

The Shrinking Nuts Case

By

Gary J. Davies

Published by Gary J. Davies at Smashwords

The Shrinking Nuts Case

Copyright 2014 Gary J. Davies

Smashwords Edition License Notes

Thank you for downloading this e-book. This book is the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the author.

With the exception of certain authorized library distributions, this e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com (or affiliated authorized e-book distributor) and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This novel is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to places, events or locales, is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my wife Susan, who puts up with my time consuming hobbies, to my book loving daughters Kristin and Kimberly, and to my favorite author James P. Blaylock for his enchanting early elven fantasy novels. Also I thank William Shatner for his inspiring writing efforts; presumably if he can write novels, so can anyone else. I thank my artist-brother Robert Davies for help with the cover. Thanks also to Microsoft for their spell-checker; which enables the formation of recognizable words even by engineers. Finally, I express thanks to the private detective TV programs of my youth and to numerous old detective movies of the 1940's and 1950's for inspiring this particular novel.

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 A SMALL PROBLEM

CHAPTER 2 SMALL IS USEFUL BUT BIGGER IS BETTER

CHAPTER 3 CASE CLOSED

CHAPTER 4 THE FLAT TIRE CAPER

CHAPTER 5 CURSES

CHAPTER 6 UNINVITED GUESTS

CHAPTER 7 PRINCE

CHAPTER 8 HENRY

CHAPTER 9 THE FOLKS

CHAPTER 10 RAILROADED

CHAPTER 11 JAIL BREAK

CHAPTER 12 YET MORE COMPLICATIONS

CHAPTER 13 RESEARCH

CHAPTER 14 ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

CHAPTER 15 TENSE HOMECOMING

CHAPTER 16 MICKS

CHAPTER 17 BANK JOB

CHAPTER 18 JAILHOUSE ROCK

CHAPTER 19 ELF INVASION

CHAPTER 20 EXPEDITION WEST

CHAPTER 21 PRISONER (AGAIN)

CHAPTER 22 CASE CLOSED AGAIN, THIS TIME FOR GOOD

About the Author and Pending Novels

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CHAPTER 1

A SMALL PROBLEM

I was blissfully snoozing away somewhere in dream-land when WHAM! Something big and heavy but soft hit me across the back like a ton of marshmallows, waking and knocking the wind out of me.

"What did you do with Jake, you little pervert!" roared an impossibly loud, deep voice. Wham! Wham!

It was one hell-of-a crazy fantasy/nightmare come true. Between blows I looked up in the dim light and saw an unbelievably colossal dame: voluptuous, light skinned, dark haired, and butt-naked, holding an enormous mattress-sized pillow in her huge hands, with which she was beating the crap out of me. The giant dummy kept demanding that I produce Jake.

"I am Jake!" I finally blurted out between blows. The beating stopped. Too-bright lights came on.

"Boss! Is it really you? Oh my God!" boomed the giant, clearly distressed. "Oh, my poor, poor, Jake!"

I finally looked up past the gigantic stunning bod and recognized the over-sized face of Elaine, my receptionist. Now I recognized the rest of her too. I had seen it all before often enough, but not this huge. When Elaine finds me sleeping at the office she often strips down and wakes me up with a little sex. It triples her value to me as an employee, and I figure it makes up for the low pay I give her. But what the hell had happened to her? She looked at least thirteen feet tall, and sounded like a tuba! And why was she whopping me with a giant pillow?

Painfully moving my numb and sore pillow-whipped self, I slipped off the sofa and got another little shock. Getting to my feet required a way-too-long drop to the floor, and left me standing in an enormous room with twenty-foot ceilings and giant furniture. Very familiar looking giant furniture! This looked like my trusty little old dump of a private-detective office all right, but everything was huge! I also noticed that I was wearing only an extra-extra-extra-large and heavy duty white tee-shirt that dragged on the floor. "What gives, Baby?" I asked the distressed giant Elaine. "Why is everything king-sized?"

"You've been shrunk, Boss!" she said excitedly, as if a crazy statement like that could explain a damn thing, while she put her clothes back on. "In the dim light I thought you were some sort of tiny pervert dwarf or something," she added, almost in tears.

Hell, at that point I didn't even mind losing the view. There are a (very) few things, like death, over-due taxes, football, or, as I had just found out, talk about your own body shrinking, that can sometimes get a guy's mind off of sex temporarily. "People don't just shrink, Baby!" I corrected her. I sat down in my favorite leather recliner; or rather I climbed up into what looked like it but was gigantic. "Besides, wouldn't I notice it happening? Like wouldn't I feel it?" I was shifting my butt and pushing it back to get the giant chair to recline, but it wouldn't budge an inch. "Shi-i-it!" I complained sincerely, in frustration.

"Who the heck knows what shrinking feels like?" she replied. "Has this ever happened to you before? Your voice is higher too, Jake! You sound like a chipmunk. That's because your vocal cords and everything have shrunk proportionally. More than 50% shrinkage linearly, I estimate, plus a height-cubed-proportional mass loss, which together would help explain a multi-octave change in voice pitch. By the way, with a more than 88% drop in body mass you might as well forget about getting that chair to recline."

She was showing off her brains and university degrees again, and though it usually bugs me when somebody does that, especially when it's a beautiful dame, at the moment I was too buzzed for it to bother me so much, and I let it pass. This whole crazy thing was making me dizzy. A guy has his limits. Chipmunk? I sounded like a chipmunk? What kind of chipmunk? The kind with the cute little black and white stripes down its back? I had to sit there for a minute and think things out.

As I did, it finally sank in. I HAD shrunk! Nutty as it was, it was the only damn idea that made any sense at all! "Jesus-H farking Cheee-rist!" I complained, shaking my poor little shrunken head.

"Well, at least it hasn't affected your vocabulary," she remarked. "I suppose that to work properly on a macro-scale, all organs must have been shrunken proportionally. They must have thrown in something to compensate for brain loss though, at least for the higher brain functions. They must have somehow increased synaptic and neuron density, because you seem to be just as, ah, intelligent as ever."

They? Who was she talking about that could have done this to me? The federal government? My landlady old Mrs Binneman?

The giant Elaine walked to her receptionist desk and rummaged around in a drawer for something. Now that she had her heels on, she looked fourteen feet tall, and a damn good-looking fourteen feet at that, in her short skirt and tight blouse, even though now she was dressed. She was a perfectly proportioned dame, including c-cup sized boobs, slim waist, and nicely rounded rear. Her legs were incredible, but now they were longer than me. Hey, I'm a leg man, but this was ridiculous. A guy has his limits.

I wasn't thinking so much about giant dames or shrunken brains though; I was worrying about other organs I was more fond of that might have shrunk too. I copped a quick feel through the tee-shirt and worked out some math. "Holy shits!" I quietly exclaimed, in shock. Ultimate shrinkage!

As though she had read my mind, Elaine pulled a ruler out of her desk. "Let's see how you measure up, big boy," she said, as she walked towards me with a mischievous smile on her huge but pretty face.

It was extenuating circumstances; I knew that I wouldn't measure up.

"Stand up Boss," she instructed, as she pulled me off the chair. Then to my relief she only measured my height. "Thirty inches when on your tippy-toes," she announced. "Two-foot-six. Well less than half your original six-foot-two." She lifted me up by my under-arms. "Under 15 pounds, I'd guess. I've hefted bigger turkeys."

She seemed to be getting a kick out of being able to toss me around. I was glad when she finally put me down; I didn't like being picked up like a little twerp. I don't see how little kids can stand it. "This is nuts!" I said perceptively, as I gathered up the tripping edge of my baggy tee-shirt and headed for the liquor cabinet.

I keep booze in the office mostly to ease the miseries of my customers and loosen their money up a bit. It's part of my business model. Almost any broad whining about her rotten husband is more likely to pay for my investigative services if she has a few belts of rot-gut in her. I also frequently raid my liquor cabinet to ease my own miseries. That's part of my business model too. A guy has to keep himself going somehow. I tried to open a new bottle of cheap brandy that seemed to weigh at least twenty pounds, but the twist cap wouldn't budge. It must be one of those child-resistant caps that turn out to be adult-proof, I figured.

"Let me do that, Boss," the giant Elaine volunteered, and she soon poured out a couple of giant-sized shot glasses of the stuff, a full one for her, and a half-full one for me. She chugged down all of hers before I could even manage a sip of mine.

"I didn't think you drank, Baby," I remarked, sucking mine all down quick to politely keep up with the lady. After I hired her I had tried unsuccessfully to booze her up plenty of times, until I found out that for sex I didn't even have to get her drunk. I hadn't offered her a drink in months. Why spend good money on booze to get laid if you don't have to?

"You know I don't drink; not normally anyway," she replied. "But this isn't exactly a normal day, especially for you."

"Hell Baby, I've been in plenty of tough jams before," I pointed out. I tried to be my usual confident macho self and walked back to my recliner, but climbing up onto a nearly chest-high chair while wearing a baggy over-sized tee-shirt and holding a giant bottle of brandy isn't easy, and the giant Elaine ended up helping me again, damn it.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, as she reclined my chair for me as if I were some kind of invalid.

We? "I plan on getting drunk," I said, as I struggled with the big bottle. Finally I cleverly positioned most of its weight on a chair-arm so that I could control the thing better as I drank from it.

"You're already drunk," she remarked. "That drink I just gave you was the equivalent of four or five shots, given that compact little body of yours."

"Swell, Baby! Think of the money I'll save on booze."

She might have noticed a touch of sarcasm in my statement; she's really perceptive with stuff like that. "Not that I can blame you," she replied, "but don't you think we should try to do something? What if you're still shrinking?"

That was a discomforting thought; so discomforting that I put the brandy bottle down beside me and capped it shut after only a couple more big yummy gulps. I was feeling pretty tipsy so I looked around to see if the booze had helped any. In my experience lots of times booze makes bad things better. But nope, it hadn't helped much this time. Everything was still giant sized, or I was still shrunk, or whatever. I was beginning to feel a lot better about it though, so the booze was helping some on that score. But as usual, Elaine was right. For sure something more solid had to be done about this shrinking business, since not even I could stay drunk forever. "OK then, Baby, do you have any suggestions?"

"Well, you should be measured every so often, to see if you're still shrinking."

"Great idea! That way we'll know just how lousy things are in terms of inches. No; what I mean is, have you got any ideas on how to get me back to normal?"

"To start with you could call a doctor, or go to a hospital."

"Hell no, woman! Those jokers can't even deal with head colds! I'd end up as an exhibit at some damn university or circus or something."

"You're probably right. OK, so I guess it's up to the Jake Simon Detective Agency then."

She was right. It was up to me. It was my case. Worst of all was the business model it implied. I was my own client, so I'd be paying myself, and I knew what a deadbeat I was! "Shi-i-it!" I remarked astutely. I was already looking forward to looking back at this case.

"You think that you might possibly need some extra help from me on this one, Boss?"

She had been bugging me lately, complaining that she wanted to help out on cases by doing actual detective work out in the field, but so far I had always come up with really good excuses to prevent that. Mainly she had her job and I had mine, I figured. Mine was man's work. Hers was whatever I wanted her to do, which didn't include man's work. But maybe I could make an exception, just this one time, since at the moment I certainly had no idea what the hell to do. A guy has his limits. Also, it was probably the brandy, but I was feeling generous. "OK Baby, you're hereby temporarily promoted to detective, second class," I told her. She was Catholic, so I crossed myself.

"What about pay?"

Pay? Crud! Not only would I be paying myself, I'd be paying her too! "Same pay and you've got to do all your normal office stuff too." Sex included, I figured, though I'd probably need to forget about some of my favorite moves, given my puny size.

"Figures. Do I get to wear a Panama hat like yours?"

"It's a fedora, Baby; Panama hats are made of straw and they're for cheap race-track hustlers. My fedora is made of genuine wool felt with a high quality genuine silk ribbon." I had started wearing a pricy hat and growing a mustache to up-class my image. Only a few old-timers wore fedoras nowadays, plus some of the up-and-coming twenty-something yuppies. I thought of myself as an up-and-coming old-timer, as I had recently nosed past forty. Anyway, my brown fedora was becoming my trademark and I wasn't sure I wanted her to wear one too. It was my trademark; not her trademark.

Of course she'd look sexy in a fedora, but then she looked sexy and terrific in anything, and a decent hat would cost over a hundred bucks. If it was required for her job she might even try to stiff me for its cost. I decided to get her mind off the subject and let her down easy. "First you've got to earn the hat, Baby. You got any ideas about my little problem?"

"I've got questions. Like for instance, where did the rest of you go?"

"What do you mean?"

"You lost over two hundred pounds since yesterday. Ever hear of the conservation of mass principal? Physicists are sort of fond of that one. So what happened to it?"

Suddenly I realized where it went. "Shit," I explained, very precisely.

"You don't have to cuss all the time, do you Jake? This is serious."

"No Baby, I mean, shit is where it went. Last night I felt really lousy, that's why I never got all the way back to my apartment. I figured it was some kind of stomach virus. I had an unbelievable case of the runs."

"While you shrank?" she asked, without even looking too disgusted. She had a pretty strong stomach and high tolerance for crude stuff, which is probably a good way to be for anyone hanging around me.

"I don't know Baby. After I got here to the office I drank some brandy, I was mostly asleep, and I felt like hell. But I guess that's right, I must have been shrinking and pooping myself away. Now that I think about it, I kind of remember that the pot seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. Damn near fell in a couple of times. At the time I was too sick and tired and boozed up to worry about it, I guess. Besides, I've had weirder times when I was liquored up. Like right now, for instance."

"OK, my next question is, how? This whole shrinking thing is totally impossible from a scientific standpoint. You still think it was a stomach virus?"

"How the hell should I know? I'm a P-I, not an M-D."

"Well, when did you first feel sick?"

"Last night about eight, I think. I had to cut out of a very important meeting with a very important new client. I have a strict rule to not puke or take dumps in a new client's home or office. It don't look professional."

"Sure, we're a high class business," she correctly noted.

"High class all the way, Baby. Anyway, this office was closer than my apartment, so I drove myself here quick. Very quick; I thought I was going to explode right there in the Ford. When I got here I headed straight for the john by way of the liquor cabinet. After taking care of that business I must have figured I'd sleep it off here on the sofa. End of story."

"What new client? Where?"

"I'm afraid that's all top secret, Baby; I pledged my client strict confidentiality. It's a matter of my professional integrity."

"Really, short stuff? Is your integrity really more important than your shoe size?"

Hell no. "John Grisim, seventh floor of the Tower Arms, downtown."

"THE John Grisim, multi-billionaire?"

OK, this was better! I was saved! It wasn't just deadbeat me paying for myself and the giant Elaine, a damn billionaire was paying! I couldn't help but smile. "Impressed?"

"First let me see what he paid you so far."

"Crud! I left before he even gave me a retainer! I must have been even sicker than I thought. We did shake hands on it though, so as much as the rich bastard can be trusted, we're on the job." Trust a billionare? That was damned flimsy, but I decided to go with it.

"Well, what did he want from us, detective-wise?"

I noticed that she said 'us', like we were partners or something, but I let it pass. "He was just starting to explain it to me when I felt sick and had to cut out of there. He yapped about some kind of weird problems at his bank. Then he yapped about some sort of game for rich folks that he was supposed to play today. It was all weird as hell. Then he said that he wanted me to help him."

"Help him how?"

"Save him from a weird fate, he said. Death maybe? I don't know; we didn't get into the details yet. But I got the impression he wasn't sure himself. He was nervous about the game because of weird stuff happening around his bank. He gave me some papers with a few rules of the rich-dude game on them or something, and then I had to take a big dump and left the place in a really big hurry, and that was that. End of story."

"I don't get it."

"Which part?"

"Any of it. No offense, but why would a billionaire hire you to help with problems at his bank or with his personal security? He must have his own bank and private security people."

"Maybe he heard about me someplace. I've cracked some pretty big cases, you know."

"You've only handled petty divorces and lost dogs since I've worked here."

"Well, I've found some damn important lost dogs and broken up some pretty damned important marriages, both here in North Jersey and in the Apple. As far as this game thing goes, Grisim gave me the impression that rich folks get bored sometimes. Life's too damn easy for them."

"Sure. Being filthy rich and living an easy life has got to be really tough on them."

"Right. So once in a while they like to do something crazy, like drugs, sky diving, unsafe sex, or goofy games."

"But what kind of 'game' kills people?"

I climbed down from the recliner and shuffled over to a chair where I had apparently tossed most of my clothes from last night. From the pocket of my huge old brown suit-coat that today seemed to be made from heavy-duty canvas I retrieved several papers, folded down to pocket size. Pocket sized yesterday; more like newspaper-sized today. "He gave me this stuff, but I didn't have a chance to talk with him about it or look at it." I handed the papers to Elaine, and she studied them for several minutes. Damn she was cute; even giant sized and wearing clothes she was cute. Smart as hell too, but I could put up with that part, as she was a dynamite sex partner. You guys out there shouldn't sell smart chicks short, that's my advice.

"Most of it is just stuffy legal wording describing what the game winners get, and so forth," she said, after looking them over. "Each of the several super-rich participants contributes big bucks to play, with most of the money going towards what will be won. The winner can get up to a billion dollars, if there is only one winner. Pretty nifty. But there isn't much information here. The names of the game participants aren't even given."

"Too incriminating," I reasoned. "Who the billionaire players are is probably only known by the super-rich participants and a few trusted game people."

"As to rules for this so-called game, there isn't much here," she added. "All that Grisim has to do is show up at the First National Bank this afternoon before four PM and prove his identity by a simple process described by these papers, and he gets the money, or at least his share of it. The pot of money is to be split evenly between those that show up. That doesn't seem like much of a game, does it?"

"Maybe rich dudes don't have enough time for poker or monopoly, so they came up with this lame gig. Hey, it probably beats bingo." A billion bucks? The whole thing was disgusting. Think of it: Grisim owned the Third National Bank. What he won at the First National Bank would probably be transferred electronically to his bank, without anyone even seeing any actual nifty green paper, or figuring on spending any. What a waste! Money is wasted on rich people. "Crashers allowed?" I asked, hopefully. Even a measly few million would do wonders for my own bank account. I'd know what to do with that kind of dough, if I ever got my hands on it! I had some inside dope on some upcoming horse races, for instance.

"Low-lives like us need not apply, I'm sure. Oh! Here's a couple of very interesting things. First, any player that causes the death of anyone or otherwise impedes another player during the course of the game forfeits his or her share."

"Gee whiz, that would be a crying shame." But then why was Grisim so worried about getting killed or whatever? No way is any rich dude going to risk losing big money by breaking those rules! They worship the green stuff, though they don't know what the hell to do with it except use it to get more of it. "What's the other interesting thing, Baby?"

"This one is really weird," she laughed. "Evidently, it's supposed to be a clue, but it simply says that 'one plus one multiplies,' whatever that means."

"That doesn't seem too helpful. We need more to go on than that."

"OK, then I guess that now we head for the Towers Building and Grisim. Right, Boss?"

"You've got to be kidding. It's only a mile or so, but I can't go out in public like this! What about my tough-guy rep?"

"What tough-guy rep? This Grisim case has got to somehow tie in with your shrinking, Boss; it's our only lead. You can disguise yourself as a kid. Or would you rather wait here until you're small enough for me to carry you around in my purse?"

I let the 'what rep' crack pass. My rep was mostly a guy-guy thing, and what the hells would Elaine know about that? "OK, let's go then, Baby," I said, heading for the front door.

"Wait a minute Boss, you'll need to get dressed first," she said.

She had a point. I was still wearing only the king-sized tee-shirt, which I could only walk in by holding up high enough so that I didn't trip over it. But my brown suit sure wouldn't fit me now, and crap: my nice brown fedora probably wouldn't fit me either! My P-I overcoat would usefully cover me, but would be like walking around wearing a tent. Besides, it was July. Not even a P-I wore an overcoat in July.

"I'll run out quick and get you some new threads," she volunteered. "Meanwhile you better shave off that mustache. A little kid can't have a mustache, Jake."

She headed for the little clothing shop downstairs. Meanwhile, cursing as I did it, I shaved off the mustache. My safety razor was huge and dangerous; I had to be extra careful to avoid cutting myself. And damn it; it would take me more than a month to grow a good mustache back! When the giant Elaine got back I was trying on my fedora, and just like I thought, the thing was much too big; the damn thing covered my whole head! When I got it off me I saw that a grinning Elaine was pulling my new clothes out of several bags. Shopping makes women happy; you guys out there should remember that.

"These are baby clothes!" I complained. "I can't wear these!" The Superman briefs were OK; everything else sucked big-time. I like to at least wear a suit to fit my P-I image, but all she bought me besides the briefs was a tea shirt, over-alls, socks and shoes.

"That's the best stuff they had in a size three super-short and skinny."

"What's all this shit on it?" I pointed out the teddy bears and bunny rabbits on the otherwise baby-blue shirt and overalls. Definitely not my usual private detective style. Who the hells designed these rags?

"This is as plain as they come in that particular store. At least these are mostly blue; the only other thing in your size was a pink outfit with cute little kittens and baby ducks all over it. You want me to get you that one instead?"

Yuck! I don't have an opinion on ducks, one way or the other, but I don't like cats at all, the selfish little bastards. They remind me of me. "These will do," I conceded, as I carried the clothes into the bathroom and closed the huge door in order to put them on. I wasn't about to display my shrunken little body parts to anyone, not even to Elaine. I also took a quick look at the receipt from the kid-store, since I'd probably have to reimburse Elaine for these new threads. Damn! I was two hundred bucks in the hole on this case already! The new threads she got for me must be gold or something, I had to figure. Shi-i-it!

I had a hell of a time with kid-clothes buttons and snaps. I guess Elaine was right; I was a little bit drunk. Even so, how the hell little kids could do this, even assuming they were probably usually sober, puzzled the heck out of me. But I finally had it all on. Everything was baggy as hell, the overalls were short, and the shoes were so wide that they almost fell off my feet when I walked, but it all more or less fit.

The giant Elaine was waiting for me with another purchase when I came out of the bathroom. "What the hell is that thing?" I asked her. It looked like a cross between a backpack and a lawn-chair.

"It's an infant carrier. You sit in it facing forward and these straps hold it on my back. Great idea, right?"

"Wrong, Baby; I won't be hauled around town like a papoose."

"If you walk you'll draw a crowd. You look like a skinny, shrunken little man, not a kid, especially walking with that odd strutting swagger of yours. With you on my back, wearing your new hat, maybe we'll get away with it."

What odd strutting swagger? "New hat? You got me a new fedora?" I asked. Maybe things were looking up!

She pulled out a blue strap-on baseball kind of cap with a too-cute yellow toy bird attached to the top of it, and put it on my head, despite my protests. "And clean up your language, Jake; try to talk like a little kid."

She strapped me into the carrier, and then hoisted it onto her back, without even giving me a chance to protest. I decided to go along with all of it. She had that determined look she gets sometimes. At least I was facing forward, and by looking over her shoulders I could see ahead pretty good.

"If I'm the kid, I guess I can't be calling you Baby," I shrewdly reasoned.

"You call me Auntie, and I'll call you Junior," she stated.

She was turning into a real take-charge kind of broad, something I normally can't stand, but I let it pass. After all, she was a damn sexy broad, and a giant, and she had me attached to her back.

"I'll need my wallet and gun, Auntie," I requested, before we left the office. She got them for me. They were big and heavy as hell, but without them I felt incomplete. I hid them both under my overalls, held in place by the elastic waistband of my Superman briefs, so that I was comforted by the feel of what seemed like twenty pounds of cold deadly Smith and Wesson revolver down one leg and a giant wallet full of credit cards down the other. A couple of the charge-cards were so new that they weren't even maxed-out. As she carried me down the stairs from my third story office to street level I reached around her and made a grab for Auntie's boobs, as that would have comforted me even more, but my new arms were too damn short. Short-armed toddlers probably miss out on a lot of good stuff, I had to figure.

When we got outside, people, cars, trucks, birds, bees, trees, and so forth were all giant sized, and I had to get used to being a little twerp all over again. No doubt about it; this was going to be one hell of a day. But hey, you've gotta play the hand you're dealt; that's life folks.

We took a cab, as the Ford was low on gas and I didn't want to waste any time on side trips. The closest gas station was on the other side of town. Taking the cab would clean out my wallet, but it would most quickly get me a retainer check from a billionaire, and I'd need that retainer check for sure, to pay for all the crazy extravagances of this case like cabs and baby clothes.

Elaine lifted me off her back and put me on the seat next to her, still strapped into the papoose contraption, and she put a seatbelt around the whole thing. Other than that the short cab drive to the Towers was pretty much uneventful, though the driver tried to stretch out the route and I had to set him straight. Surprised him. He also seemed surprised when I was the one to pay for the cab, with money from somewhere deep down in my fancy teddy-bear and bunny covered overalls.

When we got out of the cab at the Towers and Elaine hoisted me onto her back again, there he was suddenly, bigger than life and twice as ugly: Detective Joe Kebony, my old partner on the Force and my best buddy. The big guy looked to me to be about sixteen feet tall. He wore his old brown suit and his beat-up brown fedora, like always. Joe don't know or give a rat's-ass about fashion. His fedora had a yellow ribbon around it, the dummy. Mine was black, since as everyone but Joe knows, black goes with everything. Besides, in the New York area you have to wear some black, it's pretty much a requirement. One of the big guy's favorite doughnut shops was nearby, I remembered, that's probably where he was headed. It was too early in the day for a bar, even for Joe, but it was always doughnut time for the big lug. "Hi, Baby!" he rumbled, with a voice like a bull moose, as he lumbered towards us grinning.

Baby? He had somehow spotted me, even though I had ducked down in the papoose thing behind Elaine. I braced for some serious ribbing. He'd tell the rest of the guys at the Precinct, and they'd tell everybody in town, and I'd never hear the end of it. I'd never be able to walk into a bar without pointing and big laughs. Life would be pure hell.

Instead, he ignored me, and to my surprise the bastard planted a hell of a kiss on the willing lips of Elaine! It probably lasted only a couple of seconds but to me the kiss went on and on and didn't stop. My first impulse was to climb down and punch the guy's lights out, even though I would have only been able to reach up to the big guy's knees, but I found that I couldn't even get out of the carrier; Elaine had me strapped in good and tight. Finally, I squirmed up high enough in it to reach around Elaine and whack the bum along-side his big fat head, almost knocking the lug's hat off.

"Ouch! What the hell was that?" rumbled the big creep. "Hey! Is that a kid? What gives?"

"That's Junior. He's Jake's cousin's kid from South Jersey."

"No shit? Hey! He's sticking his tongue out at me and he flipped me the finger! The deformed little freak looks just like Jake! How'd you get stuck with the ugly brat?"

"Just a favor for Jake."

"So where is the full-sized creep?" He asked quietly as he grinned and looked all around like he expected to see me.

"Beats me," she replied equally quietly, "but I think he's somewhere very close."

"OK," he whispered and winked at her before announcing loudly: "You're too good for that bum. We still on for tonight?"

"Sure."

I kicked Elaine in the back for all that I was worth.

"I have to get going, Joe, I'll see you later," she said. She even gave the ugly bastard a quick kiss goodbye.

"OK, Baby. And when you see Jake, tell him he still owes me fifty," rumbled the giant rotten stinking bastard as he lumbered away.

When Joe was out of ear-shot, Elaine let me have it. "What am I, a soccer ball or something? That kick hurt!"

"Just trying to get your attention, Doll. What's with this 'Baby' handle bullshit he laid on you? Why would any broad nowadays put up with being called that? This is the twenty first century, for shit's sake! And then there was the kissing! And why the hell would you be seeing that bum tonight?"

"He's a nice guy. Besides, I thought he was your best friend."

"He was. So why are you going out with the big stinking bastard?"

"The usual reasons, not that it's any business of yours."

I was dumbfounded. After all, she had me, practically whenever she wanted me, at least on most weekdays during normal business hours. What more could any broad want? Sure, I had told her a few times that she shouldn't get too serious about me, but that was mostly to keep her from bringing up crazy things like marriage, or meeting parents, or whatever. Somehow I just never figured that she had a private life outside the office, seeing that she had me so much. And with Joe, of all people! What the hell? Joe was a big stupid lug! How could a super-smart girl like her go for a big stupid lug?

But a dame is just a dame, right? So why was I getting all bent out of shape? "Oh sure, Kid, it's a free country. I just kinda wondered, is all."

She didn't say nothing back, but I caught her reflection in the glass of the door as we entered the Towers lobby, and she had one of those 'I got-ya right where I want-ya' Mona-Lisa smiles on her face that they all get sometimes. What it all really meant exactly, I didn't have the foggiest. Who the hells can figure dames, so why even try?

Meanwhile, as planned, she hauled us straight to the Tower Arms elevators. Grisim had bought the whole damn Towers building and he used all the suites on the seventh floor for himself. "For good luck," he had said last night. Me, I always figured that all that luck stuff is bull. Chance is real, that's for sure, but you can't control it by throwing horseshoes over left shoulders at mirrors or however that stupid superstitious crap goes. Grisim had enough dough to buy all the grade-A good luck he wanted.

We ran into our first real problem when we got off the elevator at the seventh floor and found ourselves in a small reception room. A spiffy blonde babe had been the receptionist when I visited Grisim last night. That was yesterday. Today our welcoming committee came in the form of a reception dude that to me looked to be about eighteen-feet tall when he stood up. The guy was massive and ugly as all hell, wore a suit that was a bunch of sizes too small, and was pointing a very big hand-gun at us.

His suit coat sleeves exposed his hairy bare arms half way up to his elbows, and the pants ended a foot above the biggest pair of sneakers I ever saw, exposing legs that were even harrier than the arms. I don't think he was trying to make some kind of fashion statement; except maybe to say he didn't give a shit. Worst of all he wore a big white fedora that was in my humble opinion too damn similar in fashion to mine. The nifty hat wasn't anywhere enough to cancel out his big, ugly, and gun features though. This was the scariest dude I ever saw.

The big ape would have been enough to turn me around, even if I was my regular size, but Elaine took him right in stride. For the most part, Elaine wasn't scared of men, period. She packed plenty of ammo of her own: nicely shaped man-taming ammo. "Hi, big fella," she greeted him with a sweet voice and smile that should have turned his brain to jelly. "I'm Elaine King, of the Jake Simon Detective Agency. Mr. Grisim hired us yesterday. I need to see him right away, please." She sounded sexy as hell even with a bass voice.

Maybe his brains were already jelly to begin with, because his big ugly face registered nothing, but he grumbled a few words of foreign gibberish with a weird accent into a walkie-talkie and another guy came out. This guy was even scarier looking than his giant friend. He was impossibly short, a head shorter than Elaine, but he was all muscle and as massive as an ox, and was easily the ugliest son of a bitch I ever saw, and believe me I've seen lots of ugly bastards. Hey folks, not all guys can be good looking like me.

This guy wore a grey suit that matched the one his giant sized buddy had on, but it fit him even worse. It bulged out to near bursting around his impossibly thick chest and shoulders, but folds of extra material bunched up at his wrists and ankles. His suit had the extra sleeve length and pants length that his much taller buddy needed. His sneakers, what I could see of them, were even bigger than his buddy's. To top it all off he also wore a nifty white fedora! What the hell!

Both of these guys made even Kebony look like a Playgirl pretty-boy model. It was sort of like if some kid playing around had tried to make some toy clay men, but wasn't very good at it, and then just like the poor sap should have figured, his sister knocked them down and walked on them, the little bitch, screwing up their looks for good. These dudes were both that ugly and then some.

The short one was by far the worst. Bushy black hair poked out from the fedora atop the short squat guy's head, with more tufts of the greasy stuff sprouting on his chin and scattered facial warts. His huge eyes were like deep black pits, the bastard must have had on some kind of goofy contacts to make him even uglier by making it look like he had only black pits for eyes. He had a big doorknob of a bent nose, hairy warts, scars, rotten and missing teeth, etc., this guy had them all and more, ugly stuff I don't even have the words for. The only good thing about him was that he made his tall buddy seem not quite so ugly. I ain't in favor of guys wearing makeup, unless they want it known that they're fruits, but this guy was an extreme case. I'd have chipped in some cab fare myself for Avon to call on this guy.

To top things off, the short and ugly dude stunk to high heaven; it was probably all that putrid flesh and rotting teeth. I smelled the stinking bastard the moment he entered the room. If I had a paper bag on me, I'd have done us all a really big favor and tossed it over his stinking rotten ugly head, after I rescued the hat. A guy that ugly didn't rate a fedora, that's for sure, especially a nice nifty white one like that.

"We talk you," the short ugly gorilla said to Elaine in baritone, barely understandable English, with the same weird accent the taller ugly guy had gibbered with, as he pointed a huge hairy finger at Elaine and nodded to his tall partner. I had the definite impression that short and hideous was in charge.

With the extra short and wide ugly dude shadowing us all, the extra big and tall ugly dude escorted us into a nearby suite that had been converted into office space, where a knockout of a blonde female stood up and came out from behind her desk and introduced herself as Jane Fey, head of Grisim's personal security detail. Tall and ugly stood in a corner and quietly watched, and short and hideous disappeared out the door, while my attention was naturally focused mostly on the ladies.

When I had visited Grisim the previous night, I hadn't seen this Fey broad, but I had seen several other knockout chicks, enough to convince me that Grisim's hiring policy was slanted towards well-built young blondes. Damn good hiring policy, though he somehow screwed up big time when he hired the two giant ugly bozos.

Fortunately, Jane was no exception to the cute blonde rule. They made quite a pair, Fey and my Elaine; one light and the other dark, hair-wise, and I had a great butt-level view of them both after Elaine at last freed me from the damn baby carrier and I stood next to her.

"Standard security procedures first," Fey said. She frisked us and even used a bug-snooper to make sure we weren't wired. She took Elaine's cell phone. She found the gun down my pant-leg and took it too, of course, with a nice gentle touch. "Who's the kid and what's he doing with a loaded gun down his pants?" she asked. If she had searched me just a little more closely, the statement could have had another meaning, as I was a horny little bastard at the moment. I was getting used to giant women, I suppose.

"Sorry. This is my nephew that my sister stuck me with at the last minute this morning," explained Elaine. "Junior's a good kid though; he won't bother anybody. As to the gun, it wouldn't fit in my purse or in my clothes." True, Elaine's clothes were too sparse and packed full of Elaine to hide a gun. The goofy explanation seemed to satisfy Fey, who wore equally well-packed, tight clothes; she just nodded and spoke quietly into a walkie-talkie.

Fey and Elaine sat down at a small table to talk. Moments later yet another spiffy blonde broad strutted in, this one wearing an expensive business suit that she filled out really nicely. I didn't even so much mind that the suit coat was cruelly hiding her boobs too much, since the short skirt showed off most of her incredible legs. Did I mention that I'm a leg man? "All right Ms. King, where is your boss?" she demanded, without any preliminaries.

"He's on other business. Who are you?"

"I'm Alicia Tweed, President of Grisim Enterprises," she started to respond.

"And you're here to simply observe my discussions with Ms. King, Alicia," injected Fey. "I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind."

Tweed obviously did. She glared at Fey like she wanted to kick her teeth in, but could wait until later. "As long as the Corporation's interests are fully addressed," she said coldly.

"I don't work for the Corporation," responded Fey just as caustically, "but as the Corporation also works for Mr. Grisim, I'll certainly try to protect its interests."

"Humph!" responded Tweed. "Then let's get on with it." She sat down facing Elaine, but she also faced off against Fey. You could tell a lot from tone of voice and body language. These two hated each other's guts. My mind naturally wondered for just a bit then, into visions of the two of them mud wrestling in tear-off string bikinis, no holds barred.

I felt hungry and dizzy. It must have had something to do with my shrunken state, I had to figure. Sure, the dizzy part was maybe normal, due to loss of blood in the brain due to the sexy dames, but why would seeing these spiffy broads make me so hungry for food?

They all ignored me. I, on the other hand, had an unobstructed view of three sets of great though giant legs under the table, and I took advantage of that situation as Fey began the questioning. "Do you know why Jake Simon visited Mr. Grisim last night?" she asked Elaine.

"Mr. Grisim was interested in the services of the Jake Simon Detective Agency, of course," Elaine responded.

"What sort of services?"

"That's why I'm here today, to find out the details."

"From Mr. Grisim?"

"Certainly from Mr. Grisim. Is he available now?"

"Why didn't Simon come here himself?"

"Like I said, he has other business."

"More important than his business with Mr. Grisim?"

"He's a very busy man. He has some pretty big cases, you know."

"He's a two-bit gum-shoe who would sell his soul to have a client like Grisim," interjected Tweed. "I had him checked out."

I figured Elaine would punch her lights out or something for that crack, but she didn't even seem to be upset. She can control her emotions pretty damn good, I figured. I was under cover myself, so I had to let the whole thing pass, though I had to bite my lip a little to keep myself from yelling insults. I bite my lip a lot.

"This is getting me nowhere," Elaine said. "Whatever Grisim wants from us is between him and us. I'd like to see our client now."

"So would we," said Fey. Tweed gave her an especially icy stare. Fey had let a metaphorical cat out of some metaphorical bag apparently, and there were plenty of real cat-like females in this room already: beautiful, long nailed, tough ones that could go at it any second. Me, I just stood there, taking it all in. Tweed shifted in her seat and under the table I could see up her skirt almost to heaven, but the light wasn't right. I should have brought a little flashlight like those cops on TV always have. I was becoming very, very thirsty and hungry.

"What do you mean? Isn't he here?" countered Elaine.

"Did Simon tell you that Grisim would be here?" asked Fey.

"He must have thought so, or he wouldn't have sent me here to talk with him."

"Or it's a cover."

"A cover for what? What's going on here?"

Fey hesitated.

"You might as well tell her the rest," said Tweed. "The cops will tell her anyway, as soon as they come back with their search warrants. I won't be able to stop them again, Jane. They'll be swarming all over this place."

"Grisim is missing," explained Fey. "He's been missing since last night when your boss visited him in his suite. In fact, as far as we can tell, Jake Simon was the last person to see him. Simon and Grisim went in, and only Simon came out. It had to be foul play. Guess who our prime suspect is?"

"Oh shit," I whispered, sincerely.

****

CHAPTER 2

SMALL IS USEFUL BUT BIGGER IS BETTER

"You think Jake did it? Oh my God!" exclaimed Elaine.

I judged from that remark that that she was worried about me getting arrested or something and hadn't grasped the true nature of the terrible dilemma I now faced. My rich would-be damn client was missing without having given me even a retainer and we were here on my own dime! What if the rich bastard never showed up to pay me? The economics of this thing was like a punch to my gut. Anyway, my junior detective was upset, and I figured she'd lose it and blow my cover. I had to do something fast.

"Auntie, I need go potty," I suddenly whined, in my best imitation-infant voice. Nobody paid a damn bit of attention. I was a kid, a third class citizen, ranking even lower than these dames. "AUNTIE, I NEED GO POTTY NOW!" I screamed. I grabbed my crotch to emphasize the emergency.

"We'll keep you two here to wait for the cops," announced Fey, as she stood up and headed out the door of her suite, motioning to Elaine and me to follow. Shadowed by Tweed and the ugly giant, Fey ushered us into an empty suite nearby. "This is our guest suite, and it includes a bathroom. You can go potty all you want to in there, Junior; help yourself. The cops should be along any time now." She turned and strutted away, showing plenty of great leg.

Tweed looked at me funny before also turning and walking away, and then turned back again and flashed a frown at me that quickly twisted into a nasty smile. "Yes, we certainly do need to keep them both here," I heard her tell the tall ugly dude, who had already posted himself just outside the room.

I didn't much like either of these blondes, no matter how great their legs and other body parts were. Still, I savored my last glimpse of those wonderful legs and behinds as both of them walked away and the door to the suite closed behind them and I heard it lock. Dandy. Elaine and I were prisoners!

"Well, big boy, you're really in a mess now, aren't you?" said a by now calmer Elaine.

"I have to go potty," I said loudly, motioning Elaine towards the bathroom. "Auntie help Junior go potty?"

She looked at me like I was demented, but she let me pull her by the hand into the bathroom and close the door. There, with quite a bit of climbing and struggling due to my shrunken state, I turned the sink faucet and the shower on, and flushed the toilet. That all made quite a bit of noise, just like I figured it would.

When I jumped up from the toilet seat into her arms she caught me, also just like I figured. She felt warm and soft and smelled nice. She held me against her and it was pure heaven! Wow, I was hungry! "Hold me Auntie, I'm scared," I announced loudly. Then I whispered into her ear. "Bugs, Baby. This place has got to be bugged. That Fey broad wants to solve this herself. They're probably listening to us right now; I figure that's one of the reasons they bottled us up in here alone. They probably do this to lots of folks that come to visit Grisim."

"You don't have to pee then, Junior?" she whispered.

"No. I'm hungry and thirsty Baby, but right now I have to get into Grisim's personal suite and see the scene of the alleged crime, before the cops haul our asses out of here. Maybe I'll be able to figure out what happened and find Grisim before the cops arrive, and he'll write us a big check."

"Where is Grisim's suite?"

"Not far; two or three suites further down the hall on this side of the building." The biggest suite was his, of course. That was where he lived sometimes and did his most important work; whatever that might be for a damn billionaire. Half the other suites were offices, while the remaining housed live-in staff, including plenty of nifty dames. Each of the suites was a lot bigger and nicer than any normal person's apartment. All in all it was a pretty cozy set-up. That sort of stuff can get a guy thinking that being a multi-billionaire wouldn't be too bad a deal.

"You know how to get us into his suite?" Elaine asked.

"No way possible that I can think of," I admitted, glancing towards the door. "They've got too much muscle. Damned ugly muscle at that! Too ugly for even a nefty fedora to overcome."

"Much too ugly. And strange, too."

"Strange how Babe, besides the unusually ugly part?"

She frowned. "They didn't, well, you know, pay very much attention to me, either one of them."

"Gee, what a blow. Don't take it too hard though, maybe they're both fags." More likely, with all those yummy chicks around here already, adding one more was no big deal to them, though personally it never worked that way for me.

"No, I don't think what's it, but they are very strange. Anyway, if you want to get to Grisim's, I have an idea." Elaine put me down and started to fill the bathtub. "Look outside the window, Junior," she whispered. "What do you see?"

I looked. Even the damn bathroom had a full sized window that went down almost to the floor such that I could easily see out of it. "Too high up, Auntie. Junior is scared." I jumped back into her arms. It was still a damn comfortable place to be, and we could whisper again more freely. "What the hell are you getting at, Baby?"

"There's a ledge out there, Boss. Not a super wide one, only eight or ten inches, but it's plenty wide enough for you in your current condition. Maybe you can get to Grisim's suite using the ledge."

"You're nuts!"

"Meanwhile, I can stay here and pretend that you're taking a bath. Kids take them all the time. If anyone asks I'll tell them that you messed yourself up."

"No damned frigging way are you going to imply that I shit or pissed my pants! End of story!"

"You have a better idea?"

I returned to the window and studied the ledge. It was a warm, calm day, and to poor shrunken me, the ledge seemed to be plenty wide enough to crawl on. We were only seven stories up, so what the hell? I decided to go for it.

I tried to open the window, but it was jammed, and of course the giant Elaine had to help. Before I could crawl out onto the ledge, she gave me a really friendly kiss and wished me luck. A hell-of-a crazy fantasy flashed through my mind when she kissed me, having to do with staying in the suite and taking a bath with Elaine, instead of crawling out on a narrow ledge and falling to my death. This was followed by the usual natural body reactions, miniaturized as they were, followed by a sudden, unnatural, tremendous hunger, and a flash of dizziness that caused me to fall flat onto the bathroom floor.

"Are you all right?" the giant Elaine asked me, concern etched on her huge but pretty face.

"I don't know; maybe it's due to a lack of breakfast. I haven't eaten anything today. Have we got anything?"

I drank some water, while she retrieved mint chocolates from the suite's bed, a complimentary can of V-Eight from the tiny refrigerator, half a dozen little envelopes of sugar that she found next to the coffee pot, and best of all, a giant-sized extra spicy Slim Jim from her purse. I gobbled it all down like I was starving. As little as I was, that should have stuffed me up to the gills, but all it did was take the edge off the hunger a bit, and get rid of the damned dizziness.

I crawled out the window and onto the ledge on my hands and knees. It sure seemed a hell of a lot narrower now that I was on it. I made the mistake of looking down at the ground just for a moment, before squeezing my eyes shut in terror. "Shi-i-it!" was all that I could whisper, about a dozen times, as I crouched there like a sissy. Only seven stories hell, it seemed more like hundreds! I felt dizzy again and on the verge of toppling; I had to tell myself again and again that I was safe.

After all, how the hells could a guy possibly fall from a crawling position? The answer was too damn obvious. A hand or a knee misplaced over the ledge edge and down I'd go, screaming for my long-lost mommy and her pal Jesus. Mom had dragged me to church hundreds of Sundays, before she and Pop drove off that bridge in the accident. They'd have been better off taking driving and swimming lessons and I'd have been better off practicing my crawling, instead of going to church and listening to all that guff about so-and-so begetting so-and-so. They'd still be alive and maybe my life would have been different and I would be an Olympic-class ledge crawler by now.

As it was, I hadn't done much crawling in about four decades, so what did I know about it? My knees were already uncomfortable on the concrete ledge; what if they got so sore I couldn't stand it? I'd try to get up and my sore knees would probably buckle and cause me to fall off the ledge, right? I now noticed that there were king-sized pigeons flying nearby, and clods of bird crap all over the ledge. Maybe in some stretches there would be so much pigeon shit I'd slide right off the ledge! Or maybe a gang of the giant-sized birds would decide to add some meat to their diet! What the hell!

"You OK?" Elaine whispered, right above me. Her wonderful boobs threatened to break out of their flimsy restraints when she bent down that way. Damn, she was beautiful. More dizziness flooded my aching head and I felt like I hadn't eaten in days.

"Oh sure, green is my normal color. And did I mention that I'm still hungry?"

"You didn't mention that you were afraid of heights."

"Seemed like a damned good opportunity to find out."

"It's simple; just don't look down. You should occupy your mind with something else. Maybe you should think of nice things like food, or sex or something. Think positive."

Sure, think positive. After all, things were going great! Sound advice maybe, though a little late. I took a couple of deep breaths, turned my head away from the abyss and towards the building, opened my eyes, and started crawling. I tried to think of sex, but strangely enough that made me so hungry that I could only think of food, and that led to more dizziness. So instead I focused on the nifty stone of the building, and started to count stone blocks as I crawled past them. The stone was granite; the same stuff that those idiot yuppies buying houses had to have in their kitchens nowadays. What fun crawling on a ledge was, I told myself, over and over. Happy, happy, fun-fun-fun that was safe-safe-safe. Right?

Inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, stone block by stone block, at least I was moving. The yammering pigeons let me pass without any problems; the damn things had wings that let them hop on and off the ledge like it was no big deal, and most of the pigeon shit was dry and not too messy. Actually the bird poop seemed like blobs of dry paint. Who the hell knows, maybe they actually make paint from pigeon shit; there certainly seemed to be enough of it just on this ledge to paint a house or two a rather attractive off-white pigeon shit color. Too much of the stinking stuff was fresh though, and I was getting it on my hands and on the knees of my overalls. Yuck!

After what seemed like only a couple of lifetimes I was passing by the windows of the next suite. What I later figured out to be bathroom and bedroom windows were shut and the shades were drawn mostly shut, which got me a little worried, but the living room window was next and it was actually open a crack. No screen or anything!

Glancing into the suite, I noticed a large table surrounded by large chairs, a microwave, and a full-sized refrigerator; possibly to hold the lunches of some of the employees. It was hotel-quality stuff, not billionaire quality stuff, so this for sure wasn't Grisim's suite; that much was certain. It looked like this suite had been made into an employee lounge. I thought about the size of the ugly gorillas that probably owned some of this stuff, and what they might do to me if they caught me. I also remembered what sexy bombshells many of the employees were, which led to more hunger. But I had to have more to eat, regardless of the consequences, so I squeezed into the suite through the open window. Hopefully after eating I'd feel better and could continue on to Grisim's suite.

The refrigerator held a bunch of lunch bags, boxes, and other food containers, just like I figured it would. Given my size, a fraction of a single lunch should have satisfied me, but I gobbled down everything that I could find like I hadn't eaten in weeks. Sandwiches, drinks, fruit, and junk food for at least four big people were all gone in minutes. Afterwards I was still a little hungry.

I began to worry about my trip back from Grisim's rooms, assuming that I made it. I worried that I could be super hungry again by that time. So, using my trusty new Master Card, I cleverly used the room phone to place a desperate order for ten extra-large, fully loaded pizzas from the pizza place down the block. Hopefully, they would be sitting in this room by the time I passed it again. After I had impulsively ordered the pizzas, it occurred to me that the gorillas would probably figure out that something strange was up when the pizzas got here. But a guy has to eat, right? A guy has his limits.

Out on the ledge again, I made faster progress this time, though for some reason the ledge seemed narrower. In a jiffy I was outside Grisim's private suite, peeking in at the alleged scene of the alleged crime that I had allegedly committed. I managed to open a window enough to squeeze inside. Fortunately, there was still plenty of food lying around from last night. As I looked around quickly for clues, I gobbled down some of the food, and drank a quart or two of water. There was coffee, but it was old and cold, so I skipped it.

After a couple of minutes of feeling silly while whispering Grisim's name and looking around for him, I concluded that other than a missing John Grisim, nothing much had changed in the room since the previous night. I couldn't figure out what the hell had happened to Grisim. He had simply vanished, if his employees could be believed. They had to be lying. He must have secretly snuck away himself somehow, or someone must have removed him after I left him here. It must have been an inside job, but other than that I had no idea who, how, or why.

I crawled back towards Elaine's room swiftly, though again the ledge seemed even narrower. As I crawled past the lunch suite, I noticed that the pizzas hadn't arrived yet, which was all right with me, since although I felt rundown and cold, I wasn't hungry or dizzy anymore, and I decided not to wait for them.

When I crawled into our suite's bathroom through the window, Elaine gawked at me and made a big fuss. I couldn't make any sense of her excited gibbering until she backed me up against a wall, and measured me using, of all things, a sheet of paper that had inch-marks scribbled on one edge. "I made this back at the office, so that I could measure you without lugging around a ruler," she whispered. "There, just as I thought. Roughly thirty-three inches on your tippy-toes! You've grown three inches, and you've gained five to ten pounds too! You stink of bird crap though."

I was elated. Obviously all that eating had made me bigger! "No wonder these shoes and britches are getting tight, Baby." I studied myself in the mirror. She was right about the bird crap; it was all over my hands and knees and shoes. But my wrists and ankles were showing, and my toes were jamming the ends of my Keds. I was bigger!

"Tell me what happened, Junior," she whispered, and I told her about eating the lunches, searching for Grisim, and ordering pizza.

Grinning, she gave me a big kiss.

"Wow, I'm getting hungry again," I said.

"Really? That's very interesting," she remarked thoughtfully. "I think you better get out of that kid stuff, while you still can." She started to undress me. I didn't mind so much being seen by Elaine, since now I felt pretty damn good about growing three whole big-person inches, and I was no longer as self-conscious. Besides, I was really glad to get those damn kid clothes off of me; especially the baseball cap with the damn yellow bird on the top of it.

After throwing the lame stinking baby clothes out the window, I climbed into the bathtub, turned on the water, and washed off my stinking hands and knees.

"Well, how do I look, Baby?" I asked her, when I was finished.

"Good enough to eat, cutie," she replied, licking her lips.

That was enough of an invitation for me. To make a long story short, I jumped her. If you've never made love to a giant on a bathroom floor don't knock it, it was great, though a bit more weird and kinky than usual. Big as she was, women are all about the same height anyway when they're horizontal, so I figured what the hell? Besides, she was all for it. I guess that even when shrunken down I'm a babe magnet.

