Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Bronx Cheer Bombadier

--
It had been as wonderful a night as you can have in East Greenland in Spring. I was dizzy with Dardenella, who had hopped the secret long-range gyrocopter with me for the Trans Atlantic flight to Hendon air base. That was a cold flight, so cold her nipples probably arrived several seconds before we did.

Probably why I let my guard down. Churchill himself had called- that is, called me a brainless hedgehog buggerer, and demanded that I be held accountable for single-handedly ruining the cruiser HMS Hammerblowwith a straw and a box of uranium powder that clearly should not have been left lying around labeled "confectionary sugar." How was I to know that our impromptu repairs to the radium-powered robotic torso of fake-FDR would lead us to the Hammerblow instead of home to Heidelberg?

But right then the in-transit "Sweaty" Stacks And His Flinging Fardrops band was making The Fatty Arbuckle Memorial Air Force Base and Greater Nuuk swing, and when they played "Ol' Groat's Man-Frog Boogie," in A minor, I twirled Dardenella so hard she snapped the Town Quonset's baleen wainscotting with her Mary Janes. I eventually convinced an ingenuous Des Moines Air Corps captain that the decanter of Hennesey was actually fermented walrus vomit, a famous local beverage, and it was free booze till curfew, when a moon-faced MP armed with a harpoon cannon pulled us out of the photo booth at a peculiarly awkward moment when I was arguably flossing with her garter belt.

Snug at the hotel, or by some standards, moth eaten seal fur hut, I stuffed Dardenella in the down comforter, and then I put her to bed.

"Darling, don't ever leave me, " she cooed, like the famous besmitten water yak of Beruit.
"I'll be back to love you momentarily," I replied logically.

Since it was a strictly no-smoking hut, I slammed the flap and stepped outside into the gentle blizzard for a quick pipe of Captain Beemish's Old Tar-Yarn. In the stiff Nor' Easter, the acrid smoke rose and zipped away like an unstable electron with antisocial tendencies.

"Who on earth is reroofing at this time of night?" asked Dardenella.
"No one, Mentholyptus Drops. Go to sleep."

Through the darky dark and blowing snow and sleeting sleet, I noticed a lurking shape lumber in and out a view. Danger! I picked up an ancient whale gun and as I was cramming shot, marbles, razors, dried marmets and some 1937 cupcakes into the barrel a thud thudded on my temple like a Stanley Steamer over a pet gerbil named Larry.

This was the first time I was hit by an aria- an old wax cylinder, which is softer than vinyl, but it was filled with lead, which is heavier. Pain. Darkness. Darkness like a black box of black velvet soaked in pitch and dropped into an underground lake in an abandoned coal mine in a particularly uneducated part of West Virginia.

I woke up zipped inesacapably in an army sleeping bag in a Kayak cutting quitely through the smooth, deadly Arctic water, surprised to see Herman Goering paddling. No, it was Moon-face, the 320 lb MP, wearing an unusual combination of light blue sealskin parka and swastika armband. The Sergeant was a filthy Heinie! And just ahead a Dornier Flying Boat idled ominously in the grabby, pushy, surly, pokey cold. I naturally had a tiny specialty .45, so small it was actually wider than it was long in my wool socks, but it might has well have been on the moon, and as the bag got wetter and colder it got smaller and smaller, so that I felt like a big soggy kidnapped cold wet apple worm being delivered to the Red-breasted Robin of death.

There was one option, riskier than pleasing an excitable floozy in the Buffalo nitroglicerin factory with a 1.5 hp electric massager: I could wriggle in the kayak hole like Josephine Baker for a free box of opium and try to tip Moon-Face out into the deadly North Atlantic. I worked back and forth in my sleeping bag, rocking the boat with my elbows trapped inside the musty down -

"Hey," yelled Moon-Face. "No! Mein Gott in Schnitzel!"

The kayak tipped hard and there was a crack through thin ice and a distinct BLOOOP, like a someone dropped a Wells-Fargo safe in a vat of creme broule. The armband floated up with extra poignancy to the surface of the inky black sea, along with a small plastic duck he kept for company. It finally disappeared, fading into black with a fatalistic squeek.

BRRRAPRPRPRPRPRAP! Automatic weapons fire from the Dornier! Holes and Feathers! The rifle fire ripped through my bag at all kinds of points and the feathers floated in the sky - but nothing hit me, save a couple of rounds grazing my scalp and pouring sticky hot blood on the inside of the fluffy bag, which was still wedged tight in the hole with me flopping around like landed swordfish hopped up on Venezualan Bungo weed. I then realized that a skin kayak was not usually armored against fuzzy bunnies, let alone the newly chattering 20mm cannon, and as growing flurry of feathers hid me, the kayak was sinking faster than Jack Benny's hopes of getting lucky in Stalingrad.

The Dornier started turning into the wind, back towards me, satisfied I was doomed, and there dragging behind was the trailing antenna and my chance, if I could somehow grab it. I got an arm through a feathery cannon hole and searched the kayak - and, in tremendous luck, I found a 25, 000 foot roll of telegraph wire. Apparantly, from the brochure in the bow, Moon-Face Heinie was laying cable literally for once, to the secret German meterological station out on Disagreeable Oyster Point.

The Dornier passed, engines taxiing, it's wake alone ready to swamp what little of me was still above water. I made an sudden roll to the right and managed to grab the antenna dragging in the water with my teeth, and made a one-handed Fisherman's Bend, or was it a Washerwoman's Dalliance? to the telegraph wire, tying down the other end to the painter.

Several minutes later, I was clearly the world sea speed holder for small skin canoes as I skimmed the waves at 137 mph with the Dornier high ahead at about 7000 feet. In this way I also set several trans-Atlantic records that have generally gone unrecognized, and 16 hours later I let the line go, skimming my way neatly into Brest Harbor, as the suddenly unburdened Dornier rose up too quickly, stalled, and spun in, finally crashing into Francois' Boulangerie D'Obsene, scattering titty cakes and penis-shaped eclairs high into the air. This created enough of a distraction for me to alight softly on the beach and begin running away, but the sleeping bag zipper was still stuck and I was eventually captured by a recuperating 15th Panzer division accountant whose legs had been amputated after a experimental hydrogen-powered calculator explosion, and were replaced with roller skates. Embarassing. Soon, I was in the hands of the SS, and at the sight of the " SS Quality Assurance Customer Service Questionairre" passed out cold, exhausted, but not before accidently stabbing myself in the leg with the pen.

