“Just drop the fuckin’ gun, doughnut boy,” yelled Grant Stonehouse in a pseudo-Canadian accent as he took cover behind a wall of work benches, “then we can all go home, and you can snuggle up in front of the TV with y’ mama!”
“I ain’t no doughnut boy, you dumb ****!” screamed back the overweight security guard, dressed in his tight-fitting blue uniform shirt that had a button missing around his naval, and patches of fresh sweat seeping through each armpit. “I’m gonna turn your weedy *** into Chinese cheese!”
The threat was followed up by a short burst of three shots from the heavy-breathing former cop’s handgun, letting a somewhat agitated Stonehouse know that the danger was real. But Stonehouse was already acutely aware of this. The two empty clips and pile of scattered bullet shells that lay around the knees of the underpaid and overworked guard were testament to that fact. He’d already displayed his ineptitude with a pistol by unloading well over a dozen bullets in the general direction of Stonehouse. The terrible aim of the hired security man was not the only thing wrong with this scenario.
No matter how many times the chubby guard tried to deny the fact – probably each morning as he stared into the mirror while sucking in his flabby stomach – he was definitely a huge fan of the deep-fried sugary rings of dough. His physique was that of someone who had started eating at Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving last year, and hadn’t stopped. He would probably continue eating until Christmas, stuffing his round, reddened face with enough mince pies and turkey to feed Santa’s fleet of reindeer for an entire year. Despite his less than athletic appearance, his employer had deemed “Mark” fit for purpose, and had happily hired the henchman to patrol the factory in downtown Harper Rock. A short spell in the local police force, albeit a desk job over five years ago, had somehow swayed the personnel department to offer Mark the position.
Grant Stonehouse, on the other hand, was not a “dumb ****”, far from it, in fact, and although he wasn’t exactly the body double of Thor, his 6’2” frame would hardly be classed as “weedy”. The businessman, who hailed from England and was putting on his best fake Canadian accent to try and disguise his true identity, was an intellectual. He’d probably forgotten more nuggets of knowledge in the last couple of days than McNugget Mark had learned in a lifetime. Stonehouse had definitely forgotten one thing: that he should always expect the unexpected.
Stonehouse pondered what on earth “Chinese cheese” could be. Presumably Swiss cheese, with the multiple holes being a metaphor for his body when Mark had finished pumping it full of lead, was the intended nationality of the dairy-based delight? The tension of the situation, and the thought of last night’s take-out dinner, had probably confused the poor guard’s mind, leading to the wrong country being blurted out. Dumb ****! There was no time to think about such things, as this was clearly not a cheese and wine party; it was a shoot out in the manufacturing area of a factory that made household furniture such as sofas and dining tables. It was a robbery that had gone wrong. It was a ******* mess!
Organization and careful planning had been integral cogs in Stonehouse’s wheel of burglary success. The business entrepreneur had been using the ill-gotten gains of a spree of break-ins to fund his company dealings, selling tools, toiletries, and toys to facilitate his purchase of several office units from where he could conduct his “legitimate” enterprises. Each potential target was carefully weighed up through hours of surveillance from the shadows. Stonehouse learned the patterns of the security guards, the location of all the cameras and alarms, and most importantly, the proximity of the nearest sewer tunnel to enable a quick, clean escape. A recent encounter with a fellow thief, a leather clad woman who prowled the backstreets, helped to intensify Stonehouse’s focus, as she had effectively stolen his prize from right under his nose. The pride of the pilferer had been dented by his failure, allowing his carefully orchestrated pillaging escapade to be left in ruins by someone else sneaking in ahead of him. Stonehouse was determined to leave no stone unturned in his future ventures across the boundaries of respectability into criminality, yet here he was, pinned down in a corner, dodging a shower of bullets, with a factory worker’s bench as his makeshift umbrella.
“Yo! Meatfeast!” called Stonehouse as he checked on his ammunition levels, “Why don’t y’ just take a chill pill and call Domino’s. Deep pan, right?”
Stonehouse was no boy scout, but he was certainly prepared for a fight when the **** hit the fan like it had done tonight. He carried two pistols, one tucked inside his black overalls, nestled neatly beside a sheathed dagger, and a second that he currently caressed in his hands like the cheek of a lover prior to a passionate kiss. He peered around the corner of the study wooden bench, which offered adequate shelter from his counterpart’s bullets, eyeing up his options, the looter’s gaze being drawn to the figure slumped facedown in a temporary vegetative state by the entrance to the shop floor.
