Elmore Leonard said it’s bad style to open a novel with the weather. Well, fuck him—it was a blazing red-hot August morning. The ceiling fan did little more than amuse the flies, many of which wandered up to the highest layer of the office’s troposphere to burst into flame and fall spiraling down like wounded Zero fighters. The air was heavy with the smell of sulfur and interbreast sweat. It felt as if El Niño, California, and Satan were conspiring to push the city to the brink of spontaneous combustion.
And then, like a high-heeled coup de grâce, she arrived.
She paused briefly outside the door, her hourglass silhouette cast upon the glass panel with the fresh shiny vinyl letters reading,
A. KIMREAN
Z. KIMREAN
PRIVATE EYES
She knocked first, waited, then tried the handle, and the door surrendered to her touch. She wandered in like a fairy-tale top model into a CGI forest, a flutter of long skirts and flaming red hair kiting behind her, a flock of freckles swarming her eyes like glistening lakes of whoa whoa whoa, okay, wait, wait, wait.
Kimrean stops, stares dead at Detective Demoines across the interrogation room table.
DEMOINES
Sorry, just…Can we dial down the poetry a notch? The narration’s way too colorful.
KIMREAN
(shrugs)
My life is colorful.
DEMOINES
Maybe play down the alliteration a little.
KIMREAN
“Alliteration a little.” You know, your life could’ve been colorful too, Ted, but you chose the SFPD. The thrill of paperwork and the flashy badges.
DEMOINES
You need a badge to work as a P.I. too.
Pause.
KIMREAN
Sure. I was testing you.
Darkness prevented long descriptive paragraphs. Blind-striped sunlight poured through the large windows across a vast, empty space navigated by intrepid motes of dust. The woman discerned a cleared desk to the right, smelled a bed in an alcove to the back left. In the middle of the room stood a high stool or a very narrow table, dais-wise. Atop sat a chess set in mid-battle.
Through a lateral door on the alcove’s side, somebody—the slender, long-limbed ink sketch of somebody—stepped out, preceded by the sound of a flushing toilet, and stopped right upon seeing her. The woman barely made out an eye glistening in the dark, two hands wiping some rumpled clothes, a mouth greeting her.
“Wow, you are hot.”
The woman looked away, smoothed her dress, checked her hair, scratched her forearm, did another thirty irrelevant actions meant to summon her cool, and finally resumed speaking. “Are you the private investigator?”
“I can be whatever you want me to be.”
She pointed at the door, baffled. “The sign says ‘Private Eyes.’ ”
“And you’re so sagacious, I can’t believe you’re in need of one.” The mouth drew a grin as shiny and sharp as a cutlass.
The dame paused for a second while she realigned her expectations with the slim, beaming reality before her. It didn’t match her platonic archetype for a private detective. The spartan pay-by-the-week rental office she had anticipated; also the fedora and the white tank top—maybe not the skimpy black waistcoat on top. But she was also expecting a square jaw, coarse stubble, the odd scar, a dark brow: the features of a man of action as defined in her mind by the cover art of some gritty paperback. The face watching her now was oval or ogive shaped. It had the featureless skin of a mannequin and the vigilant look of a small bird. The only visible eye, spotlit by an implausibly accurate stripe of blind-filtered daylight, was a lemony green. And whether the collection of parts added up to a man was still up for debate.
“I’m sorry, are you A. Kimrean or Z. Kimrean?”
The green eye stared back at her, silent. Then the whole figure moved past her to the entrance, leaned out into the landing, looked both ways, and carefully closed the door.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked, scowling at her host’s frowsy appearance.
“Oh, yeah,” said the other, pointing toward the bathroom. “Much better now.”
The same implausible light stripe fell on the right eye now: a gentle orange brown, like ale, peeking through bangs of straw-colored hair.
“Interesting.”
DEMOINES
No, it’s not.
Kimrean shuts up, clearly offended by the unflattering review.
DEMOINES
You’re recounting your sexy scenarios with red-haired women instead of explaining your role in this…
(reads notes)
“Shooting, arson, and destruction of a police vehicle.”
