Chapter 104: A Bullet Soaked Night
By maddan
- 1421 reads
Another rain soaked evening in Vegas.
Elvis Presley, singer by day, crime fighter by night, steps down the street, the rhinestone studded hems of his trousers glittering like diamonds in the streetlights as they peep out from under his trench coat. His quiff stays up and shields his eyes from the pounding water, held there by wax and sheer Memphis bloodymindedness.
He stops and turns. It's a bad district and even he has to watch it. Invisible, somewhere behind him, there is a grumble like a subway train passing overhead. He is not out alone tonight.
He raps on a door and a panel slides open guillotine. An eye like a yellow pickled onion peers out at him.
“Get lost,” says a voice.
“Cool it hepcat,” says Elvis. “I'm just here to talk. I need to see Harry The Bastard.”
“Harry's not in,” says the voice. “Beat it.”
“You want me to get the gorilla,” says Elvis. “Push the door in.”
The eye swivels in it's socket looking up and down the street.
“He ain't far,” says Elvis.
"Beat it."
The panel chops shut like a cigar slicer taking off a finger tip. Elvis steps back, everyone is frosty tonight, everyone has something to hide, something they particularly don't want him messing with. This makes him want to mess with it more.
From behind the door he can hear voices and laughter and music, not his sort of music but something dirtier, something lower down the food chain.
Jazz.
Suddenly the volume jumps up from one to eleven as the door opens and a blonde steps out. She spares Elvis one glance, quick like glances are in short supply, but long enough for him to know that she is one knock-out dame. Knock-out dames ain't his business tonight though and fast as a rattlesnake he wedges his boot in the door.
On the other side the owner of the pickled onion eye tries to squeeze the door shut out like a woman with too much luggage trying to shut a suitcase. Elvis judges the gap between the door and the wall and kung-fu punches him through it. The bouncer staggers back and Elvis is in.
Two more bouncers appear. Each as big and as good looking as a side of beef wrapped in a double breasted suit. Elvis kung-fu kicks one until he falls down, then he kung-fu kicks the other until he falls down. Then he leaps in the air and lands facing Picked Onion Eye in a perfect Preying Mantis stance, the kind that would make Fu King, his old Shaolin master who's murder he avenged only the previous week, proud.
Pickled Onion Eye holds up his hands. He doesn't want Elvis laying any more kung-fu hoo-doo on him.
“Where's Harry.”
Pickled onion eye points upstairs.
Harry The Bastard was behind his desk in his office. He was small fat man with a bald head and face like the face of a baby that is angry because someone has stuck a moustache on its lip. He sneered when Elvis came in but didn't get up. In the corner of the room a brunette in fishnets and a silk dress lay sprawled on the sofa like she was an exhibit in the museum of really fantastic legs. She glanced at Elvis with two dark eyes peering up like circles of pitch black water at the bottom of long, long eye shadow wells. Only sexier.
“Mam,” said Elvis politely.
“What you want?” snapped Harry.
“The welcome ain't what it used to be Harry,” said Elvis.
“You ain't welcome here since you turned against Jazz,” said Harry. “You know that.”
“Turning against Jazz is like turning against evil,” said Elvis. “Fu King taught me that.”
The brunette moved, one fishnet leg snaking against the other like vipers in a pit. She liked the speech. She knew Elvis was right.
“Harry I ain't here for you. Someone's been peddling kiddy porn and drugs down at the schoolyard. I mean to stop them.” He threw the Polaroid and two brown sachets on Harry's desk.
Harry looked down dismissively. In the corner the brunette stretched, trying to see.
Then Elvis noticed. Curse all those sleeping pills and prescription amphetamines had made him slow, the room in the Polaroid was the same room he was standing in. He noticed. Harry noticed. Then Harry noticed him notice and whipped open a drawer and pulled out a piece.
Elvis was quick enough to match him though, during his time in the army, when the world thought he had been cleaning trucks in Germany but he had actually been in special forces until his partner had been tortured and killed by terrorists and the army had given him compassionate leave, something that had been on his mind ever since the cryptic message from the sultry middle eastern woman two weeks ago, he had been taught quick draw techniques.
He threw open his trench coat, briefly dazzling Harry with the rhinestone sparkle of his brilliant white jumpsuit beneath, giving him time to pull his own .45 and level it at Harry.
They stood aiming at each other, man to man, gun to gun, like a Mexican stand off with no Mexicans.
