72, Bananas
“You smell worse than Gwen Stefani’s solo record, and fuck me running that thing stunk like shit.” Special agent Death shook her head in disgust at her friend and fellow secret agent, Dale O’Connor. “You smell like a gang bang gone terribly wrong.”
“I’ve said that to you before,” O’Connor said calmly. He did stink and he knew it but he wasn’t about to let his friend get ahead on the scoreboard regarding this fresh battle of wits.
“Did you? You told me you hated Gwen’s solo career? When?” Death asked innocently.
“No, I mean, you’ve told me that I smelled like a gang bang gone terribly wrong before.” O’Connor thought about it for a second. “Maybe I told that to you, come to think of it.” He crinkled his brow and stared down at the floor as all of his concentration went to solve this mild mental dilemma. “Maybe I told that to Murdock. I know I’ve said that before.”
“What, that you smell like sulfur and regret?” Death decided she would not back down.
“Yeah, yeah, I smell like twenty nine years of bad choices. I get it. But I won’t let you use my line against me.”
Could it have been that she was indeed stealing his line? Agent Death thought long and hard about where she’d heard that line before. “Well you’ve never smelled like a gang bang gone right, I’ll tell you that.”
Instantly O’Connor let go of any brain power he was using to process the original insult. “What exactly does a gang bang gone right smell like?”
“Good question. I’d say it smells like roses, champagne that hasn’t been spilled all the fuck over, and sweet, clean money that consentingly got passed around, cuz what kind of fuck fest would it be if money didn’t change hands? Am I right?” Death patted herself on the back in her mind, but she was playing it cool and wouldn’t budge a smile.
“Fucking well played, Death.” O’Connor didn’t smile as he took his shirt off and tossed it into the trash. “The past two days in that shirt have been worse than listening to Murdock sing Madonna songs from the eighties.”
The idea of Murdock singing made her shudder. “That bad, huh?” Death asked casually, but she felt the honest sting of his pain.
‘Worse.” O’Connor walked to the sink and ran some luke warm Mexican tap water over his hands. “And you’re right about that Gwen Stefani record sucking shit through a tube. That whole record was just one big waste of oxygen for everyone involved.”
“Thank you!” Death said enthusiastically. The humor about O’Connor’s stench had passed, and now it was time to justify Death’s internal hatred of Gwen Stefani’s solo album. “I mean, the stupid bitch thought it would be a good idea to spell the fucking word BANANAS in the middle of a song. Honestly, I puked a little in my mouth when I heard that.”
“Wasn’t that the same song where she said, that’s my shit, like over and over?” O’Connor shook his head in disgust, half at the memory of a terrible album and half at himself for stinking so badly. “I can literally picture her pointing at a pile of human dung on the ground, proudly claiming the shit as her own.” O’Connor pretended to be a female music artist as he mimed dancing around an imaginary pile of excrement. “Hey everyone! That’s my shit!”
“Same shitty song, Doc,” Death said with a giggle as she knew she’d been defeated in the game of not smiling first. “I spent twenty dollars on that god damned album and to this day I want my god damned money back.”
O’Connor chuckled. “Glad I’m not the only crazy person who thought that Gwen’s solo music sucked so badly,” he said while pouring himself a glass of the same luke warm tap water. “What a let down too, you know? Her records with No Doubt were fire.” He took a swig of shitty warm water and muttered to himself, “pure fire.”
“THNAK YOU!” Death said for a second time in less than a minute. “No Doubt was SO GOD DAMNED GOOD! How could her solo stuff be so god damned bad?” Clearly, neither agent was a fan of Gwen Stefani as a solo artist.
“Look, I know I stink, but saying I stink worse than that album cuts me deep, Death.”
Nodding, Agent Death walked out of the kitchen in their safe house. “Hurting your feelings about how badly you smell was all I wanted to do, Doc. Thanks for making me feel good by admitting it made you feel shitty.”
“Anytime, friend.” There was a bundle of bananas by the sink and O’Connor grabbed one. “Speaking of bananas,” he said to himself. He pulled back the peel and took a bite. “Dang, that’s friggin good,” he again muttered to no one in the room.
O’Connor took a shower and put on some fresh clothes. He walked back into the kitchen to find agents Death, Murdock, and McVandalay on a lap top video call with the newest member of their team, Yen Roar. Yen was a computer expert in English but was having a difficult time working with Spanish translators. O’Connor could hear that she was frustrated, even though she was being pleasant as she said, “I feel like I’m a drunk American tourist in the middle of a god damned village wide fiesta when I’m looking at this code. It’s like the last twenty years of my life’s studies and work have all been so I can just pick my nose and fling the boogers at the wall. Seriously, it’s pissing me off and making me more frustrated than you can possibly imagine.”
