A new superhero in L.A. The novel and continuing adventures of an albino, 25 years-old,
superhuman divorce detective

By Pamela Hickey & Dennys McCoy
Illustration by Sergio Caruso

Nick Post is a 25-year-old divorce detective working in Los Angeles. His albinism has made him light-sensitive to the point of excruciating pain upon any contact with light. Therefore, he always works at night, spying on and gathering evidence against the rich and adulterous. Because he also possesses superhuman strength and lacks tactile sense, he limits personal contact mostly to his only friend, attorney Sheila Black.

Sheila employs Nick exclusively as an outside investigator for her huge Century City law firm. Nick has known Sheila his entire life; they were children together at a Central California orphanage. Sheila has taught Nick how to effectively navigate in the world. He relies on her for everything. The unique disposition of Nick Post has been documented by medical professionals ever since Nick was born to a drug-addict who died in childbirth.

As a child in the orphanage, he was subjected to tests that return to him as an adult in the form of hyper-realistic flashbacks whenever he experiences light-induced pain. Nick will do anything to avoid these flashbacks. His life is confined to night work on the cases Sheila brings him, and his leisure time is spent in a luxurious loft-condo in Downtown Los Angeles.

All of this changes when Sheila calls upon him to take on a missing-persons case for the friend of the firm’s most important client, pharmaceuticals magnate Edward Sorenson. Mrs. Khan’s drug addict son is missing, lost to the drug underworld of Los Angeles. Nick, who hates junkies because of what his mother was, reluctantly agrees to take the case. Sorenson has set Nick up as a specimen for Sorenson Pharmaceuticals’ most pernicious product that ultimately renders Nick Post immortal, and addicted to the most dangerous of drugs: murder.

What Nick discovers as he works this case is that he is actually solving the mystery of his own life.

THE SITUATION

Los Angeles: 25 Years Ago

Eddie was in the parking lot up the hill from the Whiskey. A couple of college boys were interested in the acid. Their parents had talked about it. Former “Flower People” who had gone on to banking and entertainment. Their kids wanted what their parents had had. No ecstasy, MDA, or GHB — stuff the “cool kids” were taking. They wanted to go “old school.” Good luck with that.

Eddie slipped them four stamps for two hundred bucks — five times what he’d charge his regulars. Eddie wasn’t giving them acid. He was giving them DMT. They would trip for days, not hours.

Eddie heard sirens. The nervous college boys took off. No police were coming for Eddie. He looked away from the quick-walking boys and stared down at The Strip. It was an ambulance; siren screaming at the packed sidewalks, shooting west towards UCLA. Odd. Usually they head south. Towards Cedars. Emergency room must be full.

Must have been the rave in Griffith Park.

He giggled to himself when he saw the black Taurus rushing after the ambulance. This had not been a good night for Johnny. He cut in between the cars on Sunset heading down the boulevard at 50. Not a good night. Ambulance drivers are supposed to save lives, get the patient to the hospital, make sure they don’t clock out on the way. Drivers are NOT supposed to get the shit beaten out of them by teenage girls.

Johnny never took his eyes off the road as he raised his large right arm and wiped the blood from his forehead. Felt like about a two-inch cut; hit a vein; hard to stop the blood; the break went all the way through. Stitches. Johnny hated stitches.

Out of the high-pitched, psychotic screams from the back, Craig’s voice rose up.

“WHEN THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA GET US THERE!!!?”

Craig’s voice was garbled and filled with pain because of his broken jaw. She broke it just before Johnny had clobbered her from behind. “Clobbered” sounded so comic book, thought Johnny, and an image of The Thing from the Fantastic Four comic books popped into his brain. Ben Grimm was transformed from a human test pilot into a stone-hard, super-strong, orange-skinned monster/superhero called the Thing when he was exposed to cosmic rays during a space flight. He could knock down buildings, hurtle 10-ton trucks across Manhattan, and clobber the biggest, meanest super-villains in the universe. “It’s CLOBBERIN’ TIME!”

And “clobber” was exactly what Johnny had done to get the 5 foot tall girl off Craig before she could plunge her skinny little fingers into his eyes. Craig was screaming like a kid when she’d suddenly gone blank and fell off him.

