. She was still screaming when Walter wrapped the duct tape over her mouth and around her head. He set the chair upright. The woman's eyes begged for help that would never come, her mouth working frantically against the tape.