I ordinarily prefer to use public transportation for a couple of important reasons. If some asshole teenager runs a red light in his 1995 Hummer and T-bones me behind the wheel, I’m history. If the same punk slams into the commuter train on which I’m a passenger, the bump might or might not wake me up depending on how deep in the bag I am. Which brings up another plus for public transportation: while it is frowned upon to drive one’s own vehicle at 60 miles per hour through the Kmart home goods department looking for the off-ramp to the towels, being drunk on a downtown bus, particularly after a certain hour, is, from my years of observation, a requirement for service.
That day, however, I needed a set of steel-belted radials that would obey my every command rather than the orders of a city bus driver who’d take twenty minutes circling every block grabbing up bums like they were piss-soaked merry-go-round rings.
There was a lot of ground to cover at speed and I still feared that my hat was the only thing holding my head together. If I was forced to run for a train, my brain might fall out on the platform and Dr. Charlotte Cheese, who had matched me bottle for bottle in our marathon morning drinking competition, was currently in such sorry shape that she’d probably wind up stitching it back in upside-down and backwards. There was no telling what an evil, upside-down and reversed brain might make me do, but I assumed it involved getting a job as a TV political commentator or, worse, law school.
After leaving my apartment, we were forced to take one bus to return us to the lady doctor’s offices in order to collect her car.
The old, gray BMW wasn’t what it used to be when she was running the show at Holy Mackerel University Hospital. It was a couple of years old, and on the first half of our ride over she’d complained about missing an annual upgrade. She not only lost the status symbol of a trade-in, but her assigned parking space at HMUH was long gone. The ex-chief of medicine now had to park in the gutter like the rest of us great unwashed.
“And speaking of washing, I’ve got to run it through a public car wash now, Banyon. One of those dumps where just anybody pulls in to wash their rusted old heaps. I used to get my car detailed every week. Now, not only do I have to park it in the street like some housewife, I have to sit in the thing while it gets hosed down. I’m a doctor.”
The mighty had fallen farther than she could have imagined. She was sitting on the plastic bus seat next to me and staring out at the world that was passing her by. She eventually ran out of steam to complain and lapsed into sullen silence.
When we arrived at our stop and the bus doors yawned open, she trailed me glumly down the aisle, tapping out a butt along the way.
“Your fall from grace might not be such a bad thing today,” I said as we de-bused. “If you were able to afford better offices, they might come with that designated parking space you’ve been blathering on about losing. If that was the case, those two goons up the street who are waiting to kill you would know which car was yours.”
“What? Who?” she demanded, craning her neck and hopping to get a better look. I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her into the corner bus kiosk as our bus drove off in a cloud of thick exhaust.
“Why don’t you send up a couple of flares to call attention to us, sister?” I said.
I wiped a spot semi-clean in the kiosk’s filthy glass. The two of us peered through the streaks at the bastards sitting in the parked car up the street. They weren’t looking back at us. Their eyes were trained on the front door of the lady doctor’s practice.
I spotted her car. It was the only BMW mixed in with the cars of the hoi polloi, parallel parked a few spaces down from her building’s front entrance.
“Are you sure they’re after me?” Dr. Charlotte Cheese whispered.
“Tell you what,” I volunteered. “Go down and knock on their window. If they don’t blow your head off, you can come back and tell me I don’t know my job better than you. Also, maybe you didn’t notice, but they’re wearing tuxedos.”
“I’m a doctor, Banyon, I’m not blind,” she snapped. “What does that have to do with anything? The whole city is crawling with butlers these days.”
“First, there’s two of them. Most of those guys are hired as solo acts. Second, they’re not doing anything but sitting on their asses. Who pays a butler to sit around when they could be spraying fungicide in bowling shoes? Third, they’re armed. I’m not even going to bother explaining that one. Fourth, shut up and let me think.”
The butler in the passenger seat took the two shotguns he had just picked up from the back seat and settled them to the floor between his legs.
The pair of them wore the same blank expressions as every Butler University graduate who was crawling all over every fabulous mansion and lowly tenement in town. Butlers were so commonplace these days that nobody passing by on the sidewalk even glanced in their car. They were like a fire hydrant or a stop sign: everyday objects to be ignored. The heretofore unknown basic human right to have somebody else pick up the laundry from the cleaner’s or scoop Fido’s shit from the dog park had made butlers the perfect killers; able to hide in full view.
Their eyes were peeled like oranges and aimed with laser focus on the front door of Dr. Charlotte Cheese’s practice with the foursquare resolve of a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d just seen the living room curtains move.
I watched them for a few minutes through the filthy window of the bus stop, and not once did I see them so much as glance at the lady doctor’s BMW with the MD plates parked on the opposite side of the road. I did, however see the one in the passenger seat efficiently check the shotguns two more times.
