Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective Page 11

  “So you going to cut my heart out to wish for your own body back?” he laughed hysterically, “Then I’ve still won. I’ve made you sacrifice lives, take bullets, do things a man should never have to do just so you can resume being your original crummy self instead of having a chance at the earth and all of its splendors, or wishing for harems of beautiful women or…”

  I sliced his throat to shut him up. He was right. And hell, from all I’d learned and all I’d done, I figured out it meant something to be Jimmy Plush. I had my gun, I had my wits and I had a few inches where a man needs to have ‘em. No point asking for the world. I had killed the bastard Jimmy Plush and the bastard Charles Hatbox in one stroke of my sword and walked out of the temple as the one, the only, the new and improved heroic Jimmy Plush. Not too bad of a thing to be.

  I returned to the only place I really knew, in spite of hating it. It was different, though. Where once I saw only filth, disease and stupidity, now I saw potential. Towns, countries, they’re like people themselves, they don’t turn good or bad overnight, they get better or they get worse, they do one evil thing or one good thing at a time, they lose people, they kill people they get dragged downstairs or brought in by cops that cut off limbs. It hurt to look at the driverless limo outside my office but I couldn’t stop staring. The best man I knew was dead.

  If I’d been able to pay attention, I would have seen the smelly, Chinese brutes sneaking up behind me to stuff me in a sack. But I wasn’t able to pay attention and they got the drop on me because of it. I didn’t mind being stuffed in a sack that much anyway. I’d been through worse and if I felt like getting out of the sack, I had a scimitar and a martian disintegrator inside my coat. I waited.

  When they removed me from the sack, I was rewarded by the sight of a pale, angry, Chinese woman. She’d be kind of a looker if she wasn’t Chinese, and if she wasn’t my dead chauffeur’s estranged wife taking revenge for his death and the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of both me and the real Jimmy Plush. The long, razor sharp fingernails and the gang of Chinese thugs didn’t do much for her appeal either.

  “Tear him apart!” she ordered them, “Let him die before my eyes!”

  There were about twenty of ‘em, real big for Chinese, a couple of eunuchs among them that towered over the others. A fella without a martian disintegrator would worry. I fired on the brutes, hoping to sizzle them with hot green death, but failing to remember that the Chinese are descended from the Venusians that colonized Atlantis, so were genetically immune to martian disintegrators, though unfortunately for Chang, not to the disembowelers their species used. Failing to blast my assailants, I drew the scimitar, outmaneuvering them with my agility and knowledge of the fighting arts. Big as these guys were, I made short work of them and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going, coward?” Chang’s wife shouted at me.

  “I’m turning my back on you and walking away.” I knew as I said it that it wouldn’t be that simple. She practically flew across the room to block the door. I didn’t think anybody could move that quick.

  “My husband is dead because of you! I am not leaving until I’ve ripped everything out from inside of you!” She showed she was going to make good on her threat by attempting a good old fashioned open palmed heartripper. I saw it coming, so I could block it.

  “I’m not the man you think I am. I did take your husband to his doom but I’m…”

  She intended to shut me up with a gilded battleaxe fist. It worked, for a second, my concentration focused on a crawling banana slug sweep, which she deftly dodged, but I was determined to say my peace.

  “There was another man who was me before I was. He…”

  “Enough of your lies!” She launched into the decapitating batkick. I ducked, readying myself to spikeshark roll when she landed. We exchanged meaningless blow after meaningless blow after meaningless blow, counterattack after counterattack, me wanting nothing more than to make her stop attacking, her wanting nothing more than to keep it up until I was dead. We fought like this for longer than I thought I could fight anyone and god help me, I started to really feel the new equipment. She wasn’t just pretty for a Chinese woman, she was pretty for a woman.

  We sat down and caught our breath.

  “We both lost everything. The man who killed your husband is an associate of the man who killed my girlfriend and my fiancée. He ruined my life and I have to start over from nothin’. Did the same to you.”

  There was understanding and sympathy in her sweet shadowy eyes.

  “You don’t seem like the man my husband wrote home about. You seem sad and good and honest.”

  “I’m tryin’.”

  “I could have been like my husband,” she said, tears flowing down her cheek, “but I’m impatient. I have hate in my heart. I ran my gang in China and he came here to be an honest man.”

  “It’s hard to be the kind of man your husband was.”

  She put her hand on my thigh to comfort me and was surprised by what she found. As I said, I’d been getting very excited. She pulled off her kimono, opened up my pants and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I was inside a woman, part of her, moving in her and feeling something, as if, for once, there was more in me than stuffing and pain. As she held me close, I thought again about what it meant to be Jimmy Plush. I was soft, warm, a thing to make people feel secure and like they live in a good enough world.

  “I’ll be back,” I told her, “I’ve got some business.”

  “You’d better be,” she said, and meant it.

  I agree that storming into J.L Wong’s and martian disintegrating Skinny and Johnny was the kind of thing the first Jimmy Plush would have done but the new, improved Jimmy Plush wasn’t gonna be a saint just because the last one was a bastard. That would be letting him win. I was through living my life by standards set for and by other people. Anybody who’s read a pulp novel before knows that heroic and merciful ain’t synonymous.

  Which is why what I did after kicking in the door to Vic Halperin’s office surprised me.

  It was quick and pathetic. I kicked in the door. He reached for his gun. I disintegrated it. He attempted a very respectable jumpkick. I responded with a much more respectable sidestep. He hit the floor hard. I pointed the disintegrator at his head. He started begging for his life.

  “What do you want, Plush? Please, anything!”

  I looked past the real Jimmy Plush and I looked past Charles Hatbox and I looked into myself.

  “First of all, you’re out of the pimp business.”

  He nodded in agreement.

  “Fine. Will that be all?”

  I shook my head.

  “How’s your driving?”