THE MONKEYSHINES CASE, ENTRY 4
The cab driver got lost in the clutch of labyrinthine one-way streets surrounding the hospital, and though I left with a clean bill of health, the circuitous route back to the office afforded me all the time I needed to plot and scheme in service of my dirty, vengeful thoughts. While peripherally aware of the break I had personally made in the case—entirely individually, without any aid whatsoever—I, with my battered brain and ink-stained tongue, was having trouble concentrating on anything other than catapulting Randy into a minefield on the other side of the earth . . . and even that required more effort than I could spare at that point, as I was also vehemently issuing directions to my clueless cab driver, who apparently believed with all his heart that driving into the lake was a legitimate end-around to the woefully congested traffic, for he attempted it repeatedly despite my shrieking disagreement and might have succeeded had I not escaped once the office was within walking distance.
Following me like a stray dog, weaving in and out of bicycle lanes and startling dog-walkers looking for his two-and-a-quarter fare, I eventually capitulated and flung my emergency roll of dimes at the cabbie in an uncharacteristic display of disgust that inadvertently became an act of war after said dime-roll ricocheted off the dash and shattered the windshield as though it was a porcelain façade instead of tempered glass.
This was, to say the least, unexpected; the cab driver and I were both stunned, at first. But while my shock settled quietly into a powerful apathy, the cabbie’s boiled over into the kind of rage that causes onlookers to consider scheduling a preemptive rabies vaccine based on proximity alone. With one scowl, pulsing veins and aggressive skin-folds appeared on his head like knuckles and called to mind owls and their hideously transformative skulls, though I would have been much more comfortable with a morphing bird’s head at that point than I was staring into the murderous monstrosity that my cab driver had become. I attempted an ameliorating wave and strained smile to indicate a whoops, sorry type of thing, but his blood was pumping so loudly I absently imagined getting beaten to the rhythm of his heart, which sounded more like rightly-discarded song lyrics than the last thing a person should think before his pulped remains are cleaned off the sidewalk with a firehose.
Recalling my woefully-inadequate detective training, I frowned, clucked my tongue disappointedly, and waited for shame to overwhelm my adversary, which, for all intents and purposes, felt exactly like waiting for my ass to get kicked in. But the blood drained from the cabbie’s face, and for a brief moment I envisioned a world brought to its knees before my furrow-browed judgment before he was literally brought to his knees by what looked like a flesh-toned bear trap holding tight on what, presumably, used to be functional genitals.
Randy had crept up behind the maniac like a mustachioed ninja in an ill-fitting shirt and used his action figure-like kung fu grip to subdue my attacker, only letting go, unfortunately for the cabbie, once I returned his are we even? head nod.
We were, despite the fact that I was still spitting rainbows and had spent the bulk of the day just trying to get back from the hospital Randy had sent me to. We were indeed even, not least because I had a sneaking suspicion that I would have need of that remarkable kung fu grip before this case was in the books.