“We knew you belonged on this team,” said special agent Trent Murdock.
Special agent Bradley McVandalay normally ignored everyone on Team Whiskey, but he couldn’t resist. “Rice has been paying Murdock here for ten long years to pick his nose and flick boogers, so if he gets fired, it’s cuz you’ve replaced him, Yen.”
Without flinching, Murdock boasted, “I’m a pro at booger picking, Bradley. Rice is gonna be hard pressed to find a better booger picker.” He felt like his tongue had been tied. “Say that ten times fast.” He started muttering “better booger picker” to himself as fast as he could, and with that, Murdock’s mind was now out of the conversation.
O’Connor enjoyed seeing his best friends talk about nose picking. He couldn’t hide his smile as Roar saw him enter her screen. “Hi Doc!” Roar said enthusiastically. “I hear that you were stuck in a dumpster for two days with no booze just to see how many people went in and out of that office building through the back door. How’re you feeling?”
“My shirt is in the garbage and my dignity will forever be in that alley.” O’Connor yawned. “As for booze, it’s always happy hour for me, baby.”
“You smell good, dude,” McVandalay said to O’Connor.
Death chortled, “You should’ve smelled him earlier when he got in.”
O’Connor said, “Hardy har har, fuckers, I know how a shower works.”
McVandalay took another sniff. “No, for real, you smell…” McVandalay couldn’t quite find the word. “Healthy!”
“Jesus, Bradley, don’t go ruining my reputation with the bartenders around here,” O’Connor joked.
McVandalay got sarcastic as he asked, “Did you actually eat some fruit that might actually provide your body with essential vitamins and nutrients? For real, you smell like bananas.”
Both Death and O’Connor had an ear worm pop into their heads of the obnoxious Gwen Stefani solo song they both disliked. Silently, their hearts filled with slow burning murderous hate.
Roar had been quiet as the agents in the safe house were chatting, but she piped up, “Is it bananas that Doc smells like bananas?” She smiled at her own joke. “You know, bananas means crazy! Like, that guy was totally going bananas on Black Friday over the flat screen prices, you know, that kind of thing?” Roar was socially awkward, but since the agents were all crazy anti-social, her inability to be casual fit right in.
“You’re funny, even if no one is laughing,” O’Connor said to try and ease any social tension Roar might be feeling.
Death chimed in, “O’Connor and I were chatting earlier about a song that spells out the word, bananas, so this is just awkward that O’Connor now smells like them when earlier he smelled like a Mexican dumpster.”
O’Connor instantly jumped in, “And anyone that gets butt hurt because they think we’re being racist is more than welcome to spend two days in a fucking dumpster in a hot Mexico City alleway before they decry racism.”
“Yeah,” Roar said awkwardly, “they’d be bananas to call you racist.”
Death, O’Connor and McVandalay all exploded in laughter as Murdock muttered “better booger picker” to himself. It made Roar feel like a million bucks. She was trying to be friendly as she asked, “Just curious, what song were you talking about where they spelled out that word?”
McVandalay added, “Yeah, I wanna know what kind of questionable childrens music you’re listening to where they’re spelling out words?”
Defensively, Death said, “I don’t want to tell you because it was so bad.”
Roar was pleasant and she said, “I’ve been trying to decipher Mexican computer code and I’m the whitest girl you’ve ever met. You can’t make my life any weirder than it already is.”
Death looked at O’Connor as he said, “She asked for it.”
After a long sigh, Death shook her head as if willing herself not to put anymore energy into the idea of awful music. “Fuck it, it’s a song by Gwen Stefani off of her shitty solo album from like, twenty years ago or something, when we were kids.”
McVandalay asked, “Isn’t that one of the gals from the Dixie Chicks or whatever?”
Death scoffed, “No! And I will end your existence if you continue insulting The Chicks in my presence, Bradley!”
“Apologies, friend. I didn’t know this Gwen person was so awful.”
“She’s not!” Death said defensively, but she knew it was no use. “Gwen used to be the lead singer of a really kick ass band called No Doubt that put out some great records.”
“Never heard of them, but you already know that I’m a death metal kind of guy,” McVandalay said plainly.
O’Connor nodded in agreement. “Cradles Of Filth for the win.”
