1889 Books: Fission Chips

Fission Chips - Chapter 1

In this life, there are three truths you should never, ever forget. First: the world’s out to get you, no matter how hard you try to deny it. The other two things don’t matter.

I’m standing outside a frosted glass door that reads ‘RICHARDSO’, arguing with a man who looks like he was birthed from some kind of bearded slime monster in a part of the world where they really ought to consider drowning their malformed kids. I’m trying to be pleasant, but it’s way too early to be pleasant.

“I still don’t see why you won’t just finish the sign first,” I say.

“I ain’t got paid yet, das why,” he grunts, reeking of garlic, onions and a healthy amount of sweat.

My eyes are starting to hurt.

“I’m not going to pay you a damn cent for this. Can you even read what you’ve written here?”

He glances at the door, probably for show. Poor illiterate wretch.

“‘M not done,” he says, as if it somehow makes everything okay.

“I know you’re not done! You’ve barely gone 20% into the job! I don’t know how things work with you sewer people, but here in the real world, we don’t count 20% as a milestone! You’ve gotta do the whole job before I cut you a cheque!”

The slugman considers this.

“‘S not my problem,” he grunts.

“So what do you propose I do? The company isn’t called ‘Richardso’, is it?”

Pause.

“You can change th’name?”

I take a deep breath to avoid pummelling him to death (slime on hands = yuck).

“Listen, it’s our first day of business today, so do you think you could maybe cut me some slack and at least get the ‘Richardson and Marx’ part on there before trying to extort me?”

His yellowing pustule eyes slip open and closed a few times.

“Nope. Cash first.”

I’m starting to lose my cool. I slam my fist against the frosted glass for effect. And what an effect it is! The window shatters into half a million pieces all around us.

Fuck.

“You’re paying for this!” I sputter. I know I’m sputtering. What would you do?

“Yer a toad,” grunts the slugman, grabbing his toolbox and waddling for the elevator.

For a moment I’m stunned by the irony.

By the time I come to my senses, the elevator doors are closing, so I make a mad dash for the stairs, running so fast that I’m not actually using the steps so much as flying over them. Three storeys go by in a flash, and I’m beaming with confidence as I land on the ground floor.

(Considering my general philosophy of life and track record of luck vs curse, I should know that any small victory means a horrific blowback. But in that moment of adrenaline and ecstasy, all I care about is body-checking the slugman into a wall so hard he squirts his evil brains all over the marble floor.)

I skid out into the foyer just in time to hear a noise that sounds very much like “thud/scritch/thump/sploosh”. This is not the kind of noise you want to hear after bursting through a door. I hear “bad karma” echoing off the walls.

Since I’m out of breath anyway, I take a moment to check it out. Behind the door I just bounded through lies a woman, mid-30’s, brunette, slim and prim and dressed in impeccable business attire — except for roughly three grande lattes sprayed all over her chest and face. She has the aura of someone who has been scalded very suddenly. Hmm.

“Which way did he go?” I gasp, hoping to distract her.

She screams very, very loudly. I consider just toodling off as if I’m deaf, but somehow I think she could catch me if it came to that.

“Jesus Christ!” she gasps, trying to keep her blouse from burning her any more. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m... just... um...”

“Give me your jacket!” she orders, and for some reason I’m obeying her without question. “Turn around! NOW!”

I do as she commands, observing the ceiling in this building is a wonderful shade of ochre, until the moment she slams me into the wall and twists my arm behind my back so strangely it cracks.

“I should break your fucking arm,” she seethes.

“No you shouldn’t,” I suggest, just in case she didn’t think of it on her own.

“I’m keeping your jacket. And I never, ever want to see your face again. Do you understand?”

I nod sheepishly. She lets me go very abruptly, and I try not to move until I hear her go up in the elevator.

The elevator!

I dash for the front door, skidding into the street just in time to see absolutely nothing.

The slugman lives to slime again.

I flip out my phone, running my impending conversation through my head. It rings twice, then goes to voice mail (“This is Matt Richardson, PI. Leave a detailed message and your number or addy and I’ll ping you back just as soon as I can!” Suave jerk), and I literally let out a sigh of relief as it beeps at me.

“Hi Matt. Gare here. You’re probably not up yet, so... yeah. Funny thing happened just now. Our... uh... the front door kinda got smashed. The glass part, not the wood. So. Er. When you get this, maybe give me a call? Or. You know. You can come down and see it yourself when you... uh... get in. So. Yeah. See you soon!”

I hang up, hoping it’s not too soon.

“Mr Marx!” comes a voice from behind me, which scares the shit out of me, and I drop my phone. I snatch it back up feebly and look around at two large men in slick leather sports jackets and wrap around shades. The right one is new, but the left one I know.

“Mr Scazoli!” I say, turning on my best businessman smile, holding out a hand for shaking.

Mr Scazoli is a friend of Matt’s. He’s a respected construction executive in town, and knows all the big players. Matt has told me on numerous occasions that simply being seen in a room with Mr Scazoli is enough to get us years of employment in the investigation racket, which is exactly the kind of thing I like to hear. This man is my future Sugar Daddy, and I want to give him a hug, not a handshake.

But no shake comes. Mr Scazoli and associate are exuding a very powerful aura of non-shake-participation. Said associate cracks his knuckles simply by flexing his hand.

“In the future, Mr Marx, you can call me Jimmy Scaz,” says the increasingly ominous Mr Scazoli. “And how much of the future you get to see, depends on how much of my money you’ve got on you.”

What a fantastic first day of business so far.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 2

Jimmy Scaz has a limo so long you need to go through customs to reach the other end. We’re sitting in the very back, so far back that it would take several minutes for the muffled sounds of my violent death to reach the driver, if he weren’t hidden behind bullet-proof tinted glass.

Jimmy does not seem happy.

“The loan came due last night, and nobody showed,” he says matter-of-factly. Matter-of-factness makes everything sound scarier. Somebody could come up and tell you you’d live forever in a blissful forest of nymphomaniac fairies and if they were matter-of-fact about it, you’d probably shit yourself.

Still, something about what he said strikes a chord: “Which loan?”

“The thirty grand you shit heads borrowed last week.”

“Thirty... uh... thousand dollars?” I ask, feeling faint.

We don’t have that much money floating around. We have our emergency fund, but that’s for stuff like, say, emergencies. The down payment on the office was big, but I paid that myself. I know Matt was talking about gathering up some money for petty cash, but generally petty cash is the kind of thing you can spend with reckless abandon... when you have the harsh shadow of the mob hanging over you, it’s very hard to do the whole “reckless abandon” thing.

I clear my throat nervously, and venture on.

“Are you sure there isn’t some kind of mistake?” I whimper.

My left foot bursts with pain as if stomped hard with a steel-soled boot, and Associate snickers to himself, shifting back into a relaxed pose. I, meanwhile, double over in agony, gasping for breath, trying to feel if all my toes are still attached.

“Do I look like I make mistakes?” Jimmy growls.

He does, but this is probably the wrong time to tell him.

“No sir. No mistakes. My mistake.”

“Good. So where’s the cash?”

“I don’t have it,” I whimper.

(Interesting side note: when asked about money you don’t have, it is generally a bad idea to say “I don’t have it”, as opposed to “I will have to find out for you”. Saying “I don’t have it” implies you had it, but have since un-had it. This is seen as an admission of guilt to people who (for the sake of argument) wear leather sports jackets, and quite often results in personal injury.

All the same, when under pressure, I say stupid things. As if you don’t, too.)

Jimmy laughs. Associate laughs too, after an appropriate delay.

“He doesn’t have it,” Jimmy says to Associate, who just keeps laughing because he probably has nothing to add to the conversation. “So who does have it?”

I think hard, but the blood is rushing to (and out of?) my foot, so I can’t concentrate.

“Please don’t hurt me,” I say to preface my statement, “But... who did you give it to in the first place?”

Jimmy’s face goes dead serious.

“Don’t you two talk at all?”

“Us two? Who, Matt? Matt borrowed thirty thousand dollars from you?”

Jimmy to Associate: “Oh, this is rich.”

Me to myself: “What the fuck does Matt need that much money for?”

“You’re the PI, you tell me.”

I sputter some more, but Associate cuts me off with a swift punch to the face. Mmm, blood.

“I don’t know what kinda scam you’re playing here,” intones Jimmy, leaning close to my ringing head. “But let me be clear: if I don’t get my money back, and I mean soon, there will be consequences.”

“Interest?”

“Interest is the least of your problems.”

“I dunno, the prime rate’s at close to 15% these days and—”

Associate quiets me down, which I admit I deserve.

“Get your pal Matt and find out what he’s done with the cash. I’ll be back round lunch, and I don’t want any more shit out of you.”

And with stunning dexterity, I am thrown out of the moving car.

In movies, you see people who are thrown out of cars, and they roll to a stop, then get up very ably, shouting a witty curse to the speeding vehicle. In reality, you just land with a solid crack and lie there staring at the sky or the pavement, and have to take a minute or two to ascertain whether you’re too broken to walk again.

“Fuck-a-duck,” I mutter to the gutter.

I run the numbers in my head while the rest of me cries little baby tears for itself. We have a bit over fifty grand in the bank (A.K.A. “emergency fund”), which I can withdraw to cover off Jimmy Scaz. That leaves twenty to repair the window, buy a magic marker to write the damn name properly, buy coffee (survival essentials first) and pay the secretary (who serves the essentials). So as long as Matt can pull in a job in the next four weeks, we won’t necessarily crash and burn.

The gutter remains noncommittal to my analysis.

My phone twitters and I very feebly scrape it out of my pocket and up to my ear.

“Matt?” I say, “I think we have a problem, but I also think I’ve got it under control.”

The voice on the other end isn’t Matt, though. It’s a woman, and she sounds as if she’s being re-animated via solar-powered defibrillators shoved up her ass.

“Hello. This is an automated message from Royal Bank. Your. Small business. Loan. Account is overdrawn by. Two. Thousand. And. Twenty. Seven. Dollars. Please contact our customer service agents immediately at 1-888...”

I close the phone, blinking into the grit by the curb. I must’ve hit my head a lot harder than I thought. All the same, I can deal with this hallucination at the same time I get the money for Jimmy, so rather than worrying myself, I get to my feet (not as easy as it sounds) and stagger back to the office.

I get out of the elevator and there’s a midgety little man with big round glasses standing there. I immediately decide to call him Mr Owl. Especially to his face. He gets all excited when he sees me, which means he obviously doesn’t know me very well.

“Mr Marx?” he gasps, like I’m some kind of celebrity.

“Who’s asking?” I say with my best tough-guy voice, which I freely admit is not very convincing.

“I talked to your partner on the phone the other day. I’m Oliver Gafoday.”

“Do I owe you money?” I ask Mr Owl, failing at courtesy completely.

“No! No sir, I’m here because of the case. I’m going to hire you.”

Pause.

“I see. Did we quote you a figure by any chance?”

“I believe Mr Richardson said fifteen thousand.”

“Fuck me.” Emergency funds! Yes!

“Sorry?”

“I said ‘yippee’. Are you thirsty? Can I get you... er... hot water?”

We pause outside the door to the office, glass still all over the place. Mr Owl is looking around anxiously, and his face spasms like crazy. If he weren’t going to pay me big bucks, I’d slap him just to make him stop with the twitching.

“W-w-w-what happened here?” he asks.

“A little tussle with a mob enforcer,” I growl, because the truth is far more embarrassing.

“Oh dear.”

“That’s what he said.”

I grab the doorknob and twist, and lo and behold, it opens. I usher Mr Owl in, then follow with a wide fifteen-thousand-dollar grin on my face, only to have it wiped right off by a fist that smells distinctly of espresso and my jacket.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 3

I’ll admit I suck at pain. When the nurse at my last job came in to take a blood sample, I screamed so loud they locked down the building for two hours looking for a shooter. And that’s for situations where I see it coming. When I have no idea pain’s on the way, I usually faint.

Which explains why I find myself waking up, lying on my back, staring up at a ceiling fan which appears to be about ten feet too far away to do anyone any good.

Mr Owl peers over me anxiously, then gets a big stupid grin that makes me feel that much worse.

“Oh, you’re alive!” he beams.

“Must be,” I grunt, “This ain’t heaven.”

“He’s awake?” says the woman in my jacket from an undisclosed location.

“Ah, so it’s hell.”

Suddenly she’s above me, handing me down a cup of scalding hot coffee, which I half-expect her to pour on my face out of spite. I take the cup and sit up painfully, rubbing my eye where her fist landed.

“I hear you’re Mr Marx,” she says, perched at the edge of my desk, eyes sullen.

“I’m guessing you’re our secretary,” I venture, on account of the coffee tasting like the kind of toxic sludge that kills killer mutants. “Do you beat the shit out of all your employers?”

“Only the dickheads.”

“I could fire you for that.”

“I could claim sexual harassment.”

“Have you ever looked at yourself? It’d never fly.”

She stands up, and I swear I can see her eyeballs turning red.

“I shoulda poisoned that coffee,” she spits under her breath.

“What, you didn’t?”

“I’ll be at my desk,” she says, marching across the room to the door. “If you want anything, tell four-eyes to relay the message. I don’t want to see your face for the rest of the week.”

“I’ve already seen enough of yours to last a lifetime!” I shout after her, and she slams my office door.

I turn to Mr Owl, who is sitting at a desk with a look of utter shock on his face. I think whatever mystique I once had has long since evaporated.

“So, Four-Eyes... I mean... sorry... whatever your name is. What job did my partner discuss with you? I would have my secretary look it up, but she’s busy flailing the flesh of innocent children until nine.”

Mr Owl shifts in his seat, clasps his hands together tightly.

“I have this young woman,” he says, and I immediately wish I had a notepad or a handheld or something to jot down notes. Bah, it’s not like I’d use ‘em anyway.

“When you say you ‘have this young woman’, where exactly is she? Because I should caution you that we’re not attorneys here, so you can actually go to jail if you tell me about your basement dungeon with the manacles and twenty-foot pit filled with olive oil and beetles.”

Awkward pause.

“Sorry?” he squeaks.

“I was projecting. Continue.”

“I have this young woman that works for me. She’s an intern at my company—”

“What kind of company is it?”

“Silicon wafers.”

“Hmm.”

“We provide the chips that power computers in a variety of clients in the public and private sectors. And Jei Chow was one of our most talented designers.”

“And an intern,” I note.

“She was only 18, just a junior in college.”

“I see.”

There’s a pregnant pause where I’m staring at him like I’m waiting for him to admit to having a torrid affair with this 18-year-old prodigy, but I think the effort is lost on him. I realize that, looking the way he does, he probably gave up on sex long ago, even in fantasies.

“She’s been missing for two weeks.”

“And you’re just getting around to looking for her now?”

This makes him shift again, and he leans closer to me, which is funny because we’re nearly six feet apart. Even severely autistic people would know this just doesn’t make sense.

“It’s a sensitive situation,” he hisses.

“In what way?” I hiss back, just to be pissy.

He looks left, right, left again, as if anyone gives a shit what he’s going to say.

“She has a laptop with her.”

I cover my mouth with mock horror.

“A laptop! No!”

“It has some sensitive information on it...”

“Porn?”

“Secrets.”

“Trade secrets?”

He considers this.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Hmm, trade secrets that are so secret he can’t even confirm they exist? That means this laptop is either worth many millions of dollars to him, or it’s filled with the kind of porn he might get locked up for. One way or another, this is good news.

“I see,” I say, putting on my best ‘thoughtful’ face. “I’m afraid I wasn’t aware of these facts when our estimate was made. Trade secrets of this magnitude are a dangerous kind of job. We’re going to have to revise our cost up to thirty thousand.”

“Thirty thousand?” he gasps, but it’s not the kind of gasp you do when you’re really surprised. It’s the kind you do when you are caught ripping someone off and want to appear indignant about the ruse. “That’s an awfully big bill!”

“Lots of peripheral expenses to consider in this kind of case,” I lie, “Surveillance, database cracking and research, wiretaps.”

“I don’t know if we really need—”

“Oh, and of course discretion costs a lot.”

Mr Owl stares at me without emotion.

“Discretion,” he repeats.

“You know, like how I won’t go mentioning to everyone I see how Jei Chow has a laptop full of trade secrets you want back.”

“But—”

“Basic service runs like that. Our deluxe package compels us to keep certain facts to ourselves in the course of the investigation.”

Pause.

“I can arrange the transfer,” he grumbles, properly defeated.

“Cash, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course.”

“Well then! Nice talking to you, and I—”

He rushes towards me, flustered, waving his hands like a retarded duck on heroin.

“Wait! Don’t you need to know... something more? You don’t even know where to start!”

I put on my biggest, most confident smile.

“Oh, don’t worry about us. With the little information you’ve given my associate and I, we’ll be able to track down Ms Chow in no time. Why, I’ll bet Mr Richardson’s already on her trail now. We’re that good.”

Honestly, I don’t know how good we are. This is our first day of business, and we don’t really open till nine. But Matt’s an ex-cop, so at the very least he can rough this guy up if we can’t find his girlie after all.

I shake his hand and show him the door, then peek my head around the corner to the secretary’s area. She’s sitting there, flipping through a magazine. A fashion magazine. Looking at her, it’s obvious she doesn’t retain much of what she reads.

“Hey... uh... secretary,” I whisper, ready to bolt if she happens to be armed.

“It’s Ruth.”

“Like ruthless,” I muse.

She gives me a stare that says, yes, yes it’s EXACTLY like ruthless.

“What do you want?” she asks, returning to her magazine.

“Can you give Mr Richardson a call? We need him in ASAP.”

She doesn’t look up, just shakes her head at me.

“Nope,” she says.

“Nope what? You won’t call him?”

“Nope.”

“Um, excuse me, but I think I’m paying you to do things like this, aren’t I?”

“Yes you are. But you should have saved a few bucks to pay your utilities. Phone’s not connected.”

I stare at the dead phone, then back at Ruth. She’s enjoying this. I should let her paycheque bounce, the bitch. I sigh, turn to leave, when she clears her throat at me.

“Mr Welch is here,” she says to no one in particular.

“Mr who?”

“Mr Jackson Welch. Computer services. He has an appointment at 7:30.”

I glance around me. Who the hell makes an appointment for 7:30 on a Monday morning? Matt needs new friends. Especially if he’s not planning on being around before nine like this. I scowl at Ruth, just because she’s there.

“Fine. Send him in.”

“Send him in yourself,” she says, smirking to her magazine.

I really want to make an issue of it, but she has a very hefty stapler at her elbow, and I know she knows I see it. I grit my teeth and head for the waiting room, where I’m quickly greeted by two men in grey jackets and stern faces.

They ask: “Mr Marx?”

I ask: “Mr Welch?”

They say: “No. Turner, Brunch, SPD. You have some explaining to do.”

I say: “Fuck.”

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Fission Chips - Chapter 4

I don’t actually hate police detectives. They have nice coats. Some of them even have good dental hygiene, and don’t feel the need to wave their damn badges around like it somehow makes them more evolved life forms, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Turner and Brunch don’t even have nice coats. They’re slumming up my office.

“Do you know a Luke Maxwell?” says Brunch.

“Is there more than one?” I rebut.

“No, just the one,” says Turner.

“Then I don’t know him.”

“If there were more than one,” Brunch posits, obviously mistaking me for someone in the same intellectual orbit as his friends and neighbours, “would you know one of them?”

“Which one?”

“Any of them,” he offers, prolonging his misery and my enjoyment all at once. You see, despite my partner being a cop, my father being a cop, and my two estranged brothers being cops, I am not — and brace yourself for this — especially fond of cops. When they are young, they’re bullies who beat the living shit out of you for being able to read three consecutive words without sweating. When they’re bigger, they’re still bullies, but they’re acutely aware that the three words “alleged”, “police” and “brutality”, when strung into a sentence by the former geeky kid, can do a world of hurt.

This is karma, bitches. Suck it up.

“Any of them,” I sigh, tapping my chin, “That’s a very big question. Does one of them wear a wig?”

“No,” Turner says, frowning.

“Does one of them wear glasses?”

“No.”

“Fake teeth? An eye patch? Fishnet stockings?”

“No, no and no,” he says, possibly beginning to catch on to my ruse.

“Wait, does he have brownish hair?”

They exchange a wide-eyed look of shock.

“Yes!” Brunch squeals, then tries to recoup his tough-guy persona.

“Ah, then no. Don’t know him.”

Turner loses it, grabs me by the jacket and shakes me around to scare me into submission. I learned long ago this can actually be fun, and have since dubbed it the “Poor Man’s Rollercoaster”. Turner is a bit on the weak side, though, so it’s less like Space Mountain and more like those twirling teacups.

“Don’t mess with us,” he growls at me, “This is serious business.”

“Hey, I’m trying to help, but you’re being very imprecise here. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and I’ll try to target my snappy comebacks to your particular situation?”

Brunch pulls out a morgue photograph of a man with the top of his head largely removed, hair dangling about in a bloody mess, like someone had decided it would make a lovely fruit bowl, gotten halfway through preparing things, and then realized how sick it was. Shave the head first, they told themselves, nobody likes bloody hairs on their pears.

“This is Mr Maxwell,” Brunch says.

“His head is empty,” I note, realizing for the first time I may have no shame and no soul.

“He’s dead.”

“That’s really no excuse. My grandmother died and looked eerily more alive in her coffin than she did at Thanksgiving the month before. This guy’s just slacking. What happened to him?”

They pause, lower the photograph.

“Where were you last night, Mr Marx?” asks Turner.

“At home with a bottle of Pisse-Dru, some cheesepuffs and a video stream,” I say, squinting at them handily.

Turner steps forward, trying to be imposing, I know, but I’m too sore from my various beatings to really care. I yawn loudly.

“Did anyone see you there?” he asks ominously.

“My webcam was off. One-way affair.”

They stare at me for a moment. I can tell Turner wants to think of a way of asking what kind of things I was watching last night, but the phrasing is hard to conjure. Poor bastard. Study hard, kids, so you don’t get trapped inside your own little mind when you’re all growed up!

“Can you tell me why Mr Maxwell might have had your business card in his pocket when he died?” Brunch asks, leaning in close.

“‘Might have’? You’re not sure?”

“No, we’re sure. He had it.”

“Wait, are you trying to insinuate you’re going to plant evidence? Like: ‘If you cooperate, he didn’t have your card. But if you don’t cooperate, he had your card and a photo of your dog in his mouth. And your name painted in blood on his chest’.”

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“I’m not sure what the question was supposed to be.”

Turner hands me an evidence bag, and floating inside is a business card that reads ‘Richardson and Marx: Private Investigators’. If only I’d had one of these to show sluggy, I might have been able to illustrate the effect we were going for. The odd thing is that I haven’t seen one of our cards yet. Matt was bringing them in with him today.

“How did Mr Maxwell happen to have one of your cards?” Brunch asks.

“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully, “I don’t even have a card of my own yet. So either he works at the printing place, or he met up with my partner sometime last night.”

“What happened last night?”

“That’s when the cards were due to be done.”

“What time?”

“Seven. Out on Industrial Road. O’Malley printing, I think. Expensive shit, but very worth it.”

I tip the bag, look at the card. Black text on white. Light card stock. Not even a nice texture. Better be made out of fucking endangered rainforest tree-living native babies for the price we paid. I wave the evidence bag a bit, cock my head.

“Say,” I say, “I always wondered what’d happen if you handed evidence like this over to a suspect and he suddenly tried to light it on fire or something. Completely destroys it sorta thing. What happens then?”

A quick punch later, and they have their bag back, whilst I shove tissues up my nose. Tampering with evidence apparently trumps police brutality. Must remember that.

“We’ll be in touch,” Brunch says as they head out the door, “Don’t leave town.”

Now honestly, leaving town is probably never on most suspects’ minds. I’ve seen my share of lawyer shows, and every time the D.A. asks for remand because “the defendant is a flight risk”, you can always see the light go off in the heads of the accused, where they think “oh shit, that might’ve worked!”. I swear, sometimes the whole system is stacked to make it easier for criminals to skip town and become someone else’s problem. Until Brunch told me not to leave town, I was mentally preparing for the rest of my crappy day. But now that the idea’s in my head, you’re damn right I’m bailing on this poop parade!

I pad my pocket, feel my car keys, and hop towards Ruth’s den of pain. She is now reading another fashion magazine, gazing at women so glamorous and perfect that she will never, ever live up to those standards... and hopefully feel acutely suicidal as a result.

“I’m going out,” I say to her, my nose still plugged with bloody tissue.

“Where to?” she asks, not looking up.

“Cuba,” I say, probably joking. Probably.

“Jackson Welch is still here for you. Along with another fifteen clients who were all scheduled for 7:45. One of them is bleeding.”

“I hope you got him something to keep the blood off the upholstery. It’ll cost a fortune to clean.”

“What do you suggest? I don’t even have stationery to write on, let alone a first aid kit.”

“Tell him to dribble into a coffee cup. That way it’s easier for you to drink later.”

She doesn’t even flinch, just turns the page. It’s a relief, because I was starting to half-believe she really was an undead hellspawn sent to drag me into an eternity in purgatory. If she’d given me an ashen look like “oh no, how did he know?” then I would have had my suspicions confirmed, and probably my liver for lunch.

