Page 128 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

“Well,” Henry said, “I think we may have escaped charges—”

“But I’m pretty damned sure we’re all caught,” John added.

“Fuck me,” Mike muttered, and Jackson had no choice but to keep his foot on the pedal and the pedal to the floor.

SEAN KRYZYNSKIand his partner, Andre Christie, were having the worst fucking night.

Of course election night was going to be bad enough, but given who was winning… oh Lord. It was a nightmare. Petty theft, vandalism, assholes with a three-year-old’s vocabulary telling any cop they ran into that it was okay, there were no cops now because they’d all become defunded.

Sean and Andre were so tired of explaining that “defunding the police” didn’t work the way everybody thought it did.

And now… well, what the hell did you callthis?

“Okay,” Sean said, his notepad at the ready. “Sir, could you explain what happened?”

The older guy he was talking to had a face chain-smoked to leather, and maybe three teeth. He could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty, and his wispy ginger/gray hair stuck out from under the hated red hat in clumps.

“Well, we were on the corner here, just waving our flags,” the guy said, pulling hard on his ever-present cig, “like it’s our God-given right in the constitution, no thanks to you commie fuckers tryin’ to stop us—”

“Nobody’s trying to stop you, sir,” Christie said, sounding bored. “So you’d all parked in the back lot behind us and were here on the corner, protesting—”

“We was celebrating!” snapped another man—bald, with a long, graying ZZ Top style beard tucked in the stretchy waistband of his khaki shorts. “Weren’t we, Shep?”

“Tha’s right,” Shep told him. “Me and Curly and Moe—”

Next to him, Sean felt Andre’s whole body tense up, and they eyed the bald guy with the beard down to his waist and the scrawny guy with long black bangs in his eyes and then exchanged glances.

“Curly, Moe, and Shep,” Andre said, with absolutely no inflection in his voice at all. “Keep going.”

“Well, we was out here celebrating our righteous victory,” Shep continued, “and some guy—first we thought he was one of us, cause he had the hat and all, but he walked up and threw the hat on the ground. Said he’d worn this eight years ago and learned so much more about the world, and he was fuckin’ ashamed of the hat and ashamed of the choices and ashamed ofus!”

Sean and Andre exchanged another glance. “And then what’d he do?” Andre asked, at the same time Sean said, “Wait, what’d this guy look like?”

“He had this young face,” said Moe, who was twenty-five at the most. “And this white hair, which was weird. And these bright blue eyes. And he had an accent… like a good ole boy accent.” Moe paused for a sec. “Was purty,” he said upon consideration.

Sean blinked and tried to keep his eyes from widening. Couldn’t be. Right? He’d met a guy like that a couple of times, but… really?

“And then he covered the damned hat in lighter fluid and set fire to it!” Curly raged and pointed his finger at a smoldering heap of what used to be nylon and cardboard.

“Wow,” Sean said, rather impressed. “So he’s the one who damaged your, uhm, vehicle?” He stared at the street in frontof him where the remains of the giant truck lay on its side, bits of exhaust pipe and various flags all scattered around it as its engine hissed and smoked and died.

“Naw,” Moe said. “But we weren’t too pleased with the guy who burned his hat, so we were giving him what for, and then, well, Curly here gotreallypissed and took a swing and….” He wrinkled his brow. “And this other guy popped out of nowhere like the goddamned thing on the box of Lucky Charms.”

“Aleprechaun?” Andre asked, stunned.

“Yeah!” Moe told him, absolutely baffled. “He was redheaded and not too tall, and Curly went after the guy with the white hair, and the leprechaun kicked him in the back of his knee, and he wentdown.”

Sean swept his eyes up and down Curly’s squat, stout frame and noticed the road rash on his knees and palms. “I see,” he said. “So J—the redheaded guy took apart your truck.”

“No,” Curly said, scowling. “But these two fuckers’d dissed us and we couldn’t let that stand, so we took off chasing them, and then our friends over there—” He pointed to another crowd of assholes who looked just like Curly, Moe, and Shep. “—started screaming because a blond-headed fella had run by and stolen their banners.” He grunted. “He threw them on the fire with the hat.”

“The smell was prodigious,” Moe told him soberly.

“Good word,” Sean noted, although he’d stopped taking notes as the story itself took shape. “So what happened to the first two guys you were chasing?”

“Well, they… uhm….” Shep wrinkled his brow. “I guess they got away, because we went after that blond fella, and he….”

“See,” Moe said, “he went ’round that pet store there, and then he disappeared.”

---