by Frank Sibila
Downloading photos of Turkish King Bats off the Internet, Max remarked, “It’s a wonder that man has the time to legislate.”
“Or the energy,” Destinii agreed. “Would you believe the bastard actually tried to tie us to extending him more credit to the War on Terrorism? I told him God bless America and reminded him that we take Visa.” She flipped through the messages and came up with another one. “New client. One Melanie Herz wants to take an extra three days at Foxwood’s next weekend but can’t get her boss to buy it as a medical expense. I don’t need your help with that one, boss. I said I’d work up some digestive ailment capable of being cured by gambling.”
“Craps is already taken,” Max pointed out.
Destinii bared claws again. “Shut up, you.” Another message flip. “We then move on to two calls at opposite ends of the morality spectrum, one from a lady who saw you on The Clark Dilton Experience and, first, wants you to know that you’re, quote, an awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful person and, second, wants to know if you’re available afternoons, before two-thirty when she has to go pick up the kids. She’s sending a photo. Another comes from one David Dunn, referred by our Web site, who provided a full account of his own predicament. He says his wife found him in bed—not just in a suspicious circumstance like coming out of the same rest-stop motel with rumpled clothes—but actually in their home bedroom doing the deed with a young lady of the professional persuasion who had covered his entire body in a low-cholesterol butter substitute and was nibbling on him like corn on the cob. According to Mr. Dunn, the slut in question was wearing a derby and nothing else. He was so close to completion when his wife walked in that he asked her to leave the room for a few seconds so he could finish up, the two of them broke the bed frame, and he left the local alternative newspaper on the dining room table open to a page of ads for escort services, including the one he’d hired, which he’d circled in black marker complete with exclamation marks, converging arrows, and an underlined ‘Wow!’”
“Gee,” said Max. “I wonder what was up.”
Frank could only agree. “Yeah. That sounds pretty clear-cut, even by the standards of our lusty clientele. Why is he calling us?”
“Maybe he’s calling everybody,” Max suggested.
“No,” Destinii mourned, “he’s of the opinion that you could help him come up with a logical explanation capable of satisfying the wife.”
Frank opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. “Let me get this straight. This guy actually believes that I can explain away finding him in bed with his call girl, completing the act while covered with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter?”
Destinii nodded. “His faith in you is really quite touching.”
“What did you tell him after he requested this miracle? That I was out walking on water and I’d be right over as soon as my shoes were dry?”
Destinii flashed a brilliant smile. “I’m the pessimist; you know that. If you ever let me turn away clients just because I thought their cases were impossible, you’d have three names on your callback list and this would just be something you did two days a week.”
“With or without butter substitute,” Max said.
“Shut up,” Destinii said again. “Finally, that new guy, the one Custer referred to us. Yorick. Called twenty minutes ago, said he didn’t want to sound all urgent or anything but wanted you to know that if you couldn’t deal with this personally, he was going to die. That’s a direct quote. He made me underline ‘die’ and then after making sure I’d done it, insisted that I underline it again.”
Frank remembered Yorick: a soft-edged, chinless sort with a voice pitched midway between Mickey Mouse and John Fiedler. Married to the same woman for twenty years now, Yorick had described his youth as being a lot like a barren field, one that had never grown any wild oats worth sowing—not a single adventure or misdeed, no mornings marked by an aching head and the woeful realization that he shouldn’t have done those things with those props and certainly not with those people. He’d woken up one day, at about the age you would guess, with the iron conviction that this was exactly what his existence was missing. Referred by a friend—Keith Custer, in fact—he had hired Fake Alibi to cover for him, disguising four days of debauchery in Vegas as the equal length of time in Akron, Ohio, where his employer was alleged to have sent him on a fact-finding mission.
Frank took the message and saw that Destinii was not kidding: The word “die” did have two underlines. She hadn’t mentioned the yellow highlighter, but he assumed that part of the emphasis had been taken on her own initiative. “Thorough guy.”
“Panicked is the way I’d put it,” Destinii said. “The side of my face got wet from all the sweat beads spraying through the phone.”
“I’ll take it in the hall,” Frank said.
As the office had no private room for sensitive phone calls that needed to be taken away from whatever Max and Destinii were fighting about on any particular day, he preferred to take business outside whenever possible. He had no fear that they’d disrupt him by shouting in the background, but had noticed a peculiar hitch in his office voice whenever the tension in the room grew too thick to be cut by anything less sharp than a machete.
He took the message, retired to the hall, and punched the number into his phone.
No audible ring, just an immediate “Hellohellohellohello?”
“Mr. Yorick? This is Frank from Veritas Investments.” This was another of the company’s registered names and an alibi Frank’s clientele would recognize. After all, it wouldn’t be all that helpful to have to leave a message in the name of Fake Alibi.
A moment of puzzlement followed by recognition. “Frank! Ohmigod Frank! You’ve got to help me! I’m in so much trouble!”
“What happened?”