When we were finished a few minutes later, I was famished. Totally. Sex always does that to me, but usually not this much. Suddenly I felt like I hadn't eaten anything in a week. The raging hunger of a short time before was nothing compared to how I felt now. "Feed me, Baby," was all that I could croak, I was so weak and desperate, as I staggered around the room holding my poor aching belly, franticly looking for more food.

"I'm sorry," an upset Elaine said as she straightened out her clothes, "I didn't know it would be this bad."

"It was great Baby," I croaked, "but I'm hungry and thirsty like crazy!" My throat felt so dry I could hardly talk, and my guts burned like I was digesting myself.

"I figured you might be, but not this bad!"

There was no more food, but a very worried Elaine gave me water, and after drinking a quart or so of that I was well enough and desperate enough to go after the pizzas. I had to dodge past the upset giant Elaine to get out the window, and I was still weak and tipsy, but I knew that I would die if I didn't very soon get more food. This time I ran, or rather I staggered quickly along the narrowing ledge with my butt and shoulder pressed against the stone of the building; crawling would have been too stinking slow, and I wanted to keep my hands and knees away from the pigeon crap, even though now I was stepping in it with my bare feet. Yuck!

About half way to the next suite, I had to fight back hysteria when I realized that I was butt-naked, and risking my life for pizzas that probably weren't even there. What if they were eaten before making it to the lunch room? Laughter, weakness, and dizziness damn near toppled me off the ledge, but I wasn't scared. Nothing at all mattered except getting food.

I quickly arrived outside the lunchroom. The two big ugly gorillas were just bringing my pizzas into the room, thank the gods. Tall and ugly carried all ten of the pizzas as if they were weightless; short and ugly followed close at his heals.

It took mountains of self-control for me to keep from jumping into the room right off. My poor stomach ached and burned for food. Maybe a naked little man attacking them would have caused the two big ugly guys to laugh themselves so silly that I could have made off with a few slices of the heavenly pizza, or at least gobbled down a few yummy bites of life-giving cheese and crust before they clobbered me. But somehow my food-starved brain realized that approach probably wouldn't work out so good, so though it was tough on me, I hid and waited.

As his big partner placed the pizzas on the table short and ugly looked very puzzled. "Grog, did pizza guy say these be for our lunch and already be paid for with human money?" he asked.

Grog? What the hell kind of name was that? Human money? What else was there? Who WERE these guys?

Grog nodded. "Lunch for us be gift from secret admirer with high squeaky voice like chipmunk, pizza guy say. Someone in office steal lunches from cold box. Maybe they get pizza to make up for that."

"What that word mean, ad-mire-er?" short and ugly asked.

"Not know, not care, Boss. Me be hungry." Grog dropped the pizzas on a table and opened the top box. It was an extra cheese and pepperoni model, I noticed, as my mouth watered. With his huge hands he rolled the whole damn pizza up into a compact, oozing tube and stuffed one end into his mouth, chomping off half of it in one bite. I cringed and maybe cried a little, but somehow managed to keep from shouting or jumping off the ledge. I was so hungry by now that I seriously considered grabbing and strangling one of the stinking pigeons and eating it raw, feathers and all. The effort would probably cause me to fall off the ledge and die, but it might be worth it, just to get some food.

"Give me," demanded short and ugly, as he grabbed the remaining half of the pizza from his partner and stuffed the entire thing in his own huge mouth in a couple seconds. The selfish bastard!

That was it. Inside of ten seconds one whole pizza was gone! My pizza! That 'secret admirer' bullshit I told the pizza dudes to say was to help get the food through the door and to me. That bit was clever enough, given my desperate situation at the time, but for some reason I hadn't figured these two big selfish bastards would actually eat my pizza, so my stupendously clever pizza plan had a major damn flaw! Two big ugly flaws, in fact! But how the hells could anyone eat so fast? Maybe these two guys were carnival freaks that did speed-eating? While I stood outside the window with my tongue hanging, my belly aching, and my knees wobbling, the ugly Boss grabbed a second pizza and walked out with it, driving Grog before him. "Back to work we go; we eat more later," short and ugly said, as he shut the door.

Only eight pizzas were left, but eight should still be plenty, I had to figure. I was weak and wobbly but I opened the window more, and slipped in. The smell of pizza damn near knocked me out, it was that good! There were more extra cheese and pepperoni pizzas, and sausage, green pepper, and onion pizzas, and meatball and onion pizzas. Best of all, there were two huge life-saving, everything-on-it pizzas, including those stinking little dead fish and annoying hot peppers.

I wolfed them all down as fast as I could, feeling stronger with every bite, and washed them down with a gallon or two of water. I should have ordered a few gallons of soda. Then I felt cold to the bone, as if my body was busy doing something else, and couldn't be bothered with keeping me comfortable. I wrapped myself in a hotel short-robe from a closet, but stayed all achy and shivery for a couple more minutes. Then I was well enough to set off again on the ledge.

Though I felt much better, the rest of the trip back on the ledge was terrifying. The ledge seemed narrow as hell, so narrow that I had to very carefully walk sideways, with my back and butt pressed tight against the stone outside of the building. The robe was short enough that it didn't trip me, but it blocked the view of the pigeon crap covered ledge I was walking on, so I again stepped into some really messy clods of goo, proving once again that in this life you can't have everything but you're bound to get a lot of shit. The Greek philosophers and Shakespeare had all of that stuff all worked out correctly years ago.

Elaine gave a squeal of excitement when I squeezed in through the bathroom window, then she backed me against the wall for measuring. I was bigger again and I knew it; Elaine was only a couple of heads taller than me! "Four feet even on your tippy-toes; that's a fifteen inch gain!" she announced, grinning like crazy. "How do you feel?"

"Better, but not perfect. I still feel a little cold, but at least I'm not hungry anymore at all."

"Very interesting," she said. She kissed me then, in a very friendly way, and then paused to study my reaction. "And how do you feel now?"

"Are you sure that we're out of food?" I asked.

She kissed me again, and her big soft hands were all over me, reaching under the robe. Damn she was sexy! When she stopped, I stumbled dizzily to the sink and sucked water straight from the cold tap. "Food, food!" I begged her. "Baby, I'm tired of going through all this crap!" I complained too loudly. "And we still have no idea at all what happened to Grisim, except maybe he shrank like me!" I complained, as I used wads of toilet paper to wipe the worst of the bird shit off my feet.

"Shhhhh," she admonished me. "Your deeper voice will carry better!" She turned up the shower to make more noise so that we could talk more freely again, and so I could stick my feet into the cascading water and rinse them clean. "Just as I figured after your first excursion," she whispered. "Sex stimulates your growth, that's what the game riddle meant about one plus one multiplying! One guy plus one gal making out multiplies size! Even getting worked up a bit seems to cause you to eat and grow, though having actual sex works even better! Together sex and food are the answer to your shrinkage problem, just like I hypothesized a while ago. Q-E-D."

"Goody. Hey, I'm not complaining, but this shrinking crap must be for the players of the game. I'm not even a billionaire," I noted.

"You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were after Grisim, but they got you, too."

"Hell! You think this is what happened to Grisim?"

"Assuming he disappeared after you left him, how else could he have gotten past those weird gorillas and the rest of them? He shrank, that's how! That's the hypothesis, anyway. Did you eat or drink anything while you were with him?"

"Just a couple of peanuts."

"That's all, just two nuts?"

"Two, that's all." Before meeting him I had just come from Burger King. If Grisim had some classy seafood or something I'd have forced myself, but he had mostly cookies and ham sandwiches and other ordinary stuff. What a cheapskate for a rich dude!

"Just to be specific Jake, you are talking about the common peanut or groundnut of species Arachis hypogaea, right? The one domesticated in Paraguay or Bolivia thousands of years ago and now cultivated most extensively in China and India?"

"I guess so." How anyone could keep useless stuff like that in their brain was a mystery to me, a mystery that I really didn't give a shit about.

"It's a legume really you know, not a true nut; it's essentially a dried bean. When you say two nuts do you mean two seeds or two pods?"

"Seeds, I guess. Those things that can break into two yummy pieces. Roasted and salted yummy pieces, to be specific."

"They can contain toxic carcinogenic substances produced by a nasty mold, Jake. I'd stay clear of them just to be safe."

"Great health tip; I'll keep that in mind." Yawn.

"Did Grisim eat any of the nuts?"

"He was wolfing down handfuls of them when I left, and his big peanut jar was about a third empty when I searched his suite just now."

"My God!" exclaimed Elaine. "That poor man!"

"You're right, Baby! He must have shrunk a lot more than I did, the poor sap, if it was his nuts doing the shrinking. I guess it's a good thing I didn't eat any more of them nuts today."

"Those are shrinking nuts," she reasoned, but shook her head in disbelief as she said it. "The irony is, in some cultures peanuts are commonly known as pigmy nuts."

"That's a real hoot all right."

"However, shrinking like you experianced is ridiculous in terms of the current state of human science. On the other hand, have you seen the stories in the newspapers, internet, and TV about magic happening in Arizona?"

"I have enough trouble keeping up with what's happening here in North Jersey."

"Crazy, unbelievable stuff has been happening in Arizona starting a few days ago, though they didn't say anything about shrinking nuts."

"This is Jersey. Goofy stuff happens all the time here. Arizona probably has its moments too."

"Right, but not this goofy. There was talk of giants and dragons and strange little people in green tights zapping folks, disappearing, and so forth, there in Arizona. Then there was the crazy tire stuff at Grisim's bank that happened right here in North Jersey a few days ago; that was in the papers too."

"Yeah, Grisim mentioned that crazy tire business."

"Tell me what else you saw in Grisim's suite."

"Well, I sure as hell didn't see a miniature Grisim. I have no idea where the hell he is."

"What about poop?"

"None that I noticed, except the bird crap I tracked in. The place smelled good, as a matter of fact."

"Better than it did last night?"

"Yah. Flowery."

"Like maybe it had just been cleaned and heavily deodorized?"

"You know, I think you might be right. By the same person or persons that gave Grisim the jar of shrinking nuts, probably. He shrank and then they cleaned up his mess! The nuts had to be an inside job then," I concluded.

"Possibly Fey and/or Tweed?"

"Hell yes, and/or others. Those two big ugly dudes seem to be in this up to their ugly stinking eyeballs. Maybe they ain't as dumb as they look and sound. You know, I think they're weird foreign geeks. Chemists probably, imported from another country to assassinate rich dudes by shrinking them." Other countries are full of evil nerdy types, same as here in the good-old U-S-of-A. And on top of being nerds these weirdoes were pizza speed-eating carnival freaks.

"Never trust a geek, Baby," I advised. "Too much brains conflicts with other organs and drives a man crazy. Maybe that's why Grisim wanted an outside agency to help him. Think about it; super rich types are always surrounded by their own people, so the only way to get to him would be from the inside. Grisim would know that, so he hired me. He probably suspected that someone on the inside was after him. Those two big ugly foreign chemists, I bet."

"What do we do now?"

"Well Baby, we can't screw around here all day, much as I'd like to gain back my other missing hundred-plus pounds. We're out of pizza, and sex without food would probably kill me. Sex is what I want to die of someday, but not right now. Besides, I'm not going back out on that ledge again; it's getting too damn narrow. Still, now that we've figured out this shrinking nuts business, I'd like to get back into Grisim's suite again and see if I can figure out what happened to him."

"We could just wait until the cops come."

"Now that's another thing that bugs me, Doll. Do you believe what they told us? It's been almost an hour since we got here. If the cops thought that fowl play might have happened to a V-I-P billionaire, no damn president of a corporation or security dame would stop them this long; they'd want to get their pictures on TV and so-forth. So why ain't the cops in here yet? Why are they still out there somewhere scrounging for doughnuts and so forth like nothing has happened up here?"

"That's just what I wanted to know," said Fey, from the suddenly open doorway.

"You all know far too much already," said Tweed, from behind her. She and the short ugly gorilla that was with her held guns that pointed at both us and at Jane Fey! "Well, well; Jake Simon, I presume," Tweed said to me, with a smirk. "At first I didn't recognize you, little man. But then we had your apartment and office checked and you weren't there, but a tiny guy that looked like you was here. That pretty much cinched it for me. It's lucky for you that you were stupid enough to get distracted by sex and pizza, and that you forgot to keep quiet in here a few minutes ago when you mentioned that you don't know what happened to Grisim, or we'd be trying to beat information out of you by now. I don't know how you figured out that sex would restore your size; that was supposed to be a secret, wasn't it Mick?" She nodded towards the short super-ugly gorilla, evidently Mick.

Mick rolled his eyes and shook his head. "You talk too much and too much go wrong," he rumbled at Tweed. His deep voice was as ugly as his looks, but it was getting easier to understand, as if he was learning better English even as we talked.

Tweed's skin color lightened up a couple shades and she stepped a little bit further away from her ugly partner. As she returned her attentions to me I had a feeling that she was scared of Mick, but was trying to stay in control of things anyway. "We had a bit of a shock when the pizzas got here, and even more of a shock when they disappeared. You came through the window and got them and the lunches, we finally realized. That was quite clever and unexpected, wasn't it! Too bad you didn't think to phone the police instead of ordering fast food though."

"Shi-i-it," I muttered. Good point. I could have phoned Joe, even though I was pissed off at him for putting moves on Elaine. Of course the cops were supposed to be showing up at any moment anyway, so why would I call them? Besides, as a rule I wasn't big on calling cops.

"We switched off the land-line phones in most of the seventh-floor rooms as a result," Tweed continued, "even though your ledge crawling times are over-with. Mick still can't figure the food angle, though."

Mick stepped in front of me. I decided to breathe through my mouth so I wouldn't smell him as much. "Both food and poop be big mystery. You poop when you get small maybe, Mr. Jake? Then maybe get hungry when you get big?" he asked, with his garbage breath.

"Yeah, so what if I did?"

Mick shrugged his impossibly huge shoulders. "Make sense maybe, but it not be part of spell. Poop not be part of shrinking spell, and food not be part of getting bigger spell. Not need to do these things to get small or get big. So this poop and food business be big mystery to Mick."

Mick moved his ugly face even closer to mine. He stunk so bad I could taste it. "You shrink too much, Mr. Jake. You eat bags of food, then do sex and eat pizzas, and now you bigger, so me learn that food balance out poop in strange spell. Why? And how you know to eat food, Mr. Jake?"

"Because after sex I was hungry as hell," I admitted, as I struggled not to gag.

Mick turned away from me to address Tweed, thankfully. "Him get too small, so Mr. Grisim maybe get too small too, too small to find. This is mystery, and how poop and food be part of spell is mystery. Is my spell but is not my spell. It be my spell changed, or another, new spell that feels like my spell. Why? How? Is big, big mystery."

Tweed and Mick moved us all into the living room, where two additional, very good-looking women with guns joined us. They also trained their guns on us. It looked like Fey's whole damn security squad had sold her out to Tweed. Of course Tweed controlled the money, so that was only to be expected.

As a result, the blonde security lead was more pissed off than ever. Fey was even cuter when she pouted. "So I was right," she fumed. "You never called the police last night at all, did you Alicia!" she accused Tweed bitterly. She advanced towards Tweed with clenched fists, but got pushed back playfully by a laughing Mick. Mick was even uglier when he laughed. But I had the impression that short, wide, and ugly was holding back, being gentle even. He could have pushed Fey through a wall if he wanted to, he was that strong.

Grog also glared at Fey. "Be good or I'll grind your bones to make me bread," the big guy roared, though he smiled as he said it, like maybe he was just kidding around too. Still, Fey backed off, and she looked about ready to throw-up, those two guys were so smelly, ugly and nasty.

"Not yet, dears," said Tweed. "We'll take care of them later. There are other loose ends to address first."

"And then you'll be getting rid of us," I ventured.

Short and ugly Mick again shrugged his huge shoulders. "Not what me plan, but Tweed say we need do it. So maybe you three disappear and your police think you all take Grisim away with you. Them not know that anyone be shrunk then. It be a good, good trick if you disappear?" He playfully poked me in the ribs and messed up Fey's hair with his massive hands. The move knocked the wind out of me and almost cracked some ribs, but he laughed as he did it, like he was only messing around. "Sorry Mr. Jake, is not personal, is business, like you peoples say. Me be on great quest."

He stared deep into my eyes again. His own eyes were black, featureless pits. "You cop for money, Mr. Jake. Tweed tell me what that is. You do good work, to break spell. To find lost people be your job. Maybe you should work for me."

He laughed again and turned towards Grog. "Watch them," he ordered. "Not hurt, but they not go out window for walks again. Me and Tweed got loose ends to tie up, as you peoples say." At a nod of his head he, Tweed, and the others exited the suite and locked the door behind them, leaving only Grog with us. I was impressed. Mick seemed to run the whole show, including even that smartass rich bitch Tweed. He was scary-ugly and strong, and had brains too. He had it all!

"I knew there was something besides your slimy looks I didn't like, Grog," said Fey to the big guy that now watched us. "You and your crazy buddy Mick are behind this; not even Tweed would come up with all this herself. So now you've betrayed me, and our boss. How does it feel to be a traitor, Grog?" Fey asked bitterly.

The big guy looked genuinely puzzled and hurt. "Not traitors; we be on great quest. Everything peoples do in this world need money, so Mick and Grog need money, so Mick sell magic. Not hurt bank boss man, only make him little bit small so Tweed fix him with kisses. Then Tweed give us money and help us do quest. Nobody get hurt, that be our plan."

Fay was so mad she could hardly talk. "Nobody get hurt? You murdered Grisim, that's what happened! Tweed will fix it so you'll both go to jail, and Tweed will control all the money herself, you big ugly stupid traitor!"

"Not traitor!" grunted the giant angrily as he advanced on Fey, clenching his huge fists but leading with his chin. "Mick and Grog be on most noble quest!"

It was the opening that I'd been waiting for. I leapt forward and caught Grog square on the jaw, putting everything I had into a wicked right hook.

He has supposed to drop cold, like they usually do. Unfortunately I was at less than half strength. So instead, the big ape smiled at me, showing-off brown-stained teeth with big rotten cavities and gaps. Then he grabbed the collar of my robe and with one hand lifted me clean off the floor, while he wound up to swing a ham-sized fist at me.

Fortunately, the blow never reached me. Fey knocked the wind out of his guts from one side with a ferocious kick, while Elaine clobbered him over the head with a chair from the other. Brutally blind-sided by womanhood, poor Grog crumpled to the floor unconscious. I liked him much better that way.

The three of us were left standing there, grinning at each other.

****

CHAPTER 3

CASE CLOSED

"So what's next?" asked Elaine.

Fey put a finger to her lips, signaling us to be quiet. Then she went around the suite and quickly retrieved four electronic 'bugs' from their hiding places, and placed them under a pillow on the bed. At last now we could whisper freely. "We go after the traitorous bastards," suggested Fey, still steaming. She retrieved Grog's gun and covered the door with it.

"That's going to be tough Babe, with only that one handgun," I wisely pointed out, as I tied Grog with electrical cords and gaged him with some torn bed sheets.

"You're right," conceded Fey. "Too tough. Tweed has been scheming for years to take over the company. She has four armed fighters, plus herself, not counting Grog here. And then there's Mick." She shuttered. "You don't want to tangle with Mick, gun or no gun. He's inhumanly strong. Grog is a big baby compared to Mick."

"We should call the cops," I heard myself say. I can't remember ever saying that, before or since, but this had gotten serious. There was too much money involved. The way things added up, I was certain that these folks intended to kill all three of us very soon to shut us up for good.

"No way to phone anyone," said Fey. "After that pizza business they switched off the phones, and cell phones aren't worth a damn in this building, even if we had one."

"That's a bad break," I remarked. "Also, your windows here face deserted railroad track, so there isn't much chance of raising help by throwing notes out of windows either."

"I don't get it," said Elaine.

That meant that Elaine was on to something; I just had to get her to spill it. "Get what?" I cued her.

"Lots of things. For instance why would Fey getting rid of Grisim be such a plausible story? And why are we still alive? What other loose ends are there for them to tie up, before they take care of us? And why did you guys ever hire Grog and Mick in the first place?"

Elaine and I both stared at Fey, who remained silent. "Fess up," I told her. "We're all in this thing together now. You must know some more about all this stuff."

"OK," she sighed. "I was part of the games from the start. I secretly work for an independent outfit that sets up the games. We've infiltrated the staff of several billionaires."

"Sort of a spy outfit that does games?" I asked. I thought that I was good at playing the angles, but this was way beyond me.

"More a game outfit that spies. But only for the sake of the games, so it's all perfectly legal and ethical."

Right. Even I could see how full of holes that argument was. It reminded me of the way that all those companies on the internet collect stuff about everybody. Even if it was legal, it for sure wasn't ethical. People complain about what the government collects, but don't seem to give a shit that the corporations collect tons more stuff about everybody. People are suckers.

"Anyway," Fay continued, "we're always looking for new games, things that will tickle the fancy of even the most spoiled and bored billionaire. Our front company puts ads in newspapers advertising that we'll pay top dollar for things that are out of the ordinary. One of our ads paid off. A few days ago Mick and Grog showed up and approached us with an incredible shrinking drug. They showed us that the drugs worked and worked safely by each taking some of the drugs themselves."

"Those two used to be even bigger?" I asked.

"Much bigger. Mick and Grog insisted that the game be played immediately and that they be paid some cash up-front. They also wanted in on the little joke personally, after they found out that Grisim owned the Third National Bank. They seem to have an interest in that particular bank. They insisted on working for him and administering the shrinking drugs to him personally. I used my influence to hire them to be part of my security team. Mick was supposed to put trace amounts of the shrinking drug in Grisim's food. Other operatives did it for several other rich players.

"Everyone was supposed to administer just enough of the drug to shrink players like Grisim an inch or less. By the way, I have received word that with the other players that's exactly what happened yesterday. Unless you look very carefully, the shrinking drug effects aren't supposed to be noticeable."

"Except to the bank people this afternoon," added Elaine. "They measure the Game participants to help identify them; that's in the Game rules. A slightly short and under-weight Grisim would lose out on his share of the prize dough."

"I sure as heck noticed my own shrinking," I said, bitterly. "And wouldn't all the pooping be noticed?"

"Like Mick said, pooping to get small and eating to get big aren't supposed to be involved at all," Jane Fey replied, shaking her head. "And like I said, the shrinkage was only supposed to be very slight; a loss of between half of an inch and one inch in height and a few pounds of weight was expected, at most. But in the case of you and Grisim, it looks like something went terribly wrong."

"What went wrong is that Tweed caught on to Mick and Grog," Elaine said, nodding towards the ugly unconscious brute on the floor. "Our cute little chemists got greedier and went in with Tweed, and schemed to completely get rid of Grisim. Poor Grisim and by accident Jake were given mega-doses of the shrinking drug in those peanuts, and Tweed and company will see to it that it's all blamed on you and the game, Fey."

"Coffee, not peanuts," said Fey.

"What?" I asked.

"She just said that the drug was in the nuts, but I watched Mick put it in the coffee. We figured that you must have drank a gallon of that coffee, to shrink as much as you did."

"No, it had to be the nuts," I explained. "I ate two peanuts. I didn't drink the coffee or eat or drink anything else."

"They must have been trying to put you off the scent, Jane," reasoned Elaine. "Later they put shrinking drugs in the nuts instead of the coffee; or they simply put it in both. What does Tweed get with Grisim gone?"

"Power and wealth," explained Fey. "Tweed is already the company president, but Grisim always runs things anyway. She hates him, though I could never convince him of that, since she always made out like she was nuts about him. But that was only because she wanted to control his company.

"But all of this is more my fault than his. I shouldn't have trusted Mick or his big side-kick Grog. Logically, I should have never made them part of my security staff here, but Mick has a way about him that lets him get what he wants. They've been here less than a week but I've seen Mick boss even Tweed around."

Right; I figured it was probably drugs and hypnosis. Those nasty nerds stank on purpose maybe, stank of drugs they had concocted in a lab someplace, to control people, and then used those weird black eyes of theirs to hypnotize them. Geeks are too sneaky, which is why most real women prefer real men like me. I'm a hundred percent geek-less and the real-deal and women can sense that.

Fey continued. "Earlier, there was that funny business that happened at Grisim's banks, and I started to worry more and more about this whole game thing. Contrary to game company policy, I even warned Grisim that I was worried about his safety with regard to this next round of games."

"At least you got Grisim worried enough to bring us into the case," I noted. I also noticed I had said 'us' like Elaine and I were partners or something, but I let it pass. "What about the money at stake with the game? Won't Tweed and the two ugly dudes lose out on that now?"

"True, but that's chicken-feed, compared to control of a multi-billion dollar financial empire," noted Elaine. "Hey, that's funny!"

"What's funny?" I asked. I figured that I could use some funny at that point.

Elaine had been messing with Grog's gun as she talked, though I don't know where she had learned anything about guns. Now she held it up to me so I could take a close look at it. Then she showed it to Fey.

"Shit!" I exclaimed. "No ammo clip!" Grog's gun wasn't even loaded! Maybe he figured he could get by with size and ugliness. That worked for him, I bet. It wouldn't work for us. It was good we hadn't decided to attack the bad guys, armed only with an empty gun and our good looks! "Not so funny." We had other issues though. "Fey, how would your disappearance square with any of this? What do they have on you?"

Fey shook her head in anger. "Tweed has a bogus set of office books that have been rigged to show that I've been embezzling the company. The arrogant bitch even showed them to me after I confronted her a little while ago about the late cops. I got especially suspicious when I tried to call the cops myself and discovered that my phone didn't work. I figure that she's been setting me up to take the fall for Grisim's demise for months, and Mick, Grog, and the game gave her the opening she needed. You guys have complicated things for them a bit, but now they have it all worked out again. I figure they will make it look like we killed each other. They have to, we all know too much now. She wouldn't have told me about the cooked up books otherwise. It has to work, or besides the cops being after them, the game people that I work for could take matters into their own hands."

As interesting as all this was, we were still trapped and going nowhere, and there were still too many holes in the story. More holes than story, probably. "OK, but then why haven't they killed us yet?" I asked, pointing one out.

"Timing, maybe," reasoned Elaine. "They have to kill us at the last minute, or the cops won't swallow the story; the forensics would be screwed up. But Jake's right; even so, what are they waiting for?"

"They're probably searching Grisim's suite yet again," confided Fey.

"For Grisim," said Elaine. "That's why they keep searching! That has to be it; they still can't find Grisim! They need to confirm that he's dead and maybe even get rid of the body, because they can't risk that the cops will find a live though shrunken Grisim. If they get rid of his shrunken body and make like he's simply missing, it will take ages to resolve his will, and Tweed will be in charge of the company and sucking up dough that whole time. But given how many nuts are missing, maybe Grisim shrank down to nothing."

"God! I never even thought of that one," said Fey, distressed. "Worse case I had figured was that he shrank a little too much. But then we couldn't find him. We examined windows and vents and so forth, of course, but they appeared not to have been opened for a long time. Until a short while ago, I was hoping that he was still alive; shrunk a little bit too much perhaps as a worst case, but spirited away to safety somehow by you, Mr. Simon. But from the bits and pieces that we overheard you say in here using our bugs it didn't add up that way. You've been as puzzled as the rest of us, haven't you?"

"That's for damn sure," I agreed. That hit the nail on the head. There were plenty of puzzle pieces here alright, but most of them still didn't mesh together worth a damn.

I was still trying to figure Jane Fey out, for instance. She was so very upset about Grisim maybe being dead that I suspected that her boss was more than just a professional concern for her. She liked Grisim, a lot, is what I finally figured. Even love maybe, whatever that is. When love comes through the door, principles and rules and everything else go out the window, I always say, so I've always stayed away from it. But maybe it helped explain why Fey warned Grisim about the game, even though she was in on it herself.

We were running out of time. "Whatever Tweed and her goons are doing now, we can't just sit here and wait for them to come back and kill us," I noted.

"Grisim might still be alive," said Elaine, comforting Fey. "Hiding, maybe. If he had dropped dead of poisoning the body would have been found, even if it was tiny. There is still hope for him, and for us. We have to find Grisim before they do, or before they simply give up looking for him and decide to get rid of us right away."

"You're right!" agreed Fey. "That's what we should do!"

"How the hell do we do that? We're trapped in here, and they're the ones in Grisim's office," I astutely pointed out. "End of story."

"We have to use the ledge again," said Elaine.

"It's too small now for even me," I explained. "Besides, you two would never make it. Your weight isn't distributed right." I studied both of them carefully. Their weight was distributed perfectly, for more important stuff than ledges, but on the ledge those wonderful butts and boobs would shift their weight off the ledge too much and be the death of them, I was sure. I had to get myself another quick drink of water.

"You got back here OK from your pizza binge, Jake," insisted Elaine. "Make just one more trip to Grisim's to get the shrinking nuts for us, and then we can all shrink and fit onto the ledge safely. From the ledge maybe we can all get a chance to search Grisim's office and hide from the bad guys."

"That's nuts," I exclaimed, not even trying to be punny. "Besides, they would have gotten rid of the nuts by now, since they're evidence."

"No," said Elaine, "maybe not. They must surely know it was both the nuts and the coffee, since they must have been the ones to drug them, but they would want to leave the nuts out as evidence to frame you, Fey. Still, the whole thing is a long shot. But does anyone else have a better idea?"

She was showing off her smarts and getting too damn bossy again, but I let it pass.

I was soon on the ledge again, making for Grisim's suite. All in all the trip wasn't all that bad, maybe because I was too worried about falling or getting shot to think about sex, which probably would have made me dangerously weak and dizzy with hunger again. Also, I was sort of getting used to having my feet covered in bird crap.

When I got to the window outside of Grisim's suite, I saw Tweed and Mick in the big room where I had my meeting with Grism. They were both on their hands and knees looking over, under and behind chairs and other furniture. "Come on out, Mr. Grisim," said Tweed, in what she must have thought was a sweet voice. "We only want to help you." Her voice, if a tiny Grisim could hear it at all, probably sounded like thunder to him, based on my earlier experience. He had to be small as a mouse to have hidden all this time. "This must be the tenth time we've looked for him," Tweed complained bitterly, turning ugly on Mr. Ugly. "Damn it, Mick, you said this scheme was foolproof."

"Me not do it; is too much magic. Is my magic, but not me. But is me, so magics mix. So me be near here. Is bad that magics mix, but is good for quest that me be near here, and me be here too." A big stupid grin formed on his ugly face as he pointed at himself. "Me be me soon!"

"There you go again with your dumb riddles!" retorted Tweed. "This is murder now, you stupid ugly idiot! This is all YOUR fault!"

"Not my fault, not me-me," he said, cryptically. "This me not have time for this!" Frustrated, he started cussing in some sort of very foreign language and moving heavy furniture around as though it was weightless. "Me find Grisim, then me find me!"

Meanwhile, while the crazy ugly guy's ranting confused the hell out of the lady, and me too, I got lucky. I could see that the jar of shrinking nuts was still on the coffee table, near the bathroom door. As usual, Elaine was right. They had to leave some evidence that pointed to Fey for the cops to find later.

I slipped in through the bathroom window quietly and peeked out into the living room. I was lucky. My good karma again, I suppose. While Tweed and her ugly buddy were occupied with arguing and moving chairs on the other side of the room, I sneaked in, grabbed the nuts, and beat it back out through the bathroom window.

Inside five minutes Elaine was counting nuts and figuring out how many Grisim ate, and talking about how much we should shrink. "Assuming proportionality with weight and linearity of shrinkage to dosage, half a peanut or so should make Fey or me small enough to walk on the ledge," she said. "At least one of us has to stay big enough to handle windows and carry the others to Grisim's suite. But someone needs to be shrunk down to Grisim-size to talk to him and sex him bigger. And that could be dangerous, maybe fatal; we still don't know the side effects from taking so much shrinking drug."

"The sex requirement leaves me out," I said, with relief. "Given the spiffy broads he hires, Grisim's not a fruit, that's for damn sure, and I sure as hell ain't one anyway." Plus, I sure as hell didn't want to be shrunk again. For all I knew, maybe there was some sort of limit on how many times someone could do it safely. More important, I was on the road back to being normal size again, and there was no damn way I was going back to being a tiny little sap.

"I suppose I could do it," said Elaine. "But Grisim doesn't know me from Adam." She and I both eyeballed our new blonde companion.

"I'll do it, of course," stated Fey, settling the issue. "His safety is my job anyway. Besides, I've got to admit I've had my eye on the boss, big time." Yeah, just as I figured, just like the rest of his female staff. What a racket Grisim had going! "How small will I get?"

"That would be useful to know," acknowledged Elaine evasively. "We know approximately how many peanuts Grisim ate, but we don't know how much he shrank." Then she started talking about medical assumptions, proportions, and empirical models, and something about having too many unknowns to confirm linearity, given only a data sample of one that wasn't even in the range of interest. I didn't understand any of it, and even worse, we were wasting more time. The woman was too damn smart for our own good.

"The bottom line is this," I told them. "If you eat the peanuts, we'll find out soon enough how small you get. We need to get moving right now. We have to either eat the peanuts, or try the frontal assault approach using only an empty handgun and our good looks."

Elaine measured out and gave Fey a large pile of peanuts, and then ate just half of one herself. Fey had barely finished all of hers when the process began. Apparently the more peanuts involved, the faster the reaction. The color in Fay's face immediately disappeared. "I have to go to the bathroom really, really bad. Is that supposed to happen?" she asked innocently. Apparently though she was schooled in what was supposed to happen with minor shrinkage, she didn't yet fully comprehend the expected messy side effects of industrial strength shrinkage. The poor bastard.

Jane and Elaine retreated to the bathroom. I guarded both the door to our suite and our little friend Grog, who had regained consciousness and was flexing his over-sized muscles against the electrical cords that we had tied him up with. The cords actually started to snap, though that required impossible strength. I hit the poor sap with a chair leg, knocking him out again, and blindfolded his ugly puss so that I wouldn't have to look at as much of it.

So I was doing my share, but I knew that the women, and especially Jane Fey, were going through hell. Of course, they were women and naturally built for stuff like childbirth, getting beat on by men, and so forth, so they could take it, I figured. They did OK. Over the sound of the TV only a few pitiful moans and a lot of toilet flushes could be heard from the bathroom as they crapped themselves away.

I tried to relax as I stood guard at the door to the hallway, hoping that a mob of armed bad guys didn't return while I was equipped only with an empty gun and a chair-leg, but TV wasn't much of a diversion. At this time of day about all I could get were some daytime soap opera shows where so-called men ran around blabbing about relationships and other crap that real men don't think or talk about. It was sickening. All those actors had to be fruits I figured, or at least their writers were. I switched to a Spanish station. I didn't understand a word they said but the chicks were sizzling hot.

After maybe ten minutes, Elaine emerged from the bathroom looking like a kid-sister version of her former self, decked out in baggy clothes. Actually, she seemed close to normal in size compared to me for the first time all day. I was finally bigger than her like I was supposed to be. She looked damn good actually, and I suddenly felt hungry and thirsty. "You OK, Baby?" I asked her. I pulled her to me and gave her a deep kiss, even though it brought on more hunger.

She responded eagerly for a moment, and then abruptly pushed me away, but she was smiling. "Later, big boy," she said. "We'll crush Jane." She pulled some kind of little plastic make-up thing-a-ma-jig from the pocket of her baggy shirt, opened it, and held it out for me to look into.

"Jesus-H-farking Cheee-rist!" I exclaimed, as I squinted at it. The tiny naked woman about half an inch tall that was inside it flashed me either the OK sign or the finger, she was too damn small for me to tell which. "She's not even H-O model train size! No wonder Tweed and Mick can't see or hear Grisim! Hell, maybe he's on the bottom of someone's shoe by now, been carried off by a spider or ant, or been flushed down a toilet!"

"Hopefully not," said Elaine. "Hey, be careful you pervert, don't breathe so hard, you'll blow her out of there!"

A few minutes later Elaine and I were on the ledge outside Grisim's Suite, peeking in at Tweed and Mick. They were obviously getting tired of looking for Grisim. "I don't get it, where the hell can that little twerp be?" Tweed shouted. "You were supposed to watch him." She poked at Mick.

"I tell you one more time, this all be surprise to Mick," Mick responded angrily. "Me come in here only half hour after Simon leave, and Grisim be gone. Now me think he be too small to find. Only find some poop in the toilet and a little on floor. Me not know how or why me shrink him so much and so quick. Him shrink too small, and poop and food not part of spell. Me do it, but not me-me."

"Quit talking nonsense! By now we should have gotten the game prize money, and I should have gotten Grisim's gratitude for exposing Fey and sexing him back to normal size," complained Tweed. "I would have had complete control of him and the company. Instead, you killed him."

"Spells not work that way, human. Shrinking spell shrink, not kill. Killing be bad evil thing. When we find little Grisim, we not kill him."

"Idiot! We have to kill all of them now! They all know too much; Grisim, Fey and those two detectives," shouted Tweed, exasperated.

The big guy shrugged. "They disappear while we get money. That be easy for me to do."

"Easy? That's what you said in the first place about shrinking Grisim!" Tweed by now looked mad enough to take a swing at Mick, but Mick simply glanced at her and snapped his huge fingers, and she stood quiet as a zombie. It had to be some kind of hypnosis. Damn good way to handle women, I figured. He ignored her and he renewed his search for Grisim, while she simply stood there quietly like a dummy. I wondered if I could learn that trick!

Grog came bursting into the room, looking all sore and pissed. "They be gone, Mickahl. They knock my head, tie me up, then disappear. Me look for them. Not find them inside and they not leave. Me think they be outside windows on ledge again."

Bingo! The big klutz was smarter than he looked. My heart stopped beating at that point, probably. In moments they were at our window hauling Elaine and me inside at gunpoint. We were prisoners again!

This time they were taking no chances; they tied both of us up immediately with rope they got from someplace. Of course they noticed that there were only two of us and that Elaine was smaller, but they didn't know where Fey was or what she had become.

"Where Fey go, Jake Simon, de-tec-tive?" Mick demanded. But I wasn't talking. Then Mick simply looked at me funny and I felt dizzy and started blabbing incoherently. I yapped about cheating on my English test in eighth grade and cheating on my eighth grade girlfriend, and then the words got all mixed up and meaningless. Grog laughed, and Mick said that my brain wasn't big enough for his magic to work on me right. It was the shrinking nuts effect, I figured, somehow influencing his geek drugs and hypnosis. That's called irony, for any of you folks out there keeping track.

He snapped his fingers and I felt like my old self again, not dizzy but still lousy. I noticed that his finger snap brought around Tweed also. She had been standing like a zombie, but now suddenly she functioned again as though nothing unusual had happened.

After the ugly goons questioned me some more with no results, Tweed slapped Elaine across the face and yelled at her, and something in me finally snapped. "OK, OK, I'll tell you!" I whined. "Fey fell off the ledge."

"Fell?" responded Tweed, with a gleeful smirk on her face that I'll never forget.

"She fell off the building to her death. When the cops find her remains they'll be up here quick. End of story." Of course, I knew that finding someone down there would be unlikely. There was a strip of woods in back of the building on that side, and railroad tracks in back of that; that's why folks could prance around half the day on that ledge and not even be noticed.

Tweed must have known it too, because she was still smiling. "Mick, send Grog down to find and hide the remains," she ordered.

Mick sadly shook his shaggy, ugly head, and Grog stood his ground. Crazy as it sounds, I thought I saw tears in Mick's black eyes. "No, Grog stay here. To kill is bad. Fay death be big, big evil."

He looked at me sadly and shook his ugly head some more, as if he was truly sorry about this whole business. "Me need Grog here, Kim go look for dead Fey." He nodded towards one of the cute blonde security chicks, who promptly headed for the door. "Grog and others spread out and search all rooms along ledge and search ledge. This Jake man be big clever even with small brain. It not be big surprise if Mr. Jake make mistake and Fey be on ledge and not be dead."

They gagged us, and that Tweed bitch slapped me as they left.

"Emph," said Elaine, through her gag. I turned my head to watch her. She was wiggling and grunting, apparently trying to get out of the ropes, but all she could do was squeeze a little make-up box out of her pocket. Only as it clattered to the floor and popped open did I realize that Fey was still in the damn thing, and had probably been killed by the fall, which must have seemed like a hundred-foot drop to her.

To my amazement a tiny human figure rapidly climbed out of the box, and climbed to the top of it, apparently to get a better view. A half a minute later, little Jane Fey jumped down to the floor and ran across the room, where she was quickly joined by another equally tiny creature. At first I thought it was a spider or something but then I could see that it was a second tiny human. It was Grisim, it had to be! The two hugged and stood there for a short time, probably talking. Then they headed for me.

I fought the urge to kick or twitch when I felt them climbing up my bare leg, yanking gently on my leg-hairs. It tickled like crazy, but if I reacted to it I'd have probably squashed them like bugs, so I let it pass. It was quite a relief when they climbed onto the outside of my robe; I had been afraid that they'd just continue on up my leg and underneath the robe, to territory where no man has gone before. I couldn't even feel them on the outside of the robe, which was fine by me.

In a short time they were standing on my left hand, jumping up and down and pointing at the end-table next to the chair that I was tied to. Straining against my bonds I was able to reach the edge of the table, and they nimbly hopped down onto it. They hopped like grass-hoppers; I figure their small size must have let them do that, unless they were both Olympic-grade long-jump track stars to begin with.

On the table there was still a nice assortment of snacks from last night, which the couple quickly explored. They heaped a tiny little pile of chips, cheese dip, and Jell-O at one end of the table, then stood closely together. Then they were laying down together and rolling around.

I thought for a moment that they were wrestling, but then I suddenly realized that they were humping like sex-crazed rabbits. After only a short time they stopped, slowly crawled to their stash of food, and quickly ate it all. Then they were gathering food again. Then they were making love again. Then they were eating. Then humping. Then they were gathering food. Then screwing. Then they were eating and drinking. I lost track of how many times they did it, the sex-crazed little twerps, all in less than a minute per round.

All the time they were getting bigger. When they reached hamster size they pushed the remaining food off the table, jumped down, and to my relief finally did their love making out of sight. I began to hear their shrill little voices though, which was almost as bad. During the whole thing Elaine stared at me with big eyes, and was maybe getting hungry like I was. Damn, she's beautiful!

Finally, I felt a gentle tugging at the ropes around my legs. Fey and Grisim, each about two feet tall, were untying both Elaine and me.

"We ran out of food," Jane explained, in a chipmunk voice so high that I could just barely hear and understand. The tiny little cutie was modestly wearing a hand-towel sarong thank goodness; I was hungry enough already. Grisim had one wrapped around his waist.

"Lock and barricade the doors," said Elaine, as soon as she could speak. "They'll be back any second, and we're finally all together here for them to kill us or whatever." She was being bossy again, but I let it pass.

"OK genius, now what?" I asked her, after the doors were blocked with furniture.

"We must inform the authorities immediately," squeaked Grisim.

"How, Boss?" I asked, though I was careful not to snicker. Never snicker at a billionaire, that's one of my rules.

"I know; help me make more rope," said Elaine. She soon had us all tearing sheets in strips and pulling chords from the draperies. Added to the rope that Elaine and I had been tied up with, it would be long enough to reach the ground. Our make-shift rope wouldn't hold my weight or Elaine's, which is of course why we hadn't tried it earlier, but we figured that it would stand up to the weight of tiny tots like Fey or Grisim.

"I'll have to climb down and get help," said Fey.

"Not without me, darling," said Grisim resolutely.

Darling?

"He's right," Elaine said. "You both have to go. Grisim could be dead or worse once they break in here and find him."

We gave the two courageous little people instructions and phone-booth quarters, and lowered them to the ground far below. They reached the ground safely, as far as we could tell, though they might still have a dangerous time of it after that, dodging stray dogs and cats, rabid rats, drunken psychos and other average city dwellers, not to mention the gorgeous blonde goon that had been sent down there earlier to search for Fey's body. Still, they had a chance of making it.

Meanwhile, Elaine and I were left with nothing to do but think about our predicament. We would probably be dead before help arrived. Tweed and the two ugly chemists would soon give up their current search and decide to dispose of us, regardless of timing and what Mick had said earlier about killing being a bad thing. Elaine knew it and I knew it. We looked into each other's eyes, and held each other tight. It made me hungry as hell, but I didn't care.

"You know," I said, caught up in the moment, "I was thinking of maybe making you a full partner."

"Equal pay?" she asked, unbelieving.

"We already share equal pay," I said. It was true; as meager as her pay was, I didn't take home any more than she did.

"I know that," she said. "I just wanted you to say it."

"How did you know that?" I asked, amazed.

"I do your books, silly. I'm not dumb, you know."

"That's an understatement," I acknowledged. "But you've got to forget about that lug Joe Kebony. This partnership has to be strictly exclusive, you know what I mean?"

Her smile got truly huge. "Joe who?" she asked, and gave me a deep kiss before abruptly breaking it off. "Out on the ledge again partner: it could buy us some time," she said, pulling me to the window.

As we edged out onto the ledge, there was pounding and shouting at the door. Tweed had returned; I could hear her yelling. She was really pissed off already, and it would get even worse when she broke in and noticed missing sheets, chords and prisoners. In a few seconds, just as we were able to move a couple of feet from the window on the ledge, the door shuttered then splintered to bits as Mick or Grog easily busted through it.

I figured we were goners. We were still slowly edging along the ledge, hand in hand, moving further from the window where we started, but still a long way from any other window where we could get inside or otherwise hide from view. More noises and shouts came from Grisim's suite. Any second, I expected to see Tweed and Mick leaning out of the window and pointing guns at us. They'd kill us then, that was my bet. They wouldn't even have to waste any bullets, since it wouldn't take much to knock us off the ledge. We'd both fall close to a hundred feet.

Goofy thoughts went through my head just then. It must have been some of that 'life flashing before your eyes' crap that they always talk about. I thought that it wouldn't be too bad a way to go, together like that. That at least we had saved our client. Really stupid stuff. Then I figured to hell with clients, rich and poor alike. Elaine and I held on to each other close and kissed again, and got very, very hungry.

"You guys staying out there all damn day?" said a familiar voice. Joe Kebony's ugly mug was grinning at us from the window a few yards away. He was a beautiful sight.

Inside half a minute we were back inside the suite. The noisy room was full of cops, most of them struggling to subdue Mick and Grog as the big guys threw them around the room like rag dolls. Mick especially was inhumanly strong; the extra wide-bodied chemist must have been popping steroids since he was a baby, along with ugly pills.

Tweed was hauled out the door, screaming that she was innocent. Like we were going to buy that one!

Suddenly Mick stopped struggling, and Grog followed his lead. Mick looked at me and our eyes met, if those black pits of his actually were eyes, and he smiled a big ugly smile, exposing rows of rotten teeth. "We not finished our business yet, de-tec-tive Jake. My curse be on you!" he said, then he shouted some foreign language mumbo-jumbo gibberish at me as he and Grog were finally dragged away by a mob of mace spraying, Taser zapping, club swinging Joes. Good riddance.

"Here, don't forget their hats," I told one of the exiting cops, as I handed Mick and Grog's beat-up fedoras to him. Yeah, I hated those two scheming chemists and wanted them behind bars, but you don't take away a guy's hat; that would just be wrong.

Both Grisim and Jane got back then, and they were a foot taller; they must have been at it again somewhere along the way. Grisim rumaged through a desk drawer and was soon handing me a check with an integer and whole bunch of zeros tagged onto it. Big bucks at last! The case was closed!

"Thanks Boss," I told Grisim. "Say, I've been wondering, where did you hear about my rep?" He looked at me blankly. "You know, where did you hear of my excellent detective service so you could decide to phone me?"

Grisim laughed. "I didn't. Since I didn't trust anyone enough to give me a recommendation, I just picked your name out of the yellow pages at random, Simon. I got lucky. That's how I made my first million at the tracks. You were a hunch bet."

"No shit!" I remarked, grinning. Fate had finally paid off for me, big time. It had to be my clean living and good karma. Now the case was finally over and I had a big, big, BIG pay-off! Case closed; end of story!

"I'll provide a more complete statement to you police folks later today, gentlemen," Grisim announced. "Right now we have to go get ready for a quick trip to the First National Bank," Grisim said, as he pulled Fey into a bedroom carrying four big buckets of fried chicken, and shut the door behind him.

Elaine eyed the check and gave me a big kiss.

The ever-observant Kebony noticed. "Does this mean our date's off, Baby?" he asked Elaine. Then he finally noticed our unusual appearance. "Hey! You two guys shrank too!" he observed.

What a genius.

"Our honeymoon will take care of that," said Elaine. She smiled and kissed me again.

Honeymoon? Shi-i-it! It never fails. Mention partnership to a woman and she figures marriage, honeymoon, and the whole damn nine-yards. I had been thinking more along the lines of just a quickie at the office and some more pizza, but with an oversized Joe Kebony standing there probably already thinking of clobbering me, I let it pass.

****

CHAPTER 4

THE FLAT TIRE CAPER

Days had gone by since the shrinking nuts case ended and business was damn slow, even for a Monday morning. Of course I don't like working on Mondays anyway, so I usually don't even bother going in to the office until at least Tuesday. Otherwise what's the use of having your own business? A guy has his limits. Hell, by rights I should have still been sleeping, but Elaine, my self-proclaimed business partner and fiancée, had other ideas.

"We need more dough," she said.

So? What else is new, I figured. Me, I was still basking in the glory of the big check from Grisim. Sure, that was last week, so by now the money was all gone, but it had been good for a few days while it lasted.

Elaine worried about things too much. Her moving into my apartment with me had some other disadvantages too. There was her damn black cat, for one thing. Prince, she called him, not that he paid any attention, but I called him several things more colorful that he didn't pay any attention to either.

I hate cats. Cats are way too sneaky; they've got little unpredictable minds of their own, like women. One minute they're purring, and you figure you've got it made, and the next they're clawing and biting your ying-yang off.

This morning Elaine and the damn cat woke me up before eight AM (That's right, I said AM!), without even benefit of coffee or sex. You'd think we were already hitched. She sent me ahead to the office to be on the lookout for new clients while she worked on wedding plans, of all things. Wedding plans! For MY wedding! How the hell was I going to get out of THAT one, I still wanted to know! I'd have to tell her the wedding was off, but then she'd leave me, and I didn't want that either. I really liked having her around. I was in the throghs of what they call a dilemma.

So there I was, laying back on my fancy new recliner, my new Navy-blue suit covered in black cat hairs, looking out my inner-office doorway through the fancy glass front doors of my fancy new office, watching extra fancy broads parade by. That part was a nice change from my old office building, where the only female traffic on the stairs outside my old office door was old Mrs. Binneman, the piano teacher and landlady. She might have been a real looker about half a century ago, but that was then.

Here there were enough good lookers strutting by to keep me awake and then some, if you catch my drift. I guess that besides broads there might have been some guys walking by the office too, I really wouldn't know.

A couple of times women stopped outside my doors for a few seconds and peeked through the glass, like they were maybe thinking about coming in, but then they made a funny face and walked away like they saw or smelled something they didn't like. With the story in the news about me helping Grisim and my fancy new digs, new clients should have been rolling in like crazy, but it just wasn't happening. It was beginning to bug me. I was having a stretch of bad luck, that's for sure.

On a hunch I got up and stepped outside to take a quick look in at the office for myself. But no, the new place looked plenty spiffy and smelled fine. The crew had worked all weekend to finish it. The office was all brand-new, wall to wall, the works; worth using almost all the remaining bucks from the shrinking nuts case that I hadn't blown at the racetrack, no matter what Elaine thought of how I decorated it. (What the hell could a dame know about what MY office should look like anyway?)

As I stood there another woman came strutting along, a spiffy brunette business suited type in her mid-thirties, and not too bad looking either, leg-wise in particular. She stared for a few seconds at my place, shook her head, then with a pained look on her face turned and walked away, but slowly, like she was still thinking it over. That gave me a really good look at her legs, which I liked, but it was money walking away from me too, which I didn't like.

Maybe that's what kept my lazy ass from returning to the recliner and sent me after her. "So OK lady, what gives?" I asked, catching up with her. "You need a P-I or don't you?"

