“Cover you from what?” the bartender shouted back.
“I don’t know! That’s just what they always yell in the movies!”
Since these were animals who lived in the ocean, Jimmy had kind of expected the place to be filled with water. Instead, the interior of the bar was all strobe lights and techno music, conveniently perfect for a fight scene. It turned out that when dolphins wanted to party on land, all they needed to do was turn up a humidifier and it was all good.
Jimmy’s army was slugging it out with a whole bunch of rowdy dolphins. It had already turned into a giant rumble. Dudes were getting tossed into mirrors, lots of kung fu, that sort of thing. Dolphins might be a bunch of easily offended prima donnas on the Internet, but it turned out in real life they could throw down.
He narrowly dodged a flipper. Then a tail swept his legs out from under him. Jimmy got up, only to have another dolphin shatter a chair over his head. “That was a dick move!”
But that dolphin was fresh out of pity, and it grabbed Jimmy by the shirt collar, picked him up, and slid him down the bar. Jimmy crashed face first through a bunch of bottles and fish sticks before flying off the end and onto the floor.
“I’m not leaving until somebody tells me where Wendell is!” Jimmy struggled back to his feet, only to get nailed in the head by another chair. “Oooof! What is up with all the friggin’ chairs! You dudes can’t even sit!”
The dolphin held up one flipper and dramatically twirled open a butterfly knife.
“Whoa, easy there! You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”
The dolphin looked over incredulously at the upside-down bus in the middle of their dance floor, then back to Jimmy, as if to say are you shitting me, human? Then it lunged for him.
Jimmy scurried back, and then grabbed a butter knife off the bar. He held it out defensively. “I’m warning you, I’ve played a whole lot of Fruit Ninja!”
Only before the dolphin could gut Jimmy like . . . well . . . a fish, a bunch of flashbangs went off, disorienting the combatants. A hole was blown through the ceiling, and a shadowy figure dropped through, landing smoothly next to the knife-wielding dolphin.
“You’ve made quite the mess of things, Jimmy.”
“Mr. Stranger! What’re you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Tom Stranger said as he used a sweet judo throw to toss the dolphin on its snout. “But there is no time for chitchat.”
A big crew of dolphins was heading their way. Jimmy’s army had gotten trounced fairly quickly and were in full retreat. Tom Stranger took up a fighting stance.
“Kick their ass, Mr. Stranger!”
“There is no need for violence, my dolphin friends. I merely seek information pertaining to the whereabouts of my client. Let us resolve this peacefully, then I will force these hooligans to leave your establishment, and I will arrange for this young man to pay for all the damages and any emotional distress he has caused.”
“Wait . . . What?”
“Silence, Jimmy. Grownups are talking. Now, please, let us be reasonable.”
The biggest dolphin ever swaggered up. He was wearing a bunch of gold chains and had prison tats from SeaWorld. “insert dolphin noise here”
“That is a terribly cruel thing to say about my mother.”
The dolphins charged. Having been left with no choice, Tom Stranger responded. It was flipper against fist. Only Interdimensional Insurance Agents fight like watching a Jet Li movie on fast forward, so the dolphins never had a chance. He clothes-lined one, body-slammed another, and when they inevitably threw a chair at him, Mr. Stranger caught it and flung it right back, knocking that jerky dolphin right out the front window and into the street.
There was a cha-chunk noise as the dolphin behind the bar racked a shotgun. Only before it could fire, Muffy appeared and stuck a giant plasma cannon against its nose.
“Drop it, you cetacean son of a bitch, before I blast you into chum.”
“Ms. Wappler, please! Remember we are trying not to be so culturally insensitive.”
“Sorry, Mr. Stranger.”
Inappropriate or not, the dolphin put the shotgun down. The techno music had stopped. The floor was covered in moaning, semiconscious dolphins and humans. The knock-down, drag-out fight was over.
“I swept the place, Mr. Stranger. They’ve got a money laundering operation, and a meth lab in the basement, but no sign of Wendell anywhere.”
