IP Violations
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.