--

It was a sound, familiar and ugly. By now, I knew it well. No one forgets the sound of being pounded in the head with a complete RCA cylinder copy of Wagner's Ring cycle, featuring Helga Clauswitz with Austro-Hungarian State Orchestra at Der Swankinmeister Opera House in Vienna in 1917. It's just that this time, as I looked down, I was becoming dimly aware -between blows in C minor- that I was in the bomb-bay of a Heinkel 177 strapped to a 5oolb HE bomb looking over what must be lower Manhattan in the evening, because I could also smell Newark. This partly explained my dizzyness, and that there was no plane, blimp, gyrocopter or plump downy goose between me and the questionable mercies of the East River.

A humorless Luft-Kraut gave me a look that was the curiously precise opposite of pleasant. He waved a sinister greeting with a black fingerless glove, by which I mean he had no fingers, and made to pull a red lever that, though I couldn't read Hun, most certainly did not say "Candy Corn Dispenser."

"How does it feel to know that your whole life has led up to this moment, as merely another munition for Third Reich?"

Before I could reply, a tall, black haired cookie with a Louise Brooks haircut, a yard long cigarette holder made out of a leopard tibia decorated with Disney characters, black fingernails an inch long and wearing a form-fitting black jacket and black leather boots so high they were technically guilty of statutory rape in 42 states, smacked me in the neck with another yet pompous aria. She was a looker, all right, the kind of tomato that's usually the last thing you ever see.

"Some clowns pay for this sort of thing, Toots, and here the Luftwaffe's giving it away." I burbled. This would have been more bitterly witty if my broken teeth bits hadn't muffed up the delivery, making "Luftwaffe giving it away" sound more "Let's Alfalfa sitting lady," a phrase I had actually heard once in a bar in Winnipeg.

"And now I must offer you my regrets," said the humorless hatchet faced fascist fly boy.

Then Cookie kicked me in the ribs, spiked me in the throat with her heel, squirted me with a soda bottle and gave me an Indian burn. Finally she bent down to sarcastically kiss me on the head and said one of the most welcome sentences I've ever heard.

Cookie leaned over me andwhispered "Darling Brain, there's a parachute taped to the underside of the bomb. A parachute! You have a chance if..."

"Farewell, Dr. Brain!"

And now I was being sent return mail to Amerika on the biggest bomb since Gone With the Wind II: The Reconstruction Era. I looked at the officer with his corpsy white hovering over the red handle of my doom. "Do you expect me to talk?"

"Talk?" He paused, looked a little confused, inspected a thick set of paperwork on a clipboard marked "SS" in large, weirdly cartoony letters. "Errr...Excuse me...," he said, grabbing an intercom handset for an abrupt conversation. He whipped out a pencil and went over a checklist, and looked up, crestfallen.

"I am...zis is most embarassing....we have a had something of a bureaucratic error, and it has now come to my attention zat no one has marked off 'interogated throughly' on the list. I must apologize"

I looked down at Empire State through the night clouds. "Not at all. Happens all the time."

"Ah here it is! Under ze 'Emergency Exceptions for Amerikanzer Detective Scum.'"

He tripped the lever without ceremony, and I was falling faster then Belgian Endive futures in October '29, the airstream whacking me like a Norwegian whacking whale. I could just see Cookie pointing vigorously to the left, and the big bomber veered off north into the night, while I had a date of infamy with the Big Apple.

I was able to wriggle my wrist out of the ropes - I could just reach my right jacket pocket. A knife! She'd slipped it to me like a picture of The Uterus in Hygine class. I promised myself to look Cookie up after the war.. Then I fumbled around with the knife, and dropped it, 25,000 feet over the best hot pastrami on the Lower East Side.

Fortunately, I was falling at the time, and I was able to reach out and get it back. As New York was getting noticeably closer and the warhead was screaming, I sawed myself free, reached around the bomb and found the parachute pack. A note was attached: "Dear Mack - Hope this works! - Love, Liebchen, " signed with a little heart and smiley face. Who was this dame? I struggled to get the pack on, and with about 2000 feet left managed it and pulled the ripcord, watching the bomb fall away in front of me - a new problem, as it occured to me I was about to parachute into a huge explosion.

But a gust caught it and it hit the East River. No force known to man could explode the East River, except itself, and the muck swallowed the monster like a fallen Catholic girl with a penis-shaped eclair. Then I heard the second monstrous BLOOOOP! I'd heard that week, and floated gently down to Clinton Street, smelling the pastrami of freedom.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Obscure Greek Word Conspiracy

I lit my pipe and watched the suck of the yellow flame into the dark whiskey and pine smelling leaves, and I felt the rainwater soak into the hole in my left Oxford, the black one. The brown one was waterproof. I stepped into the booth for the phone to ring, waiting for the smoke to cover up the smell of the apparantly incontinent alcoholic Turkish fishermonger who last used the place, to, it seemed clear, complain to a herring merchant in the Dardenelles about the bad batch he just received.

The phone appropriate tinkled.

"Brain? Mack Brain? Dr. Mack Max Marion Brain?"
"Spit it out, Chief."
"Aaacchchhcchchchch....."
"Did you just spit something out or are you being strangled?"

Fourteen quick burps from what sounded like a BAR rifle that woke up on the wrong side of the bed popped on the other line.

"You're being strangled AND shot?"
"Garreshshhghhgaaahchh/"

Then there was the distinctive rumble of a 1928 DeGrise Steam Shovel warming up, and the menacing clank of its chain linkage and bucket assembly betoke no beneficent intent.

"Just my &%$#ing luck. Okay. Do you want me to call the cops or just come right over?"
"Hoarachscchchaaaachchhh...Aieee!..Gaccchhhshshshhcchchchch!"
"Alright, just hang on. What? Operator? Collect?"

I dropped in a Buffalo nickel and considered taking my own sweeet time for that cheap bastard. But Hedy Lamarr needed him alive.
---

Unfortunately, the line went dead before I had an address. The guy had money, so it was probably in the toney part of town. That narrowed it down: a rich neighborhood with an operating steam shovel. I hailed a cab, calling it a monument to modern transportation, then I got one to stop and handed the driver a $5 and popped one of those special go pills the Fly-Boys used. I topped off with some more cough syrup, took a drag on the special Jamaican pipe tobacco, tossed the bottle out the window and off we went. If only I had been sober to begin with.