“You know it, brother,” McVandalay said, “but I still want to know what in the fuck y’all are talking about.”
Death continued, “We were kids when No Doubt was at the height of their career and I fell in love with their album called Tragic Kingdom when I was in high school. They put out some other killer albums, then their lead singer went off and made a solo album. Every song was worse than the previous, and one in particular talked about poop and bananas.”
Yen Roar had sat quietly on the other end of the video conference call and absorbed all of this information. She crinkled her face and said, “Well fruit does have a lot of fiber, and fiber helps you poop, so maybe this Gwen gal we’re talking about here had a biology degree?”
“Unlikely,” O’Connor said dryly. “Now let’s get on with it, cuz I didn’t hide out in that fucking dumpster for two days just because I thought it was a fun time.”
“Yeah, that intel you gave us about El Padre being the number one narco on the Gulf coast of Mexico was spot on. This dude is a genius, you guys. He sits right under the radar and pulls all the strings, and the guy is violent as hell. Rice’s team back at Langley is putting together a dossier on the guy before y’all make your move.”
Murdock stopped his muttering about boogers and rejoined the conversation as he chimed in, “I got word from Von Stryker back in Moscow that the Russian oil men who were involved with The General…”
O’Connor interrupted him and said with a thick Spanish accent, “¡El Heneral!”
Without being annoyed from being interrupted, Murdock blurted, ¡Sí!” and went right back into what he was saying, “are not happy that the muchacho got gunned down. The Russians don’t know who did it, but since we know it’s El Padre, perhaps an anonymous tip to them might be in order…”
The agents could see Yen Roar’s eyes go distant as she processed this thought. “So you mean Gosavich and his Russian oil lackeys would attack El Padre for revenge?”
He sucked math, but Murdock knew corruption money was big on this one. “The Russians stood to make billions, if not over a trillion dollars worth of profit from investing in Mexican resources, but by killing El Heneral…”
This time it was O’Connor who interrupted as he blurted, “¡Sí!”
Instantly Murdock’s enthusiasm perked up as he vigorously said, “¡Sí!” and then just as instantly he dropped back to his normal speaking tone as he said, “El Padre screwed up The Russian’s chance to make crazy money on Mexican oilfields.”
The wheels were turning in Death’s head as she said, “Which makes one wonder if El Padre has some money tied up in Mexican oil businesses.”
O’Connor couldn’t help it as he said, “which is why I hid out in a dumpster for two days just so I could count how many peeps El Padre has on his payroll at the local magistrates office. As far as I can tell, over half of the employees use that back entrance, and since only his peeps are allowed to use that door, well…” O’Connor paused, then said with enthusiasm, “I’d say we have a bit of a bought and paid for political system on our hands, friends! You all are welcome to hang out in a dumpster for two days to do your own surveillance if you’d like!”
“Oh yeah, about that,” Roar said. “You probably didn’t need to do that after all, you know. Porter picked up Owens and Boothausen and they could’ve set up cameras really easily. But you did a damn good job, Doc!”
It took as second for O’Connor to process this information. “Why didn’t Owens just help us out on this one, then? Where was he?”
“Well he went back to that casino where they cuffed Murdock and got back into their security rooms again and he stole a few laptops for me to crack. Normally, in English, I’d be done with them within ten minutes, but obviously they’re in Spanish and I’m having a hell of a time getting anything out of them.”
O’Connor wasn’t mad. In fact, he remembered yet again how much he liked his life as a secret agent. He spoke perfect Mexican Spanish and wanted to help. “Roar, I’ll reach out to Porter and have her fly me to you.” With a weird, half Italian, half dumbass accent, O’Connor said, “I speeka da goodah Espanyol, homie.” He went back to talking normally. “I can help you crack those things and we can hopefully get a better picture on who this El Padre asshole really is.”
“I could use all the help I can get with this. Just text me when you’re here and we’ll get to work. Don’t be too drunk, ok?” Roar added.
“Scouts honor,” O’Connor said. As the screen went black, he pulled out a flask and took his first sip of booze in several days. “That’s the best whiskey I’ve had all month.”
Murdock pretended to be insulted. “Better than the whiskey we were drinking when we interrogated those thugs last week?”
“That was good whiskey, I’ll admit it,” O’Connor giggled, “but I’ve been in a dumpster for two days. You can imagine how nice this tastes.”
In the distance, a local office building buzzed with workers who were all secretly on the payroll of a very powerful Mexican narco named El Padre who operated as chief war lord of the Mexican east coast known by his ruthless violence, intimidation, murder, and money.
