Flying blind, p.23
Flying Blind, page 23
I noted that an awful lot of ice was continuing to melt instantly as she held her hands to the wall. The ice was evaporating before it could transform into so much as a single water droplet, which was great news for those of us who had just narrowly avoided being frozen like a fish stick and didn’t want to enjoy the victory of one narrow escape while drowning to death in a tide of rising ice water two seconds later.
“Only partly amazing, Mannix,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we are currently standing at the bottom of an ice shaft that I would estimate is a good forty feet deep. As an ex-North Pole elf, you might be able to climb out for help--”
“Easily, Mr. Crag,” the elf announced, and started up the wall.
“--except the town’s emergency services are tied in knots right now,” I finished, plucking the plucky elf off the wall of the ice shaft in which we were trapped. “And with the ice machine of sinister Dr. Cohen (who is suspended in ice over there and staring glassily at me at this very moment) still presumably firing random bursts out there somewhere, I think I’d probably freeze to death before help arrived.”
“I could throw down a rope,” Mannix suggested.
“I’m a delicate flower. I blister. Besides, I have a better idea.”
I reminded Senorita Tamale once more of our trip to Canada, admitting for the first time that her car which I’d borrowed hadn’t been stolen from me by Serbian hobos as I’d informed her, but that I’d sold it for scrap to buy a Greyhound ticket home.
I told her that her sister had attempted to seduce me.
I told her that her brother had attempted to seduce me.
I told her that her mother and three of her aunts had attempted to seduce me.
I told her that the telephone company refused to give her a raise for seven years because of customer complaints. They all worked, but that last one was the difference between a kernel of popped popcorn and an atomic bomb.
The wall around us had been melting and evaporating to steam, rolling back by feet at a time, but just mentioning the telephone company customers Senorita Tamale so despised sent a burst of heat from the fiery dame’s scorching paws that wiped out almost in an instant the entire glacier that had formed around the entire neighborhood.
I’d forgotten about the fat slob acupuncture client who, while we were across the driveway saving the world, had apparently been in the process of attempting to start his Hyundai. Time had stood still for him and his foreign piece of shit, but the instant the ice vanished his engine kicked on and he tore off down the driveway, oblivious to the fact that the crisis was over. The Chinese acupuncurist dame was hanging in through the passenger side window, kicking her feet and screaming her pork fried head off as the car bounced out into the road and shrieked a pair of rubber stripes in a hasty, naked getaway.
I was grateful at least that we’d missed the part of the show where the fatso’s massive towel had dropped off. The terrycloth bed sheet had been abandoned in haste in the middle of the driveway amongst the remains of the busted-up garage.
The towel wasn’t the only thing left in the wake of all the excitement.
Senorita Tamale had already started to get the hang of her newfound superheroine abilities. All the ice was gone but for two blocks, the perimeters of which she had very carefully carved even while she was disintegrating the rest of the massive ice slab.
Mrs. Gwendolyn Johnson was a furious, frozen statue of marital betrayal. Her teeth had been bared when she’d been flash-frozen, and the expensive orthodontia that had been partial payment for the affair she’d been having with the menacing Dr. Cohen glinted beneath a half-foot of ice that was as clear as Windexed glass.
Frozen in a permanent crawl away from the rigid feet of Client #1 was Dr. Zeroth Cohen; craven, bloodied, defeated, and with the most horrifying mouthful of teeth this side of a royal wedding.
I noticed for the first time that the very tip of his escape cone was decorated with the stylized O of his logo, and if that thing could be piloted around the city I had a pretty good idea what he’d used to run down the bike messenger in the street outside my office.
“Very good work, Senorita Tamale,” I told the dame, who was still a little confused, but was already getting an early hint of that look of female empowerment that was never a good sign for any guy within piano stool-hurtling range. “There’s a lot more crap around this town to thaw out, starting with the world headquarters of Banyon Investigations. Just make sure you let me act as your agent. At, of course, a twenty-five percent fee per building, park, monument, lake, superhero, etcetera. If the cops don’t manage to track down his freeze ray machine, we could be set for life.”
