“What are we supposed to do now, huh?” Fenny grumbled. “Since you’re so on top of the situation, you’ve obviously got a plan.”

Scowling and trying valiantly to ignore her, Paul glanced up and down the darkened streets. “We get my things.”

“You have things to get?” Fenny asked, surprised in spite of herself. “We never have things.”

“I left my bag at the reception desk at the hotel.” He turned on his heel and headed for the lobby.

“Yet you brought the mongoose with you.”

“I wasn’t going to leave Troy to be abused and manhandled by hotel staff,” he huffed and quickened his pace. Fenny, rolling her eyes, followed a few paces behind him. They found the lobby empty and the reception desk unattended, so he took to ringing the little bell every half a second.

“Paul.”

“Yes Fenella?”

“Stop it.”

“I need my bag.”

“I’m sure they’ve heard you.”

“But they’re not here yet.”

“They’re probably waiting for you to stop being an asshole.”

Paul started banging the bell faster. She reached out and grabbed it from him. He tried to grab it back, but before a full on tug of war could ensue, an annoyed man in a suit from 1986 came out and they both dropped the bell. It rolled sloppily to the floor where it clanged loudly, and both Fenny and Paul put on matching innocent faces.

“Can I help you?” the man asked disdainfully, eyeing Troy.

“I need my bag,” Paul declared. “I left it here with some woman a couple hours ago?”

The man glanced around the desk for a few seconds, then grabbed a post-it from somewhere. “Oh yes. ‘Manic man with badger left bag –’ ”

“It’s a mongoose,” Paul huffed.

“Of course,” he sneered. “‘Large wife in leather picked up bag.’ I’m sorry sir, you’ll have to confer with your wife.”

“She wasn’t my wife,” Paul groaned.

“It says here she was.”

“My wife is in fucking Australia.”

“I see.” The man raised an eyebrow at Fenny, who rolled her eyes.

“You gave a strange woman in leather my fucking bag,” Paul whined. Under normal circumstances he would have torn the man to shreds, but he was too tired to do much more than pout.

“Thank you,” Fenny mumbled to the man and grabbed Paul by the arm and led him outside. “Okay, now what.”

He sighed heavily and massaged his temples. “We get out of this town before the heavettes find us again.”

“Right.” Fenny nodded and glanced around. There were no taxis, no buses, no rental car companies anywhere to be seen. “How?”

Paul scowled at her and, Troy clutched firmly in one hand, turned and marched down the street in a seemingly arbitrary direction.

“I was better off with Molly,” Fenny sighed, but followed anyway.

“Are they following us?” Gina demanded as Greg turned the heater up full blast.

“I don’t know, the rear window is frosted over and the heated side mirrors haven’t heated yet,” Greg grumbled, scowling to try to see through the layer of snow that was reluctant to leave the windshield. “Wipers, wipers, wipers,” he mumbled to himself as Gina and Danny each found a vent to snuggle up to in hopes of warming up a bit. “Yes,” he cheered quietly as the windshield wipers began slashing furiously.

“How’s the ankle?” Danny asked as Gina eased off her shoe and rolled up her soaked, freezing pant leg.

“It’s peachy,” she hissed through her teeth as she tried to ease her sock off without aggravating the swollen joint.

“Actually it’s kinda purply,” Danny grimaced. Gina punched his shoulder halfheartedly and eased her foot back to the floor before reaching for her bag.

“Whatcha doing?” Greg asked, glancing backwards through the rear window which was slowly de-icing itself since he’d managed to find the button to make it do so. Still no one following.

“Calling Fen. We told her we’d call once we rescued the speccy one. Shit!”

“What?” Danny yelped.

“Everything in my bag’s soaked.” She picked up her cell phone, which dripped a little bit, but seemed to work relatively well as she dialed Fenny.

“Why do we always end up soaked when we’re supposed to be escaping?” Greg mused. “At least in Australia we were wet and warm.” Gina raised an eyebrow at his image in the mirror, but her attention was averted to the call.

“Hey Fen, we managed to get Greg. He’s whining that he’s cold and wet. It’s called the Snowies for a reason. Oh, we had to set off the fire sprinklers to get him out. Now? We’re, I don’t know actually, I think we’re looking for a place to stay the night and not get disemboweled by Amy. Thanks. How’s the hunt for Paul going? That’s great! Is he okay? What’s he doing a block and a half ahead of you? Yeah? Oh. Tell him to stop being a dickhead.” Gina laughed. “Just give him the phone, Fen.”

