Crime Stories (7 page)

The South Side of Chicago; where screaming fat ladies are commonplace.

Doubling my efforts, I managed to catch up with her just as she reached the ticket counter. I took a 1/10,000th scale replica of the Washington Monument out of my holster and pressed the pointy end to her back. She was about to become another sightseeing souvenir victim. But before I got ram the monolith home, the ticket attendant caught my eye from behind the thick bullet proof glass.

I had a hunch the glass was also souvenir proof, and I couldn’t kill the bus driver with someone staring straight into my eyes, practically salivating to be a witness for the prosecution.

So I did the only thing I could in that situation. I whispered to the woman to keep quiet, and then smiled at the attendant.

“Two for the cheap seats,” I said.

I paid, then walked arm in arm with the driver through the bustling crowd. The picture presented to me was disheartening. People were everywhere.

There was no private corner to drag the woman into. No secluded nooks. The bathrooms had lines out the door. Every square foot of space was crammed to capacity.

How do you kill a person in a crowded space without anyone seeing you?

I closed my eyes, trying to remember if this situation ever came up in the book. Rule #90? No, that had to do with airplanes. Rule #312? No, that was for killing a mark in a rain forest.

At times like this, I really wished I’d kept my job at the grocery store. Or bought that other book, “The Complete Amateur’s Guide to Kidnapping and Extortion.”

“Let me go or I’ll scream,” the bus driver said over the pipe organ music.

“If you scream, I’ll kill you,” I answered.

A classic stalemate. It happened to me once before, in the Har Dong peninsula, on the isle of Meenee Peepee, in the city of Tini Dik. I was at a hotel (I recall it being the Itsee Wang), and came upon a gorgeous Mossad agent named Desdemona, who I managed to manipulate by engaging in massive quantities of athletic sex with her. Later, when I sobered up, I realized I’d been duped. Rather than a beautiful double agent from Israel, Desdemona had actually been just a large pile of dirty towels.

I had no idea what that had to do with anything, or how it could help me now.

No other options open, the bus driver and I made our way to the seats. They were in Section 542, way up in the nosebleed part of the stadium.

Even that section was full, fans packed shoulder to shoulder. We stepped on several toes and spilled a few beers wading through the crowd.

“These seats suck,” said the bus driver.

I told her to shut up.

To keep her quiet, I decided to appeal to her inner overeater, and bought two red hots from a hawking vendor.

She took both of them.

Then we settled in to watch the game.

It was the bottom of the fifth, Sox down two runs.

I chose to make my move at the seventh inning stretch. By then, all of the drunken fans around us would get up to relieve their bladders, and I’d be able to off the bus driver and slip into the stream of moving bodies. Then I could…

The next thing I knew, the bus driver was shoving a hot dog with the works into my face, trying to blind me.

“Help!” she screamed, at the same time trying to get her big ass out of the stadium seat.

First one cheek popped free, then the other, and then her big butt was out and shaking in my face.

I wiped ketchup out of my eyes and looked around.

No one paid any attention to the bus driver. Someone behind us even yelled “Down in front!”

I stood and wrapped an arm around her fat shoulders, under the pretense of helping her back to her seat.

Then I jammed the souvenir monument into her throat. Hard. Six or seven times.

An eerie silence settled over the crowd. Then the stadium exploded in screams.

I looked onto the field, wondering if there had just been a spectacular play.

The game had stopped. Instead of baseball players, I saw myself on the Jumbotron monitor, forty feet high, the bloody Washington Monument in my hand.

Oops.

I did a quick scan of the ball park. Thirty, maybe thirty-five thousand people.

This was going to be tough.

I reached into my holster for the roll of fabric softener and the Perry Como LP, and got started.

Written for the essay collection James Bond in the 21
^st
Century. I had a lot of fun with this, being a Bond fan for practically my whole life. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to simply string jokes together, rather than deal with a plot or characters.

I
f your first exposure to James Bond happened before the age of nine, you probably fell in love with the series for one reason: The Gadgets.

The women were hot, but you wouldn’t care about that for a few more years. James Bond was tough and could fight, but so could those short guys on UHF’s Samurai Saturday, and they had the added appeal of speaking without their lips matching their words. Global politics, espionage, and undercover infiltrations still aren’t interesting, years later.

No, the thing that made your pre-pubescent brain scream with unrestrained joy was all the cool stuff Bond picked up in Q Section. You wanted the grappling hook pistol, and the pen filled with acid, and the laser watch, and the hand-held suction cups for climbing walls, and the wrist dart gun, and the rappelling cummerbund—even though you had no idea what a cummerbund was.

But now that you’re all grown up, do the gadgets still have the same appeal? Do you still wish you could run to the nearest Wal-Mart and buy an electric razor that can deliver a close shave plus sweep your room for electronic listening devices?

This practical guide will look at some of best of Bond’s gadgets, and offer valuable buying advice to those interested in plunking down their hard earned dollars for spy gear.