“Don’t forget to order something for your buddy,” continued Stonehouse with a sarcastic tone to his artificial Ontarian dialect, “maybe a veggie special, stuffed crust perhaps?”
The second guard wasn’t supposed to be here. There were never two guards on patrol… never. The unwanted surprise that greeted a stunned Stonehouse, like yet another pair of comedy festive socks at Christmas, had thrown what should have been a routine operation into chaos. Although pizza boy Mark had followed the scheduled routine that Stonehouse had monitored diligently, like one of the factory robots, his accomplice, a so far unnamed younger male with a shaven head and a tattoo of an anchor on his right wrist, was a loose cannon, literally. A beam of battery-operated light from a flashlight was not going to damage even the weakest of vampire intruders, but the handgun that he’d withdrawn from his waist-level holster was a different matter. “Anchorman”, as Stonehouse had affectionately labelled the prone security officer, was definitely a graduate of the shoot-first-ask-questions-later school of thinking. His gung-ho attitude, that had lead him to almost instantly draw his firearm, was sadly his downfall, as Stonehouse had been forced to clobber him around the back of his thickset neck with the butt of his own gun. Unfortunately, enough commotion had been caused in the brief struggle to alert Mark to the intrusion.
The subsequent shooting storm was probably more out of panic than anything else, but nevertheless, it had left Stonehouse in a precarious predicament. The wannabe gunslinger, currently crouching behind a steel locker at the far end of the room, shouted at Stonehouse with a touch of arrogance in his voice. “My buddies will be here soon!” he yelled, clearly gasping for breath as his blood pressure rose like a silver foil helium balloon, embossed with a bright yellow Minion, that had slipped from the hand of a small child at the fairground. “You are toast, ***********!”
“Is that the pizza delivery boy,” replied Stonehouse with a mischievous glint in his dark eyes, “or your mama, coming to take you home?”
Behind the bravado, Stonehouse knew that it was no joking matter. The “buddies” in question would most certainly be the cops, and they would always arrive much quicker than any scooter-riding delivery guy.
“I ain’t no doughnut boy, you dumb ****!” screamed back the overweight security guard, dressed in his tight-fitting blue uniform shirt that had a button missing around his naval, and patches of fresh sweat seeping through each armpit. “I’m gonna turn your weedy *** into Chinese cheese!”
The threat was followed up by a short burst of three shots from the heavy-breathing former cop’s handgun, letting a somewhat agitated Stonehouse know that the danger was real. But Stonehouse was already acutely aware of this. The two empty clips and pile of scattered bullet shells that lay around the knees of the underpaid and overworked guard were testament to that fact. He’d already displayed his ineptitude with a pistol by unloading well over a dozen bullets in the general direction of Stonehouse. The terrible aim of the hired security man was not the only thing wrong with this scenario.
No matter how many times the chubby guard tried to deny the fact – probably each morning as he stared into the mirror while sucking in his flabby stomach – he was definitely a huge fan of the deep-fried sugary rings of dough. His physique was that of someone who had started eating at Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving last year, and hadn’t stopped. He would probably continue eating until Christmas, stuffing his round, reddened face with enough mince pies and turkey to feed Santa’s fleet of reindeer for an entire year. Despite his less than athletic appearance, his employer had deemed “Mark” fit for purpose, and had happily hired the henchman to patrol the factory in downtown Harper Rock. A short spell in the local police force, albeit a desk job over five years ago, had somehow swayed the personnel department to offer Mark the position.
Grant Stonehouse, on the other hand, was not a “dumb ****”, far from it, in fact, and although he wasn’t exactly the body double of Thor, his 6’2” frame would hardly be classed as “weedy”. The businessman, who hailed from England and was putting on his best fake Canadian accent to try and disguise his true identity, was an intellectual. He’d probably forgotten more nuggets of knowledge in the last couple of days than McNugget Mark had learned in a lifetime. Stonehouse had definitely forgotten one thing: that he should always expect the unexpected.
