by Gary K. Wolf
“My pleasure.” I unholstered my .38.
Potts yanked down a round, fragrant prairie flatulence the size of a bean plate. He threw it at me. It hit my hand. My gun went flying.
“Smart mug like you ought to learn not to count his chickens.” Potts picked up his gat and stood. “Let’s roll this scene back to where I was so crudely interrupted.” He brought the gun into firing position.
I rushed Potts, kicking the guard’s chair out from under him on my way past. The guard hit the floor with a thump.
I smacked into Potts’s midsection, toppling him over. I hung on to him for dear life.
The guard rolled to the baseboard, curled up into a ball, and kept sawing wood.
Potts whipped his gun hand around, trying for a clear shot at me. I didn’t have the muscle power to stop him for long. “Run for help,” I yelled to the rabbit.
“What for?” said Roger. “Two big, strong men like us can handle him fine.” To prove it, Roger grabbed Potts’s weapon. Potts lashed him across the face with the barrel. The rabbit went sprawling.
We wrestled across the floor, trundling straight over the snoozing guard. He didn’t notice.
I held on to Potts’s gun with one hand. With the other I pawed at the electrical cord connecting him to his phony shank. I loosened the end, but he had it knotted too tightly for me to pry his leg off.
Roger crawled toward us on hands and knees. Dark red blood gushed from the slash Potts had laid across his forehead. “Hang on, Eddie. I’m coming.”
“Leave the heroics to Audie Murphy. Call the cops!”
“No, Eddie. There comes a time when a rabbit’s got to do what a rabbit’s got to do. I’ll defuse this situation personally.” He grabbed Potts’s foot.
Potts kicked backwards. He caught Roger flush in the face with his heel. Roger crumpled into a bloody heap.
Potts shuffled his pins under him and stood, dragging me along for the ride. I clung to his gun with both hands, but Potts had the strength of Samson before his crew cut. He twisted his pistol around and wormed it between our bodies. I felt a hard, cold circle of destruction press into my stomach.
Potts yanked the trigger. His gun snicked, the way they do when they’re wearing a muzzler over their snood.
Searing pain ripped through my gut.
I collapsed like a ripped rag doll.
I clutched my midsection. Warm, sticky blood ran out between my fingers.
Potts stood over me, straddling my chest. “Like I said, Valiant, all’s well that ends well.” He pointed his gun at my forehead. “So long, dick.” He thumbed back his hammer.
“Geronimooooooooow!” His legs pumping full steam ahead, Roger charged Potts and tackled him around the knees. The momentum of the attack knocked Potts forward. His shot flew wild, smashing into the floor half an inch from the guard’s ear. Right. The guard didn’t notice.
Roger hung tough, but Potts proved too strong for him. Potts shook his leg like a dog fertilizing a hydrant. Roger sailed into the wall.
Roger carried the end of Potts’s electrical cord with him. Gamely, he tried to fell Potts by yanking his wire, but Roger had taken too much abuse. He didn’t have the oomph.
Potts swung his leg once quickly, forward and back, lashing the cord and smacking Roger against the hard marble floor. Roger remained there, stretched out, defenseless, a thoroughly broken rabbit. “Say your prayers,” Potts growled to him, “‘cause you’re a dead man.” He returned his attention to me. “As soon as I polish Valiant.”
Potts pointed his gun directly into my mouth. I stared straight down the long, hard, black barrel. From my perspective, it looked like the end of a road to me. “As I keep telling you, shamus,” Potts snarled, “all’s well that ends well.”
“To paraphrase your notion slightly,” said Roger, “all’s well that ends in the wall.” He plugged Potts’s leg into a socket.
Potts lit up like a Christmas tree. A brilliant corona enveloped his entire body. His hair stood on end and sparked. His eyes bugged. His arms and legs stiffened at angles that formed him into a giant X. His skeleton glowed so brightly, I could see it through his skin.
Potts collapsed over onto me. His plug yanked out of the socket an instant before he hit, sparing me his fate.
He pressed his face into mine. “We’ll finish this later,” he gasped. His last words came out in a balloon. Either high voltage or death had turned him back into a Toon.
