No matter how intensely somebody desires to bump you off, if they need help moving the furniture they’ll enlist you to haul around the sectional sofa before they put a bullet in your brain. In the case of the pair of Gypsy elders, they were too lazy to do their own heavy lifting, so I was spared immediate electrocution in order to schlep around the unconscious and curvaceous carcass of Victorina Flapchack.
The old coots had me carry the dame around the giant drive-in movie screen and up along the fence that lined the road that ran alongside the parking area.
A bunch of cows that, for all I knew, could have been the lady president of Excelsior Klown Kollege, the dame from Starbucks who poured out the latte on my shoe that one time, or the Andrews sisters, stared blankly a foot away from my elbow as I hauled the napping dame to the old Tri-City Drive-In offices.
The building was small, with a flat roof and one collapsed wall that opened at the back into the woods. There was water damage, missing windows, moss growing all over a rusted file cabinet that was the only remaining piece of original drive-in furniture, and a Gypsy king in a crummy T-shirt and jeans sitting in a tartan chair, the back of which bore the stenciled legend “Property of the Ramada Inn.”
Igor Stradivarius didn’t seem like a criminal genius who was about to slaughter a couple thousand innocent people in order to turn a quick buck. The ruler of the Gypsies looked more like a twitchy conman who’d spent nearly nine decades barely one step away from getting his emaciated ass tossed in the hoosegow for the rest of his miserable life.
“Put her down there, Banyon,” Stradivarius commanded.
He indicated a spot on the floor in front of a TV that was decorated with a strip of masking tape that read, “Property of Pauper Memorial and Rug Remnant Factory Hospital.” The TV was on but tuned to GNN, the Gypsy News Network, rather than the NASA moon channel that was drawing boffo ratings with the herd out in the parking lot.
“I’m usually not much for following orders,” I said, “but seeing as my arms are tired and I’ve got two cattle prods aimed at my delicate posterior.”
I dumped sleeping Victorina Flapchack to the rotting, spongy vinyl tile floor.
“Thank you,” the Gypsy king said. “Now, before we kill you, do you need your driveway resealed? We were doing your neighbor’s driveway just down the street and have some material left over in the truck that we will have to throw out if we do not use it up today. We can do a great job for you at half the price. All our work is guaranteed.”
Stradivarius, along with the two assholes with the cattle prods, leaned in eagerly.
“I live in an apartment and I misplaced my car which I hate anyway and which recently turned up in church but which I deliberately ignored and hope is currently lost again, this time forever,” I explained. “So, no thanks.”
“A pity,” Stradivarius said. The old bastard leaned back in his stolen Ramada Inn chair and steepled his fingers to his chin. His dirty digits were smeared with ink, driveway sealer, and whatever was lurking up his hairy nostrils where his index fingers slipped. He proceeded to tell my future, which was pretty much as shitty as non-clairvoyant I could have predicted.
“You will be turned into a werebull,” he said. “Do not think you will escape once you are in that form. We will first knock you unconscious with the prods, then when I am finished with the biting, we will pry your eyelids open and force your subconscious mind to watch.” There was a TV in the room, turned off, and the Gypsy king gestured to the screen with a filthy hand. “Immediately after the transformation we will transform you one more time, this time into hamburger to be sold with the rest outside tomorrow. As for her, she will be taken out to join the doomed. Half-price beef. You will not get that kind of deal with the markup they give you in a supermarket.”
The old bastard couldn’t stop spinning the scam, pitching to a guy who, if the king of the goddamn Gypsies had his way, would be getting the shank end of the deal.
“Why kill the dame?” I asked. “Knobs like that deserve a fate better than brisket. This isn’t me being chivalrous or stalling for time, I’m genuinely curious. After all, she’s one of yours. Although, granted, a trillion times better looking than the hideous old skanks who run your tarot tents for the tourists, but one of yours all the same.”
Stradivarius’ withered face puckered. “She has been asking too many questions, relentlessly digging around for our bible since it mysteriously disappeared.”
“You mean since you stole it,” I said.
“Slander against all Gypsies,” their thief king said. “Just because I am a Gypsy you automatically think I am a common criminal.”
“I’d say the two thousand-strong chorus of moos outside your window takes you out of the common category.”
The merest hint of accusation elicited an instinctive, rehearsed verbal diarrhea from offended professional conman Igor Stradivarius.
“What? You are not the police. They are real cows. I have a bill of sale. No, I do not know his last name. He was from Texas. Billy or Bobby something. I do not need to respond to these baseless allegations. This is a witch hunt. Do you have a warrant? I want a lawyer. The driveway was like that when we started.”
The Gypsy king was also, apparently, a senile old moron. The ancient buzzard stood. The chair under his ass creaked nearly as much as his elderly bones. His watery, bloodshot eyes dragged over the sleeping dame on the moldy floor.
