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Back Happy Hour In Hell
Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

It started back in the 1970s. No, I wasn’t around then, or if I was, I was still alive and I don’t remember. Bodies started turning up in odd places in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the range that separates San Judas from the Pacific Ocean. Usually dumped beside a highway overpass, all of them stabbed repeatedly by a four-edged blade like a bayonet. After the third turned up with the same M.O., someone noticed that all the dumping locations had graffiti on them, and that the same piece of graffiti was always there: a single word, “SMYLE.” It was a tag even the gang experts down in LA hadn’t seen before, and as a nickname for known criminals it didn’t connect with anything in the records. Some reporter remembered his college lit courses and suggested in a column that it might have something to do with Chaucer’s description of a murderer as “the smyler with the knyfe beneath his cloke.” For a few weeks the press was off to the races with that, but even after the murders were solved nobody ever confirmed it had anything to do with old Geoffrey C.

Anyway, the killings kept happening, I think there were six altogether, and after a while the police began to put a few things together. The guy had to have a car, and seemed to find his victims at night. All of them were young people from the coastal towns, and the theory was that he was taking them right off the sidewalks, either by offering them rides or simply forcing them into his vehicle.

Making a long story shorter, the police in Santa Cruz and Monterey and other coast cities began keeping an eye on the local universities and junior colleges, and one night an officer scoped a guy in a battered old VW van acting suspicious, driving back and forth along the road outside Cabrillo College. The driver spooked and ran, the officer called in backup, and it turned into a chase. It didn’t last long—you don’t outrun a police cruiser in a VW—and the van lost it on a turn and crashed into a streetlight. The driver’s side glass was broken and there was no sign of the driver, but the officers smelled gasoline so they approached carefully. Then the van exploded. The huge fireball shook windows for blocks. Burned two of the cops but not critically.