Bingo was about to try it out anyway until he heard the footsteps racing toward them.
“Here they come,” Caesar said.
Before Bingo could even see if the machine was still operational he found himself surrounded by scruffy vanilla tattooed men with rolled-up sleeves and black suspenders. All of them were grunts and they were all better armed than the guys who’d hit him back at Isabella’s place.
“Well, I guess it’s time we got started,” Bingo said, slapping his knuckles together.
But the Carnies didn’t attack. They just formed a human wall around them, keeping them from getting away. The two cleaners inched their way behind the massive clown at their side.
“What do they want?” Clyde asked.
Bingo shrugged. “I guess they want us to wait here.”
The Carnies opened a path and let four of their men through.
“Who are they?” Caesar asked.
“They must really think we’re something,” Bingo said. “Sending their four generals out to greet us? I figured we’d have to kill a few dozen of them before they sent even one of the generals out.”
When Bingo saw the four generals, he recognized them from the first and only time he’d visited Carnival Island twelve years ago. Back then, they were lowly sideshow attractions. But now they were the lords of an army. There was Petunia the Bearded Lady, who was no longer as beautiful as Bingo remembered. She’d become a muscled beast of a woman with fists like bricks and a patch over her left eye. Then there was Gustav the Knife Thrower, smiling through his salt-and-pepper beard. Enzo the Human Pretzel, a scrawny bald man wearing only a loincloth, walked out on his hands with his legs tied around the back of his neck. And finally, there he was, the man who’d almost killed him all those years ago, the only man Bingo had ever met who was stronger than he was—Orlando the Strong Man.
Bingo eyed the strong man down as the generals approached. The big guy had aged more than a decade and Bingo had packed on twice the amount of muscle he’d had when he was nineteen, not to mention all the fighting experience he’d gained working for the Bozo Family. He wondered if Orlando could still take him, especially if he had all three of the other generals backing him up.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here, clown,” said Orlando the Strong Man. “After what you did, there’s not a man on this island who isn’t dying to tear you limb from limb.”
Bingo had no idea what the guy was talking about. The beardy Carnie back at Isabella’s place had said the same thing.
“And what is it you think I did?”
The strong man ignored his question. “You’re not getting out of here alive.”
Bingo wondered if he’d done something to them during one of the fuzzy spots in his memory. He didn’t at all like the Carnies. Given the opportunity, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t have done to them.
“Look, whatever I did I’m sure you scumbags deserved it,” Bingo said. “But what I want to know is what you creeps did with Melinda and Isabella.” He waited for a response, but they weren’t talking. “I’m sure I’ll have to kill a good number of you before you take my request seriously, but if you give them back to me in one piece then I’ll see what I can do about sparing the rest of your lives.”
The Carnies weren’t listening to the clown. They had bloodlust in their eyes. Whatever Bingo’d done to them, they weren’t going to rest until either he or they were dead.
“Okay, I’ll take the big one,” Bingo said to Clyde and Caesar. “You guys take the knife thrower and the bearded lady.”
The two cleaners dropped their mouths open.
“What?” Caesar cried. “You expect us to fight them?”
“Would you rather just sit there and watch?” Bingo asked.
“That’s exactly what we hoped to do,” Clyde said.
Bingo cracked his knuckles and then rubbed his round red nose. “You guys really don’t know a good time when you see one.”
The four generals attacked first, all of them going after Bingo and leaving the cleaners to hide on the sidelines. When Bingo’s fist collided with Orlando’s, he realized that the strong man hadn’t lost any of his might after twelve years. The blow sent the clown stumbling back. If it were one-on-one, Bingo thought that maybe he could’ve taken the strong man. But he quickly learned that he was no match for the four of them working together.
The bearded lady lit a match and blew a cloud of fire into Bingo’s face. As he smacked out the flames, Enzo the Human Pretzel wrapped himself around the clown, turning himself into living bondage.
“What the hell’s with this guy?” Bingo said with smoking eyebrows.
