“So, Otto old buddy,” Greg perked as he tried to wiggle away from Danny’s elbow which was digging into his hip, “what exactly is your big plan?”

“Well, all we have to do really is get to her hideout. It’s not far out of town, in the middle of nowhere really.”

“Everywhere in this god forsaken country is out in the middle of nowhere,” Brad whined from the backseat and was given a playful whack in the head from Paul, scrunched up next to him. Fenny was wedged between Brad and one door, and Gina was sitting halfway in Paul’s lap with her back to the other door, trying to earn everyone a bit more room in the cramped four wheel drive. Danny was squishing Greg into the passenger door in the front seat, trying to stay out of Otto’s way as he drove into an increasingly foreboding landscape.

“So then what?” Danny asked.

“We threaten her. She’s heard enough about everything you’ve done, she knows she can’t win against all of you. Especially if Don couldn’t.”

“What, you’re suggesting we threaten to kill her?” Paul gasped.

“Of course not,” Otto snapped viciously. “She’s my sister for fuck’s sake, I don’t want her dead.”

“Well what then?” Greg demanded.

“You threaten to go to the cops. We know she killed Don, and Amy is scared shitless that she’ll end up in prison.”

“So she goes around killing and kidnapping people?” Brad mused.

“Well everyone knows that you bunch haven’t gone to the cops for anything, and she only offed Don because she knew she had no ties to him. Not the kind of records you want to have lying around the house, y’know. As far as I know, the cops in Scotland are still investigating, they have no clue about my sister. With my help, we could get enough evidence to put her away for life, and she knows it.”

“Will that really work?” Fenny asked.

“Should,” Otto shrugged.

“And if it doesn’t?” Gina asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Everyone sunk into their seats, generally wishing they were anywhere but where they were, and they continued in silence to wherever Otto was taking them.

Claudia glanced idly up at Beven and Ritza as they sauntered back into the room. Beven’s carefully schooled expression didn’t give much away, but Ritza was looking a bit flushed and glassy eyed. “Feel better?” she smirked.

“Never you mind,” Beven snapped, pulling out a chair and dropping into it to look Claudia firmly in the eye. Ritza situated herself between Claudia and the door, watching every movement. “So, are you gonna tell us what’s going on?” Beven asked.

“Why should I have anything to tell?” Claudia asked.

“Because you managed to get hold of our friend Sherwood after Amy had him kidnapped.”

“I merely stumbled upon an old friend of a friend in the woods near my cabin.”

“And tied him up with a bull called Snuffles,” Ritza snapped.

“Snuffles?” Claudia asked, genuinely startled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He stole my car, you know.”

“Look,” Beven grumbled, “all we want to know is where our friends are and what they’re doing there so we can keep them out of trouble. They never did anything to anybody—”

“Didn’t do anything? Of course they did,” Claudia snapped. “What about Don’s money, his—”

“They didn’t do any of that because they wanted to,” Ritza piped up, “they did it to keep from getting killed by your dickhead of a boss, but you people just won’t let it go. And now you’ve got this psycho Amy dragging them into something they’re not even involved in.”

“Have a heart,” Beven added, smiling a bit at Claudia. “You can’t really want this to go on any longer than it has.”

“I cannot help you,” Claudia shrugged, scanning the kitchen table for something. “I don’t know anything.”

“Come on Claudia,” Beven cooed. “We know too much about you for you to think you can play with us like this.”

“You have no evidence of anything that would ever hold in a trial,” Claudia scoffed.

“I’m not talking about the courts,” he smirked. “Think of the stories I could tell Franco.” Claudia give up her search to look up at him sharply. “Or Jones. Or Bowser. Or—”

“That’s blackmail,” Claudia hissed.

“What are you going to do, call the cops?” Ritza asked.

“You can’t do this.”

Beven shrugged dramatically. “If you’re not going to cooperate, maybe I’ll just let my friend here blow your head off the way she wants. You wouldn’t be much use to us anyway.” Ritza leveled her gun at Claudia again, glaring at the French woman through defiant eyes.