“Mr Welch,” she reminds me.

“Maybe when I get back,” I say, “I just realized I have an eight o’clock appointment to run screaming in terror, and I want to be early if I can.”

“Snazzy,” she nods, “I’ll be emptying the bank account for my severance and auctioning all your shit if you’re not back by nine.”

“Good luck with that! See you later!” I sing as I head out the door.

“Hope your car explodes!” she calls back.

Downstairs, I run into another five people filing into the elevator, all holding one of my cheap-ass business cards in their hands. It’s like a dream come true, which only serves to prove that there is probably a horrible, dark undertone to it all that will harm me in ways I cannot fathom.

I briefly feel bad for Matt, walking into the nightmare I’m bailing out on. It won’t be fun sorting through all the mess, all the money issues, all the police and especially sorting through Ruth. But I only feel a tiny bit bad, and very briefly. He’s the one who slept in. If he’d been punctual, he’d have had the option of chickening out first.

I swing round the corner, seeing my sleek silver Lexus sedan parked two spots down, and for a moment I feel as if things are back the way they were, back before I wanted to play detective. It’s a simple familiarity, coming back to my ride, catching the early morning sun so sharply, punching off the car alarm.

And watching it explode in a fireball.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 5

Conventional thinking would suggest that surviving a car bomb from five metres away is amazingly good luck, but then conventional thinkers have probably never been hit in the face with a head rest flying at five metres per second.

And no, the cushioning does nothing for you at all.

I wake up face-down on a dark mahogany table, arms hanging useless by my side, drool pooling around my cheek. My brain is flat on the back of my skull, which is only marginally better than flat on the back of the wall.

I look up slowly, watching the world through a pint of nice amber beer, and it immediately occurs to me I’ve ended up in heaven! But then a hand grabs the drink, slides it away, and I see a… a…

A giant Ewok?

“Dude,” he says with a comical Texas drawl, “your car is totally wasted.”

He’s like a giant ugly teddy bear, wearing a Hawaiian shirt over top a black tee that reads ‘meh’, a laptop bag slung over one shoulder. He’s got a huge scraggly beard that doesn’t exist purely on his face, but travels down into his shirt (and from there I refuse to speculate). His eyes are half-open, blinking at the pale light from the window, with skin so pale, even Nosferatu would be forced to remark “seriously, get some sun, man.”

“You think someone tried to kill you?” he asks me, mouth hanging open with a smile that a stroke patient would be ashamed of.

“No,” I reply coldly, “I think someone wanted to start a bonfire and invite us all for smores, but shit got out of control.”

The Ewok nods appreciatively, sipping the beer.

“Whoa. I can totally see that.”

We are clearly in a pub somewhere, but why it’s open before nine on a Monday, I don’t know. Someone is playing Cowboy Junkies so subtly in the background that it would drive any rational person to drink, which is probably the point. Speaking of which…

“Need beer,” I grunt, slapping a hand on my forehead.

“Don’t drink and drive, man,” the Ewok warns, then breaks into fits of laughter. He obviously shares my sense of humour, but fails at execution. I hate him even more. But then he puts a fresh pint in front of me, and I am forced to reconsider my blind hatred of like-minded people. For a few minutes at least.

“I’m Jackson, by the way,” he says.

“Good for you!” I mutter.

“I’m supposed to set up your email and stuff,” he says, ignoring my obvious antagonistic vibe completely. “You got time now?”

I look at him as seriously as I can, complete with battered face, no jacket and crapped-up shirt, ripped tie and deformed hat. Even to a mental midget such as himself, it’s got to be pretty obvious this is the wrong time to set up email.

He observes me a moment, then smiles.

“You know what I always wanted to be when I grew up?” he spittles.

“A homo sapien?”

“A detective!” he beams. “You know, with the hat and the coat and the mystery and all that jazz. I wanted hot dames coming into my office and begging me to solve their cases and givin’ me a little something extra when the job got done right.”

Sadly, I don’t have a spoon to carve my eyes out with.

“First day of business today, right?” Jackson asks, drumming on the table like he’s Ringo Starr’s retarded grandson, the one the family tried to bury in the backyard but he kept digging back out and bathing in the toilet when you weren’t looking.

“It is,” I sigh. “Terrible first day.”

“What’s gone on? Anything fun?”

I lean back and chug half the pint, waiting for the sweet taste of oblivion sweep over me.

“The police think I killed a guy by chopping his head open, which I can’t really prove I didn’t do because I don’t know where to start. And speaking of not knowing where to start, I have to find a missing girl for a client that will be helping me pay off the mob enforcer who wants to cut my feet off if I don’t get him his money by the end of the day. Any of that sound fun to you?”

“Well yeah, but I’m not the one who’s gonna get a couple of feet shorter if things go wrong!”

We share a laugh, but only one of us finds it funny.

“So what’re you going to do?” he asks without missing a beat. “What’s your first move?”

I finish my beer, motion for another, and belch as loudly as I can (which is not very loud, given the recent collapse of my lungs due to fiery explosion). Jackson is waiting for my wisdom with baited breath, so I try not to disappoint:

“I’m going to get drunk and pretend none of this is real.”

Wait, sorry, I meant to say ‘try not to not disappoint.’ The double-negatives always trip me up.

“You’re…” he says carefully. “You’re not going to do anything?”

My beer arrives, and I pause before drinking, only to savour the look of shock upon the Ewok’s face.

“Don’t be silly,” I say with a grin. “I’m going to be getting drunk. That’s gotta count for something.”

“But what about the missing girl? The mob? The police?”

“They’re not going to exist very shortly, but I wish them well.”

Jackson shakes his head in disbelief, and it occurs to me that with a bit of oil, I could make a snowman with all the dandruff he’s just showered onto the table. Showered! Ha! Get it?

“No, man, that’s not right,” he says. “You’re a detective! You solve cases! That’s what detectives do!”

“You would think so, but they actually get savagely beaten, with a little case-solving sprinkled here and there. I’ve decided that I much prefer being an alcoholic. The hours are a bitch, but I’m committed the cause.”

He reaches for my beer, but I finish it off before he can pull it away.

“I’m going to help you out,” he says.

“Okay, but I want you to read the instructions on the shampoo bottle before you—”

“I’m going to find the girl for you. You take care of the mob, and the police can sort themselves out.”

“I don’t think that’s too likely of them.”

“Listen: I’m not going to let you throw away your dream like this.”

“It’s more like drowning my dream, but okay.”

“We’re going to get through this together,” the Ewok says sincerely, and I swear it’s totally unrelated that I feel like puking all over his face. “One step at a time, we’re going to make it work.”

“You sound like my stepmom right before my dad ran away with that hooker.”

His face is expressionless and just a little bit sad, which cheers me up immensely. He reaches a thick, crusty hand out and grasps mine tightly, nodding in that way formerly-tough lawyers do as they promise the death row convict they’ll get the Governor to grant a stay of execution, don’t you worry. And then the convict dies. After the first two injections don’t take.

“Tell me the girl’s name,” he says, all weepy and shit.

“Mei Chow,” I say.

“Mei… Chow…” he says, nodding, as if he’s writing it down and not cutting blood flow to my fingertips.

“Wait,” I say, trying to think through the beer. “Wait, no maybe it was Pei Chow. Pei Pei Chow? Pei Pong Chow? Pei Pei Pei Pei JEI! Jei Chow. Jei Chow it is.”

“Jei Chow?”

“I’m pretty sure, yeah,” I nod. “Try Pei Chow and Jei Chow, and whichever one looks more missing, that’s the one I’m after.”

Jackson’s face tells me he has lost all respect for me. My quest to disillusion the entire human race has become a little less improbable.

“All right,” he says cautiously. “Any idea what she does?”

“She disappears,” I nod.

“Besides that?”

“She works at a tech company. With Mr Owl.”

“Mr Owl?”

“I don’t remember his name. What do you want from me? He looks like an owl. Tech company. Laptop. Porn.”

“Porn?”

“Maybe. I’m confused. Can I have another pint now?”

Before he can answer, the door to the pub slams open and a very hefty man in a very silly blue t-shirt stomps on it, unibrow menacing everyone it sees like a long hairy case of facial herpes. He looks around in a grand arc, left and right, and then settles on the only two people in the joint: me and the Ewok. His formidable muscles flex, meaning he’s probably going to beat the shit out of me.

“Which one of you is Gare Marx?” he growls.

“He is,” Jackson and I both say.

Jackson seems hurt that I’d put him in harm’s way like that. The fool.

The big man slams my head down into the table viciously without any warning at all. I am a magnet for abuse, I tell you. I motion for another beer.

“Which one of you is Gare Marx?” he asks again, voice deep and gnarly like an angry bear with an especially tenacious chipmunk chewing on its nuts.

“Who’s asking?” I ask defiantly, because beer is a good substitute for strategy.

“Paul,” he sneers.

“Paul,” I echo. “I know something like fifteen people named Paul. Wow. That’s pretty incredible when you think about it, isn’t it? Fifteen people named P—”

My face meets the table again, and I sip up a bit of spilled beer before sitting straight again.

“Which Paul are you anyway?” I ask. “The angry one, sure, but what’s your angle, Paul? What are you ab—”

Head. Table. Beer. Repeat.

“You slept with my wife, you son of a bitch!” he yells into my ear, and then grabs me by the arm so hard I’m pretty sure I’m actually, physically starting to fall apart from all the abuse.

“Listen, Paul…” I say, trying to calm the situation but not feeling too concerned because I’m pleasantly buzzed and my pain receptors have apparently outsourced their jobs to India. “I think you and I got off on the wrong foot…”

He pulls me right close to his face, breathes his horrid foul breath right at me, and sneers:

“You slept with my wife, and now I’m gonna kill you!”

I think I’m going to have to engage in this conversation properly from now on.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 6

I know it’ll come as a shock, but I’ve never been accused of adultery before. The closest I’ve come was in seventh grade when Ted Derby accused me of making out with Cindy Darlington behind his back, and she threw up at the thought of it. So that settled that.

Incidentally, Cindy’s a hooker down on Water Street now. I drive by in my Lexus every chance I get, just to wave.

Paul doesn’t know me well enough to know how silly this accusation is.

“I think you have me confused with someone else,” I suggest.

His counterpoint feels a lot like a knee to the groin. I make a sound not unlike a cat being run over by a lawn mower.

“Wh… wh… why do you think I slept with your wife?” I gasp.

He gets a grin on his face that suggests he is about to swallow a planet.

“That message you sent to her email last night? I saw it.”

Hmm. There is a distinct air of what-the-fuck about this.

“I didn’t send anyone any emails last night, I swear. I don’t even have my email set up yet. Ask the giant bear over there.”

Paul laughs a little girly giggle that I valiantly decline to mock.

“Don’t play dumb with me.”

“This isn’t playing. I really am this dumb. I’m famous for it. Dumb, and easily distracted. Say, you look like you could use a drink.” I motion over to Jackson, smiling as nonchalantly as I can under the circumstances. “Get a beer for my friend Paul here.”

Jackson sulks off, probably seeing the whole ‘I’ve been rejected for the guy who bathes’ scenario playing out for the hundredth time.

“How long has it been going on?” Paul growls, spittling all over my face.

“I don’t know, Paul. Honestly. Maybe… maybe there’s another Gare Marx in town? You ever think of that? Maybe it’s not me you’re after at all.”

“Yeah? Not you? Then where’d she get this?”

He holds one of my damn business cards up, then crumples it. It doesn’t even crumple expensively. Matt’s been suckered by the printing nerds. It’s almost as sad as—

“Hey!” Paul yells, snapping me back into the god awful present. “You paying attention?”

“To what?”

He head butts me, which provides me with the wonderful epiphany that his toupee is on crooked.

“I hope you enjoyed it,” he sneers. “‘Cause I’m gonna beat you so hard you’ll be crying for your momma.”

Oh fuck it.

“That’s what she said.”

It takes ten seconds for the wit to seep into his thick skull, but when it does, boy oh boy does his face get red. He winds up to punch me, and my spine immediately slacks in the hope that it can be severed on impact and save me a lifetime of suffering at the hands of my devious mouth.

But before the fist lands, I am showered with beer and shattered glass. Paul’s eyes roll back in his head, and he topples into a nearby table like a big dumb tree that even the enviro-nuts agree deserved to be cut down.

Jackson is standing there, shattered beer mug in his hand, looking the kind of excited you get after swimming in sub-zero water: giddy and insane.

“What the hell was that?” I yell.

He looks like a sad little puppy right after I poked it in the eye.

“I thought… he was going to beat you up…”

“Sure, just a little. Now he’s going to fucking kill me when he wakes up!”

We both glance down at Paul. He’s bleeding from the back of his head, twitching slightly in his right arm, and generally quite unconscious.

“Should I kick him?” Jackson offers.

“What, all your annual exercise in one outing?”

“I’ve never been in a bar fight before.”

“I don’t think it strictly counts as a fight if you sneak up on someone and beat their head with glassware. You’re like some kind of beverage ninja.”

It’s immediately obvious he loves the idea of being a ninja. I bet he tries to climb walls when he’s alone in his mom’s basement. I wonder if I can convince him to try a little seppuku…

“So what now?” he asks, smiling happily.

I consider my options. Whatever buzz I had is long gone, and I’m hurting in too many awkward places to sit down again anyway. I glance at my watch: quarter to nine. A little over three hours until Jimmy Scaz comes back to kill me. Without a car, I can’t flee the country. I could take a bus, sure, but that’s almost as bad as dying. For my pride, anyway.

“All right,” I say, puffing myself up and adjusting my tie. “You look for Pei Pong, I’m going to the bank to get the cash for the mob. We’ll meet back at my office at eleven-thirty, assuming I don’t get hit by a truck before then. Voluntarily or not.”

Ten minutes later I’m standing in line at the bank, waiting for the 109-year-old lady in front of me to finish discussing the bowel movements of her cats with the teller. I would have to guess that half the people in the bank are staring at me, as if beat-and-bruised is somehow and analogue for ski-mask-wearing. I’m bleeding a tiny trickle of blood into my left shoe, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where it’s coming from.

“Next!” calls the teller as the old lady shuffles away.

I swipe my card, punch in my PIN, and announce as happily as I can: “I need thirty thousand dollars in cash.”

“Hello, Mr Marx!” beams the teller, her blond hair bouncing cheerfully, probably just as scripted as the rest of her. “How are you today?”

My nose drips blood on the counter. I stare at her a moment, but she doesn’t seem to get it.

“I need thirty thousand dollars,” I repeat.

“Absolutely! Just let me check your account information…”

She starts tapping away at the keys with the dexterity of a tranquillized sloth, checking her polished nails every five seconds as if it they’re likely to change in such a low-impact job. Oh, to be paid by the hour! What a life!

“Nice weather today,” she smiles, barely paying attention to the screen. “I hope it stays this way for the long weekend. Do you have any plans?”

I can’t help it, I’m bruising in places man was not meant to bruise. I grit my teeth and smile: “Why, are you inviting me somewhere?”

Her smile flickers. I’m off-script, baby. OFF-SCRIPT!

“I… no, I was just—”

“Because if we’re going away, I need to check in with my psychiatrist first—”

“No, I—”

“And find someone to feed the scorpions—”

“Sir, I just—”

“How many rolls of duct tape do you think I’ll need? Five? Six? Let’s say six.”

“Mr Marx,” she interrupts, out of breath. “Mr Marx, I’m sorry for the confusion. I was just trying to make conversation.”

“Oh!” I say with mock shock. “Oh I see! Yeah, I don’t know what got into me. I must have become confused because of the shocking lack of thirty thousand dollars in my hands!”

She stares at me, perhaps appreciating the scale of my anti-Christ-ity.

“One moment please,” she says, picking up my card and shuffling off to the manager’s desk. The woman at the teller next to me is giving me an evil eye. Relatively speaking. Amateurs.

Blondie comes back with her manager, a balding little turd of a man with half-circle glasses and a down-turned mouth. The manager stares at me, sizing me up. At times like these, a black eye like mine can say: “Don’t fuck with me.” In my case, I suspect it says: “People have fucked with me and won. Now it’s your turn!”

“Mr Marx,” the turd begins slowly, carefully, like I’m an especially finicky voice-to-text program on a fifty year old computer that just happens to control a massive nuclear arsenal, “if you would come back to my office for a moment…”

“Is my money back there?” I ask.

“No, sir.”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“No, sir.”

“Well it’s not my birthday, so it’s not a surprise party, so I’m guessing you’re going to try and up-sell me a better savings plan. Funny thing is: after I take out this money, I won’t have any savings! So don’t bother.”

The turd glances left and right, whispers to me in a very feeble voice.

“Mr Marx, I’m afraid you don’t have thirty thousand dollars in your account.”

Awkward moment.

“How much money do I have?”

“Two thousand—”

“Oh shit.”

“—overdrawn, sir. You’re overdrawn. We’ve been trying to contact you since last night.”

The teller next to me is snickering to herself, and I swear if these pens didn’t have little chains attaching them to the counter, she’d be wearing one in her ear right now.

I take a long, purging breath, try my best to smile, but I just can’t shake this repeating image of Jimmy Scaz laughing as he forces me to play a round of Double Dutch using razor wire skipping ropes.

“So I guess the only way you’re going to give me more is if I decide to rob the place, huh?”

Turns out, joking about bank robbery gets your ass kicked and thrown out of the establishment. I stumble across the sidewalk, trying to regain my footing, but trip, roll, and slam into a motorcycle parked up against the curb. The motorcycle tips over, but declines to continue my trend of exploding vehicles. I am just a tiny bit disappointed.

I stagger to my feet, brush off my clothes, and pat my pockets for my phone. I need to call Matt again, find out if he knows what happened to the money. Maybe he switched banks. I know I will be, after today. Customer service my ass.

“Hey!” booms a loud Spanish-y voice. A lean but muscular man storms out of the bank, mouth agape. “What you do to my bike, man?”

I check behind myself at the vintage Harley Davidson lying on its side, then back at the angry biker gang member bearing down on me.

“Let’s skip the chit-chat and get right to the beating. Left side, if you can. It’s feeling left out.”

The thug shoves me hard with both hands in that way that kids do in school yards when they’re too chicken to really punch each other. I fall back and accidentally grab onto the thug’s leather vest for support, which makes him fall down on top of me. In a romantic comedy, this would be your moment of sexual tension. God, what I’d give for a romantic comedy life right about now…

The thug gets off me, plants a foot on my chest, and snatches my wallet out of my pocket. He starts flipping through cards, a wicked smirk on his face. But then he pulls out my Private Investigator License card and his face goes as white as Jackson’s.

“You’re a P.I.?” he stammers.

“Marginally.”

“I’m takin’ your wallet,” he threatens, weakly. “Don’t try and cancel any of the cards, cause I know where you live. Now beat it!”

“Can you get your foot off my chest first?”

He checks his boot, moves it, kicks me away. I turn and start to crawl to safety, but then I see it: the thug’s gun, lying on the sidewalk. A small silver revolver of poetic retribution. He must have dropped it when he tackled me, and now, like Excalibur with Arthur, the weapon of Truth is beckoning me… begging me to stop being a chickenshit.

But I’m good at being a chickenshit…

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Fission Chips - Chapter 7

I’ve used guns twice in my life. Once was three weeks ago on a shooting range, when Matt was trying to determine if I should get a gun license or not (not). The other time was when I was five and my brothers told me dad’s service revolver was a water gun, and I blew up the TV. It’s a miracle my family has survived as long as it has, with morons like my brothers around.

Still, when you’re being mugged, sometimes even the dumbest ideas seem smart.

I stand up quickly, aiming the gun right at the thug’s chest. Or, well, right next to him. Same general idea.

“All right!” I shout, letting some of my pent-up emotion spill out like a jock weeping in the bathroom after a chick flick. “I want my wallet back!”

The thug’s eyes go wide, and he reaches behind himself for his gun, which he finds is no longer there.

“Shit!” he curses.

“Yeah,” I sympathize. “Now give me the wallet!”

“Give me the gun!”

I have to take a moment.

“I don’t think you understand how this goes,” I say.

“Give me the gun or you’ll be sorry.”

I glance around, uncertain. I coulda sworn I was the one who hit my head several times today. Is dementia contagious?

Meanwhile, the thug is pacing toward me, hands out like some retarded mountain lion cub trying to pounce. At this range, I’m fairly certain I’m going to hit him with any bullets I choose to let fly. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so powerful in all my life. Quick, somebody take a picture.

“You ain’t gonna shoot me,” he smiles.

“Oh no?”

“Nah,” he says. “‘Cause the gun has no bullets innit.”

My face changes from powerful-and-cocky to you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“No joke, bro. Empty as a whorehouse on Sunday mornin’.”

“I’ve been in whorehouses on Sunday morning, and they aren’t so empty.”

“Yer missin’ the point, man.”

“No, I think you’re missing the point of carrying a gun around.”

“Just hand it over.”

“Why? If it’s empty, why do you need it? Why not just punch me in the face and take it back?”

So he punches me in the face.

I land on the sidewalk, world spinning like a dirty grey merry-go-round, and the gun is snatched from my hand. The thug stows it in the back of his jeans and then kicks me in the ribs. I’m going to be a fucking rainbow of bruises when I take my shower tonight. Or when the medical examiner is doing the autopsy. Either way.

“See ya, P.I.,” he winks, and gets on his Harley and drives down the street.

Half a block down the street.

He stops in front of a beat-up building and strolls into a pawn shop, slamming the door behind him. I can hear the bells on the door jingling from here. I think I can also hear the sounds of a dozen baby polar bears crying out in horror as rising water levels drown their little furry asses, all thanks to this idiot’s stunning laziness. It’s a two minute walk, for Christ’s sake! Even I’m not that pathetic!

I march down the street. Actually, I kinda limp down the street, but I look serious about it. The pawn shop — “Bobs Ponn Shopp” — is filled top to bottom with electronics and random trash, but apparently no spell-checkers. You can get a variety of laptops for half price, “and compyooters to!” Way at the back I see Mr Empty Gun. He’s flipping through my wallet again, throwing my video store membership cards onto the floor. Poor sap, those things are probably worth more than my bank cards right now.

He pushes a button on the counter and I hear the caged door next to me lock. I can’t help but notice, wedged into the door frame, yet another one of my damn business cards, flapping in the wind. I reach out as stealthily as I can, grab it. It’s all beat up and has “9aw” scribbled on the corner in blue ink, but I think it’s still good enough to use. Now I just need my damn wallet so I have someplace to keep it.

When I look back, the thug is gone, wandering through a back hallway, off to the left. Since my lock-picking skills are second only to my marksmanship, I give up on the front door and take a few steps back, trying to get a feel for the layout of the building. It’s kinda rectangle-y. I really should have invested in some x-ray vision. All I can tell is that he went somewhere in the vicinity of Bobs Barr next door.

All right then.

I mosey on into the bar, pausing inside the door to take in my surroundings.

It’s a biker bar. There are many, many bikers. They are wearing black leather and shiny studs and a truly unfortunate number of tassels for a room full of heterosexuals. There’s a big copper sign for Pival’s Red Amber Ale hanging over the bar, with a pair of bite marks in it. This is like the Special Ed of hell.

Every eye in the house is on me, probably because they’ve never seen clothes that don’t chafe. I nod in as much of a biker way as I can manage with a straight face, and stride to the bar.

“Hey,” I say. “Where’s the can? Gotta piss.” This is how the commoners speak, you see.

The bartender strokes his long, gnarly sideburns and cocks an eyebrow.

“Payin’ cust’mers only,” he slurs. He is obviously a fan of his own work.

I so desperately want to get drunk right now, but since all my cash is in my wallet, I feel compelled to carry on with my plan. I plant a hand down on the bar, nod toughly.

“What do you have on tap?” I ask.

“Pival’s Red. Pival’s IPA. Pival’s Unofficial Light.”

“What’s the Unofficial Light?”

“Marley spits innit.”

An old man at the other end of the bar starts to chortle. A phlegmy chortle. He’s got a leather patch over his left eye, and a long string of drool out the corner of his mouth.

“Charming. The Red, please.”

The bartender fills a glass with truly putrid-looking beer, slaps it down on the worn wood between us. He’s eyeing me intensely, and I start to worry I’ve stumbled into the only repressed gay biker bar in town.

“Hold it for me,” I squeak. “I’ll be right back.”

He slams a fist down on the bar, leans in close.

“Pay first.”

“If I don’t get to a toilet soon, I swear to god you’ll be stuck with a Pival’s Special Yellow.”

I do a little pee dance to complete the effect. James Bond never has to do this shit. Must be the accent.

The bartender eases up, points to the back of the bar.

“Down the hall, turn right, second door onna left.”

“Thanks, cupcake,” I wink, and skip out of sight as fast as I can. The back of the building is actually more disgusting than the front, with wallpaper peeling so extensively that if you had a machete, you could hack it away like you’re in an especially tacky jungle. Down the hall and to the right are a pair of doors marked “Doods” and “Laydees”, but to the left is a single door with “Imployies Olny” on it. I skitter on down, peek my head through.