It was not so much that the cab was fast, as that the curvature of space-time began to warp inward somewhere on the up side of Pacific Heights. Yet, I'm a grown man. I'm the first to admit that the driver might have motivated to speed by a fare as high as the moon screaming to shut up so I could listen for a steam engine because Roosevelt needed the Finnish robot scientist to tell Hedy Lamarr about the electro-atomic relay coupling before he was strangled by Nazi spies disguised as an Esther Williams' swim dance troupe. In frustration I may have fired a couple of .45 rounds through the roof. But it was hot. I needed the air, and the air was also were the chartreuse were-elephants and Errol Flynn dressed as Marie Antoinette were dancing their mysterious dance of the all-knowing nothingness. This was also the moment I was the catalyst but not legally responsible for accidently shooting some bum poet named Kerouac in the elbow.

Finally, above a sandstone Edwardian Mansion rose a cloud of yellow dust from the suspicious collapse of the sitting room. The interior lights exposed the steam shovel's remorseless steely bucket whose jaws opened and clanked shut and opened again. Menacing!

I left the cab, or rather the driver poked me out of the door into a street puddle with a broom handle. My legs were wobblier than an overweight belly dancer, and after a brief ecstatic vision of the loving reunion of Krisha and Mary Magdelene in a Helsinki sauna bath, I collapsed like a bag of mechanics' laundry on the ornate red door.

The door opened. It was Herb Caen. That guy really did know everybody.

Suspecting he was a collaborator, I screamed "You'll never last in this town!" before passing out to a another vision: it was the city in the future. Guys had long scruffy hair and were beating drums. Girls were running around nearly naked, dancing in the street. "F" on 1, "A+" on 2, I thought. But then a giant blimp flew over, with gondolas brimming with weapons, machine gunning everything in sight. The enormous tail had a giant smiling Hitler wearing a dashiki and blue sunglasses and straw hat and making an "OK" sign, as drums exploded, houses burned and the girls ran away, breasts jiggling in terror.

I was unconscious. One thought: "I can't...let....all...of. ..this...happen!"

I awoke to green velvet room with an enormous Turner painting of an avalanche wiping out a aristocratic picnic. "Scotch and Soda," said Herb, handing me a glass sardonically. No one could hand over a glass sardonically like Herb. He was so casually debonaire I once watched him take out a squad of fascist infantry in Spain with a cocked eyebrow. So what was he doing running around with the secret Esther Williams death squad?

My head felt like it had two old people whose property taxes had just been raised living in it. My religious ephinanies took a back seat to an overwhelming desire for a can of Clammato. But I reached for my .45 and discreetly pulled it on him when his back was turned to reach for the spare soda dispenser.

"Brain. Relax. I was the one who called you. We were lucky they left the keys in the steam shovel after they locked us in here. We have work to do."

That's when I noticed that my gun had been replaced with a bottle of hair tonic. No sense pulling the trigger unless I wanted to improve his appearance. A door opened and Dardenella suddenly slinked in, wearing a tight silk bathrobe with giant shoulder pads which I knew from previous experience could be used to store ammunition, lunch or penicillin, depending on the circumstances. She looked gorgeous, good like a cool summer lake in hot August weather full of women who looked just like her.

"Brain. Darling! You're here, you're alive!" She rushed over and squeezed me. "Closer, Closer!" She cried.

"If I was any closer, you'd need a obstetrician. Now what's going on, Schnookum-lips?"

"That nazi-cootch Coulter escaped with the help of the fake Esther Williams, her transvestite swim team and the atomic robots and kidnapped Hedy Lamarr, the X-47 electro-relay design and also Eleanor Roosevelt and are fleeing as we speak across to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland in a new german submarine-dirigible."

"Hmm. That's exactly what I thought you'd say."

Caen wrly pointed to a spindly blue gyrocopter, armed with flares and depth charges.

"Time's a wastin'. Here's a manual and a thermos of Manhattans."

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Tinkly Shell Game of Atomic Empires

THUD! -I had to admit, it felt strange - SMACK - beating the crap - WHAP - out of Franklin Roosevelt - with a tire iron -BAM - what with him - BIFF - in the wheelchair and -OOF -being the Joe in charge of America. I even had moments of doubt that - UFF- it wasn't the fake Roosevelt I that had located in flagrante-UGH- with a Gilbert and Sullivan soprano and sometime -SCHMITT -Finnish Masseuse named Rosalita Bjeregrensen-PONK!- in a dime an hour Marina hotel -CLAAAANG!, and about the time I cracked a pool cue over his head and stuck the shards in the wheels so they would either lock or make a cool motorcycle noise, he finally stood, where I could see that he was only 5' 3," and was hopping about like a fork in a stuck toaster.

I also couldn't help but notice that my Geiger counter was ticking like like an extra-tickey stock ticker on Black tickey Tuesday. And I could help but notice the 2 inch dent in his head, and the bolts falling off his spats.

"Yes, You have guessed, meaty human- I am Cyclotronic 6B, a Radium Robot-Man! You have damaged me! Must repair! Get vacuum tubes tied!" He was steaming mad, or, simply, steaming.

I knew it! It couldn't be the real Roosevelt who ordered innocent Americans into camps?

He raised his arm to strike, knocking off an appalling painting of two waifs with eyes as big as plates by some guy named Keane that was giving me the heebie-willies something fierce. The Robot fixed his deadly ironic robot gaze at me and fired a small rocket from his cigarette holder, which flew out the window and blew up some Okie's fruit stand. A lucky break for him - he went on to invent the smoothie.

"You have nothing to fear but Me itself!" His spectacles began shooting some kind of ray that turned the wallpaper somewhat more tasteful. But hydraullic fluid was now leaking out of it's nose and pants.

"You can trust your car to the man who wears a star!"shrieked Cyclotronic 6B Radium Roosevelt, rotating his arm like wagon spokes and destroying everything in the room except me and Rosalita and a half empty-jar of Helm's Mayonaisse which I didn't want explained. Feathers flew out of pillows and stuck to Rosalita as she ran around the room away from the deadly Roosevelt Arms.

Hmm. Mayonnaise. That's exactly what it had taken took to get Heinreicha Coulter the Nazi assassin to talk. After five or six hours of threatening, cajoling, bribing and slapping her around with nothing but a set jaw and 28 rounds of Deutchland Uber Alles for our efforts, Dardenella had walked in with an egg salad sandwich and Heinreicha began wimpering like an admonished wiener dog puppy left in a hatbox. Her father had been verbally humiliated by a Dusseldorf deli assistant manager when she was six, over a question of dressing. All I'd had to do was wave the sandwhich at her face.
" Where are they!?"
"Noo...Nein...Noo..."
"Are you sure? Sure you're not hungry....for delicious egg salad??!!"
"Aieeee!"
"With pickle bits?"
"Aaaaach! I vill tell you. Take it away!"

