The Dick Burns Homepage [Chimp!] [Rants!] [Murder!]

Blood and Garlic GOD SAVE CAPTAIN VERE! It was one of those blast furnace summer days when D.C. felt like the Billy Budd doll that the dog liked to play with: chewed-up, naked, covered with spit. I was waging a losing battle against the heat down at the Dubliner, shooting craps at the bar with Stumps Lonnegan, when one of Vito's teenage rump monkeys skipped in and tapped me on the shoulder. The kid looked like a real pretty punk: hair the color of sawdust, eyes like smoke and skin three-shades paler than a cadaver. I'd have taken him back to my place for a quick game of "Plug" if I wasn't already four-sheets-to-the-wind and counting. "Vito wanthta thee ya, mithtah. At tha' dinah," he lisped, all coy and quiet, like I couldn't tell how he liked it. The cut of his Bugle Boys said it loud and clear: Bend Me Over Your Lap and Spank My Big Behind. "What about?" I snapped back. "Can't you see I'm on a roll?" "Dunno, mithtah. I'm juth da methengah boy." And he was out the door, back into the heat, probably headed towards Dupont Circle to turn some nooners. I'd run into the punk again at Tracks a few weeks later. How we wound up hopping boxcars in Oxnard is another story. I passed Stumps the Franklin I owed him from when I gypped him last week. He reached behind the counter, slipped me a cherry half pint of Ballantines in an ice cream bag. "Watch yerself, will ya, Burns?" the old legless bartender mumbled as he spit polished a shot glass. "Vito's been acting real hare-brained lately. Insane in the brain, knowutimean?" "You ain't my mommy, y'old bald idiot!" I spat, grabbing Stumps by his tattered lapels. "Stick to pouring hooch, Yoda, and keep your sage advice to yourself. And take a bath while you're at it." I slammed my drink and headed down Massachusetts Avenue. I hiked over to Union Station, rode the Red Line uptown to Bethesda. I hoofed the two blocks to the Tastee Diner, Vito's usual hangout. Between the bourbon and the pavement pounding, my stomach was growling like a freshly kicked Doberman. I ordered a mess of chops drowned in sausage gravy, a side of scrapple, and a pot of hot mud. I was working on my second pot when Vito came rolling in like the fat, greasy maniac that he is, except he wasn't his typical bright-eyed, Christopher Robin self. Viton four days." "Damn, haven't tried AntiSleep since college." I slid into the torn vinyl booth. "Once I took a whole bottle of NoDoz before an all-night roadtrip to Ann Arbor. I had to pull over in Kenosha, though. I kept seeing this fifty-foot McDonald's Grimace wagging its finger at me like I'd done a boo-boo or something." Vito looked at me like I'd just taken a dump in his kidney shaped pool. He reached into his tattered vest pocket, produced a stack of fifties an inch thick, slid it across the slick, marbled surface of the linoleum table. I took another hit from my pot. "Ten grand, Burns. Tax free." Searing hot coffee shot out my nostrils. It felt good. "That's fine. But I gotta tell you, Vito. I don't do contracts on people no more. I'm strictly legit." "Yeah, whatever. I just want you to find someone. Find him find him and send his ass to the place where the bad psychos go!" "What's got into you, Vito? I haven't seen you this shaken up since they canceled Lance Link: Secret Chimp." Vito looked down, shut his eyes, fidgeted with his hands. He was shaking like a hophead with the DTs. He did the church-and-steeple bit with his nailbitten fingers. "They let him out" the old mobster gasped. "He's gunning for me it's Murder Boy." The pot of coffee dropped out of my hands, splashing the fifties and burning my lap. That felt even better. "When the hell did that happen? I thought the judge put that freak away for life." "Saint E's let him out by accident. I heard there was some mix-up in the files; they thought he was a manic depressive housewife." "How the hell can you confuse a manic depressive housewife with a paranoid schizophrenic psychopath?! And these are the same idiots who locked up Wilhelm Reich!" "All I know is that I keep getting these calls, see?" Vito was shaking like a leaf in a wind tunnel as he lit a Chesterfield. "All my boys, they're chickenshit scared of him. Even if they could find him, they can't touch him. Hell, you worked with him. You ought to know, right? Murder Boy goes wherever he wants to. Nothing stops him. You give him somebody to kill, it gets