The third time I got shot was a messy goddamn affair. Tommy Noonan shot me in the balls. Well, not really in the balls, so much as near them. His wife had hired me on a standard stalk and snap kind of deal. He was knocking the thigh-highs with his twenty-three year old secretary and Mrs. Noonan wanted the goods to take him to the cleaners. He obviously preferred wash and wear.
Tommy Noonan was a record producer – rap, and what they called R&B, which was just slow rap with sexy bass lines – and he made a good dime doing it. Good enough that I had two skirt two bodyguards in a pristine white Escalade to get my lens trained on Noonan and Miss Sweet Cheeks 2010. As high-on-the-horse as Tommy was, he sure didn’t lay out for a nice place to conduct his illicit affairs. He obviously wasn’t terribly concerned with security either. Cost me a fifty to the manager to be shown how to pop open the “safety” window in the bathroom, and fifty to the cleaning lady when she caught me doing it. These are the things that get itemized as gratuities on the itemized list of expenses.
From the shower stall, I could hear the rusty spring symphony, punctuated with a lot of put-on “oooh baby” and “ohhhh Mister Noonan!” type stuff. Tommy, for his part, seemed to just pound away huffing and puffing, with little interest in the nubile young thing whose heels he was jamming into her eardrums. Class act, that Tommy Noonan. Vain, too. I soon discovered what it was Tommy liked about that particular establishment – mirrored headboards – that was enough to turn a skeezy twenty-dollar-an-hour bedbug motel into his passion pit of choice. Luckily, that also played to my needs, as I crept out just far enough to get the mirror in my sights. I framed it perfectly, Tommy’s purple face visible in the mirror above the top of his young lady’s pink and black streaked-hair. Her long left leg in the foreground, with its highly specific tattoo of pink and black stars, surrounding the name Jenny.
I’d spent a solid month, learning all the tricks of my pricey camera – all the special light settings and silence buttons – learning to take perfect pictures with no flash in any number of low-light, big noise, hard action situations. I only wish that I had remembered to set them before I climbed through the bathroom window, like a low-rent Joe Cocker.
The flash boomed and filled the room with light, ending with that zinging reset sound and what felt like ten minutes of dead silence. Then she screamed, yarding the sheets up to cover her lovely form. I would have stayed and stared, but Noonan was stumbling out of the bed, still wrapped up in his own set of starchy bed linen. He dove the few feet from the bed and rustled in his jacket as I stood and made my apologies to the tattooed lady and bolted for the door.
I was high-tailing it, already half-way back to the car when the .22 shell shaved my groin and dropped me to the deck. I landed on the goddamn camera. I found a sliver of black plastic still lodged in my armpit the next day.
The secretary ran past me screaming. She had exceptionally nice stems when she was standing. They ran all the way up from her hustling pinkies to her shapely, bustling ass, which was headed as far away from my scene as possible. She was still trailing the powder blue hotel sheet, which barely kept her perky cupcakes covered. The fact that I remember a sliver of nipple either marks me as a pervert, or the most attentive P.I. you’ve never heard of.
Noonan’s highly trained gorillas lightly jogged to their boss at the sound of gunfire and, seeing me lying on the ground, shot in the balls, (or at least near them) they figured I was probably still a threat. I suppose I could have crawled over like a baby and bashed Noonan’s toe in with what was left of my poor camera. I liked that fucking camera.
Long story anything but short – The cops broke it up what seemed like ten or fifteen hours later, once my ribs were fully tenderized, and my internal organs felt a pasty mush. They called in the medics, who laughed their own balls off at the sight of me. Some Private Dick I was gonna make with no testicles to spare.
I spent a few hours at the ER, getting portraits of my spleen and kidneys. They also sewed up the slice in my crotch where Noonan’s bullet grazed me. I must have leapt all akimbo, Don Knotts-style when I heard the shot. According to the doc that stitched me up, it was a one-in-a-billion miss. Split-hair on either side and I would have bled to death or said goodbye to at least one of my wrinkly pals. I talked to some of LAPD’s finest, twisted uncomfortably in my chair for a while. I eventually made it back to the scene of the crime by cab, and searched fruitlessly for the corpse of my camera. Noonan had pulled it off of me while his thugs were river dancing on my liver. I found the remains, unceremoniously dumped in a garbage can by the front office. I was very carefully shuffling away when I heard the voice.
“You forget something?”
The manager was smiling, strong-smelling stump of a cigarillo smouldering between his ugly teeth. He held something between his first two fingers, holding it up as if he was going to flick it at me. I shuffled back as he chuckled. He spat the tobacco stump across the parking lot, snorted back a lungful and spat that out behind it.
“They must have left you cojones to spare, gumfoot.”
“Gumshoe , pal.”
I reached for my wallet and wrestled another fifty out. He handed over the memory card. Gratuity.
Beat-down and torn-up as I was, I couldn’t believe my luck, that Tommy Noonan was a vain prick, a bad shot, and a complete moron. I laughed, which hurt like hell, as I transferred the shot from the card to the laptop and attached it in the email. I also included the shots from the lapel-cam and CC’d the nice detective I’d talked to at the hospital.
I left the paperwork, and the billing, and a note to remind me to look up the secretary, on the desk. I fired up the George Foreman and laid it full of thick-cut, Applewood-smoked bacon. I poured myself a high triple-Jamesons and filled it with soda. I taped a plastic bag around my nuts and crawled into the shower.
There’s nothing like a plate of crispy bacon, a whiskey soda and a hot shower after a day like I had. Something told me it would be more of the same, and soon enough. I finished the drink and the bacon, popped the couple of pills they’d given me in one of those tiny blister-pack things, and went to sleep, dreaming of pink and black stars calling “Oooooh Mister Cole!”, and another round of whiskey and bacon.
© 2013 Axel Howerton
*** Read more of Mossimo Cole's misadventures in HOT SINATRA, available on Amazon, B&N, Sony, Kobo and most online retailers in ebook and paperback from Evolved Publishing. ***
