Bender

by Chet Stevens

Mason Prophet Long watches from behind the wheel of a taxi as an evening storm thunders down the beach. Alcohol and drug abuse has forged a crack in his personal paradise, a chasm that grows bigger each day. Fueled by the bar scene of Sunset Beach, Mason finds himself weaving a soap opera of relationships that suffer badly from his happy depravity.When he finds his eight o'clock fare and friend Carmen dead in bed, strangled with blue-black-yellow-purple bruises around her throat, the crack widens. Drowning in alcoholic blackouts, Mason's memory of the night of the murder remains dark, and police detective Kendyll Hall immediately makes him her number one suspect. When an odd little man approaches Mason with knowledge that only the killer could know, and then disappears, Mason tries to hunt him down before the police can act on their suspicions. Unfortunately for Mason, no one else has actually seen this odd little man. Detective Hall is not buying his story, and the longer he searches: the more he remembers, the more he questions his own sanity.