I was afraid I spoke too soon, and that the sound of tires in the driveway heralded the arrival of Dr. Cohen’s freeze machine, desirous of another go at finishing what the sinister dentist had started. But when the three of us who weren’t already ice statues turned, we found a scrawny figure pedaling toward us on a ten-speed bike.
The bike messenger wore a knitted scarf, an asshole Che T-shirt, a pair of skintight black jeans, and a stoned expression within irregular clumps of a beard that stubbornly refused to take root on his pasty face.
“Dr. Zeroth Cohen?” the college dropout asked.
I identified as same, and plucked the offered note from his hand. He pedaled closer to the garage to inspect the figures frozen in ice.
“Whoa, dude,” said the fascinated bike messenger.
“Whoa, indeed,” I replied, since I’d already opened the envelope and perused its contents.
Inside was like an evil orthodontist’s Christmas wish list come true. I held up the items in turn to Mannix and Senorita Tamale.
“A five hundred million dollar money order,” I announced, “made out to The Whole Tooth, LLC. A pair of season tickets to the opera. A notarized letter from the opera board awarding a perpetual parking space out front as soon as the Luciano Mankowitz Opera House is repaired. Ah, and our tax dollars have been deployed to pay off the maniac dentist’s student loans. Tell me again, Mannix, why you started making me pay taxes? And don’t mention Doris’ problems with the IRS, because you’ll only be right and I’m not in the goddamn mood.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crag?” Mannix asked, fishing for the response that would make me happy while allowing him to continue to keep my ass out of jail by paying all my taxes, tickets, fines, fees, tabs and ex-marital obligations.
“Damn right,” I said.
“Gngngaang!” interjected the stoned pervert bike messenger, who’d somehow managed to get his tongue stuck to the Gwendolyn Johnson ice sculpture.
It was the last semi-language he would ever utter, since the instant the gibberish had passed his lips there came a sudden reverse-sucking sound directly beside him, which was followed by the surprising appearance of a black-robed figure who promptly touched the kid on the shoulder. The remaining walls of the Victorian carriage house abruptly collapsed, dragging the wobbly, thousand pound cupola along with them. The cupola and nearest wall squashed flat the messenger and most of his bike.
The Grim Reaper held the handle of his scythe in the crook of his elbow and hitched up his belt, Barney Fife-like. He suddenly noticed me standing two feet away.
“Oh. Banyon,” Death said, his skull face unreadable but his voice deeply bored. “Jaublowski said you wanted to see me. What do you want? I’m a busy man.”
“It matters a lot less now than last night,” I said. “I was only wondering how you were tied up in this Dr. Cohen affair. You first took out the messenger who brought me the photographs I’d taken for the case of frozen Mrs. Gwendolyn Johnson over there. Then you wiped out the one who delivered the warning from Cohen for me to watch it, as well as the one from Cohen for Johnny Johnson to watch it. I figured whoever was getting you to take them all out was paying you to cover his nefarious tracks. However, this last unfortunate human shit stain currently twitching under that pile of garage debris appears to have dispelled my concerns. I assume now this coincidental vendetta is something altogether different from the pair of cases I’ve been working.”
Death shrugged his bony shoulders. “Bike messengers. I just hate the goddamn little pricks,” the Grim Reaper said.
He gave the jutting wheel of the dead kid’s bike a vicious kick that sent it spinning like mad before he and his long, crooked scythe vanished in the reverse of the reverse-sucking pop that had heralded the Grim Reaper’s auspicious arrival.
“He is cute,” mused smoking Senorita Tamale. “Do ju have his numbers?”
“Three sixes,” I replied. “But he’s never at home, so you’d have to leave a message with his service, and we all know how crummy operators are. In the meantime, those of us who survived, unfortunately, still have work to do.”
With a well-earned weary sigh, I trudged into the remains of the garage to see if I could scrape up a car in stealable condition.
CHAPTER 17
Fifty-four hours of semi-lucidity later found me on Monday evening gently swaying under a spluttering streetlight near the corner newsstand outside Bottomless Joe’s Diner. Across the street in the Happy Hobo Motel, the girl whose old man owned the joint was sitting glumly at her post behind the counter under a shock of pink hair.