Thus Henreicha lead me to the Marina Coin-Op Auto Motel. Dardenella stuck her with a couple hits of heroin she kept conveniently in her purse, and dragged her to tender mercies of Hoover's FBI for further interogation and make-up tips. Hoover, apparantly, was an autumn.

But in the meantime Radium Roosevelt was chasing Rosalita and me towards the Palace of Fine Arts in the night, leaving a trail of glowing drops on the street and chugging like a 4 cent steam engine. "Have you a towel? You aren't nuts/ to clean up your guts/ that I disembowel/ Burma Shave!!" quoth the evil mechanical man in a questionable electro-New England accent as we ran, me firing a few rounds from my trusty- in the sense of predictably useless -.38 Police Special. This thing was about as special as a sale on week old eclairs. The bullets just enraged Roosevelt still further, polishing him if anything. "Your New Deal is Death!" he promised.

The night air that we ran in a total death panic through was soft and flowery, and the stars twinkling over the end of the pier where were about to meet our doom at the hands of a Radium powered Democrat. Rosalita grabbed me tighter than Rita Hayworth wearing a rubber glove as an evening gown.

"I'll never have the chance to be emotionally undemonstrative again," stated the dedicated Finn at the end.
"Don't worry, Toots, I'll take this metal monster down," I said, raising my $15 ball point pen with a hope of jamming it into Roosevelt's UV joint, if I ould find it in time. He HAD to have a UV joint. Right?

Steaming, arms rotating at about 200 RPM, one glowing red eye hanging down by a spring, collar unsprung and tie askew, the robot came closer."This is a date which will end in tragedy!" it said, and then, the arm rotation slowed down, and it became unstable, wobbling like a Wobblie wasted on wood alcohol. A shredded hydraullic hose popped out , and sprayed gallons of glowing fluid on the pier. Then, the infernal contraption simply cried "Fireside Chat!" and fell into the water, leaving a column of bright green steam to rise into the night.

But this begged a bigger question. Assuming this wasn't the real Roosevelt, what had those palookas done with the President?

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter Twin .50s - The Sodden Wavering

Dardenella was waiting in the bar of the slightly less expensive the Three Seasons, wearing a dress indistinguishable from a miserly film of black oil paint. Her hair was chesnut enough to roast on a fire, and lips were like a red airfield beacon, so there was the usual flight pattern of men around her trying to get clearance to land like Wildcats on the Lexington. I brushed them aside by firing off a couple of rounds from my .38, kissed her like I was headed off on a suicide mission in the morning and helped myself to six or seven of the pile of free drinks on her table, flicking the little umbrellas contemptuously at the scattering Toms, one landing gently down on the bleeding leg of one of the slow ones. I offered him a suggestion that Dr. Alexander Hamilton would take care of everything, and folded it into an origami crane for a bit of apologetic flair.

The gunfire attracted onlookers, pressing their moist noses against the window for a better view of the romantic devastation. I noticed a wavy waft of long blond hair outside. Then Dardenella screamed!

As a spiderweb pattern of death opened in the plate glass window, her best hat exploded in a snowstorm of silk, netting and tiny wooden bird splinters! If her hair hadn't been piled high as the Stanford rowing crew's workout sweats she would have been laid out for the big dirt nap and I'd be looking for another girlfriend on the side. As it turned out, a quick coif and a foggy layer of Aquanet could fix what a shot an inch lower would have taken the entire drunken incompetence of San Francisco General Hospital to fail to do.

It had to be Heinreicha.

"You're alright baby. We gotta blow. 23 Skidoo. We've got a date- for a menage a-trois of revenge!~" I said.

Dardenella was upset. "I'll tear that Nazi bitches' arms off! I'll gum her hair to P-40 prop! . I'll sew her lips to Goering's Ass!."

"I like the way you think, sugarlumps."

I ran outside to the intersection and spotted a stopped rider on an Indian motorcycle. I waved one hand in the air like a moth for distraction and pulled out his goggles and snapped them back on his face.

"Sorry, Pal, Police business. Here, Call the Chief at his home number, " I said as I pushed him off, got on the bike and got Darenella on the back. As she grabbed me to hold on her chest pushed softly into my back like a couple of silk lunch bags full of fresh warm tapicoa pudding. I hit the throttle and we roared off.

Dardenella roared in my ear - she'd gone line by line through the Bay Area City Directory of Fascists and Totalitarians and had a hunch they were meeting at the Japanese Tea House in Golden Gate Park.

"I checked the cop reports. There's been at least 147 murders in the city of federal officials, Democrats, US Army Air Force personell, jazz musicians and attractive brunettes - all people sworn to stop Hitler. At every single crime scene is a woman with long blond hair, long black boots. It's been so bad the San Francisco police have actually begun to investigate. They always find a single 9mm casing, enammeled with a pink swastika. Look out!" I swerved casually to avoid an oncoming baseball stadium.

We were hot on the trail of Heinreicha the Bulleteer, the deadliest German since a cook from Hamburg invented E Coli at the 1909 Chicago World's Fair.

Riding along the paths I gently rolled the bike into the pond near the tea house rather than pay the outrageous nickle for parking on a motorcyle I didn't even own. We went in -but of course since the War started the tea house was run by Austrians.

Impatiently I grabbed the first man I saw with a name tag that said "Hello, My Name is Hans- ask me about our Alpine Tea Ceremony" and smacked him around until I happened to look out the window and notice Henreicha paddling by in a bicycle boat with a man so small, dangerous and shifty he made Peter Lorre look like Jimmy Stewart. I told Hans "sorry, maybe Abe Lincoln can help" and tucked a fiver in his apron for the trouble and the Thompson .45 I picked up from behind the postcard rack.

There was nothing to do but follow them on another paddle boat. We clammored in and peddled away.

It was a clear sky around the little forested park hill and the round lake. Hundreds of children were playing and beating each other up. The dappled sun slapped aroung the water. The ducks were pecking each other, and shunning the coots. A goose was extorting bread from another goose with compromising photos. A swan was on his back plastered from drinking two quarts of Mad Dog. The day was beautiful, but the world was ugly, and would be, tilled we scoured the sink scum of totalitarianism from it with bleach and grit for extra cleansing power.