Craig owed Johnny — that’s why Craig was riding in the back with the raver girl. Wide-awake now, she had not stopped screaming for the last five minutes. Screaming at the top of her voice. Screaming in a weird blend of pain and psychosis. Johnny had heard it once before, when they gave electro-shock treatment to a violent psychotic who’d successfully bitten through the rubber bit they’d stuck in his mouth. The doctors said he shouldn’t have been able to open his mouth; the electrically-induced convulsions should have clamped his jaw down so hard his teeth would crack. But the insane don’t follow doctor’s orders: Johnny learned it that day when the psycho looked him dead in the eyes, opened his mouth wide, and screamed so hard and loud that a vein burst at the back of his throat. Johnny’s face was sprayed with the man’s dark blood.

Insane described the scene at the park. What the fuck had those goddam ravers taken? They’d gone nuts. Psycho nuts. Angel dust was Johnny’s guess. Hell, he hadn’t seen that shit in a decade. It was bad shit. Except he’d never seen it this weird. The ravers had tried to kill anyone near them. Not attack, not hit — there’s no mistaking it when somebody wants you dead.

Cops, firemen, and eventually the ambulance drivers had waded into the mess. Eighty overdoses and injuries, two deaths. Johnny had treated the cop who died — this skinny kid with waist-length hair, no shirt and ripped jeans had jumped on the cop’s back and stuck his teeth into his neck, ripping open the cop’s jugular. Johnny held the cop’s hand as he felt the man’s pulse slowly disappear, watched his eyes roll back into his head. Took about a minute. Craig had fended off the other psychos while Johnny had tried to help the cop. That’s when the little girl in the big coat jumped Craig.

By the time Johnny and Craig had strapped the girl onto the gurney and loaded her into the ambulance the other drivers had already gotten a jump on them. Cedars Sinai was full. Hollywood Presbyterian was full. Last call was to save a crew at UCLA — but that wouldn’t last long.

Now it was a race — Johnny versus the other drivers. He wanted to drop the girl off, get stitches, get Craig looked after, go home and smoke weed until he passed out. That was the plan: thinking about this plan — it kept some of the screaming out of his head because the woman’s screaming had become intolerable; Craig was huddled in the corner his hands clamped tight over his ears.

Pulling into the long driveway leading up to the ambulance entrance Johnny saw he was the first to arrive. Waiting for him were a doctor, black Jack and white Jack, the body-building orderlies, and Ginny the fat nurse. Johnny had never pulled a “180” in an ambulance before — it could possibly overturn the top-heavy vehicle, but Johnny couldn’t take the noise any longer. He turned the wheel, hit the brakes hard, and felt the left side of the ambulance rise. Johnny threw his weight to the left, his bulk was just enough to stop the van from falling on its side. When the half-spin was done, Johnny had planted the back of the ambulance in almost perfect position. It was then he took his hands from the wheel and put them over his ears and when he did he felt the trickle of blood coming from his right ear.

Dr. Phillips wasn’t ready when the back doors of the ambulance opened and the attendant — “Craig!” was the name black Jack shouted — ran past, his hands over his ears. He knocked Ginny down as he went screaming for the admissions desk. When Dr. Phillips looked back to the ambulance he saw the driver stumble out and fall to the ground, holding his head and rolling around as he screamed.

But he couldn’t hear what the driver was saying because the girl’s scream was cancelling out every other sound. It was a horrific white noise.

“Get her in!” Dr. Phillips yelled to white Jack. “Take her back to C!” White Jack wasn’t moving because he couldn’t hear the doctor. The doctor made a “c” with one hand and pushed white Jack at the back of the ambulance.

Dr. Phillips grabbed Nurse Ginny and, with great effort, brought her to her feet. He kept hold of the heavy nurse’s hand as he rushed her back to C section so he could prepare for this latest o.d. He’d already heard Cedars had ten of these; that three of them had already died. He was warned of psychotic behavior and to take no chances with the patient.

Dr. Phillips was so concerned with his new patient that he never noticed the black Ford Taurus, its lights off, quietly arrive fifty feet down the driveway.

Inside Emergency, Dr. Phillips rushed towards “C,” the gurney right behind him. All he could hear was the screaming woman and feel the dull thumping of hard rubber wheels on the cracks of the cheap asphalt floor tile. It was like some kind of massive screaming monster was running after him.