I didn’t see any sign of the ogre housekeeper who’d tried to plant me like a tulip bulb through the asphalt behind the crummy philanderer’s paradise.
It looked like management had found a cheap Mexican import to do the job American ogres just wouldn’t do, probably after the lying dame at the counter blamed the attack on the telephone pole out back and the subsequent power outage entirely on the poor, dumb ogre bastard who was only following orders. The middle-aged maid dozed beside her laundry cart on the second floor as randy guests came and went.
I’d trailed Johnny J. Johnson from work, and I watched from my post under the weak streetlight as the bank manager approached the counter, paid in cash, and accepted a room key. Same routine as all the nights I’d tailed him the previous week, except this time I was off the clock, I hadn’t brought my camera, and Johnson looked like more of a pathetic loser than ever. That last point might have had something to do with the fact that news of his wife’s infidelity had been broadcast nationwide for the previous two days.
The chunk of ice in which Gwendolyn Johnson was entombed had been hauled to police lockup, along with the frozen slab containing Dr. Zeroth Cohen, criminal mastermind and rotten-toothed orthodontist bastard extraordinaire.
A special police unit had been assigned to thaw out the masterminds of a laundry list of supervillainous acts, the fallout from which the city would be cleaning up for months. Detective Daniel Jenkins was on the front page of Sunday’s Gazette leading the charge against the accused with a scowl and a hair dryer.
The cops could afford to waste time defrosting the evil duo. Dr. Cohen’s freeze machine had been discovered Saturday afternoon, thanks to a busted taillight. The diabolical dentist had mounted the device in the back of an old ambulance, which had been driving around town with the lights on and siren blaring. It was actually pretty clever, except Cohen didn’t take into account the fact that local cops were morons who’d stop a speeding ambulance just because of a burned-out twenty-cent bulb.
With the freeze ray no longer sending out random blasts around town, it was a simple matter to cart Senorita Tamale to the edge of every ice field to work her magic. When she’d thawed the ice on Connie Sellecca Lake, Minus had launched himself from the black depths through about a million boiled trout (Senorita Tamale was still getting the hang of things), and tore off across the sky without so much as an apologetic glance for dragging the two of us into his goddamn mess.
“He could say gracias,” the senorita with the glowing red hands had groused.
“Given your limited command of Spanish Lite, or whatever the hell it is you speak, I am, frankly, surprised that you can say it,” I’d replied, which had kept her sufficiently furious that she was able to free my building, along with Vincetti the fishmonger and whatever other pathetic souls toiled within its four sandstone walls.
I hadn’t told Senorita Tamale on the lakeshore two days before that Minus probably had a lot more on his tiny mind than even she could imagine.
I watched Johnny Johnson exit the lobby of the Happy Hobo Motel. He disappeared for a few seconds on the elevator, and reappeared in the open hallway on the second floor. He swiped a keycard and entered room 218.
Only once the door had shut behind him did I hustle across the street. I made sure to keep out of range of the counter at Bottomless Joe’s at my back. I didn’t want a repeat of last week, with the angry waitress screaming from the alley behind the hotel. Likewise, I kept a keen eye out for the dame at the counter of the Happy Hobo.
The only eyes that saw me cross over to the far sidewalk belonged to a little elf loitering half a block down. I nodded to him as I stepped up from the curb, and as I headed around the side of the building I saw my diminutive assistant slip through the front door of the Happy Hobo.
I made it around back at a trot, counted windows down from the corner until I was standing beneath room 218, and mounted the nearest convenient telephone pole to the second floor. I noted that the busted pole had been replaced, but that the upper half that was still strung with wires had been chainsawed halfway up and fastened to the new pole.
I was waiting for only a few seconds when I heard a muffled knock inside the room. A moment after Mannix rapped on the door of room 218, the window opened and a figure climbed out onto the sill carrying an armload of folded clothes.
The big goon launched himself off the sill, but rather than perform the traditional belly flop on the pavement two stories down, he began to float quietly up to the roof. He kept his back close to the wall for some stupid reason that I assumed had to do with stealth, which is pretty hard to manage when you’re dressed like a banana and wrapped in a purple cape with matching boots, mask and gauntlets.
