Bum luck, p.19
Bum Luck, page 19
She must have filed that particular nasty article before all the stuff about Fidelius “Big Green” O’Fart had hit the fan, because her subsequent big, splashy Sunday piece on the subject not only lacked any nasty swipes at me -- either directly or obliquely -- it managed to identify me only as a “reliable source” and a “former suspect in the Klaus von Shaflikker murder,” without any of the venomous adjectives that were the ink-stained dame’s trademark. I took issue with the word “reliable” being assigned to me for any reason, even in an article where I wasn’t mentioned by name, but even I had to admit that it was the best treatment I had ever received in the pages of that worthless daily rag.
My shower tried to alternately boil me alive and freeze me more solid than a Thanksgiving turkey, so all was normal on that front.
I dashed off a quick note for the hundredth time grousing about the shilly-shallying water temperature to property manager Harry Hooligan and I slipped it under his door on my way out of the building.
Hooligan must have been standing on the other side of the door and, assuming I hadn’t misinterpreted his caged roar, for some unfathomable reason apparently took offense at my “Dear Stupid, No-Thumbed Bastard” salutation. His apartment doorknob rattled like mad as eight fat fingers futilely attempted to open the door in order to vent his anger at the innocent tenant in the hallway, but with his deficiency in the thumb department the enraged behemoth apparently couldn’t quite seal the complicated deal.
“Grip and turn,” I called, as No-Thumbs screamed and the doorknob bounced. “If it’s too much for you, you might try enlisting the aid of a helper monkey. However its superior intelligence would almost certainly ensure that it would wind up with your job, and how could you possibly hope to hitchhike to the welfare office?”
The infuriated bull continued to pound on the door at my back as I marched out into the ugly sunlight of a horribly beautiful Tuesday.
The city bus I rode to work didn’t explode out from under me. Yet another sign that the little leprechaun runt’s reverse good-luck curse was lifted.
Finnegan O’Fart hadn’t admitted that he was responsible for all the bad luck that had befallen me after he’d wished me the reverse. He’d apologized on the steps of Frankie the Eye’s townhouse, and he was effusive in his thanks after I promised to return to my ex-canker sore the paperwork that he’d swiped and stashed away for safekeeping in his otherwise empty pot-of-no-gold.
He’d had a change of heart Friday morning after sending me after Frankie the Eye, which was why he said he’d called von Shaflikker about me. I told him he was all heart for nearly getting me killed a million times in only half a day, which was a personal record. Not once did he volunteer to pay me the ten percent of nothing he owed me for all the trouble he’d caused. The guy was a real peach, and my biggest regret was that he now wouldn’t be victim to a nightly neutering session at the hands of the acid-spewing she-hound to which he’d temporarily lied about his promised eternal fidelity.
I’d left Frankie the Eye and Finnegan O’Fart in the most uncomfortable embrace since Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and promptly marched off to O’Hale’s Bar to somehow magically transform Friday night into Tuesday afternoon with the application of only sheer force of will and the aid of copious amounts of watered-down alcohol. It was easier, I figured, since the howling nuisance Civil War ghosts who’d been terrorizing the oldies selections in the jukebox had been vacuumed up and were being held in bottles at the police station as hostile witnesses in the Seamus McGuire murder.
At some early point during my bender I’d summoned Mannix and gave him instructions to mail the stock and real estate paperwork to my ex-wife’s corrupt ambulance chaser at the law firm of Jackal, Misery & Schwarz across town. I also gave Mannix the all-clear to reopen the gates of Banyon Investigations, Inc., which was, as usual, a source of mystifying delight to the bafflingly cheery little elf.
It was days later and Mannix was still grinning happily when I discovered him filling out paperwork at Doris’ desk in the outer office of my worldwide headquarters.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Crag!” the elf sang.
“Doris?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She called yesterday,” he admitted. “She says this week isn’t looking good. Maybe next Monday.”
