9.
	Max grabbed Lupe’s shirt collar and rammed him forcefully up against the stall's chilly surface, jutting the gun into the nook of his jaw. The poor goat-anthro never received abuse of this nature from a fellow anthropomorphic being before, especially not one with a freaking hand cannon and one good eye. Max wasn’t sure how much more he could tolerate before snapping and doing something he’d probably regret later. 
	So he took initiative of the situation.
"Do they know that we're here right now? Here, in this goddam lumber mill, right beneath their goddam feet?" His single right eye appeared to be doused with gasoline and lit aflame, burning ferociously.
	Lupe shook his head with bewildered confusion. “What?” 
Wrong answer.
“Sciorrenzo! My former accomplice and pusher-daddy. Lupe, does he have any influence over your higher-ups? Please tell me they didn’t–”
“How am I supposed to know, amigo? I’m here with you right now. I’ve still got your sperm aftertaste in my mouth, for fuck’s sake! Obviously I wouldn’t know anything about any Scorensia or whoever since I’m not out there searching for the basta–”
“MotherFUCKING FUCKER!” Max yelled. He aimed his pistol towards the ceiling of the bathroom and fired off a single deafening shot. The report echoed with a roar that barreled through the small enclosed space and rattled the linoleum tiles. Even the water in the porcelain toilet seats rippled, disturbed into tiny wavelets. The cloying scent of sulfur and cordite had imbued both of their sinuses as Max took aim at Lupe’s trembling stubby adorably attractive face, frightened beyond logic and reason. Max cleared his throat and in a very calm demeanor, said, “I hate repeating myself so I’ll ask you one more time, capische?”
“…Okay.” Lupe whispered. His ears were buzzing so hard that the only way to tell what Max kept on saying was by reading his shep-coon lips and comprehending his speech patterns.
“Right. Now as I asked before, did the bastards find out that we're here yet?! None of your own people are aware of my presence in this place, I take it? They wouldn't have been hired to, say, weed me out into the wide open, would they? Answer me, Guadalupe!!” Max hollered.
Lupe raised his hoofen hands to the sides of his head and groaned. The stress of the situation had nearly caused the goat-kid to faint from exhaustion. A tiny stream of blood trickled from one of his ear canals. His lower lip quivered progressively harder and his eyes grew misty, on the verge of shedding confused and horrified tears.
A droll awkward silence filtered in between the two anthros, contrasted by the heavy disco music blaring out loud from inside the warehouse. Max loosened his grip around Lupe's shirt collar and the goat-anthro hunched over, coughing from bad air circulation. Max’s grip was always strong, even for his body type. He may have appeared to others as an unhealthily skinny punk upon first glance, but put him smack-dab in the center of a trying scenario involving probable risk (including the abhorrent promise of near-death by his former father figure) and see how scrawny Maxwell Blackburnadeaux remains.
Max brought the hammer back down with his thumb-paw and lowered his pistol slightly, still keeping his aim fixated on Lupe, just not at his head. For now any further funny business attempted would result in a rather attractive and sizable hole in the young goat-kid's chest.
“Listen to me if you want to live, Lupe.” Max demanded.
“Okay…” Lupe replied. His tone of voice took an uneasy quivering nose-dive. The young kid's peach-fuzzed lips were pried shut, sealed tighter than a clenched fist. His eyes were literally bulging from their sockets with tremendous awe and fascination over such an amazingly romantic - if not completely awkward and painful - evening this anthropomorphic psychopath had shown him thus far. Staring into Max’s one bold engaging German shepherd/raccoon hybrid eye, brown cornea and slender brow, lashes blinking with fluttering whips, his potent canine gaze intoxicating the kid's entire senses, Lupe suddenly began to feel a strange electric sensation creep back into his groin and without warning, a fresh erection sprung forth. He attempted to conceal the one-eyed trouser trout’s giddy cameo appearance by pushing it down against his pant leg, cheeks blushing furiously beet-red beneath his course wiry goat-fur. Holy shit amigo, nice timing to become aroused once more!
“Right,” Max said, then continued. “A few months ago I was sent here by my own informants to cash in on a liberal payment of weapons and ammunition that was slated to arrive at this location exclusively. There were only a few others, myself included, all sent forth with equal directives in mind and a similar goal to be reached – this very warehouse. This total shit-shack in the middle of bum-fuck and nowhere. These weapons we were meant to collect were supposed to have arrived in this very location to be bartered for a certain underground market price. Primo rates! Supply and demand! We were sent in as scouts and couriers, drug dealers and gun-runners, to make the deliveries, to roll out smooth and altogether successfully. Of course, all the goods were originating from this very same building. Like the Grand Central Station of druggies, right here in this very forest. You follow me so far?”
Lupe nodded his head up and down rapidly in agreement. Max smirked generously at him and cleared his throat, trying to talk over the sound of the outside bass tone. Yelling chants in Spanish to the ravers through a bullhorn, the DJ’s set was just getting started and yet there wasn’t much time for anything less than formalities, so Max had to make this a quick explanation, especially if he didn't wish to have his head impaled upon a fucking stick.
“Okay then… so when me and a few others unveiled the contraband supply, we soon came to the horrible realization that the bastards had supplied the wrong damn firearms to us. Not only that, they were incompatible with the ammunition included as well. A massive fuck-up by far. I could have cared less personally, but my employers were far less than impressed with the situation overall. They ordered me directly back to this very building tonight in order to oversee a specific operation."
