Part 9 CHRONIC SMOKER
Duo Maxwell had driven for all of five scant minutes before a sudden craving overtook him, and not one for the stony-eyed traveler who scribbled incessantly at his passenger side. He tenderly licked his lips and knew it was vain to deny it. So, as soon as the fire engine red car ahead of him veered off into a parking lot, the bohemian's eyes locked onto the glass windows of the humble-looking gas station, hunger glowing in the pits of his violet eyes. With certain feline cunning, he smirked and circled the block to stall the delivery truck a little ways from the gas station. Heero's dark blue eyes were much to occupied with his rapidly composing notebook to register what was happening at first, but he snapped to attention when Duo's slim dark figure was abruptly absent at his side and the air echoed with the hollow metal clash of the door slamming shut.
Heero instantly lifted his head and put writing to the back of his mind, as he looked suspiciously at the empty driver seat and moved over quickly to the window. "Duo?" He called after and leaned out the open window. His expression was marred with skepticism. "What are you doing?"
"Oh, just thought I'd grab something for the road," Duo called back absently, lacing his fingers behind his back and stretching his arms out backwards as he walked. He made it seem effortless. "If you want somethin', ya just hafta ask, ya know."
"There's no way you can be hungry. We ate all of ten seconds ago."
Spinning around, the con man continued walking, backwards this time, as he gave only a smirk and a smug salute as a response. As he let his arm fall to the side, he started laughing conspiratorially to himself and spun back around on his heels. Now he was stepping lightly up onto the sidewalk and both his hands were balled up in his pockets. And, if Heero could hear as well as he thought he could, he was also whistling "Hi-Ho," to himself. He put a hand on the windowsill and tried to hold back the sharpness of his tone as he called after him again.
"Duo," he warned sharply from the window of the Isuzu, "don't—"
"Don't what?" the bohemian called back innocently, without looking, now individually cracking all of his knuckles behind his back in a blatantly defiant way.
"You know what? If you get caught, I'm not going to bail you out," Heero warned again, his voice growing louder slightly in frustration, knowing no matter what he would threaten him with there was no way he could rein in the free-spirited bohemian. It was obvious in that dependable deviant smirk. His hand tightened around the rim of the window as he called out again. "Duo—"
Pawing at the air with a hand casually and the other sitting pretty on his hip, he called back in a mocking display of repetition, "If you want something, ya just hafta ask, ya know!" He snickered to himself. It made the straight-laced man sitting in the driver's seat, leaning out the window, tighten his grip around the windowsill while his blood pressure had begun the daily climb it'd been suffering lately.
"That's not what I meant, and you know it." His voice was raising a few dangerous decimals.
The bohemian's fingers were suddenly stuck innocently in each of his ears. "Blah, blah, blah."
"Duo!" Heero snapped.
He was whistling again, stepping like a jaunty dressage horse.
Again, he tried to get a warning through to him, but it was beginning to feel futile. Like he was talking to a deviant criminal who wasn't going to listen to him anyway. Imagine that. "I'm telling you," he said, "don't do anything stupid. I won't help you if you do."
"I'll only be a minute," Duo crooned ever so glibly in return, his wicked smile practically visible through the back of his head. It seemed to amuse him to radically piss off the traveler.
Besides, that guy is such a crumbly cookie, he thought smugly to himself. He'd come running to help a box of kittens. He's a mush-ball.
"Duo, I mean it. I won't come and bail you out if you get in trouble," came the final growl, before he gave a sigh dripping with exasperation and leaning back in the seat to simply watch the headstrong con man make his way up onto the sidewalk and towards the door. He was helpless to watch him turn around and hold the door open for an elderly lady, even giving her the tiniest of bows and his best shit-eating Boy Scout smile as she went by. He swore that he even saw him give him a mischievous smirk before turning and disappearing inside the door. Heero's face scrunched up slightly as he watched the blurry form of the bohemian behind the frosted glass, then he muttered underneath his breath and moved away from the window to write again.
Inside, Duo was strolling along the aisle as if he were no more than a paying customer looking for a gallon of milk or carton of eggs. He even would pick up a few things, but instead of taking them up to the counter, he'd simply snicker at them and put them back on the shelf. Browsing through the candy section, bending over to pick up the latest scandalous magazine, running his finger through the frost on the freezer doors, he gave gracious, beaming smiles to all the people he passed.
