Regis McCafferty

Bugs
A Hays McKay Mystery
2003, Paperback, $16.95 

Terrorist activities in the United States are not confined to foreign agents. Marvin “Ike” Miller is an escaped federal prisoner: a fugitive terrorist with a new twist, a load of hate over the killing of his half-brother by ATF, and a plot to bring martial law and chaos to America.Bugs is the story of one man’s efforts to destroy the plan and Ike Miller in the process. And he has less than two weeks to do it. Hays McKay is a pipe smoking investigator with a small agency in Columbus, Ohio, who stumbles onto Millers plot while looking into the death of a black fisherman, affectionately known as Bugs, in the eastern part of the state. McKay is analytical, intuitive, funny, passionate, yet totally without feeling when someone close to him is threatened, which is evident when he executes two men who attempt to rape his fiancé. But he has his own demons: booze, a past that includes a tour in Granada as a Marine sniper, a lost love, and time spent in Pakistan, some of it along the Afghan border.

Evan’s wife, Anna, calls on Hays McKay, an Ohio security firm investigator and old friend, to look for her husband. McKay travels to New Mexico with his fiancé, Deirdre, and together with a guide and his sister, they search for Evan Begay. In doing so, they become the targets of four men who are removing the gold artifacts and melting them down to sell. The McKay party finds Evan Begay and the cave, but in doing so, they set up a deadly confrontation between themselves and the thieves who have plundered the cave.

These poems represent the musings of a man: an intelligent man, a world traveler, a man in his fifties going slightly mad from booze and grief and a perception of a world in a headlong rush to a future he does not understand and has no wish to.We know him only as “Tweed.” But we’re never sure whether he is speaking of Tweed himself, or Tweed as alter ego, and we see his world, perhaps our world, through his eyes. We wander with him in the past, sometimes in the present, and very rarely in the future. For him, there is no future, only the daily task of living it through, and this collection is a journey with him. 

The short story, The Kendal Affair, first appeared in my collection of short stories titled, The Sherlock Holmes Adventure. Though complete in itself, it left unanswered questions for Victorian enquiry agent, Joshua Pitt, and prompted a second and longer story titled, Kendall Endgame. Because in some ways, Endgame is a continuation of the original story, The Kendal Affair has been included as the first story in this collection.

The title story, Gran Quivira, is a rather non-traditional romance placed in the late 1930s between an young Navajo woman and an out of work Apache construction worker, both searching for more out of life than they have experienced before they met. Gran Quivira was a thriving Pueblo community in southern New Mexico several hundred years ago but was in ruins by the 1930s. The journey toward Gran Quivera and beyond is their story.

The final story, Just Plain Cliff Smith, was inspired by the true stories of some of the rugged characters who lived, loved, fought, and died in the Arizona Territory of the American Southwest during the late 1800s. Cliff Smith is an occasional but highly selective gun for hire with a simple code of ethics: Do unto others….

He turned up the light, filled and lit a pipe, and then turned to the note from Sherlock Holmes. It read:”Pitt-Inspector MacLeish paid me a visit this evening to discuss the particulars of a murder that occurred at Coldfall Lodge, Tetherdown. Mr. Artimus Weatherill was brutally murdered and property taken, including a fair amount in sovereigns. There are some particulars regarding this event that puzzle MacLeish and since I am returning to Glasgow in the morning to testify in the Seamus Walsh affair, I took the liberty of telling the Inspector you would look into it in my absence. If your appointments will give you the morning, MacLeish will be at Coldfell Lodge at seven o’clock. Best regards, Holmes”Enter Joshua Pitt, inquiry agent, chess playing opponent of Dr. Watson, and one-time Baker Street Irregular who has set up shop little more than a block away on Baker Street. A young man in his late twenties, he is rarely without a smoking pipe at hand, a good blend of tobacco, and prefers strong Assam tea and Highland whiskey. His cases are as much adventure as mystery, and the reader is invited along for the ride, in a hansom, of course. 

Then Now Whenever is composed of twelve short stories that span centuries and continents from Victorian England, to contemporary America, to the realm of vivid imagination.THEN is composed of four stories prior to the mid 1930s, three of which are set in Victorian England with an inquiry agent at the time of Sherlock Holmes. The last of the four is the story of a miner looking for work in the coal mining fields of Kentucky during the Great Depression of the 1930s.NOW is also composed of five contemporary stories. Two, regarding an ex cop from Cleveland who drinks and smokes too much and finds himself neck deep and personally involved in two murders while living in New Mexico. Two more involve ordinary people thrown together by circumstance and hard luck with unpredictable results, while the final story of this group is one of far-off Pakistan and good intentions gone astray.WHENEVER makes up the last three: macabre, nightmares of horror that visit in dreams on the darkest of nights when we are alone with our own demons. Dreams that one hopes will never be repeated. 

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