The Shrinking Nuts Case



  The Shrinking Nuts Case

  By

  Gary J. Davies

  The Shrinking Nuts Case

  Copyright 2014 Gary J. Davies

  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.

  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.

  ****

  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

  ****

  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 sho
uld 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 whisp
ered 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.

  ****