Ten feet from the curtained ER the hairs on the back of Dr. Phillips’ neck went straight up and he stopped. Amongst the screaming and bumping… he’d heard a “pop.”

Dr. Phillips, 29 years old, the man who made his grandmother proud by becoming a doctor, turned to face his patient and pissed his pants in horror. Nurse Ginny grabbed his arm so she didn’t fall into a faint.

The patient — a young woman dressed in multi-layered, colorful, Melrose resale clothing — had broken the restraint on her right hand… and she had ripped black Jack’s lower jaw from his face. It was still in her hand as she screamed and broke the restraint on her left hand.

Black Jack fell to his knees; muscles that once moved a jaw now twitched in the side of his face; he slowly brought his hands up to the bottom of his face, trying to hold the blood back, his eyes growing bizarrely cold as he realized how much of his face was gone. Dr. Phillips watched as Black Jack fell, unconscious, and White Jack stood behind him and began crying like a baby as he looked down at his friend.

The woman broke free and rushed for Dr. Phillips, her left hand, held like a claw, was coming for his neck. Her right hand still held Jack’s bloody jaw. Dr. Phillips looked into the woman’s eyes when she was one step away from him. She wanted to kill him.

She hit him like a truck. Between thoughts of how he was about to die, Dr. Phillips wondered how a woman so small could be so strong. Then her left hand started to close around his throat and Dr. Phillips could only think about his own death.

White Jack was suddenly there, grabbing the woman’s shoulders, trying to pull her off Dr. Phillips. White Jack, bodybuilding buddy of Black Jack, whom Dr. Phillips had seen lift a 400-pound patient onto a gurney once, could not budge the woman who was killing Dr. Phillips. Veins bulged on White Jack’s 20-inch biceps, his face turned red with effort, but the woman was still killing Dr. Phillips.

Dr. Phillips felt the woman’s fingertips pushing through the muscles in his neck: when her fingertips touched her thumb, he would die. It would be only a second now. Dr. Phillips thought of what they would be serving in the doctor’s cafeteria later.

Suddenly the pressure stopped. Dr. Phillips could see that the cold, murderous expression in the woman’s face was gone. She was looking at him as if she was confused as to why she was killing him. Then she fell on top of Dr. Phillips and died.

As her full weight fell on Dr. Phillips, he realized something nobody had noticed. Her secret was pressing against his abdomen.

She was pregnant. Late term, too.

As Mike leaned down to pull the woman off Dr. Phillips, the doctor drew a painful breath and hoarsely forced out, “Get her to an O.R.!”

Palmer stepped out of the passenger door of the black Taurus and looked towards the emergency entrance. “Gimme a cigarette, Stan.” Stan leaned across the seat and held out a pack of Camel filters. Stan had lost his index finger a few years before, but the doctor has shaved it straight down. Almost no one ever noticed. Palmer always noticed. He glared at the pack and the four-fingered hand holding it.

“I hate filtered.”

“So don’t take one.”

Palmer snatched the pack from Stan. “Go back to working on THE FLINTSTONES, you four-fingered fuck,” he hissed. Palmer took out a cigarette and twisted the filter off. He kind of… smiled. Twisting the filter off was surprisingly fun. Like pulling its head off. He tossed the filter away and lit up. Damn, tastes just like a regular Camel. Palmer had made a personal discovery.

“How long do we have to stay?” Stan asked.

“Until we know how many. They want a head count.”

This was shit duty. Standing in the dark, outside an emergency room, Summer in L.A., no air-conditioning in the car, and forced to wear a suit.

A cool breeze kicked up. Palmer closed his eyes, took a deep drag off his cigarette, and enjoyed the moment.

Certainly the raver chick was dead by now. He looked down the driveway. No more ambulances. He couldn’t hear any sirens. Later he would check admissions and get a number. They loved their goddam numbers.

Dr. Phillips had no time for finesse. This was cut and serve. He had a dead patient. This was cowboy time. He grabbed the scalpel from the shaking Nurse Ginny’s hand, make a deep incision, pray it’s not too deep, open her up, reach inside and hope that a live kid comes out. No time for forceps. No time to think about the pain in his neck. No time to think about how close he came to death. No time to think of Black Jack shaking in shock while somebody else, thank Christ, tried to do something with his severed jaw. Outside, in the hall, he thought he could hear White Jack weeping.

Stick the hands in, pull the lump out.

