I have maybe five seconds before I get shot. And being body-bagged in this thong has definitely shot into the top five of my “Don’t Let It End This Way” list, just above accidentally drinking bleach and below diving into a freezing lake to rescue a puppy only to find out that it is actually an old rag and the girl you’re trying to impress hates dogs anyway.
As you can see, I have put quite a bit of thought into this list. Dr. Moriarty would say I was anal and the rigout I’m wearing at the moment would do little to disprove that theory.
With the seat at its lowest setting I have enough slack in my bonds for a bent-over stagger. My hands and feet are cuffed around the central column and this cheap-ass chair doesn’t even have casters so I gotta hobble along like a . . . gimp. Is it ironic that I am gimping while those dressed as gimps don’t have to? I don’t think so. I think it’s just unfortunate.
Fortz has pulled off his mask and stuffed it into his mouth in a ridiculous attempt to stop his gums bleeding, but more important, Krieger is scrabbling on the ground for his gun.
Time to find the exit.
This room has no windows and only one door, which is blocked by two buttery cops, so I’m gonna have to go through the wall.
Go through the wall?
Even thinking it sounds ridiculous. Nevertheless it’s either that or the aforementioned ball slicing. I crab roll onto the bed with just enough momentum to come to my feet.
“Hey,” burbles Fortz through the blood. “Stop! Police!”
In the words of the sweatband-wearing, fuzzy legend J. McEnroe: You cannot be fucking serious.
I bet McEnroe said fucking all the time off-camera. You can just imagine it coming out of his face.
I bounce on the bed to work up momentum and behind me I hear scuffling and clicking. I just bet that’s Krieger finding his gun. He may be a shitty cop, but usually the shitty cops are the best shots.
A bullet clangs into the chair’s column, knocking me forward a step and I decide to make use of this blast of kinetic energy to hurl myself toward the wall, praying for a single board of sheetrock. The way my day is going my head is gonna connect with a water pipe.
Also, my use of the verb hurl may have been a little optimistic. Lurch might be a bit more honest.
Saints be praised, luck o’ the Irish, the wall is a flimsy partition and I bludgeon my way through, directly into the middle of a threesome. At least I only count three. One second I’m in a room with two decidedly out-of-shape cops and the next I’m on a bed with a bunch of extremely well endowed young people who seem to be loving their work.
A line from Ghostbusters pops into my head: Do not cross the streams; that would be bad.
I duck underneath what I hope is a forearm and tumble to the floor.
A film crew is by the foot of the bed and the director jumps to his feet, all ponytail and pout.
“A eunuch? I didn’t order a eunuch?”
I will replay that later and be offended.
After a moment’s grace my sudden apparition causes pandemonium. Even in the kinkiest pornographic scene no one is expecting a semi-nude middle-aged man to come crashing through the wall. I ain’t even waxed, for heaven’s sake.
The guys lose their tempers among other things and the girl’s squeals sound a lot more authentic than the ones she was making a few seconds ago.
“Sorry,” I say automatically. “Just passing through.”
Waiting in the wings is an aged fluffer standing sentry at a dessert trolley loaded with various accessories. She is the only one un-freaked out by my arrival. Her jaded, heavy-lidded eyes tell me she has seen a lot weirder things than me in her day.
“Can you uncuff me?” I ask from the floor, shaking my chains urgently at her.
The woman squints at my shackles while the director calls “cut” over and over again in increasingly panicked tones and an expensive-looking light on an aluminium stalk keels over, exploding in a shower of white sparks.
“What kinda cuffs you got there?”
I glance nervously at the hole in the wall. “Police. Standard issue.”
She laughs. “Cop cuffs. I could open those with my tongue.” This idea is made even more unsavory by her mouthful of nicotine-stained choppers.
“A key will be just fine, darlin’,” I say, laying on the leprechaun.
The woman locates a key and goes to work on my cuffs. Meanwhile there is more activity behind me on the bed as Krieger attempts to climb through the hole.
“A gimp!” exclaims the director. “I am not doing a gimp scene. What is this, nineteen ninety-two?”
I twist around just in time to see one of the working studs, an obscenely muscled man, deliver a right hook that just about takes Krieger’s head off.
“Motherfucker has a gun,” he explains, which is enough to send the starlet shrieking from the room.
Krieger droops in the hole. One hundred sixty pounds of dead weight.
A few clicks later I am a free man.
“Who the hell are you?” the director screams. “What the hell is going on?”
I read someplace that it’s acceptable for men to scream like girls if they’re movie directors or being electrocuted.
“It’s okay, people,” I say, climbing to my feet, trying to muster some gravitas in spite of my appearance. “I’m police. Undercover. Those two were planning an illegal shoot. Just put all your permits and birth certificates on the table and I can have you out of here in five minutes.”
The room goes quiet and I can hear Fortz gurgling next door like a baby looking for a boob.
“Anything else I can do for you, honey?” says my savior, with that kind of frown on her brow that lets me know that she ain’t swallowing word one of my bullshit.
I tuck the cuff key into my thong—well you never know—then scan her trolley for something useful.
“Can I borrow a dildo?” I ask.
This is not really a specific-enough request. “Sure. Which one?”
“The big one,” I say.
I think about killing Krieger and Fortz, I really do. The bastards deserve it. No doubt this ain’t their first rodeo, so God knows how many lives I’d be saving by putting them in the ground.
But it’s not in me to murder them no matter how easily I could justify it.
Maybe this whole episode comes off a little comical with the thong and porno scene and so forth, but the reality is that I have never been so scared or sickened. There were times in the Lebanon when I endured some pretty harrowing depravity, but in that room my psyche grew a whole new layer of scar tissue.
I push Krieger back into the room leaving him flopped on the bed and climb through after him. Fortz is still in a puddle of fat and blood on the floor, bitching about his ruined mouth, like the day has dealt him a bum hand. He finds it in him somewhere to go for Krieger’s gun and I heft the dildo and give him a solid whack on the temple, which is enough to put him down.
“You are lucky,” I shout at the unconscious cop, “that I used this tool as a club and not in the fashion for which it was realistically molded.”
My heart rate is still at around two hundred, which is in the danger zone for a man my age, but I feel a little better. The immediate peril is past and now all I have to worry about is Mike’s errand and these two gimps coming after me when they wake up.
I dress myself, leaving on the thong because the porn crew, who have probably figured out that I am not in fact a cop, are peeping through the hole in the wall. Then I wave Mike Madden’s envelope under Fortz’s nose.
“You see this?” I say, but I doubt he can hear the question. “I did have the package. I told you but you wouldn’t listen.”