Crumbling… ~ Part 9

Rodger Jacob's noir parody serial enters the final two thrilling episodes!

It was then that the ground trembled with a vengeance. At first I heard a loud slam that I mistook for the steel loading ramp of a delivery truck smacking the asphalt. You’re familiar with that sound, right? But there was no delivery truck in sight and suddenly the sky itself began to shake or perhaps it was the ground below my feet that had suddenly abandoned all natural laws and began churning like quicksand. It was an earthquake, alright, one mother of a shaker that would bring down the rafters of the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, killing my girl Zivi in the process, but I would only learn this way after the fact, after my own body was laid out on a slab in the L.A. morgue with a bunch of other stiffs who suddenly got chatty. They knew all about Zivi. They knew all about me, more maybe than I knew about myself. Did you know, for instance, that I was a cop? A narcotics agent, I’ve been told. And that girl in the bar? The one who caused all of this ruckus in the first place? Well, she was a quarry of mine and I had her cornered like a canary in a coal mine until she slipped a hallucinogenic compound in my cocktail while I had my eyes trained on the black midget and the tall albino, all dead now at the hands of the man wielding the killer typewriter.

Or were they real at all?

The earthquake. That’s the only thing that’s certain. The earthquake had really happened.

Previously...