“The bible needed a little…revision, that is all,” he said, hauling his brain out of the muddy ditch where it had gone off the road. “But she. The child has been stirring up the young females of the tribe for months, constantly reminding them that this is the foretold age of the coming of the Scammessiah.”
“I take it Godot isn’t showing up on schedule.”
Stradivarius tipped his head and picked with the tip of his tongue at a bit of food wedged between his yellowed front teeth. “Weeelll, it had always been planned that when the time came we would tell everyone that there was a mistake with the math and that he would not come for another hundred years, give or take. It would be up to the Gypsies of the future to worry about it then, probably in wagons with laser beams on the roofs. But this young one would not let it go. I had the cattle deal I was setting up at the time, and her obsession with the bible, which was still in my wagon, and her fixation on the coming of the Scammessiah was a distraction within the tribe we could not afford. The elders were forced to do something, so we came up with stealing the bible and hiring a private detective to find it. We never thought you would. And you still have not.”
He seemed pretty damned smug with himself.
I rolled a hand in the air to speed things along.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Can we get this show going? I’ve got a date with a hibachi. You took the bible to buy time. These guys were playing along with the show, so that’s why they put Madame Volga up to hiring me. You’re probably going to make up some lie that the only reason you took the bible was to keep it safe from Miss Flapchack. You are, in fact, going to frame the troublemaking dame for everything, and when this beef scam blows up you’ll be eight states from here blacktopping some old widow’s driveway with a box of Duncan Hines devil’s food cake mix and hoping like hell her twenty-eight year old cat doesn’t lick the frosting off before you’re out of the county. Basically, you and the male elders are scamming the rest of your tribe, mostly the young and the dames, which, if the scammers fall for the scam, shame on them.”
By the looks on the lousy poker mugs of Stradivarius and the pair of cattle prod elders, I’d pretty much scored a bull’s eye.
“P.I. Quarterly, the magazine for pathetic bastards in my miserable profession, has a back page for the year’s best on-the-job deductions. I’ll be sure to have my office elf submit me for the December issue. In the meantime, won’t it be difficult to retrieve your bible from where you’ve cleverly stashed it without this?”
I held aloft the key I’d lifted from the Gypsy king’s filthy pants when he was lying naked in the street outside St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral.
Stradivarius patted the pockets of his jeans in search of the missing key I was sure he’d already looked for a hundred times. Despite the fact that he had to have known it was missing, he was shocked that I was the one who had it. The old bastard beckoned with one age-spotted hand to his antediluvian minions.
“Take it from him,” he commanded to the two hunchbacked, calcium-deficient, bowlegged, gout-ridden elders. The pair of buzzards squeezed their wrinkled yellowed lids over milky cataracts and hobbled forward to the blob in the middle of the room they accurately guessed was me.
“There’s one problem I can see with that,” I ventured before the two old codgers could shoot more juice in me than a Tropicana enema. “Fortunately for me, that problem is yours, and it happens to be a pretty big one.”
I held aloft my gun, which had previously been absent from its rightful spot under my armpit but which had serendipitously turned up several minutes before inside the folds of Victorina Flapchack’s peasant dress while I was feeling her up back in the woods. As I’d lifted her, I found my roscoe was stuffed in her secure vault along with five wallets (all, presumably, empty; none, presumably, hers), a money belt, two yo-yos and a four-slice toaster. I’d left the rest of the junk pile where I’d found it when I picked her up, but I’d stolen back my gat under the reasonable theory that it might be necessary to blow somebody’s head off somebody’s shoulders before moonrise.
Stradivarius was a prehistoric bastard who seemed as out of focus as a crummy AM radio signal, but the arrival on the scene of the piece that had taken a divot out of the side of his head ignited a spark of primordial maniac’s bloodlust in the Gypsy king.
For an instant, the old SOB’s human eyes sparked red, and a curl of furious, hot mist slipped from nostrils overgrown with twin forests of gnarled white hair.
“Save the bull act for Pamplona, Stradivarius,” I said. “But I suggest you go on the Spanish lam as fast as your four legs can carry you, because as soon as I find a phone I’m calling the cops on your cheap meat swindle.”
The pair of rickety codgers with the sparking cattle prods were inching forward, but stopped dead when I waved my piece at them. For one old coot, that was a literal truth. The thieving henchman on the right suddenly dropped to the floor clutching his chest. The cattle prod in his withered hand bounced into a corner.
The SOB might have been playacting. Everybody knew the old scam of faking a heart attack at a restaurant to swindle a free meal. But if he’d hauled it out in case of emergency, the added trick of turning blue and foaming at the mouth was a Golden Globe-worthy twist on the ancient scammer joke.