He tried to pull the human pretzel off his back, but the wiry man only tightened his grip on Bingo’s arms, making himself impossible to reach. Then Orlando punched Bingo in the stomach until the clown went slack.
“You’re probably pretty amazed by how much stronger I am than you, eh?” Orlando said, punching Bingo in the ribs. “You have far more body mass than I do, but you see, I have something you lack.” He punched him in the jaw as Enzo tightened his inhuman elbow around the clown’s throat. “I’ve got steel rods implanted throughout my body. Nobody in this town’s tougher than me.” He punched him in the face again, knocking a tooth loose. “Especially not some gutter clown like you.”
When Orlando kneed Bingo in the stomach, the clown could feel exactly what the big man was saying. Bingo fell to the ground. Then the Carnies took turns beating him as the human pretzel tightened his hold on him.
“This isn’t good,” Bingo said, as his eyes went foggy. “Damn Carnies. I can’t believe they got me again…”
The clown couldn’t help but chuckle as he passed in and out of consciousness. He had a strong feeling of déjà vu.
Chapter 112
After the first run-in with the Carnies, Bingo woke in the Little Bigtop hospital. He didn’t remember what had happened. Once he finally passed out after the beating he took, he didn’t expect to ever wake up again.
“You’re one tough son of a bitch, you know that?” asked a voice from within the room.
Bingo looked around to see a clown sitting next to him. The stranger wore a nice blue suit and had neatly combed short blue hair. His blue nose was so slick and shiny that Bingo wondered if the guy polished it on a daily basis.
The blue-nosed clown continued, “Even with you being unconscious, those Carnie pricks still couldn’t kill you. They stabbed you almost twenty times before they gave up and left you lying there.”
“Who are you?” Bingo asked.
“My name’s Vinnie,” said the blue-nosed clown. “But the more important question is, who are you? You didn’t have any identification on you. The hospital called my people assuming you worked for us.”
“And who is us?”
“You must be new in Little Bigtop,” Vinnie said. “Nobody around here wouldn’t recognize a member of the Bozo Family when they’ve seen one.”
Bingo had heard of the Bozo Family, long before he moved to Little Bigtop. He couldn’t believe that the guy sitting next to him was in the clown mafia. He looked around the same age as Bingo, maybe even younger. It was hard to believe that a guy so young would be working with the mob.
“There’s not many of us big enough to match your description,” Vinnie said, “nor any of us stupid enough to pick a fight in Carnie territory, so we assumed you couldn’t have been with the Bozos. But still, my capo asked me to come by and check on you anyway. Maybe see if you needed a job.”
Bingo couldn’t believe what the blue-nosed clown was saying. “A job? Are you serious?”
“Any clown who can pick a fight with the Carnies in their own territory and come out of there alive, even on a stretcher, would do pretty well for himself in our line of work.”
“But you don’t even know me,” Bingo said. “I could even be a cop.”
“You’re no cop.” Vinnie laughed. “Judging by your clothes, I’d bet you’re some suburban kid who probabl
y didn’t get along with his parents and wanted to move to the city where you’d be around more of your own kind. But since you got here, you probably haven’t been able to find a job. And I hate to break it to you, but you’re not likely to find one, either. A lot of clowns like you come here every month, and this place eats them right up. They usually end up hooked on laughy-gas and living out of a cardboard box by the end of the first year.”
It only took Bingo a minute to think about it.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass,” Bingo said. “I’m a violinist. I plan to join the symphony.”
Vinnie shrugged. “If that’s what you want to do, then you should do it. I wouldn’t stand in the way of anyone’s dreams. But if the only violin gig you find yourself is playing on a street corner for pocket change, give me a call.”
Vinnie gave him his card. It said he worked for someplace called THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. Obviously, it wasn’t the real company he worked for.
Bingo tossed the card on the table next to his bed. “Thanks, but I’ll do fine playing violin. They say I’m pretty good at it.”
