Last Ditch Effort

by Isobella Crowley

  A strange sense of claustrophobia set in as the garage walls seemed to hem him in and the other vehicles loomed close by. He had no physical fear of collision, but in his current financial straits, he did not like the idea of damaging his new boss’s property and having to pay to repair it.

  “Okay,” he said to himself as he ventured forward an inch or two, “I think we’re all the way in now. Right?” It was hard to judge.

  To be safe, he shifted into park—and checked to be sure—then left the engine running as he climbed out to examine his surroundings. He was fine on both sides but, annoyingly, his rear bumper was still almost directly below the edge of the garage door.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat once more and nudged the car an eensie bit forward.

  “That should do it.” He nodded and got out again. Thankfully, he’d managed not to run the front end into any of Taylor’s belongings, and he’d keep his rear bumper intact, also. He then remembered that he should probably shut the engine off and remove the key. With this accomplished, he examined his surroundings.

  Doubt assailed him and he froze in place. He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to enter the house via the door within the garage or if they expected him to circle to the front entrance. After a few minutes’ deliberation, he decided to try the easier option first.

  He grasped the knob on the heavy wooden door leading from the garage to the interior and tried it cautiously. It failed to turn.

  “That figures,” he muttered, walked to the front, and ascended the steps as he had on his first morning there. He’d no sooner reached the landing when the butler opened the right side.

  Remy spoke first. “Good morning, Jeeves. Sorry I’m a little late, but you know how New York traffic is.”

  The old man frowned. “Morning, sir. And do please call me Presley, thank you. Come in.” He motioned for him to follow him and turned to disappear into the shadowy foyer.

  Presley turned to face him, now, and his hands were folded behind his back. His droopy face frowned even more deeply than before.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, reading the disapproval.

  The old man cleared his throat. “Ms Steele wished for me to express her intense displeasure at your tardiness,” he stated, his voice low and cold with disapproval.

  “Intense displeasure?” he inquired. “That sounds as kinky as all hell, Jeeves. I thought your relationship was purely professional.”

  “I am uncertain what you are implying by that,” Presley retorted and his frown became almost a scowl, “and don’t think that being a smart-arse is some kind of compensation for having failed to arrive on time. You’re only making things more difficult for yourself.”

  Remy sighed. “The sympathy is appreciated, old chap. It’s good to know that you feel sorry enough for my predicament to have forgiven me already.”

  The elderly man sighed and turned his eyes heavenward. “I can see it’s utterly useless to try and lecture you, Mr Remington. Let’s get straight to your assignment, then, shall we?”

  “Good idea,” he quipped. “We shall. That way, you get to pay me for doing actual work instead of standing here talking.”

  The butler motioned for him to follow as he led the way into the kitchen. He stopped after a few paces and gestured with his hand toward the table, where a large stack of envelopes lay.

  He looked at them. “All those are for me? I didn’t realize I was already so popular.”

  The butler remained stony-faced. “They are for you to deliver, sir. Ms Steele wishes for you to act as her private courier in taking these important messages to various clients and contacts of hers throughout the city and its surrounding environs. You will have all day to do so, although sadly, you have wasted your first hour.”

  Remy frowned at the prospect of more driving. He knew he would simply have to get used to it, but the notion still almost curdled his bowels.

  “So,” he began, “if she expects me to be her delivery boy, taking her letters to her contacts, does that mean I can use one of her cars? It looks like she can spare one.”

  Presley sniffed, although that might merely have been to disguise the sudden flaring of his nostrils. “Absolutely not,” he stated.

  There were only four locations to which Remy had to deliver the letters as some of the stops had several envelopes each. It was now approaching late morning as he drove toward his first destination, which was all the way down in Brooklyn and near Prospect Park.

  It made sense to him to start with the stop farthest south and work his way back north toward Westchester. In fact, the third stop would be in some bumfuck village upstate, northwest of Taylor’s mansion. For some reason, however, Taylor and Presley had explicitly instructed him to leave one stop in Lower Manhattan for last. That made no sense to him, but whatever.

  According to his map app and GPS, it should have taken only about an hour to get from the estate to the middle of Brooklyn. He had thought that sounded rather optimistic. But, of course, even after he’d added half an hour to be safe, he had still come up short.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he grumbled and tried to navigate the narrow and winding residential streets at a consistent twenty-six miles-per-hour. “This never would have happened if there were some standardization of what constitutes right versus straight at those diagonal-ass intersections.”

  A little farther ahead, a family of Hasidic Jews seemed to be having a friendly neighborhood argument with a pair of Puerto Rican teenagers in the middle of the road. He waved half-heartedly to them as he passed in the faint hope that one party or the other might spontaneously A, ask him if he was lost or B, get out of the road. They all ignored him and he was forced to drive around them.

  With a suddenness that actually startled him, he was back in a business district of sorts. But at least his GPS finally seemed to have caught up and he was heading south again.

  When he’d first departed the village of Harrison, where Taylor’s ancient neighborhood lay, he’d gotten onto 95 South, intending to take it to where it became the 678 when it crossed the East River. That was what the app recommended and it certainly made sense.

