29, Bored
“I would literally rather be tortured by a flock of gay gorillas than be doing this with you, right here, right now.” Special agent Trent Murdock was bored to tears.
“Gay gorillas.” Von Stryker shook her head in fake disapproval, but she was smiling. “A flock? You are such a unique idiot among idiots.”
“Don’t gorillas hang out in flocks? Seriously, what do you call a group of gorillas?” Murdock rubbed his eyes. The boredom was making him tired.
“Exactly that. A group, dummy, not a flock,” Von Stryker said plainly.
“A group. Yeah, that’s fair.” Murdock yawned. “Rainbow gorillas if they’re gay, or straight apes if they’re not gay?”
“I dare you to say that to a group of woke, white women in Hollywood. They’ll tear you to pieces faster than any group of freakishly strong primates, despite their sexual orientation.”
Murdock ignored her passionless taunt. “I hate this shit, Von. Hate it.”
“I hate woke bullshit too.”
“Yeah, that, duh, but I meant this.” He pointed at the dark building across the street.
“Well it’s not like I’m gonna fucking waltz into that heroin den and make any of those gangsters just up and walk out with a million Euros worth of shit, you dumb fuck.” Von Stryker spoke plainly with no emotion and never made eye contact with Murdock as she finished applying the last coat of ruby red nail polish to her pinky toe. “My connections warned me that these assholes are super unpredictable because other mob bosses are out to get them too.”
“Oh I don’t buy that bullshit, these assholes are amateurs.” Murdock leaned over and let out a fart but Von Stryker ignored him. “Never get high on your own stash. First mistake.” He slowly unloaded and loaded a ten round clip of hollow point bullets into his Berreta over and over to kill his boredom.
“They’re junkies. What in the fuck did you expect? Early to bed, early to rise?” Von Stryker examined her handiwork. Satisfied, she closed up the polish and turned to finally face Murdock. “Hey, what if we just go in there and blow shit up?”
Murdock could tell she was being serious. He cautiously offered, “Go on.”
Truth be told, Von Stryker was getting bored too. “Mulroony doesn’t know, but I’ve got four Soviet era rocket launchers in the back of my car. We could smoke them out.” She smiled. “Oh, and what the boss doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
The thought went though Murdocks’ brain like a midnight bullet train. He formulated a plan. “We need to distract the cops first. The brass will have our nuts if we’re found out or connected in any way to this.”
“Oh Murdock, the cops here speak one language.” Von Stryker cocked up one eyebrow and grinned a hooker’s grin. “Money.” Murdock predictably looked dumb, and Von Stryker couldn’t help but be annoyed. “Money, you fool. Cold, hard, cash. They take bribes. That’s what it means to speak money.”
Murdock nodded sheepishly. “What’re we talking here? A hundred bucks to keep quiet? A thousand?”
Von Stryker stretched out her arms and cracked her neck side to side. “It depends on how dirty the cop is, but all of them answer to the mafia. One phone call to my contacts on the inside and we’ll be fine.”
Murdock had tuned out within a second of asking his question, so he’d missed everything his friend had just told him. He had a song stuck in his head and had to discuss it right this second. “Hey, I want your opinion on something.”
“As in, what’s the best way to bribe them?”
“No, no, sorry, I’m not talking about the cops anymore. Hey, do you know that song by Ace Of Base? You know, the one that was a big hit?” Murdock had a look of confusion on his face that betrayed how hard his brain was working.
Von Stryker shook her head, half in disapproval, half in amazement. “I’ll answer your question after you answer mine. Do you always swallow when you go down on your boyfriends, Murdock?”
The joke caught him off guard but he recovered quickly. “You’re damn right I do. Swallowing makes the world a better place, lady, you of all people know that.”
Her grin betrayed her approval of the joke but she didn’t give him the comedic satisfaction of a laugh. “I’ve never met a gay man gayer than you.”
“They’re out there, but they’re few and far between.” The two agents looked awkwardly at each other for several seconds. Murdocks’ brain wouldn’t let the melody go. “Look, I just want to know, how come in that song, they say that all the girl wants is another baby.”
Von Stryker pleasantly contemplated murdering Murdock, but when she thought it through, she realized she’d hear his voice in her head for the rest of her life. She then momentarily contemplated suicide, but she admitted to herself that Murdock would find a way to haunt her in the great beyond too. “This is my life,” she bemoaned quietly to herself. “Ok, I’ll bite. What song is this?”
“Oh come on, I don’t know the titles of pop hits from decades ago.”
“Jesus Murdock! How can we have a conversation about anything if you don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about?”
Murdock was scowling in concentration. “Just go with me on this. That song, by Ace Of Base. They say that all the girl wants is another baby, she’s gone tomorrow, then she wants another baby, but they don’t say who her first baby is, or who the daddy is, or anything. It’s just a song about a girl who wants another baby. I don’t get it.”
Von Stryker stood up and looked through her binoculars at the apartment complex across the street. The place was dark and had all the curtains drawn. She knew that the bad guys were in that building somewhere and that they’d be exiting at some point with large amounts of cold, hard, stinky cash. The question was, when? She addressed Murdock’s dumb line of thought. “Fuck if I know. The last thing I want is to be knocked up, let alone by a stranger on a beach.”
Murdock looked even more confused. “What?”