“You wouldn’t,” Claudia said, her unwavering confident gaze directed at Beven.

“Maybe,” Beven admitted. “But if you just tell us what we want to know, we won’t have to find out, will we?”

Claudia’s scowl deepened and she slumped back further into her chair, reaching for a packet of cigarettes but finding it empty. Ritza followed every move in the sights of her pistol as Claudia wandered to the other side of the kitchenette to pour herself a glass of wine.

“It’s Amy,” she shrugged nonchalantly. “The stupid American whore. Her idiotic sense of vengeance.”

“You’re one to talk about idiotic revenge,” Ritza grumbled as Beven motioned for her to put her gun down and wandered towards Claudia.

“She thinks that by kidnapping your friends she can lure me down there,” Claudia continued. “Certainly I want them dead, but if she can take care of them for me, I wouldn’t mind. Less mess for me. I don’t like Australia anyway, I’m certainly not going to go so the woman can try to kill me.”

“Where’s Amy trying to get you to go?” Beven asked.

Claudia sauntered into the next room, followed by Beven and Ritza, where she shuffled through a sheaf of papers for a moment before handing over a small slip of paper.

“A telegram,” Beven mused, glancing down. “I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

“She’s got a flair for the dramatic, that one,” Ritza agreed.

“This is it,” Otto declared, pulling to a stop at a huge though slightly dilapidated old house in the middle, as he’d said, of nowhere.

“This is it?” Greg echoed, incredulous.

Fenny opened the door and tumbled out, smacking her thigh into corner of the door on the way down. “Hey Otto,” Paul mused, coming around the car with Gina leaning on him a bit as she limped along. He squeezed her closer to him as Otto averted his attention from the second floor window to him and Gina with a scowl that was quickly and smoothly replaced with an open, almost eerily kind face. “Why exactly are you doing this? I mean, the psycho one being your sister and all. No offense.”

Otto shrugged. “I dunno. Just seems like you’re a pretty good bunch of people that got sucked into my sister’s strange little world of vengeance and playing gangster, and I don’t think you deserve it. With maybe a bit of sibling rivalry thrown in too,” he smiled, and headed towards the back of the house.

“This ought to get her back for pulling the legs off your Spiderman action figure, huh,” Brad grinned, until Otto glanced over at him with a slightly annoyed expression. Brad shrugged and averted his attention to Fenny’s hand, which he squeezed protectively. She leaned towards him a bit, but continued staring at the house.

“So what, we just go in and tell Amy if she doesn’t leave us alone for good we’ll go to the cops?” Greg asked.

“Shouldn’t we arm ourselves?” Danny added. “You said she wouldn’t want to fight all of us?”

“Yeah, arming yourselves would probably be a good plan,” Otto agreed. “Too bad you didn’t think of it earlier though.” He threw open the back door and ushered them in hurriedly.

“Well if you’ll wait a minute, we can get pointy sticks or something, right?” Brad asked, suddenly anxious.

“Kitchen knives, rope, a spanner, candlestick maybe,” Danny added, figuring something useful had to be in the house.

“Yeah, and if we run into Colonel Mustard I’m sure he’d help us too,” Greg sneered.

The sound of a key in the lock echoed through the cramped corridor, and Otto pushed his way past them to lead the way to a small door, which he wrenched open.

“Ok kids,” Otto chirped, pulling out a very large, very intimidating gun from somewhere and waving it at them as he nodded down into a dank, dark cellar. “Get inside.”

“Hey,” Paul protested. “I don’t remember guns being part of the plan.”

“You gullible little prick, you actually thought I was going to help you,” Otto chuckled. “Like taking candy from a baby. How did Don have such a hard time keeping track of you people?”

“I knew this was gonna happen,” Greg sighed, obediently heading down the stairs, followed by Fenny, who was quietly trembling, and Brad, who squeezed her shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture.

