osprey_archer | International Pie Smuggling Rings

For

visualthinker11, because it is her birthday, because she is a very patient beta, and because she got me involved in this fandom:

Title: International Pie Smuggling Rings
Author:

osprey_archer
Fandom: Pushing Daisies
Pairings: none really
Rating: PG
Summary: In which Chuck is arrested, Olive is inventive, and Emerson is awesome.

Emerson arrested his knitting needles mid-purl when Olive Snook stumbled into his office, her high heels broken and her hair snarled with snow. “Emerson,” she gasped, collapsing on his desk. “You’ve got to help us.”

“Uh?” grunted Emerson, setting down his knitting.

“Chuck’s been arrested!”

Emerson heaved himself to his feet. “Dead Girl’s been arrested?”

“Yes!” cried Olive.

Of course she had been. Trouble was inevitable with Chuck. “Why?”

“Speeding,” said Olive. “Without a license. Also the officer thought the car was strange. Why is there a plate of plastic stuck through Ned’s car?”

“Why was Dead Girl driving Ned’s car?”

“Ned’s sick so we were going shopping for fruit for the Pie Hole and Ned won’t let me drive because I drive too fast, but if I drive like a jockey then Chuck drives like a jockey with rockets strapped to her horse’s behind—”

“And she got arrested for speeding.”

“By an Officer Fontinelli. He’s a pretty suspicious character if you ask me.”

Emerson knew Officer Fontinelli. He was suspicious like Olive was a chatterbox. Emerson straightened his hot pink shirt and marched out his office.

“I think we should take along a pie,” said Olive, hobbling down the narrow stairs after him. “We can drug it and when all the police officers are snoring we can break Chuck out. I thought we could use some of Ned’s meds for it, they really seem to make him woozy. Do you think the police’ll believe us if we say Chuck’s in witness protection from a Columbian drug cartel?”

Columbian drug cartels. Emerson attempted to forestall more inventiveness: “Why didn’t Fontinelli arrest you too?”

“I hid under the peaches.”

“Why did you hide under the peaches?”

“So they wouldn’t notice that I looked a lot more like my ID than Chuck did.”

Emerson made a mental note to get rid of her before going to the police. He held the door open for her, and offered her an arm to help her across the snowy parking lot – to his car, nondescript, not Olive’s lime-green horror. “Why didn’t you switch seats with Chuck instead of giving her your ID?”

“Because there’s a sheet of plastic between the seats. My driver’s license barely fit through the air holes. Why is there a sheet of plastic—” And so forth, for the entire drive back to the Pie Hole, where Emerson left her while she looked for a pie to drug.

***

Fontinelli hadn’t changed, from his jowls to his white-blond cowlick to his self-satisfied I’ve-got-a-spitball smirk. He didn’t invite Emerson to sit. Emerson did anyway. The child-sized plastic chair put his nose about level with Fontinelli’s desk: sloping piles of paper, doughnut crumbs and cans of Coke.

He even had a photograph of Julieta Ronquero: Emerson’s tenth grade girlfriend till Fontinelli cracked their relationship like a safe.

“Even prettier now, isn’t she?” said Fontinelli. He twisted the heavy gold ring on his left ring finger. “We got married two years ago.”

Emerson, dignified, ignored the provocation. “I’m here to collect a Miss Olive Snook.”

Fontinelli twisted the ring around his finger again: sign of discomfort in the marriage, strong enough to distract him. “Uh huh?”

“She was arrested for speeding this morning,” said Emerson.

Fontinelli snapped to attention. “Miss Snook? She was arrested for driving with one of the worst forged licenses I’ve ever seen. One of yours?”

“You’re the forger,” said Emerson; but now wasn’t the time to dredge up the sordid past. “Let me take Miss Snook home, Fontinelli.”

“After the line she fed me about international pie smuggling rings?”

International pie smuggling rings. Good Lord. “She’s not quite right in the head,” said Emerson.

Fontinelli folded his arms. “Right enough to cook up a lie the size of Alaska.”

“She cooks for a living.”

“So she’s a professional liar?” said Fontinelli.

They glared at each other, and there would have been some serious façade cracking going on if they weren’t interrupted by the rich, sweet scent of triple-berry pie. Triple berry pie…?

No, it wasn’t a hallucination. Fontinelli smelled it too, his nose in the air and his face lit up like a spotlight shop.

Emerson heaved himself around on the too-small chair. Every officer in the joint was staring at Olive Snook as she clipped across the floor in red stilettos and a low-cut turquoise dress – but they weren’t even looking at her; no, they were looking at the pie box.

So maybe Olive’s “drug them with pie” idea had merit.

“Olive Snook?” said Fontinelli. “The real Olive Snook?”

Olive tried to hide her face behind the pie box. Fontinelli danced around the desk and relieved her of it. He took a deep sniff. “Trying to bribe a police officer on top of—”

“It’s my lunch,” said Emerson, taking the box from Fontinelli and setting it next to the desk. No, drugging them all with pie was a bad idea. If Fontinelli got a hold of the box he would never share.

Fontinelli scowled. “I’m going to get the other Miss Snook,” he said, and left.

Olive leaned against Emerson’s chair (possible the only time she’d ever been taller than him, even when he was sitting down). “You should have let him taste the pie,” she said. “It’s only—”

Emerson made a pinching motion with his hands.

Her voice softened. “—homeopathic, it’s—”

Emerson pinched the air, harder.

Whispering: “—perfectly harmless, it—”

“Next time,” said Emerson, pinching again, “this is going on your mouth.”

Olive fell silent.

