Red Just Ain't Your Color
The Lady Wore Red
“In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”
The small cup of black coffee sitting before me steamed as I listlessly stirred it with a spoon, like a pool boy trying real hard and failing to seduce that attractive older lady sitting poolside. But, to my chagrin, there were no older ladies here for me to fail at seducing; this was Pony Joe’s Diner—some part of a chain store not found down where I was from—located in Ponyville, Equestria. Outside, the rain fell like so many dead bullets in this dark night.
A ring of the diner’s front door told me a new customer was here. Just another shark to the feeding frenzy. I mean, really, a dozen donuts for so few bits? By Celestia, that was a steal! But when I looked up from my booth and to the door, I found the shark looking right back at me. Our eyes met. I looked down at the photo in my wallet. Dead ringer.
She stalked towards me like a tigress in a Burmese orphanage. Red lipstick, blue eyes, light-peach fur, and blood-red mane, she was every bit the mare of most guys’ fantasies. Me? I was looking at her red dress; a dame her age on her own shouldn’t’ve been able to afford something that looked so expensive. But judging by the way she walked and that look in her eye, I had a good idea of where she’d gotten the cash, just like a lioness being made queen of the cathouse. When you were in a situation like mine, you could only think in metaphors.
“Evenin’,” I offered, bringing the cup of coffee to my lips. It burnt my tongue, and I had to struggle not to scream and look retarded. Why didn’t coffee come with warning labels? Somepony should file a frivolous lawsuit against this place.
“So, you’re who they sent?” she asked, taking a seat opposite me in the booth. The mare flashed me a smile—the instinctive, brilliant smile of a mare who knows what feeble creatures stallions could be. You couldn’t learn to smile like that. It was something a mare either knew the minute she was born, or never knew at all. As for her perfume, it was the kind that—unless you had a nose like mine—you only noticed after she’d left a room, not while she was still in it. Even then you didn’t realize it was perfume, you only wondered what had made you think of her just then.
I instantly took a mild disliking to her. The correct word was whom, not who. “That I am, ma’am.”
“Please,” she chuckled, “don’t call me ‘ma’am’, it makes me sound like some old spinster.” The mare held out her hoof to me, and I dimly noted the black leg warmers she wore, leg warmers which had intentionally-made slits through them. Why would you wear leg warmers that were already torn? That’d be like buying a soggy jacket and then playing out in a snowstorm. “Just call me Exie.”
“Well met, Miss Exie,” I replied, shaking the hoof. She looked as if she was about to protest the use of miss, but didn’t. “So, you must have connections.”
“Why, Detective—”
“Special Agent,” I corrected, holding up a hoof. “I’m not a freelance cop or some silly PI. No, I’m from Their Majesties Royal Investigation Service, or just RIS if you’re feeling lazy. And I have a title. See, you’ve either got some real good connections or have got a lot of money to bribe the right ponies, ’cause they came all the way out to the slums of Mare Orleans just to get little ol’ me out from some bar and back to work.”
The face Exie made was probably meant to be a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, but then I paused to consider how she’d gotten me out here. “Or you’re really good at giving blowjobs. Given the way you look, I wouldn’t put it past you. Plus, it’d both satisfy the money and friends thing.”
She just blinked at me.
“Crap, said that out loud, didn’t I? In fact, I think I’ve just been sitting in this diner for the last half-hour narrating to myself.” I shook my head, took out a small flask of whiskey, and poured some in my coffee. It made the coffee better.
“You’re drinking!” Exie said as if I’d just asked her for a grilled weasel.
“Well, yeah, I gotta. I’ve been drunk for nearly twenty years straight; I’m pretty sure that if I ever stop, the cumulative hangover will make my head explode.”
She tilted her head to the side. “You’re the best they could send me...?”
“Yeah,” I chuckled derisively, pulling out and lighting a cigarette. I offered her one, but she just gave me a poorly-disguised look of disgust. I shrugged; with any luck, the burning tobacco in my lungs would kill me faster than this damn job. “My guess? Givin’ the head of the RIS some good head, ’cause that’s the only way they’d scrounge me up to help you.”
“But, Princess Celestia is the official head of the RIS!”
“Uh-huh. So you’ve clearly slept your way to the top. I laud ya.” I clapped my hooves.
She flustered. “I did not—”
“Relax, sparky,” I chuckled. “The real head of the RIS is Director Ace Eyes. And I’m just saying you must be good at something, because she hates me.” Exie didn’t ask the question I’d hoped she’d ask. “Because Ace Eyes is my ex. There? Now there’s drama. So, you clearly found a way to make her rescue her top agent—”
“Top agent?” she scoffed. “You’re the least professional stallion I’ve ever met! I’ve met garbageponies with more poise than you!”
“Yes, and with all the girls and boys you must be lickin’, somepony should really take you down to a stationary store and teach you the difference between an envelope and a whore.”
Her cheeks went red. “Now, you listen you, you bastard!”
“That’s nice,” I agreed. “Now then, enough of this teen bullshit: what’s the problem?”
Exie took a deep breath. She quietly counted down from ten, then fluttered her long lashes as she opened her blue eyes. “Okay, well, ignoring literally everything you’ve said so far, I’m in a bit of a bind.” I cocked a brow questioningly, and she said, “My thigh-highs are missing.”
I nodded, giving her a look not unlike that of a rapist who’d just found out he had AIDS. “Really now? This is why I had to come to this little town? Some girl lost her booties?”
“Hey! They’re really important to me.” She looked off to the side. “And maybe they were stolen during a break-in by a large bear which leads me to suspect a certain... influential mare is behind the theft.”
“Oh. Well. That’s different.” I gave her a dark look. “When animals go evil, there’s no more serious a case. I know now why I was sent: to stop the animal horror before it gets out of hoof. If not for you, then for my dead family... killed by a rampaging swarm of beavers... I still can’t look at aquatic rodents without wanting my momma.”
“What.”
