Deep Cut

A Fitz & Ese Story

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Track One: Cold Open

The Strip District at three in the morning belonged to exactly three kinds of people: the produce guys unloading crates of Jersey tomatoes, the bakers already elbow-deep in tomorrow’s bread, and the people watching the people who didn’t want to be watched.

Fitz was the third kind.

He’d backed the Cutlass …

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Pittsburgh has a supernatural community. It pays rent, works shifts, holds grudges, and settles debts, mostly out of sight, occasionally not. There’s a bar called the Johnny’s and if you’re wise, you pay attention to who and what comes through the door.

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Behind the Scenes: Back to Nick and Cassi

There’s a quiet vibe that settles over a table when the coffee is still hot and the story hasn’t fully unfolded yet. That’s where I am today laptop open, a notebook filling up in the…

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Black Betty — The Beginning

If you ever walk Arlington and find a coin set on a headstone, fangs stamped into one face, a raised fist on the other, don’t touch it. Just keep moving and say nothing. It means someone from the Super Natural Response Team came by to pay respects to one of their own. It means the soldier sleeping under that stone knew they were outclassed, outmatched, and flat-out overpowered, and chose to walk into the dark anyway.

You won’t find the S.N.R.T. in any history book. The files were burned. The equipment got scrapped. Every man and woman who lived it kept their mouth shut and carried the truth into the ground. Nobody today remembers how close the whole world came to a nightmare it would never have woken up from. That was the bargain those people made. They saved everything and were allowed to keep nothing.

Nick Raines carries one piece of that war on his hip. He just doesn’t know the whole story yet.

He calls her Black Betty.

She looks like a 1911 that ate something bigger and angrier. A hand cannon his grandfather Chaz carried through the Second World War and willed to Nick when he passed. Nick knows two things for certain. His grandfather was tougher than anything that ever tried to put him in the ground; one of the few mortals who could stand in a room with creatures that tore people apart for sport and not just survive them, but beat them. And he knows Black Betty works damn fine against whatever you point her at. Everything else ,who built her, what she was built to kill, why she does the strange things she does,Nick is still piecing together.

Here’s what he hasn’t pieced together yet.

The man who built Black Betty was Rafe.

Nick knows Rafe served alongside his grandfather in the S.N.R.T., the handful of soldiers handed the worst job of the war: take the fight straight to the Thule Society and the things crawling out of the Nazi labs. Super-soldier experiments. Hypnotized berserkers. The supernatural types who’d thrown in with the Reich, because monsters tend to find each other. A standard-issue .45 was never going to cut it against any of that. The good guys needed something with teeth. Sometimes, after all, the good guys have fangs.

What Nick doesn’t know is that Rafe is the reason any of them came home.

Rafe is exceptional with his hands. He can build damn near anything, which is what happens when you’ve spent a thousand years drifting through workshops and trades, picking up every craft that ever caught your eye. He’d carried a 1911 through the trenches of the First World War, gone over with all the other young Americans looking to make a difference, and he’d never forgotten the feel of it in his hand.

What he had forgotten was how to be surprised by a gun. Until he saw the one in the violin case.

A gangster’s piece, fitted into red velvet that still smelled of whiskey and cigars. It looked like a 1911’s bigger, meaner cousin, but it threw the firepower of a Tommy gun. Rafe took one look and knew exactly what the S.N.R.T. had been missing.

After that he practically lived in the armory. He begged parts, borrowed parts, and traded a week of rations for an afternoon with the welder down in the motor pool. And when he finally finished, he hadn’t built a sidearm. He’d built a legend.

The gun that gave other guns nightmares.

She was more than a slab of mean steel. A few quick changes and she became a rifle. Reconfigure her again and she’d take the big drum magazines off a Tommy gun, a hundred rounds before you had to think about reloading. A twist of the hand and she’d take a suppressor, though that idea didn’t last long. Chaz looked at it once and said it was like strapping tap shoes on a Clydesdale and asking it to walk quietly. Rafe scrapped the suppressor and went with a flash hider instead.

The real genius was in the details. Rafe hollowed hidden compartments into the wooden stock and packed them with the tools of the trade: silver powder, garlic, iron filings, salt, everything you’d want on hand when the Thule Society sent its helpers. He reworked the .45 ACP rounds, too, loading them heavy with smokeless powder so they hit faster and harder, and lacing them with phosphorus so the muzzle threw an ultraviolet flash with every shot. Every pull of the trigger was a little burst of high noon. Hell on anything that had spent its life avoiding the real thing.

The supernatural world had never seen anything like her. Before long they had a name for guns like this. They called them Wraith Guns.

Rafe gave Black Betty her name himself. He’s a Tolkien man, the two of them crossed paths once, briefly, in the mud of the First World War. Rafe believes what Tolkien believed: every good blade, every good weapon, earns a name. His mind went back to his mountain-man years, ranging across a frontier nobody had finished mapping yet, where the men who lived out there called their muskets Black Betty. The gun you married, they’d say. The one that kept you on the right side of the dirt.

