NOIR IN MY CAR

The Capitol Caper

In the last episode, a mysterious red-head hopped into Marco X. Pollo’s Nash Healey. He didn’t know her but she was quite distracting…

“Watch out!” she yelled.

Chapter 2

THE ASSASSIN

“What? What are you talking about?” When I looked to my left, I flinched. An automatic pistol pointed past my nose at Jade’s, or was it Jasmine’s, head.

The pointing pistol belonged to a would-be killer riding a black beater of a mountain bike, who had braked next to my driver-side window. His eyes were like dark-roasted coffee beans, and they peered out from under a ball cap that featured a drawing of a black llama. In block letters, under the graphic, it read, No Prob-llama.

Jade, or was it Jasmine, yelped. Her words screeching out unintelligible in a strange cross between a cry for help and an explosive sneeze. Sounded like Queef Waffle!

I lurched the Nash forward before the killer squeezed the trigger. His shot missed. That was the good news. The bad news is the bullet shattered my back-passenger window. That really torqued me because I had just replaced the small glass after a two-week search where I finally found it on eBay.

I floored my 3-speed Borg-Warner automatic. Jade’s or Jasmine’s head snapped back like a crash-test dummy.

The Nash coughed.

The transmission slipped and shuddered.

The oil light blinked on.

But I left the assassin in a puff of blue smoke as I puttered through the intersection.

In my rearview mirror, I saw him hunched over his handlebars, hacking up a lung. Sadly, for him, he never saw the Number 4 bus barreling down Lincoln Avenue behind him. The driver of the big bus never saw the coughing cloud-engulfed assassin either and left him flatter than my wallet on a Saturday night.

“Jade? You okay?”

She sat up straight on her side of my red-leather bench seat. One set of eyelashes hung like a broken shutter. “Call me Jasmine—but listen we have to get to the Capitol!”

“Why?

“There’s a bomb!”

Chapter 3

THE CHASE

“B-b-b-bomb?” is what reeled through my mind, but I wasn’t about to stutter that out loud. It would be anathema to my tough-guy PI image.

At her frenetic urging, I parked illegally, at an obtuse angle, next to the Governor’s reserved space. We rushed up the west steps of the Capitol and muscled past a tiny group of gray-haired protestors who held up signs and bullhorns. They were chanting and suggesting that the statewide spelling bee was endangering phonetic spelling. I bumped into a grandmother dressed as a bumblebee. She held up a homemade sign that read, “I’m through with thru.”

I said, “I hear ya, Aunt Bee.” She gave me a stinging look.

Inside, a security guard, big as a four-door Hummer, tried to stop our progress. But Jasmine knew how to make an entrance. She flashed her FBI creds and said, “He’s with me. Out of our way.”

FBI? Who is this dame?

The Hummer turned sideways like a big steel door and waved us through.

Jasmine sprinted ahead. I never knew an FBI agent to wear heels, much less run in them. But she was sprinting on the balls of her feet and putting distance between us.

As I ran after her, several thoughts raced through my mind: Why am I chasing a stunning redhead through the Capitol, especially one who claims a bomb is about to blow? Maybe I should run the other way. And why is the stunning redhead a fed? And why’d she jump into my car, of all people? And what kind of assassin rides a beater bicycle?

These questions distrubed me, especially since only moments ago I was driving my merry way downtown enjoying the warm October day in hungry anticipation of a Korean fusion taco. But hunger had now abandoned me like male hormones on Bruce Jenner. I yelled after her, “Where’s the bomb?”

“Basement,” she yelled back. Jasmine click-clacked ahead in her nine-inch heels.

“But wait. That’s where the lobbyists and journalists hang out…hang out…hang out,” my words echoing off the massive walls of the rotunda.

When I reached the top of the wide grand staircase leading down to the Capitol’s basement and cafeteria, she was gone. Out of sight. That is except for one black killer heel laying at the bottom of the marble steps.