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ZAPRUDER DOES PAINTBALL
Since this site is now classified as officially violent, I guess there’s no reason not to link to the paintball headshot of 2007.
Moral of the story: stay hidden behind that Grassy Knoll.
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2007 10 29 at 09:37 AM • permalinkHey, since we’ve got the reputation for violence, let’s flaunt it.
DETECTIVE PACO IN CHINATOWN (Part I)
The warehouse opened in the back onto a broad alley. Over the small loading dock, a wide strip of corrugated zinc served as a kind of makeshift awning. The rain pounding on the little roof sounded like a ragged volley of arrows from a hundred bows - the Parthian shots of my vanishing hopes and dreams. Sheila had been kidnapped.
Go on. Tell me how you would have done it differently. How you would have pointed out to Sheila that the job was too dangerous. How she was needed to hold down the fort. And how Mrs. O’Doherty would track down the person she held responsible for landing her daughter in the soup in order to exact a terrible revenge – if necessary, following him all the way to hell in her non-fire-resistant, fuzzy pink slippers.
Well, here’s a news flash: I did say all those things to Sheila, and for my troubles got nothing but a Bronx cheer. She wanted a little change of pace, to get out of the office for a few days, and, anyhow, she was a big girl now and was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. My firm and final “no” melted like a pat of butter in a hot skillet before those pleading blue eyes, those full lips, slightly parted, that cloud of blonde hair glinting like spun gold in a shaft of sunlight, and her delicate scent, which always reminded me, strangely, of fresh snowfall in the high Rockies.
So now, as a result of her determination and my own weak-kneed indulgence of feminine spunk, she was being held hostage in a dingy room in a building across the alley, with the rain beating out an endless tattoo in a dirty street in New York’s Chinatown. But the cold and sodden weather swirled futilely around the molten core of my wrath. I was going to get Sheila out of there or they were going to have to feed us both to the rats.
This whole mess got started a couple of weeks before. Because of some contract work I had done for the government during several of the Clinton-era scandals, the Attorney General’s office had called and asked me to assist in digging into the latest manifestation of Clinton-family hijinks: the strange case of campaign donations, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, supposedly originating among the struggling small merchants and salaried service workers of Chinatown, but, in reality, as the AG’s office suspected, coming out of the deep pockets of Norman Hsu, a shady operator with a dog-like loyalty to the Clintons who had been on the run from the feds for months. What I was looking at was a giant Chinese laundry, and Hillary Clinton ultimately held all of the claim checks.
Sheila and I had come to New York, and I worked my network of contacts, capitalizing on my long-time friendship with an assistant district attorney named How Now. A native of Chinatown, How was able to open a lot of doors in the secretive, clannish world of the district, and with his help, I had been able to amass some damning evidence, not only against Hsu, but against Hillary, herself.
One evening, Sheila had gone downstairs to the hotel’s guest computer facility in order to scan some key documents and e:mail them to the AG’s office. When she hadn’t returned after an hour, I grew uneasy and went to look for her. I didn’t find her, but the young female hotel employee who was minding the computer area noted my concern, and asked if I was Detective Paco, and said that Sheila – if that was the name of the attractive blonde I was looking for – had departed with two well-dressed Chinese men. The employee also said that one of the men had left a sealed envelope for me. She handed it to me and I ripped it open. My blood turned to ice water as I read the note: “Detective Paco – You inadvertently left your property in the computer room. We will take care of it for you and return it at the first convenient opportunity.”
(Part II)
I raced back to my room, got on the horn to How, and relayed the bad news. To my infinite relief, he said he had a fair idea of the location where Sheila was being held. Hsu secretly owned a dilapidated office building in the seamiest part of Chinatown. And here was a piece of good luck: How Now had a cousin – How So – who owned a warehouse next door to Hsu’s place.
