There is something uniquely serene about the city late at night, almost the same way a morgue is at its most tranquil in the quiet hours after midnight. By morning, the corpses freshly made in the former would be shipped off to the latter for processing in a synergistic ballet that kept a hundred government slackers employed at the medical examiner’s office as well as contributing greatly to the state’s thriving toe tag industry.
Except for the occasional gunshot and accompanying piercing scream, plus one lonely bus explosion that was a little too close for comfort one block down, the street had remained silent for nearly an hour.
I’d reluctantly abandoned my warm bar stool and found cover in the doorway of a closed millinery shop, which gave me a clear view across the street.
It was possible I was wrong, since I’d been concentrating most of my firepower on getting loaded as I mulled over the possibility.
I knew I was on my deductive game the minute I saw the dame round the corner.
She was obviously practiced at skulking around. I figured she’d honed her skills sneaking into bedrooms to swipe dead husbands’ gold wedding bands out of dresser jewelry boxes while a partner-in-crime kept old lady homeowners distracted in the kitchen by pitching a fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime deal on driveway resurfacing.
Victorina Flapchack’s spectacular face and honkers were momentarily illuminated in both the weak green light of the half-busted neon sign outside O’Hale’s Bar and in the gently flickering blaze of the lone bus tire that had rolled into the gutter in front of said watering hole. She glanced up and down the street, completely missed me tucked away amid the window display of snazzy bowlers opposite O’Hale’s, and ducked inside the bar.
I cooled my heels in the shadows of the doorway across the street for a couple of minutes, giving her plenty of time to sneak around inside for a little reconnoitering. She wouldn’t see me pickled amongst the shuffling mummies, so I gave her a little more time to give up searching and to question Jaublowski about my whereabouts.
I figured it’d take no more than three minutes, and like clockwork the dame emerged from O’Hale’s in exactly that amount of time. At least I assumed I was up to my usual brilliant standards and that it was precisely one hundred and eighty seconds, since I suddenly realized that my watch had stopped working while in the thieving hands of Madame Danube during the tragic plastic shithouse collapse that had claimed what little there was left to the old bat’s life.
Victorina Flapchack headed back down the street in the direction from whence she’d skulked. Across the street, I bid adieu to a hundred silent bowlers that hadn’t sold since the whipped cream pie virus of 1931 killed Vaudeville. I was the stealthiest son of a bitch in town as I followed the hot little Gypsy number down the road.
I figured she was the hang-up call to O’Hale’s. She must have star six-nined from the payphone at the Big Chief Shortpants Campground, and Jaublowski had supplied her with the name of the joint where I was holding down the bar with my elbows.
My big concern was Igor Stradivarius. The dame seemed to not know where the Gypsy king was, and her interest in retrieving the Gypsy bible looked like the real deal. But I never met a knockout dame I’d trust any more than I would a professional flimflammer, and Victorina Flapchack was both wrapped up in the luckiest goddamn peasant skirt ever to swathe a human ass. I was acutely aware, as I tailed her along the post-midnight streets and past a hundred dark alleys, that I might be getting led into a bovine ambush, and so I kept one hand close to my gat, an ear out for violent moos, and (because, screw it, I hadn’t yet been squashed to death by the werebull’s prancing hooves), both eyes trained on the hypnotic hindquarters of the skulking, untrustworthy Gypsy babe.
A lack of aboveground public transportation is murder on shoe leather as well as on physical disaster areas like me. A few vacant cabs did pass by, but Miss Flapchack failed to avail herself of them, I assumed because all cabbies are thieves or struggling actors, and either one could have skills to spot a fare cheat a mile away. To the deep disappointment of my wheezing lungs, the lovely Gypsy dame also eschewed several subway entryways.
She stayed out of the moonlight, always managing to find shadows in which to prowl. I was impressed that a dame who looked like that didn’t always seek the spotlight, nor it her. Although, upon further consideration I figured avoiding scrutiny was ingrained in her from an early age. Here was a dame who from before kindergarten had to put up with interrogators shining hot lights into her playpen demanding to know where she hid all the stolen graham crackers and chocolate milk.
Despite the late hour, she managed to do a little work along the way. She beat four sidewalk Three-card Monte scammers at their own rigged games and robbed the blind owner of an all-night newsstand on her way across town.
We hoofed it for several miles, me always a half-block behind, until the Gothic spires of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral began playing hide-and-seek in the dead spaces between the growing, multistory downtown buildings.
It didn’t become apparent that I was going to church until Victorina Flapchack took the final turn on the last block and passed through the massive wrought iron gates that encircled the old, decaying stone edifice.
By the time I passed onto the grounds, she was a barely visible speck; a black shadow passing along the deep gray walls of the huge cathedral.