His dead weight pressed into me, squeezing out what little breath I had left. I lost my last ounce of strength and all my self-respect reaching into his skivvies to retrieve the formula.
Odd, your thoughts when you’re dying. I wondered if I would spend eternity wearing what I had on when I arrived at the pearly gates. If so, I should have taken Mother’s advice and put on clean underwear this morning.
My eyes closed. The last sound I heard in life was the guard snoring.
27
The hereafter came highly overrated. From what I heard in Sunday school, I expected trumpet symphonies, choirs of boy sopranos, angels dancing on the heads of pins, and murals on the order of the Sistine Chapel. I got public address pagings, clattering gurneys, and neutral beige walls. My celestial-issue robe exposed my backside. The only angel in the vicinity didn’t dance on a pin, she jabbed me with it. My halo had the shape of a bedpan. My white cloud lumped on the edges and sagged in the middle. Saint Peter’s breath reeked of Alpo.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said. His balloon wrapped around the high-wattage stainless steel overhead light fixture and melted into a circle of white icicles.
“Bulldog?”
“Unless you know another sucker willing to hang around City General for an hour while sawbones dig six ounces of lead out of your worthless carcass.” He opened his get-well present, a two-pound box of kibble. He removed a hidden fifth of gin. “You’re a lucky pug. Your redheaded buddy kept you pumping with mouth-to-mouth until the ambulance arrived.”
A classic case of good news, bad news. I’m alive, but filled to the gills with bunny breath. “You find the women?”
“Just where you suspected.” He slipped my glucose bottle out of its wire holder and replaced it with his smuggled crock of liquified juniper berries. “Roped to a railroad track.”
“Old habits die hard.”
“So, almost, did the women. We got their ropes off less than thirty seconds before the four-oh-five freight whistled through.” He plugged my IV tube into the hooch, instantly correcting my blood-to-alcohol imbalance.
“They all right?”
“Tired, scared, cold. A quack here at the hospital’s checking them for permanent damage. I doubt he’ll find any.” Bascomb sat on a slat wooden chair. He leaned back, balancing on the chair’s two hind legs, with his hindquarters stretched out on the end of my bed.
I pulled the hose off my needle, leaked gin into a specimen bottle, and handed it to him.
“I’m on duty.” He took it anyway and tossed it back. He yanked out the squared-off corner of my bed sheet and used it to wipe his mouth. “I had a long, intensive heart-to-heart this afternoon with your brother-in-law, Ferd Flatfoot.”
“Good thing I’m in a hospital.” I reconnected myself to my liquid nourishment. “I got a hunch you’re about to give me a pain. “
“Flatfoot’s a tough little monkey, no pun intended. I had to pull rank and my brass knuckles to persuade him to hand this over.” Bascomb held up a clear cellophane evidence envelope containing a circular spool wound with a thin strip of film. “Photographed in total darkness by one Louise Wrightliter, but surprisingly illuminating, nevertheless. I gave it a gander while you were in surgery.”
“I bet you loved what you saw.”
“Positive music to my eyes.” He bounced the film in his paw. “I been waiting my whole career to nail you on a rap of thi
s magnitude.”
I held out my wrists a shackle’s length apart. One already sported a hospital bracelet inscribed with my name, age, height, weight, blood type, and the fact that I carried no medical insurance. “What are you waiting for?”
Bascomb stuck a pencil through the spool’s center hole. He yanked the film. It rolled off the reel and piled up in a tangled heap on the floor. “Unfortunately for me, your buddy supported your story. He swore he heard Potts confess to committing a quadruple dip: Enigman, LeTuit, Dodger Rabbit, and Baby Herman.”
“You believe him? A friend of mine? Will wonders never cease?”
“Can any notions you might be harboring that I’m turning soft, Valiant.” The last of the film hit the linoleum. Bascomb pinched the empty spool to a stop. He gathered up the snarled film and dropped it into the sink. “For two cents, I’d charge your sidekick with perjury and toss him in the cell next to yours. Lucky for you both, the museum guard corroborates. He heard Potts’s confession, too.”
“We talking about the same gent? Ancient sucker? Deaf, dumb, and blind? Suffers from chronic narcolepsy?”
