Heavy boots down the sidewalk. He began to whistle a tune from his marching band days, until he was right up close enough. "If you wanna clean up after bums, maybe I can get you a job down at the station doing our washroom." Evidently he thought that to be a good one. You continued your arrangement of a commodious maple leaf double spread for Alice and Petrov, two aging lovebirds who had married behind a dumpster last Spring. Reading their vows to a hydrophobic moggy named Flannigan, who left the proceedings early to trade his rented tux for some wet chemicals. You weren't going to let them down regardless of this hard man's attitude, but when he shoved you across the jagged rocks lining the nature trail causing you to take a fall, it got you thinking that maybe he wasn't just gonna be another one of the council's empty threats.
"Well then." He stared down on you through reflective lenses while you nursed the palms of your hands bloodied and stinging from an unfortunate landing onto a patch of thorny prickles. He began talking about you needing to "get the message" and that the Mayor was finally "gonna clean up this s-hole." His delivery of that euphemism revealed the murmurs of a lisp he had no doubt spent years in speech therapy trying to correct. Being the empathetic type you were, you took a moment to think of how this poor man had come to be who he was.
* * *
In '87 Officer Bugel was just a kid named Paddy, who dug holes in the dirt so he could watch the other kids play marbles. If he got too close they threw sticks, and in first grade he fell on one in a funny way and it went through his cheek. He thought that's why he couldn't speak well as a kid but his parents told him it probably wasn't.
* * *
Mongo Sun came awake to the ruckus of some cop barking at you from across the park and still in a state he arrived to both of you in his wheelchair. "You got this guy? You got this guy in trouble? This guy trouble." He said in his voice always much louder than it needed to be. "He steal my fucking rake every day and" picking up the rake and poking you with it "yesterday he ruin my business. I don't have my rake and some kid steal my beads what I selling," referring to the boxes of warped anal beads he'd salvaged from a burnt down sex shop a few blocks up. Officer Bugel asked you if this was true, if you were out to bring down an honest man's business. Your eyes were on Mongo Sun's gravy colored boots. You had brought him blankets and whiskey, and there he was giving you up and poking you with the end of a wooden handle.
Ricky Thorn was a problem because he hated cops and he also might've still had the spare keys to your apartment. If you helped him you would be an accessory to the GBH delivered to Officer Paddy Bugel with a pair of nunchucks fashioned from dinosaur bones (one handle fitted out with the potentially lethal thagomizer of a baby stegosaurus) given to him by a client who was a little strapped for cash. If you helped the cop, Ricky would plead insanity, serve a suspended sentence and crush your skull with prehistoric tail spikes in your sleep. Anyway that's what you told yourself while you kicked the crap out of this guy and ignored the sounds of his breaking ribs.
Through the onslaught you didn't notice him radioing for help, and those sirens weren't enough of a warning. Ricky Thorn had done a runner while you were still maniacly stepping on a man's face. A man of the law. Then as the blue and red lights reflected off shop windows you ran too, and the bullets missed but the cars didn't as you sprinted into peak hour highway traffic to lose them in one of those storm water drains where Mongo Sun had once shown you why rats' tails made the best jerky.
* * *
So you figured you were going to get taken in by this asshole, and you had accepted that. A night in gaol, whatever. After Bugel was done taunting you he forced you up and was ready to administer the cuffs when out of nowhere Ricky Thorn was back. Last you heard he was on the east side whoring himself out in stalls to get his new book published, that one about the seagulls that take our thoughts and drop them in the ocean until we are literally brainwashed into submission by reoccuring tsunamis.
Ricky Thorn was a problem because he hated cops and he also might've still had the spare keys to your apartment. If you helped him you would be an accessory to the GBH delivered to Officer Paddy Bugel with a pair of nunchucks fashioned from dinosaur bones (one handle fitted out with the potentially lethal thagomizer of a baby stegosaurus) given to him by a client who was a little strapped for cash. If you helped the cop, Ricky would plead insanity, serve a suspended sentence and crush your skull with prehistoric tail spikes in your sleep. Anyway that's what you told yourself while you kicked the crap out of this guy and ignored the sounds of his breaking ribs.
Through the onslaught you didn't notice him radioing for help, and those sirens weren't enough of a warning. Ricky Thorn had done a runner while you were still maniacly stepping on a man's face. A man of the law. Then as the blue and red lights reflected off shop windows you ran too, and the bullets missed but the cars didn't as you sprinted into peak hour highway traffic to lose them in one of those storm water drains where Mongo Sun had once shown you why rats' tails made the best jerky.