“You’re an evil man,” Danny announced stoically, but jumped back a bit when Otto rounded the gun in his direction. “Yeah I’m going, I’m going,” he said hurriedly as he headed down into the dark room.

“And here we were, ready to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Paul sighed, shaking his head disappointedly. “But you’ve turned out to be just like every other brain dead heavy, taking orders from psychotic fuckheads and mindlessly throwing people into dark little rooms and—oouf!” Paul stumbled down a few steps as Otto pushed him harshly, but steadied himself against a wall before he lost his footing altogether.

Brad hit his head against a hanging bulb and clicked it on. They all saw Gina, the last to descend, standing at the top of the stairs glaring at Otto with an oddly familiar, venomous expression. “Gina,” Danny, Fenny and Greg said simultaneously, the same sense of warning in each voice, pleading with her not to do something rash.

“Genie, just come on, he’s not worth it,” Paul soothed, and took a few careful steps up to grab her hand. Reluctantly she turned her gaze from Otto and limped down one step. The door slammed shut and the sound of a lock clicking into place echoed through the small basement, then as Gina and Paul made their way carefully to the bottom of the stairs, the sound of something heavy being moved in front of the door.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Greg growled, crumpling up an empty cigarette packet and flopping down on the floor.

“Go get dressed,” Beven ordered, pocketing the telegram with its instructions from Amy.

“Why?” Claudia demanded.

“We’re going to Australia.”

“I am not.”

Ritza cocked her gun and leveled it at Claudia’s head again. Ritza was finding it was almost therapeutic, really.

“Why do you want me to go with you?” Claudia demanded again, hands on her hips.

“Because we enjoy your company so much, it just wouldn’t be the same without you,” Beven said with a perky, sarcastic smile.

“I am through with the deranged American and with your stupid friends.”

“And I don’t trust you,” Ritza declared, “and if you don’t get dressed and come with us, you’ll be through with your lungs.”

Claudia looked up at Beven, who nodded towards the bedroom. “Je peut les tuer mais non, j’ai besoin aller avec le canaille anglais et la chienne—” She mumbled to herself in French as she headed for her bedroom.

“And try to put on something decent, huh?” Ritza called as an afterthought. The door to the tiny bedroom slammed shut. The man Beven had pushed past at the front door earlier looked up, idly curious, from a bed in the room at the end of the hall. “I don’t like her,” Ritza announced. “Are you sure we can’t just kill her?”

“I’m sure,” Beven sighed, leaning against a wall and closing his eyes briefly.

“So we have to take Frog Legs with us?”

“You said yourself that you don’t trust her to be here alone. Besides, if Amy wants Claudia, maybe we should give her what she wants. You never know, Claudia might come in handy.”

Ritza nodded reluctantly and leaned next to Beven. “What have you got on her anyway?”

“Not as much as she thinks I do,” he said, giving her a quick wink before closing his eyes again to wait.

The six prisoners leaned against the two walls farthest from the door, glancing around. Nothing but cold bricks, packed dirt floor, cobwebs, and the single light bulb hanging from the low ceiling.

“Well, anyone got a shovel?” Brad asked.

“Maybe Troy can dig us a tunnel?” Paul scratched vacantly at the floor with the mongoose’s front paws for a few moments purely for something to do other than count the bricks, then set Troy down heavily on the floor. There was a light thud that commanded everyone’s attention, and they watched as something small and shiny rolled across the floor to hit Brad’s boot. Fenny leaned over and picked it up.

“Yuck,” she shrieked, dashing over to Paul. She held the object out to Paul between her two fingers, trying not to look at it.

“What?” he demanded, taking it from her. “Oh no, poor Troy!” he gasped.

“What’s wrong?” Gina asked.

“Troy lost an eye,” Paul pouted.

“We’re stuck in a basement awaiting our death and you’re worried that your dead pet lost an eye,” Danny groused.

“Paul,” Brad warned, “your mongoose is leaking.”

Paul glanced over from where he was cleaning Troy’s glass eye on the end of his shirt to see a steady stream of sand trickling from the empty eye socket. “No!”