done, right? You know the story." Vito stared into his lap. My brain reeled back to last year when he testified as a witness against Murder Boy. The two of them worked as contract hitmen for the Calamari family, the local Mafia syndicate. Murder Boy had gotten the reputation down in New Orleans that he could garrotte a mark, be out of the house before the victim hit the floor, and still have time to pat the dog. Eventually, he fell out of favor with Calamari Senior: Murder Boy was sneaking into the don's house and poking his wife, her sister, and the don's granddaughter at the same time. The don beat the crap out of all of the women and put a price on Murder Boy's head. Nobody had the guts to take the old man up on the offer. Murder Boy found out about the beatings and the contract and snapped. He snuck into the family house and slit everybody's throat. Even the budgie's. But the bloodletting didn't end there. The Boy's mind was gone. He was always a few votes shy of a quorum; you have to be when you're doing wet work for la cosa nostra . Murder Boy packed the dismembered bodies into his Olds 442 and drove across the tri-state area breaking into sorority houses. Nobody saw or heard a thing, but sure as Sharon Stone can't act, some gum-snapping hair tree would run screaming from the house after finding a jawless, half-eaten head in her sink. Or so the story goes. I've always had my doubts. "So the cops aren't cutting you any slack, eh?" I asked, mopping my steaming groin with Vito's blood money. Vito hacked up a sickly laugh, like a nauseated chemo-therapy patient at an all-you-can-eat breakfast bar. "You got it. Like their little hearts are breaking over me. I'm just another wop gangstah to them. Forget that I helped them put that lunatic behind bars in the first place. Listen Burns, you're the only one who knows Murder Boy well enough to take him down." "Why don't you just leave town, Vito? Go fuck that wife of yours. From what I hear, she'll suck it through three-feet of drywall." "Wake up, Burns!" He stood up, screaming, "Loretta ain't getting any until that zombie's wearing a wooden coat. If you was smart, you'd get a move on, 'cause as soon as he's finished with me, he's coming after you. You helped put him in the bin, 'member? He's just as pissed at you as" "Chill, Vito. Take your lithium." I said, pocketing the dripping brown cash. "Check yourself into the 'Y' and lay low, and tell your boys to aim for the head. I'll give you a call tomorrow afternoon." Vito choked up something like a laugh. "Heh, 'at's my boy, Burns. I owe you big. I'll remember this one." The greaser got up to leave, ducking beneath the diner's windows to avoid being seen. The three of them hopped into his stretch Benz and took off down Rockville Pike. Yeah, he owed me one. He owed me a night with his sister and some milk money. DEAD MEN DON'T BUY CHEESE LOGS I wolfed down my porkchops, two Tastee Burgers and a malted, lit out for Saint Elizabeth's where Murder Boy had spent the past six months bouncing off the walls of the Ezra Pound Suite. I slapped the head nurse around to see if I could get some and, if that failed, to go through the visitor's records on the odd chance that someone had helped Murder Boy make his break. Sure enough, on the day he was reported missing, a Mr. Robert Dalton, Esquire, visited for over two hours. I thought, what would the multimillionaire president of Banco Ambrosiano want with a homicidal cannibal necrophile? Unless I first surmised that Dalton needed some entertainment for his kid's birthday party. Then I remembered that Dalton's wife, former child star and beet sugar heiress Linda Martyr, had a nice catering/strip-o-gram job on the side. She could just as easily have danced naked for the kids. Another airtight Burns theory shot to hell. On the way to the office, I clacked Vito's story through the abacus in my head. Serial killers, bankers, nude heiresses. It wasn't adding up. I walked into my office, found Bernie outside my window scrubbing guano, dead pigeons and bile off of the sill. After logging on to LEXIS and downing a few bourbons, the old gray matter started to flow like drool from an epileptic's mouth. According to the cathode ray tube, the Banco Ambrosiano case was still pending in Federal Circuit court. The Berlusconi coalition government had convicted most of the board of directors for laundering drug money for the Tibetan Mafia and funneling the profits