By The Shorts

By Kevin Williams

A collection of nine stories crime set in vancouver bc,
dating set in blood bank, GLA politics. Mostly silly, fairly short.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Williams
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463366370

Kevin Williams

ANNOUNCEMENT.For my ten year anniversary here? New covers+ upgrades for everything!At a million words a week, I should be done by the end of feb.(Man! Had everything proofed before posting. Shoulda been after.)Oh, the AI rev? Bring it.Stealing market share, capturing a demographic, developing a fan-base?That's the game. Always has been.Unfortunately, so are goons, thieves and legislation. Luckers, people.Latest novels:The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024FANTASY Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess's Kiss may 2023SF: Teddyhunter Rogue planets June 2023BOTH The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024Shorts : The Finest Evil in the System; Loons, goons + booms.Novels are usually 100,000 words: freebies vary. (And might be ANYTHING!)If you don't fall over laughing at least once while reading, the book is a failure.Other than that, SF is the lit/philosophy of western urbanization.Problem-solvingthe effect of techon peoplevia new mythology.Beware, you MAY learn something. Or think a bit here and there, even in the comics..Cartooning? Does-is-ought. Take a does, show what it is, (is is?) discuss the ought. (ie: table= work-server= that gossips)SF? what if, then what, so what?Fantasy? Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. (Characters in conflict over issues)***Readers are welcome to proof-read; if I think it's a good correction, it goes in. (just send an e-mail, book-name + quoted line) Thanks. (One long-suffering reader got a few books dedicated to him.)On a personal note; I've got nearly 2 million words published at smashwords.com now. SF + fantasy novels, cartoons + short-stories.Jeez, lemme see; This whole mess got started in grade school; shorts in HS; novels after. (first one done in pencil.)Dozen or so 80,000 word novelettes (mostly type-writer.); first computer stuff, 80's; novels+shorts.Years of zines, quarterlies, novels, cartoons; (apple-clones, compacts, pcs) '86: BBSing a shorts echo (rogue-bone), blogs and cartooning. I THINK I can add another million words there. Maybe. Most of them are lost unless some old CD backups turn up.2021: Dead tree? If you don't make the best-seller list with your first novel today, you don't get a second. An 8-million web-wonder hit is entry-level stuff. (for movies. An ebook best seller is 10,000 or so) I think my count is 43 currently published over 8 years; and another dozen or so early works lost.******************* WARNING! * Live and live, (long i vs short) tho and thou. I use thou as tho sometimes. It's the most common complaint. Mostly edited out, but I still do.******************Writing has been a hobby of mine since the third grade, and was an ambition even earlier. Cartooning, music + philosophy are other bad habits I keep up. (Plus a few secret ones I'm NOT telling you about, so there!)Zining SF cons with shorts for years (on the freebie table) was a hobby. Well, till charging for intros,(lessons) freebie-table placements and contests became common. It was fun; quarterly editions, mostly. Fantasy, horror (Halloween), children's (Christmas), romantic comedy, (Valentines, st pats) hard SF, on july 1st or world con.Most are in the short-story collections, tho I'm still writing the occasional one today.Enjoy, thanks, pass it on! (Have a day of it, eh?)

Book preview

By The Shorts

By Kevin Williams copyright 2020

April 2020

Smashwords License Statement Smashwords Edition. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art:

Disclaimer: This is a work of satire; similarities to persons is a coincidence?

Canadian ISBN:978-1-988261-34-8

ISBN:9780463366370

Author’s Note: Fan-mail, biz, complaints and suggestions to [e-mail]

Kevin Williams is on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/packrat2

https://kevinwillpkgd.tumblr.com

He authors an SF series, Teddyhunter: (about runaway teddybear robots), a few books of short stories, comics and the Aaron+Henna fantasy series. The first in every series is usually a free ebook.

Teddyhunter

• Teddyhunter: The Underground

• Teddyhunter: The New World Order

• Teddyhunter: The Nano-zombie War

• Teddyhunter: I Can Get Better In The Parking-lot!

• Teddyhunter: The Neanderthal Gene

• Teddyhunter: New Genes

• Teddyhunter: Baby-Blues

• Teddyhunter: The Underground Railway

• Teddyhunter: Blob2

• Teddyhunter: Rogue Worlds

• Teddyhunter: Right in the Shorts

• Teddyhunter: 2022 shorts

Aaron+Henna

• The Gateway Project

• Girl-Ghost

• Aaron+Henna: The Witch-Wizard War

• Aaron+Henna: The Singing Sword

• Aaron+Henna: The Way of The Rat

• Aaron+Henna: The Terrible Twos

• Aaron+Henna: Summer Rain

• Aaron+Henna: Broken Magics

• Aaron+Henna: Dirty Float

• Aaron+Henna: Dragon-Witch

• Aaron+Henna: Teen Learns

• Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess’s Kiss

• Aaron+Henna: Short Stories

UFO Observer (comic)

• UFO Observer Book 1

• UFO Observer Pt Two Book 2

• UFO Observer Part Three Book 3

Shorts!