It’s somebody’s home. And not the kind of somebody that has anything to do with the bar: there are pastel-painted walls, framed paintings of sunflowers, and a bead curtain on the far side of the kitchen, where a tea kettle is steaming quaintly next to a pair of mugs. No wonder it’s “employees only”… if any of the clientele got back here, they’d probably go blind at the lack of studs.

If my sense of direction is right, the pawn shop should be through the kitchen and to the right, past the tastefully-sized Norman Rockwell print. (Is it strange that I find this creepier than the biker bar?) I take a tentative step in, and all at once, through the beaded door comes a mousy 1950’s housewife carrying a package of bundt cake.

Neither one of us says a word for a moment. I wonder how long it’s been since she’s seen a human being with taste.

“You can’t be here,” she gasps.

“I’m looking for the bathroom,” I say.

“You have to leave.”

I can’t leave. My wallet is at stake. If I go back past that bar, they’re going to catch me and do questionable things to my person. I am having a bad enough day already. I’ve got to get through this kitchen. I walk further in, keeping a careful eye on the woman with the bundt. Anything can be a weapon in the hands of a psychopath, and any women dressed like that in this day and age is quite certainly a psychopath.

“Just stay there,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She doesn’t say a thing, but her eyes are welling with tears.

“I’ll be out of your hair in a second.”

Just then, there’s the boom of a door slamming shut, heavy footsteps up some stairs, and in through a side entrance comes a very large and somewhat overweight man, head-to-toe biker. He stops dead in this tracks, and keeps looking between the woman and me, the woman and me…

“Moxie?” he gasps.

The woman starts to cry.

“This is him?” the biker yells in a big hairy bad man sorta way, pointing straight at me. I step back, not sure what I’ve got myself into, but not wanting to find out. The whole situation smells like dangerous dichotomy to me.

“Bobby, no!” the woman sobs. “I’ve never seen him before in my life!”

“That’s true, Bobby,” I nod. “I’m just here to steal a wallet. Er. My wallet. It’s…”

I’m cut off by the sound of a huge, bear-like roar, and Bobby the insane biker stretches his monster arms wide and charges straight at me!

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Fission Chips - Chapter 8

There’s a knife on the table about the size of a scimitar, a cleaver on the counter that could cut through brick, and even a gnarly bread knife in the sink. So naturally, my body spontaneously grabs hold of Moxie’s bundt cake to defend itself. I would tear a strip off myself, except I have no doubt I would rake myself over some very nasty coals in retaliation.

Bobby doesn’t have time to react before the bundt cake slams into his face like a… a block of fairly dense cake.

Interestingly, it bounces straight back at me. The bonus of this is that I get to throw it again. The downside is that bundt cake is obviously a fucking useless weapon.

I reach around for something else, and come back with a cutting board.

Honestly. I need to sit myself down and work these issues out.

“Hold on a second,” I gasp as Bobby wipes chocolate off his face. “I don’t want to fight.”

“Too bad! Y’can’t sleep with another man’s wife an’ expect t’get away with it!”

“This again? Listen, I’ve never seen your wife before. And if I had, you have my word she is the last person on Earth I would want to sleep with. Well, her and Ruth. Oh, and Jackson too. But she’s a close third.”

Moxie makes an indignant gasp.

“Lady, only a special subset of idiot can manifest a June Cleaver fetish. Get over yourself.”

“Did you just insult my Moxie?” Bobby bellows.

“Mostly you, actually.”

Bobby tosses the table across the room like it’s made of a flimsy kind of tissue paper that made him very, very angry. I back up towards Moxie, keeping the cutting board loose in case I need to do something ineffectual with it.

“Enough games,” Bobby says, cracking his knuckles.

“Don’t do this, Bobby…” I warn, and swing the board back over my shoulder like a baseball bat. Straight into Moxie’s nose.

“Mother of pearl!” she curses, and stumbles back, blood gushing everywhere.

In that brief moment I’m formulating a witty remark, Bobby grabs me by the jacket, throws me into the wall, and then drags me towards the door he just came out of.

“Fix yer nose, Moxie,” he growls. “Yer boyfriend an’ me have some talkin’ to do.”

He opens the door and throws me in, which would normally be an unpleasant experience in and of itself, except this door leads down a long flight of steps to a concrete floor, which adds several dimensions to the unpleasantness… to the extent that I feel like there may only be two bones in my body that aren’t shattered, and they’re laying low to avoid any more conflict. Pansies.

The room is dark and blood-stained, with chains hanging from the ceiling and a pair of flickering light bulbs on chains hanging from cross-beams. There are two chairs there, one strewn with loose rope, and on the other is a petite woman with a potato sack over her head. All told, a much better motif than the kitchen. Ruth would feel at home here. I should really send her by, see if she disappears forever.

“All right,” says Bobby, standing over me, wrapping chains around his fist. “No more games.” He puts a heavy boot on my chest, pushes down with his quite significant weight. “You’re gonna tell me the truth now,” he says.

“You’re way too portly to pull off the biker schtick.”

He stomps on me, and my ribs go clickity-clack like so many disposable chopsticks snapped in half by a 900-pound cross-eyed klutz itchin’ for a massive bowl of ramen. Or something.

“Wrong answer!” Bobby yells.

“Didn’t… catch… the question.”

“How long has it been going on?”

I have myself a predicament here. On the one hand, if I give him a number of some kind, like “six weeks”, then I’m essentially confirming his suspicions, and he’s obviously going to beat the living shit out of me. On the other hand, if I continue to claim ignorance (honestly or not), he’s going to beat the everliving shit out of me. I have never given much thought to the subtleties separating living and everliving shit, but at this moment in time, I’m inclined to say:

“Why’s it matter?”

This confuses him, and he eases up.

“What?” he spits. “What didja say?”

“I asked why it matters. I mean, are you going to be happier if it was just one time, or if it’s been going on the last five years? ‘Cause I’ll veer towards whichever will make you happier, if you don’t mind.”

He picks me up and slams me down in the second chair, pulls my head back so I’m looking straight up his big hairy nostrils.

“Who’s the daddy?”

“Please say this isn’t kinky sex talk.”

“Moxie’s preggers, shitface!” he snarls. “I wanna know if I’m the daddy!”

Mrs Potato-sack-head looks in our direction very suddenly. She wants to know if he’s the daddy too. I think we’re just one verbally-abusive talk show host away from a trailer trash wet dream right here.

“I really don’t know if you’re the daddy,” I sigh. “If I had to guess, I’d say your sperm is probably too freakish to impregnate anything, but stranger things have happened. Like Jackson. But no, I really don’t know.”

He hits me hard on the side of the face, and though my eyes roll back in my head, I am sadly unable to slip into the next life, as if the Grim Reaper is sitting behind me, nudging me back into the game. He’s a real bastard, that one.

“Don’t know?” Bobby screams, backing up suddenly. “Don’t know? Well how about this? You tell me how long, or you get t’see yer little spy over here all cut up!”

He pulls the potato sack off, and a very scared Asian chick is making a face that says “holy shit this is not the bathroom at all please let me go”, with a just a little bit of “who the fuck are you?” I, on the other hand, have something of a bleary-eyed epiphany.

“Pei Pong?” I gasp.

She frowns at me urgently. This inflames Bobby.

“So you do know her!”

Awwwwww shit.

“No,” I try and explain. “If I knew her, I’d remember her name. Obviously.”

Dammit, the smart part of my brain must have been damaged in the fall.

Bobby grabs one of Pei’s fingers and bends it up. She starts to cry, the whiny little turd. She’s not even bruised. Grow a pair, will ya?

“Tell me how long, or I’m playin’ ‘this little piggy’ with my pruning shears!”

“Wee-wee-wee all the way home.”

“Please!” Pei weeps. “I do not know this man! I am not a spy! I am a simple girl in the wrong place! Please let me go!”

Bobby gives me a maniacal look, reaches into the back of his fugly leather pants, and pulls out a flathead screwdriver. Obviously, not what he was going for. He drops it on the ground, grunts.

“Shit,” he mutters. “Left the sharp stuff in the shop. You two stay put. I’ll be right back.”

He lets go of Pei Pong and lumbers up the stairs, scratching his ass as if he’s just off to take a leak, and not planning to violently dismember one or both of us. It’s really off-putting, having to see your killer’s crack like that. He should consider our feelings at times like these. One day, when I become a lunatic serial killer, I’m going to punctuate my killing sprees by performing musical numbers from Broadway shows for my victims. Sure, I’ll be a monster… but I’m a monster with class. Ooo, and sequins.

Where was I?

The door closes, and I snap back to the present. It’s a bleak present, but at least there aren’t any bikers in it at the moment. I take a long sigh of relief. It’s probably my last one, ever. I want to enjoy it.

“Hey!” Pei hisses. “Untie me!”

I look over lazily.

“Whuzzat?” I slur.

“Untie me! We’ve got to get out of here, fast!”

I have to admit, I’m not actually tied to the chair. Bobby figured (and rightly so) that I’m far too beat-up to get very far, so he just flopped me on top of the ropes. On the other hand, I think the odds of my getting anywhere fast right now are about a million and a half to no-fucking-way.

“Listen, Pei—”

“It’s Jei!” she snaps. “Now hurry up!”

“Jei as in Jei Chow, as in the missing intern girl, as in Mr Owl’s plaything, as in the thirty thousand dollars?”

“Whatever,” she sighs, rolling her eyes.

It occurs to me that if I save Jei now, and we somehow escape, and we make it back to my office, and I can somehow summon Mr Owl before noon… then he can pay me my cash, and I can pay Jimmy Scaz, and there’s a good chance I can end this day with my two remaining bones somewhat intact. I mean, it’s not the kind of prize you tend to dream about when you’re setting goals for the week, but all things considered, it’s better than actually dying. Possibly.

I kind of slither out of the chair and crawl across the floor, reaching the ropes around her feet. I start to untie them, fully expecting she’ll kick me in the face the second she’s free.

“So how the hell did you end up here?” I ask. “Mr Owl’s worried sick.”

“It’s a long story,” she sighs. “Bobby thinks I’m the lookout for Moxie’s lover.”

“Oh,” I nod, finishing the feet and stumbling to untie the rest of her. “So are you?”

She shakes her head solemnly.

“So what’ve you been doing here? You just like 1950s kitsch? Linoleum turns you on?”

She shifts her gaze.

“I’d rather not say.”

“I’m not untying you till you do.”

“You’re barely untying me anyway.”

“I’m having a very bad day.”

“It shows. Now hurry up before he gets back!”

“Hey!” I snap. “I made an ultimatum, and for once in my life I’m in a position of undeniable power! I am irrationally intrigued by this issue, and you will tell me what I want to know or so help me, I will… well… probably get killed by Bobby.”

She looks at me seriously.

“You’re insane, aren’t you?”

“Insane is quaint next to me. Now spill it!”

Jei grits her teeth, looks like she’s debating giving up the secret to the JFK assassination. And wow, what a secret that would be. I mean, screw this P.I. gig… I could make a fortune selling conspiracy theory books to tinfoil-toppers and retire to Maui!

“M…” she stutters. “Moxie isn’t sleeping with another man.”

Unless she’s sleeping with JFK, and JFK isn’t actually a man, I don’t see this ending with enough fireworks for retirement.

“She’s sleeping with me. Moxie and I… we’re lovers.”

“Ahh,” I nod. “The lookout and the look-in all at the same time.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’ll say.”

I tug at the ropes as best I can, and they finally drop, and she gets up so fast the chair falls over on top of me. I don’t even care anymore, I’m too tired.

“Help,” I whine.

She throws the chair off me, grabs my hand, pulls me up. She’d be a good foot shorter than me, if I could stand straight anymore. Still, she has an air of superiority about her. Almost like she’s some kind of genius or something. Fucking rocket scientists.

“Hey Pei—”

“Jei.”

“Whatever. Shorty. When he comes back down, I need you to kick his ass for me.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Do that kung fu stuff you guys do.”

“You guys?”

“Japanese or whatever.”

“Chinese.”

“Same diff.”

“Oh my god, I’m so going to kick your ass.”

“That’s the spirit!”

“Listen, jerkoff: I don’t know kung fu. I’m from Calgary.”

“Oh. So maybe make a lasso and rope him or something.”

“You’re a dipshit.”

“I can’t deny that. But seriously, I’m as dangerous as an unfrozen popsicle right now. Also, generally. If you want to get out of here with all your digits intact, you’re going to have to discover a new lethal talent. It’s all on you.”

Just then, the door creaks open, and we hear the sound of heavy boots stomping down, and thick metal blades slicing against each other.

“This little piggy went to market…” Bobby cackles, and I am forced to wonder if I can make a noose and hang myself before he gets downstairs.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 9

Weighing my options, I realize that it’s completely impractical to make a catapult out of the chairs, rope and Pei’s bra. For one thing, she’s at least a full cup size too small to be of any use. Secondly, I don’t have any projectiles handy except for this crazy Asian chick, and she’s way too skinny to hurt anyone at high speeds. Well, except me. I bruise easily.

“All right,” I say, cricking my neck. “I’ll take care of this. Get ready for some kung fu.”

Pei Pong backs up nervously as I spread my arms wide, lift one leg and get myself into my Buddhist ass-kicking zone. I saw this in a movie once.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ping Pong asks.

“I’m doing kung fu.”

“That’s karate, not kung fu. Don’t you know anything?”

“Hey! Houses, glass, stones and shut up!”

Bobby arrives at the bottom of the stairs, smiling like a 15-year-old boy who just got told his Wal-Mart gift card can be used with the prostitutes who work behind the auto shop. Apparently, I’m amusingly deadly. Without the deadly part.

“What’s this all about?” Bobby laughs. “You gonna dance with me?”

I’m having a hell of a time balancing on the one foot.

“Let us go,” I say in my best warning voice.

“Or else what?” Bobby says in his best bwa-ha-ha voice.

“Heeyah!” I scream, and let loose with a vicious kick towards Bobby’s groin. Unfortunately, the bannister is in the way, which connects quite handily with my shin. This is the part where I fall on the ground and cry like a little girl. It always seems to hurt more when you do it to yourself.

Bobby’s mean-spirited laughter is interrupted by the sound of cracking wood, and he topples to the ground in a heap. Ping Pong drops what’s left of one of the chairs.

I have to admit, I’m gaping a bit.

“You’re my hero” she says, rolling her eyes. “Now come on, you’re rescuing me, remember?”

I squeak every step up the stairs, re-entering the kitchen to find Moxie icing her nose and looking like the unassuming housewife that took on Muhammad Ali and won. At the sight of Pingy, she drops everything and stands up.

“Jei!” she gasps. “Are you all right?”

They embrace like they’re each hugging a cactus, which I assume is due to their having the respective shit kicked out of them. If not, this relationship is way broken. Pingers pulls back, frowns at Moxie’s bloody, swollen nose.

“What happened to you?” she asks.

Moxie turns towards me, frowns angrily, and Pingy does too.

“Don’t blame me!” I say. “As if I could hit anyone on purpose.”

“He’s got a point,” Pei sighs.

“What happened to Bobby?” Moxie cries. “Is he hurt?”

“Just knocked out,” Pei says. “We’ve got to go, Moxie. Will you be okay?”

Moxie nods sheepishly.

“Call me later?” she asks. Ping Pong answers with a kiss. A long, passionate, holy-shit-we’re-on-a-deadline-but-never-mind-because-I-like-potato-sacks-on-my-head kiss. I’m all for awkward situations like this, but if I’m not going to get a video camera or something, my tolerance for wanton lesbianism is significantly reduced. My YouTube account could use the traffic.

“Focus much?” I snark.

Pingy gives me an ice stare.

“Shut your hole,” she snaps.

“I was about to say the same thing.”

“Fine,” she sighs. “Moxie, we really do have to go. I’ll call you as soon as I can, all right?”

“I’ll be waiting,” Moxie smiles.

It’s like a fucking Hallmark moment. From the Fight Club aisle. I’m all teary, honest.

We’re two steps from the door when I remember why it is I came to his hellhole in the first place.

“Hold on a second,” I say, snatching the cutting board and handing it over to Pingy. “There’s something we’ve got to do first.”

I drag her through the back door, down towards where the pawn shop moron is. We find him eating cup-a-noodle in a storage room, ramen spilling out of his mouth as he connects the various dots in his memory to remember who I am, and that I typically shouldn’t be here.

“Where’s my wallet?” I demand, sounding alarmingly confident given the fact that I’m depending on a waifish midget girl to do my dirty work.

“How da fuck’d’ja get innere?” he chokes.

“Tenacity,” I sneer, then snap my fingers. “Ping Pong, break his fingers.”

“Excuse me?” she snaps.

“What? Which part? Ping Pong or the fingers?”

“Both of them actu—” She stops abruptly at the sight of the moron pointing his gun at her face.

“On yer knees!” he barks.

“Ignore him,” I smirk.

Pei pauses.

“He’s got a gun.”

“It’s empty,” I say.

“Is not!” he whines.

“Beat him senseless, Pingy,” I smile. “I’ll bet you ten bucks he doesn’t shoot you.”

“Wow, since you put it that way…” she deadpans.

“Just beat him up a bit like you did with Bobby, okay? Is that asking too much? Honestly?”

I think my psychotic misdemeanour is finally starting to have an effect, because suddenly the moron puts the gun on the table and floats his hands above his head, looking seriously terrified of what else I might beg my sidekick to do to him. Imagine if Pingy actually did what I told her to!

“I’ve got yer wallet…” he stammers, reaching into his pocket. “No harm, no foul, right?”

I snatch the wallet back, check to make sure my cards are mostly all there.

“No harm?” I echo. “You punched me in the face!”

“Oh. You remember that.”

“Pingers! Break his nose!”

“How’d I end up with this job?” she complains, very noticeably not breaking any facial structures. I point a warning finger at him, and he backs up nervously.

“You’re lucky she’s bad at taking orders,” I sneer, and then run for the front door as fast as my horribly-broken legs will carry me. Pingy is two steps behind, and yelps loudly at the sound of someone stumbling after us.

“Yer fucking dead, man! Dead!” the moron screams.

I snatch a can of WD-40 off the table where all the laptops are kept and toss it as hard as I can behind me. Somehow, it magically connects with the moron’s face, and he drops out of sight. Probably very smoothly. Heh. Sorry.

We don’t stop running until we’re back near the bank, at which point I collapse on the ground and begin to disintegrate into a sewer grate. The last time I was this physically exhausted, there was a jug of olive oil and handcuffs involved.

“Mr Marx!” calls Turner, getting out of his car, Brunch not far behind. “Just the man we wanted to see!”

“Please go away,” I mutter.

“Do you know where we just were?”

“A remedial policework seminar? Wait, no. ESL?”

“Douglas Street,” Brunch says, probably not understanding my wit. “Near Preston.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where all the donut shops in town are.”

Turner pulls me to my feet, which saves me a lot of strenuous work later. His breath is like he ate the guy who was wrapped in garlic to keep Ruth from sucking his blood.

“A car exploded,” he says ominously.

“What was your first clue? The fire or the wreckage?”

“So you know about it?”

“Know about it, I was there!”

The two of them exchange surprised glances.

“You’re admitting to being there?”

It’s at this point that I start to notice my brain is sending anxious alerts that I am stepping in a gigantic pile of dog shit right now. I pause, cock my head to the side.

“Being where, exactly?”

“Mr Marx, your partner, Mr Richardson, was killed in a car bomb less than an hour ago.”

To say the world is spinning around me would be an understatement. Then again, it’s been spinning for the last few hours, so I’m not really bothered by it. But the idea that Matt is dead… I mean, if Matt is dead… who the fuck is going to be the actual detective in this company? Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t want to keep doing this forever!

“Are you sure?” I squeak.

“The remains in the driver’s seat fit the description,” Turner says.

“Where’re you going?” Brunch yells, grabbing Pingers by the scruff of the neck as she tries to back away. I consider throwing the “police brutality” card around, and maybe a bit of the “racial profiling”, except I don’t think diminutive Chinese women are profiled often, and I just know bringing up race is going to bite me in the ass.

“Your girlfriend?” Turner asks me.

“A client. Sorta.”

“She know anything about car bombs?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Pingy darts me a look that would probably kill a kindlier man. My soul is way too empty to be fazed by such silliness.

“The two of you are coming downtown,” Turner says, shoving me towards the car. “We’ve got some things we need to sort out.”

I glance at my watch: it’s eleven already. If I go downtown, I’m going to be stuck there for hours, meaning Jimmy Scaz is going to get bitchier and bitchier, and when I finally get out, he’s gonna use a special kinda loving for each of my individual body parts. I seriously can’t go in for questioning right now. I know most police suspects claim it’s not a good time when they have to go downtown, but it’s different when it’s me! I’m special!

Brunch shoves Ping Pong into the back seat of the car, letting her head knock against the frame once or twice for kicks, then gets ready to load me in too. I can tell he’s gonna knock my head extra hard, the putz.

It’s times like these that I wish I had something resembling a functional skill to get me out of trouble.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 10

There are two things I can do that make grown men quake in fear. One of them is called a forensic audit, in which I purposely and maliciously try to find sketchy evidence that you are earning six times what you’ve declared, and have the rest hidden in an offshore account that you draw on to pay for your “going to the grocery store” Ferrari. As opposed to your “going to the corner store” Ferrari. The other thing I do is called Lemon Drop Pictionary Night, and it best left undefined. Sadly, neither one is especially useful for escaping police custody.

I know I only have seconds before I’m shepherded off to a dungeon somewhere, so I waste no time. I stomp as hard as my feeble bones can manage, straight down on Brunch’s foot.

At this point, you’d think I’d have more of a plan. But I do not.

“What that f—” Brunch begins, then bites off the rest of his sentence as he spins around in agony. It occurs to me that if I stomp on his other foot, he’ll be incapacitated. Or something. Actually, in retrospect, I think it’s this kind of strategizing that made my life the giant bowl of suck that it is.

Before I know what’s going on, Ping Pong is hopping back out of the car, cracking her knuckles, and with a tiny bit of wind-up, punches the incoming Turner right across the face. He spins, hits the trunk of the car, and flops to the ground.

“Holy—” I say, just as Pingy lands a vindictive kick to Brunch’s groin, “— shit-kabobs! I thought you were useless!”

“Stop projecting and move!”

We make it two blocks and around a corner before I get a chance to breathe. It seems to me that if there is a God, he has unfairly stacked the deck in favour of… well, everyone but me. I mean honestly, rocket scientist and master of hand-to-hand combat? And all I get is toe-stomping?

“Why didn’t you do that to Bobby?” I gasp as we collapse against an alley wall. Okay fine, I collapse. I. Be that way.

“I smashed a chair over his head!”

“Anyone can do that. Only a small percentage of the population can knock a cop unconscious with a single blow to the face.”

Pingy blanches.

“C-c-c-cop?”

“Yeah. They’re detectives. The police kind.”

“Oh my god! I thought they were from the mob!”

“The mob? Are you blind? Mobsters may suffer an over-reliance on leather and hair gel, but at least they wear brand-name atrocities. Those two were hoboes with badges.”

“I just assaulted an officer…”

“Two of them, actually.”

“Oh my god. I had no idea…”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s a learning experience. Cops dress like slobs and bring you downtown. Mobsters kill you in a dark alleys and look a lot like those two guys over there.”

Shit.

No time to run, and Pingo is too emotionally distraught to whack-a-mole anymore, so instead I just let myself be intimidated by a pair of greasy thugs with an IQ of 15 between them. One of them is chewing on a toothpick, the end of which is mouldy. I suspect no one has told him you need to switch those things out on a regular basis.

“Mr Marx,” the taller one says. “We been lookin’ for you.”

“It’s not noon yet.”

“We know. But Jimmy, he’s worried you’re plannin’ on skippin’ town.”

I laugh very unconvincingly.

“Oh droll. No, I’m too busy being beat up for that.”

“It shows,” snorts Shorty. Must remember to have Ping Pong punch him first.

“You got the money?” interjects Tally.

“Yes indeed,” I say, pulling Ping closer to me. “Right here.”

The toothpick hangs loose for a moment.

“That ain’t money.”

“She is to me.”

“We ain’t gettin’ into a discussion bout the relative value of people, a’right? That ain’t actual money, so you don’t got the money. This ain’t silosophy class. We dealin’ with absolutes.”

“If you say so.”

Shorty bears down on me. Pardon me, bears up on me. Somewhat less ominous.

“Where’s da money?” he growls like an angry, toothless Chihuahua.

“I need to get Ping Pong—”

“Jei.”

“The mouthy one. I need to get her to her boss so he can pay me the money.”

“Thirty grand,” Tally nods.

“Thirty grand?” Ping gasps. “For me?”

“I know, it makes no sense,” I sigh. “So listen. Give me about an hour to make the trade, and I’ll see you back at the office at a little past noon.”

“An hour?” chortles Tally, glances at Ping. “Where you work, chicky?”

“Dartmouth and Douglas.”

Shorty and Tally exchange wistful glances.

“That’s five mins, tops. Get inna car. We’ll bring you personably.”

I highly doubt that, but I have to concede that even a toothless Chihuahua is dangerous if you give it a gun. Ping and I allow ourselves to be escorted to their long black sedan, get plopped in the back seat, and driven the six-and-a-half blocks to her place of business. My building is made of old crackly brick. Mr Owl’s is made of big sheets of glass. You’d think I’d be jealous, but honestly, if I worked in a place like this, you just know I’d find a way to break all the windows. Every day. Probably several times a day.

