Big Trouble in Pink Town

“Hi Brian!” said Janet in her cheeriest voice.

Brian snorted. 

Janet liked to think that was a greeting of sorts, and so she rolled with it accordingly, “have a great day!”

She didn’t hang around for a response, for today she was busy. For the first time in her illustrious career as a detective, she had a big case. A huge case. A case so big that maybe now she would show what she was all about and get noticed for all the right reasons. 

As Janet lumbered through the doors of the Rainbow Club, Brian shook his noble head and muttered, “what is the world coming to.”

Brian’s disdain for Janet was evident from a mile off. To Brian, Janet was all wrong and she just didn’t belong. It was bad enough that Janet was a donkey. Donkeys were so far down the equine pecking order Brian wondered what the Creator must have been thinking, Her quality control must have been on holiday on the day Janet was made, and not just because she was all out of proportion or because she had no horn. She wasn’t even a horse and horses were decidedly substandard as far as Brian was concerned. But the worst of it was that Janet was not pink.

Janet liked to say that she was salmon pink. The word salmon sounded made up and was in any case redundant. Pink was pink and that was all there was to it. There were no alternative versions of pink.

No, Janet was red. Only she’d faded in the constantly shining sun of Pink Town. The sun that always shone in a blue sky decorated with multiple rainbows and the silhouette of birds that made a curvy M with their wings. There was also a crescent moon that was there for bored cows to jump over. The cows took it in turns to get bored and once an hour, on the hour the next cow would take a graceful flying leap over the moon. This was how milkshakes were made, the flavours coming courtesy of the cow’s diet. The chocolate eating cows were the largest of the cows and they needed a good run up for the moon jumping, and yet they still pulled it off with a wonderful bovine grace.

As well as not being pink, Janet was also grubby and ruffled. Brian the door-unicorn dreaded to think how it was that she got that way. Not in Pink Town she didn’t, not in his Pink Town at any rate.

“You must be the detective,” Tallulah the Exotic Dancer drawled.

“That I am,” replied Janet puffing out her chest in what she hoped was a detectively manner.

Tallulah smiled, “we don’t get many detectives in this joint.”

Janet nodded sagely at the shapely flamingo. There was a very good reason for that. Janet was the only detective in Pink Town and there was no way she could afford to step over the threshold of the Rainbow Club, let alone buy a drink. A cheeky sideways shimmy from Tallulah would cost Janet her life savings, if she actually had any savings, which she didn’t because she was a detective and detectives were supposed to be in debt.

Janet knew all about detectives. She’d had plenty of time to study them. She took her vocation very seriously. So seriously that she had a seriously large tab at the Pink Lion and another seriously large tab at the Pink Distillery. Pink bourbon was Janet’s drink of choice, not that she had a choice. Detectives drank bourbon. It was what they did.

“You’ll want to see the body,” Tallulah told Janet.

Janet didn’t answer immediately. Instead she pinched herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. 

Tallulah marvelled at Janet’s pinching, “you’ll have to come up and see me some time,” she drawled, “you’ve got some skills.”

Janet blushed, but nodded curtly and coughed in an attempt to clear some congestion from her throat. Congestion that wasn’t there until Tallulah had drawled those suggestive words. 

Then Tallulah winked.

And Janet staggered sideways. 

“What did you do to my knees!?” she cried from her awkward position, propped against the bar at an uncanny angle.

Tallulah smiled, “I have skills too.”

Janet managed to push herself away from the bar and get her knees working again, “the body?” she asked as casually as she could with a voice gone all wobbly and strange.

“Over here,” Tallulah said before walking over to a door to the left of the stage.

Janet tried not to watch Tallulah’s shapely legs doing their shapely thing, which was to say she stared at the magical legs and her mind supplied both a commentary and a backing track. She dared to dream of a time when she had enough money to visit the Rainbow Club so she could give it all to Tallulah in the impossible hope of a meaningful interaction.

The thought of a meaningless interaction with Tallulah made Janet blush again. She ignored the heart-breaking punchline of that exotic adventure. Janet was used to that sort of thing. She was a faded red donkey in a town of perfect pink after all.

Or rather, a town that had been perfect until death came a-calling.

“Here he is,” Tallulah said as they entered the manager’s office, “I’ll leave you to it, detective.”

Tallulah exited the small office, the feathers of her wing brushing Janet’s flank. Janet suppressed a whinny. She instantly regretted this suppression, having never whinnied before. She really wanted to know how it would sound.

She blushed again as she realised there was only one way to find out.

Now Tallulah had left the room, Janet took a look at the body.

Janet threw up.

“Must’ve been the egg and bacon roll,” she muttered to herself as she wiped her mouth on the back of her leg.

She pulled a half bottle of pink bourbon from her pink detective mac and took a donkey sized swig to replenish the bourbon she had lost on the floor of the office and to steel herself against what was to come.