KIMREAN
I’m giving you context. This is relevant.
DEMOINES
How?
KIMREAN
It’s a fundamental principle of private investigation. There’s no yin without yang. No violence without love.
DEMOINES
Zooey…
KIMREAN
I’m serious! You wouldn’t know ’cause you’re in the public sector, but it’s a natural constant in my business. From the moment you rent an office on Fisherman’s Wharf and spell your name and the words “Private Eye” in vinyl letters on the glass, only two types of people will go through that door: femmes fatales and neckless thugs coming to pummel your teeth in.
The detainee sits back, stick-insect legs spread outward, exposing the irrefutable truth. Demoines rubs his face.
DEMOINES
Can we just skip the redhead and start with the shooting?
KIMREAN
(sighs, frustrated)
Fine.
Elmore Leonard said blah blah blah blah blah. It was a blazing red-hot August morning. The fan on the ceiling did little to stir the gunpowder and brick dust suspended in the air while a long-condemned second of calm died in the clangor of Kimrean blasting through the wall, an avalanche of plaster and bathroom tiles pouring onto the bedspread. Green Teeth Murdoc, standing in the middle of the office, stepped back and fired a new burst of automatic gunfire into the alcove, the P.I. barely brushing the mattress before sliding into the narrow gap between the bed and the wall, taking cover from the bulletstorm.
A round of ammo or a piece of shrapnel tipped over the bottle of bourbon on the upside-down carton serving as a bedside table. Behind the bed, reeking with adrenaline, Kimrean took some quick, deep breaths and set out to execute their plan for survival.
Step one: Plug in the extension cord.
Step two: Yank the bedsheets and search the bundle for the revolver.
Fire ceased. A rare, quivering silence took over the room.
Kimrean found their gun and flipped it in their hands.
“Is this loaded?”
They pulled the trigger and fired a bullet into the brick wall. A new burst of submachine-gun fire immediately zeroed into that same exact square foot, splashing Campbell’s soup chunks of brownstone everywhere.
“That was unbelievably fucking stupid,” Kimrean judged, hands squeezing the revolver, mouth counting down the seconds, chest heaving at the rate of the Uzi fire, which barely muffled the sandpaper voice of Green Teeth Murdoc screaming, “WHERE’S MY FUCKING MONEY, YOU CHEATING HOLY SHIT OKAY OKAY WAIT WAIT WAIT!”
DEMOINES
(takes a deep breath)
That’s the neckless thug, I suppose.
KIMREAN
Actually, that was Green Teeth Murdoc. Qualifies as a villain, but yeah. He still counts.
DEMOINES
Okay, forget it. Adrian.
KIMREAN
Yes?
DEMOINES
Take me back five minutes before the shooter comes in.
KIMREAN
(“But, Mom!”)
That’s where I started!
DEMOINES
Shut up!
“Please take a seat…over there, I guess.”
The femme approached the alcove indicated on the left. A twin bed, unmade, filled up the P.I.’s burrow, guarded by a bare coat stand. Half a bottle of bourbon dozed next to a pair of handcuffs on an upside-down carton beside the pillow. Kimrean pulled up the window blinds, and jeering sunlight poured in to reveal something ever more embarrassing in the sheets.
“There is a gun in your bed,” the femme pointed out.
“That’s good to know.”
She turned to face the desk. It wasn’t completely cleared, she could see now: there was a toaster on it.
The P.I. presumptive was now studying the ongoing game of chess on the dais in front of the window. A mischievous smile dawned on their blank face as the left hand pinched a black knight’s head and skipped it over enemy lines.
The femme invoked some saliva and stated her purpose. “I am looking for a detective.”
“Good job so far. Any idea who’s stalking you?”
“No, that’s what—” She cut herself off midsentence. “How do you know I’m being stalked?”