What they didn't know was Duo managing to keep anything from sticking to his fingers—just yet. The black-clad con man faded in and out between the aisles while he waited for the rest of the customers to clear out, and luckily most of them had been headed for the register when he strolled by them, carefully analyzing them. His mindless welcoming grin twisted into a more sinister one and he slipped silently into the condiment aisle.
The cashier was too busy fixing her hair in a handheld mirror to notice that Duo had been roaming inside for five minutes, and he glanced at her once. Then he made a determined beeline towards the men's room, with a swindled ketchup and soy sauce bottle hand.
He ducked into the narrow hallway at the back of the convenience store and pushed the bathroom door open with his shoulder, rolling smoothly inside. Glancing around, he praised his luck. It was a single stall room, with a dismal looking sink hanging beneath a mirror and a toilet tucked, unhidden, in the corner. Someone had torn up the "Employees Must Wash Hands" sign and balled it up in the trash bin. Duo smoothly stuck the toe of his boot in the door, and leaned back to peer through the crack and get a vantage of the cashier girl.
Yup. Still trying to get that right mixture of sweet schoolgirl and streetwalkin' whore to her hair.
He removed his foot and let the door shut quietly, ticking once as he turned the lock close. After that, once he was pretty sure it was sufficiently soundproof in the room, he lifted an arm and brought it down hard, the sound of glass shattering echoing on the tiled walls.
The cashier girl then leaned her stomach against the counter, grinding down her nails with a pink and blue file, inches from her mouth and puckering her lips as she concentrated. She hardly heard the bohemian footsteps approaching her at a ragged jog until an unfamiliar face greeted her, looking a shade or two paler than he should have. Proclaimed as Darlene by her nametag, she half-started when she saw the man breathing unevenly, standing at the counter with nothing in his hands. He was also wearing all black, but her eyes went straight to his face, charming as it could be despite the uncertainty and almost horror etched into it.
"Can I help you?" she asked, suddenly wishing she'd done her hair a little nicer and standing up straight so her pushup could work it's magic.
Duo put a hand on the counter glass, as if to support himself physically and took a deep gulp to try and steady his breathing. After a second, he managed to get his lungs under control and make the cashier girl look absolutely absorbed in him. Her smoky eyes were filling with concern as he started to stammered, "Listen, Miss, miss—uh"
"Darlene," she answered quickly, bated. "My name's Darlene."
"Darlene" Duo murmured back, stringing a smile through his anxiousness. "Well, what do you know. That's a coincidence. That was my grandmother's name."
"What's wrong, sir?"
The weak smile was skillfully dropped and pleasantry in his voice was shaky. "I think something horrible has happened I didn't know what to do but come to you," Duo managed to moan out before that image of something horrific crept back into his head and made him loose another shade of color in his face. "I think someone hasthey've—God, it's just horrible."
By now, she had used whatever little intuition she had left in her head after all the aerosol hairspray she'd exposed it to during her life to realize that something serious had just happened, and despite slowly feeling a dreading fear, she had stepped quickly out from the counter and come around to stand next to the good-looking stranger. A pale, stammering, but stunning stranger she must've missed walking in. A hand went to his shoulder and she tried to comfort him.
"It's okay, sir," she said as sweetly as she could, a little disappointed as she noticed that the stranger was only as tall as her. She preferred taller men, she thought dismally, but there wasn't much she could do about that. "Just show me what happened. Is it someone you know?"
"No, I just opened the bathroom door and when I saw it, I" Duo croaked shakily, having visible difficulty speaking about it. His eyes were even taking on a fine, fearful sheen. "It was unlocked and I didn't think anyone would be in there, I didn't think that—"
"Don't force yourself to get all upset, now, and let's just go take another look. Alright? Then we can go call the police," the cashier girl Darlene soothed, guiding the upset stranger with the wonderfully subtle cologne towards the bathroom hall.
"Thank you, I just—I just couldn't do it by myself," Duo gushed shakily.