I figured she was maybe planning on stealing the granite cornerstone. One coat of white paint and she could show up at the church’s front door the next day claiming she was a traveling rock peddler who happened to be passing through town with a slab of marble that just happened to be the right size to replace the stolen twenty-ton granite block. The archbishop would be so desperate to keep his joint from tipping over onto the Domino’s next door that he wouldn’t notice he’d been scammed until the next time it rained and the watery latex paint ran like a pair of cheap nylons.
I passed the old church cemetery, which was wrapped in enough yellow police tape to re-bandage all eight mummies back at O’Hale’s with enough left over for Christo to lash Big Ben to Mount Rushmore. Beyond the yellow tape I saw in the moonlight that the customary tufts of untended weeds were all gone. The neglected cemetery was now a mud field decorated here and there with crooked headstones.
It was still beyond my semi-sober ability to comprehend that Detective Daniel Jenkins had been right about Igor Stradivarius. It was completely accidental, I knew, and relied on the same dumb luck that made winners out of lottery ticket losers by randomly dropping the right Monsterbucks ping-pong balls, but the fact remained that the Gypsy stiff Jenkins had charged with a crime might actually be guilty of that crime.
I calculated the odds of me getting hit in the fedora by lightning on a clear, starry night such as the one through which I was creeping, and I figured they had to be pretty much a trillion times greater than Jenkins managing to get anything right even by sheer dumb luck. I therefore kept my head low and tried not to think metallic thoughts as I slipped past the cemetery and continued deeper onto the cathedral grounds.
I briefly lost sight of Victorina Flapchack when she slipped behind the booths at the Park ‘n’ Go dispensation lanes. I figured she was busting into the penny indulgences box, but I suddenly caught sight of her slinking along twenty yards past it.
Bright rectangles of yellow light spilled from a couple of basement windows, and I briefly saw glimpses of Victorina Flapchack’s X-rated silhouette as she passed before the lights. And just like that she was gone, slipped through a side door of the cathedral.
I hustled to catch up, which wasn’t easy given my Hindenburg-level disastrous physical condition combined with the billion man march (minus 999,999,999) she’d just led me on across town.
MIDNIGHT MEETING IN CHURCH HALL
The makeshift sign was just a sheet of notebook paper covered in Saran Wrap in what I figured was a misguided attempt to keep the letters from going stale. It was taped to the big Gothic doorframe, and since it did not explicitly state that P.I. inebriates need not apply, I slipped through the door (which for some reason, and unlike Victorina Flapchack’s entry moments before, creaked like a son of a bitch for me), and into the musty hallway beyond.
A crappy, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling was like Studio 54 for every goddamn insect in the tri-state area. The bugs fluttered madly, snorting free electricity from the flickering, buzzing bulb like it was one of Bianca Jagger’s bazookas.
Another piece of notepaper thumbtacked to an ancient banister read only “MEATING” in green magic marker. An arrow pointed away from the typo and down a narrow flight of stairs.
I’d been pretty much all over the cathedral as both cop and P.I., from spires to catacombs. I already knew as I took to the groaning staircase that the archbishop rented out the hall underneath the joint for various support groups.
A dull glow emanated from an open door off to the left at the bottom of the stairs. This being church and me being the outstanding human specimen that I am, I had high hopes that some asshole do-gooder had accidentally left on the light into which decent people walked into a joyous afterlife of unlimited free booze and angelic nymphomaniacs. I was neither surprised nor crushed when I stepped into the reality of an ordinary, shitty, granite-walled church basement.
There were bingo supplies, a busted-up pew, and a few folding tables opened up against the wall over near the door. One wall was stacked with the disassembled frames of carnival booths that were only deployed aboveground for the annual St. Regent’s Holy Moley Carnival, an annual festival that celebrated the displacement and repatriation to a mile underneath Tulsa of the indigenous Mole-Men who had inhabited the ground into which the cathedral’s foundation had been sunk.
A bunch of rickety folding chairs were set up in the middle of the room, with an ass positioned on nearly every one.
The men and women in the room looked pretty ordinary, aside from myself and Victorina Flapchack, with both of us being, frankly, such near-perfect representations of the human species I was afraid just being seen in the same place together we were at risk of having some government agency toss a net over us, drag us to NASA and launch us on a rocket to one of those Garden of Eden planets to start a more perfect human race.
Miss Flapchack’s lovely ass graced a chair in the second row, and since she wasn’t looking back at me I slid my wretched carcass into the last row and hunkered down beside a fat slob whose main distinguishing features were five o’clock shadow, a Coors T-shirt and an air of utter misery. He was sweating like a bastard through two of the above which presumably substantially contributed to the third.
The meeting was already in progress when we arrived, and a scrawny guy who was six and a half feet tall and weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds was standing at a podium in front of the room looking like a disheveled plastic drinking straw.
“I was really, really tempted last night,” the skinny jerk announced to the room full of strangers. “It was my brother. He says I don’t need to come here. We started when we was teenagers. We thought it wasn’t nothing, you know? How was we supposed to know we’d get hooked? I mean, it was our old man’s fault.”
