Shoot the Moon, page 11
I’d been pretty much all over the cathedral as both cop and P.I., from spires to catacombs. I already knew as I took to the groaning staircase that the archbishop rented out the hall underneath the joint for various support groups.
A dull glow emanated from an open door off to the left at the bottom of the stairs. This being church and me being the outstanding human specimen that I am, I had high hopes that some asshole do-gooder had accidentally left on the light into which decent people walked into a joyous afterlife of unlimited free booze and angelic nymphomaniacs. I was neither surprised nor crushed when I stepped into the reality of an ordinary, shitty, granite-walled church basement.
There were bingo supplies, a busted-up pew, and a few folding tables opened up against the wall over near the door. One wall was stacked with the disassembled frames of carnival booths that were only deployed aboveground for the annual St. Regent’s Holy Moley Carnival, an annual festival that celebrated the displacement and repatriation to a mile underneath Tulsa of the indigenous Mole-Men who had inhabited the ground into which the cathedral’s foundation had been sunk.
A bunch of rickety folding chairs were set up in the middle of the room, with an ass positioned on nearly every one.
The men and women in the room looked pretty ordinary, aside from myself and Victorina Flapchack, with both of us being, frankly, such near-perfect representations of the human species I was afraid just being seen in the same place together we were at risk of having some government agency toss a net over us, drag us to NASA and launch us on a rocket to one of those Garden of Eden planets to start a more perfect human race.
Miss Flapchack’s lovely ass graced a chair in the second row, and since she wasn’t looking back at me I slid my wretched carcass into the last row and hunkered down beside a fat slob whose main distinguishing features were five o’clock shadow, a Coors T-shirt and an air of utter misery. He was sweating like a bastard through two of the above which presumably substantially contributed to the third.
The meeting was already in progress when we arrived, and a scrawny guy who was six and a half feet tall and weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds was standing at a podium in front of the room looking like a disheveled plastic drinking straw.
“I was really, really tempted last night,” the skinny jerk announced to the room full of strangers. “It was my brother. He says I don’t need to come here. We started when we was teenagers. We thought it wasn’t nothing, you know? How was we supposed to know we’d get hooked? I mean, it was our old man’s fault.”
“Now,” a random voice chided. “We don’t play the blame game here.”
“But it was his fault,” the scrawny bastard pleaded. “He left the liquor cabinet unlocked all the time. That’s where he kept the incantation. He was always turning himself into a weregiraffe right in front of us. We didn’t know it was wrong. Our mom couldn’t take it. She took off after he recited it at a family cookout. Embarrassed the hell out of her. I’ll never forget her and my Uncle Charlie trying to toss a rope up around his neck to get him in the car, but he just galloped off. Stripped the leaves off half the trees in the park. Owed the city a bundle for that, but by then he was spending almost all day every day as a giraffe. Got killed while in giraffe form. Coroner said he misjudged the height of them power lines. We went broke buying the coffin.” The scrawny bastard’s eyes welled up with tears. “Eight feet of mahogany just for his neck.”
The skinny speaker’s ridiculous tale of family woe made clear what the scrap of cellophane-wrapped paper upstairs had not.
Were-Animals Anonymous had been founded nearly a hundred years ago by some poor slob who’d been addicted to transforming into a whelk and who realized he’d hit rock bottom when he woke up covered in butter on a Frenchman’s fork. Local chapters of WAA held meetings in church halls around the country, and they were always busiest around the time of the waxing moon. I found a WAA pamphlet on the empty seat next to me, on the cover of which was printed the famous Were-Animals Anonymous prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept that I shouldn’t change into an animal,
The courage to not change into an animal,
And the wisdom to know that I probably shouldn’t change into an animal.
As covert plagiarists, the folks at WAA were pretty much for shit.
I kept a sharp eye on Victorina Flapchack up in the second row. She appeared to be nervously but methodically checking out everybody in the room, possibly looking for Stradivarius and not knowing that he’d been arrested or that he’d escaped pretty dramatically from his shackles and would be mooing around town until daybreak. She missed me, slouched down as I was beside a wheezing mountain of fat that was halfway to dugong without the need to strap on a size triple-X magic belt.