The receptionist at the long steel desk in the foyer gives us a very unpleasant sneer as we approach.

“Greetings, hellspawn!” I say. “Take us to your master.”

Her sneer reaches epic proportions.

“May I have your name?”

“Marx. Gare Marx. I’m sure you know Ping Pong, and this is Shorty and Tally. They’re from the mob. Shorty, say something Italian.”

Oddly, nobody in the room seems impressed with me right now.

A moment later, Mr Owl bursts through a back door, face stricken, shirt drenched with sweat, and glasses fogging like the windows of a ’68 Chevy at Lookout Point at 11:30PM: just enough to peek through. Erm. Yes.

“Mr Marx!” he exclaims. “You found her!”

I lean over on the receptionist’s desk with as much confidence and self-satisfaction as I can muster, given how genuinely shocked he sounds.

“I’m that good,” I say, and even I don’t believe it.

“Jei!” he laughs, giving her an awkward and somewhat inappropriate hug. I suppose he doesn’t know she likes girls. Or maybe he does. Good god, that would explain his demeanour!

“Thank you so much, Mr Gafoday!” Jei cries, overcome with that emotion humans call ‘joy’. “I didn’t realize you were so worried about—”

“Where’s the laptop?”

That sucking noise you hear is the hollow sound of fear in the pit of my stomach.

“S-s-s-sir?” she trembles as he holds her back.

“The laptop you had. It was… it’s…” he turns to me, face dead serious and not very appreciative all of a sudden. “The deal was that you’d find Jei and the laptop.”

“I thought the laptop was window dressing. Setting the mood. Context. That sorta thing.”

“No,” he sighs. “The laptop is vital. This is only half the job. No offence, Jei.”

Pingy looks a bit shellshocked by the notion she’s not really as important as she was a minute ago. Amateur.

“So how about you pay me half the money, and I’ll find the laptop after lunch?” I say, keeping a careful eye on Shorty and Tally, both of whom are inching closer to me as subtly as giant mutant lobsters at a black-tie ballroom gala.

“No. No no no,” Mr Owl trembles. “I’m afraid not. This won’t do. I need that laptop.”

When in doubt, I hear you’re supposed to negotiate.

“Shorty!” I bark. “Break his legs.”

Mr Owl looks terrified, but Shorty just eyes me unhappily.

“Or not. Fine. All right. I’ll go find your stupid fucking laptop. Hopefully before I get whacked, thankyouverymuch. You can keep Ping Pong. I’ve had enough passive aggressive genius shit for one day.”

Mr Owl looks deep into Pingy’s eyes, holds her shoulders, and smiles.

“Jei, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Thank you, Mr Ga—”

“But you’re fired.”

Hell no. Not while I’m still here!

“What?” Ping gasps. “Fired?”

“You lost a very sensitive laptop, Jei. I can’t overlook that, even if you were kidnapped.”

“But I… I…”

“I’ll write you a letter of recommendation, if you like.”

She gets that look in her eye that I know all too well. I avert my eyes just before the crunching noise, and when I look back, Mr Owl is crawling back towards his office like a land mine just gutted a very important part of his body.

Ping turns to me seriously.

“You need a partner.”

“I have a partner.”

“He’s dead.”

“Allegedly. And besides, I work best alone.”

She glances at Shorty, Tally, and then back at me.

“I’m coming with you. You give me half of whatever the mob doesn’t take.”

“Would you like that in imaginary tens or twenties?”

Shorty laughs at this.

“Zip it, hobbit. Nobody laughs but me.”

“Hey!” exclaims the receptionist, turning her monitor around for us. “Isn’t this you?”

There’s a nice little video of me from the bank earlier today. I look handsome, in that undead sort of way. Oh look! This is where the security guys beat the shit out of me! It’s like my Greatest Hits! Ha! Hits! Get it? Oh never mind.

The reporter is yammering away beneath all this…

“… wanted for attempted robbery, battery, assaulting a police officer…”

“Brilliant,” I sigh.

“… considered extremely dangerous…”

“Ha!” everyone says at the same damn time.

“Fuck off,” I add.

Tally grabs me by the back of my jacket, drags me towards the door.

“Let’s get goin’,” he says. “We still got time fore noon. Let’s get that laptop and get Jimmy paid.”

Well, at least I have moral support for a change, even if it is going to kill me in forty minutes. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to do…

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Fission Chips - Chapter 11

“Hold that thought,” I say before we get to the car.

“What thought?” asks Shorty.

“Exactly my point. We need a plan. A real one, not just a deadline that makes me wet myself. I don’t think driving around the city randomly is going to cut it.”

Shorty and Tally both look unhappy. Crushing dreams and ego is one of my few talents, but I’m peripherally aware that, in some cases, it causes a sensation humans call hurt. Hurt leads to anger, anger leads to the Dark Side, and the Dark Side is where I tend to get my ass kicked. I have to remember to temper my snark around them, as long as they’re armed and I’m not Superman.

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Ping asks, obviously enjoying her new delusionary role as my partner a little too much. “Shake down witnesses, put on the pressure?”

“So should we shake you down, since you lost the laptop in the first place?”

“May-be…” she says shiftily.

“I’ll throw in an extra twenty for whichever of you kills her.”

No takers.

It’s clear to me that this much baggage is going to slow down whatever feeble detectiving skills I may have buried, undiscovered, in the depths of my mind. I need to lighten the load, and fast.

“Jackson might have answers by now,” I say suddenly — nay, enthusiastically! — infusing everyone with momentary elation. “He’s been researching all this for hours already.”

“Who’s Jackson?”

“A yeti nerd. He’s back at my office. We should go… oh no…”

This is where I get all crafty and shit.

“What’s wrong?” Tally asks, trying to keep up.

“If the cops are looking for me, that’s the first place they’ll look!” The mobsters nod appreciatively. So far, so good. “Dammit!” I curse in my best melodramatic way. “If only there were some way to get in touch with Jackson without being seen! Some way to get a message to him!”

Tick tock. Tick… tock… as the wheels in the brains go round and round.

“Waitasec!” says Shorty. “Howzabout we go and ask’im what he found out? That way, you can lay low!”

I frown, as if this doesn’t make sense, as if this plan they’ve hatched, it’s utter madness! Madness, I say! And then, ever so slowly, I let the illumination cross my face, and I smile, and take a deep, enthusiastic breath, and say:

“Oh my god, that’s brilliant! That might just work!”

Tally pats Shorty on the back. It’s like zip your own zipper day at the idiot farm.

“All right,” Tally nods. “We’ll be back in ten, maybe fifteen. You stay put, right?”

“You got it. Go team! Good luck, you three!”

Shorty and Tally pause and suddenly avoid eye contact, like they need to confess something terrible, probably relating to plastic wrap, puppies and whipped cream. God, these people have sick minds!

“If it’s all the same with you,” Tally says, “we don’t wanna take the chick.” Ping looks offended at this, but honestly, she’s got to be used to not being loved by now. “She scares us.”

“She scares everyone. Don’t worry about it.”

“I dunno…” whines Shorty.

“Would it help to know she likes to make out with other girls? Oh! And earlier, she was tied up with ropes!”

They exchange glances, look back solemnly.

“Sorry. After what she did to that guy in there, I don’t think I’m getting excited bout nothing for a while.”

I sigh. It’s true. She has that “lapdog of Satan” aura about her. Small, yappy, and evil.

“Fine,” I grumble. “You bunch of cowards.”

They don’t try and argue.

“Say,” says Ping to them before they close their doors, “can I borrow a gun? I mean, just in case? It seems pretty dangerous out here.”

There is a pregnant pause where I can tell they are both trying to decide if it’s more dangerous to give her a loaded gun, or to deny her request.

Shorty pulls a small revolver from under his seat, hands it out the door to me, which is probably the most shocking thing that’s happened to me all day. Somebody trusts me with a gun! Me! I’m the last person I’d give a gun to!

“What the hell, man?” Ping sneers as Shorty closes his door, leans out the window. “You think he’s a better shot than me? Seriously?”

“No,” Shorty shrugs. “But that’s kinda the point.”

They drive off, and I swear to god I’d shoot them in the backs of the heads if I had any confidence at all in my ability to not kill myself by mistake. Fuckers.

“So!” Ping says, checking around. “Now that we’re on our own, where should we look for the laptop?”

“I don’t know… where did you lose the damn thing?”

“I keep telling you, I didn’t lose it. I never bring the thing outside the office, and I was kidnapped at Moxie’s place, not the office.”

“So for all we know, the laptop is still in there.”

“I think they’d check that first.”

“You’d also think they’d hire a better PI to investigate.”

“True.”

“Shaddup.”

“So let’s assume the laptop is not still in there,” Ping postulates, tapping a finger on her chin in a way that speaks volumes about what she believes makes people look smart. “Who would want to steal it?”

“Your competitors? Spies? Double agents?”

“Godzilla.”

“You’re a fucking useless partner. Why did I hire you again? Oh right, I didn’t. Seriously, give me something useful or go away.”

“Fine,” she sighs. “We should check out Sitewide Dynamics. They’re the biggest competitors we have in town. They’ve tried to steal our engineers before…”

“…so why not go the extra mile and steal the secrets instead?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re slightly less useless. I am extending your lease on life for another ten minutes. On a trial basis.”

“Sure. Thanks,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Maybe we should… I dunno, get going before the mobtard twins come back?”

I have to admit, she earns another ten minutes and a gold star for snark.

Ten minutes later, we arrive at Sitewide Dynamics, which looks remarkably like Ping’s old digs, except it has a different logo and the receptionist has red hair instead of brown. She is chewing a pepperoni stick like it’s the leg of a goodly imp boy that came to bless her with a happy life. She chomps away with her mouth wide open.

“Hi,” I say with my best suave impression. “We need to speak with your president please. Police business.”

She just keeps chewing.

“It’s urgent,” I add.

“What’s your name again?” she slurs between spittle and pepperoni.

“Detective Marx, and this is Detective Ping.”

The receptionist looks at Ping, then back to me, then back to her.

“Do you have an appointment with Mr Oliphant?”

“Do the police usually need appointments?” I smile, trying to restrain myself.

“Yes,” she says.

Happy thoughts. Happy, productive thoughts.

“Then yes,” I say. “We have an appointment.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

“Yes you are,” she says lazily. “Because Mr Oliphant isn’t even here right now. So how could you have an appointment with him if he’s not even here?”

“Maybe he’s running late?”

“I think you should leave.”

“Listen, you horrid hell-cow,” I say, placing the revolver very prominently on the desk between us. “I need to see Mr Elephant, and I need to see him now. Now where the fuck is he?”

She looks at the gun, then looks at me, then looks at Ping, and then back at the gun.

“The racetracks,” she whispers, as if a loud voice will make the thing go off. “He’s there all day. I swear.”

“Good. Now give me a picture of him. Anything. Brochure, something.”

She reaches into a pile of papers, pulls out a paper with this plumpy-looking middle-aged guy with his hair combed over six different ways, none of which do the job. His glasses are so thick he must be blind on an epic scale, to the point where he probably emits dark matter out of his eyeballs.

“Good. Now give me some money.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. And don’t touch it with the greasy hand. I don’t want my pockets smelling like I live in a deli.”

She hands over a few twenties and we bolt out the door. It takes four tries and two waves of the gun to get a cab, but then we’re on our way to the tracks.

The drivers in this town are some of the best con artists in the world. Here we are, looking at a completely empty boulevard, and the sneaky little shit says something about construction up ahead, so we need to take a detour around the entire fucking city.

“Forty-seven fifty,” he says as we pull up to the race track.

“It’s a ten minute walk from where we were, but it took you twenty minutes to drive.”

“Construction,” he offers as an excuse.

“Construction my ass,” I grumble, and pay him an even fifty. You can fight the cops and the mob, but if you piss off the cabbies, you might as well hang yourself. They can run you down on a quiet suburban street and no one will bat an eye. That, my friends, is power.

The tracks are crowded for a Monday morning, and there are a distressing number of balding middle-aged men milling about, like they all heard there was a meeting of the Blind Playboy Bunnies Association going on.

“See him?” I ask Ping.

“Not yet. What you’re going to do when we find him?”

“I’m going to ask him if he’s seen oh shit!”

I duck below a counter and pull Ping down with me. She’s about to talk, but I cover her mouth (something I’ve been wanting to do for some time, to tell the truth).

I carefully peer around the corner and confirm my suspicions. It’s Jimmy Scaz’s thickset associate from the limo this morning. I can’t see who he’s talking to, but I can make out the conversation…

“Are you tellin’ me he don’t got it?” the other man says. Older voice. Sicilian. Or Greek. Or something ethnic. I dunno, they all sound the same to me.

“He’ll have it,” the Associate says. “Just waitin’ on a few developments.”

“If it ain’t in my hands by two, I’ll have his hands for ice cream scoops, you got me?”

Oh shit. I like my hands a lot, but they’d make terrible ice cream scoops.

“I got ya, Tony. Loud and clear-like.”

This whole thing was a bad idea. I need to find a cab driver and get a $900 ride out of here. I start crawling away from the mob, Ping close behind (but probably not understanding why). But before we make it out of earshot, I hear one last thing:

“I’ve been more than patient with Jimmy, but if he don’t pay up today, he’s a dead man. Cousin or no.”

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Fission Chips - Chapter 12

It’s funny how, in situations of extreme danger, your brain will tell you to crawl away as fast as your bruised knees will carry you, even if doing so exposes you to more danger than just sitting still. I am beginning to realize that my instincts are well-meaning, but dumb as dirt.

I stop mid-crawl, and Ping smacks into my ass, which is doing neither of us any good. Not in this context, anyway.

“What?” she hisses.

“Back up!” I hiss back.

“Back? Where?”

“Back!” I say, and start backing up myself. We’re halfway to cover when Ping stops suddenly, eyes wide open like a kid who saw Santa Claus snorting coke with a hand down his pants.

“Back, you moron!” I whisper, but she doesn’t react.

“It’s him!” Ping says.

“Him who?”

“Oliphant!” she says. “It’s gotta be!”

“Is he going to kill me right now?”

“No.”

“Then shut up and move!”

We get back under cover just as the Associate and Tony are heading out. Associate shakes Tony’s hand, smiles nervously, and is interrupted by his phone ringing. The theme to the Smurfs. It’s taking all my willpower not to burst out laughing right now.

“Yeah?” he grumbles into the phone. “Yeah. No. He what?” Oh, so they’re talking about me. “You idiots! Stay there, don’t say nothin’ to anyone!”

He hangs up and puts on the kind of smile you see from Mexican tourists when you inadvertently call their mothers toe-licking whores in broken Spanish, and they don’t want to risk jail time by fixing your vocabulary for you. Or something. We’re getting off track here.

“You okay, kid?” Tony asks.

“Oh yeah,” Associate lies. “All’s good. Just a problem with… stuff…”

“Don’t forget,” Tony sneers at him, “I’ve already whacked one wiseguy today. Two ain’t nothing to me.”

Killed someone else today?

Associate nods deeply, then turns and runs for the parking lot. Tony adjusts his belt over his sizeable gut and turns back to the races, eyes landing quite easily on Ping and I underneath the table.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he barks, and starts shuffling away like a walrus with hemorrhoids.

“Yo Tony!” I call, getting to my feet with something less than dignity. “Got a minute?”

Tony stops, turns, stares at me very seriously. I get the impression this is the part where I’m supposed to cower in fear, but honestly, there’s only so much cowering I can fit into a day. After a certain point, you’ve just got to do your fearing standing up.

“Piss off,” Tony says, and I grab his arm before he can turn again. This gets his attention. He stares at my hand like I’m an extremely leprous leper, holds his breath. Again with the drama. This guy watches too many mob movies.

“Who’d you kill today?” I ask.

“Eh?” Ping whimpers from underneath the table.

“What’s it to you?” Tony says with a voice so quiet it makes a whisper sound like a sonic boom. I think this is his mad voice. It could use some work.

“I think it was my partner, and I want to know where to send the funeral bill.”

Tony licks his lips.

“You’re a cold one,” he says finally.

“Tax deductions are tax deductions.”

“What if it was your partner? You gonna shoot me? Here? You’d never make it out alive.”

“If I wanted you dead, Tony, you’d be dead already.”

Ping stifles a giggle.

“So what, then?” Tony says. “What’s your angle?”

“I want to understand the situation. Why are you collecting debts for Jimmy Scaz?”

“I ain’t collecting on none of his debts. The little fucker owes me cash. I couldn’t care less about his midget-dick loans.”

“He owes… you money on his own?”

“The kid can’t pick horses for shit,” Tony says, glancing down at my hand on his arm. It let go, brush some of the sweat off awkwardly. “Dug himself a hole too deep. If he’d run his racket like I told him, he’d have thirty grand on him like nothing. Instead, he prances round like a leatherbound fairy and wonders why nobody takes him seriously. His mother’d hang herself again, may she rest in peace.”

There’s obviously a lot of baggage here I don’t want to get involved in without a bullet proof shield and a pair of long surgical gloves. Tony looks like he’s getting misty.

“So you didn’t blow up my partner?”

“Blow up?” Tony snorts. “Kid, I don’t blow up nobody. Leaves too much evidence, plus it costs a lot more than a bullet to the head.”

I should quit this job and write a “Mob Murders For Dummies” book with Tony. He’s a veritable fountain of grim trivia.

“So you definitely didn’t kill my partner? Exploding or otherwise?”

“Hard to say since I don’t know who the fuck we’re talking about.”

“Matt Richardson.”

“The cop?”

“Ex-cop.”

Tony shifts his weight, looks ominous again.

“Since when?” he says, voice darkening.

“Over a year. Listen, none of this is—”

Tony grabs my shirt and pulls me close. There’s a vein in the side of his head throbbing violently, and I think my only hope of survival right now is for it to burst and spew his blood all over the floor. Go, pulsing vein, go!

“He didn’t mention that last week,” he growls.

Ohhhhh no.

“Last week?”

“Last week when he came to collect his money, the lying weasel. It don’t help nothing for ex-cops to look the other way!”

“So Matt was… on the take.”

“Jesus, kid, I thought you were his partner!”

“It’s a fluid concept. Hard to pin down. Ping? A little help please?”

I can hear the sound of her crossing her arms in defiance.

“Fine,” I sigh. “Jei darling? Save me from the bad man?”

Ping pops up, eyes narrow with cunning and/or stupidity, puts her hands on both our shoulders, leans in conspiratorially.

“Hello, guys,” she says smoothly.

“Who the fuck are you?” Tony asks in a way that suggests he wants to know so he can inscribe it on a tombstone.

“How much did Mr Richardson owe you, Tony?” Ping asks sweetly.

“Ten grand. Maybe more.”

“Let’s call it fifteen.”

Tony eyes her suspiciously.

“Let’s.”

“Good,” continues Ping. “So here’s what I’ve got for you. Mr Marx here is going to get you the fifteen thousand today.”

“I’m what?”

“As a show of good faith,” says Ping, ignoring my impending stroke. “Because, truth be told, Mr Richardson royally screwed him too. But that’s no reason for you to suffer, right?”

Tony has nothing to say. I think he’s mesmerized by the idea that such a short person can think such big thoughts. I know it’s got me in a tizzy.

“But we need a favour first,” Ping says, voice dropping an octave to something resembling humility. “A people problem, if you will.”

Tony cricks his neck, lets go of my shirt. He doesn’t wipe the sweat off. I’m remarkably okay with that.

“What kind of people problem?” Tony asks.

“There’s his guy over there,” Ping says, pointing over her shoulder casually. “Name’s Oliphant. He stole a laptop that I need back.”

“What’s on the laptop?”

“Bad stuff.”

“Porn?”

“Thank you!” I say, vindicated.

“It’s beside the point,” Ping says, pushing me out of the equation. “Thing is, we need that laptop back. And I know you’re a busy man, so I’m going to give you an extra five grand — that makes twenty total — if you can persuade Mr Oliphant to hand over the laptop.”

Tony looks over at the Elephant man, back at Ping, then to me. He shrugs, walks off with his best mobster gait. It’s kinda comical, except for that air of death about it.

I look over to Ping and smack her in the forehead.

“What the hell was that?” I squeal.

“Saving your ass!” Ping counters.

“Saving? Fifteen grand plus five grand plus thirty grand equals fifty thousand dollars and two distinct mob assassinations in one day!”

Ping smiles, pats me on the cheek. A blood vessel in my mouth starts leaking again, reminding me how shitty a day it’s been already. And I thought it couldn’t get worse. I’m such a silly guy.

“You’re cute when you’re dumb,” she smiles.

“And you’re a bitch all day.”

“You’re not paying Jimmy Scaz anything,” she says. “You’ll take the thirty, give twenty to Tony, wait for him to kill Jimmy, and end up ahead five thousand.”

“Five?”

“After my share as partner.”

My eyes roll back in my head involuntarily.

“Okay, he’s coming back!” Ping whispers, brushing off my shoulders. “Don’t speak and we’ll be fine.”

Tony sidles up with the Elephant in tow, makes a respectful nod to Ping, and totally ignores me. Fair enough. I don’t like his hair cut.

“This your guy?” Tony asks Ping.

“That’s him,” Ping nods, and Elephant whimpers. His cheek is red, and his glasses are crooked.

“He don’t got any laptops,” Tony says without overt accusation, which is much scarier.

Ping doesn’t react. She leans closer to Elephant and squints at him.

“Mr Gafoday says hello,” she says. Elephant meets her eyes anxiously. “Now where’s the laptop?”

“I… I don’t have any laptop,” Elephant cries. “I don’t know who told you that I did, but—”

Tony belts him in the stomach, and he starts to fall before being dragged back up. He looks like me, circa two hours ago. Ah, memories…

There’s a long pause where I’m sure this will all unravel on us. I can just imagine Tony and the Elephant teaming up to beat me to death, while Ping munches popcorn from the cheap seats. Bur strangely, Ping is frowning, eyes darting left and right, as if she’s able to think like full-size people.

“Give me your phone,” she says ominously, and Elephant complies immediately. It’s one of those fancy touch-screen things that I was going to buy myself with my petty cash before the cash got petty and ran away. Ping taps a few buttons, reads, taps, reads some more.

She looks to Tony.

“Can you keep him quiet for a few hours?”

“Just a few hours?” Tony smiles greedily.

“Just a few,” Ping nods. “And as a thank-you, we’ll up the deal to an even thirty grand.”

Tony starts to laugh. He shoves Elephant towards the back stairs, and glances over his shoulder towards us.

“I can’t wait to see what you’ve got planned, girly!” he calls, and disappears into the darkness. I turn to Ping, then promptly collapse in a giant sack of anxiety. Death is so much easier when it’s imminent. This anticipation thing fucking sucks.

“What the hell are you thinking?” I stammer. “We don’t even know where the laptop is, so where are we going to get the thirty grand you just promised him?”

“Forget the laptop,” Ping grins. “We’re going to sell Gafoday the data on this phone for half a mil, easy.”

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Fission Chips - Chapter 13

“Wait wait wait,” I say, stooping down low enough to look Ping in the eye. “Half a million dollars, or yen? Because if it’s yen, that’s only like twenty-four bucks.”

There’s that look again.

“Dollars,” she says in an unreasonably cold tone.

I frown at the phone in her hand. I mean sure, it’s glassy and you can stroke it gently in the night to keep you company after the hookers reject you because you’re suddenly too poor to afford them, but seriously… my phone is pretty snazzy too, and isn’t worth half a million of anything. I must be using it wrong.

“So what’s on it that’s so valuable?” I ask as we head back toward the taxi stands.

“Access to the Sitewide Dynamics intranet. Every single email, contract and chip schematic they’ve got.”

I’m not a technological person. I use my phone for its intended uses: making calls and that helicopter game. But still, even I know enough about security to know this isn’t making sense.

“How’s that possible? Isn’t that stuff locked up? Doesn’t he have a password on something like that?”

“Yes it is, and yes he does.”

“So how’d you break it that fast?”

“His wallpaper is a picture of his dog. Wearing a name tag that says ‘Ellie’. Guess what the password is?”

Oh my god, there’s someone in this world stupider than me!

“That’s amazing,” I gasp. “Let me see…”

I take the phone from her hands and move to unlock it, but… well, you have to remember I’ve been having a very bad day. The shit that was kicked out of me got up and kicked me too, so it’s not like I’m in peak physical form. Also, I’m never anywhere near peak physical form anyway. So it’s not totally unexpected that I have a hard time keeping hold of things as slippery as phones.

I’ll just say: crash.

Ping stops walking, turns around and stares at me. Then the floor. Then me again.

“You didn’t.”

This is an awkward moment.

“You didn’t!” she shrieks, and scoops the phone off the concrete. She massages it gently, careful around the cracked glass screen. I can see she wants a moment alone, so I start to back away.

“No you fucking don’t!” she snaps, grabbing my shirt and pulling me close. “You’re not going anywhere!”

I guess I’m not taking this seriously enough, given that I never really believed we were that close to half a million dollars in the first place. Ping, on the other hand, is about to descend into a kind of hysteria reserved for severely obese people who just found out all the McDonalds in their town have been replaced with organic salad bars.