Laying on the floor of the office was the owner of the Rainbow Club, Sidney Centaur. Rumour had it that Sidney had started life as a common horse and had undergone extensive surgery ever since. Whatever the truth of it, Sidney had managed to sully his centaur status with a sleazy and unsavoury edge that was really quite off putting for all and for sundry.

The centaur club owner was even less attractive in the state that he was now in. His mangled limbs were bent at unnatural angles made all the more unnatural by the fact of their not being attached to him anymore. 

The amputations of his limbs had led to extensive blood loss. His pink blook was all over the show and the colour had drained from the body rendering it off-white. The most disturbing element of the gruesome tableau was the expression on Sidney’s face.

“Is that a smile?” Janet said quietly as she canted her head to the side to observe the corpse as a detective might.

“Yes, I think it is,” said a familiar voice from behind her.

Janet jumped.

The owner of the voice laughed and squealed. The laughter being due to the comical nature of Janet jumping, the squealing being a feature of the owner of both the voice and the laugh.

Janet, having landed and calmed down, turned her head to face Percy Pig. 

“What are you doing here?” she said in a dull monotone. 

She was not at all pleased to see Percy. Percy was what passed for police in this town, but what he really was, was a thuggish tax collector with a truncheon he was far too fond of wielding.

“Arresting you for the murder of Sidney Centaur,” squealed Percy.

“You can’t…” Janet began to explain, but her explanation was cut brutally short by the wielding of a truncheon by a copper who hit first and didn’t bother asking questions later.

“Got you bang to rights!” cried Percy to the unconscious form of Pink Town’s only detective, “come on boys, to the cells with this one.”

Two almost identical pigs entered the small office and immediately threw up.

On Janet.

As Janet was dragged from the building, Brian shook his majestically pink unicorn head and wrinkled his nose. Just when he thought Janet couldn’t look any worse, here she was bedraggled and covered in The Creator knew what.

The three pigs threw Janet into the back of a pink van and squeezed themselves into the front. Telling the pigs apart was difficult unless they were entertaining at home, their homes being made from pink straw, or pink wood, or pink brick. 

Percy’s home was made of pink straw, which helped explain the slab of bacon on his shoulder and his propensity towards violence in order to solve all of life’s problems. This violence did not blend well with his fragile domestic surrounds, which only made him worse.

In the back of the van, Janet came to. The warm interior was doing horrid things to the vomit she was coated with. Smelling salts weren’t a patch on the aromas assaulting Janet’s oversized nasal passages. 

“Not again,” sighed Janet.

“Did you hear something?” Percy asked his pink and porky companions.

The two bacon flavoured police officers shook their heads. They made it their business not to hear things.

The noise Percy had heard was Janet exiting the back of the van.

Again.

This was a piece of pantomime that had played out so many times that Janet wondered whether there were forces at play in Pink Town. Forces that made a mockery of free will and indeed the life of the maverick detective.

Well, thought Janet, now there’s a sinister force in town and it’s killed a prominent figure of the Pink Town establishment. 

But what next?

Janet needed to think. She scrunched her oddly symmetrical face up, but to no avail. There was only one thing for it.

Pink bourbon.

Tis a little known fact that salmon pink donkeys can drink a considerable quantity of pink bourbon. This was why Janet was in so much debt. More so as her tolerance to pink bourbon was now reaching legendary levels. 

“Got it!” she remarked from her stool at the bar of the Pink Lion.

“I hope it’s not catching!” said Brian from the other end of the bar as he nursed an interesting cocktail with a pink umbrella poking out of it.

Brian was on his fifth such cocktail and he was nursing this one because he seemed to be warming to Janet. There was something very appealing about her that he couldn’t quite put his horn on.

Brian was experiencing the pink booze effect. The effect to which none was immune. The change in perception exemplified by the scallywag’s quip; what’s the difference between a donkey and a unicorn? Five cocktails!

Janet was oblivious to Brian’s increasingly amorous gaze. She was in the zone. This was when she was a detective, and then some. 

This was the life!

Janet walked sideways out of The Lion, crashing through the doors, which was impressive as the doors were propped wide open, “gotta go!” she called to the contents of the pub.

“What about your tab!” shouted Barry the Pink Goldfish.

“What tab?” replied Janet.

“Oh…” said the forgetful landlord. Thankfully, he had Janet’s tab written down and eventually he would remember where he had written it down.

Bleurgh!

Janet puked.

“All part of the process,” she reminded herself as she wiped her mouth with the back of her leg, before trotting across town.

At the back of the Rainbow Club, Janet rummaged.

This was a staple of Janet’s detecting and as far as she could tell, this was how it was done. Looking in the places that everyone else would rather ignore and forget. This was how Janet got grubby and she wore her grubbiness as a badge of honour. 