"I don't need an agency that can afford a fancy office like that one," she replied. "Besides, it looks way too weird. Paintings of nude women, cars, American Indians, and dogs? Furniture that's early American and modern and Native American and Chinese or something? Paisley and pink polka-dots and red striped wallpaper? I can't figure it out, and it makes me sick to my stomach. It's so upsetting I don't know if I could even stand to walk into the place. But what's it to you?"

Her eyes were a touch bloodshot, like she hadn't slept much lately. In the state she was in she probably couldn't appreciate good art and office design, so I let the goofy criticisms pass.

"I'm Jake Simon," I explained, and we shook hands. Her hand was small, soft and warm. Then she looked me over closely up and down. I like it when broads do that, since I have what it takes and I know it.

She nodded slowly. "Got a cat I see, a cat that sleeps on your suit. A black one, at that. Yes, well, maybe I could afford you after all. You're actually one of the detectives here?" She seemed doubtful. Who can figure women? They don't understand things the way us guys do.

"Sure-thing. I'm THE detective here. Come on back to my office." Elaine had arranged for the damn sign to say 'Simon and Simon' like me were already hitched, or we were copying from the old TV show, that must be why this broad was confused. I opened the glass doors and pointed the lady towards my inner sanctum. "Come on in and make yourself to-home. I don't charge nothing just to talk."

For some reason I was really relived when she took me up on my invite. Sure, she was good looking enough, and I did need some business, but there was something more about her that I couldn't put my finger on, something odd that drew me to her like a magnet. Besides the usual, I mean. It was a really weird feeling, like I was being pulled into something, like it or not. If I was smart I suppose I would have ran out the damn door and away from her about then, but I guess I wasn't, because I didn't.

I sat behind my massive new wooden desk, and she sat in front of it, next to the big nifty Chinook totem-pole with the eagles and bears and fish carved into it, and my brand new white fedora hanging tastefully over a bug-eyed fish-head. I had used some of Grisimm's big check to buy a white fedora, since now that I was a top-rung P-I brown wasn't good enough for me. The damned desk blocked my view of her legs, but that couldn't be helped. Next time I got some spare change maybe I'd replace the oak desk with a glass one or something. In my business I meet a lot of broads and it don't hurt to be able to check out their legs while you're talking with them.

"You need a divorce?" I guessed. Most of my clients were unhappy wives that needed me to get the goods on their rotten scum-bag hubbies. Women cheated too, of course, but men don't hardly ever come to a PI for help. No, my livelihood depended on guys acting natural and gals just as naturally acting pissed off, that's why I figured that I'd always have plenty of business. You can always count on death, taxes, and sin. I planned to bank on the sin part, until the other two took their final toll on me. Besides plenty of booze and sex, that, in a nutshell, was my whole plan for life.

"No, I'm a widow," she answered. "By the way, you did some work for a friend of mine. Joan Goth?"

I remembered her. Blonde, nice legs, super boobs. "Right. I found her lost doggie. Cute little pooch. Not my usual sort of case of course," I lied, "but I like to help folks out no matter what the problem is. So she recommended me to you?"

"Actually, she recommended that I didn't come to you. But when I saw your tiny little ad in the yellow pages it stood out for some reason. I felt compelled to look you up. Curiosity maybe, though I do need help from someone."

"Must be my good karma. So what's your problem?"

"You read the newspapers?"

"Sure, practically all the time. I'm a read-o-holic from way-back." I never touch the internet; there's too damn much stupid information on it. "You featured in some rag?"

She nodded her head. "All of them, local and national, for a day or two. My name is Margie Wainwright. I'm a bank manager for the Third National Bank."

"I still can't place you."

"Did Grisim mention me?"

"Grisim?"

"John Grisim. You did some kind of work for him last week; I saw your name in the paper. You still working for him?"

"Nope. That case is closed now. A case of bad nuts. And no, he never mentioned you personally, though he did mention some kind of bank trouble. A lot a people work for Grisim, why would he mention you?"

"My tires didn't get slashed."

I laughed. "Say, that's right, that crazy tire slashing thing a week or two back!" Grisim had mentioned it in our first meeting, but hadn't gotten into details. "Say, how the hell was that done? They ever figure it out?" The car tires of Third National Bank employees and customers in three states had been slashed mysteriously in broad-daylight. The Third National was Grisim's bank, and this was one of the goofy things Grisim had told we he was worried about. I had almost forgotten that part, probably because shortly after that I was too busy thinking about myself being turkey sized.

After saving his life, Grisim paid me off, so I had never gotten around to checking out his bank funny business. After the final pay-off, my interest in a case is over-with, end of story.

Actually, I had called his office several times, to ask if he had any other jobs for me, but I couldn't get through to him. Billionaires can get pretty busy at times, I supposed.

This tire business was really weird, all those tires getting slashed that way and no witnesses. More mysterious yet, even all the spare tires had been slashed, although most of them were locked away in trunks at the time. The same thing had happened to cars of all the Bank employees that weren't even at work. It happened at schools and in food-store parking lots and at stop signs and at vacation beaches. Thousands of tires had been simultaneously destroyed. Nobody had gotten hurt, though some of the cars happened to be moving at the time, but lots of people were scared and really pissed-off.

She went over all of this with me as she watched me with her big sexy eyes. The eyes were weird, I realized. Most times they seemed brown and ordinary, but then for just a moment they seemed to become bottomless black pits, that were staring deep into my head. It reminded me of something that I couldn't quite put my finger on; something I didn't like getting reminded of.

It had to be too many poppy-seed bagels for me that morning, I figured. Each time the black eye-thing happened I blinked and her eyes were OK again, or I guess maybe mine were.

"It had to be magic of course," she continued, "and the police think I had something to do with it, because of three thousand bank employee and customer tires, only my tires were completely untouched."

I had to work hard to keep from snickering. Magic-shmagic; what a bunch of crap! Anyway, most of that magic stuff, if you believed in such things, was supposed to be going on out West in Arizona for the last couple of weeks. This was Jersey for Christ sake! Plenty of tire slashing punks with shrives here, so who needs magic to ruin tires? The tires had to be a gang thing to begin with, I figured, plus a whole bunch more folks faking it so they could scam themselves some insurance dough or get themselves wrote up in newspapers or on the internet.

But maybe the cops would need to hang it on someone easier to finger. Maybe this Wainwright broad was their patsy. So maybe then she was good for a few days' pay for me. "Did you do it?" I asked her, trying to act really interested. Broads like it when you seem to pay attention to them. All you guys out there should remember that.

"Of course not!"

"So then why do they suspect you?"

"Because I wasn't victimized, that's why. My tires are OK."

"Why?"

"I don't know; that's one of the things I want you to find out. Ever since Phoenix was overrun with dwarves and elves a couple of weeks ago weird stuff's been happening all over the place. But the police seem to want to pin this on me just because my tires are OK. Can you help me?"

I tried to keep a straight face. Dwarves and elves? Right. I'll see it when I believe it, I always figure. "The police are pinheads, Mrs. Wainwright, that's why I left the Force. Yeah sure, I can give it a shot. I charge a hundred an hour, plus expenses, one week minimum."

"I can pay you fifty a day, no expenses, one week maximum."

That would have sounded good to me a week ago, before I broke my big case about shrinking nuts and made some real dough from a billionaire. Her boss, as a matter of fact; it's a small world. But now that I had moved up-town and was first rate I couldn't afford charity cases, and that's what I decided to tell this broad, despite her nifty legs, and despite the weird attraction I felt towards her. Fifty bucks a day? I was insulted.

"Hello," said a voice from the doorway. "I'm Elaine, Mrs. Wainwright, Jake's partner," she said, as she smiled, walked right in, and shook the woman's hand, like she ran the place. "We'll be happy to take your case." My jaw dropped open, and Elaine playfully reached over the desk to knock it shut with a firm tap to my chin. "Won't we Jake?" Her eyeballs caught hold of mine.

I could see that she was very serious and wouldn't take no for an answer. I don't like it when she does that, but I let it pass.

I felt myself shrugging and shaking my head in agreement. I figured what the hell; fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. Besides, like I said, I had this weird feeling attracting me to this broad anyway. I actually felt relieved that I would be working her case. "So who has it in for your bank?" I asked her.

Wainwright shrugged. "Anyone who uses it, probably. Grisim and the Board have jacked up petty charges to customers and lowered interest rates they pay out. I can't think of any bank enemies in particular, but then I'm just a branch manager. Grisim and his high and mighty bank Board that rake in all the dough would be the folks to ask."

"Grisim is a mullti-billionaire. Why does he even bother with day-to-day bank business?"

"Our bank is how he got his start in business. He still likes to tinker with it, the rich bastard. It's a hobby for him, probably."

"What about you personally?" Elaine asked, acting like she was a regular detective. "Tell us what happened, leading up to the time the tires died."

"Nothing really extraordinary happened, until the tire incident."

"Nothing unusual at all?" I prodded.

"Well, I did have to fire someone."

"Why?" Elaine asked.

Anger flashed across her face. "Because the Bank sucks, from top to bottom," she spat vehemently. "Grisim and his Board of Directors are cheap, stupid, money grabbing bastards, that's why. Grisim especially doesn't have the balls to run a bank. Shrunken nuts Grisim, I call him, sometimes."

Wow. Even after being in this business for years and seeing it all, women with tempers and nasty language bug me, but I kept a straight face. Fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day.

"Grisim is the worst, the penny-pinching bastard," she continued. "He phoned me that morning to tell me that the Bank had to save money, and I had to pick someone to fire. Imagine that, a billionaire bothering with such things? Never mind the fact that we're short-handed and over-worked."

I yawned. What the hell did bankers know about REAL work? But Elaine elbowed me in the ribs and I put my sympathetic face back on, the one that I use for all my clients. "Bummer. So who'd you pick to fire and why?"

"Grisim said it had to be a full-timer. He hates full timers because the Bank has to pay them benefits. That narrowed it down to Stacy or Henry. Stacy Land is my head teller. She does more work than any three other people in the branch, me included. If Grisim and the others weren't such asses, she'd have had her own branch to manage years ago."

Elaine frowned. "She's held back because she's a woman?"

"Sure. In me they already have their token woman branch manager; they don't want more."

Again, I tried not to snicker. Women have too damn much power as it is, over every poor guy with a pair between his legs, so why give them power in the workplace? "So let me guess. You fired this poor sap Henry?"

She nodded. "I didn't like it, but I did it. Someday I'll hit the state lottery super jackpot, buy the damn bank, and throw Grisim and the Board out on their fat hairy asses. But until then my three kids and I need this job." It sounded to me like a clear-cut case of discrimination against poor Henry, but I let it pass.

"Tell us about Henry," coaxed Elaine.

"Not a lot to tell. Henry Jenkins had always been solid as a brick, though twice as dull. Quiet, polite, precise, but distracted and slow. He has a scholarly temperament probably more suited to university research than to bank-telling. He always had books with him to read when things were slow; odd, old books in weird foreign languages, not your popular fiction. Very often it seemed that Henry was off in his own fantasy world. He took a trip out west shortly before I fired him and came back weirder than ever."

"What does Henry look like?" I asked, not really thinking that it mattered, but trying to act interested. Sometimes you get lucky by doing that, and you find out something that does matter. That's the way that we P-Is figure stuff out.

"A balding, bespectacled little man of about sixty, that's good old steady Henry."

"How did he take the news of his firing?" Elaine asked.

"With surprising anger for such a shy, quiet little old man. He'd have been eligible for partial retirement benefits in only two more years, but now he'll get nothing but a little temporary unemployment pay. Before he left he threatened the Bank."

"How?" I fit in, beating Elaine to the punch that time.

"He wasn't specific, but he said that the Bank was making a big mistake in firing him. He mumbled a few words of gibberish as he got together his personal effects, and complained that something of his was missing. He was really upset about his missing little figurine. Then he said that the Bank was cursed, shouted more gibberish, and stormed out."

"Gibberish?" asked Elaine, before I could.

"I guess it was gibberish. It didn't sound like any language I ever heard."

That seemed vaguely familiar to me too, but I couldn't place it. "Then what happened?" I cued her.

"We had a lousy day, even more lousy than usual. The air conditioning broke. Numbers didn't add up right. Customers bitched, even more than usual. Grisim himself called twice more and bitched. I bitched. Not particularly unusual stuff, but it came at us all at once, and the more I complained about it, the more it happened."

"You don't think Henry has anything to do with your problems, do you?" I asked.

"You know, maybe he is involved. He was always screwing around with weird mumbo-jumbo. If he's screwing me over he's going to catch some crap from me in return, I promise you that much. I'll rain down some shit on him!"

This broad had a temper and a gutter vocabulary, in addition to the great legs. I sort of liked her.

"What else happened?" Elaine prompted.

"Hours later, when Eric ended his shift, the serious trouble was discovered. He returned from the parking lot wide eyed and told us that his new tires had been slashed, all four of them! He had been bragging about his fancy new tires all damn day, actually to the point of annoying the rest of us. Tires, tires, tires! I was tired of hearing about the damn things! I was tired of all the crap that was going on that day.

"Anyway, the tires of all the Bank employees and customers had been slashed, except for my old beat-up ones. Later we learned that the same thing had happened at all the other Bank branches, all fifty-nine of them. Thousands of tires were ruined.

"The incident became national and international news. Local, state and federal law enforcement are investigating. Bank workers were interviewed of course, including me. I'm afraid that because my tires weren't slit the cops will try to use me as a scapegoat. So I decided I'd try to seek some professional help. I looked in the on-line yellow pages and for some reason your silly little ad caught my eye. So here I am. Quite a coincidence though, that you just did a job for Grisim."

I let the silly little ad crack pass, probably because of her great legs. "Sure as hell is a coincidence," I agreed. In my business those kinds of things are damned suspicious, but I couldn't see any connection.

"Do you have a lawyer, Mrs. Wainwright?" Elaine asked.

"I'm just a normal citizen; I couldn't afford a lawyer. Besides, I haven't been charged with anything yet. I figure that you guys are much cheaper than lawyers. If you guys turn up something that sets the cops back on the right track, I won't need a lawyer and I'll save some dough."

She was right about that. I had to smile. "You figure that in one week we'll solve a mystery that so far all the cops and Feds in the state can't crack?"

She shrugged. "So what do you think you CAN do?"

It was my turn to shrug. Elaine kicked me again. "Plenty. I can ask around. I still have some cop connections at the local precinct, I should be able to nose around for a few days and at least find out if you're really a serious suspect or not and if so what they have on you. My guess is that you aren't, but you might sleep better if I can at least confirm that. Sound useful enough?"

She smiled and nodded her head. "Yes. That sounds useful enough, at least for a start."

"What's the name of the local cop leading this thing?" I asked.

"A detective named Joseph Kebony."

It figured. My old partner Joe. The idiot that claimed I owed him money every time I saw him. The man that cursed me out just last week because Elaine had dumped him for me, and because his prisoners from my last caper, two ugly foreign chemists named Mick and Grog, escaped from his custody on the way back to the precinct. Tough damn break, but why take it out on me?

I thought back to the last day of the shrinking nuts case. Joe phoned me later that day and claimed that one-minute the freak chemists were both cuffed in back of his squad car, and the next they had simply disappeared, leaving empty cuffs. Right. Joe was a loon. Divide his age by two and you'd have his IQ on a good day.

"Sure, we both know Joe," said Elaine brightly. "Very well."

Exactly how well, I wondered? An ugly image of Elaine and Joe together, naked limbs entangled, flashed through my sick mind. I almost puked. "Some of us know Joe better than others," I quipped, and I stared at Elaine.

Elaine slipped me her little Mona Lisa smile. "You want me to go see Joe?" she asked me.

Hell no, I had made that clear to her. Did I want to see Joe myself? Hell no, not especially. But fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. "I'll go talk to Joe," I heard myself say. The big dumb bastard! What had Elaine ever seen in a big dumb guy like that anyway? The insensitive lout even called her 'Baby', and that ain't even politically correct or good English neither.

"Fine. Meanwhile I'll nose around the Bank," agreed Elaine. "Oh. And say hello to Joe for me."

"I'll kiss the big lug's ugly puss for you," I promised.

And that was that, or so I thought. We'd make a fast fifty bucks and I'd be back in the sack with Elaine by nightfall, I figured. Elaine left with Wainwright to go check-out the bank, while I grabbed my fedora and headed for Joe. My old Ford started up like a charm, and I used it to mosey on down to my old precinct, where this time of day odds were good that I'd find Kebony.

Sure enough, instead of being out on the town scrounging for leads, there was good old Joe, at his desk right where I left him five years ago when I quit the Force, still scarfing down doughnuts and coffee like it was the last food on Earth. At least he was awake.

"Hi-ya Joe," I said pleasantly enough, as I plopped down with a smile into the chair in front of his messy desk. I knew enough not to try for the doughnuts, so I nosed around the empty pizza boxes, but they were truly empty; not even an old mushroom, damn it! Food was all Joe ever thought about, or at least that's what I thought before I saw the bastard kissing Elaine last week.

"What the fuck is that thing on your head?" the big dummy said. At least he wasn't laughing. But why was he frowning?

"It's my new white fedora, Joe. Nifty, right?"

"It looks like a horse-track shyster's Panama hat. So you got money to buy fancy hats like that, but not to pay back my fifty?" he accused, without a trace of civility. His hands formed fists as big as over-sized grapefruits.

"Easy buddy, I'll pay you, but right now I came to help you out on a case."

When Joe finally stopped laughing he got curious. "What case you talking about Jake? Some broad needs divorce ammo? Or did some poor sucker loose another dog? Strange how dogs disappear suspiciously from rich good looking women and you seem to be the only guy in town that can ever find them. Some of them dames get awfully grateful, I bet, when you bring home their sweet little pooch. Hey, speaking of animals, is that cat hair all over you?"

Joe was an idiot and I needed his cooperation, so I let all the cracks pass. As to the lost dogs, Joe is still on the government dole, so he don't know what it's like out here in the private sector. Sometimes you have to stir up a little business yourself when things are slow. "I just got natural talent Joe, you know how it is. But no, this has to do with some slashed tires at a bank."

Joe sobered in a flash, and then half stood and leaned over the desk and me as he spoke quietly, maybe so that the other guys in the squad, who weren't even there or weren't paying any attention anyway, couldn't hear. "What the hell do you know about the Third National Bank case? If you came to razz me I'll rip off your fat head, Jake."

In my business you have to be able figure out what makes people tick. In this particular instance I could see that something was bugging Joe, something more than just Elaine and the fifty bucks this time. I had to play it cool. "Easy Joe; I just got a new client that works at the Bank and is afraid of what's going on, that's all. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, same as always. You in charge of this case or ain't you?"

The big guy slumped back in his chair, calmer but still all upset and pouty. "I'm still working it, but I ain't in charge no more, not since this morning."

"Sure Joe, it's a big case, what with all those ruined radials. So who's in charge?"

The lazy lug shifted his eyeballs to the right, towards the glass-windowed inner-office. Lieutenant territory. Through the windows I could make out someone standing there that had long silvery hair and nice curves. My jaw dropped open. "A woman in charge? You're shitting me Joe!"

"Look closer. Check out the ears."

I worked my way up from the more interesting parts to the ears. They were big and pointed! "The broad's a Vulcan?"

"No you idiot, she's an elf cop. Don't you read the papers or at least watch TV?"

"I usually skip the funny papers, Joe," I lied. Actually aside from horse racing news the funnies are normally all that I read.

Joe snorted like the pig he was. "Nothing funny about that broad, partner."

Just then she looked up and stared back at me, like somehow she had felt my own eyes on her. Her eyes were huge. Impossibly huge. In a flash she was walking towards me, her odd eyes still locked on mine. With her was Lieutenant Ed Marks, my former boss.

"Jake Simon? What the hell are you doing here? What the fuck is that thing on your head?" Marks bellowed as he stomped towards me.

But the thin little pointy-eared woman silenced and stopped him with a mere wave of her hand, while never taking her gaze off of me. Marks froze-up in mid-step.

She continued to move towards me, so smoothly and gracefully that she could have been floating towards me like a cloud. As she got closer I saw that her hair was metallic silver, her skin was pale and white as snow. Her eyes were silver too, deep, and impossibly huge and round as silver dollars when open but impossibly slanted when she blinked. Her age? I couldn't tell. She was like one of those ageless porcelain dolls, but come to life.

And she wasn't all that perfect either. The image of beauty faded fast as she got really close, and her weird features stood out more and more. That happens a lot, you know, when you first see some broad in the distance and think she might look like some Playboy centerfold, or you see her in the dim light of a bar, but then up close reality sets in, if you're not boozed up enough.

The strangest thing about this chick was that her face was totally expressionless, like a blank mask. Plus, her eyes were too damn big and weird colored. And her skin was too damn white. And her curves weren't all that curvy after all. And her smile showed teeth that were way too long and pointed. And the ears were even bigger and pointier and freakier than I first thought.

So up close she didn't look so hot. Up close two things were obvious, which together caused my head to spin. First, like I just said, the broad wasn't such a knockout like I first thought. There certainly wasn't enough dim light or booze to help things out, so close up she got really nasty, in the looks department. Second, she wasn't human.

****

CHAPTER 5

CURSES

OK, so she didn't look human, but of course she had to be. Elves are just in fairy tales and cookie factories, right? But I had a bad feeling about her; I don't like anyone sort of looking like a woman that might not really be a woman. I don't like there to be any question of gender for instance, like when you approach a broad in a bar and she turns out to be a fruit in drag. Yuck! Not that I got anything in particular against fruits or other weirdoes, but I don't like being tricked that way, as it makes the normally wonderful art of picking up broads in bars a nasty business.

In this case the confusion was about species, not gender, and I didn't like that either, in spades. It looked like this freaky dame had mutilated her body to the point where she didn't even look human. She looked more like a rock star. It made me want to puke. Life is too damned complicated already without that kind of shit; seriously.

She traded stares with me for a few more long seconds, and then she finally opened her thin lips to speak. "I am Loranda; and you, shifty eyed one with the hideous hat, are the cursed human Jake Simon, as has been foretold," she said with certainty, using better English than any of the rest of us put together could have said. She made a funny face, like she smelled something nasty. "And you also have hideous black cat hairs all over you. Don't you know that is bad luck?"

Her voice had an odd pitch to it, I noticed, like the tinkle-tinkle of little bells in the wind or something. I don't know how she did that. Worse, she flashed those weird, sharp pointy teeth. And hell, if anyone had shifty damn eyes it was her. "You've been reading too many comic books, lady," is the best comeback I could manage, which was really lame. Ever notice how you always think about niftier things to say to somebody only after it's too late?

She stared into my eyeballs for a few more seconds and then closed her own huge weird silvery ones and shook her silver-haired head. "Your curse is too strong for me to overcome, but at least I know for certain what we are up against: a troll. The same troll that escaped police capture last week."

"A troll? You mean just one troll?" asked Marks. "The same one in both cases? The bank caper is mixed up with that screwy shrunken billionaire story Kebony told us, the one that you're interested in also? The one where Kebony's two prisoners turned invisible or something?"

Kebony grimaced. "They disappeared boss, like I reported. They don't just turn invisible; they totally weren't there anymore at all."

Marks looked at Joe like he was crazy. Crazier than usual, I mean.

The Elf lady turned her delicate head towards Kebony and smiled, showing the pointy teeth that gave me the shivers. "Teleportation is an easy enough trick for a troll, human. Be comforted that the troll curse was directed at this poor lost soul, rather than at you." As she said it she returned her gaze to me, while slowly shaking her head as though in pity. Her skin was more pale then that of those vampires you see in the movies, and her teeth sharper. This skinny little weirdo bitch gave me the creeps.

"Now wait a minute; what gives with this curse thing?" I asked, not that I believed the mumbo-jumbo she was spouting.

"I am not able to see the details of your curse, human," she said. "But it is not to be taken lightly. I suspect that you are doomed."

Doomed? Why that didn't sound good at all! Despite my feeling that this was all hooey, her saying that I was doomed left me speechless for the moment. Just what the hell did 'doomed' mean, anyway? My head would fall off? I'd get holes in my socks? My fedora would blow away?

It didn't faze Kebony though, who shifted gears a little, back to his own selfish concerns. He had never had a prisoner escape from him before and he was still really spun up over it. "You say one of my escaped prisoners is a troll?" he asked. "Why is that?"

"The feel of the Jake Simon curse tells me it was an evil troll. Also the shrinking of humans that was done suggests troll magic. The slashing of the auto tires was also within the power of such a one, and there is a stench of troll magic in the tires I have examined."

"So you claim that all of that was troll magic?" I asked, disbelieving. "Including all the shrinking?"

"Shrinking is a common troll magic; and a magic that a troll would need perform on himself, to pass for human, though a monstrously hideous human. His curse on you must have been revenge for your foiling of his evil schemes. The tires are still a puzzle though. Much of the magic done seems to be pointless. If I knew the troll's name, perhaps I could tell you more."

"They called themselves Mick and Grog," said Kebony. "No last names."

"Those are mere human names," complained Loranda.

Grog didn't sound too human to me, but I let it pass. "That Grog guy called his ugly buddy Mickahl at one point," I recalled.

The Elf broad's eyes bulged broader and a wicked smile appeared for just a moment, before disappearing. "That is poor news, humans, for Mickahl Al Calger is the most ruthless, powerful and cunning of all the invading trolls. The one with him was taller, but also unpleasant to look upon?"

I shrugged as I nodded. "They were both super ugly bastards." I didn't add that she was nearly as bad.

"Grog would be the Giant Grogorath, the troll's partner in recent centuries. They are the leaders of the evil invasion that we have come to your world to stop. Using their great evil magic, they could destroy your world. With our own magic we will defeat them and take them away."

"Right," I said, humoring her. I turned to the Lieutenant. "You actually listening to this magic mumbo-jumbo Marks? Where'd you find this crazy little broad anyway? In a box of cookies? Elves? Trolls? Giants? Invasions? I don't have time for this crap. I think I'll just go home now and wait for the tooth fairy." I grinned, showing some gaps where I was missing a few, but at least my teeth were normal, what was left of them.

"Simon, you owe the lady an apology," said Marks, steaming.

Lady? "I owe the city taxes, to pay your stinking salary Marks, and that's about it. I'm out of here."

As I stood up to go, Kebony answered his phone. "Holy farking shits!" he exclaimed loudly, as he hung up. You have to love the man's colorful command of the language. "That was Elaine, out at the Bank. There's been another incident there, and it's a Lu-Lu."

We all urgently made for the door and headed for the bank, with Kebony and me pausing only briefly en-route to pick up some lunch-time burgers.

At Margie Wainwright's bank branch, a media circus was in the making. For more than a week the employees of the branch had been trying to put the tire incident behind them, but when Stacy Land left for lunch today she quickly returned in tears. "My brand-new car is destroyed," she kept blabbing.

Damn right it was; it was turned inside out. Seats, steering wheel, dash, carpet, engine, etc. were on the outside; tires, muffler, fenders, headlights, etc. were on the inside. Elaine wasn't amused, but I actually thought it looked kind of neat and funny as all hell. The gathering crowd thought so too, as there was a lot of laughing going on, along with the slack-jawed gawking. Stacy could probably sell this freak-show of a car for a huge bundle on the internet, I figured.

The so-called experts that the cops and the Feds called in were of course stumped. Lots of times experts just fake being stumped for a while, so us non-experts are led to believe that they're tackling some really hard shit, but I had a feeling that this time they actually were stumped for real.

Only Loranda the Elf dame wasn't impressed. "A trivial spell for a troll, though as with the tires and the shrinking of people, I do not see the purpose. Of course, trolls are evil, and do evil things with no purpose other than to do evil."

The cops cleared the joint of gawkers, including Elaine and me, while they questioned bank employees and customers, especially Margie. Loranda was clearly in charge; she had the cops jumping through hoops, even the pair of FBI goons that showed up. They all acted like she was top cop of the city, though she had just blown into town. I didn't like the pushy little bitch.

Finally, as everyone cleared out, Margie let Elaine and me into the Bank to talk with her while she locked up. At that point Grisim phoned and blamed her for everything. Margie put the whole thing on speaker-phone. "It's like being captain of a ship, Wainwright," he told her. "You take the blame for anything that happens under your command. This plague is on YOUR house, it looks like to me. Besides, the Board and I have our own problems."

After his call, Margie was closing the vault shut as Elaine and I spoke with her. Margie said that what happened to Stacy's car was no big deal; the woman's husband made good money and they could get another car. "He spoils her rotten," she said. "It's not fair that some people can have just about anything they want. I got sick and tired of hearing her gabbing about that car today. But Grisim is the real bastard; I can picture him now, sitting on his fat hairy ass. Him and the rest of the Board, all with fat, hairy asses." Her eyes seemed to become black pits for a few moments, but after the vault door was completely closed, they were OK again, and she seemed to be in a better mood.

Man, that was a rough talk from a broad, even if she was pissed at everything. Women can be cold as ice, especially when they get their monthly. I voiced that opinion while Elaine and I drove home in the Ford, and she wasn't very amused. Maybe it was that time of month for her too.

That night Kebony and I met at Sam's Bar and exchanged notes on the case. Actually he did most of the talking but in return I had to buy most of the beer for the cheap son-of-a-bitch. He kept trying to hit me up for fifty bucks he said that I owed him but I wasn't having any of that.

"That Loranda dame has taken over the whole damn thing," he complained. "I can't take a piss without her permission." Poor Joe. What a baby.

"That's why I quit the Force, Joe," I told him, playing the sympathy card. "I could see lots of that shit coming. Computers, DNA, geek cops, women bosses, the whole works. Being a cop used to be a man's job, for lugs like you and me. Mostly, we'd just go out and roust punks into squealing on other punks."

"Yeah," he said, smiling and staring off into space.

I bought him another brew, the cheap bastard. "Guy-guys like us; we gotta stick together, Joe. I bet we could solve this thing between us, me and you Joe, like in the old days."

He was smiling more and nodding his head between chugging down beers. My beers, the bastard. We should have gone to an even cheaper joint, though there ain't many joints cheaper than Sam's.

"I could help you solve this case, Joe; that would show them what a real cop can do. This should be YOUR case."

"Yeah," he agreed. "Show them. Show them all!" I bought him yet another brew.

"No more women bosses then," I said. "They'll make YOU the boss."

"Yeah," he agreed. "Make me the boss. Lieutenant fucking Ke-bo-ny. Hell, Captain fucking Ke-bo-ny." He grinned. He was even uglier when he grinned.

I knew that I had to grill him some more now before the big lug passed out. Besides, I was running out of dough. The bastard could sure put away a lot of beer. I might have been ahead if I'd have given the fifty to Joe in the first place, and let him buy his own brews. "Where does Loranda come from?"

"Never-never land," he laughed. "She's tinker-damn-bell, Jake, with a fucking attitude. I think even Marks hates her, but then when any of us talks with her we fall all over the place doing what she wants, she's so fucking beautiful. It's like she cuts off our brains at the balls; you know what I mean?"

Sure, I'd know what he meant, what guy wouldn't, if she was really beautiful. Maybe he meant that she was beautiful in some artsy sort of way, like a coral snake or a black Widow spider might be to a freaky geek, but not like a human female, not after you got a close look at her. Joe hadn't even mentioned her freaky features though. "So you think she's attractive?"

"Attractive? You got to be shitting me, Jake. Instant hard-on for every guy in the Precinct."

I didn't think even my cop buddies were so perverted. "The ears I could maybe get by, but don't the chalky white skin and the big silver bug-eyes and the pointy teeth bother you just the least little bit?"

"Hah?" he said, with a puzzled look on his face. "What the fuck are you talking about Jake? What pointy teeth? What white skin and big silver bug-eyes?"

There was a spark of anger there, for sure, and I decided to shift lanes. "Not important. How did she get involved with the bank case?"

"The Feds brought her in. They got some kind of thing going on, to work with elves to catch trolls and other dudes that escaped from never-never-land or someplace like that there in far off Arizona, where they came from. They're especially interested in our troll. The elves are our friends, the Feds say. They're here to help us with the bad damn trolls, the damn Feds say.

"Marks first said that the whole thing was crazy, that he wouldn't cooperate. But then she shows up and takes one look at him and she has him wrapped around her cute little finger." Kebony chugged down more brew. "Every damn guy in the office is hot for her. You don't think Marks is boffing her, do you?"

"What does she say about the bank case?"

"She don't tell me Jack, except to stay out of her fucking way, when I ain't jumping this way or that way like she says. But she did say that you're cursed, Jake, and she says that your client is too."

"What?"

"She says that the Wainwright broad is glowing with magic and that the tires and that inside-out car have troll magic fingerprints all the fuck over them."

I struggled to keep a straight face. Magic again. Right. "You don't believe in that magic crap, do you?"

Joe burped, managed to stand up on shaky legs, then stumbled off to check the plumbing. I knew that wasn't a good sign, him hitting the little boy's room again. Sure enough, when he got back to our table he wouldn't sit down, but he chugged down a final brew and burped again, loud enough to freak out the whole bar. "That's three burps and three trips to the john," he announced. "Jake buddy, you know what that means?"

Yeah, I knew. Joe promptly collapsed to the floor as limp, lumpy, and conscious as a giant sack of potatoes, and a dozen times as heavy. I got Benny the bouncer to help me carry the big lush to the Ford. Benny owns Sam's Bar; I don't think there ever was a Sam.

The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache to a terrible but familiar noise and found that I was in my old private detective office. There were a couple of old sofa pillows nearby that the movers must have neglected to move, but I was stretched out on the bare hardwood floor. I must have drove us to the old office out of habit. I managed to crawl to the other room and found the expected source of the God-awful noise: Kebony, stretched out on his back on the floor, snoring. Grinding noises like an ailing wood chipper echoed through the place. It was worse than sleeping with the damn cat.

Judging by light coming through a window it was morning but I was still beat and decided to try to get back to sleep. I turned Joe over onto his stomach, pushed him into a corner, and threw the pillows over his head to deaden some of the sound. Or maybe he'd suffocate; I was too damned tired to give a shit.

That worked pretty good, but then my new cell phone rang, sending sharp shooting hangover pains through my head again. Margie was calling to tell me that that her boss Grisim was in the hospital with a yet-to-be-determined illness, and that Eric, one of her tellers, had also called in sick. Margie had actually been half expecting a call from Eric, as calling in sick was something that he did frequently. Eric was likable but not very dependable claimed Margie, and it irritated her that he cut work when it suited him.

Margie told me that this time he didn't sound quite right. On the phone he sounded scared to her, and his voice was muffled. Concerned, she wanted me to drive her to his apartment, as she suspected something nasty and didn't want to go alone. I would have rather gone back to sleep, even there on the hard floor with Kebony, but fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. I grabbed my fedora and Joe and headed for the Ford.

I dropped off the more dazed than usual Kebony at the Precinct and headed for the bank to pick up Margie and drive to Eric's apartment. The kid lived in a cheap rental not very far from the bank. On the way to Eric's place Margie told me that Eric irritated her sometimes, but that all-in-all he was a good kid.

The robe-clad dude that answered our knocking was the hairiest guy I ever saw. Eric's roommate, I figured. Except for fearful brown eyes, foot-long curly brown hair cascaded from every square inch of his head, arms, legs, and feet. I felt all hot and itchy just to look at him.

"We're looking for Eric," Margie said, probably trying to keep the disgust from her voice and facial expressions but failing. "Is he here?"

Behind the hairy guy, the floor was covered with piles of brown hair clippings. I felt sorry for Eric and this hairy kid. This joint was no better than mine; not the kind of a dump where you'd like to try to bed some broad you were after.

"It's me, Mrs. Wainwright," spoke the hairy head. "I'm Eric."

We rushed the poor kid to the nearest hospital. Once again, the so-called experts were baffled and impotent. Eric grew hair at a rate of about an inch a minute, all over his body. Weird.

Margie said that it was ironic that it was his hair giving him trouble, since he was always messing with his hair at work, bugging her and everyone else. She figured it had to be another of Henry's magic curses. The man was after the Bank and everyone in it for firing him. Who else could it be? Margie cursed Henry out as we left the hospital, saying he'd have to have some shit slung back at him if he was going to sling it. Then we had lunch and I drove her back to her office, though she didn't seem too happy to return there.

So I had a few questions building up for this guy Henry. Like what was his connection, if any, to all this crazy stuff? I decided to look him up after stopping in at my own office for fresh clothes. Maybe I could even find something to wear that the damn stinking cat hadn't slept on.

****

CHAPTER 6

UNINVITED GUESTS

I unlocked and stepped into my office to find it and my recliner already occupied by a well-dressed, husky, oldish tough. He was in his fifties, I guessed, but looked fit. I thought maybe I had seen him hanging around the neighborhood a couple times, but didn't know him from Adam. "Who the fuck are you?" I asked, after deciding to be polite.

The guy didn't flinch; he just sat there, looking a hell of a lot more relaxed than I was. His black suit cost as much as my entire fancy new office, I figured. It fit his extra-wide frame perfectly without a wrinkle.

"I the fuck am Elaine's Uncle Vinnie," he said, in a level, gravelly voice, but soft, like he was conserving his energies for something else. I didn't like to think what that 'something else' was. The guy was built like he could walk through walls.

She had mentioned an Uncle Vinnie a couple of times, but this is the first time I had met any of her family. As a rule I avoid women's families like the plague, since only trouble ever comes of it.

Male family members especially. They still have visions of their innocent little girl going to kindergarten or something. Nothing like the visions I had of them, and they knew it, as they were guys themselves. Rotten bastards, all of us. I relaxed a bit, shrugged, held out my hand and walked over to the guy. "Pleased to meet you," I said, trying to sound sincere.

I naturally expected him to stand up and shake my extended hand, but he didn't budge an inch. "Sit down. We need to have a little talk," he rumbled. "And take off that silly Panama hat, you look like a damned bookie."

It wasn't a request "It's a fedora," I noted, as I took the hat off. I also sat down, but I was a little steamed. This was my place, not his, and he had insulted my hat.

Uncle Vinnie followed my every move with small, unblinking eyes. "Let's you and me get something straight right off. I don't like you. You're a two-bit bum and Elaine could do a hell of a lot better. But Elaine has the promise of her parents that they won't interfere, as long as you don't mistreat her. And of course that extends to me."

He shrugged ever so slightly his overly wide and thick shoulders. "As you might of heard, I keep an eye on things for her Mama and Papa, so it ain't been easy sometimes for me to keep out of things, if you catch my drift." He smiled at me for just a moment. Not a happy smile; this was more of a menacing shark smile that thankfully disappeared quickly. "But then I visited Elaine a couple hours ago, to give her a message from home, and I found her to be ... in distress."

"You did?"

He seemed not to hear me. "Now why would that be, I wondered, her being all happy the last few days about soon getting hitched to you and all. So I asked her. You know what she said?"

"I have no idea."

"Bull. She said she hasn't heard from you today and you never came home at all last night."

Shit, he was right. But so what? I was on a case. "Your point being?"

"The point being, things are getting much more serious now. Stuff you might have got away with in the past ain't going to hack it no more. Marriage is serious business for her family, as you might imagine. VERY serious. You ain't hitched yet but seeing how she's shacked up with you now the Family's expectations of you are rapidly increasing, shall we say. Very rapidly.

"It's a very delicate situation. Ve-ry del-i-cate. That's usually my job, to take care of delicate situations for the Family, and to you know, do whatever it takes. But the parents will be visiting the two of you tonight to check you out for themselves. So far they ain't too happy with my reports, but out of respect for Elaine they want to give you a chance. That, in a nutshell, is my message from them for you and for her."

I tried to remain as unblinking and impassive as he was. "I'll try to make a good impression."

"That would be wise."

"I'm a wise guy."

He smiled grimly and shook his head slightly, still never taking his eyes off mine. "I'd hold back on wise-ass, wise-guy jokes tonight if I was you, if you want to live to see tomorrow. Big Ma and Papa K, they don't have the sense of humor I do."

"Thanks for the tip."

All hints of a smile disappeared. "Understand I'm here telling you this for Elaine's sake, not yours. If it were up to me you'd have quietly disappeared a while back, before things got this far. She's a good kid and Big Ma and Papa K's only child. They are very concerned about this. I am personally also VE-RY concerned. You catch my drift?"

"I'll be on my very best behavior. What could possibly go wrong?"

He shook his head and smiled his nasty shark smile. "You are either cool as all hell or one super dumb fuck."

"Both, probably."

He stood up slowly, as did I. I was half a head taller than him but he was much heavier; he was built like a gorilla and he moved like it was all muscle. He was still staring me in the eyes. "Kid, have plenty of beer on hand, that might be your only fucking hope. They usually don't drink, but maybe you can get them to drink a little of it. That or leave town right now, and don't stop until not even you can figure out where the fuck you are or what the fuck your name is. Got it?"

"I sort of like it here."

"It's your funeral," he said, as he shrugged his huge shoulders again and walked slowly towards the exit. Then he paused. "One more little thing. Don't tell nobody but Elaine that they're coming to your apartment tonight. NO-BO-DY. Got it?"

"Sure thing. Nice meeting you, Uncle Vinnie."

He swung around smoothly and was suddenly staring right into my eyeballs again with those beady little eyes, and his face got even harder. "Only the Family and close Family friends call me Vinnie. You call me Mr. Veracruz." He turned away and smoothly walked out the door.

I paced around the office to think things out. The new place had air conditioning up the ying-yang but I was sweating. I hadn't liked the guy's looks. I had seen friendlier looking great-white sharks. I especially hadn't liked his lingo and attitude, not to mention his body language. Funeral? Leave town? Quiet disappearance? Vinnie Veracruz. Big Ma. Papa K. Why did those names sound familiar?

The King family? No, she had called them something else, when I first hired her. Falcon or something.

Suddenly it all clicked. Falconie. It was Falconie. Big Ma Falconie. Papa K, 'the King' Falconie. Vinnie Veracruz, their chief hit man. The Family. THE FAMILY!

I fainted.

When I woke up I was lying on the floor with a wet face, looking up at Elaine, who was bent over me with an empty water glass, looking worried. "Jake! What happened to you? And where have you been?"

I sat up. "Falconie! You're a Falconie! You're the daughter of the biggest mob bosses in the greater New York area! Hell, the biggest mob bosses in the Unites States! And they're coming to my apartment for dinner tonight, according to Mr. Veracruz."

"I know, Ma phoned me. Of course I am a Falcone, but you knew that already. I told you who my parents were when you hired me, remember?"

She had. But I must have been too damn busy checking out her physical qualifications for the job to pay any attention. Women are dangerous that way. By the time you see past their legs and other nifty parts you're in deep shit. Or deep concrete and then a deep river maybe, in this case. I stood up, shaking my head. "Maybe you did, but I guess the name didn't register."

It was her turn to look shocked. "It didn't? I figured anyone in your business would know about them."

"Sure. But I'm so low in the food chains I don't ever even meet anyone who knows somebody who knows anybody like that. Besides, I'd never expect someone connected like you to come looking for a two-bit job like yours. I mean, what are the odds? Shit Baby, why didn't you tell me?"

"I did, Jake, I did tell you!"

"So why the fuck didn't I listen?"

She turned and stepped away from me. "So now what?" she asked coldly.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what about us?"

"What about us?"

"Does this change things between us, Jake?"

My head was spinning. I didn't know what the hell to say. How couldn't this change things? Then again, why should it change things? What things? This was soap-opera talk, not the kind of stuff guys even think about. My mouth was open but nothing came out. She took my lack of answer as some sort of sign, I guess. Without another word she walked out the office door and slammed it shut behind her, leaving me standing there, confused as all hell.

By the time I ran out into the hall to look for her, she was gone.

I locked myself in the office, shut off most of the lights, and went to the back to take a cold shower and change my clothes. That would give me time to think.

As usual, thinking didn't help. As I stepped back out into my office again wearing fresh clothes my head was still spinning. Despite the shower with deodorant soap I thought that I smelled something rotten, and I glanced around the darkened office, wondering what it was. That's when in the dim light I noticed that an extra-wide dude was again making himself comfortable in my recliner.

Dear old Uncle Vinnie again. Vinnie the bone crusher Veracruz, the right-hand man for the Falconie family and most feared man on the East coast. He had seen Elaine after Elaine saw me, that had to be it. He had seen that she was more upset than ever. Now he had returned to fix things his way. It smelled like he had taken a detour through a sewer though.

"Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot," I began. "Why don't we try to be friends?"

The wide guy in the chair snapped his fingers and the lights came on, which was tricky since they don't normally operate that way. "Me think same thing," he said.

My recliner was evidently irresistible to short guys with impossibly wide shoulders to whom locked doors meant nothing at all. Reclining on it right now was the ugliest and widest guy I had ever seen; a guy that had cursed me out in an unknown lingo when last we met, a guy that should have left town a week ago, given that the whole damn state, local, and federal police force was after him. I almost fainted again. It wasn't Vinnie, it was even worse. Grinning gap-toothed at me from my favorite recliner was Mickahl Al Calger, fugitive troll!

He was wearing his white fedora, the damn copy-cat! He wore no ill-fitting suit though; now he wore a tea shirt, overalls, and gigantic sneakers. The fit was OK; he must have found a men's big and wide chothes department someplace.

"Shit," I managed to mutter sincerely. I had meant to say shi-i-it, but I didn't have enough breath.

"We be friends now," he said, grinning with brown teeth that stunk like a sewer full of dead rotten rats. He pulled something from an overall pocket and held it out to me.

Despite the source, the something had such an appealing greenish look to it that I reached out and snatched it. It was a thick wad of twenties, maybe a hundred of them. I whistled as I stepped back from him a couple of steps, further away from the rotten breath and hopefully out of reach of those massive arms.

"Now you work for me, de-tec-tive," he said.

I wish he hadn't said that. I was hoping that he had just given me the dough out of the goodness of his kind little heart. Now the rotten bastard had forced me to think twice about it. I shook my head and reluctantly handed the stack of bills back to him. "Sorry pal, it don't work that way. I already got a case, and you're in it already somehow up to your fat head."

I regretted my unfortunate choice of words as soon as I said them and I saw his gap-toothed smile started to fade, and I promised myself not to call the big guy any more bad names. Just last week I had seen him throw two hundred pound cops all over the place like they were Barbie dolls.

"I study people things," he rumbled. "You be cop, for money. Me need cop on my side to help me. You smart; you ruin me plans to get money from rich bank man and find me. Me already give you curse. Now me give you money, so you work for me."

I shook my head. "It don't work that way pal. I got to WANT to work for you, and you got to have some kind of problem you want me to fix for you. The bottom line is, I have to WANT to help you, and agree to do it."

"Me study humans. You want money, me have money to give to you. I have problem, you fix, when me give you more money." He held the money out to me again. The smile was gone and he was tensing up, maybe getting ready to spring at me from the recliner.

The guy stunk so bad I almost puked, and his brain must have also been as dense and rotten as a month old cheese pizza. After I got him out of my office, I'd have to fumigate the place, right after I called Kebony to come pick up this loony mountain of muscle. But for right now, how would I get him out of here without getting myself clobbered? I had seen him in action against the cops and I didn't want any of that. I had to use my head fast or this guy might pulverize me.

"All right, all right, let's talk," I said. "Maybe I'll work for you and maybe I won't. I don't change money just to talk, so you keep your money for now. Relax, and let's just talk."

Pushing back down into the recliner he relaxed and smiled. He was even uglier when he smiled. "Me like talk. Me like nice chair."

"Right." I liked it too. I hoped I wouldn't have to throw out my favorite recliner after he was done stinking it up. I sat down in another chair that was located strategically near the door. "First off, I already know about your big problem. The cops are after you, Mick."

The big guy shrugged, shook his ugly head, and grinned. "Humans not be problem. Me like humans. Humans help Mick."

I shook my head back at him. "If you mean that Tweed broad, you picked a rotten partner. She's already confessed to assault, but she says it was all your idea to kill Grisim. The cops will try to charge you with attempted murder. They think that you planned to kill him."

Shocked surprise showed across his ugly mug. I had seen that expression before, on the faces of a hundred guys that had been done in by women. I had seen it in the mirror plenty.

"Kill? Me not kill! Little old bank man take me here, so I come here to find me. Me need money, so make deal with Fey people to work for rich bank man and make money. Me make rich peoples little bit small, I get money. Then me use money to find me. But then Tweed find out. She want new deal. Me make Grisim little more small, then she make him big again. Bank man then be happy and give her money. Me get more money from her, money me need to quest for little old bank man me need to find me and go home. That be the plan, Mr. Jake.

"That not happen either. Wrong things happen. Grisim be too small. Me not know how that happen."

"Listen friend, you still don't get it. The cops want you for attempted murder and for resisting and escaping arrest. They want you in jail. They will catch you very soon and put you in jail. End of story."

He shrugged. "Me not have time for nice human jail visit. Nice human jail not a problem. Me have BIG problem. I give you money, and you help fix it."

"OK, what is your big problem?"

He squirmed around in the recliner like a little kid. I had the impression that he was about to tell me something he didn't like to tell anyone. Some sort of big secret. "Me need find me."

"You've said that before, about a dozen times. You need to find yourself?"

"Me be here, this town. Need find bank man with Source. Need find me. You help me find me?"

I shook my head. "Sounds like you need a shrink, not a P-I."

He shook his head. "Not need shrink again. Me already shrink. Me wait long time for me to wake up, find Source. Then me use Source to help me escape jail, and me look for me here." His smile got huge. "Me happy am free, but want me return me to home, before Evil Ones come for me. Me need you find me, need you find me fast."

I still didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. "You escaped from a jail? In Arizona?"

"No, not nice human jail; it be BAD place I escape from. Place of Evil Ones. Me shrink me to escape bad place, help me escape. Me follow me here to find me. Is only way to escape Evil Ones and fight Evil Ones. But me can't find me, so me need help.

"So me need money first. Everything need money in this place. So me sell shrinking magic, get money. Also get me to bank of bank man that has Source. Then you stop plan. Me see you smart, Mr. Jake. You be better partner. Jake job be to find lost people, and me be lost. You find me. Me already help you; me give you powers with curse."

"Powers? Me?" I asked.

He nodded his big ugly head. "You be human. You know this world. You cop for money. Me give you powers so you find me and be protected from Evil Ones. Now I also give you money, and you find me. This is our deal, as you peoples say? You help me find me and me go home?"

He seemed to be actually pleading with me to help him, though I still didn't know what the shit he wanted. Still, he was starting to get to me, the way a big, ugly, stupid, homeless mutt might. "I don't think so, or at least not until you tell me what you know about the Third National Bank."

"Yes, that be Bank me come to find."

Great. "What about slashed tires?" I asked.

Blank stare.

"Hairy people? Inside-out cars?"

More blank staring.

"Why are the elves after you?"

His jaw dropped and his eyes bulged. He glanced around nervously. "Elves? Why you say human name for Evil Ones?"

"Yesterday at the police station and at the bank, I talked to a dame named Loranda who claims to be an elf cop. She's in this town looking for you right now, big boy."

The big guy actually looked scared. "Evil Ones be here already? Loranda be here? In this town? Now? Loranda be problem. She be strongest Evil One, she be Queen of all Evil Ones. That female be BIG problem!"

Sure, of course the dame was a big problem. What other kind of dame was there? At least this one wasn't my problem, and I wasn't going to make her my problem. Let the weirdoes fight their own battles, I always figure. I just had to get this big stinking weirdo the hell out of my office, THAT was my problem!

"Me hide now, and you find me," he said. "Me give you more powers now. Me no find me anyway, that why me come see you now. Me give you ALL my powers to find me, Jake Simon, and it be ALL up to you, as you peoples say. Use human detective powers, use troll powers. Find me. Then I come back for me."

He got up out the recliner and walked towards the door, reaching out to shake my hand firmly with a giant hairy paw as he passed, damn near crushing bone. "Morgor Al Cragor Simplex Temporal," he said, or something like that, and my arm seemed to tingle.

"There, it be done. Now only you can find me, and we be friends and partners." He smiled, exposing his huge rotten teeth. The stench was awful.

