The Shrinking Nuts Case, Page 3

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 a
s 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 t
he 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.

  ****