“With luck, she and unlicensed cosmetologist Trixie Flax will be overcome with bleach fumes and wind up hospitalized for a month. Of course, the flipside bad-luck possibility there would be for Doris to have to bunk with hag Flax in my building during her recovery. Not that I think that would happen, Mannix, because the curse has been lifted and for one brief moment in time everything is going my way.”
The elf became even happier at the fact that I was temporarily less miserable than usual, and he bounced along with me as I hung up my coat and hat and entered my inner sanctum for the first time since the previous week.
“I left your mail and newspapers on your desk,” he said. “There was only one phone call on Saturday from…um…former Mrs. Crag. I saved it on the machine, if you want to hear it.” He dropped his voice low just in case the burping water cooler in the corner of my office was eavesdropping. “It wasn’t very nice,” he assured me.
“Neither was being married to her,” I informed him as I sorted through the pile of junk he’d left on my desk. “Delete the message, take the answering machine to the head exorcist over at St. Sodom’s, then smash it to bits with a hammer and toss it in the bay.”
The front page headlines on Sunday’s and Monday’s Gazette concerned Big Green O’Fart and the plight of Leprechaun Land. I’d already seen the Sunday edition at O’Hale’s. The great police hero Detective Daniel Jenkins had taken the potato kingpin into custody. Fidelius O’Fart was being held on a bunch of murders, price-fixing, taking tens of millions of leprechauns effectively hostage in a reign of terror that spanned all of Leprechaun Land, plus a whole bunch of lesser charges.
Apparently Big Green had parlayed the last of his family’s fortune into a Ponzi scheme that had crashed the entire Leprechaun Land economy. The world knew all about it, but since I don’t give a rat’s ass about the wee bastards I hadn’t heard that the entire place had fallen on economic hard times. No one had known who the maestro was behind the devastation, since Big Green had done all kinds of electronic transactions through foreign banks and dummy corporations. Once he became the de facto leader of Leprechaun Land, he’d used the collective wealth of every pot of gold to snap up as much of the world’s potato production as possible while simultaneously enslaving the population. He’d loaned out some of that gold to his brother Finnegan to set up the romancing ruse in order to swipe up my ex-asp’s stocks and potato real estate. Nice work if you can get it. According to the editor of the Gazette, it was all coming unraveled now thanks to ace gal reporter Sally McClatchen and an “anonymous wino tipster.”
“Don’t believe anything you read in the paper, Mannix,” I hollered to the elf, who had retreated to the outer office. “Wine is practically colored water and is an ineffective intoxicant. Also it stinks like Mafia feet, which offends my delicate olfactory sense.”
There was nothing in the paper about Finnegan O’Fart, so it looked like the brother was getting off clean. Not so the French waiters from Le Pissoir, who had been picked up on the Klaus von Shaflikker Company B Nightclub and Casino murders after accidentally surrendering to a uniformed ice cream man when a car backfired over on 18th Street and Epilogue Drive.
I unloaded the newspapers off the edge of my desk and onto the carpet, then sorted through the mail. I recognized Frankie the Eye’s return address on the top envelope and tore it open, hoping that the little bastard leprechaun Finnegan O’Fart had at least sent along something for all the trouble he’d dumped in my lap.
It was an invitation to a civil union that Friday at city hall between the leprechaun and the cyclops. I am firmly opposed to any ceremony that manacles anybody together who isn’t on a chain gang. I RSVPed into the trash can next to my desk.
Everything else was bills, which also got dumped in the wastebasket under the quite logical assumption that if they were important enough they would rise to the top for Mannix to sort out. I checked the clock on the wall and found I’d been lashed to my desk for nearly ten whole minutes, which was more than enough work for one day for any sane human male.
I was in the process of pushing myself to my feet when I heard a desperate thump at the window at my back. I looked back and saw my former raven roommate tumbling woozily away from the pane in a flurry of black feathers. It zoomed in a second time, bashing its head in what I figured was meant to be a painful portent.