“Hey Genie,” Paul cooed.

“Stop being mean to Fenny,” she demanded.

“I’m not,” he mumbled.

“She said you’ve been grumpy and abusive, more than usual. She’s supposed to be our friend, I asked her to find you so that she can offer you at least a little bit of help and keep you out of trouble.”

“You realize the first thing she did when she found me was nearly kill herself tripping over kitchen utensils? Right now we’re marching through McDermott Ohio trying to find a means of transportation because she lost her hired car? Jesus, her pants are even stained because she fell in a ditch when the bad guys showed up. How is this helpful?”

“We’ve never had a hired car that didn’t get destroyed or stolen, it’s hardly her fault, and you ended up in a freezer with a stuffed mongoose when the bad guys showed up.”

“That was different.”

“How was it different?”

“Well I still look pretty.”

Gina sighed and tried not to smile. “Look, be nice to each other and hurry up and find yourself a way to get safely back home.”

“Yes Genie,” Paul agreed miserably. “I’ll try. I miss you, I love you, and I fucking hate Ohio.”

“I know,” Gina chuckled. “I love you too.” Both Danny and Greg glanced firmly out their respective windows.

“So where are we?” Ritza asked as the taxi pulled up to an apartment building. They’d spent the ride over discussing her method of breaking wrists, which seemed to unsettle the cabbie a great deal. He took off down the street as soon as Beven paid him.

“Friend of mine’s, said we could use the place,” Beven declared as he grabbed his luggage and headed up the stairs

“He did?” she asked. “When?”

“Oh, about six months ago. But he said I could stop by whenever I wanted, and showed me where he kept his spare key if we should drop by while he’s a work.”

“And what kind of work does this friend of yours do?”

Beven just raised an eyebrow at her as they reached the first landing.

“Right, gotcha,” she nodded.

“If we hadn’t offed Don when we did, Chuck would’ve.”

“Kindred spirit then.”

“Something like that.” They reached the door to Beven’s friend’s flat, and Beven pried up the top of the door molding and slipped a key from behind it before letting the wood creak back into place. He unlocked the door and they wandered inside.

It was a standard sort of habitat for an obviously single man: a few too many dishes piled in the sink, a few too many piles of newspapers and unwashed socks stacked in chairs, a few too many weeks worth of dust on the furniture and fixtures, and two or three guns laying amongst old pizza boxes on the kitchen table. The guns may not have been normal for the typical bachelor, but it didn’t strike Ritza as being too overly odd.

“You can change and freshen up or whatever over there,” Beven said, gesturing to a bedroom as he wandered down the hall, and Ritza nodded as she bustled her bag into the room. “I’ll just be down here.” He closed the door to the room at the end of the hall.

Ritza changed clothes quickly and ran a brush through her hair before investigating the gun she’d appropriated and fixing it securely in the waistband of her pants. She wandered the room for a few minutes to give Beven time to finish up whatever he was doing, but promptly got bored and headed down the hall.

“You decent?” she asked with a gentle knock on the door.

“Come on in,” he called back.

She opened the door to the master bedroom and saw Beven at the bathroom sink with a pair of scissors trimming his beard down, a razor and bottle of shaving cream at the ready. “Taking some womanly advice then?” she smiled, sitting herself on the bed.

“Well, it’ll throw ‘em off if they’re following me, won’t it, if they’re looking for a guy in an unsexy beard.” He turned to shrug at her and she nodded with a smile.

“You, um, have that gun around, I wanna take a look at it.”

“Yeah, in my bag.” He gestured with his head towards the other side of the bed. She crawled over the bed and dropped on her stomach as she reached her arms over the side to riffle through his backpack. Beven hastily averted his eyes from her rather pleasantly shaped prone body and went back to shaving.

Ritza sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed trying to study the weapon. But her attention was drawn to Beven, clad only in his jeans and a thick layer of foam on his face. She swallowed convulsively as she took in his muscular form, the few tattoos that littered his torso. She found herself wondering if there were any other tattoos she couldn’t see, caught herself daydreaming, and went back to the gun, which suddenly seemed more phallic than ever before.

“We’re gonna have to pick up some more ammo for these things,” she muttered into the clip.

“Not a problem, I know a place.” Ritza watched the muscles in his arm contract as he shaved under his chin. “Have any idea what we do after that?”

