Chapter One ;Chapter Two ;Chapter Three ;Chapter Four ;Chapter Five ;Chapter Six ;Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight ;Chapter Nine ;Chapter Ten ;Chapter Eleven ;Chapter Twelve ;Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen ;Chapter Fifteen ;Chapter Sixteen ;Chapter Seventeen ;Chapter Eighteen
Jim Qwax walked these streets as mortal man, but he was legend too. He was famous in the creepy underworld of the city for solving any case - even the unsolvable ones, which usually got that way because serious looking men with large baseball bats wanted them to stay that way. It wasn't just that he solved him, but that he was neither dead, behind bars nor a vegetable yet that made the name "Qwax" feared and respected whereever two people gathered together to mug a third. Down the mean street walked Jim Qwax, puffing on the biggest joint you ever did see, clad in the kind of hat and trenchcoat that are almost the uniform of the true detectin' genius. Streetkids gathered round paper bags filled with glue flattened themselves against walls as Jim Qwax walked past.
Qwax took a huge drag on his marley. "Creeps," he said.
Through the City's waterfront slums walked Jim Qwax, towards the sad excuse for a roach motel that was his apartment. With his kind of sleuthin' skill, he thought, he should have had a seventy-three room mansion on top of the Harbour Hills, with a swimming pool and a jacuzzi and everything. Unfortunately, certain things stood in the way of this dream. One was that Qwax, unlike most cynical hardbitten private eyes, took cases that interested him - usually hunting down insane hotdog salesmen on a murderous ketchup rampage, or those which involved a lot of undercover work in brothels. The kind of people who hired him for this work didn't usually pay big bucks. Secondly, what bucks he did get paid usually went straight into the pockets of the landlord, the power company, buying new equipment for Sharleen's band, the back pocket of the Police Chief, who also doubled as his dope dealer, or expanding his collection of erotic Etruscan poetry. So, here he was, broke but at least pleased with himself, as he turned out of an alleyway into the doorway of his apartment building. "Dead Rat Mansions" probably wasn't its real name, but it had stuck. The master detective mounted the stairs up to his grotty apartment.
At the very top of the stairs stood a dingy front door with the number "5.13" on it. Jim Qwax kicked it open - the lock had been busted for a month, and the landlord was out of town until the middle of next year, but Jim really didn't have anything worth stealing, so it was alright really. He removed his trenchcoat and hat, revealing himself to be naked underneath, and hung 'em on a hook on the back of the door as he shut it and wedged a chair under the door handle. He strode past the broken refrigerator, around the piles of dirty laundry, into his darkened bedroom, where he collapsed exhausted on the bed.
"Hey, sexy, what kept ya?"
"Sharleen, if I wanted to talk I would ring up a talkback station or something, okay?"
"I was worried. You usually manage to get home from work before 11 pm most nights."
"This ain't most nights, cutie. None of those missing teenagers have turned up, the Mayor still thinks he's Napoleon Bonaparte, and the liquor store are thinking of revoking our beer tab. If you don't start getting some
gigs soon, we're up Shit Creek with no toilet brush."
"Never mind, sweetie," said Sharleen, deftly removing Jim's shoes. "Wanna fuck like crazed weasels?"
The couple then proceeded to do just that until the windows rattled and the deaf woman downstairs started thumping on the ceiling.
***
Down those same mean streets as the night before, but in the opposite direction, walked Jim Qwax. He'd bought a newspaper from a disreputable-looking street vendor, but not to read - he used it to hit street urchins who were attempting to steal his bootlaces as he stomped by. In the light of what passed for day in the City, it was easy to see that Jim Qwax wasn't exactly the hunkiest individual on the face of the planet - he still had a finely-toned body from his previous careers as bricklayer and bouncer at Sharleen's gigs, but the word you'd use to describe him wouldn't be so much "Olympian" as "killer nerd". The straggly goatee didn't help much either. Nevertheless, the lead guitarist of the Lost City Mad Dogs didn't just decide to shack up with anyone, Jim told himself every morning as he looked at his bloodshot eyes and generally scrawny physique in the mirror.Yes, Jim Qwax had perfected the art of being well-muscled and scrawny at the same time. He put it down to malnutrition, himself.
About ten minutes walking got him out of the waterfront slums of Tackville and into the fringes of the Central City. Down Seven Sisters Street walked Jim Qwax, towards the 1950's converted chicken warehouse where
his office was. Entering the lift, which appeared to be working that day, he went straight to the fourth floor and marched into his office. With weary resignation, he nodded to the fiercly copulating couple on his secretary's desk.
"Morning, Kitty" chirped Jim. "Cold out, innit?"
Jim stomped into his inner office and hung his coat up. Since it was a cold March day, he'd decided to wear clothes to the office today - black jeans, a keen white pirate shirt and a blue waistcoat. He sat behind his desk, put on his grimmest face and started counting.
Before he'd reached forty-three, the door opened and in walked his secretary, Kath Katzenjammer, professional name "Kitty Cattz", part-time hooker and full-time pain-in-the-ass. Red-faced and stammering in her woolen business suit, she hurriedly shut the door.
"Look, Jim..." she began.
"Save it, Kitty," interrupted Qwax, opening his desk and extracting a can of McHeady's Old Disgusting Ale. "This is the nineteenth, count 'em, nineteenth time I've had to walk in on you. Now, of course I'm all for you using the office for your other job, it sure beats having to pay you, but I mean, you could at least make sure you're done before business hours. I have a corporate image to keep up here, y'know," he stated, sculling the beer in one go and burping loudly. "I don't want you scaring the customers."
"What fucking customers?" retorted Cat.
Qwax chose not to answer that. "And what's more, not the desk, okay? It's fragile as anything! Why do you think I paid for that perfectly comfy sofa?"
Kitty shrugged. "Some guys are just kinky, I guess."
Jim chose not to even think about that. "Okay, so what have I got to do today?" he asked, throwing the empty beer can out the window.
Kitty extracted a notebook. "Okey-dokey," she said, "In a quarter-hour a Ms Boraman is turning up to talk to you about a kidnapping."
"Uh-huh," said Jim, rolling a joint and looking for the lighter.
"At 10 you gotta go down City Hall to pay off the Police Chief…"
Jim Qwax groaned. Although he knew perfectly well he couldn't continue to operate in his own special... *unorthodox* style without some protection, he'd taken a quick dislike to Silas O'Doobie upon first meeting him. It wasn't that he was *that* corrupt, only with 23 kids to support a policeman's wages weren't that hot. He sold good dope, though.
"And after that, we're back onto the missing-teenager treadmill."
"Hold on a moment," yelled Jim, hit with a sudden thought. "Where have I heard the name 'Boraman' before?"
"The Odor-Eater fortune," replied Kath, not missing a beat. "Sophia Boraman took over her parent's shoe repair business, turned it into a multi-million dollar deodorant empire, and proceeded to throw about a dozen wild parties with the proceeds. She seems to have settled down a bit lately, though."
"Hmm...", thought Qwax. His thoughts were disturbed, however, by the crash of an opening door in the outer office, and a light alto voice shouting in impatience.
"MY NAME IS SOPHIE BORAMAN," it declaimed. "ANYONE HERE?"
"Just a minute!" yelled Qwax, motioning his secretary out of the room
to deal with the intruder. He quickly hid his beer, put his fake diploma
from Detective School on the wall, covered his empty desk with several
sheets of scrap paper and started writing furiously. "Send her in, Kitty",
he yelled.
The apparition sighed in impatience. "Get up, you sad excuse for a man," she barked, in a surprisingly cute voice. "My name is Sophie Boraman and you have an appointment with me."
Jim Qwax, his head swimming with beer and suspected concussion, managed to struggle back onto his chair. He glanced up at this frankly terrifying individual clad in a black tuxedo and high heels, looking like a refugee from a 1920's music hall chorus line. "Of course, of course, I've been expecting you, only in about a quarter of an hour's time..." he stammered.
Boraman snorted. "I wouldn't want to speak to you if you were the kind of man I thought wanted to waste time. Word on the street, Mr Qwax, is that you're supposed to be some kind of a supersleuth. I wouldn't want you to disappoint me."
Jim Qwax, at that moment, would rather have mud-wrestled the Abominable Snowman naked than disappoint his new client. He pulled himself together quickly, leaned forward on his desk and gave her his best hard-boiled detective stare, practised in many hours before the bathroom mirror until Sharleen wanted to know what he was doing in there, and whether she could join in. Unfortunately, his next choice of words were not wise.
"So," he said, "what's the problem, toots?"
It was a good thing that Jim Qwax possessed a measure of clairvoyance, so he managed to dodge the almighty slap in the face that came his way in the next half-second.
"Call me that again and my custom goes elsewhere. Either that, or your balls go in two different directions", said Boraman, recovering her balance quickly.
"Heh," said Qwax, stubbing out his joint before he did anything else stupid. "If anyone but me could solve this problem of yours, I think you would have gone to them first, wouldn't you?" Acting cool in the face of the unexpected was another thing Jim Qwax practised in front of the mirror.
"Indeed, Mr Qwax," said Boraman. "Hell, just coming into this neighbourhood has driven my personal fortune down a million. But I need the best, and unfortunately that appears to be you."
Jim Qwax was never adverse to a bit of mindless flattery. "Okay, so what is it you want me to do?" he asked, cracking open a McHeady's to steady his nerves.
"You mean you don't know?" asked Sophie, surprised. "What, you don't read the papers or watch TV?"
"I don't have a TV," said Qwax. "It hurts these keen detectin' eyes." (Actually they did have a TV, but he only ever used it to watch Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Babylon 5 and videos with titles like Revenge of the Teenage Blood-Licking Ghouls. But he wasn't about to spoil his image.) "And I don't *read* newspapers," he added, leaning back in his chair and looking cool. "They lose their stopping power when you unfold them."
Sophie obviously didn't want to pursue that. "Well, let me just tell you then." She extracted a photograph of a fairly mousy-looking young man and gave it to the master detective. "This is my brother, Fred Boraman. He went missing about a week ago, and I want you to find him."
"Now hold on there just a cotton-picking ass-wiping moment there, Ms Boraman," said Qwax, swigging his beer. "This City has a police force, we pay good money to support them, I know I do at least, why haven't you gone to them first?"
Sophie coloured slightly. "In the fast-paced world of international finance, Mr Qwax, there are certain decisions that have to be made that... well... let's just say our loyal boys and girls in blue wouldn't be too happy to hear about, and I'd rather they stayed well out of this."
Ah, I should have guessed, thought Qwax. The shady deals and cut-throat competition of the Odor-Eater world. I wonder why they haven't made a mini-series about *that* yet, he thought?
"The thing is... Fred went missing in the Inner City a while back talking to a man called Binky the Shrew. Have you heard of him?"
Jim Qwax spluttered his beer across his desk and nearly went arse-over-tip out the window again. "Binky Rabotnik?" he croaked. "BINKY RABOTNIK?"
"Oh, so you have heard of him?" asked Boraman.
Jim Qwax threw the now-empty can out the window and started mopping the beer from his desk. "Ms Boraman, if your brother's been dealing with Binky Rabotnik, then I'd suggest you start looking at the bottom of the river. If your corporation has been dealing with the man responsible for 90% of gun-running, theft, assassination, bad drugs, crooked gambling and television sitcoms in this City, I'd suggest you deserve everything you get."
Sophie sighed, reached into her purse, extracted a cheque book and scribbled on it. "How does an advance of $10,000 against your usual daily rates sound to change your mind?"
Jim Qwax's mind boggled for about three seconds while he pondered the cheque in front of him. "It sounds very nice indeed," he said. "Um, my daily rates?" He grabbed his calculator, mopped the McHeady's off it, entered a random three-digit number, doubled it, multiplied it by its own square root, subtracted the day of the month and the number he first thought of and showed it to his client. "That's my usual daily rate," he said. (This was how he always calculated his bills.) "You'll realise, of course, that that doesn't include
expenses - cab fare, a life-endangering premium, bribes, bar tabs, fancy swimwear and whatnot."
"Money's no object, Mr Qwax," said Sophie, leaving her business card and walking towards the door. "Find Fred for me within the week, and you can have anything you want."
Jim wondered for a second whether Sophie was making a cheap sexual innuendo there, but decided not to pursue it. "Well, that'll be all, Ms Boraman. Your brother will be back safe and sound in under a week. Um, incidentally..."
"Yes," said Sophie, pausing and turning.
"What's with the whip?"
"Just a fashion accessory, sweetie," said Sophie, grinning so wide Jim was worried that the top of her head would come off. She opened the door and walked back out through the outer office, saying "Excuse me," to the fiercely copulating couple on Cat's desk.
"I'm rich! I'm rich!" he laughed. "D'ya hear me, I'm rich! I'm ten thousand smackers up!" he sang, dancing on top of his desk. "I'm rich! I'm... going up against Binky the Shrew again," he suddenly remembered, calming down all of a sudden. "I'm... DEAD!"
Binky Rabotnik! The Lord of Lightfingers, the King of Cut-Throats, the Sultan of Sleaze, the mastermind behind the Kennedy assassinations and the true cause of World War II (or so it was said). The man who used his personality not only as a contraceptive, but as a bodyguard, the man whose criminal tendencies had been so apparent from youth that his high-school guidance counsellor had given his probable future occupation as "Gangland Mastercrook." Jim Qwax had seen enough of the Rabotnik Gang to last him a lifetime during his investigations into the Mercantile Guild counterfeiting case. He'd managed to send a few of Binky's goons up the river on that case, but at the price of about three months in intensive care after the master criminal himself had personally run him over outside his office in a brand-new BMW. He knew that if he messed with Binky's business again, he'd be lucky to get out of it with his brains safely on the inside of his head. They didn't call him the Shrew for nothing. Definitely not to his face, anyway.