As if to underscore the point, three huge holes drilled into the wood on our boat and water spouts from a deadly yet refreshing spray of bullets splashed high.

Normally, when you chase down the bad guys in SF, you go the nearest chase clock, punch your card, receive the car keys , cop a little air down Jones street, take out a couple of fruit stands, crash into the bay, and Bob's your Uncle. This was different. I was in just the sort of nightmare situation every private dick fears: in a Tommy gun firefight with an expert female Nazi sharpshooter around the paddleboat lake in Golden Gate park on family day. I squeezed off a few dozen rounds as she paddled round the bend, and I shouted at the sweaty but game Dardenella to increase speed to .25 of a knot. I started picking apart my cotton candy and tossing and burning it to lay down a smokescreen.

The chase has a long tradition in town, every since Stinky Yamaguchi tried to outrun Sherriff "Handlebar Bob" McFierce in his stolen '02 Horseless Smokester, nearly getting away before a carelessly tossed stick of gum put the kibosh on his wheels turning when he hit Market street. This was so far back that Stinky was sent up San Quentin for 16 to 20 for felony interference with a magical elf carriage, the only applicable law on the books.

But this was today, not yesterday. Here, not there. Now, not then. 1 O'clock, not 11 am. It was time for justice.

Rebar for Tootise Rolls: Chapter .45 Auto: The Stink of Disimilitude

Having captured the S.S. EssEss with a well-placed sharpened bamboo stick, we steamed into San Francisco Bay, leaking like a 4 year old on his fifth pint of lager. It was great to see the Golden Gate again while some Sinatra-crazed jilted bird wasn't hurling herself off to get back at her Evangelical parents for sending her to millinery school. But as we pulled up to the docks and the brow was extended, I turned it all over in my mind like an turnover with lot of jelly and only one cherry in it, and it all added to one thing: a big pile of Hippo stink with the vanilla frosting of deceit. Sure, the commandant had cleared Crumples the Bartender after a little session with sodium pentathol and an eyeless Mickey Mouse doll, but somewhere in San Francisco a whole clump of Nazis was running around free as millionaire sparrows.

After the incident in the galley with the Russian life insurance salesman, Jenny clung onto my arm like a honey-soaked staticky balloon animal Jean Harlow, and of course now she was dressed only in an impromptu frock made of pale green actuarial tables. We hailed a taxi and got in.

"Where to, Mack?"
"Ingvar's Real I-talian Bistro, on Columbus. And step in it. On it. Sorry, Buddy."

The driver stabbed holes of glaring into my hat. I turned to Jenny. She was adjusting the mortality table for 47 year old single operators who smoked, which drove me crazy with a crazy kind of sexy desire. I could not take my eyes off the percentile risk columns. If I'd had a slide rule I probably would have been slapped.

The '42 Dodge lurched violently left and right down California street, which was a problem because it was straight road downhill. The driver's turns were so sharp a cable car had to pull a u-ey to get out of the way. I watched the sad, determined faces of several Businessman in gray flannel as they bounced off the bumper like fiscally secure corn stalks.

"Hey, Pal, want to crank it down a notch?" I inquired. "There's an extra fiver in it for you if we get there at all." He didn't say anything. "You see that cab up ahead? It's not killing anyone. Try following that."

Silence. We had just crested the top of a hill and taken out a small troop of retail candy store trainees. That's when I finally took my eyes off Jenny long enough to notice that the driver's brains were inappropriately splattered on the passenger window. A silencer! This Joe was silenced alright. Jenny screamed and raised her hands to her mouth, ironically rending the mortality estimates for taxi drivers with more than twenty years experience. I would have been more turned on if we weren't plummeting down Nob Hill at 85 mph.

I pushed the driver over and grabbed the wheel, and though I couldn't slow it down I tried to steer for something softer than the Chronicle Building, like a school bus. Right now I wished I bought that policy the Russian was trying to hustle me when I was smacking him around in the ship's galley with a pair of brass knuckles and a french horn-a couple of years in Stalin's Magadan breaking ice into cubes had taught him the value of persistent salesmanship. Fortunately at that moment, the X-tra Comfy Super-Soft Mattress Delivery Truck making its weekly deliver to the San Francisco Chronicle swerved to avoid a malemute puppy and overturned spilled matresses everywhere, just enough to overturn the cab and eject us both into the matresses, which had as it turned out impressive lumbar support.

"Funny, I've been working on getting you in bed a long time, schnookums, " I was contractually obligated to say. The tumble in the mattress had ripped so many of the remaining actuarial tables from Jenny that only collision damage estimates from 1937-42 Buicks kept us from getting arrested.

She undid my tie and made an impromptu skirt. You couldn't see everything, but you could see the future.

Fortunately we were near North Beach and Ingvar's. We walked past a goateed hepster inspired by Jenny's jello-cake walk to wolf-whistle and I had to put the beatnik down. We got to Ingvar's. It wasn't exactly a great place. The speciality of the house, lutefisk risoto, had put more people in the hospital than the Andrea Doria; on the other hand it was cold, dank and dark. I peered through the whale oil lamp light for our contact.

A silhouetted figure at one of the barrel tables with a checkered cloth on the top took a long drag on a hookah, and a sickly orange light struck his crooked nose and 16 inch Van Dyck, which cut through the rising grey smoke. He was thinner than a dieting willow branch. His skin was a syphillitic shade of green, and his black and silver hair could have greased a 6 by 6. He wore a kind of Teutonic zoot suit, with a giant hat and pants and an old fashioned high collar with bolo tie clip made from what I hope was a monkey skull. This was the other Russian guy all right, trouble with a capital Rouble. He motioned for us to come over with a skeletal finger.

"I am indeed Professor Clammato. You must be Brain. And this charming companion is, Miss Diver, I presume?"

"Creeped out, I'm sure" she said.

"You vill of course share a drink with me?," He sort of offered or hissed, or fissed, in a sort of ashy Sino-spanish-Lativian accent. "Ingvar! Another formaldyhyde and lemon! I svear by it. The cellular tissues- they do not dissolve."

"Fine, but make mine a Naked Dane, that's anise vodka and mezcal, with a sprig of pine."

"Ya, I know, I came up wit dat, " said Ingvar's enormous droopy moustache. "To gedda girl in high school. Ha. Ha!" He creaked like a knock-off Louis XIV chair. Looking at Ingvar it was a wonder he hadn't added morphine.