The lump was alive. It squiggled. Like a worm. It wanted to live. It was covered in amniotic fluid and blood, yet it seemed to shine with life under the dark stains.

“Suction.” He said and Nurse Ginny stuck the rubber bulb in his hand.

Dr. Phillips cleaned out the nose, the throat. The crying began immediately. Different crying. He was no practicing o.b., but he’d heard newborns before. This one sounded like he’d just delivered a baby with a two-year-old’s set of lungs.

Dr. Phillips decided to clean this one up himself. That way he wouldn’t have to turn and watch as they wheeled the mother’s corpse out of the room. Wouldn’t have to mix the themes of life and death.

The first swipe across the baby’s skin was enough.

Dr. Phillips, fascinated, fell silent as he continued to methodically wipe the blood and stain from the kid. It became essential to get everything off the baby’s skin so as to see all of it.

“Son of a bitch,” said Dr. Phillips. “He’s a goddam albino.”

Nurse Ginny came over to see the stark white, luminous baby lying on the table. It continued to cry, its little hands clenched in tight fists. Legs kicking out. Eyes shut tightly.

He had to pry the eyelids open. Make sure the baby was the real thing, a purebred. The pink eye stared right at him — like it wanted the doctor to know it had a secret.

Its crying continued.

Palmer dialed the number from a payphone on Westwood Boulevard. “One at UCLA. She died. Damaged three. One dead. An attendant. Body builder. Tore his jaw off. Died in surgery. She scared the fucker to death, I’m telling you. Guess what? She was pregnant. Boy. It’s alive. For now. Sure there were complications. What the fuck do you think? Sorry. He’s white. You know, all white. Yeah, albino. Yeah, we’ll hang out until they box it. Where you want it sent?”

Palmer hung up the phone. He looked back to Stan sitting in the car.

“Get us some food. We’re here for the duration.” Palmer, smiled — he sounded military. “Duration,” he said to himself and chuckled.

Lucy had come in for the 2 a.m. to 8 shift. She looked at her pendant watch. Seven-thirty. Five and a half hours and the baby had not stopped crying. That white freak had lungs like an opera singer, its voice echoed off the lacquered walls of maternity.

Mrs. Cooney, the cop’s wife in 3A, had been complaining all night. She couldn’t sleep, her new baby needed her to be at her best, her new baby couldn’t sleep because of that “thing!”

Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

That was a couple of hours ago. Mrs. Cooney closed her door and eventually fell asleep. The white kid had not.

And it was getting on Lucy’s nerves.

Because under the white baby’s screams and goat-like bleats and this weird rasping sound it made when it inhaled — there was the sound of the OTHER BABIES CRYING.

It was like Chinese water torture. Relentless. Dependable. Relentlessly dependable.

She’d come straight to work from a date. She’d been drinking and dancing. Her shift was usually quiet. A few late births during the week. Hungry mothers that would want a full meal tray. Check up on the babies every two hours. The rest of the time, just sit back and relax at the desk.

Not tonight.

The white baby took liters of formula and glucose. And when he was done with his bottle, he cried. The white baby did not have gas. The white baby did not need its diaper changed. The white baby did not want to be hugged and comforted. The white baby did not want to be rocked. The white baby wanted to cry.

She had seen small lesions appearing on its perfect alabaster skin. Problems. Lots of problems. Lucy prayed the white baby would die soon.

We believe it has some internal pain that we cannot properly diagnose as of yet,” said Dr. Phillips to his band of interns.

Dr. Phillips had become a star over the last couple of days. He was the doctor that delivered the albino baby. Interns were “dropping in” on his morning rounds with his regular sheep. He’d managed to get Jane, the newbie, to sleep with him.

She’d been disappointed, but his celebrity kept her sorrow quiet. Jane liked the albino baby. She didn’t want her access cut off.

“Did anyone take a bilirubin count? I don’t have a bilirubin count on my copy,” whined Garcia.

Dr. Phillips took a deep, weary breath and sighed out, “Of course we did, Garcia. The baby has a normal bilirubin count. And if he did have a high bilirubin count he would be as orange as a pumpkin. The baby is white — his blood is red, his shit is brown, his urine is yellow, and his bilirubin is orange.”

As always, Schwartz elbowed Garcia when Dr. Phillips put the intern in his place. Schwartz was the exclamation point to all of Dr. Phillips’ verbal jabs at Garcia.