Dismally, he examined the check. Just as he suspected - post-dated two weeks, so there was no possibility of a quick plane ticket to Rio de Janiero. It was either go after Fred Boraman, and be lucky to get out with his life, or turn down the case and eat at the foodbank for the next three months.
This dilemma so perplexed Qwax that he resorted to the time-honored detective method of dealing with difficult problems. He got out three six-packs of McHeady's and started drinking himself into an alcoholic stupor.
When Kitty walked into her boss's office about half an hour later, she was not entirely surprised to find him halfway through the second six-pack and just about face down on his desk. Jim had actually stopped drinking for a few months a while back, but she'd persuaded him that mainlining vodka wasn't exactly any healthier.
"Come on, Jim," she said, pulling him into a sitting position. "It's time to go see the Police Chief."
Jim focused unsteadily on his secretary. "Aww, to hell with Doobie. I think I'm just going to sit here and drink myself unconscious today."
"Whasamatter, Jim," said Kitty, perching on the side of his desk and crossing her legs in the approved manner for a sexy secretary.
"Alcohol poisoning is a far more enjoyable way to die than having every single bone in one's body, including the three little ones in each ear, ground into pulp by a Rabotnik goon with a jackhammer," said Qwax, reaching in vain for a can of McHeady's which Kath pulled out of his way.
Kitty wasn't having any of this. Jim was an old college buddy of hers - they'd been next-door neighbours in the hall of residence, and they'd even fucked like crazed weasels once - and she wasn't about to let him blow off the biggest paycheck he was ever likely to get. Not while she had three more payments to go on her bondage gear, anyway. She reached over the desk, slipped her hand under Jim Qwax's belt, grabbed hold of the master detective's testicles and squeezed. Hard.
If there is one way to get a man out of a fit of self-pity, Kitty had found it. It was marvellous the way Jim leapt out of his chair, pain and adrenalin fighting a strong battle against the alcohol in his bloodstream.
"AIEEEEEE!" commented the supersleuth Jim Qwax. "You didn't need to do that!" he said, comforting his poor abused gonads.
"Oh come on, Jim," said Kath impishly. "I have guys who pay me cold cash to inflict pain on them. You got it for nothing."
Jim Qwax said nothing, whimpering slightly.
"Jim, this is serious," said Kitty. "Surely your code of detectin' ethics won't allow you do let poor Ms Boraman down just because of a pathetic fear of grievous bodily harm?"
"Oh, of course not," said the master detective, laying on the sarcasm with a bulldozer. "Not that I *have* a code of detecting ethics, of course, but I'm sure you'll make one up for me. What am I going to do with you, Kitty?" he rhetoricized.
Kitty was far too smart, of course, to let a feedline like that go begging. "Well, there's the $100 basic rate," she began, consulting a list, "then there's the $150 contortionist special..."
"I don't want to hear about this!" yelled Qwax.
"Aww," pouted his secretary. "Why not?"
"Fear of syphillis," said the sexiest man alive, poking his tongue out.
Kitty laughed. "Wonderful!" she said. "We've got you on your feet and making abusive comments again. Now you can go down to see Chief O' Doobie!"
Qwax laughed too, outsmarted by his secretary. "Okay, okay," he said, putting his trenchcoat and insufferably cool fedora on. "Don't wait up for me, and tell the parents of those missing teenagers to come back tomorrow. After I've paid off the Chief, I'm going down Whiskey's Tavern to check things out."
"Be careful, sweetie," said Cat, handing him $500 from the safe. "That's a real mean and violent place..."
"Heh. I'm a real mean and violent guy," said Qwax, grinning.
He blew his secretary a kiss and stepped out the door. Walking down the steps toward ground level, he passed three furtive looking gentlemen in trenchcoats going into his office. Obviously Cat's clients. Among them, Jim thought he recognized the North Korean Deputy Ambassador. "Christine Keeler eat yer heart out," chuckled the supersleuth Jim Qwax.
On the steps leading down from his office building Jim Qwax paused to breathe in the ozone. This turned out to be a mistake, for when he continued his walk he ran straight into the person he'd been hoping to avoid - Malcolm Nitts, the owner of the local hot meat pie cart, which just about ran the master detective off the road as he was lighting up his first joint of the day
"Oh, *hello*, Mr Qwax!" said Nitts, his face contorted into a severely ironic grin. "I believe I have something of yours!"
"Um, you can keep it, Mike," said the master detective nervously, putting his lighter away. "In fact, I'd like to buy a..."
Nitts reached into his pie car and pulled out four objects - two empty cans of McHeady's and two severely squashed pies. "I ask you, Mr Qwax, does my cart look like a recycling bin?" he hissed.
"Well, now you come to mention it…" grinned the master detective, but his attempt at wit fell flat before Nitts' stony demeanour. "Well, you shouldn't have been standing underneath my window, should you, you silly bastard!" concluded Qwax lamely, looking for an escape route.
"Not so fast," said Nitts. "You're taking your rubbish away with you, and you're paying for these pies, or I'm taking you to City Hall for littering. And you *know* what the Mayor thinks of that."
Qwax groaned. Mayor Blackadder might well be insane, but he kept the city clean. He reached into his wallet and extracted a two-dollar coin. "I might as well have the pies while I'm at it," he said, taking the objects off Nitts's hands.
"It's a pleasure doing business with you, Mr Qwax," said the hot meat pie salesman, pushing his cart away yelling "HOT MEAT PIES! HOT MEAT PIES!"
"Creep," muttered Qwax, munching on a pie and heading off towards Police Headquarters.
The baroque monstrosity that was the headquarters of the City Police Force always struck Qwax as architectural overkill. It had been built something like twenty years before, when drug crime had been running rampant in the city and the vastly overgrown Police Force ran the city like a personal fief. However, in the last five years, with Mayor Blackadder's decriminalisation of drugs and prostitution and the forbidding of handguns within city limits, the Police had found themselves overpaid and overstaffed, with very little to do - especially since they were included in the firearms ban. Most cops these days kept themselves busy catching rapists and murderers, and the rest (who'd always seen that sort of thing as the dull bit of policework) spend their time approving crooked casinos, taking cuts from the organized robbery syndiCates and - like Police Chief O'Doobie - selling drugs.
Qwax always felt nervous entering this nasty-looking monument to civic-sponsored thuggery, and his demeanour was made none the happier by the surly looking reception cop who led him into a secure elevator that would lead him to the Chief's office on the tenth floor. The master detective was definitely planning to vote for whoever promised to wipe out police corruption in next year's civic elections - it would leave him far more money to buy mind-dissolving chemicals with.
As Qwax left the elevator and entered the overfurnished office at the top, both literally and figuratively, of the City Police Force, a huge man with a silly grin emerged from behind a big desk and shook him by the hand.
"Jim! How's it going?" said Chief O'Doobie, for it was he.
Jim was surprised - last time he'd been up here he'd only just evaded defenestration after an attempt at a joke about the Pope had fallen flat. "Um... just dandy, Chief. And yourself?"
"Oh, you know," said O'Doobie sitting back behind his desk and motioning the master detective to sit down. "The triplets are sick again."
"Which ones?" asked Qwax.
"The older set," said O'Doobie, taking out an even bigger marley than Qwax's of the night before and lighting up. "Like one, Jim?"
"Not while I'm working, please," said the suspersleuth Jim Qwax. "I find it hard enough to concentrate as it is."
"Suit yerself," said the Cheif, taking a huge drag. "I believe you have something for me?"
Qwax sighed and extracted the five hundred dollar bills from his wallet. O'Doobie snatched them greedily, counted them and threw them into a huge wall safe, slamming it shut and grinning. "That gets you a Stay-Out-Of-Jail card for another six months, and," pushing a plastic bag over the table, "a free ounce of hash. With my compliments."
Qwax was stunned by this generosity. Doobie was never known to be especially generous with his merchandise - was he trying to seduce the master detective, or what? He thanked the Chief moodily, secreted the dope in his detectin' satchel and wandered over to the window. Looking out, he saw a pacifist street battle going on. The McGillicuddy Highland Army, clad in Scottish kilts and plaids, were attacking a group of Hare Krishnas with paper swords and flour bombs. The Krishnoids, however, were cheating and wouldn't die properly. Damn Condomheads, thought Qwax.
"Uh, that reminds me, Chief," said Qwax. "I've come across a rather difficult case I might need some access to your records on. I've been hired to look into the disappearance of Fred Boraman, and..."
Jim Qwax turned around from the window only in time to see the suddenly thunderous face of Police Chief O'Doobie leap over the desk, grab him by his lapels and lift him off the ground. The Chief looked Qwax square in the eye - or at least tried to, because he was, as usual, stoned, and kept seeing big black spiders crawling up the walls.
"You leave this Fred case to the police, understand???" he yelled.
"Oh wow man, like, what is this shit?" said the master detective, slipping into the phony hippie idiom that always seemed to have a tranquilising effect on Doobie. "Like, what's with the bad vibes and the heavy agression, dude?"
It worked like a charm. The small red lights went out in Silas O'Doobie's eyes and he lowered Qwax to the floor. "Never you mind, you low-life piece of elderberry," ["Elderberry?" thought Qwax] "it's official police business. Now beat it afore I book you for loitering and murder."
Qwax didn't need to be told twice - he'd thought Doobie's good mood was too good to last anyway. As he scurried out the office door, he thought he heard the Police Chief take his chair and throw it out the window. Ah yes, thought the master detective as he hurriedly rushed into the elevator, my impeccable timing has saved me again!
The guards showing the supersleuth out were even more surly than those who'd shown him in, and wasted no opportunity to trip him up, mutter insults at him and even batter him around the head and neck with a broken bottle, but Jim Qwax was oblivious to all this. He was too busy wondering what was going on. Originally this had seemed a simple case - Binky Rabotnik had obviously murdered this Boraman guy, or was holding him for ransom, and all that Qwax would have to do is find out which and report back. However, it didn't seem that simple any more. What could be going on with the Police Chief? Why was he so interested? Qwax debated the idea of what kind of interest Doobie could have in odor-eaters, but gave that up as unrewarding. He'd never got close enough to Doobie's feet to know one way or the other on that score, and never intended to. Obviously this case wasn't as simple as he'd first thought.
The master detective landed in a heap at the bottom of Police HQ steps, the words "And stay out!" ringing in his ears. He picked himself up and knocked the dents out of his fedora. "Creeps!" he yelled, once the cops were out of hearing range. He made a mental note to see about the possibility of buying his dope elsewhere, and headed off downtown.
The police HQ stood on the cusp between the shiny, skyscraper-ridden central business district and the depressing low-rise sprawl of the Inner City, the old part of town where Jim Qwax had his headquarters. Twisting and turning in a network of tacky alleyways full of garbage and dead encyclopaedia salesmen, the master detective headed towards Dockside. This part of town had a bad name for itself - sailors coming in off the wharves looking for a good time, clashing with the obnoxious families of European immigrants who tended twelve to a room in the surrounding flophouses, the inhabitants of the sundry brothels along the way hanging out of second story windows and cheering on the pandemic street battles. But strangely enough, it wasn't really that tough a place. If you didn't look like you were either rich or puny, which Qwax wasn't, you'd get through unmolested ninety-percent of the time. Of course, the other ten-percent was at Whiskey's Tavern, which was where the master detective was heading.
Whiskey's Tavern was the bar which gave all the Inner City's other low-rent, high-octane booze barns a bad name. Built seven years ago between a glue factory and a funeral parlour, only built because some dickhead developer had bribed the planning officials to abolish the law for twenty-four hours, Whiskey's Tavern was notorious for three things - the strength of the beer, the strength of the stink in the toilets and the strength of Whiskey himself. The epynomous manager/owner/ bartender/bouncer/executioner of the bar was known to have a short temper, especially when soon-to-be-bleeding people asked "Is that your real name?". But he was a nice guy underneath - Jim Qwax had worked in the bar as kitchenhand, busboy and corpse-disposer just after leaving university, and had gotten to know that under the bushy beard, studded leather jacket and rippling pectoral muscles, Whiskey was a kind-hearted sort with a passion for sausages, TV wrestling and firm female buttocks. Due to that straight yuppie predilection for trying to appear tough and street-wise whilst still eating $25 hamburgers, the tavern which had originally become famous as the drinking place for hookers, dope dealers, petty thieves, private dicks, public dicks (like the City Council) and all the rest of the criminal element now had half the cool people in the city drinking there too, and rumour had it that Whiskey was now rather a rich man. If anyone knew what was going on with Boraman and Rabotnik, thought Qwax, it'd be him.
Squeezing between the dank concrete walls, Jim Qwax found himself at the door of the tavern, where one of Whiskey's cousins, commonly known as "Diesel Fuel" was filling in on the door.
"You donts gets in less youse properly dressed," uttered this walking monstrosity through three-inch thick lips, barring the master detective's way.
Jim Qwax cursed - Whiskey's warped idea of a dress code specificed black jeans, fluffy moccasins and a Metallica T-Shirt, and he was fucked if he was going to wear that kind of crap just to drink. He pointed back down the alleyway which he'd just come across. "Look!" he exclaimed. "An ice-cream truck!"