“Get to Nottingham,” she shrugged. “I don’t know anything about the place except it’s probably crawling with literary tourists. Suppose we’ll have to find a place where some crazy Yank would take another crazy Yank.”

Beven picked up a book from the counter and tossed it to her. It was a tour book of England that Beven had obviously found somewhere in the apartment, and he’d dog-eared the first page on Nottingham. “There’s a themed resort where they have all sorts of nut jobs dressing up like Little John and Maid Marion. If this Amy is kidnapping with a name theme, it wouldn’t be a far stretch to go to a place like that. There’s a couple other hotels too, big chain places.”

“I’d say the resort,” Ritza agreed. She glanced up to see Beven reaching for a shirt, which he pulled on but didn’t button. “My god, what happened to you,” she gasped upon seeing for the first time amongst the usual scars one would expect, a long, deep scar along the right side of his body.

“Oh, that,” he frowned. “Don and I had a slight argument.” He shrugged it off and buttoned up his shirt.

“Bastard,” she breathed.

“So what do you think?” He turned his head, modeling the clean-shaven look.

“Much better,” she grinned. She took a deep breath as he turned to grab his jacket, a bit disappointed he’d had to go and get dressed again, then a bit annoyed at herself for not staying focused. “Should we head out then?”

“Yeah. You wanna grab that book? I’m sure Chuck won’t mind.”

“Sure.” Ritza grabbed the book and scurried off to the other room to retrieve her things, and they were headed out once again.

Brad rifled through his bag of pilfered items trying to find something comfortable to wear. He had wanted to get some sleep but found that near impossible given the tights and the amount of adrenaline that had surged through his body since waking up tied to a bed with a buxom, slightly crazed woman.

He stripped off his costume all but the tights, annoyed more than ever that he hadn’t been given proper underwear to change into. He’d have to cope with the tights itching his legs and being one of the single most uncomfortable articles of clothing ever invented, and decided he had more respect for women when they were forced to wear pantyhose. He’d have to thank Bess the next time she worse pantyhose for him.

He reached for the shirt he’d chosen from the bag and pulled it on, buttoning it in the mirror. His fingers paused mid-button as the “FEN-” of his tattoo caught his attention. He’d spent so long trying to pretend the image wasn’t there anymore, but he lightly traced the letters with his fingertips.

Fenny rarely wore pantyhose for him. But he didn’t really need her to. Or he hadn’t. Before she’d essentially ripped out his heart and shown it to him.

He hastily pulled on his pants over the tights and discovered that, while they fit relatively well around the waist, they were at least four inches too short, the bright green of the tights clashing with the purplish color of the shirt.

“Damned tiny English twits,” Brad huffed and collapsed back on the bed, ignoring the pained groan it gave. He rubbed his forehead with both hands and noticed the sleeves were too short as well. At least the ill-fitting clothes gave him something tactile he could be angry with.

He had to find out what was going on with the others, find out if Fenny was alright. He’d spent so much of his time trying not to think about Fenny recently that it hadn’t occurred to him that she could be in trouble, too. Hell, Fenny was always in trouble. Half the time it was her own fault. And while he didn’t really want to think about things like his reasons for being upset with her and the rapidly rising reasons for actually missing her, he didn’t want her to do something foolish like try to find him and get herself into trouble. Again.

He briefly tried to remember the time differences between England and LA, but couldn’t for the life of him remember if it was six or eight hours. He’d probably end up waking Fenny up if he did try to call her. He’d tell her that he was okay and not to worry, she would probably either say that she didn’t care if he was alright or not, or that she didn’t even know he was gone, they’d both get worked up, someone would say something stupid, and everyone would end up more miserable than they had been in the first place. It was a well-established pattern they rarely diverted from.

Scowling at the floor, Brad made a decision. He’d go down and have a few drinks. And probably get laughed at for his pants. After that he’d decide what to do. He hoped he’d decide not to decide, just get good and drunk and sleep all next afternoon and wake to find this all a very bad dream and he woke up in bed. He wasn’t sure how much of his recent life he could attribute to bad dreams, so he didn’t know exactly what bed he would wake up in. He’d have to wait and see.

