Darkwing Duck: The Webfoot Chronicles
My Kingdom For a Double-Plait Bolt!

by RL Kelly

A/N: Maybe this time it'll actually show an update. :P Thanks to The Illustrious Crackpot, who actually noticed the new content on this story without the site making any fanfare about it at all! I didn't expect that at all. :)

Act I, part two

Beth stifled a yawn - an hour and a half didn't seem like that much time when you were reading, but she really felt the deficit in her sleep this morning - and crossed off each numbered box from her bill of lading as the deliveryman scanned it.

Sullenly, the deliveryman pocketed his scanner and shoved a clipboard at her, then removed the pen from between his teeth and indicated she should sign. She flinched back from the chewed-up cap, then tried to smile and forced herself to gingerly take the proferred implement. "Um - thanks," she said politely, and managed to pop the cap off without touching it much.

He didn't answer; he very rarely spoke, she'd found. She had tried, at first, to be the one to initiate conversations just so that he'd know she wasn't being deliberately unfriendly; as her mother (and others) had so often said, if you don't talk, everyone will think you don't like them. But conversations hadn't been this particular man's cup of tea, apparently, and after a while Beth grew tired of tossing out comments about the weather and the pH count of the city's water only to have them met with silence. He didn't answer questions, either, such as when she had tried to find out if he liked any sports teams. Beth didn't know anything about sports, but a lot of people seemed to like to talk about them, so she'd felt it was within reason to bring up the topic. All it had gotten her was a snort and a clipboard shoved in her face, though, so she'd given that one up as well.

She double-checked all the numbers of the boxes on the slip she'd been given, and as she signed, the silence began to gnaw at her and she wondered yet again if she'd just misinterpreted the man. "Do you ever see a dermatologist?" she asked as she scribbled her name on the paper. When she handed the clipboard back to the deliveryman, she found he was staring at her with one eyebrow raised and his mouth pulled down into a frown. "Oh, well, I just wondered because my mother called me this morning and she just got it into my head, you know, and you're supposed to keep an eye on moles and freckles, and I really don't have any freckles and I never had any moles but then this morning I realized I'm not in the habit of checking for these things! So I just wondered if you-"

He took the clipboard and headed for the door, so Beth interrupted herself and sighed. "Well, thanks," she called after him as he left. Every week for about nine months, he'd come in here, and she still didn't even know his name.

She checked the clock: 9:55 am. She had five minutes before the store opened for the day, and she probably ought to spend it getting a head start in putting out the shipment. Instead she fished around on her manager's desk in the back room until she found a hand mirror, and tried to angle it to check her neck for moles.

"This is ridiculous," she muttered to herself, but she'd checked everywhere she could see on her own this morning before her shower and hadn't had time to try to check the parts she couldn't see. The neck was tricky. She craned her head around, stretching her neck and twisting her arm about, but there was a section of the back of her neck that kept eluding her. She was probably going to need two mirrors.

And this was just NOT worth it, she concluded. She slapped the mirror down onto the counter and headed for the door, unlocking it a minute before her clock officially hit 10 am.

Time to put out the shipment, she decided, and grabbed a couple of the smaller boxes. Then she put them down again, and picked the mirror back up as she flashed on a potential way to angle it and get a better view.

The door crashed open, and she jumped and put the mirror down quickly, irrationally afraid that the manager, Henny, was going to jump out and accuse her of stealing private property. Instead, she looked to the door and saw the day's first customer: a man who was apparently dressed to lead a live staging of a battery commercial. Beth looked around the store just in case, to see if any cameras had preceded him or were on their way in.

Was that actually a battery on his back? she wondered, blinking for one moment longer before clearing her throat. "Um, hi," she said as loudly as she could manage. It sounded a bit like a squeak to her ears, but the customer looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time.

"Oh, that's where you're hiding," he said, his tone suggesting he'd been looking for some time, and he pulled a slip of paper out of a pocket. "Let's see, maybe you can help me. I need..." He studied the paper, "powerful gasoline, a clean windshield, and a shoeshine!"

Beth was vaguely aware that her mouth was hanging open, but even though she tried, she couldn't make anything come out.

"Oh, wait. Wrong list." The stranger checked a pocket, then frowned and looked around. "This is the hardware store, right?"

"Y-yes," said Beth. Keep a steady face and don't make eye contact, she told herself. Everything's normal, everything's great... "B-Bindler's Hardware."

"Aha!" Battery Guy slapped his fist into the palm of his other hand, and went for another pocket. When he brought his hand back out, he had another list, this one written on what appeared to be the back of a pizza coupon. "Okay. Do you carry double-plait bolts?"

