Bang Bang
“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…