But Chuck, striding across the station, poised despite the handcuffs, took up the slack. “It’s all right!” she chirruped, prancing up to stand next to Olive. “I’ve told Officer Fontinelli all about the fact that I’m an illegal alien from Italy who Ned met while he was at a berry crostata conference in Venice. It was so romantic when he smuggled me out of Italy to get me away from my abusive ex-husband Giacomo Solo!”

“Miss Snook,” said Fontinelli, to the real Olive. “Why don’t you tell me what this imposter’s real name is, and maybe I’ll won’t pursue twenty-five to life.”

Olive glowered.

“I already told you my real name,” said Chuck. “Maria Carlotta Venizio Saviano Pims Solo!”

Dead Girl would make up a name the length of the Mississippi.

“Wanna make something of it?” said Olive. She leaned on his desk menacingly, her fake turquoise nails clicking on the wood.

Fontinell shifted uncomfortably. “So where is this Ned character?” he asked.

“In Italy,” said Chuck. “He has to fight a duel with Giacomo.”

“Their story just strikes me as so romantic,” said Olive, clasping her hands and leaning forward so Fontinelli could see her cleavage. “You wouldn’t want to break that up by throwing Chu—the other Olive in jail, would you? It would be like breaking up Romeo and Juliet!”

“Romeo and Juliet died,” said Fontinelli.

“Yes, but first they had a beautiful love story, after Romeo abandoned poor Rosaline who never did anything wrong except not be Juliet who Romeo shouldn’t have even looked at anyway,” said Olive.

Emerson cleared his throat. “The point,” he said, “is that they’ve been though a lot of suffering, and you ought to let them go before the fruit Carlotta bought spoils.”

Dead Girl looked disappointed at this quotidian story.

“Which reminds me,” said Fontinelli. “That car of yours. What’s wrong with it?”

“Wrong with it?” said Dead Girl.

“The plate of plastic?” said Fontinelli.

“It’s a protective measure,” said Chuck.

“In case Giacomo magically shows up in the United States?”

“He has…connections,” said Chuck.

“With Columbians!” said Olive.

Emerson sighed. He should have vetoed the Columbians up front.

“Now it’s Columbians, huh?”

“Giacomo was a big time drug dealer,” said Chuck. “That’s why we need to keep my presence here on the down low, otherwise he might hear and—”

“You didn’t mention that before,” said Fontinelli.

Emerson decided he would give them a crash course in lying to the police. Later. “International pie smuggling rings,” he said instead. “You didn’t know those refer to drugs?”

“Oh yes,” said Chuck. “Pie is the current slang term in Italy for cocaine.”

Fontinelli’s thin eyebrows had just about disappeared into the disbelieving creases on his forehead. “I think you’re lying,” he said. “I think you’re lying about all of it. Drug cartels, Italy, your affection for this “Ned” person, if he even exists. It’s all going to fall down like a house of cards the instant your real secret comes out.”

Emerson had only Olive and Chuck’s split second glance to warn him that they had hatched a whole new plot. “Actually,” said Olive, pressing her cheek to Chuck’s and beaming, as if they could kill Fontinelli through cuteness poisoning. “We’re lovers. Lovers of the same-sex persuasion. The plastic through the car is so we won’t make out in traffic.”

“That’s the real reason I’m here illegally, because we can’t get properly married,” said Chuck, making her eyes all big and liquid and tragic. “I should have told you before,” she said. “I thought it was simpler this way.”

For a moment Emerson thought it had worked. Then—

“Officers?” yelled Fontinelli. “Look up the “Miss Snooks”—” with air quotes. No officer of the law should ever resort to air quotes—“for repeatedly lying to a police officer and being extremely obnoxious.”

And Olive and Chuck were led away in handcuffs. “You’re going to regret that,” said Emerson.

“Uh huh?” said Fontinelli. “Whaddaya gonna do about it?”

Emerson sat back, thoughtful.

Fontinelli glared at him.

Emerson frowned back, a rictus of doom.

But Fontinelli wasn’t finished yet; he squinted his glare up into a glower, till he resembled nothing so much as a constipated pitbull. And nothing makes a pitbull angry like constipation.

It was time to pull out the big guns. Emerson gave his face muscles a little work out. "What are you doing?" demanded Fontinelli, breaking his glare to stare in confusion.

Point to Emerson. Fontinelli remembered himself and glared again, but it was too late. Emerson had added a scowl to the frown. Emerson’s scowls had won acclaim in three county fairs. He would have won state if he hadn’t left early to take a case involving a grandfather clock and a deformed cockatiel.

“I’m going to talk to Julieta,” Emerson said, his voice raspy. “I’m going to tell her all about you.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Fontinelli said, but his eyes twitched to the photograph and his glower broke irretrievably.

"Let them go," said Emerson. "Or it’s about time Julieta knew all about how you forged that break up note I supposedly sent her."

"She'll never believe you," said Fontinelli, but he was breaking. Sweat glistened in the creases of his forehead.

“Sure she will,” said Emerson. “Your marriage isn’t going to well. I’m sure she’s looking for an out.”

Fontinelli’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Emerson sat back and folded his hands on his stomach. Fontinelli swallowed again, twisted his wedding ring…”Officers,” he said, defeat in his voice. “Bring back the Miss Snooks. We’ve made a mistake.

And the officers brought Chuck and Olive back. Emerson stood up as gracefully as possible from the tiny chairs, and held out his elbows. “Miss Snook,” he said. “And Miss Carlotta.”

And they collected Ned’s car and went back to the Pie Hole, where they shared the story and a Georgia peach pie with Ned.

Of course, they’d forgotten Olive’s drugged triple-berry pie at the police station. But that’s another story.

The End.