Hunting a Priest Killer - Day 6

Fred was not the kind of man to hold a grudge...after yelling at me for ten minutes, telling me how stupid I was, how unprincipled and that I was in over my head; he finally let me talk.

We stayed up most of the night talking at Fred's place about what we could do about Sykes and the Snake Devils. I was drinking whiskey and Fred was drinking coffee. Needless to say I woke up with a hangover to discover Fred had gone. 

This wasn't unusual, neither was the fact that Fred had clearly carried me to bed when I had fallen asleep in the living room and left me fully clothed. He hadn't left any note though as to where he had gone. This was problematic for several reasons.

1) If he had gone to work then I would have to wait for him to come back before I could do anything about Sykes and his serpent friends. 2) If he had gone after the Snake Devils, then he had gone alone and was probably going to end up being shot and dumped in a ditch. 3) He had taken my guns from me whilst I was asleep and I didn't know where they were. 4) I might have to also ask Harry Lee for help.

Of all these problems, the discovery of where Fred had hidden my weapons was the easiest to solve. Thinking of the last place that he would think I would look for them is often the best place to start. After I had checked the washing machine, the dishwasher, the oven and the cupboard where the vacuum is stored, I found them in the top draw of the nightstand by the bed. 

I decided that phoning Harry wasn't the most horrible of ideas as he would be able to find out if Fred was working and if he wasn't then I'd be in the perfect position to get Harry to volunteer to help find him. It took four phone calls to find Harry and a further six to actually speak to him. That's the problem of calling a man who seems to spend all of his off duty time in bed.

I swear the man has more girlfriends than brain cells.

He did however confirm that Fred was not working today and then very hurriedly hung up. It was at this point that it occurred to me that going to see Harry in person might just be the best way to get his co-operation.

He didn't live that far from me, so twenty minutes later I kicked in his door and found him in the hot tub on his balcony in a very clichéd situation with twins. 

It's amazing how effective wits and bravado are in clearing a room and even more astounding how much more effective twin revolvers can be. Harry was a tiny bit mad about having a hole in the side of the hot tub, but he seemed to calm down when I told him that the twins were related to the Mayor; and had Mayor Major Tyler found out about them being in Harry's hot tub, well, that life could have been more than a little unpleasant.

It was also this point that I chose to tell him about Fred going off to take on Sykes on his own. 

Lazy Afternoons

There are many reasons that I enjoy winter. It's dark most of the time, which makes my life much easier, lots of shadows for me to hide in. It's cold so most people tend to stay indoors and dress in thick layers of clothing. So there is always a feeling of sadness in what passes for my heart when I see the first snowdrops appear in flowerbeds.

It's not because I have anything against the summer. On the contrary, it's nice not having ice on the inside of my windows. What I have a problem with is the lazy afternoon mentality that people seem to get in the summer - that and the fact that girls seem to think letting erroneous parts of their body hang out of their clothing is a good thing.

How can I track targets covertly through parks and streets when people all look and stare at the woman walking around in a long black trench coat because they have nothing better to do than laze about in the sunshine?

Fred is also especially unbearable during the summer months. His mood always seems to be elevated to unacceptable highs. It makes it so much harder to annoy him. As soon as he has had his Star Wars geekery fed at the start of May, he is as giddy as a school girl with pigtails until September arrives.

Harry is the only saving grace of all this as he hates the summer and when I say hates, I mean he would love to pack it into a box and throw it off a cliff and then become best friends with Kevin Metis and Derek Long and throw parties in their honour...the strange thing is though, he won't explain why it is that he hates it so much.

He doesn't have hay fever, nor is he pale skinned to the extent that opening the curtains gives him sunburn. I have come to one of two conclusions on the subject though. He is either secretly a vampire (the kind that Sam and Dean Winchester would hunt) or he has an extraordinarily high body temperature that means when the climate changes to being in double digits he overheats. Personally I think the first one is much more plausible...

Temperature

Why is it that the moment that it starts to get warm that I get ill?

