Crime Birds

by Rod Drake

He sat there in the interrogation room, smug and snotty, as he casually smoked his thin brown French cigarette, believing we couldn’t pin the murder rap on him. But he was wrong, dead wrong. It’s true we didn’t have his fingerprints at the scene or the murder weapon, but we had something even better – an eyewitness. As I recounted his killing of rival gangland boss Cochran “Cock” Robin, detail by detail, our suspect began to pale visibly and broke into a sweat. When I revealed that we knew about his master archer ability and numerous awards won, and that Cock Robin’s heart was cleanly pierced by an arrow from a 100-foot distance, Sammy “the Sparrow” Flynn demanded to know, as we cuffed and read him his rights, how we figured out it was him, who had given him up. I took my own sweet time with the answer, leaning down on the table directly in front of his flushed face, snuffed out his smelly cigarette and replied coolly, “It was Paulie ‘the Stool Pigeon’ Carrier, who saw the whole thing from his statue perch, and you know how he hates you and loves to talk to the cops.”

6S

Rod Drake, author of Sanctuary, wonders if anyone remembers the old Nursery Rhyme: "Who killed Cock Robin? / I, said the Sparrow / with my bow and arrow / I killed Cock Robin." Check out his longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.