The story was sordid without the compensating attribute of originality. Yorick had enjoyed precisely two days of his planned erotic adventure of a lifetime before meeting a spectacular, wonderful, emotionally generous, totally uninhibited, and yet really very sweet girl with a corn-fed complexion and a smile capable of shaming the very stars in the heavens, who had wasted no time getting him back to his hotel room, slipping him a roofie, and robbing him blind. As her last gesture before divesting him of any means he had of getting home, she’d called hotel security and local police on him, advising them that she’d fled for her life after recognizing him as a notorious mass murderer she had seen on America’s Most Wanted. She even named names, which was unfortunate since Yorick did apparently possess at least a modicum of resemblance to the serial tongue-collector in question. To make matters worse, the police had been less than clear about the specific reasons they were holding him, explaining only that he was the kind of diseased creep who made them sick, and thus opening him up to more ill treatment every time he protested that he thought the Vegas police would be used to this kind of thing by now.
Now cleared upon the FBI’s return fax to the effect that the Tongue Depressor Killer had already been caught and unmasked as a dentist driven mad when he lost his license for his prior crime of implanting novelty fangs in orthodontic patients, Yorick had a greater problem. With no cash, debit cards, or credit cards to his name, and his luggage held by the casino until he was able to pay his bill, his only option other than calling Frank was calling his wife Loretta. And—
Frank closed his eyes. Don’t say it.
Yorick said it. “What happens in Vegas …”
Frank struggled to cut off the rest. “Well, um, here’s the thing, Mr. Yorick….”
“… stays in Vegas, isn’t that right? Isn’t what happens in Vegas supposed to stay in Vegas? Isn’t it?”
“… I certainly recognize that you’re in some pretty deep water over there, but this falls outside the boundaries of our usual business model. We provide support services for lia
rs. We don’t arrange legal aid or provide loans for stranded people. That’s an entirely different thing, and we can’t…. ”
Yorick’s voice, already hovering near the ceiling, rose an additional half-octave. “But isn’t that what I’m asking you to do, Frank? Do you really think I want to call my wife of twenty years and tell her, ‘Hello, dear, I need your help, because I wasn’t in Akron, but in Sin City getting framed for murder by some practical-joking hooker? It’s really the funniest thing that ever happened to me. In the unlikely event that you ever talk to me again, we’ll just laugh and laugh and laugh’?”
Those shrieks from the other end of the phone drove spikes into Frank’s ears and created a nexus of pain between his eyebrows that felt like somebody had implanted a red-hot ball bearing in the periphery of his brain. “What exactly would you suggest I do for you, Mr. Yorick?”
“Come get me.”
“Get you?”
“Catch the next flight and get me. Do whatever you have to do to make me look innocent again. Work it out so I can get home, open the front door, toss my hat on the rack, smile confidently, and say, ‘Honey, I’m back!’”
Frank removed the phone from his ear and stared at it as if discovering a new species of insect previously unknown to science. “Do you even wear a hat?”
“Please!” Yorick begged. “This is my life I’m talking about! Can’t you do anything?”
Frank rubbed that sore spot at the bridge of his nose, aware that he had lost the argument the moment he’d answered Yorick’s call. Pity was just part of it. After the publicity wave Fake Alibi had ridden these past couple of months, any news of a client getting screwed this badly without, in another sense, getting screwed at all would hit the Internet and the tabloids in no time. Soon it would be like God Himself had extended His mighty thumb and pressed down hard, reducing everything Frank had built to a shiny grease spot. So he sighed. “I’m going to bring a special contract, George.”
Yorick might have pumped his fist. “Yes!”
“Listen to me. That contract is your pledge to pay for my time, including overtime, and for every single expense I incur, from the last-minute airplane fare to any cash I front you and anything else I have to lay out to get you back home in a reasonable amount of time. If you need a payment plan, we’ll set one up. But the contract will be your understanding that we will only back this alibi for as long as you live up to your end of the bargain. Is that clear?”
“Oh, yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“Don’t thank me,” Frank said. “Just pay me.”
Destinii may have been the only person Frank had ever known whose bubble gum was goth. It came out black, like a balloon at the funeral of somebody you were happy to see dead. He asked her if it was licorice and she laughed at him; licorice is old school. She popped a bubble on her cheeks, pulled the wad back into her mouth, and said, “Bad idea.”
Frank rubbed the back of his neck. “Tell me about it.”
“No need. I’ll tell you all the reasons why it’s a bad idea, and you’ll just nod and say you understand perfectly, but you have it do it anyway, ’cuz,” her voice took on the distinct cadences of John Wayne, “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
Max said, “Gary Cooper, right?”
Destinii didn’t bother to turn her head his way. “Shut up, you.”
Frank did turn to Max, regretting it at once when his tension headache assumed the scale of a major international conflict. “Bats, plural. Our bed and breakfast got infested by one big swarm of bats, not one freakish single bat.”
Max, who’d been Photoshopping a tabloid-quality image of a picturesque English village in flames with mobs of colorful villagers fleeing from the fifty-foot winged monstrosity in their midst, failed to look up. “You have no imagination.”
“And you have no idea how to lie with consistency. The bat Cecil’s alleged to have seen was small enough to fly around inside his guest room. The one you just doctored up is the kind of thing the army would bombard with nukes.”
Max used another desktop window to call up images of nuclear explosions. “I’ve got it covered, boss.”