I’d hoped the pair of codgers would help cart the unconscious dame outdoors for me. At that moment, I didn’t have time for their Gypsy games. Still holding my gat on Stradivarius, I grabbed Victorina Flapchack and tried hauling her to her feet.
Action hero stuff always works swell in the movies. Not so great in real life.
The dame was a hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight. I was (and am) a physical wreck. Plus, I had the added difficulty of having to keep my gat waving menacingly at Stradivarius and the remaining elderly Gypsy elder, who was still holding his cattle prod and wasn’t, unlike his pal, twitching like dying road kill on the soggy floor.
I gave up trying to carry the dame, grabbing her indelicately by the wrist on which she sported my stolen watch. Her heels scraped up rotten tile as I dragged her out the open side of the small building and down the remains of the missing wall, which was covered with thick moss and enough rusted nails to give Victorina Flapchack the worst case of lockjaw this side of an Ivy League yacht club.
“Don’t switch over to the moon on the TV in order to change into a werebull and try to chase me,” I warned Stradivarius as I gave the dame a final tug that tumbled her off the ruins of the wall. The pair of us fell out into the woods.
The last I saw of him, the Gypsy king was huffing another puff of angry smoke from his bushy nostrils and heading for the TV against the wall.
“You cannot run, Banyon!” Stradivarius shouted.
I actually could, and can do so with surprising velocity when my fragile mortal hide is in immediate jeopardy.
I propped the dame against the trunk of a fat tree, slipped my watch off her wrist, quickly reset it to the proper time that had been displayed in the corner of the TV Stradivarius had been watching, and ran like a lunatic.
Behind me, a series of great, terrifying moos emanated from the three-sided ruins of the Tri-City Drive-In offices. Stradivarius had clearly switched over to the all-moon, all-day channel, a fact that became even more certain when I saw the rag doll corpse of his tribal elder henchman flicked like a tiddlywink out the open wall.
The decrepit, dead bastard was sporting a fresh horn-hole through his scrawny chest. He flew into the near woods and got entangled in the high branches of a pine tree, bouncing to a wild stop like the last Christmas ornament that had caught the attention of the family cat.
Speaking of pussies, before the elder’s body stopped bobbing, I was already halfway to the road and still running like mad. Somehow, I miraculously managed not to stumble over roots and rocks and about a billion beer cans dumped in the woods by drunken teenagers. Tree branches swatted me in the kisser like offended dames in a restaurant after I ask them to fork over their half of the check.
I cut straight through the brush to the path that led to the road.
I knew I was in trouble when I felt the earth trembling under my feet before I made it to the rear of the movie screen.
The ass end of the ancient screen was nothing but rusted sheets of corrugated metal held up from behind by scaffolding of rotting timbers. All at once, a large section of screen close to the ground exploded out into the woods as if an Ishtar-level bomb had gone off on it. Rusty metal blew back and was flung into the underbrush like twisted leaves from a tetanus tree. Pulpy wood burst apart at the base, rocketing insect-laden splinters in all directions.
Through the fresh hole burst Igor Stradivarius in all his werebull glory.
Debris from the screen covered the bull’s head and back, and it was shaking the wreckage off as it stuck its huffing nose in the air while perusing the area with evil eyes.
It caught sight of me cowering through the woods as fast as my feet could sprint.
The werebull threw back its head and let loose a deafening moo.
The pause for dramatic effect was probably what, at least temporarily, saved my bacon since in the second it took to scream bloody moo murder at the sky the rotted timbers holding the screen aloft suddenly realized that they no longer had a base to stand on.
The upper timbers splintered one after the other and the entire screen came down in spectacular, slow-motion, sliding to earth like a calving glacier. The rubble dropped over the werebull, covering it completely in a heap of busted tin, rotten wood and a blossoming cloud of asbestos.
The last I saw of it before it vanished beneath the trash avalanche, the massive bull had its glowing eyes fixed firmly on diminutive me picking my pathetic way through the edges of the woods on my stumbling route to the rutted path that led to the main road.
My lungs were tearing holes like burning acid through my chest as I tripped up a culvert and staggered into open air.
I heard some furious crashing behind me and I looked back to see the werebull emerging from the ruins of the drive-in movie screen. A sheet of corrugated metal was impaled on one of its horns, and the beast shook its head violently to loose it.
The collapsed screen revealed the vast herd of werecows penned in behind it, which was a vision I glimpsed only briefly, as sightseeing at that moment seemed an unwarranted distraction. By that point I was channeling all physical efforts into convincing my rubbery and barely responsive legs to get me the hell out of there, and if there was any residual strength remaining it would certainly go not to my eyes (which, frankly, were only showing my brain horrifying images it didn’t want to see in the first place) but toward evacuating my heroically terrified bladder.
I knew by the groans of metal and cracking wood behind me that the werebull was in the process of freeing itself from the mountain of debris.
