“Sure, all us kids have bodyguards. Dad won’t let us out of the house without them.”
I looked all around the office with a couple thousand retinas. My complex eyes don’t miss much, but something here was way off. “Well then,” I slammed a claw on the desk and shouted, “Where the hell is yours?”
He looked like he might cry and I was afraid of drowning. “You shouldn’t curse Mr. 3, it’s not nice.”
I clamped my mandibles together tight and counted to zwerp. Then, with great effort, I managed to keep my upper right from drawing my Oric 3000 Whispersonic Bowling Ball Cannon and blasting this kid, and, with even greater effort, managed to hold my temper in check. “Randolph, where is your bodyguard?”
“Right here.” He produced a Barelyscopic Phytoplasmite from his pocket and held it up for me to see. It flicked the tiny stub of a cigarette bouncing off my exoskeleton, balled up its teeny fists and shot me a nasty scowl. “Don’t try anything funny mister, I’m packin’ heat,” he squeaked.
This was finally starting to make sense, which should have scared me. “C’mon kid, we’re going to talk to your sister.”
Down at the crowded coffee shop she was easy to spot. She had on a bright yellow, polka dot dress and dark sunglasses. I walked to the booth and slid in next to her.
“Your boyfriend’s dead,” I sneered.
“Ziggy is not my boyfriend,” she said through her nose as she typed away at an Eye-Type-pad deluxe. I knew it was a deluxe because of all the blinking—no artificial eyes on that model.
“So why the ruse?”
“Daddy can’t know where I am. He has to be distracted until I’m done. Now be a good bug and crawl back where you came from.”
I thought maybe I would do the old man a solid and kill her for free. “Your father wants me to bring you in and that’s what I’m going to do.” My right upper claw gripped the handle of my Bowling Ball Cannon.
She turned and stopped chawing her gum long enough to stare me up and down. “Look creepy,” she sighed. “I’ve got business to attend to here, so why don’t you just bug off and when I’m done, I’ll pay you twice what my father offered. He’s going to be broke anyway.”
I poured her coffee onto the Eye-Type-Pad.
“Eeek!” she trumpeted as it sparked, crackled, and popped. The rows of eyes blinked rapidly, turned red, and then fizzled out.
“You’re coming upstairs with me,” I hissed.
She swung a massive paw, limp wristed, at my thorax. I stepped aside and twisted it behind her back with two of my claws. “Next time use your tusks,” I grunted. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“Stop it you creepo, you’re hurting me!” she shouted. She was up on her tip-toes and trying to wack me with her trunk.
I snagged it in my mandibles and marched her up the stairs, inhaling some alluring perfume with every step. Randolph followed.
“You’re going to get yours, Bug,” she bellowed as I shoved her inside my office.
I patted her down for weapons.
“Look,” she cooed. “If you’ll just let me finish what I’m doing I’ll pay you handsomely. You could buy your girlfriend a plasma necklace.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Really. Randolph, why don’t you stand outside and guard the door until daddy gets here?”
“Um…OK.”
When Randolph stepped out she pulled me onto the sofa. I don’t know what came over me but I succumbed to her mammoth charms and the next thing I knew we were locked in love’s sweet embrace. I knew these pachydwerps were manipulative but oh, boy could she manipulate.
“There!” she shouted as she snapped a pair of cuffs over my right upper arm and onto the radiator. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” As she stood her head snapped back and she crashed down, shattering my couch and causing the downstairs neighbor to start banging on the ceiling. Bang away jerk. “What? What the hell did you do?” she shouted, tugging at her trunk which was also cuffed to the radiator.
“No dame ever gets the jump on PeeDee3,” I said jamming a thumb to my chest with a click of claw against exoskeleton. “So, seeing that we’re not going anywhere, you mind telling me what this was all about?”
“Fine,” she snapped and crossed her thick arms over her humongous breasts. “Last year my father fired one of his accountants for conflict of interests. He was hedging bets for massive underwear sagging to occur in the forty-fourth quadrant. Then he was bribing quality control to let inferior steel supports being shipped to that quadrant pass inspection. That way when the moons came out in the forty-fourth, he’d cash in big time.”
This is one reason I never wore underpants. “So what’s this got to do with the price of beryllium 37?”
“Ziggy, my old bodyguard, had a friend inside US Steel who had forged some papers to indict my father in the hedge-scheme. He’d be forced off the board and tossed in jail and the company would fall to me.” Her eyes grew distant and large. “And I’ll be rich.”
“Look, I got something like sixty-thousand siblings, so I never really knew my old bug, but still, he’s your father.”
Her lower lip rolled out over her chin. “He was threatening to cut my weekly allowance down to twelve quadzillion credits a week.”
“That’s more than some planets make, sweetheart.”
“Well I’m no planet and I need money.” She turned one of her big eyes to me and I got a little sick in one of my stomachs. “So, being that we’re in a bind here, why don’t you tell me how a lowly bug gets to be the galaxy’s number one insectiod assassin?”
I gave her a click of my mandibles, that’s about as close as I get to a smile. “Who said I was in a bind, darl’n?” My severed arm had all ready called her father and was dragging the restraining cuff key over to me. “Now we have some time to kill before your dad gets here so we might as well finish what we started earlier.”
“You…you horrible thing!” she screamed as she leaned away.
One shouldn’t play with fire…you know, I never understood that saying.
The old man wasn’t happy with the way he found us, but he paid me anyway. “Say, I like you,” I said staring at all the zeroes on my check. “I’m going to rub her out at no additional charge.” I pointed the bowling ball cannon at the bow atop her furry head.
“No!” The old man waved his arms frantically.
I lowered the weapon, no easy task. My claw would never forgive me. “But she tried to stage a hostile takeover of your company and frame you for fraud!”
“Look, Mr. Bug, do you have any children?” he sighed.
“Sure. Probably. A few thousand.”
“Well then, I don’t have to tell you how little girls can be.”
As they walked out she shot me a wink. I shook my head. The case was a bust. I was going to have to spend the whole twelve thousand on antiseptic booze just to forget this little incident.
-Next Time-
PeeDee3, the universes’ deadliest, most feared, and most hated intergalactic, insectiod assassin spends most of his days breaking brain casings, dodging bullets, and insulting as many species as he can. It’s an exciting and exhausting existence. But some days meander along like lumpy sauce out of a gravy boat. Bullets and blasters he can take, but can the galaxy’s deadliest Kacekan survive the worst threat of all—boredom.
PeeDee3, Season One, Episode Seven, Gravy Day
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