by G M Eppers
“Acrophilia, I would imagine,” said Badger, thumbing his smart phone. “Yep. I was right.”
“Okay, then we’re acrophiliacs,” Avis said.
Sticky was surprised. I laughed. “They’re not kidding. They’d climb up the outside if they could.” The twins let out an ‘ooo’ and I saw them eying the structure, looking for handholds. “But they can’t,” I added firmly. They feigned a matching set of pouts.
“Imagine if one of you was an acrophiliac and the other had acrophobia,” said Nitro. “It’s possible. Not even conjoined twins share everything.”
Agnes and Avis looked at each other. “I’m the dominant one,” said Avis. “So my preference would control us.”
“No, you’re not,” objected Agnes. “I’m the dominant one.”
“No, I am.”
“Girls,” I said, shutting down this inane argument, “It’s hypothetical nonsense. Come on. We’re next.” And it was just then that the clerk behind the counter pulled down the rolling shutter. “Oh, wait!” I called. “We want to –“
He rolled it back up again, but held onto the inside handle. “Sorry, we need to close so the current passengers can disembark. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
“But –“
“Tomorrow. Sorry.” He rolled the shutter back down and we heard it lock.
I’ve been in line for the Eye at least a dozen times over three years or so, and something always seems to interfere. Sometimes a call from Miss Chiff, once I began to feel ill, and it had closed due to severe high winds from time to time. It seemed to be my own personal curse. Don’t queue up with me for the Eye. It’s not going to happen.
“We can come back tomorrow,” said Sticky. “But it’ll be daylight.”
“No, that’s all right. We’ve had a full day, Sticky. Thank you for your hospitality.” There was a bit of grumbling, but they all knew there was nothing I could do about it.
We returned by the Tube and walked back to Hearth and Home from the nearest station by twilight. It was a nice evening for a walk. There was a waning moon. We were all glad to get back to the bed & breakfast and to our separate rooms. I showered, got into pajamas and climbed into bed. As I was placing my phone on my bedside table for the night, it rang. A text from Ms. Forthright told me the extradition had gone through, and we could pick up Butler first thing in the morning.
Chapter Five
Leaving the rest of the team at Hearth and Home to pack up our things and help Sticky clean the rooms we’d used, Roxy and I grabbed the Tube to Southbank, close to the Chembassy, and walked to Ms. Forthright’s office from there. We didn’t bother sitting down this time. Ms. Forthright had a sheaf of papers in a folder on her desk and as we entered she opened the folder and began stamping numerous pages with her seal. In a minute or two, she closed the folder and handed it to Roxy. “There you are, ladies. You’ll find Mr. Butler downstairs in the holding cell. Show that top sheet to the guard and he’ll hand over the prisoner. Good luck!” She held out her hand, and Roxy and I shook it in turn, and thanked her for her efficiency.
We took the elevator down to ‘B’ level, which opened on a cement hallway with a ceiling lined with pipes and conduits. At the end of the hallway, there were two doors. The one on the left was labeled “Guards on Duty,” and the one on the right read “Holding Cell.” We turned left to check in with the duty personnel, who mingled behind a lengthwise counter with a hinged opening to our right. As directed, Roxy opened the folder and spun it around to show the attending officers the top sheet. “Right-O!” said the guard cheerfully, after examining the document. “Follow me, then.” And he led us out of the offices and to the other door.
Before he opened it, I said, “By the way, you’ll remember he came in wearing rather distinctive handcuffs. Would you have a spare set I can replace them with?”
The guard’s face almost split in two from the huge grin. “That’s the bloke, is it? It’s been a right pleasure. Sure thing. Here you go.” And he handed me his own standard issue cuffs. “Don’t worry about them. I can slip it past requisitions.” He winked at me as he opened the door.
The holding cell, almost by necessity, resembled an old style zoo exhibit. A large, bare cage, milling with a couple dozen or so people who were competing uncomfortably for a spot on the one small bench in the cell. An open toilet was in one corner, but that was the extent of the furnishings. Poor Butler.
