Terse news blurb about Komodo Dragon beheaded during burglary

August 26, 2016 7:39 PM

I could always find it until now. Probably Associated Press, 1992-96. Richmond, Virginia.
posted by Mr. Yuck to Pets & Animals (1 answer total)

Response by poster: In the early sixties, a woman who inherited an antebellum fortune in real estate married, gasp, a sadistic Polish doctor. They had liveried black servants. They had a girl, another girl and finally a boy. First girl survived her parent's toxicity and was obviously from money but she didn't judge and her friends were all over the various scales. Second girl was a suicidal mess, but so damn funny in the sacrificial way that people who have death on their mind can be. Boy was never good enough and he finally broke with the parents and started making his own rough way. The girls were tall and pretty and had faces that would launch ships. The boy was short and swarthy, built like a coal miner.

Boy was a mechanic who wanted his own specialty shop. The girls were in college. Boy found backers of shady provenance and threw a grand opening party. It's 1989, Richmond, heroin od's piling up in the morgue, crack is making inroads, students are living in buildings Upton Sinclair would have had an aneurysm about, Petersburg is a total no-go zone, tech-9 conversion kits being sold out of trunks, what a crap gun, but I digress.

So there's this party at the new mechanic shop and boy is still tight with his sisters and they arrive and every guy looks and somewhere off to my right I hear "The taller one. They don't care about the other one." I look but can't be sure who said that. The whole quadrant looks like trouble. I don't know anybody here except the woman who invited me and kinda left me to my own devices 10 minutes later. I came to visit a friend and his girlfriend's friend asked me if I wanted to go to a party and I have no fucking clue how to get back to where I'm staying and now I can't even find the person I came with and if I try to go back on my own things are going to crawl out of the dumpsters on the sidewalks and I don't have my sword.

Daughter number 1 spots me looking lost and she's right there. Asked me some rather personal questions in a light way and took my arm, steered me through the room to a couple of people she thought I might want to talk to. And she was right. WTF? Nobody has ever steered me through a room like that before or since. Not a bit of guile. But I was conscious of exactly where she had touched me for a long time. I felt like a prize when she had my arm.

So I had a really good time with the people I was deposited with. We had nothing in common but really dark and twisted senses of humor. I kept looking around for daughter one. I wanted to see her do that to someone else. I asked present company about her. Oh yeah, she's great isn't she? That family is really fucked up. Which really didn't answer the question I couldn't quite formulate. Daniel Goldman had yet to write his book yet, so I didn't have the term. That woman had just done to me, in a very different way, something I was really good at and I really wanted to talk to her. Not because she was stunning but because she had mastery over this thing we call ours and didn't even know it. Field specimen caught in the wild exhibiting advanced behaviour.

I never did see her again that night and my being a stranger became an issue for a a few hours before the ransom note arrived. Parents immediately called boy, blamed him for everything and charged him with getting her back cause they were only pretending to have money. Boy just caved.

Boy flipped out and started hitting me. Hit me in the head and I let him. Kept quietly saying it was someone you invited, was not me. Why would I still be here? C'mon, stop. Think. Told him what I'd heard. Who here would have sized up your sisters that way?

Sorry, you gonna help me with this? I don't know shit about kidnapping. Who is the baddest repo guy working in Petersburg?

He lived in Richmond but was willing to work in Petersburg and that made him singular. Plus he was a bounty guy before that was a show. Sister 2 comes up and informs us that she is so glad we have this and her brother and I both say "We have what?" simultaneously.

So we get to Guy Left Behind on Cambodian Island's house and it's fenced around 3 Plymouth Furies, fishing line taut in places. Waif comes out and tells us it's all fake but we're gonna see something unique and she lets us in.

We're in this long cinderblock hall and it sounds like there's a garage door opening down the way and it doesn't quite sound like a horse getting closer. Waif extracts a beef kidney or something from the fridge next to the door we just used and throws it at the biggest reptile I've ever seen then shoos it away down the hall. "Every time one of the exterior doors opens that one opens. Took a while to get used to. We can go upstairs now." It goes back? Of course it does. The fuck?

"So NamVet asked me to go over a few things. He's up in Pissburg bringing back a BMW full of coke but he's gonna stop and get money to finance your rescue mission."

The sawed Ithaca and two 1911's. Where's the men's? I slipped out. Absolutely not my fight, giant lizard would come AFTER I shut the door and delay humans.

They did get daughter 1 out and I attended her wedding a few years later. She got so drunk things got delayed. If you are already wobbly, hoop skirts don't help. Suicide sister is up there and her 3 year old boy is done with this and I got a Frisbee in the trunk and ask him about that while getting the nod from the parents. There are a few things better than seeing an immaculate kid in fine clothes get really dirty.

Years later I'm in Seattle and somebody left a paper on a bench and there was this little newsiclce and I just knew. Who else could it be? Still like to find it.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 5:58 PM on October 13, 2016