Cellist v. CFO

When Pepple arrives to carry off and bury the liquidated CEO, the Cellist stands wary.

She doesn't sleep that night. She keeps herself awake by force of will, her back to the oak, starring at the dim light shining through the cracks in the wall of the shack. Listening for the door to open. But it never does.

The next morning, when the CFO arrives, the Cellist asks for time to sleep. The CFO objects. He lists the myriad of problems he's faced since receiving notice of the duel:

First off, my wife tells me she won't sign the divorce papers. My daughter refuses to live with me. My son got sent home from school for attempted arson. Heard about that last bit of news during an emergency conference call over the disappearance of a kid we sponsored to fly across the Atlantic, and then of our CEO. This was all yesterday, mind you. I get home and my son's drunk off the bottle of a 36 year-old Talisker single-malt I was keeping to celebrate the one year aniversary of my father's fatal aneurism. Also, the cable's blown. And there's a note from the maid telling me she quit - and took the cook.

The Cellist rubs her eyes.

This morning I woke up with a crick in my neck. I was strip-searched at airport security. I sat squeezed next to an obese lamp wholesaler who wouldn't stop showing me pictures of his fat kids, and naked pictures of his two Filipino mistresses. After we landed I ran across the tarmac to board some paint-flecked prop that probably hasn't been serviced since the Truman administration, landed in this ho-dunk town, and got carted up here by a stuttering maniac who just inherited his uncle's taxi business and got us lost four times before fishing a map from under a pile of fast food wrappers.

The Cellist's eyes droop shut, then open. She blinks.

So I'll be damned, he concludes, if I come all this way to wait because some young woman - the same woman with whom I will fight to the death - wants to take a mid-morning siesta. No ma'am. We came to duel, we're dueling.

The Cellist sighs.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.