They spent the entire night driving around, looking for Nicky Bowtie. He was no longer on the streets. They knew Nick was going to play it safe. He already knew they were after him. All he had to do was wait until their time ran out and Mr. Pogo whacked them, and he’d have nothing to worry about.
Jackie the Grump eventually got back to Hats with Nicky’s address, but no one was there when they showed up. Hats took the liberty of raiding his refrigerator and urinating on his bed, but it wasn’t much of a consolation prize.
“So what now?” Hats asked, flipping through Nicky’s vintage record collection and smashing the vinyl disks against the wall one by one.
“We wait for him to show up,” Pinky said. “He’s got to come home eventually.”
“I can’t believe we let him slip through our fingers.” Hats removed his massive hat to reveal a heavy machine gun. He aimed it at Nicky’s seventy-inch plasma screen television and opened fire, turning the rat’s entertainment center into plastic Swiss cheese.
After an hour of waiting around, Pinky’s phone rang.
“It’s Nick,” Pinky said, holding up the phone.
“Are you serious?”
Pinky answered.
“Hello?” Pinky asked.
“Hey, Pink, how’s it going?” Nicky asked, his voice friendly and chipper, as if nothing had just happened between them at all.
“Where are you?” Pinky asked.
“You don’t have to know where I am,” Nick said. “I’m not at my apartment, as you’ve probably found out by now.”
“Yeah…,” Pinky said, wondering how he knew they were at his place.
“Feel free to help yourself to a bottle of scotch, on me,” Nick said. “But if you touch my record collection I’m going to shit on your grave.”
Pinky looked over at Hats who was spray-painting the word RAT across what remained of Nicky’s record collection.
“Sure…,” Pinky said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I know you don’t have a lot of time left on this earth, so I’ll keep this short,” Nicky said. “You will not come after me again. You will not tell anybody about my secret arrangement with the police. You will do nothing but wait patiently for Mr. Pogo to come for you. Then you will die.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I asked you nicely,” Nick said.
Pinky laughed. “Not a chance.”
“Well, how about if I said that if you didn’t do as I requested your little girlfriend is going to die.”
Pinky nearly dropped the phone. “What?”
He could hear her screams in the background. Even though there was a gag in her mouth, he could still tell that it was her.
“You…” Pinky couldn’t even find the words for what he wanted to say to him. Tears pooled in his eyes. “You son of a…”
Nicky chuckled. “I know you’d never let anything bad happen to her, Pink. You’d even give your own life to save her. That’s just the kind of pathetic guy you are.”
Pinky tried to think. There had to be a way to convince him to let Taffy go.
“You won’t kill her,” Pinky said.
“Why not?”
“She’s Jojo’s daughter and the boss’s niece. If you killed her there wouldn’t be a fed in the world who could save you from their wrath.”
“That’s if I was the one who killed her, Pink. But, remember, I use sad bullets. I’d just fill her with depressors until she killed herself. The Bozos would think she was so distraught after Mr. Pogo killed her dear half-clown boyfriend that she just couldn’t go on.”
“You better not hurt her,” Pinky said.
“I won’t, if you do what you’re told.” Nicky snickered again as Taffy’s cries escalated in the background. “You will do what you’re told, won’t you, Pink?”
Pinky’s teeth were clenched. He wanted to reach through the phone and strangle Nicky to death.
“Yeah,” Pinky said, his voice going soft. “Fine. Just don’t hurt her…”
Nicky laughed out loud and hung up the phone.
“So what did he say?” Hats asked, holding a flamethrower to Nicky’s rare-comic-book collection.
“He has Taffy. We can’t go after him.”
When he heard that, Hats turned the flamethrower on the rest of Nick’s living room and burned it all down.