From the helicopter, the camera showed a lynch mob of young Italian-American men wielding bats and chains as they chased what would turn out to be a professional killer from Trinidad.
Roger took over, “Thanks, Bill. We’re just above Bensonhurst, and as you can see…”
Chapter Seventy-three
“There’s A&E, USA, Bravo, HBO…” Bob paused as he tried to think of more.
“I know, I know, and ESPN and CNN and fifty others,” Klaus said in an agitated tone. “I have cable.”
“Sorry,” Bob said. “I just want to make sure. I mean that’s my wife in there, you know.”
“I know,” Klaus said, trying to reassure his friend. “You are just going to have to trust me.”
Convinced the ruse would bring him face-to-face with the Cowboy, Klaus started across the street with his canvas bag. He climbed the stairs to the front door of Bob’s house, the Desert Eagle perched behind his back.
The Cowboy was stuffing a new wad of tobacco into his mouth when he heard the footsteps on the porch. He grabbed Mary and jerked her to her feet. He pulled his pearl-handled revolver from his belt and put it to the back of Mary’s head. With Mary as his shield, the Cowboy walked to the door.
A knock came and the Cowboy nudged Mary to answer. “Who is it?” she asked nervously.
The voice from outside answered, “Queens Cablevision.”
“We already got it, pardner,” the Cowboy replied.
“We’re offering a free month of HBO,” Klaus said, not missing a beat.
“We ain’t interested!” the Cowboy yelled at the pesky salesman. “Now git!”
“How about if I throw in a second hookup at no charge? Think of the money you’ll save.”
“Piss off, buddy! I said we ain’t interested, goddammit!”
Klaus could tell from the Cowboy’s tone that the plan was working. He readied his weapon.
“Would you like a free Discovery Channel T-shirt?”
“No I wouldn’t, you stupid little shit, now git off my front porch ‘fore I turn my dog loose on ya!”
“How about a Beavis and Butthead poster for the kids?”
Frustrated, the Cowboy shoved Mary face first onto the living room floor. He whipped open the door and yelled, “Look, you dumb sumbitch, I told you—”
Those were the Cowboy’s last words before the Desert Eagle flapped its big wings and blew a large hole through the Cowboy’s small brain. He should have taken the T-shirt.
As the corpse collapsed in a heap in the front hall, Klaus signalled for Bob, who raced from his hiding place. Klaus laid the Desert Eagle on the table, kicked the bloody cowboy hat out of the way, and quickly closed the door behind them.
Chapter Seventy-four
“Goddamit, what the hell was that?” Dick Pratt blurted when he heard the shot across the street. He shuffled across the dirty pea-green shag carpet and ripped the curtains back to see what all the noise was.
“What’s that asshole doin’ over there? I’ve just about had it with that lousy douche bag! First it’s a roomful of goddamn bugs and now this shit,” He turned to yell to the back of the house. “I’m tellin’ you, Doris, I’m gonna evict that deadbeat sonofabitch! You hear me talkin’ to you, Doris?”
Doris could hear her husband fine, but right now she couldn’t see him too well. She had an ice pack over her recently blackened eye, and the other eye rendered only blurry images because of her tears.
“You better listen when I talk to you, Doris.”
Pratt looked out the window again, but didn’t see anything, so he shuffled back to the kitchen for another beer.
Chapter Seventy-five
After a long, sweet, loving embrace, Bob looked deep into Mary’s eyes. “You scared the shit out of me, honey,” he said. “What the hell were you thinking?”
Mary sheepishly pulled the locket from her pocket. “Sorry, but I couldn’t leave without this. I got a little fixated.”
“Excuse me,” Klaus said, “but as our cowboy friend here might say, we need to skedaddle.”
“Where’s Katy?” Mary asked.
“She’s fine,” Bob said. “She’s still in the car.”
Bob saw the two UPS packages on the table. He grabbed them and handed them to Mary.
“What’s this?” she asked as she ripped them open.
“Good news, honey,” Bob said. “We’re rich!”
