Pedro and His Five Romantics
Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots
Beer Tastes on a Champagne Budget
Earthquake in an Anvil Factory
The Private Detectives of San Francisco
Chapter 1/Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots
A Strange Cup of Sugar from Oakland
The Labrador Retriever of Dead People
Smiley’s Genuine Louisiana Barbecue
Good News, Bad News
January 2, 1942 had some good news and some bad news.
First, the good news: I found out that I was 4F and wasn’t going off to World War II to be a soldier boy. I didn’t feel unpatriotic at all because I had fought my World War II five years before in Spain and had a couple of bullet holes in my ass to prove it.
I’ll never figure out why I got shot in the ass. Anyway, it made a lousy war story. People don’t look up to you as a hero when you tell them you were shot in the ass. They don’t take you seriously but that wasn’t my problem any more at all. The war that was starting for the rest of America was over for me.
Now for the bad news: I didn’t have any bullets for my gun. I had just gotten a case that I needed my gun for but I was fresh out of bullets. The client that I was going to meet later on in the day for the first time wanted me to show up with a gun and I knew that an empty gun was not what they had in mind.
What was I going to do?
I didn’t have a cent to my name and my credit in San Francisco wasn’t worth two bits. I had to give up my office in September, though it only cost eight bucks a month, and now I was just working