She pushes the “on” button, then again, then again, and the tears start to fill her beady little eyes, and I feel bad for her, so in a selfless act of self-preservation, I touch her shoulder gently.

She bends my pinkie backwards in a very unfriendly way.

“You idiot,” she growls. “This was my ticket out of here!”

“I thought we were partners,” I gasp.

Her expression changes suddenly. Honestly, this is scarier than if she could maintain the same mental state across four consecutive minutes. She lets go of my finger, puts out her hand.

“Fine, partner. Give me your phone.”

“My ph—”

She smacks me over the head very viciously for someone so small. I didn’t even know she could reach that high.

“Phone. Now.”

I fish out my phone, hand it over. She shoves it and Elephant’s phone into her pockets, hails us a cab, and I can’t help but notice she’s refusing to make eye contact anymore. It’s like our roles are reversed or something. Freaky.

“Where to?” says the cab driver, some English bloke with a string of licorice hanging out of his mouth.

“Sitewide Dynamics downtown,” Ping says. “Know it?”

“Yes’m,” nods the cabbie.

“Take First Avenue,” she says. “Not the waterfront.”

“Ah, but there’s constr—”

“First!” she barks, and he shuts up. She looks at me, sees my mouth hanging open, scowls.

“What?”

“I’ve never seen pure evil so close.”

She ignores me, pulls out the phones, starts popping out parts. I can’t keep up with it all, but I choose to believe it’s because of recent head trauma, and her PhD in Nyah Nyah Nyah has nothing to do with it. When she’s done, she powers up my phone. Except it’s not my phone…

“What did…” I say, trying to read the screen.

“I swapped the cards,” she says, as if explaining to an especially stupid child. The kind that barfs his cereal into the bowl so he can have seconds. “Your phone is using his account now.”

“But the data… it’s all on that little thing you put in there?”

“No,” she grumbles. “That’s the problem. The data’s still on the broken one. If we’re lucky, I can trick Gafoday into buying this piece of shit instead of the real phone. Otherwise, we need to find someone who can get it out for us.”

“I bet the Ewok can do it.”

“The who?”

“Jackson. Big and furry and oh god I just gave myself a shiver.”

“Wait, is this the guy at your office?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Where Jimmy Scaz is waiting to kill you?”

“Only for another fifteen minutes or so.”

Ping looks out the window, distant, then sighs.

“Fine, we’ll try and fool Gafoday, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll risk going to the office. Sound like a plan?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never actually made one before.”

The cabbie giggles at this. When you think of all the potentially-serious business that cab drivers must overhear on a daily basis, it’s really quite amazing. If I intended to keep being a private eye after this is all over, I’d probably spend half my time questioning taxi company employees, and save myself a lot of effort.

In the middle of thinking that, I notice a card on the bulletproof partition between us and him. Another one of my damn business cards.

“Where the hell are these things coming from?” I say and pull it off. This one has more handwriting on it: “9iv”. What does that mean?

“Oh yeah,” snorts the cabbie. “Guy’s a detective. Take that card, I’ve got lots up here.”

I pocket it, then pause.

“Wait, what guy?”

“The detective,” the cabbie says, now joining the Gare’s a Retard Club.

“Himself? I mean, in person?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Said I should hand ‘em out, help drum up business, right?”

I look at Ping. Ping is not paying any attention to this. Not enough math involved, I guess.

“Where was he going when you saw him?” I ask.

“Bus depot in Cloverville,” the cabbie says. “I just got back from dropping him off when I snagged you two charmers.”

Now Ping is listening. I’ve got a twitch on the side of my face like a hamster in a cocaine-filled snowglobe.

“How… long… ago?” I ask.

“I dunno, ‘alf an hour ago?”

I check my watch. It suggests to me that either Matt is now an extremely well-behaved zombie, or he’s not actually dead. I can’t tell which option I’d prefer.

“What’s at the Cloverville bus depot that isn’t at the one downtown?” I ask.

“You mean besides the world-famous apple pies?” smiles the cabby like an especially inept used car salesman. “Not much. Just out of the way, I guess.”

Before I can really ponder this any further, the cab comes to a quick stop, and we’re back in the lobby of Ping’s old job. I wave broadly to the reception as we approach.

“Beelzebub!” I call. “Summon your master!”

She pushes a red button on the desk. Ping leans over, real close-like, and whispers something in her ear. The receptionist’s eyes shoot wide open, and she gets on the phone, nods, and then leads us into a back room without a word.

“You’re sure this will work?” I ask.

“Are you going to say anything?”

“No.”

“Then yes. It’ll work.”

The door opens and Mr Owl limps in, obviously still smarting from the eviscerating he endured earlier. I can’t help but notice he is standing a safe distance away from her, eyeing her hands cautiously.

“Jei,” he nods. “Nice to see you again.”

She holds up my phone for him to see.

“Oliphant’s phone,” she says bluntly. “It has access to their whole intranet. Everything. How they’re raiding our overseas suppliers, the contacts they have in the government, which of our executives are on their payroll… Remember those prototype designs we’ve been hearing about? Not rumours. And they’re all right here.”

“But if he’s lost this, they’ll—”

“Taken care of. You have about an hour before anyone finds out about this.”

He looks at the phone, then at Ping, then at me.

“How did you get this?”

“That’s not important.”

“Legally-speaking, I think it might be…” he says.

“Legally? If you use this information, they won’t have enough money to pay for a lawyer’s lunch, let alone a lawsuit.”

A long pause. I’m about as tense as a hillbilly at a spelling bee, but Ping looks like she’s got it all under control. Mr Owl inhales slowly.

“How much do you want?” he asks finally.

“A million.”

This is considerably more than we’d discussed, but I do my best not to let my elation show.

“Five hundred thousand,” he counters.

“Nine.”

“Five and a half.”

“Eight and a half, or we walk, and I get on the phone with the Department of Defence and let them know about the laptop you lost.”

He flinches. Ping stays stoic. I am doing a happy dance in my underwear in my head. All my happy dances involve underwear. Stop judging me.

“Fine,” Mr Owl grumbles, pulling out his phone. “Cash, I presume?”

“Transfer,” Ping says quickly. “To my account. You have it on file.”

Mr Owl frowns. I’m frowning on the inside.

“But—”

“Label the transfer ‘severance pay’,” she says.

A smile spreads across his face. He nods, repeats the instructions into the phone, then closes it carefully.

“It will be done within fifteen minutes,” he says.

“Good,” Ping says, and hands him the phone. He turns it on and greedily bumps into a password screen. His face blanches. He looks at Ping.

“What’s the—”

“You get the new password I set when I confirm the money’s in my account,” she says. “And don’t try cracking it. It’s very long, and very complicated.”

He scowls at her, but given her general willingness to savagely maim people (like, for instance, him), he probably doesn’t want to say anything overtly impolite. She pats him on his shoulder, leads me out the door.

“We’ll call when the funds show up!” she says. “Be ready!”

Outside, I stop her, pull her into an alley.

“If you were a real person, you’d be my hero,” I say. “How did you see all that secret stuff on the phone before it broke? You only used it for ten or twelve seconds!”

“I made it up. Told him what he wanted to hear.”

“No shit.”

“Nobody fires me and lives,” she sneers. I must remember to clarify with her her non-employment status with my firm. When she’s less testy.

“So I guess we just wait for the money, and send him the password…?” I suggest, trying to catch up.

“I can’t give him the password. I just hit keys randomly. I have no idea what I typed. No, we’ll fix the phone, download the info, and then blackmail Oliphant for another million. Sound good, partner?”

“Actually,” I say, dumping acid rain on the parade, “speaking of partners… how about we take a ride over to Cloverville to find Matt. Because — no offence to your plan — if I don’t prove he’s not dead, I’ll be a little too imprisoned to enjoy any ill-gotten gains you have planned.”

“I’ve got a better idea!” calls Turner, climbing out of his car, Brunch close behind. “How about we all take a ride down to the station, where I beat the shit out of you and say you walked into a door?”

“Heh,” snorts Brunch.

They may be inbred half-wits, but these two make damn good bloodhounds. Unfortunately.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 14

There’s one thing I really hate.

Wait, sorry, that’s disingenuous. There are like at least two hundred things I really hate. But there’s one thing I hate more than anything else: gloating cops that smell like pickles.

Turner slams me into the wall and starts tightening the cuffs.

“Who’s the clever one now?” he asks.

“Still me,” I note, and he shoves my face against the brick a little harder. Ping isn’t being cuffed, which is like my ace in the hole, except for the fact that she’s just as likely to run away at any moment.

“Listen,” I say, “I know this’ll ruin your day, but Matt’s not really dead.”

Turner looks to Brunch, chortles loudly.

“Yeah right,” he laughs. “Then who’s that burned up in his car?”

I really want to say ‘your mama,’ but I’m trying to focus right now.

“I don’t know,” I say, amazed at my own self-control. “All I know is that he’s somewhere in Cloverville, and he’s not blowed up.”

Brunch leans in close.

“Says who?” he sneers.

“A cabbie. British. Candy addict. Just dropped him off.”

“You’re bluffing,” says Turner. “And besides, even if he’s alive, it doesn’t clear you of the other murder.”

“What, that again?”

“Yes, that,” Brunch says. “And based on what we turned up, I think it’s a slam-dunk case.”

“I’ll bite,” I sigh. “What did you turn up?”

“The vic was a board member for the Accountants Practices Association.”

I frown. Ping gives me a quizzical look that suggests she has only just realized she forgot to ditch me when she had the chance.

“How’s that relevant?” she asks Brunch.

“Marx here lost his certification last month on account of the APA.”

“I had bigger things on the go,” I lie.

“Looks like it,” Turner laughs, eyeing Ping.

“Wait, you’re an accountant?” she asks me.

“I didn’t mention that?” I say.

“That explains so much.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So the way I see it,” Turner interrupts, “you found out Maxwell led the charge to have you booted, you get angry, and you get your revenge.”

I roll my eyes.

“There’s only one problem with that plan,” I say.

“And what’s that?”

“It’s stupid. What are you, four? How dumb do I have to be to kill the guy who cost me my certification? And anyway, all those deliberations are secret, so I’d have no way of knowing who did what. How do you know?”

The cops exchange glances. Nervous ones. God, I should play poker with these guys. I don’t know the rules, but I’m sure their expressions make up for it.

“It doesn’t matter,” Brunch says.

“It does fucking too! If I didn’t know, why would I target Maxwell? Wouldn’t I just kill the entire board?”

Why hello there, Mr Hole. Why yes, I would like to dig you deeper, thank you!

“Listen,” Ping says seriously, taking hold of Brunch’s arm. “He didn’t kill anyone. He was with me.”

“Last night?” Turner asks, suspicious.

“Last night,” she nods.

“I thought you said you were doing a video chat thing,” he says to me.

“With me,” Ping says, lying so convincingly I almost wonder if I’m mis-remembering my own past. But then, Moxie did look familiar… all you need is a donkey and—

“Her?” Turner asks, pointing incredulously.

“I have a midget fetish,” I nod.

“I don’t buy it,” Brunch says, shaking his head. “How d’you explain the business card in his pocket?”

“You’ll have to ask Mr Richardson that question,” Ping interjects. “Now if you wouldn’t mind uncuffing my partner, we have business to tend to, and you have some slam-dunking to redo.”

There’s a long pause where I can literally hear the gears in their minds turning. The great thing about Ping is that she looks so sweet and innocent that you wouldn’t expect her to be the kind of cold, calculating bitch that eats regular bitches for breakfast. Believing her is dangerous, but easy.

I feel the cuffs drop off.

“Fine,” Turner says. “But don’t leave town.”

“You already told me that. Now get lost before I get angry and chop your head open. Ha! Just kidding! Retards.”

They do not seem amused as they get in their car. Ping turns to me, pauses, and then slams me back into the wall. I’m so used to this kinda thing, it doesn’t even surprise me anymore. The good news is, my spine has never been straighter!

“You lied to me!”

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Girls are sensitive about their looks—”

“You’re not a detective at all!”

“Not yet, but how many times can you really fail those exams before they give you a license anyway?”

She grips her head in her hands, crouches down on the ground. I think she’s about to have an aneurism. I’ve never seen one in person. God, if only I had my phone, I could take a picture!

“We need to get the data off the phone,” she says darkly. “Let’s get going.”

“Actually,” I say, “I was thinking we should investigate the Maxwell murder first.”

“Is there money involved?” she asks cautiously.

“Not really, no.”

“Then it’s not our problem. Come on—”

“It’s just that whoever did kill Maxwell seems to have a hard-on for me, don’t you think? I mean, it looks like I’m being framed. Don’t you want to know why?”

I can tell she doesn’t.

“All right,” I say “Look at it this way: Jimmy Scaz isn’t due to die for another five minutes. Give them half an hour to clean up after, and then we can go see Jackson. So we’ve got just enough time to do some detectiving.”

“You mean accounting. Oh wait, you lost your certification. What does that make you, then?”

“Transient.”

“Ha! Fancy word for ‘loser’.”

“Let me show you a fancy word for ‘punch you in the face’.”

“Try it, number-boy.”

We are engaged in an epic stare-off, which I freely admit I will lose badly if it ever escalates. I can tell she really wants to get the money and run, but I want to be able to run in a less hunted way.

“Compromise,” I say. “Fifteen minutes on the murder, then we see Jackson. Deal?”

She stares at me for a second, and I realize you’re supposed to make more advantageous deals with the Devil when it comes time. Drat.

“Deal,” she says, and hails a cab with supernatural ease.

“Where to?” the cabbie asks, turning down his loud ethnic music which I assume is some kind of Irish-Portuguese hybrid by the shivers it sends down my spine.

“The Accountants Practices Association,” I say. “And take First Avenue!”

“But it’s on Fifth—”

“First!” I command, and he swears under his breath and does as he’s told. Truthfully, this is probably a longer route, but I need to exercise some outward control for a bit, and he’s obviously the least empowered in the car at the moment. Ping is watching the seconds tick by on her watch, oblivious to anything else.

There’s no receptionist at the APA, but I find a helpful twat of a man, wearing bright red suspenders and Harry Potter glasses, sitting at a cubicle. He smiles warmly as we approach, illustrating how naïve he really is.

“I’m detective Marx, this is detective Ping,” I say. “Need to ask you a few questions.”

“Do you have a brother?” he asks.

“What? No.”

“Oh, that’s odd. You look just like this accountant we—”

“Hey!” I say, slapping him across the face. “Focus, kid. Focus. Important stuff going on, and not much time.”

“Ten,” agrees Ping.

“You know Luke Maxwell?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” says the twat, holding his cheek and looking like he’s going to cry. “He’s a board member. But he’s not in today.”

“Nah, he’s dead,” I say, finally appreciating why I’m not meant to be a real detective.

“He’s… he’s…”

“Listen. What was he working on, the last few days? Any big cases? Anything controversial?”

“No,” says the twat, shaking his head, “We only get one or two cases a year.”

“That can’t pay well,” I say aloud.

“It doesn’t. That’s why most board members freelance on the side. It’s not strictly allowed, but you know… rules are—”

I slap him again, but I’m not sure why. It’ll come to me.

“What kind of freelance?”

“Forensic accounting mostly,” he cries. “Private enterprise stuff.”

“Who’s he working for now?”

“I… I don’t know…”

I cross my arms.

“Ping?”

“Eight and a half.”

“Not that,” I sigh.

“Oh, right,” she says, snapping out of her timekeeping obsession. She stomps on the twat’s foot with cruel ferocity, then looks up at me. “What’d he do?”

“He’s playing dumb.”

“God I hate that. Here…” she stomps again, on the other foot, and the twat falls off his chair. He’s weeping all kinds of sissy now, and other workers are starting to stare.

“Pull it together, kid,” I growl. “Listen, any way to find out who he’s talked to recently? Call logs or something?”

He climbs back onto his chair, wipes the tears from his eyes, and clicks a few things on his computer, and breaks down into sobbing. It’s really sad, seeing a display like this. I got way worse earlier, and you never heard me complaining, did you?

Don’t answer that.

“He… he had calls from Mr Kingston, Mr Smithers, Dr Pratt, Mrs Dewali and then a short conversation with Mr Hammerstein yesterday at four, but that’s all I—”

“Wait, Mrs Dewali?” Ping asks.

“Yes. She’s a regular—”

“Mrs Antoinette Dewali? Big lady, ugly little dogs?”

“Y-y-yes. They like to pee on my chair.”

Ping pulls me a short distance away. She leans close, and I can smell the sulphur from her villa in Hades. Mmm, toasty.

“Dewali has lunch with Gafoday every Tuesday,” she says. “Big shareholder. Very connected.”

I frown.

“So what, you think she killed him?”

“Not a chance,” Ping says. “She doesn’t even cut her own food. But if she’s seeing a forensic accountant, I think we’ve got to find out why.”

“Wait, you’re saying Mr Owl killed Maxwell?

She cocks an eyebrow, which does not make her look as smart as she thinks.

I turn kick the twat in the shin, and he yelps feebly.

“Get me an address for Dewali,” I say.

He scribbles an address on a notepad and gives me the whole thing. I pat him on the cheek gently, smile.

“If this doesn’t pan out, we’ll be back,” I say, and I swear to god he wets himself. Power is fun. I need to look into getting more of it.

Outside, Ping is deep in thought, and totally ignoring the time for a change. I try hailing a cab, but they seem to ignore me, as if they don’t want to pick up a filthy, bleeding man or something. Fascist pigs.

Finally, a car stops for me, and the window rolls down. Except it’s not a cab, it’s a limo. And it’s not any limo, it’s one I’ve practised parachuting from.

“Hello, Mr Marx,” says Jimmy Scaz.

“Jimmy!” I beam. “You look remarkably good for a dead man!”

He points a gun at me, and his face goes dead serious.

“Can’t say the same for you.”

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Fission Chips - Chapter 15

Sometimes, when you have a gun pointed at your face, your brain takes initiative and makes you duck, or knock the gun away, or… you know… something useful. My brain, on the other hand, doesn’t let me move a muscle. It’s so irritatingly useless, I think my best bet at survival is for Jimmy to pity me and drive away.

“Hold on!” interrupts Ping, getting between us without actually physically getting between us. “Just hold on a second!”

“Who’s the dame?” Jimmy sneers.

I check around myself.

“Dame? What… oh you mean Ping. Ha! Good one!”

Jimmy sighs, looks towards Ping. I get the feeling I’m being left out of my own conversation again.

“You his boss?”

“Interested party.”

“Interested how?”

“That kind of information costs money,” Ping says with a smile, the cunning little munchkin.

Jimmy opens the door, gets out, and leans close to Ping, his leather jacket squeaking in the noonday sun.

“Mr Marx!” he barks at Ping, “how bout you tell me what I wanna know, and I shall magnetically let your girlie live.”

“Magnanimously,” she corrects.

This is one of those crossroads where you need to pick the right choice, or regret it for the rest of your life. Historically speaking, I never get this right.

“How about this,” I venture. “You can take Ping as your slave, and we’ll call it even.”

Yes! Undefeated champion of suck!

Both Jimmy and Ping look over at me, then at each other with tangible disgust.

“Excuse me?” Ping says, anger levels rising. “Slave?”

“What? Retro clothes made a comeback, why not slavery?”

Yeah, now nobody’s on my side.

“You miserable, gutless, number-crunching sack of shit!” she curses, turning towards me and rolling up her sleeves. “I am going to kick your ass so bad it’ll make your face look pretty!”

And before I can react, she’s grabbed Jimmy’s gun from his hand, beat him across the face with it, and clipped the Associate’s ankle with a bullet as he tries to get out of the car.

If I check myself for bullet holes right now, it won’t look like I planned it all.

“My nose!” Jimmy burbles, blood gushing everywhere. “You broke my nose! I can’t breathe!”

Ping points the gun at his head.

“Need another hole?”

Jimmy squeals, crawls over to the Associate, who is writhing around in pain himself. It seems like the perfect time to stomp on his toes for a change, but somehow I think that’s pushing my luck.

“Nice job,” I whisper to Ping with a hearty thumbs-up.

She grabs the thumb and twists. I find myself on my knees, begging for mercy again.

“I can’t wait to be rid of you,” she says.

“What? It’s not like I said ‘sex slave’! I thought he could use someone to fetch his hair grease or something!”

Oh dear, my thumb is now double-jointed!

“Load them in the limo. We’ve got things to do.”

“We’re bringing them?”

“You want to be looking over your shoulder all day?”

“Says the lady with the gun and my thumb in a pretzel.”

“Go!” she orders, and tosses me towards them. Despite only having a facial problem, Jimmy is the bigger baby of the two. Why is it that the bosses are always the biggest whiners? I mean besides me. Oh shut up.

I settle them in the rear-facing seats and strap them in like they’re overgrown toddlers in very bad clothes, then sit down next to Ping.

“1301 Culver Street!” Ping calls to the driver, who will probably be fired once Jimmy realizes he did nothing to stop the Chinese imp from attacking them. “Take the blue bridge!”

We start driving, and Ping re-grips the gun ominously. I knew she was testy, but I never expected she had such a short fuse. Ha! Short! Get it?

“You’re a dead man, Marx,” whines Jimmy like a poor wittle baby who wost his bwankie.

“Funny, the way I hear it, you’re the one in trouble, Jimmy.”

He shifts his weight, but doesn’t betray anything. He must be used to everyone always knowing more than him.

“Tony sounds royally pissed with you,” I continue happily. “In over your head? That can’t be fun. I’d help you out, but I broke my caring bone in a trip out of a speeding limo earlier.”

Jimmy and the Associate look suitably pissy.

“So you don’t got the money?” Jimmy grumbles.

“I’ve got something worth more than money. My pride—”

“When did that happen?” Ping snipes.

“Zip it, slave. Now Jimbo. Can I call you Jimbo?”

I can’t, but hey, he doesn’t have a gun.

“Jimbo, I’ll make you a deal. We’re off to see this woman. Rich woman. And I’ll make you a deal. Once we’re done with her, you go and offer her some of your mob ‘protection’, cut me in for half, I’ll not only call off my savage Chihuahua here, but I’ll also give you your thirty grand.”

His eyes narrow at exactly the same time that Ping’s widen. She grabs my ear and pulls.

“One moment please,” I squeak.

“What the hell are you doing?” she whispers at me.

“Negotiating.”

“You’re doing it wrong!”

“Yeah? You do better.”

Ping throws me away, points the gun at Jimmy’s groin.

“New deal,” she says. “Forget the thirty, cut us in for seventy percent, and you get to pass along your stupid-ass genes without a test tube.”

Jimmy’s face goes white. He crosses his legs.

“Sounds fair,” he whimpers.

Ping aims the gun back at his head, which makes him a lot more relaxed.

“All right,” she says to me. “When we meet Dewali, you don’t say a word, understand? I don’t want a repeat of—”

“Dewali?” Jimmy asks. “You mean Antoinette Dewali? With the dogs?”

“What about her?” I ask as dismissively as I can.

“She ain’t on Culver anymore, for one.”

“Yeah? So where is she?”

He crosses his arms, cricks his neck. The poor fool thinks the tables have turned somehow. How quaint.

“It’s gonna cost ya,” he smiles.

Ping cocks the gun and points it back at his groin.

“It’ll cost you more,” she says.

“You wouldn’t dare. You need me to—” His bravado is cut off by Ping’s foot crushing his man-parts. He squeals like a curly-haired little girl in checkered pink bows and topples onto his side, tears streaming down his face. Given the wind-up, I think he’s out of business for at least half an hour. He probably wishes Tony had killed him after all. I’d feel sympathy, but my heart is made of coal.

“Driver!” Ping yells. “Swing by Mr Marx’s office!”

The car makes a quick U-turn and in no time at all, we’re parked behind the charred wreckage of my car. It makes the street look like a war zone stopped by to say hi. Either that or the parking meter cops are taking it to a whole new level.

“Take this, aim it there, and don’t move,” Ping says, handing me the gun and pointing at the Associate’s head for me. I grip it with both hands to show I mean business. Also, because I’m scared shitless of being left alone.

A minute later, Ping’s back with Jackson, laptop in tow, sitting down next to me.

“Shit!” Jackson beams, looking at Jimmy. “What happened to him?”

“Poor personal hygiene,” I warn, but it goes right over his head.

“Jimmy!” Ping says, taking the gun from me and pointing at his head. “Want to tell me where Dewali is now?”

Jimmy is squealing incoherently. Despite liking girls too, I think Ping has very little understanding of the average male. She sighs, turns to the Ewok.

“I need you to get the data off this phone,” she says, and hands him the cracked phone. “I doubt it’s encrypted, so it shouldn’t be hard.”

“You got it,” he says, pulling a few cords out of his bag. “What happened to it?”

“Epic stupidity.”

“Cool,” says Jackson, as if it explains everything. “Give me fifteen.”

“But first…” interrupts Ping, “I need you to find Antoinette Dewali for us. Can you do that?”

“Can monkeys fly?” he says with a grin.

“No. No they can’t.”

“I mean in movies.”

“Just shut up and do it.”

“Right,” he nods, finishes typing, and raises his hand like he’s in class and Ping is the substitute teacher from Hell. “Done!”