The diner’s door opened up. It was a real Kodak moment as that kodiak strolled into the diner. With a knowing look, it shook the rain off its brown coat. Time froze as we locked eyes. It was a moment of suspense. There were only four ponies in the diner: there was me, Exie, and a frightened-looking guy behind the counter. The fourth, of course, was Death—and by Princess Celestia, Death was giving me that look that made it hard not to get aroused. I knew what I had to do for my family, for all families wronged by nature, for this strange girl now staring at me.
“Exie, get down!” I shouted, jumping out from the booth and pulling out my .357 revolver. She covered her ears as I unloaded all six shots into the bear’s head. I didn’t care what you were, six .357 bullets to your head will, in fact, pretty much explode your brain. Before anything could happen, I whipped out my badge and flashed it to the buck behind the counter. “Royal agent, don’t panic!”
“Did you just shoot a gun in here!?” Exie screamed.
“Yeah, pretty much,” I chuckled. “There is brain splattered everywhere.”
“Ah, tu coglione!” she barked. “Don’t shoot a gun so close to my ears! I don’t wanna catch tinnitus!”
“First of all, you can’t catch tinnitus, you get it from hearing really loud noises, which aren’t contagious unless you’re in, like, a canyon or something, but those are echoes. You can ameliorate the problem just by not listening to loud noises for a while... usually. And second of all, j’en ai rien à foutre!”
“What did you call me?!” Exie demanded as I walked over to the dead bear.
“Honey, my father was from Prance: I’m half-Prench, half-Maretalian, and a first generation Equestrian. So trust me, I know those two languages, and I resent the notion of being insulted in my mother’s tongue.”
She crossed her forelegs. “Great. So you’re one of them.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s racist! Where’s this coming from? Too far, Exie, too far.”
The mare ran a hoof through her red mane. “Okay, yeah, um, that was a little uncalled for.”
“A little?” I said indignantly, kicking the dead bear in the shoulder. “I’ll have you know that Maretalians are good ponies! Why, when I was a colt, Grandma Di Napoli would take me to the seaside market with her. By Celestia, all those stallions there were of the greased-up, rough-and-tumble sort that you only find in the Navy... except that these stallions were all secretly straight. Yeah, my childhood was kinda screwy, but I liked it! What about you, huh?”
“I’m not telling you.” She rubbed her eyes, muttering something about “What am I doing with my life?” to herself.
I looked down at the dead bear. “You know, I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to, you know, make a bearclaw using actual bear claws. Actually, come to think, I don’t know what a bearclaw is in the first place. Seriously. Can you believe I’ve gone almost fifty years and I’ve never seen a bearclaw?”
She just stared at me. Her jaw slowly fell to the floor, and she had to try really hard not to scream as her face sort of just bled like—okay, yeah, no, jaws didn’t do that. Didn’t stop me from thinking it, though, and thinking that it’d be an amusing sight.
I kicked at the bear’s motionless body. As I proceeded to search the body, I said, “Hey, you got a cleaver or something hiding in your tail? I mean, maybe not a cleaver, but some sort of cutting tool. You strike me as the kind of girl who’d keep a knife in her tail. Or vagina. I wouldn’t blame you, I’ve got one in my a—”
Somepony smacked me very hard across the face. “Listen here, Agent whoever you are, I was trying to be nice, but you’re kinda going beyond what I can tolerate! So, are you going to help me find my Celestiadamned thigh-highs or not?!”
“Ow,” I moaned, rubbing my cheek. “You know, the Royal Investigation Service is paying me the big bits to help you. That, and using lots and lots of coercion. Of course I’ll help you, but I ain’t doing it any way but mine.”
“Oh, yeah?” she scoffed. “And just what is your way?”
I smirked. “Shooting guns, killing things, solving crimes, and trying not to get a boner from any of those things.” Before she could sputter at that, I declared, “This bear was clearly working with those who stole your boots!”
“Wait, really?”
“Well, do bears ’round these parts usually come into diners in the middle of the night, carrying notes taped to their paws that read, ‘Exie, we know’ on them?”
She looked down at the bear’s paw. “Holy hay, you’re right, it does say that.”
I looked out the glass front door and into the parking lot outside. “This might be a problem,” I muttered, holding my revolver out and manually reloading each of the six spent shots. “Which auto is yours?”
“None of them,” she replied, and I looked at her. “Ever since those animals broke into my apartment, I’ve been staying at the hotel across the street from this place.”
Revolver reloaded, I holstered it back beneath my black trenchcoat, which I wore because trenchcoats equaled awesome. “So. You just walked here?” I asked, and she nodded. Rubbing my face, I sighed. “Okay, first step: We need to go to your home. There could be clues there.”
“Well, I do have my suspicions. But aren’t you forgetting something?” She looked down at the bear.
“What about the dead animal?” I scoffed.
She stamped a hoof on the checkerboard-tiled floor. “What are we going to do about a dead bear?!”
“Amendment: what is he—” I pointed at the horrified-looking stallion behind the store counter “—going to do about it? Because do you see this RIS badge? It’s literally a license to do most whatever I want to. Even a license to kill... bad guys, but killing nonetheless. So, on behalf of their royal highnesses, Princesses Celestia and Luna, I declare that I have no time to worry about a dead bear and that you, fine sir, may do with it as you will. If that means you want to skin it, mount it, and make it your wife—cool by me, bro.”
The stallion behind the counter did what any reasonable stallion in his position would do, and had a heart attack and died. After phoning an ambulance, I was ready to blow this popsicle stand.
Adjusting my fedora—because fedoras were pure sex appeal—I opened the door and stepped out into the rain. “C’mon, Exie, my auto’s right here.”
|—Ꮬ—|
“So,” I said, trying to break the awkward, awkward silence between the mare and I. “What are your fears?” Thankfully from studying the street layout of the town, I knew where her apartment was.
Her forelegs crossed over her chest, she shot me a look. “The hay kind of conversation starter is that?”