As the bohemian walked reluctantly along side the unsuspecting girl, coming closer to the cracked bathroom door in the half-shadowed hall, his face betrayed nothing but honest disturbance. Or, so any unsuspecting girl would have thought so, mostly because she was just that unsuspecting. He even would balk back a step or two as they drew closer like he couldn't stand to return to the sight he'd stumbled across. She would put a hand on his shoulder regularly to try and guide him along, and told him, "Just please come with me, alright, I'm scared too," she confessed as they made it through the aisle and stood at arm's length from the door knob.
It was nothing but dark in the bathroom itself, and the inch of space between the door and the frame didn't reveal any of the horror that the stranger in the convenience store had claimed to witness. But none of that seemed to set off any alarms in the young girl's mind, and she cautiously looked back at him again. "In there?" Darlene asked nervously.
Duo was hovering close behind her, but still occasionally balked backwards. He was cradling his arms against his chest and covered his mouth with one as he nodded tensely, eyes thick with concern. She took a second to muster whatever courage she could, motivating herself with the possibility of a date to help comfort' the stranger further, and took a few steps toward the door. Darlene paused once again, but she put her hand around the doorknob and pushed it tentatively open.
Through the four-inch crack she could clearly see a pool of liquid on the floor, and as her eyes adjusted, she could tell that it was a deep red substance that leaked steadily toward the door because of the slight slope of the ground. As she gasped, she anxiously pushed the door further open upon a seeping pool of blood on the floor, praying to God for the first time since Sunday school that there wasn't a corpse lying beside it. She didn't hear Duo shifting quietly behind her, but she did hear her own gasp turn into a confused sound as she saw what lay inside. A half-shattered bottle of soy sauce lay beside a half-emptied ketchup bottle, mixing together and forming a dark, watery, blood-like pool.
Darlene started to turn her head, her eyebrows digging together in confusion. "What's going on—?"
There was a series of loud thuds as a hand came down on the back of her head and her unconscious body sprawled out onto the tile, some of her coifed hair spilling out into the pool of mixed condiments. The bohemian snorted smugly to himself and balled his fists casually in his pockets. The door swung slowly close until it was stopped by the young employee's body, and the sound of footsteps calming walking away with the tiniest hop in their stride was the only thing heard aside from the complacent whistling tune.
A few seconds later, the sign in the window had been overturned to proclaim, "Sorry, We're Closed," and a pair of keys pillaged and both doors securely locked. That was just before the bolted plastic case over looking the register was easily foiled and pilfered and was one expensive pack of Marlboro less to show for it.
"Grandmother's name my ass," Duo snickered to himself, pinching a cigarette between his lips. He sat lounging on the counter with a knee bent casually and his back supported by the cash register, sprawled out as if he were rolling in piles of war spoils.
He twirled the stolen fag between his lips, enjoying it for a second before he lit it. Then he laughed. "Pitiful hienn, they get easier and easier to fool everyday."
The bohemian slung an arm up into the air behind his head and with the other, looked for a place to tap his cigarette. He shrugged and ended up using the penny dish. After a few long, prosperous drags, the con man leaned back and craned his neck to peer a second at the cash register. He pinched the cigarette between his lips with a lazy smirk as he twisted an arm back to reach toward the unprotected motherload. Snickering again to himself and the empty convenience store, he skillfully waved his fingers over the keys and jabbed the cash tray ejector button with the greatest of ease.
"Come on, make it a little bit of a challenge for me, people," Duo drawled, turning over to paw idly through the various denominations just waiting to be pilfered with a massive grin. A smile that, reasonably, had disappeared with the first shot that ripped through the cash register a scant inch from his chin and extinguished his cigarette, not to mention turning said cash register into a smoking, sparking wreck. Duo managed to bark out a surprised, "Christ!" before he rolled inward off the counter, still able to feel the wind from the bullet as it had whizzed by him.
The bohemian stood up, now behind the circular counter looking out upon the expanse of the convenience store, and struggled to find the source for a second. It was just enough time for another shot to blast through a magazine rack and scatter bits of Cosmopolitan to the floor. Duo instinctually ducked, with a string of vulgar curses already spilling out, bearing his teeth unhappily. While crouched down behind the counter with a glass case of cigarette lighters as cover, he peered out to see one bedraggled employee standing at the mouth of the bathroom hallway.