“Drat.” He looked over at Jimmy, who was busy picking splinters out of his hair. “I know your world is remarkably odd, but are you unfamiliar with the concept of how employment works?”
“I know I got fired, but I was going to prove those evaluations wrong and take care of this claim.”
“Strange . . . As statistically improbable as it sounds, even deprived of the firm’s resources you still somehow figured out that this pod of criminal dolphins hired out some of their cartel assassins to a secret cabal of shady businessmen to thwart a hostile takeover, in the same amount of time it took me to come to the same conclusion.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s like totally what I was thinking happened.”
Mr. Stranger seemed confused. He looked at Muffy, who was blowing a bubble. She shrugged.
“So do I get my job back?”
“Hmmm . . . We will revisit the accuracy of our employee evaluations later.” He went over to the big boss dolphin and picked him up by his dorsal fin. “We know Wendell was taken by members of your pod. Now talk.”
The prison-hardened dolphin made an extremely rude gesture. Which was saying something since it was kind of limited, not having fingers and all.
Jimmy realized that they’d been joined by some of the Junior Associates. They were all taller than he was and super buffed. Plus they were like smart and good at stuff. To be honest, they made Jimmy feel a little dumpy and inadequate.
Face-Punch went over to the Alpha Dolphin. “A tough guy, huh? Back on my planet we had a way of making dolphins talk. I’ll need a hair dryer and a ShamWow.”
“Nyet,” said McSpetsnaz. “There is no time for reverse waterboarding. There is deep fryer in kitchen. We should see how much dolphin can fit.”
“I respect your enthusiasm, Junior Associates, but inserting sentient beings into deep fat fryers is against company policy. Such barbarity is better suited for firms like Conundrum and Company or United Airlines. “ Tom Stranger sighed and released the dolphin. “Besides, if we engage in atrocities, we will be plagued with negative dolphin reviews forever.”
Jimmy thought back to the profound bartender wisdom of that Danny Trejo guy. “We could just try asking him nicely.”
Tom Stranger didn’t seemed convinced, but Jimmy was on a roll. “Very well.”
“Cool. I got this. Okay, Mr. Dolphin Mob Boss dude. I’m really sorry about the bus crash. With all due respect and stuff, we really need to get this manatee back, so could you like do us a solid and help us out?”
The dolphin studied Jimmy with his beady, shifty, little black eyes, and slowly nodded in agreement.
“See?” Jimmy turned around and grinned. “Told you guys—”
Then the dolphin grabbed yet another chair and broke that one over Jimmy’s head, too.
“Enough of this foolishness and carrying on.” Tom Stranger put the evil dolphin in a headlock and squeezed. “I tried being polite, but if I am to receive a one-star review in pursuit of my duties, so be it. Where is the manatee?”
From Jimmy’s new position on the floor, he had a good view out the big hole in the wall. At first he thought he was hallucinating from all those traumatic brain injuries, but the big thing outside seemed pretty real. It looked like a gigantic spaceship was rising out of the ocean. “Uh, Mr. Stranger?”
“Where, curse you, where?” Mr. Stranger shouted as the dolphin’s face turned from grey to purple. Jimmy reached over and started tugging on his pant leg. “What?”
Jimmy pointed at the big warship that was rising into the s
ky until it blotted out the sun. It was like a sleek, manatee version of the Space Battleship Yamato. It began blaring a warning through loudspeakers as it hovered over the beach.
“FLOOOOOO.”
Tom Stranger dropped the obstinate dolphin. “For those of you who do not speak the language, the manatees have dispatched ships like this to a hundred worlds as part of a punitive expedition. They just declared the land mammals have one hour to return Wendell which, all things considered, is a remarkably merciful time frame, or the perpetuators will taste their righteous vengeance.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Jimmy said hopefully. “For everybody other than the perps obviously.”
“Except historically, manatees aren’t very good at target identification,” said Face-Punch. “Back on my home world, off the coast of Innsmouth, a manatee strike team mistook King Triton for Dagon. It was the worst friendly fire incident of the Deep War.”
“Oh, man, not Ariel’s dad!”