I turned a corner, idly watching the windshield wipers futilely battle the downpour. It was like watching a little mare trying in vain to stop her foal from being hilariously gangbanged by the Blue Mare Group, which was funny because they were all wearing clown noses. And clowns were funny. Except Bobo. He was a rapist.
“Well,” I went on, trying not to imagine being raped in the eye by a clown or wonder if clowns had weird clown penises, “I thought it’d help me know the real you if you told me a list of all the things you fear and hate.”
“The real me?” she scoffed. “Well, let’s start right at the top of the list of things I hate. Numero uno: Special Agent Douchebag over here. Numero dos—”
“Hey, are you wearing a seatbelt?”
“No, why?”
And I slammed down on the breaks, the auto’s wheels shrieking with rubbery protest. Exie screamed as she flew forwards, her head slamming against the bulletproof window. Then she stopped screaming and simply fell back onto the seat.
“Look, that attitude is about as welcome here as a leper in an orgy,” I berated sharply. She didn’t reply, didn’t even groan. “Hey, angry girl.” Nothing. Great, I thought, she’d better not be dead. Dammit, I can’t afford another dead hooker! “Wait, no, I don’t kill prostitutes... At least not anymore.”
I poked her body with a hoof, and she simply slumped against the door. With a sigh, I shook my head. “Oh, yeah, me, wanna good idea? Slam Exie’s head into the windshield. That’s genius. Almost as good an idea as the time you tried jerking off with lighter fluid and learned that day that friction started fires. ‘Oh, yes, you can either work for the the RIS again, or you can try your luck in the current job market.’ Figures I’d pick the dumb choice!”
Then I put a hoof to her neck, checking for a pulse. I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t. It was just some instinct as old as fear: you seek the dark when you hide, you seek the light when the need to hide is gone. All the animals had it, too.
And the white moth of hope fluttered before my face as I finally felt a pulse.
The fear was no longer “Was she alive?” but was now “How do I wake her up and make sure she’s not in a coma?” And that was a big fear. The alcohol in my system wasn’t helping anymore.
I think that fear neutralized alcohol, weakened its aesthetic power. It was good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist, that head of cabbage in your fridge staring murderously at you; alright then to take a drink. But for the big ones? I didn’t do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It took sand, literal and in the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that was fear. And if you were out of sand, that meant you had to burn up.
So I reached for the only sand that came to immediate mind. “Hey, wake up!” I shouted, my hoof deciding that it was in love with her cheek and that now was the time to give her a big wet one. “Wake up!” Every shout came with more of my hoof’s special brand of love. “Hey! Wake your ass up! You know what, screw you! This is for being a bitch! This is for all the furry midgets in the world! This is for saying ‘who’ instead of ‘whom’! This is because I get aroused when slapping mares!” She groaned but didn’t wake up.
Rolling my eyes, I unbuckled myself and reached out for a large duffel bag on the back seat. I really hated the world right this moment. Everything came into it so clear and went out so dirty. After pulling out a hypodermic syringe, I went back to the unconscious mare. There wasn’t a guarantee this was even a good idea, but there was no time to weigh chances. There was no such thing as chances anyways, not in the distorted perspective that was the threat of me not getting paid because Exie was dead. The injection of the magical drug to the back of her neck was quick and easy. I tossed the needle off somewhere to be disposed later.
I counted aloud. “Three... two... one...”
Exie gasped like she’d just been a drowned mare moments ago. Sweating and panting, she jerked up, holding a hoof over her breast. She wiped away a trail of drool from her lips. Then the light-peach mare looked around wildly until her eyes set upon me. “You!” she growled.
“Well, last I checked, I am me, yeah,” I replied.
“What did you do to me!?” she demanded, still trying to catch her breath.
“Well, you weren’t wearing your seatbelt, and that’s dangerous. Click it or ticket, girl.”
“Not that!” The mare jumped out of her seat, tackling me and shoving my back against the door. “Why can’t I stop shaking?!”
“’Cause I injected you with a drug cocktail,” I casually offered.
“You what!?” she fumed, pushing me harder and harder against the door.
“Well, you were unconscious, so I hit you up with a stimpack. It’s a cocktail of magical healing drugs mixed with painkillers, adrenalin, and some other stuff that let you ignore the haze of painkillers. The shakes are just the adrenaline surging through you.” With a blank look on her pretty face, she sat back. Exie raised her hooves and just watched them shake. “Stimpacks are just one of the things I have access to as an RIS agent. The shakes will pass in a moment; but it was either that, or you might have been seriously hurt. Take your pick.”
I glanced around the road, then pulled the car up to the curb. “Damn, these Ponyville streets sure are empty at night.” I let the moments pass by, let Exie try to collect herself.
“This is not at all how tonight should be going,” she muttered, rubbing her forelegs.
“And how should it be going?”
Exie shot me a look that only a lungfish could have copied. “For starters, you were supposed to be at least twenty years younger and twenty years better-looking. It was supposed to be all, they send some cute royal agent who’d use their smarts and wit to solve this case and put an end to whomever stole my thigh-highs. Then I’d be able to go back to my home, and probably wouldn’t have gone...” She shot me a venomous look. “Instead, they send me some old drunk with a serious attitude problem and no skill!”
“Reality check, toots: the only reason they sent me is because I am the very best they ever had.” I reached out and turned the crank on the door, rolling the window down as I lit a smoke. “But just because somepony up high really likes you don’t ergo mean I gotta. I’ll solve this case, put an end to whomever stole them boots, then I’m gonna see if the RIS will cut me loose again. So I’m sorry I ain’t some young buck but rather a forty-something-year-old bastard.”
She narrowed her eyes into what were known in the Hurting and Killing People trade as “cold slits”, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression you’ve just lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is, as of yet, an unresolved problem. So I ignored her and took a puff of my cigarette, exhaling the smoke out the window.