Darlene harshly blew a wisp of soy sauce saturated hair from her face as she reloaded. There was a maniac gleam in her eye that told him he'd picked the wrong disgruntled worker to push around. The false blood had soaked into her once finely fluffed coif and painted part of her face in a bizarre war-paint. "You're going to regret messing with me! I swear! I've played Halo!" Darlene yelled at him, jamming a pair of fresh bullets into the double barrel rifle. She whipped it shut and cocked it. "You can rot in hell, filthy thief!"
Duo was an incredulous face to himself as he ducked back down, back pressed tight to the counter. He hissed in disbelief, "What the hell kind of security is this for a convenience store?!"
The highly temperamental employee started stalking toward the front of the store, fearless now that she wielded a farmer's machine gun. She let the barrel lower slightly as she approached the counter were she had worked in peace, squinting as she tried to pick out a sign of the dastardly, gorgeous man she'd seen and get a satisfying chance to unload a couple into him. Suddenly, a flash of black had whirled over the countertop, sending coins flashing and scattering to the tiles below. She fired, too late, and it bit into tile. Jerking with recoil, she tried to prepare to fire again, but any traces of the black blur had long disappeared into the aisles.
Darlene frowned over her shoulder and began to trot back up to the cash machine, still warily brandishing the rifle as she backed up and surveyed the damage. It was more of an instinct to check the money than anything—God have mercy on that man's soul if it turned up unbalanced. The cashier girl with the stained hair and the rifle made a disgruntled face and walked back up to the counter. She leveled her weapon and waited to catch a glimpse of black.
But nothing appeared. The entire bullet-pocked building, without any bystanders or any other source of sound, filled with an eerie, impossible quiet.
"Come on out," she said mockingly, squinting carefully at the rows and rows of innocent food and windshield scrapers. "Come here so I can give you your change!"
Duo let out a tense, hissing breath as he accidentally leaned back against a bag of potato chips, then let out a sharp little curse as Darlene whipped her head toward it like a vindictive cobra and began stalking in his direction. The criminal quickly slunk off in the other direction, making a furtive ring around the store, unbeknownst to the cashier girl. Normally, he didn't have any trouble with people threatening him with guns—they usually had the restraint or the fear to avoid shooting, but that wasn't so for trigger-happy maniacs who really, really hated people ruining their hair.
"Jesus, get over it," Duo muttered to himself as he slunk past aisle after aisle out of the line of sight, rolling his eyes. The con man tensed up as he realized he'd stepped into the open with his enemy just about to turn her head toward his particular aisle, and hid behind the metal partition stuffed with foodstuffs. His eyes drew together like opposing magnets and he frowned cross-eyed at the extinguished cigarette and threw it to the floor before stealing off in another direction.
Moments later, Darlene's frown widened and she raised the barrels a little higher as she warily walked toward the aisles. Her eyes were flickering back and forth looking for just a glimpse to land a bullet in, but she might have been moving in slow motion to the con man she was hunting. Duo watched her walk into an aisle from a secret vista, stepping cautiously, but nowhere near cautious enough.
"That's your first mistake, Girly-Girl," he snickered.
Still leveling her rifle at every suspicious looking bag of potato chips and Little Debbie cakes, Darlene, the disgruntled cashier girl, rounded on aisle and stalked up another one. She squinted and little lines appeared in her forehead and around her angry scowl.
Duo, who had been crouched at the ready just inside the very next aisle, lunged out from his hiding place and had planned to go past her without even her noticing. He rolled past the aisle and landed fluidly on his feet, but what he hadn't planned on was her finding the cigarette and taking a second longer to turn away. He knew she'd seen him, as soon as he'd committed to it.
She slurred something indefinite, her face flushing red with rage, and took a vicious shot at the passing blur. The barrel bucked and roared and Duo held back a yelp of surprise as the shot nearly grazed his chin, ruining his concentration and sending him to the floor. The bohemian cursed as he recovered onto his haunches and burst out into the next aisle as fast as he could. He stood up just as Darlene had loaded another pair of bullets, and for a second they stared each other in the face. Duo tried his best to smile for her, before shoving at the metal partitions with all his might and the barrel of her gun bucked at him again.
Duo felt some of life shear off, the bullet had gotten that close to landing squarely between his temples before he'd reacted and ducked. It ripped into a box of animal crackers and smoking camels and monkeys spilled out onto the tiles. Meanwhile, the force the criminal had exerted caused the metal shelf to splinter, break, and topple forward toward the cashier girl. As Darlene's mouth gaped open, his nerves kicked in and he was sprinting for cover.
