BILL PRONZINI “Hooch,” First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 2014. Quite possibly collected but the whereabouts at present are not known.

   Time: Prohibition Era in the US. Place: Somewhere along the Northern California coastline. Players: Three hoodlums in one truck are helping bring in a shipment of fine liquor from Canada. Two are old pros at the job. The third, by the name of Bennie. is a young fellow whose first job this is. He doesn’t seem nervous. Antsy, maybe. There is a small chance the delivery will be interrupted by a rival gang, but that hasn’t happened in a long time, and it isn’t likely to happen this particular early morning either.

   All the rest of the time Bennie is chirping away at the books and magazines he’s been reading: Black Mask, The Maltese Falcon, you know, the good stuff. He also tells the other two guys in the truck all about the book he’s writing. He doesn’t shut up about it. A book that covers the adventures of a young mobster, stories like the very adventure he’s on that very same night.

   He’s going change the names of all the characters in the book. He tells them that, over and over as the night goes on. They other two men don’t say anything about that, but you can hear them thinking.

   And does the story end the way both you and I are thinking? (I think you ans I are thinking the same way, aren’t we?) Well of course it does, and with an extra kick in the pants (plot twist) to boot. The story is short, only seven pages long, and if you’re thinking the way was when you read this one, you’ll remember it for a quite a while, I think.