(a stream-of-consciousness exploration of love crimes in the demon world)
-Episode 2-
Rasta leaned too far in his swayback and nearly lost his ass to the furnace. The place was unnecessarily hot by his own choice, and he rarely explained himself.
His four-tone hat was hanging by a loop on his desk, right next to his shotgun. Some people said that three tones on a hat was pushing it and that four tones was totally fucked up, but Rasta wasn’t the type to listen to the opinions of retards. And besides, he was the one with the shotgun hanging on his desk, nobody was gonna tell him shit about his hat.
Recovering himself in the square solidarity of upright chairdom, Rasta felt strongly like punching someone in the face. Not because he was angry, but just because of an itch he had. A whimsical itch that demanded blood sacrifice.
Having gone several minutes without a square meal was taking its toll on Rasta’s temper and he felt his hands quiver, missing the feeling of cold steel the way a weak child misses the engorged nipple of his fawning mother.
Cases were down. It was hard to understand, though Rasta would never admit that to any man without crushing his skull immediately afterwards.
Looking at his reflection in the liquor cabinet Rasta winced, not because of what he saw but because his Hotpocket was molten, just the way he liked it. Times were hard so he was hard; of course he had always been hard…always.
One thousand and thirteen separate surgeries had disfigured his body, leaving him with a twisted matrix of ruined veins and scar tissue. He had at least three hundred rods holding the bones in his toes together. He had a sweating problem.
He had fit right in when he made his first pass to the demon world. That was over two hundred years ago, if you count the time he spent messing with people.
He wasn’t sure if he was the first or only the best, but up until this point his credentials as a P.I. of love crimes had never been challenged in the demon world, let alone in the human world, where he still maintained practice as an entertainment lawyer and rock journalist, as well as hosting twelve different cooking shows and a variety of mortal combat reality series’.
Bills had to be paid, and a half million ex-wives were banging at his door on the daily looking for their pieces of his pie.
But his pie was just too hot to be shared.
He lived on the run, shower to shower, sandwich to sandwich, always looking for the next big thing. But there was nothing big enough for Rasta, so he traded in his human blood for the title of P.I., and gave up his mind for the insanity of demon chasing. It was a fucked up road to travel, but he was just the animal for the job.
Except now somebody new was out there, making trouble for him, knocking the burrito out of his mouth, cutting off his chug mid-bong.
“Time to shine up the old dick,” Rasta muttered into a five-gallon bucket of scotch just as a knock struck his door.
Rasta reached intuitively for the shotgun, an old sawed off Mossberg loaded to the guts with 8lb. slugs. Each one was enough to take out an orphanage, which had been their selling point. Rasta was a shrewd consumer, and he had taken the bait.
Unloading one slug into his door just to let everybody know, Rasta said calmly “Come in,” but nobody came. Blood dripped under his door.
“Not again,” he muttered into his bucket as he lit several cigarettes at once.
Opening the door he saw the lovely form of Anita Hatesbrook, premiere lingerie model of the demon world. Her crumpled limbs twisted under her lifeless body.
“Shame,” he muttered as he picked up the corpse and launched it out the window of his office and ate an entire bucket of chicken and wrote an instruction manual on lawnmower safety.
By the time he sat down his phone was ringing. It was his literary agent calling to report the good news. His manual on lawnmower safety had exploded on the New York scene and Miramax wanted to option. The manual was currently being translated into a half-million different languages and sales were through the roof, particularly in desert and mountain regions and other third-world wastelands whose inhabitants had never heard of lawns.
Barney Zucklestein, Rasta’s agent, wanted Rasta to drop what he was doing and immediately embark on a fourteen year book tour.
Rasta immediately dispatched a ball of razor-gel through the phone using his mind, turning his agent’s face into a delicious pile of Belgian waffles which were quickly consumed by Zucklestein’s widow and enormous family.
Nobody was going to distract him from his mission. Love crimes were up, yet business was down. Shit was fucked in the demon world, and only Rasta P.I. Fedora, P.I. was capable of figuring it out.
Besides, books were garbage.