"I'll have a morphine and Coke," said Jenny. "A-Cola," she added. "And you got any women's clothes in the back? I'm a little breezy here." Indeed, her nipples were more at attention that a formal review of the Royal Navy.

"Ya sure, I'm in touch vit my sexuality."

"So, Brain," said Clammato, with his pimento-like pupils trained on a small red leather book. "As you know I am a Professor of Hydraullic Engineering and Women's Studies at Berkeley. As such, I have been privileged to be the recipient of a large federal grant to cure monthly cycles. I noticed several weeks ago a certain teaching assistant named Henreicha Coulter at a formal dinner with a Death's Head hairclip which I believe she left on by accident. "

Just then Ingvar arrived with a blue silk dress for Jenny with shoulder pads so sharp she could mug a sailor.

"I have done some investigation with my contacts," Clammato continued. She is somewhat conservative in politics, in the sense she was kicked out of the Nazi party by Speer personally for making others uncomfortable with inflammatory proposals. Her thesis proposal is for aggressive kitten eugenics, " He wagged his beard sadly. " I have been a fool not to see the signs. When the invasion of Poland was announced, she brought out champagne and strudel for the undergraduates. She is so blond a DC-3 once mistook her hair for a landing light in the fog and crashed into a beauty salon. One student even referred to her 'jackbooty.'

I was starting to put the pieces together."Is she by any chance an expert rifledame?" I asked.

"If you mean does she brandish a K-98 Mauser sniper rifle to hunt squirrels in Golden Gate park at distances exceeding 1000 yards, I would say 'yes.'"

Finally a lead. But the danger was increasing. Our dinner had arrived. Only Ingvar wasn't actively trying to kill us.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter .44 Magnum - Where Kittens Dare

Through the gunsmoke, seawater, sweat and diesel, I worked my way forward in Unterseeboot-143 , picking off sea-Krauts with the old Swiss Guard crossbow, pulling the arrows out of the bodies and shooting again, while Dardenella in the mink bikini continued to distract the Japanese military delegation with a hula dance in the 10 by 6 foot wardroom. Normally, the mere sight of Dardenella, a woman so beautiful she'd had to take out restraining orders against several woodland creatures, in a mink bikini would have induced men to buy her a car. When she started singing "Stardust," two of these clowns had a coronary.

The gamble of lighting a giant swastika on fire on the volcanic island had paid off, attracting the submarine to us like a bedbound grandfather to a cherry-flavored menengitis lozenge.

Down the long gray corridor lined with bananas, the door to Captain Jerry Von Bosch's tiny steel cabin appeared. I kicked it in with democractic enthusiasm, and rifled through the Nazi Commander's linens. Judging by its contents, he seemed to have a girl in every port, or I was begining to hope to that he did. Where was the log? Where was the codebook? Where was the extra secret secrety thingy that the engineered gurgled out of his throat after I winged him with a razor bolt? I took a second to deliberately drop cigar ash on El Kapitan's paisley bunk cushions. I tried to think. The magic 3-d picture of Hitler than turned into Errol Flynn from a different angle began to get on my nerves, and I took a sip from the first bottle I could find, which unfortunately turned out to be stale milk kept I think deliberately in a whiskey bottle for just such a contingency.

"AH HA! Halt! You Amerikanzer Pig!" Surprised, I spit the turned milk on Hitler. Or Errol Flynn, from his side of the room, which was no more than three feet away.

El Kapitan, short, blond and so pink he could play a baby rat in the school play, was back, with an ugly looking burp gun that could shoot 30 ballerinas a second and a trigger finger so itchy he actually carried a bottle of Calamine lotion in a holster. His eyes were so steely you could sharpen scissors with them, and with that fascist gaze on me with my hand in his linen drawer, I could see that this was no time to try to sell him an insurance policy.

"I will show you how weak your pathetic Amerikan wool suit is!"

He squeezed: the blast of bullets flew - 10, 20, 30, 50 rounds. In that tiny room it was louder than than stepping on a cat who'd swallowed an air raid siren. Then he reloaded.

"Next time, I shall be considerably more careful with my aim! And you will learn the futility of resistance and worsted wool sportsjackets with a mere three buttons."

I'd heard of fashion Nazis before.

"Prepare to die a quick and unstylish death with no trace of panache!"

It was a fair bet that I wasn't going to survive yet another 50 round clip blast of 9mm in a 24 square foot metal space. I had less time to think than Marie Antoinette after her head hit the basket.

Which is exactly the last thought Klaus Oppressenheimer had as the pirate snipped off his head with a cutlass as neatly as girl deals with a prom-night nose pimple. Pirate?!

"Arr! That'll barnacle-blasted bilge-bat's polished his last jack-boot!"

My mouth was filled with the tangy taste of profound surprise as well as sour milk.

"I need a drink, Mack. Got any rum?"

"The name's Captain Jules Rougier. What kind of two-eyed pegless lubber d'ye take me for?" He tossed me a tot in a leather jug, yet I had clearly rattled his beard beads.

"Thanks, no offense. Nice work on taking out Herr Dusseldorf there, but we need to get to the control room." I showed my appreciation with a nice crossbow shot to a marauding squarehead's wrench-wielding hand.

"Arrghhh, your tea, sir," he said, dropping the china and soaking the cucumber sandwiches. I may have been rash.

Running forward over a headless Nazi in a U-Boat with an 18th century pirate with a bloody dripping cutlass back to a girl in furry underwear mesmerizing a clutch of Japanese diplomats made me wish I was back at Mel's trying to get Crumples to front me another Sloe Gin Howitzer so I could think this over. But it was Crumples and his crumply chloral hydrate betrayal that got me here in the first place. When I got back, I'd show that bum what America stands for by smashing his dentures in.

Wait - Pirate, cutlass, headless bodies, Losie the bookie, rumors of some kind of German time changing device that some egghead named Hiesenberg may or may not have been working on. Hard to process it while cranking the crossbow. Maybe I should have picked up the machine gun. It occured to me that someone had gone back in time to place and win bets with Losie - but Einstein had proved that was impossible. There was something, there was something....and that's when I bumped into Dardenella smack in the fuzzy gazongas.

"Arr!" said Captain Jules.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter .41 Wildcat - Under Spurious Owls

The lollipop-lucious lips of Dardenella steamed away East at six knots max as Jenny and I woke up tied face to face on a slow boat to Bora Bora that hauled a load of flax, jute and floss for Singapore. Crumples had slipped me a Mickey alright, a chloral hydrate handshake with San Francisco Nazis!

