Redneck Press: Home of TOUGH

T he night my father finally died, my mother and Janice and I were eating Greek food at one of the round Formica tables in the function room of the care facility, which was little used. People who came to the skilled nursing section didn’t stay long. They either healed or died. And either way, they were not in a mood to socialize. My mother was struggling with her pita pocket sandwich. The dressing and the moisture from the vegetables had softened the bread until it split and spilled the contents onto the waxed paper wrapping. She threw the mess down on the table and held her yogurt-smeared hands up in the air. “ Won’t someone help me?” I grabbed a handful of napkins and knelt next to her wheelchair. “ I’m sorry, Tommy. I can’t seem to hold it together.” I wiped her gnarled hands clean, the cheap paper napkins shredding and shedding bits on the floor like snow. “ We never wanted to be a burden to you, you know,” she said. Which was why, I supposed, they left the family in New Yo...

I t’s a truth universally acknowledged that people don’t hire PIs because they’re happy. I didn’t go into business specifically to deal with jerks, but too often that’s what I got. Alton Deane was polite, at least, a well-preserved seventy, lean and handsome with hair white as milk and a light tan, even in December. I didn’t see many suits that nice in my office. “It’s printed right on the carton. Human Remains.” He knotted his hands in his lap. “I can’t imagine anyone stealing them, except for a prank.” “Have to agree.” I’d run out of surprise at what assholes people could be. There were days I got tired of dealing with them, considered quitting the business. “What on earth would you do with them?” I read a book once where a serial killer fertilized his tomatoes with the bodies of his victims, but saying that out loud would send Deane scrambling for the door. I couldn’t afford to turn down even a simple case. It had been a dry fall. “Probably kids. Whose, uh, remains, were they?” “My ...