In the middle of the morning, an elderly gentleman with a faint accent stops in to the Wolynczyk Garage to ask for directions to the Pearl Island Club. Penny has no truck with such establishments, so she sends him on his way.
Half a block down the street, he is grabbed, stuffed into a car, and driven away by several large men in ill-fitting suits.
Penny takes down the license plate number and calls Granny Gunderson, who knows how to get information out of the police without having to fill out paperwork. (Cookies. The secret is cookies.) She gets an address to go with the car registration, calls Swan Mae and Irene (who don't have jobs) and goes to investigate.
The address is of a bookstore, which shows no sign of ever having had that car anywhere near it. There is a secret trapdoor in the back room, but it only leads to a basement where ration coupons are forged. Irene partakes of the bounty.
The Pearl Island Club is closed (the sun still being in the sky), but the back door is curiously ajar, so while Mae finds out what it's like to sing on stage, Irene and Granny case the joint. Granny's jingling spurs alarm someone else who's having a look around, and a masked man scampers out the second-floor window and tries to escape. Irene chases him down, though, and Granny shoots the engine block out of his motorcycle, so he gives up and talks to Our Heroines.
The Masked Crusader For Justice is investigating Johnny Christmas (the owner of the Pearl Island Club) for leads on more vile mobsters, and knows nothing about old men being kidnapped. He did hear Johnny Christmas and his boys talk about going to "the station" though, and the goon he tied up and locked in the closet is able to confirm that he meant the train station. (The goon is then regagged and put back in the closet.)
Sensing the climactic confrontation drawing near, Our Heroines call Penny and Christine to join them, and descend upon the train station. Johnny Christmas is easily spotted by the sprig of holly in his hatband; he, the old man, and an assortment of torpedos are at the left luggage counter.
Penny, the only one who has met the old man and witnessed his kidnapping, goes in to check up on him, but he assures her that he is fine, and the "kidnapping" was just a matter of Mr Christmas's people being a bit overenthusiastic after having missed meeting him earlier. Feeling slightly foolish, Penny turns to leave...
"Looking for this?" asks the Masked Crusader For Justice, brandishing a large ornate antique bottle. Johnny Christmas yells for his goons to get 'im, and the fight is on!
Before anyone except Granny has a chance to engage in gunplay, Christine fills the left luggage area with toxic fumes, immediately incapacitating most of the mobsters and severely impairing most of the rest (who are quickly disarmed by Granny in any case). Things seem to be going well until Masked C F Justice bludgeons a mobster with the bottle, releasing an ominous cloud of vapors.
The largest mobster, Grubb, a doughy-skinned giant with poisonous breath, continues to cause problems for a bit, until he and his boss are hogtied by Granny, but the vapors are more of a threat; it's not just any smoke cloud that can grab a Masked Crusader For Justice and use him to bludgeon Swan Mae! Between Mae's wings and a suitcase flailed about by Irene, though, the evil cloud is dispersed (and later sucked into a bottle by Christine and Mae, who then scarper).
Leaving Granny to explain things to the police, Penny and Irene escape with the old man, who turns out to be an antiquarian from New York who had heard of Johnny Christmas's habit of collecting strange old objects and came to LA to sell him an alleged djinn bottle. (Judging by the money Irene found in Johnny Christmas's pockets, the going price for a djinn bottle is $5000.) The antiquarian sets off back to New York philosophically empty-handed, but Irene makes sure half the money ends up in his pocket.
Christine and Mae, after some research on djinn seals, decide to weld the neck of the old bottle onto the new one, thus avoiding having to either make a new seal or break the old one to transfer it. Perhaps it will hold.
[Run by Chrisber on 28 Sep 2003. Adam, Christy, Dave, Earl, and Trip present.]
This file was last modified at 1103 on 02Oct03 by trip@idiom.com.