Chemical Burn

Dinus Interruptus

Rain fell all day and into the evening, and with the sun on the other side of the planet, yes, it actually was dark. Some clichés simply can’t be avoided. My assistant Rachel and I were celebrating the closing of what I had dubbed The Three Monkeys and a Football case. The Comparsi twins, who weren’t really twins at all, were also in attendance. It was their case, after all. We—me and my friends, not the monkeys—were sitting around a table at the Sunset Grill. I’d invited my buddy Xen too, but I hadn’t heard from him in a few days.
Probably working on the data I’d sent him
, I thought.

The twins wore matching, blue, high-sheen suits. Their short, blond hair and close-cropped beards made them look like the Hollywood trash they were. Rachel looked immaculate in a slinky, black satin dress that drew the eyes of every straight man and at least bi-curious woman who walked by. Long, auburn hair done as usual in a simple ponytail draped down between her exquisite shoulders, and her hazel eyes were easy for people to get lost in. She used her looks to get information, and she was damn good at it, dodging would-be suitors like a matador. Under that flawless surface lay one of the most dedicated, trustworthy, and decent humans I’d ever met, and I’d met quite a few over the years. She was absolutely, unequivocally my best friend on Earth.

Normally, service at the Grill was outstanding, but tonight was a little different. We’d been seated, provided water, and given menus quickly, but we spent the next forty-five minutes making small talk, mostly about the three monkeys and the amusing irregularities of simian mating habits. Unusually packed for a Wednesday night, the Grill sported a crowd thick with Hollywood
wannabes
, a couple of
has-beens
, and the odd
is
scattered throughout.

Must be a premiere or something, I thought.

I had gone to the bar a couple of times for drinks and managed to get mai-tai shooting out of the noses of both twins not once, but twice, so I already considered the evening a victory. As we continued chatting, I habitually scanned the crowd, and from the corner of my eye caught sight of a waiter approaching from behind me.

I didn’t recognize the guy, but it should have struck me as odd that he held the serving tray with a fresh, white towel draped over his hand behind it. The staff didn’t use towels like that.

In retrospect, the guy didn’t feel like a waiter. As he approached, I reached into an inner pocket of my coat, pulled out four straws and laid them on the salad plate in front of me—one of them noticeably shorter than the others.

“Isn’t it just hysterical?” Stevie Comparsi asked with a distinctly effeminate lisp.

“I really don’t understand why they kept doing it,” his un-twin Riki said, smiling broadly. “I mean, honestly, after two days straight, breaking only to eat bananas and throw crap at each other, you’d think they would have gotten bored with—”

I pulled a twelve-inch meat cleaver out of another, pulled a whetstone out of a different pocket, and prepared to sharpen the blade. The coat, like me, isn’t from around here. It’s got damn near everything in it but the kitchen sink.

My friends looked at me with shock pasted to their faces.

“What?” I asked innocently, grinning at the circle of wide eyes as I casually held the lethal kitchen implement. I made rhythmic whisking noises as I ran the blade across the stone. No one at the table said a word.

“I’m sorry for the delay, folks,” the waiter said as he came up behind me. “We had a change of staff at the last minute.…” The waiter’s voice trailed off as he looked over my shoulder and spotted the heavy meat cleaver.

I stopped sharpening and turned to him with a genuine smile. “Oh … no worries,” I said. “In fact, you just saved somebody’s life.” I waved the cleaver in the general direction of my companions. “We were getting ready to eat one of our own, but we hadn’t gotten down to drawing straws to see who ended up on the rotisserie. You do have a rotisserie back there, don’t you?” I asked.

The twins giggled while Rachel doled out a faint smile in my direction, shaking her head lightly. She’d been inoculated against my antics three years prior during the Green Orca Case—Orca, in this case, referring to a man, not a whale. That was when we’d first met, I’d saved her life and, as a result, she worked first for and then with me. It was an important distinction … for both of us.

The waiter didn’t look amused. He leaned in close enough to whisper and not be heard by anyone else. “Put the fucking cleaver down on the table and rest your hands on either side of the plate,” he hissed.

I felt something hard pressed into that classic spot between shoulder blades—the one where guns always get jammed when assholes make unreasonable requests. I heard the all-too-familiar “snick” of a hammer being pulled back. Through a mai-tai haze I began to suspect this guy might not be the waiter, or if he was, he was having a really bad night.

My eyes got wide, and I stopped smiling.