“Now,” a random voice chided. “We don’t play the blame game here.”
“But it was his fault,” the scrawny bastard pleaded. “He left the liquor cabinet unlocked all the time. That’s where he kept the incantation. He was always turning himself into a weregiraffe right in front of us. We didn’t know it was wrong. Our mom couldn’t take it. She took off after he recited it at a family cookout. Embarrassed the hell out of her. I’ll never forget her and my Uncle Charlie trying to toss a rope up around his neck to get him in the car, but he just galloped off. Stripped the leaves off half the trees in the park. Owed the city a bundle for that, but by then he was spending almost all day every day as a giraffe. Got killed while in giraffe form. Coroner said he misjudged the height of them power lines. We went broke buying the coffin.” The scrawny bastard’s eyes welled up with tears. “Eight feet of mahogany just for his neck.”
The skinny speaker’s ridiculous tale of family woe made clear what the scrap of cellophane-wrapped paper upstairs had not.
Were-Animals Anonymous had been founded nearly a hundred years ago by some poor slob who’d been addicted to transforming into a whelk and who realized he’d hit rock bottom when he woke up covered in butter on a Frenchman’s fork. Local chapters of WAA held meetings in church halls around the country, and they were always busiest around the time of the waxing moon. I found a WAA pamphlet on the empty seat next to me, on the cover of which was printed the famous Were-Animals Anonymous prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept that I shouldn’t change into an animal,
The courage to not change into an animal,
And the wisdom to know that I probably shouldn’t change into an animal.
As covert plagiarists, the folks at WAA were pretty much for shit.
I kept a sharp eye on Victorina Flapchack up in the second row. She appeared to be nervously but methodically checking out everybody in the room, possibly looking for Stradivarius and not knowing that he’d been arrested or that he’d escaped pretty dramatically from his shackles and would be mooing around town until daybreak. She missed me, slouched down as I was beside a wheezing mountain of fat that was halfway to dugong without the need to strap on a size triple-X magic belt.
I actually couldn’t imagine she really expected to find Igor Stradivarius at a were-animal support group. The bastard-turned-bull who’d tried to pin me with his horn like a butterfly to a hunk of corkboard hadn’t struck me as the twelve-step type. Maybe she knew something about the Gypsy king that I hadn’t been able to observe, running as I had been in unbridled terror from the murderous horns of the thoroughly evil SOB.
The skinny speaker left the podium still blubbering, but with words of much encouragement from the ass menagerie.
“Do we have any other volunteers…someone want to go next?” a soothing voice purred from somewhere in the front row.
I felt the earth move under my keister and I realized too late that the mountain of flab beside me had hauled itself from the couple of half-crippled folding chairs which it had been intimately abusing and risen to a pair of massively jiggling legs.
All eyes turned to the behemoth, including -- because life must have suddenly realized that things hadn’t been going completely to shit for me in ten whole minutes -- the beautiful brown orbs of Victorina Flapchack. Her gaze shifted immediately from the aisle full of flabby bastard in steaming sweatpants to the comparatively insignificant speck that was me. Her flawless Gypsy face became annoyed, and she immediately got to her feet and came down to hover over me in the back row.
“Crag Banyon. Did you follow me here?” she demanded.
“I’m Banyon’s twin brother,” I ingeniously bluffed. “There was too much handsome to waste on one of us. Pardon me for ogling your mesmerizing honkers, but since we only just met I’m appreciating them for the very first time.”
“I wanted to talk to you about the book, Mr. Banyon,” she insisted. Unless she figured the P.I. me shared the details of his cases with my nonexistent twin, I’d wasted a truly topnotch cover story.
At the front of the hall, the slob who had vacated the seats beside me had managed to wedge a good-sized chunk of himself behind the podium.
“My name is Tony,” Tony the fatso announced to the group, deploying a hilariously incongruous falsetto that set every stray mutt in the neighborhood howling. “It’s been sixty-two days since I last turned into a chipmunk.”
“Hi, Tony!” the crowd enthusiastically screamed back at the fattest goddamn chipmunk in the history of the universe.
Alone in the back, the babe with the cleavage you could spelunk down leaned in close. “We must go somewhere private,” Victorina Flapchack insisted. She grabbed me by the wrist and attempted to haul me to my feet.
“Sweetheart, I just walked halfway across town. I did so mostly sober, after a nightmare day that earned me the right to be staggering only partway across town hours from now entirely drunk. If you want me to move, rent a forklift.”
I crossed my arms to illustrate that her unstoppable Gypsy force was no match for my immovable slack-assed object.
She sat down with a hell of a lot less reluctance than I’d have had on one of the partially crumpled seats Tony the lardass chipmunk had been using as a folding suppository.
“You would not answer me on the phone, Mr. Banyon,” the dame said. “I need to know if you have located the book.”
