Dome War

’I’d have gone wearing normal clothing but we have no idea if it will be just you, me and them there so for unlimited passage in and out of the scene to look for them I insist you wear even the hat and fake scar to tell us ‘twin detectives’ apart. And why did you not reinstall your seatbelts? And your airbags? Are you flirting with the grim reaper?’ Lenny said trying to make the most casual of conversation. ‘For a person who mimicked me into riding six grade’s Halloween carousel horses bareback you seem pretty uptight about precaution.’ He sarcastically replied. ‘What? It was a carousel. What you needed was not a saddle it was holding on to the pole that vertically impales the horse thing. Maybe you would not have gotten a face full of dirt, broken milk teeth, Veronica Sanders’ rejection two summers after and a candy apple stuck to your face!’ Chuck laughed and said, ‘Veronica was a nightmare of a high school girlfriend anyway and Brad can testify… Claire was the bomb though.’ Lenny laughed and said, ‘The same Brad that had you wearing the retainer he threw into a toilet three times. And the same Claire that stood up to Brad when he knocked out your tooth? Wow your match making is giving Tinder a run for its money!’ Chuck retorted, ‘That was when we became soul mates! Wow you really were not kidding about the watching me thing!’ Lenny pulled his lower lip to show Chuck the denture replacing the tooth the high school jock punched out. ‘I lived your life.’ He said and turned back to focus on the road. If this man was the only other person apart from Chuck himself to know he once buried a watch to make a watch tree, then maybe he did not need to be so uptight around him. ‘She needed you, you know. She was too proud to admit it and you were still guilty for the kid’s death. She had to know you were sorry and still loved her but most importantly she had to hear it from you- Wait I hear them. We are bound to intercept at any…’ He was cut short by their Lexus pimped into a cop car ramming into the target car. Luckily he was wrong about Chuck not reinstalling the airbags, which is more than he could say about the undercover cops, Dmitri and Willard, who shot out of the windscreen and into the coffee shop that Chuck had looked into earlier. Dmitri immediately fell unconscious but Willard, who was now shooting at the pileup they made was going to be abducted by a treasonist over his dead body- a condition which Lenny, who was shooting back and stealthily closing in, was willing to scavenge. Chuck an amateur at heart, was startled by the sudden Wild West turn of events but was no stranger at making any shoe that wasn’t a glass slipper fit when it needed to. He made his first ever shot, jinxed of course, ricocheting off a wall and onto a security camera. He rolled into the café through the large window display and followed Lenny, who was now closing in on the Willard that was hiding under a counter. Realising their opponents’ downed but very temporary position, Lenny and Chuck rushed to claim vantage by standing on the counter and shooting the first thing they saw. The two separate things they saw, that is. The unintended one being yesterday’s talkative as a magpie café owner; the one who helped Chuck retrace Lenny’s footsteps.

The Smith and Wesson model 19 revolver. Standard issue for Korean police and amateur sleuths in coffee shop shootouts. It comes with only three live rounds, a blank and an empty slot. Chuck’s lucky stars were shining down at him and at Lenny, for successfully gunning down this Willard fellow and having only the non-lethal blank been shot at the meek and terribly scared White retailer. ‘All in a day’s work’, Lenny said, ‘we need to get this guy to the crib before he bleeds out- Watch out!’ he screamed before Willard fired deadly force through the café owner’s torso before kicking his own! It was one of those moments were one hears only their seemingly amplified heartbeat and that inexplicable high pitched siren while everything turns foggy. Lenny grabbed Chuck, an action spurred by something about the fuzz pulling over and how they could not do anything about the dead innocent man. Chuck then fainted, conveniently for that red handed Lenny that had heard the cops kick the backdoor down and made their entrance into the hallway in which Lenny was dragging an incapacitated Chuck. In the nick of time, Chuck regained consciousness and like quicksilver jumped and let himself loose on the cops, a dire and severely hasty move- nonetheless effective enough for his opportunistic double to join in on the brawl. Meanwhile the other police team at the front door had managed to squirm through the car collision blocking the entrance and were not expecting getting the confession for the cause of such a wreckage to be anywhere near the inconvenience of walking through the door of a wannabe Starbucks but seeing all their men passed out on the floor, it seemed they were in for a rude awakening.