It never fails. Every year as soon as the temperature rises out of tundraic proportions and into that of the tropics, my temperature goes up with it.

So predictable is this annual event that I received the weather forecast cut from the paper in the post. Fred had sent it along with a box of tissues and a get well soon card that was horrifically unsympathetic...especially since he had circled the rise in temperature in red.

The card he sent read:

Nic,

I wanted to thank you in advance this year for the two week period that you will be too ill to get out of bed and cause me headaches for. It is around this time of year that I like to kick back in the office and catch up on my paperwork, safe in the knowledge that you will not be breaking into my apartment or shooting half the population of the city.

Harry will be stopping by with some supplies for you in the next few days so you don't even need to stir out of bed and run the risk of your shortened temperature causing an accidental misfiring of your weapons in public places.

Get Well Soon Slowly

Fred

The moment that my body can move without my head spinning, all his furniture is going to the charity shops.

Neighbours

When living around other human beings it is always hit and miss...and I don't just mean my aim.

The people that have moved in and out of the building I live in have ranged from being the most aggravatingly arrogant members of society to the most sycophantic. Yes, even more so than Fred can be.

I'm not really sure what it is that attracts these people to where I live. It could be that the rent is ridiculously cheap, that most ordinary people find where I live to be unacceptable to look at let alone live in or it could be that Mayor Major Tyler knows just how much my neighbours annoy me and is sending these people to live in the my building.

Though the third is possible, especially after the number of letters I have sent complaining of my predicament to the mayor, I think that it is more that the first and second are the major cause.

This leaves me in an awkward position as despite the irritating cattle that inhabit the general environment around, I like where I live. It's an excellent place for my business to flourish and repairs to the building after the number of gun fights and explosions that have taken place here over the last few decades are very affordable.

Fred is insistent that I should live in his building as all of his neighbours are delightful. I am not sure that living around a bunch of Stepford wives is any better than what I am surrounded by now, in fact it could be much worse. And I'm sure that Fred's motivation for having me move into his building has much more to do with him being able to keep a very close eye on everything I am doing than improving my relations with my neighbours.

Considering how much clucking mother hen Fred would do constantly if I moved in, I think the loud, outspoken and downright rude neighbours are a much better deal.

Hunting a Priest Killer - Day 5

Somewhere quiet, that was the last place the police – or any one for that matter, would look for me was also a very comfortable place to relax and unwind after sitting in that horrible back room. I started by running a bath and soaking for a while just to get the feel of dank bar gun fight off me.

As to where I was, nobody in the world would think that when I was being hunted by Fred I would go to his apartment to hide. In fact, he was probably sat in my office now waiting for me to come home so it was only fair that whilst he was using my place, I used his.

On balance, I definitely had the better trade. His place was big and warm with lots of plush furnishings; mine was small, cold with furniture barely holding together. Fred’s fridge was well stocked with a variety of food, mine contained milk, eggs and some three week old takeaway noodles.

Sykes wanted to rise to fame and glory in the gang scene and with his meteoric rise he also wanted more territory. At this point there would be little to be gained from just shooting him, well except for an enormous amount of satisfaction. The stunt at the bar had the Snake Devils fighting each other for the moment, but that wouldn’t last long and there were always more peons to be found. In fact, killing Sykes would probably cause more harm than good. It would leave a power vacuum that those within would fight to seize control of the gang, and those outside would fight to destroy the competition. If that were to happen then more people would get hurt, more people like Patrick would suffer. So my usual plan of attack was not one that was going to work.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I couldn’t deal with the Snake Devils on my own. Yes I could hold them off in small numbers and pick them off one by one as they started to expand their territory, but the whole gang was a just a bit too much to take on, as were all the possible repercussions of my actions. In truth, I could think of only one thing that I could do.

I called Fred. I hated doing it and the angry response to calling him on his house phone was not at all satisfying when I had to tell him that I needed to talk to him, that I needed his help.

After that phone call I had to take another bath.

In sickness and in health

It has finally happened...