In those few lines of dialogue, the detective’s countenance had segued from patent curiosity to absolute tedium. No trace of interest belied that impression during the following speech:
“Young high-class white woman visits cheap private eye; she’s neither employed nor married, so this isn’t business or family related; it’s personal. Your pulse was shaky when you applied your lipstick, but it’s steady now: you feel insecure at home; your space was violated. My first choice would be burglary, but victims of burglary become more guarded, whereas you didn’t hesitate coming to this neighborhood wearing that gold pendant shaped like a vine leaf. Nonetheless, despite the heat, you opted for a high-collar dress this morning, so I’m leaning toward my second option: harassment.” Oxygen was replenished, and the conclusion followed. “Thus, you’re being stalked.”
All this had spurted out of the mouth like a telex message, while the hands interrogated a couple drawers in the desk and moved a white bishop on the chessboard.
The femme examined her host once again, or rather the assembly of body parts that played said role. The mismatched eyes hardly blinked; the lipless mouth (lips, in fact, so thin and pale as to be considered absent) virtually vanished when it closed. The body was neither muscular nor bony: both those qualities presume volume; the subject here, perched on the desk, looked flat. And yet, as she glanced down the P.I.’s neckline…were those breasts inside the tank top?
“You had breakfast?” the good host chimed, hopping off the table and crossing the room toward the embryo of a kitchen next to the coat stand, left hand prodding a black pawn to c5 on the way. The kitchen consisted of one salvaged wood-grain vinyl cupboard and a camping stove connected to a propane canister. The detective retrieved the single item in the cupboard—a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts—and headed back to the desk, right hand pushing the white queen to xc5 and tossing the captured pawn over the shoulder. It clunked somewhere in the dark side of the alcove.
“Yes, I had breakfast,” the femme said. “And I am being stalked. For a time now, at nights, I’ve been feeling someone watching me when I undress.”
“Can’t imagine why!” the P.I. inserted as a riant exclamation while loading two Pop-Tarts into the toaster.
“And last night, when I was going to bed, I saw somebody peeping through the French windows. I screamed, and he disappeared into the rosebushes.”
She stood by for another comment, but the detective’s attention was now on the toaster. The lever was down, but the appliance wasn’t working.
The brown and green eyes tracked along the power cord slithering across the room and disappearing under the bed. Then they rose to meet hers.
“Terrifying.”
The smile was gone. Along with any other sign of human emotion.
The femme wondered whether the voice (cold, slightly coarse) fell within the masculine or feminine spectrum. Terra nullius, she concluded.
“So, can you help me?”
“I charge three hundred bucks a day. Half a day in advance.”
“Excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to ask,” she began, gathering courage for the indiscretion: “Are you a man?”
“Aww, she’s so sweet. I love silly redheads!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Granted,” the orange-brown eye ruled. “As soon as you give me my one fifty.”
The voice had again become a mirthless drone, the asymmetrical face inches away from the client’s. If only to look away, she went for her purse and pulled out a wallet. By the time awkwardness yielded to common sense and she realized she was giving $150 to a virtual stranger for no apparent reason, she already had the money in her hand. The other’s right snatched the notes in an asp-like movement.
“Thanks, you can leave now.”
The detective counted the money and slipped the folded notes into the nonexistent space between the pants and the hip.
The femme felt heat in her cheeks. And not from the blazing red-hot August morning. This was her blushing with shame.
“Are you even going to ask my name?”
“Fiona Hearsh,” one of the two eyes answered. It would be difficult to assert which one; they were both looking away. One mantis leg topped the other, hands alighted on a knee. Then the eyes noticed the customer was still there. An index finger pointed at her purse. “Your name is embossed in the inside.”
“It says ‘F. Hearsh.’ ”
“And Fiona is the most popular F name among women of Irish ancestry,” the index postulated, alluding to her red hair. “Plus, it means ‘vine’ in Gaelic.” It pointed at her gold pendant.
A fly buzzed between the characters, aware of its comic-relief role.
The grin dawned back in the lipless mouth one last time.
“If you wanna help, we could role-play the facts of the case. Pretend you’re going to bed, it’s been a long day, you take off your dress, finally get rid of that bra—do you mind if I take pictures?”