"Oh sure, buddy," I agreed and smiled a real smile this time, since at last he moved towards the exit door and opened it. "Right. We can play some hide and seek, friend. I'll find you alright, sure thing!" Always agree with muscle-bound lunatics, that's my motto.

He nodded and smiled as he walked out. I locked the door behind him, for all the good it would do, then breathed a huge sigh of relief. The place still stunk, and I was breathing it, but at least I was still breathing. Beyond him stinking up the office, he had accomplished nothing, except to tell me a bunch of stuff that didn't make any sense at all. At least I had confirmed that he was on the lamb from the freaky Loranda chick. The rest that stuff about finding him was obviously mixed up crap. The guy was loony tunes.

Shaken, I washed my hand-shaking hand with lots of soap and hot water before checking out my recliner. The chair seemed OK to look at, and didn't stink any more than the rest of the room. A few sprits of Lysol and it would be good as new, I figured. Things would soon be back to where they were before Mick had visited.

Then I saw the money. The bastard had left the pack of twenties on the recliner. I ran out of the office with it to look for him, but he was gone.

I had his retainer. So he had actually for real hired me, he had to figure. I had to figure it too. It was the code of the P-Is.

"Shit," I complained, as I counted the dough, but I had a smile on my face. Two thousand bucks is two thousand bucks. Besides, any guy that wears a white fedora must be OK. Right?

****

CHAPTER 7

PRINCE

I still planned to look up Henry but I figured I better square things with Elaine first, so I headed for the apartment, after gassing up the Ford with one of the twenties from Mick. As I walked into my apartment smiling she was walking out, carrying a suitcase. Veracruz was right behind her, carrying another suitcase and a cat carrier with the damn cat in it. They weren't smiling.

"What gives, Baby?" I asked.

She looked red around the eyes like she had been crying. About what, I couldn't figure. "I'm moving out, Jake. This was a mistake."

So the marriage was off! I felt relief, for just a couple of seconds, until I thought about it some more. What would the Family make of Elaine being pissed off at me like this? Would they have Vinnie pay me a little visit later? Break a couple kneecaps as a going-away present maybe? Or worse?

No, I couldn't let it end like this. I had to think really fast about what she might want to hear, and what the Family might go along with. "Oh, no!" I exclaimed convincingly. "What gives Baby?" I tried to look and sound really hurt.

"You won't have to worry about my family, Jake; I'll explain that this was all my fault."

"Screw your family, Baby; this is about you and me. They don't figure into this."

She stopped walking and turned to stare at me. "They don't?"

I glanced at Veracruz. He was taking this all in with his hard, beady, pitiless eyes. "Well, not hardly they don't."

"They really don't? You mean it?"

"I mean it. Just give me a little time to get used to your family situation, Baby. We'll get through this."

She sat the suitcase down and smiled for a moment, but then her face hardened again. "What happened to you last night?"

I shrugged. "I met with Joe to talk about the case. It made sense to loosen his lips with some beer at Sam's bar. Well, let me tell you: that took one hell of a lot of beer. We both got a little drunk and fell asleep on the floor at the old office. You know how it is. Then some more stuff happened this morning and I was very busy." I nodded towards Veracruz.

"You couldn't even phone?"

I shrugged. I had a new cell phone but hadn't even told her about it yet. I decided that now wasn't the time. "Phones are disconnected at the old place," I explained. That much was probably even true.

"That's not good enough, Jake. What if I had simply disappeared overnight? Would that have been OK with you?"

"I'd have worried about you, sure. But you know, I'm on a case, Baby."

"I'm on the case too, Jake. Even if we weren't engaged and living together we're still business partners. Don't you think we should keep in touch?"

"Sure, I guess so. I'm sorry Baby; I just ain't used to our new setup yet. Tell you what; I was going to see this Henry character next. Why don't you tag along with me and I'll bring you up to speed on everything."

"I don't think so, Jake. I better stay here and prepare for my folks. You know, clean up and cook and that sort of thing. Woman stuff."

"Sure Baby. I understand woman stuff." You guys out there, it's always good to pretend you understand women stuff; remember that. Behind her, I could see Veracruz putting down the suitcase inside the apartment, along with the case with the damn cat inside it. "You know, if you really have another place to take the cat, Baby, maybe he'd still like a little adventure. You know, don't take this wrong, but while your folks visit, maybe the cat should take a powder."

Elaine shook her head. "Not a chance, Jake. Prince is a gift from Papa. He'll expect to see him. He'll expect to see Prince and us all living happily together."

So Prince was a gift from the King? Great. Veracruz smiled. Almost laughed even, maybe. He must have seen the look on my face. "Sure thing, Baby," I said. "We're just not real close buddies yet, me and cute little Prince." I tried to kick the damn cat whenever I got the chance; maybe that explained some of it. "I'm just not a cat person."

Veracruz released the damn cat from the cat carrier and it strutted out into the living room like it owned the joint. Damn I hate cats!

"Wrong, Jake," she said. "You're the most cat-like person I know. You're the strong independent type, and you don't take any crap from anybody. Cats sense that. And I suppose that's one of the things I love about you." She reached up and grabbed me, and we kissed long and serious.

The cat meowed. "Feed me," said a strange little voice, at the same time.

I looked around. Veracruz had disappeared. The cat was sitting there on MY recliner, like he owned it, staring at the two of us, like he usually does, with those weird orange cat eyes of his.

He meowed again. "Feed me," demanded the voice. It seemed to come from the cat!

"What the hell?" I remarked.

Elaine laughed. "That's just Prince, Jake. I put his smart collar on. It's one of those new computerized ones that translates cat to human. You must have heard of them."

Not really. Technology ain't one of my strong points. It's what a guy has between his ears and his legs that counts most I figure, but not necessarily in that order. I still had to admit this was a pretty damned amazing thing though. "What the hell!" I remarked. "The damn cat talks?"

"Quite a bit. He's been genetically enhanced, brain wise, and the collar translates. Daddy thought he'd make better company for me that way. Right big guy?"

The cat jumped off the recliner and strutted over to Elaine, where it rubbed itself against her legs, purring. "Elaine love Prince?" asked the little mechanical voice, over the sound of his meow.

She reached down to pet the damn thing. "Of course Elaine loves her big guy."

"Prince go home now?" it asked.

The damn thing was actually carrying on a conversation!

"This IS your home now, Prince. Here with me and Jake."

The damn cat looked up at me and snarled. "Jake bad," it said, as it turned away and disappeared into the bedroom, still strutting like he owned the joint, with his tail high-up like he was going to take a leak or rub his ass on something.

"You didn't tell me your cat talks," I noted.

"It takes a little getting used to. I thought he should get acquainted with you on a non-verbal level first."

Right. So now when the Family visited they would hear about me from the damn cat! "Non-verbal sounds good to me. So can we take the collar back off then?"

She shook her head. "Papa and Mama will be expecting it to be on him."

"How does he understand us? Does the damn collar speak cat language to him?"

"No, silly! Prince knows English, Italian, Russian and Spanish, just like I do. He doesn't need a translator to understand people-talk."

"Oh, sure," I agreed. Great. Even the damn cat was better educated than I was.

"Why don't you go see Henry, then come home and help me and Prince get ready?"

"Sure thing Baby. You and little Prince."

I left without telling her or little Prince anything more about the case, as I didn't want to upset her again. Besides, if she could just square things with the Family, she would be doing her share, I figured.

****

CHAPTER 8

HENRY

Henry Jenkins' place was clear across town, but fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. Margie had given me the ex-bank teller's address and described the place to me. He lived in a nice little old house at the end of a quiet street. Margie had seen the Jenkins house once years earlier, when she had to pick him up because his car wouldn't start. She described to me a neat little white Cape-Cod home surrounded by nifty trees and flower gardens.

When I parked the Ford in front of his house things looked anything but nifty. The man must have gone totally bonkers after being canned at the bank I figured, and destroyed his own property. It looked as though a tornado had struck his place and his place only. The trees and bushes were all smashed down with leaves shredded off. The flowers were crashed and rotting brown. Worst of all, the plants and lawn and walkways and house were covered over in thousands of thick clods of brown mud.

Stunned by the destruction, I got out of the car and walked as far as the walkway that led to the house. Just a few steps ahead the mud started. The wind shifted and I almost barfed when I caught a brief whiff of putrid air. It for sure wasn't mud covering everything; it was shit, tons of it. Cow manure, maybe. Sure, Jersey is the Garden State and all, but this was ridiculous.

Just then a couple of brown softball-sized clods plopped down out of the clear blue sky to land a few feet from me, splashing bits of gooey crap in all directions, but somehow sparing me.

I wondered how and why Henry was doing this. I eye-balled the house and surrounding area for some kind of crap launching mechanism, but saw nothing that looked like a poop gun or catapult or whatever a guy would fling big wads of manure with. More fell here and there all over the yard and I finally realized that it was simply raining the stuff. Even in Jersey, that's unusual.

"Shit," I observed astutely. But fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day, so I ran back to the car and put my precious white fedora in it. I wasn't about to risk my hat with this shit. Then I started towards the house again, planning some fancy footwork to dodge airborne poop bombs and the patties on the ground as necessary. Not for the first time, I wished I had another set of eyes, so I could look up and down at the same time, as I figured that I would have to step over and around the stuff as well as watch for the incoming airborne stuff.

As I started working my way through the field of goo I got some more surprises. Good ones. The nasty looking clods of crap actually disappeared when I was within a couple feet of them, like they weren't really real! Also, they hardly smelled at all. I relaxed a little.

It all had to be some kind of optical delusion, I figured. Sure, poop seemed to plop down all around the yard, but the airborne stuff also disappeared whenever I got close to any of it. My reflexes still had me dodging a few of the airborne bundles of goo, but they popped out of existence before they could hit me anyway. No big deal. After a while I completely ignored both the airborne and the on the ground stuff, and I was fine.

Soon I was at the front door ringing the bell. A gawking little old bald guy answered it; it had to be Jenkins. "Mr. Henry Jenkins? I'm Jake Simon, private detective. I'm working for Margie Wainwright to figure out what's going on at the bank. Can we talk?"

"How the duce did you get here?" he asked, glancing skyward. Then he looked me over carefully. "Why aren't you covered in manure?"

"I don't know; I just walked in through all that smoke and mirrors."

His eyes went even wider. "Smoke and mirrors? Is that what you call it? Extraordinary! Well, come in then," he said grudgingly, motioning me through the door, which he hastily closed behind me.

"Nice place you got here," I remarked.

He winced and his eyes flashed anger, but he didn't quite try to slug me. "It was nice until yesterday. I don't suppose you would care to explain my little precipitation problem?"

"Didn't seem so bad to me. But no, I came to you to try to find some answers."

"Answers? So, you claim to be a fellow seeker of knowledge. Well then, why don't we make ourselves more comfortable in my knowledge room?"

Soon we were in a snug little book-lined study, sitting in soft chairs. The walls were lined with hundreds of books, most of them even older looking than Jenkins, with spooky titles like Dwellers in The Mists, Spells to Conjure Ghosts and Mysteries of the Ancient Aztecs. Many were in foreign languages, and some just had goofy markings on them that didn't hardly look like writing at all. The air was full of flower smells, probably from at least a dozen cans of air freshener, I guessed; almost enough to gag on.

"The smell doesn't bother you, Mr. Simon?"

I shrugged. "Flower smell beats cigar smoke, anyway. But what gives with the special effects in the yard? You got a plague of Avon ladies or Jehovah Witnesses you're trying to scare away?"

"Flower smell and special effects? Please, no more games Mr. Simon," said Jenkins. "You win. Margie wins, if she had you do this. Whatever you want, you've got it. I give up. You obviously have me far outgunned. I surrender. What exactly do you want?"

"Just some information," I said.

"Of course. Knowledge. First, I'm sorry about what I said to Margie at the bank after she fired me; I was in shock, that's all. I had never been fired before. But she has always been fair to me; I shouldn't have blamed her personally. My firing had to be direction from the front office of course. I take back my curse on her and the bank."

"You do?" Would slashed tires fix themselves and so-forth, I wondered?

"Certainly, for what it's worth; that is to say, absolutely nothing. My curse wasn't completed and I have no powers anyway. But you would know that, wouldn't you."

It wasn't a question. "I would?"

"If course. Anyone that can do what you've just done in getting through my yard would know that. What degree warlock are you?"

"Warlock? Me? What the hell are you talking about?"

He studied my face and shook his head. "I'll be damned! You really don't know what I'm talking about, do you, Mr. Simon?"

"No. And call me Jake."

He looked a little relived, but still on his guard. "Call me Henry then, Jake, but this doesn't make any sense. I watched your approach from the window, expecting you to be pelted the way I've been and the poor paperboy was. And contrary to their extravagant claims, the mail didn't get through. That rain and snow and sleet guarantee business evidently doesn't extend to crap. I'll be lucky if the mail service doesn't sue me. But you simply walked through the stinking slime outside like it wasn't there, and without even an umbrella or gasmask. Also, you remark that you smell flowers in here instead of the overpowering crap stink that for me no amount of air-freshener can overcome."

"So you didn't create that little side show out there?"

"Of course not."

"Then who did?" I asked.

"If it wasn't you, I'm not sure."

"Got any guesses?"

He shook his head. "Perhaps. But my guesses could just get me into more trouble."

"Not from me, Henry. I'm just a seeker of knowledge, like you say."

"Then you're in far more trouble than you know. You don't even know what you are. Then again, I'm not too sure about myself either. Look around you, Jake. I've altruistically devoted my life to the pursuit of wisdom, and what has it gotten me? Tons of magic poop, that's what!"

"What do you know about what's happening at the bank?"

"I heard about the tire destruction. Nasty, that. Attacking the American automobile is serious business. The car is a sacred icon in this country. But as you can see, I have my own crappy little problems."

"The bad stuff happened at the bank right after you left it."

"You mean right after I got fired for no cause."

"That's the breaks. That really pissed you off, did it?"

"Of course it did. But I got over it. I have had more serious matters to concern myself with; more serious than even noxious poop."

I glanced around the room at all the old books. "Your hobby?"

"My life. My passion. Something I pursue with every minute and meager dollar that I have."

"Did getting fired at the bank keep you from pursuing it?"

He sighed and seemed to be looking at some far off place. "Possibly. I'm not sure what happened. I was perhaps on the verge of achieving my lifetime goal, only to have it slip away."

"Because you were fired?"

"I didn't think so at the time. But when I looked for it before I started for home on that last day at the bank and it was gone. I had it with me at the bank that day, and I'm absolutely positive that I had put it in my lunch box. But when I looked for it, it was gone."

"What was gone?"

"The artifact that I had worked for over thirty years to track down."

"Out West?"

"Correct. Got it from an old Navajo shaman. I didn't dare leave it alone so I brought it to the bank with me. But at the bank, or here, or somewhere in-between, it disappeared."

"What kind of artifact?"

"One with real magic, if you believe in those kinds of things."

I managed to keep a straight face. "And you say it disappeared. What does it look like?"

"It took me decades to figure that out. Why should I tell you?"

"OK, well then, tell me this: what do you know about trolls?"

His eyebrows popped up. "Now why would that interest you?"

"I've run into one lately. Hell, a troll was in my office just this morning."

Jenkins sort of fell into his chair like somebody had slugged him, but then a smile formed on his face then disappeared before he shook his head in denial. "That's not possible, Mr. Simon. First of all a troll wouldn't even fit into your office. Trolls are huge, aren't they?"

"According to an elf I was talking to the other day, this troll has shrunk himself down by using magic. He was only about your height."

He breathed a sigh of relief and smiled. "So, that small, was he? And you also spoke with an elf? Now I know that you're teasing me, Jake. Trust me on this: trolls, elves, and their ilk, if they exist at all, inhabit a parallel universe, not this one. I've made it my life's work to study what little is known of this entire business. I have found legends about them but they haven't actually visited Earth for hundreds of years."

I shrugged. "Personally I think this magic business is all a bunch of hooey, but I got to admit I've seen some weird shit myself these last couple of weeks, and I don't mean just the stuff in your yard. If you're the expert, what do you make of all this elf and dwarf stuff they talk about in the news?"

"I'm afraid I don't pay much attention to current affairs, and my paperboy couldn't get near the house today because of a little yard problem I'm having. What elf and dwarf news are you referring to?"

"You know; the stuff that broke out near Phoenix a couple weeks ago. Say, you were out there just before then, weren't you?"

He turned a couple shades whiter. "Phoenix? Elves and dwarves in Phoenix? In the news?"

"That's the story. Someone even reported seeing a dragon. The weird stuff at the bank started soon after that, and shrinking of people and a troll right here in Jersey happened a few days after that. I was less than three feet tall myself for a while last week. What do you make of that, as an expert?"

He looked shaken. "I'd say that things have been seriously thrown out of kilter, Jake. I'd even venture to guess that my finding the artifact may have had something to do with it, as suggested by the timing of events in Arizona shortly after I was there, and what is happening to my yard and at the bank."

Suddenly energized, he stood up and started pacing around the room, smiling and nodding. "Yes, these are very interesting developments, Jake, very interesting indeed. Thank you for making me aware of them. This suggests entirely new directions for my research. I am greatly indebted to you for bringing all of this to my attention."

"And the weird stuff at the bank?"

"I can assure you that I have no direct connection with whatever happened at the bank."

"Did you mention the bank when you were on your trip out west, to your shaman friend for instance?"

"Perhaps, but I don't see the relevance. If there are really trolls and elves in this area, almost anything is possible. You seem to be the one with the suspicious connections. What, may I ask, did the so-called troll want of you?"

"He wanted my detective services to help him find himself, he said. I told the guy he needed a shrink, and he said he didn't need any more of that. I figure he escaped from a loony-bin."

Jenkins seemed to fight back laughter, and smiled even more. "Find himself! Find a troll! A shrink! Of course!" He pulled himself together, but was clearly very excited about something. "Well! How very, very strange. I'd keep my distance from the affairs of trolls if I were you, Jake. Even in this universe a troll would wield considerable power. The trouble at the bank may have just been in response to some sort of petty banking problem that this troll had. He lost his ATM card maybe." Jenkins laughed. "Whatever it was, it's over and done with now. My advice to you and to Margie is to leave it all alone. Did the troll happen to mention his name, by any chance?"

"No, but it might be Mickahl Al Calger."

Jenkins eyes went wide and his jaw dropped for a moment, then he fought it back. "Odd name."

"Familiar name?"

"I can't say it is."

Bull shit. "Can't or won't?"

"I can't help you further Jake. Not with anything you'd understand. Just stay away from this troll, if you can."

"Any advice on elves, Henry?"

"Same advice as with trolls. These are creatures of great power. Stay out of their way and they'll soon be going back to their own world, if history is any guide. And now, if that is all, I'd like to return to my research."

He stood, and I got up myself and started towards the door. "Mind if I hit you up again sometime for more info on this stuff? There probably aren't too many experts on it around here."

"Certainly. But I hope it won't even be necessary."

I left with the feeling that he had learned far more than I had.

****

CHAPTER 9

THE FOLKS

Without a word to me, Papa 'The King' Falconie and Big Ma Falconie walked through the door of my apartment like they owned the joint, which technically they did. Elaine had just informed me that they owned the whole damn apartment complex I lived in.

Papa K looked to be in his late fifties and was about my size and build, but was big-boned, with the square jaw of a boxer, knife scars on his face and the big hands of a street fighter. He wore a dark mob-suit and red tie. When I opened the door he moved me aside with an icy stare, ignoring my extended hand, gave Elaine a quick hug, and then with shifty eyes began to take inventory of the place.

Meanwhile Big Ma, after also giving Elaine a hug, stood eyeballing me up and down. She must have liked what she saw, because she got a little smile on her face. She was a much thinner, female version of Vinnie, and I realized that they had to actually be related somehow. Brother and sister, most likely, as that would explain that whole Uncle Vinnie business. Though probably in her fifties, she was big and strong looking for a woman, even in a black dress. Where Elaine got her good looks, I couldn't figure.

"Not bad, Baby," Ma remarked, with a smile. "So this is your guy. He looks even better in person than in the surveillance shots. Even with clothes."

Surveillance? Even with clothes? Shi-i-it.

"He's a hunk, Ma," said Elaine. "Jake, say hi to Ma and Papa."

"Hi folks, glad to meet you."

"We'll see," quipped Papa Falconie menacingly. He spun around towards me, light on his feet and in a boxer-like stance, to stare at my eyeballs. "Elaine says you only just figured out who the hell her Family is. That right?"

"That's right."

"So what did you think?"

"I didn't think nothing. I fainted."

The King laughed, and Big Ma almost smiled again. "Well, maybe you ain't quite as dumb as Vinnie says," proclaimed Papa K, and he finally shook my hand, though more to crush my fingers than to show we were suddenly buddies. "I ain't promising nothing Kid, but maybe, just maybe, you'll still be alive tomorrow." He laughed again, and gave me a too heavy slap on the back. But there was no knife in his hand. Yet. Things were going great so far, I figured.

Prince came flying into the room and jumped up into the King's arms. Papa K cradled the creature in one arm and stroked it gently. The damn thing started purring like crazy. What the hell!

"Now Papa," said Big Ma, "don't worry the lad." She also reached out and started petting the damn cat.

The King glanced around the room. "No offense Kid, but this place is a dump. You got plans to improve on this?"

I decided not to remind him that he was my landlord. "No, I like it just fine. It's a pretty good deal for the money. But Elaine can do whatever she wants with it, as long as she leaves me the recliner, a TV, and a couple dozen cold brews in the fridge. You folks want to sit down for a while before dinner?"

"Sure Kid," said the King, picking my recliner to settle down in while Ma and Elaine picked the sofa. "Hey, this chair ain't half bad," he said, reclining. Prince leapt away from King and settled down on the sofa between the two women, purring. Ma put him on her lap. Meanwhile I sat in the remaining chair that the cat usually uses, getting another damn dose of cat hairs on my otherwise blue suit.

I figured I'd sit there quietly while Elaine entertained them, but she suddenly escaped to the kitchen, leaving me alone with the most feared mobsters in the country. I tried to remember that they were here for dinner and not to kill me. Hopefully. Fortunately, with his recliner remark the King had just given me an opening for small talk. "I guess I'm a recliner freak. Keep my best one at the office, but that one's pretty good too. Oh, and you can call me Jake."

"You can call us King and Ma," conceded Big Ma. "Everyone does." Her smile suddenly melted away like last week's paycheck and her face turned to stone. "So Jake, what the hell are your intentions towards our daughter?"

"The usual," I admitted, when my heart had started up again. "Hey, I'm a guy, right? I ain't going to try to sell you a line, but Elaine is very special to me."

"She's very special to us too," said the King. "Is our little girl special enough for you to marry?"

I shrugged. "If that's what she wants."

"Is it what you want, Jake?" asked Ma.

"I ain't complaining. I just never been married. Idea has me spooked a little, maybe."

"An honest enough answer," said Ma, "but not a good enough one. Marriage is a big step, Jake. You have to jump in with both feet."

King started laughing again. "Jump in with both feet, Ma? Ain't that what we told that guy just last month to get him into the East River? Of course he was wearing cement overshoes at the time, so he had to use both feet." He kept laughing as he looked down at my feet, like he was measuring them for a matching set of concrete spuds, then he said something in Italian as he made motions with his hands like he was slitting someone's throat. Cute.

His remarks sort of put things into perspective for me again. "Right, it's a big step," I agreed. "Marriage, that is. But I'm all for it, if that's the right thing for everyone. Sure, marriage is a really great idea, now that I think more about it."

"Our psychiatrist report on you says that you're afraid of long term commitments," said Ma. "Your Mama and Papa were killed in a car accident, so they both left you alone. Your aunt raised you for eight years, and then she died when you were eighteen. Now you're afraid of anything that's long term. No long term career as a cop, and no long term women. You get some money and that scares you too, so you blow it on the horses. Your pitiful life is just short little detective cases that wrap up quick, and a bunch of one night stands with anything in a skirt. That sound about right?"

Actually, maybe it did. It was like they knew me better than I did. Where the fuck did they get all this stuff? Psychiatrist report? I was pissed, but I took a deep breath and let it pass. "We're engaged, ain't we?"

"So if she's engaged, where's her ring?" demanded the King.

The thought of an engagement ring had never even entered my mind. Now it was like a slap across my face. "I just ain't gotten to it yet. I'm working on it though."

"Using what for bread?"

"Got some dough burning a hole in my pocket right now." I pulled out the stack of troll money and flashed it at them for about two seconds before replacing it in my pocket.

The King shrugged. "Looks like only a couple of grand. You blew a hundred times that at the racetrack and on your new office just last week. You better get her a better ring than that."

"Like I said, I'm working on it. I'm on a job right now." I didn't tell them it was for only fifty bucks a day.

"Do you like kids?" continued Ma, sounding all pleasant again. If this interrogation was a good-hood, bad-hood sort of grilling, then Ma must be the good hood I figured, even if she was asking the toughest questions.

"I'm not sure; I ain't ever had one, that I know of." Kids? Shi-i-it! I thought of myself when I was a kid. I sure wouldn't want to live with anybody like that!

"Elaine wants several kids you know."

It hit me then. Their weakness. The grandchildren angle. Oldsters looking for immortality. I decided to play the card. "Sure. Whatever she wants is OK by me, like I said. And kids are great; the more the merrier. I'm looking forward to them."

Ma smiled.

I smiled.

The King sat up in my chair, not smiling. "Me, I always figured she'd get hitched to someone from another Family, you know? Someone with good connections; someone who could bring something to the table. You're a deal breaker. Besides, I don't see how the hell you could raise kids in this dump."

"We could move to a bigger place maybe."

"Well, don't ever expect to move in with us," snarled the King. "And I still don't see how you could ever afford kids."

"We'd get by," I said.

"On your money or hers?" he demanded.

"On our money, from our business," I replied, although it suddenly occurred to me for the first time that secretly Elaine was probably rich as hell. "We do have our own business, you know." That I could talk about OUR business like that was a sign of how quickly things were going to shit. A couple of weeks ago it was MY business, MY apartment, and MY car. As pitiful as it was, all that stuff was MINE. Now it was becoming OURS. Crap.

The King snickered. "Your business is more like a fucking hobby. You don't even have a fucking accountant."

"Elaine does the books," I pointed out. She was in fact, a certified accountant, and a fucking accountant at that, which I tactfully decided not to point out.

"She has four college degrees," lamented Ma. "And she's a WOW, did you know that?"

"Sure; that's the first word that entered my head the first time I saw her," I responded.

"No, Kid!" interjected the King. "WOW as in W-O-W meaning Woman Of Wisdom."

"It's a society that honors only very special women," explained Ma. "To be a WOW you have to be a member of Mensa and produce some heavy duty thinking of benefit to society. Elaine produces essays on everything and publishes them in magazines and posts them on-line.

"She's a fucking genius," noted the King.

I agreed with him on that. "Turn WOW upside down and you get MOM," I noted.

Ma smiled. "That's right, Jake. Her parents are both publicly proclaimed M-O-Ms: Masters Of Mayhem. That's a dis-honorary society that we'd just as soon our daughter not ever be named to."

Being a MOM inductee was a public badge of scorn. Most ex-presidents were members. The current president was a member. If you got named to it and you weren't a president, that was a special badge of dishonor. Apparently the Falconies weren't proud to be members.

"She didn't want to get into our business," continued Ma, "so we figured maybe she's out to find herself a doctor or something. Someone to keep her out of trouble and help her raise a family; to stay a WOW and not ever be a MOM. But she found you instead. You're fifteen years older than her and a nobody. Why did you quit college, Jake, and go into being a cop, and then sink down to this? What could you have been thinking? Plus you're what used to be known as a male chauvinist pig. I don't see why any woman as smart as Elaine would put up with that nowadays."

Damn, Ma was as annoying as Pa. More annoying, actually. At least Pa asked guy kinds of questions. She asked woman questions; the tough ones that guys don't ever think about or talk about, even to themselves. I was pissed. I took another deep breath, and let it pass. "College wasn't for me. I'm a man of action with some street smarts. My Pop was a cop, so I figured I'd try that out, but I couldn't take all the bullshit."

King laughed. "Being a beat cop and then a detective wasn't even low enough for you, so you switched to this."

I reminded myself again who it was I was talking to. If I were to take a swing at him, tempting as the idea was, I'd be a dead man. "I had my reasons. Say, you know, I think I better check on Elaine. I don't know about you guys, but I'm starving." I got up and moved towards the kitchen, while keeping an eye on them in case they were going to physically jump me too.

The King shrugged. "Sure, Kid. You don't want to talk so much right now about all your fuck-ups, that's OK by us. We pretty much have things all figured out anyway."

Great.

I found Elaine in my little kitchen, working over a hot stove. She wasn't sweating nearly as much as I was. "How's it going?" she whispered.

"I'm dying out there. They haven't killed me yet, but I think the King is sizing me up for cement overshoes. Ma will probably mix the cement, smiling."

"Don't be silly, they haven't done that to my boyfriends since high school. Besides, Ma likes you, I can tell. Papa is a pussycat; just stick to small-talk. This stuff is almost ready; just give me a few more minutes." She gave me a kiss for encouragement and shoved me back into the living room. This must be that 'tough love' stuff they talk about I figured.

"Nice weather we're having," I suggested with an amiable smile, as I returned to our esteemed MOM guests, hoping like hell to change the subject.

"You're after our fucking money," replied the King with a snarl.

"The hell with your money," I replied. Thinking fast about where to tell him he could shove his damn money, I decided not to give him the most obvious answer. "Give it all to charity," I blurted. I have no idea where the thought came from.

"We want to leave it to Family, which you ain't," he countered.

"So? Stipulate in your wills that I ain't ever to get one red cent of yours. Put all your dough into a trust for your grandchildren when they reach twenty-one. Leave me pennyless."

Ma and Pa looked at each other. Ma shrugged, smiled, and nodded. "It's a thought. A start, anyway. In the meantime, hopefully Elaine will come to her senses and dump you long before that; and of course if you do her any wrong at all you're a fucking dead man." They looked at each other, then both nodded and smiled at me.

"Sure thing," I said, smiling back. "Hope springs eternal, I always say. Yes, always look on the bright side, that's my motto too."

Elaine came out of the kitchen then, thank the gods, carrying a big tray of lasagna that smelled great. "Soup's on," she announced, as she put it on the little card table that occupied the far end of what passed for living room in my little dump of an apartment. "How are you guys getting along?"

"They ain't killed me just yet," I observed, "but they've been working me over pretty damn good."

The oldsters laughed. Elaine laughed. "That's encouraging news," she said. "He could use some working over."

"Oh, I don't know. He's not too bad in terms of raw material," judged Ma. "He seems to have balls and even some brains."

I breathed a sigh of relief. Momma mia, I was in!

The cat meowed. "Jake bad," said the little prick's electronic voice.

The King shrugged. "Prince recognizes his own kind. The cat ain't got money or ambition either," he stated. "But the main thing is how your guy treats you, Baby, and he damn well better treat you good. Have you thought about the wedding? You want a big one or just a few hundred close relatives and friends?"

"Smallish, I should think," said Elaine.

"Maybe we could elope," I volunteered. "The smaller and quieter the better."

The King glared at me, and then gave me a wicked smile. "Quiet like a funeral?"

I swallowed. "OK, maybe not quite THAT small and quiet. But having one that's on the small side would make it easier to set up, so we could get it done quicker," I explained, hardly believing what I heard myself saying.

By then the food was circulating and conversation pretty much stopped, which was fine by me.

In the end, I figure it was the lasagna that saved my ass, at least for the time being.

****

CHAPTER 10

RAILROADED

After they left I reclined on my recliner, chugging down a few brews and thinking things out, or maybe trying not to think things out. Uncle Vinnie's advice to skip town didn't look half bad. I had always wanted to see South America. I heard that the chicks on the beaches down there are practically naked and so hot and eager that you got to damn near tie them down to get at them.

Elaine came from the kitchen and joined me on the recliner, small and soft and warm. She was a real dish too. For now. Would she double her weight and look like Ma after we were married with kids, I wondered? Married? Wedding? Wedding ring? Kids? Talking damn cat? The Falconie mob? In-law MOMs? Uncle Vinnie the bone-crusher? What the fuck had I got myself into? Even trolls and elves were starting to look pretty damn good. I chugged down another brew.

"That visit by my folks went pretty good, I thought," she said.

"Sure, Baby," I said. "It was swell."

"You thinking about the case?"

"Sure, the case; flying shit and a troll client that needs a shrink. Quite a case, ain't it?"

"What flying shit and what troll client?"

I told her about my visit to Henry Jenkins and Mick's visit to our office to ask for our services. It had been a damn busy day.

"We work for the troll now? Isn't that some sort of conflict of interest?" she asked. "What about Margie?"

"She's still our client too. Fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day."

"What kind of powers was that Mick character talking about that he gave you?"

"I don't know. I can make shit disappear, I guess. Say, that could have come in really handy in our previous case." I noticed that I had said 'OUR previous case' like we actually were partners, but I let it pass.

"That case never really finished," she claimed.

"Sure it did, we got Grisim's check, and the check cleared. Case closed, end of story."

"But Joe never even got Grog and Mick to the jailhouse," she countered. "They claimed they weren't behind shrinking you and Grisim so small, and Fey and Tweed claim that they weren't either."

"What did you expect them to do? Dance into jail singing a confession?"

"No, but nobody knows for sure what happened, and now this Mick character has got us helping him. It looks like the shrinking nut case is still open."

"I don't take cases to figure out everything that happened; I take them to get a payoff. We got the big payoff check from Grisim; that's good enough for me. The shrinking nuts case is history, as far as I'm concerned. This troll case is a completely new nutty case, without actual nuts or dried legumes this time. Life gets too complicated otherwise."

"I'd like to talk to him."

"Talk to who?"

"The troll. You could find him with your magic powers."

"Hell's balls Baby, there ain't no such things as trolls and I don't have no magic powers. That guy is just a big, ugly, loony-bin foreign chemist with sneaky geek tricks up his sleeves. I'll come up with something to make it look like we laid down some leather to help him, but I don't even know what the hell he was talking about when he tried to explain what he wanted. Maybe he'll take my advice and find himself a shrink. But whatever else he is, he's dangerous, so both of us should stay the hell away from him. Anyway, he's clear across town."

"How do you know that?"

"Know what?"

"That he's across town."

I drew a blank. "I don't know. It's just a hunch I have, I guess. He's hiding in a small dark place, I figure, though I don't know how the hell he fits into anything so small."

"Is it your troll curse powers telling you that?"

"Powers? No, Baby, I get hunches all the time, usually wrong ones. Anyway, in the morning, maybe we'll interview some of the bank folks and see what we can turn up."

"Speaking of folks, what did you think of mine?"

"They're swell."

"No, really."

I tried to think of something good to say about them. It wasn't easy. MOMs don't have a lot of good stuff about them to talk about. "Well, they're up-front, so you know how things stand with them. I like that in people."

"You didn't feel intimidated?"

"Gee-wiz no, why would I feel intimidated?"

"You didn't like them."

"Hey, I just met them, but what's not to like?"

"Give it time, Jake. They're really great people when you get to know them."

"Sure, Baby. Hey, maybe we could all go out drinking or bowling together sometime or something."

"They won't drink enough to change any opinions they have of you. They don't like to get too drunk; they don't ever like to leave their guard down."

"Speaking of guards, who were those guys trailing behind them?"

"Just some of their associates. My folks are never alone. That's what drove me away. Somebody in a dark suit and wearing a shoulder holster was there with me everywhere I went, for as long as I can remember. I needed to get away. When I went off to college, I finally laid down the law with them. I changed my name and started living my own life."

Poor little rich girl; I almost felt sorry for her. "What did they think of that?"

"They didn't like it, but they actually respected me more for it, I think."

Our pointless conversation was interrupted by my falling asleep.

I woke up to heavy pounding on the apartment door. I was alone on the recliner; Elaine must have gone to bed, and the damn cat was nowhere to be seen. Glancing at my watch I noticed it was six-AM, too damn early for callers. It was still the middle of the night, in terms of sleeping. There was dim light coming through a window though, so even this early it was starting to get light-out from the sun already. Who'd have figured that?

The pounding continued as I stumbled to the door. When I peeped through the peephole I saw that it was only Joe Kebony. He looked sort of dazed. I checked my watch again, because it was way too early to be seeing Joe, but it was still six-AM.

His face was blank, even more blank than usual I mean, and his gaze was unfocused as if he was sleepwalking or something. I figured it for sugar shock. Too damn many jelly doughnuts again, probably, or not enough of them, had screwed up his night, and now he was extending the favor to me, the big dumb bastard.

When I opened up the door I saw that Joe wasn't alone. Loranda the elf woman and a new little friend were with him. "What the hell is that thing, Joe?" I asked. Laughing, I elbowed the big lug in the ribs and pointed at the little dude standing next to the elf woman. He was three feet tall but thick of build and wide of shoulder, and had an ugly little face. The little dude's squat ugly appearance reminded me a little bit of our troll friend Mick. The rest of him was covered by trench coat and a nifty black fedora, except for big hairy bare feet. He looked like one tough little bastard though.

"This is Loranda's head dwarf," explained Joe. He said it straight, like it wasn't even funny.

"Oh sure," I said, as I reached down to shake the short dude's hand. He was wearing a police badge, I noticed. This had to be a gag. "A dwarf? I should have figured. Which one are you? Dopey?"

The carnival freak shook my hand with one surprisingly large, hairy, clutching paw, while with the other he handcuffed me so quickly that I didn't even see it coming. "My name be Quin, flat worlder," said the little dude with a shrill, munchkin-like voice.

"What the hell!" I exclaimed, staring at my two handcuffed hands in disbelief. The little nitwit had cuffed my hands together in front of me, instead of behind me, but it was still quite a trick.

Joe looked at Loranda and then back at me with a confused look on his face for just a moment, then it went blank again. "Jake Simon," he said, "you were seen at Henry Jenkins' house yesterday, and your fingerprints have been found at the scene." He said it like he was reading it, though I knew the dope don't read very much.

"At the scene? The scene of what? Piles of shit? Is Henry blaming his shit problem on me? What gives with the charm bracelets?"

"The murder scene," said Joe. "We're arresting you for murder."

"Murder?" I said, my jaw dropping. "Henry's been murdered?"

"Move it, human," squawked Dopey, as he yanked on the cuffs. I didn't budge an inch. His hairy eyebrows rose. "You are right, Loranda. This one is warded somehow. He does not obey me."

"Wards or no, you would do well to cooperate, Mr. Simon," said the sharp toothed, silver haired elf broad.

"I'll do what Joe says," I replied, looking at my old partner.

Joe looked at me with blank uncaring eyes. "Jake Simon, we are taking you in for murder. Move!"

"Don't worry darling, I'll have you out in a jiffy," said Elaine from the door, as Dopey and Joe led me away, pulling me along by the handcuffs like I was a damn criminal.

Kebony mutely stared right through me as Dopey shoved me into the back of a black and white, then my old partner walked away stiffly towards his own unmarked car. I found myself sitting next to a second little dwarf, this one old and wrinkled. I decided to call this one Doc. Dopey slid in too, so that I was sandwiched between the two of them, while Loranda got up front behind the wheel and started driving, following Kebony's unmarked sedan towards the Precinct station. So then, elves can drive, I observed. I wondered why the boss lady would be doing the driving, but then realized that the dwarves were too damn short to reach the pedals. Same problem I had, just a week ago.

"He stinks of troll," complained Doc, with bad breath that could have knocked out a lesser man than me. Then he began wailing some sort of weird mumbo-jumbo, as he reached into a pocket and pulled out a little leather pouch and dumped something into one hand. "WILLLLEOWARDWERIEM!" he shouted, as he threw a fine grey powder over my head. "WEELO, WEELO, WEELO, WOOOOOOOOO."

"Hey, watch it pal," I complained. "I took a shower just a few days ago."

"It affects him not," said Doc. "The spell on him is indeed very strong. It must be the troll's doing. To sustain this strong a spell, he must have passed to the human much of his own powers."

"What must be it," agreed Dopey, spitting into my face as he talked. "And he would only do that for one reason. Be you a troll lover, human?"

"What's it to you, Shorty?" I replied. "It's a free country. Maybe I happen to think that trolls are kind of cute."

"The troll is a wanted fugitive," said Loranda, from the front seat. "Tell us where he is."

"Now which troll is that?"

"Don't play dumb, human," Loranda hissed.

"Mickahl Al Calger, fool!" Dopey snarled. "Tell us where he is! You must have been given troll finding powers; use them!"

"I ain't playing dumb; I really don't know where the hell he is, and I wouldn't tell you if I did know."

"He was at your office yesterday," said Dopey. "We tracked him there. We smelled his stench there. What did he tell you?"

"Not a damn thing that I could understand, and not a damn thing that I'd tell you creeps."

Dopey slugged me in the guts. It hurt plenty; he had a pretty damn good right for such a tiny little dude.

"I still don't know nothing."

"What did Harry tell you about the troll? Did he give you anything?" Loranda asked.

"Not a damn thing," I said.

Dopey slugged me again. I had the impulse to clobber him, using my handcuffed hands, but judging from the badge he was actually some sort of cop, so I just counted to ten silently instead, cussing to myself.

"The troll is an enemy of your people, flat worlder," said Doc. "If you help us capture him you will be helping human-kind."

"You're breaking my heart, wart face."

Dopey hit me again.

"Give up the troll, human," said Loranda.

"I don't believe in trolls, doll, and I believe even less in you."

"Your time is running out, human," she said. "If you are not for us, you are against us, and you are an enemy of human-kind as well."

The car was at last pulling into the station. Kebony pulled me out of the car and man-handled me up the steps, while Loranda and her creep squad trailed behind. I breathed a sigh of relief with my aching ribs. In the station I'd hopefully be surrounded by my old Precinct pals and out of the hands of these freaky little bastards. Also, I was relieved to realize that my fedora was safe at home and not in the clutches of these bozos.

Inside, I got a nasty surprise. An ugly old dwarf manned the front desk and it wasn't Sergeant Kalhoony, and behind him, in the pits where the detectives usually live, a couple of dozen male dwarves and several elves, both male and female, were sitting at most of the desks, talking on phones, snoozing, munching on doughnuts, and milling around the water cooler like they were real cops. The male elves were small and slim like the females, and had the same smooth white skin, huge, slanted, bulging silver eyes and tell-tale pointy ears and teeth. Thin ugly little sons-a-bitches, every last one of them.

The elves and dwarves all wore cop badges, I noticed, which hit me in the guts worse than Dopey had. There were still a few human cops, but they sat around with blank zombie faces like they were zonked out on downers or had run out of Twinkies. Strangest of all, there were no perps. This time of morning the place should have still been overflowing with last-night's assortment of dolled-up hookers, plus a scattering of colorful pimps and gangs of kick-ass street-toughs. The squad house was overflowing with weird creeps all right, but not human weird creeps.

"What gives, Joe?" I asked; but Joe was as glassy eyed as the rest of them as he strode through the office behind Loranda, while Dopey shoved me through the fucking twilight zone behind them!

The silent Kebony and the weirdly grinning Loranda led me to the office of Lieutenant Ed Marks. A male elf sat next to Marks like they were sharing the desk. Marks was signing papers that the elf held in front of him, one after the other, without even reading them. Marks looked up and stared through Kebony and me like he didn't even know who the hell we were.

"This is the killer of Henry Jenkins," said Loranda. "He admits that he and the troll did it."

I felt like I had just been slapped across the face. "The hell I do," I said, steaming. "You're a damn liar." I tried to lunge at her but Kebony held me firm on one side, and Dopey held me on the other.

Hate flashed across the lieutenant's passive face and he shot up from his seat, suddenly alive, to reach out and grab me by the collar and pull my face within inches of his. "You can't say things like that about the Princess!"

Princess? What the hell?

"He's a troll lover. He's a traitor to you and to man-kind," stated Loranda, with that inhumanly toothy grin on her face.

"A traitor," repeated Marks, pushing his face into mine. "A dirty, rotten, stinking traitor." But his voice trailed off and his eyes started to clear.

"Hey," I objected. "I took a shower lately and I ain't no traitor to nobody."

Marks' face continued to shift towards normal, or at least normal for Marks. "Jake Simon?" Marks questioned more calmly as he looked at me with growing recognition. "What's going on here?"

"He should be questioned about where the troll is," suggested Loranda, who reached in to pull Marks and me apart.

Marks shook his head, bewildered. "I don't understand what's happening."

I understood. Whatever drugs he was under were wearing off.

Loranda pulled a leather pouch from her belt quickly reached into it and threw a pinch of the silver-gray powder over Marks. "You remember now, Ed, don't you? We are working together, you and I, to save the city from the trolls. This man Simon is a murderer and is helping the trolls. He has to be arrested and questioned about his troll friend. He's a murderer and a traitor." Her voice was sweet, too sweet, so sweet that it was somehow rotten, like fruit that was too far gone.

"A murderer and a traitor," repeated Marks, nodding in agreement, his eyes wild again. "He has to be arrested and questioned about the troll." He was re-drugged and back under the elf bitch's control again.

I made a mental note to get me some of that elf powder. It must have a million great uses. "Don't listen to her," I protested. "You know me, Marks; you hate my ass but you know that for the most part I'm on the up-and-up. Hell, you and my Pop were buddies. This skinny broad is drugging you and playing you for a sap."

Marks, screaming with sudden rage, hauled off and punched me in the jaw, and with a flash of pain I went down, my head spinning into silent darkness.

****

CHAPTER 11

JAIL BREAK

I woke up with a splitting headache and an aching jaw. I was slumped in the hot seat of interrogation room number three, the room that we cops had always called the ball buster. We called it that because the room was located way in back of the building, where we could work someone over good without being heard. Me and Joe had some productive times messing up punks in that room, back in the good-old days. I glanced at my watch. It was late afternoon; I had been unconscious for several hours.

"Ready to talk, flat worlder?" asked a munchkin voice. I shifted my eyeballs painfully, just enough to see Dopey standing nearby. In back of him Kebony towered, his blanker than usual eyes staring through me.

"What you want me to say, creep?" I managed.

Dopey slapped me across the face, hard enough to draw blood. It was an amateur move, hitting me where it shows. Now when my lawyer got here I'd be all bloodied.

My lawyer was Zeke Feltstein, of Harding and Feltstein; Zeke Feltstein junior, not the old man. I had helped the kid out once when he got into trouble at the track, and I still hit him up for favors. He really wasn't that much of a lawyer but even he should be able to spring me from this stupid deal. Elaine probably called him hours ago; I figured he would show up any second now. Actually, he should have been here hours ago.

"Where is the troll?" demanded Dopey. He slapped me again.

It was the last straw. I was just sitting there like a sap, cuffed hands on my lap, and as the little creep went to slap me a third time I clutched my hands together and with all my anger rocked forward and up out of the chair, gathering my feet beneath me for leverage. My balled hands shot up with a wicked uppercut to Dopey's dopey little chinnie-chin-chin, lifting him off his feet and throwing him back against the wall like a rag doll. Little Dopey was laid out on the floor, out for the count.

A second later, Kebony swung a thunderous right at me. I partly blocked it but it still grazed my already sore jaw with such force that I was knocked off my feet. Moments later he was kicking my ribs with size fourteen-triple-E shoes.

I knew I was in big trouble. On a good day I might be able to take Joe, given my better speed and some lucky breaks. Cuffed and on the floor and already tired and sore as hell, I didn't have a chance. What about Zeke? It occurred to me for the first time that these folks didn't give a shit about lawyers; mine probably wouldn't ever get past the dwarf at the front desk. I was on my own.

I drew up my legs in a fetal position to protect my ribs, then lashed out with one foot, trying to knock Joe down. My foot bounced off his massive leg without budging the big guy, but it got his attention and he stopped his kicking, reached down and hauled me up off the floor by my jacket cuff with his big left hand, so he could hit me better, as he cocked his massive right arm. "Traitor," he said, sneering as a partly blocked roundhouse right caught me in the gut, sending me back to the hard cold jailhouse floor.

I had to do something. I couple more blows like that and I'd be unconscious, if I was lucky. If he landed one square on target I could be in a lot worse shape than that. As he stepped up to me again I locked onto one of his legs with both my legs and bit the other one with all my strength, my teeth sinking into muscle through cloth.

"Ugh," he yelled, and then, off balance and with me holding both his legs, he fell forward to the floor. I scrambled onto his back and got my right arm around his thick neck with a chokehold and held on as the big guy stood up, never mind my extra two hundred twenty pounds on top of him. Joe is one big strong bastard. He shook me and swung me around like a rag doll against the brick wall, but I held on. Then he mashed me between the wall and his back, knocking the breath out of me, but I still hung on, as I still didn't have any other plan. I figured we could go on like this for a while, until I was knocked unconscious, but at least for now we seemed to be stuck in a stalemate.

Then suddenly the big guy just stood there motionless, with me on his back and my arm sore from squeezing his ugly neck. "What the fuck is going on?" he managed to ask, through clenched teeth.

"You tell me, buddy," I replied. "This whole deal ain't my idea."

"Jake? Is that you? Let me the hell go or I'll break you in two."

"That's why I'm hanging on, you dumb lug, so you don't break me in two."

"Why the fuck would I do that? You're going to give me that fifty, ain't you?"

"Sure buddy," I lied, as I slipped the arm over and off him, dropped to the floor, and backed away from him towards the door, ready to dodge if this was some kind of trick. "Soon as I have it."

Joe looked around the room, noting the unconscious dwarf on the floor and me in cuffs, than sat down heavily. "So Jake, you want to explain why it is I find myself in the ball-busting room with you choking the crap out of me? Why do you have cuffs on? Who is the ugly shrimp on the floor? What the fuck gives? Does this have anything to do with Elaine?"

"Elaine? What the hell are you yapping about? You arrested me for murder, you big dummy, don't you remember nothing?"

"Murder? Did you murder someone?"

"Hell no!"

"Then why the fuck would I arrest you for murder?"

"The elves and dwarves drugged you or something. They got the whole damn station under their control, using drugs or hypnosis or whatever. Don't you remember anything like that?"

"No. I mean, I had a really weird bad dream about something like that. But this ain't a dream, is it?"

"If it is, we're having the same nightmare."

"So who's the sleeping shrimp on the floor? Hey, someone bit my damn leg!" He was poking at the hole in his trouser leg where I had bit him. He withdrew bloody fingers and held them in front of his darkening face. "Son of a bitch!" he swore, really steamed.

I pointed at Dopey. "Loranda's henchman dwarf did it."

He got up slowly and walked over to where the little dude lay with his face down and rolled him over with his big foot. "I'll wait until he's awake to clobber him. I remember some of it now. We were supposed to find out from you where the troll is hiding. Do you know where he's hiding?"

I hesitated. Maybe this was a trick after all.

Suddenly Joe threw his big hands over his ears. "Wait Jake, don't even tell me. I can't control myself around those elves and dwarves. If you tell me maybe I'll tell them, you get it?"

"It's OK, Joe; I don't know where the troll is."

"They said you do. They said you know more than you think you know. They said that it's troll magic."

"It's bull shit," I said.

"Maybe, but that's what they said. You got to get out of here, Jake. Go out the back door. Get out and work on this until you figure out what's what." He took off the handcuffs!

"OK, I don't mind getting out of this crazy house. You coming with me?"

"No. I'm staying here to see what's up here at the station. I came around; maybe some of the other guys will too. Right now I want you to hit me Jake, to make it look good."

"The hell you say!"

"Come on Jake, slug me where it shows, unless you got a better idea."

I shrugged, and then as the big dummy just stood there, I slugged him hard in the jaw. He crumbled to the floor like a rag-doll, the lucky bastard, leaving me to do all the tough work, just like in the old days.

I headed for the fire exit door, figuring that they never fixed the alarm that was supposed to go off when it was opened. I pushed the door open. No alarm. The damn thing had never worked, as far as I know. I was in the clear.

Behind the Precinct building, my luck held: Zeke Feltstein Jr. was just getting into his illegally parked Lexus. "Hey lawman, can I bum a ride?" I hailed him. As I slid into the seat next to him, I enjoyed the wide-eyed, slack jawed expression of surprise on his face.