The intensity of her gaze would have burned holes clear through to the back of my head had her eyes been lasers, so it was pretty lucky for me she hadn’t been outfitted with one of those bionic implants like that astronaut-spy who crashed his plane a few years back. (Not that the eye did him much good. Yes, he could see danger approaching from a million miles away, but the robot legs he was outfitted with only worked in slow motion. He was running his heart out at two miles an hour when alien Bigfoot walked up and unplugged the works. The furry bastard made off with the eye, legs and one robot arm tied up inside the pants of the astronaut-spy’s own red velour jogging suit. It was the biggest national intelligence scandal since that Methodist gibbon from another dimension stole the H-bomb plans from Los Alamos and sold them to Quaker Oats.)
“What’s so important about this book to you?” I asked. “I mean, personally, not the fact that it’s loaded with all the scams that are fit to print. Because, sister, I saw you in action tonight on your way over here. You managed to swindle and/or steal a couple hundred bucks in a couple dozen blocks. You don’t need the book. You won’t go hungry as long as type 2 diabetes keeps producing enough blind newspaper peddlers.”
She took a moment to consider whether or not she could be honest with me. Or maybe honesty in Victorina Flapchack was similar to an appendix in good Christian boys and girls: it just didn’t goddamn work.
The tension at last oozed like cold honey from her shoulders and she exhaled warm resignation into my face.
“Our bible contains more than that which you were told, Mr. Banyon,” the sexy Gypsy dame said. “It foretells the arrival on Earth of the greatest con artist the world has ever known. The Scammessiah will lead my people into a new age, one in which we drive cars that we actually own and dwell in houses that we pay for.” She closed her eyes and began repeating something she’d obviously heard many times sitting around a campfire made from stolen wood lit with hot matches. “‘And those who live in this great age will have jobs and verily shall go forth to PTA meetings, and the straights will not know them for they will be like unto them. And then, once they have been accepted as Italian or maybe Jewish, the Scammessiah of whom the prophets foretold will guideth his people to work the biggest, most fantastic con on them since the Snake swindled the Garden of Eden all to himself with a little fancy patter and one Whole Foods apple.’”
She opened her eyes, a look of beatific religious tranquility shining forth for all the world to see. Except the world currently had its eyes trained on some fat slob at the front of the room, so I was stuck picking up the slack.
“Oh,” said I. “Goodbye.”
I got up and left.
There was a stir taking place over by the refreshment table. An alpaca in a pair of khaki slacks had staggered down the stairs and was grazing at a tin deli plate of stale Chips Ahoys! Some of the human attendees were trying to coax the werealpaca to take off his magic alpaca pelt, which evidently hadn’t been too magical for the real alpaca to whom it had previously belonged who was currently, presumably, running around naked somewhere in Peru.
Victorina Flapchack grabbed my arm before I reached the door.
“You do not believe me,” the dame said.
“That’d be my default mode with you, sister, and that goes double if you were looking to seal coat my driveway. However, this suddenly sounds more like a religious thing than just finding a book, and despite what our current surroundings might suggest I generally avoid religiosity. That isn’t a knock against those who dabble in it, it’s just that I’ve had some bad experiences with deities.”
“So you are not going to help us after all?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t say that because I probably can’t,” I told her with zero enthusiasm. “Thanks to the elf who runs my life far more efficiently than I ever have -- or, frankly, want -- that cash Madame Volga and your elders paid me is probably already in the hands of the bastard plutocrats of the electric company, who are men so without scruples or souls that they actually expect payment for keeping my lights on. But as far as your interest in the book goes, I’m not interested. I’ll do the job I was hired to do and place it in the crooked hands of Madame Volga. Then I’ll celebrate at either Chuck E. Cheese or that dump of a bar you chased me out of. I’ve got a pair of rigged dice in my pocket at all times to help me with difficult life choices.”
I took a step for the door, this time determined to actually pass through it, but as lousy luck would have it, I flung it open dramatically at the precise moment somebody on the outside was trying to stomp in.
I’m not generally the Sir Walter Raleigh type. As far as I’m concerned, Gallant is just a patsy who folds his laundry and takes out the garbage in Highlights. But I’m the goddamn Duke of Good Manners when the bastard who reaches the intersection at the exact same time as me is a gigantically muscled bull with a mouthful of vicious teeth like yellow slate roof shingles, murder in its malevolent bull eyes, and hot air pouring from its flaring nostrils like a couple of men’s room hand dryers.
The Igor Stradivarius werebull huffed at the inconvenience of having to kill somebody extra on its way into the room, which delay would slow it down for all of half a second. Then it saw who it was standing two feet away from it on the other side of the wide open doorway, and its bloodshot eyes went wide.
“Mooo!” the werebull roared.
The air became a blast furnace thanks to the bellowing heat that belched from the behemoth’s wide open mouth. So mighty was the wind from the werebull’s powerful lungs that my fedora would have been blown off my head had I not wisely taken a firm grip and held it in place. Also, I was already running away from the door at a mach 2 sprint that would have left Usain Bolt looking like I’d nailed his Nikes to the floor.
