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Karma Doll By Jonathan Ames (Sample)

Narrated by Jonathan Ames In this darkly humorous detective story, plagued by death on his conscience, Happy Doll has committed himself to a simple, spiritual life; that is, until a tragic and brutal murder forces his hand and sets him back on the bloody path of retribution and justice. After narrowly escaping with his life at the hands of a murderous Hollywood pimp, detective Happy Doll, bullet-ridden but healing, has landed on a remote Mexican beach. In a humble shack and with his dog for company, Doll settles into a peaceful idyll of Buddhist study. But then trouble, as it always does, comes to paradise. Doll is the witness to a murder for which he is framed, and now, with an expired passport and the Mexican authorities on his tail, he must sneak across the border back to L.A. by any means necessary, with the goal of bringing the true murderer to justice. But it’s not just trouble that expels Doll from paradise! His dark past reaches for him, like a hand from the grave, old enemies want him dead, including the Jalisco Cartel, and Doll, a reluctant instrument of mayhem, yearns to end this cycle of violence and tip the karmic scales in his favor. But how can he do this without getting blood on his hands? Karma Doll marks the third installment in a madcap, bloody, and impossibly fun series, bringing us back in the good company of Happy Doll: a beloved, introverted anti-hero who has taken more hits to the head than a linebacker, yet still always manages to come out on top.

Duration:: 3m
Broadcast on:: 11 Jan 2025
Audio Format:: other

The ancient-looking doctor, with half his face and shadow, seemed to be leering at me. He was also busy drying his hands on his dirty lab coat, which had a smattering of blood stains more brown than red. For my part I was sitting on his examining table, stripped to the waist, my feet dangling like I was a little boy, a little boy with a bullet in his shoulder. It was two a.m. and very dark outside, and the only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the ceiling, fluttered at by a moth who had mistaken it for the moon and would be dead by morning. Of course I knew about such things, having flown toward false moons all my life. Then the doctor stopped drying his hands, at least he had washed them, and said, "You have an interesting face, almost Jewish." "That's what all the girls tell me," I said. That made him smile, and I got a glimpse of old yellow teeth, which went nicely with his jaundice bald head. Then he extinguished the smile and said, "What Calabair is the bullet?" Calabair sounded like Calabair, coming out of his mouth, and he spoke English well enough, flawlessly even, but did so with a strange Russo-Mex accent, on account of the fact that he was a Russian Jew who had washed up in Mexico City in the early 80s when the Soviets were getting rid of their Jews. A bit of information he had already imparted to me. It was a talkative old man, and I said, "I don't know the caliber. It was a rifle." "Hunting accident?" he asked, knowing full well it wasn't. "Yeah, hunting accident," I said, and he nodded, smiling to himself, and began removing the flimsy gauze bandages I had applied to my shoulder. While he worked, his little pink tongue kept darting out from between his lips, wetting a small blister, which I tried to tell myself was a cut from shaving, but I knew otherwise. He turned on a surgical lamp to better see what he was doing, and his examining room was a converted bedroom in a private, off-the-books hospital in Rosarito, Mexico, roughly 40 miles south of San Diego. I had crossed the border a few hours before, and it was the kind of hospital, an isolated old hunting lodge in the mountains above Rosarito, where you could pay in cash and not give a real name, and where you went for specific ailments, like gunshot wounds and bad D.T.'s. I happened to be there for both items on the menu. There was the bullet in my left shoulder, and I also had a hideous case of the French fits from too much cocaine. I could have detoxed off the coke in the States, but no American hospital would have treated me for the bullet wound without calling the cops, which was why I had crossed the border for medical attention, that and other reasons. The doctor finished removing the bandages, showing a sensitive touch, and placed them on the little metal table next to the operating lamp. Also on the table was a tray of medical instruments, and the syringe of morphine he had already shot me up with to calm me down. From his lab coat he removed a pair of black glasses that had magnifying lenses on them, and they looked like something I would have liked to order from the back of a comic book when I was a kid, if my father would have let me. The doctor put the glasses on, and his brown eyes got all big and distorted, and he showed me his yellow teeth again, just to be nice, and then he bent over and studied the hideous mound that was protruding from my shoulder and looked ready to burst. It was the size of a grapefruit, and the bruising from the bullet's impact had painted at red, purple, and green, with some bilious yellow peeking through wanting to join the party. In the center of the colorful mound where the bullet had entered, there was a black scorched hole, which I had filled hours ago with crazy glue to stop the bleeding.