to the CIA, the Vatican, and SeaWorld. The Justice Department was mishandling this end of the money pipeline. But what did the bank want with a deranged, serial-killing, Mafia hit man? Then it came to me I opened the window for some fresh air and to think my latest theory through. Across the street, some grunts in pinstripe suits and fedoras were washing the fourth floor windows and looking my way. I stuck my head out and yelled up to Bernie who had moved up to the next floor. "Hey Bernie! Those guys across the street" "Yeah?" "They with your cleaning company?" "'Fraid not, Mr. Burns. They're with the Corsican Mafia." "Straight-UP." I looked back at the fedora boys and found myself staring down the barrels of a pair of Ruger Mini-14s. As I dove for cover beneath my desk, the window erupted in a hail of bullets, safety glass, feathers and smoke. I heard Bernie screaming as he took several slugs and dropped four stories. Lucky for me, he'd landed on a bartender I'd stiffed one time too many. When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, I hopped onto the sill to give them their change but the goons had split. Surveying the damage, I looked at the wall opposite the window. Written in bullet holes were the words, BACK OFF RICK. I hopped back on the sill and screamed, "THE NAME'S DICK! DICK BURNS, YOU ILLITERATE DAGO BASTARDS!" There is nothing I hate more than a hitman who can't spell. There was only one thing for me to do, besides getting some spackling. I got on the blower to the Ambrosiano headquarters on New York Avenue. I asked for Mr. Dalton and told him it was an emergency: his wife had been injured in a freak liposuction accident. The jittering, temp secretary put me on hold. Instinctively, when I heard the sound of the Muzak rendition of Like a Virgin, I reached for my gun. Dalton's frantic voice came over the receiver. "Hello? Hello?" "Dalton?" "Yes, yes. My wife? Is she alright?" "Your wife's fine, Dalton. That was just a cover story to get your attention. This is the Pope." Silence. "Yes yes, Your Holiness, what can I do for you?" "I heard you'd been a naughty boy, Dalton. Been sneaking around in broad daylight with cannibal necrophiles." "Eh, what what do you mean, Your Holiness?" he stammered. I could hear his sweat dripping on the receiver. "Cut the crap, Dalton. The College of Cardinals is very upset with your sloppy work. I want to see you personally. Tonight. Nine o'clock. Your place. Be there or beheaded. Aloha." I hung up and headed for Dalton's estate outside Vienna. YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PAPAL SOME OF THE TIME Dalton's place had a really nice lawn. It was the kind of lawn that most suburban meat puppets would trade their grandmothers for, and many still do. I killed the headlights, pulled over into some bushes a quarter mile down the road, walked up the weaving country lane to the manor house. The place was lit up with floodlights and looked like a split level Emerald City with a garage and tennis courts. In the distance I could see a dozen kennels. The twenty-foot high wrought-iron fence was topped with razor wire. I pulled my Hush Puppies out of their holsters, screwed silencers onto both of them, approached the main gate. Two surveillance cameras whirred methodically at the apex. Two quick slugs and they were fifty grand worth of smoking machinery. Three rounds in the gate lock and it was as useless as nipples on men. I pulled out my silent dog whistle and blew. A dozen rottweilers came at me howling like drunk frat boys on wet t-shirt night. I dropped on one knee for balance, extended both guns. Once they were within fifty feet I opened fire. The first six bought headshots. The dogs immediately behind them tripped over the falling bodies. I lost my aim but managed to take three out in the jaw, the throat and the chest. The final two got within a dozen feet before I planted two shots each in the middle of their ugly faces. They were close enough that the blast set fire to their heads. I waded through the whimpering, smoking masses of bleeding canine flesh, dispatching each swiftly with a bullet in the ear. I made my way to the house. Passing the kennels, I found one depressed looking rottweiler that had been tied to a leash. "Puppy dog!" For some reason, the stupid beast calmly sat and watched me pass, staring up at me with sad chestnut eyes. It was wearing a spiked collar with "Binky" written on it in