“That’s where he fooled you, Valiant. That old bucket’s sharp as a tack. Doesn’t miss a trick.” Hard to tell exactly, since Bascomb never opens his eyes more than a slit, but I swear he winked. “Based on the overwhelming weight of accumulated evidence, I’m satisfied that Potts murdered the four stiffs in question. Hence, I’m declaring this case closed. Which means you’re off the hook, Valiant. And your rabbit friend, too. Good thing, since I really get a tickle out of that chowder-head. Besides, it would have kicked the slats out from under the value of his autograph If I had to execute him for murder.” Bascomb ignited a match. He threw it on top of the film. The damning evidence went up in flames, burning hot and bright.
Bascomb bit the end off a cheap cigar. He leaned in close to the conflagration and sucked his stogie to life.
The nurse, my needle-jabbing angel in white, entered my room on the run. “No smoking allowed in here, Officer,” she said. “How do you expect this man to get well?”
“I got a sneaky suspicion he’s feeling better already.” Bascomb turned on the water and washed my problems down the drain.
My bed quaked. I opened my eyes to find Bunk Thunker kicking the leg. “Visiting hours are over,” I told him.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Valiant. If I had my way, they’d quarantine this room ‘til doomsday and you along with it.” He searched his pockets by patting them hard. “I brought somebody who wants to see you. Though I can’t imagine why.”
Little Jo emerged from behind his cigarette pack just ahead of a hard smack. She wore a dress cut out of sterile gauze and belted with a Band-Aid. She’d tucked her hair into a skullcap made from the amputated thumb of a rubber surgical glove. Dabbings of Mercurochrome called attention to the facial abrasions around her mouth and cheeks. Except for those, and the string burns on her wrists and ankles, she appeared none the worse for wear.
“Hi-yah, Toots,” I said. “Good to see you. You okay? Doc give you a clean bill of health?”
“Oh, Eddie, I’m fine.” A tear the size of a mustard seed rolled off her eyelash. “But just look at you. You poor wounded dear. How heroic of you. Risking your life to help a friend.” She slid down the center gully of my mattress, crawled up to my head, kneeled on my pillow, and smooched me on the cheek. “I was worried beyond belief when Sergeant Bascomb told me you’d been shot. I was afraid I’d never see you again.” Her words came out in the fine, delicate line used by Victorian ladies to pen love letters.
“Aw,” gagged Thunker, jamming a wooden tongue depressor down his throat, “ain’t that sweet.” He placed his hand over his heart but only to pull out his shirt pocket. “Come on, Tootsie. Hop back in. I ain’t got time or the stomach for any more kootchie-coo. “
She combed her fingers through my eyebrows. If it’s all the same to you, Officer, I’ll stay here with Eddie.”
Thunker shrugged. “No accounting for taste.” He left us to our own devices.
Little Jo graced my mouth with a passionate smacker. The astringent taste of her antiseptic tingled my lips. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I should have asked you first.” She crawled under my blanket. “Do you care if I stay and nurse you back to health?”
With the type of first aid she administered, I didn’t mind one bit.
28
My doctor prescribed an absolute minimum three weeks of hospital bed rest. I cut him short by twenty days. I’d rather bleed to death on the street than be bled to death by the room rate.
I rummaged through the paper bag containing my personal effects. I hauled out a cigarette and the formula for Toon Tonic. I used the same match to torch both.
I stopped at a phone booth and checked my answering service. Skipper read me my lone message, from publicity agent and flicker flack Large Mouth Bassinger. Large Mouth’s client roster boasted many of Hollywood’s most notable stars. His well-deserved reputation as the slickest fish in the pond derived from his oft-proven ability to turn horse manure into the Lipizzaner stallions.
He wanted to see me pronto.
Large Mouth’s secretary, a trim young perch with undulating fins and a pouty smile, sat behind her desk scissoring her boss’s utterances to eight and a half by eleven and embossing them with his letterhead. An efficient way to handle correspondence. Saves a bundle on White Out. Not to mention the hours normally wasted practicing “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”
She migrated me into Large Mouth’s office. All it needed to become a fish tank was caulk, a hundred gallons of water, and a giant cat staring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The gritty layer of sand carpeting the floor nurtured large clumps of snaky, pastel-colored ferns. A copper-helmeted diver’s suit stood in a corner. Slightly below the cornice, a plaster fisherman sat on the end of a mock dock. He was reeling in a scuba diver.