Fenny averted her gaze as Paul righted Troy, marginally repulsed by the whole idea. She’d grown used to the idea of having the stuffed dead creature with them everywhere Paul went, but she wasn’t prepared to deal with its insides. “This can’t possibly be a good omen,” she mused.

“Don’t say that Fen,” Gina snapped.

“We’ve made it through worse than this. Like, I don’t know, all of Amsterdam,” Paul mused.

“No one’s managed to kill us yet,” Brad added, trying to sound hopeful.

“First time for everything,” Greg said.

Danny was busying himself with collecting sand from the floor and trying to get it into the empty eye socket, and everyone else watched, for lack of anything better to do. After a minute or two, Fenny stuck her hand into her pocket to pull out the sheet of paper Stuart had given her what seemed like eons ago, and fashioned a rough funnel that might help Danny and Paul get more sand in the cavity than embedded in the mongoose’s fur. As she shuffled over to them on her knees, her cell phone rang from somewhere, and everyone in the dark cellar glanced at everyone else until it rang again and Greg remembered he’d been holding onto it. After digging it from his pocket, he anxiously answered it in the hopes it would be his wife.

“Hello?”

“Um, I’m sorry?” a confused, distinctly male voice asked. “I’m trying to find my daughter.”

“Fenny?” Greg ventured.

“Yeah…who’s this?”

“Greg.”

“Oh, Brad’s friend! I’ve heard so much about you, I love your show.”

“Yeah, thanks Mr. Grey,” he said, frowning at the phone. “Look, here’s Fen.” Greg quickly handed the phone over to Fenny. “Your dad’s strange.”

Fenny rolled her eyes. “Yeah?” she sighed into the phone.

“What’s Greg Proops doing answering your cell phone?”

“I was busy trying to heal Paul’s mongoose.”

“Whose what?”

“Never mind, Daddy. Is there something specific you wanted?”

“You wouldn’t believe this field of geodes your uncle and I found, it’s amazing, goes on for miles.”

“Would you just stick it in already, that hole’s freaking me out,” she heard Greg command.

“It won’t just go in,” Gina groused.

“Dad, seriously, this is so not the time,” Fenny said, moving away to the other end of the cellar to avoid the strange conversation.

“So you don’t want me to bring you back some geodes?” her father asked, obviously sulking.

“Maybe if you lubricated it?” Danny suggested.

“What’re you gonna do, spit on it?” Paul yelled. “No, stay away from it.”

“Eew,” Brad protested.

“Bring all you want. Tell you what, find me a yellow one, huh?” she suggested, hoping that would give him something to occupy his time. “Just don’t tell me about it, I wanna be surprised. But look, I’m kinda busy at the moment, but I’ll come up and visit you and your new rocks when you get home, alright?”

“Well, ok. Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah, you too Daddy,” she breathed, and hung up the phone.

“It’s in!” Paul cheered, petting Troy’s fur lovingly, brushing away bits of dirt and sand and pondering the eye, which was in a bit crooked.

“What was that sound?” Brad asked, jumping a bit at the odd skittering sound that didn’t seem to come from anywhere specific. Paul checked for any other renegade body parts.

“That would be all of my hopes and dreams shattering into a million angry little pieces,” Greg grumbled.

“The last of my optimism running away in a blind panic,” Fenny said, resuming her spot between Brad and Greg on the floor, handing Greg back the phone which he took, grateful for something to fiddle with.

“I think it was the sound of our collective mortality preparing to stare us in the face one last time,” Danny announced.

“You know, a lot of these places are haunted,” Gina mused.

“Thanks, just what we needed,” Greg sighed. “Homicidal maniacs, Fen’s insane father, a rotting mongoose and the disembodied spirits of the last people to die down here.”

“We could invite the ghosts for a game of tic-tac-toe,” Gina suggested with a smile as she noticed Fenny and Brad drawing random patterns in the dirt.

“Make it Twister and I’m in,” Danny chirped.