Excerpt:

The Two Ugly Detectives Agency

My name is Lafayette “Lafe” Larson. A former homicide detective, I’m now a private investigator unlike any other. I’m smart and literate as hell thanks to my late polymath father and artistic mother. As you can tell, modesty is not a virtue I practice often although I’m getting better at it. Because I’m cultured, I don’t need a Dr. Watson to write books about my cases as Sherlock Holmes did; I write them myself. This is the second one.

If you read the first book, you know my history. I was born handsome and made half-ugly by disfiguring bullets to the face and leg. The rounds came from the murderer – I refuse to name him – who killed my only child, my daughter, Mary, nine other students, and three teachers at Lakeside Elementary. By chance I was there to deliver a forgotten permission slip for a field trip when he entered the building. I shot him down in the middle of his rampage. The only comfort I have from that situation is that more kids and teachers weren’t murdered because of my actions, but it doesn’t come close to making the pain go away.

Due to my wounds, I’m the living embodiment of the fictional character, Two-Face. One side of my head is the good-looking remnant of my earlier self; the other is frozen in a permanent rictus of ugliness caused by muscle and nerve damage. I have a limp as well.

Because of my facial injury, I often scare the hell out of unsuspecting people just by showing up in a room. But whenever I get down about their reaction to my disfigurement, my partner, Mike, is there to jokingly remind me that he’s not such a good-looking guy, either. He’s raw-boned, beak-nosed and stoop-shouldered from ducking under doorways all his life. A neo-Nazi once called him a “jug-eared giraffe.” After that insult and nearly murdering Mike and me during a siege of his white power “sovereign compound,” Cam Oliveri didn’t live much longer. I killed him myself. I emptied the clip of a Sig Sauer P226 into him, and the racist sonuvabitch deserved every last round.

The combined ugliness of Mike and me has led to a private and joking name for our business and the title of this book – The Two Ugly Detectives Agency.

The real name is Janus Investigations, Inc. In Roman mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions. He’s a two-faced deity because he looks to the future and the past. But I selected the Janus graphic for our business for a reason that has nothing to do with ancient gods. I chose it because it gives first-time clients a hint of what to expect in my appearance.

Mike and I formed Janus because we had to. Our injuries forced us out of our positions as homicide detectives. The facial and leg wounds from the school shooting ended my police career first. Then, three years later when I’d rejoined him on a temporary assignment at the request of Chief Mordeen, Mike’s was cut short as well. During the siege of Oliveri’s compound, my partner found himself on the wrong end of a blast from a neo-Nazi homemade mortar. He survived but endured a long rehab to remove all the shrapnel.

As a result of our wounds, pain is a daily companion for both of us. It makes us irascible around each other at times. But the truth is that we got on each other’s nerves before the injuries. Mike thought I was a “pretty boy” detective who got all the glory because I looked good and spoke well on television. I considered him a solid detective, but one who lacked imagination (in those arrogant days, I thought everybody but me lacked imagination). To our annoyance, Chief Mordeen paired us together on many homicide investigations because he saw that Mike’s relentless focus on details provided the foundation for many of my insights. Our solve rate was the best in the department, It was a source of pride – and irritation – for us.

It took Mike and me nearly dying, but we reluctantly saw that the chief was right about us being a good team, and we set aside our differences (mostly) to form Janus. We expected it to take several months of advertising and networking to generate clients for our new business and the tedious but bill-paying work of investigating fraud, skip tracing, surveillance of cheating spouses and the like. In fact, it took far less time, and our unexpected first case was anything but dull.