Instantly, the bouncer's piggy little eyes lit up, and he bounded away down the alleyway, already drooling. It was almost too easy.
The smell of sweat, vomit, spilt beer and sundry other essential bodily fluids hit Jim Qwax's nose a millisecond after a 1000-watt amplified heavy metal guitar solo hit his ears. Yes, Whiskey's Tavern was buzzing even at this early time of the day.
It was almost pitch black inside the bar, but even in mid-morning it was crammed full of serious drinkers. A three-piece thrash-metal combo whose bass drum proclaimed themselves to be "The Piss-Drinking Motherfucking Asslicking Chicken-Stomping Blues Band" did a passable Black Sabbath impersonation, including, as Qwax was gratified to note, a live bat. Making a mental note not to invite any of his SPCA friends here, he pushed through the hordes of metal heads of both genders towards the bar. Yes, this place was like a cross between the Seventh Circle of Hell and a truck-driver's convention. Jim spotted the man we was looking for and waved.
"Jim!" said Whiskey, cracking the heads of two patrons together. "Be with ya in a second, just gotta take out the trash, y'know."
Qwax nodded and looked for a seat at the bar. Finding one which was unoccupied, he made the mistake of sitting on it before checking why this might be the case. Oh well, he thought ruefully, his trousers had needed dry-cleaning anyway. Whiskey finished with the troublemakers and threw them out into the alleyway, where Diesel Fuel, icecreamless and in a bad mood, would no doubt deal with them in his own special way on his return. He wiped his hands and returned to the master detective.
"Well, Qwaxie, whadd'll ya have? On the house."
Qwax was impressed. "Get me one of those incredibly expensive cocktails with a dozen different kinds of booze in it, plus bits of fruit, whipped cream and a little umbrella. I've always wanted one of those."
Whiskey shot him a Look.
"Okay," sighed the master detective. "A McHeady's".
Whiskey drew off the pint and slid it in front of the master detective, who sculled it almost instantly. "So, what brings you here, Jim? Haven't seen you here in weeks?"
"Well, I've been busy, y'know, man," said supersleuth Jim Qwax. "The missing teenagers just keep going on going missing, and while it pays the rent when Sharleen's in a rough patch, it's deathly dull. Plus, almost getting defenestrated by the Police Chief every coupla weeks isn't exactly the most fun way to spend a lifetime."
"The Chief, eh?" said Whiskey, motioning some poor broke student to go serve the customers who were in danger of breaking up the bar, and to tell him what "defenstrate" meant later on. "He still peddling wacky tobaccy?"
"Hell yeah," said Qwax. "Hey, he gave me some on the house this very morning!" He took out his plastic bag to show the barkeep.
Whiskey whistled. "He can afford to give that much away? Gee, either that's pretty low-quality shit or he doesn't need the cash anymore. Which doesn't sound much like Doobie. You hear his wife's pregnant again? I do hear it's twins."
Jim grimaced. That'd explain the Chief's bad mood, of course, but what do you expect from taking the Pope seriously?
He turned back to the barkeep, and slid three bucks over the bar. "Throw me up another McHeady's, willya? My head hurts."
Whiskey nodded, drawing up another pint. "Good band, eh?"
Qwax didn't had anything nice to say, so he said nothing. Instead he said, "Listen, man, I didn't just come down here to drink myself silly. I need some info on what Binky Rabotnik might be up to."
Whiskey almost dropped the beermug in shock. "Oh shit, Jim, you're not messing with Binky again, are you? After what happened last time?"
Qwax grabbed his beer out of Whiskey's hand before anything nasty happened to it. "Heh, when Sophie Boraman is paying me $10,000 in advance, I'd mess with Beelzebub's minions..."
Whiskey looked puzzled. "You said Sophie Boraman?"
"Yeah, the odor-eater bigwig. You know her?" replied the master detective, sculling his beer.
"Not so much, but I was under the impression that Binky did. About a couple of weeks back, he came in here with some short babe with a whip who he kept calling 'Ms Boraman'. All over him like a cheap suit, she was. Of course, I couldn't hear what they were talking about - they were sitting in a far corner surrounded by his goons. But I did notice one thing that impressed me very much..."
"What? What?" asked Qwax, pushing his mug back for a refill.
"That woman put away twelve double Kahluas and didn't even stagger!" said Whiskey, admiration in every syllable.
The master detective was not prepared to deal with that sort of information sober. Gratefully receiving his third pint, his thoughts began to chase each other around the inside of his head, mewling softly. Not only was the Police Chief in thick with his quarry, but his client also? What in the name of Dobbs was going on here?
"Word on the street, though, Jim," said Whiskey, leaning forward to whisper conspiratorily and in the process treating Jim to his second dose of halitosis in so many hours, "is that Binky's planning the biggest thing to hit this city since the atom bomb, and then some."
Now that *really* didn't do anything for Jim Qwax's piece of mind. A criminal genius allied with the power of legit finance capital? Hell, they could probably foreclose on the city, like in Robocop 2. Jim Qwax didn't find a future full of scum like Binky and insane women like Boraman a friendly prospect. He thanked Whiskey moodily for his help and turned around, just in time to see Diesel Fuel come flying past his face.
Qwax instinctively ducked, but the huge bouncer wasn't out for revenge. In fact, he was out for the count. He crashed into the stone wall at the end of the bar, lightly denting it, and stayed there. In walked the people responsible, large individuals in tailored Italian suits. Ten of them. Only one person in this city could afford ten well-dressed thugs to hang around them, and he was standing in the centre of them. Yes, dear reader, it was Binky "The Shrew" Rabotnik himself.
Except for the obligatory gangland shades, you could have mistaken the Shrew for a staid executive at some television network. Which, indeed, he was. Quite apart from all his illegal activities, Binky Rabotnik owned a television network, notorious for buying up the crappiest shows around, sticking them with a 40% advertisment component and then shooting straight to the top of the ratings by generous exposure of tits-n-ass programs during ratings sweeps. On top of all that, the creep had the temerity to screen sitcoms that made "Punky Brewster" and "Small Wonder" look like laugh riots. Most citizens of the city were prepared to tolerate gunrunning, bad drugs and even judicious assassination, but TV sitcoms had made Binky Rabotnik an unpopular man. He pulled up to the bar and ordered a pint of tequila. Yes, a pint. That's the other thing Binky was famous for - an indestructible liver, and the money to carry out destruct-testing on it.
He turned around, and appeared to notice the master detective for the first time. "Well, well," he said, his weasly face splitting in a huge grin. "If it isn't good old Dogfood Qwax. Got the tire-tracks off your head now, I see?"
Qwax grimaced, not only for the use of his forbidden college nickname, not only for the memory of the last time that Binky had run into, or more accurately, *over* him, but for the third wave of halitosis to sweep over him that morning. "Apparently, Binky. Hey, I like your prime-time schedule these days. Topless Bullfighting and Naked Twister Challenge must be packing them in, no?"
Binky grinned. "We give the people what they want, Dogfood. You gotta problem with that?"
"None whatsover, Binky," said the master detective, starting on his fourth pint of McHeady's. This might well have been making him more foolhardy than usual, which would explain why his next words were "Tell me, is it true that your parents were brother and sister, or do you just have six toes on your left foot for some other reason?"
Instantly, the master detective regretted it. Or, more accurately, he regretted the ten pistols suddenly held to his neck. Binky waved his goons back, leant over the master detective and spat in his face.
"Looking for trouble are we, Qwax?" he hissed.
"Well, I dunno about you, but I'm looking for some clean trousers," said the master detective, deciding to cut to the chase."And some information. Tell me, are you hanging around with Sophie Boraman for a business reason, or is it just that you dig chicks with whips?"
That seemed to enrage Rabotnik more than the 'inbred' gag. "Oh really? And just how, pray, do you know about *that*?"
Qwax gulped. The man had just used "pray" in cold blood - he'd be lucky to get out with no broken limbs. He kept silent - somehow, he sensed that revealing his client's identity would not be a bright idea.
"You told him, didn't ya, you creep?" yelled the master criminal at poor Whiskey, cowering behind the bar. "Well, I'll show ya how we deal with stoolies in this town!" He sculled his tequila, eliciting gasps of amazement from the assembled patrons, and motioned his thugs. They dropped Jim Qwax, already pretty far gone from all that beer, on the bar, surrounded their boss and headed for the door. As they reached it, Binky turned around and yelled:
"BURN THIS FUCKING PLACE TO THE GROUND!"
"It really isn't my day, is it?" thought the master detective, slumping
forward
onto his face as everyone else rushed for the exits.
Qwax, who was well used to taking orders from little voices in his head, got up, tottered towards the door, slipped on the flammable material now covering the floor and fell flat on his face. He stayed there a moment.
"Oh shit! Jim, get your bony ass *out of here*! I don't want you in the way when the shit starts to hit the fan!"
Strange, thought the well-pissed master detective. When did the little voices in my head start sounding like Whiskey?
"Ah, to hell with it."
Qwax felt a light splashing as one of Binky's goons decided to see if supersleuths burned any faster than disreputable taverns. The master detective, who didn't really have the same interest in the subject, crawled towards the door on his stomach, Binky's goons kicking him in the head as he inched past.
Suddenly, the most heinous noise heard since the last time the Qwax household had had beans for dinner ripped through Whiskey's Tavern. Binky's goons turned around just in time to see Whiskey himself, toting a crowbar in each fist, smash them upside the head. He had two out for the count before the other knew what was going on. Jim Qwax turned around as he reached the door, just in time to see Whiskey pick up a large match, the kind one used to light gas ovens.
"How would the *rest* of you like to burn, shit-for-brains?"
The remaining goon appeared to take a quick decision, and pulled out a match of his very own. Ah, thought Qwax, almost out the door, the classical Mexican standoff. How sad that I'm not going to be around to watch it!
The master detective pulled himself into the alley, dragged himself to the door and tottered rather unsteadily towards the sunlight. Expecting to see the twenty-yard-long limo of Binky Rabotnik still parked outside, he got the shock of his life. There instead were three City Police SWAT Team cars, bristling with armed cops. Qwax raised his hands automatically as three of the creeps came across, threw him against a car and frisked him.
"You stay right where you are, unnerstan'?" hissed a cop who appeared to get his image from re-runs of "CHiPs".
"ALL RIGHT THE REST OF YOU FOOLS," shouted a familiar voice from a squad car. "THIS IS POLICE CHIEF O'DOOBIE, AND WE'VE RECEIVED A TIP-OFF THAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN FOR THE INSURANCE MONEY. COME OUT WITH YER HANDS UP OR *WE* SET FIRE TO IT!"
Isn't that just like the Shrew, thought the master detective, face down in the paintwork on the roof of a squad car. Prepared to sacrifice his own goons to make sure no blame attaches to him? This man makes Lex Luthor look like a bleeding-hearted liberal!
Slowly and reluctantly, Binky's goon emerged, dragging his two fallen comrades behind him. After them staggered Whiskey, helping Diesel Fuel who was still a big groggy to walk. He was attempting to explain.
"Look, fellows, you've got it wrong - "
A single round from a police shotgun punctured the concrete just above Whiskey's head. "Don't speak till yer spoken to," shouted a cop who appeared to get *his* image from "The Dukes of Hazzard".
Jim Qwax had just about as much of this as he was prepared to take. "Um. Doobie? S'me, Qwax. I'm all paid up for the fortnight, so kindly tell your goons to cease and/or desist, okay?"
A slam of car doors and the faint odor of underarms told the master detective that the Police Chief had emerged from his squad car and was coming over to talk to the master detective. "Book those other bozo's for disturbing the peace," he yelled to his men. The five large individuals were quickly surrounded by cops who appeared to get their image from the Germans on "Hogan's Heroes".
The police chief leant down so he could hiss in the master detective's earhole. "And just what might *you* be doing here, Mr Qwax?"
"Getting a drink, Doobie, what else do you think I get up to in bars? Lapdancing?"
Doobie signalled, and the cop hit Jim Qwax on the back of the head with his nightstick. "Watch yer words, Qwax, or you'll have other charges to add to disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, and... oh *yes*, drug trafficking!"
Qwax was at a bit of a loss about the last one. "What?" he said.
The cop, whilst still holding down the supersleuth's head with one hand, reached into his detective satchel and pulled out the plastic bag the police chief had given him earlier in the day.
"You can't bust me for having hash on me, you nimrod!"
"Hash, eh?" chuckled the police chief. He signalled to his cop, who pulled the master detective up by his hair so he could face the police chief.
Silas O'Doobie emptied the bag onto the pavement, revealling what had been hidden in the midst of the fragrant green weed - a small bag of highly suspicious looking white powder. Doobie dipped his finger in, tasted some and grinned. "Looks like pure white Colombian to me, farmboy."
"You're *crazy*! Possession of coke isn't even illegal anymore!"
"Trafficking in it is, Qwaxie. You got far too much here for personal consumption. Going to sell it to schoolkids were you, you double-dyed bastard?"
Qwax was really angry now. "You gave me that yourself, you overbloated, pseudo-Catholic, lard-assed corrupt son of a motherless GOAT!"
Doobie signalled and the cop hit the master detective upside the head with his nightstick again. "Add those to the charges against him: slanderous accusations, and use of foul language!"
Qwax struggled to break free, but it was no use. As he was shoved into the back of a squad car, he thought to himself: I've been pissed off my skull, almost defenestrated, almost barbecued, abused both the Police Chief and the City's meanest gangster, and been arrested, and it's not even eleven a.m. yet. Now that's what I call a full day, he thought ruefully as he was driven away.
