The Winner: Part Twenty-Two

I run furiously, avoiding the sidewalks and streets and taking the alleys whenever I can. I want to put as much distance as I can between myself and the sodomite bathhouse that my beloved Alley Cats has become. If I’m going to lose Burke’s men, it is going to have to be now.

So I run and run until my lungs feel like over-inflated balloons and I’m dripping sweat. I have to stop for a moment to catch my breath and am depressed by the fact that I’ve only made it four blocks from the porn store. Fuck, I’m so out of shape. I’m also horrified to find that I’ve neglected to remove the gimp-mask those leather-fags made me wear. Way to keep a low profile, Poopy. Way to go…

I yank the leather mask off my face, the crisp spring air feeling extremely cold on my sweaty face. I toss it into a nearby dumpster, then do my best to wipe the slime of blood, shit, and Crisco off my arm with a dry old newspaper. Once I’ve gotten enough of that crap off me that it didn’t look like my arm was absolutely covered in gore, I grab my 32 karat gold Rolex out of my pocket and look at the time. I’ve got twenty-five minutes to make it Sixth avenue.

Still winded, I get onto the sidewalk and start walking at a normal pace (which was really all I could do at this point), figuring I’d stand out more if I were running. I still would have to hump it. Sixth Avenue was pretty long ways to make it on foot in the time I had. I could try and take a taxi, but didn’t want to get off the side streets onto the major roads to try and hail a cab. Looking around, I didn’t see the goatee man or the black car or really sense anyone following me. I didn’t want to risk them picking up my trail again what I had to do to lose them.

So I keep walking towards Sixth. When I look behind periodically to see if I’m being followed, I see a bus ambling up in the direction I’m heading. I hustle up to the stop at the end of the block, winding myself again. The bus pulls up just as I get there, waving my hands around for it to stop.

The doors open up and I’m digging through my pockets for change for the fare when the bus driver stops me.

“Hold on, buddy. We’ve got some handicapped people we’ve got to let off first.”

I roll my eyes and jump back onto the sidewalk. The bus driver starts operating the hydraulic lift that lowers wheelchairs down to the curb. Some cripple with a disease that twisted his body into all sorts of inhuman positions pilots his wheelchair over to the ramp with his claw of a hand and joystick. It takes him two minutes just to get his wheelchair in position on the lift. Then another minute to lower it to the ground. Once cripple boy has finally made his way off onto the sidewalk, I start up the steps to the bus. The bus driver holds out his hand once more.

“Wait, we got one more rider we’ve got to unload.”

“What the fuck?” I yell. “I have places I gotta be, goddammit.”

“You and everybody else, buddy. Just stand back. This will only take a moment.”

Of course, it took longer than a moment. This was a female cripple this time. She must have had the same disease as the guy before her, but it took her even longer to use her joystick to get her wheelchair in position.

Finally, I explode: “Look bitch. Would you please hurry it up? Normal people here have someplace more important to go to than a fucking sponge bath.”

Her numb face doesn’t even register my comment. The other cripple bumps me from behind with his wheelchair.

“L-l-leave her alone. Th-that’s my wife, j-j-j-jerk.”

Great, these people are breeding now. I’m furious, I grab him by his chair and look straight in his lopsided face. “Or else what motherfucker? What are you gonna do? Roll over my foot? I’ll say what I want to whomever I want to. Got it?”

The cripple backs his chair up and starts stammer at me. “Y-y-you’re a p-p-p-prick. And you sm-smell like sh-sh-sh-it.”

“Whatever. At least I don’t need a ramp to get into my house, dickhead.”

After what feels like an eternity, the cripple’s wife finally rolls off the hydraulic ramp. The second she rolls off, I try to get on the bus, but the driver snaps the doors shut on me.

“Get the hell off my bus,” the driver sneers. “Catch the next one you prejudiced asshole.”

“No! I have to take this one! You’re required by law to give me a ride! This is discrimination!”

“Bullshit. Get out of here your prick.”