"What kind of operation, amigo?"
Max smiled. "Why, rig it to the teeth with plastic explosives and blow it all the fuck up, of course. We were given small remote detonators in the form of pagers and instructed to set 'em off ‘when the timing is just right’, quote-on-quote. The only problem is that the pagers are defective. They don't goddam work! Mine doesn't, at least. Perhaps there's still one that isn't busted. And I have a hankering feeling that I know exactly who has the little fucker." Max said, growling softly beneath his breath, reminiscing. Max's eyes cleared free of the painful memories and he returned back to the present moment. "Evidently your being here wasn’t as much of a mistake as I’m admitting to you after all." Max sighed and rubbed at Lupe's shoulder, gazing into his goat eyes with a forlorn expression. "Guadalupe, I believe both our suppliers have set us up to be in here purposefully at the exact same moment those goddam explosions are set to go off. They gave us faulty beepers to keep us in line, but essentially, they're running the show here.”
“Wait, so you mean…” Lupe stared questioningly at Max, attempting to recollect what he’d just heard, shaking his head uneasily and clearing the haze from his collective thought process just enough to grasp what Max had told him.
“That’s right kid, if you had shown up earlier you’d have been out of this place fast enough to have seen fireworks from a distance; me too as well, I guess. However, it seems as though we may both end up being roasted into fucking fleshy marshmallows if we don’t act quickly and get the lily-livered Christ out of here!” Max said. A small sound of tinkling glass caused Max's ears to perk up. He looked around cautiously, ensuring nobody was listening in to their conversation, performing the glorious act of criminalistic eavesdropping.
As he was about to unlock the stall and help the kid to his feet to plot a narrow escape, the restroom door flung open from outside. A multitude of voices flooded in between the non-stop clustered patterns of groovy dance beats.
“We need to kill those dirty rats before they totally narc us out!”
“I get dibs on that coon-dog faggot!”
“Bullshit, I get dibs on him; you can go for his butt-buddy boy-toy goat-bitch!”
“Like hell I will!”
“Chew on this, you piece a' fuckin' shit.”
Uproarious laughter echoed through the bathroom, hollow and droll, followed by a sweet acrid scent of marijuana - goddam stoner renegades. Max always seemed to ascertain the best of good luck when it came to routine business engagements, so it fucking seemed. He inhaled deep and let loose with a troubled sigh, hoping these rouges wouldn’t discover him or Guadalupe inside the bathroom stall. He didn't want a gun's magazine clip empied into his shep-coon chest.
“Would both you silly ignorant cunts just chill the fuck out already? Sheesh Crimony, I swear I feel like a damn babysitter sometimes, the way you fools always...” The rest became drowned out – nothing more than barely audible mumbles and softly-spoken nonsense, carrying over the implosive throbbing rave beats (now graced with a Mariachi side-rhythm of some kind), muffled enough to be just barely heard.
A shattering sound echoed through the bathroom with a loud brittle crackling. Millions of tiny glass shards came raining down upon the tiling. A wide diamond teardrop-shaped sliver slid into the occupied stall. Max looked down to see his own reflection staring back up at him. He cocked his head at an angle to appeal to his single eye and used the shard of reflective paned glass to peep in on this group assembled and now hot on his ring-tailed trail, ready to strike both him and his newfound butt-buddy prick down hard and nasty. Inconveniently, Max could only see two of them, from their undersides up. He knew for a fact that there were more though.
“All of you scum buckets, shut the hell up and listen to me and I mean RIGHT fucking now!” The others in the room hushed up immediately, save for a brief cough or clearing of one’s throat. The fluorescent bulbs suspended upon the plaster ceiling flickered dully, attracting a small gathering of dainty moths. They twisted and bent their ribbed satellite antennae to and fro while swirling around the air within the thin light bulb’s aura, dive-bombing and swooping through the sodium-arc glare in strange aerial patterns.
Obviously this more dominant and tenor-octave voice belonged to none other than the alpha leader of the pack, or at least as well as Max figured.
The clamoring voices faded down softer and fainter until silence upswept his ears. Max peered through the sperm-crusted glory hole embedded into the stall's surface and scouted out about five thugs, maybe six. What appeared to be either a caribou or a large buck scratched an itchy spot against his buttock as he inhaled his sinuses and hocked a chunky yellow blotch of snot into the standing urinal bowl, right next to the coagulating vomit. Beside him, a fox and a random mammal of some kind (maybe a ferret or a weasel by the looks of it) were the ones standing closest in proximity to the one and only occupied bathroom stall. Their tails flicked back and forth, whipping alongside each slight nuance and gestured movement of their owners. Max considered the risk of prying the door open and firing his weapon into the minor disorganized group of hit-anthros, probably going out in a slew of spraying gunfire, a real Bonnie and Clyde-inspired fate. Unfortunately, his plan of action was interrupted by a sudden frenzy of swift pain that exploded from his thigh. He winced and glanced back at Guadalupe, who had cautiously whipped out a switchblade and impaled four inches of its glinting steel into Maxwell’s furry shep-coon leg without even missing a single beat.
Whatever patience Max may have possessed before had now been inevitably shattered beyond repair.