inch-thick chrome letters. Reaching into my pocket, I popped open my Daffy Duck Pez dispenser, tossed him a lime-flavored one. He chewed that thing up like it was the last one on earth. I reached over and patted him on the head. His drooling tongue that slapped against my hand felt like a hot pastrami two-by-four. I unleashed the bitch and it followed me to the manor. I occasionally looked down at his stupid, grinning face. FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE I told Stupid to wait on the porch while I tried to kick the front door down. I reloaded my .45s, took aim, blasted the hinges off of the carved oak door. My Doc Martens took care of the rest. On the black leather couch, Dalton was on his knees with his head buried between his wife's legs. He was making sorrowful, flatulent noises on her inner thighs. She was decked out in a Wonder Woman costume, a brunette wig with bangs, a diamond tiara, and thigh-high white vinyl boots. She was snapping gum and moaning something about painting the ceiling turquoise. In her elbow-length gloves, she clutched a rubber riding crop and a mesh sack of garlic. She alternately beat Dalton about the head with each. She was squealing like a stuck marmoset as her back arched towards a shivering climax. Dalton was wearing what looked like a rubber scuba suit with an opened zipper on his mouth. He had his hands cuffed behind his back. I was tempted to drop my pants and join them, but I wasn't getting paid to have a good time. Linda saw me and screamed. "Vito hired me to find Murder Boy," I shouted. "Where the hell is he?" "What's the meaning of this?" Marine Boy squealed. "Is that any way to talk to the Pope?" "Look, I don't know who you are, but" "Burns. Dick Burns, private eye. I've come for the Boy." "He ain't here," Linda cried, her breasts jiggling beneath the skin-tight silver fabric. "The Pope wasn't talking to you, bitch!" I shot the tiara off of her head. "Now I want some answers why did you get Murder Boy released?" They looked at eachother and smirked. "You'll have to kill me first!" Dalton spat. I shrugged, fired twice at Dalton's shoulder, blasting bone and cartilage all over his couch, his wife, and the Ming Dynasty vase on the kitsch table. The impact of the jacketed hollow-points threw him off his feet, blood erupting out of the smoking exit wound. I left Dalton and his wife screaming while I walked over to the mantelpiece and blew open his cigar box. I grabbed one that was already on fire, started puffing. "I got twenty rounds and you got one arm left, so sing." Linda was using her wig to mop the blood off of her coughing husband. "You shot my husband, you bastard!" "Keep it down, lady. Let Marine Boy talk." "Don't shoot Calamari family" he hacked, " wouldn't do business with Ambrosiano bank was a CIA front they brought in Murder Boy" "Why'd he kill the family?" "Agency wanted to muscle in on their heroin operation Calamari refused to cooperate had to bump them off both him and Vito were part of Project ARTICHOKE Agency's attempt" " to create the Manchurian Candidate," I chimed in, puffing madly. Now it all made sense. The Company'd been working on that brainwashing crap back when I was station chief in Montreal. All they managed to get was a bunch of lab mice that could gnaw on command and mix drinks. Badly. " needed to get Murder Boy out of slammer for contract to kill the Pope Vito bragged to everybody about ARTICHOKE he was a liability have to kill him." Wonder Woman got up, started mincing towards me. In her bloodstained outfit she reminded me of a substitute teacher I had a crush on back in Montessori. "C'mon, Mr. Burns, what are you waiting for?" she purred seductively. "Aren't you gonna kill me?" "Back off sister! I shot the bearded lady and I'll shoot you!" "C'mere, honey. Mommy wants a hug." She reached out towards my gun. Before I could squeeze off a shot, she gave me a swift kick in the gonads. It was one of those kicks that you don't feel until your jewels slam up into your adam's apple. I was wailing on the carpet while the girl grabbed my piece. I've said it before, I'll say it again: never trust a blood-soaked broad in a Wonder Woman outfit. DOG DAY AFTERNOON Nothing compares to waking up with your nuts in your mouth, except maybe waking up with someone else's nuts in your mouth. "Well, Mr. Burns," Linda sighed, stroking my gun with her long, painted fingernails, "I could shoot you here. It