“I see them!” Dr. Charlotte Cheese said. “I just saw the guns.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’re for a fox hunt down Main Street,” I grunted. I dropped my weary ass onto the seat of the bus stop.
She gave me an accusing glare. “You can’t just sit there,” she insisted.
“This is contemplation, not defeat. We need a plan to get from point A to point B. A good plan would get me there without getting killed. A perfect plan would get us both there. I’d settle for the former, but at the moment I don’t have either.”
A heavily perfumed dame in an audible plaid dress and flowered hat selected that moment to lumber into the other end of the bus kiosk.
The new arrival had clearly not fallen prey to the butler craze. She was lugging her own overflowing bags of groceries. With great relief, she dumped the two paper sacks on the dirty bench and shot me a look that heavily suggested she’d harpoon me with a hat pin if I tried to filch her asparagus.
In her wake, the woman had dragged into the small space two screaming brats. Her kids were tugging on her skirt, kicking each other in the shins and generally reminding me why children should not be seen, heard or conceived.
I turned to my physician, who was ignoring the new arrivals and attempting to peer through the bus stop’s window grime.
“How much dough do you have left on you?” I asked Dr. Charlotte Cheese.
* * *
I find that diversions are a fantastic way to redirect somebody’s attention. In this case, it took fifty bucks to purchase a dozen eggs and twenty each to rent the services of the mother’s two offspring, which would no doubt be the last jobs either of the little bastards would have until the prison laundry a decade or two hence.
Mama directed the destruction wrought by her little monsters like a pro, and if I had to guess I’d say she regularly set them loose on every landlord, cashier, movie theater usher and ex-husband in the tri-city area who was dumb enough to cross her.
The brats approached the butler’s car on stealth mode, each armed with half a dozen eggs in a ripped-apart cardboard container. When they pounced, one attacked from the street side, the other from the sidewalk. The first volley of eggs crisscrossed over the windshield in smears of dripping yellow yolk and viscous albumin smears.
The Jeeves behind the wheel was instantly appalled, as if witnessing his master descending the grand staircase for a state dinner wearing nothing but flip-flops and a smile. He quickly turned on the engine and fumbled the wipers on.
The wiper blades managed only to bust open the one yolk that hadn’t burst on contact, worsening the glistening modern art smears across the glass.
The original pair of raw eggs were quickly joined by two more avian splats.
The butler in the passenger seat climbed with great alacrity and greater dignity out of the car, clapping his hands to shoo away the two little laughing bastards who were each hauling back with round three.
“Here!” the butler cried. “Stop that, you foul urchins! Stop that this instant!”
“Oh, no, you didn’t just yell at my boys!”
The furious voice came from the sidewalk. For ninety bucks, the dame in the flowered hat apparently went all in.
SKREEK-SKREEK!
The worthless wipers dragged an omelet back and forth across the windshield as the hapless butler at the wheel added a few squirts of wiper fluid to the scrambled mess.
“Are these yours?” the guy outside the car droned. He had to duck back to avoid the splatter on his tuxedo from the next pair of launched eggs.
“You better believe they’re mine, buster,” the mouth under the hat snapped.
“Well, madam, if I may be so bold, please control your offspring.”
The dame in the flowered hat went from slightly agitated observer to high dudgeon in no time flat.
“Are you saying I don’t take care of my kids?” she screeched. “Is that what you’re saying, that my kids are out of control?”
One of her in-control kids selected that moment to score an impressive direct hit on the knot in the bastard’s bowtie.
“Well, I never,” the butler said, doing his best impression of Margaret Dumont. He drew a spotless white handkerchief like a rapier and began dabbing fruitlessly at the breakfast untidiness that was rapidly oozing south in the direction of his cummerbund.
My only regret in the previous minute was that I hadn’t gotten the mother’s name. I would have put her and her evil brats on retainer, since the trio had proven to be better diversionary pros than I’d ever imagined.
During the initial uproar of the first egg volley, Dr. Charlotte Cheese and I broke from our bus kiosk cover and darted across the street.
“Shouldn’t we crouch or bend over or something?” she panted as we ran.
“Why? Did you lose a contact lens?”
“So they don’t see us,” she explained, apparently having smoked away that very morning the part of her brain able to identify sarcasm.
“All we’re doing right now is hurrying across a street, which I’m led to believe normal people do all the time,” I replied. “If, however, you want to call attention to us by reenacting a scene from the last midnight World War Two prison break movie you pretended to watch while contemplating your moribund medical career, feel free.”
We had already reached the other side of the street by that point, so she’d have to await another opportunity to haul out her Steve McQueen impersonation.
“You should probably crouch now,” I instructed from a fresh crouch.
I led the way at a hurried squat alongside the row of parked cars until we reached the dame doc’s BMW.
