Img: actual black widow bike by Paulie jr. The boys had awoken in a circle surrounded by ancient cypress trees whose wispy limbs swayed in the wind like early morning arms stretching for a yawn. All of their clothes had been washed and neatly folded but the boys approached them cautiously, not sure what to…

Max checked the locator app and still no motion. “Dang it, Spider!” He rechecked it every couple of minutes, then said a prayer asking God to please let Spider call before Mrs. Cara’s nine o’clock deadline.“Hey, Max, can you run across the street and get me some coffee? You can get yourself a cinnamon roll,…

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…