The bird was joined an instant later by the mangy black Leprechaun Land cat, which jumped up on the sill outside and ran back and forth across my path in what I assumed was the feline’s best approximation of a friendly warning to get the hell out of Banyon Investigations HQ as fast as possible.
The bird had given itself a third concussion, the cat was howling like Zombie Cher (who isn’t technically a zombie yet, but why split hairs?), and I was running for the door when it swung open wide and a horrifying beast in black came stomping in on terrifying high heels.
The ex-Mrs. Crag Banyon was followed by overweight and desperately perspiring attorney Chester Misery.
“You!” the spitting cobra spit. She lunged for me, but obese barrister Misery, the esteemed esquire who’d handled her end of our welcome divorce, dropped his briefcase and grabbed her by her bony shoulders.
“I advised you to wait in the car,” her attorney said.
“Just who is paying you, Chester?” she hollered.
“That would be me, technically,” I volunteered.
I ducked the shoe that smashed the window that chased the cat from my fire escape. The bird just wandered around on the steel landing in search of a cold compress and a peckable Tylenol.
“You are understandably upset,” I said, nodding. “My bravery and genius have saved you a bundle and probably your life, but lost you your latest matrimonial victim. I know it’s not as fun as punching a green dwarf in the groin for the next forty years, but as a diversion from your woes you could always go down the wharf, detach your jaw, and devour a few dozen rats.”
“He admitted it!” she shrieked at her corpulent legal representative. “I’m suing you, Banyon. I’m suing you, I’m suing that leprechaun bastard Finnegan O’Fart, I’m suing that hussy cyclops he’s taken up with. I’m taking you for everything you’re worth!”
She stormed from the room, lopsided once more on her single stiletto.
The lawyer merely shrugged, handed me an envelope, and followed his client out into Doris’ office, then out into the hallway.
Once they were gone, Mannix stuck his head in my office, terrified much more than a purely innocent elf ever deserved to be. He was having a hard time breathing, and he opened and closed his mouth to speak, but no words came.
“Don’t sweat it, buddy,” I assured him, winking. “She can sue me for everything I’m worth, but the joke’s on her. I’m worthless.”
I tossed the lawyer’s envelope on my desk, snatched my hat and coat from the rack in the outer office and headed out into the hall.
I was surprised to find that the ex-wife was still there, since she’d had ample time to slither down the elevator shaft.
She was sitting on her superb ass on the floor and pressing a palm over one eye. Her desperately fat lawyer was trying to help her to her feet while simultaneously dodging the heel of the one shoe with which she was repeatedly attempting to gouge his ankle.
“I’m suing you, too!” she was screaming at the dame who was marching up the hallway, away from the aftermath of what must have been a thrilling, albeit regrettably short contretemps.
Sally McClatchen, girl reporter, was frowning as she approached me.
“Do you have any idea who that is?” she snarled, stabbing a thumb back to where fatso Chester Misery, esq., was hauling the ex-hag to one shod and one bare foot.
“Never married her before in my life,” I replied. “What’s the crisis?”
“The crisis is she shoved me as I got off the elevator, so I decked her,” Sally McClatchen replied.
Not a hair was out of place on the gal reporter’s head, and her cheeks weren’t even flushed from going toe-to-toe with a komodo dragon in a leather skirt.
The ex-wife screeched her way onto the elevator with the aid of her embattled, obese attorney, and not once did admirably ice-cold Sally McClatchen so much as glance back to acknowledge what was, frankly, a superlative temper tantrum.
“I came to thank you and also to apologize in person for that wino crack on the editorial page,” Sally said as the doors to the elevator closed on the one-woman act of shrieking performance art. “That was my editor and it was after you’d given me the story. I don’t, on the other hand, apologize for the article about saving you from the falling safe, which was printed before you’d delivered the leprechaun story to me when I still assumed you were a complete bastard, instead of the partial one I now suspect you are.”