When I spotted him, I had only slightly more sympathy for him. He had his back to us, trying to hide from his cellmates in the corner farthest from the toilet. I could see he still had the purple fuzzy cuffs on, and I tried hard to stifle a giggle. I didn’t succeed very well. Neither did Roxy. “What took you so long?” He asked when he finally saw us.
“They didn’t want to let you go,” I told him. “We had to arm wrestle for it. Come on.”
He stayed in the corner. “Wait a minute. What about these?” he said, raising his wrists. “The bloody key is here in London. I’m not leaving until they get taken off.”
“I’m not sure that’s your choice, Butler. You’re being released into CURDS custody. If we want to take you and the fuzzy purple cuffs, we have the authority.”
“But you won’t.”
“Who says we won’t?”
He stared at me through the iron bars, making no move toward the door. “You didn’t bring the key?”
“Sticky said his friend has the only key. I believe she lives in Elstree.”
He cleared his throat, preparing for an attempt at politeness that probably felt completely alien to him. “Would you please call Sticky and see if they might messenger the key here so I can walk to your bloody plane like the cold-blooded criminal you think I am instead of like a member of the Kinky Rainbow Parade?”
Well, it was as close to polite as Butler was likely to get. It wasn’t as if the rest of the team hadn’t seen him in the fuzzy cuffs. And I think Badger got a snapshot with his cell phone before the police took him away. So I relented, stepping back from the cell to ring up Sticky. Out of the corner of my ear, and another corner of one eye, I could hear the other people in the cell take notice. “How much you charge, Big Boy?” asked an overly made up blonde in a miniskirt, almost certainly here for prostitution.
“Can I ring you up when I get out?” asked a large bald man in leather and tattoos with a Van Dyke and a mockingly girlish giggle.
“Purple is absolutely your color!” someone shouted from the rear.
Another prostitute, a brunette wearing skin tight jeans and a deliberately shredded top revealing a tattoo of a snake with spiders crawling on it, sidled up to him, reading the tag. “Is the sticky part before or after, love?” she asked around a wad of chewing gum.
“Hey, Sticky,” I said when he answered the phone, both glad and disappointed to be pulled away from the Let’s Ridicule Butler Show. “We got Butler released, but he wants out of your special handcuffs. If you contact your friend, tell her we will reimburse her for sending the keys to the Chembassy in the fastest manner possible.”
“Love, you really don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
“Do you think that the blokes who use cuffs like that would risk losing the bloody key?”
“Sticky, what exactly are you saying?”
“The key is ON them, love. Under the fuzz. The bloody thing is on a leash!”
I pressed my lips together to avoid laughing out loud. It was clear that Sticky could have informed the police about this situation days ago and Butler could have been out of the cuffs almost immediately. He deliberately chose to keep quiet about it, and I couldn’t blame him. “Oh, you are evil, Sticky!”
“Not evil. Sadistic. I don’t wear the bloody things. She does!”
“Um,” I hesitated. “You know the American acronym TMI, Sticky?”
I could literally hear the grin on his face. “Yes, I do, love.” He then told me exactly how to find the key.
“While I have you, how’s the rest of my team?” I a
sked Sticky, in no particular hurry to free Butler now that I knew where the key was. He was where I could see him, and that’s all I wanted at the moment.
Evidently, Sticky moved the phone to pick up noises in the room. I heard what sounded like feeding time in the monkey house. “They’re having a bit of breakfast. A real fry up. Got three fryers going full speed, and we’re on the second pot of tea.”
“So you’re having fun,” I said.
“Oh, yes, love. Gads of it. Thanks to you, I’ll be able to open for guests in a few days. You saved my life, Helena. You saved my life and my business and my bloody wits. You blokes can stay all you want, eat all you want, and heck, shag all you want –“
I had to interrupt. “Sticky, we don’t ‘shag’ each other. This is business.”
“If you say so, love. Oh, there’s the tea!” I could hear a high pitched whistling in the background. “Ta ta!” The line went dead and I stared at the phone for a moment before slipping it back in my pocket.