“How?”
Max double-clicked, and a mushroom cloud appeared on Derbyshire’s horizon. “Toxic waste spill in the caves just outside of town. The bats lapped up one of the puddles and grew to monstrous proportions, driven by primordial instinct to go after the very villagers who so thoughtlessly went after them with brooms. Now, who will survive—humanity, or the bats?”
Frank felt like he was just treading water. “And just what is Cecil Aiken’s wife supposed to think when she sees this story?”
Max offered a shrug of cosmic indifference. “She was dumb enough to marry him, wasn’t she?”
Frank might have argued further, but was deterred by the firm hand of Destinii, who tugged at his wrist to steer him back to the more urgent of today’s burning fires. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He’s just fooling around. I’ll make sure he gets the real story done.”
“The real story’s that Cecil Aiken cheated on his wife.”
“I don’t mean the real real story,” Destinii said. “I mean the real fake story. I promise you I’ll make sure Max gets that done the instant he gets this fake fake story out of his system. But you, you’ve got something worse to worry about. This bad idea. This flying across the country to help out George Yorick. That’s as crazy as any ten-story Cloverfield bat could ever be.”
Another double-click, another mushroom cloud striking the heath, and Max said, “I wouldn’t know about that. You wouldn’t know the psychological pressures those ten-story Cloverfield bats have to endure.”
Destinii threw an empty Dasani bottle at him. “Shut up, you.” Then she turned back to Frank. “Seriously, boss. You need to consider something. Yorick wouldn’t be the first cheating husband to wander into the wrong hotel room with the wrong hooker. If it was just that, I’d say the heck with it. Fly to Vegas, catch Penn and Teller, and pull Yorick’s ball sack out of the meat grinder. But that’s not the only thing going on here. Did you catch what he said about the lipstick message on his bathroom mirror?”
Frank remembered. “This is what liars get.”
“That wasn’t some working girl wanting to swipe Yorick’s card without services rendered. That, and sending his name to the police, sounds personal. I think somebody out there has a bone to pick with liars.”
Little eeks began to emanate from the panicked villagers on Max’s screen. “It’s a good thing we don’t know anybody like that.”
Destinii must have been serious indeed, because she didn’t immediately tell Max to shut up. “And after all that, you’re about to tell me that,” again in the voice of John Wayne, “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
Frank could only shrug at her. “I promised.”
“You mean like Yorick promised at his wedding to forsake all others? That kind of promise?”
Max sniffed. “I’m sure he meant it at that time.”
Frank tried to assure Destinii that she was just being paranoid, but the words wouldn’t oblige by actually coming out his mouth. They seemed to be bunched up at the opening to his throat, like a group of reluctant skydivers at the hatch of the plane, all jockeying to stand at the rear of the pack as they assured their equally reluctant buddies that politeness was their only motive for holding the door for everybody else to jump first. Meanwhile the plane was running out of gas, the drop zone was beginning to disappear under cloud cover, and the pilot was going nuts on the intercom, saying, “Oh, for pete’s sake, this is ridiculous. Either one of you jumps, or none of you do.” And when the moment passed and Frank had said nothing, it was as if none of those parachutists had decided to jump, because they all knew that the mission was a lie and that there would have been no safe place to land.
If Destinii was feeling para
noid, then so was Frank.
He didn’t know what was up, but he was sure as hell something was.
He said, “Don’t throw anything at each other while I’m gone.”
Max, whose giant mutant bat was now incinerating the little eeking villagers with blasts of flamethrower breath, could only grimace. “This job is absolutely no fun.”
Last-minute travel arrangements are also no fun. They’re like taking a map of the United States and drawing random lines hoping that they connect with your final destination even if only reluctantly and with a marked pout. Frank was horrified by one proposed route, a quick hop to Reagan National in Washington, D.C., that connected to Chicago and from there to Salt Lake City before wheezily expiring in Vegas, if only out of exhaustion. He wondered if anybody ever said yes to such a deal and, if so, if they really cared where they were going or were just huge fans of the emergency procedures demonstration.
In the end he was able to avoid writing a big W across the breadth of the United States by snagging a direct flight, leaving LaGuardia at 7 p.m. After a quick trip home to feed Catty Arbuckle and toss toiletries and a change of clothes into his bag, he was on his way to the airport, where he spent two hours on his cell phone fielding emergencies from his office staff. There were only four of them, the most interesting among them another call from Mr. Dunn, who called not because he was so anxious for Frank’s verdict on his last predicament, but because his wife had caught him with a second call girl, covered with cooking oil. Destinii said, “I have a theory.”
“Hit me with it,” Frank said.
“He needs all that sex to burn off the calories from all those edible lubricants.”
Frank smiled. “The man is a glutton, all right. What else is happening? Is that giant bat still attacking Derbyshire?”
“Nope. Like I said, Max got that crap out of his system and put together a fucking ridiculous bullshit vampire bat tabloid story I could believe. It’s saved on the system in case we need to produce it for Mrs. Aiken. With that done, we’re all caught up for the day. Max clocked out, and I’ll be leaving after seven, but you have my number if you need me.”