How made arrangements with his cousin for us to conduct surveillance from the warehouse, which explains how the Assistant DA and I came to be standing in the semi-darkness of a loading dock, smoking endless cigarettes and staring through the rain at Hsu’s office building. The place was a tumbledown affair of eight stories, with most of the windows at street level boarded up. The rain had finally died down and night had come on and, straining my vision, I noticed something – a glimmer of light shining at the edge of one of the boarded-up windows. I pointed it out to How and we decided that that was a likely place to find Sheila. I suggested that we try to gain entry on the second floor via an ancient fire-escape, and then work our way carefully down to the first floor. How agreed, so we buttoned up our trench coats, pulled our lids down low and dashed across the alley.
We climbed slowly up the rusty fire-escape steps and stopped at the landing on the second story. The door was either locked or rusted shut, so we eased our way along a narrow ledge to a window. It was locked, but under cover of the noise made by a truck rumbling down the alley, we broke the glass and climbed in. I flashed the beam of my penlight around the empty room and found the door, which opened onto a narrow corridor, littered with paper and empty bottles and a layer of dust that looked like a coating of volcanic ash after a major eruption.
We found the stairwell and tip-toed down the sagging wooden steps to the first floor, emerging into the hall. It was partially illuminated by a dusty light-bulb at one end, mounted in the low ceiling near the door of the room where we figured Sheila was being held. How tapped me on the shoulder and suggested that we enter the room adjoining our final destination. We proceeded slowly down the hall until we got to the targeted door. I placed my hand on the doorknob and turned it with infinite care, easing the door open a couple of inches. The room behind it was empty and dark, but to the right was another door: an ill-fitting slab of wood with a large space at the bottom letting in a small band of light from the next room. How and I crept in and positioned ourselves in a prone position on the floor to see what we could see.
Our view was filled with a pair of brontosaurus ankles in comfortable shoes. How grasped my shoulder and whispered, “It’s Hillary!” I shook my head; she was too cunning to get this close to the dirty work, and a moment later my opinion was borne out as a cigarette butt hit the floor and one of the fat ankles waggled back and forth, the shoe in which it was planted grinding out the ember. The big feet walked away, making it possible for us to observe the legs of a chair, along with an incomparably lovelier pair of ankles in stiletto heels, bound with rope. Suddenly, a gruff male voice was heard.
“Your time is running out! If you don’t agree to tell us who your boss is working with, and if you refuse to call Paco and have him deliver the remaining evidence, we’ll . . .”
The guy interrupted his harangue long enough to howl in pain. “Owwww! Let go of my finger!” Sheila’s interrogator apparently had been wagging his finger in her face while he was making his threat, and she had bitten it. How and I figured that there was no time like the present, so we burst into the room, pistols drawn.
(Part III)
The heavy was standing in front of Sheila, wrapping his finger in a handkerchief. And sitting at an old roll top desk was Norman Hsu, unmistakable with his turnip-shaped head and the woebegone expression of a lonely pug dog. We had collared the Democratic bagman and perennial bail-jumper, himself.
Sheila was seated in an old oak police-precinct chair, her wrists bound to the arms of the chair, her feet tied together, and a cloth gag hanging loosely at her neck. She didn’t say anything, but if ever a pair of eyes communicated the words, “My hero!”, hers were doing it now. How untied Sheila while I covered our new friends with “Shiny Sal”, my stainless steel, Ruger Police Service-Six revolver. Hsu’s goon stood stolidly in the middle of the room with his hands in the air, a little trickle of blood running down an index finger. Hsu merely remained seated, emitting a huge sigh, no doubt wondering how large a bond he was going to have to post this time.
Sheila rose from the chair gingerly, stretching her limbs carefully to ease her strained muscles and joints. Then she tottered over to me and threw her arms around my neck. “Oh, Paco! Thank you!” Standing there, with a beautiful blonde in one hand and a .38 caliber revolver in the other, I was painfully aware that I looked like the cover of a pulp fiction magazine. I patted Sheila’s shoulder and eased her away so that I could have a few words with Hsu.
“You took an awful big chance for your boss this time, Hsu. And you’ve got to know that this little escapade isn’t exactly going to put you in solid with her. The Clintons are notorious for a lot of things, but gratitude isn’t one of them.”