Stonehouse pondered what on earth “Chinese cheese” could be. Presumably Swiss cheese, with the multiple holes being a metaphor for his body when Mark had finished pumping it full of lead, was the intended nationality of the dairy-based delight? The tension of the situation, and the thought of last night’s take-out dinner, had probably confused the poor guard’s mind, leading to the wrong country being blurted out. Dumb ****! There was no time to think about such things, as this was clearly not a cheese and wine party; it was a shoot out in the manufacturing area of a factory that made household furniture such as sofas and dining tables. It was a robbery that had gone wrong. It was a ******* mess!
Organization and careful planning had been integral cogs in Stonehouse’s wheel of burglary success. The business entrepreneur had been using the ill-gotten gains of a spree of break-ins to fund his company dealings, selling tools, toiletries, and toys to facilitate his purchase of several office units from where he could conduct his “legitimate” enterprises. Each potential target was carefully weighed up through hours of surveillance from the shadows. Stonehouse learned the patterns of the security guards, the location of all the cameras and alarms, and most importantly, the proximity of the nearest sewer tunnel to enable a quick, clean escape. A recent encounter with a fellow thief, a leather clad woman who prowled the backstreets, helped to intensify Stonehouse’s focus, as she had effectively stolen his prize from right under his nose. The pride of the pilferer had been dented by his failure, allowing his carefully orchestrated pillaging escapade to be left in ruins by someone else sneaking in ahead of him. Stonehouse was determined to leave no stone unturned in his future ventures across the boundaries of respectability into criminality, yet here he was, pinned down in a corner, dodging a shower of bullets, with a factory worker’s bench as his makeshift umbrella.
“Yo! Meatfeast!” called Stonehouse as he checked on his ammunition levels, “Why don’t y’ just take a chill pill and call Domino’s. Deep pan, right?”
Stonehouse was no boy scout, but he was certainly prepared for a fight when the **** hit the fan like it had done tonight. He carried two pistols, one tucked inside his black overalls, nestled neatly beside a sheathed dagger, and a second that he currently caressed in his hands like the cheek of a lover prior to a passionate kiss. He peered around the corner of the study wooden bench, which offered adequate shelter from his counterpart’s bullets, eyeing up his options, the looter’s gaze being drawn to the figure slumped facedown in a temporary vegetative state by the entrance to the shop floor.
“Don’t forget to order something for your buddy,” continued Stonehouse with a sarcastic tone to his artificial Ontarian dialect, “maybe a veggie special, stuffed crust perhaps?”
The second guard wasn’t supposed to be here. There were never two guards on patrol… never. The unwanted surprise that greeted a stunned Stonehouse, like yet another pair of comedy festive socks at Christmas, had thrown what should have been a routine operation into chaos. Although pizza boy Mark had followed the scheduled routine that Stonehouse had monitored diligently, like one of the factory robots, his accomplice, a so far unnamed younger male with a shaven head and a tattoo of an anchor on his right wrist, was a loose cannon, literally. A beam of battery-operated light from a flashlight was not going to damage even the weakest of vampire intruders, but the handgun that he’d withdrawn from his waist-level holster was a different matter. “Anchorman”, as Stonehouse had affectionately labelled the prone security officer, was definitely a graduate of the shoot-first-ask-questions-later school of thinking. His gung-ho attitude, that had lead him to almost instantly draw his firearm, was sadly his downfall, as Stonehouse had been forced to clobber him around the back of his thickset neck with the butt of his own gun. Unfortunately, enough commotion had been caused in the brief struggle to alert Mark to the intrusion.
The subsequent shooting storm was probably more out of panic than anything else, but nevertheless, it had left Stonehouse in a precarious predicament. The wannabe gunslinger, currently crouching behind a steel locker at the far end of the room, shouted at Stonehouse with a touch of arrogance in his voice. “My buddies will be here soon!” he yelled, clearly gasping for breath as his blood pressure rose like a silver foil helium balloon, embossed with a bright yellow Minion, that had slipped from the hand of a small child at the fairground. “You are toast, ***********!”
“Is that the pizza delivery boy,” replied Stonehouse with a mischievous glint in his dark eyes, “or your mama, coming to take you home?”
Behind the bravado, Stonehouse knew that it was no joking matter. The “buddies” in question would most certainly be the cops, and they would always arrive much quicker than any scooter-riding delivery guy.
