Free The Octopus on My Head by Jim Nisbet

ignored this. “Did you find the lights?”
    â€œI found some switches.”
    â€œLet’s have a look.”
    â€œWhat about—?”
    â€œI have a few rounds left.”
    â€œOh, great.”
    â€œWhoever you are,” Lavinia said loudly, “we’re here on business. That’s it. No other reason.”
    Silence.
    â€œOkay?”
    No response.
    â€œOkay,” she said grimly. “Let’s get on with it.”
    I cautiously stood into a crouch and slid my hand up the sheetrock wall, sweeping the palm back and forth until it hit the switch plate. “There’re four of them.”
    â€œWhat am I, an electrician?” Lavinia barked.
    The first switch caused a rectangle of light to appear around the edges of the roll up door.
    â€œThat’s the outside light,” Lavinia said. “Turn it off.”
    The second switch instigated the creak of a belt getting traction on a pulley. A rooftop exhaust fan barely got started before I killed it. The third switch, once thrown, rebounded to its original position. The roll up door emitted a bang and rattled open an inch.
    â€œBack! Down!” Lavinia hissed. “What are you doing?”
    I bumped the switch in the opposite direction. The door banged shut.
    The fourth switch illuminated the whole place with a ghastly energy-efficient ochre.
    A sheetrock partition ran parallel to the garage door, about twenty-five feet inside the building. Lavinia was lying against it. The sheetrock was fire-taped—seams and screws had been hastily mudded, but any topping, smoothing or painting remained undone, which left a floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall hopscotch pattern of white dabs and stripes on a gray background, twenty feet high and maybe forty wide. At the far end of the room in a second fire-taped wall, at right angles to the first, stood a pair of steel doors, gray with no windows. Opposite, to my left, loomed an ancient cinderblock wall.
    We were in a box.
    Between us, on the floor of the box, a man lay face down.
    Five feet beyond the body, Lavinia held her pistol in both hands, trained on it. Her pallor was more wan than usual, and her confidence was mostly gone.
    The man wore a yellow pineapple shirt, black jeans, and white athletic socks. His hair was brush-cut and dyed yellow with a few magenta tufts drawn into spikes. A large pool of blood, perhaps a yard across, had spread away from him, toward me. Its surface had taken on a dull sheen, like the skin of a rotten apple. Its color was no longer red, precisely, but it was not yet brown.
    â€œHe lost all that blood before we got here,” I guessed aloud.
    â€œI tripped over him. After I fell I heard a crash. I shot three times.” Lavinia moved her eyes to her left, then back. “Over there.”
    Further down the box, to my right, the guitar case lay on the floor, its lid sprung open and leaning against the outside wall beyond the far end of the garage door. It had a bullet hole in it.
    â€œNice shooting.”
    â€œHe’s dead. Isn’t he dead?”
    â€œLooks that way.”
    â€œI didn’t shoot him. I shot over there.”
    â€œYou shot my guitar case. Not this guy.”
    Her eyes darted to her left, then back to me. “What the hell.”
    â€œWhat was I supposed to do, get shot? The guitar case was a spontaneous distraction. Now that the lights are on, I see that somebody else bought the farm. Somebody I don’t know. My friend, Lavinia, is perfectly okay. I’m delighted to see that my good friend Lavinia is okay. The same goes for myself. And I’m sorry that some guy I didn’t know is dead. But the sum of the game is, not all that much has changed since five minutes ago.”
    She looked at me as if she might shoot me and cry, or vice versa.
    â€œIf you’ll point that pistol somewhere else, I’ll have a look at this guy.”
    She didn’t move.
    â€œOkay, I’ll stay here. From this