“Oh, no, I’m a complete one,” I assured her. “To prove it, you’re buying me lunch. Nowhere French. I only eat food that has a face, vertebra and rudimentary intelligence. There’s a good dolphin joint over on Pike.”
Sally hooked her arm in mine and led me to the elevator, where the doors were conveniently in the process of opening once more.
A figure jumped out before we’d even reached the still-yawning doors, and for a moment I thought it was my rapacious, malevolent ex-bride ready for round two. Instead, I recognized the big yellow feathered headdress and red feathered shawl of the Mayan soothsayer who’d leapt out at me from the shadows of Vincetti’s fish market on my way to the office on Friday morning. The poor slob wore thick wads of tape over his nose where I’d socked him. A pair of bloody gauze strips were jammed up both nostrils.
“You’re late,” I told him. “The mangy cat is gone, but if you want to catch up with the bird it’s probably still out on the fire escape looking for its car keys.”
The witch doctor hollered something in Mayan, which made about as much sense to me as wearing feathered bathrobes while ripping out hearts for fun and profit.
Luckily, an extremely large, elucidating figure leaned out behind the Mayan and stuffed an envelope in my hands.
“He’s suing you, too,” Chester Misery, fat bastard attorney-at-law explained.
Our whole horde piled into the small elevator for what I anticipated would be an unusually awkward ride to the ground floor, assuming Chester’s humongous lard-ass didn’t snap the cable and drop the load of us to sweet oblivion.
“You’re also buying me supper. And, what the hell, breakfast, too,” I informed Sally McClatchen, dame reporter, as the silver doors slid shut.
***~~~***
If you liked Bum Luck, please go online and review it.
Crag Banyon will return. You have been warned...
About the author:
Jim Mullaney is the author of over 30 books, as well as comics, short stories, novellas and opinion pieces. His work has been published by New American Library, Gold Eagle/Harlequin, Marvel Comics, Tor and Moonstone Books. The first paperback of his Red Menace ebook action-adventure series will be released to bookstores in spring 2013 by Moonstone. He is also author of the comic ebook Crag Banyon Mystery series.
Connect to Jim Online
Email: housinan@aol.com
Jim’s Blog: jamesmullaney.blogspot
Twitter: twitter.com/JamesMullaney
Website: JamesMullaney.com
Forum: jamesmullaney.com/forum/
Facebook: Jim's Facebook Page
Red Menace on Facebook: Red Menace news and updates
Bonus Previews
One Horse Open Slay
A Crag Banyon Mystery
Dashiell Hammett meets Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town
"Hello, you've reached Banyon Investigations...."
Crag Banyon is just your run-of-the-mill P.I. He's got a secretary who loves to hate and hates to love him. His worst enemy in the world is on the local force and relishes the thought of seeing Banyon behind bars. And he's got a knack for attracting all the crazies to his small downtown office above the fish market. So when an elf shows up on a stolen reindeer and hints of foul play at the North Pole, Banyon takes the whole thing in stride, refuses to take the case, and heads off to his favorite saloon. But when the elf turns up dead the next morning, the cops make their least favorite private eye the fall guy.
A hunted man, Banyon lams it to the Arctic Circle to clear his name. He quickly finds that Santa's workshop is a lot more dangerous than even a plucky P.I. with a ready quip and a five-alarm hangover can handle. Between fighting for his life and fending off the advances of a hot-to-trot Mrs. Claus, Banyon uncovers a conspiracy that goes far past December 25. If he can just ring in the New Year without a bullet in his brain, it'll all be just another day's work for Crag Banyon, P.I.
"....he's an SOB, but he's cheap. How may I direct your call?"
What readers are saying about One Horse Open Slay, A Crag Banyon Mystery
"A fun romp...Mullaney continues his winning streak." --J. Buckley
"A quick and fun read." --Tractor45
"Crag Banyon is a perfectly pessimistic PI...a truly fun read." --Melissa