Five seconds later, the femme fatale was walking out of the office and the novel, her scandalized steps echoing down the stairwell.
Kimrean stood up, smoothed out their two-dimensional pants, and leaned outside the door into the shadowy landing. Eventually, the slam of the front door downstairs announced that the client had left the building.
“All clear,” Kimrean said. “No need to rein in your halitosis.”
At the far end of the landing, the ember of a cigarette twinkled in the dark. It died a moment later, squished on a step.
There was a soft rustle of impending doom, and Green Teeth Murdoc emerged into the penumbra. Light cringed to shine on the gambler’s pale lime skin, the breezy pastel suit, the yellow-smeared fingers curled around a submachine gun.
“Brought a friend of mine along,” he croaked, beaming a fan-favorite smile.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Kimrean said, yielding the threshold and calmly retreating into the office. “Calling your firearms ‘friends.’ Completely normal. Lots of men whose father didn’t buy their first prostitute do it.”
Before that snarky remark had time to garner a reaction, Kimrean slammed the front door in Murdoc’s face and lurched through the side door to the bathroom.
Murdoc kicked his way into the apartment, faced left, and opened fire. A full artillery battalion could have hardly made more noise in the 2.6 seconds the gun needed to turn the bathroom door into a sieve.
Then the door opened, and a two-hundred-pound man in a black suit staggered out with an anal plug stuffed in his mouth and three bullets lodged in his chest. He collapsed facefirst on the wooden floor with the seismic force of what the flying fuck wait wait wait!
Detective Demoines riffles through his notes, Kimrean frozen in the middle of mimicking the fall of a speared mammoth.
DEMOINES
Who the hell was that?!
KIMREAN
(like, “Obviously.”)
A neckless thug.
DEMOINES
Well, when did that one come in?
KIMREAN
Oh, he was from the previous batch.
It was a blazing red-hot August morning, strewn with the black-and-white imagery of ineffective ceiling fans and self-igniting houseflies. And then, like an untimely snowstorm, they arrived, their Ikea Dombås wardrobe silhouettes barely fitting the glass panel with the fresh shiny vinyl letters reading,
A. KIMREAN
Z. KIMREAN
PRIVATE EYES
The two neckless thugs squeezed through the doorway into the zebra-lit office, sun highlighting their Hasidic gun-smuggler suits, the baseball bat apiece, the square mugs so easy to picture against a height-measurement screen—somewhere in the vicinity of the 6'8" line.
A lithe human figure slumbered at the desk, two feet in imitation Converse on the table offering the visitors their worn white soles.
“Mr. Kimrean.”
The body stirred. A hand lifted the brim of a fedora.
“Almost.”
“Mr. Murdoc sent us,” the same thug spoke, or perhaps the other. His voice was like the ubiquitous public announcement before a street riot is quelled. “He is distressed about the outcome of the poker game last Monday.”
“Well, that’s because Mr. Murdoc is like a carpenter who misplaces his tools,” Kimrean said, sitting up, a stray right hand stealthily sliding toward the drawer on that side of the desk. The green and brown eyes checked for a reaction from the audience. “A saw loser…Really? Do I need to explain this one?”
“Mr. Murdoc’s concerned there was cheating at his table,” the thug resumed. “He wishes to see you about it.”
The way he held up the bat and stroked the barrel made the addition of a time adverb unnecessary. Kimrean nodded, making sure to show undivided attention while their right hand felt its way around the contents of the drawer.
The other thug, already tagged “Gravel” in Kimrean’s mental notes to distinguish him from his brother, “Rock,” poked around the detective’s quarters.
“Any chance you keep your winnings around here?”
“Sadly, no. I already drank, smoked, and fucked those,” Kimrean informed. “By which I mean, I used the money to buy bourbon, weed, and the services of a pretty ladyboy I met in Little Saigon. She just left. Should’ve seen her.”
By that time, neither Kimrean’s eyes, nor Rock’s, nor Gravel’s, could any longer ignore the fuss of the P.I.’s rogue right hand fumbling behind the desk. All the characters exchanged looks. A very uncomfortable silence somehow wedged its way into the already tense scene.
