Sea No Evil, page 15
The problem for Parka Man this time was that he didn’t seem to understand that I was finally wise to his game. This time he didn’t have an ocean of water, the element of surprise or exploding porcelain fixtures to back him up. This time it was just me and him, and as much water as he could throw at me in that one room before I reached him.
He reeled back, and with a demented look sent all the water he’d collected up at the ceiling streaming right for me. Unlucky for him I was close enough that all I had to do was snatch up a chair and keeping on barreling right at him.
The water from the street and kitchen couldn’t get to me fast enough. All I had to contend with was the stuff from the ceiling, and even though it knocked me back for a second when it hammered the underside of the chair, I just kept right on going.
The water broke around the chair. My arms strained at the pressure, but I knew it wouldn’t last because by then I’d reached old Parka Boy. When I got to him, I didn’t stop. The seat slammed the bastard at a full sprint and he went up and over, tumbling off his chair. I saw bare feet and bits of grass skirt flying up in the air, and I saw the trident go flipping from his hand and skittering underneath the next table.
Without the bastard to direct it, every drop of airborne water suddenly lost interest in playing drown the P.I. The water stopped dead, hovered in the air for a second, then dropped like a two-second monsoon to the restaurant’s threadbare carpet with the ketchup stains on the African safari motif.
“No!” Parka Man shouted as he scrambled to his feet. “You not alive! Banyon dead! Banyon dead!”
He was clearly begging for a demonstration that his assumption was incorrect, and after all the times he’d tried to kill me in the past two days I was in an instructive mood. I grabbed him by the lobster bib and played the joker a symphony of chin music, sending a couple of his bloody ivories scattering to the concert hall floor.
The eyes rolled back, the life went from the bow legs, and Makalooka, president of Gagoonda, went down for the count on the carpet in an inch-deep puddle over the worn-out trunk of a sickly-looking hand-stitched elephant.
Water rolled in lazily from the kitchen. I heard cars honking and people yelling outside, but without Parka Man to direct it, the water from the busted pipes out in the street no longer rushed through the front door.
A few of the Tiny Taste staff peeked in from the front hall. I waved them in and got one of the kitchen help to give me his apron, which I used to tie up Makalooka.
“Call the cops,” I ordered. “Ask for Detective Dan Jenkins. I can’t think of anyone else on the force who deserves to clean up a mess this big.”
I filched a napkin from Makalooka’s table, shook it out and used it to pull the trident out from where it had slid, careful to keep the cloth wrapped around one of the tines. There’d be prints on the thing if the cops decided to come looking for it, and I sure as hell didn’t want any of them to be mine.
I saw the bastard’s sunglasses lying on the floor and figured I could use them later on. I scooped them up, too, and stuffed them in the breast pocket of my suit jacket.
I left Parka Man sopping wet and tied up on the floor in his gnarled grass skirt that looked like a maniac’s front yard after a downpour.
When I headed to the side exit, half the staff of A Tiny Taste of Zimbabwe were poking him with a spatula while in the flooding kitchen the chef was cutting a huge pat of butter into the biggest frying pan I’d ever seen. I was deeply disappointed when I slapped open the door and heard the approach of distant police cruisers.
“No wonder you’re going out of business,” I muttered. “You have no concept of American fast food. If you’d deep fried instead of grilled, he’d be done by now.”
They were hoisting Makalooka into the air and spiriting him into the kitchen as I slipped out the door with Poseidon’s trident clutched tight in my hand and, for the first time in days, a song in my blissful bastard heart.
CHAPTER 15
When I returned to the barge ward floating out behind Holy Guacamole Mexican Memorial Hospital and Grill, I found a whole herd of middle-aged heifers in gigantic white skirts and starched white hats giggling around the nurses’ station.
All the fatso nurses were in swooning overdrive. I knew it was rotten news when I saw they were so busy gabbing that they’d left their takeout ice cream order to melt in the paper bag on the counter.
“He’s so handsome.”
“Oh, yes. I can see why People named him the sexiest god of the year in 1500 B.C.”