I actually couldn’t imagine she really expected to find Igor Stradivarius at a were-animal support group. The bastard-turned-bull who’d tried to pin me with his horn like a butterfly to a hunk of corkboard hadn’t struck me as the twelve-step type. Maybe she knew something about the Gypsy king that I hadn’t been able to observe, running as I had been in unbridled terror from the murderous horns of the thoroughly evil SOB.
The skinny speaker left the podium still blubbering, but with words of much encouragement from the ass menagerie.
“Do we have any other volunteers…someone want to go next?” a soothing voice purred from somewhere in the front row.
I felt the earth move under my keister and I realized too late that the mountain of flab beside me had hauled itself from the couple of half-crippled folding chairs which it had been intimately abusing and risen to a pair of massively jiggling legs.
All eyes turned to the behemoth, including -- because life must have suddenly realized that things hadn’t been going completely to shit for me in ten whole minutes -- the beautiful brown orbs of Victorina Flapchack. Her gaze shifted immediately from the aisle full of flabby bastard in steaming sweatpants to the comparatively insignificant speck that was me. Her flawless Gypsy face became annoyed, and she immediately got to her feet and came down to hover over me in the back row.
“Crag Banyon. Did you follow me here?” she demanded.
“I’m Banyon’s twin brother,” I ingeniously bluffed. “There was too much handsome to waste on one of us. Pardon me for ogling your mesmerizing honkers, but since we only just met I’m appreciating them for the very first time.”
“I wanted to talk to you about the book, Mr. Banyon,” she insisted. Unless she figured the P.I. me shared the details of his cases with my nonexistent twin, I’d wasted a truly topnotch cover story.
At the front of the hall, the slob who had vacated the seats beside me had managed to wedge a good-sized chunk of himself behind the podium.
“My name is Tony,” Tony the fatso announced to the group, deploying a hilariously incongruous falsetto that set every stray mutt in the neighborhood howling. “It’s been sixty-two days since I last turned into a chipmunk.”
“Hi, Tony!” the crowd enthusiastically screamed back at the fattest goddamn chipmunk in the history of the universe.
Alone in the back, the babe with the cleavage you could spelunk down leaned in close. “We must go somewhere private,” Victorina Flapchack insisted. She grabbed me by the wrist and attempted to haul me to my feet.
“Sweetheart, I just walked halfway across town. I did so mostly sober, after a nightmare day that earned me the right to be staggering only partway across town hours from now entirely drunk. If you want me to move, rent a forklift.”
I crossed my arms to illustrate that her unstoppable Gypsy force was no match for my immovable slack-assed object.
She sat down with a hell of a lot less reluctance than I’d have had on one of the partially crumpled seats Tony the lardass chipmunk had been using as a folding suppository.
“You would not answer me on the phone, Mr. Banyon,” the dame said. “I need to know if you have located the book.”
The intensity of her gaze would have burned holes clear through to the back of my head had her eyes been lasers, so it was pretty lucky for me she hadn’t been outfitted with one of those bionic implants like that astronaut-spy who crashed his plane a few years back. (Not that the eye did him much good. Yes, he could see danger approaching from a million miles away, but the robot legs he was outfitted with only worked in slow motion. He was running his heart out at two miles an hour when alien Bigfoot walked up and unplugged the works. The furry bastard made off with the eye, legs and one robot arm tied up inside the pants of the astronaut-spy’s own red velour jogging suit. It was the biggest national intelligence scandal since that Methodist gibbon from another dimension stole the H-bomb plans from Los Alamos and sold them to Quaker Oats.)
“What’s so important about this book to you?” I asked. “I mean, personally, not the fact that it’s loaded with all the scams that are fit to print. Because, sister, I saw you in action tonight on your way over here. You managed to swindle and/or steal a couple hundred bucks in a couple dozen blocks. You don’t need the book. You won’t go hungry as long as type 2 diabetes keeps producing enough blind newspaper peddlers.”