“Meeting adjourned! Meeting adjourned!” I advised at the top of my lungs as I ran.
The thunderous crash behind me shook the granite foundation of St. Regent’s. Two hundred year-old dust and mortar busted loose from between stone slabs.
I glanced back to see the werebull backing away from the door, the frame of which looked more rickety than it had a moment before but was still standing. I caught a glimpse of Igor Stradivarius’ filthy laundry dangling from the monster’s horns before the bull took a second, raging charge at the doorway.
The ancient floor beneath my fleeing feet was still rocking with the aftershocks of the werebull’s first run at the door when the second crash nearly flipped me on my ass.
Over and over, the werebull slammed its head and horns into the thick wall that separated the hallway from the meeting room, apparently caring very little about the severe walloping it was giving what was still technically the Gypsy king’s cranium as well as the soft wad of gray matter rattling around inside it. Another charge at the wall loosened granite slabs. Huge stones began to separate from one another, like a kid in a carriage nudging the other side of a stack of Triscuit boxes at the corner market.
At first, there was a delayed reaction among the WAA members to the arrival of the werebull, who was literally crashing their meeting. The members who were over near the refreshment table grabbing Chips Ahoys! from the alpaca were closest to the door. They stood there with their mouths hanging wide open in shock while the cookies they’d managed to salvage slipped like stale, brown poker chips from between their fingers.
Up at the front of the room, the fat slob still wedged behind the podium had lost the crowd as completely as he had the sight of his own genitalia thirty years before.
Faces had snapped around at the first of the thunderous, world-ending crashes to issue from the back of the room. Faces bloomed with horror, which might have been appropriate to the occasion, but wouldn’t be useful in stopping a huge bull horn from sticking them up the ass and shaking them around the room like meat Popsicles.
The WAA members apparently didn’t hear my “meeting adjourned” announcement as I flew up the aisle between the rows of chairs, the tails of my trench coat flapping insanely in my wake, a fact I attributed to most of them being preoccupied with shitting their folding chairs.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear the first time!” I screamed, as full-throated as my wheezing lungs would allow. “Meeting a-goddamn-journed!”
A cathedral-rattling “MOO!” sounded from outside the room. The half-retreated form of the werebull was charging across the hallway once more, growing terrifyingly large as it closed in on the door. It landed against the solid granite wall with yet another horrific crash that reverberated like a sonic boom throughout the building and most of the rest of the neighborhood. The first slab of granite finally broke away and dropped like a Caterpillar engine block to the floor. A long, exploratory horn poked through the newly-formed opening, waving the flag of Igor Stradivarius’ grass-stained T-shirt at the crowd.
The horn retreated and a single, huge eye peered through the opening, blinked once, then vanished. Through the wobbling doorframe, the werebull could be seen backing far across the basement hallway once again.
When pandemonium breaks out it’s never a joyous occasion. I’ve had it explode around me more times than I comfortably like to contemplate, and in the midst of the chaos I’ve never heard anybody cheerfully exclaiming, “Hey, get a load of all this swell pandemonium.” When it happens, it’s generally a hell of a lot of running and screaming and pretty much a concentrated burst of the very worst human behavior. Like the Bataan Death March sped up to look like the closing credits of Benny Hill.
When the delayed panic in the basement room of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral finally split open at the seams, I was suddenly caught in the middle of the L.A. riots inside Best Buy at four a.m. Black Friday morning.
Men and women jumped to their feet, knocking back folding chairs and scrambling over one another in a mad dash for the exit.
Then came the sudden mass realization that the only exit in the death trap was the entrance through which the giant werebull had by this point widened enough to successfully wedge into the room half its head and one huge horn, on the end of which dangled a pair of filthy blue jeans. The bull snorted and the head retreated back into the hallway as the werebull backed up to take another run at the collapsing wall.
By that point I had already made it across the room, despite having to vault a bunch of panicked WAA members leaping to their feet directly in my path, as well as having to duck suddenly airborne chairs that seemed to be zeroing in on my pretty mug like I was Geraldo.
With no other doors, the reaction of a brave he-man would have been to plant his rigid back against the wall, foregoing a blindfold while puffing a Marlboro and stoically awaiting the end. Lucky for me, I’m the biggest coward in the history of the human race. Stoicism in the face of death is for people who don’t have anything to live for, and I had a bar stool that loved me. My four-legged friend back at O’Hale’s had grown accustomed to my ass, and would no doubt wind up like one of those brokenhearted dogs that sleeps on the grave of its master until the day we are finally united in drunk heaven, and I could never be so cruel to such a loyal piece of wobbly furniture.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but I find that being terrified shitless works pretty okay too.
The stack of disassembled carnival booths was leaning up against the far wall. I grabbed one of the bare frames and slammed it at an angle up against the wall. It was every man for himself, and since I was the only man in the room who’d figured out how to get the hell out, I was first up my makeshift ladder.