When she got the package open Mary found the note from Marcel along with $100,000 in cash. Mary stared for a moment, unable to believe her eyes.
“Holy cow!” she said finally. “Look at all this!”
“Let us hope you live long enough to spend some of it,” Klaus said as he propped the Cowboy’s body up in the tattered BarcaLounger.
Bob told Mary to go back to the car and wait with Katy. He had to grab a few things but he and Klaus would catch up with them and they’d finally get out of New York.
Mary kissed Bob and, clutching her locket and the valuable UPS packages, she ran out the back door.
Klaus dropped the canvas bag into the Cowboy’s lap. “Hold this for me, would you?” he asked the corpse.
Bob went to the Bug Room and lit a few burlap rags and stuffed them into the bee smoker. As the rags began to burn, he stacked up three bugquariums containing Bloodsucking Conenoses, Wheel Bugs, and Jagged Ambush Bugs. He took them to the front hall, then went back for another load. Klaus didn’t notice what Bob was up to. He was busy watching out the window for other assassins.
Not yet used to the fact that he was now a wealthy man, Bob returned to the Bug Room intent on collecting his matching set of atomizers, his jar of African Leaf Beetles, and the queen from the killer bee hive, all of which he felt were too valuable to leave behind. He pulled the white bee hive from the window and put it on the workbench. He gently slid back the top of the hive, exposing several hundred agitated killer bees. He took the bee smoker, which by now was issuing a thick, white, calming burlap cloud. He poured the smoke expertly over the hive, soothing the bees, allowing him to kidnap the queen along with a bit of royal jelly for her to munch on.
Bob slid the queen into his shirt pocket, then grabbed the atomizers and the jar of African Leaf Beetles. When he reached the front hall Klaus was looking at the bugquariums. “What are you doing?” Klaus asked.
“Grabbing my stuff. What’s it look like?”
“You cannot take any of this. You have to travel light—” The doorbell rang, cutting Klaus off mid-sentence. On reflex, Bob looked out the peephole.
Klaus whispered urgently, “Do not open the door!”
Bob pulled back from the peephole, reaching for the knob. “It’s just a Girl Scout, for Pete’s sake. Not everyone in the world is out to kill us.”
Bob opened the door and an ugly, rather stocky Girl Scout stepped up, holding out a box of mint cookies. “Would you like to buy a box?” she asked. The girl’s voice was surprisingly deep and quite British.
“I’m sorry,” Bob apologized, “right now’s not a good time. Could you come back later?”
“No bloody need for that, you wanker,” the Girl Scout said as she dropped the cookies and drew her blue-steel .38. Merit badges notwithstanding, Klaus knew Reginald was no Girl Scout. But Klaus’ gun was on the table in the front hall, right next to Reginald, so there was nothing he could do about it.
Reginald gestured at the bugquariums. “What’s all this, then?” he asked, sounding much like John Cleese in Silverado.
“Insects,” Bob said.
“I rather hate insects,” Reginald replied.
Unarmed and unable to control the situation, Klaus’ words betrayed his frustration. “Why don’t you just shoot us and get it over with, Thumbelina?”
Reginald turned the gun on Klaus. “Right! All mouth and bollix, t
hat’s what you are, Klaus. Don’t try and get my monkey up, you tosser. You’ve got yourself caught in a dog’s dinner and you’ll not bowl a googly over me to get out of it.”
Bob hadn’t the vaguest idea what that meant, and at the moment he didn’t care. An idea had popped into his head. He caught Klaus’ eye and winked, conveying confidence.
Reginald turned back to Bob, “Here now, what’s that you’re doing?”
Bob was groping around in his shirt pocket. “I want to show you something.” He pulled the queen bee from his pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. She was mired in royal jelly. Her wings stuck to her abdomen, she was unable to fly.
“That’s an ugly little customer,” Reginald said.
“You are one to talk,” Klaus replied, trying to participate in Bob’s plan, despite not knowing what was.
When Reginald turned to Klaus to respond, Bob tossed the queen bee at him. “Here, take a closer look!” Bob said.
