Mystery, Noir, Recurring Character, Short Story, Word Challenge, Word Prompt, Wordle, Writing Prompts

Up All Night: A Dirk Malone Story

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Sunday Whirl Wordle. Our host is
Brenda Warren; her prompt words for this week are
shown below. Here’s where the prompts took me.

mind, visit, thinking, creature, exists, criminal,
know, dirt, walk, head, writer, and rumbles

Image by Me & ChatGPT

The dame was a knockout …. all long legs and a body built for trouble wrapped in red silk. She walked into my office that Tuesday with the kind of beauty that rumbles through a room and shakes up everything in it.

“Mr. Malone,” she said, her voice a controlled tremor. “They found my brother. What’s left of him.”

I offered her a chair and a stiff drink. She told me about her visit to the morgue. I didn’t know which was worse …. what she’d seen, or the cool-as-a-cucumber way she described it.

The deranged “criminal“ they suspected …. the cop’s polite term, not mine …. was a fiend named Ripley. A creature of habit, they said. No writer of ransom notes, no demands made. Just pure, unhurried savagery. This sick SOB enjoyed what he was doing.

That’s what burrowed under this dirt-toughened skin of mine.

See, every killer exists on a chart somewhere. Most act out of desperation …. rage, greed, fear. Those I can understand. But Ripley’s twisted mind was something else entirely …. the stuff of the blackest dreams imaginable.

The detectives walked me through the scene with flat, professional eyes. After all my years in this unforgiving, cold-hearted racket, I still couldn’t manage that. Standing there, staring at the photos of what remained, something bitter and heavy settled in my head. Not fear. Not anger. Grief.

Grief for a man I’d never met. For his family. For a world that keeps creating monsters and calling it an aberration.

I told the vic’s sister I’d find the maniac who did this.

I didn’t tell her that thinking about what I’d like to do to him kept me up all night.

NAR©2026
#MLMM
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This is “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads

Wordle 759

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.

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