Colin Gee

The pirates came aboard in a bloody dusk in a tussle of meaty hands and rouge and bonepierced lips and grim little bursts of powder and the first thing was they stood our captain and officers up against the rail and executed them one by one with pistol shots to the face, very gory, without saying a word. We knew it would happen this way because we had turned and run from them for a long time and put up a hard fight.

LAM CHOPS Excerpt from the forthcoming Ransom On The Wrong Side Of The River: A Ransom Mones Mystery Jackson’s old lady opened the door in house heels and a dress the size and color of a three-page high-school love letter. She told me to come right in. Her exact words were, ‘What the hell do you want?” but I knew an invitation when I heard one. She had on long sturdy legs, bounding breasts, and back fat like a pork barbecue.

It was about eighteen months ago when I made the acquaintance of Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good. This is what happened: I was up by Bamangwato hunting elephants and shit just kept hitting the fan, and I got the dengue, so I gave up and limped back into Cape Town and got a passage back to Natal on a ship known only as the Dunkeld. ‘Dunkeld, Dunkeld, never heard of her,’ I told the station master, fear and worry evident in my face and aching luggage bearers.

I drank my way through that year, half on the sly. Put down a bottle of hard stuff every two days without a thought. But this story isn’t about that, it is about Grandpa. We were living in a cabin way down a holler south of Mexico when he decided to drive himself down in his 98 grey Caddy with the crimson faux leather interior. The last US highway patrol to interfere with him told him to drive faster, or else get off the interstate.