Joe placed the hair into a Ziploc bag and sealed it up. José and him got into the van and headed to the other side of town. As they were driving down Main Street towards the other side of town, Joe noticed that a black SUV in the rear view mirror had been there for a while.
“I think we’re being followed,” Joe said.
“Yeah I think so too. Lose that sucka,” José replied.
Joe quickly turned the van off Main Street at the next possible right. They saw that the SUV didn’t turn to follow them.
“I guess he wasn’t following us after all,” Joe said with surprise on his voice.
Joe continued on towards their destination taking back alleys just to be completely sure the black SUV wasn’t following them. Five minutes later they arrived.
“We’re here,” Joe said as they pulled into a driveway of a small house on the edge of town. The house was only one story and was painted in an appalling shade of yellow.
“That is a truly appalling shade of yellow,” José said with disgust as he stepped out of the van.
“Yeah I know, dude. Just don’t bring it up, okay?”
The two of them walked up to the front door and José rang the doorbell, still eyeing the house warily. A moment later the door opened revealing a young woman who could have been no older than 25. She wore dark rimmed glasses and short, straight black hair draped down around her sharp face. Upon seeing Joe standing on her doorstep she instantly whipped around back into the house and threw the door back shut, but before it closed Joe pushed it back open.
“Aly, wait! We need your help,” Joe called after her. She stopped, turned around, and came back to the front door, obviously not one bit happy about her current situation.
“Give me one reason why I should help you,” Aly demanded.
“Someon-“ Joe was cut off.
“Who the FUCK painted your house?” José said, not being able to stand in silence any longer. Aly shot him a look that could tranquilize a hippo and slammed the door again. Joe managed to stop it with his foot.
“Someone kidnapped Courtney!” he yelled after her desperately. She stopped and slowly reopened the door. She peered out at him with deadly serious eyes.
“Are you lying to me? ‘Cause if you’re lying to me, so help me…”
“Look,” Joe said and he held up the cupcake from which they found the hair.
“Okay, come inside. Quickly,” Aly said to them.
They followed her into the house and closed the door behind themselves.
“Take off your shoes,” Aly ordered. They obeyed.
The first thing that Joe and José noticed was that the colors on the interior of the house somehow managed to make the exterior look good. Joe eyeballed José, silently warning him not to say anything.
“So what do you need from me?” Aly asked cynically.
“We found a hair on Courtney’s last cupcake. We think it might be from the guy who took him,” José said.
“We need you to run a DNA test on it for us,” Joe added.
“Fine,” she snooted, “As long as it’s for Courtney. Follow me,” she led them over what seemed to be a coat closet and opened up the doors. She gestured for them to enter. José gave Joe a concerned look. Joe shrugged and they both stepped into the closet. There were some coats hanging in the closet and a lot of shoes on the floor. Aly entered the closet with them and closed the doors behind her. It was pitch black, the only comfort in the darkness was the jackets up against them. Then a low hum was heard and the jackets started to lift off of them. In reality it was actually the floor that was moving down.
“Clever,” Joe thought out loud.
After what felt like what must have been two stories down the elevator closet finally stopped. Aly pushed the doors back open and they were greeted by a large open room full of many scientific looking devices and computers.
“Bring the specimen over here,” she said.
They followed her over to a device that looked like it was half microwave, half computer, and half something else that made it qualified to claim to have three different halves. Aly gestured for the hair and José handed it to her. She removed it from the Ziploc bag, put it into the strange machine, and pushed a button which caused it to whirr. Then she walked over to a different computer and pushed a button. Immediately after doing so the room was filled with the most abhorring music ever devised. Joe and José instantly cringed when the sounds entered their ears. It was some mix of horribly done screamo backed up by electrically distorted kazoos and broken bagpipes all of which was fronted by a lead singer who could only be described as a satanic Elmo-Gollum.
“Can you turn that off?” José shouted over the cacophony.
“No,” she smiled at him as she sat down in a chair and spun around in it, humming along to the music.
José went over to Joe and took him to the other side of the room. The music was only slightly quieter over there.
“How the shit do you know this chick?” he asked.
“It’s a really long story, dude,” Joe answered.
“Well tell me a short version then,”
“Trust me, I’ve tried, and the shortest version of the story I can possibly conjure up takes about 3 hours to tell,” Joe said in all earnesty. José just shook his head and looked past Joe only to see Aly sitting at her computer typing away at the keyboard. José’s jaw dropped. His jaw did not drop at the sight of her typing on her computer, but at the sight of a man dressed in black, head to toe, standing behind her holding a silenced pistol to the back of her head.
“Hey!” José shouted as loud as he could over the music at him, causing both Aly and the masked assassin to turn and look at him. Aly never even saw the man standing behind her, because less than a second after José shouted at them he pulled the trigger. Pewp: the sound of a silenced bullet exiting the barrel of the assassin’s pistol. The bullet then found its way into the side of Aly’s head right bellow her temple, mulled around in her brains for a millisecond, and then burst out of the other side of her head, brining plenty of brains and skull fragments with it. It finally came to rest in the wall after missing the computer screen by millimeters. Brains dripped down the screen.
“FUCK!” Joe yelled as he and José leapt aside to take cover behind some tables. Pwep pwep pwep! Bullets destroyed the equipment on the tables above them. They were in a tough situation; they were unarmed and they were between the assassin and the elevator. Hold on, Joe thought. There’s no way that guy could’ve got down here on the elevator without us seeing him.
“There must be another way down here!” Joe shouted to José over the still blaring music.
“Yeah I think so too!”
After a moment they realize that the shooting has stopped. They both stuck their heads out to check if the assassin was still there. He was gone.
“C’mon! Let’s go!” José yelled to Joe. “You go turn off that shit music and see if we got a result from the hair, I’m going upstairs to see if he’s still there, there’s prolly some stairs over there or something.”
“Okay!” Joe acknowledged as he ran over to Aly’s body, she was still sitting in her chair, slumped over the keyboard. When Joe got to where Aly rested he straightened her in the chair so he could have access to the computer. Then he pushed the chair away with his foot. The chair rolled away and hit another table causing Aly’s body to fall off the chair. Oops. Joe then looked around for something to wipe all of the brains off of the computer screen, spying a lab coat laying on the table he grabbed it and used it to wipe down the screen.
Meanwhile, José was inching his way up the stairs on the other side of the room. When he reached their apex he slowly poked his head around the corner. Everything was still. He hustled over to the front door and looked out just in time to see the black SUV peeling away down the street. Well fuck me, he thought. He then went back downstairs to see what Joe had found out.
“What you got?” José asked as he approached Joe, being careful not to step in any blood, or on the body as he did so.
“It’s not finished yet. Almost done,” Joe replied.
The two of them watched incomprehensible information flash by on the screen as the progress bar inched its way towards 100 percent. When it finally finished, the screen produced the information on the owner of the hair immediately. It showed a picture of a very large, yet muscular man. The man had a very short haircut and had long thick sideburns and a moustache. In the picture there was a cigar hanging out of his lip. It said he had grown up in Russia. His name was Daniel Wosikov.
“You’ve go to be shitting me,” José said dumbfounded.
“You know that guy?” Joe asked, surprised.
“Oh, I know that dirty son of a bitch all right. Let’s get outa here. We need to get strapped.”
No comments:
Post a Comment