  The plan had gone well at first, and he’d begun to congratulate himself on his brilliance and success. In fact, he grew so confident that he changed lanes at high speed to avoid getting funneled into an exit and almost clipped some lady with a “May I speak to the manager?” haircut in a pearl-colored SUV. She reacted in usual New Yorker fashion.

  Directly after that, something had gone wrong. At the interchange, he’d misinterpreted exactly what the hell the robotic voice from his phone meant by “bear to the right” and somehow ended up on Cross Island Parkway, which had borne him to the east and into Queens.

  Cursing and pounding his fist against random sections of the car’s interior, he had gone along with it, ignored his GPS’s garbled attempts to get him back on course, and taken Grand Central Parkway southwest into Brooklyn…until it suddenly ended in a labyrinth of diagonal streets.

  “I’m sure I’m somewhere fairly close, by now,” he muttered, nodded, and stared straight ahead. “I’ll stumble onto the place any minute now…any minute now….”

  He did not stumble onto the place that minute or even the next. After driving around randomly and getting stuck in congestion at every red light, he pulled into a metered parking space and thumped a single quarter into the machine. He only needed long enough to sit for a moment and check his phone to determine exactly where he was.

  “Okayyy.” He breathed deeply and zoomed out on the map as the app pinpointed his location. “This is beginning to make some sense…”

  Thankfully, it appeared that he was only about a mile away. He backed out into the street—spinning the wheel as rapidly as he could to correct his position once he realized he’d left the front corner of his car in the oncoming lane—and hurried toward his destination.

  The place turned out to be an unusually small block of rowhouses—four individual residences. There was only one address
for the entire complex, which suggested that whoever lived there owned or rented all four adjacent houses.

  Remy turned to the items on the passenger’s seat. This location had four envelopes assigned to it.

  Taylor had also written a few notes on a piece of paper to go with the pile of mail. Her handwriting was beautiful and elegant. He recognized it as the same script he’d seen on the missive he’d received before the meeting at the Italian restaurant. The notes themselves, however, were terse.

  Her comment for this address simply said, Elves—beware temptation.

  “Interesting.” He turned the paper face-down on the seat. “I wonder what kind of temptation we’re talking about here?”

  He narrowed it down to two things on the short walk from his car to the front entrance.

  The door with the address plate in front of it seemed like the sensible place to start. Remy tapped the knocker three times. While waiting for a reply, he heard jangling and unstructured music wafting from somewhere within the building.

  Light footsteps approached and the door clicked and opened.

  He wanted to get this over quickly, so he began to speak even before the door had swung all the way inward. “Hi, I’m from Moonlight Detective Agency and have a few letters for…you…” He trailed off and his mouth went slack.

  The person—elf?—who’d answered the door was a young woman wearing little more than a loose skirt and multiple necklaces of brightly colored beads, which mostly hid her breasts. Mostly. She had huge golden eyes and long, messy, silver-white hair which barely concealed the points of her elongated ears.

  “Uhhhh…” he slurred and tried not to stare.

  “Hello,” she greeted him. Her voice was soft and musical and her facial expression somehow wise but also strangely innocent. “You may come in if you want.”

  He swallowed. “Well, I only need to drop these letters of, from…you know, Moonlight Detective Agency. You…uh, know us, right?”

  In the middle of his reply, another elf—a male—came up behind the woman. He was an inch or two taller and noticeably flatter-chested but otherwise looked little different than she did.

  “Hey, brother,” the elf said. “We were a little bored and we’ve actually been looking for someone who might want to expand their mind a little, you know? It’s on us. No charge.”

  Even despite their obviously non-human eyes, there was something distinctly familiar about them, which he noticed immediately. They possessed a kind of sheen and displayed an overstimulation and dilation of the pupils. Quite obviously, both were as high as kites. Behind them, the music revealed itself to be Pink Floyd, although someone in another room strummed a sitar in a way that toyed with and reshaped the music.

  His palms itched and sweated and he worried he might be drooling.

  “No,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, “thank you. I merely need to drop these off.”

  “Aww.” The woman pouted. “You’re not into free love? It seems like not many people are anymore. We thought it was a good idea so we’ve tried to keep it alive.” She smiled pleasantly.

  As if to agree with her and emphasize her words, the male elf fondled her breasts, which caused the pert nipples to protrude through the layers of beads. He smirked in a way that reminded Remy of some Euro-trash prick he used to know who had a thing for watching his girlfriend with other men.

  “Sorry,” he apologized quickly. “Interspecies relations is one of the few kinks that even I feel should remain off-limits. Now, if you’ll please take these—”

  Another elf suddenly wandered past the doorway, swaying as he moved. “Whoa,” he exclaimed, noticed the visitor, and snatched the letters from his hand. “They finally showed up, man. Ha.” Smiling goofily, he staggered and started to close the door.

  Remy waved to the couple who had first greeted him. They looked disappointed.

  “Maybe some other time,” he said, using the classic blow-off line.

  The elves merely stared at him. He exhaled sharply and made himself turn and walk back to his car.