would be a simple matter of breaking and entering." "There'd be an investigation," I coughed, "too much explaining to do." "Yes, yes, I suppose." She seemed slightly annoyed by my reasoning. Maybe it's just me, but there's something about a bloody, pissed-off, half-naked woman with a gun that gets me harder than Chinese algebra. "Why don't you throw me to the dogs," I suggested. Dalton was hallucinating on the floor. Unless that was a mood carpet, he'd lost a few buckets of blood. "Dogs, eh? Well, why not? You were on our property, Mr. Burns," she said, motioning for me to go to the door. "Daddy daddy please, no no more fisties!" Dalton yelled in his delirium. "What're you gonna do with Marine Boy?" I growled. My groin felt like I'd been dry humping a jackhammer. "That bastard? He made love like a sack of wet mulch. It's a pity you and I couldn't get to know each other better, Mr. Burns," she said, smiling and stroking my inner thigh with the barrel of my gun. "Sorry babe, don't think I'll be schtupping anyone anytime soon, thanks to your boot." She placed the gun in the small of my back, shoved me towards the door. I opened it and shuffled outside. Binky was still faithfully sitting next to the door. "Kill, Binky, Kill!" Linda howled. The dog looked up at the woman. It looked at me. It looked back at the woman, sighed, and began peeing. She started beating the dog about the head with the gun barrel. I reached into my pocket, pulled out some Pez. "Here, Binky!" I yelled, tossing a half dozen limes in his gaping mouth. "Now, KILL!" The dog leapt onto Linda's tiny frame, lunging for her neck. Her screams were quickly cut short as her throat disappeared into Binky's slobbering mouth. The dog relentlessly tore into the woman's delicate neck until it hung lifelessly from his jaws like a slab of blood-soaked bologna. A sighing, gurgling sound bubbled from her crimson-stained lips as blood spurt rhythmically from her ragged, severed arteries. "Attaboy, Binky." I went back inside and grabbed Dalton by the hair, whipping his head back. "Your wife's dead, Dalton. And you'll be too if you don't tell me where Murder Boy's holed-up." I pistol whipped him a dozen times until blood shot out of his ears. After babbling for ten minutes about the S&L crisis, cheese logs, and Lyndon LaRouche, he finally said something coherent before passing out. "Oh, baby make the garlic stop stinking" I dropped his unconscious body on the blood-smeared carpet. Garlic: that could mean only two things. Either Murder Boy was hiding out at the Kawai Odor-Free Garlic Farm, or Dalton's fondness for garlic was not limited to its kitchen uses. Judging by his wife's behavior earlier, I was inclined to believe the latter. GREY HARVEST I rode 95 East to the garlic factory just outside Lanham. In my headlights, I kept seeing Wonder Woman's bloody head moaning about the turquoise ceiling and the den needing spackling. Damn shame she had to go that way. My hose hasn't been stretched by a woman in a costume in at least three days. I switched off the headlights, parked half a mile from the main entrance, hopped the fence, followed my nose to the main processing mill. My piece came out and I rapped on the door. No answer. I blasted the lock off. The warehouse looked like San Simeon packed to the roof with cloves of fresh garlic. Murder Boy was seated at the far end of the warehouse. He was reading a Flaming Carrot comic book. Towering above him was a fifty-foot storage vat of crushed garlic, a release cord dangled next to his head. Next to him was a sign that read, "CAUTION: GARLIC TREATMENT FACILATY." I walked over to the sign, pulled out my red pen, corrected the misspelling. "Who the hell are you?" the kid asked "You don't remember me?" He shrugged, went back to his comic. "Dick Burns. Vito sent me. The jig's up. You're going back to the asylum for keeps." "The asylum?" he asked, dropping the comic book. "Oh yeah, the asylum. It's nice there." The kid was looking at me the way a five year old watches Power Rangers: open mouthed, vacant, a rope of drool in the corner of his mouth. "Yeah, it is nice there. So don't give me no trouble, Boy." "Oh I won't, mister. Say, you wouldn't happen to know where I've been for the past few weeks, would you?" "You riding me? What's the last thing you remember?" "I was in the hospital. Mr. Dalton came to visit me. Then I woke up, and I'm here." From the little I knew about Project ARTICHOKE, he