“By the looks of your fingers, I’m sure you’re great,” Vinnie said. “But being great doesn’t always equal success.”
Vinnie placed his blue hat on his head and took his leave. Before he left the room, he said, “Just think about it. This town’s been waiting for you, Bingo. You could really go far here.”
At first, Bingo had no intention of ever calling Vinnie Blue Nose, but for some reason he kept his card. When he couldn’t find work playing his violin anywhere, or work of any kind for that matter, and his parents cut off his allowance and told him to either come back home or sell his violin, he decided to give Vinnie a call. He didn’t care what kind of work the Bozo Family wanted him to do, as long as he got to keep his violin and stay in Little Bigtop. It wasn’t the line of work he ever saw himself getting into, but he was pretty sure that he’d get the hang of it.
Chapter 113
It took eight Carnies, including Orlando, to drag Bingo across the grounds to see their boss.
“We had nothing to do with this guy,” Clyde said to the bearded lady as they were forced to come along.
“We swear,” Caesar said. “He practically kidnapped us.”
The guy in charge went by the name of Lord Preston Fantasio. When Bingo saw him through his swollen glazed eyes as they brought him into the boss’s tent, he recognized the son of a bitch immediately. Though the guy now wore a cloak and top hat like some kind of carnival ringmaster, he wouldn’t miss those stupid muttonchops and tiny round glasses anywhere. Fantasio was the rapist security guard bastard Bingo got into the fight with twelve years ago. The clown had no idea how the jerkoff could make it to the head of the Carnie gang being the scrawny prick that he was. He must’ve just been the brains behind the Carnival Island laughy-gas operation.
“So this is the guy who killed Boris?” asked Fantasio, tapping a skull-handled cane at the clown.
“Who’s Boris?” Bingo asked.
Orlando slammed his face into the concrete floor, and then raised it back up, leaving a round clown-nose-shaped splat of blood.
“He’s the guy you killed last week,” Fantasio said. “Boris the Sword Swallower. A dear friend of mine.”
Bingo had problems with his memory of the past couple of days or so, but he remembered everything from last week. There was no way he’d killed the guy Fantasio was talking about.
“I didn’t kill any friend of yours,” Bingo said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to take credit for killing any of you Carnie pricks. But it wasn’t me.”
Then the Carnie boss saw something in Bingo’s eyes. He just now recognized him as the clown he’d gotten into a fight with twelve years ago.
“Hey, Orlando,” Fantasio said to the strong man. “Isn’t this the same clown we beat down years ago? You know, the one we couldn’t kill no matter how many times we stabbed him.”
The strong man smiled through his handlebar mustache. “Oh yeah. I think he is.”
Fantasio shoved the skull side of his cane into Bingo’s mouth. “Is that why you killed Boris? You finally got the guts to get your revenge after all these years?”
Bingo used his nose to butt the cane out of his face. “I told you, I didn’t kill the guy.”
“It’s no use denying it. Charlotte saw the whole thing.”
“Charlotte?”
“She’s the carnival’s new fortune-teller,” Fantasio said. Then he turned and called her name. “And my fiancée.”
A tall, gorgeous woman stepped into the tent and wrapped her arm around Fantasio. She was covered from head to toe in tattoos and wore an albino anaconda around her neck like a scarf. The snake slithered across her shoulders, coiling around her arms in an almost sexual way.
“Yes, my love?” the woman asked.
Her voice was familiar to Bingo.
“Is this the man who killed Boris?”
It wasn’t just her voice.
She nodded. “Yes.”
She somehow wasn’t a clown anymore, but when he looked in her eyes there was no mistaking that it was her.
“Isabella?” Bingo asked.
She pointed at him with a long, black fingernail. “He’s the bastard who killed your friend.”
Bingo didn’t understand. How could she be Isabella Funshine? Isabella was a clown and this woman was vanilla. She couldn’t have just been wearing clown makeup the whole time. He’d made love to her many times, he’d held her in his arms, he’d pinched her little round nose. There was no way she wasn’t a true flesh-and-blood clown. To imitate a clown that well she would’ve had to go through some serious cosmetic surgery. It just wasn’t possible.