Von Stryker’s eyes struggled as she adjusted the focus on her cheap binoculars. “First off, the song is called All That She Wants. Second off, if you ever listen to the words, she’s literally trying to bang a random guy on a beach to get knocked up.” Murdock made eye contact with her and looked momentarily scared. “So there you have it, a hit song about a fucked up woman. Whaddya do.” Von Stryker didn’t say the words as a question, and her dry delivery of sarcasm was appreciated by her very bored friend.
“Oh, but I like ’em dysfunctional. Gimme five minutes with a girl at a bar drinking away her daddy problems and twenty four hours later I guarantee I’ll be using my one phone call to beg you for bail money.”
“You need to raise your standards, dude.”
As he stretched, his spine popped in a few places echoing off the trees. “Send ’em to me broken and I’ll do my best to glue ’em back together for a night.”
“How do you not have face AIDS by now? For real, get your shit together.” Von Stryker spoke dryly and stood up from the bench to stretch a little too. “This team needs you, dipshit, but we need you to not be a mess.”
“Don’t you worry about me there sissy. I’ll die in a nuclear explosion on the moon, just you wait and see.”
The Moscow night was way too quiet for the action seeking agents. Six hours earlier, twelve large men walked into an apartment complex with duffle bags that were bulging and heavy. After that, nothing had happened. The sun had set and the midnight moon was bright. The waiting was torturous.
The agents were on a personal mission to rob a Russian drug runner and did not have clearance from the state department. If caught or killed, they would be completely on their own. The worst part was, in the completely absurd predicament where they might be killed, their team didn’t even know where they were. Even to their own standards, this was dumb.
“For real, I want to sneak in there, find the cash, kill all of them, piss on their corpses and light the place on fire.” Murdock quietly opened a water bottle and took a sip. “Thoughts?”
“I bet I can beat you again in a pissing contest.”
Murdock turned red. “My prostate has been kinda fucking with me, I think.” He had no idea what he was talking about, but the words sounded like a plausible excuse for losing badly in their one and only pissing contest months previous. “So once I get that checked out, you’re going down.”
“You fuck with the bitch, you get the horns.”
“Only males have horns, Von.”
“Not if you’re a bison, dummy.”
The two friends chatted and bickered with zero emotional energy. They were clearly annoying each other but neither would budge or bail. Their combined desire to bring carnage to these drug thug bad guys gave them super power patience. Both of them dreaded the idea of their personal mission being fruitless, but neither one of them would address the thought, maybe they’d screwed up?
“Bison females have horns. Huh.”
“Yup. There are a few other species where females have horns. Reindeer in particular in this country.”
The agents quickly hushed and jumped behind separate trees to hide. A car was approaching from three blocks away with it’s brights on. It was driving slowly, as if the passengers might be looking for something. When it came closer, the agents could see it swerve a little one way, then jerkily over correct to the opposite direction. The brake lights were on a lot, and the car slowed to an almost crawl in front of their location.
Von Stryker looked over to see Murdock grinning ear to ear. Her heart was pounding and her mind was sharp. She was a killer of bad men, and she was determined to make tonight a good one. “Can you get over there behind that trash can without being seen?” Her whisper was barely audible in the calm night air.
Murdock on the other hand had a whisper that could be possibly be heard over a blender. “Yes!” He froze as Von Stryker gave him huge eyes, then simply shook her head in disappointment.
The two watched the car creep by their location. It didn’t stop. It took another minute to mosey several blocks away until it disappeared into the distance.
“Drunk driving is so dumb,” Murdock lamented.
Russia was a place that annoyed Murdock. He came here often for work, but if he had his way he’d never return. The opposite was true for Von Stryker. She’d had a love affair with the country and had become a powerful undercover spy for Team Whiskey. She had connections in the government, the military, the mafia and the media.
“Did you hear the latest about Sarge?” Von Stryker asked.
“Not for a few weeks, no. I’m listening.”
“Well I saw her two days ago and she wouldn’t stop smiling. She was beaming. She told me about her time in Colombia and it was as if she were a college girl bringing home a boy to meet her parents. She was that excited, Murdock.”
“Did she ever find the bean pole guy?”
“No, and that’s kind of what concerns me. I told her that she’s a delusional idiot and she should stop being in love with an imaginary relationship, but she gave me a big hug and told me that I’d find love someday too. It was really fucked up.”
Murdock leaned his head back and pointed his chin to the stars. His neck tendons felt wonderful release as they stretched out the tension created by immense boredom. “We’re so used to her being hard nosed and calloused, so it’s strange to see her like a giddy girl.”
“I watched that woman throw a concrete paver through a mans skull once. She was really happy that day too.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that. Word got out to all the war lords that day about it and the regional violence slowed way down.” Murdock dropped his jaw in an “aha” moment that momentarily startled his friend. “I forgot, Sarge fought the night before in a boxing tournament, so she was reeling from a typical undefeated night. She was in a good mood that whole day. Killing that evil bastard with that paver was just joy icing on her happy cake.”
The dumb joke finally got Von Stryker to snort. It was enough for Murdock to know that he was winning in the battle of wits by one point. Unbeknownst to them, the night was young and the mental competition to make each other crack into laughter had begun.
In the distance, an unknown assassin was long gone as twelve Russian drug running junkies lay dead in an apartment building hallway after having been poisoned by gas, robbed, and left to be discovered the following day by locals who drank too much vodka and needed dental work.