“Drop it Harry,” said Elvis. “I've got the gorilla outside.”
“Have you?” said Harry. “I don't hear him.”
Elvis listened but all he could hear was the sickening muted thud of a jazz drum from the floor below. Harry started to laugh.
“The blonde!” exclaimed Elvis.
“I hear he has a weakness for them.”
Elvis turned and ran, pursued by Harry's laughter and the deleterious strains of Jazz. He raced through the mean streets of Vegas. Streets he knew like the back of his hand. If they were going to ambush Kong they'd do it at the docks. It was the only place you could dispose of the body.
His guess was good, he didn't have to look far when he got there, just follow the gunfire and screaming. Kong was on top of a warehouse holding the blonde, surrounded on all four sides by men with machine guns who were firing up at him. At that range they wouldn't have the impact to penetrate his hide, for that they would need heavy machine guns like the M60 he had lugged through the Vietnamese jungle on a secret mission to save the president the previous year. They didn't have that, but Elvis saw when he rounded the corner, they did have hypodermic dart guns of the kind the Colonel used to humanely bring down rampaging circus elephants in his part time role as director of the Tampa Humane Society. They were not trying to kill Kong, they were trying to capture him. They just needed to get within range.
Elvis silently crept up behind the man and knocked him out with one kung-fu chop to the back of the head. He waved and when Kong saw him he winked back and roared a little louder, knowing that all he had to do now was keep the other three gunmen occupied.
Unfortunately the blonde saw him too, she stopped screaming and yelled that Elvis was here.
There was no more time to be stealthy. Elvis drew his .45 and ran for the corner of the warehouse. Already the man was on his way, Elvis crouched on the floor, leaned round the corner and fired, dropping the man in one shot. He heard the second man behind him and wheeled round and fired. Bam! Sayonara kidnapper number three. Straight between the eyes. That left only one and Kong had him, leaping off the warehouse room and seizing him up in one hand, holding him with a grip like a big hairy iron cage.
“Talk,” said Elvis. “Or he squeezes you like you're not supposed to squeeze toothpaste.”
“Ach! Hoots mon,” said the would-be kidnapper. “I'll talk. I'll talk. Just get this hairy beast off me.”
“Talk first,” said Elvis. “Who sent you.”
“The Bastard sent us, he knew you'd be coming.”
“How did know.”
“I dinna ken mon, he nae tell me nothing.”
Elvis looked the man straight in the eye, using an old Red-Indian trick a kindly witch doctor had taught him when he had saved their reservation from being turned into an open cast plutonium mine by an evil industrialist by winning the rights from him at a game of Texas hold'em which would undoubtedly reveal whether the man was lying or not. “Do you really not ken?” he asked.
“Really,” said the man.
“Let him go,” said Elvis. “He's telling the truth.”
Kong released the man, who ran off into the night.
“And let the girl go too.”
The gorilla looked sad, but put the girl down where she could follow the man.
“We were set up,” said Elvis. “But by who?”
Kong shrugged, he didn't know.
“I smell the work of Ol' Blue Eyes in this,” said Elvis, referring to the secretive criminal mastermind who had run the Las Vegas underworld for years without anyone knowing his real identity. He was also Elvis' own personal nemesis and had sworn to destroy him.
“The only person I told was Sinatra, and he's my very good musical chum,” said Elvis. “Ever since I turned him away from the path of Jazz.”
Kong held up a finger, indicating that they were missing something. He pointed in the direction the kidnapper had fled and then at his mouth.
“What,” said Elvis, “the man's accent?”
Kong nodded.
“Scottish?”
Kong indicated upwards, further north.
“Not the Faeroe Islands?”
Kong nodded.
“But together with the Lichtenstein Passport we found and the Lesotho connection that can only mean one thing.”
Kong nodded slowly, it was too terrible to contemplate.
“The League Of Tiny Nations,” said Elvis. “The most evil, and dangerous international crime syndicate there is.”
They both stood there in silence on the rain soaked dock, a fog horn sounding plaintively in the distance. Both of them contemplating the full horror of what they had discovered. This thing just got real.
“Oh mama,” said Elvis.
“Couldn't have put it better myself,” said Kong, taking a pipe from his tweed jacket and lighting it.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
Wonderfully mad, dan! A
- Log in to post comments
"Bullet soaked" is
- Log in to post comments