The ensuing and wholly anticipated argument over who would take possession of the keys took more time than I’d allotted for it, and according to my calculations the little bastards across the street were well out of eggs by the time I slid in from the passenger side and deposited my ass behind the steering wheel.
Dr. Charlotte Cheese crawled into the passenger seat, slouching low behind the headrest. She raised her nose like a periscope to sneak a peek across the street.
I’d warned her ten times before we left the bus kiosk to stay out of sight, which included cramming herself as far down as possible in her seat until we were well away from the front door of her crummy medical practice. I didn’t have time to tell her for the eleventh time.
The instant her snoot broke cover from behind the headrest, there rose an alarming shout from across the street.
“I say!” yelled the butler with the omelet bowtie. “It’s her!”
In a flash, I shoved in the key and turned on the Nazi wagon. Unlike most every other time with all BMWs ever, it started.
I caught a glimpse of a studiedly effete butler waving his wrists in my direction as he slipped on egg slime and stumbled back inside his car. His tuxedoed legs were still sticking comically out and flailing in empty air as I gunned the Third Reich-mobile into the light afternoon traffic.
“Watch out!” Dr. Charlotte Cheese screamed in my ear.
I had no idea that for which she meant I should watch, as there were about a thousand cars, pedestrians, dames with baby carriages, dog walkers, mailboxes, trees, curbs and buildings that had chosen that moment to spring out before me.
I wended my way at speed through all, the dashboard needle kicking up to near sixty as I raced through the urban obstacle course and tore off down the road.
In the rearview mirror I saw the butler car scream out of its parking space and fly up the street behind me. It nearly ran down one of the two egg-tossing punks, and the dame in the flowered hat responded by launching a gratis cantaloupe grenade that dented the roof and exploded seeds and orange melon down the windshield.
“It might be prudent the next time somebody tells you to stay the hell out of sight that you, in fact, do,” I suggested to Dr. Charlotte Cheese.
The lady doctor was clutching her seat with all ten digits and grinding her heels into the floorboards in a vain attempt to control the pedals on my side of the car.
“Old lady! Old lady! Old lady!” she screamed in reply.
I had seen the mature female in question, an octogenarian prune in a crosswalk lugging a two-wheeled wire grocery cart.
I cut the wheel hard, nearly sideswiping a double-parked cab and weaved expertly -- as much to my surprise as anyone else’s -- between taxi and old bat. The old broad’s cloth dress flapped like an airport windsock in the gale thrown up by the BMW.
I roared up to an intersection, the butler car gaining all the while.
The green light was with me which was, as near as I could calculate, my first stroke of good luck since my ex-wife uttered those two magic little words “I don’t” in the presence of a divorce court judge.
With expert manipulation of gas and brake pedals, I nearly killed us by taking the turn too hard and almost flipping the kraut klown kar. I dropped speed and blew around the corner at forty, stomping hard on the gas the instant I hit the straightaway.
This part of the city hadn’t risen from teepees, trading posts and old horse carts. All the blocks were laid out in a perfect grid with ruler precision. I could see a half-mile worth of four lanes of traffic stretched in a perfectly straight line ahead. I also saw a strip mall car lot filled with used foreign wrecks, which was a hell of a lot more appealing than racing through town all day with a pair of heavily armed penguins on my ass.
I stomped the brake, cut the wheel, spun completely out of control, realized woozily when we stopped twirling around that the ass end of the car was where I’d planned the front end to be, threw the heap into reverse and backed up at a hundred miles an hour into the used car lot. I found a vacant spot behind a pile of BMWs that their owners had had the belated wisdom to divest themselves of, and cut the engine.
Just in time.
The car carrying our two butler pursuers roared around the corner, two wheels lifting momentarily off the pavement before crashing down in a dramatic hail of Starsky and Hutch sparks. The pair of impeccably dressed bastards flew straight past the used car lot where Dr. Charlotte Cheese and I were hiding and raced up the main drag. They blew through a yellow light and caused three fender benders as they roared out of sight.
“I hate goddamn car chases,” I informed the panicked doc dame seated next to me.
A used car salesman in a provocative, evocative, ironic, or possibly oblivious brown shirt had seen me pull into the lot. The little runt came hastily goose-stepping out of the little one-room showroom, slicking down his hair with spit as he hustled up beside the window I’d just rolled down to let out a fresh plume of cigarette smoke.
“Zis is eine beauty,” he informed us, eyeing der good lady doktor’s Kraftwagen.
“Thanks, Adolf,” I said, “but we were just browsing.”
I turned the key. It was a BMW, so this time the more usual thing happened which was nothing at all. I looked back up into the salesman’s Charlie Chaplin mustache.
“What’s Deutschlandian for ‘trade-in die shit-heap?’”