She took a moment to consider whether or not she could be honest with me. Or maybe honesty in Victorina Flapchack was similar to an appendix in good Christian boys and girls: it just didn’t goddamn work.
The tension at last oozed like cold honey from her shoulders and she exhaled warm resignation into my face.
“Our bible contains more than that which you were told, Mr. Banyon,” the sexy Gypsy dame said. “It foretells the arrival on Earth of the greatest con artist the world has ever known. The Scammessiah will lead my people into a new age, one in which we drive cars that we actually own and dwell in houses that we pay for.” She closed her eyes and began repeating something she’d obviously heard many times sitting around a campfire made from stolen wood lit with hot matches. “‘And those who live in this great age will have jobs and verily shall go forth to PTA meetings, and the straights will not know them for they will be like unto them. And then, once they have been accepted as Italian or maybe Jewish, the Scammessiah of whom the prophets foretold will guideth his people to work the biggest, most fantastic con on them since the Snake swindled the Garden of Eden all to himself with a little fancy patter and one Whole Foods apple.’”
She opened her eyes, a look of beatific religious tranquility shining forth for all the world to see. Except the world currently had its eyes trained on some fat slob at the front of the room, so I was stuck picking up the slack.
“Oh,” said I. “Goodbye.”
I got up and left.
There was a stir taking place over by the refreshment table. An alpaca in a pair of khaki slacks had staggered down the stairs and was grazing at a tin deli plate of stale Chips Ahoys! Some of the human attendees were trying to coax the werealpaca to take off his magic alpaca pelt, which evidently hadn’t been too magical for the real alpaca to whom it had previously belonged who was currently, presumably, running around naked somewhere in Peru.
Victorina Flapchack grabbed my arm before I reached the door.
“You do not believe me,” the dame said.
“That’d be my default mode with you, sister, and that goes double if you were looking to seal coat my driveway. However, this suddenly sounds more like a religious thing than just finding a book, and despite what our current surroundings might suggest I generally avoid religiosity. That isn’t a knock against those who dabble in it, it’s just that I’ve had some bad experiences with deities.”
“So you are not going to help us after all?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t say that because I probably can’t,” I told her with zero enthusiasm. “Thanks to the elf who runs my life far more efficiently than I ever have -- or, frankly, want -- that cash Madame Volga and your elders paid me is probably already in the hands of the bastard plutocrats of the electric company, who are men so without scruples or souls that they actually expect payment for keeping my lights on. But as far as your interest in the book goes, I’m not interested. I’ll do the job I was hired to do and place it in the crooked hands of Madame Volga. Then I’ll celebrate at either Chuck E. Cheese or that dump of a bar you chased me out of. I’ve got a pair of rigged dice in my pocket at all times to help me with difficult life choices.”
I took a step for the door, this time determined to actually pass through it, but as lousy luck would have it, I flung it open dramatically at the precise moment somebody on the outside was trying to stomp in.
I’m not generally the Sir Walter Raleigh type. As far as I’m concerned, Gallant is just a patsy who folds his laundry and takes out the garbage in Highlights. But I’m the goddamn Duke of Good Manners when the bastard who reaches the intersection at the exact same time as me is a gigantically muscled bull with a mouthful of vicious teeth like yellow slate roof shingles, murder in its malevolent bull eyes, and hot air pouring from its flaring nostrils like a couple of men’s room hand dryers.
The Igor Stradivarius werebull huffed at the inconvenience of having to kill somebody extra on its way into the room, which delay would slow it down for all of half a second. Then it saw who it was standing two feet away from it on the other side of the wide open doorway, and its bloodshot eyes went wide.
“Mooo!” the werebull roared.
The air became a blast furnace thanks to the bellowing heat that belched from the behemoth’s wide open mouth. So mighty was the wind from the werebull’s powerful lungs that my fedora would have been blown off my head had I not wisely taken a firm grip and held it in place. Also, I was already running away from the door at a mach 2 sprint that would have left Usain Bolt looking like I’d nailed his Nikes to the floor.