“And don’t move or yell,” he added, “or you get it … then the lady.” Although the twins didn’t notice the change in my expression, Rachel did.

“Jesus, man, it was a joke,” I said quietly, laying the cleaver down. “I’m a very big tipper, I swear! Twenty … sometimes even thirty percent!”

“Shut your fucking mouth, would you, Case?” the waiter-turned-gunslinger growled, just loud enough for everyone at the table to hear over the crowd.

“How rude!” the twins said in unison. They had finally figured out something was very wrong.

“We’d never let our staff speak to customers that way,” Stevie blurted.

“I never did understand that fad about the New Cruelty,” Riki added in his partner’s ear.

The twins ran an up-scale Italian restaurant on the other side of town. They had exceptional food, but to celebrate I’d had my heart set on burgers and fries, so I’d suggested the Grill.

“Okay folks,” the gunslinger grumbled, clearly running out of patience, “here’s how this is going to work. Case is going to reach into that coat of his, drop a hundred bucks on the table, and then he and I are walking out the front door. The three of you are going to the bathroom. You can all use the ladies’ room, right boys?” He tossed a sneer at the Comparsi twins. They both glared at him. “If any of you stops on the way there, he gets it. If anyone reaches for a cell phone, he gets it. If anything else goes wrong … a cop walks through the door, lightning strikes, a plague of locusts … if I get a hangnail or stub a toe on the way out … he gets it. Get me?”

They all nodded.

Rachel looked at me, asking with her eyes what she should do. A pang of worry shot through me at the thought of her getting hurt. She could take the guy apart in close quarters—I’d trained her myself—but I didn’t want to see her take a bullet. Besides, I really wanted to know what this asshole was after. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to interrupt my dinner plans, and I rarely kill the messenger. I prefer to kill the sender.

“It’s okay Rachel,” I offered quietly. “Do as the man says.”

“That’s right, Rachel,” the gunslinger agreed. “Do as the man says. Now, Case, grab your wallet real slow and put the money on the table. I don’t get paid by the hour, and I have some other work tonight that’s more pleasure than business.”

I slowly lifted my hand and slid it into another inside coat pocket. I felt my way past a few miscellaneous items I’d been saving for a different rainy day and wrapped my hand around my billfold. I pulled it out, opened it, and separated a hundred-dollar-bill from the thick stack within. I dropped the C-note on the table and started to put my wallet away.

“Hold up,” the gunslinger said abruptly. “Gimme the stack,” he ordered. “And hand it over below your elbow. We don’t want the customers to get suspicious, do we? That would be bad for everybody.” I could actually feel the man grinning.

“Son-of-a—” I grumbled, but he jabbed the gun hard into my back.

I pulled out the stack of hundreds and moved my hand below and behind me. The gunman leaned the serving tray up against the leg of my chair, the towel still hiding the gun. I felt the money pulled away and heard him slide it into a pocket.

“Okay. Now, everybody play their parts so we can all get on with our evenings.”

Everyone stood. Rachel and the twins put their napkins on the table and walked towards the restroom. I turned towards the front door, my escort close behind. We picked our way through the crowd, walked through the front doors, and stepped into a hard-hitting downpour that quickly soaked us both and, regrettably, flattened my mohawk.

“To your right,” the man behind me said. “The limo.”

A few car-lengths up sat a black, über-stretched limo, double-parked with the motor running. I headed towards it and scanned the street. There were no pedestrians, and it occurred to me that I could spin and clobber the guy, taking my chances with the pistol. However, I really hate getting shot, and I wanted to know who was in the car.

It turns out that was a miscalculation I later blamed it on the mai-tais. I should have taken my chances with maybe getting a bullet there on the sidewalk as opposed to the near-certainty of getting one later on. Getting shot has invariably been what happened to me in situations where I got abducted and driven someplace in a limousine. It had happened before … more than once. Granted, I didn’t know I’d get shot for sure, but statistically speaking, the probability of a bullet wound was pretty high. Had I simply stopped, turned around, and taken the guy’s head off, I probably would have avoided the twenty-four hours of chaos I endured before a particularly unpleasant plane ride … but I’m getting ahead of myself. Whoever sat in the limousine clearly needed me a hell of a lot more than I did them. A door in the middle of the limo opened as we approached, and I stared into darkness.

“Please get in,” a woman said, her silky, central-European accent floating up out from the abyss.

***