The doors start tightening on my chest and finally I have to pull back. The bus starts immediately rolling forward. From behind the windows, I hear the other passengers start cheering the driver and flipping me the bird. Scumbags. This must be what Rosa Parks felt back when the niggers started getting uppity about their rights.

I turn around to continue walking when the cripple cuts me off with his chair, the wheel running over my foot with the broken toe. I bolt of pain tears through my leg and I fall to the ground.

He stutters at me, “F-f-fucker…” before he and his cripple wife start rolling down the sidewalk at top speed. Not that I could catch up to them with my foot in this much pain. Besides, I had more important things to do than kick the shit out of some handicapped people. When I can finally stand on it again, I continue on down the street towards Sixth Avenue. I had only ten minutes to get to my meeting with the FBI. I limp along as best as I can.

Of course, I don’t make it to the Wilshire Apartments on Sixth in ten minutes. By the time I was able to limp the entire way there, I was about twenty minutes late and fucking exhausted. Fuck it. Twenty minutes is well within the realm of fashionably late. I just hope the FBI thinks that way too.

They must, since when I get around the back there to the area with the loading dock, I see a non-descript gray van parked there by itself. I head towards it cautiously. When I’m within twenty feet, the panel side slides open and there’s a man wearing a sharp gray suit and an earpiece.

“Are you Poopy Peanutz?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I say, hobbling over to them. “Sorry I’m late, but you wouldn’t believe the shit I had to do just to get here.”

“Tell us about it in the van,” he says, waving me forward. “Our time window is slipping and we don’t want to compromise our position.”

As soon as I jump into the van, the driver (whose wearing blue coveralls) starts up the van and starts backing out of the space. The inside looks like what I’d assume is surveillance van from what I’ve seen in the movies. There’s a bench with a laptop bolted down as well as several TV monitors. Besides the agent in the gray suit, there’s another agent sitting down with his coat off and his sleeves rolled up.

“Have a seat right there. There’s no seatbelts, so hold on using that bar right there.” I do as he says. “I’m Agent Allen, this is Agent Smith. We’re both with the Bureau’s Corruption and Ethics squad.”

“Pleased to meet you guys,” I say. Between these two agents and the two I met at the police station, it feels like I’ve met half the FBI in the past couple of days.

The van peels out of the lot of the apartment building and I can feel it heading down the street, though the windows in the van are non-existent so I don’t know where we’re going. Agent Allen leans forward, “So, Mr. Peanutz, we heard through our liason in Organized Crime that you need desperately to talk to us. We’re talking with you because you claim to have information on Carl Van Hertzwelder that may be of use. Do you mind if we record this conversation?”

“No, go ahead,” I say. Even though I don’t like the idea of having my words recorded, I figured consenting would make me look like less of a crackpot. “Look, it boils down to this: Carl Van Hertzwelder is involved in a plot to kill the President of the United States.”

Agent Allen looks over to Agent Smith, but says nothing. “That’s a fairly serious allegation you’re making Mr. Peanutz. To be quite honest, the Bureau thought that this probably had something to do with you having gay sex with him in a bathroom somewhere, or some sort of blackmail.”

“Fuck you,” I say. “I’m not a fag.”

“The information in your file would seem to say otherwise Mr. Peanutz. For one, we do know that you were cellmates with Van Hertzwelder’s son when you were doing a year up in Canon City. Second of all, while it can’t be proven in a court of law, you were also cellmates with Armando Herrera. Very close cellmates we heard. It looks like you were being passed around quite a bit in there.”

“Fuck that! I was the pitcher, not the catcher! You haven’t had to go for a year without busting a nut. I did what I had to do while I was inside, but I haven’t fucked any guys since I’ve been outside. I’m straight, and I’ve got references.”

“Very well,” Agent Allen scribbles something onto his PDA. “So do you have any evidence of this alleged plot that Mr. Van Hertzwelder is involved in to kill the President?”

“Yes. I was forced to meet with him a week ago. He was there with two other people and they told me all about their assassination plot!”