One of them who looked like a bison in white pantyhose waved an autograph over her head, announced it was from Zeus and said that he’d promised to take her in his Lamborghini Chariot ZG001 to gather clouds in Asia Minor on Saturday. The rest of the round-up mooed over their gargantuan colleague’s great luck. They’d been so effectively distracted that not one of them was paying attention to the room down the hall.
I heard the sound of a struggle even before I reached the door. When I ran into the room I found Zeus with a pillow in his hands going Cuckoo’s Nest Indian Chief on Poseidon’s face. The sea god was flailing around in the bed trying to fight his brother off.
Miss Ravelli was pounding her fists on Zeus’ back trying to get him to drop the pillow. The dame was bawling her eyes out and screaming for help, but the twenty head of nurse down the hall weren’t budging from their grazing station.
When I burst into the room, the wife looked up all pleading-like, but when I took out my gat she shook her head that it wouldn’t be enough.
“Out of the way, sweetheart,” I ordered.
She obligingly left the bedside, giving me a clean shot at Zeus. At the sound of my voice, the hulking king of the gods in his lounge lizard Seventies outfit glanced over his beefy shoulder. The lower half of his salon tanned face pulled down in a frown.
“I warned you, Banyon,” Zeus said, looking like a pissed-off seven-foot Bee Gee in Mr. T chains. “I told you not to take this case. You’re next.”
He kept both hands pressed firmly into the pillow over Poseidon’s mug. The fight was draining from the sea god’s steroid-pumped arms.
“Step away from the fish stick,” I ordered. “You only get one warning.”
Zeus laughed. “You think some mortal pea shooter is a match for an Olympian?” he mocked. “The heavens obey my commands, Banyon. The goddamn heavens.”
“I don’t order around the stars,” I admitted, “but I do my best with my little corner of this crummy town. You were warned.”
Three shots. I was real careful to count. A couple of warm kisses from Misters Smith and Wesson to the shoulder and Zeus dropped the pillow and wheeled on me.
There was a little blood through his green nylon polo shirt, but not anything like the human level plasma you get from three point-blank blasts. I figured he was already healing, and my guess was confirmed when I heard a sound like three dropped pebbles and I saw my slugs fall to the floor and roll away behind him.
The king god shook off what amounted to a trio of bug bites and approached me with fresh rage. He held out his hand like I’d seen him do back on Olympus, and the first flicker from the ball of glowing fire formed the size of a marble in his palm.
“When I’m finished with you, there won’t even be so much as one cinder left for the janitor to sweep up,” Zeus growled.
“Admittedly, your plan is probably neater than mine,” I said, nodding. “My plan, on the other hand, has the benefit of the element of surprise.”
“Plan?” he scoffed. “What plan? Why are you putting on those sunglasses?”
I’m better at show and tell than twenty questions.
This time when I pulled the trigger there was a flash of light like something from the birth of the universe. The blast threw me back against the sink in the corner of the room. A pile of tongue depressors flew everywhere and a cardboard box of rubber gloves smacked me on the head on its way to the floor.
I knew enough to close my eyes behind Parka Man’s shades, but the light still permeated my eyelids. I blinked away stars as I struggled to my feet.
The room was coming back into focus. Zeus lay stunned on the floor. His head had made a V-shaped dent in the baseboard heat. The king of the gods looked a hell of a lot smaller than he did before. He was no longer the towering six-foot-plus SOB who’d strode around his temple on Olympus, threatened me, swiped his brother’s undersea kingdom or made time with every babe in every Cretan schoolyard and barnyard. One thunderbolt to the chest looked like it had done a mortal number on him. But being the professional that I am, I figured I’d make sure.
“Here,” I said, reaching under my coat. “Finish it, will you? I don’t feel like looking over my shoulder for incoming thunderbolts the rest of my life.”
Poseidon was coming around on the bed, and when I tossed the god his trident and he snatched it from the air the resultant surge of energy that coursed through the room made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
Miss Ravelli was stumbling to her feet over by the bathroom door. She didn’t seem to know what to make of what had just happened. She saw her husband newly invigorated in his bed, she saw what looked like the mortal version of Zeus struggling to his feet over by the baseboard heater, and she saw me coming over and grabbing her by the arm.
It turned out Parka Man was like a kindergarten kid who’d gotten hold of a box of paints and a brush. Put the trident in the hands of the master, and you had Michelangelo.
