Brea's Tale and Other Stories

By Karen Pullen

Brea's Tale and Other Stories contains four short stories: "Brea's Tale" (Winner of a 2012 Derringer),the story of an ex-beauty queen with anger issues who is wrongly imprisoned; "Scritch," in which an ex-con looks up a pen pal, a story of revenge; "Years of the Wicked," in which a small town police department is overwhelmed by three murders; and "Gone, Gone, Gone"-- you'll never look at Fluffy the same way again. The first chapter of COLD FEET, Karen Pullen's mystery novel which will be published in January 2013 by Five Star, is also included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen Pullen
• Release date: May 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781933084503

Karen Pullen

Karen Pullen’s award-winning short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Spinetingler, Every Day Fiction, Crime Scene Scotland, and the anthology Fish Tales. She earned an MFA in Popular Fiction from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina where she runs a bed & breakfast and teaches memoir writing and fiction workshops. Her first novel, Cold Feet, a mystery, will be published by Five Star Cengage in January 2013. Updates on Karen and her writing may be seen at www.karenpullen.com.

Book preview

Brea's Tale, originally published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, won the 2011 Derringer Award for Best Long Story from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Scritch won second place in Spinetingler's Pay The Bitch Back contest, 2010.

Brea’s Tale and Other Stories

Karen Pullen

Published by Luna Moth Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Karen Pullen

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

The Years of the Wicked

Scritch

Brea’s Tale

Gone, Gone, Gone

Notes on the Stories

Acknowledgements

About the Author

excerpt from Cold Feet

The Years of the Wicked

This ward’s like death row, all of us in line for the big compost pile. Can’t stand the waiting. Or the noise. Beep, drip, whoosh. Who knew I’d end up hooked to machines? Sometimes it’s hard to hear the TV. I like 48 Hours and Cops. Bad boys, bad boys … Someday they’ll make a movie about my last case but I’ll never watch it. I’m sliding to eternity too fast. Damn. I’d like to see that movie, find out what I’ve forgotten.

One thing I’ve learned recently, talking helps me remember. See, even us old guys can learn, something Rhianna wouldn’t believe. You’re a rigid thinker, John, she’d say. An ex-wife can get bitter and say unkind things. But I don’t play that game. It could get back to our daughter that I’d said something mean about her mother, and I’m already on eggshells with that one. She just turned fifteen, kind of another rigid thinker.

The paint hasn’t dried on my last case. It irks me that the headlines blazed Serial Killer! It terrified the citizens of our quiet town, a fine place to live if you’ve got nerves, like I do. In my twenty-nine years on the police force, we never had a single homicide until that one bloody week.

The first death looked like a mugging. Early Sunday morning, Sam Klinkevals–a lawyer known for sucking lifeblood out of the gullible–looked out the back window of his office and saw a body in the alley. Once Sam figured out there was no profit in it for him, he called the cops.

I don’t work Sundays but I’ve always got the scanner on, another thing that drove Rhianna nuts, out of the house, and into the arms of that scrawny accountant. I’d just come back from visiting my Momma’s grave when the static broke and Drum’s shaky voice said 10-54, possible dead body. I pulled on my uniform and drove to the crime scene.

The body–really dead, not just possible–was a sixtyish male, a little soft around the middle like most of us. He lay face-up, staring at a row of garbage pails. His nose had been relocated and his face was bloody, so he didn’t look like himself, but I knew him. I pulled up his jacket sleeve to show Drum a fading tattoo, a bulldog just like mine. Semper Fi, another Marine. I’d met him the night before. His name was Roman Falco.

I’d been chewing the fat with the bartender, a good buddy of mine, in Nam about the same time as me; he’d been a chopper pilot and I was infantry. That history marks you, gives you a bond. When Falco walked up, we saw the tattoo, and the three of us had a drink together, playing who-did-you-know and where-were-you-at. Hell, we even joked about post-traumatic stress and who had it worst. I won with my story about the time a helicopter flew overhead and set off a flashback, and I locked Rhianna in the bathroom for a day while I stood guard against the hordes of Cong yelling outside our front door. That was the first time Rhianna threatened to leave me, though I didn’t brag about that.

Chief Jerry asked me to find out more about the dead guy. It wasn’t hard. His car keys came from an agency at the airport; I advised them we’d have to impound the car and they wouldn’t get it back for a while. Notebooks and binders in the car told me Falco was traveling through, selling