A crack of lightning briefly made the street as bright as daylight. In the heavy rain, I could just imagine it like some scene from a movie. I could picture some young buck dancing down the raining street, singing about how his best girl had just left him, and all the bars were closed.
Then a second crack erupted, and the car clanged. I blinked. That wasn’t thunder or lightning. I looked out the windshield at a distant figure standing on the sidewalk. A red-orange spearhead leapt from the figure and harmlessly impacted the windshield.
Exie gasped as I grabbed the stick shift and hauled ass into reverse. Throwing a foreleg over my seat, I looked out the back window as I tore backwards down the wet street, the mysterious figure still slowly shooting. Jerking myself back forwards, I hit the brakes and twisted the wheel, spinning the auto some one-eighty degrees before hitting the gas.
“Put your damn seat belt on right now unless you want to die!” I barked, and she complied quickly. “We’re taking a detour to your apartment!”
Suddenly, things had gotten much more interesting. As I sped my black auto down the road, pieces of the puzzle came to me as if I’d mail-ordered a puzzle box. It was a rough outline, but it gave me the idea that her thigh-highs were just some sort of excuse, perhaps a codeword. Was this Exie girl a spy? She certainly had the seductive appeal of one. Was I being dragged into some dark game?
No matter the case, I had the inexplicable feeling that I was going to get shot before morning.
|—Ꮬ—|
My impressed whistle sounded like air escaping a dying corpse. The penthouse apartment was none too shabby, soft-blue walls, the many rooms, the large leather couch, the loveseat, the television, and the tasteful carpet. I shut and locked the door behind me, then put my hat and coat up on the rack, and now I was just wearing my suit and tie. My eyes fell upon the wall behind the couch, where a large framed portrait of Exie leaning over a counter gave me a seductive look; from the way she was leaning, I could see her torn leg warmers and hints of her black thigh-highs.
Exie herself turned to look at me. The mare had stopped shaking a few minutes ago as we were on the elevator up to this floor. It’d taken far too long to calm her down about the shooter, but at least I’d calmed her. “Well?” she asked in an annoyed, expectant tone.
I cocked a brow. “Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to ask why my place is so nice, and insinuate that I’m a filthy harlot?”
I shook my head. “Believe or not, I actually read the dossier about you.”
She blinked at me. “There’s a dossier about me?”
“Yeah, and it was a strange read. Trust me, I actually know a fair bit about you—” I winked “—Miss Ecstasy.”
“Don’t call me that!” she snapped, murder in her eyes.
I strolled over and took a seat on her couch. “Well, it is your birth name, ain’t it?” She didn’t reply. “And the dossier told me you don’t like being called it, am I right?” No response, just angry staring at me. “Other things the dossier mentioned you didn’t like that I can recall: prudes and by extension much of the upper class and aristocracy, unkempt hooves, ponies what don’t take care of their bodies, and you get particularly insulted when somepony insists on showering after sleeping with you.”
Her jaw dropped. “How the hell do they know that last part?”
“Miss Exie, believe you me when I say that we know everything about any sort of interesting pony.” I grinned at her. “Your mother was one such interesting pony. As her only daughter, that means you’re such an interesting pony too.”
“But—”
“Please, do you want to argue with the guy with the gun?” I jeered, and she fell silent. Exie just stared at me from her spot in the kitchen doorway. “So, earlier this evening you swore at me in Maretalian. Where’d you learn that?”
“I thought you knew everything about me,” she scoffed.
I leaned back in the couch. “Doesn’t mean they tell me everything.”
A pause.
“Because I lived in Manehattan for a good six years,” she admitted. “Where I lived in it there was a healthy Maretalian community, and they really like to swear.” Exie facehoofed.
“Good. See? We’re making progress. Now then, do you know who would try to shoot you?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t really make many enemies. Well, not the kind that’d want to murder me, that’s for certain. Worst enemy I could have would be, like, a particularly angry ex, and I can’t think of any that were particularly and murderously angry with me after we broke up.”
I took out a pen and notepad, taking notes. “Really now? The only possible thing a dame like you’s ever done that might cross a pony is break up with ’em?”
Exie walked into the kitchen and came back out with a wineglass and a fitting bottle of wine. She strolled across the living room and took a seat in the loveseat before pouring herself a glass. “What kinds of things would I ever do to piss somepony off?”
“No off-the-records debts, no ponies insulted, no outstanding gambling wins?”
At that last one, she glanced to a door on the far side of the room. “Isn’t non-casino gambling for big money illegal?”
“It’s not my jurisdiction to enforce those kinds of laws.”
She took a sip of wine. “In Ponyville, there is... a sort of gambling place. Back room in a popular bar. It’s not a high-rollers sort of place, more just the locals having some fun.”
“And have you ever gone to this place?” I asked, taking more notes.
Exie hesitated. “Perhaps once or twice, yes.”
“Have you ever won anything somepony would rather you not have?”
“I don’t really know. I’ve won a few odds and ends—you wouldn’t believe my poker face.”
“Odds and ends?” I probed.
She bit her lip. “An ocelot.”
I blinked. “You wha’?”
Exie took a sip of wine and chuckled. “Yep. A while back during a very slow and boring month, I might have convinced a certain animal-loving mare to join in on a game, and I might have convinced her to bet an animal, and I might have won said animal that night.”
“You have... an ocelot?”
“Mmhm.” She nodded to the door on the far side of the room. “Won him as a kitty, named him Mr. Bitey. Should’ve named him ‘Winner’s Remorse’, since all he ever does is get sick. Can you believe I’ve actually had to miss work to take care of him a few times?”
I slowly nodded. “Whatever happened to Mrs. Bitey?”
Exie crossed her forelegs and looked away. “We don’t talk about Mrs. Bitey anymore.” A moment paused, then she laughed, and I pitched in with a chuckle.
“So, hey, I’ve never seen a real live ocelot before. Can I go look at him?”
She shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Don’t let him out of the room, though. While you do that, I’m gonna change into something different, and then we’re going to solve this case, okay?”
I nodded. “Y a-t-il un problème? Non, je compris.”
|—Ꮬ—|
I took a drink from Exie’s bottle of wine as I sat on the couch, slumped forwards. When she came out of her bedroom, I didn’t like her any more than I had; in fact, perhaps even less. She’d put on a shiny dress, all red fishscales, like this was some exotic game and not a serious matter we were dealing with. You couldn’t tell whether she was a mare or the demoness I suspected her of. Right in front, plastered across her face, was a sort of question-mark worked into her look. And I took the liberty of answering the unspoken question.
“Because there’s something very, very wrong.”
At the steely, serious tone of my voice, she stiffened. “What?”
“Well, first of all,” I said, gesturing for the ocelot’s door, “I don’t know much about cats, and I know even less about ocelots, but my gut’s tellin’ me you need to get, like, a couple of tree branches or something in there for him, because he is desperate for something to play with. There’s literally only a bowl of food and water for him, nothing else. It’s like... Meowschwitz or something in there.”
She pawed at the ground. “Well, I’ll admit it, I really have no idea how to really take care of an ocelot, but...”
“And then there was the other thing.”
“Other thing?” she intoned.
“Yes, it was a rather nasty surprise, all things considered. And I don’t like surprises, except surprise fellatio, that I’m all for. ’Cept, y’know, when it’s from other dudes, but I probably shouldn’t be saying this aloud.” I affixed her a hard look. “Tell me, Miss Exie, are you much into chains and whips?”
“Excuse me?” she replied as if I’d just asked her, well, pretty much exactly as you’d imagine she’d sound if I’d just randomly asked her if she was into hardcore BDSM.
“Whips, chains, straps, sadomasochism, pain, cuts, bites, screaming.”
“Fuck you,” she spat. I took a sip of wine, emptying the glass. As I set the glass on a coaster, I opened up a little drawer on the small table beside the couch, pulling out a set of steel hoofcuffs. Exie flustered. “Okay, so maybe there was this one pony and they happened to leave that there and—”
“A she?” I asked.
After a moment, she admitted, “Yeah. So?”
“Hmm. Bi. Neat,” I muttered, then I looked up and asked in a more authoritative tone, “And did any sessions with this young mare ever get really out of hoof?”
“Just what are you saying?” she demanded, taking a step towards me.
“Was she of a small frame?” I asked. “Light-blue coat, mauve eyes?”
“What the hay are you saying?!”
“Did she have a short, tomboyish mane of pink? Was she a pegasus?”
Exie stomped towards me. “Listen here, you sonofa—”
I cocked my revolver, and she froze. “Don’t take that tone with me, girl.” She stared at me with a look that could have sent the hardest stallion crying for his momma. Hard as in ‘tough’, not hard as in ‘could’ve sent a stallion with a huge throbbing erection crying for his momma’, because that’d just be creepy. “When did you last see her?” No answer. “Well then, when last you saw her, was she tied to a chair, four bullet holes in her chest?”
Exie blinked. “What?”
I reached behind myself and tossed the mare a single thigh-high boot. She looked down at it as the boot rolled to her hooves. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes, a thigh-high, one of yours.”
The mare affixed me with her blue eyes. “Where did you find it? Where’s the other one?”
“Want the other one? Look at the boot—there’s a note.”
Exie blinked, then reached down and grabbed the little note off the boot. For some reason, she read it aloud. “You’ve been a naughty girl, Exie. Like your friend here. Like her look? We’ve been watching; we know this is just the kinda thing that turns you on.” As she read, I could almost see the blood draining from her face. “Now, we bet you’re looking for your other boot, aren’t you? Whom you suspect. She might have it. And remember: you’re next.” She dropped the letter, looking up at me.
I sighed. “You’d be surprised how difficult it is to ask forgiveness of a stranger when you’ve never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest pony from the panhandler. I thought this was some game, but now I see how serious it is. I’m sorry. Won’t behave much different, but at least I understand truly the stakes.”
My vision shifted to the glass doors leading to a dark patio. The square of sky over the patio was soft and dark as indigo velour, with magnificent stars like many-legged silver spiders festooned on its underside. Below them the white roses of the small patio garden gleamed phosphorescently in the starlight, with a magnesium-like glow.
A raging, glowering full moon had come up and was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio. This was not the meek, the pallid, the gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Princess Luna a thousand years ago and turned her into a world-ending monster. The moon that was looking for new ponies to corrupt and rape of innocence. The primitive moon that had once looked down on early heathen civilizations and equine sacrifices. The same moon that’d been there the night my family was murdered so many years ago by a swarm of bloodthirsty aquatic rodents.
And that moon could go fuck herself.
When I looked back at Exie, she was still standing there, staring at me like a cow looks at an oncoming train. With a sigh I stood up. “The room with the ocelot, aside from being in severe need of a stuffed animal for Mr. Bitey to play with, has a problem. Do you want to see it? After getting the boot, I came straight here.”
With extreme hesitance, Exie nodded. I got up and led her to the door, opened it, and flicked the lights on. The ocelot—basically a housecat, but bigger, more awesome, and spotted—looked up at us from the corner where a jug of cat food and another jug of water were. But on the far side of room, facing the door, was a wooden chair.
Exie had never seen a dead body before, I could tell as much. She just stood there, and looked and looked. Then she took a step forwards, and looked some more. Dead bodies were always worse with open eyes—they just looked right back at you and made you feel like you were being watched by something from another world.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said slowly, painfully slowly; I didn’t like that slowness. “She and I... last weekend...”
To me, the look of death just made me think the corpse was mocking me. A part of me quite wanted to go over and smack a dead bitch. The ocelot looked guilty, but the reason was clear enough from the gnawed hindhoof where the thigh-high boot hadn’t been.
“How long were you at the hotel?” I asked.
“Couple nights,” she murmured almost inaudibly.