When the war ended and the S.N.R.T. wrapped its last cleanup down in Antarctica in the early ‘50s, most of them went home to ordinary lives. The supernatural community spent years hunting down every Wraith Gun it could find, desperate to see them destroyed. Most got found. Chaz kept his hidden. Rafe kept his, a matching 1911, the S.N.R.T.-S, that he’d named White Lightning. Anyone who figured they’d just take a gun off an ancient and powerful werewolf was welcome to try their luck.

Black Betty passed to Nick when his grandfather died.

Nick has created a few tricks of his own since then. Non-Denominational Holy Water, The Mix, all manner of deadly little things assembled out of dumpsters and thrift-store junk. They keep him breathing. But none of them have kept him alive the way Black Betty has.

Someday Nick will learn the whole story, Rafe at the welder’s bench, the violin case, the name pulled out of the old frontier. He’ll learn exactly what kind of man his grandfather had to be to carry her into that war and walk back out again. That’s a story for another night.

For now, all Nick really needs to know is the thing he already does. Point her at whatever’s trying to kill you, and Black Betty does the rest.

The Dirt Cheap Deed$ World Keeps Moving Whether I Write It Down or Not

I finally got Touché out into the world.

And the moment I did, the Dirt Cheap Deed$ universe didn’t pause to celebrate with me. It just kept going, the wa…

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Intro

I think several of my readers are going to experience some real pain from this story, pain that they may have carried for a long time and not wanted to explore. This time we explore what happens when we have a deep need met. Does it become addictive, Does Validation, Self Worth, even Love have a dark and horrible cost. Especially if it is foreign …

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QUILL NOIR

How Pittsburgh Paid

A werewolf at Johnny’s bar. A story told in his own voice.

Pittsburgh · Johnny’s Bar · Present Day

The man at the end of the bar has been nursing the same drink for forty minutes. He is not old th…

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No pain, no gain? Well the pain we feel when we put in the work in is not always physical.

Thank you for your patience. I’ve heard that writer’s block plagues so many writers, but my experience has been something else enti…

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Nobody asked where he came from.

That was one of the unwritten rules of Johnny’s bar, the kind of place that didn’t technically exist on any Pittsburgh zoning map, tucked beneath the North Side in the particular darkness that the city’s three rivers conspire to create. You didn’t ask where people came from. You didn’t ask what they were. You ordered your…

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A little something from Nick talking about how he uses his creativity to create the things he needs in his special line of work. Sometimes the things he creates for work help him in his personal life.

Non-Denominational Hol…

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Some days, writing feels like trying to pull a thread from somewhere deep in your chest, one that’s tangled around old memories, half‑healed wounds, and the ghosts of people who shaped me long before I ever imagined turning them into characters. I sit down to work, and the page doesn’t just ask for words. It asks for honesty. It asks for pieces of me I …

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Patience is useful and patience is painful. for those who have wisdom and patience you may consider yourself doubly cursed. i am still working on my short story Touche, but I felt this story coming and had to give it time to become real. Based on much of what I see happening in our workd, and as a student of history i se things that are recurring, th…

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This tale is going to be hard to write. Personal reasons and I think several of my readers are going to experience some real pain, pain that they may have carried for a long time and not wanted to explore. We explore what happens when we have a deep need met. Does it become addictive, Does Validation, Self Worth, even Love have a dark and horrible cost.…

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Hey everyone — quick check‑in from my desk

A rough head cold knocked me off my feet this week, and I’m easing back into the work as my body allows. I didn’t want the silence to stretch too long without letting you know that something new is coming. I’m moving a little slower than usual, but the story is still unfolding, and I’m excited to get it into you…

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Seat Yourself

Ritters Diner in Pittsburgh is Legendary. Perhaps it is legendary to many more types of people than we normally think it is? Great Food, Classic strong coffee, extensive menu. You get the classic diner experience from waitresses who have been practicing their craft for generations…. Maybe even longer? It has been said that no one has ever gone to Ritters, but you end up there. Hmm… Does not really matter, the food is so good you will not care how you arrived. What mysterious forces are possibly attracting those who end up there? Open 24 / 7 365 In the wee hours who might be there when you are not there? Here is an example of what you might miss while you are sleeping. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy the ride as you learn more about the characters who are a part of the Dirt Cheap Deed$ world in Pittsburgh.

Chapter 1 Hunger

It was three am on a rainy Tuesday night, so what does my stomach do? It is growling like crazy, almost screaming at me for food. Have to do something about that, I don’t even like me when I am hangry, you do not want to meet me when I am like that. So how am I going to take care of this at three am? Why Ritters of course! They have everything you could ever want, well mostly. My pallet may be a bit skewed.

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Between holidays, I settle in with my notebook and let the characters talk a little louder. Perhaps it is a little deeper than talking. Nick borrowed my car, found a note in the garage, this has me coincerned. Rafe left my workshop with a bunch of tools and only said “You don’t want to know.” Fitz ask me for gas money, and a fire extinguisher. Ese raid…

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