How Bizarre, How Random, How.....

Chapter IV-- A Song For the Rain

The duo were outside.

“I’m not done yet,” he said tartly.

“But we just got a call saying that one of us has to be in F. in half an hour.”

“Really, and who was the caller?”

“I don’t know, someone who said we had to be there.”

“And you’ll just go there because of that? Incredible.”

“Well, he sounded positively mayoral.”

“Did he? And do we even have a mayor. Isn’t our town too small to have a mayor?”

“I didn’t say he sounded like our mayor. I said he sounded mayoral. That is to say, he could have been mayor of any city, a little one like ours, a large one like New York.”

“But what business would a mayor of any other city have calling you?”

“I don’t know. He was very curt, almost chilling.”

“Wait a minute,” Mallory suddenly remembered something, “ you say he was curt. He wasn’t Hermann, was he?”

“Hermann? Our Hermann? The one none of us liked? No, definitely not.”

“I don’ t recall Hermann ever sounding mayoral.”

“Its Hermann,” said Mallory.

“But that wasn’t his voice,” squeaked the quiet one.

“Well, it was someone on Hermann’s payroll. Or someone on whose payroll Hermann was.”

“You make it sound like the same thing.”

“For our sakes, it is.”

“So what do we do?”

“Don’t go. And okay, you take care of the kid. I’ll…..well, he called you on your cell-phone, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and….”

“Give me it, quick. Anyone got a scrap of paper?”

They made lugubrious lips, the both of them.

“Not a scrap of paper? What about your notepads?”

“Oh those,” and Flaherty removed his, once again happy.

“Here, let me jot down his number, while you take care of the gentleman. And mind you, he isn’t the easiest interrogation subject.”

“And what are you going to do?”

They heard a sound, of a car starting up.

Flaherty hesitated. Wallace hurried inside.

“He’s gone sir,” he said breathlessly, as he came out.

“Who, the kid?”

“But why?” Flaherty wanted to know.

They saw a streak of blue down on the road.

“Okay, boys,” said Mallory, firmly, “after him.”

“Oh, I know what’s next,” said Flaherty, dour once more, “we’ll go there, only to find our tires slashed.”

“Go, go, for heaven’s sakes,” cried out Mallory, “and never mind the tires.”

And Flaherty and Wallace bounded up to their cars, and saw Flaherty’s assumptions to be true.

“Oh, God,” groaned Flaherty, “now what do we do?”

“We’ll behave like policemen,” broke in the quiet man, and ran up to an incoming truck.

“Stop, stop, police,” he yelled and waved, and when Flaherty caught up with them, they practically chucked the driver out of his truck.

“Fucking pow-lees, I’m-ah call the real pow-lees,” said the driver from his prone position beside on the ground, beside one of the wheels. He was a big black man, middle aged, paunchy, with a bald dome that looked like chocolate, chocolate with one or two strands coming out of it.

They bade him farewell, and bounded away and the quiet one was just in time to see the black man wave one fist at them and have on an extended middle finger poking out from the other.

“Where do we go,” he asked.

“I don’t know. We go on till we spot the car.”

“All we know about the car is that its blue.”

“Yes.”

“He could have dumped it somewhere.”

“Yes.”

“It could be a very fast, very sleek, blue sports car, while we’re driving a somewhat aging truck.”

“Yes.”

“We could exchange it for another car. Say, something like that blue car which I imagine him to be driving.”

“We’re cops. For the sake of upholding law, we can have any car we want.”

“Nothing on the road yet, nothing suitable.”

“Naw, keep on looking.”

“There, I see it.”

“There, on the side of the road. Dumped.”

“Jeez, and I wanted to nail that guy, and it.”

“Well, lets just go and get it.”

Well, the car was blue and sleek looking, all right, but nowhere as fast as they’d have liked.

“Its still a lot faster than that truck.”

“That it is.”

“So now, we’re looking for an orange car.”

“Yes, those were the colors at the sides.”

“Since we don’t have any more backup than the three of us, d’you think it might be a good idea to call the state troopers?”

“No, I say we go on, and get him all by ourselves.”

“But, we’d be crossing county lines, and under our state’s new laws, that’s forbidden.”

“So we’d break a law, so what?”

“But, we’re cops, we enforce laws, we don’t break them.”

“We learn something new everyday, don’t we?”

“You mean, we really break laws?”

“Wallace, look for clues.”

“Clues, where?”

“In the car, where else? I’m driving, so you might as well be doing something too. I like it when people are always doing something, the sheriff’s got his mind all warped up with this yogic meditation shit, but as for me, I like to see action happen, all the time. So, my friend, look for clues.”

“But what clues could I find? The car seems to have been stripped before he left. And he clearly used gloves…”

“Yeah, its against all the rules, using the suspect’s car to chase him, but what can we do?”

“Clever fellow, this fellow, clever story, his story.”

“But we’ll get him. In the end, we will.”

And the car came to a halt.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. It just stopped.”

“He did it. And who knows what he might have done further? What if he booby-trapped it?”