I blinked. “You left your exotic pet ocelot alone for two days? The hay is wrong with you?” She didn’t reply, just more looking at the dead girl. I shook my head. “In that case, she must have been put here within those days, since she looks so fresh. Question on my mind is, how’d she die? And don’t say ‘shot’, because those bulletholes are clearly post-mortem.”
Exie stared at me as I walked across the wide and room and to the body, whereupon I put on a pair of gloves and proceeded to prod the body. Slowly moving her head side-to-side as I observed the several bruises on her cheeks, the black eye, the bloodshot eyes, the ball gag in her mouth, the marks around her neck. Setting her head back, I touched and felt around her neck. The bones were intact. Nopony had broken her neck.
The rest of the dead mare’s body was mostly encased in a black catsuit, with certain bits purposefully exposed for their sexual purposes. Eye-measuring the bullet holes like a jungle cat not sure if it had or hadn’t just seen a tin of cat food through the forest, I estimated them to be from a .45 caliber of some sort. The slightly singed fur visible through the holes in the catsuit told me that the rounds had been fired point-blank, and their spaced-out pattern suggested just how deliberate the shots had been. Her legs were tied with leather straps to the chair, and a quick beneath revealed to me that the chair had no proper bottom, allowing a foreign presence open access to the sitter’s buttocks. Disgusting.
I stepped back from the corpse. What painstaking effort, what exquisite attention to detail, had been put into extinguishing this mare’s life? But what more effort had been put into bringing her here, like this? It had certainly been far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard way this young mare had been brought into the world.
Looking at the doorway, I was puzzled not to see Exie standing there. Taking the rubber gloves off, I trotted out of the room. She wasn’t in the living room, so I checked the bedroom. In the far dark bedroom corner was a little light-peach mare with a crimson mane, her red dress little more than a pile of clothes as she cowered and shook in the corner, her forelegs wrapped desperately around the one thigh-high boot.
There was a catch phrase everypony must have heard sometime in their life. You walk into a room or go over to a group. Then somepony turns and says with huge emphasis, “There s/he is!” As if you were the most important pony in the world. (And you’re not.) As if you were the one they were just talking all about. (And they weren’t.) As if you were the only one who mattered. (And you probably don’t.) It was a nice little tribute, and it didn’t cost a cent. And though the circumstances were all wrong, that was what I said.
“There she is!”
Exie didn’t even look up at me, just kept murmuring and quietly sobbing to herself and clutching her thigh-high. It looked like she was in full delirium. But delirium was the opposite of death; it was the body’s struggling to survive.
I knelt down before her. “Are you afraid, Exie? Afraid of being next, of dying, of ending up just like the fling in yonder room?”
She looked at me, still shaking. A very fatherly part of me wanted to reach out and hold her or something. But she wasn’t my daughter, and I was pretty sure she’d punch my balls if I touched her.
“Because it isn’t dying I’m afraid of,” I sighed, “it isn’t that at all; I know what it is to die, I’ve died before. And, just so we’re clear, Lady Death kinda sucks at reciprocating oral sex. Well, ‘sucks’ is the wrong word because of the accidental pun, but comprends-tu, oui? Where was I? Oh, yeah. See, it’s the endless obliteration, the knowledge there there will never be anything else. That’s what I can’t stand, to try so hard and end in nothing. You know what I mean, don’t you...? By Celestia, I should become a writer.”
Her moist little eyes just looked at me, her lips quivering. I shook my head and stood back up. For a moment it looked as though she was going to stop me, to say something to make me leave, but she didn’t.
I checked the revolver and said, “If you need me, I’ll be in your kitchen, making a phone call to the police department and then getting a drink.”
As I’d predicted, there was a phone in her kitchen. I called up the police, told them I was a royal agent, my badge number, and some other details to help them out in finding this place and not arresting Exie or me. It was over in a few minutes, a few very tiresome minutes. I looked over to her icebox.
Well, it was her kitchen. Where was the harm in rooting through what she had? Ooh, vodka and tomato juice and lemons and Worcestershire sauce! Who was making a Bloody Mary? I was making a Bloody Mary! I took out two highball glasses from a cabinet.
Three parts vodka, six parts tomato juice, one part lemon juice, and I didn’t care to use any other ingredients nor did I bother to garnish it, though I did put ice in it. A single sip of divinity down my throat and now there was a fire in my belly. I sighed with pleasure, looking out into the living room. Two blue eyes looked back at me, poking out from the bedroom doorway.
I waved at Exie. “Howdy. What brings you here?”
“You left the door open,” she replied. “Open doors freak me out. Came to close it.”
“Want a Bloody Mary?” I offered. She hesitated, then nodded. I opened her fridge up and—”Oh sweet Celestia, no!” I shrieked, falling backwards and slamming the fridge closed like a bag of carrots.
“What?! What?!” Exie gasped.
“There’s a head... of cabbage!” I yelped, crawling backwards.
He face went blank. “What.”
“Cabbage! You’ve got cabbage in your fridge!”
“I repeat: what.”
I stood up, keeping my back to the kitchen counter. “You can’t trust cabbage!” I took a deep breath, the sounds of tanks and airplane and guns and bombs in my head. “They killed my father during the war...”
She tilted her head to the side. “What war?”
Miraculously, even after I’d jumped down, I still had my Bloody Mary. It helped fight the memories. ”The Krauts killed my father... wave after wave of them charged his position, forcing themselves down his throat till his stomach exploded with... sauerkraut. Endless wave after wave after wave of cabbage, sauerkraut, and cabbage-related products... To this day, the mere concept of cabbage and cabbage-related products fills me with horror.”
“What war?”
“The only war... the fight for peace!”
“Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity,” she scoffed, and I paused.
“That was... surprisingly insightful of you.”
Exie narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, ‘surprisingly’? Are you implying I’m stupid?”
“Well, I won’t lie, you seem to me the kind of girl whose first instinct to solve a problem is to spread your legs and pucker your lips.”