The sheet of metal that the bull had been attempting to fling off its horn suddenly whizzed like a jagged Frisbee past my right ear and embedded itself in the trunk of a tree, quivering and humming like a Baptist choir.
Nearly being decapitated spurred me to speeds hitherto unreachable by man, and I flew out onto the main drag at a Churchill Downs gallop.
In one direction was the bend in the long, main road, in the other was straight blacktop. In neither direction on the barren strip of asphalt was so much as one vehicle.
I checked my watch as I whipped from my pocket the pamphlet that Mannix had provided me back at my office. The time was right, but the world was clearly wrong.
Behind me timber cracked, while underneath my Florsheims I felt the foundation of the earth shake hard enough to dislodge all seven continents.
Despite the fact that I’d made up my mind moments before that my eyes should mind their own goddamn business, I glanced back over my shoulder.
The Stradivarius werebull had figured out that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, with Point A being the spot where he’d busted out of the mound of movie screen debris and Point B being my soon-to-be cadaver. Between us was a right angle of forest overgrowth that mostly shielded the theater from the street.
The lone bull stampede was blasting through the woods like a cannonball. Saplings were uprooted and trampled underfoot. Trunks of larger trees splintered outright against the lowered horns of the charging behemoth.
There was nowhere I could run that the werebull couldn’t smash through.
I stood helpless on the double yellow line and tapped my watch like a magic talisman. Some fresh movement caught my eye, and I tore one crossed-eye away from my watch and the other from the nearby swaying and crashing trees.
A large object was rounding the bend in the road. I saw it, but the werebull -- in its single-minded determination to perforate my skull -- didn’t.
I turned away from both incoming items and ran like hell.
I could hear Stradivarius in bull form break free of the forest. The brute was panting furiously, and I knew it was scurrying up the culvert at road’s edge and mounting the pavement. The clip-clop of hooves followed as the werebull gave chase.
The angry thunder closed in on the flapping tails of my trench coat. The monster was almost on me. We both knew that there was no way a measly P.I., even one as handsome and quick-witted as me, could outrun the bastard beast. So naturally I resorted to the only option open to me. I stopped dead and turned to face the charging werebull.
For a split-second it was High Noon in the dead center of the lonely road, although unlike Gary Cooper I didn’t bother to draw my piece.
The werebull was charging straight at me full-tilt, legs pumping furiously, dark hide glistening with sweat, enraged fire burning in its eyes.
When I stopped dead, the Gypsy conman buried deep inside the beast was alert enough to sense something was very wrong, maybe remembering the twin shots I’d given it to the side of the head. The werebull quickly slammed on the brakes, skidding across the pavement until it was advancing only in a cautious trot. The huge beast lifted its horns high in the air and offered a single, querying, “Moo?”
While silver is the preferred instrument for killing were-animals, as it turns out, in a pinch, a couple of cakes of C-4 will do the job nicely.
The bus that had rounded the curve and advanced up the road behind the werebull slammed the monster at a full 55 miles per hour. The collision crushed the grille and cracked both front windshields. The force of the impact combined with the weight of the werebull slowed the bus down by a couple crucial MPH. When the inevitable explosion came I had already flung myself into the culvert at the side of the road.
I saved my eardrums with a couple of plugged fingers, and the flames and bus parts mostly blew past me and landed in the woods or further down the road. I wasn’t so lucky with the gobs of meat.
Bloody red bull parts splattered down like hail blasted out the door of the Kroger’s meat department. I got a steak to the shoulder, a rib roast to the back, and a side of beef on my right leg.
The flames quickly abated and the rumble from the blast echoed to silence.
Once the danger had passed, I continued to cringe in mortal terror for another quite sensible full minute before I reluctantly decided that grown men bury themselves under a mound of beef only after the first five courses of booze, which it felt like I hadn’t eaten a glass of in weeks. I tunneled out of my Ruth’s Chris Steak House sleeping bag and crawled woozily up to the road.
The blown-up bus had rolled to a stop, had listed slightly into the culvert on the other side of the road, and was in the process of burning the hell out of an acre of woods. A single, charred bull horn stuck from the crippled front of the bus like the lone arrow fired in the most successful mass transit attack in Apache history.
Stew meat covered the street. Once the road kill word went out, the good folks at the local Dinty Moore plant would, as usual, be all over the area with buckets and pails. While I was reveling in the post-Apocalyptic afterglow, the wind tossed a small scrap of paper across my path.
In my haste to not be blown up, I’d dropped the pamphlet which my well-organized office manager elf had had the very great foresight to stash in my file cabinets under the, as it turned out, sensible theory that it might come in handy.
I scooped up the bus schedule and sat my weary ass down on the non-inferno side of the road to do some light reading as I awaiting the arrival of the worthless authorities whose job I had, as usual, gift wrapped and left under the goddamn tree.