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.