The Curse of the Maharajah's Diamonds (Part Two)

(By no means mandatory, but perusing Part One first would be to one's advantage)


The screen door opened with a long, splintering crack, like the folding money compartment in Paul McCartney's wallet. Oozing out from the cavernous gloom of the room beyond the shadow of her back, Mrs. Rickenbacker slowly emerged, and stood less than three feet from me - an imposing figure in wrinkled 200 denier pantyhose and a grimy brown apron with WOODSTOCK 1967 emblazoned across her ample bosom that rested just above her knees.

I swallowed hard.

Lord bless us and save us, I murmured inwardly; my little heart pounding inside my fluffy chest. Rarely in all my doggy years had I seen such a gonad-shrinking sight.

Her graying russet locks - like ageing thatched coconuts - lay bound  in tight curlers along her forhead like tiny tombstones in a hamster cemetery. A few inches below, her tufted eyebrows were knitted into a canopy like a giant hairy caterpillar above the two corroded ball bearings that were embedded in her eye sockets. Even in thick fog, she looked like Hulk Hogan in a frock. To be fair, there was a faint aura of attractiveness beneath the ruddiness of her cheeks and her after-five shadow; and she must have been a good-looking woman in her day, long before the advent of electricity and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, that is.

I steeled myself, and weakly made an attempt at dialogue.

'Mrs. Rickenbacker.....?' I stammered with both expectation and dread.

She looked right at me and said nothing, holding me in her steely gaze: her only response was to move her right hand slightly and remove a sprig of spinach stuck between her three front teeth with the silencer attached to the barrel of her 12 bore shotgun.

'Mrs. Rickenbacker,' I pressed on, the sweat running in tiny rivulets down my little furry back,  'may I ask you a personal question?'

She shuffled a few inches toward me across the porch, forcing the acrylic tassels on her carpet slippers to quiver slightly (amazingly, this seemed to have the same effect on my bowels), and then slowly and deliberately wiped the back of her gnarled fingers across her dry, papery lips before uttering the testosterone-charged assent that made my little silky ears fold inside out.

'Spit it out, Fido.' She growled.

'Mrs. Rickenbacker, ' I said without missing a beat, 'what would you like me to do about these awful children who keep messing up your lovely garden with their nasty toys?'


                                                                      THE END