"What about my one phone call?" yelled Qwax to the hulking behemoths who had carried him there.
"All lines outs is busy," chuckled one of them, who made Diesel Fuel look like a seven-stone weakling. "You gets phone call later, Mr Master Detectiff. Hur hur hur."
"Hur hur hur," agreed his cohort, clearly not the intellectual of the two.
The two pachyderms in blue uniforms slammed the cell door behind them and stomped off. "Creeps!" yelled Jim Qwax after them, sotto voce.
Looking around him at the greasy concrete walls covered with obscene graffiti which did nothing to cheer him up, the supersleuth sat his detecting ass down on a vermin-riddled mattress and took stock of his situation. Okey dokey, he thought to himself. Let's be at least semi-logical about this. Boraman suspects Binky of hijacking her brother. Boraman was, at least until recently, in league with Binky. Doobie got way mad when I mentioned Fred Boraman to him. Binky's goons try to trash the Tavern - Doobie's goons turn up and arrest them, and me, and presumably Whiskey while they were at it. Doobie doesn't want me to make contact out. Now, if I were prepared to suspect our loyal boys and girls in blue of being corrupt, power-crazed weinerbrains, which they are, I'd think that our dear Police Chief didn't want me finding Fred, or messing with Binky. But why? "BUT WHY???" he yelled out loud.
"Keep the yelling out loud down!" shouted something which Jim Qwax had assumed to be a bundle of dirty rags on the top bunk. "Some of us are trying to concentrate on masturbation up here!"
"Sorry," muttered the master detective glumly. He debated whether to engage in conversation with the foul old man, just on the grounds of something to do, but decided against it. He needed to get the rest of this McHeady's out of his system so he could think clearly. He curled up on the mattress and attempted to get some sleep...
On the other side of town, on the third floor of the Potts Chambers on Seven Sisters Street, the North Korean Deputy Ambassador was struggling not-too-strenously against the silken ropes that tied him to Jim Qwax's office desk. The fact that he was also naked and oiled should not cause you too much surprise. Beside the desk, tickling the Stalinist functionary with a fly whisk, was Kitty Cattz, dressed in a plain grey khaki suit.
"Again! Say it!" she barked in a clipped accent.
"I admit it!" he cried. "I've been a capitalist tool in the pay of the Americans, Russians, Yugoslavians, Fijians *and* the Luxembourgians! I've said bad things about the Party, forced my own mother to eat Big Macs at gunpoint and bootlegged tapes of amoral imperialist musicians like Michael Bolton in the People's Democratic Republic! Oh, I've been a *bad* boy!" The last phrase had an edge of pleading to it.
"You're a disgrace to your uniform!" barked Cattz, removing her top. "As Functionary of the People's Corrective Agency, it is my duty to punish you by spanking with a copy of the collected works of Kim Il Sung!"
"Oh mercy, Comrade!" said the Korean, grinning from ear to ear.
Just then there came a loud knocking at the outer door. Cattz froze for a moment, hoping like hell Jim hadn't come back from the Tavern early to find her using *his* desk. If he had, her ass was surely green and growing.
"Wait here, you foul traitor," she said, putting her top back on and heading towards the door. The Korean nodded, strangling in the S-M equivalent of coitus interruptus.
Kitty entered her outer office and closed the door. Through the glass into the hallway she could just make out a figure in trenchcoat and fedora. Oh shit, she thought, hurriedly thinking up a good excuse.
She opened the door. "Look Jim, I'm really sorry, but he offered to pay extra and WHO THE DING-DONG FUCK ARE YOU?"
The thin, nervous-looking cop on the other side of the door blanched a bit under Kitty's abusive assault, and fished out some ID. "Detective Inspector Cameron Fenn, City Police," he tried to bark, but ended up gurgling. "We have a warrant to search these premises," he said, gesturing at the two goons in blue uniforms standing behind him.
Kitty, flushed and worried, grabbed the many-times folded piece of paper from the cop's hands and studied it. "What the hell's this supposed to mean? Is Jim in trouble?"
"With a capital T, I'm afraid, Ms..."
"Cattz," said the sexy secretary, sensing that revealing her real name wasn't such a hot idea at this juncture. "Kitty Cattz," she added defiantly, expecting the obvious reply.
"Really? He-he-he," said Fenn, chuckling lewdly. "I suppose you give really good pussy, huh?"
"Great. I haven't heard that particular joke in, oh, twenty minutes," growled Cattz, in no mood for low humour. "If you'll just give me a moment to tidy a few things up, I'll be right with you."
"I'm afraid not, Ms Cattz," said the cop, motioning the two uniformed thugs behind him to barge past her. "I don't want you doing anything like, say, throwing filing cabinets out the window, would we?"
Damn, thought Kitty, plan A down the tubes. "Look, um, Cameron, can I call you that?" she said, trailing after the cops into the outer office.
"No," said the cop, motioning his goons to rustle through the papers on Kitty's desk.
"Okay, Inspector Fenn, would you mind telling me what's going on?"
"Simple, Ms Cattz, or whatever your real name is," said the inspector, as papers flew around the room like confetti. "Your employer, Mr James Archibald Qwax, is suspected of trafficking in narcotics without a licence, cutting it with Drano, selling it to blind under-age boy scouts, that sort of thing. We suspect him of being in league with a certain odor-eater heiress name of Sophia Boraman, and we're looking for evidence of such an association."
Kitty really began to worry about what was going on now, as the cops took the drawers out of her desk and emptied them on the floor. "Look, officer, I'm sure I can sort this out," she began, as the goons ran through her private papers with big thick clammy fingers. "Is Jim in jail?"
"I'm not at liberty to reveal that," said Fenn, stiffly.
"Okay, then, I won't give you a blow job," said Kitty, sweetly.
"On second thoughts, maybe I am," said the cop hurriedly. "Jim Qwax is indeed in police custody, along with sundry other conspirators we picked up at a disreputable tavern in the Docklands area. Bail is set at $10,000 each. Now, what was that you said about blow jobs?" Kitty sighed, and hoped the cops wouldn't smash her mouthwash while they searched.
Fortunately, one of the huge cops picked that time to interrupt. "Boss? Dere's another room thru here!"
"It'll have to wait till later," said Fenn to Kitty. "What's through that room?"
Kitty grimaced at the thought. "Uh, that's Jim's private office, but there's nothing of interest in there..."
"Really? Well, we'll be the judge of that," said the cop, all thoughts of oral gratification gone from his mind to be replaced by promotion fantasies. "Where's the key?"
"I swallowed it," Kitty lied.
Fenn didn't have time to argue even with incredibly cute half-Greek secretaries. "Smash that there door open!" he ordered his men. One of the huge cops grinned, and pulled out his nightstick. Taking a reasonably large run-up, he ran at the door to Jim Qwax's office and smashed it open. The other three ran through after him, to be greeted with the sight of the North Korean Deputy Ambassador, naked, oiled, tied to a desk, and getting rather cold and impatient. As he was also built like a sumo wrestler, this was probably not a sight that the cops were prepared to handle so soon after lunch.
"Are these people going to spank me too?" he asked.
Kitty turned to Cameron Fenn, who appeared to be going several different shades of crimson. "Well, big boy?" she asked. "You want to spank him too? I'm sure he'd love you too..."
"That... won't be necessary," stammered the chief cop. "Well, Ms Cattz, I think we've gotten all we came for. The initials SB in your appointment diary for this morning look like sufficient evidence to implicate your boss in the biggest coke deal this year. I... think we can let things rest for now. Um... carry on..." He motioned to his men, and they scurried back into the hall, slamming both doors behind them.
"What, no blow job?" called Cattz after them, grinning.
"Ur... excuse me?" asked the Korean.
"Oh, right. Sorry to keep you waiting. No, actually, I'm not! It's
what you deserve for being an enemy of the people! Now BEND OVER!" she
barked, picking up a very thick book.
Jim Qwax, probably much like the reader, was rather disgusted by this, and had only managed to Catch a couple hours shut-eye. Fortunately, this was as much as he needed to get his fine detectin' mind up to full speed, free of the depredations of McHeady's. In this state of heightened understanding, he could see the patterns of the case so far stretching out behind him.
Doobie wanted him out of the way, that was sure - it was also sure that he had some vested interest in Fred Boraman not being found. Or, at least, not being found by Qwax. Was he in on the deal that Binky and Sophie appeared to have been cutting, before someone decided to up the ante by means of kidnap? If not, did he *want* to be? What was that deal, anyway?
The master detective's musings were interrupted by a clanging at the cell door. "Qwax!" barked an ugly cop. "The Chief wants a word with you!"
Oh no, thought the master detective, struggling to his feet. The third dose of that oh-so-special O'Doobie halitosis in one day!
"And stop that, you little creep," barked the cop, "you'll go blind."
"Only if it hits me in the eye," cackled the dirty old man.
Quick as a flash, the cop marched across to the top bunk and pummelled the onanist into unconsciousness with her nightstick. "Only way to deal with these creeps," she snorted, handcuffing Jim Qwax and leading him out of the cell, up the stairs.
Judging by the air in this place, thought Qwax as he walked along, I'm not going up, so much as along. His suspicions were confirmed as he was frogmarched into a small, dank room lousy with cigar smoke and forced roughly into a chair. Any illusions that this was going to be a civilised chat were dispelled as he was bound hand and foot.
Around the room stood three large and ugly looking cops, the ugliest of which was Police Chief Silas O'Doobie. He chuckled as the master detective was restrained. "Didn't I *tell* you to leave this Fred case to the police, Qwaxie?" he cackled, puffing on a cigar that looked like Madonna would not be ashamed to use it as a stage prop.
"I dunno. Didn't you?" asked the master detective, not in the mood.
Doobie signalled, and the cop who'd brought Qwax in hit him over the wrists with a rubber hose. "Rule one, Mr Qwax, you answer my questions quickly, quietly, thoroughly, and honestly, is that clear?"
Jim Qwax, howling in pain, managed a nod.
Doobie smiled, stood up, and went to sit on the desk. "Right, now, Mr Qwax, would you like to make a formal confession?"
"To what crime?" muttered the master detective.
"Illegal narcotics trafficking, attempted arson, the kidnapping of Fred Boraman, murder, rape, high treason, the sacking of a major city, being a wise guy, listening to progressive rock music, bad dress sense, malicious lingering... you want me to continue?"
Qwax felt a glimmer of hope. Doobie was obviously blitzed off his face, as usual, and thus Qwax had the upper hand - intellectually speaking. On the other hand, the man was a fucking nutter, and he was currently surrounded by several thugs just panting to beat the shit out of the master detective. Jim Qwax chose his next words carefully.
"Go and get fucked, tosspot," he politely replied.
Doobie signalled and Qwax got the garden hose over the knuckles again. "Oh, and use of foul language," he added, grinning as the master detective yelped. "I have a confession all ready here for you to sign, Mr Qwax. With luck, you won't get more than 10 years, and you'll be out in three if you play your cards right. That'll teach you to mess with me."
"Well, it wasn't as much fun as messing with your wife," said the master detective happily, thinking if he got Doobie mad he might do something stupid. Like what, he had no idea.
Doobie sighed, reached over and pulled Jim Qwax, chair and all up level with his eyes. "Qwax, you know too much about Fred!!!" he bellowed.
"I don't know shit about Fred!" the master detective replied, dangling three feet off the ground and wondering whether his strategy was a good idea after all.
"DON'T CONTRADICT ME!!!" yelled the police chief, throwing the master detective across the room, to lie dazed in a corner. Doobie seemed at a loss as to how to follow this up for a moment. The master detective was glad of the relief.
Doobie stood stock still, as if listening to little voices in his head for a moment. Visibly calming down, he sat down and smiled. "Okay, Jim, we can be civilised here. Physical violence won't get us anywhere."
"It got me all the way across the room," groaned Jim Qwax, as his stool was put back upright by the cops.
Doobie chuckled. "Bring out the syringe," he said. One of the cops reached into a medical kit and extracted the aforementioned article, and approached the master detective.
"What's that, Doobie?" asked Jim Qwax warily. "Some kind of truth serum? You expect me to talk?"
Doobie cackled. "No, Mr Qwax, it's actually liquid LSD. I expect you to go completely insane! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" he added, trying to sound evil, but not suceeding.
"HELP! HELP! SHIT!" yelled the master detective as the needle came near his arm...
A long, green and exceptionally sexy Mercedes pulled up in front of Police Headquarters - or, at least, tried to. The chauffeur, who'd been hired from Student Job Search, hadn't actually mastered the concept of braking yet, and ended up driving straight up the steps of the law enforcement building and through the front door. Cops of various descriptions screamed and dived for cover, much like the people at the train station at the end of Silver Streak.
As broken glass and masonry tinkled to the floor, and cops emerged from their hiding places all muttering variations on "what the fuck was THAT?", Kitty Cattz, the sexy secretary of the master detective Jim Qwax, emerged from the rear door and sashayed round to the driver's window.
"Okay, sweetie, I think that's enough for one day. Why don't you take the rest of the day off, hmmm? Here's $100 for bus fare." The grateful student clambered out of the wreckage and headed for the hills. Kitty turned with a smile and wandered over to the reception desk, whose attendant cop was still starting slack-jawed at the chaos in his lobby.
"Hello, Officer," she started pleasantly, "sorry about the mess, I rang before. My name's Kathleen Katzenjammer, and I'm here to bail out Jim Qwax."
