The fireball of a clown car roared down the street with the Juggler Brothers tailing close behind. No matter what he did, Vinnie just couldn’t shake them. The jugglers rode their unicycles across the telephone wires as quickly as if they were on motorcycles, launching bottle after bottle of liquid fire into their path.
“How the hell did they find us?” Jimmy yelled, hanging out the window and whipping at the flames with his coat.
“Somebody must’ve seen the direction we were headed after we left the brothel.”
“Shit.” Jimmy’s coat caught on fire and he tossed it away. “You think Miss Tina told them?”
Vinnie shook his head. “It had to be another customer. Did you see him with anyone before you got into the fight?”
Jimmy shrugged. “He might have been hanging out with other vanillas.”
“Were they French?”
“I don’t know. All vanillas look alike.”
Another bottle exploded in the road ahead of them. Vinnie swerved to avoid the pool of flames, nearly rolling the little car in the process.
“They’re sloppy,” Vinnie said. “But they’re not bad.”
“How the heck are they keeping up with us on those unicycles?”
“They say these guys have been riding unicycles nonstop since they were old enough to walk,” Vinnie said. “And they’ve built up their leg muscles into super-powered pedaling machines.”
“They’re faster than hell.”
But they quickly learned that the jugglers weren’t even going as fast as they could go. Once they dropped down from the telephone wires onto the street, they were able to pedal at full speed. The jugglers came up alongside the car, one on Vinnie’s side and the other on Jimmy’s. They were no longer juggling Molotovs. They juggled chain saws, tossing them back and forth over the roof of the car.
“Where did they get chain saws?” Jimmy asked.
The saws sliced through the car’s exterior as the French clowns juggled. Sparks flew from the hood as the chain-saw blades grazed the metal.
“Take them out,” Blue Nose said, handing Jimmy his air horn.
Up close, Vinnie was able to get a good look at one of the jugglers—a clown so skinny that his limbs were like twigs of muscle. His clown face was patterned with black and white circles around his blood-red eyes, wide black grins stretching across his round cheeks. He looked like a spring-action doll from a jack-in-the-box, complete with the pointy little hat on top of his bald white head and a frilly collar around his neck. His brother was identical but he wasn’t as thin and he was missing his nose, as if it had been bitten off in a bar fight long ago.
“This is for Pierre, you filthy Bozo,” said the noseless juggler in a thick French accent.
Then he tossed the chain saw into the car with them. It cut a gash across Jimmy’s chest, then sliced the top of Vinnie’s wrist, and the skinny juggler caught it as it passed through the driver’s-side window.
“Motherfucker!” Jimmy cried as blood gushed from his torn shirt.
Jimmy aimed his air horn at the noseless clown and fired, but the juggler was too quick. He leaned back on his unicycle, his back nearly touching the street as he pedaled at seventy miles an hour. The sound wave went right over him and shattered the windows of a hardware shop.
Vinnie let the blood drip from his wrist. It was bleeding fast, but it wasn’t that deep. He jerked the wheel and made a hard left, trying to knock over the juggler riding alongside him. The skinny clown moved with him, turning just as quickly, as though he anticipated Vinnie’s every move.
“We don’t want you, Blue Nose,” the skinny clown said. “Turn over the Bozo boy and we’ll let you go.”
“Yes, blue man, don’t you want to go back to your pretty human wife? Are you sure you want to make poor Samantha a widow so young?”
Vinnie had no idea how they knew so much about him. All the Bozo Family knew about the members of Le Mystère were rumors they heard from friends of theirs around Little Bigtop. But the French clowns must’ve done their research on every high-ranking Bozo in the family. Vinnie couldn’t help but respect that, despite the vulnerable position they put him in.
“It would be a shame to let the mademoiselle’s bed go cold without you,” said the noseless one, juggling the chain saws by himself.
“We’ll make sure to keep her warm when you’re six feet underground,” said the other, who was now juggling grenades that were attached to his suspenders.
Vinnie didn’t like to let his emotions lead his actions, but he couldn’t help himself when they were talking about his wife. He pulled out his gun and shot at the skinny clown. All three of the laughing bullets missed their target when the juggler fell back into Vinnie’s blind spot. The clown chuckled, delighted to have gotten a rise out of the stone-cold capo.
“So that’s your answer then?” the noseless clown said through the passenger window. “You care so little for your wife’s well-being?”
Jimmy fired his air horn at the clown peeking through his window, but again the juggler dodged as fast as wind. When he pulled himself upright, the noseless clown tossed one of the grenades into the backseat of Jimmy’s car.
“Look out!” Jimmy cried as the glittery pink-and-blue-speckled ball landed in the seat behind them.
The Juggler Brothers fell back, waiting for the vehicle to blow.
“Get it!” Vinnie said.
Jimmy didn’t have time to crawl back there and throw it out the window. He aimed his 12-gauge air horn at it and fired. The blast had enough force to blow the back door out, sending the explosive out the new hole in the side of the car.
Vinnie looked in the rearview mirror, watching the grenade as it bounced down the street like a colorful rubber ball. As it bopped between the two unicycles, the smiles dropped from the Juggler Brothers’s faces as the French clowns disappeared into a cloud of blue fire.
“Did we get them?” Jimmy asked, sitting on the edge of his seat. He stared back at the blue flames behind them, so excited that he forgot about the blood dribbling down his chest.
“I don’t see them,” Vinnie said, watching the flames through the mirror.
“We got them. I know we got them.”
But only a moment later, the Juggler Brothers emerged from the blue flames, pedaling their unicycles like apocalyptic horsemen. Their clothes were scorched. Their pointy hats had been blown from their heads. But they weren’t wounded. They were pissed.
“No…,” Vinnie said. “They don’t go down that easily.”
“Those sons of bitches.” Jimmy leaned out of the window and fired three more blasts from his air horn, but at that range the sound waves dissipated in the wind before reaching their targets.
The juggler brothers threw everything they had at the Bozos. Vinnie swerved the car in a zigzag pattern as grenades exploded into blue fires that tore apart the exterior of the car. When they were out of grenades, the jugglers came at them with the chain saws. Jimmy pointed his air horn out the window and the noseless clown sawed it in half as he pedaled by. Then the skinny brother juggled a saw into the front of the car, cutting into the engine. Smoke poured from the hood.
The engine made a shrieking sound as Vinnie hit the gas, trying to go even faster.
“Hold on,” Vinnie said. “I’ve got an idea.”
He took a hard right and floored it.
“What’s that?” Jimmy yelled, looking at the jagged remains of his air horn.
“We’re going into The Sideshow.”
“What!” Jimmy’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Are you freaking nuts?”
“The Juggler Brothers won’t follow us in there.”
“Yeah, because they’re not stupid.”
“You got a better idea?”
“Yeah, we can put a couple bullets in our heads right now and make it easy on ourselves.”
Vinnie shook his head. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s the only choice we got.”