Reginald turned just in time to see the jelly-coated queen land on his shirt and slip down behind his sash of merit badges. He swatted at his chest, trying to brush it off, but the queen had landed in a torn seam in the sash and wasn’t going anywhere.
Reginald kept his gun trained more or less on Bob as he swatted at himself with his free hand, all the while panicking the queen and causing her to send out enormous quantities of her alarm pheromone.
“I think you killed it,” Bob said calmly. “What do you think, Klaus?”
“Yes, that would be my guess,” he said, shrugging.
“I bloody well hope so, you spotty fuck!” Reginald said. “You rather dropped a brick on that gammon, old chap. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll kill you both.”
That’s when Reginald heard an ominous, angry buzzing sound. “What’s that noise?”
Reginald had never seen, or imagined, anything like it—a dense gold-and-black cloud flying at him so fast he couldn’t get out of the way. He started to scream and, as the first barbed stinger found its mark, Reginald fired a shot straight at Bob.
Chapter Seventy-six
Pratt nearly dropped his beer as he ran back to the front window. “Goddammit, Doris,” he bellowed, “there they go again! What the hell’s going on over there? Sounds like the goddamn Fourth of July! I’m tellin’ ya, if that deadbeat son of a bitch and his cowboy friend are settin’ off fireworks, I’m gonna get the cops on their asses! I swear, I’ve had it with that asshole. Are you listening to me, Doris? You better be listening, you big cow, or I’ll hit you so hard you’ll wake up in Jackson Heights!”
Pratt pressed his greasy forehead against the window and squinted for a better look. “Goddammit Doris, you should see the shit goin’ on over there! Some sort of goddamn party with a bunch of his drunk exterminator friends! Looks like one of ’em’s doing Saint Vitus’ dance in the front hall.”
Pratt noticed something else. “And what’s this shit? Looks like some woman’s over in the friggin’ bushes! I’m tellin’ you, if they mess up that landscaping, I’m gonna have his ass! I’m callin’ the cops in a minute. You just wait and see, Doris. This time I’m gonna do it! I don’t have to put up with this kinda shit and you know it!”
Chapter Seventy-seven
Reginald finally stopped his spastic quivering and attempted one last scream, but 40 or 50 of the killer bees had flown down his throat and stung his vocal cords. His hypersensitivity to the proteins in the bee venom had led him deep into the pit of anaphylactic shock. Of course, it helped that Reginald was a little person; the Phospholipase-A component of the venom, which normally took several seconds to interfere with the neurons of an adult human, had arrested his miniaturized nervous system instantly causing his shot to miss Bob by a good meter.
Klaus and Bob swatted at the few bees which came at them, but since the pheromonic message was coming from Reginald’s sash, most of the 500 or so members of the hive were on, or in, the diminutive assassin, some having flown down his throat and into his tiny stomach.
“What should we do?” Klaus asked as he thrashed at one particularly persevering worker bee. “Won’t they kill us next?”
“Don’t worry, they can’t.” Bob explained that a bee eviscerates itself when it uses its stinger. “That’s why they don’t just up and sting things for the fun of it,” he said. “It’s a suicide mission, a last resort used only to protect the hive or the queen.”
And with one final gasp, it was over. Reginald’s welt-covered body swelled dramatically, threatening to burst the seams of the Girl Scout uniform, the bodies of the disemboweled bees, either dead or twitching, modestly covering any skin that might be revealed if the uniform gave way.
Two down, Klaus thought, but how many to go? “Can we get out of here now?” he asked, exasperated.
“Not just yet, mon cheri,” a voice said from the shadows of the front porch. A striking figure stepped into the house, legs first, so to speak. It was Chantalle, her gun trained on Klaus. She closed the door behind her.
Bob was incredulous. “Oh, I don’t believe this! Why don’t we just get a turnstile and sell tickets?”
Klaus smiled as he raised his hands. “Ahhh, Chantalle, beaux yeux mais arriver comme un cheveu sur la soupe.”
“Merci,” she said.
