THE MONKEYSHINES CASE, ENTRY 10
So, if Randy wasn’t by then dead, he was going to be a very strangely-shaped alive person, twisted as he was like an Egyptian pictogram of a heathen who had gotten on Anubus’ bad side. I poked at him with the curiosity of a child finding an unmoving, upside-down turtle, and in response Randy shallowly croaked out what I could only presume was his last word: vroom.
Godspeed, Randy. May you vroom into the afterlife with hands full of kung fu grip.
“Shame, that,” said Countess von Bang, then standing beside me with a razor-smile of black lipstick and curious, inky eyebrows that appeared to be the lone aspect of her face allowed free movement. “His was a fascinating life, and he died the way he lived: twisted up from trauma.”
With that, things seemed to be getting a little too real in what to this point was a banger of a case, so I kicked von Bang in her heavily-fortified shin for bringing her flat tire to this free-wheeling narrative. Her head tilted to the side in what looked like an attempt to get her mouth to smirk, and it was more into her eyebrows than eyes that I asked her to get on with the demands so I could go ahead and shout never! with a shaking fist and send her on her way.
“We want your building,” she said.
“Never!” I said, shaking my fist. “It’s not mine to give—I lease.”
“Of course, but the owner was willing to part with it if, and only if, you agreed to it.”
“Well, I don’t,” I said, far more confused than I was letting on. “So you can go suck eggs.”
“That’s that, then,” she said, shrugging. “It appears the final monkeyshines is yours.”
Before I could even venture a what the hell does that mean?, von Bang took my hand in hers and kissed it as though I were the finest debutante in all the land, motioning to the cadre of goons with her to pick up Randy’s broken body and head back to the hovercraft.
I objected, of course, but whatever words I intended on using disintegrated under the extended scream that escaped my mouth in a torrent of bewildered agony, as the back of my kissed hand caught fire and shot billowing smoke directly into my open maw, which was partially my fault for bringing my burning hand so close to my face. I desperately tried to put the fire out by hopping on one leg and shaking my hand in a routine I was convinced, a) would somehow work, and b) was the at the root of all improvisational dance, and by the time I had smothered my fiery hand against the couch, Countess von Bang, her goons, Randy, and the hovercraft were gone, leaving me to smolder and stare out of my suddenly uncovered windows into a flat and dispassionate sun.
Curling up into what would be considered the fetal position had I not been beset with a curvature of the spine that disallowed such positions, I thought of my landlord, to whom I hadn’t spoken in over a decade, and wondered about what game he was playing, leaving the fate of this brick-and-mortar representation of the Lost Detective Agency in my throbbing hands.
Of course, the conflagration on the back of my hand resolved into a chapped and raw branding of a splayed four-fingered monkey’s paw, and as I shook my fist to the heavens in a half-hearted display of a beaten man vowing revenge, I heard the dot-matrix printer go off in the next room, already alerting me to the next case.
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The Monkeyshines Case was written during repeated listens to Aphex Twin albums, specifically Syro, Cheetah, Collapse, and Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 f760