Unfortunately for Duo, the good, heavy scrap of metal he'd used to try and stop this highly disgruntled teenager fell just short of toppling on her and instead the loaves of bread that'd been stacked on top scattered around her and she stepped through them, leveling her rifle again at Duo's retreating back. She wanted horribly to squeeze the trigger and see just how far the con man's liver would fly, but he'd slipped behind yet another aisle partition and she followed, careful to stay in the open walkway this time.
Darlene ran after him as fast as she could toting a firearm along with her instead of her purse, and raised it to fire as soon as she got insight of the aisle. It was hopeless. Eventually luck would smile upon her and she'd get a clear shot of him, or he'd simply tire out, and she'd be able to show him the what for. And when she glared down the scope into nothing but empty tile, she jerked in frustration. "No fucking way! Where'd that bugger go?"
A split second later a soft black object fell to the floor beside her feet. Darlene peered suspiciously at the baseball cap crumpled on the floor, and turned that disgruntled stare up towards the ceiling. A black-clad man clung effortlessly to the ceiling above her by the thin support beams, his shoulder-length hair hanging down like the wings of some strange vampire bat and his smile toothy leering at her.
Darlene growled loudly as she hoisted the double barrels into the air and fired as fast as her finger would obey. The shot ripped through an empty metal panel and blew a jagged hole through it. That empty metal panel promptly plunged from the sky and fell atop the cashier girl, sending her groaning and half-conscious to the floor. The rifle clattered and the loosened bolts scattered around her on the tile. A thick layer of dust from the air passage over head wafted through the air like a miniature and silent mushroom crowd.
Ten feet away the wanted criminal crouched close to the ground on his haunches where he'd landed, and panted quietly as he looked at the girl loosing consciousness and drooling on the tiles. Eventually, his breathing leveled out and he stared blankly for a second. Then the mischievous glint in his eye returned, reveling in the feeling of survival, even on such a ridiculous scale. "Heh," Duo smirked breathlessly.
"...It's been way too long. I know he's up to something in there, he has to be—Duo!"
"Oh, hey ya, traveler," the bohemian greeted casually as they met at the door. The long string of grumbling that was audible even through the door and the impatient frown on his face made it pretty obvious that Heero had just become too overwhelmed with his suspicions and gone against his word and chased after the con man. A con man who, after unlocking the door, had just walked out the door and shut it behind him as the other man had just reached to open it.
He flashed his best disarming, easygoing smile at him, which had been perfected at the cost of the many people that had fallen victim to his trickster nature. "Didn't think you'd be coming after me," Duo reminded him as he tried to subtly keep his attention from wandering. "I could have sworn you were adamantly against it, even."
Being of relatively even height, Heero's stare went flat across to the ever-changing expressions on the criminal's face, and the cynicism in it was almost palpable. He squinted over Duo's shoulder in suspicion. "What did you do in there?" he asked, leaning to the side.
Suddenly, the bohemian shifted over to block his view, disguising it with a little step. "Just a little pitstop," he drawled, waving a pack of cigarettes in his face as proof to back up his alibi. "I promise. What, you still don't believe me? I'm hurt."
"That was an awfully long time just to buy a pack of cigarettes."
"Well, they didn't take my ID at first. I guess I'm just too youthful and beautiful for my own damn good," Duo said cryptically, stuffing the Marlboro pack into his pocket and snatching Heero up by the wrist as he started walking towards the white truck waiting for them across the street. "Come on now, can't be dropping behind schedule. Gentlemen should be prompt and timely, as always."
"You didn't cause any trouble," Heero remarked flatly, releasing his wrist from the bohemian's grip and warily following behind him, though he was unable not to take one last scrutinizing look at convenience store.
"Oh, it was no trouble at all," Duo grinned, already sliding into the driver's seat and shutting the door.
When the blue-eyed traveler had resigned himself to the passenger seat again, notebook cradled under his arm while he stared out the window, Duo casually stuck another war spoil between his lips and lit it. As he turned the engine and slung an arm out the open window, he murmured to himself, "No trouble at all," and grinned.