"Huh? Oh, right," muttered the cop, snapping out of her trance and getting down to business. She tapped a few keys on the large computer terminal in front of her. "Um, I'm sorry, Ms Katzenjammer..."
"Doctor," said Kitty, brusquely. She had never in fact finished her PhD, but it paid to impress functionaries.
"Uh... okay, Dr Katzenjammer, but I'm afraid that bail has been denied in the Qwax case."
Kitty looked sharply at the cop. "What? But I spoke with the bail sergeant on the phone before, and she said..."
"I'm sorry, but it appears to have been overridden. On the orders of the Police Chief himself. It appears that Mr Qwax has been declared a menace to public security, and he'll have to remain in custody until his court hearing, tentatively scheduled to next week."
Kitty wasn't taking this kind of shit - she'd studied law at varsity, but had found it unrewarding as a profession, not least because of having to wear a business suit and silly-assed robes. "Oh, and I suppose that you've never heard of the right of habeus corpus, then?" she said, smiling sweetly.
"The Public Security Act overrides that, Dr Katzenjammer," said the cop, apparently on the verge of losing her temper.
"Wasn't that repealed last month?" asked Cattz, beginning to worry.
"Still in force till the *end* of the month, Dr Katzenjammer," said the cop, turning towards her papers and pointedly shuffling. "Until then, I'm afraid that Mr Qwax is a guest of the City."
Kitty was plenty mad at this stage. She launched herself over the table and grabbed the protesting cop from the lapels. "Look, you, I'm sick and tired of having to take shit from corrupt functionaries! The greatest detective this city has ever known is probably down in a cellar somewhere having to fend off big hairy guys called Bruno, and I for one am not going to stand here arguing with the likes of you while his anal virginity is at stake! UNDERSTAND???"
The policeofficer thought quickly. "Um, look, Kathleen - may I call you that? - um, what I can do is immediately release a couple of Mr Qwax's acquaintances that were arrested with him at the Tavern. If you come back early tomorrow morning, I'm sure we can have it sorted out with the Chief. Will this content you?"
The sexy secretary subsided, and unhanded the shaking cop. "It must,
of force," she sighed.
"Again! Say it!" barked the apparition.
"Okay! I am Elvis's love child! Will this satisfy you?"
Skippy grinned, turning into an elephant. "Excuse me," it said, "I gotta make a couple of trunk calls."
Even Jim Qwax could tell something bad was going on. "Look, this is really beginning to piss me off," he said to the multi-coloured aardvark on his shoulder. "Why is everyone around me turning into a bad pun? And how the ding-dong fuck did I get into the Himalayas in the first place?"
"Ah, Grasshopper, you have much to learn," said the aardvark sagely.
"Figures," muttered Qwax, as Skippy the Bush Elephant swung a glacier past his head again.
Back in the real world, a couple of cops sat beside the twitching, gibbering and drooling body of the master detective, occasionally whispering weird little things in his ear to set him onto an even worse trip than before.
On the other side of the room, Police Chief O'Doobie was discussing the case with the doctor who had performed the injection on Jim Qwax.
"You sure you gave him enough?" asked the Chief, popping a pill.
"Absolutely," said the doctor. "By the time it wears off, it will have left no traces at all on him - except that he will be utterly, totally and clinically insane. Not able to molest any more poor schoolgirls!"
"Eh? Oh, right," muttered the Chief, remembering the bullshit story he'd told the doctor to get him in on the scheme. "Or to conduct any sort of rational thought, am I right? And no way of telling how it happened?"
"Of course not," glowed the doctor, secure in Doobie's promise of a recommendation to the Forensics Coucil for this. "Your secret vigilante work will remain a mystery, Chief!"
"Yeah, well, I ask no gratitude," smiled Doobie, inwardly cackling at the gullibility of some people. He marched over to the master detective and pulled one eyelid open. "Everything all right in there, Qwaxie?" he chortled.
Jim Qwax attempted to focus on the large statue of the title character from Robot Monster which had just lumbered up his peak. "Hey man, you're beautiful," he muttered, unsteadily.
Doobie let the eyelid fall. "Beautiful, just beautiful!" he yelled, doing an impromptu jig. The master detective gave up even trying to think as the drug took him deeper, and deeper...
An alarm clock rattled out its shrill buzz as Jim Qwax was jerked out of the blackness into which he'd fallen. Strangely, he appeared to be neither in a dim and dingy cell in Police Headquarters, nor on any sort of mountain. He felt cool sheets beneath him and a warm duvet atop. He risked opening one eye, wondering if the aardvark had gone yet. He was more than midly surprised to see the roof of his own room. He flipped over on his side to see his alarm clock still going - the time was seven a.m., on that same dismal March morning. He struggled upwards to see Sharleen, clad only in her flimsy nightgown standing at the door of his room, carrying breakfast on a tray. The master detective was befuddled as to what he'd done to deserve breakfast in bed, let alone as to why his favourite song, "Told the Judge to Suck My Dick" by Doktors for "Bob", was playing on the stereo.
"Hungry, Jim?" asked Sharleen?
"Great Goddess, yes!" cried the master detective. "Oh great, so it was all a dream!"
"What was, Jim?" asked his lover, putting down the food on the bedside table and sitting beside him.
"I dreamt I was in a police cell being injected with LSD!" the master detective grinned, tucking into scrambled eggs on toast with gusto.
"Um, Jim?" said Sharleen nervously.
"Uh-huh?" said Qwax, his mouth full of scrambled egg.
"Actually, *this* is a dream. You're still in the cell."
"Oh FUCK." muttered the master detective, pissed off to the max. He chewed his eggs, thinking for a moment. "Really?" he asked.
Sharleen nodded, sadly.
"In that case, I'd better make the most of it before I wake up. Wanna fuck like crazed weasels?"
"I thought you'd never ask," grinned the imaginary Sharleen, grabbing the master detective and pushing him down onto the bed.
Back in the real world for a moment, as the early afternoon sun coasted its way above the city, Kitty Cattz led a slightly bruised and battered Whiskey and Diesel Fuel out of the slightly wrecked entrance to the Police Headquarters, down to her Mercedes - now driverless, thankfully. Cattz ushered her charges into the back seat, where they gazed around in awe.
"Nice wheels, Kitty!" said Whiskey, suitably impressed.
Cattz blushed. "Just rented, Whiskey - although they do give me the option to buy in another month or two..."
"Qwaxie paying you enough, then?" grinned the tavern owner.
"Heh," said the sexy secretary, getting in the front seat and starting the engine. "Bugger all. This is on cash from my other occupation."
Whiskey nodded, sagely. Kitty had been one of his best customers when she'd been a law student, and they'd been good friends with each other for almost as long as they had been with Jim Qwax. Diesel Fuel was already asleep, sucking his thumb.
"So," said Kitty, "Binky tried to burn the place down when he heard that Jim was taking the Boraman case, and tried to put the blame on you two?"
"Yup," said Whiskey, "and I think the Police Chief wanted nothing better than to have Qwaxie behind bars, as well."
Cattz thought briefly. "But Doobie and Binky can't be in cahoots - they've hated each other since Adam was a cowboy, surely?"
"That's the wierd bit, all right," said the tavern owner, scratching his beard thoughtfully. "But listen, Kitty, I think Jim's in real trouble. I heard a couple of cops talking, and they were saying that the Chief was planning to deal with Jim once and for all. What can we do?"
Silence for a moment. Then:
"We have no choice," said Cattz, turning towards the ruins of the Tavern with a flick of the wrist. "We've gotta break Jim out."
"I hoped you were going to say something like that," grinned Whiskey.
The police officers, like all the bad guys in bad action flicks, weren't hanging around to make sure their prisoner didn't escape, and that's never been known to be a good move. Jim Qwax, therefore, was alone in a police dungeon, quietly hallucinating. However, at this precise moment he was having the wet dream to end all wet dreams, and didn't appear to want to be rescued. "Oh Sharleen, you're a love albatross!" he burbled.
Obligingly, the imaginary Sharleen turned into an albatross for him.
On the other side of town, way over in Docklands, Diesel Fuel stood behind the bar of Whiskey's Tavern, looking uncomfortable in his hellishly undersized bartender's apron, vainly trying to remember what went into a screwdriver. The bar was beginning to fill up again, the local patrons finally realising that the place had not, despite all indications, burnt to the ground. On the floor, under the direction of Diesel Fuel, a gang of dirt-poor students were mopping up the petrol on their hands and knees. Actually, it was probably one of the least toxic substances that had been spilled on that floor recently.
"Make sure you gets all of it," chortled Diesel Fuel, adding a quiet curse as the vodka bottle slipped between his chubby fingers and hit the floor. "Fuck," he said eloquently, motioning a student to gather up the broken glass. "Where's dat nogood cousin of mine gone?"
Where Whiskey had gone, indeed, was someplace very special. Down in the dank storeroom of the tavern, he was looking behind a group of antique liqueur bottles for something. The sexy secretary, Kath "Kitty Cattz" Katzenjammer, stood behind him and shivered.
"Found it yet?" she asked. "It's bloody cold in here..."
"Nothing my patrons like less than warm McHeady's", muttered Whiskey, "except for the Police, dope shortages and soap. Ah! here it is!"
He picked up a rather large green-looking key. "Now," he grinned, "prepare to be amazed!"
Loping over to the other side of the storeroom, he singlehandedly shoved a huge stack of beer kegs out of the way, revealing a musty old door that had been completely hidden. Unlocking it with the key, he opened it up to reveal a completely pitch-black room. He motioned Kitty over, an insane grin on his face. Kitty followed him towards the doorway of the room, pulling her pink jacket tightly around her. Whiskey grinned at her once more, and switched the light on.
The sexy secretary had really not known what to expect. The Batmobile, perhaps, or an antique distillery as an outside chance. What she had really not expected was the biggest cache of arms and ammunition she'd ever seen, even on Chuck Norris movies.
"Ta-dah!" shouted the greasy bartender.
Kitty stared around her, dumbstruck. There were not only pistols, rifles and shotguns, but machine guns, flamethrowers, bazookas, hand-grenades, molotov cocktails and what she really hoped wasn't a small tank up the back.
"The fights in here get pretty aggro once in a while," said Whiskey by way of explanation. "It pays to be prepared."
Kitty finally found words. "How the hell could you afford all this stuff?" she stammered. "And why aren't you in jail for it?"
Whiskey walked over and casually tested an ammo belt for weight. "I got an uncle who's minister of defence in a South American banana republic - he gets it to me under the table. And it's all legit, too."
"What about the gun control laws?" asked Cat, still dazed.
"I draw your attention," said the bartender picking up an AK-47, "to the section in the Public Safety Laws that allows arms caches to be kept by officers in the City Militia to be handed out to members in case of a threat to public order. You didn't know I was a Section Commander, did you?"
Kath shook her head dumbly.
"No, well, with all the fights we get in here I thought it a good idea to get some firearms training. Anyway, in this place no-one's really going to question me if I requisition a couple of hand grenades to calm things down a bit." He threw Cattz a flamethrower, and she caught it deftly. "And if Jim Qwax, the sexiest master detective alive, being held illegally in jail isn't threat to public order, I dunno what is. Let's go."
Cattz began picking up ammunition, grinning.
***
Speaking of the sexiest master detective alive, he was experiencing his first taste of consensual inter-species love making. Sharleen had gotten tired of being an albatross, and had gone through crazed weasel, amoeba, Yeti and octopus, before going back to human - well, more or less, since Jim Qwax had asked her to keep the eight arms. The master detective was currently being erotically Catered for by something that looked very like one of the more esoteric Hindu goddesses.
The master detective began realising that being completely psychotic could have its upside. Sharleen held him in all eight arms while he watched the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (in which they now were) turn paisley and psychedelic in turn. Jehovah himself had stopped giving Adam his finger and was now giving the finger to Jim Qwax, who gladly returned it.
"I don't believe in you either, you creep!" he chortled.
Suddenly a knock came on the door which had apparently just materialised in front of him. Jim Qwax turned and smiled at his lover obligingly. Sharleen grinned, and extended one of her tentacles to open it.
The door opened and in walked a whip-wielding love temptress. Since Jim Qwax was lying on an exceptionally comfy futon, he couldn't go arse over tip out the window again, but there was no doubt that it was Sophie Boraman again, appearing just as she had that very morning.
Sophie sighed. "Get up, you greasy male naked bastard," she barked. "I'm Sophie Boraman and we have an appointment!"
Jim Qwax scrambled to his feet and wrapped a duvet around him. "Of course, of course," he muttered, getting a strange feeling of deja vu, "only I was expecting you..."
"No you weren't," chuckled Sophie, sitting on the bed and removing her hat. "I wanted to know what the fuck you're doing hallucinating disgusting perversions when you're supposed to be looking for my brother!"
The master detective wasn't prepared to take that kind of shit from (what was probably) a hallucination. "I dunno, I mean, I didn't ask to go on this trip, you know!" he said in a hurt tone. "Oh, by the way, this is my lover Sharleen. She usually has only two arms."
"Hi," said Octo-Sharleen, turning a friendly orange.
"Charmed, I'm sure," said Sophie Boraman. "Anyway, Jim, I didn't come here to bitch at you."
"What for, in that case?" asked the master detective, although he had a sneaking suspicion of the answer. This suspicion was confirmed as Sophie Boraman quickly stripped naked.
Jim Qwax was really not prepared to deal with this. "Um, yeah, cool, well gee I'd *love* to, but Sharleen's very monogamous, I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to share me..."