“The claims paperwork still haunts my nightmares. Dead flounders and talking crabs everywhere . . . Sorry, Jimmy. Where I’m from The Little Mermaid is considered a very tragic movie. We’ve got to do something, Mr. Stranger.”
“You are correct, Junior Associate.” He began dragging the evil dolphin over toward the hole. “I’ll start by turning this miscreant over to the manatees.”
The dolphin thrashed in terror. “insert dolphin noise here”
“Begging for mercy will do you no good. Manatees laugh at the Geneva Convention. Now do you want to talk?”
“insert dolphin noise here”
“See? That wasn’t so hard. Thank you for your cooperation.” He karate-chopped the dolphin and knocked it unconscious.
“What just happened?”
“Now I know where the kidnappers are. Sadly, I was just in that reality. Come, Junior Associates, we need to get back to Jimmy’s home dimension.” Scowling, he looked at the battleship looming overhead. “And we must hurry.”
“Yeah, man. It’s like high noon out there.”
“Worse. It’s nigh hoon.”
CHAPTER SIX
Tom Networks on the Golf Course
Somewhere over Florida
Earth #169-J-00561
THE STRANGER & Stranger battlemech blasted through the dimensional rift and tore across the sky at Mach 3. Tom, Muffy, Jimmy, and the three Junior Associates were all crowded into the cockpit, making Tom glad that he had purchased a battlemech with a roomy interior.
After the dolphin crime lord had admitted that it was his crew who had been hired to kidnap Wendell, Tom had quickly figured out the entire complicated plot. Someone was trying to stop the CorreiaTech merger by pitting two of Tom’s clients against each other. The damages would be astronomical. The paperwork never-ending.
Muffy was looking at a spreadsheet. “Mr. Stranger, if this incident causes an interdimensional war, we insure both sides! Whoever is found at fault, the payout would ruin our third quarter numbers.”
“And millions of innocents would die.”
“Oh, yeah, that too. Total bummer.”
“I shudder to think of all the customer dissatisfaction that could cause.” Tom pounded one fist against the control panel. “Not on my watch! Prepare yourselves, Junior Associates. We will be over the drop zone shortly. Somewhere inside that compound the dolphins have hidden Wendell. The humans there are unaware that they are being set up, but they will attempt to defend themselves, as will the manatee raiders. We will split into teams to cover more ground. You must find Wendell, secure him, and avoid harming any of our clients, human or manatee. Stun weapons only.”
“What about dolphins?” asked McSpetsnaz.
“For them you may set your Wombats to mulch. There is our destination, the Mar-a-Lago Resort and Presidential Golf Retreat.”
“All signals are being jammed,” Hardsack shouted. “I can’t make contact with the clients.”
There was a huge manatee battleship floating ahead of them. It began firing its particle beam cannons.
“Taking evasive maneuvers.” Tom’s super-quick reflexes saved the day as he pulled the stick and rolled the mech between the death rays. Of course, Jimmy had unbuckled his seat belt in order to get a drumstick from the Kentucky Fried Velociraptor to-go bucket and wound up smashed against the ceiling by centrifugal force. One of the manatee’s rail guns got lucky and blew a hole through their shields and shattered the window.
Muffy reached out with her robot hand and snagged Jimmy by the sleeve right before he would have gotten sucked out the hole. “Seat belts are company policy for a reason, Jimmy! Why do I even write all those safety briefings if you dipsticks never bother to read them?”
Jimmy screamed incoherently in response.
“Well I, for one, appreciate your timely emails, Ms. Wappler.” Tom grimaced as one of the mech’s arms was torn off. Manatees were incredibly lethal marksmen, and despite Tom’s Top Gun-like piloting skills, the mech took several more hits.
“We are going down. Now remember, team, this America is a new client. Prior to my saving their previous vice president from Ball Sharks, they were insured with Conundrum and Company. Let’s show them what proper customer service looks like.”
As the flaming mech hurtled toward the ground, the Junior Associates began bailing out. Since each of them was rated fairly high on the Grylls Survivability Scale, they didn’t even bother with parachutes. An impact at this velocity was only sufficient to kill four or five Bear Grylls, tops. Unfortunately, not all of his team were up for such strenuous activity. “By the way, Ms. Wappler, would you kindly stick a jet pack on Jimmy or something? I would hate for him to explode on impact.”