I turned back to Roxy and Butler. Butler was slobbering all over her, oozing insincerity, as if she had the means to remove the cuffs herself. Roxy, in her defense, wasn’t falling for any of it. “Sorry, Butler. No can do. You can drop the flattery. I don’t have the key.”
Butler pouted like a child, then saw me returning. “Finally. How much longer do we have to wait to get these damn things off?”
I was tempted to stretch it out. I could just as easily sit here for hours pretending to wait for a courier before revealing the truth, just to play with his head. But there was no place to sit outside the cell, it was dingy and two drunks were starting to snore so badly I thought there was a dying walrus in there. “Okay, Butler. Click your heels together and repeat ‘there’s no place like home’”. I motioned him toward me.
“What do you mean?”
“Get over here.” He came, puzzled, and presented his wrists, though he neglected to follow either of my other instructions. I pulled out the cuffs I’d gotten from the guard, maneuvered them between the bars, and slipped them on Butler right behind the fuzzy purple cuffs. Then I found the almost invisible fishing line leash near one end of the chain and followed it to the magnetic key mounted on the metal cuffs under the fuzz. The leash was just long enough to reach the lock, and in short order the fuzzy cuffs were in my back pocket. Well one cuff was in my back pocket. They were too bulky to hide there, so one fuzzy cuff hung loose from my butt. Out of sight, out of mind.
As they slipped off of his wrists, he exclaimed, “Bloody Hell! It was on me the whole time? I’m going to kill that son of a bitch!”
With my eyes, I pointed to the security cameras mounted in each corner of the holding room. “You sure you want to say that here?” He looked nervously at the cameras and clammed up.
Roxy got the guard’s attention and he came in to unlock the cell door and help extricate Butler and only Butler from the milling drunks and sleazeballs. The bars clanged shut on a chorus of groans. “Come on, Nigel,” one of them complained. “I’ve been in here for days! You can’t do this to me!”
“You’ve been there an hour and a half,” said Nigel. “Shut your pie hole.”
Nigel led us out of the holding cells and back to the offices, where Butler collected his confiscated personal effects, which amounted to $3.64 in American money, a stained handkerchief (and I wasn’t sure what bodily fluid it was stained with since he wasn’t exhibiting any nasal difficulty), and half a pack of Life Savers. Awkwardly, he gathered the items and stuffed them into his right pants pocket. With the hand of Miss Chiff again at work ahead of us, a police escort was waiting outside the Chembassy. We went back to Sticky’s, where I surrendered the fuzzy cuffs to the rightful owner and collected the rest of my team. Billings went with Sticky to return the rental van, bringing up the rear in a most impressive motorcade, and in short order we were, finally, ready to accompany Rennet Butler onto the CURDS plane.
We stood at the tarmac several yards away from the waiting stairway that led up to the plane. Billings and Sylvia had Butler one arm apiece, with the twins standing in front facing him to deter any attempt to escape. It looked ludicrous, two relatively small young women facing down the six-foot Butler, but he’d seen them in action. Last time, they’d gone for his wrists. With his wrists in cuffs, he could only imagine what they would do to him instead.
“Well, this is it, old chum,” said Sir Haughty to Sticky. I had considered putting him on Butler duty, since he was the tallest and most massive of us aside from Billings, but who was I to deny them a proper goodbye? The two embraced. “Listen, I left your gift in the room I was using, 206. You can open it when you get back.”
“I’ll open it when I’m good and ready,” said Sticky. “Which will be about five seconds after I get in the door.” He patted Sir Haughty about the shoulders as they pulled apart and turned to me. “Helena, you bring your team to Hearth and Home anytime you like. It will cost your fine government nothing. I promise. If I don’t have room, why, I’ll just ask the Prime Minister to leave. He and his entourage will have to find accommodations elsewhere.”
“Thank you, Sticky. We’ll do that.”
The two old friends embraced one more time and then we headed for the plane.