I have finally been brought to heel...

I have become sick.

I have never been sick a day in my life before. Yes I have been to hospital countless times but that has been because of bullet wounds, broken bones, head trauma, being run over, thrown through windows, well a lot of different reasons really, but I have never been sick.

I woke up this morning with a fever that was high enough to stop ice forming on the inside of my windows. I tried to get up but found myself so dizzy that I fell straight back into my bed. The last time my head felt this bad was when Bob Davies took a baseball bat to it to stop me shooting his brother. I am coughing and can barely speak and I think I must be hallucinating.

I opened my eyes and Fred was sitting on my bed next to me, a wet flannel pressed to my head to cool my temperature. I could smell chicken soup being cooked and I wasn't in my apartment any more but in his. I had the duvet pulled up around me and I was wearing some very soft, warm and comfortable pyjamas. Fred was speaking very softly, too softly to be really audible, so I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

When I woke up the second time I discovered I was not hallucinating. That in my weak and stricken state, Fred had effectively kidnapped me. Yes, the cities greatest private investigator was kidnapped from her bed by a Star Wars geek of a policeman. I wasn't sure what bothered me most about being kidnapped. It could have been that Fred had broken into my home and taken me from my bed without me waking. It could have been that I was now surrounded by luxury that I didn't have at home and realised that actually some of it was quite nice, the pyjamas for instance. Or it could have been that my guns were nowhere near me for the first time outside of a hospital. Whilst all of these were mildly irritating to semi frustrating, it was something else that bothered me.

It was the fact that whilst Florence Nightingale had brought me to the other side of the city to look after me whilst I was sick without my consent, he was right in doing so and I knew it! This revelation completely undermines my friendship or rivalry with Fred. He is not allowed to be right!  Not ever! Not because if he is right, I am wrong, but because when he is right he is so insupportably insufferable. He will use being nice to me as a way to stop me ridiculing him, or even worse stop me shooting other people. It's either that or I have to be equally nice to him to even the score and that might just make me vomit.

He had even called for a doctor to come who said that I would be in bed for a week, if I was lucky; had to take some foul tasting medicine and needed to sleep as much as possible. If I wasn't so tired, I would have argued with him about it. Fred showed him out and came back to feed me soup. He told me that I was staying here until I was well again and that he would look after me.

Can't believe it, it's going to be a year before I can shoot anyone again now! It did give me chance to talk to Fred about Patrick though. And though I would never tell him, it was nice to have someone looking after me.

Weather

What is it about the weather that people find so terribly suitable to fill awkward silences or create meaningless small talk from?

Is it that the rate of precipitation of any given day has the ability to thrill even those of a low boredom threshold? Is it that the humidity is of great concern due to the effect it can have on the hair styles of individuals? Is it that atmospheric pressure is key in understanding pressure systems? Is it that it is so changeable and unpredictable in this country that there is something fascinating about it? Or is it that people just like to have something generic to complain about that they think most people will agree with them about?

I recently may have planted bugs on a certain Police Sergeant's and though some of the information has proved very useful, the topic of conversation that routinely comes up is weather. Out of four hours of listening to the recordings of the bugs, one hour was about girls that the police force seems to be enamoured with, half an hour was talk about classified cases, twenty minutes were insults being thrown back and forth between Harry and Fred, ten minutes was Fred complaining about me (I don't understand what he could possibly have to complain about personally) and two hours of the conversations were about the weather.

Complaints about how it was too hot, then too cold, too sunny, too cloudy, too windy and too calm; there was not a moment when there was talk of the weather that they were not moaning about how awful it was.

Personally I have never found the changing of the seasons to be much of an interesting topic. In fact the only difference that it seems to make to me is that I have ice on the inside of my windows or I don't. It's times like these that I am reminded of a poem that my father used to recite to me and my sister and I think that Fred should really listen to...

Whether the weather be fine, Or whether the weather be not, Whether the weather be cold, Or whether the weather be hot, We'll weather the weather, Whatever the weather, Whether we like it or not!