“Do you have any other evidence besides your own personal testimony that this exists?”

I think for a moment. “I guess I don’t. Wait! Yes! There’s was a kidnapping! This stripper got her children kidnapped. That was how they got me to meet with them!”

“Yes,” Agent Allen says. “When we pulled up your file, we did notice that your name came up in the investigation of a kidnapping of the children of one Angela Clements. Why didn’t you mention all this to Agent D’Anci and Johnson when you met with them?”

“I was afraid the interrogation room was bugged. Or maybe that they were double agents or something. Van Hertzwelder told me not to tell anyone or they’d kill me and Apple’s children. I figured I’d be much safer telling the FBI through back channels. From what they were telling me, this conspiracy goes into the highest levels of government.”

“I see,” Agent Allen says. He scribbles some more stuff into his PDA. “Why would a high level government conspiracy tell you about their plot to assassinate the president, if one did in fact exist?”

This fucker obviously doesn’t believe me, but I tell them anyway. I tell them about how Van Hertzwelder blamed me for the death of his son and that they were blackmailing me into killing the president as a way to stage a coup in American politics. I told them about Burke and how the entire military-industrial complex was involved in this.

“Very well,” Agent Allen says. “You do realize how completely ridiculous all this sounds and that it is a federal crime to threaten the life of a sitting president?”

“No shit, Sherlock. Look, I don’t want to kill the president and I’m taking some serious risks in order to tell you this shit. I’m being followed by men in black cars constantly. Like I said before, you don’t want to know what I had to do to throw off their surveillance just to meet with you guys! Fucking hell! I could get killed for giving you guys this heads up!”

“Calm down, Mr. Peanutz,” Agent Allen says. “We’re not saying we don’t believe you or that we’re not taking you seriously. It’s just that we need to make this sound believable for our bosses. Listen, I’m gonna call them right now and see what we can make of this information.”

Agent Allen pulls out his cell phone and starts talking discreetly into it. I look out the front of the van and see we’re pulling up to my apartment building. I bound out of my seat up to the driver and yell at him, “Get out of here! The conspiracy has people watching my apartment twenty-four seven! If they see me here talking to you guys, we’re fucked! Keep on driving you stupid son-of-a-bitch!”

I feel a hand yank me back into my seat by the collar, followed by the unmistakable cock of pistol. I turn my head to protest when I see the barrel of a silencer Agent Smith is holding just inches away from my eye.

“Everything is fine here, Mr. Peanutz. Please, calm down,” Agent Allen says. He speaks into the cell phone again, then hands it over to me. “I have someone here who would like to speak with you.”

I carefully take the cell phone from Agent Allen. I put it up to my ear and hear a familiar voice.

“Do you know who this is?”

“This is Burke, right?”

“Correct.”

“Mr. Peanutz, you’ve not been following our instructions,” Burke says. “We told you not to tell anyone about our little arrangement or else there would be serious consequences.”

My eyes dart between the two agents and silenced pistol being aimed at my head. “Well, since these guys work for you, I technically haven’t told anyone else about your plot. So I haven’t really told anyone else.”

“Yes, that is technically correct,” Burke says. “In fact, the reason you’re not dying in an inimaginably painful way right now is that you’ve not leaked our secret in any way that isn’t one-hundred percent containable.”

“Okay, so no harm no foul. You have my word, I won’t do it again.”

Burke laughs. “Mr. Peanutz, we both know that your word isn’t worth the breath you used to give it to me. No, we need to teach you a lesson that will hammer home how serious we are.”

My eyes dart between the two “agents” in the van with me. “You really don’t need to teach me any lessons. I double-dog swear I won’t tell anyone about you guys again!”

“No, you do need to be taught a lesson. We’ve been onto your half-assed plan to inform the authorities since almost before you even thought about it. If we wanted to nip this in the bud, we could have done it days ago. However, we figured it would be useful to let you think you were getting away with something for a brief time, if only to bring to light two points…”

“Can’t you just tell me those two points? You don’t need to, um, ‘hammer them home’ so to speak.”