“Isabella, what’s going on?” Bingo asked. He was nearly in tears. “Why are you pretending to be some Carnie whore?”
The strong man smashed his face into the ground again.
Fantasio looked over at his fiancée. “Charlotte, do you know this clown?”
“No,” she said, then spit in his face. “The only time I’ve ever seen him was in my crystal ball, the day he killed Boris.”
“Then why does he think he knows you?”
She looked at Bingo and laughed. “He must be mad. That bullet you put in him must have scrambled his brain.”
Then it all came back to Bingo. The night before, Isabella came to his apartment. He heard her voice on the intercom and buzzed her up, but when she came through his door she was no longer a clown. She pretended to be some kind of woman in distress. He sat her down on the couch, asking her a million questions about why she was dressed up as a vanilla and why she was acting that way. His back was to the door, so he didn’t notice the group of Carnies coming up behind him. He heard the first split second of a gunshot and then everything went white.
“Who the hell are you?” Bingo asked the woman. “Did you work for the Carnies this whole time?”
“I’d appreciate it if you stopped speaking to my fiancée,” Fantasio said.
“No…,” Bingo said. “You’re not with them, either, are you?”
“Tell him to stop looking at me like that,” the woman said. “I hate clowns.”
Bingo turned his eyes to the Carnie boss. “She’s playing you, just like she played me. Do you actually think she’s a real fortune-teller? Do you think she can actually see anything in the crystal ball?”
But Fantasio wouldn’t listen to a word he said. It was obvious the guy was blindly in love with her and couldn’t possibly doubt her, not even when she claimed to have actual clairvoyant powers.
“Get rid of him,” the woman cried.
Her blind lover obeyed her command.
“Gustav,” Fantasio said to the knife thrower. “Finish him.”
Gustav threw a knife at the clown, but the tip barely entered his muscled chest. It fell back out and plopped in the clown’s lap.
Bingo continued, “Or maybe she knew what happened to your friend Boris because she’s the one who kill
ed him.”
Gustav tried again, but the second blade just bounced off the clown’s head.
“Aim for the neck!” Isabella cried.
Bingo said, “Can’t you see what’s going on, you Carnie pri—”
The third blade plunged deep into the clown’s throat. An explosion of blood sprayed from Bingo’s mouth and he went limp, falling face-first into the floor.
When the clown was dead, the two cleaners looked at each other. They assumed they were going to be next. All eyes in the room turned toward them. Caesar nearly puked, his heart was racing so much. There was an awkward silence for a few moments.
“Well?” Isabella asked the cleaners.
“Well what?” Clyde asked.
“Well, get rid of the body,” she said.
Clyde pointed at the clown, then at himself. “You want us…to get rid of the body?”
“Of course,” she said. “We hired you to do the job, now finish the fucking job.”
“Oh, of course…,” Clyde said, shaking his head.
As the two men got to work, Caesar oozed with relief. “That’s why we’ve been following him around all day. We were just waiting for him to die so we could finish the job.”
Clyde elbowed him to shut up. He wanted to grab the body and get out of there as soon as possible.
“Why did you hire outside people to do the job anyway?” Fantasio asked the tattooed woman.
“Because if your men did it they’d do a lousy job and the Bozo Family would figure out the Carnies were behind this,” she said. “You really want a war with the Bozos?”
“The Bozos ain’t nothing,” Fantasio said, wrapping his arms around his woman’s waist. “Look at how easy we took out their toughest guy. I tell you, with the two of us working together, one day we’ll be running this town. And the Bozos will be wiped off the Little Bigtop map for good.”
Charlotte fake-giggled and then kissed him. As they embraced, the snake on her shoulders coiled itself around Fantasio’s neck like a cold, fleshy noose.
Chapter 114
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