PeeDee3, Intergalactic Insectiod Assassin in: In Sheep's Clothing (Season 1, Episode 2)
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creeping up behind me. I couldn’t get a moment’s rest. I was afraid to go out, all that money sat around, doing me no good. I was even afraid to go out and get the Biotronic legs I’d been planning on. So I took it, I took all of it and hired her.”
The mucus already covered his wounds. He’d stopped leaking and started healing, but then so had I. I knelt and set the gun down, then patted his back. “There, there, it must have been hard.”
He blew his nose again and sobbed. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“So why the sphynx? And why the Armadillo disguise?”
“She was supposed to be the best…second best,” he said, flashing me an awkward smile. “The costume was her idea. She heard you had a thing for ‘Dillos, and being that they’re all pacifists, she figured you’d let your guard down.”
“That worked pretty good, didn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” he wrung an artificial fist in the air, then opened it and rotated the palm up. “No, no I mean, you were way too smart for her, you’re still the best, PeeDee3.” He gave me a little, smarmy chuckle. Then his beady, black eyes opened wider and his mechanical shoulders slumped. “I guess you’re going to kill me now.”
I let him stew a moment. Then I stood and raised the Orik, gazing at it as lovingly as my complex eyes could express.
He screamed and covered his eyes, but I set the gun in the remains of its holster and started to walk away.
“You...you’re not going to kill me?”
I stopped and collected the rest of my weapons before picking up my still smoldering hat.
“But what about your arms and all, aren’t you mad at me?”
I turned to face him. “Nah, I’ll grow new ones at my next molt; new antennas too, so no harm done. Like I said, we go way back, so let’s forget it.”
“Really?” he asked, undulating toward me. “You really mean it?”
“Sure, in fact I’ll even take you to lunch. A friend of mine’s a chef. He owns a little place just around the corner, a seafood place. What do you say? My treat.”
“Oh yeah, I love seafood,” he said running his black tongue around his icky Anguilaiean mouth. “That would be wonderful. Do you think they serve mermaid, it’s my favorite?”
“I’m sure they do,” I said resting a claw on his shoulder.
An hour later I was sitting at Jose Sandiego’s Sushi bar finishing up my third round, though I was having a little difficulty handling the chopsticks in the left claw. I was about to polish off the last piece when a deep, sultry voice snapped my mandibles closed.
“Is this seat taken?” She was tall and curvy and built to be dangerous in all the best ways, a Robo-Ho, a late model by the shine of her stainless steel tail-piece. I doubted she was even out of warranty yet.
I pulled the stool beside me out. “I was saving it for you, honey.”
She settled her iron posterior down like it was made of china. “Do you eat here often tall, hard, and buggy?”
“Not often enough,” I said clicking my mandibles together.
She flashed me a two-hundred and fifty-six pixels-per-millimeter smile and one of her camera lenses shuttered with a tantalizing wink. She lifted the menu in her precision calibrated micro-hydraulic fingers. “So what’s good here?”
I flicked the piece of sushi into my mouth and swallowed. “Personally I recommend the eel. It’s fresh.”
-Next Time-
Short on cash, Peedee3 is freelance and on the trail of an elusive time jumper with a price on his head. But the jumper knows he’s being tailed and his Coleco Edsel sling is armed and waiting for everybody’s least-favorite insectiod assassin. PeeDee3, Episode 2, Another Time Perhaps
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