Just then the gingham dog came capering up Satin Street with the three-legged calico cat hanging from his mouth. The happy swinging of his tail knocked over lampposts on both sides of the street. He trotted right past the apartment block and veered left onto Fuzzy. As he passed, the cat's limply swinging head bashed one corner of the building.
In Teddy's den, a fat chunk of cement and rebar bashed through the ceiling and landed on his head. He crumpled to the carpet and lay where he fell — still breathing but knocked senseless. He was completely at Edna's mercy. With not a witness in sight.
Should she run away, she wondered. Talk to the police dogs? File charges?
Or should she simply take her revenge?
The phonograph needle in the room upstairs was skipping now, playing the same snatch of music over and over again. "Clock, it told me — clock, it told me — clock, it told me. "
T.B. was floating down a sidewalk in a strange city. All sorts of stuffies were swimming past him — stuffed cabbages, stuffed olives, stuffed salmon, stuffed turkeys. A sinister black limousine cruised past, wiggling its tail fins. A rear door flipped open. There was an eel in the back seat holding a machine gun.
All at once bullets were punching holes in innocent bystanders like they were cans of condensed soup. T.B. dove for the sidewalk and turned gray. Scraps of lead-riddled stuffies writhed like dying worms in the trash-strewn gutter. It was like some terrible dream.
T.B. woke up on a sofa in a furnished hotel room. Doris the Doll was wiping his face with a washcloth, sitting beside him in a black brocade robe. There was a bandage on his rip. Everything was Okay after all.
"You're awake," said Doris. "Is your head on straight?"
"Straight as it gets, Doll Face. Got any java?"
"You thumped on the door and passed out. You've lost a lot of ribbons."
"They grow back."
Doris nudged the bandage. "How'd you let a thing like this happen, T.B.? I thought you were smart."
"Where's my briefcase?"
"Under the sofa."
T.B. groped under the sofa with four of his arms. He retrieved the case, unsnapped the latches, and looked inside. The money was still there. "Where's my gun?"
"In a safe place. You can have it when you leave."
T.B. studied Doris's face. "Do you feel like a vacation, Doll Face? They say Candy Land is nice this time of year. I'm ready for something different."
"How different?" she asked, sliding onto his lap and twining her arms around his shoulders.
"Different enough, Sugar. What's the alternative? You gonna stay in this hellhole city until it kills you?"
There was a knock at the apartment door. T.B. shoved the briefcase back under the sofa. "Who would that be?"
"I dunno," said Doris. "It could be the lemur from next door. He pays me to loan him my clothes."
"Get rid of him."
Doris unbolted her door and opened it. Standing in the hallway were two Chinks. One was a yellow shark, big enough to be denting his fedora against the hall ceiling. The other was Mr. Cho. They strolled in like they owned the place and trained two big black guns on T.B.
T.B. stood up, not too steadily. "You sold me out," he said to Doris. "You called me in to the Fighting Fish."
Doris shrugged. "I called you in to Vince. I can't afford to cross Vince."
"You think I can?"
Doris touched his cheek. "Poor little mollusk," she said with sadness in her blue glass eyes. "You're poison now. You're wrong. And you're not going to talk your way out this time." Mr. Cho and the shark sat down on Doris's bed and made themselves at home.
"Why am I wrong? What have I done?"
Doris lit a cigarette. "You haven't done a thing. It's a deal that Boss Mandrill made with the triad. They're going to hunt you down like a dog, T.B. Which is just what Harry the Mule did to a triad kid last week, for no particular reason, just boredom. You heard about that kid they buried?"
"I heard about it."
"Well, the Fish didn't like it, and they complained to Boss Mandrill. So he cut them a deal. He offered them payback, and you're it. You and that cash in the briefcase. The cash is just to sweeten the deal. I don't know why Vince chose you for the patsy. I guess you're just the expendable type."
"So I'm tagged for the Big Burn Pile, and everybody's happy, huh?"
"I'm not happy at all, T.B."
"Well cheer up. Prohibition can't last forever."
Mr. Cho and the shark stood up and gestured with their guns, inviting T.B. to leave the hotel with them. Doubtless they'd throw him in the trunk of a car and drive him to a secluded spot, before or after they croaked him. They stood on either side of him, took a tight grip on two of his arms, and moved him toward the door.
"Can I at least have my overcoat?" he asked them. Mr. Cho nodded to Doris. She pulled T.B.'s coat off the back of the sofa and draped it around his shoulders.
"Doris," he said, "if you're planning to throw boiling water on these creeps, right now would be a good time." Doris laughed in spite of herself. T.B. could always make her laugh.
The fish and T.B. were tightly packed as they hustled him through the doorway. Tightly packed was exactly how T.B. wanted them. It was all so easy.
What happened next seemed to be over before it began. All at once the fish were flopping on the floorboards, grabbing at their necks while pink ribbons gushed out of them. They'd made sure that T.B. had no gun, and that had made them careless. They hadn't figured on the little concealed pockets in the hem of his overcoat. So they hadn't expected the straight razors. And best of all, they'd forgotten that an octopus has eight arms.
T.B. slid back into the apartment, heading straight for Doris. She was kneeling beside her phonograph, throwing records around and groping for something in a cabinet. At the last second she snatched the disk off the turntable and threw that at him. He knocked it aside and grabbed the collar of her robe. "Be careful with those things," he hissed into her pretty painted face. "Sharp edges." Her scream started strong then shrank into a gurgle. Half a minute later she was lying on the carpet with her throat slashed.
T.B. wiped his razors on the bedspread, retrieved his pistol from under the phonograph, and pulled his briefcase from under the sofa. Then he said goodbye to Doris. "Hugs and kisses, Sister. You've got some strange ideas about how to throw a party, but what the hell. See you in the funny papers."
T.B. slithered over the twitching heap of shark meat sprawled in the doorway. The stairs were just up the hall. He climbed to the roof and slid down a rear fire escape. Up the alley to Paisley Street, and he was free and clear. If any more sharks were waiting in front of the hotel, they'd be waiting there for a while. T.B. meandered north, comparing the various flops. Up the street a canvas sailor boy and a hula dancer in a grass skirt were leaning against a lamppost and fucking on their feet. Nice neighborhood.
T.B. was peering through a fly-specked window into a truly unsavory lobby when the moose with the Luger shot him in the back. This time the moose was standing up close and hit him dead center. The moose turned toward the sailor and the hula dancer in their pool of lamplight. They walked up the sidewalk at top speed and disappeared around a corner.
The street was deserted then. Just the moose and T.B. A light drizzle began to fall. T.B. could feel it wetting the back of his head. The moose knelt down beside him, rolled him over, and frisked him. T.B. thought of his gun and his razors, but putting up a struggle seemed too difficult suddenly. He just wanted to lie here on the sidewalk and go to sleep. But this moose. This crazy moose in the cheap green suit jacket. What was his angle?
The moose flipped open T.B.'s wallet and glared at the driver's license. "T.B. Otherweiss?" he said to himself aloud. "That ain't right. This ain't the guy. What kinda name is that for an octopus anyhow?"