THE MONKEYSHINES CASE, ENTRY 6
If you wanted a noncompliant cab driver electroshocked, and I mean really electroshocked, Dr. Crimson was the only man for the job. But we were on a bit of a budget, so we went with the only woman for the job and it saved us a good fifteen percent off the top.
While I agree that it’s odd that female electroshock doctors command less compensation than their male counterparts, particularly considering that the level of sadism needed to properly turn a brain to goo is so far beyond the baseline, namby-pamby sadism of even the most unhinged chiropractor, I’d imagine this case of market-value incongruity to be more the result of prospective knock-kneed clients having to keep the name Dr. Deathsphere in their contact-list than anything gender-related.
If whomever designed Dr. Deathsphere’s dungeon had heard of sanitation it was clearly only in the realm of the theoretical; there were rats in the rats in the walls, little rats being chewed on by bigger rats like the worst gum imaginable, and if poop hadn’t been used as a spackling material, then whatever they went with to decorate the walls was an astoundingly accurate facsimile. But we weren’t there for the feng shui, impressive at it was, no: we were there to scare the bejesus out of a recalcitrant cabbie.
We had run out of sharp things to poke the cab driver with back at home base, Randy and I had, and I was already three texts toward a meeting with Dr. Deathsphere by the time Randy had resorted to jabbing him with a pillow, but that didn’t mean I actually wanted our portly porter’s brain-pan to pop; I just wanted to be certain that Randy had kung fu grip squeezed every bit of usable information out of him before we let him loose.
But, as often happens when one dabbles in torture, things went sideways quickly down in the Deathsphere dungeon, as the walls began to close in on us, sliding at us slowly on rusty, screeching rails, while the good Doctor herself unleashed a hideous laugh that all but sent Randy to pieces. It was sad to see, my longtime partner choosing to huddle in a panic of hastily-written goodbye texts rather than staring into the face of a death-by-squishing with a triumphant gracias, no quiero.
The walls managed to shriek out a tu español es terrible before Captain Quadrangle—whom I had never seen in person, and whom was much lovelier in real life than her magazine spreads would have lead me to believe—kicked through the door, declaring that this time Dr. Deathsphere had gone too far and throwing Randy a wink before pulling the doctor close, muttering something about enthusiastic role-play and sitting her down in the other room so that they could hash it out.
And while the walls might have continued to close in around us, I was floored that Randy—Randy, of all people—had a direct line to Captain Quadrangle; floored and, I’m not embarrassed to say, a little jealous. Randy pooh-poohed the whole thing as I dragged our cabbie out of our deathtrap, but I peppered him with questions relentlessly, finally getting him to admit that they had gone to high school together just as we passed a rather stern Captain Quadrangle saying it’s about boundaries, Susan to a downcast Dr. Deathsphere, reaching the outside of the dungeon just as the sun began to hide behind the horizon.
It was then, in the fading light of that anxious day, that we let the cabbie go like a dove into the air, free, then, to return to his flock, his crew of likewise corpulent cab drivers surely welcoming him back with open, pudgy arms.