• Shorts From All Over

• Christmas Shorts

• The Apprentice’s Shorts

• The NWO: The Orderlie’s Silent Spring V2.

• Bogus Shorts

• SF Shorts

• By The Shorts

• 2021 Shorts

• 2022 Shorts: Odds and Ends

• Shorts 2023

comics

• Friday The 13th Sex-cult Problems

• Stalking Millionaires

• The Pour Witches of Fenwick

Canada

• The Cold Grows, The Roads Shrink P2

• The Maple Dyraid Life

sf • JoyToy:Singularity

FEITS

• The Finest Evil In the System: Omnibus

• The Finest Evil in the System: Goons, Loons and Boons

• The Finest Evil In the System: AI Woes.

***

chapter 1 easy chair killer

A beauty but she wasn’t moving or talking. Dead did that kind of thing to you.

Keep looking, boys. Double donuts to the one that finds proof this guy’s a multiple killer.

Aldrin again, trying to transfer to a better position in the force. Grunting noncommittally at that official-type noise coming from the suit by the door behind me was all I could manage. Aldrin was always sure of the worst till it was proven otherwise, even at work when we did murder investigations together. Especially then, really. It had something to do with his desire for promotion, I think, glory-hound that he is.

The only problem was he took his frustrated fantasies out on the team when that turned out wrong. Nobody liked working with him when the case we got sent out on by GVRD didn’t look like it would make good paper.

Here? Greater Vancouver Regional department. Hire talent, promote locals and politics is your life-blood. It’s a family thing.

The apartment was dark and damp around us; typical cramped Village-Vancouver living with a TV prominent. All clues about the messy demise of tonight’s body was in the process of being destroyed by big, flat feet and clumsy prying fingers. Patrol officers desperate to get off the street, ones that hadn’t fallen into anything worth knowing about yet.

Looking around carefully (That’s what I was being paid for), I squatted down and started with the wall in front of me. There was something and I checked again with one eye closed. Freckles were dancing merrily on the wall, suspicious-looking freckles dark against light paint. I did a double-take and looked at the tiny spots again, more carefully this time and with a pocket microscope glass.

Those weren’t freckles, they were specks of dried blood. Old dried blood and lots of it.

Something special and deadly had gone down here and from the lack of dirt on the freckles, fairly recently. Long enough back the blood had turned into concrete as it’d aged.

But not tonight, there were fresh splatters about too. This was old, dark and hard dried blood, stuff that’d been wipe-washed once or twice. The problem was the murder we were called in on was only hours old. These spots were too old, too dark for that.

There were lots of them too, more than a few sprays, mostly around the baseboards in the apartment. Unless somebody here liked washing dried bloodstains clean, this was a recent previous, with older ones around it. And tonight’s, of course.

That meant a whitewash, a coverup, and habitual murderer most foul. Not a shaving-accident story unless Bozo-the-killer here shaved near the floor and shaved fairly carelessly to boot. A lot.

Things looked bad. Maybe Aldrin was right for once in his petty little life. Stranger things have happened to nicer people in this city.

We’d gotten told on the way in by the super that Bozo-the-killer was a hustler with a taste for the more poisonous bitches out there; gaming in the city for hot ones that lived on big money from the looks of it. We knew one fox had died noisily here tonight, one that was with him when he came in.

This case started to look hot to me. And nasty. Hopefully someone else’s problem.

Putting my pocket-scope back in a pouch, I considered things, sitting back on my heels to think a bit and look around the room for whatever story it could tell me.

It was a clear yarn. There were two dirty glasses, one with lipstick-stains, both by an easy-chair that looked like it was designed for two to cuddle up in. That looked like a good place to start looking for sups to me, so I went over and looked at the chair.

Surprise, surprise. By damn, it was designed as a cuddler. A classy little set-up too. Expensive. It was heated, leather-covered, a vibrator massage built in, dual controls and a soft-stuff terry cloth towel with sticky stains on it puddled on the seat. Other pseudo sex-toys were littered around, most within easy grabbing distance of the chair. This moved girls from necessary hobby to lifer-obsession-with-rituals status in here.

This definitely wasn’t an accident. Bozo had a problem getting it slaked, from the looks of things. A twisted type that snapped and killed.

Some people do like to frolic at home. I grinned. Frolicking at home was better than frolicking in the park. The suggestions some people shouted when you tried that were disgusting, usually.

Aldrin! Come scope this out. There’s a donut-claim on this one. Maybe a half-dozen or so. That snapped a head or two out of notebooks and looking my way as I pointed at the stains on the wall behind me.

That little hint got most of the team up and over messing up my find, but I was finished with it already and didn’t care. I already knew where Bozo killed his babes; and how and when. The lab labbies would dig the proof out of the walls and carpet that led back to the chair when they wanted it.

Skipping the team-effort thing, I headed out to the balcony of the small apartment-cum-condo, looking for the rest of this guy’s personality. I found it in another chair out there.

The balcony was low, and protruded into the branches of a tree growing out of the lawn below, since this place was only the top half of a house that gotten remodeled as a single. Probably illegally, too.

Walking out there on the balcony was a lot like walking into a room that glowed leaf-green in the streetlights and rustled in