Large Mouth’s desk replicated a sunken ship. Telephone and intercom resided on the bridge. Work in progress occupied the poop deck.
Large Mouth shook my hand with the vigor of a thirsty man priming a pump. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Eddie.”
“It’s mutual, Mr. Bassinger.”
“L.M., please. All my intimate, close, sincere, good friends call me L.M.” His gills labored to suck in air, shrouding his lippy face. Large Mouth’s glassy peepers bulged outward with the curve of cat’s-eye marbles. His dorsal fin undulated as daintily as a Japanese fan. A liberal coating of fish oil gave his scales the shimmer of interlocked rainbows. He stood on his tail, flattening the ends to solidify his base of operations. “Simply because we’ve only just met doesn’t preclude you from joining the immense, worldwide fraternity comprised of my oldest and dearest acquaintances.”
“Fine by me, old buddy, old pal. What’s on your mind?”
He opened a gold-foil-lined tin box of expensive English blends, the brand advertised as decorator items in better fashion magazines. He slid one out and inserted it into an ivory holder the size of an elephant’s toothache. He flipped open his lighter and removed an eel. The eel grabbed a deep breath, flicked its flinty tongue across its ratchety incisors, and belched an impressive electrical arc which Large Mouth used to light his smoke. He extinguished the eel by dipping it headfirst into a bowl of lemon-scented water with a gardenia floating on top. Nero burned Rome with less showmanship. “I invited you here to hire you on behalf of a client of mine, Baby Herman.”
“He’s got no friends? His publicity agent has to pay six men to carry him to the grave?”
Large Mouth dipped a manicured flipper-tip into a pink shell filled with sea salt. He sniffed the crystalline residue up one of his double-barreled, sixteen-gauge nostrils. “Suppose I were to assure you, Mr. Valiant, quite confidentially, that the rumors of Baby Herman’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
I grabbed a smoke of my
own, a garden-variety Lucky right from the pack, and lit it with a plain wooden match. “I’ll believe that when I hear it straight from the horse’s toothless, pacifier-sucking mouth.”
“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. Baby is in strict seclusion, under a doctor’s care. Recuperating from an extremely frightening experience.” His words emerged as a string of bubbles the size of seed pearls. They barely made it into my field of vision before popping to smithereens. “Baby was kidnapped. Threatened with death. He escaped from captivity only hours ago. Baby has been quite traumatized by the whole, horrible ordeal.”
“How does that involve me?”
“Baby requires your aid in the resolution of a rather delicate personal matter, totally unrelated to his recent tribulation.” His balloons orbited his head like tiny moons, slowing slightly as they passed his eyes so he could have the pleasure of watching himself talk. “Baby committed a minor peccadillo, a slight malfeasance, a bit of an indiscretion.”
“Skip the disclaimers. Open the floodgates and spill the swill.”
With a clanking of heavy chains, the drawbridge descended from the ersatz castle that functioned as Large Mouth’s private toilet. “Jeez, L.M., throw a squirt of Lysol in there. The whole place reeks of silt.” Baby Herman toddled out.
“Baby, I don’t believe it’s advisable for you to make an appearance quite yet,” counseled Large Mouth. “Wait until I’ve had an adequate opportunity to outline your situation and justify your position.”
“Route it out your snout. I’m not hiding in a fish crapper while you bleach my dirty diapers.” Herman ripped the cellophane off a cigar. Large Mouth hastened to offer him the eel. Herman kept it, dropping it into his nappie. “Here’s my problem, Valiant. I need muscle. To protect me from one of my soon-to-be-former buddies.”
“What’s the beef?”
Herman waded across the sandy floor. “Do something about your carpeting, L.M. It makes me feel like the fritter in a cat box.” He halted at a leather sofa sewn to the shape of a snail. “Seems I started this quaint little rumor concerning a friend of mine.”