It took eight Carnies, including Orlando, to drag Bingo across the grounds to see their boss.
“We had nothing to do with this guy,” Clyde said to the bearded lady as they were forced to come along.
“We swear,” Caesar said. “He practically kidnapped us.”
The guy in charge went by the name of Lord Preston Fantasio. When Bingo saw him through his swollen glazed eyes as they brought him into the boss’s tent, he recognized the son of a bitch immediately. Though the guy now wore a cloak and top hat like some kind of carnival ringmaster, he wouldn’t miss those stupid muttonchops and tiny round glasses anywhere. Fantasio was the rapist security guard bastard Bingo got into the fight with twelve years ago. The clown had no idea how the jerkoff could make it to the head of the Carnie gang being the scrawny prick that he was. He must’ve just been the brains behind the Carnival Island laughy-gas operation.
“So this is the guy who killed Boris?” asked Fantasio, tapping a skull-handled cane at the clown.
“Who’s Boris?” Bingo asked.
Orlando slammed his face into the concrete floor, and then raised it back up, leaving a round clown-nose-shaped splat of blood.
“He’s the guy you killed last week,” Fantasio said. “Boris the Sword Swallower. A dear friend of mine.”
Bingo had problems with his memory of the past couple of days or so, but he remembered everything from last week. There was no way he’d killed the guy Fantasio was talking about.
“I didn’t kill any friend of yours,” Bingo said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to take credit for killing any of you Carnie pricks. But it wasn’t me.”
Then the Carnie boss saw something in Bingo’s eyes. He just now recognized him as the clown he’d gotten into a fight with twelve years ago.
“Hey, Orlando,” Fantasio said to the strong man. “Isn’t this the same clown we beat down years ago? You know, the one we couldn’t kill no matter how many times we stabbed him.”
The strong man smiled through his handlebar mustache. “Oh yeah. I think he is.”
Fantasio shoved the skull side of his cane into Bingo’s mouth. “Is that why you killed Boris? You finally got the guts to get your revenge after all these years?”
Bingo used his nose to butt the cane out of his face. “I told you, I didn’t kill the guy.”
“It’s no use denying it. Charlotte saw the whole thing.”
“Charlotte?”
“She’s the carnival’s new fortune-teller,” Fantasio said. Then he turned and called her name. “And my fiancée.”
A tall, gorgeous woman stepped into the tent and wrapped her arm around Fantasio. She was covered from head to toe in tattoos and wore an albino anaconda around her neck like a scarf. The snake slithered across her shoulders, coiling around her arms in an almost sexual way.
“Yes, my love?” the woman asked.
Her voice was familiar to Bingo.
“Is this the man who killed Boris?”
It wasn’t just her voice.
She nodded. “Yes.”
She somehow wasn’t a clown anymore, but when he looked in her eyes there was no mistaking that it was her.
“Isabella?” Bingo asked.
She pointed at him with a long, black fingernail. “He’s the bastard who killed your friend.”
Bingo didn’t understand. How could she be Isabella Funshine? Isabella was a clown and this woman was vanilla. She couldn’t have just been wearing clown makeup the whole time. He’d made love to her many times, he’d held her in his arms, he’d pinched her little round nose. There was no way she wasn’t a true flesh-and-blood clown. To imitate a clown that well she would’ve had to go through some serious cosmetic surgery. It just wasn’t possible.
“Isabella, what’s going on?” Bingo asked. He was nearly in tears. “Why are you pretending to be some Carnie whore?”
The strong man smashed his face into the ground again.
Fantasio looked over at his fiancée. “Charlotte, do you know this clown?”
“No,” she said, then spit in his face. “The only time I’ve ever seen him was in my crystal ball, the day he killed Boris.”
“Then why does he think he knows you?”
She looked at Bingo and laughed. “He must be mad. That bullet you put in him must have scrambled his brain.”
Then it all came back to Bingo. The night before, Isabella came to his apartment. He heard her voice on the intercom and buzzed her up, but when she came through his door she was no longer a clown. She pretended to be some kind of woman in distress. He sat her down on the couch, asking her a million questions about why she was dressed up as a vanilla and why she was acting that way. His back was to the door, so he didn’t notice the group of Carnies coming up behind him. He heard the first split second of a gunshot and then everything went white.
“Who the hell are you?” Bingo asked the woman. “Did you work for the Carnies this whole time?”
“I’d appreciate it if you stopped speaking to my fiancée,” Fantasio said.
“No…,” Bingo said. “You’re not with them, either, are you?”
“Tell him to stop looking at me like that,” the woman said. “I hate clowns.”
Bingo turned his eyes to the Carnie boss. “She’s playing you, just like she played me. Do you actually think she’s a real fortune-teller? Do you think she can actually see anything in the crystal ball?”
But Fantasio wouldn’t listen to a word he said. It was obvious the guy was blindly in love with her and couldn’t possibly doubt her, not even when she claimed to have actual clairvoyant powers.
“Get rid of him,” the woman cried.
Her blind lover obeyed her command.
“Gustav,” Fantasio said to the knife thrower. “Finish him.”
Gustav threw a knife at the clown, but the tip barely entered his muscled chest. It fell back out and plopped in the clown’s lap.
Bingo continued, “Or maybe she knew what happened to your friend Boris because she’s the one who killed him.”
Gustav tried again, but the second blade just bounced off the clown’s head.
“Aim for the neck!” Isabella cried.
Bingo said, “Can’t you see what’s going on, you Carnie pri—”
The third blade plunged deep into the clown’s throat. An explosion of blood sprayed from Bingo’s mouth and he went limp, falling face-first into the floor.
When the clown was dead, the two cleaners looked at each other. They assumed they were going to be next. All eyes in the room turned toward them. Caesar nearly puked, his heart was racing so much. There was an awkward silence for a few moments.
“Well?” Isabella asked the cleaners.
“Well what?” Clyde asked.
“Well, get rid of the body,” she said.
Clyde pointed at the clown, then at himself. “You want us…to get rid of the body?”
“Of course,” she said. “We hired you to do the job, now finish the fucking job.”
“Oh, of course…,” Clyde said, shaking his head.
As the two men got to work, Caesar oozed with relief. “That’s why we’ve been following him around all day. We were just waiting for him to die so we could finish the job.”
Clyde elbowed him to shut up. He wanted to grab the body and get out of there as soon as possible.
“Why did you hire outside people to do the job anyway?” Fantasio asked the tattooed woman.
“Because if your men did it they’d do a lousy job and the Bozo Family would figure out the Carnies were behind this,” she said. “You really want a war with the Bozos?”
“The Bozos ain’t nothing,” Fantasio said, wrapping his arms around his woman’s waist. “Look at how easy we took out their toughest guy. I tell you, with the two of us working together, one day we’ll be running this town. And the Bozos will be wiped off the Little Bigtop map for good.”
Charlotte fake-giggled and then kissed him. As they embraced, the snake on her shoulders coiled itself around Fantasio’s neck like a cold, fleshy noose.