“Already?” Ping asks.

“500 Westchester Avenue. And look at the satellite view.… she’s got a swimming pool in the shape of a dick. How messed up is that?”

“That’s a dog bone, you moron.”

“Is it?” Jackson says with a wry smile.

“Ping’s a lebsian,” I explain. “So she’s not familiar with such things.”

“Ah,” nods Jackson, and subtly shifts closer to Ping.

Ten minutes later, we pull up at the gate to Mrs Dewali’s mansion. This is the Oak Ridge neighbourhood, where the servants take their own private jets to the corner store. The last time I was here, I was helping a client evade more taxes than the GDP of Australia. I wonder how prison’s treating him…

“Yes?” asks a suave butler from a video screen by the gate. He looks like a wax replica of a real butler, right down to the lack of facial movement as he speaks.

“Hello,” says Ping. “I’m here to see Mrs Dewali please.”

The butler doesn’t react.

“On what business?” he asks.

“It’s about Mr Gafoday,” she replies.

There’s a long pause where everyone makes like the butler.

“And you are…?” he asks.

“Jei Chow,” Ping says. “An associate of Mr Gafoday’s.”

Another pause. Even Jimmy has gone quiet. He probably doesn’t want to give a bad first impression in this part of town.

The gates open before us, and we drive down a long, winding driveway, around the pool shaped like a dick, and pull up in front of the mansion. Shopping malls aren’t this big. It’s so huge you’d expect there to be at least four Starbucks on the ground floor alone.

The front doors open and a rather large woman strides out, her two poofy dogs trailing on diamond-studded leashes. She comes to a rest at the top of the front steps, smiles at us, and waves.

And then fifty-five heavily armoured SWAT-looking guys surround us, machine guns at the ready.

“The nerve of that man,” tuts Dewali. “I’ve been playing so nicely, and now this?”

She looks to the closest SWAT guy, nods.

“Please try to keep blood off the gravel, Maurice. It’s always so hard to clean completely.”

“Yes, ma’am,” nods Maurice, and all the guns get ready to fire.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 16

All right, fine, I wet myself a little. It’s one thing to have a gun pointed at you by someone Jimmy, who has a brain the size of a pea. It’s quite another to have a few dozen weapons — so automatic it’s hard to not kill things with them — all aimed at you. That, my friend, is my threshold for tinkling.

“This is bad,” gulps Jackson, sinking down into his seat so his head is about the same level as Ping’s.

“Marx,” she says, “Sort this out.”

“Me? I thought it was well-established that never ends well!”

“You’re closest to the window.”

“We can switch spots.”

“Not a chance. Just lower the window and explain why we’re here.”

I nod, even though I don’t want to. I lean far back in my seat, reach my hand over, and touch the window control. The window slides down carefully, comes to a stop.

“Um…” I begin, and then the Associate’s brains splatter all over Jimmy. He starts shrieking even more.

I roll the window back up.

“That went well.”

“We need a plan B,” plots Ping from the safety of the floor.

“Driver?” I call. “Get us out of here?”

“Not on your life,” calls back the pansy-ass driver.

I glance down at Ping.

“Plan B is this: you run out there and draw their fire.”

“What the f—”

“You’re small! Harder to hit! You can give the rest of us time to escape!”

She sneers at me.

“If I die, you’ll never get the money Gafoday transferred.”

“Hmm. I see your point. Jackson, you’re big. You can take more bullets than a human can—”

“No!” barks Ping, and pulls me down onto the floor with her and Jackson. We’re all so buddy-buddy close it makes me kinda ill. Who the hell smells like Jack Daniels at this time of the day? And why don’t I, too?

Ping reaches her hand over, rolls down the window.

“We don’t work for Gafoday!” she yells. “I repeat: we do not work for Gafoday!”

For a moment, there’s no reply, and I figure it’s because the machine gun guys are just walking up to the window so they can aim down more effectively. But then…

“Who do you work for?” Mrs Dewali calls.

“We’re investigating the murder of Luke Maxwell!”

Mrs Dewali appears at the window so suddenly I pee just a little bit more. The old hag sticks her head in, eyebrows up so high it’s like they’ve got strings attached to them, being pulled by a hyperactive elf with no sense of restraint and/or decorum.

“Goodness, no! Mr Maxwell is dead?”

“I didn’t do it,” I mention, but nobody seems to care.

“We think it has something to do with Gafoday,” Ping says. “We know you’ve been seeing him, and we need to know why.”

The door opens and Mrs Dewali looms before us. All the guns are still pointing inwards, of course.

“Oh my dear, you’re more right than you know,” gushes the broad broad. “Gafoday’s been bleeding the company dry.”

Ping sits up, frowning. Knowing my luck inside out, I stay put while the guns are still out there.

“How do you mean?” she asks.

“The shareholder reports have been falsified for more than three years,” says Dewali. “It was brought to my attention two months ago, and I have been working with poor Mr Maxwell to discover the truth. Before it’s too late.”

“Wait, what’s too late?” I say. “You’re saying the company is going out of business?”

“That is my fear, yes. And with it, large investment from some of the best people in this fine city.”

I glance at Ping. She looks just as shocked as I am.

“So you think Gafoday found out about your investigation and had Maxwell killed?” I continue. “I’m not sure I buy that. He seems like to type cry at a kid’s movie, not hire hitmen.”

“He tried to kill me last week,” Dewali sniffles. “The barbarian sent me flowers rigged to explode.”

“Explode?” I echo, thinking of my poor car.

“Maurice detonated them before they cleared the gate, thank goodness.”

Ah, good. The head of security who ensures his own job is safe by making his employer a paranoid loon. It appears I am still the only one around with even half of a functioning brain. Except for Ping of course. But hers is naturally small, so it’s different.

“How long does the company have left?” I ask, wondering if Ping really has all the money she thinks she has. “They’re starting to liquidate assets?”

“From what I understand, they already have liquidated assets. The lease on their headquarters came due and the building’s management told us Gafoday has been making token payments for months—”

“Itemizing the full amount and pocketing the rest. He’s a crafty little bugger, isn’t he?”

“Goodness, such language!”

“Lady, this is my upper crust censorship right here.”

I notice Ping is looking really concerned about something, so I close the door on Mrs Dewali and her Un-Merry Men.

“What now?” I ask.

“If the company’s going bankrupt—”

“Yeah, we might not be rich.”

“Worse than that… if the company is struggling, maybe he’s selling off assets to add to his parachute?”

“You? You’re not an asset—”

“The laptop. I never took it out of the office, but somehow it got out through security. Which means somebody on the inside got it out...”

“Wait, are you implying he lost his own secrets and framed you for it? I hate to ruin your day, but if he were really trying to get away with something like that, why would he hire me to investigate?”

“You’re a dummy.”

“You’re a dipshit.”

“No, I mean you’re a decoy.”

“Ah. Well, you’re still a dipshit.”

The car door opens quite forcefully, and I look around into the barrel of a machine gun. It takes the piss and vinegar right out of me. Well, the vinegar anyway. We covered this already.

“Which one of you is in charge?” Dewali asks as Maurice flexes his trigger finger.

This is one of those moments where you get screwed no matter how you answer. Why does she want to know? Kill the leader? Kill the underling to threaten the leader? Honestly, there’s no way to answer this without a serious amount of hurting.

“That guy,” Ping and I both say, pointing at Jimmy.

Dewali looks at Jimmy, then back at us.

“Which one of you is in charge?”

We glance at each other.

“She is,” I say, motioning to Ping carefully. “She’s a rocket scientist.”

Dewali glances at Ping, snorts to herself.

“Don’t be absurd,” she chortles. “That girl? She may be quite good at your pole room dancing… or… whatever it is you people do. But she is most certainly not a rocket scientist. Rocket scientists are distinguished gentlemen in their fifties, with cute balding heads and moustaches.”

Ping looks extremely pissed at this. I think she should take it as a compliment that someone thinks she looks good enough to be a pole dancer. Hey, maybe Dewali can be her sugar mommy!

Maurice reaches in and grabs Ping by the arm, pulls her out, where she’s dragged away by a trio of burly men.

“Now then,” Dewali says. “I am hiring you. I am henceforth your most important client. You have one hour to find Mr Maxwell’s killer.”

“One hour? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“I expect results, sir.”

“And I expect exorbitant compensation!”

Dewali tuts at me.

“Your compensation will be to see your pop tart floozy alive again.”

I can’t think of how to respond to this without it seeming like I’m defending Ping.

“You’re kinda sexist, aren’t you?” I say. Because you know, as crass as I may be, I never judge people by their genitalia. I’m an enlightened soul, even when it comes to midgets like Ping.

“One hour,” Dewali says, and slams the door. The driver starts back down the driveway as if he’s got a dozen weapons aimed at his head at the same time. It takes me a moment to fight the intertia and get into a seat.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do now?” I say to myself. “One hour? I don’t even know where the hell Maxwell lived!”

“221 Waterford,” says Jackson.

“Is that—”

“Five minutes’ drive.”

“So I should—”

“Dude, relax. It’s all good.”

But is not all good. For one, Jimmy is starting to come out of his daze, and without Ping to protect me, I might get hurt more than I am already. Also, there’s a dead body in the car, and if we get pulled over for any reason, I’m definitely going to jail for a long, long time. Also, I don’t have the first clue what I’ll do when I get to Maxwell’s house. If he’s dead, who’s going to let us in? I can’t pick locks, and I’m fairly certain I don’t have the un-fractured bone density to kick in a door.

We pull up outside a nice two-storey home with an honest-to-goodness white picket fence, with a red compact car in the driveway. Jackson hops out first, and I drag Jimmy behind me, just so he doesn’t try and run away with his driver. It’s mildly embarrassing to have him hanging around, but I figure the damage is done with the Ewok, so why not finish the job with a leather jacket loser too?

I ring the doorbell and hold my breath. This is where it can all go wrong.

Finally, the door clicks open and we’re faced with a late-20s blonde with a too-tight bright pink v-neck, and the body to make it okay. To people who like blow-up girlfriends, at least.

“Mrs Maxwell?” I ask, trying to sound professional.

“Wh-who are you?” she squeaks with a tiny little voice.

“Detective Marx, Detective Ja… Jackson…”

“Welch,” the Ewok says.

“Yeah, Detective Welch. And, um, Detective Scaz. We need to ask you some questions about your late husband.”

Tears well up in her eyes, but there’s something about them that seem as real as her boobs. I can’t put my finger on it.

“H-h-he wasn’t my h-h-husband,” she stutters. “But p-p-please, come in and I’ll answer anything I can.”

She steps aside and I walk in, finding this whole “I’m a real detective! Look at me!” thing to be quite exciting. But as soon as I’m in, she slams the door on Jackson and Jimmy, and locks it tight.

I turn around slowly, not sure what I’ll see.

“We don’t have much time,” says the not-wife, eyes open wide.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 17

Nine times out of ten, when a woman locks you in a room with her and says “we don’t have much time”, she’s being pragmatic and/or witty. Something about the look in the not-wife’s eyes says that’s not what she’s after. Unless there’s some really freaky role-playing to do, in which case I will need a nun’s outfit and some pliers.

“I think Luke was murdered,” she tells me urgently.

“Yeah, we figured by the way his head was chopped open.”

“I think I know who did it.”

I squint at her, trying to look the inquisitive kind of suspicious, but probably only achieving the other kind of suspicious.

“I’ll bite. Who did it?”

“His secretary.”

“Can’t argue with your logic. But why?”

“He was having an affair.”

I cross my arms. She crosses her arms too, which puts so much pressure on those damn balloons on her chest that I’m deathly afraid they’re going to explode. On the other hand, that would be fun to watch. I squeeze my arms tighter.

“You know he was having an affair, or you think?”

“I know.”

“Ah.”

“I think.”

“I see. Well normally, I’d say you should hire a good private eye to check up on him, but I guess that’s not an issue anymore.”

She shakes her head sorrowfully, reaches into her bra, and pulls out a card, fingers it gently. I am intrigued and disturbed all at once.

“I hired a detective,” she says meekly.

“And you still don’t know if he had an affair?”

“I haven’t got my report yet.”

I sigh, scratch a bruise at the back of my neck, and try not to cry.

“Mrs not-Maxwell, you should consider hiring a real detective. I’ll make you a deal. If I’m still alive tomorrow, I’ll give you peace of mind for half of what your other dick is costing.”

Her eyes light up and she starts to bounce like a sugar-buzzed first grader on trampoline. The bouncing, it’s making me sea sick!

“Oh thank you!” she squeals. “Thank you very much!”

“Yeah, yeah, good, fun, whee. Please stop now,” I gurgle, putting a hand on her shoulder. She takes my hand in hers, caresses it gently. I suspect this is that mythical beast they call the “gentle female.” I am extremely uneasy.

“Thank you,” she says softly, getting so close that my body is falling under the gravitational pull of her boobage.

“You’re welcome,” I gulp.

“How can I ever repay you…” she whispers, running her hand down my chest.

“Non-sequential fifties are usually—”

She wraps her arms around me, pulls herself closer. This is the part where I find out vampires are real, and they’re hungry, and I’m the tastiest variety of human.

“How,” she whispers right in my ear, “can I ever… repay… you?”

I have to take a moment.

Her left hand is running down my spine.

Her right hand is gripping the back of my jacket.

Her breath is hot on my neck.

“Um…” I gurgle. “I can also take Visa or Mastercard.”

The caressing stops very suddenly. I would like to say I’m disappointed, but honestly, I’ve never felt so in tune with organic food nuts before. Artificiality is creepy, and this is its queen.

“Gettin’ a beer,” says Jackson from behind us.

“On the door,” says Boobarella.

“Wait a second,” I say, turning around suddenly as the Ewok disappears into the kitchen. “How the fuck did you get in here? And where’s Jimmy?”

“Ah!” comes the reply as a beer twists open. “Jimmy left in the limo. He said to tell you to fuck off and die. Or die and fuck off. I can’t remember.”

I rub my eyes.

“I thought you were watching him.”

“I did, dude. He got in the limo and left.”

I lean against the wall, wondering where I went wrong. I believe it was somewhere in third grade, when I decided to sit at the front of the class instead. Mrs Carpington made me clean the chalkboard so much I developed asthma and got picked on in high school gym class, thereby ruining my career as a pro athlete. That utterly screwed up my life. What a dipshit I was.

“Lady,” grins Jackson, looking inflatable girl up and down, “your garage is so arranged.”

“The garage is unlocked?” she gasps.

“Uh, yeah,” he chortles. “Nothin’ worth stealing in there, so who cares? Unless you like power tools.” He starts laughing to himself, obviously unaware that an entire subset of the species actually regards physical craftsmanship to be a worthwhile endeavour. Or so I hear.

“Hold on,” I say, holding up my hand. “Do we need Jimmy anymore?”

Jackson and Boobarella stop to think. Or at least pose like they’re thinking.

“I don’t think so,” Jackson says with absolutely no conviction.

“Good enough,” I say, and turn to not-wife. “Does your car work?”

“What? Why?”

“We need a ride.”

“But I—”

“Listen,” I say gently. “I know none of this will matter to you, but someone very special to me is in danger, and if I don’t solve this case soon, she’ll die, and I’ll never get to tell her… tell her…”

I do my best impression of human emotion. She boob holds me tight, and I let out a legitimate sob for all the wrong reasons.

“You poor man,” she says. “Of course I’ll bring you. Let me get my bag.”

She runs off down the hall, and Jackson hands me a beer. I crack it open, take a swig. It reminds me of morning. I am developing a problem, and I don’t even care.

“She’s hot,” Jackson purrs.

“You can have her,” I grumble.

“No! Really?”

“Freaks of nature unite, right?”

“Dude!” Jackson grins, clinking our bottles. “You’re the man!”

“In so many ways…”

The boob comes back in with her purse, pulling a long fluffy pink keychain out. She hurries to a side door, and we follow her into the garage. Jackson was right: it’s so organized it’s like an anal-retentive mathematician was bitten by a radioactive OCD spider and decided to make this his masterpiece. Even the junk on the table saw is neatly arranged.

“Oh deary!” the boob squeals. “The car’s outside! My silly!”

“Your silly,” I shrug, and follow her out the garage door.

The compact is compact, but big enough for two normal people with an animal in the back, so that’s how we play it. As we putter down the street, and I turn around and poke Jackson in the forehead.

“Can you get a message to Dewali?”

“Give me a sec.”

“Just say something like—”

“Hello?” comes Dewali’s voice from his computer. He is freakish, but fast.

“Hello, Mrs Dewali? It’s Gare Marx.”

“Hello? Who is this?” she squawks.

“You’ve kidnapped my assistant.”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to be more precise.”

How many people does she kidnap on an average day?

“The short one.”

“Oh yes, dear Jei! We are having iced tea on the veranda! Say hello, Jei darling!”

“Hello,” comes Ping’s very unhappy voice. I bet she can’t figure which would be worse, death, or more of iced tea on the veranda. I wonder if she has a sun hat. Do they make sun hats that small?

“Mrs Dewali,” I say, “I need you to meet me—”

“Dickhead!” barks a voice very much like Tony’s. “You’ve got Jimmy. Where is he?”

“Oh, uh, Tony, right? Jimmy seems to have escaped.”

“Fuck!” Tony booms.

“Anthony, please!” pleads Dewali. “No potty mouth on the veranda!”

“Yeah, Tony,” I say. “Save it for the study.”

“You got my money yet?” Tony grumbles, and I suddenly picture him in a sun hat too. And a pink summer dress. Divine!

“I don’t have your money,” I say. “How did you end up at Mrs Dewali’s place anyway?”

“Jimmy’s phone has GPS,” he grunts. “I gots this guy who pushes the buttons and tells me where to go.”

“I’m so sorry about your poor boy’s leg, Anthony. My poochies get so excited sometimes.”

“Er… it’s okay, Mrs D. Ain’t nothing wrong with wheelchairs.”

They all share a very awkward laugh.

“Listen,” I interrupt, “can the three of you meet me back at Mr Owl’s in fifteen minutes?”

“Mr—” Dewali begins.

“Gafoday,” Ping says. “What’s going on, Marx?”

“I know how this all fits together,” I say. “And if you want to know too, you’ll be there in… fourteen.”

Jackson cuts the connection with a grin.

“Fucking awesome!” he gurgles, cracking open another beer. “That’s amazing! You figured it out already?”

“You know who killed my Luke?” the boob says excitedly.

“Actually, no,” I say. “I have no idea. But I’m going to blame Gafoday.”

“W-why?” Jackson sputters, choking on his beer.

“He’s generally deplorable, so I don’t think anyone will mind.”

“B-b-but the real murderer will go free!” the boob whines.

“Only for a day or two. Listen: as much as I hate to admit it, I can’t solve this case without Ping. I can’t get Ping back without solving this case. It’s a catch-22, and the only way to break out of the vicious cycle is to lie. So unless you’ve got a magic mystery-solver in that bra of yours, shut the fuck up and drive!”

She puts on a pouty face and doesn’t say another word until we arrive at Gafoday’s place. I cross the foyer in five powerful strides, arms wide, beaming at the receptionist.

“Undead witch-hound!” I call. “Summon your overlord! I have come to kick his ass!”

She doesn’t say a word, so I ignore her completely and push my way into the back offices. At the end of a long hallway, I see a door marked “President”, and Gafoday’s name etched in below. I need to find out who did that for him. It looks quite nice.

I don’t bother knocking, and swing open the door in triumph, only to stop dead at the sight of… well, death.

“Jesus!” the boob gags. “What happened?”

A cursory observation suggests Mr Owl has had his throat slit, shortly after being thrown around the room like a rag doll. Presently, he is laying spread-eagle on his desk, with a look on his face like he just found out Jackson was his brother and was coming over to stay: horror.

“This is not what I was expecting,” I grumble.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 18

When you think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that I’ve been able to see three dead bodies in one day, even if one was just a photo. It’s like everyone I come in contact with ends up dead. The odds of that happening are pretty slim, unless I’m some kind of serial killer. Which is probably what the police are going to think. So yeah. I’m a winner!

I close the door very quickly, and cover the boob’s mouth before she can scream.

“Jackson,” I say, “check his computer for clues. We’ve only got about five minutes before—”

The door opens and Tony, Dewali, Ping, and four armed guards come rolling right in like a circus that doesn’t appreciate the difference between “exotic” and “ugly”.

“Goodness!” cries Dewali, feigning displeasure like a pro.

“You been busy,” grunts Tony to me.

“He was dead when I got here,” I sigh.

“Helps if you emote more as y’say it,” Tony says. “Like this: ‘He was already dead when I got here!’’”

It’s like William fucking Shatner’s failed Italian clone. He could take that act on the road, by golly!

Ping nods to me dismissively, but I can tell she missed me in her own special midgety way.

“Marx,” she nods.

“Ping,” I nod.

“You’re not dead yet….”

“And you still haven’t grown. Shocking.”

“Do we have any idea who did kill Gafoday?”

“You seemed to hate him a lot.”

“I’ve been tied up at a tea party. So any other ideas?”

I check around the room, crack my knuckles, and step away from all the riff-raff.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “I know who did it. It was… the boob!”

Everyone frowns.

“The who?”

I lean toward the boob.

“What was your name again?”

“Tish.”

“Right. Thanks.” I step back again. “The killer is Tish with the boobs!”

Everyone glances at the boob. Ping is checking her out and drooling like a fool. On the inside. I can tell. Shallow, shallow Ping.

“Me?” the boob wails. “How did I kill him? I was with you the whole time!”

“Aha!” I snap. “What whole time? Where were you before we got to your house?”

“My… my house…?”

“Exactly!” I declare. “Wait, no. Well anyway, there’s lots of evidence in your home. I saw it all. All of it. And by the way: you’re sick. Sick and disgusting. Shame on you.”

I clap my hands and motion to the door.

“All right, everyone! Let’s go search her house!”

Nobody moves, the damn cynics.

“You do not know a thing,” Dewali sighs.

“Finally!” I yell. “Somebody’s paying attention!”

Jackson is holding up his hand like a kid in class. I feel an uncontrollable urge to throw a blackboard brush at him. Also, my therapist sucks.

“Tish,” he says, “do you know Finnish?”

The boob screws up her face in a way that strongly suggests she doesn’t even know Finnish is a nationality. It’s so sad when the plastic surgeon gets the anaesthesia mix wrong and the patient loses brain function, isn’t it?

“Know which?” she asks.

“I don’t think she really killed him, Gare.”

“I knew that,” I snark. “It was all a ploy to confuse the real killer, which is… Tony!”

“He was already dead when I got here!”

Golf clap.

“No,” says Jackson, tapping away, “I mean I think the killers were Finnish. And angry. They’ve been threatening him for a really long time. And dude, if the translation’s any good, he was into some very serious shit.”

I rub my eyes and stomp my feet for effect, because this is starting make me as crazy as an American Idol marathon. Aren’t detectives meant to know all the suspects before things get out of control? Why am I always playing catch up all the time? I don’t even know what a Finnish person looks like, so how the hell am I supposed to pick one out in a crowd?

In the face of adversity, I get adversarial.

“How the hell do you know all this?” I snap.

“It’s in his email.”

“Whose?”

“Gafoday’s. He has a folder called ‘sensitive’, and it’s like half the messages at least.”

I sit down in the middle of the crime scene and couldn’t care less.

“How did you get into his email?” I ask feebly.

“I logged in and it was open.”

“How did you log in?”

“I used his password.”

“How did you get his password?”

“It was on a sticky underneath his keyboard.”

“Jesus,” I sigh. “I’m surrounded by mental midgets.”

“The password was ‘password’, too.”

You know that expression that goes “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is”? Yeah, I have no idea how accurate it is. Nothing good has ever happened to me, which is why this whole situation is confusing the shit out of me.

“What’s the email say?” I sigh, giving in to temptation on the off chance it gives me an easy pay day rather than a swift kick to the head.

“I’m not a hundred percent or anything, but I think Gafoday was tryin’ to sell military secrets.”

“I knew it!” Dewali shouts, making the boob jump. “Dispersing assets under the table to pad his own pocket!”

“But terrorists?” Ping says. “We don’t do anything that would be of interest to terrorists… the closest we come are controller chips for nuclear reactors, but that’s only useful if you’ve got the rest of the equipment assembled. What kind of terrorists were they?”

“Finnish separatists.”

I roll my eyes.

“That’s absurd,” I grumble. “Finland doesn’t have terrorists, does it? And what would they separate from? Ikea?”

“That’s Swedish,” Ping notes.

“All the same damn thing!” I yell. “This makes no sense. It’s a decoy! It’s meant to confuse us and throw us off the scent!”

“When were we on a scent?” Ping snarks.

“We were doing pretty damn well till you came back, thank you very much!”

“What, with Tish the boob?”

“Don’t mock her, she’s been through enough.”

“Oh, I’m sure it bounces right off her.”

Where’s a rimshot when you need one?

Tony slams his fist against the wall and makes two books fall off the book shelves near Jackson. His face is red and he’s starting to sweat. He looks like a very obese lobster in a very cheap suit.

“Enough games!” he booms. “I want my money!”

“And I want to know who killed Mr Maxwell,” snorts Dewali.

