Creme de la Merde

by Robb White

About the Author: For the last dozen or so years, Robert White has been writing and publishing noir, hardboiled, and mainstream fiction. He has two hardboiled private-eye novels featuring series character Thomas Haftmann, one collection of short stories, and a crime novel When You Run with Wolves. Also published recently is an ebook Special Collections, winner of the New Rivers Electronic Book Competition in 2014. His latest crime story online is “Queen of Hearts” in Pulpwood Fiction: A Magazine of Southern No

Excerpt

The beautiful people, I really hate them. Miami’s South Beach, its snobbery, glam and glitz—all of it makes me sick. I’d never set foot on this expensive pile of sand if the job didn’t take me here once in a while. If I had my way, I’d bulldoze the whole city straight into the Everglades, art deco buildings included. I’d rip down every Givenchy and Gucci logo on every boutique window. As for the hoochie-coochie girls, the trophy wives, the blue-haired widows, and the millionaires with their old/new money, I’d give them all thirty-six hours to get out of town or face deportation to Barrow, Alaska. I’d burn everything except the mansions, the yachts, the Lamborghinis and Porsches. I’d let the residents of Little Havana and Liberty City loot everything and whatever’s left can be won in a big lottery. Ticket money would go to build retirement houses for aging greyhounds from Hialeah.

I track runaways. I’m a private eye from Northern Ohio where a lot of the flabby, melanoma-prone snowbirds live. I despise them, too, for what it’s worth. But here I am, once again, in the land of sunshine and clubbing ‘til dawn.

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