Making Their Own Law

By Bill Beatty

Three noir mystery stories about justice gone sideways. 

The Koreli: In Turkey the gypsy can provide whatever is wanted. Even if it isn't needed.
Barbie's Boys: The pretty boys gave her whatever she wanted. Eventually she wanted death.
Burning Water: You can't run from your problems. At some point you start running towards them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. M. Kreg Publishing
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540181718

Book preview

Making Their Own Law

Three Short Stories

By

Bill Beatty

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Electronic edition published by D. M. Kreg Publishing.

Copyright © 2014 by D. M. Kreg Publishing and Bill Beatty.

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All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art:  Tish Marti and Dreamstime

Table of Contents

The Koreli—The gypsy can provide it.  Whatever it is.

Barbie’s Boys—They gave her whatever she wanted.  What if she wanted death?

Burning Water—You can’t run from your problems, only run to your problems.

The Koreli

Bill Beatty

The Evil Eye had surely struck down the gypsy family. 

Wails rolled out from the unnumbered building ahead.  Wails crushed National Police Detective Veli Yaziz with the weight of obligation.  He hadn’t wanted to return here to his old neighborhood of Ulus, a labyrinthine city squeezed onto the cone of a hill within the modern city of Ankara. 

But how much more could one family endure?  Three weeks ago, it was the father.  Today, the youngest child...a baby girl, but even so... 

Yaziz elbowed his way up the sharp pitch of the street.  Gossiping voices murmured around him. 

Not even his superior, the chief of Ankara’s police force, wanted him to waste his time with this neighborhood.  Not when Yaziz could be stalking the mansions on the other side of the capital, tracking down plotters against the Grand National Assembly.  Plotters were always a threat during these uncertain times. 

Yaziz, too, would rather work across town than here, anywhere but here, but he could no more turn his back on his old neighborhood than he could’ve renounced his duty to fight in Korea five years earlier. 

Which made him koreli.  A title of privilege.  A privilege that made him almost as wise as a hodja.  But he knew the truth.  He was no wise man.  He knew, instead, about survival.  In truth, honoring that koreli honor was only another obligation that weighted him down. 

The wooden buildings that clung to the side of the hill formed a canyon, funneling welcome shade to the cobbled streets.  The walls above Yaziz’s head tilted downhill like a box of timber resting upon a stone foundation.  He ducked into the plaster-scented air of one doorless entry, an address without a number.  He knew this hole in the wall well enough by now. 

The shady gloom of the central stairwell was a cool, damp kiss compared to the parched heat of late summer outside.  Yaziz sighed through chapped lips.  Since the interior was empty except for a few stray cats, he lingered a moment to mop his brow and soak in what he could of cool relief. 

He carefully folded his handkerchief, sweat and all, in the meticulous way he had learned during his university days in America, and stuffed it into his trouser pocket next to his tespih.  Worry beads that he needed close at hand. 

The wooden steps squeaked as he climbed them, tickling up through his legs in tandem with the squeak of his polished shoes.  Keening hysteria from above resounded on each wall, each