sounded like the typical post-brainwash dupe. I'd been through it before: one minute I'm sipping decaf at Langley, the next minute, I wake up in a gutter in Cleveland wearing nothing but a bump on the noggin, a smoking gun and a turtleneck dickie. The novelty wore off after the first dozen times. "Hate to break this to you, kid, but you're the patsy. The Agency's been using you as a robot assassin and you don't even know it. From what I've been able to gather, they Simonized your brainpan and gave it a nice wax job. They probably pumped you full of psylocibin and fermented bean curd, locked you in an isolation tank and fed you your instructions. Hell, they probably made you watch reruns of Love, American Style." "So that's why I've had that damned theme song in my head. Man, I thought I was going crazy." "You are crazy." "Hmmm. I guess that's why you want to take me back to the asylum, huh?" "Straight-UP. I know a good cult deprogrammer there. He uses a revolutionary monkey therapy technique. Works wonders. Cured me of bedwetting." The boy sat there, stared at his hands. "The Calamari family," he wept, "I killed them all. I I couldn't help myself." "It wasn't your fault, kid. Don't blame yourself. Just get yourself a brain retread, serve your time, and you can get a nice job garotting poultry for Colonel Sanders. Let's go." "Y'know, Burns," he whimpered, "sometimes you just can't make up for the things you've done. You don't know what it's like being a pawn, not being in control, not knowing where you'll be when you wake up. If you wake up." I lit a cigarette, sat next to him. I didn't feel like listening to some ex-con wax philosophical while trying to heal his inner chimp. It made me mad; mad enough to chew my own arm off. "Who the hell do you think you're kidding, boy," I yelled, "Talk to me about being a pawn I was in Laos in '63 running guns and smack for Pol Pot; I played Nintendo with the president of Kenya before I shot him in the eyes; I was that close to having the company install me as dictator of the Seychelles. I've been brainwashed by the KGB, the CIA and the Jesuits so many times I shit laundry detergent. So don't gimme any of your namby-pamby 'oh-woe-is-me-I-was-a-mindless-gunman-for-the-CIA' sob story, 'cause you're talking to the 'G what wrote the book." He still looked as glum as taxidermist who'd failed his entrance exam. I put an arm around his shoulder. "Look, Pops," I said cheerfully, "you and me, we kill people, right? It's what we do best. We get paid pretty good for it. We work our own hours. Hell, we even get to have fun with some of the leftovers. Neither of us is any damn good at being a temp worker or a petty bureaucrat or a short order cook. Just be glad you found a hobby that pays the rent. Why don't you just accept the fact that you put people on the slab and just get on with your life?" He gave me the look a baby harp seal gives a raised baseball bat. "Guess you're right, Burns," he sighed. I got up to leave. I got twenty feet away, turned around and saw him sitting there looking philosophically at the tank of minced garlic suspended above his head. He looked at me, smiled, whispered, "Tell Mommy I love her." Before I could stop him, he'd yanked the release cord. A hinged door released a torrent of minced garlic that smothered him instantly. I dove headfirst into the pile, shoveled away fistfuls of garlic. When I finally reached him, I found that his neck had been snapped clean. Garlic was running out of his nose and ears, but he still had that Bob's Big Boy smile on his face. I left the poor slob where he was, put my cigarette out on my forehead and walked back to the car. Remorse can eat a hole in a man's gut worse than battery acid and tapas put together. Take St. Augustine: one day he's on all fours, diving headfirst into the fleshpots of Europe; the next day he's masturbating with a Bible. After all Murder Boy had been through, I figure he just had himself an epiphany beneath a mile high pile of garlic. Stranger things have happened. Look at Strom Thurmond. Then again, there's saps like me that crawl into a bottle trying to drown their guilt. On the other hand, there's those that drown themselves in minced garlic. I suppose I could pass judgment, but that would make about as much sense as a Morris Louis painting. I grabbed a couple of cloves and headed home to make some pesto. The Dick Burns Homepage [Chimp!] [Rants!] [Murder!]