“So does this mean that Jimmy is rehired, sir?”
Tom glanced over at the screaming intern as he flailed back and forth in the thousand-mile-an-hour fire wind over the hull breach, through which could be seen the ground rushing up to violently meet them.
“Well, it was rather sloppy, but he did provide some quality customer service to our client today. I think that perhaps Jimmy, coming from such an outlandish and silly universe, may actually turn out to be a benefit. At times it’s as if his very presence alters the laws of probability. Let’s give him another chance.”
“Aaaaaaaaahhhhaaaaaaahhhhaaaaaaaa!”
“You are most welcome, Jimmy.”
“Aw, that was really nice of you.” Muffy shoved an anti-gravity belt into Jimmy’s arms, and then let him careen wildly into the atmosphere. “Let’s face it, Mr. Stranger, you’re really a big softie.” Then Muffy unbuckled, tucked her arms to her sides, and smoothly flew through the hole.
Needing to draw the manatees’ fire, Tom stayed in his crippled mech, wrestling with the controls as missiles exploded all around. He activated his personal energy shield as the cabin was engulfed in flames. He’d already gotten feathers all over this suit today; getting charred to a crisp would make him look completely unprofessional.
The mech was headed right for the golf course. Trying to minimize casualties and maximize customer satisfaction, Tom aimed for a water feature on the fourth hole. Except a manatee photon cannon blasted his stabilizers into shrapnel and the controls seized up. The mech went into an out-of-control spin and slammed into the green at several times terminal velocity, erupting in a huge fireball.
Miles above, the manatee gunners high-flippered. Which is sort of like a high five, but you get the idea. They hadn’t even known what they were shooting at, but manatees simply loved to blow shit up.
Jimmy the Intern somehow managed not to die. Luckily for him, he got the anti-gravity thingy figured out right before he would have been turned into sidewalk pizza. According to the help menu, the device created a repellant force field, not that Jimmy understood what those words meant. Unfortunately, he cranked it up a little too high, and ended up bouncing on impact like he was riding a giant hamster ball, through a bunch of trees, a flock of very startled ducks, and directly into a big glass window, which shattered,
and then the stupid belt shorted out as he skidded through a luncheon on his face.
“Whoa.” He groaned as he sat up. If it wasn’t for all the bruises and the sick carpet burn on his forehead, that landing would have been Die Hard-level cool. Then Jimmy realized he was being stared at by a whole bunch of old guys in tuxedos and rich ladies with furs and little dogs in their purses. This place was really fancy. They had like monocles and stuff. He looked up and saw that he had crashed through a big banner that read welcome world leaders.
They were staring at him in shocked silence. Jimmy waved. “Hey, everybody. Don’t mind me.”
“Where did you come from, young man?”
“He fell out of the sky!”
“Well, we started in outer space, but no biggie. I’m just your friendly neighborhood insurance guy.”
“It’s like the commercials!” cried Chancellor Angela Merkel. “If you say the incantation, insurance agents will suddenly materialize.”
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” sang the president of China. He looked around expectantly, but then got disappointed when nobody else appeared out of thin air.
“Wrong company, dudes. I’m not like Beetlejuice or something.” Jimmy got up and brushed the broken glass off his clothes. He was feeling pretty awesome. Nothing builds confidence like a near-death experience and getting your job back. Super smooth, he whipped out a business card. “Stranger & Stranger, for all your interdimensional insurance needs. Call us for a free rate quote.”
“This is all so very exciting!” declared the kid from High School Musical, or maybe it was the Prime Minister of Canada Jimmy always got those two mixed up. “These summits have been such a drag since my real da—uh . . . I mean, Fidel Castro died. He was the life of the party.”
“But anyways, we’re all going to get blown up by that big floating battleship outside, unless any of you guys has seen a manatee around here?”
The world leaders all simultaneously pointed toward the buffet.
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