Hsu rose from his chair, bowed slightly and smiled. “You are quite right, Detective Paco, in your assessment of Mrs. Clinton’s character. But it is her very unscrupulousness that makes her amenable to negotiation. I am a successful businessman, and I discovered long ago the importance of diversifying my investments. I assure you that I have made room in my portfolio for a future pardon.”
I nodded and knocked a cigarette out of my pack. Hsu graciously offered me a light. I took a drag and blew some smoke at the ceiling. “What happens to your pardon if Hillary doesn’t win the election?” Hsu smiled again. “As I said, Detective Paco, I have a very broadly diversified portfolio.”
How had busied himself in calling the police. They arrived and took Hsu and his sidekick away.
(Epilogue)
After spending a few extra days in New York – briefing the AG’s office on our investigation and giving statements to the NYPD on the kidnap caper – Sheila and I boarded an AmTrak train for home. The Silver Snail or Box-Turtle Express or whatever it was called was nearing its final destination when Sheila noticed that I was gripping the armrests in white-knuckled anxiety. She patted the back of my hand.
“Don’t worry, Paco. It’s all behind us now.”
“It’s not what’s behind us that’s bothering me; it’s what lies ahead. Your mother’s going to be furious.”
“Well, I’m not going to say anything to her about that business in New York. Besides, deep down, she likes you.”
“Baby, that’s an ‘unplumbed depth’ if I’ve ever heard of one.”
The train slowed and came to a stop at our station. Almost directly across from our window, standing motionless on the platform, was a short, stout woman in a gray wool overcoat, a pillbox hat sprouting enough gaudy feathers to account for a whole flock of bald macaws, and a purse that looked like Felix the Cat’s magic bag of tricks. Her face bore a contemptuous scowl, suggestive of Chief Crazy Horse looking down at Custer’s corpse at Little Big Horn, and clutched in her hand, like a trout in the talons of a hungry eagle, was a copy of the New York Post. I could just make out the headline: “Hillary’s Bagman Bagged in Kidnap Plot.” I remembered that edition; it came out two days after Sheila’s rescue. The front page sported a couple of small photo inserts of Hsu and his goon, but Sheila was the main event. Plastered across the greater part of the front page was a photo of Sheila that had been taken by a reporter in the lobby of our hotel. She was sitting in a green leather chair, her lovely pins crossed, a stiletto-heeled shoe dangling from the toes of a long, delicately-arched, elegant foot, her elbows planted on the arm rests, her fingers gracefully interlocked in front of her breast, and her grateful, laughing eyes focused stage-left on a sheepish-looking character in a rumpled trench coat and a fedora pulled down as low as it would go; undeniably, yours truly.
Sheila leaned in next to me, her cheek almost touching mine, and together we studied Mrs. O’Doherty, clearly at the zenith of high dudgeon.
“ ‘Smoldering’”, I muttered. “Yes, that’s definitely the word I’m looking for. ‘Smoldering’”.
Sheila said softly, “Paco, I told you not to worry. Deep down . . .” She heaved an enormous sigh. “Deep, deep, d-e-e-p down, Mom really likes you.”
I laughed, ruefully. “Well, baby, help me on with a diving helmet, because I’m going to have to go down pretty deep, indeed, to find any affection in that customer. Though, maybe, a helmet would at least ward off the blows from that vicious-looking purse.”
Should this officially violent site call in the coordinates for an F -18 super hornet-delivered 500lb GBU satellite guided paint bomb?
Of course not!
We don’t really know exactly where the “finest of the Socialist Left’s gun-toting elite militia” are. Worse, we just might splash some paint on a great many innocent Socialist Left’s elite gun-toting militia.
Play it safe politically, I say, and set the rules of engagement somewhere between surrender and total, unmitigated military failure.
Pffft! Lefty paintball team (Little pink balls?)...
I organized a charity event once between a whole National Guard infantry batallion and 1200 paintballers. Now that was a paintball fight…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 10 29 at 10:55 AM • permalinkI would vote THIS as the most violent head shot…...
Posted by Old Tanker on 2007 10 29 at 11:29 AM • permalinkWe just had an incident in Ottawa here where a girl was injured in the eye with a drive-by paintball shot.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 10 29 at 07:38 PM • permalink
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