She stamped a hoof. “Are you suggesting I’m a whore?”
“Suggesting? No. Expressing the belief in no uncertain terms? Yes.”
“And who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body? Is it because I’m not married? Are you one of those ponies?”
“Well, every stallion approves of premarital sex.” I looked out the window dramatically. “Until he has a daughter.”
Exie facehoofed. “You know what? I don’t think you ever had a daughter. I think you’re just a crazy pony.”
“You’re oddly angry tonight,” I commented, frowning at my empty glass.
“Well, forgive me—it’s not as if I’ve had to deal with a psychotic prick, being shot at, and finding a dead body in my own Celestia-damn house!”
I shrugged. “You’re right. None of that happened. Apology accepted!”
She leaned against the wall, rubbing her forehead. I was pretty sure she was muttering something about “Murder is a crime” over and over again, shooting me the occasional glance.
The night outside was just doing its thing, watching over the whole of Equestria, but forgetting the little patches of evil here and there. But this was why I was here. I checked my revolver as I asked, “Ma’am, whom did you suspect stole your boots, again?”
Exie groaned. “Fluttershy.”
“And do you know where she lives? I have a theory.”
|—Ꮬ—|
The empty countryside passed by as I drove the car through the dead of night. Ponyville was far behind us, and my headlights only illuminated the dark road before me. Exie, sitting shotgun, cast me furtive glances, like the look of a mare trying to literally steal candy from a baby. I was glad she didn’t have a shotgun, actually, because a very sane part of me worried that she’d shoot me. On accident, if I was lucky!
Slowly, very slowly, Exie reached out a hoof and touched the radio. As soon as the tunes hit my ears, I smacked her hoof and turned it off. “Death before disco!” I hissed.
“Funk, actually,” she corrected. “That was funk.”
I scoffed. “It’s zigger music, is what it is. I don’t trust zebras and their songs. Disco, jazz, funk, ‘black and blues’—whatever music they make is corrupting.” I turned the auto slightly to account for the road’s gentle curves.
“And you call me a racist for remarking about your Prench-Maretalian background?” She rolled her eyes, crossing her forelegs over her chest.
“Well, last I checked, honey, the Prench never used witchcraft and creepy magic.” I chuckled. “Used to like that stuff before a zebra blinded a fellow agent of mine. He and I were on an operation many years back, trying to—”
“I don’t care,” she spat. “And I’m pretty sure you’re just making it up to sound dramatic.”
As I was about to give her a witty response, I glanced in the rear-view mirror. There were two black autos following us, their lights off, but their silhouettes visible in the moonlight. It was just like that time Count Chocula was stalking me, and I learned all about his mad hacky-sack skills. “Exie, who normally travels these roads at this hour?”
“Nopony,” she hesitantly offered. “Why?”
Like the shock of finding out you’d just deflowered the Princess of some generic country, a bullet hit the back of my car. Exie shouted, but I commanded, “Exie, take the wheel!”
“What?!”
With the force of a stallion harboring lumberjack fantasies overpowering his father in order to prove his heteronormativity, I pulled out my revolver and opened the door. Exie screamed and swore as she lunged for the wheel, but I was already hanging outside the car.
Like my disappointment at discovering that there were no take-backsies after a pretty girl gifts you with surprise sex, a hail of gunfire erupted from the two black cars, now side-by-side each other and clearly breaking several traffic laws.
“Exie, keep your mouth away from my penis!” I barked, taking aim and firing.
“What?!” she shouted back.
“I’m just saying that I’m shooting guns, killing things, and solving a crime—that’s all three of my big fetishes right there,” I replied, shooting into the window of one of the cars. “So fair warning that this totally gives me an erection! And I get the feeling you’re the kinda dame who likes licking things to claim them as your own.”
I couldn’t tell if I was hitting anything. Then, with one bullet and like a piñata full of scorpions, something’s head exploded. The leftmost car swerved and careened off the road and into a ditch. Where it exploded, like a bigger, blacker dick. Stupid foreign cars, always exploding at the slightest provocation.
“This is more fun than being a dick to children!” I laughed, throwing myself back into the car and slamming the door. Taking back the wheel from a startled peach-coated mare, I reached over and opened the glove box. “Can you shoot?”
She sputtered something incomprehensible out.
“Whatever,” I sighed, holstering my gun and pulling out the one from the glovebox, plus two extra .45 clips. Ah, the Colt 1911. What would I do without you?
“You have a gun in your glove box?”
I nodded. “Yeah, and a caché of weapons in the back, plus ten pounds of C4.”
“What, why?!”
“Well, I don’t trust the government, that’s why.” I cocked the 1911, smiling at it. “Exie, take the wheel again!”
Out the door I went, hanging part of my body out as I opened fire. Gunfire came from the other car, and I returned it with due diligence, but something was wrong. Very wrong. ‘Teaching a robot to love’ kind of wrong. From all the small arms fire, I could estimate that there were four bodies in the car. They had no sense of how to aim, as if they didn’t even know what guns were.
One shot. One kill. Second shot. Second kill. And... why were we slowing down? I looked forwards to see a small cottage on an upcoming hill, no doubt that it was Fluttershy’s. Oh, and I’d taken my hoof off the pedal. Yeah, that’d slow down my car. Whatever, as the car slowed down, I fired off the rest of my clip, and the other car veered off into a ditch. To my erection’s limp sadness, the car did not explode.
I reloaded and stepped out of the car just as it was about to halt, which gave me a weird feeling of being more badass than I was. Exie, on the other hoof, opened her door when the car stopped, and she more-or-less just flopped onto the ground.
“Who,” Exie stammered, “who were those ponies?”
“Not ponies,” I said darkly, looking up at the cottage and the little footpath up to the door. “They were monkeys. Literal monkeys. Chimps, I suspect.”
“I... wha’?”
