By the Balls -- Excerpt
The only thing I could get out of the jokers here at the police station is that Duke Wellington wanted to talk with me. Already, I'd been in the holding room for close to two hours. Various officers occasionally brought me styrofoam cups of coffee with a promise that they'd be right with me. Both left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
    Finally a cop I knew came to see me. Mark Weisnecki, a tall, moustached lunkhead of a detective, had the pleasure of being Duke Wellington's partner. I trusted precious few of the police in this town, and Weisnecki was no exception. At least he was easier to talk to than Duke Wellington.
    "Sorry about this, Ben."
    "Don't be. Just tell me what the hell this is all about. Better yet, tell me when I get to leave." Raising my voice as I did brought back the pain in my ribs.
    "The big guy wants to ask you some questions."
    "That's no good and you know it! I want some answers."
    The door flew open. "I'll give you answers!" Duke Wellington stormed in, waving his arms, not stopping until he was inches from my face. He was in a dark gray suit, maroon shirt, and a silver tie. The smell of musk pushed its way toward me.
    He continued yelling at me, "You want answers? Fast and furious, I'll give you answers, answers with big question marks at the end of them! How about this answer: what in God's good name you doing messing around with Jack Walker?"
    "Who?" I was tired and beat, but I always had a little bit of extra energy available to yank this guy's chain.
    Weisnecki intercepted, "Ben, don't give him a hard time and then expect us to cooperate with you."
    I snaped back at him: "I don't expect you to cooperate with me!"
    Duke Wellington was pacing the room. He grabbed a chair, pulled it over to where I was sitting. He spun it around and straddled it backwards. "Ok, Drake, let me break it down for you."
    He rolled his head on his shoulders as if he were warming up for some exercise. Motioning to Weisnecki he said, "Mark, break it down for him."
    Mark did. "It's like this, Ben. We’ve been trailing you since you left Iverson's. We know you met with Walker. We know his goons were trailing you."
    "Do you know who killed Gentleman Joe Biggs?" I had little patience left.
    "No." Weisnecki blurted out.
    "Then the truth is you want me to cooperate with you. Well, I got news for you and DW: I'm not a cop. I don't get paid to help you out, and I'll be damned if I'm going to do it for free."
    Duke Wellington's loud mouth went off again: "Are you asking for a payoff, you dirty little..."
    "Come on," I said. "This is entrapment!"
    Weisnecki continued what he was trying to say, "We know Walker's goons were trailing you. You must have had something pretty irksome to say to him. How about telling us what you were doing at Jack Walker's office and what bit of information you gave him?"
    I didn't feel like answering. Even if I did, I wouldn't have.
    We stayed like that for a while: Duke Wellington sitting right in front of me, trying his best to stare me down. Mark Weisnecki's big, hulking body leaning up against the wall. Me just sitting there.
    Duke Wellington was the first to start up again. "We're not threatening you, Drake. You'll know when we're threatening you."
    "Oh, will I?"
    "You'll know, you'll know. What we're doing here is trying to cooperate. You and us, see. Cooperate. We're trying to do our job. We're just a pair of honest cops."
    I glanced at Weisnecki. He turned away. I said, "Give me a break."
    "What were you doing at Walker Industrial, Ben?" Mark was sounding like a record. He wasn't getting any happier. "What'd you tell him?"
    "The fact that you want to know so badly, makes me want to tell you all that much less. And..." I pointed at the hothead detective sitting in front of me.     "You're the last person I'll tell anything."
    He sprang up and tossed his chair to the side. "Maybe you'll talk to my fists!" He came at me.
    I was up to meet him. "Maybe my fists'll talk to you!"
    Before we could get to swinging, the other detective rushed over and pushed his partner out of the way. Weisnecki then took two fist-fulls of my lapels and lifted my 180 pounds high enough from the ground that only my toes remained there.
    He growled, "Let's get something straight: I don't want to be wasting the night with you any more than you want to be wasting it with us. You're not here to find out what we know, you're not here to ask us questions, and you're God-damn not here to throw fists at my partner." He put me down, but he kept a hold of me. "You're here to answer a few simple questions."
    He walked to the back of the room and leaned against the wall, right next to the No Smoking sign. He pulled out his Marlboro reds and tossed one into his big wet mouth. I licked my lips. It was going to be a long night.
    "Now how about telling us what you were doing at Jack Walker's office?"

By the Balls
Tom Fassbender & Jim Pascoe
UglyTown, 1998
ISBN: 0-9663473-0-7
$5.95 US
224 pages
Trade Paper
4 1/4 x 6 3/8

"[An] affectionate salute to the vererable hard-boiled genre." —Publishers Weekly

"By the Balls is retro at its best, in both story and packaging—more please!" —Joe Lansdale, author of Rumble Tumble and Bad Chili

"By the Balls is classic hard-boiled detective fiction reminiscent of Mike Hammer, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Highly recommended." — Midwest Book Review