After a fair bit of walking down what appeared to be the main street in town, following directions Fenny had gleaned from a streetwalker who had propositioned Paul, they came across what was trying rather hard to be a bus station. It was very late at night and the only people inhabiting the area were a homeless woman, a man in his middle twenties sitting on his luggage, and a bored woman playing a Game Boy at the ticket window. Paul collapsed on a bench and promptly lay along it. Fenny slumped into the bench opposite and glared at him. They’d wandered more or less in silence since Paul had gotten off the phone, and Fenny was rather hoping it would stay that way. She wasn’t used to being on Paul’s bad side. Well, he’d given her quite a few stern talking-tos, but she’d never had to endure the senseless anger and nastiness that was more or less his trademark on stage, but rarely used to such a degree in normal day-to-day life. She was very much not in the mood.

“Well?” Paul asked suddenly, staring at the overhang that constituted the bus terminal.

“Well what?” she countered, glaring at him.

“Are we getting tickets or what?”

“Where to?”

“Timbuktu,” he growled.

“I don’t think you can get to Timbuktu by bus, Paul,” Fenny said dryly.

“I want to get to the nearest fucking airport so I can get back to my wife and so you can stop trying to rescue me.”

Fenny mumbled incoherently under her breath and wandered to the ticket window. Paul listened with little interest as the two women conversed. As Fenny’s quiet footsteps returned, he sat up and looked at her expectantly.

“Where we headed then?”

“Cincinnati. There’s an airport there. We can’t get a flight from there to LA, we can probably get a shuttle into Cleveland, and from there to LAX. And from LAX you can fly back to Sydney and wait for Gina.”

“Brilliant,” Paul sighed. “Where’s my ticket?”

“What ticket?” Fenny asked, eyes wide.

“What do you mean, what ticket?” he said, voice dangerously low.

“Well, I mean, you said you didn’t need my help, so I figured you could get your own ticket. I kinda thought that maybe I’d just save you having to put up with me and just take a nice leisurely bus trip straight to Cleveland, maybe see if Drew and Ry are still there and check out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and let you get on by yourself, but I did tell Gina that I’d—”

“You stupid bitch,” Paul yelped. “I don’t have any money to buy a fucking ticket because—fuck!”

Fenny turned to see what had suddenly caught Paul’s attention: a trademark black car with two very large and Fenny was guessing very familiar women inside.

Paul grabbed her hand and dragged her across the terminal to shove her into the men’s restroom next to the ticket office. “Paul,” she whispered angrily as he bustled her into a toilet cubicle and jumped onto the seat.

“Shut up,” he hissed, and she reluctantly stood on the seat and leaned against the tiled wall while Paul leaned against the stall partition. She could just make out the voice of the ticket woman being interrogated by one of the two heavies.

The bathroom door opened and Fenny cautiously leaned further into the stall, but the door closed again without incident, both Paul and Fenny slumping against the walls. Fenny listened a bit longer and then stepped down off the toilet.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

“They’re gone.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because I heard Marlene talking to them. When I bought the tickets I casually mentioned that we’ve got some gold digging women after us for a paternity suit and we’d really appreciate it if she would tell them that we’d already left on a bus to Chicago if they happened to drop by.”

Paul blinked at her for a moment.

“Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to get out of the men’s bathroom and continue to pretend that I don’t know what these places look like. Oh, and here’s your ticket.” She reached into her back pocket and produced two tickets, one of which she handed Paul before wandering out of the bathroom and up to the ticket window, where she gave Marlene an extra five dollars and thanked her profusely, while Paul went back to sulking on his bench.

The trio, still wet but warming and made a bit happier with the knowledge that at least Fenny and Paul were still alive if not slightly strange, continued trundling down the road through the light sifting of snow that had begun to fall, accompanied by droning classical music. Gina and Danny leaned against each other’s shoulders in the back seat and seemed quite willing to take a nap after their rather exciting day out.

Greg peered at them in his mirror as he ran one hand through his wet hair, pouting at how foolish he must look. His mind flashed back to that evening in Australia after Gina’s Beetle had been neatly deposited in a pond full of scum and she’d torn off his sopping clothes and they’d spent the entire night making love. But that was before Paul. Well, not really, he thought to himself with a snicker, since Paul had been in the next room listening to Gina scream out Greg’s name. That had always pleased him more than it probably should have, and made his therapist question his competitive, territorial manner like Greg was some sort of coyote or something.

He switched gears to his new territory and reminded himself either to call his wife when the opportunity presented itself and he could be bothered remembering the time difference between whatever part of Australia he was in and California time, or to buy her an absurd amount of flowers as a peace offering when he got back home.

