I stared Death in the face and gulped. No, seriously, I did. He was tied to the chair next to me. “They got you too?” I asked the Reaper. He shrugged. “I was just hanging around the area. Someone told me Morricone was going to accidentally cut his own throat with a straight razor. Next thing I knew, they clubbed me and dragged me in here. Bastards made me late for a plane crash in Glasgow.”

“AHEM.” Morricone said. “I believe we were about to torture youse.”

“Oh, right.” I said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

Razorblades McGee smiled evilly. He advanced on me with the vibrating razor. What, I wondered, was he about to do? Cut off my ear? Cut off one of my fingers? Or worse….cut off two of my fingers? Then he withdrew something from his pocket and I knew it was going to be even worse than I thought.

“Recognize THESE?” he giggled.

“NO!” I shrieked! “Not my cool, anti-hero, ubiquitous cigarettes!” He began laughing hysterically as he shredded the first of my emphysema sticks with his razor. I screamed bloody murder. No, wait, wrong punctuation. I actually screamed “Bloody murder!” repeatedly. Eventually they told me that if I didn’t stop they were going to cut off two of my fingers. I stopped.

“Now are you going to talk?” asked Morricone.

“Yeah,” I said. “Because I have a couple of questions. First of all, why is SHE here? I mean, what’s her purpose? Second, since when do big, powerful crime bosses like you actually preside at a routine torturing? Don’t you have, like, illicit businesses to run? And why do we need the bodyguards if your top hit man is here and I’m tied to a chair? And…”

Marie slugged me hard in the jaw. That answered one of my questions.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang. I wasn’t aware that windowless torture rooms had doorbells, and apparently neither were my captors. Sergio looked through the slot.

“It’s just the pizza guy,” he called to Morricone. “He says he’s got an order for twelve deep-dishes, all with the cheese peeled off.”

“Why in God’s name do you do that?” asked Marie. “HEY!” said Morricone defensively. “Not hurting you, am I?” He turned to Sergio. “Let him in.”

Sergio opened the door. The pizza guy was none other than Billy Needles.

“Billy, old buddy!” I exclaimed. “I had no idea you delivered pizza when you weren’t passing me information and fencing stuff! By the way, how much did you fetch for Morricone’s college ring?” Billy drew his finger across his throat and looked panicky.

“Oho, made a killing, did you?” I said. Billy rolled his eyes. “DUCK!” he yelled.

The next few things happened in about seven seconds, but looking back on them, it seems more like eight or nine. One, the stack of pizza boxes he was carrying exploded in a huge puff of everything-shrouding smoke. Two, although I couldn’t see them, I heard the five bad guys fumbling around in the haze over Morricone’s cries of “Find him, stronzos, find him!” Three, Billy grabbed my arm and yanked me through the door before the smoke cleared. When I next saw anything clearly, I was standing on a crowded city street, Billy was nowhere to be found, and I was hit hard by the Rolls-Royce that had come careening out of nowhere and went flying over the top of it. Well, I guess technically it hadn’t come out of nowhere, and I really should have kind of expected it, since Billy had inadvertently dragged me onto a busy street. At least I hoped it was inadvertently. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the considerable pain of being slammed into by a car. I lay there for a while, my fedora inexplicably still on my head. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, staring down at my body. As I staggered to my feet, I prayed the hit hadn’t done any damage to my thinking ability. That would be awful. Then I was helped to my feet by an angel. This angel was thin, blonde and rather weary-looking. She was wearing a burgundy jacket and skirt and a string of faux pearls that would make Barbara Bush scream for help.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “That was deliberate, I’m sure of it. That guy was probably drunk or something.” I shuddered. I had been drunk once. Lots of people said it helped them think clearly, but I really did. What I said made much more sense, even if it was something like “Magglsh nu frrd…”

“So what’s your name?” I asked the dame.

“Laura,” she said.

“That’s a nice name.” I said. “It makes me think of bunnies and stuff.”

She looked concerned. “How hard did he hit you?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m fine.” I said.

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “But you should probably know that as a rule, people don’t say words like ‘bunnies’ in noir detective stories.”

“Oh, sorry.” I said. “How about I just say ‘listen here, doll’ and we call it even?”

“That’ll work.”

As we traded more of that scintillating banter that made Raymond Chandler famous… wait, Raymond Chandler is the guy from “Friends”, right? Screw it. Anyway, I noticed we were heading in a familiar direction. A direction I had been in before. I decided to press my luck and ask Laura if we were going where I thought we were going.

“Is this… left?” I asked cautiously. She raised an eyebrow. I was slightly hurt. Throughout my life, whenever I correctly identified a direction, people had usually responded by high-fiving me and rewarding me with an Oreo they hadn’t spit on. Clearly, Laura didn’t know me as well as the people who already knew me. Then I realized we were also heading towards a building I recognized.

“Are we going to the movies?” I asked.

“No.”

“But ‘Planet of the Apes 7: Cornelius’ Revenge’ is playing!” I protested.

“NO.” said Laura. “I need to take you to my husband. He’ll know what to do.”

“Is your husband a doctor?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“A lawyer?”

“No, thank God.”

“A car salesman?”

Rather than answering me, she held her hand out in front of her. We were at City Hall. No one ever called it that, though. Some of the nicer names for it were City Hell, Castle Gerrymander and City? Haw! Less nice nicknames for it involved naughty rhymes for the word “city” (“kitty” was not one of them).

I scratched my head and got blood on my fingers. What business could Laura have at City Hall? Maybe she was on the “Derogatory Nicknames for Government Buildings” committee. I really admired their work. “Shite House” still makes me crack up.

She led me up a flight of stairs and down a hall. We stopped at a door with an ornately carved knocker, of the kind that usually moans “Scroooooge” as its livelihood. Laura opened the door and led me in. I stared around the office in awe. In the back of the office, behind a rosewood desk, was a thin, bored-looking blonde man in a black suit and burgundy tie.

I gasped. “Your husband knows Mayor Gerrymander?”

“My husband IS Mayor Gerrymander.” she said.

“Indeed,” nodded the bored-looking man who was blocking my view of the mayor. “I think we need to talk, Mr. Ness.”