"Jake? What the hell is this? I just busted my balls for hours trying to get in to see you! I was turned away by a damn ugly little dude at the front desk, and it wasn't Kalhoony."

"Thanks Zeke, but they sort of let me go anyway. Say, could we just scram, before they change their minds?"

Zeke swung the Lexus into the light early-evening traffic, and we moved away at a leisurely pace. "So, you want to fill me in?"

"Not especially, you being an officer of the court and all."

"I don't like the sound of that. What did they take you in for? Elaine said something about a murder."

"I didn't do it."

"Sure. And the cops apparently agreed, because here you are."

"Not exactly."

"Lack of evidence?"

"Not exactly."

"Well then, how did you get out?"

"I escaped."

"Shit no! What the fuck is wrong with you!" He suddenly drove a lot faster, and made a sharp right turn down a side street, studying his mirrors for a tail. There wasn't any. I could have told him that to begin with, but I didn't mind seeing him squirm just a little bit. Lawyers sure are a nervous bunch!

"Relax, buddy, it was a clean get-away. But maybe escape is the wrong word. See, the cops are being controlled by evil elves and dwarves."

"You've been drinking again."

"No I ain't. You got anything though? I sure could use a belt of something."

"Under the seat."

Under my passenger seat was a pint flask of cheap bourbon, half empty. I took a big swig, and then passed it to Zeke. He took two big swigs, and then didn't pass it back; I had to wrestle it away from the cheap stingy bastard to get my share. That's life in the city.

"Actually, the cops being controlled by elves and dwarves would explain a lot, now that I think about it," Zeke noted. Like I always say, bourbon can often clear things up. "You want me to drop you at your office or apartment?" he asked.

"No. They'll have those staked out."

"So where do you want to go?"

He had me there. I thought it over. This was an unusual situation. There were two intermingled cases: the bank branch manager and the troll were both my clients. The troll was wanted by the cops for screwing around with a billionaire and maybe for murder, if they were smart. The cops, or at least the elf cops and those they controlled, wanted me too, for the same murder. So I had to keep a low profile.

The elves had wanted me to give up the troll. Why? And who the hell really killed Henry? The elves? The dwarves? The troll? Why? Did this stuff all fit together somehow? How? I decided not to try to explain it all to Zeke; hell, I couldn't make heads or tails of it enough to explain it.

In my head I tried to list good guys and bad guys, as sometimes that helps. Trolls, elves, and dwarves? Bad. Grisim was a super-rich client, so he was good. After all, he had given me a big check, and it even cleared. Margie was good, especially the legs and cleavage. Henry was dead. That probably got him off my lists for most stuff, including his murder. The King family and Uncle Vinnie mob, scary. The cops, hypnotized or something. Me, confused and on the lamb. OK, so going through my list hadn't helped.

"So where the fuck do you want to go?" asked Zeke again.

Tibet could have been nice this time of year, I figured. Yakety-yak, and don't come back. Do they shrink people there too, I wondered? Is that where they do that shrunken head thing, or was that the Andes? Hey, if they knew about shrinking, maybe they knew about un-shrinking. That could come in handy sometimes. "Lend me some dough and drop me at my bank branch manager client's place," I finally decided. "I'll cab it from there."

Fifteen minutes later, Zeke slipped me four twenties and dropped me across from Margie Wainwright's townhouse. I stood around in the dark shadows of trees for a while, making sure her place wasn't staked out, and letting night settle in.

Fifteen minutes later, when I was just about to walk to her front door, Margie came hurrying out. I was standing at her car by the time she reached it. In the dim lighting provided by a nearby street light, she looked startled to see me. Me, I felt happy to see her, though I wasn't exactly sure why, since it was too dark to see her legs. There was something attractive about that woman though, something weird that I still couldn't figure out, like I said before. I didn't like that. I don't like not knowing why I'm thinking something.

"Jake Simon! What happened to you? You're a mess. And where is your fancy hat?" She was a mess too. That is, she seemed to be really upset.

"The usual. Worked over by cops and dwarves. The Mob's turn is next, then probably the troll. But at least my hat is safe at home. What happened to you?" We sat together in her car where we were less conspicuous.

"Too much happened, but not to me. The cops just called. They said Henry has been murdered."

"Yah, I heard about that too. I'm sorry. He seemed like an OK little old guy to me."

"Good thing my kids are visiting my sister; the cops want me to officially identify Henry at the morgue. He didn't have any family."

"They say anything else?"

"They said you did it." She stared at me close, looking for my reaction.

I shrugged. "I'm not surprised; they probably figure to hang it on me because I went to see him yesterday and left some fingerprints."

"Why would anyone kill Henry," she asked, close to tears.

"That's one of the things I was going to ask you."

"I don't know. I didn't know that he had any enemies. When you talked to him, did you find out anything about what has been happening at the bank?"

"He claimed he was innocent. He could have been lying, but I don't think so. He didn't tell me all that he knew, but I don't think he was lying. Talking to him, I got the idea that his trip out west had something to do with starting all of this. Tell me about his trip."

"Not much to tell. He was a week in Arizona somewhere. He came back to work all happy, and then a couple days later I had to fire him." She looked at me with sad eyes. "You don't think, I mean, he wouldn't have done this to himself, because of getting fired?"

"No; no damn way," I reassured her. "He wasn't all that upset about getting fired when we talked. He even said he knew that it wasn't your fault. He was eager to continue his hobby. I agree with the cops that he was murdered. He didn't strike me as a guy that would snuff himself, not at all."

"No, I don't suppose so."

"He mentioned having lost something at work. You didn't happen to find something odd there, did you?"

She shook her head. "Now that you mention it, Henry complained about losing something on his last day. A little figurine. I told him I hadn't seen it."

"A figurine? You mean like a statue of something?"

"A little statue of a man, he said."

"No kidding." That didn't sound quite right to me; I don't know why. Maybe I had hoped it would be a black falcon made of gold or something.

"What else did Henry say about that day?" she asked.

"Nothing, really. Strange stuff wasn't going on at that point yet, was it?"

"Strange stuff?"

"You know, like was in the news a day or two later," I explained. "Even before the bank stuff, there were Elves and dwarves helping human cops search for trolls in Arizona. You mentioned the Arizona stuff yourself, when you hired me. Was there any weird bank stuff happening before you fired Henry?"

"Not that I noticed. Do you think there is a connection between the bank incidents and the Arizona business?"

"Well, one of the guys that drugged your boss Grisim is a troll, according to the elves. Not that I trust the so-called elf woman that told me."

"Elf woman? That last time Kebony questioned me about the inside-out car he had a weird looking woman with him."

"Right," I explained. "That would be Loranda the elf cop."

"That was her? She didn't say much, though she glared at me a lot. Freaky looking woman."

"That's her. She's one of the so-called elves."

She smiled. "I can't believe that this elf, dwarf, and troll stuff is serious. What do you think? Are they really for real?"

"Of course not. They're all just nut cases. Tripping on something. You can buy drugs on almost any street corner that can make you think you're Santa Claus. If these weirdoes want to call themselves elves or dwarves or whatever, it's no skin off my nose. Did Henry ever talk about trolls and elves at work?"

"Not to me. I was his boss, and his strange hobbies never interested me. He talked the most to Eric. Eric is one of those dungeons and dragon freaks. Henry wasn't, but they seemed to get a kick out of exchanging lore."

"Any word on Eric's hair problem?"

"Good news. The problem has disappeared. He's not back to work yet, but he's home. He sounded OK on the phone."

"Any other weird bank stuff going on?"

She shrugged. "I hear that Grisim and the Board are acting strange."

"Strange how?"

"Some of them went into our bank vaults and were seen playing with the money or something."

"Playing?"

"Grabbing wads of paper money and change and just holding on to it compulsively."

It sounded like something I would do, if I had that much cash. "Is that unusual behavior for rich guys?"

"Very. There are rumors of something else too, a hair problem similar to the one Eric had."

"Similar?"

She laughed. "They have been seen to have a lot of long hair poking out of their pants."

"Hair growth like Eric's, but more localized?"

"So it would seem." She looked at her watch. "Listen Jake, I'm supposed to meet Kebony at the morgue."

"I wouldn't go near the morgue or the cops without a lawyer. They could grab you like they did me. I'd go with you myself, but they want to get me. Go by my apartment and pick up Elaine, and then try to get my lawyer to go with the two of you to the morgue."

"Good, I'm too scared now to go alone. But poor Henry had nobody. At least I can do this much for him; identify him I mean. You going to try to find his killer?"

"Solve a murder for fifty bucks a day?"

"To show it wasn't you that did it."

She had me there. "Sure."

"Good. Henry was a really nice guy."

"But he was mixed up in this business somehow. You might be too. The elves say that you stink of troll magic."

Her eyes went wide. "They do? That's crazy."

"That's what I said when they said the same thing about me. You have any idea why they would think it of you?"

"No idea. What about you?"

"The so-called-troll cursed me. That could be why they think that stuff about me. But you ain't seen any trolls?"

"No, not really."

"If not really, then un-really?"

"OK, I have had some strange dreams," she admitted.

"How strange?"

"Silly. That I'm all alone and hiding in the dark."
Why did that seem familiar to me? "Hiding from what?"

"I don't know."

"What has that got to do with trolls?"

"I don't know. It just feels like it might."

Woman's fucking intuition, probably. I hate it when they do that. Women are always trying to make something out of nothing. God, if there is a God, is probably a broad, and she created this whole damn mess of a world out of a torn stocking or something. That could explain a lot, philosophically speaking I mean, though even the Greeks and Shakespeare never had that part worked out. "Anything else you can tell me?"

"I can't think of anything."

"Drop me at Eric's place then; it's on the way to my place. I'll catch a cab from there."

A few minutes later she dropped me off in front of Eric's apartment and drove off to pick up Elaine for their trip to the morgue.

I hardly recognized the guy that answered Eric's door. He was completely bald, and his breath stunk like garlic, but otherwise he seemed OK. "Yeah, that's a trip, isn't it," Eric said, pointing to his bald head. "How was I to know the last time they shaved it off that it wouldn't be growing back again in a minute or two?"

He showed me into his place, which also was hairless, compared to the first time I saw it. We were both sitting comfortably before I told him the nasty news of the day. "Henry Jenkins was murdered, probably sometime last night."

It was a bad shock and surprise to him, or he was a damn good actor. "No! Hell no! Who? Why?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out. I got to talk to him a little, about his hobby. He ever talk to you about magic and trolls and elves?"

"Lots of times. But it wasn't a gaming thing for him; he was into it for real, big time. He had old books on the stuff, really old books. I'd tell him about a game character, and he'd tell me that his research had found out different stuff about it. It was sort of interesting."

"What did he say about trolls?"

"That was his big thing, trolls. He said there was a lot to them, besides what the old kid stories say."

"Like what?"

"He said that they have magic powers and live in a parallel universe. Said they're pretty nasty characters."

"And elves?"

"Said they're enemies of the trolls, and just as nasty as the trolls or maybe even worse; not cute little cookie makers at all."

I wasn't too surprised. I couldn't imagine Loranda wearing an apron and mixing flour, sugar, chocolate chips and other crap in a little bowl or whatever. That was a good thing though. If I ever found out "Did he talk about his trip out west?"

"He was all excited about that when he got back. Said he visited some old Indian digs and found an ancient troll totem, proving that Indians knew about trolls. He found some old Indian legends about trolls too."

"Troll totem? Did he show you what he found, or tell you any of the legends?"

"I asked him to, but he wouldn't. Said he had to keep things to himself until he published his findings."

"Published?"

"In some sort of journal on ancient stuff, I guess. I didn't ask."

"He ever talk about enemies or anybody else that was out to get him?"

"No. Hey, he was just a cool old dude, doing his own thing. I tried to get him into the gaming side of things, but he just laughed. 'This isn't a game, this is my life's work,' he'd say. I'm going to miss him."

"You talk to him after he was fired?"

"Just once, that night he was fired. He phoned to ask about a figurine of his missing from work. I hadn't seen it. I haven't talked to him since. There was too much going on after that: the tires, my hair, and so forth. I was going to call him next week, just to check up on him. He was a loner you know, just him and his old books."

"Who would want him dead?"

"Nobody. Not me, that's for sure. Hell, I really liked the old dude."

I sighed. This case was dragging. I longed for rich broads with nice legs and rotten husbands and/or small dogs. Keep it simple, that's my motto. "Hey, could you drop me somewhere local? My car is laid up." Don't pay for cabs if you can avoid it, that's my motto.

"Sure. You going to find out who got to Henry?"

"Sure thing."

"Good."

"Could I use your phone too?" I asked. Don't pay for phone calls if you can avoid it, that's my motto. I phoned my office answering machine first, and found out that I had gotten calls. Joe had called twice, telling me to turn myself in, the last time only ten minutes earlier. I figured he was back under elf control. I couldn't tell for sure, but in the message he hadn't mentioned anything about me owing him fifty bucks, and that's not like Joe, the cheap bastard.

Uncle Vinnie had called me to say that he wanted to see me, pronto. Great. I was wanted by both the mob and the cops.

Finally, Grisim had called. He wanted to see me about work. He sounded upset, and said he had another unusual problem for me to help him with. When money talks, I listen really close. Grisim moved to the very tip-top of my to-do list. I had Eric drop me off outside the Tower Arms building.

****

CHAPTER 12

YET MORE COMPLICATIONS

Jane Fey met me at the door of Grisim's seventh floor suites. She was dressed extra sexy instead of like a business woman. Besides looking crazy beautiful she looked tired and anxious. "Jake Simon, I'm so glad you came! John has been asking for you. What happened to you? Are you alright?"

"Sure. You should see the other guys." Actually, I felt perfectly fine, which was strange, since I should have still been in terrible pain since my run-in with Joe and the dwarves. It usually takes quite a while for cracked or broken ribs to heal. Based on past experience, I should have been in a hospital for at least a week, and then laid up home in bed for a couple more. But I wasn't even sore. My clothes hadn't recovered at all though, so I still looked more whipped than I felt, and I still hadn't gotten back to the appartment for my fedora. But I felt like I was in top shape, and figured I looked good enough to visit Grisim.

I walked with Jane down the hall towards the big boss's personal suite, admiring her legs and other nice accessories. That she had called Grisim 'John' instead of 'Mr. Grisim' or 'Boss' symbolized her new status. According to the local newspapers, she had been promoted from head of security to fiancé.

That wasn't the only change since list time I was here. We walked past several security folks that snapped to attention when they saw her. They were all new people, and none of them were trolls or giants. None of them were nifty blondes, brunettes, or redheads either, I noticed with disappointment: they were all guys. Despite his billions, I felt a pang of pity for Grisim. Jane Fey was a great, sexy broad, don't get me wrong, but to go from bachelor billionaire to married man was going to be a big shock for the poor guy. At least I didn't have so far to fall.

Within Grisim's inner-suite of rooms, Fey escorted me into the same office/lounge where Grisim had first talked to me and we shared those damned shrinking nuts. I made a silent vow to turn down any free snacks while I was there, though I was getting pretty hungry, and don't normally turn down stuff that's free, especially food or drinks.

The man himself was sitting behind a big oak desk, wearing a robe. This is the first time I had seen him full size and normal looking since he first hired me. He was a medium sized guy in his mid-forties with short brown hair that had hints of gray. Pretty normal looking billionaire, I guess. He sort of half stood up and shook my hand when I came in, with a forced smile on his worried face. What the hell did a billionaire have to worry about, I wondered? Did he have the marriage jitters like I did?

"Jake Simon, my rescuer, I'm so happy to see you, even though you look like a train hit you. And no hat again!" He sort of sat back down, but he must have had a couple of pillows on the seat, because he seemed to be sitting on a high chair. He was a youngish looking guy for someone over forty, but right now I could tell that something was bothering him.

"Good to see you full sized again, Mr. Grisim. Yeah, I had a little difficulty earlier today, nothing serious though. Comes with the job. You should see the other guy. So, do you have another little problem that I can help you with?"

"Yes, it seems that all of my problems did not cease at the conclusion of our last adventure, as I had assumed they would. I want you back on the case. Are you available?"

I did the math. Let's see, I already had a fifty dollar a day client and a crazy troll client. Could I somehow possibly also fit in a billionaire client? "I'm completely available. You want me working on your bank problems?"

"Probably; it all seems to be somehow connected with the bank. Those two fellows that were arrested for that nasty shrinking business, they escaped I understand. That Mick fellow seemed to be the ringleader."

"He's a mean one all right," I agreed. "Probably him that's at the root of it all." I have a firm rule: always agree with billionaires.

"Yes he's our man, in my opinion," Graham agreed. "Find him, and give him to the cops. That's your job in a nutshell."

"OK," I said. "Sure thing."

"There are elf cops now, have you heard of them?"

"Sure. In my business you have to keep in touch with those kinds of things."

"There was one here to see me earlier, along with a police lieutenant named Marks. They said that this fellow Mick is an escaped troll. Not even human. A monster."

"You don't say?"

"Troll or not, he's up against the wrong man. I won't stand for this business. You are to find him and feed him to those cops and elves."

"Good idea. What other problems have you been having lately, that have you so dead set against trolls?"

He forced a smile again. "Sort of a minor thing really, after that shrinking business. It's also caused by evil troll magic, the elf told me." He stood up and reached down into his robe. For one scary second I thought he was going to pull out his wang, but instead he pulled out the tail-end of a huge clump of brown hair. "The whole damn bank board has a bad case of fat hairy ass."

He laughed long and hard, and I was glad he started it, because there was no damned way I wasn't going to be laughing. While Fey looked on awkwardly, we both laughed like crazy. When we had worn ourselves out laughing, his face suddenly sobered in a flash. "Sense of humor, Mick has, wouldn't you say?"

"Seems like it."

"Work him over good for me, OK, before you give him to the cops?"

Grisim must have already forgotten what Mick was like. Ten of me would have had trouble working him over. But when money talks, I listen. "Sure, no problem," I said, smiling.

He reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a check, and handed it to me. "Your retainer. Double that when you've turned in the troll."

It wasn't as big as the last check he gave me, but it was huge. "I'm your man," I said, sincerely.

After that I was dismissed, and Fey called a cab for me. "Just drive west, to the Motel-Six," I told the cabbie. It had been a long day.

Then I noticed the tail. It was the cops. They followed, block after block, never even attempting to catch up. "Change of plans," I announced. "No motel tonight."

I had the cab drive me towards my apartment. The cops followed, but still made no attempt to capture me. The elf cops didn't really want me, they wanted Mick. They had me working for them now, not against them, so they were simply following me, waiting for me to find Mick. Maybe they had a bug at Grisim's, or maybe they just assumed that if I saw Grisim, that would get me to look for Mick. Or maybe they just figured I'd meet up with the troll. Either way, I was inoculated against cops for now. Hell, I was one of them, even if I wasn't doped up on elf powder like they were.

I had the cab do a short stop at my bank so that I could cash Grisim's check. It was too much cash to carry around so I deposited most of it, but I did get a thick stack of fifties and twenties. I was smiling when I left the bank. Everything was clearer now, made simple by that great common denominator that measures everything: money. Everything had been reduced now to one simple thing: get the troll! Getting troll equals getting more big money. End of the story.

Outside the apartment the cops and/or dwarves and elves sat in their car watching for my next move. I thought maybe I should walk over to their car and thank them, for letting me stay at my place without arresting me, and avoiding a motel bill. But I was too lazy.

As I climbed the stairs to the apartment I was still smiling, it was all so simple. Help the elves, screw over the damn troll, and get more money. My wallet was so stuffed already that I had even given the cabbie a good tip, a first for me, cheap bastard that I am.

Elaine was relieved to see me, though the cat cussed me out for showing up. But we had company. Vinnie was sitting in my recliner. Elaine retired to the kitchen so we could talk man-to-man.

"We got business to talk over, Jake. Family business."

"Your Family is my family, Mr. Veracruz."

"The Family is very concerned about elves and dwarves, Jake."

"Elves and dwarves?"

"They're taking over cops and government, Jake, especially around here."

"You don't say?"

"OUR cops and government, Jake."

"Our nation's cops and government?"

"Don't be a sap. The Family's cops and government. Cops and city council and judges and so forth throughout the greater New York area. That's a big, vital Family investment, all those people on the inside."

"I suppose it is."

"Damn right it is. You think that taxes pay those people enough to live on? Not hardly."

"The Families are certainly doing their civic duty by bribing them then."

"And then some. That's why it don't make no sense for us to pay taxes; we skip the middle-man and give money direct to Government leaders. That's real efficiency for you. Think of all the money that saves your average tax-payer! But the elves are screwing up the works by taking over our cops and our territory, it looks like. Our inside connections won't even talk to us. What do you think that does to our credibility on the street?"

"Can't be good."

"Our street punks are losing confidence in the Families. It's like the stock market you know, confidence is everything. Dealers ain't dealing. Hookers ain't even hooking. Our profits are dropping."

"Sounds serious."

"So we wanted to find out what the elves are up to, and maybe return the favor. The word on the street is that they're looking for trolls, and one troll in particular by the name of Mick."

"Why?"

"Don't know. Don't particularly care. Whatever they're doing, we're losing money. The word is they get people to help them by using drugs or magic or something."

"Magic?"

"That's the word. And the word is this, Jake: you're mixed up in it up to your eyeballs."

"Me?"

"And by association Elaine, of course. She tells me that this troll Mick has hired you to help him. That right?"

"Right."

"And that's just what you got to do, Jake. The Family is watching you on this, not to mention the other Families. You ever hear the term 'gang warfare' Jake?"

"Sure, I saw it in the movies or TV or someplace. Messy stuff."

"We're damn close to that, Jake. Damn close. Families against elves, or cops, or even each other. Could be the worst mess since prohibition, and you and Elaine are right in the middle of it. You lift a little finger to help the elf cops, or the elf controlled cops, and you're dead meat, that's a promise."

My jaw dropped open but no sound came out.

"On the other hand, the elves and your old cop buddies will be pressuring you to help their side. In fact, I'm surprised you ain't been made into one of their zombies by now. So I can appreciate that you're in sort of an awkward position."

My jaw moved again but again no sound came out.

"You don't have to worry about Jake, Uncle Vinnie," said Elaine. She had rejoined us at some point; damned if I know when. "He's honor bound to help the troll. The troll is our new client."

"I'm honor bound to help the troll," I managed, nodding my head weakly.

Vinnie laughed, his mouth set in a cruel smile. "Honor? Jake don't know what the fuck that means. But now I think he understands the situation from a practical point of view. This situation is Family business. You understand that now, don't you Jake?"

I nodded my head. "Sure thing. No problem. Help the troll. Don't help elves or cops. I get it. Nothing could be simpler."

Vinnie smiled again as he made for the door, like he believed me, or worse yet, like he didn't, and was hoping for any excuse to kick my concrete encased ass into the East River. After he was gone I sank into my recliner in a mind-bent stupor.

"Vinnie says you've been to see Grisim," Elaine noted.

"Vinnie knows too damn much."

"What did Grisim want?"

"He wants us to help the elf cops get Mick."

"We can't do that!"

"No shit. But if I don't, the cops will arrest me, and worse, we'll miss an even bigger payoff from Grisim."

"Interesting situation."

"Too damn interesting."

"What else happened to you today?"

I gave her a quick run-down. She took it all in calmly. "Young Zeke Feltstein is a good man; my folks use him sometimes," she commented at one point.

My eyes bulged, but I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Zeke sure as hell wasn't making a living off me. Or maybe indirectly he was? Were all the favors he did for me lately because of us being buddies, or because of Elaine's connections? And did it matter?

"I think we should just seek the truth," Elaine said, whatever that meant. "We'll seek the truth and let the chips fall where they may."

I tried to keep a straight face. Despite her background, which should have taught her better, Elaine was like that. Good, bad; black, white; lies, truth, or whatever, she thought they could all be worked out. "Sure, great. Seek the truth. Super idea."

"So what do we do next?"

It was nearly midnight. "Go to bed," I said.

She smiled. "I think we should get some rest instead."

"No damn way," I grinned.

****

CHAPTER 13

RESEARCH

The next morning, I decided that I didn't know enough about our so-called visitors from another world, particularly trolls and elves. Know thy enemy, right? So I figured to get geeky with some books and maybe talk to some experts. I hate doing that kind of crap, but sometimes a guy in my line of work has to do what he has to do. Fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. As to my mob and cop problems, I'd play it by ear and hope for the best. A lot of times, if you just ignore a problem, it sort of just goes away, that's my motto.

First thing I did was arm myself with my thirty-eight. I don't normally expect to need a piece. I have a licence to carry my gun, and like to have it with me, but I don't like to be in situations where I need one. Now like it or not I was in one. A guy I had just talked to had been murdered. So from now on for this case I would wear the Smith and Wesson or at least keep it in the Ford.

I told Elaine my plan. While I hit the books she would go to Grisim's bank. I figured that if she poked around, she would be doing her share by visibly working the cases, and thereby keeping the clients happy. Instead, she insisted on tagging along with me. "After the last couple days, I'm not letting you out of my sight," she said firmly.

She was getting too bossy to suit me, but I let it pass.

I needed knowledge, and unfortunately that probably meant books, since I can't stand computers. So we went to the public library together in the Ford. Why pay out of pocket for books when you've already paid for a lot of books with your taxes? The library was a new experience for me, but it turns out that all four librarians knew Elaine by name. Would you believe that she already had her own library card?

Me being on occasion a reluctant taxpayer, the whole scale of the library operation hit me hard. Land, building, librarians, and so forth, all paid for by taxes! Why did they need so damn many librarians and such a big building?

Too damn many books, that was obviously the root problem. There were thousands of them, shelves and shelves of them, filling several big rooms, with new ones probably coming in all the time, written by geeks without real jobs. There was no end to the damn things. More and more books meant more and more librarians and geeky writers supported by more and more tax dough. What a racket!

I wasted a couple of hours looking up references to elves and trolls that turned out to all be either pure fiction or stuff that should have been labeled fiction. It turns out that in novels trolls and especially elves are pretty damn popular, though not as popular as dragons or vampires. I could understand that; how could anything compete with giant, ugly, fire breathing, flying lizards? The very thought of dragons gave me the shivers! Chicks seemed to dig blood sucking vampire creeps; who the hells knew why? There were also tons of books on gaming that discussed trolls as players. Why was any of this stuff so damn popular? I couldn't figure it. If I weren't mixed up with them in a case I certainly wouldn't be wasting any time on all this freaky crap. Real stuff is creepy enough.

One of the so-called librarians tried to help me but I couldn't get across to her that I wasn't interested in lame old folk tales or kids games. "Don't you have any up to date research on those guys running around all over the country claiming to be real elves and dwarves and trolls?" I asked. "You know, like stuff on what they're after and how a guy could get rid of the creepy little bastards? Some book worm or other must have written something on that, somewhere in all these damn books!"

She suggested that I try looking at recent newspaper and magazine articles, which is what Elaine had already figured out to do. It turned out that there were quite a few news stories on elves and such over the last couple of weeks. We found out that there had been hundreds of elves and dwarves traveling around most of the United States, but lately most of the action was in our neighborhood. It looked to me like the little creeps were all zeroing in on Mick, the big ugly creep.

There were several interviews with elves described, most of them with Loranda, who appeared to be the leader of the whole elf/dwarf shebang. They all told pretty much the same story. The good elves and dwarves simply came here to help mankind against an invasion of nasty trolls. Right. There was no news on any trolls other than Mick. How could one troll, even an ugly bastard like Mick, be an invasion?

All of the editorial commentary was in support of the elves. Hey, people are stupid, and I've got the brains to prove it. There was quite a bit of talk about their 'stunning beauty' too, and no mention at all of pointy teeth, pale skin, and the other nasty aspects of our little elf friends. I couldn't figure that one out.

As we sat at our out-of-the way table I pointed this out to Elaine, who was looking over some color photos of Loranda and other elves in a woman's magazine. Why women's magazines mostly have pictures of snazzy women is one of the great mysteries of life. Would a guy buy a magazine to look at pictures of other guys? Not unless he's a fruit! I pointed out to Elaine that the elves in the pictures were creepy looking. "What are you talking about Jake?" she said. "Those elf women are flawless. Just look at the photos."

I looked at the photos. Models are almost always too damn skinny for my taste, so I ignored that part, though the elves pictured surely could have used some fries and burgers to fill in some curves better. Besides being too skinny though, these elf bitches were freaks, pure and simple. "There," I said, pointing. "Look at the pointy teeth on Loranda, and the weird eyes, and the white skin, and the big ears. I don't keep up with all that fashion shit, but silver hair is a bit out of style too, ain't it?"

Staring at the same photo, Elaine shook her head. "Are you putting me on? The hair is blonde, the skin is tanned, and the eyes, teeth, and ears are normal. Better than normal; perfect even. I hate to say it, but she's a ten."

"Ten? You can count better than that; don't screw with me, Baby," I said, laughing. "I suppose that the guy elf on that page looks OK to you too?"

She smiled and licked her lips. "Does he ever! Ten-plus!"

"Don't screw with me Baby," I repeated, more worried now than angry. Was she going wacky too, like the cops?

"I'm not!"

"Are you serious? You don't see the same things as me?"

"Not if you see silver hair and other freaky things I don't."

"Damn! They have you drugged too!"

"No way, Jake."

"Ask one of your librarian friends what she sees," I suggested.

Elaine showed the photo to one of her librarian friends. The woman smiled and actually sighed when she looked at the photo, so I knew right off that she didn't see the deformities either, unless she was a freak herself, but what she did say that she saw was even more mind-blowing. I somehow refrained from calling her a stupid bitch, as Elaine pulled me aside to our table where we could talk.

"She sees a beautiful woman with brown hair," Elaine whispered excitedly. "I see blonde; you see silver."

"Seems that way. So go ask some other folks."

She showed the Loranda photo to half a dozen other people in the library and asked them about hair color. I tagged along and watched discretely. We got several different answers as to hair color and style and so-forth. Weird. Were all these people color blind, or what? Maybe being stuck here in a library all day, day after day, had screwed them up. After all, the place was already getting to me.

We retired back to our table. "It's some kind of damn trick picture!" I exclaimed, as I grabbed the magazine out of Elaine's hands and studied it from different angles. One of them hologram things, I figured, like the poop in Henry's yard. But it looked the same to me from any angle. The ugly bitch was still an ugly bitch. With silver hair.

"What did you do to it?" Elaine asked, as she looked over my shoulder.

"Do to what?"

"That's the photo of a silver-haired vampire or something," she said, pointing at Loranda.

"That's just what I've been saying right along."

"That's the same picture?"

"Sure it is."

"Why don't you show it again to our friends in the library?" she suggested.

"We just did that."

"I did it. Now it's your turn."

"They'll think I'm a loon."

"They already think that. Come on Jake, just do it."

I did as she suggested. I showed them all the same photo that Elaine had showed them minutes earlier. Every damn person said they saw the vampire-like features and silver hair this time, and several made nasty faces and comments about pointy teeth and so forth. Elaine and I retreated to our table again.

I was too stunned to even gripe about her loony library friends, but Elaine was smiling. "Give me the magazine, Jake," she asked, reaching for it. She held it and looked at it for a few seconds, blinked, then looked at it again. "Blonde again," she announced.

"Shit," I remarked. "What the fuck is going on?"

"Same thing that's been going on all along, Jake, we were just too dumb to figure it out. Let me try one more thing though. Give me a kiss."

"What? Right here in the damn library? Ain't that against some kind of library rule?"

"Just a little peck on the cheek should do."

A walked around the table, took off my fedora for a moment to get it out of the way, kneeled beside her, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. She smelled really good, I noticed.

"Just as I thought," she said, looking at the magazine. "Silver hair again. You can cancel out the magic by either being near the magic object or the person looking at it."

"I don't believe in magic."

"I didn't either, until you were shrunk down to turkey size. You do remember that, don't you?"

My face might have changed color. "So what do you think?"

"I don't think you have to worry any more about getting shrunk, Jake."

"I never worried about it in the first place, Baby, but it happened anyway."

"Or getting controlled by elves, or rained on by manure, or seeing beauty where it isn't."

"I don't?"

"No, you don't. Put it all together, Jake. If you even get close to someone who is under a spell, you cancel it out, like you did with Joe and the Lieutenant at the Precinct. Harry's magic poop disappeared near you. It all adds up Jake, that's your so-called curse, or at least part of it. Mick put a spell on you so you couldn't be fooled by the elves, or rained on by magic poop, or whatever. Your magic curse is an anti-magic one."

Anti-magic? I actually felt a little relieved. I had been wondering about the curse thing, but this didn't sound half bad, as curses go. But what was it for? "Why would he do that to me?"

"Because otherwise you'd be under elf control like everyone else they want to control."

"Why me?"

"Because you're a detective and he wants you to do a detective job for him, just like he says, and he doesn't want the elves and dwarves to stop you with their magic."

"Shit," I remarked. She was right. It did all fit. So I really was under a troll spell, but one that protected me from elf spells, and even protected other people from their spells, if they were close enough to me.

I still didn't like it. Sure, it wasn't as bad as being shrunk or rained on by poop, but I was still being used by these bastards in their little game, whatever that game was, in a way that was way-too up-close and personal. I was right in the middle of this thing, even more than I ever thought I was. "Son of a bitch," I remarked, too loud for in a library. A couple of the librarians gave me the evil eye. One of them had really nice legs, so I forgave that one.

"Jake, don't you see what a break this is? We should tell Vinnie so that the Family doesn't dispose of you."

"Sure, Kid; it's just great news. Might as well tell them." Why not? The elves, being in this magic business, must already know. I was a danger to them. But then why didn't they simply get rid of me, rather than grill me?

The answer was obvious; they wanted me to lead them to the troll. Then they would kill me, probably, if the mob didn't kill me first. Just like Henry. Dandy. But I had no choice, really. This wouldn't be over with until the troll was caught. There was at least one other little tiny catch. I didn't know where the troll was! Oh yeah, and the mob would bump me off too, if I turned the ugly bastard in. Almost forgot that part.

It was still only morning but I had a headache already, and wanted a stiff drink. Elaine and I left the library and went to Sam's Bar for drinks and sandwiches. I watched, but didn't see any tails, but I knew they must be there somewhere, from both the elves/cops and the mob. I felt like a rat in a maze, and I wanted out.

After throwing down a couple of shots I stood up at our booth and loudly made an announcement. "Trolls, elves, dwarves, I wash my hands of the lot of you. You hear me? I quit. Play your games without me. You go your way, and I'll go mine." I got a few casual looks from my fellow drinkers at Sam's, but that was about all. People that start drinking before lunchtime hear all sorts of nonsense, lots of it from their own mouths.

I got more of a reaction from Elaine. "That better be Jack Daniels talking, and not you," she said. She seemed to be a little pissed.

"A little of both, I think."

"Do you really want to turn-tail, Jake?"

"You could call it that. Listen Baby, I've got it all figured out. The troll has had it, with or without my help. There are hundreds of elves, dwarves, and cops out there looking for the big ugly bastard, and they'll find him soon, and that will simply be the end of it. The mob won't even care, because this whole business will be over with. The way I see it, Jack Daniels and I spend the next few days here together, getting real chummy while I regrow my mustache. As long as I don't help anyone on either side, I'm in the clear. Plus, Grisim pays us when the troll finally gets caught. That's my new plan. It's foolproof."

"Maybe, maybe not."

"Hah?"

"How do you know you'd be in the clear? Why shouldn't the elves just get rid of you anyway, for being a royal pain in the ass? And why do they want the troll so bad? What happens when they get him? Maybe the elves like it here; maybe they'll want to stay and continue to run things. And maybe the mob won't like it if you don't try to help the troll. I tell you this, if you accept any money from Grisim, the mob will see it as a payoff, and you are done-for. Then there's the little matter of you being framed for Henry's murder."

"My head hurts," I complained. I had already made that quick stop at the bank and cashed the new check from Grisim, but hadn't told Elaine. I chugged down another shot of whisky. So OK, she was right. I was a dead man a lot of times over. It seemed like the walls were closing in on me.

Meanwhile, she droned on. "The troll is the key, somehow, but unless we know more, we don't know if we should find the troll, or what to do if we do find him. Henry must have known something, that's why he was killed. The key to the troll and this whole business must be Henry and his trip to Arizona."

I chugged down another shot. It was all spinning in my head. Elves, trolls, giants, dwarves, mobsters, and marriage. Help the troll and I'm a dead man. Don't help the troll and I'm a dead man. Henry's murder. Henry's trip west. The mob. The cops. My future in-laws. Suddenly out of the blue, or maybe out of the booze, it came to me, a way out! "I have to go to Arizona," I announced.

"What?"

"Henry went to Arizona and found something out, something that had to do with the troll, something that got him killed. He mentioned a Navajo shaman to his buddy at the bank. He got his artifact and whatever he knew about it from that shaman. When I find the shaman then I can find out what's going on here, I'm betting."

"But Arizona? That's so far away!"

"This is the twenty-first century, Baby; I could be there and back again in a day or two. Meanwhile you can hold down the fort here. Besides, I'll have a new cell phone. We can stay in touch. End of story."

"But Jake honey, it could be dangerous. Henry went there, and someone killed him."

I shrugged. "Danger is my business, Baby."

When we got back to the apartment I showered and packed for the trip, and worked things out some more in my head.

While Elaine showered I phoned the airlines and booked an early afternoon flight to Phoenix. Better still, the flight had just a one hour layover in Phoenix, then continued on to Hawaii. I had always wanted to go to Hawaii. I heard that the chicks on the beach there are eager for sex and almost naked. No trolls, no elves, no Jersey mob. OK, no Elaine either, but that's the breaks. You can't have everything. By late tonight, given the time zone business with the Earth spinning and so forth, I'd be in Hawaii!

Don't get me wrong, Elaine is a fantastic chick, but me get married? Having a great chick is like having a great piece of spicy chicken. Just right while you're eating it, every hot juicy bite a sweet chunk of heaven, but in the end it's just chicken, and your fingers are all greasy, and you poop burning crap and flush the stinking stuff away. It was time to flush. There were other chicks. In Hawaii. I'd look terrific on the beach wearing my white fedora.

Elaine wanted to go with me to the airport, but I insisted that she get right back on the case. We left in the Ford, tailed by a black sedan.

I dropped Elaine off at the Bank and we kissed for the last time. She figured I'd make everything better and be back with her in a day or so. She had faith in me, but I knew me better. Besides, she'd be better off without me, that's for sure, any chick would.

I drove myself to Henry's place. I had just enough time before the flight to look for clues there. I could mail whatever I found to Elaine from Phoenix, and tell her I was being followed by someone nasty looking there in Arizona. Everyone would believe it; I was being followed all the time. When I never returned everyone would figure someone had bumped me off in Arizona. It was a foolproof escape.

I parked the Ford a block from Henry's place and walked the rest of the way. On the outside the place looked better than it did the last time I was there. Stuff was still tore up, but except for the normal little piles of dog doo that everyone gets in their yards; the flying shit was all gone. The place had yellow tape across the door, but no other signs of cops.

I broke in through the back door. The inside of Henry's place was a mess. Whoever got Henry had been looking for something all right. Papers, clothes, furniture, and some red smears that must have once been part of poor Henry were scattered all over the house. "Shi-i-it," I remarked.

If this was a murder scene, a lot of this stuff should have been bagged or sponged up, but given the current state of our city's finest, the murder investigation was probably even more lax than usual. Besides, they already had me as their patsy, so why look any further?

Probably, the cops weren't even the ones that tore up this place looking for something, but someone had trashed the joint when they killed Henry. Poor Henry's study was the worst. All of his fancy old books were shredded to bits. It had to be the artifact that they were looking for, the figurine that looked like a little man, along with anything in books that might relate to the artifact.

Just then, I got the weirdest feeling. Like I was snug inside a dark place, hiding. "Find me," said a strange voice in my head!

"What the fuck was that?" I asked of nobody in particular.

"Come get me," said the voice. I couldn't hear it with my ears, but it was in my head as clear as anything! And somehow I knew I should head east to find it. East, towards the bank and the mob and the troll.

Like hell, I figured. I had enough of this. Newark Airport was to the north, and I ran back to my car and headed that way, losing the tail first, thanks to a few side trips down alleys and through backyards. The black sedan that had been tailing me ended up in a swimming pool, a victim of brains over brawn. Hopefully the sedan was packed full of short little elves and dwarves that were in over their heads.

With all the extra driving around, I was in danger of missing my flight from Newark. To save time I even parked in the close-to-terminal, high rate parking. That was a first for me but I was never coming back anyway. I remembered to leave my Smith and Wesson revolver in the Ford: nowadays they frown on carrying guns on airplane flights. I was leaving behind both my car and gun.

I ran to the terminal with my bag to pick up my ticket and check my bag to Hawaii. I got to my gate in time for final boarding, but inside the airplane flight attendants insisted that I sit in first class instead of coach, in seat 2a instead of 20a. The answer to the little mystery of my upgrade was already sitting in 2b, and he needed all the extra shoulder room of a first class seat.

"Sit the fuck down," said Uncle Vinnie. "You damn near missed your flight, Kid."

"What are you doing here?"

"Elaine. She fears for your sorry ass on this little trip. Good thing I came, too. The airline fucked up and had you booked through all the way to Hawaii. Now ain't that something?"

"Shit yeah, what a screw-up. Lucky thing for me that you checked."

He smiled his shark smile at me. "Reminds me of another guy that did something similar. He was supposed to go to London for us but he somehow got himself booked through to Paris. Guess what happened? He ended up at both places! Ain't that a good one?" Vinnie grinned.

I didn't get it, and it must have showed.

"You get it Kid; there was parts of him in London, and there was parts of him in Paris. Fifty-fifty split; sort of messy."

My jaw dropped open.

"Don't worry Kid, you'll get through this OK. I promised Elaine I wouldn't let you out of my sight."

"That's a comforting thought."

"We're going to see a guy named John Nomoxin, by the way."

"We are?"

"The Arizona shaman that Henry vacationed with, Jake. You ain't too well informed, are you?"

"You got that from Henry?"

"From his papers we found at his place."

"Did you kill him?"

"Why the fuck would I do that, Jake?"

"Maybe you went to him and asked some questions he didn't want to answer. Questions about elves and trolls that the Family had a business interest in."

"Could have happened, but think about it."

"I have been thinking."

"Think some more. You just been to his place, so you seen the mess."

"Messy isn't your style?"

"Not unless it's necessary to make a point. And if it was messy accidently, we'd have burned the place down and not left all that shit lying around. Evidence, is what it is. No, if we got to Henry soon enough, he'd still be alive. He knew some things, all right. That's why we have some of our guys in Arizona checking things out."

"You have guys in Arizona?"

"Friends of the Family. Business acquaintances."

"All the way out in Arizona?"

"They're going to meet us at the airport."

I must have made a sour face, and Vinnie must have noticed. "Cheer up Jake, it could be worse. We got other friends that could have met parts of you in Hawaii."

That gave me something to think about for the rest of the flight. Also our two flight attendants were really cute. A brunette and a redhead, both young and fully equipped. They kept coming back to us, asking if we wanted anything. At first I thought they were just looking me over, like women usually do, but then I noticed Uncle Vinnie slipped them some bills every time they came by, and they were smiling at Vinnie a lot. I'd have never even thought about doing something like that, giving away dough that way to a broad that wasn't even a hooker or a stripper. Vinnie had the style, not to mention the spare dough, to carry it off.

I drank a few of those tiny little bottles of brandy they have, and relaxed for the rest of the flight. Then I must have dozed off. I even missed the movie, if there was one.

I had a weird dream though. I was in a dark place, and I was hearing a voice. "Come get me," said the tiny mystery voice.

"Who the fuck are you?" I asked.

"I be you. You be me. Come find me. We be one again."

"Fuck off!" I yelled, apparently out loud, because a big hand tightened on my shoulder like a vise and shook me so hard I thought my head would fall off.

"Wake up, Jake!" Vinnie said, and then the shaking stopped.

I opened my eyes and there was Vinnie, standing over me as big as a mountain. "What's wrong with you? Can't hold your liquor?"

"Naw, just a bad dream."

"No shit?"

"No shit in it this time. Different problem."

He sat down in his seat but kept his beady little eyes locked on mine. "Some free advice. Don't fuck up no more, Jake. You ain't a kid no more, except compared to an old fuck like me. You got responsibilities now."

"I understand." I was massaging my shoulder, trying to get some feeling back into it.

"You say that, Jake, but it ain't so. If it was so, your luggage wouldn't be going to Hawaii."

I didn't fall asleep again, but we were landing anyway.

****

CHAPTER 14

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

At the Phoenix airport a couple sour-faced toughs in black suits were standing in the lobby. I could tell right away they were Family friends, even before they spotted Vinnie. The huge tall one sort of hung back, looking this way and that, casing the place out, while the short skinny one stepped up to Vinnie with a big smile on his face. "Vinnie, you son-va-bitch!" he said. He said it with no accent, so I figured he was from North Jersey or The Big Apple.

`"Snake, you fucking little weasel!" replied Vinnie with a huge smile, and the two hugged each other like they do in those mob movies, while the big guy eyeballed me, sizing me up. He smiled a little, and his eyes sort of twinkled, and I knew exactly what he was thinking: that he could take me out if he had to, no problem, and he'd have fun doing it. Mobsters, you gotta love um. These are real guy-guys, the real deal, and no bullshit.

"This the Kid?" asked Snake, eyeballing me himself.

"That's him," said Vinnie, nodding. "Jake, this here is Snake and Tiny. We go way back."

"Pleased to meet you," I said, with as much sincerity as I could muster, offering my hand, which they each shook, Tiny squeezing hard enough to let me know where I stood in the pecking order; as if I needed any education on that score.

We walked away from the gate. Snake and Vinnie went first, followed by me and then Tiny, who followed me like he was my shadow. I didn't like it. I missed my comfortable first class airline seat already, with the free drinks and the curvy flight attendants; I missed it plenty. We all walked to the airport entrance, and stepped to one side, out of the path of rushing tourists and business folks. Vinnie and Snake faced off. They were in no hurry; everything they did was careful and deliberate. "So. You find our Indian friend?" Vinnie asked Snake casually.

"Sure, we got him stashed away in a little house in the country. Why is this red guy so hot? Red hot, right?" He laughed.

"That's just what me and Jake need to find out. You see any elves or other funny folk here-abouts?"

Snake laughed some more. "Not since Halloween. The papers got that all blown out of proportion. We got some rattlesnakes and Indians out here, but we been working on that. Another couple years and it'll be just as nice here as Queens."

Vinnie never broke a smile. "It ain't so funny now, back in Jersey and the Apple. We think maybe the elves are trying to nose in on our turf."

"No shit!"

"Lots of shit. Tons of shit. Magic shit, even. Jake here can tell you guys some pretty wild shit stories later. How far to the house with the shaman?"

"Not far. We got enough hours of daylight to make it there easy. Here's our limo." He pointed to a long black SUV-limo parked curbside where there wasn't any parking allowed. A cop stood nearby, waving away anyone that threatened to block off the limo. Our tax dollars and non-tax dollars at work.

"What about our luggage?" I asked Vinnie.

"Yours is going to Hawaii, smart ass. Mine is in the limo, right Snake?"

"Sure. We wouldn't screw around wasting your time."

We piled into the plush limo, me and Vinnie and Snake in the back and Tiny in front with the driver, another oversized sourpuss who didn't say a word. Though he sat in front, Tiny kept staring at me by use of a mirror on the back of his visor, while giving me that goofy little smile of his. The big guy was still bugging me. It must have been part of his job description.

I decided to pay more attention to other things. The inside of the stretch-SUV limo was all polished black leather, probably standard mob-issue. Pretty easy to clean up blood, I bet. They probably kept a roll of paper towels and some body bags stashed on board somewhere, for those awkward messy moments that can happen.

The countryside was totally weird. As we moved away from the concrete of the airport, I noticed the flowers planted all over the place, sprinklers shooting water up from hidden underground pipes, and trees: weird trees, if they were trees. "Hey, what the fuck are those things?" They were tall with a few big leaves only at the top, the same kind of leaves you see Catholics running around with in the spring.

"Palm trees, Jake," said Vinnie. "Oh, that's right, you ain't never been west of Pittsburgh or south of Baltimore, ain't that right?"

"Damn, you know more about me than I do!"

"That's how I stayed alive so long, Kid. Enjoy the trees and flowers and so forth now, when we get out of town there won't be so much of them."

He was right. Green life and lawn sprinklers quickly gave way to tan sand, rock, cactuses, and brownish leaved, dead looking bushes. There were scrawny little trees too, here and there along dry streambeds, but mostly it was pretty damn plain. I ain't knocking Arizona, but Jersey dirt is mostly sand too, but at least there's green stuff growing all over it. This whole place was mostly dead and empty looking as hell. It was hot out there too, in the late afternoon sun. A dry heat, but this was obviously a damn tough place to live. Even worse than Connecticut, maybe, and that's saying something.

We turned off the big highway onto a small one, and off of that onto a dirt road (I say dirt, but it was mostly just more sand and stones), and off of that onto a dirt path. The limo moved on smoothly, rocking a little like a big boat, but taking on big rocks and ruts like they weren't even there.

I'm not sure I like that in a car. In the Ford, I can feel the road really good, every Jersey crack and hole and patch, and crack or hole in a patch. That lets you know what's going on with your tax dollars. In the mob limo I was riding smooth, too smooth. I was beginning to get a bad feeling that this whole trip was like that; first class airline seats and then limo travel that could let a guy get a false sense of well-being.

We drove on and on. I've been in the country lots of times, but I never seen nothing like this. Back home there would be junk yards as you moved out of town, then the occasional farm and fruit stand and lots of small bars. Little chunks of civilization, even out in the boonies. Here there was no traffic, no cows, no bars, no nothing. I ain't never seen so much nothing.

Meanwhile, Tiny kept turning and eyeing me, and smiling. I was getting a little nervous. I couldn't help thinking that this easy to dig in sand-pit of a state was a really good place to take someone if you wanted to bump them off, especially if you were mob guys. And I happened to be in a limo full of mob guys. "Nice and quiet out here," I remarked, hoping to spark some friendly conversation. Male bonding, the geeks call it.

"Quiet as a fucking grave," said Snake, laughing. Tiny laughed too, proving he had sort of a frog-voice plus a morbid sense of humor, and everyone including the driver eyeballed me like they knew something I didn't, but didn't care to talk about. Not to me. Why bother talking to me, anyway? Maybe I was dead already, to these guys. Shit.

I took out one of those little bottles of brandy I grabbed from the plane and chugged it down. "Makes a guy thirsty, being out here in the desert," I remarked. Actually I was a little cold, the A/C was turned so high, but I was sweating anyway. Tiny stared at me almost constantly now, smiling more and more, and probably reading the growing fear in my eyes. Mob guys can read you that way, just like a pit bull can. No, Tiny was more like a mastiff; Vinnie was the pit bull. Snake? He was a smallish Doberman. Me, I was the burger, chopped up and ready to be ripped apart.

Was this it? Were they going to bump me off? What would Vinnie tell Elaine, I wondered? The Elves got me? Indians got me? Scorpions got me? This place reminded me of a particular gravel pit back home in Jersey, famous for bodies somehow showing up in it after-hours. Only it looked like this whole damn state was a gravel and sand pit. No wonder the mob liked it! This whole fucking place was one big setup, I realized, and here I was, quietly going along with it, taking the limo ride to hell. At least I was going first-class. I checked my pockets for more booze and came up empty. While I was on the plane I should have stashed away more of them little bottles of hooch.

Just when I figured there was nothing out here but my grave, we pulled up to an old shack. Another guy in a black suit waited at the open door of the shack. He was another big, mean, ugly looking bastard, but I was really so glad to see him and the shack, and not just a Jake-sized hole in the sand, I could have kissed his ugly puss.