The rectangular basement windows past which I had seen Victorina Flapchack glide while I was stalking her through the grounds of St. Regent’s were eight feet up. I’d scrambled only halfway to freedom when a lone, sexy voice cried out behind me.
“Mr. Banyon!”
How Victorina Flapchack managed to make herself heard over both the panic from the WAA members and the systematic disassembling of the two hundred year old granite basement wall by the head and horns of a rampaging werebull, I had no idea. She probably had a stolen megaphone stashed down her cleavage.
At that moment, I hated the dame more than nearly any other skirt on the planet, with the only exception being my ex-wife, who had once stabbed me in the shoulder with a knitting needle for the crime of giving her a pair of knitting needles for Christmas and advising her to knit her goddamn mouth shut.
I figured when the werebull showed up at the front door that Victorina Flapchack had lured me into a diabolically clever trap, and that all her talk about the Gypsy bible and her long-awaited Scammessiah was just stalling for time. When I glanced down to see if she was close enough to use her head to play kick the can on my way out the window, I found a dame just as terrified as me (which was saying a lot, as I was born with a yellow racing stripe up my spine like some kids come with a prehensile tail).
“Please,” she begged.
In dramatic punctuation to her entreaty, the werebull chose that moment to burst through the wall.
Half-ton chunks of granite exploded in every direction across the basement floor. The werebull came stumbling in over the ruins, a trickle of blood glistening black on its broad forehead and a murderous, albeit semi-concussed, gleam in its eyes. It shook its head to bat away the cobwebs and dust. Chunks of ancient mortar flipped from the dark fur of a head as big as a Volkswagen. The motion flicked Stradivarius’ dangling laundry into its own face like the tips of a couple of damp towels, which ladled yet another layer of rage on top of the seven-layer cake fury it already had going.
Not just the alpaca showed up at the WAA meeting prepared to fall off the wagon. The basement of St. Regent’s was suddenly a cross between Kent State and Barnum & Bailey as panicked men and women yanked out belts, pelts and animal incantations.
The alpaca in the casual slacks was the first to buy it. The wall was still falling as the panicked were-animal tried an end run around the stumbling bull. It wound up impaled on the dirty T-shirt horn. With an angry jerk of its head, the bull sent the midget llama sailing. There was a furry blur and a sickening splat, and the werealpaca was suddenly a spectacularly gory, Dockers-clad bug on a windshield on the far wall of the basement room.
“Moo!”
The werebull’s triumphant roar rattled the window pane before me, which I was in the process of smashing the hell out of with my elbow. The monster’s head instantly snapped around to the sound of shattering glass.
“Yes, of course,” I groused as I picked up the pace and rapidly knocked away the jagged shards of remaining glass. “A collapsing stone wall behind it; a menagerie of transforming were-bastards barking, howling and chirping all around it; Chips Ahoys! thudding to the floor; and he hears one goddamn breaking window.”
I was balanced precariously at the top of the wooden frame of a fried dough booth, which I was deeply aware could be knocked out from under me by one sweeping bull horn. Below me, Victorina Flapchack was in the line of fire, terrified and frozen at the bottom of my rickety carnival ladder.
Clearly chivalry wasn’t dead, and at that moment I would have liked to devote some serious time to tracking down and murdering the rotten bastard. Instead, I sighed, which I didn’t really have time for, but what the hell since I was about to die anyway.
“Shake a leg, sister,” I said. “And a little jiggling of the rest of your anatomy would be nice, seeing as how it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever see.”
Wholly against my better judgment, I flung a hand down and hoisted the Gypsy babe up the framed wall of my carnival booth.
“Fast would be better,” I suggested, when her peasant skirt snagged a nail and she took a second we didn’t have to tear it free. “I’d prefer that I not end the night with my head stomped flat like a plastic port-a-shitter.”
“Moooo!” the werebull exclaimed across the room. It harpooned a frightened dachshund in the ass to emphasize how invested it was in killing me.
The yipping dog ran bleeding through the legs of the behemoth and fled out the remains of the door to limping freedom.
A middle-aged dame finished her transformation into a cat and managed an agile series of hops along the length of the werebull’s right horn. The werecat did an incredibly graceful feline leap to the floor where it was promptly flattened to road kill.
The horns lowered and the werebull charged. A few flicks of the head left, then right sent half-transformed were-people flying in both directions. The floor shook, my bladder seriously considered evacuating the building, and if the entire world wasn’t actually about to come to an end it was doing a great goddamn Rich Little impression of doomsday.
As I was shoving Victorina Flapchack’s lovely ass through the busted-out window, the charging bull got its feet tangled up in a couple of folding chairs. The metal chairs didn’t stop it, but they did slow it down long enough for me to get the Gypsy dame out of the room. While I was copping what might be my final feel on Earth, a frantic chicken was suddenly airborne beside me, flapping its white wings and showering my coat with feathers appropriate to my level on the Kinsey bravery scale.
