D. Schmidt - They Ate the Waitress?

The large man was slow to reach the door. His shots blasted holes in the blacktop. Nick ran across the lot, through a patch of trees, and down a trash-strewn alleyway. He jogged for several blocks, ducking between two parking garages. He wriggled out of the ropes, the pieces of the broken chair clattering to the ground. The handcuffs still held his hands behind his back. He paused, listening. “No gunshots. I guess I must be safe. Fat boy probably doesn’t want to run this far.”

After a few blocks, he saw a familiar-looking blue box: an emergency transmitter booth. Stepping inside, he was greeted by an overly-friendly, computer-generated voice: “Welcome, and thank you for choosing Prolix Communications! Name and city, please.”

“I could call a security patrol, tell them what happened,” he thought, “but that would be pretty embarrassing. Even so, I still need some help.” To the transmitter booth, he said, “Business listings. Any locksmith, city of Vancouver.”

“Please insert one dollar.”

“Oh, hell.”

He struggled and stretched to reach his money pouch. He dropped a coin into the booth’s slot, and then positioned his body so that the handcuffs wouldn’t be visible to the camera.

A voice came from nowhere. “Hello?” Apparently the booth’s hologram projector was out of order.

“I locked myself out of the house,” he lied. “Can you come to this transmitter booth?”

“Be there in forty-five minutes,” the locksmith’s voice replied. “Maybe a couple less.” The booth beeped, ending the call.

He leaned against the side of the booth and lowered himself to his feet. His head felt like a piece of meat on a skewer. “God, I hope the locksmith has a sense of humor.”

The following morning, Nick had a rental car sent to his apartment. “Technically, my car was destroyed because of my last case, which I had already declared closed. Can I still charge the rest home folks for it? – God, I wish Fairbanks had murdered Renée. That would make my life so much easier.”

Feeling stressed, he decided to have a long, relaxing breakfast at his favorite coffee house, a little place called Caffè Ebbro . A neon sign in the front window flashed their slogan: “Our Coffee Has Booze In It.”

Picking at an apple bacon omelet, he tried to go over a copy of his case notes, but Sophia forced her way into his thoughts. “Why can’t I keep my mind on Renée? Sophie came to the hospital and I wouldn’t even speak to her. I told myself that I didn’t have the energy to maintain a conversation, but that was just an excuse. She cares about me so much; more than anybody else does, that’s for damn sure. Why can’t I just talk to her? Why can’t I talk to anybody? – God, these eggs are terrible. Breakfast here is like something out of H.P. Lovecraft.”

A woman in a blue shawl stepped through the door, carrying a crying toddler over her shoulder. It was pulling at her hair and screaming like a teenager in a horror movie. “What would I do if Sophie wanted children?” he wondered. “Having a child is like losing a finger: you can deal with one or two, but three or more could ruin your life. Even if you baby-proof the house, sometimes babies still get in.” He finished the last few bites of egg and stubbed out his cigarette in the butter dish. “Even if Sophia never wants children, staying with any woman long enough will change your life forever. Sometimes even in a good way.”

He was finally ready to see her. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he had to say something. It was early enough in the morning that her shift at work should have been just about over. He would try to catch her before she went home.

The sign in the parking lot was supposed to say “Little Brothers – Always Open.” Someone with a socket wrench and too much free time had rearranged the letters. Now the sign read “two LOnely lips At her Breast.”

He stepped inside and headed for the back of the store, hoping to find Sophia in the employee locker room. The store was very busy for so early in the morning. A salesman was demonstrating an advanced lie detector that could also identify fibs, exaggeration, and hyperbole. Across the aisle, another salesman was showing a customer how to properly hide a spy camera inside another, slightly larger spy camera. Over by the office supplies, a new poster advertised “Pen Ultimate: Almost the Last Writing Instrument You’ll Ever Need.”

Ignoring the “Employees Only” sign, he pulled open the door to the locker room. Empty. Sophia’s voice drifted to him from across the store. “I think I have something like that in stock. Over here, next to the salt and pepper spray.” He weaved his way through the crowd, finally close enough to see her customer. Sophia was standing behind the gun counter, talking to a leggy redhead in a tight sweater: Jessica Campbell.

He ducked behind a mannequin and, peering through its armpit, watched the women lean over the counter. Sophia was idly rolling a long, black tube under her fingertips. The tube had a couple of large buttons on the side, one of which was protected by a latched safety cover. “It can deliver quite a nasty shock,” she said, “at just the right frequency to stop the heart muscles.”

“How exciting!” Jessica breathed. “That’s fatal, right?”

Sophia rolled her eyes. “Well, I suppose you could bounce up and down and hope some blood reached your brain…”

“And that button’s the power control..?”

“Yes. It has a relatively gentle buzz, for when you want to drag things out for a while, a stronger jolt, for when you want screaming and gasping for air, or a painful blast to finish you in seconds.”

Jessica covered her mouth and stared at the floor. “Good, good. Sometimes you just want to get it over with quickly, you know? Just get on with the rest of your life.”

Nick stepped out from behind the mannequin in what he hoped was a dramatic fashion. “Just who are you planning to ‘finish’, Miss Campbell? My money is on Todd Sweeney.”

Jessica grabbed the tube from the counter and pointed it at his head. “Maybe I’ll finish you first!” She pressed the largest button. The tube emitted a low, humming sound, a burst of blue light, and then… nothing. “Bang! Bang!” she laughed, twirling the tube on her fingers like a baton.

Sophia groaned, exasperated. “Nick, you ass, she’s not going to kill anybody… You can get up off the floor now.”

Brushing off his pants, he ignored the stares of the startled customers. “Then what’s she going to do with it?”

“She came in to look at our cameras,” Sophia explained. “We got to talking, and she mentioned that she hadn’t had a date in a while, so I told her to get the X43. You see, only the highest voltage is lethal. The lowest voltage just feels kind of nice…”

Tossing some coins on the counter, Jessica shoved the gun in her pocket. “What can I say? Danger is sexy. If I could, I would date a bobcat.”

For once, Nick was at a loss for words. Ignoring Sophia’s attempt at a goodbye, he returned to his car. “I’ve never been this embarrassed in my life,” he thought. “At least, not since I was eight, when Mom explained human reproduction in graphic detail. The worst part was, I had actually asked her ‘where do rabies came from’.”

He drove out to Renée’s building, careful to see that he wasn’t being followed. He slipped in through the laundry room again, this time not bothering with a disguise.

He knocked on one of Renée’s neighbor’s doors and waited. There were sounds of movement and someone stubbing their toe and swearing. Eventually, the door was opened by a barefoot woman in a pink bathrobe. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, showing her a printed photo of Donald Canard. “I’m Detective Wergild, and I’m investigating the murder of one of your neighbors. Do you recognize this man?”