We hadn’t brought any weapons with us, so we were able to zip through the locker room. That was just as well. I didn’t want Butler getting any better a look at the setup than he had to. It took only a few seconds for everyone to stow their go bags. We took Butler to one of the seats next to the inner wall and I moved the cuff from his left hand to a mounting ring on the floor to the left of the seat. I could have used a clip on the ceiling above and forced him to keep his arm elevated, but it was a seven hour flight and I didn’t want Nitro to have to perform an amputation. The severed arm would clog the disposal chute. I strapped Butler’s seatbelt across his lap and tightened it as hard as I could. He grunted. “Tighter, baby.”
“Be careful what you ask for,” I told him, pulling it tighter with a jerk. “Happy?”
“Ecstatic.”
“Oh, by the way, I’m required to tell you that if the plane goes down over the Atlantic, your seat can be used as a flotation device.”
He pulled up on the cuffs. “But I’m chained to the fuselage.”
“Oops.” I said, using the term deliberately.
I took my seat closer to the team in the window seats, but where I could see Butler at all times, and strapped in. “I’ll take first watch,” I said. “Who wants second?” Every hand went up. “I’ll pick someone at random. The rest of you, shut eye.” I think Roxy was already asleep, sitting up straight in her window seat. Her chin was bumping into her collarbone.
As was usual now, Sylvia turned toward the wall. Her injury wasn’t noticeable to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. As long as she didn’t move the eye patch, she had nothing to worry about. But I’m sure she felt self-conscious all the same. I’d feel better when she felt comfortable enough to allow everyone to know about it. The more I thought about her original intent, the more I wanted a team that could really trust each other, that could share both good and bad without fear. It seemed I didn’t have just one child who depended on me for emotional support. I had seven. And I was proud of every last one. But I was going to have to work on the trust thing.
I noticed Sir Haughty sitting in a window seat, looking out just as he had all the way to England. I went over to him. “You okay, Sir Haughty?”
He turned his head toward me. “What?” Then his brain filled things in and he said, “Oh, yes. Fine, my dear. Thank you for asking.”
I crouched next to his seat. “Sir Haughty, I have a couple of questions. You don’t have to answer either one if you don’t want to.”
“Go ahead.”
“First, how did Butler know that Sticky was your friend?”
I could tell from his expression that the thought had not occurred to him. “Oh my. I . . . I don’t know!” Fear and worry of a new kind spread across his features. �
�Oh dear. Somewhere my communications have been compromised.”
“I could ask him,” I said, partly to myself, “but he probably wouldn’t tell me. We’ll figure it out, Sir Haughty. Try not to worry. He may have just Googled you. Are you on Facebook?”
“Most certainly not. Nor that Twitty thing. What’s your second question, dear?”
“Um . . . I meant what I said. You don’t have to answer.”
“Understood.”
“What on Earth did you buy for Sticky?”
He laughed out loud. “Oh, Helena. I’ll tell you. You remember the story I told you on the way in? About how he got the name Sticky?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, it occurred to me that, even though he seemed to have come through it all intact, more than likely it will affect him in time. He has to trust strangers in his job, and how can he do that now without thinking about this? It’s bound to shake his confidence.”
“Super Glue.” I guessed. “You got him a tube of Super Glue.”
“Quite correct.”
I smiled. “You’re a wonderful friend, Sir Haughty. Don’t ever change.”
“Hadn’t planned on it,” he said.
Shortly after takeoff, the pilot turned off the seatbelt sign, and I unhooked, ready for anything, but stayed in my seat. Butler looked at me. I looked at Butler. Butler sneezed. I debated with myself about whether to say ‘bless you’ or ‘gesundheit’ or nothing at all until any response was pointless. He noticed, but still didn’t say anything. He rubbed his nose with his free hand and sneezed again. I would think it was deliberate, but I’ve tried to sneeze on purpose and you just can’t, not convincingly.
It was then that our three furry passengers, getting along at last, strolled down the aisle. T.B. jumped into my lap, but instead of curling up he sat up straight with his front paws on my business, his nose inspecting mine, and his eyes squinting suspiciously. Backwash and Harelip, after a brief stop for mutual grooming, approached the stranger on the plane and began sniffing around his feet. “Hey, get those things away from me!” He said, politely not shouting very loudly. “I’m allergic!”