We stepped out of the limo into the late afternoon sun and the heat and the brightness of it damn near knocked me down. In the city back East we've got protective smog to cut back on them nasty, deadly rays from the sun. No such natural comforts here, where there was nothing but clear blue sky and more of that damn dry heat. Luckily we had only a few feet to walk to the shack, and my trusty white fedora shaded my head. It was made of heavy wool felt material though, and I was begining to appreciate that in certain climates a light-weight straw Panima hat might be a good idea.

Inside, I was disappointed to find it wasn't even air-conditioned. It was hot as hell, and so dry it hurt to breathe, but at least we were in the shade. It was dark as a cave in there, and almost as sandy and dusty as outside; the desert was moving in to take over again, through all the little holes and cracks in the ancient windows and wood-slat walls.

In the darkest corner a small figure with gray ponytails sat cross-legged on the dusty wood floor. He had a many-colored blanket wrapped around his shoulders, even in the heat. I couldn't make out his face. Vinnie and I stepped forward to face him, with Snake behind Vinnie, and my shadow Tiny right behind me. Too close behind me; I could hear the big guy breathing, and feel his stinking breath on my neck, and I didn't much like it.

"How," said Vinnie, lifting a thick paw in greeting to the Indian. You got to admire those mob guys; they can communicate OK with anyone.

It was too dark to tell for sure, but the old man didn't seem to do a damn thing in return.

"What's your name, chief?" asked Vinnie.

The old man still didn't do nothing.

"He don't talk much," explained Snake. "We figured we wouldn't wear the old guy out ourselves, till you got here, Vinnie. We figured you'd want to talk to the old dude yourself."

"Sure. You and Tiny can wait outside. Me and Jake will persuade our friend here to talk."

"Right," said Snake, and he and Tiny moved towards the door, with knowing smirks on their faces.

"Hey no, you know what?" added Vinnie, as they reached the door. "Why don't we let just Jake do it? That OK with you, Jake?"

"Me?" I was too astonished to say anything else.

"Sure Kid, that's what you came here for, right?"

"OK, sure, I'll talk with him."

Jake patted me on the back. "You're one of the Family now, Kid. Use that curse thing of yours on him."

As Jake closed the door behind him I could feel the old man's eyes on me. "You be the cursed one, white man," he said, in a quiet voice. It was a strong voice though, a voice with authority and no fear, like might have been expected under the circumstances of him being snatched by the mob.

"I just got a few questions, Nomoxin, nothing for you to be afraid of. Just tell me exactly what Henry Jenkins got from you."

He chuckled. "You know that better than I do. You cannot escape your fate. The fear is yours, not mine."

What the hell! It was like he was reading my mind! "Listen John, I can help you get away from these guys. Just cooperate."

"No, it is I that can help YOU escape, Jake Simon."

"How the fuck do you know my name? Did the mob goon squad tell you? And what do you mean, you can help me escape?"

"It is you that can't escape, Jake Simon, unless I help you. I have talents, white man, like the elves. I can cause your friends outside to forget you, for a time. Then you can leave here; go away someplace and start your life over. You are carrying enough money."

He was right. I had some of the cash from Grisim's last check, stuffed away in my shoes and shorts for Hawaii. "I don't get it. What's in it for you?"

"I don't like being brought and held here. This is the way I will get back at them. This way you can get out of trouble. You can escape them all."

It was what I wanted, all right. A fresh start. No mob, no trolls or elves, no marrying into the Mob. It was perfect. Almost. No Elaine, for one thing. In my head I could see her sad puppy eyes. I could hear her voice. Then there were the legs and other good parts. Shit. "No deal," I said with a sigh. I must have been crazy.

"No? Are you sure? The troll left a treasure. My tribe could help us get it. We could both be rich."

"Treasure? What kind of treasure?"

"You know! You've been working with the troll, cursed one. What is he after? What are the elves after? You know what it is, don't you?"

"No, I don't know. That's why I'm asking you."

"Even if you don't know about the treasure, I can still save you, get the treasure myself, and share some of it with you, just to get even with these evil white men. You can escape them forever with some of the treasure, and you can escape the Family."

Sure, it sounded good. Too good. Elaine was only one reason for not doing it. The other big one was that I couldn't chance it, it was too risky. I was already way out on a limb with the Hawaii thing, and I didn't want to end up in London and Paris at the same time. "No can do. Sorry, Nomoxin. I'm going to play this straight through for the Family. I wouldn't betray them for anything."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm very sure. I ain't crazy; no damn way would I ever, ever cross the Family. Now just tell me exactly what you gave Henry."

The guy stood up and pulled off the blanket and a gray wig. Even in the dim light I could see now that he was a little old white guy in a dark suit. The usual dark suit! One of the mob! He whistled.

Vinnie led the others in. He was smiling and shaking his head. "Son-va bitch, you did it, Kid! Our man here was wired and we heard it all. You passed with flying fucking colors!" He patted me on the back, knocking the wind out of me.

"This was a setup?" I managed to ask Vinnie.

"Sure. Nothing personal, Kid. Family business. We had to be sure, especially after that Hawaii crap. I set the whole thing up with Snake."

"There is no John Nomoxin?"

"Sure there is. Snake?"

"In the back room," Snake said, as he nodded towards the back wall. Sure enough, there was a doorway that in the poor light I hadn't even noticed before. Snake opened the door to the second half of the shack and we all went in. A boarded up window let in just enough light to show it was another empty room, except for a small thin guy standing along the far wall.

My blood ran cold when I saw him. Old Indian shaman hell, it was a fucking elf! Ears, fangs, slanted eyes, the whole damn nine-yards!

"Hi Chief," said Vinnie. "I want you to tell us what Henry Jenkins got from you a couple weeks ago."

I backed away, towards the door, but got only as far as Tiny.

"Can't you see what he is?" I yelled.

"What the fuck you talking about, Kid?" asked Vinnie.

How could I explain? And if I did, who would believe it?

Then it was already too late. The elf reached into a pouch that hung from around his neck and waved a hand full of glittering faerie dust into the air, as a dozen more of the creature's elf and dwarf friends poured through the door and into the room, laughing and grinning. They weren't dressed like cops or Indians either; these were wearing pointed hats, green tights, fury vests and other weird stuff.

My mob buddies just stood there blank-faced and covered with faerie dust.

"Vinnie," I yelled. "Do something!"

"Hurt Jake," shouted the fake shaman/elf at Vinnie, pointing at me with a clawed finger. "Hurt him bad, Vinnie, but don't kill him."

Vinnie turned his massive body towards me, his huge fists clutched. But otherwise he didn't move. His faced showed confusion, like he was maybe trying to fight off the dust.

"Jake is a traitor to the Family, Vinnie, hurt him, but don't kill!" said the elf.

"He's lying, Vinnie," I pleaded.

Vinnie's beady black eyes turned as cold as a hooker's heart. I had seen that look before, on the faces of other guys under elf control just before they tried to clobber me. "Call me Mr. Veracruz, punk. Only my friends call me Vinnie." He reached into a vest pocket. I thought he was going for a gun, but his huge right hand came out with a couple of pounds of brass knuckles across his thick fingers. "Shooting would be too good for you, punk! I'm going to break you to bits and pound you into bloody pulp."

Dull eyed mobsters and gleeful elves and dwarves backed against the walls to make some room for me to get clobbered. There were a couple of dozen elves and dwarves; they were so dense I couldn't even see where the windows were, and they also managed to block the way out through the door.

When Vinnie swung at me with a right hook that would have crushed bones, I sprang away from the blow, and fell into Tiny's loving arms. I kicked and squirmed, but I was like a little kid to the huge lug. Tiny held me tight as Vinnie moved in to smash at me again. Vinnie wound up for his next haymaker and let loose.

At the last moment I was jerked roughly aside. I could feel Vinnie's fist whistle past my left ear to again strike only empty air.

"What the fuck is going on?" asked Tiny quietly in my ear, as he held me like a rag doll, again yanking me out of the way from another thunderous blow from Vinnie.

When I got close to Tiny, I must have broken the spell they had him under, and now he was saving my lucky hide! Meanwhile the elves and dwarves, quickly figuring out that something was wrong, latched onto both Tiny and me, dozens of hands pulling and pushing me towards Vinnie, while Tiny, even with angry screaming elves and dwarves hanging from his legs and arms, yanked me away from blow after blow from Vinnie. It was so rough that I lost my fedora. It was probably being trampled to bits by mob, elf, and dwarf feet. But I was still in pretty good shape, thanks to Tiny.

My big guy was already tiring though. There were too damn many elves and dwarves. They were hitting us now too, and getting in some pretty good punches for little guys. But in a fistfight I knew that Vinnie was the one to worry about. The elves and dwarves were getting in Vinnie's way, actually making it harder for him to get in good shots at me, but I knew that it was just a matter of time before he clobbered me good.

"Throw me at him," I shouted at Tiny, over the screaming oaths of the throng that attacked us.

"What the fuck?" asked Tiny, as he smashed a dwarf with a huge left hand and two more took its place.

"Trust me," I shouted. "Throw me at Vinnie!"

In a flash I was airborne, powered by both Tiny and our attackers, who were taken off-guard, and were still pulling me in the direction of Vinnie. With something like a flying tackle I hit Vinnie, head to head, knocking him to his knees. Then I kissed the big guy, the most feared mob hit man in the country, square on his ugly puss, hoping that would break the elf spell really quick, like before he could break me in two.

It did. He looked at me funny, and wound up as though to still clobber me, but in another moment he was knocking screaming dwarves and elves through walls and windows. Tiny, now that he was free of me, was doing the same.

It was a slaughter. The Elves and dwarves were going down and out so fast I had to move fast to give the fake Indian elf an upper-cut to the chin. He went down cold. Magic-smagic, good old-fashioned fists worked just fine on these guys. In less than a minute not a single elf or dwarf was standing. It was a wonder that the cabin was still standing. Most of the windows and walls were gone, knocked out by flying elf and dwarf bodies.

Tiny and Vinnie gave each other a high-five, and then turned to me. "What the fuck just happened?" Vinnie asked.

"You were both under a spell by the elves," I explained, "then my troll anti-magic curse brought you two around."

"Me?" Vinnie exclaimed. "Controlled by fucking elves? I don't believe it."

"Ask Snake and his buddies," I said, pointing at where the skinny mobster leader, the limo driver, the first fake Indian, and another mobster stood motionless like zombies. They had been bounced around a little during the melee, but they looked none the worse for it.

"O.K. Snake, what gives?" asked Vinnie.

"Look, he's still spooked," said Tiny, who was waving his hands in front of Snake and getting no reaction at all.

Vinnie snapped his fingers in front of Snake's face. No reaction. He shook him. No reaction. Finally he shrugged and motioned me into action. I shook Snake's hand; I didn't feel like kissing his ugly puss.

Snake's eyes cleared and took in the scene. His jaw dropped open in astonishment. "What the fuck just happened?" he asked, straight to the point, just like Vinnie had asked. Mob guys, you gotta love-um.

Vinnie smiled. "You got yourself a little elf problem around here yourself, just like we got back in Jersey. We was all magic-spelled clean out of our gourds, and my guy Jake here got us out of it. Show him Jake." He pointed at the limo driver. I shook the driver's hand, and the hands of the other two guy's, and we all stood back to watch the fun. Sure enough, they all soon came around OK and were winking and blinking and asking dumb questions.

"Oh shit," I remarked, shortly thereafter. We had all started looking around, admiring Tiny and Vinnie's handiwork, when the unconscious elves and dwarves that were lying around simply vanished.

"Son-va-bitch," agreed Vinnie. He picked something up off the floor of the shack, shook some dust from it, and handed it to me. It was my white fedora, and by some miricle it was as good as new! At the same time, his cell-phone rang. He answered it and carefully listened to it for a few long seconds, then said "right," sharply into it, before hanging up and turning to me.

"Some big trouble back home," he told me. "We was gonna spend the night at a good hotel. I even had them two nice stewardesses lined up to keep us company, Jake. Now we gotta go right back home on a company jet."

"Shit," I remarked, as we exited the remains of the shack, wondering if I would have had the brunette or the redhead or both.

We piled into the limo and it headed back towards the airport, while Snake made a few calls of his own. "My guys found the real John Nomoxin, what's left of him," he told us, a few minutes later. "Looks like them elf bastards found the real shaman first. He's dead, and then some."

Just then my own cell phone rang. I was amazed that like my hat it hadn't been smashed to bits, given all the rough-housing, and even more amazed that I had coverage all the way out in the middle of nowhere. "Is that you, Jake Simon?" asked an all too recognizable voice. It was Loranda, the head elf bitch.

"Sure," I mumbled.

"I have someone here you know who wants to talk to you."

Worst case, I knew who I didn't want to hear at that moment, but that's just exactly who it was. "Jake? Is that you?" she asked. It was like a blow to the gut; the breath went right out of me. It was Elaine.

"Baby?" I asked, as best I could. "Is that you? Are you OK?"

But it was the elf bitch that was talking again. "Come home and help us find the toll, Jake, and just maybe we'll let her live. Maybe." Loranda laughed then, that crazy elf laughter. She laughed and laughed.

I was quickly past being scared and hurt and well into being pissed off. "You little bitch!" I screamed. "I'll break your fucking head off if you hurt her!"

After more laughter the line went dead. I turned to look at Vinnie. He has looking back at me, stone faced. "I know, Kid," he said. "They carried Elaine off a few minutes ago. We had guys watching her, but they pulled some kind of magic shit on them."

"That's why we got to get back to Jersey right away, Mr. Veracruz?"

"Right. That's why, Kid."

Numbly I nodded in agreement.

"Oh, and call me Vinnie."

****

CHAPTER 15

TENSE HOMECOMING

It was dawn, and I had only slept a couple hours on the plane, but my body was telling me it was morning and time to get moving by the time we landed at Newark. It was also telling me that I was tired as hell, but that couldn't be helped. Those freaky bastards had Elaine.

"We've got to find her," I told Vinnie, as we left the airport in his limo. Vinnie was sullen. He always was, but right now it was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

"We already have, Kid; she's at your old cop precinct house. Probably at your old desk right now, eating doughnuts with the elves and your old cop buddies. They're probably under their control, all of them in that joint, including the guys we just sent in a few minutes ago to check things out."

"So then let's go in and get her," I said.

"Sure, that's what we got to work towards, getting her out, but it ain't that simple."

"It ain't? I think it is! We just do it! You've got the firepower to make it simple!"

"Sure. We could level the fucking joint. But that wouldn't be too damn smart, would it. It's a police station, and she's in it. You're thinking with your balls again, Jake. Brains are what we need now."

I thought about it. He was right. "Shit," I remarked. Brains are my Achilles heel; I'm smart enough to know that much.

"Exactly. Anyway, Elaine has probably been arrested for something or other, and the elves have the whole fucking government to stop us from springing her."

"What about lawyers and judges?"

"We're trying, but I don't think that will work either. The elves have corrupted our whole legal network."

Even corruption was corrupted. What a world. "I'll kiss the legal bastards and get them out of elf control."

"You're our not so secret weapon all right, but you can't kiss every damn cop and judge in town. Anyway, they'd just put them back under their control faster than you could free them up again. You only got one set of lips and there are hundreds of them."

He was right. "So what will we do?"

"Play it cool; use our heads. There's stuff they want and stuff we want. We'll work this thing out. First thing we do is go to your place."

"My place?"

"Right. The scene of the crime, so to speak."

There were lots of dark-colored sedans parked outside my apartment building, double-parked even, most of them probably still occupied behind tinted glass. Mob thugs and/or elf controlled cop thugs, I couldn't tell. Both, probably. I could feel dozens of their eyeballs looking me over as we walked into the building, but Vinnie ignored them, and nobody made a move.

The apartment door opened from the inside as we approached it, by a huge guy that could have been Tiny's east-coast twin, except for the shotgun he leveled at my head. He nodded and waved us both in when he saw Vinnie.

Inside the apartment, the place was all torn up, and someone was already sitting on what was left of my sofa. Two someones, as a matter of fact. Both of them MOMs. "Big Ma and Papa K the King Falconie!" I exclaimed in surprise. In my apartment twice in one week! Crap. I had just let their precious daughter get nabbed by evil elves. Not to mention the Hawaii bit. This was a real oh shit moment, all right.

The King motioned me with his hard eyes for me to sit down in what was left of my recliner, which I did. Vinnie and the copy of Tiny discretely disappeared.

"Is she alright?" I asked.

"Now that's something you should know, ain't it," said the King, bitterly. He was pissed, I could tell that right away. "You are engaged to her, right?"

"It's hard to say exactly what her status is, Jake," said Ma. "Our people go in, but they don't come out. Nothing comes out. She's their trump card though, so they probably wouldn't be stupid enough to mess that up. That's what we hope anyway."

"They show us disrespect," said the King, his voice almost a snarl. He stood up and started pacing around the room like a caged tiger. "Bastards won't even negotiate with us. Instead, they gave us demands. We. Don't. Like. Demands."

"We're in an awkward position," said Ma. "First we figured they were using her against us, and that's what brought this on, but that isn't what they claim, even though they have obviously discovered who she is and what she means to us. It's just a little bonus for them, having something on us to get what they really want. They're using her to get us to control you for them, Jake. They claim you have something of theirs, or know where to find it."

"They want the troll," I said, "but you wanted me to help the troll."

"Things are more complicated now," said Ma.

"That's for damn sure," I agreed. "Are you going to trade me to them for her?"

"It ain't that simple," said Pa. "If it was, we'd have done that already. They don't really want you; they want control over you to get at the troll and the thing the troll is after. The thing he paid you to find for him. Henry's artifact, or figurine, or whatever, that's what they want. They want you free but doing their work to find it for them. For them to not harm Elaine they want us to help make sure you do your work for them. And we'll do just that, but with a little twist of our own."

"We have our own business considerations," Ma explained. "Whatever they want from you could hurt the Family, so we have to consider the bigger picture. Besides, we of course don't trust them."

"They're fucking freaks," said Papa K. "Worse than the damn Russian mob!"

"Awkward," I commented.

"We been in awkward spots before," said the King. "But not with our Elaine in the middle of it. As you can imagine, this ain't a happy situation for us. Especially when it seems to all come down to you, and you ain't exactly our first choice to bank everything on. You ain't much of a choice at all, based on that Hawaii business."

"I screwed up. I was scared; everything was closing in at once. I wasn't thinking straight."

Ma shook her head. "Well, you've got to think straight now, Jake. For Elaine. And for your own skin, if you want to keep it." She smiled. It was scary when she smiled. She looked a little like a shark. Worse, she looked a lot like Vinnie. Worst of all, I could see that she looked a little like Elaine. Very scary. "When it came down to it you done real good out west, according to Vinnie."

The King snorted. "Maybe too damn good. The elves only grabbed Elaine when you got away from them again."

"Shit," I remarked. He was right. I was too dangerous to them and I wasn't doing what they wanted me to do. So they were using Elaine to get to me. Someone might even think that Elaine's predicament is somehow my fault.

The King nodded, staring at me with cold unblinking eyes. "That's right. It is your fault." It was like he was reading my mind again.

"I'll take care of it," I said, not sure exactly what it meant even as I said it.

"That's exactly what you're going to do," agreed Big Ma.

The King pointed a big finger into my face. "You get your lazy, sorry ass the fuck to work on this case. Only now you're working exclusively for us, get it? Find the troll and the damn thing he wants you to find, and make sure we know what it is and why the elves want it before anything is done with it. Then we'll use it as leverage to get Elaine back somehow. That's the goal. Use your fucking curse or whatever you need to get it done. Vinnie will make sure you don't fuck up again. He's going with you. You don't piss or scratch your balls without checking with Vinnie first, you got it?"

"You're the boss," I croaked.

"Damn right. You got any questions?"

"How much are you paying me?"

I shouldn't have asked that. I'm not even sure which one of them hit me, I was out so fast. When I came to I was laying on my sofa, moaning in pain. There were a couple of cold, wet, bloody wash-cloths on my sore jaw.

Vinnie sat comfortably in my recliner, watching me, with an amused look on his face. "You're off to one hell of a good start, ain't you? I don't know what you said to piss them off, but it wasn't too damn smart."

I nodded in agreement as I checked my jaw over. It was sore and swollen and I had a cut lip, but no bones or teeth seemed to be broken. Also my fedora was sitting unharmed on a nearby chair. Lucky me.

"So Mr. P-I, what you plan to do now?" asked Vinnie.

I thought it over. Compared to where I was a day or two ago I was back to square one, minus Elaine, plus Vinnie. All negatives, in terms of progress. I like simple cases that take maybe a day or two of work to get the goods on a scumbag husband and/or slutty wife, or to return a missing pooch; cases that could still be milked for a whole week or two of pay. This last week or so had been a nightmare.

Triggered by Vinnie's question, the whole mess swirled around in my head again. Elves, troll, mob, cops, magic flying poop, shrinking nuts, inside-out car, slashed tires, Indians, figurine, etcetera, etcetera. My head was spinning. Guys have limits. Taken all at once it was too damn much.

I took a deep breath, and decided that I should get back to P-I basics. Take one step at a time. "A case is just a case. I just gotta keep collecting more pieces and putting the puzzle together, little bit by little bit. Once you eliminate the possible, whatever truth remains is lame; that's how these things work. Eventually I'll have it all worked out.."

"Right. Meanwhile, the elves will be watching you, making sure you're doing what they want. I'll be making sure too."

"Sure, they all want me to go right after the troll and find him and his missing whatever, but I ain't quite ready for that yet, since first I got to figure out stuff. We have some of the big puzzle pieces for sure, but I need to find some more small pieces to fit them together with."

"Sort of sounds sensible Jake, but you'll be walking a fine line. The elves want results, and they want-um fast, and so does the Family, especially with Elaine in danger. So there ain't much time."

I nodded in agreement. "A day or two tops, I figure. Hey, I'm just a working stiff. If you've got a better idea, I'd like to hear it."

Vinnie shrugged his extra wide shoulders. "I'm mostly just a working stiff too. So what do you figure the first move is?"

"We backtrack. To the bank, the bankers, everyone I already talked to, and so forth, looking for a break. We follow up new leads we turn up. You know, detective stuff."

"In other words, you don't have a fucking clue."

"Well, clue-wise we can start right now, with this apartment. Maybe the elves left a clue when they trashed this place."

Vinnie shrugged and we began looking around the apartment. The mob guy paused when he came across a bowl of cat food on the kitchen floor. "Hey," he said, "we should ask Prince what he seen."

"The damn cat?" I responded. "I ain't even seen him. Maybe the elves got him." I had to smile at the thought. "That would be a damn crying shame."

"Jake, I have something to tell you," said a disembodied voice, right on cue.

"Elaine? What the hell!" I exclaimed. It was Elaine's voice! From behind the sofa?

Prince meowed loudly and stepped out from behind the sofa.

"Son-va-bitch!" I exclaimed. "It's the fucking cat!" It walked towards me with its sneaky cat eyes looking into mine, ready to take-off if I threatened it. I figured to kick it as it got closer, but then refigured that Vinnie might not go for that. "What you got to say, cat?"

"Jake bad," the little son-of-a-bitch cat said, in its normal voice. Figuring it was safe from me for the moment, it jumped up onto the arm of the sofa, and scratched the hell out of it, right next to me, daring me to take a swipe at it, but I still held back.

"Yah, so what else is new," said Vinnie. "What did Elaine say to tell Jake, cat?"

The cat stretched, jumped onto my recliner, arched its back and dug its damned claws into my nice leather, the little bastard. Then Elaine's voice resumed. "I decided to use Prince to take notes, Jake. I told Prince that if I go away and don't come back, he should give you my notes.

"Note one. I love you Jake, remember that." Vinnie's beady little eyes rolled back.

"Note two. I talked to Jane Fey and Alicia Tweed about the shrinking nut case again. They both claim they weren't behind the extreme shrinking of Grisim. I believe them. So was it Mick then? Why would he do it? He and Tweed got a pay-off if he shrank Grisim only a little bit. And then there was the tires and the inside-out car and the hair business and Henry's flying poop problem. Was it elves? If so why? To make the troll look bad? Why are the stunts all connected in some way to the bank?" It sounded like Elaine was as confused as I was. Not good. "By the way, I'm being followed," the cat/Elaine added.

"Note three. I talked to Margie Wainwright. The woman has issues. She's always spouting off about Grisim and other people in the Bank. The elves said she's cursed; what if they're right? Could she be behind what's been happening? I asked her, point blank, and she laughed about it. But there's something about her I don't trust. Yeah, I know you guys all like her legs and so-forth, but that's not what I'm talking about. Maybe she's mixed up in this business, even if she doesn't know it. That happened to you, remember? Even if you didn't know it or believe it? Maybe it happened to her too. Maybe she's deeper into this than we know.

"Note four. You have to talk to Grisim. He's been trying to reach you. He isn't very happy about you leaving town while you're supposed to be working here for him. It's my fault; I shouldn't even have told him you are out of town. After all, you're going to be back soon, and you were still on the case anyway. But he wouldn't have even had to know that you had left town.

"Note five. I talked to Eric. He knows more about this magic business than we do. He says there are some things about magic that Henry told him. Henry said that there is still supposed to be some magic here in our world somewhere, strong magic. That's why the fairy folk split with us long ago; they didn't like the competition. He says some of the old tales are true, about human witches, silver and to some degree iron being sort of magic-resistant, and garlic repelling magic. To stop his hair growing, Eric ate some raw garlic and spent an hour in his mother's steel lawn shed. It worked. Or maybe the problem would have gone away anyway. On a separate topic, I think it's cops following me, plus some of my Pop's guys. They haven't followed me around like this since I was a teen, but I'm not complaining this time.

"Note six. Last note for a while, probably. You should be in Arizona by now. I hope you don't mind that I got Vinnie to help you. I know you don't think you need help from anybody, me included. But I miss you and worry about you all the time, and knowing Vinnie is looking after you helps a lot."

The voice stopped and the cat, looking bored, scratched behind his ear, stretched and leapt away.

So that was it; Elaine had done a lot in one day. She saved me and Vinnie some work, by questioning folks that way. I could fill in the rest. We whopped the elves' butts in Arizona and when that didn't work out for them the elves decided to capture her instead. It must have been their backup plan all along. The King's mob guys tried to stop them but ended up zombies or worse.

"You learn much from that?" asked Vinnie.

"Some bits and pieces maybe. Hey, what you doing?"

Vinnie had pulled a revolver from under his suit coat and began dumping bullets from it out onto the floor. He pulled a little box from a pocket and started loading new bullets into the gun. "Using some of those bits and pieces, Jake. These are silver bullets. Just like the lone fucking ranger had. Based on what Henry left behind I had a hunch already about this, and what Elaine says cinches it. She didn't say nothing about lead being any good, just silver and iron and garlic."

"Hey, you have a Smith and Wesson Model 64 thirty-eight just like mine!" I noticed.

"This is yours," he said, as he finished loading it and tossed it to me. He was right, it was mine!

"I left it in the Ford at the airport," I noted.

"That's where we got it from."

"What about your gun?" I asked.

He patted a lump under his suit that I thought had been muscle. "Mine holds a thirty-round clip of steel jacketed lead slugs. Should rip those little fuckers in half."

Mob guys, you gotta love um. I put on my gun and fedora and we headed out.

****

CHAPTER 16

MICKS

"Hey! This ain't the way to Henry's house," I told Vinnie. I hadn't been paying very close attention to where he was driving us. Actually, I was tired and trying to catch a few zees. When I woke up he was driving us through the warehouse district near the river, miles from Henry's place.

"I know it ain't," replied Vinnie. "Henry's stuff ain't at Henry's no more."

"It ain't?"

"No. We moved it last night for safe-keeping."

He didn't explain further. I like that in a guy. Guys that yap-yap-yap about everything and nothing, like women do, are a big pain. If I wanted to hear that kind of fake bullshit from a guy I'd be watching one of those daytime soaps on TV.

A minute later we were pulling up to the backdoor of what looked like a deserted warehouse. As we approached it the big door slid up and we drove in. It slammed shut in back of us, cutting off the two cars that were following us. Pretty nifty.

There were mountains of wooden crates and cardboard boxes of assorted sizes inside. I also noticed about a dozen toughs with automatic rifles pointed at us. We got out of the car. The smell hit me just as I noticed that the toughs were all wearing necklaces strung with garlic. Lots of garlic. Too much garlic. It stunk and it looked goofy and unnatural, to see mob tough guys wearing necklaces.

"I told them about what Elaine said about garlic," Vinnie explained.

They must have taken it really seriously. While guns were kept pointed at us, a big bowl of crushed garlic was shoved in front of Vinnie, and then me, obviously as some sort of test. My face probably changed color, but the smell wasn't quite unbearable. Good thing, because they might have shot me if it was. "Whew!" I exclaimed, my eyes watering, "couldn't we all just eat an Italian meal?"

"Hope to get to that later," said Vinnie, as he led through a maze of crates. "With extra garlic."

"Isn't this garlic business jumping the gun just a little? Maybe the elves love the stuff."

"Not so," said Vinnie. "Some of the boys just tried it a few minutes ago on an elf and a spooked cop."

"And it worked?"

"The elf totally lost its cool, turned green and puked."

"And then?"

"Don't know. One of the boys got excited and popped him with some silver bullets. Those worked real good too." He gave me a big toothy smile.

"And the cop?"

"Garlic didn't do much to the cop until we force-fed him a couple of cloves. Then he came around to his usual good natured cop-self. We gave him some garlic and some Italian recipes and sent the guy home."

"So the garlic works then?"

"Seems to. Fresh garlic and garlic juice seem to work better than powdered. We're hoping we'll learn even more from all this stuff we got from the banker's place."

We came to a clearing in the middle of the warehouse, where we walked into a big plastic tent. Inside it a couple dozen men and women in white lab coats were busily going through stacks of furniture, paper, clothes and assorted trash. I guess it was Henry's stuff, but trash being trash it could have just as well come from my closet, for all I could tell, except for the blood and guts on some of it.

They wore rubber gloves and were using magnifying glasses, microscopes, and other tools to go through Henry's stuff. From time to time one of them got excited about something and yapped about it with a buddy and put it in a little plastic bag, but for the most part they were quietly working their way through everything. "Who are the geeks?" I asked.

"This is our forensics team in action," Vinnie explained. "Hey Doctor Mike, anything interesting yet?"

An old man in a white lab coat stepped out from the mob of geeks. "Not yet, Mr. V. Physical retrieval, categorization, and preservation are the first steps. Is this young man with the nifty white fedora Jake Simon?"

"It is," I said. I tried to shake his hand but he backed off, waving me away from his gloved hands.

"So what have you got?" Vinnie asked the geek.

"Nothing of obvious significance stands out so far. At least nothing is recognizable as a case-breaker. We'll give you a daily report and rely on your feedback to help focus our efforts better."

I doubted it. These geeks would study this stuff for years probably, and then write a fancy report that didn't help anything. That, in a nutshell, is what geeks do. It's a living, I suppose, but that sort of job would drive most regular folks crazy. "What's over here?" I asked. Something made me want to look at a little pile of cards and papers laid out on a card table.

"That's the contents of the victim's wallet and pockets, Mr. Simon," Mike the geek explained.

Right, I could see that. It was Henry's driver's license, credit cards, ATM receipts, and other odds and ends. All of this should have been at the police station, of course, but I wasn't going to ask any questions about that. Before I could reach for them Mike had me put on rubber gloves like his, then I was allowed to look through them. I didn't pay much attention to most of it, until I found a little folded up sheet of pink paper. I don't know how, but I knew at once it was the thing I was looking for. "This is it," I announced, even before I unfolded it.

"What is it?" asked Vinnie.

"A note from Margie Wainwright to Henry," I said, after glancing at it. I held it out for Vinnie to read. "I hope you have a good vacation, Henry," is all that it said, and then Margie had signed it.

"What's the big deal about that?" asked Vinnie.

"I don't know, but I knew this was here, before I even looked. I somehow knew it was here and important!"

"Your troll curse?"

"I guess so." That was crazy, but what else could explain it?

"Do you feel drawn to anything else here?" Mike gestured with his hands at the piles of stuff that surrounded us.

I looked around, but sensed nothing. "I suppose not."

"The fact that you were drawn to that little note, and not to anything else, may be significant," he suggested, as he took the note from me. "I'll run some tests on it."

"Do that," said Vinnie, "but I don't think you'll find nothing. It came from that Wainwright broad; that might be the point. It ain't her words or finger prints or DNA that are important. She's cursed or something too, according to the elves, and this about cinches it. Jake here could find the paper because of his curse, because her curse cursed it."

Margie Wainwright? She was a client, so I should have kept in touch with her better. Fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. But mostly I had Elaine keeping in touch with her instead of me. Why, as usually I liked keeping in closer touch with good looking clients, I didn't know. The truth is I always had a funny feeling about Margie. I felt drawn to her in a weird sort of way, besides the usual I mean. There was something strange about her, and that bothered me. I wasn't too anxious to see her now, but what the hell. "I suppose we should go talk with her," I said, without much enthusiasm.

Vinnie noticed. "What's the matter Jake, I hear she has really nice legs and cleavage."

Any discussion we might have had about her legs and other nifty attributes was cut short by one of the mob toughs running up to Vinnie. "There's a visitor with a weird black cat that just came to the front door, and he wants to see Mr. Simon. A big ugly guy by the name of Grogorath."

"What's weird about the cat?" asked Vinnie.

The tough looked uneasy. "The creepy little son-of-a-bitch can talk. The damn cat says it wants to see Jake too."

"Son-of-a-bitch!" exclaimed Vinnie. "It's your old friend the giant, Jake, and Prince. Bring the big fella up to the office, but keep a close eye on him, boys. And let the cat come too, if he tells you his name is Prince. Prince is the Falconie Family cat, so treat him real, REAL special."

We walked to the front of the warehouse, up some metal stairs, and into a small office. A minute later, two toughs escorted the big guy in. They had his hands tied together in front of him with stout rope. Prince followed them in, prancing with tail pointed high in the air, looking as cocky as ever.

"Hello, Mr. Jake, nice hat," Grog said, smiling and showing off his rotten teeth. He stunk to high heaven. I hadn't seen him since the cops carted him off from Grisim's place last week, and I can't say that I was too happy to see him again now. For one thing he was wearing his white fedora, and maybe that sort of made my white fedora seem nasty by association. He also wore a tee-shirt and blue-jean overalls, matching what the troll wore the last time I saw him. They must have shopped together at the same big and tall dude clothing store.

"He gobbled down a couple pounds of raw garlic when we showed it to him," said one of the toughs, grinning. "He's crazy about the stuff. Maybe he's an Italian giant."

Grog's smile deepened. "Good food. Make Grog big and strong." Over the next few seconds everyone watched in astonishment as Grog, already immense, grew several inches taller, to nearly eight feet tall and maybe six to eight hundred pounds. Conveniently his clothes including the hat grew with him. The ropes around his growing wrists snapped off, and the mob toughs watching nervously leveled their guns at the big guy.

Vinnie waved them off. "Take it easy boys; Grog here is a troll friend like us."

"Yes, me be troll friend." The smile got even bigger, and then faded. "Big Mick unhappy when troll friend Jake go far away." His smile got bigger. "Happy when he come back. Happy that Jake wear troll hat." The smile disappeared. "Unhappy when Jake not find Mick. Grog look for Jake, find cat." The smile returned. "Nice cat want to find Jake too, so cat come with Grog."

Peachy keen. The giant and the cat, a couple of my very favorite folks, come to see me.

"Grog happy he help troll friend Jake now." He grinned widely, showing off his big rotten, stinking teeth.

"How did you get past the cops and the elves?" I asked.

"Elves not like daytime sun so much. Mick give Grog nice gift so Grog fool others." Grog reached under his vest. In an instant the bastard simply disappeared! He was there, and then he wasn't, I kid you not!

"What the fuck!" exclaimed Vinnie.

The mob toughs were soon going nuts looking high and low, behind chairs and such, pointing their guns here and there.

A couple seconds later Grog re-appeared exactly where he had disappeared from. He hadn't gone anyplace at all, he just made himself invisible! "Shi-i-t," I remarked. "I could use a trick like that!" I could have used it on my trip to Arizona. Hell, I'd be on a beach in Hawaii by now, watching the bikini clad babes, or invisible in their dressing rooms, watching them become bikini unclad. What a deal!

"Jake job be to find Mick," the giant stated. "Jake find Mick now?"

"Yes," said Prince. The cat jumped up onto Grog's wide shoulders. "Jake find Mick and then find Elaine."

"Is good," said Grog, as he pet the cat with a huge hand that was as big as the cat. "Cats be troll friends. Elves not like cats, not like black cats most. Black cats confuse evil magic."

"Grog, I don't understand," I said, ignoring the silly cat business. "You just came from Mick."

"Yes."

"So you already know where he is?"

"Yes."

"So why do you need me to find him?"

"Jake job be to find lost Mick."

"Jake dumb," interjected Prince.

I wished the damn moron cat would shut up; trying to talk with just a moron giant was tough enough. I looked at Vinnie, who shrugged, then asked the obvious question himself. "Why does Jake need to find Mick?"

"Mick need Mick."

"What the fuck does that mean?" demanded Vinnie. "Some kind of psychology crap?"

"Need one Mick."

"One is plenty, that's for sure," I agreed.

"Yes," agreed Grog, nodding and grinning, as though I finally understood. I didn't.

"This troll talk ain't getting us no place," said Vinnie. "Did you guys take down Henry the banker?"

Blank grinning stare from the giant.

"You know, did you rub him out?"

Slack-jawed confusion from Grog.

"Grog dumb," noted Prince.

Even Vinnie was losing his famous patience. "Did - you - or - Mick – whack - Henry - the – banker?" he asked slowly.

The big guy shook his head no. "We see his home, see him dead. Mick say elves kill little old bank man so he not help Mick. Henry be the bank man we look for, man who bring Mick to Source that give him note. Note wake up Mick. Mick think Henry help Mick find Source and Mick. But then Henry be dead. Dead be full dead in this world, true end of being alive. Henry not help Mick again, ever."

"What's a source?" I asked. Mick had used the term earlier. "The source of what?"

"Magic Source of power for Mick, so Mick can open door big, let Mick out."

"Door?" I asked.

"Door to this nice world from bad place. Mick and Grog use door to come to this world. But door opens again and again now, using Source power and Mick, twisted by Elves' spell. Closes again and again, but opens again and again. Many elves and dwarves come through door again and again. That be bad. Big bad."

"Why are the elves after you and Mick?" Vinnie asked.

"Elves be bad. Elves want to take Mick and Grog back to bad place."

Vinnie's eyes lit up. "You guys are escaped cons! It's like the newspapers say! The elves had you in their jail and you escaped!"

"Yes," said Grog, grinning.

"What did you guys do? You know, to be in jail?" I asked.

"Mick be troll, Grog be giant, and elves be elves."

"And boys will be boys," I concluded. "But I still need to know what Mick wants me to do."

"Jake job be to find Mick. Then Mick find Jake and Mick be Mick."

I shook my head. "OK, so how do I find Mick?"

"Jake close eyes. Use power Mick give you. Feel where is Mick. Know where Mick is."

"Why don't you just tell me where he is? You just left him!"

"Yes. No."

"What does that mean?"

"Mick give you his gift to find Mick. Now Mick cannot find Mick. Grog cannot find Mick. Only Jake can find Mick. Jake must find Mick."

"Why find Mick?" asked Vinnie, again.

"So Mick be one Mick."

"Wait!" I said. I just had a crazy idea. "Is there more than one Mick?"

"Less than one Mick," Grog said.

It wasn't exactly the answer I expected, but then again maybe it helped explain things even more.

"Mick is small, you mean," said Vinnie. "If he eats garlic will he get big and strong again like you?"

"No, Mick need Mick. Garlic help only little bit."

The crazy idea was still jelling in my head. "Is the Mick I should look for a little Mick?"

"Yes. Little Mick."

"How big?"

Grog held up his little finger. "Big as mouse."

He couldn't have meant that, Vinnie must have figured. "Big as a house?" he asked.

"Mouse," said Prince. "M-O-U-S-E." The damn cat could spell, or at least he could spell mouse! But then being a cat he would know about mice, right?

"Big like this," said Grog, as he wiggled his little finger and looked at it.

"Big as your little finger?" I asked.

"Yes."

"What the hell?" asked Vinnie, dumbfounded.

Me, I was smiling. Lights lit, bells rang. It all fit. "The figurine," I explained. "The thing Henry got from the Indians in Arizona. The thing that big Mick needs so he will be whole again. The thing the elves want. It's a little part of Mick that broke out of that elf prison and came to this world a long time ago. Hundreds of years ago maybe. There was only enough power for a tiny bit of the troll to escape. Little Mick looked for more power in this world and finally found a source of magic power strong enough to help him get big Mick and his buddy Grog out of the elf jail too. Am I right, Grog?"

The big guy nodded and grinned yet wider, apparently as happy as we were to at last have gotten somewhere.

"Jake slow," remarked Prince.

"You find now?" Grog asked. "Find Mick?"

"How?"

"Close eyes and make brain empty."

No problem, I figured; I do that all the time, even with eyes open. I closed my eyes. My brain was about as empty as I could make it, and still nothing happened. "Shit," I remarked. "Nothing at all."

Grog's smile disappeared. "Jake no see where is Mick?"

"No. Sorry."

The big guy's legs seemed to give in, and he sat down on the floor, hard. "Jake not see Mick!" he lamented. He sounded like he might start crying.

"What does it mean?" I asked him. "Why can't I see him?"

He looked up at me with big sad eyes. "Grog not know." The cat lay down on the giant's shoulders and took a cat nap, the lazy little bastard.

They were both going to be a big help, I could tell.

****

CHAPTER 17

BANK JOB

Margie Wainwright's bank was just about to close for the day when we got there: the mob hit man, the invisible giant, and me. Two of us wore white fedoras, also known as troll hats. Plus we had the damn cat, still asleep and invisible on the giant's shoulders, as far as I knew. Real heavyweights. It's a good thing we were using Vinnie's big beefed-up Cadillac, as all that weight would have killed the Ford for sure. As it was, the caddy raised a half a foot and groaned and squeaked when Grog squeezed out of the back door.

I figured though he was invisible Grog was even bigger now, , since he had eaten more garlic before we left. For sure he smelled even worse than ever, after shoveling huge handfuls of stinking raw garlic into his big stinking mouth. He stunk but at least he had the good taste to make his ugly face invisible. Either the cat was invisible too or he had snuck off when we weren't looking. Either way was better than being able to see him, I figured.

Vinnie wasn't invisible, and being seen publicly with a mob hit man probably wasn't especially good for my business. Sure, all in all these mob guys were OK by me, real guy-guys, guys that I wouldn't mind sharing some brews with, but not everyone cared for them. Besides, I really like working alone better anyway, since then I can do whatever I want to. For instance if I were alone I'd have probably stopped for some good coffee and donuts on the way, a habit I developed as a cop. Or I'd drop this whole business altogether for a while and spend some quality time at the racetrack or in a bar.

As we approached the bank's front door, it happened: I was suddenly seeing double. Besides seeing the front of the bank, I also had a vision of the inside of a dark cave or hole or someplace, and a strange little voice, THE voice, was talking to me again. "Me be here, hiding in safe place near Source. Me open gate when Source come near. Come get me, I need me," or some such shit. It was like the dreams I had had before, but a hundred times stronger.

The voice talked and talked, pounding the same words into my poor little brain over and over, so loud it almost took my head off. The vision was so strong it seemed real, right in front of me, a shimmering ghostly image mixed in with the normal stuff I was still seeing.

And this time I knew right where I had to go: into the bank. It was there, in the bank, whatever it was, whoever it was. If it was a little troll named Mick, I couldn't tell for sure, but it was pulling me in, like a giant magnet.

I stumbled towards the bank, with my eyeballs wide and my jaw hanging open, arms reaching out like a blind man to keep myself from bumping into things that might really be there, and bitching like crazy.

Vinnie finally noticed that something was up. "You having some sort of attack Kid?" he asked. "What gives?"

"Him finding Mick," explained an excited but deep disembodied voice close behind and above us. "Is good!"

"Bull!" I said, disagreeing. "I hate this weird shit!" It was definitely NOT good. I was seeing things, hearing things! I wanted to get away from there, to hide from the voice, to stop the vision, but at the same time I felt deep in my gut that I had to find the source of it all and be done with it. No more putting off seeing Margie, no more Arizona or Hawaii; this was it. I wanted to be done with this crap so that I could get back to simple divorce cases and lost dogs. I wanted my life back, end of story.

It was time for me to earn my fifty bucks a day, I figured. Dazed and still seeing and hearing double, I entered the bank with Vinnie propping me up on the left and invisible Grog propping me up on the right. Inside there were a few people queued in a line, being waited on by three tellers behind a long counter. A typical bank set-up.

Nobody looked at us when we came in, as there was already a show going on. Behind the counter and its three busy tellers, Margie was having a heated discussion with Eric, loud enough for me to hear as we approached closer.

"But it doesn't make sense; it's extra work to do that," complained Eric. The kid was obviously not happy, even though I noticed that his hair had grown back a little.

"I don't care," said Margie angrily. She was holding her forehead like she had a really bad headache. "Close the damn thing. Now!"

Eric shrugged and then pushed the heavy bank-vault door closed. As the massive steel door swung shut, the loud voice in my head faded to nothing and the vision disappeared. What a relief! Vinnie and Grog still held me up, or I might have still fallen over just from the relief.

"Jake!" said Margie, when she saw me. "Where have you been?" She even smiled. Her pain seemed to be gone, though she still looked tired. "How's the case? Come to my office and we can talk."

"Right," I agreed, following her. Vinnie and Grog still held my arms but I shook them off, as my dizziness was gone.

"And who's your wide shouldered friend?" she asked, eyeballing Vinnie, who followed us. She couldn't see Grog, since he was still invisible.

"This is Mr. Veracruz, an associate," I explained. "He's helping me on the case, at no extra charge to you." Vinnie gave her a slight smile and a little nod as he checked out her legs, which were pretty damn good, from where I stood.

"So what's happening with my case? Am I a suspect for the cops or not?" She asked, as she closed her office door behind us. I thought for a second she had shut out Grog, but then I smelled the garlic, on top of sewer breath and garbage body odors. Margie did too; I could tell from the sour looks she gave both me and Vinnie.

"It's sort of gone beyond that stage," I explained. "Things are complicated. The cops and their friends the elves want me to find Henry's missing figurine for them. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

She had pulled a can of room deodorizer from her desk drawer and was spraying it all over the room, including on the stinking invisible giant. I liked this chick; she was the straight forward and in your face type. "No, I still don't," she answered.

"Have you had some weird things happen to you lately? Have you been hearing voices or seeing things?"

"Of course not."

"We can fix it, but to fix it you need to fess up," I told her.

"OK, a little bit maybe, for a while," she admitted.

"Or getting dizzy or bad headaches? Like maybe every time the bank vault is opened?"

Bingo. That one got to her; I saw it in her face. She even stopped spraying the flowery deodorizer. "I have headaches and feel tired whenever that thing is opened. How did you know that? I made that connection myself only yesterday."

"I think the figurine is inside the vault."

"Henry's missing figurine? That's nuts! Like I told him, I never even saw it. What would it be doing in there? How would it get in there?"

"I don't know; maybe it hid in there itself. Why don't we go ask it?"

"Ask it? You expect it to answer us?"

"It just might be able to."

"A talking statue?"

"A tiny talking troll that hid himself inside the safe."

She laughed. "Troll? A tiny figurine that's a troll?"

I shrugged. The concept wasn't such a stretch for me, not anymore. After all, not long ago I had seen people shrunk to ant size. That experience had broadened my thinking quite a bit. "A small part of a big troll."
"Oh yeah? Which part?" She shook her head. "This is crazy talk! What I mostly wanted you to do for me is get the general lay of the land on this tire business and see where I stand with the cops. I don't care about trolls. Am I in the clear legally or not?"

"None of us are. Not while we have murderers and tire slashers on the loose. We need to work out a few things. For starters, can you tell us more about the problem you have with the vault?"

"OK, I confess. I'm even seeing a therapist about it. Ever since the slashed tire day, I've been having problems whenever the vault is opened. That's what I finally figured out."

"Headaches?"

"Not at first. I felt all charged up at certain times, and then I'd feel a big letdown and be dead-tired, like I had just run a marathon. Several times a day I would get all moody and fired up, and see crazy things in my head. Then suddenly I'd feel empty and tired as hell, plus have a nasty headache."

Note to myself: I wasn't the only one that had been getting visions.

"At first I thought it was just all the excitement here at the bank. Then I figured it was some kind of manic depression or something. I went to see a shrink and was told that it's anxiety attacks. She started me on some pills. Then yesterday, I started having really bad headaches. Plus I feel really charged up and then really, really tired. That's when I noticed that it only happened when the vault was opened. I figure it's some sort of association deal that my shrink will be able to help me with."

"Sort of inconvenient for a bank manager," Vinnie noted.

"Not as bad as you might think," Margie replied. "True, the vault has to be opened several times a day, but it can be kept closed most of the time. Since yesterday I've been keeping it closed as much as possible, and staying away from it. I don't even go inside it; I get the others to do that. It's sort of bugging them, I suppose." She glanced towards Eric who was standing outside the office, watching us as he pretended to be messing with a computer terminal. I couldn't blame the kid for being curious, not after all the nasty hair business he had been through.

"Does staying out of the bank help any?" I asked.

"Not all that much. For example, yesterday I left work early, figuring out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But my crew here opened the vault and I damn near drove off the road, even though I was miles away. I phoned the bank and had them shut the vault, and I was OK again."

"What time was that?"

"About three."

"Right. I was on an airplane at the same time, having a nightmare. Right Vinnie?"

"It adds up that way," agreed Vinnie.

Margie's shocked face paled as she looked more closely at Vinnie. "You're the mobster, Vinnie Veracruz, aren't you?"

"Some might put it that way," said Vinnie, shrugging his wide shoulders.

"What's the mob's interest in my bank?"

Vinnie smiled. "Relax. Most of the money you got here is already ours. We wouldn't want nothing bad to happen to it. We got you protected better than the Feds do."

"Is that why you're here?"

"Let's just say I got an interest in the case. I fix things up for a living, sort of like Jake does. In this case we got a mutual interest, and I'm here to help Jake fix things."

"If you two get the little troll out of my vault, will that fix things?"

"Maybe," I said. "But I think we should consult our other partner first. What about it Grog?"

"Me say is good if you find little Mick," rumbled Grog, from behind me. "It be your job. Grog help."

The effect on Margie of hearing a deep loud voice coming from nowhere was predictable, I suppose. It was the first time I saw fear in her eyes, for just a second. Then she looked pissed. "What games are you playing on me now, Jake Simon? Ventriloquism?"

"No. Grog is real but he's nothing for you to worry about. He's invisible at the moment, but he's on our team, right Grog?"

"We all be troll friends," replied Grog, by way of explanation.

"An invisible troll friend, hah? Isn't that just dandy!" quipped Margie.

"He's a giant, actually," I noted for the record. "Most of the troll isn't here, as far as we know, unless he's invisible too."

This was all a bit much for Margie to swallow, apparently. "Listen, all of you. I just want all of you and whatever is in that vault out of my bank and out of my life. Do that and I don't give a shit whose friend you all are. Do that and you can consider my case solved."

"OK, that sounds good to us," I agreed, though I didn't really want to stop getting paid by her. Fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. But I wanted this thing to be over with as much as she did, and maybe more. "Let's get to it then."

Margie led us to the vault and with her back to us unlocked it. Except for Eric, the other bank folks were busy with their customers, and hardly even glanced at us. They may have figured we were merely customers headed for a safe deposit box. "This better work fast," she said. "I can only take a few minutes inside this vault." The vault door must have been perfectly balanced on its hinges, because the multi-ton monstrosity swung open pretty easily for her.

She staggered and grabbed her head, but stepped into the vault anyway. She was one tough broad; I could see she was in pain. I couldn't sympathize with her much though; I had my own problems. "Let me out!" screamed the voice in my head again, and I started seeing shadows. I stumbled into the vault, supported by Vinnie.

