Exclusive Preview!!! Hardcase McDougal and the Huge Fucking Mystery

Do you like special treats? Do you like super-exclusive content? Do you like being the first idiot in your group of idiot friends to discover the next super-hip pop culture sensation?!

You're in luck.

We've teamed up with emerging novelist Keith Blackwater to give you a sneak preview of his debut book, Hardcase McDougal and the Huge Fucking Mystery.

The following excerpt is from the chapter "Hot Dog!"

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Hardcase McDougal woke up in a ditch, covered in a thick layer of the mud-slush-animal shit mixture typical of a Midwestern spring. It felt like a family of raccoons was having an orgy in his head. He said a quick prayer: Lord, please let this be a hangover. Because if there are actual raccoons fucking around with my ear-holes again, I swear to you I will burn down every hospital and orphanage. Like literally all of them.

McDougal tried to stand up and take a few steps: an endeavor which went poorly. He tripped on some air and retreated back to his starting point in the ditch by way of a mildly amusing barrel roll.

“Walk much?” Byron mocked. He was crouched a few yards away, up out of the ditch in the middle of a dirt road. He appeared to be starting a fire with a small mound of garbage and dried leaves. He looked like total shit, his eyes practically swollen shut.

“Suck much cock?” McDougal shot back, trying again to stand up and faring a little better than he had on the previous attempt. “What the fuck are you doing over there?”

“Starting a cookfire. I woke up with a half package of hot dogs in my pocket and I figured we should eat them.”

“That's a good idea,” said McDougal. “But let's smoke a bunch of weed first.”

“The weed is gone, Hardcase.”

“What?!”

“We've been partying for three days, dude. Everything is gone. Even the can of Beast Ice. Don't you remember?”

“It... wait, what? My beer is gone?”

“Are you okay, Hardcase?”

“I don't know,” McDougal answered honestly. “I think... I don't know if I'm still wasted or not right now, and it's weirding me out. Does that make any sense? Did I just say words or was I mumbling a bunch of animal sounds? Do you know if I remember what words are?”

“I can't understand a fucking thing you just said,” replied Byron. “Stop making animal sounds.”

“Oh fuck,” groaned McDougal. “It's happening again.”

“No, I'm just fucking with you. And—if I had to wager a guess—I would say that you are still wasted. I base this opinion on two factors. One: we stole a half gallon of gin from the grocery store last night and drank the entire thing. Two: you've been awake for five minutes and you still apparently haven't noticed that you're nude.”

McDougal looked down. Yep—that muddy, haggard tube of flesh was his exposed dick swaying to and fro in the early afternoon breeze.

“Well, I'll be fucked,” exclaimed McDougal, and he went about the chore of looking for his clothes.

He found his fedora, duster, and badly blood-and-puke-stained Jimmy Buffett t-shirt a few yards away from where he had woken up. His gun, monocle, and other valuables were still in his jacket pockets. He never found his pants, but there was—coincidentally—a family of dead raccoons about thirty yards down the ditch. It appeared the raccoons had been sexually active recently—whether before or after dying, McDougal couldn't say. He removed an eight-inch hunting knife from the nylon sheath on his otherwise-naked calf, and expertly skinned the slutty, dead beasts.

He returned to Byron wearing a fashionably bloody pair of raccoon-skin capris. The mother raccoon's tail was fastened to the waist of the pants just below McDougal's belly-button, creating the appearance of a raccoon-tail dick. This was humorous.

He handed Byron a necklace made of raccoon intestine that had been shredded into thin strips and braided. Five hastily-cleaned raccoon skulls were strung on it like giant pearls.

“I made this for you,” said McDougal.

“Fuck yeah you did! Thanks.”

“We take from nature only what we need,” said McDougal deeply. “And we dare not use her treasures wastefully. The spirits of the animals, the rocks, the water—even the spirits of this pile of plastic and styrofoam you're burning—they are here to provide for their human masters, but only if we reciprocate by serving as their stewards in this corrupt, modern age, the age known to the ancient demigods as the Fifth Zarnakkthium. I give you this amulet as a reminder of your essential role in the delicate realm of nature-spirits.”

“This time I really don't know what the fuck you said,” Byron admitted. “But I'm keeping the necklace anyway.”

“What? I didn't say anything, you creep. Hey, cool skull necklace! What are those, kitten skulls? Where did you get that?”

“Why don't you just sit down in this gravel and make yourself comfortable? Come on, have a hot dog with me.”