Poseidon raised the trident. The ship in which we were floating groaned.
He whipped it down.
The bulkhead burst apart and a sliver of water that grew into a fat serpent-like stream shot into the room. The coil of water wrapped around Zeus’ neck like the end of a whip, and the last thing I saw as I hustled the dame out into the hallway was Zeus flying around the room banging off every wall.
The nurse herd pounded past us down the hall on massive hoofs. The stampede stopped outside Poseidon’s door and the dames in white were justifiably horrified at the brutal beating that was going on inside. The most gigantic of the mammoths lumbered back to the desk to place a frantic, fat call to security.
“How--” was all Miss Ravelli managed to ask.
I still held my gat in my hand. I gave a real casual shrug.
“I gave Vulcan a bullet to copy,” I said as I holstered my piece. “I didn’t realize until after I blew away your husband’s sea monster ex-girlfriend back at your place that he’d even given me that one thunderbolt. I sure as hell had no idea until I got back to my office and cleaned my roscoe that he’d kept the original and made me two. Guy was pretty bored. Guess he was showing off. Don’t worry, it’ll all be on your itemized bill. Hey, sounds like the party is wrapping up. You better get back, Senorita Pescada.”
I gave the dame a big wink and watched her face fall as I turned away.
Down the hallway, the fat nurses were appalled, some doctors in sombreros with bandoliers wrapped in X-shapes over the chests of their scrubs were running in from the siesta ward to see what was going on, and the metal walls of the old converted scow were denting out into the hall in suspiciously Zeus-shaped lumps.
I made it up topside in time to hear the metal side of the boat ward tear open as if it had been ripped apart by the can opener on a giant Swiss army knife. I saw the speck that was the mortal remains of Zeus sail far out over the sea and disappear into the night beyond the warm glow of the peaceful harbor lights.
I doubt I could’ve heard the splash when it came even if I wasn’t whistling a jaunty-assed tune as I marched across the gangplank to the shore and ultimately, with luck, to the end of several days of god-induced goddamn sobriety.
CHAPTER 16
The only part of the job I generally don’t hate is writing up a client’s bill, mostly because unlike every other part of the work I usually don’t nearly get killed doing it.
The Poseidons had paid a flat fee upfront and there wasn’t a lot of miscellaneous crap to add up. I billed them for the bullets I’d bought from Vulcan along with the imported Greek booze. (That false sense of security I lulled the naked blacksmith god into by making him think I was just another Olympus tourist was a stroke of P.I. genius.) A little cab fare here, some dry cleaning there, the cost of the new water cooler Mannix hadn’t told me he put on the credit card I didn’t know I had. All in all, only a couple hundred bucks in expenses. A bargain at twice the price.
The week after I’d saved the day like the hero bastard that I am, I had their bill on my desk in the to-be-mailed basket. I’d also finally tracked down Doris.
For the first dozen times I called her house, that old bat mother of hers stonewalled and insisted that Doris was in the hospital recovering from tonsil surgery. I finally got the nasty biddy to put Doris on the phone by cleverly threatening to come over and burn down her house if she didn’t. When Doris came on the line she tried to make her voice sound rasping, but she was as crummy an actress as she was a secretary.
“You are not, Doris, recovering from surgery. You weren’t in the hospital you said you were going to be in -- don’t interrupt, Doris -- I checked, and you weren’t in any hospital in town. Since you’re home and not on some godforsaken kitsch vacation with that hag who spawned you--” (A horrified gasp and I knew the hag herself was listening in on the extension.) “--I assume your absence is hair-, nail- or makeup-related.”
She snarled, she exhaled, and finally she spit, “I got my hair done, Crag Banyon, what’s it to you?”
“I care, Doris, because I should have a smiling face in my outer office to greet clients. Until I find one that eases up on the clown makeup I’m stuck with yours, but that arrangement only works if you’re actually popping that wad of gum out at your desk.”
“You’re a rat,” Doris insisted. “I’m entitled to some of them personal days like other secretaries get. I just been spoilin’ you is all. You ain’t got no clue that good secretaries are hard to find.”