The wall against which I was leaning shook and I felt my carnival booth begin to slide out from underneath me. I felt the first gust of warm air from the charging werebull’s nostrils as I grabbed onto the window frame and did a deft flip of the legs…
…which naturally missed, since I’m not goddamn Mary Lou Retton.
The booth slipped and fell, and I was left scrambling against the wall for an instant before my toe found a blessed crack in the saintly granite. I heard the sound of carnival wood being splintered beneath rampaging hooves even as I shoved myself through the window. I rolled desperately into the cool night air on a bed of glass that somehow managed not to puncture a hundred holes in my battered carcass.
Or maybe the glass shards were just deferring to the big gun.
A bull horn suddenly shot out the basement window like a pointed battering ram, passing an inch across my chest. I flattened myself on the ground and gave the sincerest prayer that had ever been made on the grounds of St. Regent’s, hoping like hell that whatever deity kept its impressively decaying spires aloft would see to it that Euclidean geometry was on my side.
The werebull jabbed a few times, just whiffling the front of my shirt but, thanks to the placement of the window and the solidness of the sill, couldn’t get the angle quite right to murder me. The horn retreated and after a silent moment when it felt less unsafe to roll up and grab a peek inside the basement, I did so. I found myself staring deeply into a pair of the most malevolent bovine eyes since Oprah.
The werebull and I were practically nose-to-nose as it stared out at me lying on the ground in front of the basement window. Streams of hot air from a bunch of furious, impotent exhales washed over me, stinking like a damp meadow.
I didn’t know how much of Igor Stradivarius was looking at me from out of those eyes. I sensed more cunning than intelligence, but the same could have been said about the Gypsy king in scrawny human form.
There was blood on the T-shirt that was hanging on his left horn, and up close I was able to see dry, crusted streaks on the side of its head near the left ear where I’d plugged it twice back at the cop station.
A hand was suddenly tugging my wrist. The werebull’s gaze refocused along with mine on the crouching form of Victorina Flapchack.
“We must go,” the dame urgently insisted, bouncing her enticing jugs around a few inches from my face, either to emphasize her point or to give me a fatal heart attack.
I didn’t know if the werebull got what she’d said, but all at once there was a great humid flood of reeking barnyard air. The eyes vanished from the basement window. Through the opening, I saw the werebull retreating back across the ruins of the Were-Animals Anonymous meeting. Snakes, lizards, a pony, and a couple of dogs darted from the big beast’s path. A hugely obese chipmunk couldn’t waddle out of the way in time and became a fat, red smear as the bull stomped back out, still wearing Stradivarius’ ragged boots on its rear hooves, through the hole it had made in the wall. With a swish of its tail, it darted into the hallway and was gone.
The unseen behemoth was no doubt thundering up the stairs to street level, the level on which I was current leveled. Victorina Flapchack was correct that a hasty, pusillanimous retreat was in the best interest of both our asses.
I hopped to my feet as quickly as my various contusions and creaking bones would allow, grabbed the dame by the arm, and ran like mad along the deeply shadowed side of the cathedral. There was a crash and an angry moo somewhere around a distant corner, but by then I’d already found a side entrance. The ground was shaking at the approach of the stampeding bull as the sexy Gypsy dame and I slipped inside the church.
The werebull pounded past the door, realized its mistake, and doubled back. The earth-shaking got closer once more. The bull didn’t pause its charge, but immediately slammed the wall separating us from it.
It might have figured it would have as easy a time as it had bringing down the basement wall. However, the main granite walls of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral were nowhere near as flimsy as the interior granite walls. It pounded, pounded and, for good measure, pounded again, but the thud of forehead on rock scarcely registered inside.
The werebull was still slamming futilely on the exterior wall as I led Victorina Flapchack through the transept to the crossing at the middle of the cathedral. It was so dark that we nearly ran into the large shadow of a derelict car that had apparently busted down during Sunday services and been devoutly abandoned by its owner.
I led the dame to the smaller east transept and we hustled up a set of rock-hewn steps so narrow that not even the most determined werebull could climb them.
I burst out onto the roof just in time to see the dark shape of the Stradivarius werebull circling the west front of the cathedral.
If it knew we were a mile above its horns it didn’t let on. The big, dumb beast seemed only to be looking for a way inside. There were no more earsplitting moos. A few angry huffs rose up through the dark night as the werebull sniffed the foundation of the great, stone monstrosity. It moved quietly as it slipped alongside the steep wall and vanished back around the lady chapel on the cathedral’s east side.
There was not the sound of a single siren anywhere in the vicinity, which probably meant that either the WAA members weren’t interested in calling the cops in order to hold firm to their second A, or that the survivors were clinging to their ferret and flamingo forms out of fear, and had no desire to revert to human form and search for their cell phones in their abandoned clothes. Either way, it looked like I was stuck for the night.