Her rears legs waggled as she over extended herself in the industrial bin. The waggling was comically reminiscent of swimming strokes, not that Janet could swim. In the dumpster itself, Janet nosed and nosed around until her nose was coated and soaked in the fermented juices of unidentifiable refuse.

Those rear legs of hers pushed against the side of the bin and with a strangely odd POP! she was propelled from the bin and to the dirt coated floor.

“Wow!” she sighed, “that’s some wicked shit!”

Janet was off her face on garbage fumes and as she sat there in the dark her head traced random curves as though she were tracking a rollercoaster’s trajectory. In her heightened state, her unfocused eyes saw beyond the glitz and the glam of Pink Town, and no wonder. She was behind the scenes. She was in the place where no one would go. Janet was looking at things from a different perspective and suddenly she knew.

And then she knew some more as she witnessed the awful and gut wrenching murder of Henry Hippo, the pinkly portly mayor of Pink Town. 

Literally gut wrenching.

“His guts!” gasped Janet, “pulled from his belly like they’re so much spaghetti…”

Bleurgh!

No one could blame Janet for that one. No one should see such a hideous and callous crime.

Janet scrabbled to her feet. 

This took Janet quite some time. Her feet weren’t where they were meant to be and neither was the floor. Bringing the two together was a feat of feet and floor that took quite some effort. Janet may have fallen over several times in the attempt. One of the falls may have been quite spectacular and involved her laying on her back and kicking her feet around in an amusing impression of an upended tortoise. Not that Janet knew what a tortoise was. Pink tortoises avoided Pink Town, more so since it had gone to the dogs. Even some of the dogs had moved away.

Moved.

Disappeared.

All a matter of perspective was that sort of thing.

Eventually Janet found her feet. Then she stood on them. Taking a moment to compose herself, she then very carefully and deliberately conveyed herself deeper into the dark underbelly of Pink Town. Here the pink of Pink Town was no longer pink. It was ruby red.

Blood red.

Boldly, Janet stood in the place that pink angels feared to tread and she turned her gaze upwards. Janet dared to look up into the killer’s face.

“Aren’t you a bit old for all of this?” she asked the killer.

The killer’s face creased in something like consternation and surprise, the sort of unwanted surprise that leads to much embarrassment and the requirement for a deep clean of certain undergarments.

The creasing then subsided as the killer’s eyes fell upon the grubby and worn donkey, “oh it’s you! I thought I’d lost you!”

Something like a memory tapped Janet on the shoulder, but she was so enraptured in the moment that she ignored it. Being picked up by a huge, pink giant will do that to a donkey, even if that donkey is a detective.

“What’s this that you’re wearing?” said the giant as he held her before him.

He then took Janet’s detective coat off and discarded it many leagues from Pink Town. Janet looked off after it and her heart broke in two. Without that coat, she was no longer a detective, she was just this beaten up old donkey with no purpose.

“Here you go,” said the giant, and he placed Janet in the pocket of his shirt, “a ringside seat for you!”

Janet watched on in fascinated horror as the giant cast aside a house made of pink straw as though it were, well, straw. He plucked the owner of the house from what remained of his abode, “you’re right Janet,” said the giant, “but then you’ve always been different. Insightful. You’re not like the rest of them. You’re special.”

I’m not sure I want to be special, thought Janet, I just wanted to be a detective. I wanted to find things out…

She stopped that train of thought, but it was too late. Suddenly she didn’t want to be a detective and she didn’t want to be here. But what choice did she have? What choice did any of them have. There were forces at play here. Forces beyond their comprehension. They weren’t meant to even be aware of these forces, but Janet was. Janet was all too aware.

“I am too old for this,” the giant told her, “so it’s time for a change. Pink Town isn’t going to be pink anymore. And there’s no need for this annoying little pig!”

Percy’s squeals pierced the sky of Pink Town and all the inhabitants saw him die. Janet wished she could close her eyes, but she had no eyelids so she saw it all. 

It turned out that Percy wasn’t made of bacon after all.

One by one, the pink residents of Pink Town were torn apart.

Brian’s demise was particularly sad. His horn went first and without his horn he wasn’t him. His majesty fell to the bedroom floor and his eyes conveyed the deepest wells of sadness.

When it was nearly done, the giant paused.

“You like her, don’t you?” he asked the little donkey as he pointed at the fragile form of the flamingo.

Janet wanted to say yes. She wanted to save Tallulah, but something inside her had broken when Brian’s horn had been snapped from his face. 

Gone.

The magic was gone.

This brave new world wasn’t a place for the exotic pink flamingo that even now the giant was bearing aloft.

“Janet?” Tallulah said quietly as she was brought eye to eye with the threadbare donkey.

That’s when Janet understood. 

They all thought she was to blame. 

And maybe she was…