“I should know; back before I had my family, I once banged some primatologist. She taught me the difference between good and bad cholesterol.” I nodded. “C’mon, Exie, we need to investigate this Fluttershy mare.” I reloaded my revolver, checked my 1911, and then went into the backseat of my car. Oh, sweetness was found in lead! Two clips for me and my newly-equipped tommy gun. And some C4, because it was awesome.
As the little earth pony mare stumbled around the auto, she just stared at me and my perfectly reasonable amount of murderous instruments “Y’know... when I asked somepony to help me find my stolen boots...”
“The last thing you expected was the mixing of the races, right?” I offered helpfully, and she just stared at me. Taking a look at the large, very friendly-looking cottage, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that time when I was a colt and got abducted by Pony Pan. “And you know, Exie,” I said, checking the Tommy gun, “nothing livens up a party quite like multiple gunshot wounds.”
The trot up the hill was well and nice, the moon glaring down at me like a vindictive ex. Something about the nice little stream next to the cottage just screamed ‘homoerotic volleyball montage’ to me, though I wasn’t sure why. I could see the distant lights of Ponyville from up here, but there was a door to knock down.
As I bucked the door down, Exie screamed, “The hell!?”
“Probable cause,” I vaguely replied before rolling through the doorway and sweeping my gunbarrel across the room. Aside from the oddly located 55-gallon drum of lube and what I suspected was a cooler full of organs, there was nothing of interest here.
Whom you suspect. She might have it, the ominous letter had said. So either it was secretly here and hidden somewhere, or I was an idiot. The kind of idiot who picked up girls at the abortion clinic. Something about this made me feel more out of place than that time I woke up fully-clothed atop the Colta-Cola building.
And yet this empty place reeked of a murder most foul. Fouler than going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and dumping three tons worth of Mare’s Fitness magazines in their front lobby. In any case, I continued deeper into the house. As soon as Exie entered, through, a howling, wicked laugh filled the air.
A completely contrived slab of metal fell over the door, sealing us in. “So, you’ve found me, have you?!” the feminine voiced cackled.
“Fluttershy?” Exie gasped. “Is that you? You did all of this?”
“Fluttershy? Ha! No, I am not Fluttershy!” A yellow mare with a pink mane stepped from the shadows, and that annoyed me because I was sure she couldn’t have been—Oh, wait. There was a hidden door behind the bookshelf.
“Stupid bitch,” I muttered to myself.
That yellow bitch flashed us a smile as she adjusted her red-tinted goggles, her white lab coat fluttering slightly. “It is I, Doctor Adorable!”
I raised my gun. “So you’re behind the murders! Or just one, but I’m sure there are others!”
Her evil laugh died. “Wait, what? Murders?” she asked in a soft, baffled voice. Doctor Adorable shook her head. “No, I didn’t do that; I only stole Exie’s boot in order to unlock their secrets and make myself even more adorable!”
“But why?” Exie gasped.
“Because you took my pet ocelot, that’s why!” Doctor adorable shouted with renewed vigor. “You tricked me into accepting your game and betting my ocelot and now I lost him, you... you big, manipulative meaniehead!”
“She sucks at taking care of it, too,” I added. “Just keeps it in a very lonely room.”
“What?” the good doctor gasped. “That’s so horrible! Exie, you’re horrible! I demand the ocelot back, and in return you can have your thigh-highs back.”
I rose a hoof into the air. “You know, this still doesn’t explain who murdered that mare.”
“I believe I can answer that,” a big, gray pegasus said, stepping in through an opened window.
“Oh, yes, fine,” Doctor Adorable groaned. “Just everypony break into my house at three in the morning.”
Exie gasped so hard that her lungs sounded like they’d imploded. “You!”
“Yes, I!” the pegasus sneered. “It was I who truly stole your boots, I who trained the animals to kill and shoot guns and drive, I who murdered that mare!”
“Wait. What? This just got really stupid.” I shook my head. “And how do you even know each other, Exie?”
The little mare shook her head. “It was years ago... I was sent to straight camp by my mother because I liked both genders... and he was my instructor.” She gave me a strange look. “It was a very weird time in my life.”
“You know, I’m still here, still being evil,” Doctor Adorable said, so I walked over to her and punched her face, knocking her out.
“Problem solved.” I smiled at a job well-done.
“Last I saw of him,” Exie went on, “was in a rice paddy, as he was drowned by his inability to swim.”
I cocked my head to the side. This room really needed some wall paint, I noticed. “Does he, uh, have a name?”
“Yes!” he laughed. “I am Gaylord Steambath, master of the straightening!” Exie and he faced each other off, teeth bared.
“So... does anypony notice he has the single most literally homosexual name ever?” I asked. “I mean, I couldn’t make a gayer name if I tried.”
“Sh-shut up!” Gaylord Steambath demanded of me. “I shall defeat Exie and make her straight as Celestia intended of us ponies! It is my gift to her!”
“You know, in most Mareopean languages, the word ‘gift’ means ‘poison’,” I said. “And you can’t make somepony straight if they aren’t already. It’s caused by a chemical imbalance, not evil. Duh.”
“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do!” he shouted
“Welcome to the real world, jackass!” I shouted back, firing a single bullet into Gaylord Steambath’s shoulder. He collapsed to the ground, rolling around. “See, I know for a fact that you were probably going to explain your evil plan involving Exie and Doctor Adorable here, but I don’t care about it.”
Exie just stared. “I... but... I...” Her eye twitched.
“What?” I shrugged. “Were you hoping for some epic climax wherein you could resolve all your inner demons?” I trotted over to Gaylord Steambath and hoofcuffed him to a nearby radiator. “Please. This is how things work in the real world, the guy with the gun wins. But no matter how this was solved, I still get paid. Et c’est la vie.”
The little mare said nothing.
“I like the way you think, Exie! Now then, let’s find your Celestia-damned boot and get out of here.” I brought a cigarette to my lips and lit it. “I’m sick of this town.”
Fin.