“Psst. Hey, genius,” I called over to Minus, who hadn’t noticed me watching every moment of his pathetic escape attempt from my perch glued to the telephone pole that was positioned between his room and the next. He was so shocked that he nearly dropped his suit, necktie and dress shoes which were tucked carefully in the crook of his arm. “Mr. Gwendolyn Johnson, we need to talk.”
* * *
Two minutes later, we were both inside Minus’ crummy motel room. The hero of the hour had flown me in through the window, and had immediately taken off his mask and sat morosely on the edge of the bed. As far as I could tell, he was trying to stare the color out of the toes of his purple boots which, for all I knew, might have been one of his hitherto unknown super-abilities.
The folded clothes of his not-so secret identity were piled beside him. I was over at the door, which I’d opened a crack to find a nervous elf loitering in the hallway.
Mannix need not have been anxious, since the only sentry on duty was the snoozing Mexican chambermaid, who was a hell of a lot less intimidating than the ogre the Happy Hobo had previously employed to terrify patrons into not straying outside the broad range of what the sleazy dump regarded as acceptable behavior.
“Hit the bricks, Mannix,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”
The elf turned on a pointy-toed shoe and hustled to the exit.
I shut and locked the door and took a seat at the desk across from the bed. The surface of the desk had been carved up by hundreds of romantics who’d wanted to memorialize the five minutes they’d spent at the Happy Hobo. There was no heart-shaped scar to mark any of the nights Minus, nee Johnny J. Johnson, had spent there.
“I suppose you want bribe money,” Minus announced glumly.
“I’d be insulted if I were in any other profession,” I replied. “But as it happens, I take everybody’s low opinion of private detectives in stride, mainly because I know a lot of them so, frankly, my informed opinion is far lower than the typical layman’s. In point of fact, you paid me plenty. But you’re not getting a partial refund, since you nearly got me killed multiple times, so the multiple death clause in our contract kicked in. Plus, I had to save the city, for which you and Senorita Tamale are getting credit. Or blame, if you prefer. I’m vacillating between the two. It’s pretty much thirty-seventy right now.”
“So what are you doing here?” Minus asked.
“A few things. First, to clear up your case. I thought we might be able to do it at your house while you were still Johnny Johnson, mild-mannered bank manager, but thanks to your wife’s extramarital adventures in the dental chair of the fiendish Dr. Zeroth Cohen, there are TV camera crews parked all over your neighborhood.”
Minus sighed and covered his eyes with one purple glove. “I can’t believe Gwendolyn was cheating on me.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was quite a shock to you and that one blind, deaf monk living in an underground cage on Jupiter. For the rest of the human race, it wasn’t quite the same bolt from the blue. On an astonishment scale of one to a billion, I’d say I put my personal amazement at about one. Wait. Less than one. I just remembered that hot-to-trot strapless number she was shoehorned into on the day she hired me.”
He looked out from around his glove. “Wait. Gwendolyn hired you?”
“Funny story. She claimed you were cheating on her, so she had me tail you. Mostly to this dump, as a matter of fact. Since she’s frozen in ice at the police station right now, I can’t really ask her, so most of this is conjecture. I figure she figured out your double life. Somehow you do that thing superheroes do where you put on a pair of tights and nobody recognizes you. But maybe a wife knows. Maybe you talked in your sleep. Maybe she tailed you here one night before me. Who knows? But once she knew your secret, she needed to expose you. She wanted dental work. She didn’t need it, mind you, since her teeth were perfect. But she was a dame for whom perfection isn’t perfect enough, and she decided she was going to use every tool at her disposal, including the two of us, to join that expanding legion of adult skirts who think fastening a chain link fence to their choppers is a goddamn status symbol. She couldn’t afford the braces, so she’d been trying to romance a set out of Dr. Cohen, who, ironically, was himself terrified of all dental procedures. He planned to end all dental work as we know it. They found a manifesto tucked away in a hidden compartment in the ruins of his spit sink.”
