The "Expletive-Deleted" Case - Entry 9

As I caught up to Randy on Shinkleblossom’s roof, the thought of why this cracked and withered old hussy had targeted our little Detective Agency in the first place crossed my mind, however briefly; I knew this was not the time, nor the place, to get caught up in the thinking patterns of an elderly, though terrifying, psychopath, but the long walk from the road to Shinkleblossom’s house gave me quite a bit of alone time to run some ideas through my ever receptive, though increasingly embattled, brain.

Climbing up the side of her house soundlessly, while carrying a duffel-bag, was no small task either, but I had managed to catch Randy just before he was to drop into the living room through the skylight, and he was shocked to see me at all, much less on the roof; I was supposed to have been inside more than an hour ago, setting up the details of our little plan, and Randy looked at me with the wide-eyed understanding of how incredibly awful it would have been to jump through the skylight without the proper preparations in place. I cut off his seething rage at what could have been, whispering that, yes, I was late, but that he should just be glad I got there when I did. He agreed, nodding and wiping his suddenly very sweaty brow, and we got to refining our plan further, on the fly, so that this trip wasn’t wasted...after tonight, we wanted for there to be no reason to ever return to this pit of hell again.

Randy suggested the term, "Hellderly", but I nixed it for being, though clever, unusable and unnecessary.

We came to a consensus on the plan, and I handed Randy the glow-sticks and the low-grade toilet paper, as well as the Imitation Rain Coat, and just before I slithered off to find my way into the house we coordinated our watches; it was superfluous to be sure, as Randy could just watch me from the skylight, but the action of staring at our watches seemed to calm him, and I would need him at full mental capacity if we were to pull this off.

I found a rotten latch on the back door of Shinkleblossom’s garage that I could force open without much trouble, but was confronted with a stubborn door to the inside of the actual house. It took every ounce of skill I had, along with eight different Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Lockpick Tools, to finally jimmy the lock enough to allow my entrance. First off, I needed to establish where, exactly, Shinkleblossom was hiding so I could keep abreast of her movements...I slunk low to the ground, using one of the many shaving-mirrors to peer around the corners; there was a very powerful absence of light that made it difficult to differentiate between shapes, but by the time my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I heard the pounding footsteps of someone running, and they were coming in my direction. I found a nearby desk to crawl under, curling up into a ball and fingering the traffic pylon as a possible weapon, when Shinkleblossom flew past me to her front door, ripping it open with the strength of shark tearing off a human limb; I caught a glimpse of her peering out of doorway, and I felt the blowback of the menace she was sending out into the world, daring someone to be out there and thinking ill of her. My pulse-rate quickened and I began to sweat; this wasn’t a typical situation for right-thinking people, or Detectives, for that matter, to thrust themselves into, and my body was making sure I knew that, as my prodigious sweating had left but one doubt in my head, and that was how many layers of shirts I was to leak through. Shinkleblossom turned back towards me after shutting her door, walking, no, strutting back into whatever room she came from with the arrogant gait of a movie star down the red carpet. Behind her, timed perfectly, I saw the rolls of toilet paper dropping down and covering the windows from the outside; it wasn’t long before every window was covered with toilet paper, and Randy was back in position, hovering over the skylight. I got to placing the shaving mirrors in their strategic positions throughout the lower portion of the house, combing the floors to avoid any notice from Shinkleblossom, whom I found watching television with the flitting eyelids of the almost-asleep. I sat down on my pre-determined mark, covering myself with my own Rain Coat and holding up the pylon as a cue to Randy, who disappeared from view, though only fleetingly; I saw him again once he was airborne, a foot from crashing through the skylight, and my heart jumped as well.

All hell was, indeed, about to break loose.

Entry 10