Pressed right up against the gorgeous red-haired Jenny but facing a bottle-nosed Luger wielded by that psycho mime Gunther, I was kinda scared and kinda turned on, like the last time I floated a check to the Jimmy the Twitchy Cleaver to cover a long-odds bet on nag named Cement Molasses.

Gunther made a move. He started swimming in the air, and then pretended to drown. He wasn't the best mime, but I worked that out it was a threat. Then he pretended to hit me across the face with the Luger. That would have hurt, had he hit me with the Luger.

He made a dumb-guy face, and held up a finger.

"Um...one word...sounds... like wrench? No..tool! Fool!!"

Gunther touched his nose, and pointed at me, then air-beat me with the Luger again.

"I'll never talk! And neither will you, apparantly."
Over the next twelve minutes and a knee cramp we eventually worked out that I was still being foolish and there were bays of making me talk. I may have missed a bit. It's always sad how the art goes to hell when a street performer turns fascist on you.

This kept on for hours. I wouldn't crack. Gunther was getting sloppy. The darkness fell. The wind arose.

The Pacific turned surprised and angry, like a woman who's just been kidnapped by a Nazi sea mime. Huge waves built. Gunther finally left forward by grabbing a non-existent rope and pulling against the wind, which somehow seemed to affect him more strongly than I thought it would have. He left Jenny and I tied around a stantion, and I noticed a rather large number of times that her silk dress was soaked, and I could estimate the temperature pretty accurately.

"Make out with me if you want to live!" she screamed against the wind.
"Whaa..?" But it's not the kind of request you really question for very long. Finally I got it - in the throes of our attempted sea-passion, the ropes were falling around our heads in reach of our mouths. By the time I got to 2nd base Jenny had chewed lustily through a 2 inch hemp cable. I smiled quietly through the rope burns to myself.

There were only a few dirty Krauts on board. I came around a corner and a dark shape asked me in Kraut-talk for a cig. I had a pack, which I shoved all at once into his mouth.

"Here's your smokes, Henreich, courtesy of President Roosevelt!," I informed him, and I shoved him overboard with splash lost in the furious waters.

I really wish I hadn't done that. First of all it was my last pack, and Ol' Fritzy McNazi turned out to be the navigator, and since Jenny had shot the captain with the little derringer she kept in her unmentionables, by the time we had taken the bridge no one actually knew where we were anymore. Gunther the mime was now in the engine room and I prayed to god he was actually shovelling real coal. "All Ahead full!" I yelled, and turned the Bon Chance Hedy Lamarr into the wind, praying for break in the storm.

We did get a break, in the form of a brand new volcano, and the break was the ship's back on a shoal that could not have been more than 2 weeks old. Jenny and I scrambled into a lifeboat and managed to launch, leaving six or seven Jerrys to fend for themselves on a bitterly ironic floating shipment of models of lifeboats, while we watched the curious spectacle of Gunther both drowning and pretending to drown at the same moment.

I counted my blessings. Two, if you include Jenny.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter .38 Special - The Drippings of Angels

These were some fancy digs alright. Not only was there a restroom attendant with an monogrammed ascot, but the solid gold urinal also had it's own ascot, changed hourly by superbutlers with monogrammed capes. I tipped a superbutler with a sawbuck and he thanked me with a disdainful grunt before returning to the blower to renegotiate his currency futures with some joe in Melborne named Cecil. I headed back out past the hot towels, taking a swipe to brush the distracting chandilier out of the way. Dardenella was waiting back at the Louis the XIV dining room table, drinking champagne so old the label read "Le Tres Ancien Jus-de-Grape Bubblie," because the French region of "Champagne" had not yet risen from the sea-floor.

My diplomatic sash began to ride up. This white tie monkey suit was a rental. So was Dardenella, at least as far as dashing Prince Olaf of Norwegia was concerned. I walked up to the table, my fists tightened up in balls of fury, ready to send Olaf back across the Baltic. Sensing trouble, a couple of superbutlers made the mistake of leaping at me only to have me bat them from the air like a couple of helpful bleeding shuttlecocks. Olaf looked up from Dardenella's mesmerizingly poofy cleavage just long enough to watch his teeth land appropriately in a punchbowl.

"Jeez, Brain, why'd ya have to do that? He was just making conversation." Olaf was stuck boots out in an enormous blanc-mange.

I casually plucked the broken monocle from her decolletage and put it in my pocket for later analysis. "Sorry, Tootsie, I got firsties and we gotta blow this popsicle stand now. We got a meet with Losie the Bookie."

The Rolls let us out on Dockwater Street. I tipped the guy with a suggestion to to get the hell out of there, and punched him to make sure he got the idea. It's a neighborhood so rough the kittens are packing heat. I adjusted my top hat. Normally it's not a great idea to wander around a place at night where the gutters are full of discarded police badges, not to mention wearing a white tie and tails with a foxy dame on your arm dolled up for an Academy Award with a 2 million dollar pink diamond broach, but Losie was the only person who knew anything about the use of floss for dental violence, and he didn't hang around the Waldorf counting his Canadian nickels. There was a reason he was called "Losie."

I had one arm mostly around Dardenella's little waist and one on my piece, and one eye on the alleys, windows and doors, and another eye helpless sucked into Dardenella like a baby duck in a whirlpool.

We followed a couple of depressed rats as they shuffled along the applicance repair and remaindered sandwich shops, and then there was the sign and stairs leading up to "Losie's For-Real Pawn and Danish Furniture," possibly the least believable front since Hitler sent a division of wood-pixies to stop the Russians in Berlin.

Dardenella stepped in something sticky, and it wasn't saltwater taffy. I should have guessed. There was poor Losie's body lying at the bottom of the stairs. More disturbingly, his head just then tumbled down each step and rolled out into the street where it was run over by an ice cream truck.

Dardenella was unflappable. "Guess Losie's had his last Orangesicle. Sorry about your friend." She opened up a hydrant with a firehouse wrench she kept in her bag and soaked her shoe in cold water to get the stain out.