“Whoa, that’s a scary thought, and I’m getting out. Damn it, doors won’t open either.”

“Mine neither. I think I’ll try to break the windows.”

“Be careful, don’t hurt your legs.”

“Thanks for the advice, but I’ve kept them firm and well muscled all my life, and a little scratching is not likely to do them much harm.”

Simultaneous crashes were heard, and then seen simultaneously, two figures in cop attire struggling to get out of (obviously) broken windows.

Both landed simultaneously on the ground, muttered simultaneous grunts, and got up simultaneously together. All enacted, as it were, in perfect synchronicity. Even the way they both got up was the same. Then, simultaneously they ran their opposite directions.

Simultaneously, rolled and simultaneously hid beside bushes, so far not one little movement different, wow, you bet they practiced their moves before, but of that, no guarantee, sometimes things just happened….

One minute, two, three, the car stood still, and their patience was wearing out pretty simultaneously too….

Pretty much, but not quite. For these two, who’d for a little while seemed almost one in the way they moved, a one with two equal, symmetric halves, were now moving away once again from their executed feats of synchronicity and into individuality, so that one yelled a clear two or three seconds before the other…..

“Damn it, I’ve been stung by a fucking wasp….or a bee, or maybe even bitten by a scorpion…”

“Relax, relax, there are no scorpions here , so its only a bee, or a wasp.”

“You say only? Only? I’m burning here.”

And they’d have been burning a lot more badly if they’d stayed inside the car, because it blew up and what was sky blue a second ago was a dirty blue-black out of whose top rose a cloud of shimmering red and yellow, and this tapered upward to pure black that gave itself up to the sky in a thick, curly wave. This wave rose undulating till it became wispy.

“See, I told you it was booby-trapped,” one of them said.

“But, why didn’t it go off immediately,” the other wanted to know.

“Maybe it was meant to go off slowly, it was some sort of slow-acting bomb.”

“You mean, slow starting. I certainly wouldn’t call this slow acting. If we were inside, we’d have been acting dead.”

“Whatever. Maybe it was a warning.”

“A warning for what?”

“Or maybe, maybe, it was meant for that guy, and he was smart enough to find out and got away.”

“And how’s your wasp-bite?”

“Forgotten, until you reminded me, and now it hurts.”

“So should we call the state cops then?”

“And have them catch us crossing counties? No way. Let us head home.”

“I gotta tell you though, I can hear you pretty well.”

“And so can I hear you very well. Why?”

“So close to a bomb, shouldn’t our eardrums have burst, or at the very least, sustained some damage?”

“Good question. Maybe they are sustaining some damage and we don’t know about it. Maybe we’re screaming to each other and we don’t know about it, maybe we’re both carrying internally damaged ears, maybe there’s all blood inside, and let me see if that’s the case…..”

“Not my case, for sure…”

“Dig deeper.”

“Hey, I don’t want to make a bad situation worse.”

“But you gotta find out what’s going on..”

“I’ll leave that to the doctor. And we’ve got a long way to go besides, so let us not occupy our heads with such morbid matter. Can you sing?”

“Yes, and I’ll bring the rains down.”

“Then don’t. I’ve never really heard you sing, that’s why I asked.”

“Well, I tend to sing dirges, you know, laments, sad, soulful matter. That will not only bring the rains down, but also tears to your eyes, and so many tears that they’ll compete with the rain.”

“Well, I’m kinda feeling nasty right now, but I don’t think I want to cry that badly. I sure as hell don’t want to compete with the rain.”

And the other fellow started to sing.

“Hey, cut it out. You’re right, you really are terrible. You’ll bring the rain, and tears to my eyes, not because what you’re singing is sad, but because you’re so particularly, spectacularly bad. You’re horrendous, you should never attempt to sing another note in your life.”

“But that’s horrendous, accusing me of being so bad. You’re cruel, don’t you have no pity? But I’ll grant you your request, and sing well out of your earshot. Is that okay? Can I at least hum?”

“Okay, hum, just make sure I don’t hear a thing.”

“Okay, I’ll hum very softly. I’ll make sure you don’t hear a thing.”

Five minutes later he wasn’t humming anymore, but singing, and L had had enough of that and went over and put a hand over his mouth.

H. fidgeted and shook his head until he was free.

“But, you promised if I just sang softly………”

“No, that wasn’t the agreement at all, I said, if you hummed, and I couldn’t hear it. You broke the agreement on all fronts.”

“Please, be a buddy for once and let me sing. I promise, only one song. Just one. I’m such a fan of good music that I can’t let it be….”

“Well, if you were such a fan of good music, you wouldn’t be singing and destroying it completely…..”

And they both stopped in their tracks, right in the center of the road, because the ground began vibrating. And over in the distance, they saw a black shape grow larger.

They waited till they could see what it was, and it turned out to be a truck, one of those lengthy eighteen wheeled ones, and both waved and pointed to their badges when it was close enough.

The truck stopped, and for a moment nothing happened. No one got out.