“Sorry,” Kimrean apologized, sincerely. “Do you guys see my revolver somewhere?”
The thugs actually took the trouble to survey the room, as far as the dramatic lighting allowed. They returned to Kimrean, shaking their heads.
“Is there any problem?” one of them wondered.
“No, it’s nothing,” Kimrean answered, extracting from the right top drawer what everyone in the room unsynchronizedly identified as a large anal plug. “Except now I’m wondering what the ladyboy had inside her when she walked out.”
There was another compulsory pause for unsettling mental pictures, and then Kimrean stood up, wiggling the sex toy in their hand.
“No problem! I’ll just give this a quick rinse, in case Mr. Murdoc wants to use it in our tête-à-tête, and we’ll be on our way.”
The thugs felt way too uncomfortable to do anything but watch as the zany sleuth crossed the room toward the bathroom, stopped by the door, sent them a charming smile, and then relinquished any form of composure to run the hell out of there.
It was a six-foot leap to the bathroom window over the toilet, but the first thug still caught the lower half of the P.I. squirming through the opening. Kimrean failed to get a grip on the waste pipe outside before being dragged back in.
The good thing about skirmishes in narrow spaces: they favor the smaller skirmisher. When Rock yanked Kimrean back inside, flinging them across the ten-by-six-foot bathroom, their in-flight puppet body slammed the door on the incoming second thug before hitting the tiled corner at the other end and landing in the shower pan. After which Kimrean’s first action was to pull the curtain closed.
“Privacy! Privacy!”
Rock tore it open, just in time to get a jet of scalding hot water to his face before Kimrean leaped onto his back, hoping to knock him down, failing, but managing to rodeo on him for a few glorious seconds and crash him against the door, slamming it once again on the other thug’s face. That was a short-lived victory before Rock grabbed them by the neck, smashed them into the mirror cabinet, and haymakered them off the sink back to the shower corner.
Kimrean was still scrambling upright, broken tiles falling off the wall, when Rock gripped his bat and tried to hammer down with a vertical strike, but the tip of the bat knocked the curtain rod over the target. He attempted a power hit instead and capped his partner’s face with the backswing as Gravel tried to join in the fun for a third time.
“Sorry!” he roared over his shoulder, and then faced the cowering freak fumbling under the fallen curtain again. He switched hands, measured the distance, watched for any obstacles, swung the bat…
And Kimrean whacked his shin with the curtain rod, destabilizing him, and hatched triumphantly from the canvas bundle, spraying half a can of long-lasting deodorant into his eyes and yelling, “Strike threeeeeee!”
That was enough to make Rock drop the bat and roll back, opening a metaphorical window for Kimrean to leap over him and reach the literal window, but the thug reacted in time and slammed Kimrean’s head on the toilet, then staggered up and repeatedly—banged—the seat—on—the little—bastard’s—head—“Dear—Mister—Lysol—Fresh—Pine—my—ass”—until one of Kimrean’s hands located a shard from the broken mirror and jammed it into the guy’s thigh. Rock rolled over, his scream of pain cut short as Kimrean jammed the anal plug into his mouth.
“Oh, now you wish you let me give it a rinse, don’t you?”
The door crashed open. Gravel, blood trickling out of his new tooth gap, glared down at the melee on the floor.
The slippery little clown met his gaze from under the sink, frozen in the middle of a chokehold on his terrified, latex-stuffed partner.
“I can explain,” the clown said. “What was I supposed to do? You’re never home!”
Gravel lurched in, slipped on the baseball bat, fell forward, and landed on top of them like a sack of rocks, head lopping off a large section of the sink on the way down.
The showerhead was still spraying hot water, the only noise on the sound track for a moment.
Kimrean took a minute to check the vitals of everybody in the room. The thug on top of them was unconscious. The thug beneath, still gagged and half choked and reeking of Chill Ocean fragrance, was on his way there. Kimrean made sure to hold his hand all along, shushing into his ear, until his heartbeat plateaued into a comfortable coma.