"Jim, haven't you been paying attention?" said the tentacled monstrosity on the bed. "I'm not the real Sharleen. I'm your *fantasy* of her. I'd be more than happy for a threesome!"
Yes, thought Jim Qwax, as he happily under two warm bodies, a lot indeed can be said for insanity.
At exactly the same moment that Jim Qwax was running through all of his seediest fantasies, a green and amazingly sexy limousine parked itself across the street from Police Headquarters. It was now closed to the public, so there was no way anyone could get inside. Anyone who didn't have a rocket launcher, that is.
A window slid down and a rather ominous looking turret poked out. A shell came whizzing out of it and exploded against the hastily repaired door of Police Headquarters, destroying it utterly for the second time that day.
"Nice shooting, Kitty!" said Whiskey.
Grinning, the two leapt out of the car. Probably none of their best friends could have recognized them, so loaded down with ordinance were they - together, they looked like Sly Stallone in Rambo and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, except that they were both wearing balaclavas. They sprinted across Cowtrack Avenue and into the building.
"Right," said Kitty, spraying bullets around her amid screams. "We've got to think of a sneaky way of getting them to tell us where Jim Qwax is." Whiskey nodded.
After-hours cops who'd come running to the scene ran away again rather quickly when they saw this advertisement for Soldier of Fortune come running towards them. One who didn't run quite fast enough was collared by Whiskey.
"WHERE'S JIM QWAX???" he bellowed into the poor underling's face.
Kitty grimaced - so much for subtle plans.
"Room 102, sub-basement level, don't kill me please," squeaked the cop.
Whiskey grinned at Kitty. "How's that for subtle?" he asked.
Kitty let that slide and motioned Whiskey towards the stairwell. As she followed him, she turned to yell at the bemused cops. "We are the Hookywalker Liberation Front!" she yelled. "We are here to strike a blow against the capitalist state and not to release any specific prisoner by any manner of means!" That should work, she thought.
The two of them had already planned to create a mass jail-break to cover their plans, and as they scurried through the cellblocks beneath the Police HQ they did just that. Fortunately, none of the holding cells contained real psychos - mainly people caught throwing empty Coke cans in the river, just being held under the Civic Pride Bylaws for a few hours to teach them a lesson. Whiskey and Kitty methodically shot the locks off the doors, letting these psycho litterbugs loose on the streets, as the police stayed the hell out of their way.
"You handle that weapon of yours pretty well," said Kitty, fluttering her eyelashes through her balaclava. "Up for a freebie afterwards?"
Whiskey sighed as he let a flasher out of the last cell on the basement level. "No time for that, woman," he bellowed. "We've got to save...um... you know who! Thingy!"
Kitty nodded as they burst down the stairs, throwing bemused guards to left and right. The sign on the door said "SubBasement" before it disappeared in a hail of gunfire. The two pseudo-revolutionaries let the poor guy in Room 101 out, removing the ratcage from his head, and kicked open the door of 102. Large and ugly cops appeared, then disappeared just as quickly. This was more than their job was worth.
Jim Qwax was interrupted from his erotic reverie by Sly Stallone and Linda Hamilton bursting into the Sistine Chapel, toting huge guns that looked exactly like penises.
"Cool! Hi guys, the more the merrier!" he chortled.
"Jim?" said Linda Hamilton. "What have they done to you?"
"Fucked the living shit out of me," said Jim Qwax cheerfully, before Sharleen stuck a tentacle in each of his orifices.
"Sounds like Doobie, all right," said Rambo darkly.
"No, shut up, Whiskey," said Sarah Connor. "I think something's seriously wrong... Jim? How many fingers am I holding up?"
Jim tried to focus. "Sometimes there are five," he said finally. "Sometimes there are three, or four. Sometimes there are all of the above."
"They've drugged him!" screamed Linda Hamilton, turning confusingly into Kath Katzenjammer for a moment. "Let's get him out of here!"
"Nah, guys, why don't you join in? Sophie here gives great head!"
Back in the real world, Kitty untied the master detective while Whiskey rummaged through the objects on the medical table. "Here," he said holding up a syringe. "It's Thorazine, apparently. What's that?"
"A tranquiliser. Used to bring people down from... bad acid trips! They've given him acid?"
"Free? Heh, doesn't sound like Doobie," said Whiskey, unrolling Jim Qwax's sleeve and injecting him.
"Right," said Kitty, "you carry him out of here, and I'll cover him."
Back inside Jim Qwax's head, the Sistine Chapel and the two willing love-slaves waved sadly bye-bye to the super-stoned sleuth as the now-empty cellblocks of the Police Headquarters slowly faded in to replace his wildly aesthetic hallucinogenic décor. All in all, it wasn't an improvement.
Back on the ground floor, the police were too busy trying to stop all the litterers, petty thieves and flashers escaping to worry about the masked couple carrying the master detective out. As they left the building, Kitty turned and threw another tear-gas grenade at the milling policemen.
"I'll be back!" she yelled, happily.
Whiskey shot her a Look.
Cattz had the grace to look defensive. "Well, I've always wanted to say that!" she muttered.
Quickly, Whiskey threw Jim Qwax in the back seat and started the motor of the Kathmobile. Kitty threw herself inside through the passenger window, just like one of the Duke boys, just as it speeded away across town to Jim Qwax's place.
"Down a one way fucking street? You are insane!"
"No shit, Sherlock, but I don't really think that matters at this stage, does it? Now step on it!"
Jim Qwax, the sexiest supersleuth of all, huddled in the back seat of Cat's Mercedes while Whiskey the tavern owner shouted directions at his sexy secretary. The colours were just starting to return to normal, although the distant police sirens didn't really help a man coming down from the mother of all acid trips. Strangely enough, it appeared that Police Chief O'Doobie's plan had backfired dismally - far from destroying the master detective's keen deductive mind, it had opened the neural pathways in the right hemisphere of his brain, turning it into a keen inductive mind as well. Waves of intuition literally surged back and forth across Jim Qwax's neural pathways as the pieces of the Fred Boraman case began slipping slowly into some recognisable order.
"Don't you think you're over-reacting just a tiny bit, man?"
"Over-reacting? AIEE, woman, are you insane as well as deaf? We've just pulled off the most daring jailbreak seen in the City for years, and about a dozen screaming squad cars will be out looking for a bright green Mercedes driven by two hot love objects in no time flat and you find time to worry about TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS? Right! Right here!"
Jim Qwax was thrown violently across the back seat as the Mercedes screeched around a corner into Disley Street (or "Dismal" Street, as its inhabitants called it), just up from the master detective's home. As the last rays of the City's smog-filtered sunlight died away, Cattz pulled an impossible 270-degree turn, squeezed into an impossibly tight alley next to a glue factory drove around the back and instantly threw the car into Park. Whiskey hit his head on the dashboard as the car stopped suddenly.
"Ouch!" he yelled.
"Wear yer seatbelt next time, Chucky," said Cattz, leaping out the front door. Instantly the car's airbags started inflating, and Whiskey followed before he was trapped by them, like he'd seen on 60 Minutes.
"Come on, Jim, we're home now. Time to go!" called Cattz sweetly.
"Fneh," said the master detective opening the rear door, "how long do you think they'll take to trace us here?"
"Quite a while," said Whiskey, "if Diesel Fuel did what I asked of him at the police motor pool..."
At precisely that minute, the evil Police Chief Silas O' Doobie was standing in the middle of his motor pool, ranting and raving at a bunch of new recruits. All around him were police cars with flat tires.
"You MORONS! You simpering BUFFOONS!" he yelled, his eyes bulging out like billy-o. "How could you have let this happen?!"
"B-but Chief," said a flunky, "he had the correct ID and everything!"
Doobie stopped, walked over to the gibbering flunky and hoisted him in the air. "Didn't you stop to think for a moment, you IMBECILE, that there is no such thing as an AIR-IN-THE-TYRES INSPECTOR???"
"Don't we have to change it every week or something?" asked another cop. Doobie threw the first one at him.
"No we fucking DON'T!" he screamed. "For fuck's sake, get off the ground and start PUMPING!"
A lieutenant ran up to the police chief as he stood watching the recruits manhandle the air pumps. "Sir? We've got evidence to suggest that the breakout wasn't political after all. Sergeant Quirke reports that one of the terrorists asked him where Jim Qwax was, and room 102 was one of the first places they searched."
News like that really wasn't what Doobie needed at this time of the day. Calmly he drew his pistol and shot the lieutenant in both his kneecaps.
"Damn," he muttered as the inferior officer lay on the ground screaming. "I knew I shouldn't have left him alone to go watch Oprah. Where the fuck is he now?"
Where Jim Qwax was was walking up the steps of Dead Rat Terrace. What he was doing was laughing insanely at what Whiskey told him of his cousin's major feat.
"Air-in-the-tyres inspector? Even cops aren't that stupid, surely?" chortled the master detective.
"Hey, do you see any squad cars out there?" asked Whiskey, grinning.
"Here we are," said Cattz, a note of uncertainty in her voice as they reached the top of the landing. "Apartment thirteen, fifth floor. Uh, Jim?"
"That's my name," said the master detective, searching his pockets for McHeady's. "Wear it out and you'll have to buy me a new one."
"I think I'd better not hang around long. You know Sharleen really doesn't like me..."
Jim Qwax had been through this all before. He sighed and took his sexy secretary off to one side.
"That's all past history, Kitty," he explained to his dubious secretary. "I've explained to Sharleen that we're friends. Nothing more. She might be jealous but she's not irrational. I'm sure you two will get along just fine. Oh, but make sure you keep your top on, all right?"
Kitty grimaced and punched the master detective in the arm.
"All right," said Jim Qwax, giggling, "in we go."
"All right," grinned Qwax. "In we go, then."
Jim Qwax pressed lightly on his front door. As he'd expected, it swung open with almost no resistance. Still no lock.
"Fuck that landlord to hell and back with a rusty razor blade," he commented.
"Jim? 'Zat you?" called an incredibly sexy voice from the next room.
"Apparently," said the master detective, walking inside and motioning his friends to follow him. "I hope we've got something to eat in this place, because I've brought a couple of friends home."
"Jim? This isn't to do with that silly-assed group sex idea, is it?" said Sharleen (for 'twas her), giggling.
"Oh shut up, you," laughed the master detective. "Come out here and give me a big kiss, I've had a fuck of a day. How about you?"
Jim Qwax's closest friend and semi-permanent shagging partner, Sharleen Climer, emerged from the bedroom, clad in a blue dressing gown and towelling her hair dry. Jim Qwax had always had a thing for tall women with long black hair and take-no-shit attitudes, and Sharleen filled these qualifications to a T. It hadn't been so much love at first sight, as being very impressed - the young Qwax, fresh out of university with a degree in Classics and Criminology, had of course been completely broke and was working as bouncer/busboy at Whiskey's Tavern when a jazz-rock band called the Lost City Mad Dogs had played their first ever gig. The yet-to-become-master-detective had instantly "stood to attention" (so to speak) on his first sight of their way-cute guitarist, and had been even more impressed after the gig when she polished off seventeen McHeady's in an all-night drinking session. Jim Qwax that night had decided to become Sharleen's personal groupie, and had finally gotten his desire three months later at their record-release party in a night of passion behind the amplifier stacks - during the encore. They'd been an item ever since - it had been a tough few years for the two of them, both with their own careers and permanent money worries, but the fact that they hardly saw each other these days probably meant they got on better than ever.
Sharleen wrapped herself around the master detective and gave him a vigourous tonsil massage with her tongue.
"Ahem," coughed Whiskey, slightly self-consciously
Sharleen looked around. "Oh, hi, Whiskey, long time no see. Oh, hello, Kathleen," she added, a little more coldly.
"Hi there!" said Cattz, in her best cute-little-schoolgirl voice.
Sharleen looked back at Jim, reproachfully. "And to what do I owe the pleasure of these charming individuals' company?"
Jim Qwax broke away from his babe's clutches and hung his cool detectin' trenchcoat up on the back of the door. "Would you believe that we're on the run from the police?"
Sharleen snorted. "Again? Wassamatter, Doobie get bored again?"
Jim, wandering into the kitchen to look for McHeady's, moaned. "It's a long and complex story, and I really don't have the nerve to run through it right now. Why don't you tell me about your day first?"
Sharleen paused. "Same shit, different day," she sighed, sitting on the couple's rickety couch and motioning the visitors to do the Same thing.
"That stoned keyboardist of ours just about strangled herself with her own amp lead again, and the drummer thinks he's a frog. If we ever get tight enough to go on tour, I think I'll be an old woman."
Whiskey and Kitty sat next to one another on the other couch, grinning nervously. Both of them were mildly put off by Jim Qwax's lover. Kitty was always conscious of the fact that Sharleen regarded her as a rival, even though Jim had expressed no interest in her since he'd met Sharleen. Whiskey, on the other hand, just couldn't take his eyes off her tits.
"Kitty," called the master detective from the kitchen, "we're going to have to go back to the office to get my files. The cops will be all over it in no time, and I don't want them taking notes on my personal affairs."
"You been having affairs again, Jim?" asked Sharleen, playfully.
"Shut up," retorted the master detective. "Well, Kitty?"
"Already done, Jim," smiled Kitty sweetly, brandishing a Macintosh floppy disk.
"Excellent," said the master detective. "Did you prime the self- destruct mechanism as well?"
"Sure did," said the sexy secretary.