“Klaus, what did you just say?” Bob asked.
Klaus looked to Chantalle for permission to translate; she gave it with her eyes.
“I said she is, uh, how would you say, she is beautiful of face but she has arrived like a hair in the soup.”
Bob’s blank look encouraged Klaus to explain further. “It is an idiom roughly equivalent to your phrase ‘turning up like a bad penny.’ Frankly, I have never understood that one.”
“Me either,” Bob admitted. “I think it’s the same as ‘welcome as a turd in a punch bowl.’”
“Yes, that is the sense of it,” said Chantalle. “Now, do you mind if we get on with this?” She glanced at her watch. “I would like to kill you both and catch an eight o’clock flight if at all possible.”
Suddenly Bob lunged for Klaus’ gun, which was still on the table. But Chantalle grabbed it first, so Bob snatched the next nearest item, which turned out to be one of the atomizers. It was labeled “Blattodea” and it contained a non-species-specific essence of cockroach. Desperate, Bob trained the spray bottle on Chantalle like a forty-five-caliber bottle of Chanel No. 5.
Chantalled looked down her perfect nose at Bob, in the French way. “What are you proposing, death by cologne?”
Lacking any options, Bob spritzed her several times with eau de cockroach, prompting Chantalle to laugh and turn her weapon on him. “You are a very silly little man,” she said.
No one noticed, but the moment Bob sprayed Chantalle, the 600 or so Assassin Bugs in the bugquariums had flown instantly to the screens covering their cages. Bob hadn’t fed them in three days. To these hungry assassins, Chantalle was a five-foot-seven, two-legged cockroach with nice breasts and no antennae.
Chantalle looked Bob up and down. “I find it hard to believe this is the famous Exterminator,” she said. “He does not look so dangerous to me.” And then, in the annoyingly snotty way French people say so many things, she uttered, “Ecrasez l’infame!”
“What the hell does that mean?” Bob asked.
“It means ‘crush the infamous thing,’” Klaus said. He turned to Chantalle. “He is not one of us, Chantalle. Let him live.”
Chantalle turned to Bob. “Is this true?”
“Would I lie to you?” Bob asked.
She dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “C’est la vie, “ she said, tossing Bob the Kit Kat bar. “Now, would you prefer to die first or second?”
“Well, that’s a pretty big decision. Can I think about it for a second?” Bob unwrapped the candy bar and took a bite.
The
bugs in the terrariums were in a frenzy, attempting to bite through the screens with their powerful mouthparts. Minute traces of insect saliva moistened their razor-sharp mandibles as they drooled for a chance to get at the giant French cockroach standing just four feet away.
“You are getting soft, Chantalle,” said Klaus.
“Compassionate? Moi?” She spit the words out. “C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.” Chantalle drew a bead on Bob’s forehead to make her point. “A bientot, monsieur Exterminator.”
“Wait!” Bob shouted, spitting crumbs of the Kit Kat bar on the floor. “If you’re going to kill me, uh, at least tell me what you just said. You owe me that much.”
Again Klaus translated. “She said compassion is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.”
“Oh. Thanks,” Bob said. “You know, my parents made me take Latin in high school, said it would help with the Romance languages, but it never really did. Unless you count learning all the classifications of insects, phylum, species, all that.” Bob was operating under the mistaken impression that he would live as long as he talked. “For example,” he continued, “bees and wasps are in the order hymenoptera, which means membrane wing.”
Bored with Bob’s delay tactic, Chantalle started to squeeze the trigger. The hammer reared like a cobra about to strike. Certain he was about to be knocking on heaven’s door, Bob stood frozen and helpless. The next thing he heard was not a gunshot, but rather a squeaking sound coming from the bugquariums. He looked down and immediately realized he had one chance to get out of this mess, so he shouted, “Wait!”
“Now what is it?” Chantalle asked, bristling like a Thistledown Velvet Ant (Dasymutilla gloriosa). Her arm was tiring from holding the gun on Bob for so long.
“I want to ask one last question,” Bob said.
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