  He fell into the driver’s seat and fumbled for the air conditioning as soon as he turned the key in the ignition. The temperature had been set at seventy but suddenly that seemed too hot, so he reduced it to sixty-five. He was sweating excessively.

  “God,” he drawled and fought to clear his head. “Come on. I assume elves live longer than humans, but I still would have thought they’d be over the Sixties by now.”

  His next stop was in Hell’s Kitchen. Once across the river and onto Manhattan Island, he was at least back in relatively familiar territory and he made good time as he drove north on 9A.

  This time, the problem was finding a goddamn parking spot.

  The public housing structure he sought wasn’t difficult to find, but there were almost no actual lots nearby and the curbside parking situation was not encouraging. He circled the building four times. Each time he saw an open space, some other asshole appeared out of nowhere, cut him off, and slid home before he could react in time.

  “This,” he grated as his jaw muscles tensed, “is why operating a motor vehicle in the City of New York should be left to the professionals.”

  Eventually, he cruised down a nearby side street and found another metered space. He was grateful that he kept each of his cars stocked with a handful of quarters in the case of exactly such a contingency as this.

  Remy gathered the two envelopes and checked Taylor’s notes again. Gremlins—knock loudly, she’d written.

  “Gremlins,” he muttered and eased out of the vehicle. “I can’t even imagine what we’re in for now.”

  He wandered around until he found Building C, ignored the sidelong glances of a few dudes who loitered about, and was surprised to discover that there was no concierge or receptionist or anything. Instead, he simply entered the building and ascended to the second floor.

  As soon as he found the correct hallway, Taylor’s note started to make some sense. Seemingly, this half of the floor boomed with gunfire, explosions, and colorful swearing.

  “I wonder,” he said under his breath, “which Call of Duty that is. The thirty-ninth one, perhaps.”

  He took a few steps toward the door marked with the correct apartment number. Halfway there, he was stopped in his tracks by a stream of curses from a high-pitched, thin, ragged voice unlike any he’d heard before.

  “Oh, that’s fucking bullshit!” the voice shrieked. “You’re simply taking your incel rage out on people who are better than you because your fucking dog’s pussy isn’t tight enough ever since you lost your Fleshlight. Just admit you’re going to lose and tell your mom to bring you more pizza rolls down to the basement.”

  Remy blinked. That horrible voice made him feel nauseated—as did the particular word-picture it painted—but at least he could take comfort in knowing that the world of competitive online gaming hadn’t changed much over the years.

  “Hello?” he called and pounded on the door. “I have some—”

  “Fuck, yeah!” another voice squealed, perfectly timed with another blast of gunfire. This one was similar but sounded like it belonged to a different gremlin. “You just transitioned to female because you’re a pussy and you got fucked. Go tell everyone to learn your new pronouns, bitch!”

  Remy raised his voice. “Letters. I have letters for you…people.” He pounded on the door again. When no one answered after several more moments of noise, he squatted to see if there was a mail slot or even if the crack under the door was wide enough to admit a couple of envelopes.

  He had no luck in either case, kicked the door, and pounded on it again.

  Suddenly, someone lowered the game’s volume to merely loud, rather than deafening.

  “What?” a voice demanded.

  He gritted his teeth. “Important letters.”

  The door unlatched and opened. Almost before Remy could see what happened, a small, dark, mottled claw appeared and snatched the envelopes from his hand. His eyes locked onto
a knee-high figure that scuttled back into the apartment, and the door slammed in his face. A moment later, the sounds of simulated combat again echoed through the whole floor once again.

  “So sorry to disturb you,” he mumbled.

  Somewhat relieved that nothing more had been required of him, he descended the staircase, departed the housing complex, and returned to his car. His ears were still ringing from the racket.

  He sighed. “Well, I’m about half done. And it’s only around lunchtime.” He was already getting tired—not so much physically as mentally. It was the stress of having to focus on driving and finding the right location and dealing with whatever weirdness both humanity and inhumanity threw at him along the way.

  His next destination was all the way in Tuxedo, which he was reasonably sure was where they held the Renaissance Faire. He’d gone to that with some friends when he was sixteen or seventeen although he’d been too fucked-up to remember most of it.

  “Ugh,” he grumbled and checked the directions on his phone, “the shortest route cuts through New Jersey. At least it’s only a small part of the northeastern corner.” He contemplated going farther north within New York and then taking the Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River, but that would take longer. He sighed mournfully.

  A short drive to the west brought him to 9A, which he took north. From there, he headed west across the George Washington Bridge into Jersey and bore northwest, first on 4 and then on 17. To his pleasant surprise, he arrived in the vicinity of Tuxedo after only about fifty-five or sixty minutes, which was what his app estimated. He seemed to be well ahead of rush hour.

  The area grew sleepier and more rustic. Without having to actually focus as much on the act of driving, he was able to glance at his notes. His destination seemed to be some kind of farmer’s market outside the town, where his task was to seek out whoever was in charge of the whole mess.

  He took his foot off the gas and let the car slow to a crawl while his head moved from side to side to scan the countryside for the correct streets. Some of them barely even appeared to be marked, but at least he didn’t have half a city’s worth of traffic behind him now if he needed to go ten miles per hour.