Jacob Raus hobbled out of Mr. Henry's cluttered workshop with it's animatronic spare parts and half completed projects feeling as if he'd finally accomplished something in the ongepotchket, the hot mess, that had been the last two days.
Granted, the sudden appearance of pain in Jacob's hips, knees, and feet took away most of that satisfaction, but still, a man took his pleasures where he could. Stabbing that moyshe kapoyer, that screw-up in the chest with his own screwdriver had more than made up for the aggravation, the stress of finding his quarterly report… What report?
Oh, yes, that quarterly report… on his desk… or was it on his coffee table? Out of habit, the formerly well-preserved early sixtyish-looking minion of Wolfrum and Hart consulted the dybbuk. Only instead of the comfortingly malevolent presence of his partner for the last six decades all Jacob found was empty, echoing space…
...somewhere in the dark echoing corners...
...of his mind…
...a mind which was a lot fuzzier, a lot darker, than Jacob remembered...
Still, the satisfaction of eliminating a putz, however profitable… what was he saying? Where'd he park his car? Jacob paused on the sidewalk in front of the now burning house of… some goy… shouldn't somebody call for an ambulance? The police? Oh, yes, the shtik drek, the shithead, he'd stabbed with his own butter knife, no, no, it was a screwdriver… hadn't sent the ledger… what ledger? "Oy vey!" Jacob slapped his now heavily lined forehead, exclaiming, "THAT ledger! You'll be forgetting your own head next, Herr Jakob…"
Henri, the stupid Frenchman, hadn't betrayed him after all.
Still, Raus dimly recalled blood on the floor in an office, but exactly whose blood, he was unsure of. Now, where'd he park that car? But instead of his lovingly tended 1935 Frazer Nash Sport Roadster two-seater hulked some boxy monstrosity… still the key fit even if it took his gnarled, arthritic fingers fifteen minutes to get the strangely shaped key into the door lock as a low-rider grunted past…
…anyway, he dimly remembered arguing with the man, that momzer, who denied even knowing about Jacob's ledger… Still, it had been lovely to stab the schlump in the chest… so that he fell back into his ugly metal toy, giving Jacob the idea to go to the kitchen and take a knife out of a drawer and put it in the toy's nasty metal hand and turn it on so that it stabbed it's creator over and over again… while Jacob wrote a suicide note for this latest enemy that wasn't exactly an enemy and put it on his workbench… the nasty cluttered workbench…. Oy vey! Was that a tooth that just fell out of his mouth?
Well, if it wasn't that amoretz, that stupid Frenchman, then who betrayed him? Jacob paused, unsteadily gathering his thoughts, which took a while…. Then it must have been that alte makhsheyfe, that old witch, that nafka, who owned the theater in Sunnydale, who betrayed him to his masters!
After a grinding, jerking start, a drooling, rheumy eyed hairless Jacob gripped the wheel of his lovingly tended BMW in his aching hands and pulled unsteadily out into the street before erratically steering his way to the intersection, where he ran a red light, made a left turn while signaling right, and came to a dead stop in the middle of the intersection to the blaring of horns behind him, barely remembering why he was meandering towards Outer Hotseplots… errrrr, or was it Sunnydale?
Jacob crept his slow, cautious way onto the first exit ramp he saw, hoping it would get him onto the Interstate because… something…. Something…. Something… about a missing ledger…
…and that his masters should never...
"Eh? Stop honking your horn at me, you faygala - gey strashe di gens!"
…see what was in the ledger…
"Vey is mir, I shat my pants again! Maybe it's time to retire after all."
…and he, Jacob, Herr Jakob, would be safe.