And then there was a knock on the front door.
Careful not to disrupt the momentary peace, Kimrean slipped out of that particular manwich, turned off the water, replaced their hat, queried a piece of mirror, wiped off the dust and a little blood from his cheekbone, and then flushed the toilet and scurried out of the bathroom.
Outside, the femme fatale was still letting her eyes adjust to the dark.
“Wow, you are hot,” Kimrean said.
DEMOINES
Wait--that whole bit was a flashback?
KIMREAN
Uh-huh.
DEMOINES
Inside your statement? Which is itself a flashback? A flashback within a flashback?
KIMREAN
(impatient)
Yes! Jesus Christ, Ted, do you need a graphic or what? “Oh, this Christopher Nolan shit’s so confusing, give me linear narrative, I’m a hundred years old!”
DEMOINES
Right! Right! So the femme fatale comes in…
(thinks)
She wasn’t all that fatale, was she?
KIMREAN
I know. I defused her. Shall I skip through her part?
DEMOINES
Yes, please.
The femme approached half a bottle of liquor next to some handcuffs on an upside-down carton. “There is a gun in your bed,” she pointed out the ongoing game of chess any idea who’s stalking you blueberry Pop-Tarts queen to xc5 into the toaster three hundred bucks, “Thanks, you can leave, Fiona Hearsh.”
Meanwhile, in the paltry bathroom, the neckless thug known as Rock bobbed up from his short lapse into unconsciousness to an unconfessable taste at the back of his throat. His jaw hurt. His associate lay facedown on top of him, knocked out. Beyond his body, far above, the bottom of the fractured sink looked like the unreachable dominion of angels.
His right arm was bent behind his own back. Every cramped muscle from the shoulder down moaned loudly while he freed it, but he took pleasure in that pain. Pain meant anger. Anger meant will. He grudgingly pushed his partner off toward the toilet and heaved himself up, careful not to cut his palms on the broken glass. The stab wound to his thigh sent out a tortured distress signal, but he gulped down the scream.
As Gravel drowsily stirred back to life, Rock cracked his ten knuckles and stood before the door whence the clown’s voice could be heard. Vengeance awaited behind that door. Sweet, cathartic vengeance.
Then, within the next second, the door exploded open, banging his head, and Kimrean dashed in and dove into the shower. And in the second after that one, a bullet wave pierced the door and sank into Rock’s vital organs.
Inertia allowed him to open the door and stagger out, his senses again shutting down one by one. Taste was the last to go and, as he plummeted forward, it informed him that he had forgotten to remove the plug from his mouth.
Kimrean reached to close the door as the body outside hit the floor like a mass-extinction event.
The celebration, however, had to be postponed at the sight of the enormous shoes that had just appeared behind the door, blocking the way to the window.
Gravel hoisted the P.I. by the throat, held them at full arm’s length. Kimrean didn’t have time to come up with a flattering comment on the thug’s new face before the guy covered the length of the room in one stride and whammed them into the shower, two feet in the air, then swept them across the wall and crashed them again into the southeast corner. The whole wall trembled with the shock: inches from the shower, it was likely rotten and damp. It would make a nice visual memory, Gravel thought, to knock that freaky lollipop head clean through the plaster.
Before he could throw the punch, though, another roaring burst of gunfire came from the main room. Bullet holes blossomed into the corner, on either side of Kimrean’s waist, two slugs actually grazing their waistcoat and belt, one sinking into Gravel’s abdomen.
“Fuck!” he cried, tumbling back. “Boss! I’m back here!”
It was useless: the shooting continued, bullet holes popping all over the wall and sweeping back toward the door, while both the thug and the detective lay down, covering their heads from the flying debris, Kimrean trying to make conversation through the burst.
“He seems like a great employer.”
The thunder stopped, and Kimrean listened to the footsteps in the office and immediately grabbed the baseball bat and used it to wedge the door shut right before Murdoc twisted the handle from the other side.