“Meeting adjourned! Meeting adjourned!” I advised at the top of my lungs as I ran.
The thunderous crash behind me shook the granite foundation of St. Regent’s. Two hundred year-old dust and mortar busted loose from between stone slabs.
I glanced back to see the werebull backing away from the door, the frame of which looked more rickety than it had a moment before but was still standing. I caught a glimpse of Igor Stradivarius’ filthy laundry dangling from the monster’s horns before the bull took a second, raging charge at the doorway.
The ancient floor beneath my fleeing feet was still rocking with the aftershocks of the werebull’s first run at the door when the second crash nearly flipped me on my ass.
Over and over, the werebull slammed its head and horns into the thick wall that separated the hallway from the meeting room, apparently caring very little about the severe walloping it was giving what was still technically the Gypsy king’s cranium as well as the soft wad of gray matter rattling around inside it. Another charge at the wall loosened granite slabs. Huge stones began to separate from one another, like a kid in a carriage nudging the other side of a stack of Triscuit boxes at the corner market.
At first, there was a delayed reaction among the WAA members to the arrival of the werebull, who was literally crashing their meeting. The members who were over near the refreshment table grabbing Chips Ahoys! from the alpaca were closest to the door. They stood there with their mouths hanging wide open in shock while the cookies they’d managed to salvage slipped like stale, brown poker chips from between their fingers.
Up at the front of the room, the fat slob still wedged behind the podium had lost the crowd as completely as he had the sight of his own genitalia thirty years before.
Faces had snapped around at the first of the thunderous, world-ending crashes to issue from the back of the room. Faces bloomed with horror, which might have been appropriate to the occasion, but wouldn’t be useful in stopping a huge bull horn from sticking them up the ass and shaking them around the room like meat Popsicles.
The WAA members apparently didn’t hear my “meeting adjourned” announcement as I flew up the aisle between the rows of chairs, the tails of my trench coat flapping insanely in my wake, a fact I attributed to most of them being preoccupied with shitting their folding chairs.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear the first time!” I screamed, as full-throated as my wheezing lungs would allow. “Meeting a-goddamn-journed!”
A cathedral-rattling “MOO!” sounded from outside the room. The half-retreated form of the werebull was charging across the hallway once more, growing terrifyingly large as it closed in on the door. It landed against the solid granite wall with yet another horrific crash that reverberated like a sonic boom throughout the building and most of the rest of the neighborhood. The first slab of granite finally broke away and dropped like a Caterpillar engine block to the floor. A long, exploratory horn poked through the newly-formed opening, waving the flag of Igor Stradivarius’ grass-stained T-shirt at the crowd.
The horn retreated and a single, huge eye peered through the opening, blinked once, then vanished. Through the wobbling doorframe, the werebull could be seen backing far across the basement hallway once again.
When pandemonium breaks out it’s never a joyous occasion. I’ve had it explode around me more times than I comfortably like to contemplate, and in the midst of the chaos I’ve never heard anybody cheerfully exclaiming, “Hey, get a load of all this swell pandemonium.” When it happens, it’s generally a hell of a lot of running and screaming and pretty much a concentrated burst of the very worst human behavior. Like the Bataan Death March sped up to look like the closing credits of Benny Hill.
When the delayed panic in the basement room of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral finally split open at the seams, I was suddenly caught in the middle of the L.A. riots inside Best Buy at four a.m. Black Friday morning.
Men and women jumped to their feet, knocking back folding chairs and scrambling over one another in a mad dash for the exit.
Then came the sudden mass realization that the only exit in the death trap was the entrance through which the giant werebull had by this point widened enough to successfully wedge into the room half its head and one huge horn, on the end of which dangled a pair of filthy blue jeans. The bull snorted and the head retreated back into the hallway as the werebull backed up to take another run at the collapsing wall.