At the same time, Dr. Phillips was sure that Garcia and Schwartz probably had a private, derogatory name for Dr. Phillips — something like Dr. “Pill-ups” or Dr. “Fill-it-up” or Dr. “Shithead”.

“Has it slept, yet?” Garcia asked.

Dr. Phillips stopped at the door to the baby’s room. He pulled at his collar and the pain made him grimace. He’d been wearing a tie and his collar buttoned since the attack. The bruises distracted people. He hated seeing them stare at his neck. “No,” he told Garcia. “It has a healthy appetite, too. The only time it stops crying is when it’s feeding. It’s in pain. It’s developing lesions.”

Dr. Phillips opened the door and quickly stepped in before the anxious crowd would have a chance to push at him.

The room was filled with “GGGGGGGGHHHH!!!” “YEEEAAAEEEE!!!” “KIKKIKKIKKIK!!!” In this small room, now removed from the others in the nursery, the sound had become a physical thing, like sharp, cold water.

“Have you found anything unusual in the blood tests!?” Garcia shouted above the crying as several of the interns, including Jane, quickly gathered around the baby and started poking and staring at it.

“Nothing. In every aspect other than pigment and the lesions the baby is normal, healthy and strong.” Then Dr. Phillips brought up his stethoscope and smiled — it was time for the big reveal. “However, his heart is not where it should be. This could be why he’s in pain.”

Dr. Phillips directed each of the interns to put their stethoscopes on the baby’s abdomen, to the right, on the bottom rib. That’s where they heard the loud, strong heartbeat of the albino baby. Dr. Phillips delighted in the look of surprise on each of the intern’s faces. When Jane heard the baby’s heartbeat she shot Phillips a look that strongly suggested he would get some sincere fellatio that night.

When Schwartz got his listen and stepped back in line, he immediately elbowed Garcia. The elbowing was beginning to wear on Garcia.

“How often does it eliminate?”

“Does anyone other than Mr. Garcia have a question!?” Dr. Phillips shouted out to the interns.

As Dr. Phillips glared at Garcia, Jane, the newbie, opened the baby’s swaddling. She poked at Dr. Phillips, asking him, “Have you seen this?”

Dr. Phillips leaned down to see what Jane was pointing at. There was a new lesion, right next to an old lesion. An old lesion that was almost completely healed. “What the fuck?” whispered Dr. Phillips. “This lesion is only a day old. It was fresh yesterday.”

Dr. Phillips literally scratched his head. An albino baby that developed fast-healing lesions. A perpetual pain machine. As soon as it died, Phillips was going to have a field day with the body.

“Dr. Phillips,” said Garcia.

“Shut the fuck up a minute,” said Dr. Phillips.

Schwartz elbowed Garcia. Too hard. Garcia winced and pushed back at Schwartz. Schwartz, offended, pushed back. It was juvenile. It continued. The baby’s crying had this effect on people. It made them touchy. On edge.

Schwartz punched Garcia in the stomach. Garcia fell against the light switch. Two interns grabbed Schwartz to hold him back as the lights went out in the room.

Somewhere in the dark the interns heard Dr. Phillips mutter, “Jesus Christ.”

For the next three months the baby ate, slept, cooed, and thrived.

Read the next chapter of Nick Post Private Detective on Expost
A new superhero in L.A. The novel and continuing adventures of an albino, 25 years-old, superhuman divorce detective by Emmy and BAFTA– winning writers Pamela Hickey & Dennys McCoy, authors since the ’80, also for Marvel and Ghostbusters. Each Sunday, a new chapter on Expost.

NICK POST: PRIVATE DETECTIVE
I’M A MONSTER
By Pamela Hickey
& Dennys McCoy Kindle Edition and Paper Back,
p. 264

If it weren’t for the young attorney Sheila Black, Los Angeles detective Nick Post wouldn’t have made it these twenty-five years into life. His albinism makes him so sensitive to light that any exposure causes excruciating pain and debilitating, childhood flashbacks. He and Sheila’s friendship began at a Central California orphanage, and today she employs him exclusively as an outside investigator for her Century City law firm. Only able to work nights, Nick scours the city, collecting evidence against the rich and adulterous. Sheila should’ve known how this latest case would make him feel though.