When My Dad Didn't Die ***by Frank Hickey*** I'm a rookie private eye when a nightmare splits my sleep, saying that my Dad died. It is only a dream, I tell myself. But it feels as real as the paint chips on my bedroom wall. So real, so real, this echoes through my mind's caverns. Details swing past, cawing like buzzards. They give my nightmare depth and reality. Gray dawn hits. I wake up, shaking. MY DAD DIED, keeps repeating like my own blood pulse. "No, he didn't!" I repeat aloud in the real world at last. Stumbling through my apartment, I shiver naked, trying to calm myself. At 22, I'm living on a silly man-child shoestring. No bank account, credit card, gun or driver's license. Writing unpaid and unknown COPERAS. These stories mix cop work with opera themes of love, loss and song. But the detective work holds me. After a rocky teenage relationship with my Dad, I can always talk with him. He's too shrewd to nag me about anything. He holds more guts than I do. In World War II, he volunteered for fighter pilot training and flew better than his instructors. He wanted combat. Gambling on his skill, he demolished planes while training. The Navy washed him out of flight school for 'suicidal tendencies.' Later, as a sailor in the war, he dove overboard one night and saved a drowning officer The officer outweighed him by 80 pounds. Dad never told us about it. The officer did. In New York's construction landmine, he earned respect from criminals by staying honest. He confronted Jimmy Hoffa, America's most powerful and murderous union thug. "Hey, everyone's afraid of me except this guy, Larry Hickey," Hoffa told his gangster pals. Psychology, I try to remember, tells us that our dreams are psychotic. Is that accurate? I'm not sure. What I do recall is that the prefrontalcortex checks reality while awake. Once we sleep, this cortex works less. So we run wild in our dreams. Waking today overjoys me. My father is not dead, I keep repeating to myself. This good feeling of escape carries me through my subway ride. It follows me into Mr. Wade's private eye office in the World Trade Center. We juggle cases of lost dogs, murder defense, car accidents, slippery sidewalks and everything else. As always, he reigns Buddha-like and richly dressed. He views the wide window overlooking the river. Sunlight catches his black skin against gold cufflinks. "Hickey," he breathes through his mouth. "Ya gotta go to Brooklyn, find a lil Spanish gal and tell her that her father just died". Frank Hickey. Somehow, Frank became a detective. He writes the Dancing Max Royster crime novels about the world's only ballroom dancing detective at frankhickey.net Get link Facebook X Pinterest Email Other Apps July 09, 2026 Read more