That was the south exit blocked. West was the bathroom window, its promising view blocked again by Gravel, pressing his newest wound with one hand, gripping a mirror shard in the other, growling out of a bloodied mouth.
Kimrean measured the distance to the window, subtracted it from the length of the room, guessed the resistance left in the bullet-ridden partition wall behind them. It would have to be east.
A long-condemned second of calm died in the clangor of Kimrean blasting through the wall, an avalanche of plaster—
DEMOINES
Hey, that’s familiar.
KIMREAN
Yeah, isn’t this cool? I lived the whole thing sequentially and it was way less exciting.
—unbelievably fucking stupid,” Kimrean judged, hands squeezing the revolver, mouth counting down the seconds, chest heaving at the rate of the Uzi fire, which barely muffled out the sandpaper voice of Green Teeth Murdoc screaming, “WHERE’S MY FUCKING MONEY, YOU CHEATING, LYING, LITTLE DANGLY SHIIIIIT?!”
A slow stream of bourbon from the tipped bottle was flowing west along the groove between two floorboards, past the kitchenette and nearing the bathroom whence Gravel now emerged.
“Where is she?! Where?!”
“Behind the bed; he’s got a gun!” Murdoc said.
“Cover me!” Gravel shouted. Kimrean felt the incoming T-rex footsteps shaking the floor. “I’m gonna tear her limb for—”
Kimrean fired three rounds under the bed; one or two hit the incoming thug and sent him crashing to the floor like a tripping wildebeest in a stampede. He stayed there, crying in agony, while the nth wave of bullets hit the alcove, forcing Kimrean to retreat to the back wall and hold the fort just a few seconds more now.
Three. Two. One.
The plugged-in toaster on the desk went ka-chunk, ejecting a couple blueberry Pop-Tarts. They barely stopped at the zenith of their trajectory before gunfire blew them both into subatomic matter.
In that nanosecond of distraction, Kimrean popped up and fired the fifth round at Green Teeth Murdoc. It hit him in the shoulder. The modified Uzi dropped with a defeated clank that was the signal for Kimrean to jump out of the trench, grab the handcuffs, kick the Uzi out of the equation toward the lifeless, neckless thug by the door, and connect a cross sucker punch to Murdoc’s cheekbone.
The villain fell to one knee, the sharp pain from the bullet wound effectively numbed by the ringing in his ears. It started to fade out only after the detective had clicked the cuffs on his wrists.
“Please don’t scratch them up,” Kimrean admonished. “They bear very fond memories.”
Unappreciative of quips, Murdoc attempted a left uppercut that didn’t connect, but the right that was bound to follow did. Kimrean flew backward, felt the revolver leaving their hand—in that order—and landed on their back, vertebrae slamming on the woodwork, and from that angle watched with reasonable horror as the bad guy dove after them to elbow their skull through the floor. The detective rolled over to dodge the blow and, in the absence of the revolver, seized the next best thing: the toaster’s power cord.
There was little Murdoc could do in handcuffs to stop the cord from wrapping around his neck. The first strangling yank pulled them together: villain on top using one hand to grind the detective into the floor and the other to keep the cord from fully choking him, Kimrean on bottom wincing at the close-up of the face that had contributed so much to its owner’s legendary street rep.
Until the safety switch of a submachine gun spoke.
The submachine gun. Murdoc’s Uzi. Held point-blank to Kimrean’s head by the supposedly lifeless Rock, who wasn’t so lifeless after all.
“Oh no,” Kimrean admonished. “You lost your plug. Now I have to spank you.”
“Don’t shoot!” Murdoc warned, anticipating a rage response from his henchman. “I want him alive when we harvest his organs for payment.”
He sat up astride Kimrean’s crotch, cuffed hands struggling and failing to reach his own side pocket.
“Cigarette,” he ordered, taking the Uzi from his henchman.
“I won that money fair and square, Mudsy,” Kimrean said, pitying the cruiserweight thug who could barely stand reaching into his blood-caked suit for a smoke. “Why not just let it go?”