"Self-destruct?" asked Sharleen, nervously.
At that precise moment, the third floor of Potts Chambers in Tackville was rocked by a massive explosion. Clouds of smoke billowed out of the door marked "J. Qwax, Private Eye; Kitty Cattz, Private Attentions". Out of the wreckage walked Cameron Fenn, Detective Inspector, and a few junior cops. All had smoke-blackened faces.
"How the *hell* can paper explode like that?" Fenn wailed.
"Yeah, self-destruct," said Jim, cracking open a McHeady's and sitting down. "My mates at Swadling Labs know all sort of neat stuff about explosions."
Sharleen let that pass. "Great, so, what shall we do now?"
Jim Qwax paused for thought. "Right now, some of us have to go out and get some takeaways, because I'm starving, and there's no damn food in the house. Secondly, we've got to find Fred Boraman, and fast. If I know right, Binky will have him holed up at his headquarters - unfortunately, I only have a vague idea where that is. But we have to find him, and tonight - by tomorrow, not only will the cops have caught us with us and sent us all to jail for a thousand years each; but if my keen detectin' instincts tell me right, by this time tomorrow Binky will have carried out his master plan."
"His master plan?" gasped Cattz.
"Indeed. I don't have all the pieces to the puzzle yet, but I'm beginning to put twelve and twelve together, and if it's what I think it is... here, take a look at this. I picked it up off the street as I got out of the car."
The three others crowded around the sexiest man alive. He was brandishing anadvertising flier for Boraman Products. "NEW! SUPRA-ADVANCED ODOR-EATERS GO ON SALE 9 O'CLOCK TOMORROW! BUY 100, GET ONE FREE!"
"Yeah, I seen those," said Whiskey. "Been all over the town. Hey, you don't think this has something to do with Binky's plan, do you?"
"Indeed I do," said Qwax, polishing off the McHeady's. "I'm not sure quite what yet, but we have to get in touch with Ms Sophie Boraman. She can probably help us find her brother - more than she herself knows..."
"Right, then. What are we waiting for? Let's go," said Sharleen. "Oh, and Whiskey? Please stop staring at my tits."
"Who me?" said the barman, having the grace to look guilty.
"Jim," said Cattz, slowly and calmly, so as not to alarm the master detective who was going through his pockets for small change, "what are you talking about?"
The master detective looked up and grinned. "I'm talking about two hundred words to the minute, Cat, why?" he said impishly. "And have you got an extra ten dollars? I wanna order pizza."
"Um... no, Jim, I'm flat broke. The money I got from that North Korean guy I had to give to the Rent-A-Car company for the dents in their Mercedes."
"Hell and blast it," swore Jim Qwax, supersleuth. "And the local fish 'n' chip shop was closed down for killing alley Cats last week. Well, there's nothing for it. I'm going to have to..." he grimaced, "go out and buy some hot meat pies."
Sharleen turned green, a colour which didn't really suit her. "Oh no, Jim, do we have to buy from that Nitts creep? Why can't we just lick the fungus off the inside of the fridge?"
"Because we did that last night," said the Master Detective, fetching his hat and coat, "and we need more variety in our diet. Right, well I've got about ten dollars here, which should be enough for four hot meat pies and a bottle of something fizzy with too much caffiene and sugar in it. If what I think is right, we've got two hours before we have to make our move. Who's coming with me?"
"I usually do, Jim," said Sharleen with a sultry chuckle.
Jim Qwax raised his eyes to the heavens. "Why has the Great Goddess afflicted me with a girlfriend with a filthy mind?" he asked.
Sharleen sidled up behind him and pinched his bum. "That *is* what you prayed for, wasn't it, big boy?"
"Okay, okay, enough public displays of affection," said Whiskey, who had to slap himself around the face every so often to distract himself from Sharleen's cleavage. "Cattz and I will go with you, Jim - we've got all the ammo, and we know how to use it if we get jumped by ruffians or something. I think Sharleen should stay here, so she can feed the cops some bullshit story if they come looking for Jim."
Sharleen thought for a moment. "He's been kidnapped by Middle Eastern terrorists, waving pots of Vaseline and yelling 'Qwax, we love you in the Rubh al-Khali'?" she came up with.
"That should work," chuckled Jim.
***
The time was approximately eight p.m. when the master detective disentangled himself from his woman's clutches and made his way around the Tackville "Inner City Residential Area" (read: pile of semi-condemned warehouses holding squatters, students and techno DJ's), looking for Malcolm Nitts and his Hot Meat Pie cart. To either side of him walked Kath Katzenjammer, the sexy secretary, and Whiskey the tavern owner, each toting a .45 Magnum and watching out for police. Streetkids, muggers and rapists took one look at this crew and headed for home, where it was nice and warm. The City's mildly smoggy twilight wrapped itself around the three adventurers, making them shiver.
"If I know Nitts," said the master detective, "which I do, he'll be plying his wares up Threadneedle Street at the moment. Which should be... right around *this* corner..."
Sure enough, the master detective was right. The distant sound of a bell ringing and a voice calling "HOT MEAT PIES! HOT MEAT PIES! THEY'RE HOT, THEY'VE GOT MEAT IN THEM, AND THEY LOOK SORT OF LIKE PIES!" was heard upon the mists rolling in from the river.
But that wasn't the only thing that the master detective and his friends heard. The staccato chatter of a machine gun was really not what they expected to hear coming from the direction of the hot meat pie cart.
"What the fuck was *that*?" said Whiskey, instinctively pulling out his weapon and running up the street.
"Why do you think any one would run *towards* machine gun fire?" muttered the master detective, chasing after him. "It's against all logic."
Cattz sighed. "Jim, for the master detective of the whole city, you can sometimes be a real wuss, you know that?"
Jim Qwax ignored this comment, but he couldn't ignore what he saw as he rounded the corner. No sign of Whiskey, who appeared to have run off into the mist. But there, slumped against a wall behind his blood-splattered hot meat pie cart, lay Malcolm Nitts - alive, but with serious chest wounds.
"Oh FUCK." said the master detective. That seemed to sum it up nicely.
Luckily, the master detective had had some first-aid training, and ran forward to Nitts's aid. "Kitty! Phone the ambulance!" he barked. The sexy secretary didn't need to be asked twice, and skedaddled round a corner.
Malcolm Nitts, just about at death's door, was wakened out of an approaching coma due to blood loss by a strange sensation. What he saw when his eyes refocused was the master detective, Jim Qwax, bandaging his chest with strips torn off his hot-meat-pie-vendor's apron, and coincidentally stealing the pieman's wallet while he did so.
"Oh Jesus..." he groaned.
"Good guess, but not quite right, I'm afraid, Nitts," said Jim Qwax, who was riding the crest of an obscene adrenalin rush, in which state that actually seemed like a funny joke. "It's all right man, you're going to be all right. What did you do, sell a dodgy pie to Binky the Shrew or something?"
"Surprisingly close, Dogfood," said an all-too familiar but extremely nasty voice behind the master detective. "Maybe you are a super sleuth after all!"
Jim Qwax felt that oh-so-familiar sinking sensation in his gut as he turned around. There behind him, clad in the same clothes he'd been wearing in the tavern that morning, was Binky Rabotnik and two thugs. Interestingly, neither of them was toting a machine gun. Jim Qwax was too busy to really think through the implications of this, however, what with staring down the barrel of a bazooka and everything.
As a brief sidebar, it may be interesting to note that due to a misunderstanding by "Kitty" Kath Katzenjammer, it was not the City Free Ambulance that had been alerted to the plight of Malcolm Nitts, but the Morgue. Thus, the almost-dead Malcolm Nitts, after the standoff between Qwax and Binky was resolved, was taken away to the Morgue, who rejected him on the grounds that they didn't take "almosts". The only reason this is being mentioned at this stage is to reduce speculation as to the fate of the Hot Meat Pie salesman - who will, as a matter of fact, not only survive, but play a pivotal role in upcoming chapters. Satisfied? Okay, back to Qwax.
"Heh, Binky, ol' son," said the master detective. "If you couldn't kill me with a dozen litres of petrol and a lighted match, or with the tires of a BMW, what makes you think you can kill me with a bazooka?"
The evil television executive groaned, and motioned to his goon with the bazooka. The goon aimed it at a tugboat on the river, and fired. The tug instantly sank without trace.
"That," said Binky, chuckling. "And don't think the cops are going to save you now, Dogfood. I'm pretty damn sure ol' Doobie would like nothing more than to see you go up in smoke at this stage."
"Um, Binky, look," said Jim Qwax, beginning to panic. "Since I'm going to die anyway, why don't you tell me all the details of your plot now, since I'm never going to reveal them?"
Binky signaled, and his other goon floored the master detective with a punch. "Get up, you stupid bastard," he spat. "I've seen James Bond movies too, you know. The instant I tell you the plot, you commit some daring escape and instantly thwart my best laid plans. You really think I'm stupid, don't you?"
"Well, you did spend five years in kindergarten, Binky," said the master detective, getting to his feet with the insane cheerfulness of the truly doomed.
Binky sighed, and floored Jim Qwax with a punch himself. "Get up, you stupid bastard," he spat. "I think I'm just going to kill you NOW!"
"JIM!" yelled an incredibly sexy female voice from the other side of the street. "What's going on?"
"None of your concern, sugar-tush," said one of Binky's goons, leering.
Binky turned around and floored his goon with a punch. "Get up, you stupid bastard," he spat. "Don't you know it's not right to talk like that to a lady?"
Cattz, for it was her, came clattering across the intersection, her .45 pointed straight at the gangland mastercrook. "Let Jim Qwax go free, you son of a suitcase, or I blow your Armani suit to kingdom come!"
Binky grinned. "If even one bullet whistles through the air, my dear, my compatriot here will bazooka your cute behind to bollocks and beyond."
Jim Qwax, now that death didn't seem to be all that imminent, groaned. Not another Mexican standoff! How many of these could fit into one day?
"Of course," continued the owner of Bink-TV, "there is one way you could make sure that your friend Dogfood here goes free..."
Cattz grimaced. "Let me guess. This is going to involve me coming back to your gangster HQ, wearing a leopard skin bikini, feeding you grapes and letting you have your wicked way with me again and again?"
Binky chuckled. "Uncanny! We're certainly running into the psychics tonight, aren't we, guys?"
"Hur hur," chortled Binky's goons, obediently.
Cattz dropped her gun and walked over to Binky. She paused to lean down to the master detective. "It's all right, Jim. I know what I'm doing."
"Great," groaned Jim Qwax. "I wish I did."
"Okay, macho man," said Cattz, putting on her best sex-bitch-goddess voice and rubbing up against Binky, "I'm all yours."
"Excellent. Hold on a moment?" asked Binky. He bent down to Jim Qwax, who was trying to inch away backwards on his behind as quickly and humanly possible.
"A word of advice, Jim," muttered the gangland mastercrook " - drop this Fred case. You're just so lucky your little friend here has bailed you out. If I see you even outside the gates of your house before nine a.m tomorrow, I'm going to cut you up and feed you to my pet chihuahua Stanley, is that understood?"
"Yes Sir Mr Binky Sir," said the master detective, trying to put as much sarcasm into it as possible while still avoiding a bazooka in the face.
"Great," said Binky, smiling with a mighty smile. "Let's go, dudes."
Cattz waved back to the master detective over her shoulder, as Binky wrapped his hand around her and started groping her behind. The two goons followed, obviously disappointed with the lack of slaughter.
Jim Qwax was so pleased to be alive that he almost didn't notice the sound of running feet coming up Sturdy Street.
"Jim! Jim! Looky what I've got! It's the bastard what shot Nitts!"
Jim Qwax looked around, into the face of an evil he'd hoped he'd never
have to deal with again...
"Well, well, well," said Jim Qwax, searching in his pockets for a joint. "Haven't seen you around in ages, Humphrey. Keeping bad company, I see?"
The paramilitary snotrag thus addressed starting wriggling furiously. "Unhand me, you subhuman!" he whined in a pathetic, weedy voice. Whiskey responded to this request by slapping his prisoner around the face a few dozen times. Whiskey's foot-wide hands soon had the prisoner swinging to and fro like a side of beef in a freezing works.
"Know this punk, Jim?" asked the bartender between slaps.
"Humphrey 'The Organ' Morgan? Sure I know him," muttered Qwax, lighting up. "We were in the Same first year philosophy tute at university. He got thrown out for torturing kittens in class. Tried to set up a branch of the FFFF on campus. Last I heard, he was living off the earnings of a whore on the other side of town. Why?"
Jim Qwax cursed as he searched for his lighter. The Fascist Federation
of Forces for the Family, started by an ex-laundrette operator named Peter
Winstone about ten years back, was the biggest bunch of brownshirts to
ever roam the streets of Jim Qwax's city. They had a political plan worked
out calling for discipline, flogging, repatriation of undesirables "back
where they came from" (usually the suburb where Jim Qwax lived), nice clean
uniforms, making the trains run on time, traditional family values, pornography
controls on the Internet and other such extreme-right bullshit, but what
made them a force to be reckoned with was their military aims of "beating
the shit out of whoever gets in our way". This cunningly worded call to
humanity's baser instincts had struck a chord with the white-trash underclass
that inhabited the area of the city around the Civic Stadium so as to hear
heavy metal bands for free when they played there. Humphrey Morgan, probably
the slimiest little ferret Jim Qwax had ever met, had been ideally suited
to high rank in that organisation, on account of his festering resentment
of anyone who was better than him (that is, everyone), and his complete
inability to fight, which meant that he couldn't be a "Street Soldier"
(ie, a crop-headed, flag-toting neanderthal). Qwax had clashed with the
FFFF on several occasions, and had found their combined intelligence to
be somewhere near that of a Central Bank economist, which meant that Humphrey
Morgan was an intellectual by their standards. That is, he could read.
