Bingo Ballbreaker parked the car outside Squirrels’s apartment building. His two passengers stepped out of the vehicle, keeping their distance from the angry clown.
“Come on,” Bingo said. “Melinda’s nearby. I can smell her.”
A couple of passing old women gave Bingo appalled looks when they overheard his words.
As they rode the elevator up, Bingo looked at the two men. Their clown outfits were terrible. He could see the string holding on their rubber noses, and their makeup was smeared in multiple places, especially near the sides of their mouths.
“You know dressing like that can get you killed in this neighborhood,” Bingo said, staring at them.
Red Wig broke eye contact. “Yeah, but we wanted to blend in.”
“You call that blending in?”
“It’s better than coming in without the makeup,” Red Wig said. “Vanillas, as you call us, stick out in this neighborhood and it’s not good to stick out when you’re moving bodies.”
“Well, most clowns find it offensive,” Bingo said. “You’re lucky I’m the merciful type.”
Red Wig straightened the nose on his face as they reached the top floor. When they got to Squirrels’s place, the door was unlocked.
Bingo called out as he opened the door, “You here, Squirrels?”
There was no response. The place was a mess. It had been ransacked. When they found Squirrels’s body, the scrawny clown was lying with his pants down on his bathroom floor. Somebody had shot him in the head while he was taking a leak. But unlike Bingo, his head wasn’t hard enough to stop the bullet. His brains were sprayed across the shower curtains. Bingo turned him over to make sure he was the guy he was looking for. When the identity was verified, he stuffed the clown’s tongue back in his mouth and closed his eyes.
“Sorry I doubted you, Squirrels,” Bingo said, unzipping his fly to take a leak in the brain-painted toilet on the other side of the corpse. “I guess I wasn’t the only one who got double-crossed.”
When Red Wig saw the clown, he said, “Wait a minute. Is that who I think it is?”
He looked at his partner. The partner shrugged.
Red Wig asked Bingo, “Is his real name Arlo Palazzi?”
Bingo’s urine stream trickled down onto Squirrels’s corpse as he finished relieving himself. “Yeah, why?”
The two cleaners looked at each other again. “He was our next job.”
Bingo zipped up and looked at them. “What do you mean?”
“We were paid to dispose of this clown’s body as well,” Blue Wig said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, we would’ve come here right after we finished at your place. I wasn’t paying attention to the address when we pulled up so I didn’t realize it was the same guy until we saw him.”
Bingo was surprised to hear that.
“How many other jobs were you paid to do today?”
“Four others, besides this one and yours.”
“Who were they?”
When the cleaner listed all of the names, Bingo grunted. He didn’t like what he was hearing. It complicated things quite a bit.
“You know them?” Red Wig asked.
“Yeah.” Bingo lowered his head “We all did a job together. I guess Squirrels and I weren’t the only ones to be targeted.”
“I’m sorry,” Red Wig said.
“Don’t be. They were sons of bitches, the lot of them. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. The only thing that bugs me is who would’ve done it. If the other five guys are dead, there doesn’t leave too many suspects.”
Red Wig didn’t know what to say. He just shrugged at the big clown. Blue Wig shrugged, too.
“So you were paid to take care of this body?” Bingo asked.
The cleaners nodded.
“Then I guess I’ll let you get to it,” said the clown.
“But we left our tools at your place,” Red Wig said.
“You’re professionals,” Bingo said. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. I’ll be in the kitchen. Hopefully Squirrels left something edible in this dump.”
After the cleaners finished their job and Bingo finished his ham-and-bubblegum sandwich, they went to check on the corpses of the other four clowns with whom Bingo’d done the job just to make sure it was true they all got iced.
“I figured as much,” Bingo said, once they got to the final residence.
All four were dead. If one was still alive Bingo would at least have a suspect, but with the whole crew wiped out Bingo had nothing. He had to find another answer. But he had no idea who it could possibly be. Whoever shot him had to have something to do with the heist, since their goal was obviously to take the loot all for themselves, but very few people knew anything about the job. The only two people still alive who knew about it, besides himself, were Beano Moretti, who’d set up the job, and Bingo’s capo, Vinnie Blue Nose. The thought that Vinnie or Beano would take him out for mere peanuts was ludicrous. Bingo brought in far more money than that on a regular basis. They weren’t in the business of killing off their paychecks.
Then Bingo realized there was one other person who knew about the heist: his girlfriend, Isabella Funshine. She was an exotic dancer down at Bonkers, one of the Bozo Family’s clown strip clubs. A real looker, but young and naïve, way too innocent for a place like Little Bigtop. If it weren’t for Bingo coming into her life just as she moved in six months ago, the city would have eaten her alive.
With Bingo as her boyfriend, nobody touched her. Nobody even got too close to the stage when she was dancing at work. She was protected, but in order for her to be protected Bingo had to make sure everyone in town knew that the girl was his. Yet it was a double-edged sword. Though it made sure nobody abused or took advantage of the innocent girl, it also made her a target. Anyone who wanted to get to Bingo could go through her. That had to have been what happened. Somebody got to Isabella and forced information out of her. She told them about the heist and they made their move.
“Poor girl…,” Bingo said, thinking about all the things her captors could have done to her. Even though he knew she probably sold him out to save her own skin, he still felt bad about it. She didn’t have a choice. It was all his fault. He just hoped they let her live after they were through with her.
“Come on,” Bingo said to the cleaners. “We’re going to Bonkers.”
“Bonkers?” Red Wig asked.
“A strip club.”
Blue Wig asked, “Why are we going to a strip club?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Bingo asked as he went back to his car. “Don’t you like strip clubs?”
The cleaners looked at each other as if their time with the clown would never come to an end.
“He wants us to go with him to a strip club now?” Red Wig asked his partner.
“What’s he think we are, members of his crew or something?” Blue Wig asked.
“This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Red Wig said.
But no matter how much they complained about it, they still couldn’t figure out a way to escape from their predicament.