Do You Want a Sandwich?

“Soooooo any suspects?”

“We literally just got here dumbass. How am I supposed to draw a list of suspects in the matter of seconds? If I were Sherlock, perhaps, but clearly I am not.”

This is no start to a mysterious detective story. On the contrary, we the readers, are subject to a case of a broken window being examined by two youthful children. 

“Well it might be a baseball or something. Them older boys that play ball here can get wild.”

“Nice analysis Watson, but if anyone were to open their eyes, they would see this hole is far too small for a baseball. But...but you are right. This glass has been broken by something of tremendous force.”

Indeed the boys were correct, an object with high acceleration had punctured the glass, forming a small hole decorated with cracks. 

“Hey, I wonder what would happen if I touched it-”

“I can’t- I can’t believe it. You destroyed the crime scene!”

And so was the end to their little escapade.

For the time being.

If we were to fast forward a decade, one would say nothing had changed.

Efron was still a dumbass as usual and Liezel would remind him of that every day. Yet the two had such a strong bond one would never think of separating them. Most people at least. One day however, Liezel woke up to a foreboding feeling in his stomach that something was off. Or maybe it was just indigestion from the alcohol Efron managed to smuggle into their dorm room settling in. He smirked, tracing the outline of the bottle the two drunks had managed to slip under his pillow when the matron came to examine rooms. Quite an accomplishment in its own sense.

Convincing himself it was nothing more than a mild hangover, Liezel shakily got up and swayed to the bathroom. He paid no attention to how there were no more plastic cups on the floor or how the lights had been turned on and blinds open even though Efron was very sensitive to light. Perhaps he should have examined the area closely, just as he had done with the hole in a window ten years ago. Then he might’ve seen the silhouette of a man hiding behind a curtain, or a red dot that followed him around the house, or even the most obvious hunk of a male helping himself to a fresh PB and J in the living room. But he didn’t. Poor Liezel spent a full hour with a dot attached to his head before noticing one of the two unwelcome guests. Still with a bit of booze in his system he stuck his hand out and squished the older man’s cheek. 

“Hehe. Efron you're a lot taller and chubbier than normal. Maybe we should take you in for facial remodeling because it seems you finally got the height.”

Normally at this point Efron tended to bathe in the prospect of being a model and might have even signed himself up for surgery. Knowing Efron, it seemed plausible. His hand was instead slapped away with such brute force it seemed all the alcohol in Liezel’s body had been flung away as well.

“WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F-”

And that’s when the man hiding behind the worst hide-and-seek-spot emerged.

“SHHHH the boss doesn’t like curse words”

“Well I guess the boss won’t like me much.”

The intruders turned to each other and blinked. Was the boy just dumb? Of course their boss didn’t like him. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been disturbed from the traditional daily doughnut run.

Liezel sighed “It’s just sarcasm. So where’s my dear friend Efron? See him anywhere? I swear he gets lost in the worst places. Yuh know, one time I found him on top of the fridge, blackout drunk. Had to call some mates over to pull him down before the matron came.”

Liezel is pretty cool right? Managing to stay cool with a sniper watching you and 2 men twice your weight, one eating a PB and J sandwich in your living room. If they could find the peanut butter, and that was never an easy find, they knew the structure of the dorm room well. Liezel seems pretty cool, but the sweat glands on his palms were working overtime to the point he worried he might start dripping sweat like a leaky faucet. And that, would be terrible for his cover.

“So you are Liezel...right?” the man who had just shown himself from the curtains asked.

“No shit Sherlock. I thought you would've known that given the ‘no mistakes here’ vibes your giving off”

“Well” the sandwich man started, “we have made one mistake, and you and your Erzon friend messed up our operation. I don’t want to tell you much, but I suppose I should explain. Might take a bit. Do you want half of my sandwich? I’m planning on making another one before I start the brief”

A word of caution readers: never trust adult men who offer you PB and J sandwiches. Other than it might be drugged or you might be allergic to the type of jam, no grown man shares his sandwich. Hell no. Never share your sandwiches when you grow up. 

--

“So, ten years ago, we were sent on a mission by Boss to eliminate one of our competitors on the market. That shed was a meeting place for the ‘Scorpios’ and their leader was supposedly going to conduct the meeting. Mind you, he only appears once in a blue moon. Being the top assassins in our agency, we were sent to kill their leader. No mistakes. We also had placed a bomb in the shed, no way to disarm it. Somehow you two came along and managed to stop the bomb by breaking the window. To be honest, I’m not even sure how breaking the window did anything, but the boss is dead set that the two of you are to blame.”

The sandwich man looked up at Liezel from his brief, expecting the kid to be scared at the least. Liezel however was busy examining his nails intently as if he couldn’t give a flying fuck if an elephant were to be catapulted through the window.

Liezel looked up. “Continue. How did you know we broke the window? I assume your team had left by the time we got there.”

“Ah, you see, Boss doesn’t trust us-”

“I can see why,” Liezel sniggered silently.

“Boss sent a watcher to keep track of us, and the watcher fell asleep. When he woke up, the two of you coincidently showed up. Wrong place, wrong time I guess. You have any more peanut butter here? No? Anyways the watcher saw what happened, the place didn’t blow up, we were kicked out the agency, brought back in a week ago, and now we are here to finish up some old business.”

“I don’t see where we share business. Clearly neither Efron or I knew about a dead body in the shed, a bomb, or your existence.”