“And I want a crispy chicken sandwich with a sprinkling of light, sparkly rainbow ecstasy, but it ain’t going to happen!” I scream, jumping to my feet. “So everyone shut up for a second so I can think!”

Nobody says a word. For about ten seconds, and then the boob taps Dewali on the shoulder, puts on her best sheepish face, and says:

“Why do you want to know about my Luke?”

Dewali is transfixed by the boobs. Or she doesn’t want to look commoners in the eye. Well, either way, she’s conveying the right attitude.

“Mr Maxwell and I had a common goal,” she says.

The boob’s face gets all twisted and purple and she points at Dewali accusingly.

“I knew’d it! You an’ Luke was lovers! You cheating bitch!”

Dewali turns her head away from the boob and waves her off.

“Maurice, silence her please.”

Maurice pulls one of those strangling wires from his sleeve and cricks his neck like he was just asked to take the trash to the curb while he was watching his favourite soap opera. The boob, bless her soul, is too dumb to cower.

“Hold on a second!” Ping says, getting between Dewali and the boob. “Tish, Mrs Dewali was working with Mr Maxwell to investigate accounting irregularities at this company.”

“Who’s company?”

“Mr Gafoday. The guy on the desk.”

Everyone looks at Mr Owl. The boob turns away and scrunches her face up like she’s thinking (but she’s obviously not, as her grammar clearly discounts higher mental functions). Her eyes are watering so much, it’s almost like she’s a camel and oh my god that explains everything!

“S-s-so you weren’t boinkin’ Lukey?” she asks Dewali.

Dewali glares at her.

“I do not fraternize with the help,” she tuts.

Just then, the door opens and a janitor pushing a trolley comes in, whistling to himself. He starts dusting the book cases happily. He takes an old tome out, leafs through it, and drops it in the bag slung over his shoulder. He goes on whistling and dusting, only pausing when he notices that he’s dusting a very irate Italian.

“Oh,” he squeaks. “Bad time?”

Then he notices Gafoday on the desk, and he stumbles back and covers his mouth in horror. He scrambles to his feet and starts to run away, but Tony catches his arm and pulls him into the centre of the room.

“You whack this guy?” Tony asks.

“N-n-no, sir.”

Tony applies some twisting pressure, which makes the Harley Davidson tattoo on his forearm look all swirly and girlish, and it makes me think of—

“Oh my god,” I gasp. “Oh my god, I’ve figured it out.”

“Shut up, Marx,” Ping says. “You don’t really—”

“No, I do!” I giggle. Yes, giggle. “It’s too convoluted to be wrong!”

This is an epiphany! This is what it’s like to be a real detective! It’s far more exciting than they let on in movies, let me tell you. Holy shit, I’ve ascended to a new level of consciousness!

And then the janitor belts me in the face with his book bag, and makes a run for the door. Tony, Dewali and the boob chase after him, but Ping just stands over me with her arms crossed, nudging me with her foot.

“Nice distraction,” she says.

“It’s not a distraction,” I mutter. “I really do know how it all connects.”

“You gonna tell me?”

“Not yet,” I cough, getting to my feet. “There are a few things we need to take care of first.”

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Fission Chips - Chapter 19

“Hairball!” I say to Jackson, “Any idea where the Finns are hiding?”

Jackson is staring at me like he’s vaguely hurt and largely confused by my new nickname for him. I need to buy him a mirror. Actually, no, I can’t afford to have him kill himself.

“Why’re we looking for them again?” he asks slowly. “You think they’ve got the laptop?”

“I doubt it,” I say. “But that won’t stop them from trying to find it. And I don’t need the distractions.”

Jackson taps away at the computer, face twisted up like he’s passing especially foul gas. Oh wait no, he is.

“What’s going on?” asks Ping, obviously unhappy with the fact that she’s not the smartest one in the room anymore. She was using her intelligence as a crutch after her body failed to live up to expectations, but now even that has been taken from her. I can’t help but smile.

“It’s really complicated,” I say.

“Try me.”

“I don’t do lesbians.”

Oh cute! She has death rays in her eyes!

“Explain to me what’s going on,” she says.

“One second,” I say, holding up a finger that she declines to break off, the old softie. “Hairball! Update!”

“They’re meeting across the harbour, down by the docks. Tonight at ten. Or were. It looks like it got cancelled after he lost the laptop.”

“You’re sure?”

“Dude, I’m a fucking genius. I’m goin’ to Monitor City some day.”

“Dare to dream, Mr Cashier,” I nod, and lead Ping to the door. Outside, half the staff of the company are whispering amongst themselves, while the rest are talking loudly about job prospects. Even the guy fixing the photocopier looks nervous about the future. They all stare at us like we have the plague.

“It’s amazing he’s still alive,” I say, not very quietly.

Ping gives me an urgent stare.

“Good work, Dr Ping,” I continue. “Good thing you were here.”

Ping is about to say something when the guy by the photocopier gets up and starts to walk for the door a little too briskly. People are so predictable, if you have the courage to dislike them en masse. I point at him.

“That’s the guy.”

Ping grabs a toner cartridge off the shelf and pitches it at the guy’s head so hard his feet leave the ground before he breaks his nose. He rolls onto his back and pulls a switchblade from his pocket, but Ping is over him with another toner box, eyes narrower than usual.

I offer her the gun I’ve been carrying around, but she waves it off.

“Guns are too quick,” she says ominously.

The guy drops the knife.

I stand next to Ping, arms crossed, trying to look imposing. It would be so much more effective if I didn’t smell like urine and blood.

“You killed Gafoday?” Ping asks.

“I speak nothing!” he sneers.

She steps on his hand and I hear two of his fingers pop.

“You killed Gafoday?”

“Yes, lady!” he squeaks. “Yes, is me!”

She doesn’t ease up. I lean down next to him, tap him on his bleeding, swelling nose. He whimpers a bit more.

“The laptop you’re after is gone,” I say. “It got trashed this morning. Thousands of pieces. Can’t be fixed. What you’re after doesn’t exist anymore.”

“B-b-but… how do you—”

“Trust me, buddy. I know a lot more than you think. I don’t care about Gafoday or anything else. I just want you and your buddies at the docks to pack up your shit and leave town before I get angry. Got it?”

He starts to cry, which I assume is because of my dominating personality, but then I hear another finger pop, which totally undermines my self-image.

“Now get going,” I say, and kick him in the arm for good measure. “Go and tell your friends you’re not welcome anymore!”

Ping lets him go and he scrambles to his feet and dashes for the door. She drops the toner box and scoops up the knife, squints at me unhappily.

“The laptop’s really gone?”

“Hell no,” I smile.

“So where is it?”

“Wait and see,” I say, heading back to the lobby.

“You’re really irritating when you’re cocky!” she calls.

“You’re irritating year round!”

I wait by the demonic receptionist until Ping and Jackson catch up. I steal some candies from the little dish on the desk, and am just about to make a snarky comment about the horrible stench of rotting flesh that she obviously confused with perfume… but then Turner and Brunch come rushing in the front doors, and I decide to use my venom strategically.

“You!” Turner growls.

“Aw shucks, you remember!” I grin.

“I should have known you’d be here,” he says, trying to intimidate me in the way my dad did when I said I’d rather finish my homework than play football with him in the yard. Which is to say: lamely. “What did you do?”

“Just now? I got some candy. You want one? Sugar’s good for the brain, and god knows you can use all the help you can get.”

He breathes donut sprinkle air onto my face.

“I’m watching you.”

“I can see that,” I say. “But seriously, you’re going to want to pick up Jimmy Scaz.”

“Scazoli? Why?” Brunch asks.

“Check out the office and you’ll know,” I say.

Turner pushes me back, grabs some candies from the dish, and then he and his partner rush into the back like a pair of lapdogs without a lap.

“Jimmy didn’t kill Gafoday,” Ping says, continuing to be baffled.

“No he didn’t,” I say.

“So why are you—”

“Distractions,” I say. “The more of them I’ve got, the less I get done. My two biggest distractions are Jimmy and the cops. For the next few hours, they’ll be out of the picture.”

She smiles at me. Ew, shiver.

“You’re not as dumb as you look,” she says.

“You are,” I reply. “So next on the agenda is money. Before anyone freezes anything, I want that Gafoday cash in… well, cash. So let’s go. Take me to your teller.”

A few twists in the road later (and not without extensive bitching and complaining from the overweight fuzzball in the back, who has apparently never walked more than fifteen consecutive metres in his life), we close in on a familiar sight: my bank.

“Oh fuck me,” I sigh. “I love this branch.”

The teller from earlier is staring at us with abject horror. I’ve really got to stop travelling with Jackson like this. He scares the natives.

“Hey babe,” I say smoothly. “You free later?”

“I’d like to withdraw some money,” Ping says, handing over her bank card and trying to ignore me. “In cash.”

The teller punches some buttons and then her eyes go wide. This is what she did earlier when she checked my account, but I’m hoping this time it’s not because we’re over-drawn.

“I… I need to get an authorization for this,” she says, and stumbles out of her chair.

Ping looks to me, shrugs.

Just then, the teller and her manager come back, faces puffed with the kind of self-importance you can only get from working as a low-level employee at an international bank.

“Ms Chow,” says the manager, glancing at me regularly, as if I’m some kind of optical illusion he wants to be sure isn’t real. “Is this man bothering you?”

Everyone looks at me like a leper in a swimming pool.

“What?” I snap.

“It’s okay,” Ping says. “He’s harmless.”

The manager leans closer.

“He’s a wanted criminal,” he says. “If you’re in distress, we can—”

She swings her fist back and catches me in the throat. I collapse onto the ground, gasping for air, while she carries on like everything’s just peachy.

“He’s harmless,” she repeats.

If my eyes weren’t watering so much, I’d love to see the manager’s expression. Jackson pats me on the head like I’m a retarded dog, and I hear him snap a picture on his phone, the bastard. I’d shove it up his ass, but I’d probably lose my arm in there.

I roll onto my knees and press my forehead into the floor, trying to find the willpower to breathe properly again. God, it hurts. I don’t want to end up like one of those people with the holes in their throats, and they smoke through the hole, and they sound raspy and scary and they never get any real pity, because you know they did it to themselves, right? I didn’t do this to myself! I need the pity, dammit! Curse, you Ping!

“Thank you,” Ping says a few minutes later, closing up the nice and stately bag they give you when you clean out a lot of cash at once. She strolls on past me, and I scramble to follow before she disappears forever. We stop around the corner, where I promptly collapse onto my knees.

“Okay,” Ping says. “So now what?”

“I… can’t… breathe…”

“Oh stop whining and focus. What’s next on your magical agenda? We’re going to pay off Tony, right?”

“Not yet,” I say, shaking my head. “One last stop, and then we’ll be done. Just keep that cash close. I need something to live for.”

I turn in an attempt to walk away when I collide with a young pup of a man with freakishly wild hair and big bug eyes. We both topple to the ground, but since I’m more experienced at it, I don’t bitch and complain like a little girl.

That is, until I see the card.

“Mother of fucking pete moss on a stick!” I fume, picking it up off the ground. “Where in the hell did you get this?”

The buggy boy backs away from me, terrified.

“I… they were… it was…”

Another damn URL on it. Somebody’s playing games. I hate games. Especially when nobody’s bothered to tell me the rules. I mean, I think I’ve been more than reasonable today, putting up with the kind of shit that would make the average person lock himself in a church steeple and throw thumbtacks at pedestrians at rush hour. But seriously, this is one step too far. Just when I feel like I’ve got it all under control, I’m reminded of the one thing that still makes no sense! And by god, I’m not putting up with it anymore! Fuck that! No more irrationality! I demand reasonableness!

I point the gun at the kid’s face.

“Where the hell did you get the card?” I yell.

“I just thought my girlfriend might be cheating on—”

I flip off the safety. Or at least I think that’s the safety.

“Where?” I boom.

He points behind him, down the street. His hands are shaking and… yes! He wet himself! It’s the circle of life in action!

“The alley by the Chinese restaurant…” he stammers. I sneer at Ping, but she just rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, we’re all plotting against you.”

“Fuck-a-duck,” I grumble, get to my feet, and put the gun back in my pocket. The buggy boy gets up and runs for his life, tripping onto his face two whole times before he’s out of sight. I turn to Jackson and Ping, hold up a warning finger.

“You wait here. I don’t want witnesses.”

I storm down the street, thinking of all the nasty things I’m going to do, and by the time I get to the corner, I’ve devised a thousand means of torture, any one of which would make Dick Cheney blush.

I enter the alley and come face-to-face with the bitch who’s been giving out all my cards.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 20

The first thing I see in the alley is a dog wearing a vest and a sign. The second thing I see are spots as a stroke cripples the logic parts of my brain, because oh my fucking lord it’s a dog!

“Marx!” Ping says, arriving just as I’m about to collapse in furious agony. “What’s… what’s going on?”

I point at the dog.

“This dog is giving out my business cards.”

Ping stares at me in exactly the same way I would if I were not myself: as if I’ve been sniffing so much glue, my brain has started to re-form itself out of sticky particles that bond together random shit like gum and cancer cells, and is creating a whole new universe that no one but me can see. Dogs giving out business cards? Suuuure…

“I think you need to sit down,” she says.

“No!” I yell, and pull the sign off the dog’s side. “See? Look here…”

Ping reads the sign.

“‘Hi, I’m Winston. Want to know why I’m carrying business cards? Call Richardson and Marx’… wait, this is your marketing strategy?”

“No!” I scream. “No, that’s what I’m saying! We have no marketing strategy! This dog is an interloper!”

The dog licks my fingers. I punch it in the face.

I was already going to hell. You shut the fuck up.

Ping grabs my shoulders and turns me around as the dog whimpers and crawls away. I should get all Old Yeller on his ass, the little punk.

“You need to get a grip,” Ping says. “The business cards aren’t important.”

“They are!” I say. “They’re important because they make no fucking sense at all! Why the hell is someone making a dog hand out my cards? Who would do that? Are they trying to help me? I don’t need any more business today! I’m already busy enough! This is going to kill me, and I don’t understand why!”

“Shit dude,” says Jackson, waddling into the alley like a moss-covered Buddha, “you’re doin’ the first case free?”

“The what?”

“The first case is free.”

“It is fucking not.”

“Says so on the sign.”

I turn around, and sure enough, on the other side of the dog is another sign that says “And the first case is free!”

Ping grabs my ear and pulls me back before I can strangle the dog. He’s laughing at me, I can tell. I should cap his ass.

“You’re getting distracted again,” Ping warns.

“Of course I’m getting distracted! If everyone dipshit within a ten-block radius has one of these freebie cards, how the hell am I going to get any real work done? It’s going to take up all my available time and…”

I stare at the dog.

“Oh shit.”

Ping frowns, pulls me further away.

“What now?”

“The world is starting to make sense. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. This is not good.”

“What’s not good?”

“I’m losing my house. Furball! Can you check Matt’s email?”

Jackson takes a step back, tries to pass himself off as someone with scruples. If he has any, they’re deep inside that massive mound of blubber, and I don’t see ‘em.

“Dude… reading someone else’s private email…?”

“Yeah.”

He stares at me for a second.

“No problemo.”

Ping slaps me across the face and pushes me against the wall. If she were wearing leather, tassles and a clown mask, this would be one of my more conservative dreams. Well, except for all the Chinese people.

“Where do we go next?” she asks.

“That’s confidential.”

She punches me in the stomach, but doesn’t let me double over. Pretty much par for the course with her.

“Where are we going next?” she growls.

“We’re calling the cops.”

She follows me as I barge out across the street to the convenience store promising “Cheap Condoms!”, which is probably the least appealing marketing scheme I have seen since someone made a fucking dog give out business cards, god dammit.

“Hello and welcome!” says the teenaged girl behind the counter with exactly as much pep as I have sunshine in my life. This is what they mean by “functional comatose.” Well, at least she has enough eye shadow on to paint the Mona Lisa, so we all have something to mock.

“I need to use your phone,” I say.

“No public phone,” she says blandly.

I grab a pack of candy from the rack, toss it over.

“I’m a customer. Gimme the phone.”

“No public phone,” she repeats.

“All right, can you call the cops then?”

She stares at me a second. Once again, I am off-script with hired help… but in this case, I’m not sure she has the neural pathways to cope. She’s blinked five times in the last five seconds. Is her brain rebooting?

“No public phone,” she says, after much deliberation.

“I don’t need to make the call myself. Can you call?”

“Nuh-uh,” she says.

“Why the fuck not?”

“No public ph—”

“Look!” I shout, pointing at Ping, who doesn’t want to be involved, I can tell. “She was mugged just now!”

The girl looks at Ping, chews her gum, and then looks at me.

“We offer pay day loans at unbeatable prices—”

I take out the gun and aim it straight at the girl’s head.

“Make the damn call.”

She chews some more.

“Are you robbing me?”

“Yes. Yes I am. Now call the cops.”

The girl looks at Ping, who touches my arm gently and whispers in my ear: “Can’t we just get Jackson to call instead?”

“He’s busy right now. And besides, it’s the principle of the thing. How did we, as a society, get to the point where a customer can’t come in and get a free phone call without resorting to robbing the place? What have we become? Who brought the dog in here?”

Winston the shill is sniffing some cookies on a low shelf.

“He looked sad,” Jackson says, as if it’s something resembling an excuse.

“That’s cause I punched him in the face. You want to be next?”

Jackson shrinks away.

“No dogs in the store,” the girl says.

“Have you called the cops yet?” I yell.

Chew. Chew. Chew. Blink.

“No.”

“If you don’t call them right this minute, I’m going to shoot this dog.”

“Outside the store?”

I throw a pack of gum at her forehead. Miraculously, I hit! Her face twists up and her eyes start to water, and she reaches down and picks up the phone and punches in a very short number that I can only assume is for the police. Either that or she’s writing “WTF” on Twitter.

“Hi? Yeah, I’m like being robbed,” she says under her breath, as if we’re not standing right here and I didn’t just order her to call for help a second ago. “No, like for reals this time.”

Ping whispers in my ear: “We should go.”

“Hold your midget horses will ya?” I wave to the girl, and speak as clearly as I can for the sake of her fragile mental acuity: “Send Turner and Brunch, if they can.”

“Hi, yeah, he says he wants Turner to bring food or somethin’. For reals. Would I make that up? Seriously? No way.”

She hangs up the phone and goes back to chewing with full ferocity.

“They said waitasec.”

“Good. Tell them we’ve gone to the pawn shop down the street.”

The girl frowns at the complex sentence structure, and I briefly flirt with the idea of speaking in Idiotese to make it easier on her. Instead, I march up to the counter, grab a blank lottery ticket form and a pen, and start writing.

“Five ways to win,” says the girl. “Millions in prizes.”

“You’re a failure of a human being,” I tell her.

“Cheap condoms.”

“I don’t need your life story.”

I finish writing: “Turner/Brunch: Gone to pawn shop. Hurry the fuck up!” and toss the pen in a bottle of licorice. Ping and Jackson follow me out the door as the girl calls “Thanks come again!” like it was drilled into her by a wiry German man who thinks waterboarding is for sissies.

“What pawn shop are you talking about?” Ping asks, trying to keep up with my full-size strides.

“Bobby’s joint,” I say. “That’s where the party is.”

She grabs my arm and turns me around, and I let her — not because I’m scared of her, you understand. Because she’s about to go through some really tough shit, and I want to be sure she knows that I’m going to be there with her. Laughing, of course, but never mind that.

“Why Bobby’s pawn shop? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Your patience is as short as you are, isn’t it?”

“I’m serious, Marx. What’s going on?”

“Marx!” comes an angry voice from behind, and we turn to see Jimmy Scaz limping towards us, drawing his gun.

“Running time!” I squeak, and Ping and Jackson and I tear down the street and into the pawn shop, ducking behind some stereo equipment and trying to blend in rather unsuccessfully.

Just then, I get the distinct impression we’re not alone. I glance over my shoulder and notice the room is remarkably full of life. There’s the janitor from Mr Owl’s place… his face is a funny kind of blood and purple. Then there’s Tony, whose right hand is a funny kind of blood and purple. And Mrs Dewali, who’s just a funny kind of fat and ugly.

“What’s up?” says Tony.

Jimmy bursts in the door with a victorious grin on his face, which disappears the second he sees Tony.

“Shit,” he says.

“What’s all the racket in here?” yells Bobby, lumbering into the room with a shotgun ready, but aimed at the floor. That is, until he sees me.

“You!”

“Hey, Bobster,” I say. “Didja miss me?”

He takes careful aim at me, face twitching furiously. Obviously feeling left out, Tony points his gun at Jimmy, who flinches and aims at Dewali (mistaking her for Tony’s wife? Poor, stupid Tony). Maurice, being the good bodyguard that he is, aims at ninja-like Ping, who shoots daggers with her eyes, because she doesn’t have a gun, the loser.

It’s like if the cast of Gilligan’s Island parodied a Tarantino flick: funny, but somehow deeply and sickeningly sad.

“All right!” I say sharply, knowing this could very well be the last speech I get to give before I am sent into the fiery depths of Hell to spend eternity with Ruth and her minion, Satan. “Everybody here has something they need to confess. Who’s gonna go first?”

“Nobody’s goin’ nowhere!” Bobby growls.

He storms towards me, but stumbles on some boxes, and his shotgun almost falls from his hands. At that moment, I take my own gun from my pocket and make the biggest decision of my life…

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Fission Chips - Chapter 21

“All right!” I shout, “Everyone shut up, or I shoot the dog!”

Ha! The sheer absurdity of it is so stunning that nobody knows what to say! By threatening the life of a seemingly-innocent canine, I have shocked them all into complacency!

“What dog?” asks Tony.

Or, well, they don’t see the dog and think I’m crazy. Fine.

I point my gun down at the dumb-ass dog at my feet, tail wagging back and forth like the piss-licking assclown it is. Everyone spares a moment to look at the dog.

“Whose dog is it?” asks Bobby, getting back to his feet, but thankfully not aiming a weapon at me in any way.

“I have no fucking idea. Do you really want to see it shot?”

“It ain’t sporting when he’s just sittin’ there,” says Tony.

“It isn’t sporting no matter what the dog’s doin’!” yells Bobby. “It’s a dog, for the love of Pete, not a deer!”

Tony glances over his shoulder at Bobby.

“Don’t go imposin’ your morals on me, ding dong.”

“Say that again.”

“I said—”

“Hey!” I shout. “Shut up! All of you, just shut up! I’m going to blow the dog’s brains out if I hear one more word out of any of—”

“Don’t shoot him!” whines the boob, who is hiding in the corner. I’d totally forgotten about her, as if my brain had (for whatever reason) constructed a complex psychological barrier that prevented me from perceiving freaks of nature. Except I still see Jackson huddled on the floor next to me, so there goes that theory. Oh well. At least the boob doesn’t have a gun.

“Marx,” says Ping, edging towards me as Maurice keeps careful aim at her forehead, “let’s just calm down, okay? You’re sounding a little stressed.”

“Stressed?” I cackle. “This is me being calm! Now come on! I’ll make everyone a deal! Nobody shoots anybody, and I’ll tell you all how things got so fucked up.”

“I’ll show you fucked up!” Bobby says, pulling his shotgun up again. I flinch, hold out my hand as if it could stop the blast.

“Wait! I’m not boinking your wife! It’s—”

Ping leaps at me, trying to cover my mouth. The shock of it makes me pull the trigger, and the dog yelps wretchedly. Maurice, ever the good servant, takes a shot at Ping. The window shatters behind us as Ping topples me to the ground.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” she hisses.

“Wweh twuu wuhhh,” I say with my mouth full of lady fingers. She takes off her hand and I repeat: “It’s true love, right?”

“You don’t know Bobby.”

“Don’t want to, either.”

“Keep your mouth shut.”

“Fine,” I say, and she gets off me, stands up carefully.

“You shot?” asks Tony. Ping checks herself, finds no holes that weren’t previously there.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

Dewali glares at Maurice. He just lost his allowance for the week.

“Nobody shoot!” I say, carefully getting to my feet. “Everyone stay calm! We can work through this!”

“How is the mongrel?” asks Dewali with a hint of concern.

I check the dog. The bullet hit the floor next to it. No blood, no death, no nothing. Lucky fucker. Even my accidents fail to impress.

“All clear,” I grumble.

“So now what?” asks Tony, gun itching to blow Jimmy’s head off.

Nobody seems to have any initiative, so I break the ice.

“Ping’s pinging Bobby’s wife,” I say.

Ping kicks me in the nuts. Sure I deserve it, but damn does she have a lot of power in those little legs of hers. I fall back down on the ground.

“Liar!” shouts Bobby furiously. “I know it’s you! I know it!”

“Seriously, Bobby, I’d rather have sex with a pencil sharpener. I’m really happy that you can look past physical trappings, but good god, I’m not that strong. No, I’m sorry to say the one fulfilling your manly duties is Ping. Say hi, Ping!”

“You’re dead,” she growls as I stand back up.

“She’s a little shy. And little. Anyway, that takes care of that. Who’s next? I’m a tireless dispenser of truth and justice today! Bring it on!”

Bobby is staring at Ping with wide-eyed wonder, like he’s trying to think of how to broach the subject of a threesome without seeming like a barbarian. Looking like he does, I don’t think there’s much hope of that. If he read a passage from Shakespeare so beautifully it would make a grown man cry, he’d still just be a barbarian reading Shakespeare. Life sucks, don’t it?