“That is true,” I conceded, “which is why I never set my sights that high. Lousy secretaries are, on the other hand, a dime a dozen. They’re flunking out at Miss Beauregard’s School of Cosmetology across the street every day. I could holler out the window right now and get three applicants. Even a dame too dumb to bleach hair can answer a phone. My cup runneth over. So what’s it going to be? You still work here?”
“You’re a bastard, Crag Banyon.”
“See you bright and early tomorrow morning,” I replied.
As I hung up the phone I could hear both Doris and her old bag mother screeching up a storm.
Mannix was standing at the open door to my office and had heard the whole exchange. “Will Miss Doris be coming to work tomorrow?” the elf asked.
“Hope springs eternal,” I said, “but I wouldn’t bet the ranch.”
“I’m glad, Mr. Crag,” Mannix nodded. “Gambling is naughty.”
“The way I do it counts as charity. Speaking of which, here. Outgoing mail.”
I held the Poseidon bill out to him. I probably saved the little guy’s life, since the moment he stepped from the door there was a flash of light and a crack of thunder. All the loose paperwork and dust swirled around my office like somebody had set a tornado loose on the third floor, and I knew what to expect once the squall settled.
There stood Mercury, messenger of the displaced Olympian gods. I hadn’t expected he’d be accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Poseidon.
Poseidon was back to full strength. The sea god’s broad shoulders filled the doorframe, and one mighty hand gripped Mercury by the back of the neck. The wife stood before the sea god, beside the messenger god, and tried not to look guilty.
“Speak of the devil,” I said. “You saved me a stamp. Mannix?”
The elf plucked the bill from my hand and delivered it to Mrs. Poseidon. After he’d handed it off, he kept on going past Poseidon’s massive thigh and into the outer office where he started battering nervously away at the Smith Corona.
“This guy gave you a problem last week,” Poseidon announced. He rattled Mercury around like a four-limbed maraca. “He’s here to make amends.”
I’d told the wife about the threatened lawsuit from Schmecky Shyster after we’d first brought the comatose sea god to Holy Guacamole.
“No need,” I said. “After I left you at the hospital last week, I met Mitchell Fraud of the illustrious Shyster, Pilfer and Fraud law firm chasing an ambulance into the Holy Guacamole parking lot. He’s younger and hungrier than the other senior partners and has the best running shoes. After he finished passing out business cards to everyone in the emergency room, I hired him to sue partner Schmecky Shyster for inflicting emotional distress on me by threatening to sue me for inflicting emotional distress on him. It put the whole law firm into a jurisprudent chicken-and-the-egg causality loop, the upshot of which is that nobody is suing anybody or the universe might explode.”
“Oh,” Poseidon said. He shook a very miserable-looking Mercury for the sheer hell of it. “You’re still paying for that window.”
The sea god bounced the messenger god from my office. The wife lingered.
“I wanted to thank you for everything you did, Mr. Banyon,” she said.
I waved a magnanimous hand. “Prompt payment for services rendered is all the thanks I require.”
Something was eating the dame. I figured I knew what. Once the husband was gone, she shut the door on my outer office.
“What you said at the hospital…” she began.
“You’re really a mermaid,” I said. (Why beat around the bush? Besides, I had a barstool that was probably so panicked that it hadn’t seen me in days that it was filing a missing person report on me.) “That’s why no family was there to cheer you on at the Olympics and why you have no real life history before then, and no human naughty or nice record at the North Pole. I figure you appropriated somebody else’s ID, probably a kid who died at birth whose family members have all died since then. I knew something was fishy about you, I just didn’t know what. Poseidon said back in your kitchen that you were visiting your sister when Makalooka stole the trident, and I filed that one away in the curious bullshit category since you have no family, at least according to every source we here at Banjo Invest were able to track down. That doctor calling you Senorita Pescada was the last clue I needed. He knew you. Probably operated on you, since they do mermaidoplasties at Holy Guacamole. Pescada is Spanish for fish, which I’d forgotten but was reminded of thanks to old Vincetti the rancid fishmonger downstairs. The garbage you’re always drinking is the equivalent of hormones for sex-changed humans. I looked it up. It keeps you from sprouting scales on those pretty gams of yours. Simple.”
