Django Durango

“Before we begin, please listen to a personal message for Our Prudent Friend: The Fox is in the Hen House. The Fox is in the Hen House!”

“Really? Uh, I mean, Zanthus!” Ms. Henderson said the codeword to confirm receipt of the message. She could hear the man on the other end of the line snickering as she hung up the phone. She dashed back the safehouse in Edenham as fast as she could with bare feet. She’d need to catch Prudence before she left. “Before we begin” was code for “do not proceed”.

When she got back, Prudence was packing her spartan collection of toiletries back into her handbag, preparing to move on to the next stop in the underground.

“You may as well get comfortable here for now,” Ms. Henderson said. “We’ve just been told to pause all plans for the time being.”

“What? Why?” Prudence said, alarmed.

Read on…

Buster Edwards, a thief, had been casing Nick Lightbearer’s house for a week. It was now Friday and Nick still had not left. You’d think a rockstar would have events to be at, but Nick had spent the last five days lounging around his home in various states of lucidity and undress.

Buster came back from a long postponed piss break to see a tall, skinny someone up in the scaffolds, crouched in his spot and reading his notes.

“Fuck,” Buster whispered to himself as he ducked out of sight. He watched this interloper scurry across the scaffolding around the building and slip into Nick’s house through the third floor window entry point detailed in Buster’s notes. That lanky shit was gonna knick all of Nick’s knick-knacks!

Buster climbed back up into the scaffolds and waited. A while later, Nick finally emerged from the back door. Or… no, it was that stringbean fuck dressed as Nick. You could tell because he was about six inches too tall for the outfit. The pants were unfashionably high up the ankle and his jacket was too short on the waist. He had the wig on straight at least. Buster spied on him as he tore off down the street, pointing at passerby and greeting them with knock-off Nick-isms.

The real Nick was still yet to emerge. Buster chanced a few circuits around the scaffolding to peek into his windows but didn’t see him anywhere. Unless he had a secret basement or he was Harry fucking Houdini though, Nick had to still be in the house.

Read on…