“Mr. Peanutz, calm down. These men will not be inflicting any physical harm,” Burke says, then adds: “On you at least.”

“Agent” Allen leans over and turns on the laptop, types a few things and a photo-slide show pops up. The first one is a grainy one of the inside of my apartment. Allen cycles through various freeze frames of me destroying the place, looking for this camera that, from the angle the photos seem to be coming from, the tract-lighting above right next to the loft; an area that was out of convenient reach for me to check.

“First of all, Peanutz, don’t bother trying to find them again now that you know roughly where they are. My men have gone inside your apartment during this time you’ve been trying to evade our surveillance and removed the devices. We didn’t learn much from anyway. We found the cameras are more amusing than informative.

Apple… “But, what about…”

“Don’t worry, we did not disturb the drugged out stripper you have tied to your bed. In fact, we’re quite pleased that you did that. You plugged a potential hole that we didn’t have to.”

Agent Allen clicked to advance to the next picture. This one was a picture of Hirsch, tied to a chair. He looks angry and is yelling at the camera. Men dressed in black gloves are behind him.

“That Jew lawyer you hired was a great help to us. We picked him up within a day of when he contacted the FBI trying to find someone to talk to you. Of all the people you talked to, he knew the most. He was also the most helpful in telling us about your plans. We didn’t even have to torture him to get him to talk. He gave you up only on the promise of quick and clean death…”

Allen clicks forward to another picture of Hirsch, this time he’s slumped in the chair with a flower of blood on his shirt right over his heart.

“We are nothing,” Burke says. “If not men of our word.”

Allen clicks forward again, this time to a picture of two men in suits hung by their neck in some wearhouse. They have signs on them in hastily scrawled Spanish. It takes me a second to recognize them. It’s Agent D’anci and Agent Johnson, the two FBI guys who interrogated me back at the police station.

“We made their deaths look like retaliation from a Salvadorian gang they are—I mean, were—investigating. They didn’t know much of anything. Thanks to us, they never will know anything.”

Click forward. The next picture is one of the two cops that arrested me in the park that night getting into their cruiser. “We haven’t done anything about these two yet. Tonight, they’re going to get a call for a domestic violence dispute. Something will go wrong and they will both end up dead during this call. These two cops likely don’t know a damn thing, but we’ve got to close up any loose ends that might arise. Cops sometimes have a tendency to get nosy,” Burke clears his throat. “I don’t need to remind you that there will be torture involved should you try to warn these two cops of their fate.”

“That’s cool,” I say. “I’m not all that big of a fan of the police to begin with.”

“Good to see you’re becoming a team player, Mr. Peanutz,” Burke says. “That’s the end of our slide show. The second point I’d like to make is that I hope it’s clear that even if you were to slip past us and speak to the authorities behind our back, your story is completely nonsensical. In fact, our plan was designed that way. If you tell the police, they are more likely to throw you in the loony bin than the will able to stop us. We’ve got moles in the FBI, CIA, NSA, and every other alphabet suit government agency you can think of. They are all experts of information containment. You’re pleas will not get very far. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good,” Burke says. Agent Allen hands me a slip of paper. “In the meantime, you will cut a check to the organization on that piece of paper for a half-million dollars. For a donation of that size, you will be invited to play a game of golf with the president, as well as donors who have given similar sized gifts. That will be where you will murder the president. Further instructions will be forthcoming, just be sure to send that check tonight.”

“A half-million dollars?” I say. “I’m not sure I even have a half-million dollars left in my account thanks to you assholes.”

“We’ve noted that you seem to have problems keeping track of your money. You have exactly five-hundred two-thousand seventeen dollars and sixty-two cents in your account Mr. Peanutz. After cutting that check, you will have more than enough left over to pay for groceries and basic, incidental needs for the next two weeks. However, you won’t have enough to do anything stupid like flee the country or hire any more lawyers or mobsters to do your dirty work.”