After eating two lukewarm hot dogs, McDougal sobered up a bit... or did he?

“Thanks,” he said to Byron. “I needed a good home-cooked meal.”

“You're welcome, pal. Hey—what is that on your forehead?”

McDougal put a greasy hand up to his head and fondled the shrapnel wound. The healing process had begun over the last few days, but had been retarded somewhat by a lack of R.E.M.-cycle sleep and a steady diet of cheap drugs and cheaper liquor. The gash was still fairly sticky.

“I already told you,” said McDougal. “I got cut when I exploded a robot.”

“No, I mean there's something inside the cut. It's green.”

“Shit, is it infected? I had a bet with my cousin Jerry... whoever gets an infection first has to pay the other one twenty bucks. Damn, I made it almost a week.”

“Jerry? Dude, I bonehawked him at Curly's the other day. And if a chunky, foul-smelling discharge has anything to say about it, I think Jerry already lost the bet before you ever injured yourself fighting that robot—much less before the injury got infected.”

“No,” McDougal said sadly. “We both agreed that dick infections don't count.”

Byron nodded. “That's fair. But I don't think this thing on your head is an infection anyway. Hold still.” He pulled a pair of rusty tweezers from a small pocket on his safari jacket.

McDougal protested, “You're not putting those things inside an open wound.”

“Don't be a pussy,” Byron said reassuringly. “Besides, I use these to smoke roaches all the time, so they get pretty warm on a regular basis—probably sterile as shit.”

“Hopefully even a little more sterile than shit.”

“Right. Now don't fucking move.”

Byron began extracting the foreign object from McDougal's injury with hands that were as calm and steady as a well-beaten chihuahua going through alcohol detox.

“Fuck!” screamed McDougal. “That fucking hurt, you dumb pile of fuck!”

“Almost got it,” said Byron, deciding to take the high road and ignore the name-calling. But then that's just the kind of guy Byron Wilson was. That kind of guy, and also an emotionally-crippled drug abuser kind of guy with a badly-damaged sense of morality, and also, by a lot of folk's accounts, a dumb pile of fuck kind of guy. Yeah, he was that kind of guy all right... or was he?

“There!” Byron exclaimed, holding up the tweezers triumphantly. They were tweezing a flat piece of bloody green plastic about one-inch square.

“Oh my stars! What is that?” asked McDougal, taking the object in one hand and flipping his multifunctional spy monocle into place with the other.

He turned the magnification on the monocle up to maximum and examined the plastic shard carefully. A roadmap of thin gold lines on one side told him that it was most likely a broken-off corner from a circuit board. White lettering was visible on the other side.

UNDIK

USTRIES

McDougal removed his monocle and asked Byron, “Do you know anything about Undik Ustries?”

Byron thought for a moment. “No, I don't think—aww, man! Wait a minute. Isn't that the Russian mail-order bride I knocked up? Did she fucking hire you to find me and make me pay child support?! I thought we were friends, Hardcase.”

“No,” said McDougal. “Her name was Undiknia Ustrivicanavic. And she was my Russian mail-order bride. Friend.”

“Oh, shit, yeah. Whatever happened to her anyway?”

“I delivered your baby myself, sold it to a barren jew woman for fifty thousand dollars, then shot her.”

“So what happened to the baby if you shot this Jewish lady? And I know its not my place to tell you what's what, but I'm pretty sure it's called armed robbery when you take fifty thousand dollars from somebody and then shoot them.”

“I didn't shoot the jew woman, dumbass.”

“Oh, you shot the baby?! Did the woman want her money back?”

“Of course she wanted her money back; she was a jew. But no, I didn't shoot the fucking baby. I shot Undiknia because I had an anger problem in those days and I was upset that she had taken your boner and put it inside of herself.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I guess that makes more sense.”

“More sense than Undik Ustries,” McDougal grumbled, handing the jagged piece of circuit board to Byron. “It looks like some of the letters might be missing along the left edge where it broke off.”

Byron examined the item for a couple of seconds. “Roundik Industries?”

The two men looked at each other and said, “Fletcher Roundik!” simultaneously.

“Maybe we should pay our old pal Fletcher a visit,” said McDougal.

“Yeah,” agreed Byron. “But we need to get back to town first. Where the fuck are we anyway?”

“Why y'all is out in the gaw-damn woods!” shouted a zany hillbilly voice.

“Who said that?” demanded McDougal. He reached for his gun.