Moonlight shone between the spires and washed over my trench coat, casting a wretched, rumpled P.I. shadow across the buttress outside the triforium staircase.
“Is he gone?” Victorina Flapchack’s frightened voice asked. The dame hadn’t followed me out on the roof. It wasn’t, I now knew, out of fear of heights.
She was hiding out inside the archway door, content to bestow on me the honor of being her personal narrator. I could scarcely see the outlines of her perfect face and knobs, so swamped was she by heavy shadows.
She had made sure she’d stayed in the shadows all night long, from when I first watched her sneaking up the sidewalk to O’Hale’s Bar, all the way across town to the St. Regent’s WAA meeting. It was only the latter at which I pretty much figured out why. Downstairs, when her pretty head had been swiveling around, she hadn’t been looking for Igor Stradivarius after all, but to see if anybody at the meeting might recognize her.
“No, he is not gone,” I informed the hiding Gypsy dame. “He’s the opposite of gone. He is, I suspect, going to remain not-gone for the rest of the night. He is currently circling the cathedral, and -- oh, look -- he’s just reemerged around the west front. I’m only glad I’ve misplaced my car again, because once he realizes there’s no way he’s getting up here in that form he’d probably take out his frustration on something that I love, and a chronically lost automobile that I haven’t seen in months is the closest thing I’ve got to family to tie me to this miserable plain of existence.”
The werebull passed through the night beneath us. I leaned forward when I heard the distant exhale of a frustrated moo.
“Ah, now he’s parked his bottom round directly below us and is staring up at me with those malicious bull eyes of his. At least I think he is, as he’s mostly just a very large, sinister shadow. The moonlight isn’t reaching the spot where he’s presumably glowering like hell. Which reminds me.”
I reached into the doorway and grabbed Victorina Flapchack by her thin wrist, which so startled her that she didn’t do what I would have done under the same circumstances; namely shoved me off the cathedral’s battlements. I yanked the dame out onto the catwalk and into the full wash of brilliant moonlight.
Before she realized what was going on it was already too late.
With the light of the moon full upon her -- which, dim as I am, even I eventually noticed she had been successfully avoiding the past two evenings -- there was no stopping what happened next.
The first thing that appeared was the horns. They sprouted out of her black hair like a couple of animated head bumps from a 1940s Warner Brothers cartoon.
The spine stretched out long just like Stradivarius’ had in the interrogation room back at the cop station, but unlike the Gypsy king Victorina Flapchack remained upright during her metamorphosis. In an instant, the dame was suddenly looming two feet taller than me and teetering on the stone Cathedral pathway high above the city. She weaved in place as her hands rapidly transformed into hoofs. Her face reformed, her nostrils widened, and the whole mess pulled like soft taffy to become a snout.
The formation of her udders and the anatomical rearranging that was necessary to relocate the corresponding bits of human anatomy was nearly enough to put me off both dames and dairy for life. I figured I could only reasonably be expected to give up one, and I opted for door number two since milk doesn’t mix well with bourbon and misery.
I saw now that her loose-fitting peasant blouse and skirt were perfectly suited for the change, stretching wide at waist and shoulder to accommodate the transformation from hot Gypsy babe to Guernsey.
Unlike Stradivarius, Victorina Flapchack didn’t have a pair of unlaced work boots to expand along with her budding hooves, but before her shoes were shredded she managed to kick them off with her toes. One of the shoes skittered only a few feet away, landing in the armpit of a flying buttress. The other went right off the edge of the roof, and must have dropped right on the werebull’s head if the sudden, soft burst of irritated mooing that rose up from the depths of the night was any indication.
A cow in a peasant skirt wobbling upright on its back legs is an amazingly hilarious sight, and I planned to look up talent agents in the yellow pages in the morning to get her booked on The Zombie Ed Sullivan Show. She teetered on her hind legs for a moment, balancing like a trained poodle on a beach ball, then ruined the whole act by pitching forward and landing square on all four of her newly-formed hooves.
Victorina Flapchack’s eyes were pretty much the last to go.
The dame’s big, human brown eyes widened and darkened, shifting over to either side of her head. The fear and pleading in those desperate orbs turned into a dull lack of understanding, and she stared at me not with the homicidal gaze of the bastard bull downstairs, but as if I were nothing more than a farmhand or a fence post or the Sultan of Brunei. Who knows what goes through a goddamn cow’s brain?
Her ears sprouted long and flopped down in the traditional bovine manner, and the transformation was complete.
“Moo?” asked the bewildered cow, née Victorina Flapchack.
“Yes, moo,” I replied. “Very, in fact increasing exponentially, goddamn moo.”
I looked around for a cozy spot on the cold, solid rock at the top of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral and, a bull down below who wanted to murder me and a puzzled cow in a dress at my side, lay down to await the dawn of a day that, simply going by the law of averages, would almost certainly have to play out better than the last shitty one.