“Well that’s why he told you all that,” the curtain man said. “We are not trying to set up some stupid Prof. Doofenshmirtz to Perry the Platypus evil doominator introduction. Technically you would have just been unfortunate passerbys but now you are tied to us because you know the reason behind that hole in a window.”

--

“Hey, hey hey. Let’s all chill for a second. Stop. STOP coming towards me. I- I have a peanut butter jar and I’m not afraid to use it.”

--

Liezel woke up in the back of a truck. Pretty classic, except for the four horses surrounding him that would occasionally flick their glossy tails into his face. He wanted to ask the owners what conditioner they used, but realized there were some more important matters at hand. Math. Yes, math. He had homework he had to do yesterday but as we all know, the boys got drunk and passed out long before the scheduled study session. Liezel did remember folding the papers and slipping them into his pants before flopping down onto the bottom bunk, but when he reached back, he could not find his math homework.

Sighing he worked on slipping off the metal aglet off his right shoelace; the men had at least the decency to not let him be captured barefoot. He could not pick the lock on the truck doors with a mere aglet, but all he needed was a commotion. Poor horses. He pressed a sharp point of the aglet into the thigh of one horse and that caused a chain reaction of butting and neighing around the container. It created so much of a ruckus, the truck swerved the side of the road and suddenly stopped. He heard the voices of 2 grown men, bickering about how they should have increased the dosage of the drug and how they should go to a convenience store and pick up some peanut butter sandwiches.

Liezel heard the door being unlocked and right as the door flung open, the horses took off onto the highway, which caused a lot of problems, but we can pretend everything was all right to focus on Liezel. 

“Do they even sell peanut butter sandwiches at convenience stores?”  Liezel asked the Sandwich man.

--

I’m sure we can all guess what happened next. No, he was not knocked out or drugged. He was given a free piggy-back ride along the edge of the highway until the group came to the base of a hill. 

Note to reader: Never accept free piggy-back rides. Those who offer them always want something in exchange. At that time, Liezel was given a free piggy-back ride, but only because his kidnappers never got to ask for PB and J sandwiches. 

“Come along, just up this way”

Liezel, slightly curious now as to where the men were guiding him, quickened his pace ‘til it was he who was leading the pack.

Sandwich-man and curtain-man caught up eventually, taking in large gasps of air as their rotund bellies from their daily doughnut runs had left them out of shape.

“Ah Boss!” the two of them exclaimed.

“Boss? Where?” As far as Liezel could see, there was practically no one. 

“No, no, look down.”

There sat the biggest tarantula Liezel had ever seen. Not that he had seen one before, so the spider could have been malnourished or oversized. Who knew.

Looking closer Liezel realized the spider was actually dead. Above it was a miniature cross saying “RIP”.

“Wait, so your boss is a dead arachnid. Are you mental!? You killed a person, threatened to kill me, tried to blow up a shed, and kidnapped my dumbass friend Efron, all for one dead spider”

“No you wait,” sandwich man started “I never killed a man, kidnapped your ummm dumb friend Ezron-”

“Efron”

“-Efron or tried to kill you”

“Wha- yes you did! There was a sniper watching me”

“Oh, really? That wasn’t us though. Scorpios must have employed them. But you also heavily misinterpreted everything. The Scorpios are a group of Scorpions and we watched them kill Boss. Their leader deserved to die. Not gonna deny the bomb, but we never took your friend. We wanted to, but he wasn’t there when we arrived.”

Liezel started to wonder if he was really sober or he was somehow also high from last night. Full grown men killing scorpions, even bombing a whole shed for the sake of spiders. He couldn’t even begin to fathom the inner workings of their brains. What in the world had prompted them to do that?

“Boss said we have to kill you now”

Flabbergasted, the boy looked up at the gun attached to his forehead.

“The Boss, your dead spider boss who can’t speak, said what!?”

“Boss said we have to kill you now”

Liezel felt the ricochet of the bullet in his mind, worse than the hangover he had in the morning. He felt his body start to topple, his legs collapsing under the weight of his numb torso. He faintly felt a trickle down his nose, running down until he began to swallow the metallic taste of blood.

--

Liezel jolted awake. He licked around in his mouth, surprising himself by only tasting hints of moscato and throw-up. He hastily got up and teetered out of the room. No grown men, check. No blinds open, check. No sniper, check. No Efron, che-

The door of the dorm room slammed open as Efron swayed in, a tub of peanut butter dangling from the tips of his fingers. Efron chucked the keys onto the table and collapsed onto the sofa. He grumbled to himself, then got up and headed towards the kitchen. 

It was as if Efron couldn’t see him. Liezel stood there with an open mouth, blinking away the remnants of his dream. 

Dream, the word reassured himself that none of it was real, but after his interaction with Efron he wasn’t too sure.

“Efron,” he called “where were you?”

“OH! OH MY GOD! You're finally up. I was out at the grocery store. Seems we used up all our peanut butter. I don’t know how, but I woke up to both cans of my secret stash of peanut butter all used up and waiting for me on the counter. I need to conduct an investigation into who came in when we were both knocked out and used all my peanut butter.”

Weird, Liezel thought to himself. Efron’s peanut butter was there yesterday, and if the two intruders were part of his dream-

“Yeah I wonder what happened too. I’ll help you find them. By the way, I suddenly remembered last night. Do you recall a decade ago when we found a hole in the window of the shed? We went to investigate, but then you broke the window.”

“Hole in a glass window? I know we got pretty drunk last night but I didn’t think it would affect you this much”

Efron turned around from his activities and gave Liezel a sickly sweet smile. A smile that seemed to be hiding something.

“Do you want a sandwich?”