Going Shogun by Ernie Lindsey

to speak truthfully,
39% of me was wish-upon-a-star hoping she’d realize how crazy this mess has
gotten, bow out, and go home to her white-walled, sparsely furnished apartment
and call it a night.  I forget sometimes how hardheaded she can be.  It’s cute
in a feisty puppy sort of way.
    We sit in silence, each of us lost
in the peaks and troughs of our brainwaves.   As we flow through the night,
riding along with Forklift’s masterfully fluid driving, we finally breach the
edges of Urine Town and start to work our way through neighborhoods that rise
in level with each passing set of city blocks.  It reminds me of swimming
through the ring of garbage in Las Vegas Harbor as it opens into a slightly
cleaner ocean. 
    I can tell where we are based on the
types of stores and shops and gas stations that swirl past in a mish-mash
spectrum of double-rainbow colored light.  The R12 blocks have businesses with
generic names like JOE’S GAS and Mike’s Pawn .  They’ve got bars
over their windows and floodlights that burn blue, floating circles into your
retinas.  Sometimes it prevents the nasties from breaking in, sometimes it
doesn’t. 
    We go osmosis into the R11 ‘hoods
and the door-to-door, wall-to-wall exuberance of capisocialism begins to scream
at us from all sides with perky neon and artistically decorative overhangs.  We
tear past a Coffeestars the size of a big box grocery store and the wafting
smell of pseudo-Arabica beans saturates the car.  I know Forklift despises that
place and I can feel the g-forces of Machine get bumped up by a couple
miles-per-hour.
    I mention that he may want to lift
the anvil off the go-zoom to avoid any undue attention from a bored security
cruiser.  Doing so reminds me of the pot-stirring moment back in The Minotaur’s
pad.
    “Holy shit,” I say.  “I forgot about
the Board Agents getting dispatched to LX’s place.”
    Forklift slows down a tick, looks
over to me and says, “Memory bank computational, Brick Bro.  It’s current in
the visual.”
    “So now what do we do?” I ask.  I
grab Bingo around her waist, shifting her a little so her tailbone stops
digging into my thigh.  She smiles at me when I leave my hand on her hip.  And
at a time like this, with everything going on, I feel it stir a bit. 
    I think, Fireball, Fireball,
Fireball .  And it’s just enough to soothe the savage beast.
    For now.
    Forklift takes a break from All That
Is Forklift for a miniature moment and conveys his thoughts in a deciphered
manner.  “The Minotaur said we should lay low for the rest of the night.  Go
groundhog until we see if the BAs show up, yeah?  I’m not about to do that
though.  Too much going on up in the ol’ bean for me to sleep.”
    “Agreed.”
    “So, the way I see it, if we’re
going to stay a step ahead of the All Seeing Eye, we need to find LX and figure
out what went down in his apartment.  He was in there when all this happened. 
I’m sure of it.  Just in case, we need an alibi, and he knows what happened,
man.  He knows.”  Forklift pauses to light up a cigarette, both hands off the
wheel.  I notice he’s not even steering with his knee, so I reach over and
readjust our course about two seconds before we take the mirror off this green
and white R11-2 taxi.  Bingo whimpers, but Forklift remains as cool as a spritz
of Wishful Thinking’s Peppermint Fish Oil salad dressing.
    “Where do you think he might be?” I
ask.
    Bingo says, “Didn’t you mention
something about a rabbit hole?”
    I go, “His message said, ‘down the
rabbit hole,’ and that was it.”
    “That’s an Alice in Wonderland reference, but I have no clue what he could mean by it.  Do you guys?  It’s too
deliberate for there not to be a connection, isn’t it?”
    Forklift cracks the window and tries
to blow a smoke ring out into the night.  It gets caught in the rush of cool
air and is ripped to shreds before it even has a chance to form up.  Sort of
like our