"Well, he wasn't much of a friend. Or a bookie. Or really a very good informant. He never graduated from middle school, or knew the sweet love of a woman, and the Danish furniture was mostly styrofoam, and usually, he was wrong about the bus schedule, and what day it was, and the name of the state he lived in. He once lost 35 large betting that the Miami Dolphins would take the NBA title. He also smelled poorly, and had to replace his full set of house and car keys three times a week, and as you can see he never met a bucket he didn't like as long as it was full of chicken. "

Dardenella picked up something from the stairwell. "Hey, Honey-brain, check out the envelope."

It was a large envelope marked "INVALOPE." It was exactly what I was looking for. I planted a fast one on Dardenella's lips.

"I was wondering if those worked," I said.

"Only when they're moist and squishy."

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls : Chapter 9mm Hollowpoint

"Dr. Brain!" "Dr. Brain!" Cleotmos the ex-patriate Lichtensteinian was trying to get my attention in the dark oak-wood lobby with a small series of parachute flares.

I'd been trying to forget that I ever went to medical school. As a young resident in the San Diego Hospital for The Bleeding, I accidently killed so many patients I still get a thank you card every Christmas from the Buenos Dios Funeral Home. Ever since I'd often dosed my drinks with morphine, not to kill the pain so much as to improve the flavor of Canadian schnapps, which calmed my nerves enough to perform the total skeletectomies I occassional still did for a little extra cash on patients whose bones were always in the way.

"Don't get your panties in bunch," I groused, " and if you do, you can get them unstuck with moustache wax."

"But Dr. Brain, it's that woman." Just then she walked in.

I haven't seen so many dangerous curves since I drank a can hydraulic fluid and jacked a Porsche for a shortcut to Zurich. She was so hot I began to wonder if cold fusion might be real after all. Her skirt was shorter than the list of Pauly Shore's Oscar Nominations, and her legs were so shapely most of the other legs in the room turned and left in shame. Her breasts were like Jesus's personal throw pillows. She had a face that was sweeter than a Krispy Kreme creme-filled candy creme, and moist ruby lips that were illegal in parts of rural North Carolina. Her streaked blondish hair danced and bounced in multi-hairy colors like an over-caffeinated touring company of Cats.

She poured along in my direction, and gave me the kind of look that knocks 737s out of their landing approaches.

"We spoke on the phone," she cooed like a flock of New York pigeons on a good batch of MDA. "I'm Dardenella."

"An unusal name, for a woman that didn't used to be a man."

She looked at me like I'd just handed her a bouquet of poodle turds. Then those lips moved in such a way that I forgot my middle name ("Kevin"), and that silky voice not uncoincidently followed.

"It's Jack. Jack's been strangled. And shot. And poisoned. And shot and strangled again. And his hands were bulldozed. His feet were stabbed as well and also poisoned and shot and bulldozed. His ball-sack was detonated. They did terrible things with a satellite dish. Then they ran over him with a mobile steam calliope - I didn't even know they still made those. Then--"

She was about to cry. It was getting mushy, so I grabbed another handful of popcorn.

"Then they killed him. "

"That must have been rough, Tootsie Roll." I grabbed the first affectionism I could, but like a real Tootsie Roll, it seemed to have no specific purpose.

"I never thought I cared for Jack. I was just with him for the Val-Pack Coupons. And the diamond-encrusted gold missile launcher."

She was cruel, even militarily ambitious, but not stupid. This tomato had "Dangerous -Like Plutonium Teddy Dangerous" actually written on her business card. Sure I was tough - I once had to beat Seattle Seahawk Mack Strong unconscious with his own tongue, but was I tough enough to handle Dardenella?

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter .22 Rimfire

The only real light in the Precinct interogation room was the bulb in the fridge. If it hadn't been full of donuts I wouldn't have seen anything.

"Brain! Brain! Brain! Snap out of it!"

Capt. Kornwalski pasted a meaty paw right across my talkhole, with a side of vegan contempt. I peered up at him, his smug cop face beaming down at me like the searchlight of a Nazi helicopter over a sinking box of kittens.

"Brain!" Then came the bucket of ice water on my head, complete with empty bottle of champagne.

"Brain!" Then, a refreshing lemonade and light snack.

"I ain't talking, Kornwalski. " My head felt like a family of badgers had moved in and were fighting over the last strip of caribou jerky. "Why don't you talk to your momma's Pilates instructor?"

"You saw Jenny yesteday, about 3; a man fitting your description was with her."

"At lot of people visit City Hall, and then have sex with Jenny in City Hall."

"Don't tell me the mayor didn't recognize a pair of edible panties on the desk."

"Vanilla or Blueberry?"

That did it. That cop goon of his, Martha, who'd been standing menacingly in the corner knitting, tied me to the chair and beat me with an 800 pound crab pot full of fresh Dungeness crabs. I started seeing more stars than the Hubble telescope. My right eye swelled up like an overinsulted horse jockey. What wasn't dripping on the floor was spotting the walls. And then Martha really went to work. I'd never felt so much pain since I was shot in the kneecap at a Celine Dion concert. Another man might have broke, but I was philosophical. Some men pay good money for that sort of thing.

After I was swept up and the 5-0 Doc stapled me together in a sort of a impressionist collage of a human being, my attorney Abu arrived and sprung me with the $3.34 bail, pleading that I was not a flight risk and could never be under my Delta mileage plan.

He picked me up from the Precinct in a horse-drawn Gypsy wagon, where he lit some incense and went over the charges:

"Guy, they're throwing the law library at ya. 2 counts of 2nd Degree Murder. Felony assault. Kidnapping. Misdemeanor Smelling. Impersonating a better actor. Felony phone solicitation. Felony Mp3 downloading. Felony couch relaxing with intent to order pizza. Felony Got-Your-Nose. Three hundred thousand counts of federal utility fraud. "Abu looked puzzled, shuffled a couple of papers. "Sorry- that's Ken Lay. Hmm. I was wondering where that was."

The cart jerked. A huge black Cadillac rammed the side of the wagon, trying to drive us off the cliff downtown, across from Nordstrom's. Dozens of tarot cards flew through the air. I pulled a .45 Abu kept hidden in the pantry and popped off a couple of rounds through the Queen of Swords. It was louder than a coked-up rock star at a high school party. The horse dropped dead. Mental note to check sight on gun. Then a crash and the Cady knocked us over on our side. My hand hit the ground and the .45 flew across the street. I lay there, with three or four broken ribs and a dead horse on my leg, wondering whether "lay" or "laid" was grammatically preferrable.

The car door opened. Out walked Jenny. Standing in that light, she looked sexier than two sexy patties in sexy sauce on a Brazilian sexy bun.

"You got a light?" She asked.