"Living off the...? I'm a subway clerk, you bastard!!!" yelled Morgan, still wriggling.
Jim Qwax walked up to the struggling prisoner and breathed out, slowly and deliberately, in his face. "The Subway Company's virtually a prostitute anyway, Morgan, don't argue. Now, why were you shooting at Malcolm Nitts the hot-meat-pie salesman?"
"None of your business, you degenerate Jewish Communist homosexual, you," said Morgan. "All enemies of the People will be dealt to in this way!"
Quick as a flash, Whiskey floored him with a punch. Jim Qwax stepped over the groaning brownshirt on the pavement and removed his wallet.
"*Now* are you going to talk, Humphrey?" he asked.
Humphrey Morgan lay on the ground, cursing and muttering.
"Whiskey? Break out the nunchucks!" grinned Qwax. "This is going to be *fun*!"
"No! No! I'll talk!" yelled Morgan.
Qwax smiled - it was good to have unbelievably strong friends with short tempers sometimes. He reached into his leather detectin' satchel and pulled out a tape recorder.
"Into this, Morgan," he ordered.
Humphrey Morgan, the paramilitary prat, looked sideways at the murderous bartender and quickly began to talk. "All right. It was a contract job. The FFFF needs some more money to buy armbands, banners, spotlights, replica Lugers and so on, and our traditional sources of income have collapsed since that mad old rich woman on Threadneedle Street found out we weren't the Boy Scouts. Plus, my pet pit bull has the flu, so we couldn't even run our regular Friday night dog-fight betting circus. So, about a week ago, we were surprised to receive a visit from Binky Rabotnik. He's been feuding with us for a long while - he wanted the contract to run our street appeals, but we found out that his great-great-aunt once went out with a Pakistani, so we weren't going to collaborate with any mud-race scum. He promised us funding and... well, other forms of assistance if we were to do a series of small jobs for him. This was to be the first."
Jim Qwax nodded briskly. "Okay, did Binky say *why* he wanted Nitts dead? Or why he couldn't get his own goons to do it? And what are all these other small jobs?"
Humphrey Morgan opened his mouth to respond, suddenly stiffened and stared wild-eyed over the master detective's shoulder. "Look over there!" he yelled.
Both Whiskey and Jim were fooled for just enough time to look back and
see the snot-green uniform of Humphrey Morgan disappearing down a back
alley.
"Shall I go after him, Jim?" asked Whiskey, whipping out his nunchucks.
"On an empty stomach? You're kidding," grinned the master detective.
"But JIM..." whined Whiskey.
"No buts, man. Morgan has told us just enough to make another piece of the puzzle slip together in my mind. I get a strong feeling that when we go after Binky, we won't find the FFFF too far away - forewarned is forearmed. Now, let's find some food. I'm hungry, and we've suddenly got the contents of two wallets to spend."
In fact, for some strange reason there seemed to be a real drought of food vendors on the streets of the City that night - it took Jim Qwax and Whiskey another half hour to find one that didn't look like alley cat comprised more than 20% of the pie's filling. Thus, it was another hour before they staggered back up the stairs of Dead Rat Terrace, through the busted door.
"Where's Cattz?" asked Sharleen, as the two grim-faced men walked over to the couch and collapsed.
"It's a long story," said Jim Qwax, wiping sweat from his forehead, "and I'll tell you while you go to the kitchen and get me a McHeady's."
Sharleen gave him a Look.
"Okay, Whiskey, *you* do it," said Qwax. I really should have known better than to say that, he thought.
As Whiskey fended off the fungus in the fridge, Jim Qwax told his lover the story of the attempted murder of Malcolm Nitts, the standoff with Binky, Cattz's great sacrifice, the testimony of Humphrey Morgan, the number of zits on the guy who served them at the other hot meat pie stand, the weather, the poor performance of the City soccer team, and anything else that crossed his mind. Eventually, Whiskey got him a whole six-pack just to shut him up, and went across to listen to the radio.
Sharleen was confused, and said as much. "I'm confused, Jim," she said. "Binky's in league with both Boraman *and* the FFFF? What they hell have *they* got in common?"
"Slightly more than most people would think," said the master detective, getting into his second can. "All of them want to dominate the City, for example. But I get the feeling that Binky's taking all of them for a ride."
"So, what happens now, Jim?" asked Sharleen.
Jim Qwax finished his second beer, and cracked open a third. "Tonight's little ruckus has had a positive spinoff, guys - we now have a person on the inside of Binky's organization, and if I know Cattz, which I do, she'll be working as hard as she can to get back some useful information to us."
"Speaking of useful information, Jim..." said Whiskey, pointing to the radio. He turned up the volume dial, so that the others could hear the ten o'clock news.
"A sudden wave of random assassination attempts has been made across the city. The victims, all but one of which are now dead, include a street porter at a Dockside nightclub, a hot meat pie salesman, three prostitutes, an encyclopaedia salesman and the rhythm section of a famous heavy metal band. Responsibility for these outbreaks of violence has not been claimed, but suspicion has been laid at the doorstep of the Fascist Federation of Forces for the Family. FFFF Supreme-Leader-in-Chief-for-Life, Peter Winston, denies any such allegations and has called upon Mayor Blackadder to declare martial law to stop what he calls 'this communist-inspired wave of terror'. Mayor Blackadder's response was "cluck cluck cluck", as he now believes himself to be a chicken. Further bulletins as events warrant. In other news, the fugitive master detective Jim Qwax is still on the loose, although police forces are rapidly..."
Whiskey switched off the radio and stared at his friends.
After what seemed like an eternity, Jim Qwax sighed. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again - hell in a handbasket. We've got to get out of here, and fast. To the Cattzmobile!"
Out of the alleyway at the bottom of Dead Rat Terrace walked the master detective, carrying his heavy duty detective satchel; Whiskey the bartender, carrying enough heavy ordinance to make Rambo jealous, and Sharleen Climer of the Lost City Mad Dogs, carrying Jim's beer.
"The way I figure it, is this," said the master detective, debating with himself whether to light a joint or not and deciding against it. "Binky is going around killing people at random, funnelling it through the FFFF so it can't be traced back to him. For why? Why would anyone want to institute a reign of terror?" He looked expectantly at Whiskey.
The bartender thought. "Fucked if I know, Jim."
"To *terrorise* people, you dodo-brain!" hissed the supersleuth Jim Qwax. "And why would you terrorise people? To increase, fear, uncertainty, and demand for products that create certainty. What could be more certain than the feeling of having clean, fresh feet?"
"Yeah, right." said Sharleen. "You think that Boraman and Rabotnik are holding the city to ransom just to increase sales of a deodorant product? That's the most silly assed thing I ever did hear, including the FFFF manifesto!"
Jim Qwax stopped in his tracks, and turned with a resigned expression on his face. "Sharl, Sharl, Sharl," he intoned, "do I tell you how to play jazz guitar? No? Then I'll thank you to leave the master detecting to me!"
"Don't take that tone with me, boy, or I'll kick your ass," said Sharleen sweetly.
"Okay, you two break it up," said Whiskey wearily. "We'll all be in the bowels of Binky's HQ or Police Headquarters quicker than one can say Elvis impersonator if we stand here arguing. What's the plan, Jim?"
Jim Qwax, the master detective, had been dreading that particular question. His first thought was to ride around aimlessly in the streets until they saw Binky and then kick his ass but good, but that lacked a certain something in the subtlety department. Anyway, there were still a few loose ends to clear up. He had no clear proof that Boraman was still involved with Binky, or what had really happened to Fred Boraman. Anyway, he had to admit that Sharleen had a point about odor-eaters really not being worth terrorising an entire city for.
The master detective said nothing as he walked over to Cattz's car and went to unlock the door. It was good that he did so, because otherwise he wouldn't have heard the tiny, tiny voice of his sixth sense telling him to run backwards as quickly as possible. Jim Qwax turned tail immediately, not questioning the instinct, and ran like billy-o in the other direction, dragging his two startled companions with him. It was a bloody good thing, in fact, because the Cattzmobile chose that particular moment to explode.
Yes, dear readers, your eyes are not playing you tricks. The bonnet of the green Mercedes erupted in a huge orange fireball, taking the rest of the car with it. Jim Qwax and his friends were knocked backwards by the explosion into a huge pile of dustbins that were piled up on the streetcorner for some reason. They stayed there for a moment, face down, listening to the remnants of the car quietly burning away, wondering whether maybe they should give it all up and go off and live on an island somewhere.
Slowly, the three extracted themselves from the pile of aluminium and stared at the wreckage. Whiskey was the first to speak, and, as usual, summed up everyone else's reaction nicely.
"Well, fuck me up the arse with a blunt stick PLEASE!" he uttered. Jim and Sharleen nodded their agreement, even though neither of them wanted to take him up on the offer. The car was so utterly totalled it wasn't funny. Bits of green paint melted and dripped onto the sidewalk from the burning wreck.
"Cattz is going to kill me when she finds out," said the master detective morosely. "And then the Car Rental Company are going to kill Cattz! That's the third Mercedes she's wrecked in as many years!"
"Perils of working for a master detective?" asked Sharleen, still ashen-faced.
"What? No, she just hires really bad drivers. Well, what the fuck are we going to do now?" asked Jim Qwax, the sexiest man alive.
"Get the fuck into this ALLEYWAY, you sad excuse for a man!" said a new, strangely familiar voice.
Qwax had no time to wonder where that specific voice had come from, as he was dragged backwards into a dank and smelly alleyway. His companions followed, curious as to whether he was about to be beaten up or what.
The question of whether the master detective is going to be beaten up or what will have to wait a few minutes, as we have other pressing matters to resolve. For example, what has become of Cattz.
The scene, dear reader, is the secret headquarters of Binky Rabotnik's criminal apparatus. His legitimate, though morally scandalous, businesses were housed in a big ugly black office building smack dab in the middle of the Central Business district, but he only discussed his truly evil plans in this specific hideout, known only as "the Binkcave". Yes, we are dealing with a truly cheesy individual here.
Binky Rabotnik sat in the jacuzzi he'd had installed in his office space so that he could relax as he ordered people murdered and stuff like that. He was butt naked, as was the poor sap sitting beside him giving him a vigourous shoulder massage. Guess who.
"Wow, gee, Binky," said Cattz, for it was her, smiling, "I never knew you were such a sexy hunk of man until I saw you naked!" The sincerity in her voice would have fooled anyone who hadn't heard her say exactly the same thing to three clients a day in the front room of Jim Qwax's office.
"Yeah, well, I gotta lot of hidden depths most people don't see into," said the gangland mastercrook, grinning his toothy grin and shifting to a more luxurious position. "Lower please, honey. That's it. Aaahhh..."
Cattz grinned and bore it as her expert fingers needed the tension out of the shoulder muscles of the nastiest person in the City. She hoped that Jim and Whiskey were on their way to bust the Rabotnik Corporation wide open soon, because she was smart enough to realise that when Binky was well and truly relaxed he'd demand more out of her, or more accurately, out of him, and she wasn't even going to get paid for it. She grimaced, hoping she'd brought her mouthwash with her.
"Mmm, I'm so glad I decided to come home with you, macho man," said Cattz, inwardly cringing at the drivel coming out of her mouth. "And I bet I know what you want to do after we're done in here, hmmm?"
Cattz's expert schmoozing was working well, as Binky Rabotnik relaxed in the delusion that he was attractive in the slightest. "Maybe a bit later, honey. I got some work to do tonight, but tomorrow, you're going to be all
mine. And I mean all." He turned around, grabbed the sexy secretary and forcefully stuck his tongue down her throat.
Kath Katzenjammer was saved from utterly throwing up then and there by the entrance of a figure that Jim Qwax, had he been there, would have kicked in the nuts as hard as possible. Humphrey Morgan, his FFFF Obergruppensteppenfuhrer's uniform ripped, ragged and sweaty, marched into the room and saluted.
"Hail the White Race!" he uttered, sticking his right arm straight up into the air as if asking permission to go to the toilet.
The gangland mastercrook extracted his tongue from Cattz and turned around wearily. "Oh! So it's you, Morgan! Finally decided to grace us with your presence, did you?"
"I had no choice, Rabotnik," said the juvenile fascist, wearily. "The detective Qwax and his barbarian subhuman friend apprehended me and interrogated me most ruthlessly."
Binky punched the hottub water in disgust, splashing Cattz's perfect hairstyle and thus ruining it. "What the HELL? I turn up to pull your arse out of the fire, fire a bazooka, scare the creep Qwax half to death and you still get caught? You sure you really are the master race?"
"Don't take that tone with me, you greasy wop criminal, you," said Morgan, really getting mad now. "Come the revolution, we'll have inferiors like you shipped out to the Solomon Islands to bury bodies!"
Binky gave one of his trademark nasty chortles. "Yeah, and back in the real world, maybe you won't. All right, so what did he get out of you?"
"Not much," said Morgan, colouring slightly. "All he knows is that the assassination of Nitts was paid for by you..."
"Yeah, and I didn't get my fucking money's worth. You know he's still alive? This bimbo here managed to drag him to an ambulance before his worthless ass was good and dead. Heard it on the radio. Still, he