“Right now I pretty much hate everybody.”
Ricky chuckled. “Aw, don’t talk like that. I’m about to become your very best friend. Even though you’re heterosexual, you’re going to want to make sweet love to me. I’ll turn down your advances, but you’ll be insistent, and finally--”
“Will you get to the point?”
“If you’re going to act that way, maybe I won’t.”
George found the two red wires he needed. If he had a pair of wire strippers, this next part would take a couple of seconds, but he’d have to use the claw hammer, which was going to be a bitch.
“Ricky, just tell me the good news,” George said.
“He has good news?” Lou asked.
“Salvation is near. Werewolf Hunters Incorporated--that’s not their real name, that’s just what I’m calling them--is in the area. I don’t think they have an actual name, or if they do nobody told me, but they are armed to the frickin’ teeth and that werewolf is toast, baby!”
George scraped the claw of the hammer against the first red wire. “They’re going to kill it?”
“No. I guess I didn’t mean ‘toast’ like toast, y’know, dead. I just meant that they’re gonna catch it. Then we’ll throw it back in the cage, get it to Dewey, and everybody can kiss and make up.”
“Ah.”
“You should be a lot happier than you sound. What’s wrong? Did you kill the werewolf? Please tell me you didn’t kill the werewolf.”
“No. But there was a...uh, slaughter.”
“What?”
“He murdered a bunch of people.”
“How many is a bunch? Fifty?”
“No. Nine or ten.”
“Nine or ten? He killed nine or ten people? Aw, shit, the cops are going to be crawling all over this!”
“And he mauled two cops.”
“Mother fuck!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Y’know, I actually had two minutes of happiness where I thought everything was going to be okay. That’s what I was thinking: ‘Wow, this was a bad scene for a while, but help is almost there and everything will be fine. I’m sure my good buddies George and Lou won’t screw things up any worse than they already have, right? Oh, no, they’re professionals, they won’t cause me to have to chug down any more Peptol Bismol! It’s all wonderful! Life is ducky!’“
The claw hammer was sort of working, but not efficiently, and George was scraping carefully to avoid accidentally cutting the wire in half. “I’m really kind of busy right now,” said George.
“Busy? Busy? Are you seriously trying to tell me that you’re too busy to talk to me?”
“Will you please get to the point?”
“I need you to punch this address into your GPS. Are you ready?”
“We don’t have the GPS.”
“Why the fuck don’t you have the GPS?”
George saw no reason to confess everything that had gone wrong. “It broke.”
“Well then somehow you need to find 7151 Pegg Avenue. Two G’s. It’s just a parking lot. The Werewolf Hunters Incorporated are on their way over there, and they need all of the information you’ve got. Everything you can tell them about his powers so that they don’t get screwed like you did.”
“All right.” The hammer slipped and George cursed.
“They’ll move the cage to their own van, and you can ride along while they recapture him.”
“Ah.”
“What?”
“We lost the cage.”
“Explain.”
“He stole the van.”
“Please tell me I didn’t hear you right. Because otherwise I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.”
“The werewolf stole the van, okay? What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say any goddamn thing but ‘The werewolf stole the van!’ Are you in league with him? Is that what’s going on? Have you formed some kind of werewolf alliance?”
“No, we just lost control of the situation.”
“You owe me one punch, George. When you come back here, I get to punch you in the stomach, as hard as I can, and you can’t hit back. Same thing with Lou. One punch for each of you.”
“Fine.” George had finally stripped the first wire, and started on the second.
“Somebody’s coming,” Lou whispered.
George immediately dropped the hammer, got in the car, and shut the door, trying to behave in a casual and completely non-suspicious manner.
“I just can’t believe this,” said Ricky. “I thought I was going to deliver good news, and we’d laugh, and there’d be some homoerotic banter, and I’d get to go home. You realize that you’re basically unemployable at this point, right? Who’s going to hire thugs who messed up like this? You’d better get a real social security number, because you’re going to be flipping burgers for the rest of your life.”
“I understand that.” George discretely looked over his shoulder. A well-dressed couple stood by their car, talking.
“And I don’t mean that you’re going to be flipping burgers at a classy place. You’re going to be flipping shit burgers at a rat-infested restaurant where everybody in there is a fat redneck and you have to wear some kind of dumbfuck uniform and a zit-faced teenager barks orders at you all day. That’s your future, George!”
“Can we do this later?”
“And you’ll probably get food poisoning just from the fumes of the crap you have to cook! You’ll have your stomach pumped, and the doctor will say ‘Oh, shit, it’s cancerous!’ But it won’t be the good kind of cancer that you can get rid of with chemotherapy, George, it’ll be the kind where your whole body decays inside, where your guts turn into this big goopy blob of rot!”
“I think I should hang up now.”
“Yeah? Well, I think you should not. Are you on your way to 7151 Pegg Avenue yet, you jerk-off?”
“I’m hotwiring a car.”
“Oh. Need me to talk you through it?”
“No.”
“Did I tell you about when I hotwired this guy’s car and drove it into a lake?”
George hung up on him. The couple finally got into their car, started the engine, and backed out of their parking space. As they did so, their car scraped against the one next to it. They stopped.
“You have got to be kidding me,” George muttered.
The man got out of the car to inspect the damage. He ran his finger along the spot where the two vehicles had scraped against each other, looked nervously at George and Lou, did a double-take at their grotesque appearance, then hurriedly got back in his car, backed the rest of the way out of the space, and sped away from the restaurant.
George opened the door, returned to his previous position, and began to strip the second red wire. His phone kept ringing, but he ignored it.
“Are they going to exterminate us?” Lou asked.
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah. They want us to tell the reinforcements everything we know about Ivan.”
“Should we do it?”
“Tell them about him?”
“No, meet up with them.”
“I don’t know. Ricky was having a meltdown yelling at me, so I doubt that he was trying to be sneaky about anything. I think we’ll get our asses chewed out--and for what it’s worth, I’ll make sure I take the heat on that--but I don’t think there’s any reason for them to kill us.”
“What about pure anger?”
“What I mean is, we won’t give them a reason to kill us. We’ll just make sure we don’t give up all of our information right away. Keep ourselves needed.”
“Are you sure that’ll work?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of our lives as fugitives from the law and from other criminals?”
“I guess not.”
George finished stripping the second wire. He wrapped the two stripped wires together. “I’m going to let you make the final decision on this one. My choices today haven’t worked out so well.”
“I don’t know. We should at least return the case of money, so they’ll stop looking for us eventually.”
The phone had gone to voice mail three times, but Ricky kept calling. George pressed “talk.” “Give it a rest, will you, Ricky?”