"So where is it?" she asked me.

I looked around. We were in a small hall with both walls lined with what looked a little bit like little airport lockers. Safe deposit boxes, I figured. I had heard of them but never had anything valuable enough to use one for. At the end of the little hallway there was a closed door of steel bars that led to a dark second room, which was where the big dough was kept, I figured. You might have figured the figurine would be in there, but it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I stumbled to one wall and sunk to my knees and put my hands on one of the locked safe deposit boxes. The voice in my head quieted down some and changed its tune. "Yes, me be here! Me come to get me! Me soon be free!" it said. It sounded like a happy chipmunk, I realized, now that I was close enough to hear it clearly.

"Where's the keys?" asked Vinnie.

"We'll see," said Margie. She motioned to Eric, who was standing by nervously by this time, and he ran off someplace. He was back a minute later with a printout and two keys in his hands. "Nobody is assigned to that box," he said, as he handed me the keys, then retreated again to the open vault door, where he could watch us.

I unlocked the box, pulled it from the wall, put it on the small table that was the only furniture in the room, and flipped the lid open. Inside was a tiny replica of Mick, maybe eight inches tall. It looked like one of those little clay or whatever statues you see in the gift shops, painted to be life-like, with one major difference. This one was moving, and looking up at me with tiny black eyes. The little bastard was alive!

But soon it was backing into a corner of the box, cringing and pointing at me. "Trickery!" it screamed shrilly. "You not be me! You wear troll hat but not be me!" The tiny little troll also wore a tiny white fedora, I noticed.

Grog dramatically materialized next to me, complete with Elaine's cat on his shoulder. Marge gasped but didn't faint or scream; like I said, she was one tough broad. I moved aside so that the big guy could look into the box himself. "Hello little Mick! It be Grog!" he said, grinning from ugly ear to ugly ear. "Soon you be mighty troll again!"

The tiny troll jumped up and down, waving his little arms, and shouting for joy.

"Now we go get Elaine," added the cat. The cat talking probably should have freaked Margie out, except she was already totally freaked out.

The happy moment was brief, however. First there was the muffled sound of gunshots, obviously from somewhere outside the bank. Then from where I was I could see the door to the outside burst open as dozens of gun carrying cops, elves, and dwarves came pouring through it, upsetting the bank customers.

Oh well, I figured, at least with Vinnie and the giant, we would put up a damn good fight. And the tiny troll could maybe give these bad guys the heebie-jeebies. All in all, I figured it would be quite a battle.

Then I noticed that both Grog and the tiny troll were gone, vanished, cat and all. In moments, Vinnie, Margie and I were grabbed by dozens of strong, loudly cussing little dwarves and elves, and I noticed dozens of hard little fists beating the crap out of me. The beating got serious and my fedora disappeared in the crowd of attackers as they started using little clubs and spear-buts. I hadn't even had a chance to think about drawing my Smith and Wesson. Then I didn't notice anything anymore, not even pain.

****

CHAPTER 18

JAILHOUSE ROCK

My first thought when I woke up was that I was dead. I felt dizzy, I hurt everyplace, and I thought there was an angel looking down at me. Could this be what death is like? I also felt cold and wet. Couldn't be hell then at least, I figured, or it would have been hot and probably dry.

Plus, there was an angel staring down at me, smiling. That somehow didn't seem too likely either. A moment later when things came into focus I realized it was the queen elf bitch herself, Loranda, staring at me with her big nasty eyes and grinning to show off her sharp, pointy fangs.

Other nasty stuff came into focus. I was laying on the floor of a Precinct cell in a puddle of water. Loranda's nasty dwarf friend Quin was standing next to her holding an empty bucket. The little creep had thrown cold water over me, I realized.

"Hi Dopey," I said to him, trying to smile. "How's your little bitty chinny-chin-chin?"

I guess he didn't like that much, because he kicked me in the ribs.

"No more playing around, Mr. Simon. Tell us where the troll is," demanded the Elf bitch.

"I don't believe in trolls, and I sure as hell don't believe in dwarves."

Dopey kicked me again. Probably not even hard enough to crack any ribs, but it still hurt like hell.

"You'll have to do better than that," I said, which was probably pretty stupid. He kicked me again, harder, and then several small hands pulled me up into a sitting position so that I faced the next cell. In it were Elaine and Margie.

"Jake," said Elaine, "are you alright?"

"Sure Baby, I'm just dandy, how are you? They ain't hurt you, have they?"

"Not yet," said Loranda, "but that can change quickly."

One of Dopey's side-kicks unlocked Elaine's cell and led a dazed looking Vinnie into it. Elaine started towards him, probably to give the big lug a welcoming hug, but then she stopped in her tracks and backed away from him when she saw the vacant look in his eyes. Margie recognized the danger too, and closed ranks with Elaine, and they backed away from him together.

"Elaine betrayed the Family, Mr. Veracruz," said Loranda. "You know what you have to do."

Big arms spread wide he advanced slowly on the women, his beady, hateful little eyes focused on Elaine.

I pulled myself up and over to the iron bars separating our cells, ignoring the pain, and reached through, but I couldn't reach any of them. "Snap out of it Vinnie," I said. Elaine was talking to him too, but he didn't seem to hear either of us.

"Keep away from us, you bastard," said Margie, her eyes flashing.

Vinnie paused for a moment and stared at Margie, as if uncertain.

"She's an enemy of the Family too, Mr. Veracruz," said Loranda, her voice rising. "If she gets in the way, get rid of her too." Vinnie resumed his ponderous advance.

"You lousy bitch," I shouted, and I lunged towards Loranda. Take out the elf bitch and Vinnie would be OK, I figured. But a half-dozen dwarf's gang tackled me to the floor, and then pulled me again into a sitting position such that I faced the other cell, where Vinnie had backed the women into a corner and was moving in ponderously for the kill.

"Tell me what I want to know, Mr. Simon," demanded Loranda. "Where is the troll?"

Vinnie reached for Elaine but the women, hand in hand, tried to dodge him, and he ended up grabbing Margie by the arm.

"OK, OK," I relented, "I'll tell you everything. Call him off."

"Vinnie, Vinnie, Vinnie," Elaine pleaded, to no avail, as she pounded on the arm that held Margie, but her little fists bounced off, doing nothing. Margie gasped in pain, and also uselessly tried to beat him off. Vinnie meanwhile, reached for Elaine with his other hand.

"Stop, Mr. Veracruz," commanded Loranda.

Vinnie froze like a statue.

"Get lost, Vinnie," shouted Margie, as she kicked him hard in the jewels.

It had to hurt like crazy, but instead of doubling over, the big gangster released Margie and stood looking around as the women scrambled away to a neutral corner. "Where the fuck am I?" Vinnie asked, looking confused but normal. "Why are my balls sore?"

Several confused looking dwarves led the confused gangster out of the cell, and he went with them without resisting. The elves also seemed to be confused too. The elves and dwarves watched Elaine and Margie warily, as though they were suddenly afraid of them. Meanwhile Loranda and Quin watched and whispered to each other.

Something unexpected and significant had happened just now, but I couldn't figure what it was.

"Where the fuck am I?" Vinnie asked again, as if he had never seen the inside of a jail before, as he was led away, out of sight and hearing range. The kick in the balls must have snapped him out of the elf spell, I figured.

One of the elves wearing a police badge pointed a revolver at Elaine. Another one held a gun to my head. So much for magic. The elves had learned some other tricks.

"Well, Jake Simon," said Loranda, "where is the troll?"

"I'll tell you what I know," I said. "There was a little tiny troll in the bank vault, and he disappeared with the giant when you guys stormed the bank."

I stopped talking, and Quin took the opportunity to kick me in the ribs again.

Loranda gritted her ugly teeth. "No, Jake, we want to know where the big troll is NOW."

"How the fuck would I know that?" I asked.

Quin kicked me again.

Loranda shook her head. "Use your troll-given powers, you idiot! Close your eyes and look for him!" She was so angry she almost spit the words.

"Sure," I said. "Hey, you're holding all the cards, so I'll try." I closed my eyes and saw nothing but black. I tried to relax, so that maybe a vision would come. Then for just a second I thought that I began to see stuff in my head.

Then the dwarf kicked me again.

"Piss off!" I complained. If there weren't a bunch of them holding me down I swear I would have gone after the little creep. "I was starting to see stuff and you just screwed it up! How the hell you expect me to do anything this way, with all these bastards holding me and kicking me? I ain't used to doing this kind of stuff; you got to let me focus. Leave me alone for a little bit and I bet the vision will come back to me. It sure as hell ain't going to happen this way."

"All right," said Loranda, after a few moments of thought. "But this is your very last chance, Jake Simon. Fail now and there will be dire consequences for both you and your friends." She glanced meaningfully towards Elaine and Margie. "You have four minutes."

They all trooped out of my cell and out of sight.

"Jake," said Elaine. She was standing against the bars, reaching for me.

I pulled myself up and to her, grunting with pain, and we held each other tight and kissed through the bars. It hurt like crazy but it felt really, really good at the same time. Totally weird.

"Ah-hum," said Margie. "Could someone explain what the hell is going on here? Is everyone going crazy? Where are the regular cops? Have those weirdoes really taken over the police in this town? And isn't my part in this, whatever that was, totally over with, now that that little troll-thing is out of my vault? What do these characters want with me now?"

"All very good questions," I admitted. "As far as we know, the elves and dwarves want to get their hands on the troll, so they grabbed all of us; you guys for leverage to force me into telling them where he is, and me because the troll cursed me such that I sometimes get visions about where he is. That's how I knew that part of him was in your vault."

"What happens when they get him?" Margie asked.

"We aren't sure," said Elaine. "Maybe they'll grab him and then all go home."

"Hopefully," I said.

"If you were the cursed one Jake, why did the little troll in the vault give me headaches and stuff?" Margie asked.

"I still don't understand that part either," Elaine admitted. "Maybe he was raising such a ruckus that you could sense his presence. Have you ever had any psychic or mystical experiences before? Do such things run in your family?"

Margie shrugged. "My mom used to say that grandma was some kind of white witch. Before she died my grandma told me that I would grow up to be one too."

"And?" asked Elaine.

"Are you serious? Fairy tales, that's what they were telling me. I grew out of fairy tales years ago."

I looked at my Timex. It had taken a licking, and was still ticking. "As interesting as all this is, I have only about two minutes left to get a fix on Mick. So let's can the chatter for now, ladies."

I pulled away from Elaine and stumbled over to my cell's cot, sat down on it, closed my eyes, and tried to relax. Nothing happened. I lay down on the cot and closed my eyes again. Still nothing. My minutes slipped away. I noticed that my soreness was disappearing, and as it did, I felt my thoughts begin to drift.

Finally something, some sort of vision, began to seep into my sore head. I was walking down a street somewhere, Grog at my side. For some reason we were walking in the street instead of on the sidewalks, and cars were getting out of our way or stopping, and people were getting out of them and running away from us, shouting and screaming. The neighborhood looked familiar, but it was from a strange, elevated perspective. Mainly, everything looked smaller, except Grog, who was absolutely huge.

As I lay on the cot I started to hear other voices besides the shouting of my vision. Next thing, I was pulled off the cot onto the floor by a dozen strong little hands. I opened my eyes and wasn't surprised to see Dopey and his crew, back again with the queen Elf bitch. "For the last time where is he, human?" she demanded. "Where is the troll?"

"You sure you want to know?" I asked, smiling.

Dopey wound up to kick me again, but he never got the chance. I could hear shouting outside, real this time, not through a vision, and also some gunshots, and then with a sound like a train crash something huge hit the outside of the building.

The impact knocked everyone but Loranda off their feet. Bricks, dust, concrete and steel were flying around the cell in big chunks that caught a few elves and dwarves with nasty results. Then everything was quiet.

As the dust settled we noticed that the cell wall on the alley side was lying in bits on the cell floor, along with my little dwarf friends and me. A massive troll that was elephant sized, and a giant-giant that was twice elephant sized, were looking down at us from the alleyway. Huge size didn't do anything to decrease their ugliness, I noticed, though they did both wear nifty white fedoras, along with their big and tall tea-shirts and overalls.

"Hi Jake," said a grinning Mick, with a voice like thunder. "You be OK? Me come get you."

I stood up and dusted myself off. "I'm fine, thanks. Are you OK?"

"Me be fine too. You find little me!"

He reached down and touched me with his index finger. For a moment I felt my body tingle all over. "Now me have all troll powers back! Me and me be all one me, strong and troll-sized again! Grog strong too." He glanced at Grog, who was also grinning ear to ear.

"Me be giant again!" thundered the big guy. "Me come to squash dwarves and elves."

"There's plenty of them here to squash," I noted.

In fact, there were maybe a dozen each of dwarves and elves in what remained of my cell, picking themselves up out of the rubble and scrambling away from the two monstrous creatures that faced them. All except Loranda. She stood facing Mick and Grog calmly, with a bigger smile than theirs! "The prophesy is fulfilled!" she exclaimed.

"Not yet, Elf!" roared Grog. A couple seconds later a Precinct black-and-white, in Grog's big hands being used as a club, came smashing down towards Loranda. I scrambled further away from her, in a desperate attempt to not also end up as a casualty.

I need not have worried. The elf never so much as twitched, but there was a bright flash of green light that blew the car back into Grog's face, knocking him back into the alley, down, and half out of sight, where he lay motionless. The giant was down for the count.

Mick crouched and glared at Loranda hatefully, while his black eyes suddenly exploded with twin laser beams of blue light that shot towards the elf. "Die witch!" he shouted.

Loranda, laughing, returned the favor, as twin beams of green light shot from her own eyes and met and blocked the blast from the troll. Where the two sets of power beams met, half way between elf and troll, a blazing ball of swirling blue and green energy formed that was almost too bright to look at. It started out breadbox sized, but continued to grow, big as a recliner, then big as a SUV, and ever bigger.

I picked up a chunk of concrete from the floor and tried to brain the ugly elf-bitch with it, but was thrown back like Grog for my trouble by green-glowing energy. I tried simply throwing it at her and the green shield bounced it back at me, and I barely dodged it. This was apparently something that only the elf and the troll could settle.

They battled for what seemed like forever, pushing power against power, as the energy ball grew. Neither combatant was smiling anymore, as they each realized that the outcome was in doubt.

The troll seemed to have the upper hand for a while, pushing the ball almost to the elf, but then she rallied and pushed it back towards the troll. Meanwhile I still tried again and again to get at the elf, but got thrown back each time. Mick rallied again, and then the elf rallied. The cycle repeated itself a dozen times or more, but the energy ball gradually turned more and more green, and came closer to the troll each time, and it became apparent that Mick was gradually weakening and losing the battle.

"Ha!" shouted the elf bitch in triumph, as a bus-sized green energy ball finally completely engulfed poor Mick.

He stood there wide eyed for a few moments, arms and legs flailing spasmodically as he screamed in pain, while the green energy ball was apparently beating the heck out of him. Abruptly he was motionless and the energy ball faded away, as his limp body crumbled to the ground next to Grog. His poor fidora, no longer pristine white but singed mostly black and still smoking, lay beside the grimy and smashed flat hat of the giant. What a waste of hats.

"Dolandurus, miuscopus," chanted Loranda, as she pointed at the troll and giant. The two of them shrank down to human size again, and dozens of elves and dwarves, shouting and laughing with glee, came out of hiding to retrieve the ill-fated pair. There was no pile of poop either, I noticed, to go along with the shrinking. So much for Elaine's silly conservation of mass theory.

"You've killed them, you bitch," I shouted as they grabbed me again too.

The elves were busy throwing glowing dust over the shrunken, motionless troll and giant.

"Of course not, stupid human," said Loranda. "After hundreds of years the first phase of our plan is complete at last. We tricked the troll into entering your world, opening the way for us. He was so dumb, it took him centuries, but we were patient. Now that we've captured him again, he will continue to provide a gateway between our worlds. Or should I say my worlds?" She laughed, showing her vampire-type teeth. "I don't think it will take more than a few years for me to take full control of your world as well as mine." As she talked, Mick and Grog, shrunk down to human size and unconscious but tied up with stout ropes, were carried away by a mob of grinning, jeering munchkins.

"That ain't gonna happen!" I shouted. I struggled to loose myself from the grip of the dwarves, but the little bastards had me good.

"Well, you certainly won't live to see it," the elf queen told me. "When I defeated your troll friend I also destroyed any remaining protective spell he might have had over you, human. And I've had enough of you, Jake Simon, believe me I have. More than enough. You've far outlived your meddlesome usefulness."

She pointed at me and started to mouth-off some sort of mumbo-jumbo. I again tried to wriggle away from the dwarves but I couldn't budge. I had seen what she had done to Mick and Grog and figured I was a goner.

"Stop it! Leave us alone and get out of here, all you freaks," shouted Margie, who was pointing at the elf queen with her arm extended outside the iron bars. "Leave here now. You won't hurt anybody else today." Her voice was loud, like she was yelling through an amped-up speaker system, and it must have been the fowled up lighting but she seemed to me to have black eyes and to be glowing, like she was all charged up and ready to burst.

At the same time Prince appeared from out of nowhere and sprang snarling and spitting onto Loranda's head, all claws! The damn cat was maybe ten or twelve pounds, but I've seen smaller cats take out dogs bigger than that little elf bitch.

"Eeeeeeeee'" the elf screamed, as she grabbed the cat and pulled it off of her face. She tossed Prince to the floor and screamed again. I had a glimpse of angry, hate-filled eyes, and bloody scratches on too-white skin.

Then she ran away, along with the dwarves and the other elves. Even elf and dwarf bodies disappeared. I could say I was surprised, but I'd be lying. I'd seen so much weird shit by then that I was all wore out of being surprised.

In a matter of seconds only humans and the cat remained. The joint was soon crawling with dozens of cops and mobsters, including Big Ma and The King. Cells were opened and captives were freed. Everyone was themselves again, spell free, and laughing and hugging each other.

I sat on the floor where the fleeing dwarves had dropped me, gathering my wits, when the cat slowly picked itself up, then sauntered over to me and licked my face. His tongue felt like sandpaper, but I felt lucky to be able to feel it. I reached up and actually scratched the little bastard behind the ears. "Thanks cat," I said. "You're alright. I owe you big time."

"Damn right," said the cat, in my own voice. Freeky.

Vinnie appeared and gave me a hand up just as Elaine reached me. Then she was hugging me and I was hugging her, only partly to keep myself from falling over.

Lieutenant Marks appeared at my elbow, Joe Kebony in tow, just as Big Ma and Papa K also reached us. "Jake Simon! It figures! What the hell did you do to my jailhouse?" Then he noticed Ma and the King. His eyes got even bigger. They don't often get VIPs in the Precinct. "Holy shits, it's the mob! What the fuck is going on here?"

Zeke Feltstein appeared through the throng of cops and mobsters and planted himself in front of Marks. "Nobody answer any questions," he ordered. "There are plenty of potential false arrest lawsuits at stake, lieutenant. I'd be very careful if I were you."

"Yeah, take it easy, boss," said Kebony to Marks. "They helped us regain control of the Precinct from the elves and dwarves."

"Elves and dwarves? Are you crazy Kebony? And what's that stink in here?"

Feltstein, Ma and the King pushed open their jackets at the top, exposing necklaces of garlic cloves.

"What the hell?" asked Marks. "Some kind of clearance sale on garlic at the food market today for mobsters and their lawyers?"

"What day is this, lieutenant?" asked Big Ma. "Do you know?"

"Why of course I know," thundered Marks. "It's Tuesday the third." Then he looked uncertain. "Isn't it?"

Ma shook her head. "Not even close."

"I don't get it."

"Feltstein," said Elaine, "why don't you explain some things to the lieutenant. The rest of us all need to go home soon and get some sleep. Right Mother?" She hugged Big Ma.

Elaine was being bossy again, but I let it pass.

"Mother?" said Kebony, all bulgy-eyed and shack-jawed, looking at Elaine and then at Big Ma Falconie, and then back at Elaine again. "Holy shits!" He fainted.

We had lost, right? The elves had taken Mick and Grog, just as they said they had always planned. But everyone in sight was all smiles. Somehow the rest of us were still alive and the elves and dwarves were gone. So all in all, we were very happy about how things had turned out. Big Ma and The King hugged me like I was family already, when they weren't hugging Elaine. Margie was holding Prince, and even over all the commotion I could hear the little bum purring. The little bastard was a fucking hero! Who would have ever figured that?

A mob guy handed me my Smith and Wesson and I was armed again.

When Joe woke up he was so befuddled he didn't mention anything about me owing him a fifty, but otherwise he seemed to be OK. Soon cops would be arresting hookers and taking bribes again. Things were pretty much back to normal, and that was a good thing.

So what if everything hadn't turned out exactly like we wanted? That's the breaks. Mick and Grog were gone but I still had Mick's two thousand and another big check due from Grisim and a small one from Margie. Things were looking up. Life goes on. Case closed, I figured. End of story, finally. We all went home. Elaine and I even got some sleep, eventually. Life was good.

****

CHAPTER 19

ELF INVASION

"Wake up Jake, we've got company," said Elaine.

I turned over and reached for her, expecting to touch warm, soft woman-flesh, and something furry bit and scratched me, almost drawing blood. It wasn't Elaine. It was Prince in his damn fancy collar again, pulling a fast one on me, sounding like Elaine, the sneaky little bastard. Elaine was nowhere in sight.

The real Elaine poked her head into our bedroom. "It's Ma and Papa," she said, smiling. "Shake a leg, Jake." Then she disappeared.

I shook a leg at Prince but I missed, but that was OK, because now every time I felt like kicking the little bastard I remembered how he helped save our asses at the Precinct. Then I yawned, got out of bed, and got dressed. I did it in a rush but not in a panic. In the three days since the rumble at the Precinct Ma and Papa Falconie had gotten along fine with me, possibly because I hadn't seen them at all in the last three days.

On my nightstand was a pile of dirty rags that had once been three magnificent white fedoras. I had recovered my own white fedora from Wainwright's bank and it was all crushed with stains and holes. I also retrieved the remains of the fedoras of Mick and Grog from the ruble of the Precinct. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them, but it didn't seem right to simply throw them out in the trash. Maybe because my Pop and his Pop wore fedoras, I had a special attachment for them.

Now I was back to wearing my old brown one, and brown made more sense to me now that Mick and Grog were gone. White fedoras were troll hats, for trolls and troll friends. For heros maybe, and most of the time heros ended up crushed and torn and dead. The elves probably had Mick and Grog in Arizona while here I was safe and sound in Jersey. I didn't qualify as a troll friend any more. Maybe I never had. I settled for a brown fedora now. I settled for being alive, and for Elaine being alive.

After all, most everything was going pretty damn good. I had money in my pockets, lots of it from Grisim, and hints of more to come from new clients. Though most things had been hushed-up, word of mouth must have gotten around, because we had gotten calls from several people requesting our detective services. I just had to figure out which of them had the most money, and then I would pick a new case. I was in no hurry for that though. First things first. I hadn't even gotten to the horse track yet since coming into cash again.

The King and Big Ma were seated in the living room with Elaine and Prince by the time I got there. Vinnie stood by the door. None of them were smiling, but these were serious people, so maybe this visit didn't mean the end of the world, I figured.

I figured wrong. For one thing, I smelled garlic. Much more garlic than they would normally have, even as Italians. I couldn't see it, but they must have had a ton of it on them somewhere under their suit-coats and so-forth. I figured that it meant more trouble. Elf trouble. Shi-i-it.

"Hi Sonny," said The King. He actually stood up and shook my hand when I came in, and didn't even try to totally crush my hand in the process. 'Sonny' was the new name he had given me. I wasn't too wild about it, but I figured it was better than other things he used to call me, so I let it pass.

"We have elf problems, big ones," said Big Ma, getting right to business.

I shrugged. I had done my part already, and then some, I figured. Let someone else take care of elf problems for a while. "I thought they all left town."

"They left the New York area," explained The King, "but more started showing up in other places. There's a whole new crop of them every damn day, showing up first in Arizona and then flying all the hell over the world from there, thousands of the creepy little bastards. Elves, dwarves, and all kinds of really nasty critters; giants and dragons and other beasties that would make the troll look like a wimp. All controlled from Arizona. That's where Loranda and her captives are, we figure."

"Thousands of them? What the hell are they doing here? Vacationing?"

Big Ma rolled her eyes up and shook her head.

"Jake, don't you remember what Loranda said?" asked Elaine. "They're taking over our world."

"Sure, I remember. But I figured that was bull. As you remember, they had enough trouble just trying to hold on to the Precinct. How the hell would they take over the whole damn world?"

"We hoped that was the case too," said Ma. "But we've been getting reports from Families all over the country that the elves are infiltrating everywhere. They control judges, cops, reporters, the military and other power brokers. The nasty buggers take out anyone that gives them trouble that they can't handle by magic. Permanently."

"And now they're trying to take over your business again? Is that it?" I had to ask, even though I was getting bored with this whole discussion. I was out of it, whatever was going on. The checks were cashed and the case was closed, end of story. Now I just wanted to be left alone so I could have some beers at Sam's and pick some winners at the track. Maybe when I needed more dough I'd also get the goods on some cheating husbands or find some lost dogs. A brown Fedora life was good enough for me. Was that too much to ask?

It was the King's turn to shrug. "As far as we can tell, they ain't pushing to take over the greater New York area, at least not yet. So far our garlic is just a precaution." He pulled a several inches of stinking garlic necklace out from uner his shirt and fiddled withy it.

My turn to shrug again. Italians wearing garlic seamed sort of natural. Maybe that's how they took over the world back in the Roman days. "Sounds good to me. So what's the problem?"

"The other Families want us to solve their problem," said The King. "They see we're OK and they figure that we were successful in clearing the elves and dwarves out, or they figure worse."

"Worse?" I asked.

"That we have a cozy deal with them," said Ma.

"A deal with the elves? That's crazy," said Elaine, before I could.

"I'd rather kiss a wookie," I added. We had just watched an old Star Wars flick the night before.

"I told them pretty much the same thing," said The King, "but I can understand why they might think that way, especially when I couldn't tell them what I wanted to tell them."

"Which would be?" I cued him.

"Why the elves ain't bothering us no more," said Ma. "We're in an awkward position. The elves will get back to us at some point, I'm sure, but why didn't they try to finish us off when they defeated the troll? And why are they still avoiding us now? It's almost like they fear us."

"Prince," I said. "They took off after Prince mauled Loranda. They can't stand black cats."

"We tried that," said King. "Every Family from here to L.A. has tried cats against them, black and otherwise."

"And?" I asked.

"The result has been a few scratched, pissed off elves and a lot of dead cats," said Big Ma. "They don't like each other, cats and elves, but the elves sure as hell don't leave town because of cats. Garlic works better against them."

"And garlic is getting hard to find, even here in the Garden State," said The King. "We got our hands on a lot of it early on; most of it from up north where garlic grows best and from some really big garlic growers in California, but the elves have been buying it up all over the world and probably destroying it. There's a worldwide garlic shortage already. When we run out, we'll be weakened, that's for damn sure. But garlic just annoys them, it don't really hurt them bad."

"Shi-i-t," I commented. Car tires messed up, fedoras destroyed, and now garlic; this elf/troll business was hitting hard at some core American valuables. What would the world be like without garlic? But then again maybe there was a lot of stuff we didn't ever have that could make life better or worse. "Then it had to be more than the cat and the garlic, when they retreated from us at the Precinct."

"Margie," said Elaine. "She yelled at Loranda just before Prince attacked. She told the elves to take off, and said Loranda wouldn't be messing with anyone else or something like that." Her eyes suddenly bulged. "She's it! She's behind the bank tricks and so-forth too!"

"Are you crazy?" I objected. "Margie?" She had great legs and cleavage; she had to be innocent.

"Don't you see, Jake? It has to be her. She's the source of magic power that the little troll tapped to open the Gate, whenever the bank vault was opened. She's behind the bank tricks too, she has to be."

Suddenly it all clicked. Elaine was a Mensa WOW, all right! "She was the source of magic power that the little troll was tapping," I said, slowly, as what she said sank in. "Then there was that little note from her that Henry had when he went to Arizona, that's what woke up the little troll and got things started. It had some witch magic in it that the sleeping troll figurine felt. Shi-i-it!"

"I bet she shrunk your nuts too, Jake," said Big Ma, laughing, showing her MOM side.

The shrinking nuts crap again? Wouldn't that case ever end? But she was right. That had to be Margie too.

King laughed too. At least they both had a sense of humor, if a situation was extreme enough. I guess that's a good thing for future in-laws to have, especially if they're MOM mob bosses.

"This has to be confirmed and used," said Ma, suddenly sober.

"Jake, Vinnie, you two take care of it," ordered The King. "Go out to Arizona. You two take this Margie witch woman with you and kick some elf butt where it will do the most good."

My jaw dropped open. Kick some elf butt? Me, Margie, and Vinnie? What about the Feds? Hell, what about the Army?

"The Feds are too much under elf control to handle this," said the King, as if he had read my mind. "We can hit them fast and hard ourselves, under the radar. That's how most stuff in the world really gets settled, Jake."

"I'm going too," said Elaine, firmly. "And Prince too. He helped out last time we dealt with the elves."

Ma shook her head. "Baby, we just got you back from those devils. You're our princess, and this is a job for soldiers. If they capture you again, we're helpless. But if they do away with Jake or Vinnie?" She shrugged. "No offense Vinnie," she added, smiling at him.

"None taken," agreed Vinnie, nodding his head. "Soldering is my job."

Not mine. I specialized in lost dogs and stray husbands or versa-visa. "Me, I'm planning on hanging around here a few days, and maybe catching some football on TV. Giants and Eagles play this weekend."

"You're going too, Jake," Ma told me firmly. "Elaine can't go but you should take Prince with you. And you better take damn good care of him." The damn cat purred and rubbed against my leg, and I had to fight off my natural healthy impulse to kick the little bastard.

So then, it would be me, Vinnie, a black cat, and a bank broad with great legs against an army of elves and nasty monsters worse than trolls and giants. That's a plan? "Don't you think this should be thought out some more?" I asked, wisely.

"The issue is closed," said Ma.

"Jake, this is a Family matter," said Papa 'The King' Falconie, as though that settled everything. He stood up, along with Big Ma, signaling an end to all discussion.

I opened my mouth, and almost asked what they would be paying me, but then remembered what happened to me last time I asked that. "Shi-i-it," I muttered wisely, as they each gave Elaine a hug and left.

Next thing I know Elaine was handing me my suitcase and a bag of cat food, kissing me goodbye, handing me my Smith and Wessson, putting my fedora on my head, and showing me out the door too. She was crying like I was already dead, or maybe she was just missing the cat already. Vinnie led the way, carrying the cat carrier, with the damn cat draped over his wide shoulders. The fur-ball was purring and eyeballing me smugly as I trailed dutifully behind them.

Damn, I hate cats. The little bum was happily going off to face the elves and so forth again. I thought he was smarter than that.

Outside, I expected to climb into a nice mobster limo, but at the street a little surprise was waiting for us in the form of Detective Joe Kebony.

"Hi Joe, what shakes?" I asked the big guy.

"I gotta take you in, Jake," he says. At least he seemed respectful and even a little sad when he said it. Or maybe it was the fact that he was standing eyeball to eyeball with Vinnie, who was blocking Joe's path towards me; or at least eyeball-to-eyeball as much as possible, considering Joe is more than a head taller than Vinnie. Actually Prince stood up on Vinnie's shoulders, and he was eye-to-eye with Joe.

"In-in?" I asked Joe. "You mean in to the Precinct?"

"Yeah," says Joe, "what's left of it. Hey, you've got your old brown fedora!"

"I'm sort of busy right now," I mentioned, glancing at Vinnie, nodding my head towards him, and blinking meaningfully. Even Joe must have gotten the message that I was on mob business.

"You need him for how long?" asked Vinnie, as he stared menacingly into Joe's eyes. "Like the man says, he's a little busy right now."

"He ain't being charged with nothing. He just needs to have a short talk with Captain Marks, Mr. Veracruz. Should only take a few minutes, I promise."

Vinnie smiled and stepped aside, but I could tell he still wasn't too happy. "In that case, Jake is always willing to cooperate with the cops, ain't you Jake?"

"Oh sure," I said. What the hell. I handed Vinnie my suitcase and followed Joe to his car.

"I'll meet you at the Precinct, Kid," added Vinnie, smiling. "I'll pick him up in about a half an hour," he said to Joe, not smiling.

"Your new friend is a little pushy," said Joe, as he drove us to the station.

"You noticed that too? Hey, when did Marks get promoted to Captain? What gives with that shit?"

Joe laughed. "Don't you read the papers? He saved the Precinct from terrorists almost single-handed."

"He did? No shit! What terrorists?"

"You know, the ones that tore up the Precinct."

"Really? When did that happen?"

"The troll-elf thing, dummy. You remember. You were there."

"What's that got to do with terrorists?"

"Not a damn thing, but the public had to be told something."

"And what did it have to do with Marks? Why should he get any credit?"

"He shouldn't, but he grabbed all the credit for himself. You know how that goes."

"Yeah, I remember. So now why does he want to see me?"

"Maybe he wants to give you a medal."

"You think?"

Joe laughed. "Get real. By the way, where's that fifty you owe me?"

The discussion went downhill from there.

"Jake fucking Simon!" exclaimed Marks, smiling, when I walked into his big new office. It was in an obscure part of the building that hadn't been destroyed by elves and so-forth. He got up and shooed Joe out as he shook my hand, still smiling. I never saw this guy smile like that before; I had to look at him again real close to be sure he was really Ed Marks. "Take off that nifty fedora of yours and have a seat, Jake; make yourself comfortable. Nice of you to come by. I hear you're a busy man nowadays."

"I do alright," I said, as I sat down.

He actually laughed. "Sure, sure, I bet you do! Hell Jake, I didn't know you were connected. What I mean to say is, if I had known I wouldn't have said some things I said to you maybe, and so forth. You know what I mean?" He winked at me.

Not really. "I'm in sort of a hurry, Marks. Could we get on with whatever it is you wanted to see me about?"

"Sure, sure. The truth is, I'm in sort of a jam, and I'd really like your help."

I glanced under his desk, to see if there was an empty husk from one of those space alien pods that clones people. No husk.

"You see, Jake, the FBI and the Chief of police figure that I somehow came up with a way to handle the elf problem."

"Elf problem?"

"Don't pretend to be dumb."

I don't need to pretend. "So someone at last noticed that the elves are the real bad guys?"

"The Feds, or at least some of them. They also saw that our area became free of them, and they were anxious to find out just how we managed that."

"So they asked you."

"Sure, since as far as they knew from the mayor, I was the one to get rid of the little creeps."

"So you told them."

"Now that's the part where I need your help. I fed them a line, sure, but I really don't have any fucking idea how we really got rid of them."

"So what did you tell them?"

"I told them that I managed to negotiate their withdrawal, using someone that I had working undercover for years, infiltrating the mob."

"A mob infiltrator? No shit!"

"All shit. But it was the best thing I could come up with at the time."

"What's this all got to do with me?"

"You're my undercover man that's infiltrating the mob."

That couldn't be what he said. "I'm your what?"

"You're my infiltrator into the Falconie Family. They're MOMs you know!"

My jaw popped open and I stood up. "You stupid son of a bitch! If the Falconies get wind of this, my ass is cooked!"

"Now, now, Jake, I'm sure that you exaggerate. Besides, how would they ever find out?"

"How would they find out? Are you nuts?"

"Wait Jake, you haven't heard the best part yet. We owe you five years back-pay, for all those years you have been under cover. I rushed things through, and the money has already been put into a bank account with your name on it. Taxes are already paid and everything."

That sounded good for about two seconds, but then my brain kicked in. "Great. That means that there's a paper trail leading straight to my neck for the mob to follow. That's just wonderful."

"A green paper trail, Jake, lots of green. A quarter of a million dollars."

I sat back down again and my jaw dropped down further. "A quarter of a mil?"

"That's right. But there is no actual paper trail, Jake. Do you think we're stupid?"

I judiciously avoided answering that one. I was being paid off by the cops. Sweet! But if the mob found out I was worm bait. But a quarter of a mil is a quarter of a mil. I found myself smiling.

"I need something else from you and the Feds, Marks."

"More than money?"

"Hey, cash ain't everything, not quite. A lot of shit's been happening, what with slit radials, the busted up Precinct house, Henry's murder, and stuff like that."

"So?"

"Me, the Falconie Family, Margie Wainwright, or Joe ain't ever going to be charged with any of that stuff that happened. Agreed?"

Marks shrugged. "OK, fine by me. Publicly I've got to stick with the terrorist line anyway. Anything else?"

"Where's my dough?"

"First things first, Jake. There are a couple of things I need from you first."

I knew there had to be a catch. "Like what?"

"Tell me why the elves really split. You're up to your eyeballs in this whole elf thing somehow. What really happened? The only thing I can figure is a mob deal, with the mob working things out with the elves, just like I told the fucking Feds. They had the Falconie girl as hostage, after all."

"Sure, Marks, it was something like that. But along that line I got to go on a business trip and take care of some things now, or you'll be up to your eyeballs in elves again. You wouldn't want that! Just tell me where my money is and I'll even put in a good word for you with the Family and the elves next time I see them." I stood up to go.

"Sure, Jake. There's just a couple more things. Little things."

"Like what?"

"You have to wear a wire." He pulled a thick black pen out of his desk drawer and handed it to me. It didn't have any wires sticking out of it of course, since wires nowadays are wireless.

"Are you nuts? Wear a wire while I'm running around with the mob?"

"I had to promise the Feds you'd wear it at all times. It's called a Mark-220. Latest thing the Feds have. They tell me you don't have to do nothing to it; it's on all the time. The Feds will be tailing you, of course."

"Great. I feel really, really secure already, just knowing that. So where is my money?"

"Just one more tiny little thing."

"What?"

"Kebony."

"Kebony ain't very tiny. What about him?"

"He's going with you, wherever you go."

I sat down again. "You have to be kidding this time. I can't hang with the mob with a cop at my elbow!"

"That's part of the deal. I want one of my own men with you at all times, but it has to be someone the mob will get along with. Your good buddy Joe will have to do. He's going under cover with you. I'm putting out the story that he resigned the Force to join your P-I firm."

"And I hired the big lug?"

"That's the story."

"That's nuts. It won't work. I won't do it."

"You want the money, don't you?"

He had me by the balls, the slimy bastard. "OK, he's hired. So where is my dough?"

"It's in an escrow account being managed by someone you know and trust. I give him the word and he turns it over to you."

Someone I knew and trusted? I couldn't think of anyone like that. "Who?" I asked.

"Your lawyer, Zeke Feltstein Junior of Harding and Feltstein."

My buddy Zeke. One of the Falconie Family's lawyers. "That's swell," I heard myself say. I was a dead man.

Next thing I knew, I was numbly walking out of the Precinct with Joe.

Right in front of the Precinct, parked in a no-park zone, Vinnie was leaning against his limo, waiting for me. I took a deep breath of fresh air, and then exhaled it in the form of some pretty wild news for him. "Vinnie, you remember Joe? Good news! He's quit the Force and joined my private detective company. He's going to go with us and help us out with our little situation. Now ain't that just great?"

Vinnie never cracked a smile or blinked an eye. "Sure Kid, that's just dandy. Now let's all go for a little ride." Always the gentleman, he opened the limo door for us and we all piled in, as if cops and mobsters sharing a ride was as normal as anything. Prince was sleeping on a seat and only opened one eyeball to check us out for a few seconds before going back to sleep, the lazy little bastard.

As Joe sat there grinning and gawking, giving the swanky limo a good looking over, admiring the leather, TV, mini-bar, and everything, I winked at Vinnie, pointed at the pen that was sticking out of my suit coat pocket, and mouthed the word 'bug' a few times.

With an amused twinkle in his eye Vinnie pulled a little electronic gizmo from a limo storage bin and swept it around in the air like a music conductor while it buzzed and beeped. It beeped a lot when it was close to my new pen. Vinnie pulled the pen out of my pocket and crushed it in his hand like it was a cracker. Then he held out a big hand to Joe, and Joe shrugged and handed him another identical pen, which Vinnie also crushed. He threw them out the window.

"Mark 220s," remarked Vinnie. "Marks must have got them from the Feds. Good little bug. We own the company that makes them."

"It wasn't my idea," I said.

"Relax, Jake," said Vinnie. "No problems. Big Ma talked to Zeke yesterday."

My heart stopped. "What did she say about it?"

"She was as amused as all hell. Imagine getting paid off by the cops! That worm Marks must be really desperate, to arrange something like that."

"Ma wasn't mad at me or anything?"

"I don't think so. She was more concerned about the story that the Family had a deal with the elves. She told you about that already, right?"

"Shit. So Marks started that rumor?"

"He strengthened it."

"The Feds are in on this," I said.

"Sure. That goes without saying, even without the Mark 220s."

"The Feds are tailing us then, I bet," I mentioned.

Vinnie shrugged his big shoulders. "Sure. They always do that anyway. But we lose them whenever we want to. Such as now." The limo sped up and made some two-wheeled turns.

"I hate Feds, myself," said Kebony.

"Sure you do, Detective. Everybody does. They even hate each other. How do you feel about elves?"

"I hate them even worse than Feds."

Vinnie smiled. "Good. I suggest that be the basis for us working together." He reached his huge right hand out to Kebony.

"Ok by me," agreed Kebony, shaking Vinnie's hand vigorously with his equally huge mitt. "You happen to have any donuts in this limo, Mr. V?"

"Sure thing," said Vinnie. He reached into a big storage bin under his seat, pulled out a box of donuts and handed them to Joe. "We're always giving rides to cops for one reason or another, so we always got fresh doughnuts." Joe was soon happily wolfing down jelly filled gut-busters.

The rest of the ride to Margie's bank we spent talking about sports and dames. We all really hit it off well. Mobsters, Cops, and PIs have a whole lot in common, being different sides of the same coin: 'heads' for mobsters, 'tails' for cops, and the edge between for PIs, if you think it all through, from a philosophical angle. Plato and Shakespeare probably figured that one out centuries ago.

I went into the bank alone to talk to Margie, since we figured that Vinnie, Joe, and Prince might spook her. I had decided to ease into things with her.

"Everything is back to normal, Jake," said Margie, smiling, after she ushered me into her office. "What brings you here? Did you come to show-off your brown fedora? Did my check bounce?"

"Naw, nothing like that," I said. "I just want to hire you for a few days."

"You want to hire me? What on Earth are you talking about?"

"We figured it all out. You're a white witch."

Her face did get a little whiter, at that. "You're crazy. Some weird stuff was happening while the troll was around, but that's over with now. It was the troll all along, or parts of him, behind all of it. It had to be."

"Maybe because of the troll being around, you could do what you did, giving the magic a taste of troll as far as Mick and the elves could tell, but it was you that actually did the magic spells."

"Me? I did magic spells? That's nuts."

"Good example, the nuts. You were pretty pissed off at Grisim when you had to fire Henry, weren't you?"

"Sure. So what? I get pissed off at a lot of things."

"Did you say something about his shrinking nuts when you were mad at him?"

"Hell, I don't know. Well OK, maybe."

"That's what shrunk him and me, you know. Nuts that when eaten caused him or anyone else that ate them to shrink. Shrinking nuts."

Her face paled. "I don't remember, exactly. I might have said something about his nuts shrinking, and also maybe something about him turning to shit. Maybe."

I had wondered about that part. Apparently with magic you didn't really have to shit yourself away when you shrunk, unless it was part of the spell. "You did say something about him and the board sitting on their fat, hairy asses, I heard that one myself."

"So?"

"So, they all magically got fat, hairy asses."

"It had to be a coincidence."

"What about Eric? Weren't you mad at him? About his new tires and about him skipping work? Did you say or think something about tires and about Eric always fussing with his hair?"

"Maybe, but I didn't mean for it to really happen."

"What about that car that turned inside out?"

She shook her head and put her hands over her ears.

"And you wished some shit to come down on Henry too, I remember that one. Well, shit was raining down on his house and yard when I went to see him later; falling out of the clear blue sky. Quite a coincidence, wouldn't you say?"

"Get out of here!"

"It wasn't your fault."

"What?"

"You didn't even know that you were doing it. Besides, you saved my life, yours, and lots of other lives, there at the Precinct. You saved the whole damn New York area, it looks like. You're a hero. Hell, a super-hero!"

"What are you talking about now?"

"You used your magic power against the elves. You sent the Queen of Elves away and she went, before she could hurt anyone else."

"I did?"

"Damn right you did. They left the area and stayed away. We think it's because they're afraid of you."

"Afraid of me? You had me going there for a while, but you've really gone off the deep end now. That's crazy!"

"Now I want to hire you to go with me after the elves in Arizona."

"No damn way. Even if I wanted to go, there's my kids and my job to think of."

"Taken care of. Your sister is arriving at your home as we speak to watch your kids. My client called Grisim and he's given you a leave of absence."

"That's big of him, but I do need my paycheck, small though it may be."

"How is this for a start?" I pulled a stack of money out of a pocket and handed it to her. She gasped. "That's ten thousand for starters. Tax-free. Plus another ten thousand a day starting right now. Plus, we'll have all potential police charges dropped as far as the slashed tires, hairy asses, and other things go. It's already been worked out with Grisim and with the cops."

"I must be dreaming."

"The people I work with want results, but they pay good. Are you in?"

"I'll have to pack."

"Your sister is already doing that. We'll stop by your place on the way to the airport, and you can pick up a suitcase and say goodbye to your kids."

We joined Vinnie, Joe and Prince in the limo and were soon on our way. Margie fit in well with the rest of the group. She had a vocabulary like a drunken sailor and nice legs. Good combination in a woman, I figured. Prince insisted on sitting on her lap, where Margie constantly stroked and scratched him, the lucky little bastard. "I always got along well with cats," she explained. "Especially black ones."

Right; just like any witch. So now we were finally all assembled: mankind's finest warriors, a cat, and about a hundred pounds of fresh garlic. No MOMs or WOWs included, I noticed; as usual, all the MOMs and WOWs of the world were home snug in their beds while us pawns were out doing their dirty work. We were going up against invading hordes of magic-wielding elves and their monstrous minions.

We didn't stand a chance.

****

CHAPTER 20

EXPEDITION WEST

It was a long flight in the Family's private jet. No nifty stewardesses at all. Plus, on the way, we all figured out about a million times that our odds weren't too good, and some of us (I won't mention any names) were a little nervous about that.

"Does this plane have enough fuel to get to Hawaii?" I asked, being practical. "Or maybe Columbia or some other far away country without elves? Vinnie, the Family must have connections all over the world."

Sensible questions I felt, but Vinnie didn't even want to talk about it. He made a fist and shook it at me, then made like he was zipping shut his mouth. Then he made like he was cutting his throat. Then he pointed at me. So OK, I figured it out, he was thinking of cutting MY throat.

"Shut the fuck up, Jake," Joe translated for me further, ending any reasonable discussion about our fate. Mostly people dozed-off for the rest of the flight, or tried to.

We couldn't land at the Phoenix airport; the elves had firm control of that. Instead, we were supposed to land on a dry lakebed, miles from anywhere.

Joe and I were a little apprehensive about that whole concept. "If it's a lake it has water in it," insisted Joe. "That's what a lake is, a big mess of water."

I nodded in agreement. "How the fuck can we land in a lake?"

"It's what they call a DRY lake," explained Vinnie. "Its dry most of the time. About once a year or so it rains enough to put a couple of inches of water in it and it's a wet lake again. The locals run out with their beach chairs and sit in it, I suppose."

"What the fuck for?" I asked.

"How the fuck should I know?" said Vinnie. "Maybe because they ain't got a decent beach like in Jersey."

"Then it ain't a lake," said Joe. "It's a fucking puddle. It should be called a dry puddle-bed. I'd buy into that one."

"You can call it any fucking thing you want, but we're landing in it," said Vinnie.

Sure enough, the plane landed on a flat whitish desert. No water in sight. No fucking lake, that's for damn sure. A big black mob limo was waiting, of course. Snake, Tiny, and a driver got out of it, none of them looking too happy. They had guns pointed at us, for one thing, which is always a strong hint that things are not totally OK. Vinnie and Joe had guns pointed back at them, which didn't seem all that friendly either.

"Show us yours, Vinnie, and we'll show you ours," said Snake. "We can't take no chances; the damn elf controlled guys are everywhere."

"No problem boys," replied Vinnie, as calm as ever. Moving slowly and deliberately, he opened his jacket, revealing four fat necklaces of garlic, each one probably made up of a couple dozen smelly cloves. At a nod from Vinnie the rest of us showed off our trendy garlic necklaces too. Snake and Tiny visibly relaxed, lowering their guns. "Your turn," said Vinnie.

As Snake, Tiny and the driver each showed us necklace chains on which there were only a couple of pathetic looking cloves, Vinnie still kept his gun trained on all of them.

"Here, put these on," said Vinnie, shaking his head, and he threw each of them one of his own garlic necklaces.

Smiling, Tiny rubbed the smelly necklace on his face and gobbled down one of the cloves before putting it around his neck. Snake mashed up one of his cloves and rubbed the juices all over his face. The driver simply put his on.

"All right, all right," said Vinnie. He holstered his gun and with open arms greeted his two mob buddies with hugs and slaps on the back, mashing yet more garlic in the process as they yammered to each other in Italian. Everyone stunk to high heaven. The ride together in the enclosed limo was going to be really pleasant, I could tell already.

From the airplane we unloaded guns, ammo, bags of garlic, squirt guns, and balloons. I still wore my Smith and Wesson with the silver bullets. Most of it we put in the limo's trunk, but we brought quite a bit of it up front with us, where Vinnie proudly showed it off.

"OK," said Margie. "I understand the regular guns and the garlic. What about the squirt guns and water balloons? Are we going to a birthday party or something?"

"They're filled with garlic juice," explained Vinnie.

"Which is better than bullets?"

"Much better," said Snake, "when you're going up against your own men that have been turned against you. Much better to turn them back to our side than to kill them. The stuff also bugs the shit out of elves and other bad guys. It bothers them but it don't finish them off, not by a long shot. But we were holding our own until we ran out. What I want to know is how you plan to finish off that Loranda bitch, white witch."

"Damned if I know," admitted Margie. "I guess I'll just curse at them and hope for the best."

Great. We guys looked at each other and shrugged, than got busy loading up pockets with garlic goodies and silver lined revolver ammo. Joe got creative with bazooka ammo by replacing the explosive charges of a couple of the rockets with garlic-juice balloons. Me, I was becoming really partial to a supper squirt gun with a half-gallon tank of garlic stink-juice attached to it. I really liked a twelve-shot pistol with silver bullets, but I stuck with my good-old Smith and Wesson. It's better to carry a gun you're familiar with; you folks out there should remember that.

Prince allowed a small garlic necklace to be put on himself, and some really clever, tiny, silver-tipped extensions for his cat claws. Margie had to put those on; the damn cat wouldn't hold still for anybody else.

Then we were finally underway in the mob limo. We stopped after a couple hours and met up with a dozen other mobsters in several black sedans and SUVs. They split up most of the garlic and other ammo between them.

"We'll have a hundred men by tonight," claimed Snake. Then he and all the new guys headed off in different directions to gather more men.

As me, Vinnie, Tiny, Margie, Joe and Marty the driver resumed our trip in the limo I was beginning to feel better about our little quest. A hundred garlic-armed mob guys would raise quite a stink, and I felt pretty invincible with my own Smith and Wesson and garlic juice.

"Hey what's that stuff?" I asked, pointing to what looked like a field of giant mushrooms along the road. "I don't remember seeing those things on my last trip." They looked like purple mushrooms, but they were tall as a man and had heads the size of garbage-can lids. There were other odd things scattered around them too, including stringy little pink trees that looked like jungle-gyms with big, fat purple toads climbing on them.

"Weird elf stuff is growing all over the damn place," explained Tiny. "The weather is changing too; near their stronghold we're getting more rain and even fog, especially at night. Me and the boys was just getting used to the desert and now it's disappearing."