"Oh!" She hadn't been expecting a request that actually made sense; the question was so normal that it took her a moment to respond. "Oh, yes we do! What size?" As soon as she'd asked, she wished she hadn't. This might open up a whole new can of worms.

But apparently, Battery Guy was on track now. "Four-and-a-quarter," he answered, pleasantly enough. Beth was tempted to just point him in the general direction of the bolts, but it went against her customer service training to point to anything, so she steeled herself and led him to the section he'd need. On the way, he got chatty. "Boy, what a relief. I must've been to eight stores already today and none of 'em carried the right kind of bolt."

Beth wondered what time other hardware stores opened; Bindler's never opened before 10 am, and if Henny was the one opening it was usually about 30 minutes later than that. "Double-plait bolts can be tricky to find," Beth said. "A lot of places only have them by special order, and-"

"OOOH, is that a klinkenheimer?!" the customer interrupted. He grabbed one of the tools on a nearby wall and, to Beth's slight alarm, hugged it. "Come to papa!"

Everything's normal, everything's great Beth told herself, and gestured to the wall of bolts and screws. "W-well, um, here ya go! p-Plait bolts are right here, and um, if you need any more we just got a shipment in that I haven't unpacked yet, so just let me know..."

Battery Guy took a box and squinted at it. "Twenty-four to a box," he muttered. He grabbed the three remaining boxes from the wall and said matter-of-factly, "I'll take another 16.83 of these from the new shipment."

"Um -"

"Oh, what the heck, I'm feeling kooky today. Make it an even seventeen!"

"I'll - see what I can do," stammered Beth. She made a hasty exit to the back, then felt anxious at the thought of the odd customer alone in the front of the store, and ended up dragging the box of the shipment she was after out into the front of the store to dig through it out there.

She came up with only fifteen boxes of bolts, and sighed. Before mentioning it to her customer - who was distracted, it seemed, by the electrical tape display - she decided to consult with the order log. It concurred with what she'd managed to dig out of the box: fifteen boxes, no more and no less.

"Um - sir?"

He was speaking to someone, but she couldn't see anyone else. His attention seemed to be on a large industrial-sized flashlight. "Well, granted, Feynman did say that, but - oh, FINE, just ignore Einstein completely, why don't you!"

"...Sir?"

"Whaaaat? This better be important, we're in the middle of something here!" He shook the flashlight he was holding, and it looked like it was nodding.

"Well, I - the shipment - o-only -" She stopped, scrambling to gather herself. "I'm afraid we only had fifteen boxes. Of bolts," she said in response to his blank expression. The blank stare didn't change. "In the shipment. You - asked for seventeen...?"

Recognition lit his features, finally, and then slid right into a terrifying kind of frazzled anger. "WHAT?! Well NOW what am I supposed to do?? Do you think I can just use ANY kind of bolt to finish my work? Is that tower going to finish itself?! Boy, that'd be nice, wouldn't it?" He finished in a return to his conversational tone from a moment before. Apparently not noticing Beth cowering in front of him, he simply shrugged. "Well, you guys aren't the only hardware store in the area. Incidentally I'll be taking a few more items as well as the bolts." He hefted an armload of electronics and basic handtools onto the counter.

Beth tried to breathe more easily, but with an awareness of the customer's mercurial moods, she knew she wouldn't be able to calm down until he was gone. "I-I'll ring you up, th-then," she said, and nearly ran for the counter.

"Oh," he said with a chuckle, "you really don't need to do THAT."

By the time Drake woke up, it was nearly noon. He slid downstairs towards the kitchen, his eyes not fully open until after the first two mouthfuls of coffee, and noticed Launchpad standing just behind him looking expectant.

"What?" he snapped.

Launchpad was unfazed. "How long ya think you'll need before we head to the hardware store?"

Drake felt blearier than he was sure he looked, and Launchpad's enthusiasm bugged him. "You're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning," he said, sipping at his coffee again.

"Yeah, I dunno why, but I slept great!"

Drake rolled his eyes; leave it to Launchpad to get hit with knockout gas and wake up refreshed. "Caught up on some sleep, I guess," he ventured. "Why such a rush to go buy hardware?"

"I got a friend who works there," he said happily. "Thought I'd introduce ya."

"Thrilling." Drake relished his bad mood nearly as much as he did his coffee. "Sounds like exactly how I want to spend my day: hobnobbing with mechanics. Can't wait to meet him."

"Her," Launchpad corrected.

"Ah. Her. Even better." He gave a long sigh. "Give me a while to get myself together."

"No problemo." Launchpad pulled a chair up to the kitchen table, and picked the newspaper apart into sections. Finding the crosswords, he grabbed a pencil and then just stared in heavy concentration at the newsprint.

"Any mention of last night?" Drake asked, flipping through the sections Launchpad had discarded.