Greg glanced back in his rearview mirror again as he’d done every few minutes in fear of seeing rapidly approaching headlights that signified Amy had gotten herself together enough to follow them. He saw rapidly approaching headlights and his heart nearly stopped. “Shit, there’s a car behind us,” he gasped and accelerated roughly. Gina and Danny both jumped and turned towards the back where a set of headlights glared at them through the snow

“What do we do now?” Danny asked.

“We hide,” Greg squeaked, turning the wheel suddenly towards a little side street that presented itself rather conveniently. The tires lost their grip on the icy road and the car spun around, Greg trying valiantly to remember what they’d taught him in drivers ed class all those years back and decided just to stop doing anything and join Danny in screaming that they were all going to die.

After two and a half revolutions, squealing tires and a blue streak of swear words from Gina as the centrifugal force whacked her nearly destroyed ankle into the door, the rear end of the car hit one of the trees lining the narrow street and it came to a sudden halt facing the main road. The three passengers sat panting and trying to stop their heads from spinning. The black vehicle that had been following them whizzed past, occupied by a happy family of five returning home from a ski trip.

“For Christ’s sake,” Greg hissed.

Gina kicked the back of his seat with her good foot.

“What was that for?” he demanded.

“For being an idiot and nearly getting us killed.”

“When’s the last time I had to drive in snow?” Greg demanded. “Last Christmas it was like 65 degrees outside, LA doesn’t get weather, which is one of the few things I like about the place.”

“Hey guys, what’s that?” Danny asked, pointing out one of the rear windows to a large house with a welcoming warm glow.

“What’s what?” Gina asked, shifting awkwardly to try to see past Danny, just as a huge clump of snow dislodged itself from the tree they’d hit and splatted heavily onto the windshield.

“We’re living a cartoon,” Greg sighed, starting up the windshield wipers again. As soon as he could see, he turned the car around, trying to ignore the sound of metal scraping against bark, and headed exceedingly cautiously towards what was rapidly revealing itself to be a bed and breakfast. They parked out front and headed inside, Greg and Danny helping support Gina until they made it to front room where she leaned heavily on the desk where a young woman was reading a fashion magazine.

“Oh, hello,” she perked as she looked up, but her face quickly fell to the odd combination of shock and pity tinged with fear that always seemed to be the way people’s faces fell when they saw any of their little group of rescuers mid-rescue mission. “What’s happened to you lot?”

“Snowball fight gone awry,” Gina smiled. “We’d like some rooms?”

“We’ve only got the one room, with a double bed,” she winced.

“Fine, we’ll take whatever you have,” Gina breathed.

The woman nodded and called for someone named Trevor. “Where’s your bags and things?” she asked the weary travelers.

“His are in Sydney, hers are somewhere in Ohio, and mine are probably in Oakland. Damned airports, always losing our luggage,” Greg supplied.

“Oh my,” the woman breathed. “You’ll be needing some warm clothes for the night then, wait there for a moment.” She dashed through a door, shouting “Never mind Trevor,” and Greg turned to Gina.

“One bed?”

“It’s a place to sleep, and it’s warm, and the bad guys don’t realize B&Bs exist. It’s better than sleeping outside in the car or braving the icy roads again.”

“I don’t wanna sleep with Greg,” Danny pouted.

“I don’t wanna sleep with you either, buddy,” Greg countered.

“Great,” Gina perked. “You boys can sleep on the floor and I’ll take the bed then.”

“But I wanna sleep with you,” both men replied simultaneously as the woman reappeared with a bundle of clothing in her arms. She blushed at Greg and Danny’s declaration but soldiered on as they both looked at the floor.

“I’m really sorry,” the woman said, “but we’ve only got the two sets of pajamas.”

“Thanks, that’s fine,” Gina smiled kindly, taking the proffered items. “Oh, and you wouldn’t happen to have a bandage or something would you? I hurt my ankle…”

“Of course, you poor thing, I’ll be right back.”

“I’m definitely not sleeping with him naked,” Greg declared.

“Nobody’s going to be naked,” Gina said, handing Greg one pair of striped pajamas and Danny the bottoms to the other set while keeping the top for herself.

“How come he gets the whole thing and I have to share with you?” Danny pouted.

“Because if I have to see one of you shirtless, I’d rather it were you.”

Greg stuck his tongue out triumphantly at Danny before considering the implications behind the statement. “Hey…”