“You cheated!” Murdoc hissed. “We checked the tapes. You had an ace in your waistcoat pocket.” He leaned forward to receive the cigarette in his mouth, then waited for the light. “I. Never. Lose.”
Kimrean made sure to take a deep breath before the next speech.
“Miss Watson was on a draw looking for the king of spades in my hand, Mr. Windsor had the queen, and Professor Sweeney always bluffs with queens or higher, but she just called your twenty. You went all in with a 1.3 percent chance of double aces and kings at best, 6.7 percent just aces, 10.3 percent kings on seven.”
Rock, holding out a lit match, blinked twice at the line, unusually long for a fight scene. Murdoc ignored the flame and loomed over Kimrean again.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The brown and green eyes looked away from his face, revolted. The frail throat almost rebelled at the smell. The lipless mouth smirked, grateful for that perfectly timed villain question.
“It means I never needed the ace.”
Which Kimrean proved by showing the ace was still in their waistcoat pocket and bringing it to Murdoc’s eyes. All of it in one-twelfth of a second.
In fact, the edge of the card sliced Murdoc’s cornea.
Just as the villain jerked back, Kimrean’s left hand gripped the cord and flailed the toaster against the neckless thug’s head, the burning match flying out of his grasp. Murdoc leaned forward again, ready to unload the Uzi point-blank into Kimrean’s brain, while Kimrean swung the toaster again into the air. Over the ceiling fan.
The cord got caught in the rotating blades, winding Murdoc up by the neck, lifting him just as the still-burning match landed in the stream of bourbon on the floor.
DEMOINES
The bourbon from…Oh, right.
(beat)
Did you even know it would land there?
KIMREAN
I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I just hope the other guy does.
It was a blazing red-hot August morning.
The ceiling fan did its best to hoist a full-grown, chain-smoking, midlevel gang lord upward and counterclockwise.
A Milky Way of toxic saliva droplets trailed off the nine-inch tongue wrung out of his mouth.
His clenched finger strangled the Uzi’s trigger, bullets pulsing out of the barrel drawing a perfect logarithmic spiral.
Rock staggered back toward the door, into the predicted trajectory of a bullet.
The sixth round clicked inside the chamber of the forgotten revolver that Gravel had retrieved near the window.
Blue flames ran up the stream of alcohol across the room, flowing right under the propane canister in the kitchenette, and A. Z. Kimrean, sprinting ahead of the flames, gazed over the chessboard on the way to the window and, as they passed, moved a black pawn to c3.
“Oooh yeah! Let’s see you get out of that one.”
And then time resumed, and Murdoc completed a full revolution on the fan, and an Uzi bullet went right into Rock’s skull, and Gravel aimed the revolver at the charging private eye, and the propane bottle exploded, and Kimrean rammed against the revolver and the thug and the window behind him and crashed through it, inches ahead of the deflagration trailing them out into the blue sky.
In the time it took to free fall down three stories, wind slapping their faces at 9.81 m/s2, Kimrean clambered on the thug, all the way screaming, “My turn on top, baaaaaaaaaaaabe!”
Three hundred thirty-five pounds of combined weight dropped on the roof of the police car that had just parked in front of the building, sinking its blaring siren and flashing lights beneath the dashboard, where the neckless thug stayed, while Kimrean bounced off the flesh-and-broken-bones sack, flipped six times in the air, and landed faceup on the road two steps away from the incoming Powell-Hyde cable car whose driver jammed on the brakes until sparks welded the brake pad to the wheel and pulled the juggernaut to a full stop just as the front right wheel was literally rolling on top of a strand of Kimrean’s hair.
Two policemen crawled out of the cruiser, shaking the broken glass from their eyes. The thug lay buried in the hood, fused with the engine. Smoke and no flames billowed out of the third-floor window.
On the pavement, Kimrean stared dead at the underside of the cable car and at a slice of morning sky beyond, mentally roll-calling all four limbs spread on the asphalt and checking on a wallowing—but still intact—spinal cord.
And then they burst into maniac laughter.