The elves were even changing the weather? But what was I worried about? We had a growing army of gun and garlic slinging mob toughs on our side. At this rate, within a few weeks we could be invincible!

Then Vinnie made a little announcement. "We'll hit them in two hours," he said.

"What?" I exclaimed. "Today? Already? We don't even get to freshen up in a hotel or nothing? We've been in cars and airplanes all day!"

"Best to hit them quick, before they know we're here," agreed Joe. "Surprise them."

"Won't nobody be more surprised than me," I said. I didn't like it but mostly I already didn't like it anyway, so what the hell? "What's our plan of attack?"

"They're headquartered in an abandoned town up ahead," said Vinnie. "It's located near an Indian holy spot where the troll figurine was found. Snake and the boys will hit them from all sides, with about a hundred men. But that's just to distract them. We'll hit them a few minutes later. Lady," he told Margie, "you better start thinking up some good curses."

"That's it?" I asked. "That's the grand plan?"

"You got something better?" asked Vinnie.

I didn't. I needn't have worried about the plan though, since we never got to use it. About ten minutes before we were supposed to reach the elf headquarters, Marty our limo driver started swerving all over the road. The rest of us looked out the windows but saw nothing. "Dragon!" shouted Marty, as he finally slammed on the breaks, swerved the car into a ditch, jumped out of the car, and ran.

Maybe that last part wasn't the wisest thing for him to do. As the rest of us piled out of the limo carrying all the weapons we could, with a whooshing, explosive noise like a dozen flame-throwers, bolts of exploding fire rained down on poor Marty. There was a hideous scream from the resulting pillar of flame, and then the guy was gone except for some ashes and smoke.

With bulging eyeballs I followed the fading flame trail up to the dragon. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw; it was huge and deadly, a thing of nightmares. Crap; dragons were real! It hovered a couple of hundred feet above us, mega-sized and mostly black, with airplane-sized bat-wings attached to a T-Rex sized body complete with giant tooth-filled jaws, claws and arrowhead-ended tail. There was a tiny figure in green riding on its horned head, probably an elf or a dwarf, at that point I couldn't tell and it didn't matter anyway.

They hadn't even seen the rest of us maybe, but then Joe and Tiny managed to get their attention by uselessly shooting small caliber guns and curses at them. It was enough to piss them off. The monster promptly flew a nifty one-eighty and headed back for us, and we ran towards nearby hills, where we could hopefully hide among the rocks, as rocks are the one department where Arizona has it all over Jersey. Dodging through a scattering of giant purple mushrooms, we all dove behind some bigger than refrigerator sized rocks that we figured to be perfect as dragon protection.

Except for Joe. I looked back and the big dummy was still standing next to the limo, loading his rocket launcher as the dragon made its pass.

"Joe, you idiot, get the fuck out of there!" I shouted. I doubt that he even heard me, above the sound of monstrous flapping wings and roaring.

Joe's shot was perfect. The rocket hit the creature dead center, right in its white colored chest, and silver fragments blown apart by high explosives should have ripped a hole in the monster big enough to drive my Ford through, but that's not what happened. Instead, the big lizard got splattered with garlic juice. Joe had shot the wrong damn rocket!

"Shit," I could see his lips say, though the roaring of the pissed-off dragon was too loud for us to hear him.

In a rage, the dragon huffed flames at Joe, the limo, a nearby cactus, a billboard selling cigarettes, the giant mushrooms, the rock I was hiding behind, and everything else in sight. When I looked out from behind my still smoking rock the monster was flying off, shaking and sputtering in confusion, like a wasp that had caught a whiff of bug spray and figured to work it off by flying around. Joe's smelly shot had saved us after all.

I ran back to where Joe and the limo had been. There were smoking bits of limo scattered all over, mixed with other charred remains. It stunk bad, all that burning stuff.

There was nothing but burned stuff, everywhere I looked, but no Joe or Joe sized cinder. "Joe!" I shouted. "Joe Kebony!"

In response I heard only flapping wings, getting louder, even though I could clearly see the dragon in the distance, still flying away from us. I couldn't figure it out. I pulled out my Smith and Wesson but there was nothing to shoot my fancy silver bullets at.

"Look out, Kid!" I heard Vinnie yell. "Second dragon!"

I turned just in time to see a giant, black, scaly, clawed hand-thing coming at me. My life, pitiful as it was, flashed before me. Like in slow motion, the big clawed hand of death came at me, and I tried to duck away from it, but gravity wasn't anywhere near fast enough to pull me down and out of its way. There was a brief sensation like being hit by a Mack-truck, and then everything went black.

****

CHAPTER 21

PRISONER (AGAIN)

When I opened my eyes, she was looking down at me, smiling, showing off sharp white fangs, too-white skin, silver hair, pointy ears and all her other dandy non-human points. Loranda, Queen of the damned elves, had me again.

"Hi, you ugly bitch," I tried to say, but it came out more like a weak "ha, ya uh-la-bi." I was hurt, really bad. And my fedora was gone. Probably burned to ash by the damn dragon. And my Smith and Wesson was gone too, not that I had the strength to use it if I had it.

"Jake Simon, what a wonderful surprise! We were just thinking of setting up an expedition to go after you and your pesky friends, but here you are! Isn't it wonderful, Mickahl? Your friend Jake Simon has come to join you!"

I struggled to move my head an inch or two, just enough to see where she was looking, and there he was, Mick the troll, shrunk down again to almost human size and held by massive chains attached to his wrists, legs and neck, which led to the wrist of a monstrous, twenty-five foot tall, ugly, shit-brown, furry, one eyed giant that had cloven feet like a goat. A Cyclops, I figured, based on my recollection of some old Sinbad movies. Crap; Cyclops are real! But hey, did that mean that maybe Santa Claus is real too?

Mick looked terrible. Almost as bad as me, maybe. His tea shirt and jeans, which had apparently been conveniently shrunken down to still fit him, were torn, dirty and bloody, but his feet were bare. His wide shoulders drooped as he stared at me with big sad eyes. "Me sorry, Mr. Jake," he said.

As soon as he said it the Cyclopes roared and jerked up and down on the chain violently, and it rippled up, causing Mick's end of it fly a dozen feet into the air with poor Mick attached, and then to crash back down onto the rocky ground. Groaning, the stunned troll managed to sit up.

"You forget yourself again Mickahl," said Loranda. "I had not given you permission to speak. As punishment, tonight, after you open the gate to our world again for the final time, Mr. Simon will be fed to my dragons."

"Thanks heaps, Mick," I managed to say, as the Cyclops dragged the poor battered troll away.

"Some questions first, Jake Simon," said Loranda. "I can't believe you came here alone. Even you aren't that stupid. My elves say that you were with several others. Who else is here?"

"Eat shit," I said; pretty clearly, I thought. I was getting better at talking without the full use of properly functioning body parts.

Someone kicked me in the ribs. It hurt so much I blacked out, but someone threw water over me and I came too again. There was bad news and good news and bad news, I realized. I was hurt really bad, which was bad, but I was in shock, so I didn't feel pain so much, which was good, but next I would probably simply lose consciousness and die, which was for sure bad. And the elf bitch was still standing over me, smiling her ugly smile, which to be fair was the only smile she had.

"What's the matter human? Feeling poorly? No more troll healing spell in effect? Let me tell you who you brought with you, shall I? Your friend Vinnie and his mob friends, for sure, wearing stinking garlic necklaces. Oh, and that bank lady, what's her name? Margie? The one with the raw wild magic powers that helped us open the gate? Did you bring her too?"

"Kiss my ass," I managed to say, though saying it hurt me more than it hurt her.

"That's all right Jake, I can read it in your eyes and little brain, as you are no longer protected by the troll curse. You did bring the witch here! That's wonderful! That's simply perfect! Here I was, puzzling over how to get at her, and you brought her right here to my stronghold!"

"She'll kick your ass!" I said.

She lowered her ugly face close to mine. "She's powerless, fool! She'll be dead by dawn, you little toad, along with anyone else you brought."

"Killed the way you killed Henry Jenkins?"

"Much worse. I was in too much of a rush with your friend Henry, and there wasn't anyone but a few of my dwarves to watch the fun."

That cinched it; she had been the one to kill poor Henry! "I'm going to watch you die, bitch!"

Laughing, she kicked me again and I blacked out.

****

I woke up on the cold hard floor of a jail cell. It was a standard cell; this must have been the town jail at one time. I heard moaning. It was me. I stopped moaning, but I still heard moaning, a little ways away from me.

It was coming from the next cell. With a big effort, I turned my head so I could see through the bars. In the dim light I recognized another old buddy, Grogorath the giant. He was sized down to only about seven feet tall again. Big compared to the average human, but a midget among dragons and Cyclops. Like his buddy Mick, Grog still wore tea shirt, jeans, and no shoes, but the giant and his clothes looked to be in even worse shape than the troll. He sat leaning against the wall on the floor in the far corner of his cell, moaning with each breath.

"Hi Grog," I croaked.

He stopped his moaning, managed to stand up, and stuggled to the bars to stare at me. "You alive, Jake Simon! Me be happy to see you, even without your troll hat! Me know you would come to save us."

"Sure," I said. It hurt to talk, but there was nothing else for me to do. I couldn't hardly do anything else, including moving arms or legs. I was all busted up inside and out. I probably looked even worse than Grog.

"Me be sad too, because soon you die. Grog die too, very soon. Grog be hurt many times so Mick does what the elves want, but after tonight them not need Grog or Mick. Soon door between both worlds be open always. Elves not need troll magic anymore after this night, to keep door open. They will kill all trolls in our worlds then, because trolls could close gate. After they kill Mick they kill Mick's family and tribe. With no more trolls to change gate, gate will stay open forever."

"Cheer up. I brought the magic power source with me: Margie. She'll curse these elves back to hell." It took me a long time to say that, a couple of painful words at a time.

Grog shook his big shaggy head sadly. "Margie still need Mick to help set her magic free. Mick wear iron chains now, chains with spells that hold his magic. I hear others talk. Elves, Dragons, Cyclops, and others hunt Margie tonight, kill her. Then tonight Mick will open gate for last time. He open it so many times already, it stay open forever this time, so elves and elf helpers come here forever. Then they kill Mick and Grog. Then they rule your world. That be the big plan of Queen for long, long time. They let little Mick and big Mick escape so he help them do this. Mick, me, and you, we all be pawns in the evil game of the elf Queen."

"There must be a way to stop it," I said. It hurt to talk, but I had to do it. "You're a giant, do something."

Grog shook his head. "Me be weak little giant."

"If you were big again, I bet you could even clobber a Cyclops."

The big guy smiled, showing off his rotten teeth. "Easy job. Grog be biggest, strongest giant ever."

"And you could break the chains that hold Mick. You could free his magic."

"Maybe. But that be no good. Loranda elf magic stronger than Mick troll magic."

"But what if Margie uses her magic to help Mick this time?"

"Maybe. Maybe Mick win, if Source help. Earth wild magic be strong here on Earth. Maybe what you say be good plan. But it all be no good, now Grog and Mick be little and weak."

There was something in my left back pants pocket that could help. I tried to move my left arm to reach it, and I hurt myself, just trying to move my stinking arm. It must be broken, I figured. But I had been getting better at talking, the more I tried, and I figured the same thing might hold with my other body parts. I tried again and I could feel my arm move, just an inch or so, but it moved, even though it felt like someone was drilling a root canal in my arm, minus any nifty Novocain. Damn, I could have used a few shots of rot-gut!

I kept moving the arm, again and again, almost passing out from the pain, but slowly getting the job done, moving it an inch at a time. I was dizzy but I fought to stay awake. After maybe fifteen minutes, I was finally reaching my searching fingers into my back pants pocket. Yes, it was still in there. With a supreme effort, I pulled it out: the remains of a garlic-filled balloon. It was flat and torn and empty, and only slightly damp. It must have burst earlier. At least it made me stink so rotten that my captors hadn't searched me very good, and the juice probably still protected at least my ass from elf-spells. Maybe that's why my ass seemed to be the only part of me that didn't hurt.

"What that be, Mr. Jake?" Grog asked, watching me through the thick bars that separated our cells.

"Garlic juice balloon," I said.

He smiled, showing off rotten teeth.

"Sorry, buddy; it's broken and the juice is all gone."

With that bit of news Grog sat down limply in his cell, more glum than ever.

That was it, the last hope, the last long-shot I could think of. Now all hope was gone, not that there had been much of it anyway. I contemplated lapsing into blissful unconsciousness. Or, if I was really lucky I'd die soon, before the dragons ate me. Swell.

"Yaaaaa," I yelled, or at least attempted to yell, when I felt something rub my hand. My hand was on the floor near my butt, as far as I could tell, and I couldn't see back there at all, but it had to be one of those giant rats after me, like they show in those jail movies. Or maybe it was one of those weird purple frogs the elves brought. Painfully I tried to move my hand away, and it did actually move a whole inch or so, but then there it was again: a light scraping touch, damp and rough like sandpaper.

Actually, it felt familiar. "Prince?" I asked, hardly believing that it could possibly be him. But he walked around to where I could see him, despite only the dim Moon-light that came in through the barred windows, strutting like he owned the world, the magnificent, beautiful little bastard! Then he sat down and started licking himself; paws, legs, privates, everywhere he could reach, like he had all the fucking time in the world. Why not? He was small enough to probably be ignored by bad guys and to walk between the jail cell bars.

"Where's Vinnie and the others?" I asked, even though it hurt like crazy to even whisper. "Are they here?"

"Jake bad," he said, as plain as anything, which didn't address my question at all.

"Yeah, yeah. Nobody else is here, just you, right? Do you have a message for me, or did you just come here to screw with my head?"

The cat yawned and stretched, like it was in no hurry to do a damn thing, just to drive me nuts, I figured. Then he started playing a message recorded by his mob cat collar. "Jake," said Vinnie's voice, almost in a whisper. "If you get this we're hiding like rats. There's dragons and other big weird monster shit out here, looking for us. I figure it ain't going to be too long before they find us. I got Tiny and the witch and the cat with me, but nobody is worth shit. Tiny mixed it up with some kind of one-eyed giant and actually took the monster out, but he's broke up bad inside. I don't think he'll last the night. Margie the witch ain't no witch at all! She's been cussing all damn night with no results, except to bug us. She does have great legs and cleavage though; you were right about that much. Then there's the damn cat. I'll send him to find you though, that's what I'll do. Bring help if you can, Jake. That's all. Go cat! Find Jake. Bring help from Jake."

Then there was silence. The message was over.

OK, so I was wrong before about all hope being gone; NOW all hope was gone. Glad to have that one straightened out. On the plus side, one of my key observations on life was confirmed. Even if you think things are already as bad as they can get, there's usually plenty of room for them to get even worse, and they usually do. QED.

The cat yawned and scratched himself. I wished I could do that, but yawning would upset my broken ribs, and scratching myself was only a dim exotic memory. At the very thought of scratching, I started to itch like crazy in a dozen places. I'd have given all my money from Marks to have one of those nifty bamboo back-scratchers, and an arm that worked good enough to use it on myself.

"Shit," I said, though pain shot through me from even doing that. "Prince, record what I'm going to say and play back it to Vinnie. I'm held prisoner with the giant and the troll. I'm hurt bad; can't move an inch. I'd like to help you guys out, but I can't even scratch my own ass. I'll be fed to a dragon soon. How about YOU sending help to ME! Garlic juice might help Grog, if you can spare some. Get me garlic juice, Vinnie!"

"Take that to Vinnie, cat," I said. "Go now!"

The cat never gave any further indication it knew that I was alive, though of course I wasn't very alive. Did it record anything at all? I had no idea. It yawned and licked its own butt for a few minutes, then stood up, stretched, and slowly walked out of sight.

For the next hour or so I dozed or watched Grog doze. What a dumb way to spend the last minutes of your life, I thought, when I was thinking at all. It was getting pretty late at night, I figured. Sometime soon the hunting parties would return and I'd be a late night snack for an overgrown lizard. I'd probably be lucky enough to wake up as I was being stuffed into the mouth of a hungary dragon. Elaine would be better-off without me though, that's for sure. That's the only up-side about this that I could think of, and it wasn't all that much of a plus, from my point of view. Maybe she and Joe would get together, I thought, but then I remembered that a dragon already got Joe. Shit.

Maybe I'd be with my Mom and Pop again after I died though, that part would be good. And my Aunt Millie. It was mostly due to Aunt Millie that I never took up smoking. Smoking had killed her husband and then her and she would have killed me if I ever smoked. Besides, I noticed that girls that smoked tasted terrible when you kissed them, so I figured that guys that smoked must taste terrible to girls. The last thing I needed was to taste terrible to girls. None of that mattered now, but now I wondered about how the smoking thing played out in heaven. Did they have smoker and non-smoker parts of heaven? Mom, Pop, and Aunt Millie all smoked. Would we end up in different parts of heaven because of that? Could I have a nice fedora in heaven? And my Smith and Wesson? Would I be able to regrow my mustache there? Those kind of questions weren't ever answered by even the Greeks or Shakespeare, as far as I knew. While I was in that library with Elaine I should have checked that stuff out, just in case I was to get wacked and knowing about it came in handy. But a guy has his limits, and I was getting close to mine. I was dying and I knew it.

Then in the dim moonlight I noticed the cat. It sat down in front of my face again and simply stared at me with its mocking cat eyes. Probably it had never gone to look for Vinnie. More likely he had been sleeping on the other side of my cell where I couldn't see him the whole damn time, the lazy little bastard. Something about him was different though, and I strained eyeballs and my fuzzy brain to figure out what it was.

Suddenly I figured out what it was. The cat must have gone back to Vinnie after all! Even in the dim moonlight I could see what he carried! "Hey giant, there's two garlic juice balloons tied to the cat," I said to Grog, as loud as I could, though it was only a whisper. "Tied to the cat's collar."

Grog didn't answer me. He was fast asleep and snoring a hell of a lot louder than I could whisper, the big stupid bastard, though you got to admire a guy that can sleep so good even under those kinds of circumstances.

"Cat, wake up Grog and give him the balloons," I said. The cat stretched, scratched behind its left ear, scratched behind its right ear, and then started licking his damned privates again. Not that I could blame him; hell, if I could lick myself like that I'd probably do it 24-7, but right now everything including the fate of the world, and more important, my own sorry hide, depended on the stupid damn cat getting garlic juice to Grog. "Go wake Grog," I said, several times, though every breath and syllable caused excruciating pain.

Finally the cat stood up, stretched by arching its back and extending its legs, and then walked slowly out of sight again. He probably got himself out of my sight so he could lick his balls in peace, I figured. "Damn cat," I commented, with my last strength. I needed a loyal dog like Lassie or something, that's what I needed, something that did what you told it to do, but I only had a stupid black mob cat that hated my guts. A guy has his limits, and I had reached mine. I blacked out.

Next thing I noticed, I was being picked up by a giant hand and lifted up through space where there used to be a jail-cell ceiling. Then there was a huge ugly face looking down at me in the moonlight, and it wasn't an ugly hungry dragon like I expected. It was an ugly giant. A familiar, smiling, ugly giant with rotten teeth and garlic breath.

The cat's garlic juice had apparently cancelled the magic spells on Grog, and he had reverted to his natural size, at least ten-tons worth, and broke into my cell. That silly conservation of mass business that Elaine had once mentioned didn't hold once again, since he wasn't eating me due to hunger. He stood quietly for a minute, listening with his giant ears. I couldn't hear anything, but I figured that his giant ears could hear plenty.

"Loranda be gone now," he whispered. "Now be the time, Mr. Jake!"

With a mighty roar he smashed through stone walls to the outside. He still held me gently in one hand as with the other he picked up a huge boulder that had been part of the prison wall, just in time to crush several dwarf guards that had the misfortune to investigate the ruckus.

The Cyclops guarding Mick, when Grog found him, charged at us with an iron club bigger than me, roaring with rage, dragging poor Mick along with him. Grog sat me down on the ground and charged the Cyclops head-on, closing so fast that the Cyclops club-swing was off-target, then grabbing the creature's own club away from him and using it on the one-eyed giant. He smashed its head to mush, judging from the sound. I was glad there wasn't enough light for me to see the gory details, though I was probably already much too sick to puke anyway.

The giant knelt next to Mick, and give him sips of garlic juice from the second balloon. "Emmm," Mick grunted, with increasing vigor. Finally the troll grabbed the balloon from Grog and popped the whole thing into his mouth, chewed it with his rotten teeth, and swallowed it.

As the garlic juice canceled out elf spells Mick grew rapidly in size, including his clothes, and the irons holding him to the dead Cyclops creaked and popped off of him one by one. Another huge smiling face even uglier than Grog's was soon looking down into mine. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see it.

"Jake! You save me! I always know you come!" he said. There was a huge smile on the troll's ugly face. His black eyes twinkled, dancing with power. Then the dummy hugged me and I blacked out, probably as much from the guy's stinking garlic breath as from pain and shock.

The next part was like a dream. I heard voices, and then my whole body burned like it was on fire. Next thing I know, I was standing there looking down at Mick, who was lying on the ground, still huge but totally exhausted. Grog paced nearby brooding. The giant looked down at me and for a moment and cracked a smile, but then he looked at Mick and shook his head sadly. The cat stood nearby, also watching. A nice peaceful scene, but it wouldn't be that way for very long. Loranda surly must have been summoned by now, and would show up with her goons at any moment.

"Come on, Mick, what gives?" I asked the troll. "That Loranda bitch and her friends must be coming to get us by now. Are you ready to fight her again? I don't think so! You look terrible, what happened to you? Hell, you're still big but you look weak again!"

Then I realized why. The troll had fixed my broken body with his magic, but it had taken a lot out of him. I must have been really messed up. Now I was fit as a fiddle, except I still needed to regrow the mustache. I still had no weapons or back-scratcher but I felt fine. Mick couldn't even stand up now, the idiot. For sure he couldn't battle elf queens, or even run away from them.

"Come on Mick, we have to run off and find my mob buddies. Maybe they have more garlic juice." I pulled up on a limp arm, but it was like trying to lift a truck. He had to weigh as much as an elephant, a big fat one at that.

Mick shook his big ugly head and spoke weakly. "Grog take you away now, Jake. I fix you good, you live now. I stay and slow down Loranda bitch, you go save yourselves and your friends. Run far away. My friends Grog and Jake will be safe."

"Leave you here to face that Loranda bitch alone? No damn way!" I protested.

With great effort the troll lifted his head to look directly at Grog. "I order that you go, my old friend," he said to the giant firmly. "You take Jake, save you, save Jake."

Mick stood there, not sure what to do, huge tears dripping from his eyes. He reached down towards me slowly, then stopped, his huge hands closing into fists, a determined look slowly forming on his ugly giant face. "No," he said, simply, as he bent down over his big friend.

Grasping the massive, slumping troll by a hand and an ankle, and with a lot of grunting and groaning, Grog heaved Mick up into the air and over his shoulders in fire-man-carry fashion. Then with his free hand he scooped me up. "Cat, find Vinnie," he ordered, with his rumbling voice.

With that, we were off. We moved steadily across the moon-lit Arizona landscape. I assumed that Grog was following Prince, but it was too damn dark for me to tell, as I couldn't very well see or hear the damn sneaky cat. I thought that several times I caught a glimpse of the cat a little ways ahead of us, a dark little shadow slinking steadily through boulders, giant alien mushrooms, and brush, but I couldn't be sure. Grog, on the other hand, had eyes as big as saucers and ears as big as an elephant's. The moonlight and quiet little cat footsteps were more than enough for him.

After maybe fifteen minutes, there has a loud clamor far behind us: inhuman roaring and screaming, mostly. I figured it was Loranda and company, arriving at their headquarters and finding out that we had escaped. We had a head-start, but not much of one. We had to keep moving.

Aside from a groan once in a while, Mick was silent, but Grog's breathing got louder and loader. Even his great strength was already giving out from carrying the big troll up and down rocky hills and gullies. Me, I felt fine. I would have offered to walk myself instead of being carried, but I knew it wouldn't have made any difference, I was so small. Besides, especially in the dark and with boulders, brush and mushrooms, on foot there was no way I would have been able to keep up with the giant.

The next bad-guy we ran into was another Cyclops, and he did no better than the first one. Without even putting his passengers down, Grog pulled the iron club from his belt with one hand and batted away the boulder that the Cyclops flung at us, and then brained the one-eyed giant.

Maybe two minutes later Grog put me and Mick down. At first I thought he was simply catching a well-deserved breather, but then he turned to face the way we came and pulled out his club. In the moonlight a dozen huge, black, bat-winged, T-Rex sized lizards were flying towards us, breathing red fire, eyes glowing red.

"GROAAAAGGHH," roared Grog, in challenge to the dragons, as he positioned himself away from where Mick and I were sitting behind rocks.

The dragons reared and spit fire in return, as the lead beast swept down towards Grog, talons reaching down like those of a gigantic eagle with two pairs of legs.

Pushing his way through a wall of dragon fire, Grog's iron club met the creature's head, and dragon and giant went down together in a tangled pile of flailing black dragon and giant limbs. They rolled around for a few seconds, roaring, limbs kicking and smashed mushroom parts and squashed purple toads flying all-over, then Grog stood, holding the limp body of the dragon over his head, and threw it at the next attacking dragon, knocking it also to the ground, where he clubbed that one senseless.

That was two dragons clobbered already but there were ten left. The dragons landed in a circle around him. They folded their great wings and advanced on Grog, walking-four footed, huffing plumes of red fire, great jaws snapping. Grog was everywhere, swinging the big iron club in an attempt to hold them back, but they closed in wherever grog wasn't, like a pack of snarling wolves. Three of the black beasts pounced on Grog at once, one receiving a clubbed-head for its trouble, but the other two pushed Grog down on his back and piled onto him.

"POWERRRRR OF THE LIGHT!" cried out Mick. He stood himself up on wobbly legs, and pointed a huge fist at the dragons attacking Grog. Orange and blue light burst from the troll's fist with a thundering flash, and the two dragons on Grog were thrown off and clean out of the circle.

The remaining circle of dragons, surprised, paused in their attack, while Mick, his strength again spent, sank to his knees. There he was met by Prince, rubbing against him.

"Damn cat," I complained, as I scrambled to get him away from the teetering troll, who looked like he was ready to collapse again. A squashed cat wouldn't do us any good in these circumstances, I figured. Meanwhile, behind me, the dragons were ganging up on poor Grog again. As I picked the cat up and scrambled away from the troll, I noticed there was yet another balloon tied to the cat. The sneaky little bastard had another full garlic balloon! Vinnie must be close!

Snatching the putrid thing off the cat, I dashed back and tried to reach up into Mick's mouth with it, but with a moan he first toppled over backwards. I scrambled up onto his big stomach, making for the open mouth, but a huge dragon was suddenly towering over us, looking from me to Mick and me again, clearly confused due to having two things at once to attack. Maybe legends about their wisdom were exaggerations.

I was confused too. If I threw the balloon in the lizard's face it would probably retreat for a bit, and I'd be safe, if I moved fast. If I got the balloon into Mick, the reaction might take a little while, maybe too long to save anybody. On the other hand, if I broke the balloon over myself, it would almost for certain keep the lizards and everything else off me long enough for me to totally get away. On the other-other hand, if I didn't do something damn quick the dragon would eat me.

Mick's big belly where I stood was heaving around, not giving me the firmest of footing, but I took the best NBA Oscar Robertson type jump-shot I could with the balloon. As a little kid I had loved to see old re-runs of the Big-O make those shots on TV, lining up his body just right and then gracefully jumping up and pushing the ball up so that it arched towards the basket. My Pop had shown me those re-runs; it was one of my best memories of my Pop. I had practiced this shot for years in my office, hitting my wastebasket with wads of paper and other assorted trash at least nine-out-of-ten times. Now all of that valuable practice paid off. The balloon disappeared into the troll's mouth.

Jumping up like that must have gotten the dragon's attention though, since its jaws shot down at me. If I were a real basketball player with decent hang-time I would have been dragon food. As it was, it missed biting off my head by at least an inch and I landed on Mick, then rolled off of him, got up and sprinted towards the dragon. I ran between its legs then off to one side, cussing at it loudly as I went, to keep its attention.

I hoped it would follow me away from Mick but hoped equally hard that it wouldn't. I got my wish. The dragon spun around and was after me in moments, roaring fire in rage.

I only got about twenty yards when I tripped over a mushroom or something in the near-darkness and went down hard. Rolling with the fall and looking up I could see the dragon's dark silhouette over me, blocking out the moon, roaring in triumph as its giant jaws came dropping down towards me. I prepared to roll away but I knew I would be too late. This time the lizard had me.

I shut my eyes and there was a terrible crashing sound, but I noticed that I was still alive. That was a really pleasant surprise. Opening my eyes, I saw that the dragon was moving away from me, falling backwards. In the dim light I had the impression that something had jumped on it and knocked it away from me, and was now whopping the tar out of it.

The dragon soon collapsed to the ground and lay still, and a short, wide, elephant-sized something stepped away from it. It had glowing eyes and when it bent over me I noticed it had putrid, rotten, garlic breath. "ME STRONG AGAIN!" roared Mick, happily.

At the time, Grog was buried under a half dozen dragons. Roaring, Mick jumped onto the pile of dragons, his big fists swinging. Dragons were soon flying without even using wings. Grog helped Mick stand up and they stood back-to-back, roaring with laughter, knocking the lizards silly when they got close. In a matter of minutes there were only the two of them standing, aside from a couple of wobbly-legged dragons that didn't have enough brains to fall down.

"Like old times!" said Grog, happily. The two of them hugged and gave each other high-fives. I ran towards them but stopped short when bright green light suddenly shined down on us from above.

"Very impressive," said Loranda, from over-head. She floated in the air above us, forty feet above the ground, surrounded by green, shimmering light. She was ugly as ever. "But troublesome. If I didn't need you for one last permanent gate opening, I'd incinerate you now, Mickahl Al Calger. Things were easier when your tiny little self drew power from the human witch and kept opening the gate every week-day during bank hours, thinking that your big troll self still had to escape from the prison in our world. Instead, those gate openings unknowingly allowed me and my followers to invade Earth. As to your oaf of a friend Grogorath, I think that we can do without him right now."

From Loranda's fingers a blast of green lightning erupted, striking poor Grog dead center, knocking him off his feet. I was knocked off my feet too, from the concussion. Nothing living should have survived that blast, but after a few moments Grog sat up, though he was smoking, beat up and moaning. Biting fire breathing dragons and power blasts from witches seemed to only give him superficial wounds or daze him. In response Loranda shrugged and waved her arms, and from out of the darkness a half dozen massive Cyclops advanced on the stunned giant with raised wooden and iron clubs.

"No," roared Mick, and again with the sound of thunder, blue lightning shot from his eyes and knocked the Cyclops all flat.

"Thank you," said Loranda, laughing. "I wanted you to use up more of your power."

At that there was a repeat of the Precinct battle, Loranda's green power beam against Mick's blue one. They were again pretty even, to start with. But now there was a second cast of characters, slugging it out. The dragons and Cyclops were revived enough to again attack. Grog was soon being over-powered again and Mick had to keep diverting some of his blue lightning to knock them back from either Grog or himself.

Every time he did that, the part of his flame that pushed against the elf's flame was weakened and Loranda laughed and pushed harder, driving her flames closer and closer to Mick.

I could do the math. Mick was giving it everything he had but a guy has his limits. It was only a matter of time.

I had found some nice desert throwing-rocks and chucked some of them at the elf bitch, but they simply bounced off the green light that surrounded her, without even getting her attention. I tried cussing at her myself, but she ignored that too. I would have thrown the cat at her but the little bum was again nowhere in sight, not that I could blame him.

All my useless carrying on did manage to get the attention of a Cyclops. I noticed him when he got close enough for the ground to be shaking. I leapt to one side as his giant cloven foot came down where I had been standing a moment before, and then ducked the gigantic wooden club that he swung at me. I figured to scramble up off the ground and run for it when I noticed that a several creep deep ring of elves and dwarves had formed in the shadows, surrounding the battling titans and myself. I had no place to run.

By then I hadn't been paying close enough attention to my Cyclops. I looked around and saw a monster hand coming at me too fast to dodge.

That's when the Cyclops blew up. The huge hairy arm and the hand attached to it that had been reaching for me slammed down to the ground next to me, one end of it a mass of torn, bloody flesh and broken bone. Meanwhile, the dwarves and elves were scattering and screaming, and dropping by the dozens in a hail of gunfire.

"Far fucking-out," shouted a familiar voice.

"Vinnie?" I said.

Out of the gloom a couple of dozen gun-toting thugs in messed up dark suits advanced through the swarm of fleeing dwarves and elves, mowing them down. Wide-shouldered Vinnie shared the lead, only a step or two behind a black cat.

A big lout with a still smoking rocket launcher strode next to Vinnie. "I used the right kind of rocket that time, right Jake?" he said.

"Joe?" I said. It couldn't be, but it was! "Joe fucking Kebony," I shouted joyfully!

The big lug gave me a hand-up off the ground. "You still owe me fifty," the bastard said.

He looked and smelled a little singed, but he looked so good I might have kissed his ugly mug or something, but for the small distraction of dragons and Cyclops regrouping and coming at us, and Dwarf and elf spears and arrows flying out of the darkness. We lost several men right away, and were forced to flee into the shelter of nearby rocks.

Dragons were blasting red flame and Cyclops were heaving giant boulders at us. We were soon out of rockets, and small arms fire and garlic balloons were mostly just pissing them off as they advanced on us. More deadly arrows and spears rained down from the sidelines from the dwarves and elves. We were getting whacked.

Fifty yards away, through the advancing monsters, I could see that Mick and Grog were somehow still fighting on, but the end was near for them too, even though the mob had bought them a little time. A big ball of mostly green elf-light was slowly but steadily advancing towards Mick, while a couple Cyclops were beating up on poor exhausted Grog, laughing as they did it.

"Where is Margie?" I shouted at Vinnie, though the noise.

"Back a little ways," said Vinnie, after he squeezed off another shot. "Didn't you get my message? She don't have no magic."

"Bull shit!" I shouted back. "That was then, before Mick was free. She needs to try again. Saving the troll is our only chance."

Vinnie actually shrugged, which is damn hard to do while machine-gunning a Cyclops and dodging an elf arrow. I guess it was his way of saying he was busy at the moment.

I turned to the cat, who was sensibly cowering in back of a big rock at the moment.

"Take me to Margie, Prince. Now."

"Bull shit," the cat said back to me wisely, using my own recorded voice, as a spear bounced off his rock. Who said cats are dumb?

"If we stay here we're dead," I said, trying to reason with the mangy little fur-ball.

It worked, or maybe he simply decided to flee the battle scene at that point to save himself. Meowing, he shot away into the darkness, with me in awkward pursuit.

"Kid," I heard Vinnie yell. "Message for Snake: tell him to go ahead with plan B, right away!"

I had to go through a couple of dwarves, which felt damn good, feeling their chins break beneath my fists, and watching them go down for the count.

When I looked around, the fucking cat was gone.

I didn't have giant ears and eyes to track him. "Cat!" I said, in a loud whisper.

I heard a meow from somewhere ahead, and I ran towards it, tripping over rocks, bushes, mushrooms, purple frogs and other stuff I couldn't make out good in the dim light, which suited me fine. Then again I had no damn idea which way to go. But then I heard another meow, and so forth.

After a couple more minutes of stumbling around in the dark a couple of black-suited men suddenly appeared and were sticking gun barrels into my ribs. Under the circumstances I was glad to see them. "Who the fuck are you?" asked one of them.

"Jake," said Margie, before I could reply, as she dashed up to me from the shadows and gave me a hug. "Where's Vinnie?"

"Well I'll be damned," said another familiar voice. Snake appeared with maybe a dozen other armed men. "It's the Kid. Vinnie was supposed to rescue you, Jake. So what happened?"

"There's big trouble. I came to get help," I said. "Margie has to go help the troll fight the elf queen."

"I tried," said Margie. "I don't have any magic."

"That's right," said Snake. "The magic deal is a bust, and they're too strong for us without it. The plan now is that we cut our losses. We regroup, get more guns and garlic, and attack again in a few days. Vinnie insisted on going back to get you, or we'd be gone already."

"No way," I said. "They'll have the gate to Fairy Land open for keeps by then, and let in hordes more dragons and what-not. If they ain't stopped tonight, they won't ever be stopped."

"Sorry Kid, the decision's already been made. Didn't Vinnie say anything when you left him?"

"He said to tell you to go ahead with plan B right away, whatever that means."

"Shit," said Snake.

"So what's plan B?"

"We take off now, to fight again another day, just like I said. Full retreat, that's plan B."

"What about Vinnie and the others?"

"They'll hold off the bad guys while we get away." Until they were dead, he didn't have to add.

"No fucking way," I protested. "We all go after Vinnie and the others, right now. We take Margie with us to help the troll, using her magic. That's our only hope to win this thing!"

Snake shook his head angrily. "Listen Kid, Vinnie and me are buddies from way-back, but this is the way he wanted it and this is the way it's going to be. He's dying for you, do you understand? This is your damn fault for getting snatched in the first place! Don't give me no shit about it or I'll drop you right here and now, I don't give a fuck whose boyfriend you are."

I slugged him. My right uppercut, a good one. Snake went flying. A dozen burly hands grabbed me, and a couple of hard mobster fists made acquaintance with my own jaw.

"Get away from him, all of you," Margie shouted.

For the next few seconds we were treated with the entertaining spectacle of a dozen mob toughs being flung away from me by forces unseen; they were flying, stumbling, and rolling away from me. The look of astonishment on all their faces was precious.

Snake was the first to speak. "I'll be damned!" Wide eyed, he looked at Margie. He smiled. He looked at me, and felt his chin, and shrugged.

"I told you she has magic," I said. "I had to slug you to make her show it. Now that the troll is loose she has plenty of powers. Now let's go find Vinnie and win this thing."

Less than two minutes later about thirty of us hit them with rockets and machine guns, blowing apart a couple dragons and Cyclops and scores of dwarves and elves. Margie wanted to try out some things on the hordes of bad guys herself but I told her to focus on one thing: helping the troll. The troll was the key to everything.

Poor Mick was on his knees, with Loranda's ball of green power pressing down on him just above his head, when Margie let loose. "Let him be, elf bitch," she shouted with an impossibly loud and powerful voice. "You won't hurt him."

The green ball of elf fire dimmed and shrunk away into nothing, and Loranda turned to face her new foe, eyes big and glowing and smiling so that we could see her big sharp teeth. "Have it your way, human. He doesn't have anything left. I'll finish with him after I finish with you!"

The green fire shot from her fingers at Margie! "No!" she shouted, just in time to stop it as it struck her, but she was knocked off her feet. "Eat shit," cursed Margie, gamely, as she sat up, and a big clod of poop materialized and shot towards Loranda, only to be diverted away by the green light before it reached its target.

"Upstart!" shouted the elf queen, "I've been doing this for ten thousand years! Did you think you could defeat me with a piece of dung flung by your wild Earth magic?"

I didn't. But while all that was going on a certain black cat was giving our two last garlic-balloons to a tired troll, and I was sneaking up on the elf bitch with something I had been almost dying to try out all night. It was my super-water gun, which Margie had been carrying for me since the dragon got me, all pumped up and ready. There was only a quart of garlic juice left in it, but I figured it would be enough.

The thing was supposed to shoot over fifty feet into the air, and it worked perfect. "This one's for Henry," I shouted, as the stream of stink juice rose towards the witch. She screamed when the stream hit her ugly face, after passing through the green light like it wasn't there, just like I figured. I kept pumping the juice onto her non-stop. The green ball of light dimmed as more stink-juice hit her, but she looked down at me, eyes flashing hate, white teeth showing as she snarled at me. The juice bothered her, sure, but didn't stop her. Mostly it just pissed her off.

She raised an arm and pointed at me, and I could see her lips starting to form words, as she glowed green brighter than ever. Maybe she was going to blast me to bits or turn me into a toad or something neat like that, I'll never know. At that moment a tremendous ball of blue fire erupted from Mick and engulfed her.

"Die, bitch!" shouted Margie, from where she sat, adding her magic to Mick's in the form of a massive white lightning bolt that shot out from her finger tips to strike the already staggering elf witch.

There was a huge clap of thunder that knocked me down again, and Loranda was gone. Some white ash floated down on me, and I brushed it off as best I could. Sure, I was wearing a torn-up outfit already covered in blood and dirt and cat hairs, but I didn't want no part of that crazy elf witch bitch MOM on me, even in the form of her ashes.

Vinnie gave garlic juice from another squirt-gun to Grog to drink and he was soon well enough to help Mick mash and chase off the remaining dragons and Cyclops, but they were running away anyhow. With Loranda vaporized they were both defeated and free. The mob toughs took out some of the retreating elves and dwarves, but most of them also disappeared into the night. No longer sustained by spells, giant alien mushrooms and the other weird stuff was rapidly withering away and turning to dust. What was left was good old fashioned American desert, grade triple-A.

"End of story," I pronounced.

Mick went around healing folks then, including Tiny. The big mob guy was busted up bad, but Mick pulled him through, just like he had done for me. With Margie and garlic juice there to help him keep up his strength, Mick even fixed up scores of hurt dwarves and elves, which gained him plenty of respect in their eyes, I could tell. Meanwhile I was able to phone Elaine, and tell her that things were OK. Better than OK, now that the stinking shrinking nut case was at last closed for good. I told her to look for Grisim and get another check from him. The case was over. About damn time, I figured.

One of the mob guys handed me my missing-in-action Smith and Wesson revolver and I was happy to get it back. I checked it for rounds. Not a shot had been fired with it, despite all the fighting. That was typical of my experience with guns; they usually aren't even there when you need them. I was happy to have this one back though, as I liked having the damn thing around even if I never used it much. It used to be my Pop's gun. It was the only thing of his that I had.

Then we all went to sleep, then and there in the desert on the sandy ground, we were so damned exhausted. It was a warm night, and we even heard some coyotes, happily howling at the moon. I sort of felt like howling myself, but I was too damn tired.

****

CHAPTER 22

CASE CLOSED AGAIN, THIS TIME FOR GOOD

The next morning, Mick and Grog were going home to Fairy Land, and they were taking most surviving elves, dwarves, and their monster buddies with them. Faced with Mick's plan to close the gate, the creeps wanted to go home peacefully to their own world, even though Mick would be the new boss there. A lot of them of them seemed to be actually happy that Loranda was dead. I half expected the dwarves to dance and burst into a chorus of Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead, using their munchkin-like voices, but I guess they didn't know that one.

Mick and Grog were happy to be going home, but sad to be leaving us. As ugly and as much trouble as they were, I knew I'd sort of miss those two big lugs, but they promised to come back and visit us sometimes.

Peachy.

"You be troll friend forever," Mick told me with a stinking gap-toothed smile, almost making it sound like a good thing. He and Grog had somehow gotten themselves nifty new tea shirts, overalls, and white fedoras; huge ones of course, to fit their elephant-sized bodies. They still had bare feet though; apparently they didn't like shoes.

Mick reached down to gently touch the top of my head with a troll finger as big as my leg as he muttered a few unpronounceable troll words, and suddenly I was wearing a new white fedora myself! "Troll hat be gift from Mick," he announced. "We be friends forever!"

Then and there I decided I would stick with wearing that white troll hat. What the hell. Maybe white did make better sense than brown. White was sort of a hat color for good-guys, and maybe good guys could win sometimes after all, and maybe that meant something, something special. Maybe wearing the troll hat would be good for my karma. Hey, I had to wear a fedora anyway. My Mom really liked guys like Pop that wore fedoras. Pop wore one to church every damn Sunday. Once I started wearing them I was hooked for life.

The infamous gate to Fairy Land turned out to be just an area of fuzzy looking sand and sky in a little clearing near town, and nothing much to look at, since it was basically invisible. First the beaten elves, dwarves and even a couple of dragons and Cyclops scrambled through the gate gratefully and disappeared, and then we watched the grinning giant Grog and finally Mick the Troll King walk through it. As Mick walked through he looked back at us, smiled at us with his rotten teeth, waved bye-bye with a huge troll hand, and then finally snapped his huge fingers. With a clap of thunder he was gone, along with the fuzzy gate itself.

I breathed a sigh of relief that they were gone, but I wasn't smiling.

Afterwards, the surviving local mob guys were really good to us. Limos drove us to Phoenix, and we cleaned ourselves up at a fancy hotel. They gave each of us a fresh new set of clothes to wear; they gave me a classy dark mob suit, just like one of theirs. Prince got treated to clean litter, and shrimp and caviar to eat, the spoiled little bastard.

"It was my idea, not Elaine's," Joe told me, during the limo drive to the airport.

"What was?"

"That whole thing to make it look like Elaine and I were dating was my idea."

"What the hell?" I managed.

"To make you jealous, so you two would get married. You two are made for each other, I always figured. You just needed a little push, so I talked Elaine into it. When she blinked at me we were supposed to go into our act. That morning we met on the street near Grisim's place she was blinking like crazy, so I kissed her."

I didn't know what to say. I sat there with my jaw hanging open, thinking about it. Maybe if Joe and Elaine hadn't performed their little drama, I wouldn't be engaged to be married to her. On the other hand, if I wasn't engaged to Elaine, maybe her family would have already gotten rid of me, mobster style. So maybe Joe actually saved my ass by kissing Elaine. Life is totally weird.

"So are we OK, Jake?" he asked me.

What a dummy. "Sure, Joe. We're partners, right?"

"Good, Jake. But you still owe me fifty."

I smiled. Me and him were back to normal.

By afternoon, as we flew back to Jersey, news reports were coming in that the remaining elves and dwarves all over the country were in full retreat, thanks to the defeat of their Queen, the closing of the gate to their world, and a supply of good-old American garlic sent out from The Garden State, California, and some other garden spots. I figured that the remaining at-large little creeps and their Cyclops and dragon buddies would settle deep in the woods someplace, and make camping a little more exciting for Boy Scouts wearing garlic necklaces and carrying silver-bladed Swiss Army pocket-knives. A whole new line of scout merit badges would probably open up.

On the radio we picked up a goofy up-beat newscast that said that the troll threat was over, followed by less clear statements that what had happened was under investigation, and that details would be broadcast when available. Fat furry chance! Mostly mob folks were involved, and they wouldn't talk, and non-mob folks involved would know better than to talk, since mob folks were involved. The Feds, if they ever figured anything out, never told anybody anything anyway.

Joe would keep quiet too, I figured, though I wished he could keep quiet during the flight home. The big bastard snored up a storm, only pausing once in a while to mumble in his sleep about me owing him fifty bucks.

I noticed something as we flew back in the mob jet, between my own naps. Vinnie and Margie were getting really chummy. By the time we landed, they were engaged to be married, and talking about having a double wedding with me and Elaine! What the hell?

They were really chummy with Prince too. "The cat likes both of us," Vinnie told me, glancing at Margie, "and you and him ain't always been getting along so good. If you want, we could take him off your hands, Jake. I'm pretty sure I could square the deal with Elaine and the Family, if you back it up."

The cat was on Margie's lap at the time, purring up a storm as she scratched the lucky little bastard. With his sneaky little cat eyes he looked up at Vinnie and then at me, like he knew we were talking about him, which of course he probably did know, thanks to his mob-financed, genetically enhanced little cat brain.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "It's up to him. After what he did he's a fucking hero, first class, and he's entitled to go wherever the hell he wants to go. But I won't mind so much if he comes home with me. I'm sort of getting used to the freaky little bastard."

Poor Vinnie. Marriage? On purpose? Was he crazy? Of all the nutty things I'd run across lately, this was the nuttiest. He hadn't even tried her out yet, unless they pulled a fast one in the john on the airplane while I was napping, or had a quickie back in the desert, when they weren't busy whacking elves and so-forth. Had Margie used white-witch magic on the poor slob, or just her womanly wiles? Were those both the same thing?

Vinnie wanting a double wedding with me and Elaine wouldn't make it any easier for me to get out of my own wedding either. I'll tell you something though, Elaine was there at the airport with the Ford when we landed at Newark late that night and I was damn glad to see her. I wasn't even mad at her about that thing with Joe I noticed. After all, she was a wow and a WOW and not a MOM, even though she wanted to be a mom. Maybe being engaged wasn't all that bad. Maybe even being married would be OK. What a damn crazy thought!

Was it love? How the hells do I know? But we kissed and hugged like we hadn't seen each other for ages and I felt more happy than I could remember ever being before. Maybe it was love or maybe not, either way I was stuck with it so what did it matter? Whatever it was it felt good. So did being back in Jersey. Now don't get me wrong: Arizona is OK, though weird, but I don't ever plan on going west of Pittsburgh or south of Baltimore again. A guy has his limits.

The MOMs King and Big Ma were there at the airport too, and they smiled and gave me hugs and whacks on the back, just like they did with Vinnie, like I was really one of them now. I wasn't sure how I felt about that, but it looked like I was in their good graces, at least for the time-being. Better that than being fish food at the bottom of a river or contributing to the New York skyline as part of a nifty new concrete building footing. Maybe if I was careful and caught some breaks I'd even live long enough to grow back my mustache. Hope springs eternal, that's my motto.

As Elaine and I pulled away from the airport in the Ford with her driving and me riding shotgun, the damn cat leapt in through my open window, sank four sets of silver-tipped claws right through my new mob pants and deep into my legs, and sat his hairy, smelly butt down on my lap as he purred and stared up at me with his weird all-knowing cat-eyes. "Shi-i-it," I commented astutely, through clenched teeth. But I let it pass.

The End

****

About the Author and Pending Novels

If you enjoyed this novel, please return to Smashwords.com or an affiliated E-book distributer to discover short stories and other emerging novels by this author. Born in Erie, PA, I am a recently retired engineer with degrees in physics. For nearly forty years I worked for the DOD/Navy and then for a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC). I took up writing as a hobby about two decades ago, for no good reasons that I can think of. My usually sensible wife and my two daughters allowed me to do it, for no good reasons that they can think of. I have also published flute music. Still, I am not 'the artist' of the family; that distinction more aptly belongs to my brother Robert, who often helps with my book-covers.

My first published novel is Blue Dawn Jay of Aves, a traditional science fiction story of a distant planet inhabited by giant song-loving sentient birds that is being colonized by humans. It was written in response to my appreciation for birds, birders, music, and song. The birder in my family is my daughter Kristin, who teaches college in Queens, NYC; the music lover and most dedicated reader of the family is my daughter Kim, a school psychologist in New Jersey. I'm incredibly proud of both of them.

In addition to Blue Dawn Jay of Aves and The Shrinking Nuts Case, two novels to be soon published as EBooks are as follows:

Secrets of Goth Mountain began as a short story titled Cube. The novel involves ancient secrets kept hidden by the Goth family (including the hero Johnny Goth) and a reclusive Native American tribe. Mythic characters introduced in the short story If Einstein Could Fly are featured, with a unicorn named Pru playing a critical role. Secrets of Goth Mountain is being published at essentially the same time as The Shrinking Nuts Case.

Government Men is a sequil to Secrets of Goth Mountain. Pru the unicorn again plays a critical role. It is the first written and the most complex and ambitious work. The unlikely hero is an inept DOD civilian scientist who leads an effort to save Earth from an impending alien-induced apocalypse. The large cast includes mythical, supernatural, scientific, and alien characters, as well as an unlikely reincarnation of the author. Perhaps still more unusual, the novel is also included within itself. Like The Shrinking Nut Case, Government Men was written as mostly a 'fun' whimsical novel, despite the threat of human extinction. It will be published sometime in early 2014.

Several other novels are in various stages of creation, including a possible sequel to this one, if there is sufficient reader interest.

For a diverse collection of twenty Twilight-Zone-like fantasy and science fiction short stories, see There Goes the Neighborhood; Earthly Fantasy/Science Fiction Short Stories.

All the above works are available now or soon via Smashwords and affiliated eBook distributers.

Gary J. Davies

Mechanicsville, Maryland, January 2014
