Img by Adrian Borda At the same time, some 240 miles away, Julian shivered as the mist rolled in off the river, creeping around the shell of the old LeBoux mansion like a living blanket, robbing light and only spotlighting the most ghoulish of the ancient oaks. The haunted house sat on a lot beside…

Their loud, drunken laughter filled the hotel. They guffawed about the way the cashier had tried to give April a check and she had gibed in a southern drawl, “Sugar, the only paper I’m acceptin’ is cash.”Even though he was laughing as he entered the hotel room, Slick’s eyes were taking an inventory of the…

With her make-up putting up a valiant effort to hide her rapidly healing black eye, April took one last look in the mirror before heading out to the parking lot. She had no idea how, but she was prepared to try all the keys in all of the cars until one of them started an…

Hours later as little Max, a.k.a., Fish helped ‘Just Tall’ stack shelves at the voodoo shop, the dilemma of how to ease Mrs. Cara’s mind without betraying his friends was weighing on him. He noticed a fresh tattoo on the seven-foot-tall stock boy. The tat was an old time pistol with a six pointed star…

Cara was waiting outside in the cab and Max ran down the stairs of the guest house and cut across the courtyard. He heard the twang of an arrow being loosed from a bow. He skidded to a stop and bent backwards while a foot-long plastic arrow zoomed over him to stick its red suction…

Six hours away at the St. Vincent’s guest house little Max was busy cooking breakfast in the kitchenette of his studio apartment. The apartment felt like it had become more spacious after Detective Bernos had moved all of his life’s work to his office at Lee Circle. The small twelve by twelve living room was…

April upended the over-sized purse that would have weighed down a marine on a ruck march onto the quilt of the bed in the dimly lit hotel room. She shook the rapidly emptying bag to purge it of its eclectic contents, then ran her fingers through her hair trying to make sense of the menagerie.…

Remember when I said that there were guardian angels and those angels could influence people? Well, a guardian angel would have been perfect at this point; some voice of reason to light Spider’s path. However, the powers that be didn’t assign the Ice Cream Gangsters a guardian angel because half the city, including Arch Angel…

Back in Mississippi, Country Mike had talked the boys into letting Buddha’s cat stay with him. The cat didn’t even protest. She slept on Country Mike’s lap and rode with him back to where he was staying. He was being housed at a correctional facility, but not the kind with barbed wire and guards. He…

“That old man must have 300 pairs of overalls!” Spider exclaimed while the boys cleaned fish under the tutelage of the fourth grade fisherman. The only one who remotely knew what he was doing was Spider who said Rambo had taken him fishing at Bayou St. John - a five acre waterway next to the…