Considering the shit I’m now, the last thing I should be worried about is my fortune. But still, the thought of having to use it to seal my own doom raises a sliver of defiance in me. “What if I don’t do like you say and just fly out of the country tonight motherfucker? I’m sure a half-million bucks could last me a long time in some third world beaner shithole.”

Burke sighs. “You know what will happen. We have ample resources to kill both the president and you anyway. And before you die, you will also have the deaths of everyone you love and the stripper’s two children to boot.” He clears his throat, then adds, “I thought we already went through this.”

I’m still angry though. My back is against the wall and my instinct here is to fight. “How do I even know you even have those kids, asshole? For all I know, they’ve been in a daycare this whole time.”

“Well, if you really need convincing. Allen, show him the last picture.”

Allen clicks forward. The screen shows a photo of two babies bawling in a crib with masked men over them. One of the men is holding up a newspaper. The date on the paper is from two days ago.

“I don’t see why you think we’d be bluffing on such a matter, but there’s your proof that we really are holding Ms. Clement’s offspring.”

The picture of the two babies kind of deflates whatever defiance I have in me. I mutter into the phone, “I’ll have the check in the mail tonight.”

“Very good. Just follow the instructions on that piece of paper and nothing else will happen to them.”

“’Else’? What do mean ‘else’?”

“Mr. Peanutz, though dealing with your recent insubordination has been trying this past week, I must say, I do admire your guts in trying to do something. You obviously have some big, swinging balls on you; that’s not in dispute. But what I really want to know now is, how big is your dick?”

What the fuck is he talking about. I start to get snotty again, “Why does that have to do with anything you nigger faggot?”

“Just humor me…how big is it?”

“It’s the size of a baby’s arm holding and apple. What. Is. The. Point?”

Burke laughs. “Well, you’ll see. Now get the fuck out of the van and go home, like a good little boy.”

I’m about to unleash a flood of curses on him, but the phone cuts out immediately and Agent Allen and Smith simultaneously grab my shoulders, slide the panel door of the van open and toss me onto the asphalt on my back, the impact winding me. The van starts driving off and I just barely get my leg out from under its tires before I get crushed.

I stay laying on the street until the van turns the corner. Then I lay there for another minute until I can get up again. I’m exhausted. It is the exhaustion that comes from struggling fruitlessly against fate. I wallow in it, since that seems to be the only thing I can do with my fate.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I finally pick myself back up and begin limping towards my apartment building. I hear a car pull up on the street behind me. I turn around and see the black car that’s been tailing me, right back in position. I swear I can see goatee guy in the passenger seat through the tinted windows. I’m pretty sure he’s smiling at me. I flip him off, then turn around and go inside.

After digging around forever for the keys to my building, I finally just follow two of my neighbors in. They look at me even more distastefully than usual. I probably look even more hellish than I usually do, with chunks of grit from the street sticking in the back of my neck. The three of us ride silently on the elevator. I get off on my floor before they do.

As I walk down the hall towards the door to my loft, I notice there is a box laying in front of the door. It looks like it could have been left by the mailman, but there is a note on top, the letters cut and pasted from newspapers like a ransom note in a movie.

POOPY…OPEN ME.

I pick up the small cardboard box and feel the weight shift around in it. It’s sealed with masking tape. I unlock my door, then skip around the rubble of my apartment and put the box on the island countertop. I take one of my kitchen knives, made of heat-tempered Japanese steel, quickly slice through the tape and open up the cardboard flap.

I recoil in disgust and shock, leaping backwards and banging the back of my head against the shelves of my cupboards (I’d removed all the doors in my search for surveillance devices). The knife falls from my hands and sticks tip first into the linoleum of the kitchen floor. I’d been on the verge of it all day, but finally I have to throw up.

Inside the box is the severed baby arm. It looked like it was in the first stages of decomposition, with the veins turning purple through the rapidly graying skin. The cut looked clean and not jagged though, as if it was done with a jigsaw.

But the big fuck you was what it was holding in its hand, the tension of the tendons being kept in place with what looked like construction staples…

A big, red, Washington apple.