“Who killed my Lukey?” asks the boob from the corner, catching everyone off-guard. It’s like a physical impossibility that something so big could move so silently. “D-do you know who killed my Lukey?”

“What,” I say, “you don’t remember doing it?”

“I…” she says, looking very sheepish.

“Pardon me,” says Dewali, “are you saying she killed Mr Maxwell? But she’s so small!”

“Lady, to you, everyone’s small.”

“He’s a liar!” the boob shouts. “I would never kill my Lukey! He was my one and only!”

“Which is why it probably sucked when you found out he was having an affair, right?”

“I… he…”

“Oh yeah, you heard me. He kept disappearing, sneaking out at night, staying late at work… and you got jealous, didn’t you? The tiny bit of a brain you have left got as excited as Bobby is now, and you convinced yourself he was cheating on you. Except he wasn’t.”

The boob stares at the ground sheepishly. Victory!

“He was helping Dewali. And I bet he told you that, but you didn’t believe him. So you got mad, and you got into a fight…”

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” the boob sobs. She grabs a large wrench off the table and slams it down into an old cassette deck, which crumples quite ably. “He just kept building those damned cabinets, and he didn’t listen to me at all!”

“So you pushed him,” I say, watching the wrench carefully.

“And he… he f-f-fell into the table saw!” she cries. Dewali nudges Maurice, and he gives up on Ping and aims at the boob instead. “I didn’t know what to do! His head was cut open! His brains were… were everywhere, and I—”

“You’re uncomfortable around brains,” I nod.

“I didn’t know what to do! They’d put me in jail!”

She’s pleading with me, but kinda threatening me with a wrench at the same time. For the first time, I feel vaguely excited to be around her. And probably for all the wrong reasons.

“Look,” I say softly, “don’t feel bad. You flew into a jealous rage, killed your boyfriend, dumped his body and sterilized the scene of the crime. Who wouldn’t feel a bit put-down by it all? That’s a lot of trauma for one day.”

She sniffles.

“Th-thank you…”

“Now zip it, blimpy. I’m working here.”

“So wait,” says Tony impatiently, “what’s this have to do with the money Jimmy owes me?”

“Oh, this is where it gets interesting,” I smile. “Jimmy owes you money, and I was going to pay him off with the money that Gafoday was giving me for finding his laptop. The one he said Ping lost.”

“But I didn’t—” Ping says.

“No, he was trying to frame you for it. He was selling it to the Finns as part of his liquidation sale. He arranged to have it stolen, and figured nobody would think to look past the midgety Chinese girl with obvious anger management issues.”

Vicious eyes. Vicious devil eyes.

“But things went wrong. You got kidnapped, and the laptop got stolen by someone else entirely. The Finns found out, thought they’d been double-crossed, and killed him.”

Stunned silence.

“We found the murderer though. Ping kicked his ass.”

Everyone looks at Ping. She shrugs uncomfortably.

“So where’s the laptop now?” Jimmy asks, staring down Tony’s barrel, but still hopeful he can turn things around. It must be nice being that dumb.

“It’s right here,” I say. “The janitor works for Bobby. Don’t you, janitor-guy?”

The janitor nods unhappily.

“Exactly. The tattoo on the arm was a dead give-away. Too many spelling mistakes to be a coincidence. See, the janitor here, I bet he steals stuff from the office to sell here at the pawn shop. He saw the laptop out on a desk, just waiting to be stolen, and he took a chance.”

The janitor glances at Bobby, who tears his eyes away from Ping long enough to look offended.

“Prove it!” Bobby snarks.

“You really want me to?”

He considers this.

“Fine, so what? I didn’t kill nobody.”

“No, but I think you’re going to want to give the laptop to Mrs Dewali before she gets angry. As a shareholder in Gafoday’s company, she’s as hot for that piece of junk as Jimmy is for hair gel.”

Maurice obliges with a second gun aimed at Bobby’s head. Bobby swallows slowly, reaches across the counter and picks up a standard grey laptop and holds it out with shaking hands. Dewali stares at it, then looks to me.

“What is your angle here, Mr Marx?” she asks.

“Me? I just want everyone to leave me the fuck alone. You all suck.”

She nods.

“Fair enough.”

Ping looks very unhappy with me, so I lean close and whisper: “You following so far?”

“You’re an idiot. Who’s going to pay Jimmy?”

“Oh right!” I say to the group. “Jimmy, I almost forgot about you. How’s it going, guy? Feeling the heat?”

Jimmy scowls at me.

“You owe me thirty grand, Marx. No, forty!”

“You’re not good with numbers, are you?”

“You shut up!” he snaps.

“No you shut up, you little punk!” says Tony, face turning red. “You’d be running things by now if you put half the attention into business as you do in your goddamn limo! Your mother — may she rest in peace — would hate the bitch of a kid you’ve become!”

“Well since you killed her, we’ll never know for sure, will we?”

“You little pissbucket… she hanged herself!”

“Yeah, after you pimped her out to that weasel Giocchi!”

Wow. I have never heard a family history even more fucked up than my own. I want to explore further at the same time that I’m certain any more information would cripple me emotionally. Somebody stab me in the ears.

“You shouldn’t be talkin’ bout things you don’t know about.”

“Fuck you, uncle Tony!”

“Fuck me? Fuck you!” Tony gets ready to shoot, and I get ready to get splattered. But then, without warning, Jimmy grabs Ping around the neck and points the gun at her temple, face all wooden and serious like he just now grew up and realized what a shithole the world is.

“Make another move and I kill her!” he shouts.

“This’s like the dog again,” sighs Tony. “I don’t care if you kill her, dipshit! This is what I’m talkin’ about! If you’d stop to think once in a while, you’d know!”

Jimmy glances at me. I shrug. Ugly as he is, Tony’s got a point. But Ping is giving me this urgent look like she’s in some kind of mortal danger or something, and that tiny sliver of a conscience that I keep meaning to throw out, it flares up and makes me do something silly.

“Jimmy,” I say, “put the gun down. We can work this out.”

“How?” he whines. “Tony’s gonna whack me if I don’t got protection! How can we work this out?”

“Well shit, Jimmy, I don’t know. I’m just trying to be positive, and you’re ruining it. Thanks a lot.”

“This is all your fault!” he half-cries at me. “You and that goddamn partner of yours! If you’d just paid me when I told ya, none of this would’ve happened!”

“Boo fucking hoo,” says Tony.

Jimmy’s eyes are watering. He pushes the gun into the side of Ping’s head even harder.

“You shut up! All of you, just shut up! If I hear one more word out any of you, I’m going to blow her brains out, and I bet I can kill a bunch of you before you can get me!”

“Oh please,” I sigh, “Ping as a human shield? She’s not even a real human!”

“Jimmy!” Ping says. “I’ve got your money… hold on…” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a bundle of bills. Her hands are trembling, but if you ask me, it’s because she’s having to give up the cash. Demons don’t feel fear.

She lifts her baggie up so Jimmy can see.

“There’s enough in here to clear everything up,” she says. “Just take it, okay? Nobody has to die.”

Just then, the door flies open, knocking Jimmy and Ping onto their faces. Tony is so shocked that he lets one fly, catching the surprised Brunch in the shoulder. Brunch stumbles to the side, and then he and Turner fire three clean shots into Tony’s chest. He stumbles a bit, then collapses backwards into a display of used dumbbells. Oh, the irony.

Turner quickly sweeps the room, eyes narrow and focused in a way they’ve probably never been without a Phonics book. Maurice expertly stows his weapons, and Bobby puts his shot gun down on the counter. Turner comes to me, and I realize I’m still holding my pistol.

“Finally,” I say.

“What’s going on here?” he asks, checking on his bleeding partner. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“Not much,” I say. “How’s stuff with you? Beat any suspects lately?”

“You said to meet you here,” he says.

“Oh right, yeah. Here…” I grab the boob by the arm and push her forward, right into Turner. Boob meets boobs. It’s touching, really.

“She killed Luke Maxwell,” I say. “And you’re welcome. If you like, I can stop by the precinct to give classes on how to be a competent detective. Oh, we can give out donuts for prizes! It’ll be a gas!”

Again with the evil stares.

“Hey!” grunts Brunch, dripping blood everywhere. “What’s this?”

He grabs the bundle of cash from in front of Ping, who tries to stop him. He flicks through the bills, wide grin spreading on his face. Ping clutches the baggie a bit tighter, backs up into Jimmy, who is trying to look nonchalant while sprawled on the floor.

“Well well well,” says Turner with a grin. “This room just got a lot more interesting. Whose money is this?”

“Mine!” says Jimmy, then switches attitudes. “Uh… sir.”

“I’ll bet. This place is a mess. Lots of paperwork, lots of questioning to do. For anyone that was here, I mean. Were you here, ma’am?”

He smiles at Dewali. Dewali puffs her chest out.

“No, officer. Not at all.”

“You get my drift then,” he grins. He looks at me. “So how about it? You want to be here too, Mr Marx? Or you want to take a hike? Cause all it takes is a small fee, and I can make it so you never saw a thing.”

I look at the bag in Ping’s hands, the bills in Brunch’s grubby mitts, and at his stupid, oafish grin. There’s only one thing I can say…

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Fission Chips - Chapter 22

“Winston is peeing on your shoe.”

Turner frowns at me.

“Who the fuck is Winston?”

“Look down.”

“Oh Jesus! What the hell?”

I must admit, the dog’s tugging on my heart strings right now. I’d give him a big kiss, but I don’t want to give Jackson the wrong impression about inter-species love affairs.

Turner kicks the dog away and stumbles into the door, then points an angry finger at Ping.

“Gimme the money!” he shouts.

Ping glowers at me. I shrug. Not my fault. For a change.

“Listen,” I say in as serious a way as I can manage while addressing a grown man who smells like pee. “Here’s the thing. We need some of that money to pay off Jimmy.”

Turner glowers at me too. It’s like a glowering party! Everybody!

“You owe him money?”

“Thirty grand.”

“Tough shit.”

“You sound just like my psychiatrist.”

He starts to turn away, but I clear my throat.

“There’s just one thing, detectives,” I say. “I’ve got this whole conversation recorded. We’ve got enough here to screw your pooch — ahem — if you don’t cooperate.”

Nobody moves, least of all Ping, who I can tell can see right through my ruse. As ruses go, it’s not the smartest, but I don’t have much going for me at the moment. If you had a better idea, you shoulda spoken up sooner, all right?

“Where’s the recorder?” Brunch asks.

“None of your business,” I snap. “Now here’s what I want. Do this, and nobody has to hear what we said here today. Ready? Got your little notepads open? Brains chugging along? All set?”

“Marx!” snaps Ping.

“Right. Sorry, getting carried away. Here’s the deal: you give me thirty thousand, and I let you keep the rest.”

The two detectives glance at each other. I can tell they’re trying to use telepathy to talk to each other, but since their brains are barely able to work at a first-grader level, complex mental acrobatics are probably far, far beyond them right now.

“All right,” they say together.

Maybe they actively share a brain. That would almost make sense.

Brunch flips through the wad of cash in his hand and passes it over to me. I put it in my pocket very gently, as if there may or may not be something else in there that could record conversations with stunning clarity.

“Wait a sec!” Jimmy snarls. “That’s my cash!”

“Oh Jimmy,” I laugh. “You’re so wrong. Tony’s dead, which means the Curse of the Idiot’s Debt has been broken. You can go back to being mediocre again.”

“I want that money!” he yells.

Brunch steps on his back and pushes into his spine with a well-worn heel. Jimmy yelps like the prissy bitch he is.

“It ain’t yours,” Brunch says.

“Yes sir,” Jimmy mumbles.

Brunch pushes down harder.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes sir!” Jimmy squeals. “It’s not my cash! I got it!”

Brunch looks back at me, and I shrug.

“You know what’s strange?” I say. “I just don’t feel safe with all his animosity. He could kill me at any moment, and then who knows what might happen to my personal recordings…”

“I’ll leave him alone!” Jimmy yells, taking some initiative for a change. “Nobody’ll touch him! I swear!”

Turner looks for my reaction. I shrug, as if having simultaneous mob and police protection is a so-so alternative to my chosen path in life. They’ve seen Ruth, they should know what I’m up against.

“Sure, why not,” I sigh.

“Good,” says Turner, then punches me in the nose. “Stop being so smug.”

I’d answer, but I’m bleeding and stuff.

Ping arrives at my side and helps usher me out the door as the sound of police cars and ambulances fill the air. We pause briefly at the sound of Bobby clearing this throat.

“Um,” he says, hesitating. “I’ll… I’ll get Moxie to call ya!”

The look of cosmos-dissolving displeasure on Ping’s face is enough to make me smile, at which point my nose shoots with pain and I go back to being miserable.

We sit on the curb with Jackson and the dog, watching the emergency crews race inside. One of the paramedics trips in mid-run and lands flat on his face, and the three of us laugh at the same time. It’s so fucking depressing, knowing I have anything in common with these losers.

“Too bad about the money,” Jackson sighs.

“Yeah,” Ping and I both say.

“Still, good to be alive.”

We both stare at him, and he decides to pet the dog instead. Exchange fleas, that sort of thing.

“So I guess this fucks up your day,” I say to Ping. “No job, no money, and Bobby watching you sleep at night. I wonder if he’s a watcher, or a doer. And I wonder what he’d be doing. I bet you’re wondering too…”

“We’ve still got the phones,” she says. “With the kind of microchip tech they had, collectively, it could really revolutionize the fission industry. I’m sitting on a gold mine. The info on there is worth a fortune on the black market.”

“I’ll give you five million,” says Dewali from behind us, staring at the sky as if she has nothing to do with the riff-raff that have been bathed in her glow of wonderousness. By the way, wonderousness smells like re-hydrated skunk ass.

“Ten,” says Ping without missing a beat.

“Six,” says Dewali, “and I let your friend live.”

Maurice points a pointy pocket at Jackson, who is still happily playing with the dog, and possibly making plans to elope, judging by the level of intimacy they seem to be enjoying.

Ping shrugs.

“Without him, you’ll never get the data you need.”

The gun points at me.

“Oh please,” Ping sighs. “Is that a threat or a favour?”

Maurice looks for instruction, having run out of options. I’d suggest he could try shooting paramedics, but he’s probably been exposed to enough Ping today to realize she enjoys random acts of cruelty. Shooting bystanders would just make her happy.

Dewali grunts and stares into a different part of the sky.

“Fine,” she says. “Eight. Final offer.”

“Done,” smiles Ping. “We’ll get the phones ready and arrange a swap. Nice doing business with you.”

Dewali doesn’t answer, just waddles off to her car, Maurice in tow. They drive off towards the good side of town, and I imagine they think our world is getting a bit darker with their absence. I’ll take darkness over self-importance any day. Unless of course I get a share of eight million bucks, in which case I will be more important than you.

I pat Ping on the back, visions of dick-shaped swimming pools dancing in my head.

“I can’t get over how useful you can be sometimes.”

“Shut up,” she says.

“So what’s fair? 50/50? I may need a blood transfusion, so maybe make it 60/40. Also, you’re smaller, so you don’t eat as much—”

“You must be joking. I’m not giving you any of the money!”

“Hey!” I say. “I got the shit kicked out of me today!”

“Not for me, you didn’t!”

“I… well… no…”

“Then case closed.”

She hops to her feet and starts walking down the street. Jackson gets up to follow, leaving me and the dog sitting on the curb. I’m used to being rejected, of course, but as a rule I only let my mom do it without some form of retaliation. Taking it like a man just gives you a phobia of shopping malls. Or something. Stop prying.

Pushing down as much wretchedness as I can swallow, I look over at the dog and notice it’s still offering me a business card from its vest. I take one, flip it over, and crumple it up. Richardson and Marx, Private Investigators. Go team.

Team!

“Hold up!” I yell, and hobble after them. “Jackson… check my email.”

“Gotta set it up. You got a phone on ya?” he asks.

“No, check it on yours. You can do that, right?”

He just rolls his eyes at me, and taps through some screens on his phone before stopping, mouth hanging open.

“Dude,” he gasps. “Oh dude, you don’t want to see this.”

Oh, there’s that migraine again.

“It’s from Matt, isn’t it?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says, handing it over. I read it, and pass it over to Ping. She reads for a few seconds, then starts laughing maniacally, the little bugger. I’d punch her in the face, but she might bite my hand.

“Oh my god,” she cackles like a witch. “You got royally screwed.”

“Thanks,” I sigh.

“He fucked you right over,” she says. “He got you to set up a business, but he pocketed all the investments.”

“Yeah, thanks for rubbing it in.”

“And he blew up his own car?”

“To fake his death, maybe. At the very least to throw us off the trail. And then he blew up mine for kicks.”

“Wow. I can see why he’s the brains of the outfit.”

“Thanks. Nice weather down there?”

She just sneers at me.

“So what?” she asks. “He’s disappeared? He’s off to…”

“Fuck-knows-where. He had plenty of time to escape, too, because I’ve spent the whole day trying to survive the onslaught of cases he set up for me. It’s a pretty brilliant plan.”

“Wait,” says Jackson, “You mean Winston…”

“A furry accomplice, yeah.” I glare at the dog, but it doesn’t seem to care. I should punch it again, teach it a lesson.

“That’s awesome,” says the goddamn Ewok.

“And the real kicker,” I say, “is that I have no way to get any of my money back. My house, my car — or what’s left of my car — all my savings… there’re all gone.”

“So you’re broke?” asks Ping.

“And broken.”

“God,” sighs Ping. “I feel bad for you. I do. So I’ll tell you what. Take this…” she hands me a bundle of cash. Thirty grand, probably. “… as a thanks for all the fun we’ve had today.”

I stare at her.

“Where’d you get this?”

“The bank,” she says.

“Then what was in the bag you’ve been carrying around?”

“Blank paper,” she says. “I told them I needed sixty as a decoy, but the bag should be stuffed with junk in case you tried to rob me.”

“So Turner and Brunch have—”

“Nada, yeah.”

“And you still have—”

“Yeah.”

“You fucker.”

“Usually, people says ‘thanks’ when they’re given money.”

“Thanks a lot, fucker.”

She pats me on the cheek and hands a phone to Jackson.

“I need all the data off both the phones, put on an encrypted disk and ready to go by the morning. Can you handle it?”

Jackson nods seriously.

“Yes ma’am,” he says. “I’ll get right on it. See ya, dudes! Be safe!”

He heads off to work, which is suspiciously in the same direction as the pub. Ping and I keep walking down the street towards my building, neither of us saying a word. I have so many things I could say, but none of them seem hurtful enough. Also, if there’s a chance she’ll give me more cash, I’ve got to be careful with the barbs.

We finally arrive at the office and take the elevator up. The button’s still slimy from the morning. Yummy. Down by the door, glass is all over the ground, because obviously nobody is being paid to clean anything up. I open the door for the midget and follow her in. It’s like I’m a gentleman or something, except I’m really just letting her act as an early warning system, in case Ruth has laid traps.

The waiting room is empty, but there’s blood and wreckage everywhere, as if every dead beat in the city has stopped by to say hello. Actually, they probably have. I bet they’ll be back tomorrow, too. If some of them have money, we might stay in business past Wednesday.

“Nice place,” Ping says as we enter my office. The big bay windows give a great view of the city, sun going down and lights coming on. It’s pure Private Eye bliss. The kind of thing I always wanted, back before I realized this job hurts like an angry antelope glued to your ass.

I sit myself down in the chair behind the desk which was supposed to be Matt’s, and carefully push one of his framed photos off the edge. It smashes rather nicely. Catharsis, baby!

“Is that a fan up there?” Ping asks, squinting at the ceiling fan, still churning that upper-atmosphere ozone like there’s no tomorrow. “Who designed this place?”

“Someone with the mental dexterity of a mango,” I say. “Or a sick sense of humour. Oh, speaking of which! Ruth! Any calls while I was out?”

“On what phone?” Ruth sneers.

“Oh, what a card,” I laugh, rolling my eyes at Ping. “How many cases did we sign up today?”

“Fifty,” Ruth says. “I hope you found Mr Richardson, because I think they’re expecting competency.”

Ping covers a laugh with her midgy little hand.

“I’m a lot more competent than you think,” I say.

“That’s a low hurdle to clear,” calls Ruth.

I turn my chair away from her, stare out the window. I can see my burnt-out car in the street below. There’s a spindly guy with red hair trying to figure out where the glove compartment is, hoping to steal something good. I hope it explodes again. I should get popcorn just in case.

“Wait a second,” says Ping. “Are you seriously thinking of being a private investigator? Like, for real? Even after all this… this… reality?”

I can practically taste the incredulity in the air.

“I think it suits me,” I shrug.

“Yeah, like a French maid costume.”

“Planning for a night with Bobby already? Remember, he likes leather. Roar!”

She glares at me with her beady little eyes in a way only the newly-rich can, and knocks twice on the desk before heading out the door.

Without so much as a good-bye.

I don’t know how they do things in Midgetland, but after all the shit we’ve been through today, I figure I’m owed a ‘thanks’ at least. Or a thumbs-up or something. If I weren’t so scared of her, I’d chew her out.

The far door closes, and I hear the crunch of glass as she goes down the hall. I have to admit, I feel a little sad. If nothing else, she taught me it’s fun being the tallest one in the room.

“So Ruth!” I call. “You still up for this gig?”

“Is there pay?”

“I think so.”

“In money?”

“I hope so.”

There’s a long pause where I’m certain she’s putting the finishing touches on a makeshift crossbow to plunge a rusty letter-opener through my heart. It is almost dinner time, after all.

“I’ll think about it,” she says.

“Don’t think too long!” I call. “Or I might just replace you!”

“Ha! As if you could find someone as qualified!”

“Maybe! What time does the zoo open?”

“You’re a real piece of work, Marx.”

“Work? You… you know what that is? When did that happen?”

She leans her head around the corner, eyes flaring red, and I hear the screams of the souls of three dozen children as they burn in the hellfire of her unholy gut.

“Say that again,” she growls.

I sit forward and put on my most passive face.

“I said,” I say, “I was not aware you have the mental acuity to perform menial tasks. Using a stapler, for instance.”

“You want to see a stapler?” she fumes. “I’ll show you a stapler.”

“It’s the red thing that punches metal spikes into things. Like you, but less evil.”

“Keep digging that hole, buddy.”

“Oh, I can go deeper.”

“Straight down to Hell.”

“Ha! We can do lunch at your place, then.”

“You asked for it…”

“You bring the blood of innocents, and I’ll find a video explaining how to appear human. It’ll be a gas!”

In this life, there are three truths I should really never, ever forget:

Staplers are oddly aerodynamic.

Ruth’s aim is inhuman.

And my reflexes? They suck.

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Fission Chips - Chapter 23

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS — READ TO THE END, FOOL!

Holy hell, this was hard work.

I knew it was going to be hard, but I had no idea how hard it was really going to be. Writing a book in single chapters every week for four and a half months takes a lot out of you, especially when they have to be funny and interesting and cohesive. Cohesive is the hardest part.

I really need to thank you all for helping make this fun. There were a few times when I saw the voting options and thought “damn, this is going to be the best chapter ever.” I especially loved it when you had me punch a dog. Or the bundt cake. Excellent, excellent choices.

There are a few people who need special thanks, but please don’t think it means you, personally, are any less important. Unless you are, in which case, well, learn to accept it.

Tim Sevenhuysen seriously screwed with your lives here. You can’t appreciate how much more fun it was with him working against you all. He took a very iffy plot sketch and turned it into a living beast. Please send him candies.

Ebonwumon won the business card mystery game, and suggested the perpetrator be a dog. It takes a special kind of crazy to do that, given what’s gone on in this story. Together, we kicked all sorts of conventional taboos.

Kyle Newton, as always, for finding the typos I made as I went. I write these things in less than an hour, but he somehow makes it look like I know what I’m doing. You all owe him a beer. Because I’m too cheap.

Now on to some serious business!

Fission Chips is done, but it’s not done. There are giant gaping holes in continuity and logic that need to be addressed, as well as creating a better flow to the story. I need to go over this thing with a hatchet to get it into shape.

Why, you ask? Because I’ll be releasing Fission Chips 1.0 in the first quarter of 2010, in eBook and print. Mark your calendars. Vaguely.

To make it work, though, I need your help. I need you to tell me (either by email or Twitter or comments below) what you DIDN’T understand about this version. What stood out as being wrong, or bad, or confusing? I know there’s lots, so don’t hold back. I need a big list of stuff to fix, so I can make this a better book.

So there you have it. Round One is complete.

Thanks for playing, and I’ll see you in the next Richardson and Marx Mystery!

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Fission Chips - Chapter 24

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Fission Chips - Chapter 25

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Fission Chips - Chapter 26

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Fission Chips - Chapter 27

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Fission Chips - Chapter 28

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Fission Chips - Chapter 29

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Fission Chips - Chapter 30

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Fission Chips - Chapter 31

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Fission Chips - Chapter 32

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Fission Chips - Chapter 33

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Fission Chips - Chapter 34

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Fission Chips - Chapter 35

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Fission Chips - Chapter 36

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