“Why, I done said it!” A zany hillbilly sauntered out of the woods. He was barefoot and dirty, with a red flannel shirt and a long-ass white beard crusted with animal shit and old tobacco. He grinned broadly, showing what was left of his teeth: a single, brown nub on the bottom gum.

“Okay,” said Hardcase McDougal.

“Y'all ain't with the police-law, is ya?” asked the grimy old retard.

Byron bluffed, “What if we are?”

The old thing cackled demonically and performed the faintest hint of a jig. “Why, if you was the police-law, me and my boys'd hafta kill ya dead into the ground like a bear-hound that done turned queer!”

“We aren't police,” McDougal assured him.

The old man cackled again. “Well that's fine! That's just fine!” Suddenly the man was playing a fiddle; McDougal couldn't guess where the instrument had come from. He played it rather poorly and it was out of tune besides.

McDougal began to lose the little bit of patience he hadn't realized he possessed to begin with. “What are you doing out here, old man? You making moonshine?”

“Who's askin'?”

“A customer, maybe.”

“'Fraid I ain't. Truth be to Jesus, all I'm's doin's out here's cookin' a little bit o' crystal meth. You boys wouldn't wanna buy a little baggie of ice, would'ye?”

“No,” said Hardcase McDougal. “We certainly wouldn't.” He glared at the hillbilly and shook his head in disgust. “And by the way, I find it pretty fucked up that you would insinuate it's okay to kill a hunting dog for being gay. For fuck's sake, man, it's... Byron, what year is it?”

“I have absolutely no idea, dude.”

“It's at least the nineties probably,” McDougal said with a degree of confidence. “So either grow up, or go die somewhere because decent people in the modern world aren't going to tolerate your intolerant bullshit.”

“Well, shucks,” said the hillbilly. He looked down and kicked a tin can sadly as if to admit that he knew, deep down inside, that his entire existence was a mistake. Then he vanished back into the woods, as if he had never been there at all.

“Wait a minute,” said Byron. “Why didn't we get some meth?”

McDougal chuckled at his naive friend. “Call me a snob, but I don't buy meth that's been cooked outdoors. They use creek water in these backwoods operations.”

Byron's dumb stare said plainly that he didn't see the problem with that.

McDougal lowered his voice to a whisper and explained, “Minnows poop and fart in those creeks.” He tried not to giggle when he said it, but a little titter slipped out around the word fart.

“Oh, okay,” said Byron. “Well anyway, that was pretty weird. And we're no closer to getting back to town.”

McDougal just grinned. He put two filthy fingers inside his mouth and let out a loud and distinct whistle; it sounded like a cross between a post-hibernation bear queef and the murderous scream of a falcon with nothing left to lose.

“Cool whistling skills, dude,” said Byron. “But what exactly—“

Suddenly, Boy trotted out of the woods. The bastard mongrel was riddled with ticks and lice, but in good spirits, and almost certainly drunk.

“Good Boy!” said McDougal, affectionately punching his dog square in the snout.

“Cool dog trick, dude,” said Byron. “But what exactly—”

McDougal shushed Byron with a gentle slap and unzipped a vinyl satchel attached to Boy's collar. The first thing he took out was a pint of whiskey. He chugged half and handed the rest to Byron. He reached back into the satchel and began to pull out a series of collapsible aluminum rods and assorted plastic fittings.

Byron sipped on the whiskey. “Cool tent poles, dude, but what exactly—”

“It's not a tent, fuckdick,” interrupted McDougal with great wit and precision.

“Cool ability to call someone a fuckdick, dude, but what exactly are you doing?!”

The detective continued assembling the aluminum rods until he had fashioned a structure that looked like a dog sled, more or less.

He removed the last item from Boy's satchel: a length of parachute cord. He used it to hook the sled up to Boy's collar, and then he stepped onto his contraption.

“All aboard the Boner Express!” McDougal announced gleefully.

“I have no idea why I'm friends with you,” Byron muttered. He stepped onto the ridiculous dogsled behind McDougal and wrapped his arms around the detective's chest out of necessity.

“Probably because you want to fuck me,” quipped McDougal expertly. “Mush! Mush, Boy! Mush!”

Boy galloped majestically down the dirt road, the sled skidding along the gravel and mud behind him, just like on a Christmas card.

 

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Yeah. You're right. This book is going to change the world.

To keep up with all things McDougal, connect with Mr. Blackwater on his Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Hardcase.McDougal.) And watch out for Hardcase McDougal and the Huge Fucking Mystery on Amazon this spring!