"Dunno," said Launchpad idly. "Didn't see anything."

"Well, they took a photo, so I'd think - Ah-HA!" He stopped, finding a small picture tucked away at the back of the "local news" section. Almost immediately, he frowned. "'Vigilante Captures Citizen'," he read, and snorted. There was a pause.

Then he tossed the open newspaper in front of Launchpad, covering the still-blank crossword puzzle. He pointed at the photo. It was, as Drake had feared, of the worst possible moment: Darkwing was in the process of turning around to scold Launchpad, who was looking so groggy that he could have been heavily medicated.

"I have another headline," said Drake huffily. "'Sidekick Ruins Photo Opportunity'!"

"Sorry," said Launchpad contritely. He examined the picture, looking confused. "I don't remember them takin' that..."

"Pff. Figures. You were barely conscious." Drake tossed the paper down onto the kitchen table and sighed, staring at it. "Well, I guess there's nothing else for it! These things do happen, right?"

Launchpad shrugged. "I guess they do! That's a good way to look at it."

"Que sera, sera," Drake said, nodding. "Give me a minute to get ready, and we'll head over to the hardware store and get the bolts to fix up the gas gun. Get a good jump on the day." He looked down at the photo again, and frowned. In a more distracted voice, he said, "Yep, just one minute to get ready..."

Tuesday mornings were generally slow at Bindler's Hardware. As such, the typical day included only one person on shift in the morning, with the second worker not arriving for their shift until the early afternoon. The schedule always indicated that the second shift was to start at 1 pm, although there was a great deal of variation in this depending on just who was working the late shift.

Beth waited for her manager to arrive for the afternoon shift, feeling increasingly tense. It had been a bad morning. She had built her life on a solid foundation of routine, and that routine was crumbling around her. Beth hardly considered herself compulsive in any way - she was flexible, really she was - but a person could only handle so much flexibility in one day. One morning, as a matter of fact.

And this wasn't just a matter of being flexible. This day was a matter of far, far more than flexibility.

She realized that she'd been tapping her index finger on the countertop in a sharp rhythm, and clenched her fist to make herself stop. Checking the clock, she found that it was just past 1 pm; going by the written schedule, Henny should be arriving any moment, but that rarely was the reality.

Still, she should probably get that hand mirror back into Henny's office - right? It was something to keep her busy, and keeping it out here was just increasing her obsession with checking the back of her neck, and that was never going to work. And she couldn't shake a growing paranoia that Henny would accuse her of stealing it -

At that particular word, she broke into a cold sweat, and swallowed hard. Stop it, stop doing this to yourself! she thought, and slid off of her stool so that she could duck into the back room and replace the mirror.

As her feet hit the floor, however, the door opened and Henny walked in, her expression one of distinct unhappiness.

Beth's first reaction was, on instinct, to whip the mirror around her back, out of sight. "Henny! You're-" she began, looking at the clock; it was around five past one, and she bit her tongue. She certainly couldn't say "you're early", or even "you're on time" truthfully; and "you're not as late as usual" had the wrong kind of ring, especially when you said it to your manager. She scrambled for something else to say, and ended up with, "You're... looking well today!"

Henny, her face framed by hair curlier than Beth could ever dream of getting her own to look, raised an eyebrow. "Okay, thanks," she said, clearly finding the statement to be an odd one. She started for the back.

Stepping in front of her, Beth said, "Um - H-Henny, before you go back there, I should tell you-"

"Later," said Henny, waving impatiently, "kinda in a hurry."

"We-ell," Beth persisted, "this is - important, see, because -"

"Zip it, Beth, it's gonna have to wait!" Henny reached towards Beth, perhaps to push her aside, more likely knowing that this would get her employee to step aside politely.

Beth tried once more, even as Henny was nearly through the door into the back room. "Okay, but Henny, can I just -"

"Beth, I gotta go to the can!" Henny said, managing to sound both irritated and petulant at once.

"Okay, okay," said Beth apologetically, "sorry! But - but as soon as you, I mean -"

"Yes, as soon as, okay!" She disappeared into the back, then stuck her head back out for another moment. "You put out all today's shipment yet?"

"Well, most of it-"

"'Kay. Well then, you got something to keep you occupied, don't you?" She disappeared again.

Beth wondered why putting out the shipment was urgent enough to not wait until after Henny's bathroom break, but well, it probably was a good idea to take her mind off of things. She normally had the Tuesday shipment out and on the shelves by noon, but today -

Okay. Take her mind off of things. Right. She went back to the boxes she'd been half-heartedly working on, and set about re-stocking the shelves. And any minute now, Henny would come out, and Beth would tell her about the robbery. Henny would know what to do.

Even Beth had to acknowledge that that last thought was kind of a stretch.

To be continued!